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?

… and the thinker whose reputation it befouls.

1.The Monster

George Soros is a real-world supervillain and he is able to direct the law, constitutional and political culture of entire nations using his money and his vision of what society ought to look like. He is able to get away with it thanks to general ignorance of just how effective he is and a coordinated effort by the media to smear anyone who calls him out as a dangerous fanatic.

George Soros is a dangerous fanatic.

He is gunning for you, your property, your children, and ultimately your way of life.

So Sam Jacobs explains at Ammo.com.

George Soros is bankrolling and influencing public policy and opinion from the local level all the way up to the national level. Entire nations have been made to bow to the Soros agenda, but perhaps more importantly for us, key local officials in government are increasingly wholly owned subsidiaries of the Soros machine.

He distributes money to subvert governments and institutions mainly through The Open Society Foundations, an umbrella organization with many subsidiaries.

He spreads his destructive ideology through a “think-tank” called New America. 

Ever wonder why urban terrorists can burn down cities with no consequences but the McCloskeys are prosecuted for defending their home against the same? The answer is George Soros, his money, and his influence.

How does Soros go about his subversive work, his treasonous work in America?

We partly quote, partly summarize the article by Jacobs:

The Soros operation aims to abolish the police. It has invested $1.5 million in the “Community Resource Hub for Safety & Responsibility”, one of these blandly named organizations working to undo the American way of life.

Soros funded urban unrest in Ferguson in 2014.

He spent $33 million fomenting chaos in the formerly safe suburb of St. Louis, and another $33 million on Black Lives Matter (BLM) alone.

BLM is a communist racist organization.

And he has been quietly funding a campaign to place district attorneys amenable to his agenda across the United States.

As of September 2020, there were 31 Soros-backed DAs in the United States. That might not sound like a lot, but it includes the DAs of Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, and St. Louis. All told, tens of millions of Americans are now victims of the Soros racket in the form of their local top prosecutor.

Some examples of the Soros machine at work in America’s DA offices include:

• • After the last round of rioting, looting, and arson in St. Louis, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner dismissed charges against all 36 people arrested. She’s on the take from Soros for $307,000. This is also the prosecutor who filed charges against the McCloskeys.
  • Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon got over $2 million from the Soros operation, he ended cash bail and is no longer prosecuting the crimes of trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, prostitution, or driving without a license.
  • Kim Foxx is the Illinois State’s Attorney and has received $807,000 from Soros. She also declined to prosecute rioters, saying “The question it comes down to is, is it a good use of our time and resources? No, it’s not.” Foxx likewise declined to prosecute hate crime hoaxer, Jussie Smollett.
  • Philly District Attorney Larry Krasner has received $1.7 million from Soros. He won’t be prosecuting rioters, looters, and arsonists. Krasner was very open about the ideology driving his permitting chaos in the city: “Prosecution alone will achieve nothing close to justice—not when power imbalances and lack of accountability make it possible for government actors including police or prosecutors to regularly take life or liberty unjustly and face no criminal or career penalty.”
  • Krasner is worth calling out for special attention because he filed 75 cases against the police and has represented both Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter. At his victory party, supporters chanted, “F*** the police! F*** the police!” He generally declines to call himself a prosecutor, instead labelling himself a “public defender with power”.
  • The results in Philadelphia are stunning as charges are dropped in 60 percent of all shooting cases – though we suspect your odds of being a conservative self-defense case and having your charges waived are rather slim. Shootings in Philadelphia were up 57 percent year after year from 2019 to 2020.
  • San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who’s working off $620,000 in Soros money, proclaims, “The criminal justice system isn’t just massive and brutal, it’s also racist.” He doesn’t prosecute crimes such as solicitation, public camping, or public urination. Homicide rates, burglary cases, motor vehicle theft, and arson rates have all hugely increased. He was formerly an advisor to Hugo Chavez and his parents were members of the Weather Underground, a far-left terrorist organization. [They murdered police officers – see here and note the 1981 killings.] Chesa Boudin’s victory party included obscene anti-police chants.
  • DA Mike Schmidt of Portland, who has received $230,000 in Soros money, also declined to prosecute rioters who burned the city for months and besieged a federal building. He openly sympathized with the rioters.

• The Open Society Foundations announced a plan to spend $220 million on “efforts to achieve racial equality in America”. What Soros deems “racial equality” might more accurately be called “racial revenge”.

Which is what the Left means by the term “racial equity”.

Soros has caused political upheaval in many other countries.

He has spent and continues to spend multi millions on trying to bring about Leftist revolutions that would turn existing open societies into closed societies. He promotes Marxism, communism, socialism. As a youth he helped the Nazis round up Jews to be mass murdered – although he is Jewish himself, and dares to complain that any criticism of him is “anti-Semitic”! And he is trying to destroy Israel.

Some of the revolutions he has promoted have succeeded not so much in overthrowing an existing government but in forcing it to accept radical concessions that dramatically remake the political culture in the country. Revolutions which were effectively regime change were those in the Republic of Georgia (twice), Ukraine, the Arab World, and Belarus.

There are some common themes to all these revolutions. A disputed election where there is widespread cheating generally kicks things off. There are then street rallies where violent operatives – actually terrorists using human shields – hide in crowds of otherwise peaceful protesters. The government then responds and there is outcry from [Soros funded] “humanitarian” organizations.

The playbook should look familiar to Americans after the summer riots of 2019 and 2020, and in the aftermath of the 2020 elections.

All of which is true and appalling.

2.The Great Thinker

But Jacobs goes on to say this:

So what is an “Open Society?” Well it’s based on a phrase used by Karl Popper, a somewhat obscure 20th Century thinker known best for his “paradox of tolerance” which essentially says that liberals should stop tolerating diversity of opinion when it begins to threaten liberalism.

NO, that is not what Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” means. What it does mean is that tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance.

Jacobs continues to misunderstand and mislead:

There are some key takeaways about what an open society actually is. First, the open society is an atomized society. People are to be seen not as part of any kind of social organism, but rather as radically separate individuals. The individual is not an essential building block of society, it is the end to itself. Social norms and traditions are seen as necessarily oppressive.

That is not what Karl Popper meant by an open society. Certainly he asserted that each individual is an end in himself but not “radically separate” from others; and nowhere does he say or imply that “social norms and traditions are oppressive”.  He was a conservative, and the observing of norms and the keeping of traditions are what conservatism is all about.

Karl Popper is an extremely illustrious and famous (not”somewhat obscure”) political philosopher and philosopher of science. One thing he is famous for is his “fallibility test” of scientific theory. It distinguishes real scientific theory from pseudo-scientific theory. In the case of a real scientific theory, something could happen, something could be discovered, that would show it to be wrong. (Scientists test their theories by trying to disprove them.) But nothing could ever happen, or be imagined, that would disprove to believers the dogmatic contentions of (eg.) Freud, or Marx, or the propounders of catastrophic man-made global warming.  

It is as a political philosopher that Karl Popper is invoked in this context. His two-volume work titled The Open Society and its Enemies is a monumental defense of freedom.

An open society is one in which there are no government-imposed barriers to individual achievement. In an open society, government has limited powers and is the servant of the people; the members of an open society make personal decisions for themselves. A closed society is a collectivist society; all lives are regulated by government.

Popper critically examines the ideologies of closed societies from ancient Greece to the present, mainly those of Plato and Marx, and explains lucidly what is wrong with them. Collectivist ideologies  of our time are called Marxism, communism, socialism, national socialism (Nazism), international socialism (such as Trotskyism), New Leftism, or  – the most recently preferred “ism” on the Left –  “wokeism” (a term that became common after Popper died in 1994). All of them are tyrannies and all of them could also accurately be called Sorosisms.

Jacobs seems to be trying to find fault with Popper’s political vision as part of his criticism of Soros, finding Soros’s inspiration where it cannot possibly be found. It is unmistakably obvious that Soros uses the phrase “open society” cynically, sarcastically, as if it is his aim, while he tirelessly promotes the creation of closed societies, collectivist regimes, wherever he possibly can.

The Open Society and its Enemies is one of the essential political books of our culture. 

For more about George Soros, including lists of the many organizations he funds, see the entry on him in that excellent resource, Discover the Networks.

… of the teachers’ unions.

This is from a longer post at PowerLine:

America’s teachers’ unions are the country’s single most malign influence. They do more to promote leftist extremism, and do it more effectively, than anyone else. The teachers’ unions dominate the schools of education, from which most teachers come, and they control school board elections in most districts. In effect, they run the public schools, which is the main reason why the public schools are so bad.

How radical are they? The National Education Association boasts that it is not just the largest teachers’ union, but the biggest labor union in the U.S. One of the NEA’s top priorities is promoting the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the public schools.

The NEA is currently holding its annual meeting. [These clauses are from] Item 39 of New Business:

The NEA will, with guidance on implementation from the NEA president and chairs of the Ethnic Minority Affairs Caucuses:

A. Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) — what it is and what it is not; have a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric; and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members.

B. Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.

In addition to their evil intentions, these NEA authors commit verbal atrocities: “critiques” “anti-Indigeneity” “ableism” “cisheteropatriarchy“? No person who does that to the English language should be allowed to teach.

For as long as the teachers’ unions continue to exist, all public schools need to be kept closed.

Karl Marx was a nasty man.

He was racist, snobbish, hypocritical, dishonest, spiteful, cruel, covetous, malicious, arrogant and overbearing.

Racist? He scorned Blacks, he loathed Jews (although he was descended from a long line of rabbis). Poles and Czechs, he declared, were worthy only to be subjugated by their betters – “the  Austrian Germans” – or, better still, wiped off the face of the earth.

Snobbish and hypocritical? He scorned peasants – they were primitive “troglodytes”. He was repelled by “the masses”. They should and would, he predicted, inherit and rule the earth – but they were “the rabble”. On the other hand, he loved aristocracy. He was proud that his wife was an aristocrat. He kept her family name, von Westphalen, on their visiting cards. He most hated his own class, the bourgeoisie. He longed for, predicted, and rejoiced in the prospect of its utter destruction. Yet he longed to live again in the bourgeois style of his childhood, and towards the end of his life he did – kept in it parasitically and contentedly by his devoted admirer, Friedrich Engels.

Dishonest, spiteful, cruel? Engels was so devoted to Marx that he agreed to claim the paternity of Marx’s illegitimate child, Frederick Demuth. Marx begat the boy upon the subjugated body (one could fairly say slave body since he never paid her) of his servant Helene Demuth. (She even contributed her savings, from her better rewarded days with the Marx family in Karl’s childhood, to Karl’s family’s survival.) He had the baby boy taken away from her to be fostered and forbade any contact between the mother and her child.

Was Karl Marx clever? No. He left the University of Bonn without a degree. He graduated but failed an attempt to earn a doctorate at the University of Berlin. Then he had a bit of luck. The University of Jena found itself in financial straits and to raise revenue offered doctorates by correspondence. Karl had only to send it a fee along with an essay, which he did, and it mailed back a document certifying that he had a Ph.D.

He was quite unable to earn a living. Three of his seven children died in infancy and one at the age of nine because he did not get them enough to eat nor buy medical treatment for them when they fell ill – though he always managed to afford cigars. He demanded money to which he was not entitled from his widowed mother – so much that he impoverished her. He even begged, and got, small change from the poor. He did, however, promise them a glorious future when his grand economic theories proved prophetic and they ruled the world.

His theories? They were not his. He was a shameless plagiarist. Ideas that are attributed to Marx were appropriated by him without acknowledgement of their source. Examples: “Dictatorship of the proletariat” (Blanqui); “Scientific socialism” (Proudhon); “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau); “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (Saint-Simon). ); “Workers of all countries, unite” (Karl Schapp); “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains” (Jean-Paul Marat); “The Labor Theory of Value”  (David Ricardo).

In 1867 Marx’s very long, wholly fallacious book Das Kapital was published. Marx and Engels claimed it “proved”, by the “iron laws of economics”, that the prevailing capitalist order would be “inevitably” overthrown by violent revolution and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would impose Communism. The revolution was needed to force this inevitable transformation.

And then?

Well, then everyone would be happy – or else.

In the name of that vision tyrants have terrorized and impoverished nations, murdered uncountable millions by starvation, torture, slave labor, executions.

And yet it is now in high favor in the United States, formerly the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“We are trained Marxists,” Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, boasted as its adherents rampaged through the Democrat-governed cities, injuring neighbors, burning their property, killing law enforcement-officers.

The Leftist federal government, “elected” through voter-fraud, approves of the inspiration and the action.

What can be done to stop it?

What will be done to stop it?

NOTE:

References to sources for the information in this post can be found with our essay under Pages titled The Fiddler and His Proof, a subsection of The Darkness of This World Part One. To find it go here and scroll down to essay 7.

… in compliance with the doctrine of Wokeism.

And to prove the French judiciary’s abject submission to Islam. 

Sarah Halimi was tortured to death and thrown from the balcony of her Paris apartment by a Muslim assailant chanting Koranic verses on April 4, 2017.

Michel Gurfinkiel writes at Middle East Forum:

The Sarah Halimi case—a brutal antisemitic assassination followed by an ongoing denial of justice—may be construed as the “original sin” of the current French centrist administration headed by President Emmanuel Macron.

Sarah Attal Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish retired physician and a mother of three, lived alone in a modest apartment on Vaucouleurs Street, in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, a middle- and lower-middle-class neighborhood stretching from Republic Square and Bastille Circle to Nation Circle in the center of the city. On April 4, 2017, she was attacked in the middle of the night, beaten to death, and defenestrated by a 27-year-old Malian Muslim neighbor, Kobili Traore.

The murder took place in between the two ballots of the 2017 presidential election, when Macron was already poised to be the next president but not yet elected; and the ensuing legal and political injustices are not so much a matter of individual guilt as a systemic flaw. The president has been undoubtedly shocked by the murder and subsequent denial of justice, and has attempted to correct it. He was not able, however, to do so effectively, and that may be held against him next year when he will run for reelection.

Kobili Traore

The 11th arrondissement, once celebrated as a place of social, ethnic, and religious diversity, was turning, at the time Halimi was murdered, into a more sinister place. Some even called it “Paris’s death triangle”—for good reasons.

In January 2006, Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah), the 23-year-old Jewish manager of a watchmaking shop in the 11th arrondissement, was kidnapped and tortured to death by the Barbarians, a multiracial gang of thugs led by Youssef Fofana, a second-generation Muslim immigrant from Cote d’Ivoire.

In July 2014, in the wake of the second Israel-Gaza war, pro-Palestinian rioters attempted to take over a synagogue on Rue de la Roquette, in the same area. Large numbers of worshippers, including the chief rabbi of Paris, were exfiltrated under heavy police protection.

In January 2015, two French jihadists stormed the premises of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on Rue Nicolas Appert in the 11th arrondissement. The magazine had published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Using automatic weapons, the jihadists killed 12 people (most of the editorial staff, including two 80-year-old illustrators) and wounded 11 additional people.

The 11th arrondissement of Paris, once celebrated for its social, ethnic, and religious diversity, has transformed into a more sinister place.

In November 2015, the Bataclan Theatre, also in the 11th, was the epicenter of large-scale jihadist attacks, in which 130 people were killed and 430 injured.

More jihad-related or antisemitic crimes took place in the area after Sarah Halimi’s murder. In March 2018, another Jewish woman, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, was stabbed to death and burned at her home on Avenue Philippe-Auguste by young Muslim neighbors.

In September 2020, as the terrorists who decimated Charlie Hebdo were being tried by the Paris Criminal Court, a Pakistani migrant attacked and wounded passers-by with a machete at the weekly’s former premises on Rue Nicolas Appert. Apparently, he was not aware that the publication had moved elsewhere after the 2015 massacre.

For all that, the circumstances of Sarah Halimi’s assassination were quite particular and should have led to a trial much more swiftly than in most other cases. As Halimi’s brother William Attal later explained on the French TV channel LCI, “no murder has been perpetrated in front of so many witnesses”. The beating went on for at least thirty minutes. Many neighbors were awakened by the knocking, the shouting, and the screaming, and were able to identify both the attacker and the victim. Muslim neighbors distinctly heard Kobili Traore chanting Koranic verses, vilifying the helpless woman for being Jewish, and charging her to be a Sheytan (a Satanic creature). No doubt can be entertained about Traore’s murderous intentions and about his deviant religious motivation.

Moreover, the murder took place in front of many police personnel. Diara Traore, a distant relative of the murderer who was living in the same house, called the police. A unit of the Anti-Crime Brigade (BAC) that happened to be patrolling the neighborhood came almost immediately. Reinforcements arrived within minutes. This large police force failed to rescue Sarah Halimi in time. The police were apparently convinced, until she was defenestrated, that she was still alive and that a rash intervention might be fatal to her. Still, they were by the same token additional witnesses in a criminal investigation.

What happened next was all the more surprising. Instead of prompt justice, a process of cover-up and procrastination set in. While the murder was instantly reported by Agence France-Press (AFP) and within the Jewish community, the mainstream media ignored it for two full days and then barely mentioned it for seven weeks. As a result, a protest march on Rue Vaucouleurs initiated by Halimi’s relatives and neighbors attracted only one thousand people, very low numbers considering the nature of the crime.

It took a press conference by Halimi’s lawyers on May 22, 2017, and a collective statement in Le Figaro by seventeen public intellectuals on June 1 for the story to spread to the public. Axel Roux of Le Journal du Dimanche admitted on June 4 that, as a journalist, he was “stunned” by the “minimalist” approach hitherto taken by his profession on this issue. Arnaud Benedetti, an assistant professor at Paris-Sorbonne University, wondered on June 6 in Le Figaro how “the dominant media” had determined that the Halimi case was not worth their attention.

The judicial investigation and prosecution was equally troubling. Kobili Traore was not sent to jail on a preventive basis, which is almost automatically the rule in France for all manner of crimes, but rather to psychiatric hospitals. On April 7, François Molins, the public prosecutor in charge of the case, declined “for the time being” to characterize it as “antisemitic”. On July 11, investigative judge Anne Ihuelu charged Traore with murder and kidnapping but noted that he claimed to have acted under the influence of cannabis taken the previous day and of “Satanic forces”.

Psychiatric experts were consulted over and over again, as if the prosecuting judiciary would not be content with anything less than an exonerating opinion, which they finally obtained. The use of a substance, the experts conceded, might have “momentarily” altered Traore’s mental perceptions, thus rendering him unaccountable in court. By contrast, the fact that Traore had spent the same preceding day praying at a local salafist mosque was not taken into consideration. Likewise, no crime reconstruction—again, a quasi-automatic practice in France—was done.

The Halimi family’s lawyers were bewildered, and so was President Macron, who demanded “full justice” on July 16, 2017, and later. In spite of claims to the contrary, the French judiciary has frequently been accused of being subservient toward the executive. In this case it overplayed its independence: The issue was submitted to an Indictment Chamber that both conceded that Traore had antisemitic motivations and determined that he was not legally accountable—some of the most convoluted legal reasoning ever heard of. The family’s lawyers applied to the nation’s court of last resort, the Cour de Cassation. On April 14, 2021, this court upheld the Indictment Chamber’s decision as technically valid.

This time, the uproar reached unprecedented heights. Many legal experts disavowed the High Court’s decision as inconsistent with well-established jurisprudence regarding the use of alcohol or substances as an aggravating circumstance rather than as an alleviating one. Many politicians and public intellectuals observed that any admission that a substance-induced “momentary mental lapse” rendered a murderer unaccountable amounted to a blank check for murder.

Macron vented his dismay. Considering that the Cour de Cassation’s ruling is final and cannot be reversed, he ordered Eric Dupond-Moretti, the minister of justice, to draft a new law that would preclude a similar situation in the future. Francis Szpiner (one of the Halimi family’s lawyers and a conservative deputy mayor of Paris for the 16th arrondissement) and Gilles William Goldnadel (another lawyer of the family and an eloquent public intellectual) retorted that they would rather apply to an Israeli court in order to keep the file open.

On April 25, 2021, more than 20,000 people demonstrated at the majestic Rights of Man Plaza in Paris, in front of the Eiffel Tower, at Szpiner’s call. The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and the conservative president of the Greater Paris Region, Valérie Pécresse, attended as well. More than 10,000 additional protesters demonstrated in several other major cities—a far cry from the aborted march on Rue Vaucouleurs in 2017.

20,000 people gather at a “Justice for Sarah” rally in Paris on April 25, 2021.

One motto of the protest was “No Justice? No Republic!” While Sarah Halimi’s tragic fate is eliciting much grief and compassion, and while concern about antisemitic crimes is very real, the emphasis has been shifting—precisely because of the inept prosecution—to the broader issue of a failing judicial system that is closely linked, in turn, to a decline in governance.

The French used to be extremely proud of their public administration—arguably one of the most comprehensive, efficient, and honest in the world—as well as of their police force and their judiciary. But over the past four decades, they have perceived a steep decline in these institutions. The decline is the result of various factors, including the transfer of governmental jurisdictions to either poorly organized local powers or to the European Union; the advent of the euro and its corollary, budget cuts; mass immigration; the decay of public education; and the descent into a post-industrial, two-tiered society.

The breakdown of public safety, as witnessed in Paris’s 11th arrondissement and in many other places, or more recently by a returning wave of jihadist-inspired assassinations, has been more deeply resented than anything else. However, the French people do not blame the police, who on the whole bravely stick to older standards, but rather a politicized judiciary

The extent to which the French magistracy has succumbed to woke ideologies was disclosed in 2013, when a French TV journalist found a “Wall of Bums” displayed at the main judiciary union’s headquarters. This was a list of “bums”, or citizens demanding justice for themselves or their relatives in cases that the union deemed to be “politically incorrect”. As a matter of fact, many of the offenders or criminals now arrested by the police are released by the prosecutors or the courts on such pretexts as age, inconclusive evidence, or “ethical” leniency.

Political correctness may have been no less crucial in the Sarah Halimi case. As noted earlier, the murder took place in between the presidential election’s two ballots. While Macron stood well ahead of his only challenger, Marine Le Pen, in every opinion poll, some people may have been afraid that the brutal assassination of an elderly Jewish lady by a young African Muslim would vindicate Le Pen’s anti-immigration platform. Hence, perhaps, a move to sweep the news under the carpet, at least until the second ballot.

This media manipulation may have subsequently comforted the judiciary in their wokeish prejudice and inspired them to shelter Traore from the full consequences of his act. Then, by an all-too-natural process, the more that public opinion—or the head of state, for that matter—insisted on justice, the more the judiciary fought back. Until justice was entirely denied.

The due process of justice means that innocents should be protected against arbitrary charges and that everything should be done to avert judicial errors or unfair sentences. However, it means also that criminals should be eventually punished. Short of that, growing numbers of citizens may be induced to think that there is no Republic and no government anymore. Shortly after the Cour de Cassation issued its highly contested final decision on the Sarah Halimi case, a number of retired generals published a petition asking the president and the government to restore order, law, and patriotic values. According to a Harris Interactive/LCI poll, it was approved by 58 percent of the French.

The “Biden” administration is compelled by the Holy Writ of Wokeism to appoint black women to top government posts.

It’s not easy to find black women to head some of the posts, such as the Office of Science.

But they have found one. She has the skill to adapt Science to fit the dogma of Wokeism.

She will stop Science being a form of white-supremacist racist oppression which is all it has been hitherto.

Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports.The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science”, as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion.

As head of the Office of Science, Berhe would be asked to choose strategic directions for DOE-funded science. Should the agency try to expand understanding of fundamental particle physics or of the physics of the universe? How much attention should be given to solid-state lighting, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence? With regard to energy conservation and clean energy, should DOE pursue geothermal or biomass, tackle storage issues, or seek greater energy efficiency through insulation and refrigeration? Each day, the Office of Science turns out dozens of “one-pager” descriptions of projects and proposals. It is unlikely that a soil geologist (with an M.S. in political ecology) will have the knowledge to evaluate proposals for, say, advanced scientific computing research or nuclear physics, or make the policy judgments that those “one-pagers” require.

But she is not expected or asked by the “Biden” administration to do anything of the sort. She is asked to be black, which she is; to be female by nature or choice, and she qualifies in that by nature; and to get non-white people recognized as scientists. Getting non-white people recognized as scientists is the future of Science. It is called “Diversity” and is far more important than nuclear physics.

It is fitting that Berhe teaches at the University of California, Merced. UC Merced was created as a diversity campus, in the hope of minting more Hispanic graduates with a UC degree. No one advocating for this new institution, located in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, made the case that California needed more university research capacity. Berhe herself benefited from UC’s obsessive diversity push, having received a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program for promoting “underrepresented minority” graduate students.

A physicist wonders if Berhe “can know merit when she sees it”. Preference beneficiaries “think that merit is a myth and hierarchies of achievement are arbitrary and based on power and oppression“, this professor observes, based on years of watching academic admissions and hiring. Berhe argues that the lack of race and sex diversity in STEM is due to exclusion, rather than to the absence of a proportional number of competitively qualified “diverse” candidates in the hiring pipeline. Her co-authored articles include: Leaky Pipeline vs. Vicious Obstacle Course: metaphors for the persistent exclusion of minoritized scholars from STEM; A critical feminist approach to transforming workplace climate in the geosciences through community engagement and partnerships with societies; Hostile climates are barriers to diversifying the geosciences. She will undoubtedly further elevate the importance of race and sex as criteria for federal research awards.

Berhe’s Soil Biogeochemistry Lab at UC Merced strives, according to its website, to “create a dynamic, diverse, and equitable STEM community that represents the public”.  Scientists do not mirror the public’s demographics, however, thanks to yawning academic skills gaps. Nor is it the mission of science to be representative of population groups; its sole mission is to advance knowledge. Berhe’s lab, however, is developing and testing “sexual harassment bystander intervention training programs that incorporate experiences of diverse women” as part of a National Science Foundation consortium. Her lab recommends readings on racism and offers tips on writing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” statements that are increasingly required of academic science hires. Expect such statements, thinly disguised euphemisms for announcing oneself as “diverse”, to become mandatory for a DOE science job or grant.

The Biden administration’s war on merit is being waged at an unprecedented rate.

The subjection of scientific research to the requirement of race and sex parity threatens future human progress. Such parity can be achieved only by sacrificing intellectual standards. An electrical engineer at a prestigious California university compares Berhe’s nomination to “putting a newspaper delivery boy in charge of Google”. Theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia warns that by choosing scientific leadership according to a political agenda, “science itself risks becoming another form of covert political activism”.

It is that. Has been for decades. What is global warming science but a form of political activism – and not covertly but openly?

The national science agencies have already wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on identity politics. The Biden administration will multiply that waste at a time when China is relentlessly racing to surpass the United States at the frontiers of science.

China is winning. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe will help it win.

And the new great goals of Woke America – the abasement of the white race, the humbling of men, the bringing down of the barriers those villains put up by making Science, Engineering and Mathematics difficult – will be achieved.

Wokeism is fast becoming the American state religion.

Ben Weingarten identifies it as such, writing – surprisingly – at (woke) Newsweek:

Should it overtake our government, in making identity politics paramount it will unmake any semblance of a unifying American identity.

In so doing, it will serve as the ultimate tool of cynical, radically leftist power-grabbers, who will be dividing and conquering under the guise of a fraudulent virtue, justice and morality.

It is the religion of the party that is now in power. The government is woke. It is making identity politics paramount.

The Woke’s core views have been bubbling up from elite classrooms to the commanding heights of society for decades.

What is different is that now such views have been legitimated by the authorities and mainstreamed in our culture. If you dare to challenge them, you are liable to end up excommunicated from American life—canceled. After all, dissenting from the Woke orthodoxy makes you a racist.

Consider some of the signs that indicate the fast-accelerating ascent of Wokeism.

In New York City, at the same time Mayor Bill de Blasio was preventing Jews and Christians from freely exercising their religions—including peaceably assembling—he permitted adherents of Wokeism to assemble en masse in protesting, rioting and looting with impunity. The Woke enjoyed First Amendment rights foreclosed to the [other] faithful.

Mayor de Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the relevant health authorities had argued the coronavirus-driven draconian shutdown of New York City, and the rest of the state, was necessary to save lives. If so, by permitting the Woke to flood the streets, were not New York officials conceding that public health was not really the number one priority? Were they not suggesting that they were willing to let people get sick and die because the right to practice Wokeism was absolute, sacrosanct and preeminent—this, incidentally, after instructing citizens to take to the streets in celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year in February, coronavirus be damned, in context of a broader campaign against purported coronavirus-related anti-Chinese discrimination? Were they not affirming that Wokeism mattered more than the lives of the Woke—and everyone else?

Certainly, this view would seem to have been reinforced, as, in the face of the Woke, New York reduced police funding, and policing itself, which coincided with a dramatic rise in violent crime.

In St. Louis, menacing protesters by the dozens were able to threaten a couple, the McCloskeys, at their home, without consequence. The police did not rush to the McCloskeys’ aid. In fact, after the husband and wife were recorded brandishing firearms to deter those descending on their home, authorities left them not only defenseless, but threatened to disarm them and throw them in jail.

Did it not appear again as if privileging the Woke was now the highest responsibility of government, over and above protecting our natural rights, including those to life, liberty and property—all of which the Woke threatened?

The religion of Wokeism is the most extreme racist ideology since segregation.

While the “summer of love” may be over in Seattle, with CHOP/CHAZ—the ultimate symbol of government acquiescence to Wokeism—no more, its ideals persist. Seattle recently held a training session for white municipal employees—to be clear, a government training session for those of a specific race—called “Interrupted Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” Meanwhile, Washington’s state phase-in plan for public schools calls for giving priority to “students furthest from educational justice first,” specifically including “students of color”—that is, on the basis of race.

Tal Bachmann deplores it at Steynonline:

Wokism is now the official state religion of the United States of America.

By constitutional standards, this means something has gone wrong. The United States isn’t supposed to have a state religion. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Yet it now has one, and its name is Wokism.

Wokism is now celebrated or taught as Absolute Truth in every elementary school class, every middle and high school class, every university class, every corporate training session, every Capitol Hill political chamber, every Hollywood movie or cable show, every civic ceremony, every law, every political speech, every novel, every awards show, every sports league, every everything.

Government, its corporate allies, and cultural institutions all fund Wokism. They, along with their street troops, all demand Wokist belief and perfect compliance with Wokist commandments and rituals. They all punish those who question Wokist orthodoxy, often by completely ruining their lives. They fire dissenters, ban them from social media forever, initiate global social media pile-ons, and even threaten to kill them. Sometimes our officially Wokist government sends in goon squads to scare, or even arrest, those who dare criticize Wokism.

Wokism, the writer rightly says, is a “bellicose, uncompromising, ruthless, unself-critical, totalitarian movement“.

Does that remind you of anything else? If you say Islam, you win. The fact is that Wokism is now well on its way to becoming to American government and society what Islam is to Iranian government and society.

That this has happened means—can only mean—that something has gone terribly wrong in America (and the rest of the West). America’s original plan was to avoid funding and pushing any particular religious ideology or practice. It was to have full religious freedom. It was to keep government limited to solely protecting a few basic liberties. It was for Americans and their government to live and let live.

But things have changed. Why?

Maybe luxury spoiled us and made us fat and lazy and stupid. Maybe the Frankfurt School communists really did inject a lethal dose of philosophical poison into American thought. Maybe misguided government policies, and socially corrosive movements like sexual libertinism or feminism, really did start the implosion of the family unit.

Somehow or other, we’ve wound up in a total mess. And somehow or other, we need to find a way out of it. This is no way to live. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to live in a society run by frothing ideologues who have declared war on human biology, logic, and mathematics; on unborn children, confused adolescents, and the traditional familial arrangements which raise them; on Shakespeare and Homer; on fairness and decency; on reality itself—on survival itself. These people are all manic, obsessive-compulsive nation-destroyers, community-destroyers, culture-destroyers, family-destroyers, individual-destroyers, love-destroyers, beauty-destroyers, everything-destroyers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win”, by now we all know where it will end up.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America.

The public is now increasingly bombarded by 360-degree, 24/7 wokeness in the fashion of the Maoist Red Guard gangs. There appears little refuge from it. Not in television commercials. Not from CEOs. Not from professional sports. Not from movies or television shows. Not from Wall Street, the internet, and social media. Not from the administrative state, and not from the military. Not from the K-12 teachers, much less the professors.

It is largely the well-off professionals, the “privileged” and the rich—CEOs, news anchors, actors, star athletes, college presidents, foundation heads, corporate board retired military brass, Wall Street grandees—who usually do the woke remonstrating (or fund it) to the supposedly non-privileged but guilty un-woke.

The most law-abiding of Americans now seem terrified of the law—the FBI of James Comey vintage, John Brennan’s legacy at the CIA, the same old IRS of Lois Lerner, the Justice Department once branded by Eric Holder, and the predictable court order of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Enlisted men fear their inquisitional officers.

Conservatives especially fear that the once-revered FBI can become analogous to the Stasi, the once indomitable CIA after 2015 began emulating the KGB, and the federal prosecutor has become a vindictive Inspector Javert. And just when you think they are crazier for such fears, another couple is rousted out of bed by agents for supposedly being at a riot they were not at.

The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold. 

Roger L. Simon writes at the Epoch Times:

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

All key aspects, most parts of them anyway, of our society “get it” … the media, the corporations, the government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the military (yikes!), entertainment, the university system, the K-through-12 system, the medical community, the scientific community (incredibly), the religious, and on and on.

All, to one extent or another, believe in “woke” except—the people.

What the extremist ideology of “woke” actually provokes is talk of—and not just talk—secession and even civil war.

Few of us have heard anything like that in our lifetimes. But now it’s real. We have been driven apart as never before. We have been awakened indeed.

Anything can happen and some of us, who would never have considered anything like secession and civil war, suddenly do—highly disturbing to us as those thoughts may be.

How long will it be before “considering” comes to decision and “some of us”  – ideally most of us – act?

What is the Republican Party FOR?

Where are its protests, its howls of rage,  its demands, its questions, its investigations, its objections, its actions?

As a national party in opposition to the dictatorship of the Oligarchy it is useless! Feeble! Positively collaborative with the destroyers of the Republic.

What is a conservative party needed for, what is it up against? Extreme bigotry that declares itself to be against bigotry; extreme racism that declares itself to be against racism; fascism that justifies its violence in the name of anti-fascism; terrorists that pretend they are acting against terrorists; relentless outpourings of bitter hatred against what is falsely called hate; oppressive dictatorship claiming to be against dictatorship; the spreading of fake news and misinformation to label true reporting as lies; a junta’s coup d’état to undo what it wrongly called a coup d’état; a continual committing of crimes of perjury to get honorable men punished for perjuries they did not commit; Americans destroying America. 

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Why are Republicans so reluctant to confront Democrat racism? Why are they reluctant to use the word “traitors” for a party that funds Palestinian terrorists and favors Iranian Nazis, blows up America’s borders in the midst of a global pandemic and privileges illegal aliens and criminals over law abiding American citizens? Why isn’t it treason to systematically attack America’s constitutional order, and its revolutionary founding, aid and abet America’s enemies, and attack the integrity of America’s electoral system?

The Democrats are busily creating a one-party state by destroying the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, eliminating  voter I.D.s, flooding the polls with unsolicited mail-in ballots, demonizing opponents as “insurrectionists” and traitors, de-platforming presidents and prominent conservatives, banning books they find “offensive”, conducting witch-hunts of conservatives in the military, in the Capitol police, in the Department of Homeland Security, and turning our schools into indoctrination centers for anti-American racist ideologies. Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are now the curricula in thousands of K-12 schools. The crackpot racism of these theories  turns our national heritage upside down, caricaturing Americans as slaveocrats and racists rather than as the leading defenders of freedom and equality in the world.

Democrats control every major inner city in America, and have for fifty to a hundred years; every killing field – Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Minneapolis. Every injustice real or imagined in the inner cities, Democrats are 100% responsible for. The oppressor of inner city minorities is not “white supremacy”; it’s the flesh and blood racist, pro-criminal officials of the Democrat Party.

And nothing, no one, actively opposing it!

Please, Donald Trump, get a firm grip on the Republican Party and make it work for you, against them, and so for America.

The Left, a passionately destructive movement, has won. The Right has let it win.

Where now can those who want to live what had become the normal life of the West – being safely free under the law, having children, enjoying family life, gaining knowledge and prosperity, contributing talent and labor, pursuing happiness  – look for the preservation and protection of that normality?

Not to any institutions we can think of – government, police, army, intelligence agencies, courts of law …

Not to the Republican Party. Not to any conservative organization or grass roots movement.

Does that mean that the greatest civilization in human history, begun in the Renaissance and launched by the Enlightenment, is now over and done with? Is this the suicide of the West?

Having taken away the security of equality under the law; having put an end to real education; having wrecked the arts; having, in short, destroyed in a few decades the greatness that had taken centuries to build, the destructive Left now concentrates on putting an end to the human race itself – by sterilizing it.

Pedro Gonzalez writes at American Greatness:

The first thing we have to accept about the culture war is that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have lost.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the battle of the biological sexes, lost without a shot fired.

In the United States, Congress generously provided $5.7 million in taxpayer dollars to the National Institutes of Health for a study wherein children as young as age 8 received puberty-suppressing, cross-sex hormones that will render them permanently infertile.

Nationally, Republicans like Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem have capitulated to the queer zeitgeist. Hutchinson vetoed a measure to ban castration for minors suffering from gender dysphoria, also known as “gender-affirming therapy”.  Noem effectively killed a bill intended to restrict transgender participation in women’s sports. Even when they had the upper hand over Democrats in Florida and Texas, limp-wristed Republicans performed silent retreats from transgender sports bills, allowing Democrats to run the table.

Conservatives accept the Left’s premise that transgenderism is normative and, therefore, something to be glorified and even celebrated when they speak of the “rights” of the transgendered. The alternative, in this view, is rank bigotry and perhaps even violence. But this is a false choice.

No one should suffer abuse, but rather than exalting the virtues of our transgender culture, the Right should reject the normalization of what is essentially a pathology connected to staggering suicide rates.

An order wherein underage boys can receive hormone blockers to hinder the growth of their penises, and have male genitalia “reconstructed” into female genitalia, is not worth preserving.

Yet –

This is the order the conservative movement and Republican Party seek to preserve. They do not reject it but only protest that treatment should not be taxpayer-funded and that sports remain free of biologically unfair competition, blind or indifferent to the dishonor of it all.

A civilization that legalizes the sterilization and mutilation of its children has put itself on a path toward suicide by robbing its sons and daughters of the ability to procreate even as birth rates plummet.

It has chosen to die a humiliating death. 

But transgenderism is only the latest failure of conservatism and the GOP, which has surrendered on everything including immigration, criminal justice, and reparations.

There is, therefore, no reason to be “conservative” because to be conservative in America today is to preserve an order that has lost its legitimacy, and the right thing is not to conserve but destroy it and institute something else. The Republican Party, as it stands, is and will continue to be an obstacle to this cause.

What “something else” can be “instituted”? How? When? By whom?

At last count, approximately 8,000 people live on San Francisco’s streets. 

Erica Sandberg writes at City Journal:

The most important walk you can take in San Francisco is not to the grand Golden Gate bridge, down crooked Lombard Street, or to the brightly painted Victorians in Alamo Square.

They are still there of course. But they are not the most memorable things about San Francisco. Not any more. What is?

It’s to the city’s large and gritty sixth district, which contains the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods. What you’ll find there will shatter any preconceived notions about homelessness you might have heard from activists, city departments, and elected officials. You’ll realize that San Francisco doesn’t have a homeless problem—it has a substance-abuse crisis. And Project Roomkey, California governor Gavin Newsom’s hotels-for-homeless plan that he’s touting as a model for the rest of the country, won’t help any more than a band-aid will cure a cancer patient.

Block after block, you’ll see thousands of people who are barely alive. Some are alone; others are piled on top of one another, running into traffic, or standing slumped over, unconscious. They’ll be injecting or smoking heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in front of you, unaware or unfazed by your presence. Scabs cover their faces and bodies, limbs are swollen red and blue, often bloody and oozing pus. You’ll notice the garbage, rotting food, discarded drug detritus, and feces surrounding them. A shocking number are mere teenagers, but many are old or have aged well before their time.

Yet Newsom has declared that with programs like Project Roomkey, the United States can solve homelessness. To see the results of the program is to know what a bizarre claim this is. While a small portion of the unhoused are healthy enough to shift into and benefit from such housing, the vast majority are not—and their troubles won’t be alleviated by a hotel room.

Crime has also surged around the SIP motels and hotels, as people score from dealers just outside the lobbies. Shootings, robberies, and car break-ins have become commonplace, as have open-air drug use and sexual acts performed in broad daylight—an alarming change for neighborhoods like the Marina, which not long ago did not have a high population of unhoused, addicted people.

The tide of people coming into the city, drawn by easy access to cheap, potent narcotics, will continue unabated. Some may get a hotel room, but most will become fixtures on the streets. Few, if any, will get better. Based on current projections, more than 1,000 people will die from overdose in 2021.

Who or what turned pleasant charming San Francisco into a hellhole?

What political party governs the city? And the state?

To what party does Governor Gavin Newsom belong?

No prizes for the right answers.