The Little Red Blog

A Day in the Life

"I read the news today, oh boy..." (Beatles, "A Day in the Life")

I already suspected that 2024 will be bad, but it’s only January 4th and look what Media Matters has already aggregated for us (Homepage | Media Matters for America):

Heather Mac Donald to Charlie Kirk: “White civilization has decided to engage in the great replacement theory, and to go down without a fight.”

Charlie Kirk calls for Republicans to take Joe Biden off the ballot

Charlie Kirk: “We've allowed our beautiful cities to just be captured by the cult of anti-racism.”

Charlie Kirk: “Why are whites taking this? Why are we just sitting idly by and allowing corporate America to give all the jobs to nonwhite people?”

Fox host blames antisemitism on “the spiderlike cancer that is diversity, equity, inclusion.”

Fox News' Jesse Watters claims the CIA will use DEI to “subvert the Republican nominee” in the 2024 presidential election

Matt Walsh: “Nonwhite countries are by far more racist than white ones”

Oh, and then there's this:

Colorado Supreme Court building shooting suspect appears in court | CNN

And this:

(126) ‘A deadly serious pattern’: Five state capitals evacuated after a series of bomb threats - YouTube

And, to top it off:

Perry, Iowa, school shooting: Sixth grader killed, five wounded | AP News

Fasten your seatbelts. 2024 is going to be a bumpy year.

 

Saturday Lecture: The Zeitgeist It Is A-Changin'

{I don’t know much about Ross Barkan, but he apparently hasn’t read (or doesn’t remember) Pascal. “For thousands of years,” Barkan informs us, as he blithely explains today’s Zeitgeist, “mature human beings knew how to be alone in their own thoughts and tolerate boredom.” Compare this smug observation with Pascal (17th century): “All humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It also seems that Barkan, who was born in 1989, is unaware that New Age spirituality is not new: e.g., New Age - Wikipedia or, for an even longer historical view, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment. Those caveats aside, Barkan’s recent essay is indicative of—well, of something.}

Ross Barkan (from “The Zeitgeist Is Changing” ¹):

Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.

Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future – and hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age – with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable – would magic suddenly hold such sway?

What explains the dominance of digital charlatans who promise all of life’s riches are at hand if only you visualize hard enough or utter the correct incantations. ² Embracing the paranormal or believing, wholeheartedly, that star positions can determine personalities can be harmless fun – until the delusions become life-consuming and despair takes hold when they inevitably do not deliver on their promise.

Irrationality, on its own, is no virtue, and some of the romantics of the 19th and 21st centuries succumb to the same ancient dross, magic alone as the supposed channel to transcendence. That spiritualism has spread with tech is an irony fitting of the age.

Against the hype of progress, the new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras, and video recorders worth it? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there has been at least one press report of a teen group ditching smartphones altogether because “social media and phones are not real life”. Science brought about these revolutions; science compressed once unimaginable computing power into a single handheld device. Science now promises a great leap forward with artificial intelligence, which seems intent on replacing the arts themselves – machines will now make mediocre art, music, literature, and even fact-challenged journalism.

For now, rapacious tech still has a mass buy-in. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are hegemonic. Mark Zuckerberg sculpts his pharaonic Hawaii compound. He and his ilk own the present. Whether they own the future, forevermore, is no longer clear. Generational change is hard on the incumbents. And romanticism won’t hold still; it promises, at the minimum, a wild and unsteady flame. What it burns is still anyone’s guess. ³

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The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms | Ross Barkan | The Guardian

Ross Barkan - Wikipedia

¹ Experts say that, for best results, your zeitgeist should be changed every generation or so, perhaps at the same time you refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."  Thomas Jefferson) I would also recommend that you take your zeitgeist in for a tune-up every five years or every 80,000 miles, whichever comes first.

² Belief in incantations and ritual formulae is shocking to Christians? That seems odd.

³ As is, for that matter, whatever Ross Barkan is going on about.  

You may not be interested in the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is interested in you.

Economy Collapses Under Weight of New Jobs!

{Is it just a coincidence that "new jobs" rhymes with "Lou Dobbs"? I think not.}

CNN: US markets fall on shockingly strong US jobs report

Oh no—too many people is getting hired and has jobs! CNN analyzes the disastrous developments: The US economy added 336,000 jobs in September, significantly more than Wall Street economists expected. The unemployment rate remained at 3.8%. Economists had predicted the US added just 170,000 jobs last month and thought the unemployment rate would inch back down to 3.7%. While that strong report is better for the economy than August's tepid figures, it's not exactly the cooling labor market Fed Chair Jerome Powell is looking for to keep inflation in check.

US stocks tumbled Friday after the report was released, with the Dow falling more than 200 points before paring some of those losses.

This is why economics is known as "the dismal science": what appears to most of us to be good news turns out to be, for economists, shockingly bad. "The job market remains too hot for comfort," they explain; "today’s report indicates the economy is almost too hot to handle."

Should we not, then, blame our economic travails, such as they are, on the hallowed "job creators"? Why do they keep creating jobs at a time when the economy is already up to its ears with them? Thanks to them, "The Federal Reserve has a complicated situation on its hands." That cannot be good!  "Fed officials have said they want to see the job market cool off to ensure that inflation is on track to reach the central bank's 2% target." On the other hand, "The recent sell-off in government bonds means that the US financial system will become more burdensome for American families and businesses." And that, believe it or not, is the good news, because "The bond-market rout could cool the economy enough for the Fed to hold interest rates steady."

Drat that darn Bidenomics! It’s turned out to be a bunch of malarkey. We were much better off when no one was working but prices were lower—right? Why do people even want to work, anyway, when they could get on the entitlement gravy train and make out like veritable bandits? Yet they keep taking jobs—inconceivable! Are they trying to tank the stock market (again)? Jobs, jobs, everywhere, and investors are turning to drink. Didn't Joe Manchin warn us that if working people get money, they are likely to fritter it away on food, clothing, and shelter--or worse, on their children!

It's simple Economics 101: people earning money causes prices to rise, because the Invisible Hand has so decreed. You want to fight inflation? Then stop with all the jobs and the working, okay? Uncle Sam wants you to be unemployed, and so do the geniuses on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve.

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Jobs report shock: American economy added a stunning 336,000 jobs in September (cnn.com)

"We're doomed!" Americans react with shock and panic to horrifically good jobs report...

Wednesday with Pascal: Two Guys in a Bar, Talking

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat rarely strays from his philosophical turf, but now and then, while he is out and about, he chances upon events that demand to be memorialized. This is the story of one such event.} 

So, the other day I sit in one of the dives on Railroad Street, one of those places where faces along the bar cling to their average day and the lights never go out and the music must always play. ¹ Anyway, there I am and suddenly I overhear two guys at the end of the bar talking about Fox News, which apparently they both used to like and which one of the guys (Eric) even says he used to work for, but now they’re not happy with Fox because the network doesn’t seem to respect Donald Trump like it did before. So, Eric is like, what’s with that and why are they so mean to Trump? And the other guy goes:

It's because they want a puppet in the White House. It's not about fighting for conservatives, they're fighting for their billionaire class, and they put, you know, neocon RINOs like Paul Ryan on their board. ² They don't represent hardworking, conservative Americans. That's not at all what they want. They want that power. They want the proximity to power because that benefits them like it does all of the elite. Again, Trump is the antithesis of that, because he's the only one of those people, the only one of those politicians or the people, perhaps considered in that group, that doesn't actually need those people's money, doesn't need their love, their attention, and that's why Donald Trump is the only threat to that deep state, to the establishment who's been failing us for far too long.

Spoken like a man of the people, I thought, and I tried to get a better look at who this hardworking blue-collar character was, but the bar lighting wasn’t good enough. Anyway, the Eric guy says, “I was hoping that, given the announcement that Rupert Murdoch was stepping down last Thursday as chairman -- he's handing his board seats over to Lachlan, James, Elizabeth, and Prudence -- that maybe the new era of Fox would be a little bit more welcoming of Trump--” And his buddy slams his bottle of Bud Lite down on the bar and snarls, “Hey Eric, I got news for you. My eyes are rolling in the back of my head so hard. I mean, you know, half of those people are just, like, devout Bolsheviks. I mean, they're left of the most radical people in the world.”

I am concerned that this guy might be having a seizure, but I am also intrigued by this bit of “information” he has disclosed—half the Murdoch family are devout Bolsheviks? I didn’t know there were devout Bolsheviks anymore! And aren’t the Murdochs filthy rich? Aren’t they Australian? You're telling me there's a family of rich Australian Bolsheviks? I move surreptitiously down the bar to see if I can identify this guy, who keeps on ranting:

“If they're on the board of Fox, I imagine it's not getting better. It's only going to get significantly worse. You know? The wives are just, you know, avowed leftists. You know, you can say what you want about the others, but, you know, RINO, at best, in my opinion. And yeah no, it's not going to get better. It's not going to become more objective or fair. You know, they may come around if Trump wins the nomination, because that's what's best for them and their wallets, and whatever that may be, but, you know, they're not fighting for actual conservatives or for conservatives across America even a little bit.”

And Eric just shakes his head, muttering something I don’t catch about “a damn shame” and then what sounds like “Second Amendment remedies”. Eric’s buddy stands up, and yes, he looks familiar--dark hair slicked back from a forehead you could fit a billboard on, punchable face disfigured by a permanent sneer--but I just can’t place him. He says, “Thanks for inviting me on, Eric,” and Eric, still seated at the bar, says “Always my pleasure, Don. You know you’re welcome on the show anytime.” I think, “Don”? Then I think, “show”?

I watch Don as he heads out the door; I see there’s a car waiting for him, and a buxom dark-haired woman gets out of the car and walks up to him, teetering clumsily on her high heels, and hugs him. Damn it, I think, she looks familiar too! I open the door just in time to hear the woman say, in a simpering tone but at full volume, “How is my little Donny-Wonny today?” The Don guy glares at her and snaps, “Shut your pie-hole, Kimberly.” He gets in the car. I’m in the doorway, taking in the scene, and Kimberly looks directly at me. “The best,” she shrieks, “is yet…to come!” An entire murder of crows shakes the branches of a tree as they flee the horrendous sound. Kimberly gets in the car and cuddles up to Donny-Wonny, who seems to recoil, and they drive away.

I go back inside. Eric seems to have passed out, his head on the bar, drool coming out of his mouth. I catch the bartender’s eye and he shrugs; “Defenseless under the night,” he says, “this guy in stupor lies.” ³ Is he quoting a poem or something? I ask for another Cold Smoke—motto, The best damn beer in the whole damn world—and when the bartender brings it, I ask him if he knows Eric or Don. He looks at me like he’s not sure if I can be trusted with whatever he’s about to say, then leans on the bar to get closer to me: “Those are the guys,” he whispers, “who recovered Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

I polish off my Cold Smoke as quick as I can, and I get the hell out.  

----------------------------------------------------

On Newsmax, Donald Trump Jr says "half" the Murdoch family are "devout Bolsheviks" | Media Matters for America

¹ W.H. Auden bears no responsibility for my borrowings from his poem, “June 1, 1939”.

² Neocon RINOs: best band name ever!

³ See footnote #1, above.

Democracy for Dummies?

Speaking of dummies, Matt Walsh is best known for asking people, “What is a woman?” His follow-up question, apparently, is “What is federalism?” Why he expects people who don’t know the difference between a man and a woman to know anything about our constitutional structure or about the Tenth Amendment is beyond me, but regardless:

Americans don't know anything about the history of their own country, they don't know anything about how their government works or is supposed to work, they don't know anything about anything. And we see all the surveys. We see the dumb guy on the street interviews that are all over YouTube and the late-night shows and everything. And we're so accustomed to it that, although we realize this is the case, we don't really understand how significant it is and what a problem it is. You know, because we've grown so accustomed to it, we don't stop to think about it. We don't stop to think about the fact that this is a civilizational crisis that we are dealing with when you've got a country filled with millions of adults who don't know anything, who are totally oblivious. And yet, those same adults have the power to direct the future of our country. And when it comes to voting, they have the same power that you do. Their vote counts equal to yours.

Notice how cleverly Matt ingratiates himself to his audience by exempting them from his indictment (“their vote” versus “yours”), making it clear that other people are the problem. To my knowledge, no one who advocates knowledge-based limitations on the right to vote ever acknowledges that they themselves might be disqualified under such a system; that contingency never seems to cross their minds.

Walsh continues:

The right to vote is not a God-given right guaranteed to everybody regardless of anything--it's not. It's not fundamental to your human nature that you automatically are entitled to have a say over the political system in your country--it's not. There are some basic guidelines that should be in place. You should have to earn that right. Not everybody should have it. And it is so incredibly obvious that if you are an absolute oblivious moron, who knows nothing about your own country or the political -- or the government that runs it, then you shouldn't have any say over it.

Speaking of absolute oblivious morons, how about this: if you’re dumb enough to listen to Matt Walsh, you are automatically disqualified from voting?

That said, this anti-democratic argument has been made by people much smarter than Matt Walsh. Notably, it is made by Jason Brennan, a professor at Georgetown University and author of the 2016 book, Against Democracy, who earned his fifteen minutes of fame by claiming that “most voters remain ignorant, biased, and misinformed.” His solution? We should replace democracy (rule of the people) with “epistocracy” (rule of people who know what the word “epistocracy” means). With nary a trace of condescension, Brennan explains to those too dumb to figure it out themselves:

Voters tend to mean well, but voting well takes more than a kind heart. It requires tremendous social scientific knowledge: knowledge that most citizens lack. Most voters know nothing, but some know a great deal, and some know less than nothing. The goal of liberal republican epistocracy is to protect against democracy’s downsides, by reducing the power of the least-informed voters, or increasing the power of better-informed ones.

Brennan has some thoughts on how to implement the rule of bright people:

There are many ways of instituting epistocracy, some of which would work better than others. For instance, an epistocracy might deny citizens the franchise unless they can pass a test of basic political knowledge. They might give every citizen one vote, but grant additional votes to citizens who pass certain tests or obtain certain credentials. ¹ They might pass all laws through normal democratic means, but then permit bands of experts to veto badly designed legislation. ² For instance, a board of economic advisors might have the right to veto rent-control laws, just as the Supreme Court can veto laws that violate the Constitution.

Rather than getting into a discussion about the merits of epistocracy, let me suggest that Walsh and Brennan might more profitably focus their concern on politicians and the political parties that choose and support them (not to mention the deep-pocket donors who finance them). My own modest proposal is that all candidates for public office should henceforth be required to take, under rigorously controlled conditions, a standardized exam (call it the “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV” test), the results of which would be released to the public. In addition to basic questions like “What is a woman?” and “Is this a doggie or a camel?”, the test would include puzzlers such as “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” and “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Of course, there would be a vocabulary test to determine which candidate has all the best words; and each candidate would compose an essay on one of several proposed themes—e.g., “My Life as a Very Stable Genius” or “The Civil War—Why Couldn’t They Just Talk It Out?”  Each candidate’s test score—rated on a scale from “Trump” at the low end to “Obama” at the high end—would be displayed next to her or his name on the official election ballot; it would also be required on all campaign literature. 

What I’m saying is, maybe the voters aren’t the real dummies after all.

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¹ Says the credentialed university professor.

² Feel free to insert your own joke here about “bands of experts”.

https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-walsh/matt-walsh

The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge | Aeon Ideas

Your Weekly Charlie Kirk

{The following is presented as a public service.}

In his inimitable way, the right-wing wunderkind Charlie Kirk explains it all:

There is an orchestrated fix that is in against Joe Biden right now. It is coordinated. There has now been an established war room to get Joe Biden out of the way. They're terrified the Republican base is consolidating. The immigration thing is failing. The inflation thing is failing. There is going to be an attempt to take out Joe Biden. To take him out first like Richard Nixon, and maybe if they have to do the JFK thing they will. I don't even know if that's a thing, but we'll see.  They're gonna try to take him out. The deep state is tired. It's over. They said, we'll play this out. We'll try the lawfare. We'll try the incumbency thing. It's easier said than done, because once you open up the Game of Thrones, once you cut off the head of Ned Stark, war happens.

Is America’s deep state on the verge of cutting off the head of Ned Stark (or perhaps of Ned Flanders)? Is it planning to do the JFK thing, if that’s a thing?

Charlie Kirk reports and we--well, let's say, we give him all the respect he deserves. Stay tuned for updates as they come in. 

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Charlie Kirk claims the "deep state" will "take out" Biden, "first like Richard Nixon, and maybe if they have to do the JFK thing they will" | Media Matters for America

Deep State gonna get you if you don't watch out!

 

Friday Feature: Jeers in Heaven

“Our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, the authorities, against the Powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Paul the Apostle)

From the show Prophets and Patriots (streamed on Rumble):

ROGER STONE (GUEST): On the morning of January 6, I was in the shower. The Lord came to me in the shower. Over the New York Times — You want to make fun of me? Go ahead. A voice clearly told me, do not go to the Capitol. And I did not go to the Capitol. Yes, the Lord does send you a message. He does speak to you. And you need to speak to him. It is — and then, of course, the day after the election, I was in Memphis. I was headed to Mike Lindell's studio. The car that I was riding in with two security guards was broadsided. The car was demolished, was totaled. They were both injured. I walked away without a scratch.

STEVE SCHULTZ (HOST): Praise God, praise God. 

STONE: So now I'm praying for one more miracle. Not for myself, but for the nation. ¹

^{=================================}

The LORD checked His latest incoming prayer-texts and sighed. “One more miracle?” He thought. “What does this Roger Stone fellow think I am—his personal Mak-a-Wish vending machine?” Looking over his Father’s shoulder, Jesus reminded Him, “Abba, I’m pretty sure Roger Stone sold his soul to the Rival years ago.” Father and Son turned to the Holy Spirit, the keeper of the Eternal Archives: “Is that true?” the LORD asked. The Spirit nodded. “At the age of eight,” He explained, “Roger Stone attempted to influence his fellow students to support John F. Kennedy for President. Mr. Stone has stated, ‘I remember going through the cafeteria line and telling every kid that Nixon was in favor of school on Saturdays. It was my first political trick.’ In 1972, Mr. Stone, having officially turned to the dark side, was hired to work for Nixon’s ‘Committee to Re-Elect the President’—CREEP. Shall I continue?” the Spirit asked.

The LORD asked, “Wait a second--isn’t Stone the joker with the ridiculous Nixon tattoo on his back?”

“You are correct, Sir,” said the Spirit.

Jesus spoke up. “Also, Stone sometimes dresses up like a 19^th-century Victorian dandy. Not that there is anything wrong with that,” he added; "I mean, who am I to cast stones?"

The LORD waved His hand irritably. “Did I really speak to Roger Stone while he was in the shower? I mean, wouldn’t I remember something like that?”

“Well, Sir,” the Spirit responded, “You do tend to manifest yourself in unlikely places—you recall the Burning Bush, do you not?”

Shaking his head, the LORD insisted, “If I was with Roger Stone while he was taking a shower, I think I would remember it--if only because of the Nixon tattoo.”

“I bet,” said Jesus, “that if you had seen Roger Stone in the shower, you would have told him, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’” The LORD and the Spirit both groaned; Jesus, when incarnate, had developed what humans call ‘a sense of humor’. It did not play well in Heaven.

“Do either of you have any idea what Stone means by ‘one more miracle’ and ‘not for myself, but for the nation’?” demanded the LORD.

“Ask not what the Almighty can do for you,” Jesus recited; “ask what the Almighty can do for your country.”

“Shut up,” said the LORD. “You’re not helping.”

The Spirit cleared its throat. “This archival material may be relevant. It was published by the Huffington Post in December 2022. I quote:

Long-time Donald Trump confidant and informal adviser Roger Stone insists he has witnessed a momentous phenomenon: A “demon portal” above President Joe Biden’s White House.

It’s “swirling like a cauldron,” he claimed in an interview earlier this week with conservative radio host Eric Metaxas, who pointed out that the observation by his guest “sounds insane.”

The portal — apparently a direct connection to hell and Satan — was first spotted months ago and even captured on film, according to Stone. “It’s still there,” he declared. “I think that a portal, a demonic portal, opened above the White House around the time that the Bidens moved in,” Stone said. “This was brought to my attention by a Christian who lives in north Florida who sent me a bunch of photos, a bunch of documents and also a bunch of notations from the Bible about portals.”

Stone said he was initially skeptical. But he has examined photos of the spot and scrutinized “live cam where you can actually see it in real-time, and there does appear to be something above the White House.” ²

“That’s enough,” interrupted the LORD. “For once, I agree with Eric Metaxas; Roger Stone sounds insane.”

“Would you like me to drive out his demons?” Jesus asked. "Or not," he hastily added; "I mean, not my will but Thy will be done, right?"

“There aren’t enough swine in the world to hold that many demons,” replied the LORD, “and I certainly don’t want those particular demons on the loose, especially with the election only a year away.”

“I thought, Sir,” the Spirit politely interjected, “We had agreed to leave politics to the Rival, since he owns all the candidates anyway.”

“The point is,” declared the LORD, “I wouldn’t touch this Roger Stone guy with a ten-trillion-foot pole, much less talk to him in the shower. He wants a miracle, does he? How about this: it’s a miracle that he and his cronies aren’t in jail!”  

Somewhere far below could be heard the sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth, accompanied by the plaintive, feeble cry, “Trump won…”

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¹ Roger Stone claims that on January 6, "the Lord came to me in the shower" and "clearly told me, do not go to the Capitol" | Media Matters for America

² Trump Confidant Roger Stone Says He Saw Swirling 'Demon Portal' Above White House (yahoo.com)

Note: I had intended to illustrate this post with a photo of Roger Stone's Nixon tattoo, but Typepad would not allow it, which is understandable. However, it also refused an image of the demon portal over the White House, which is inexcusable. 

 

Friday Fragments

{Here and there on the WorldWideWeb...for once in my life, I will refrain, for the most part, from snarky comments.}

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson makes a sensible point: laws should apply equally to everyone, with no loopholes for anyone whose personal Lord and Savior says otherwise.  Or, as Robinson phrases it, “If a law should apply, it should apply regardless of how people feel about following it. If the law infringes on liberty, it should be repealed. All a religious exemption is at the end of the day is a rule that some people are allowed to violate laws because they believe they ought to be allowed to. Or rather, because they believe God told them they shouldn’t have to follow the law and should get to discriminate against people.” 

There Should Not Be “Religious Exemptions” To Laws ❧ Current Affairs

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Kerry McDonald, on the other hand, leader of the Foundation for Economic Education, would like to get rid of laws forcing kids to go to school. Yay, Kerry McDonald! Where were you when I needed you in 1965? Ms. McDonald argues as follows:

Compulsory school attendance laws terrorize parents and weaken families. Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law that allows parents of children who regularly miss school to be jailed. The case focused on two single mothers in Missouri who were given jail sentences when their children, who were in kindergarten and first grade, were each absent from school for roughly 15 days during the 2021/2022 academic year. 

We may see this criminalization of parents accelerate in the coming months as states and school districts try to find the allegedly “missing” children who have left district schools since the pandemic response began in 2020. It is likely to be low-income parents and those from historically marginalized groups who will be targeted for truancy.

Compulsory schooling is incompatible with freedom, as Thomas Jefferson himself recognized. While promoting broad educational offerings, free to the poor, and noting that a society could not be both free and ignorant, Jefferson opposed forced education. “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father,” Jefferson wrote in 1817.

Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, we should seek instead to eliminate compulsory schooling statutes and free families from the government’s coercive clutches. In the absence of these laws, a robust, diverse, and decentralized education ecosystem would emerge that would be grounded in consent over coercion and defined by variety over monopoly.

Compulsory Schooling Laws Have Got To Go - Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)

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Lastly, educator Daniel Buck is very excited about a new college admissions test that, he says, will challenge the SAT and the ACT for prominence: it’s the CLT (Classical Learning Test), and it requires students to read Plato and Teresa of Avila!

Created in 2015, the CLT hopes to revive what we consider an education of old — logic, grammar, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. In format, it resembles its competitors, featuring passages with multiple choice questions. Yet students instead read the likes of Plato on tyrannical man or St. Teresa of Avila on the virtues of a humble life.

Hundreds of private colleges and universities now accept its scores. Last spring, Florida began funding its administration at the K-12 level, and high scores can even earn students Bright Futures Scholarships.

Especially as the classical education movement more broadly gains national momentum, there is both room and need for a challenger to incentivize the kind of education that cultivates wisdom, fosters virtue, inspires wonder, and crafts the soul.

A test to challenge the SAT | The Hill

Democracy of Dunces?

{The Little Red Blog will be on vacation for the next week or so. Pascal the existential Russian blue cat does not wish to be disturbed in my absence.}

“Most citizens are not doing us any favor by voting. Asking everyone to vote is like asking everyone to litter.” (Jason Brennan)

Is America’s voters stupid? Yes, says Jason Brennan, author of Against Democracy, and he said that even before the electorate put Donald Trump in the White House. Most voters, he claims, are “misinformed or ignorant about basic political information; they know even less about more advanced social scientific knowledge.” As a result, voters “support policies and candidates they would not support if they were better informed; we consequently get suboptimal and sometimes quite bad political outcomes.” We are a veritable democracy of dunces, and we get the government you would, under those circumstances, expect.

What this country needs, says Brennan, is an “epistocracy,” which is to say, “By law, in some way or another, more competent or knowledgeable citizens have slightly more political power than less competent or knowledgeable citizens.” Imagine being offered the opportunity to take, on a completely voluntary basis, an “American Civics Exam”; depending on how well you do on the exam, your vote would be given added weight (i.e., it would be counted as 1.25 votes, or 1.5 votes, or 2 votes, or more). Brennan does not, to my knowledge, suggest a similar exam for political candidates, but it seems a logical step forward.

Brennan isn’t opposed to democracy per se; he believes it is only a method for allowing us to choose our leaders and representatives, and, as such, there is nothing sacrosanct about either democracy in general or about the mechanics of any given democratic system. Tweaking (not “twerking”) the ways our democracy does its electoral business is not at all the same as ditching democracy entirely.

On the other hand, Brennan likely knows that epistocracy is a slippery concept which could put us on an even more slippery slope. As someone who always scored much better on standardized tests than I did in life, I can see objections to that approach. Why not determine voting status by income level or education level? Why not limit the franchise to property owners or to the gainfully employed? Should parents be given proxy votes on behalf of their minor children? How do we avoid turning the epistocracy into something resembling China’s “social credit” system?  

The good news is that we have plenty of time to consider and to fine-tune Brennan’s proposal, because there is no chance his epistocracy is going to replace our bumbling democracy in the foreseeable future; nor will related gimmicks such as “lottocracies,” “specialized betting markets,” “futarchy,” or “predictocracy”. There are, however, other paths we might take toward building a better electorate. Perhaps we need continuing civic education for adults? Perhaps we need media that convey accurate information and that explain issues calmly and rationally? Perhaps we need to limit the amount of money that politicians and parties and PACs are allowed to spend on disinformation and propaganda? Perhaps we need to stop giving politicians and government officials license to lie?

God help me, I’m going to conclude by quoting Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." 

Friday Frights

{You may not have noticed, but America is beset by tyranny and totalitarianism. Fortunately, astute observers like Glenn Ellmers and Walter Kirn are here to enlighten us. Wake up, sheeple!}

Despite the promise inherent in its title, Glenn Ellmers’ “You Got a License for that Tyranny?” does not discuss tyranny at all. Instead, the brief essay is a lesson in how to substitute invective for argument--which is not to say that Ellmers is incapable of presenting substantive anti-Left arguments, only that in this case he eschews them.  When you’re preaching to the converted, I suppose, there is no need for apologetics; you can safely assume that the congregants (in this case, readers of The American Mind) will be satisfied if you simply invoke the familiar epithets.

Which is precisely what Ellmers does (and all that he does), making the case against our Liberal overlords with nothing but a barrage of pejorative language, unleavened by even the slightest hint of respect or charity. Ellmers captures the flavor—not to say, the essence—of Liberal tyranny with a string of well-chosen words and phrases:  

Leftist ruling class, dysfunctional, sanctimonious, deranged, urban hipsters, moral superiority, social parasites, ruthless self-interest, ideological purity, insane, urban barbarism, bureaucratic oligarchy, anti-rational postmodernism, genteel Mafiosi, self-conscious managerial class, elite education and training, expertocracy, misplaced arrogance, unserious leadership, hostile incompetence, ideological posturing, absurd academic dogmas, propaganda, self-contradictory, incoherent, nihilistic.

That, it seems, is all we know about Liberalism and all we need to know.

I give Glenn Ellmers enormous credit for not having used the words “woke” or “Wokeism”. I also give him credit for noting, more or less as an aside, that “The United States is still relatively peaceful, prosperous, and secure.” That is something for which we should all be grateful, especially given all the unlicensed tyranny to which we are being subjected.  

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You Got a License for that Tyranny? - The American Mind

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In an interview worth quoting at some length, Montana-based author Walter Kirn (Up in the Air) bemoans the fact that “America has lost the plot”:

I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.

Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.

The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.

Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.

But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things? ¹

The final lesson wasn’t that any of this was inevitable, but that by growing up and being good citizens and standing with the right kind of people, it could all be averted. It was portrayed as navigable. It wasn’t portrayed as catastrophic but merely as a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome. Even the Soviet Union and the threat of the atomic bomb were construed as something that would probably not occur because we were so strong, so influential, so virtuous.

Kirn, who was born in 1962, is perplexed that his seventh-grade understanding of America (“so strong, so influential, so virtuous) and of the world (“a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome”) has to be either amended or defended. If only his rural Minnesota public education had included lessons on America’s unresolved racial conflicts, its political, social, and cultural turmoil, its foreign interventions and entanglements—really, if only Kearn had been exposed to anything that would have complicated, in the best sense of the word, his Midwest naivete.   

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Walter Kirn on How America Lost the Plot (palladiummag.com)

¹ Analogously: as a child, I was taught to be afraid of lions and tigers. Now that I’m seventy-five, you’re telling me that it’s neurotic for a grown man to be afraid of kittens?