… from triumph to abasement.

“So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness.

Having control of the White House and both Houses  of Congress, what have the Democrats accomplished with all that power?

Their priority was to undo what President Trump had done.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record.

What had Trump achieved? Most importantly –

The greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past. …

Then came the rule of the Left and –

Within eight months the following was finalized [by the Democrats]:

Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause.

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists.

Whereupon –

Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts.

China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.

At home, gas prices have soared.

Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink.

The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century.

A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes …

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective non-enforcement of existing laws: wors, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.

And among the shocks administered to Americans as their country fails and falls, acts of treachery and deeds of corruption:

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists”, or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive? …

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding.

All who voted for Trump are declared to be “white-supremacists’ and “terrorists”. Peaceful protestors are labeled “insurrectionists” and locked up without charge as political prisoners, while  violent protestors are called “peaceful”. The “peaceful” rioters, arsonists, and killers are alone exempted from having to wear masks in obedience to the absurd restrictions imposed on the rest of the nation in the time of pestilence, on the grounds that their ideological correctness sanitizes and immunizes them.

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. …. There were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

When there were –

120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. … The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020 [when Biden “won” the election]. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality.

Convicted criminals have been let out of prison by the thousands. The innocent are punished. The guilty go free – and are rewarded.

America’s undoing has taken less than a year.

The earthly Devil and his ideological mate.

See how lovingly they gaze into each other’s eyes.

They both personify the two evils we exist to oppose: RELIGION AND LEFTISM.

The Pope and Pelosi

Is it all over for America as the world’s one-and-only, unchallengeable, superpower?

Despairing thinkers on the Right think so.

Roger Kimball writes in part at American Greatness:

“Never forget [9/11].” “We remember.”  The sentiment [is] invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism.

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered …

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the “woke” perspective that has laid waste the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military?

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity”. The explicit cost for such gender programs was $787 million; the real cost was much higher because “gender goals” were folded into almost every initiative we undertook in Afghanistan. …

The dissolution of the British Empire—one of the most beneficent and enlightened political forces in history—took place for many reasons … Part of the reason for its dissolution was inner uncertainty, weariness, a failure of nerve. By the middle of the last century, Britain no longer wished to rule: it wanted to be liked.

The promiscuous desire to be liked, for states as much as for individuals, is a profound character flaw. …

When we ask what nurtures terrorists, what allows them to flourish and multiply, one important answer concerns the failure of authority, which is the failure to live up to the responsibilities of power.

Christopher Bedford writes at The Federalist;

How many are willing to confront the deep, decades-long rot that is the actual reason we lost in Afghanistan?

America is sick. …  If we don’t make the choice to confront [that fact] directly, it will kill us.

In his view the decline has been recent and rapid:

If all of these things — that riot and that disease, and the ever present specter of racism — were to disappear right now never to be seen again, this country would still be very, very sick. The United States — our home — would still be feeble compared to five years ago, let alone 10, 15 or 30.

Mark Steyn said in an address to the Gatestone Institute that China’s “moment” has come, and the “transfer” of superpower status has already begun:

We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.

American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China. …

Everything we need comes from China. China not only gives us the virus, we are also dependent on China to give us the personal protective equipment ‑ all the masks and everything ‑ that supposedly protect us from the virus. …

We’re living in the early stages of a future that is the direct consequence of poor public policy over the last couple of generations. …

Right now, we are witnessing a non‑stop continuous transfer of power to a country that is serious about using that power. This is China’s moment. My great worry is that actually, the transfer to China has already happened. The baton has already been passed. We just haven’t formally acknowledged that yet.

America has been a benign superpower, as was Britain in the nineteenth century.

Communist China will not be benign.

If America’s decadence, its putrid sentimentality, its self-abasement, its effeminization allow China to become the next world-dominating power, the Leftists, the anti-white racists, the “woke” liars and cheats who now rule America will learn too late what “systemic” oppression really is.

Will the rest find that sufficient compensation for the loss of freedom?

The Left and Islam are allies now against our civilization.

But they are incompatible and cannot long co-exist in power.

Sooner or later they will turn to confront each other. The way both deal with opposition is to destroy it. They will war against each other. Which will be the victor?

If Islam wins – and it almost certainly will – there’ll be an end to feminism, to homosexual marriage, to “transgendering”. There will be no bothering about the future temperature of the planet. Obsessive striving for “diversity, inclusion, and equity” will stop. Blacks of African descent will be regarded and treated as subservient even if they are Muslim, and there will be true “systemic racism”.  Sects of Islam will clash with one another. Torture and killing will be routine events. There will be no laughter, wine, or music (unless in secret). Life for most people will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

If by remote chance the Left wins, there will be an equal lack of tolerance. Organized religions will be disallowed (don’t cheer, the sentence is not concluded) except for Leftism itself. It will punish heresy as rigorously as Islam would. Life for most people will be communal, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

With either of those two faiths dominant, poverty, misery, and unremitting fear will be the lot of all but the rulers.

With either in power, there will be no more innovation. New ideas come from the heads of individuals, never from governing cliques or compulsory assemblies.

How long,  you may wonder, will the man-made wonders of science and technology that we have now remain available to us? Neither Islam nor the Left believe in teaching math, science, or engineering.  Who will have the ability to maintain products of advanced technology? Where will the genuinely skilled be found?

The answer to that can only be – China. China will be the tower of know-how; the laboratory and engine room of the world; the exploiter of individual genius; the producer and withholder of all things needed for sustaining human life. 

(The life, that is to say, of those permitted to live.)

So no matter which side wins the coming battle between Islam and the Left, it will not enjoy its triumph for long.

The real winner, now that the free West has given up, will not be its ideological destroyer Leftism, nor its terrorist destroyer Islam, but its science-and-technology successor China.

(This is in part a repeat of  a post we first published on September 3, 2011, under the title The need to knock Islam.) 

The greatness of the West began with doubting. The idea that every belief, every assumption, should be critically examined started the might of Europe. When those old Greek thinkers who founded our civilization learnt and taught that no one has a monopoly of truth or ever will have, they launched the intellectual adventure that has carried the human race – not without a long interval in the doldrums – literally to the skies.

Socrates taught the utility of suspicion. He is reputed to have said, “The highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.” He was not, however, the first to use doubt for discovery. Thales of Miletos, who was born 155 years before Socrates, dared to doubt that religion’s explanatory tales about how the world came to be as it is were to be trusted, and he began exploring natural phenomena in a way that we recognize as scientific. He is often called the Father of Science. With him and his contemporary, Anaximander, who argued with him by advancing alternative ideas, came the notion – for the first time as far as we know – that reason could fathom and describe how the universe worked.

Science is one of the main achievements of the West, but it is not the only product of constructive doubt that made for its greatness. Doubt as a habit of mind or tradition of thinking meant that new, foreign, even counter-intuitive ideas were not dismissed. Europe, before and after it stagnated in the doldrums of the long Catholic Christian night (and even to some extent during those dark centuries), was hospitable to ideas wherever they came from.

Totally opposed to this intellectual openness were the churches with their dogma. Those who claim that the achievements of our civilization are to be credited to Christianity (or in the currently fashionable and nonsensical phrase to “the Judeo-Christian tradition”) have a hard case to make. It was the rediscovery of the Greek legacy in the Renaissance in the teeth of Christian dogmatism, and the new freedom from religious persecution exploited by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that re-launched the West on its intellectual progress, to become the world’s nursery of innovation and its chief factory of ideas.

Our civilization cannot survive without this openness. Critical examination is the breath that keeps it alive. But it is in danger of suffocation. It is more threatened now than it has been for the last four hundred years by dogmatisms: the old religions still – especially Islam which absolutely forbids criticism – and ever more by Marxism, feminism, environmentalism (especially the myth of manmade global warming), critical race theory (CRT), and the orthodoxy of “diversity, inclusion, and equity”.  

The Founding Fathers of the United States perfectly understood the necessity for an open market of ideas. Every citizen of the republic, they laid down, must be free to declare his beliefs, to argue his case, to speak his mind, to examine ideas as publicly as he chose without fear of being silenced.

There are now two chief sources of doom to free speech:

One is Islam. Its ideas are the very opposite of those on which the USA was founded. It is an ideology of intolerance and cruelty. It forbids the free expression of thought. By its very nature, even if it were not now on a mission of world conquest (which it is), it is the enemy of the West. The best way to defeat it is by criticizing it, constantly and persistently, in speech and writing, on the big screen and the small screen, in schools and academies, in all the media of information and comment.

The second is the orthodoxy of the Left: all its beliefs, and very urgently, “diversity, inclusion, and equity”.  By “diversity” the dogmatists mean non-white supremacy. By “inclusion” they mean the exclusion of whites. By ‘equity” they mean forced uniformity: all equally indoctrinated, all equally compliant, all equally poor.  

The outcome will be an age of lethal conflict, because if defensive words are forbidden, the only other weapons are instruments of death.

Suddenly the FBI has changed its institutional mind. The January 6 protest at the Capitol was not an insurrection after all, it now declares. According to Reuters, the FBI now says there was no conspiracy behind the event.

Has the shock of America’s calamitous fall in the world’s esteem with its defeat in Afghanistan woken the agency up? Will it wake up  all the  “woke” half of America to the extreme danger this country is now in?

Steven Hayward of PowerLine quotes part of the Reuters report, including these paragraphs:

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

“The violence?” The only violence recorded on the videos we have seen was on the part of the Capitol police – one of whom shot an unarmed protestor dead.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme … to storm the Capitol and take hostages.” 

FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said. 

‘Far-right?” What Reuters – and Leftists in general – mean by “far-right” are Americans who like their country and want its Constitution to remain unchanged and in full force.

One source said there has been little, if any, recent discussion by senior Justice Department officials of filing charges such as “seditious conspiracy” to accuse defendants of trying to overthrow the government. They have also opted not to bring racketeering charges, often used against organized criminal gangs.

Senior officials had discussed filing such charges in the weeks after the attack, the sources said.

Hayward comments:

But we’ve been told that the events of January 6 were an “insurrection,” and the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War. And this narrative is the pretext for the Biden Administration to claim “domestic terrorism” is the single greatest security threat facing the country. And also the pretext for banning Trump from social media platforms because he incited the mess.

As with the Muller report on the 2016 election, don’t expect the left, and the media, to give up on their “insurrection” narrative easily.

Right! With that pretext, that claim, that lie, the “Biden” administration hopes to destroy the Constitution and entrench the America-hating Democrats in power.

 Resist not evil (Matthew 5:39 KJV)

In humility count others more significant than yourselves (Philippians 2:3 English Standard Version)

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life.

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity.

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Joe Biden has conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care.

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism.

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages [thanks to Trump – ed.], Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing.

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed.

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive.

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.

No one seems to acknowledge that both students and the universities—which lured them to borrow—knew exactly the risks they were taking. Meanwhile, millions of American youth, the working classes who choose not to attend college, and those who paid their loans off or whose parents saved enough over the years to cover their tuition obligations, will subsidize those who renege of their debts by paying higher taxes.

Inflation is roaring back as the administration is printing trillions of new dollars that do not reflect commensurate gains in productivity or population.

Soaring prices are a direct result of incentivizing the unemployed not to work, while discouraging manufacturers and producers of food, gas, oil, timber, mineral, and metals.

The crime wave likewise is not accidental. It is the logical result of deliberate nihilistic policies of releasing thousands of criminals from jails and prisons, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not of the criminal.

In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities.

Race relations have regressed 50 years. Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are.

The current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear the nation as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole. 

All this multifaceted chaos is not just faculty lounge stuff. We are beginning to see the collective craziness filter down to disruptions in our everyday lives.

Airliners cannot take off due to fuel shortages. Automobiles, houses, gas, and lumber are in short supply.

Consumers can’t get their roofs fixed or their houses painted or the trees trimmed as employers plead to their idle government-subsidized employees to come back to work.

No one knows whether our laws even still exist—or at least exist haphazardly depending on who breaks them.

Thieves steal with brazen impunity.

Scared Americans have lost faith in the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the CDC, and most of the federal bureaucracies that are as politicized as they are increasingly incompetent.

What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone’s daily life. If we don’t wake up from wokeness, we will continue on our sure trajectory to self-inflicted, systemic paralysis—followed by civilizational collapse.

Accused by the ruling elite, many Americans are doing penance for actions they never took, words they never spoke, ideas they never thought. They plead guilty to being oppressors. In penance they hand power to their destroyers and abase themselves.

Why do millions of Americans accept the accusation that they are guilty of oppressing minorities when they are doing no such thing?

Could it be because a religion, still common to millions of Americans, taught self-abasement to generation after generation? Taught that you were born guilty? That you must always put the wants of others above your own?

That you must not resist evil?

The plan is to empower a new, hyperpolitical, easily manipulated domestic security agency. 

A national police force?

An American Stasi?

When President Trump was in power the Democrats were against it:

When the Left was worried about Trump’s use of Department of Homeland Security officers to protect federal buildings during last summer’s riots, the Atlantic noted, “One common tool for an interior ministry is a national police force. That can be a dangerous tool because an armed national police force at the disposal of the central government has a tendency to be misused. A repressive regime that is in danger, or simply faced with protests it finds troublesome, can use the national police to crack down, turning the force into an agency that protects the rulers, rather than one that defends the rule of law.”

Then the Democrats cheated Trump of his victory in the November 2020 election and fraudulently seized the presidency. So now they are for a national police force. It was surely to be expected.

As a general matter, whatever the Left has warned the Right might do, they do when they have the power.

We quote Christopher Roach writing at American Greatness:

We recently saw the first phase of the January 6 show trial. The congressional hearing, which the House Republican leadership has boycotted, always threatened to be a farce, prolonging and exaggerating a one-time event for partisan political gain. It lived down to expectations.

The assembled U.S. Capitol Police jerked tears and repeated popular lies, including the now-disproven claim that officer Brian Sicknick was killed during the riots. [He died days later of natural causes.] One of the policemen exposed himself as highly ideological after his tweets praising Black Lives Matter violence surfaced soon after his testimony. All of the witnesses used highly charged language, referring to their fellow Americans as “terrorists” and the event as an attempted “coup”.

In other words, the Capitol Police leadership supported the Democrats’ bleak view of the moment: that the country is beset by dangerous, violent, right-wing extremism … namely, those who supported President Trump and have doubts about the 2020 election.

Defining Trump supporters (some 75 thousand voters in 2020) as “extremists” and terrorists” …

… permits extreme measures to defend “Our Democracy”.

The most ominous development is the plan to deploy the Capitol Police in the nation’s interior, with the first field offices located in California and Florida.

The Capital Police is now being purposely remade as a political police force, aimed not at real subversives and dangerous violent criminals, but at critics and opponents of the congressional members of the ruling class.

We perceive the plan to be the brainchild, specifically, of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The Capitol Police are the security guards of Congress, so she apparently regards them as her personal Praetorian Guard, subject to her will. Her will now is that the force must expand over the whole country and spy on us all.

But can it be used for that?

The Capitol Police have very limited jurisdiction by statute. Even in Washington D.C., they’re only allowed to arrest for crimes within the Capitol building and grounds. In other words, they are highly paid security guards.

So what gives Pelosi’s Congress the right to turn them into a secret national police force?

While the Capitol Police have no nationwide arrest authority, they do have a right to work outside the Capitol grounds for “intelligence gathering”.  The scope of this authority is entirely undefined by the statute and related regulations.

Which means that the nationwide force can be secretive, accountable only to Congress.

It is not subject to presidential control. It is not limited by executive orders on intelligence gathering. It is not limited to the investigation of crimes. And it does not have to respond to FOIA [the Freedom of Information Act]. By way of example, the Capitol Police has concealed the identity of the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt.

[Since] oversight of the Capitol Police is exclusively within a single branch, the Congress, in a case of divided government some future Republican president would have no ability to reign them in.

The USA is no longer a free country. 

The Left has consolidated the power of the media, corporate America, the scientific establishment, the military, and now an obscure federal agency to push its agenda and to punish those who refuse to recognize their authority.

The acquisition and use of such power by a government over the people it governs is the making of a tyranny.  

Can it be denied that America is now a tyranny?

Is it not being taken in the direction of totalitarianism?

Nothing new, stupidity in power. More the general rule than the rare exception.

Think of the First World War. A greater blood-letting than the human race had ever achieved before in all our blood-stained history. Death the only victor. Virtually a whole generation of young men wiped out. Why? For what? To gratify the vanity of a bunch of stupid monarchs. Stupid, vain monarchs and the leaders of a couple of stupidly governed republics.

But their stupidity was not deliberate. Not chosen as a preference over wisdom. Never until now have governments decided that stupidity is a chief qualification for high office. 

But now it is, in America.

Now, in America, under a leftist Democrat federal government – the stupidest government the republic has ever had with a doofus gone senile for a president, a cackling fool for a vice president, a childishly vindictive harpy for speaker of the House, all supported by mass media staffed with parrots and toadies – generations are being raised to be ignorant and dumb. Illiteracy and innumeracy will be conditions of honor; ability, talent, mastery, mere proofs of “white privilege” and “white supremacist” ambition.

Joel Kotkin writes at the American Mind on the intentional stupidifying of Americans:

Our educational deficit with other countries, notably China, particularly in the acquisition of practical skills in mathematics, engineering medical technology, and management, has grown, threatening our economic and political pre-eminence. Our competitors … are focused on economic competition and technological supremacy. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, [including] not only China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

Only 5 percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China; as of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees.

“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields,” Apple CEO Tim Cook has observed …

The skills shortage may be even more profound on the factory floor. Due to an aging workforce, as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs expected to be generated this decade cannot be filled. The percentage of the skilled manufacturing work force over the age of 55 has doubled in the last 10 years to 20 percent of active workers. And there is no deep bench of talent waiting to replace retirees—50 percent of the active workers are above the age of 45. The current shortage of welders, now 240,000, could grow to 340,000 by 2024. Manufacturing employment is expanding more rapidly than in almost four decades but there are an estimated 500,000 manufacturing jobs unfilled right now.

To maintain our factories, offices, and laboratories, America needs more rigorous training, not less, and greater emphasis on skills and the ethic of work.

But more rigorous training, an emphasis on skills, an ethic of work are not on the schedule of those who make the big decisions. The Democrats in power believe – have always believed since their slave-owning days, their Ku Klux Klan days, their days of Jim Crow laws – that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites. In recent decades, still looking down on Blacks but opting to be charitable to them rather than cruel as of old, they have insisted that Blacks must be given special concessions, special advantages, to help them compete with Whites. And now they are going much further in their folly. Blacks can’t compete in exams, they say, so abolish exams. Further still: Whites and Asians must be handicapped so that Blacks can surpass them in academic achievement and governmental power. For Blacks to be elevated, Whites must be brought down. Blacks must be honored as eternal victims; Whites execrated as eternal oppressors.

That lie, that racist lie, is what Democrats insist they must be taught. That false and perilous belief – not literacy, not numeracy, not the acquisition of skills – is, they say, the business of education, from first grade to college.

They call it Critical Race Theory.

Kotkin deplores the effects of it:

Critical Race Theory is re-enforcing, and enhancing, a long-developing pattern of educational failure ever more evident. …

The current educational philosophy has purposely downplayed the acquisition of skills by scrapping such things as exit exams, or clearly comparable measures of achievement. …

Critical Race Theory and its growing chorus of implementers—from the highest reaches  of academia down to the grade school level—have little use for practical skills acquisition and brook little dissent from teachers and researchers who raise objections to the new curriculum of racial grievance. ‘Woke” educators, like San Francisco’s School board member Alison Collins, claim that meritocracy [is an] essentially racist system. Some denounce habits of punctuality, rationality, and hard work as reflective of racism and white privilege.

In a world where brainpower pushes the economy, the denigration of [such] habits of mind can only further weaken our economic future and undermine republican institutions. Even though the vast majority of corporate executives perceive a growing skills gap, they have failed to stop educators from abandoning skills in favor of ever greater emphasis on race and gender. …

The new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have little use for our [cultural] inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists. The Western classics, no longer celebrated, are at best fodder for deconstruction. Yale English majors no longer have to study Shakespeare or Chaucer, while you can get a classics degree at Princeton without learning Greek or Latin.

For years, humanities have been molded by post-modernist ideology, but now even the sciences are becoming, as in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, politicized. One would think the tech oligarchs at least would advocate for a well-educated domestic technical workforce. But secure in their wealth and power, the new hegemons feel little fealty to traditional ideas about competition and merit; some, including Bill Gates, openly support groups that promote the idea that science and math are themselves racist for focusing on grades and performance. A new Canadian math curriculum stresses the way in which [math] works “to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges” …

So now there is not knowledge, a pool of learning common to all humankind, but race-differentiated “knowledges”, all equal in value.

The goal is to “decolonialize” math, which is ironic, to say the least, given the huge role of Indian and Arabs in generating the symbols and concepts critical to the understanding of numbers.

Rather than science based on evidence and argument, we now get something closer to Science as Revealed Religion [most notably] on issues like the pandemic and climate change.

Government and their allies in the oligarchy, the media, and academia … have transformed science into fallacies that turn unsupported assertions into “accepted truths”.

As the concepts of objectivity, debate, and merit decline, even talent is now seen as yet another “social construct” of our “corrupt society”. Asian parents have to fight off attempts to eliminate merit for admission to elite high schools …

The pushback against the war on merit won’t come from the craven masters of Wall Street or Silicon Valley but from the grassroots, operators of small businesses, new and old, and most importantly, from parents. Most American voters—by wide margins—reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is supported by most Democrats, the powerful teachers’ unions … and the White House. 

Without knowledgeable, motivated, and skilled workers, America’s future will be dismal. … Merit has to be restored …

Has to be, yes. But will be? When? How?