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Sunday, 4 April 2021

Daily Digest

Daily Digest

Link to Power LinePower Line

Trump calls for boycott of woke enterprises

Posted: 04 Apr 2021 04:33 PM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

Donald Trump is encouraging people to boycott companies and organizations that cave to, or do the bidding of, the left. He mentioned by name Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS, and Merck.

Trump said:

For years the Radical Left Democrats have played dirty by boycotting products when anything from that company is done or stated in any way that offends them. It is finally time for Republicans and Conservatives to fight back—we have more people than they do—by far!

I’m not sure the last part of that statement is true, but it doesn’t matter. There are more than enough conservatives to inflict a huge amount of economic pain on enterprises that take the left’s side in political and cultural disputes — if conservatives wake up to reality and are willing to fight back.

I patronize two of the entities Trump mentioned — Major Baseball and Coca-Cola. No more.

I turned down the opportunity offered by a good friend to attend Opening Day for the Washington Nationals. The weather is supposed to great, the pitching matchup (deGrom vs. Scherzer) could scarcely be better, and the Nationals will finally be honored for winning the 2019 World Series.

But I won’t be there.

I’ve been drinking Coca-Cola since I was a child. My mother, a wise woman, realized that the stuff is bad you and limited me to half a bottle a week, which I shared with my sister every Friday when we were young. (To minimize the chances of either of us getting one drop more than the other, one of us would pour the bottle into two glasses and the other one would pick his/her glass.)

I’m still my mother’s offspring to some degree. Thus, since retiring from the practice of law, I limit myself to four mini-cans of Coke per week. I look forward to them almost as much as when I was ten.

But I’m done drinking Coke. From now on, it’s sparkling water in its place or, if I’m desperate, an alternative soft drink produced by another company.

I hope millions of conservatives will heed Trump’s call and, to the extent feasible, boycott every enterprise that sides with the left. If only the left flexes its economic muscle, we will lose the culture and political wars in a rout.

“Out, Nazis!”

Posted: 04 Apr 2021 12:01 PM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

I don’t know the whole story here, but this two-minute video is rocketing around social media today, reportedly showing a clergyman in Canada telling the police and a public health bureaucrat to leave his church immediately. I’ll update as I find more details (here’s one early news account), but for the moment, this is the sound of someone asserting their liberty. The clergyman speaking is reportedly Polish, and from the accent I’m guessing he is an immigrant, and thus knows a thing or two about tyranny.

UPDATE: The Calgary police have issued a statement:

The Great Liberal Death Wish Enters a New Phase

Posted: 04 Apr 2021 11:18 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

“The Great Liberal Death Wish” is Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous theme, which appeared in various iterations over the years. Here’s one version, from which we can extract the essence:

I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I'd supposed it to be—a creative movement which would shape the future—but rather a sort of death wish. . . It's difficult to convey to you what a shock this [recognition of the bankruptcy of liberalism] was, realizing that what I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father and his cronies had imagined long before, was simply on examination an appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only reality, was power. . .

The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. . .

It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I'd supposed it to be—a creative movement which would shape the future—but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutally and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded.

This thesis comes to mind in watching the hysterical reaction—and outright lying—by the left in reaction to Georgia’s revision to its election laws, which, it must be pointed out, replicate many of the same election management features in Democratic-run states such as New York and Maryland. Even the New York Times concludes that this is mostly much ado about nothing, while the Washington Post gave (P)resident Biden four Pinocchios for lying about the bill.

It’s one thing for the partisan left to lie about the bill in order to serve the imperative of gaining and keeping power by any means necessary. What’s baseball’s excuse? Or Delta Air Lines? (By the way, shouldn’t Delta follow the example of major league baseball and boycott Georgia by ceasing or reducing flights into and out of Georgia? What that? Cheap grace you say?)

Turns out there are some real costs to baseball’s cheap virtue-signaling, as the Daily Wire reports:

The Georgia county that was set to host the 2020 Major League Baseball All Star Game said over the weekend that it will lose more than $100 million after the league pulled the game and draft out of the state — a decision that comes after Democrats made a number of  false claims about the state's new election law and signaled they would support the league boycotting the state. . .

The Atlanta Braves released a statement following the league's announcement, saying that they did not support the decision and that they were "saddened that fans will not be able to see this event in our city."

Punch line: Cobb County voted for Biden. And this is the thanks they get. Atlanta used to boast it is “the city too busy to hate,” but for the activist left that controls the Democratic Party, you’re never too busy to hate Atlanta, and inflicting economic pain on your own voters is a perfect example of the Great Liberal Death Wish in action.

Postscript: I’ve been wondering whether CNN’s egregious Jim Acosta is in the witness protection program or something as we see so little of him lately, and also wondering how soon he and others like him would admit they secretly miss Trump. We’re not even to Day 100 of the Biden Era, and here he is, as predicted:

CNN’s Jim Acosta said reporters are experiencing “post-Trump stress disorder” following the former president’s exodus from the White House.

You need to read this statement backward to understand what’s really going on (besides ratings that are cratering. . .)

Happy Easter! [Updated]

Posted: 04 Apr 2021 10:06 AM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

Happy Easter to all of our Christian readers!

I confess to feeling surly about the fact that this is the second consecutive Easter on which we have not been able to actually go to church. In many quarters, the covid shutdown persists. I think that our collective reaction to the coronavirus will be studied for many years to come as an instance of terrible public policy, driven by emotion and politics rather than by data and common sense. The closing of the churches is just one facet of that irrational, fear-driven response.

Fear-driven, but obviously welcome in some circles. There is nothing like an alleged emergency to expand the powers of government and constrict ever more tightly the private sphere that once predominated in our culture. Churches closed for Easter–hey, don’t worry, there is a pre-recorded “service” available online!–are a powerful symbol of a society gone badly astray.

UPDATE: The Babylon Bee links Easter and covid in a more amusing way:

The Face of Evil [Updated]

Posted: 03 Apr 2021 06:13 PM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

Michel Foucault is the intellectual godfather of the modern Left. I have always found this fact strange, as his theories, to the extent they are intelligible, are obviously wrong. But they formed the basis for such leftist staples as identity politics and sexual confusion, and so, coherent or not, they were welcomed enthusiastically by liberals.

Foucault has long been known to have been, personally, a sinister figure. At the Epoch Times, Roger Simon writes about recent revelations of Foucault’s history. Roger starts with the scandal of Major League Baseball weighing in on behalf of voter fraud, one of endless instances of virtue signaling and moral narcissism. Then, on to Foucault:

[J]ust who is this godfather of "woke"?

Well, there's a lot of convoluted graduate school rhetoric, but it turns out the reality of the man may not be very flattering. Rumors of a certain amount of perversion have surrounded Foucault for some time but now testimony has surfaced that is distinctly "unwoke."

I am not sure I agree with Roger here. Are the “woke” actually opposed to perversion? I doubt it.

What follows is a quote from the London Times:

French-American professor Guy Sorman accused French philosopher Michel Foucault of being a 'pedophile rapist' in an interview with The Sunday Times. Sorman, a friend of Foucault, said that the philosopher sexually abused Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.

Stating that he learned of the situation when he visited Foucault, Sorman said: 'The young children were running after Foucault to say, what about me? Take me, take me. They were 8, 9, 10 years old. Foucault was throwing money at them and would say, 'let's meet at 10 p.m. at the usual place.' He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn't even raised.'

Roger asks: can a moral degenerate nevertheless be a source of sound philosophy?

Now, admittedly, just because the godfather of "woke" was allegedly a very sick and deeply evil man, a monster, really, doesn't necessarily mean all its precepts are wrong, but this should give one pause.

Roger goes on to urge that the entire sick culture of “wokism” should be smashed, a conclusion with which few who read this post will disagree.

The London Times, to which I happen to subscribe, has more:

Sorman claimed that "Foucault would not have dared to do it in France", comparing him to Paul Gauguin, the impressionist said to have had sex with young girls he painted in Tahiti, and Andre Gide, the novelist who preyed on boys in Africa. "There is a colonial dimension to this. A white imperialism."

Oh, please. Homosexual rape of young boys has nothing to do with “white imperialism,” it has to do with opportunity seized on by the evil. In fact, Foucault’s predations were well known:

But, he added, the French media already knew about Foucault's behaviour. "There were journalists present on that trip, there were many witnesses, but nobody did stories like that in those days. Foucault was the philosopher king. He's like our god in France."

With his trademark polo necks, a bald head and spectacles, Foucault, the son of a surgeon, was one of the first celebrity intellectuals of the 20th century remembered not only for his controversial analyses of prisons, madness and sexuality but for signing a petition in 1977 to legalise sex with children aged 13.

He wasn’t exactly hiding his predilections.

Foucault’s influence has been great. I used to complain that more American college students studied Karl Marx than John Locke, but the situation today is even worse than that:

Foucault is the most cited scholar in the world, often associated with the rise of identity politics in America, where MC Hammer, the rapper, is one of his fans. "It is almost invariably Foucault to whom contemporary activist studies departments trace their intellectual foundations," wrote Daniel Miller in The Critic magazine. "At the most basic level, Foucault the famous French professor supplies a signature of seriousness for disciplines without clear academic standards or traditions."

In 1980s America, the "Foucauldians", as the philosopher's academic admirers are known, "enshrined Foucault as a kind of patron saint . . . whose authority they routinely invoked in order to legitimate in properly academic terms, their own brand of progressive politics," Miller wrote in his biography.

The fact that Foucault’s obscurantism is taken seriously in academia is testament to the pitiful quality of intellectual life in the West. But there is more to it than that:

For Sorman, Foucault's behaviour was symptomatic of a distinctly French malaise dating back to Voltaire. "He believed there were two morals, one for the elite, which was immoral, and one for the people, which should be restrictive."

He continued: "France is still not a democracy, we had the revolution, proclaimed a republic but there's still an aristocracy, it's the intelligentsia, and it has had a special status. Anything goes." Now, though, "the world is suddenly changing," Sorman added.

Here in America, too, there have been two sets of standards: one for the elite, like Jeffrey Epstein, Roman Polanski, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Harvey Weinstein, and many more. Another standard for the rest of us. Is the world “suddenly changing?” We certainly haven’t seen that recently.

The interesting question, to me, is whether a man who is a moral monster can nevertheless produce sound philosophy. I think the answer is No. On the Left, it is fashionable to nit-pick great men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. But the men and women who founded what we now know as conservatism were good, if inevitably imperfect, people.

Conversely, the icons of the Left–Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Michel Foucault and many more–were hideously deformed and evil. I think a flawed man or woman–which is to say, a normal person–can produce sound political and social philosophy. But I think it is impossible for a moral leper like Michel Foucault to produce anything good or useful. Which helps to explain, perhaps, why today’s Left is irredeemably corrupt.

UPDATE: Roger Kimball, who is much more a Foucault scholar than I–happily, my education predated the Foucault fad–has an in-depth consideration of the man and his work at The New Criterion.
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