Category: ideological culture

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folly general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Seppuku for Dutch Farmers?

farmer protest, Dutch, Netherlands, global warming, climate change

Two years ago, the Netherlands government was spending millions of euros to subsidize farmers and others hurt by pandemic policies.

Now it seeks to destroy many Dutch farmers by compelling them to drastically slash livestock herds to reduce nitrogen oxide and ammonia, thereby supposedly benefiting the environment. The government has also thwarted construction projects on save-the-planet grounds.

Farmers are protesting throughout the country. At one site, police opened fire. No one was hurt.

The prime minister objects to “intimidating” officials by, say, clogging highways with tractors — which protesting farmers have done.

Understandable, but shoe the other foot: Is using governmental coercion to destroy farmers a form of peaceful suasion?

Such irrational policies conform to ideologies that sure seem bent on the progressive destruction of civilization for the alleged sake of fine-tuning the weather. Yet nothing the Dutch could do — not even mass seppuku — would appreciably affect our far-more-massive-than-the-Netherlands global climate. But the government may succeed in making life harder for everyone in the habit of eating.

Just some overseas craziness that could never happen here?

It already is. Federal assaults on the oil industry have fueled skyrocketing fuel prices. Our current president says the burden is an acceptable part of “an incredible transition” to a world that will be “stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”

Will the U.S. government next decide that too many cows are emitting gases such as methane and mandate culling of herds here?

Who knows? It depends on the politics of the moment, how eager officials are to appease enemies of mankind, and other factors having nothing to do with respecting the requirements of human survival.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture international affairs

‘Ideological Prejudices’

Xi, China, communism, foreign policy

“‘One country two systems’ has been tested and proved time and again,” Chinese ruler Xi Jinping told his hand-picked Hong Kong audience last week, “and there is no reason to change such a good system.”

Twenty-five years into that “good system” — created when the United Kingdom signed it over to the Chinese Communist Party with the proviso it would recognize basic civil liberties in Hong Kong until 2047 — Xi was taking a victory lap. 

He had successfully squelched freedom of speech and of the press.

“China’s government is,” Ian Easton writes in The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, “far more powerful and sophisticated than any that came before. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s Russia all pale in comparison.”

Easton, who studies defense and security issues involving the U.S., China, Japan, and Taiwan at the Project 2049 Institute, also pointedly suggests that it is “of national importance that Hollywood begins to make movies about China that are not censored.”

Censored by Beijing, he means. 

China’s long list of tyrannies has gotten so bad that even NATO — yes, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — has recognized the threat posed by the totalitarian country engaged in the largest military build-up in human history. 

“NATO has listed China as one of its strategic priorities for the first time,” Al Jazeera reported weeks ago, “saying Beijing’s ambitions and its ‘coercive policies’ challenge the Western bloc’s ‘interests, security and values.’”

To which the Chinese objected, arguing the NATO statement “vilifies China’s foreign policy” and “China’s natural military development” and was “filled with . . . ideological prejudices.”

They have a point. It’s about time the West shows a bit of “bias” against totalitarianism and genocide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly ideological culture

Go Slow?

racism, Stepin Fechit

Somewhere along the line putative anti-racists forgot what racism is.

“In an email obtained by Reason,” writes Robby Soave at, yes, Reason magazine, “Regional Health Equity Coalition Program Manager Danielle Droppers informed the community that a scheduled conversation between OHA officials and relevant members of the public would not take place as planned.”

And she offered an . . . interesting . . . excuse.

“We recognize that urgency is a white supremacy value that can get in the way of more intentional and thoughtful work, and we want to attend to this dynamic. Therefore, we will reach out at a later date to reschedule.”

While it is obvious that Ms. Droppers does not like what she calls “white supremacy,” her blithe acceptance of the notion that punctuality is a racial characteristic is rather bracing.

Referring to blacks as, generally, slow and even lazy was once a common white-racist evaluation of African Americans.

So common, in fact, that it was a joke — one constantly referenced “as a trope” by Steppin Fetchit and other actors as they portrayed the languorous and servile blacks laughed at in a now bygone era.

Then, as now, there were blacks more than capable of speed and competence in matters where time was of the essence, who valued a “sense of urgency.” 

To now accept the stereotype as reason enough to extol loose scheduling is . . . almost . . . funny. 

If not so disturbingly stupid and racist.

Robby Soave briefly touches on the intellectual movement that does this sort of thing consistently. We can thank, it turns out, white anti-racists.

Who are quickly establishing a new stereotype: that white anti-racists are hopelessly witless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Target: Government Schools

US flag, Christianity, secularism, education

Former Attorney General William Barr gave a rather stark appraisal of the current politico-cultural moment, last Saturday.

Speaking at a Christian conference in Chicago, Bill Barr said that our “whole civilization” is “under sustained attack by increasingly secular forces.”

Certainly, the western tradition in which we live is “Judeo-Christian,” yet the explicitly religious aspect of our civilization is openly mocked and undermined by major progressive institutions. But is the civilization itself under attack?

Well, if you lean left you might say No. 

To others, the “woke” mob that dominatesso many major organizations in America is foursquare against freedom of speech and religion, and by demanding ideological conformity on a number of issues like sexual identity and racial “equity,” seems determined to re-make society from the ground up, and have that work done under mob violence threat as well as corporate compliance and state command.

But especially interesting is what Barr said was the foundation for today’s secular revolutionaries: the public schools. 

“The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr argued, as quoted by The Federalist. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral any more.”

This radical a critique of government schooling is something I used to hear only from libertarians. Barr’s advocacy of school choice is not as cautious as Republicans would advance decades ago. His is an attack on government-run schools as such: the constitutional and existential crisis in American education requires,Barr said, a direct attack upon the government monopoly over the provision of education.

The culture war just ramped up a notch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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ideological culture

Not Tired of Winning

Paul Clement, 2nd Amendment, guns, law

The title of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by lawyers Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, “The Law Firm That Got Tired of Winning,” is not strictly accurate.

As reported there and in an accompanying Journal editorial (“You Won Your Gun Case. You’re Fired”), the law firm Kirkland & Ellis did tell Clement and Murphy to quit their Second Amendment clients or quit the firm. But not because it was pushed past the edge of exhaustion when these attorneys won a major U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming the Second Amendment right to carry a concealed firearm.

Of course, the op-ed title is ironic.

We all know that it’s the terror of the vituperative left that’s got Kirkland & Ellis suddenly gun-rights-shy and welshing on a prior agreement. In 2016, when the firm recruited Clement, he required as a term of employment that he be able to retain clients involved in Second Amendment litigation.

Clement and Murphy write that it is no novelty for lawyers to represent controversial clients and no virtue to abandon them for light and transient causes. Moreover, the Constitution “isn’t self-executing”; it depends on lawyers willing to take on controversial cases and judges willing to hear the best arguments for both sides.

So, rather than abandon clients of long standing, they’ve left Kirkland & Ellis.

Kirkland & Ellis has every right to run its affairs this way. But prospective clients should think thrice before entrusting their fate to such a firm.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Pushing Past Protest

Jane's Revenge, abortion, Supreme Court

A group called Jane’s Revenge is on a rampage against organizations known to oppose abortion.

“We promised to take increasingly drastic measures against oppressive infrastructures,” the manifesto declares. “Rest assured that we will, and those measures may not come in the form of something so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti. From here forward, any anti-choice group who closes their doors, and stops operating will no longer be a target. But until you do, it’s open season.”

We don’t know how Jane’s Revenge is constituted. Maybe it will turn out to be just one woman with a keyboard. Whatever its form, though, it has acolytes, persons willing to damage the property of churches, anti-abortion pregnancy centers, and other anti-abortion organizations.

Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for vandalizing the Agape Pregnancy Center in Des Moines this month. In Olympia, St. Michael Parish was spray-painted with the words “abort the church.” Dozens of similar incidents began in early May, when Wisconsin Family Action was damaged by arson and vandalism. (Family Research Center maintains a list of the attacks; Wikipedia curates a page about those attributed specifically to Jane’s Revenge.)

The Biden administration has finally made a pro forma objection to the violence being perpetrated by pro-abortion protesters. Too often, though, government officials and others have been conspicuously silent. Could it possibly be the case that they’re OK with violence as a means because they agree about abortion as an end?

This is tantamount to encouraging violence by the angry left — and not just when it comes to this particular controversial issue.

Thankfully, though there have been protests nationwide against the Supreme Court’s overthrowal, last week, of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), there has so far been no “Night of Rage.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Some Scandal

drag show, education

Why do public schools and libraries expose their charges to drag queens and cross-dressers but not to strip-club “artistes”?

Both are overtly sexual and “kinky” and contra traditional family values. But “drag” is where men (and now boys) dress up in parodic feminine clothing. Milton Berle did it as comedy while the “Drag Queen Story Hours” held these days in schools and libraries around the country play for something else.

In late May, in Iowa, “Ankeny’s Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) club hosted a drag event as part of the club’s end-of-the-year meeting,” explains KCCI Des Moines. “The event was not for the whole school.”

Thankfully. 

“Drag event at Ankeny High School,” ran the headline, “draws criticism from some parents” — why the “some”? Normally, wouldn’t it read “draws criticism from parents”? Could the editor have used it, here, to weaponize this as a divisive issue rather than a public scandal?

Before you can say “Sodom and Gomorrah,” the real problem with allowing drag shows in schools reveals itself: this is not unlike a religious issue, except the religion is irr-. 

A tent revival meeting in a public school should be scandalous, too, if with a different “some.” While prayer groups and LGBTQ+ clubs are both fine on public school campuses, as part of normal student activities allowed outside the curriculum, a mass baptism would not be fine, and neither are . . . drag shows.

Behind all this I catch a whiff of something worse than the push to normalize (rather than merely legalize) “sex work”: anti-natalism. Not having babies. All of this fits the population reduction ideology that has been pushed since the Sixties.

A tax-funded movement against the basic task of humanity. 

That’s the most scandalous.

The opposite of Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Long Road Back

San Francisco, homeless, crime

Decades of wrongheaded policies have eroded San Francisco’s once much-vaunted charm. 

These policies include onerous burdens on building construction; lax attitudes toward homeless folks’ tent cities and public excretory practices; and a green light for sundry criminal activities, including broad-daylight theft.

The green light flashed statewide in 2014, when Californians passed Proposition 47, giving looters much less to worry about if caught stealing less than $950.

Remove a disincentive and you wind up with a huge incentive: thugs were emboldened; folks on the margin between criminality and civilized peace went the wrong direction.

In San Francisco, they were further emboldened when voters installed Democrat Chesa Boudin as district attorney in 2019. At least the election was close.

A recent recall election wasn’t so close, with some 61% voting to oust him.

In the cause of abetting criminals, DA Boudin did everything but serve as getaway-car driver.

Right away, he fired several prosecutors, and The Epoch Times reports that soon “more than 50 prosecutors, support, and victim services staff had either been fired or had quit their jobs over Boudin’s progressive agenda.”

The agenda included ending cash bail, slashing incarceration rates, routinely releasing repeat offenders.

Although it has lost a lot, San Francisco still has piers and fog and that famously twisty road, Lombard Street. Residents have a ways to go to emerge from their ideological fog and perhaps must travel an even twistier road to reclaim their city.

By getting rid of Boudin — and three pretty rotten school board members in another recent recall election — San Franciscans have taken the first steps back to something like sanity. Which always makes next steps easier.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Showcialism, Schmocialism

Venezuela, socialism, Hugo Chávez

Americans have never gotten into “socialism” like the rest of the world. This places pushers of socialistic ideas in a tricky situation. So they often defend socialism in less than honest ways. 

William Neuman, formerly of the New York Times, is a current example of this. St. Martin’s has just published his Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, and boy, do we get a story.

Hugo Chávez called himself a socialist, repeatedly, but Neuman won’t accept it. Why? Venezuela was basically ruined by Chávez and his henchmen and successors. So the former New York Times reporter provides excuses. 

Which is not to say I have read his book, or will. I am entirely trusting a review by Jim Epstein, at Reason, and agreeing per a plethora of other examples with Epstien’s critique of Neuman’s denialism.

While Neuman insists that Chávez was, in effect, a SINO (Socialist In Name Only), using the s-word just as cover — “showcialismo” — Epstein takes us back to reality. “One classic definition of socialism is government control of the means of production. Chávez nationalized banks, oil companies, telecommunications, millions of acres of farmland, supermarkets, stores, the cement industry” and on and on. Now wonder, then, that “nationalization led to deterioration, abandonment, and collapse.”

Neuman cannot blame socialism, oh no. So he lamely argues it was just “bad management.”

But that is what socialism is, and must be. Even when managed by the very best experts, those experts must fail, in the end, because they lack the expertise that counts — the know-how that is spread out among all participants in society. 

Markets leverage that knowledge best.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

The Woke Mob’s Capitalism

climate justice, social justice, woke, wokeism

A prominent rating system has gone “woke.”

“Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500,” Elon Musk tweeted a few weeks ago, “while Tesla” — the billionaire’s high-end electric car company — “didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

We could quibble. Is “phony” the right word? “Social justice” has always been slippery. It’s a “mirage,” explained Hayek, really just a stalking horse for power.

What Musk is objecting to, though, is worth thinking about. The ESG standard is supposed to mean something . . . based on objective criteria. The reasons to eject Tesla from its Top Ten and place Exxon at the pinnacle are laughably transparent. It’s a woke power grab. The leftist ideology has taken over another capitalist institution, the better to create . . .

What?

Socialism? Fascism?

Michael Rectenwald, in a fascinating essay, calls it “woke corporatism.” 

The plan is, he writes, to “establish a woke monopolistic cartel.” Musk’s company has been “subjected to the S in ESG — the ‘social’ or ‘social justice’ quotient.”

Musk, Rectenwald argues, “has been deemed a deplorable, and thus his company does not pass ‘social justice’ muster.” In other words, the putatively pro-inclusion folks are excluding him from the ranks of the favored.

And all because he wants free speech on a social media platform!

Laissez-faire grew out of economists’ objections to the grinding inefficiency and over-politicization of business. Adam Smith, back in 1776, called the pre-liberal, insider-based trade system “mercantilism.”

The leftist mob now pushes a neo-neo-mercantalism, mobocracy capitalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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