Archimedes – nom de plume  of a member of our forum – wrote an essay against affirmative action in 1977 when it was a topic of intense debate in America. The reason for the interest in the subject then was an appeal by a white man, Allan P. Bakke, to the Supreme Court against the rejection by many universities, partly on grounds of his race, of his application to their medical schools.

In 1978 the Supreme Court issued its verdict in the Bakke case. It found for Bakke, but also allowed affirmative action in favor of black applicants. The universities launched it as a policy which persisted – against majority opinion – until this year, 2023. Now the Supreme Court has declared affirmative action to be illegal.

We have reviewed the essay by Archimedes and we agree with the him that his argument is still valid. We think he makes it excellently well.    

Here is the essay:

To reward or punish a person on the basis of his race is morally wrong; no good can come of it. And what the opponents of Bakke are proposing is not an end to this pernicious practice, but merely a change in victims and beneficiaries. The results, however, will be the same: resentment, envy, bitterness, social divisiveness, stereotyping, and a general corrosion of the spirit.

The American judicial system is based on precedent. Should the Supreme Court rule against Bakke, the equal protection amendment, which has been the bulwark of the civil rights movement, could be severely weakened, in which case there would be little left in the law to prevent a new Supreme Court or a vengeful majority from legally institutionalizing an inferior status for blacks.

Preferential treatment is condescending and patronizing and both stimulates and nourishes the very attitudes we are supposedly attempting to eradicate. One does not patronize a person one regards as an equal; neither does one regard as an equal a person one patronizes. Similarly, one does not accept preferential treatment without a loss of self-respect and integrity. I suspect that behind all the fine talk by white liberals is a posture of noblesse oblige and superiority, and behind all the strident demands by certain black groups and leaders is a gnawing sense of inadequacy.

Preferential treatment taints all black achievement, makes it suspect, gives it the appearance of a benefit conferred rather than something earned. Let this policy continue for another twenty or thirty years and not a single black doctor, lawyer, civil servant, teacher, engineer, scientist, business manager, or politica appointee will know for sure whether his success is the result of his own talent and efforts or is at least in part the result of some gracious indulgence on the part of Whitey. I cannot conceive of a policy more degrading and damaging to the black person of real merit. By the same token, I cannot conceive of a policy more likely to arouse the skepticism, resentment, and disdain of whites, however well-intentioned and kindly disposed toward blacks they may be initially. And the longer this policy is pursued, the more likely it is that all black achievement (except achievement in sports and entertainment, where excellence is immediately obvious) will come to be regarded by most whites and probably many blacks as not genuine.

We are told that quotas and affirmative action are necessary if we are to put an end to the underrepresentation of certain groups in various aspects of American life. But what does the word “underrepresentation” mean? When is a group properly represented? The quota people have the answer to that one. They tell us that if a group constitutes X per cent of the population as a whole, then that group should constitute roughly X per cent of every profession and trade. The premise here is that attitudes, aptitudes, tastes, and desires are, or at any rate ought to be, uniformly distributed among all racial and ethnic groups, and if in fact they are not, we must simply go ahead and pretend that they are and force people into their predetermined slots. This is egalitarianism at its worst. It is totally at variance with traditional American notions of individual merit and personal freedom. There is absolutely no health in it.

The argument that blacks as a group require quotas and special treatment as compensation for deprived and disadvantaged backgrounds lumps all blacks in one category and all whites in another category. Blacks are by definition “disadvantaged”; whites are by definition “privileged”. Yet we know that tens of thousands of black children are growing up in comfortable, middle-class homes and can by no rational standard be termed “underprivileged” or “disadvantaged” and that an even larger number of black children attend integrated schools and receive the same instruction and enjoy the same opportunities for learning as their white classmates. If the opponents of Bakke were truly sincere about taking into account and compensating for deprivation, they would exempt the above children from special consideration. But they do not. Deprivation is determined by race and race alone. What this says is that a black child who attends school in the wealthy, innovative, richly endowed Berkeley system is disadvantaged, while a white child who attends an impoverished, woefully understaffed school in Appalachia or the rural South is a member of a privileged group – the white race – and hence can learn to live with a few minor handicaps, such as exclusion from college or graduate school.

The whole argument about inferior schooling and disadvantaged backgrounds is shot through with cant and self-deception. It is true that blacks going to “bad” ghetto schools learn very little. However, it is also true and the NAACP knows this that – blacks enrolled in “good” desegregated schools do just as poorly. (This unwelcome fact has emerged from virtually every one of the numerous studies of the effects of school desegregation on academic achievement.) Thus, as things stand right now, even if the entire country were desegregated and every school had a statistically “correct” racial balance, the educational gap between blacks and whites would remain unaltered (as it has after nine years of integration in the much vaunted Berkeley school system) and there would still be a demand for quotas and preferential treatment.

What is required is not quotas but a fundamental change in the attitude of blacks toward academic achievement and a determination on their part to perform as well in the classroom as they do on the basketball court. But the policy of quotas and special placement seems to be precisely the kind of policy that will discourage such a shift in attitude and emphasis. It implicitly assumes that blacks cannot or will not do well enough to be admitted to colleges and graduate schools on their own merits; it awards blacks easy and unearned victories at the expense of a generation of whites that played no role in the previous subjugation of the black man; it discourages rather that stimulates a desire to excel on the part of blacks. And because it treats the symptoms instead of the causes of the problem, it cannot bring about fundamental change. To succeed in its goals, it can never be relaxed; it must be maintained forever. Is this what we really want?

Fortunately it can no longer be openly maintained.

President Trump has been indicted on federal charges – all of them absurd – in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida.

Read the indictment here.

It happened on the same day that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives announced they have incontrovertible  proof that when “President” Biden was Obama’s vice president he accepted a $5million bribe from Ukraine. A single instance of his many treasonous crimes.

But innocent Trump is indicted, not corrupt, crooked, evil Biden – or his deeply guilty son Hunter.

Robert Spencer writes at FrontPage:

Donald Trump is the principal opponent of the Biden regime, and the individual who at this point is most likely to be elected president in 2024.

And that is why –

He has  been indicted on federal criminal charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, and is scheduled to be arrested on Tuesday. Not too long ago, when Trump was arrested by the Manhattan DA on bogus felony charges, critics of the Biden regime began to say that America had become a banana republic. We’re racing past that stage now. America is heading toward becoming a new Stalinist regime in which critics of those in power are arrested by the regime itself, tried on false and fabricated charges, and executed. The Left may not plan to murder Trump, but they’re certainly trying to execute him politically.

They might “suicide” him. The “Democrat” panjandrums are adept at that. 

[Attorney General] Merrick Garland and his henchmen [at the “Department of Justice” and FBI] think they’ve found something they can use to destroy the principal foe of the regime, and so fairness, decency, common sense and impartial justice are out the window. Biden’s handlers are treating Trump the way Stalin treated the Old Bolsheviks whom he saw as rivals: he had them falsely accused, imprisoned, and executed. But Garland and the rest should take careful note: Bolshevik pioneers such as Nikolai Bukharin, Gregory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev had never actually been opponents of Stalin the way Trump is Biden’s opponent. They had been his friends, whom he turned against in his paranoia and destroyed in his quest for absolute power. They had helped install the authoritarian Communist regime in the Soviet Union, only to find themselves becoming its victims. It likely never occurred to them that someone could subject them to the same treatment they had meted out to so many others.

But it could happen here, just as everything else we used to think couldn’t happen here is happening now. Now that the Justice Department has become a weapon of political vengeance, it could turn one day against the very people who are using it so ruthlessly today against Donald Trump. But right now, firmly ensconced in power, they can’t even envision a day when someone might displace them. This gang of criminals aims to be in power forever.

And so this is yet another dark day for the United States. Once again we see how few people with integrity there really are among today’s political movers and shakers. A notable exception was Ron DeSantis, who tweeted Thursday: “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

And what of all the perpetrators – including Hillary Clinton – of the “Russia collusion” hoax which was aimed at destroying Trump’s presidency, whose guilt in the conspiracy is authoritatively confirmed by the Durham report? They  are all free and gloating over the martyrdom of Donald Trump.

Powerful “Democrats” are above the law.

The free constitutional Republic of the United States is lost.

We are living in one of the most tragic eras of history. The Enlightenment is being undone.

Another Dark Age is descending on the world. 

Who is the person, or who are the people, who is/are directing the transformation of America into a slummy dictatorship?

What is his/her name or their names?

Who are the masterminds of the revolution?

Who conceives the policies and commands their implementation?

Who invents and sends out the catch phrases of the day putting the Leftist spin on events to be repeated by every left-minded news medium?

Nobody tells us. Nobody who might tell us seems to know.

It isn’t the head of state, that lying oaf Joe Biden. So who makes the decisions and does the work of transmitting the instructions?

From what source do legions of human demons go out to instruct the administrations of universities to reduce (and eventually  eliminate?) the admission of white men, Jews, and Asians, and fire conservatives from their faculties?

Who persuades or forces states, counties, cities, law courts, corporations, trade unions, school boards, the armed forces, police departments, publishers, professional associations, hospitals, financial institutions, airlines, movie-makers, sports leagues, in the United States (and everywhere else in the Western world) to embrace DEI, ESG, CRT, LGBTQIA+, abortionism, transgenderism, bug-eating, EV buying, Trump hunting, vote cheating, Whites hating, gun opposing, crime-tolerating principles? What arguments do they use, or bribes, or threats?

Does anyone really believe that letting millions of “refugees” from Latin America walk into the United States, many of them illiterate, diseased, criminal, is good for this country?

Someone or some small group must be the nucleus from which the power irradiates. From which wokeism is dispersed.

Victor Davis Hanson provides a summary account of the turning over of the American Republic into a woke dictatorship.

He writes at American Greatness*:

We are swept up in scary revolutionary times, after the perfect storm of the 2020 rioting, the COVID destructive lockdowns, and a radical socialist takeover of the old Democratic Party.

Decades of successful and legitimate efforts to ensure equality of opportunity, a safety net for the poor, and increased civil liberties have transmogrified into an “equity” agenda, or state-mandated equality of result—or else!

“Diversity” is now an Orwellian word for racial essentialism to the one-drop degree. Jim Crow racism was not eliminated permanently. It now has resurfaced as woke or “good” segregation. Racially separate facilities and events are apparent “reparatory justice”. Black activists are calling for $800 billion in reparations from San Francisco, a city that is melting down as we speak.

The old precivilizational tribalism and monotony of thought are now deemed “diverse”. “Inclusion” means replacing one racial hierarchy of the 1950s with a newer one of the 2020s. Woke leftists prove “inclusive” by excluding as “haters” and “denialists” any who disagree and cannot be easily refuted.

Well-off, degreed suburban grifters suddenly became “woke” arbiters of the “correct”. Thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion czars bloated administrations, broke university budgets, and terrified faculty and employees with their panopticon surveillance. And yet did any of them result in a single better student reader, or at least one more accomplished university math major? Have K-12 scores soared with DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] monitors on hand?

We have not descended to the guillotine yet, but we are getting there with online cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, boycotts, mandatory diversity statements, indoctrination training, ostracism for an incorrect word, and violence redefined as activism.

Black Lives Matter ended when its supposedly Marxist architects all vanished into comfortable bourgeoise estates and cushy retirements—along with the millions of dollars they shook down from guilt-ridden corporations.

#MeToo sputtered out once the mantra of “believe women” turned its attention to candidate Joe Biden and Tara Reade. It turned out that she most certainly must not be believed when she swore the Delaware Democrat had sexually assaulted her.

Supposed transgendered heroes vie for profitable TV endorsement commercials that are as lucrative to them as they are ruinous to their employers.

In our revolutionary times, mediocre biological male athletes “transition” into female sports and suddenly become rich and famous. Women who transition to males, for some reason [yes, he does know the reason – he’s joking – ed.], find no such profits from male competitions.

A black transient with 42 arrests and three assault convictions is accidentally killed by a would-be Samaritan bystander who takes action to stop his threats on the subway. The tragedy becomes a rallying cry for “activist” leaders, eager for continuous notoriety and profits, while 10,000 black people murdered per year, mostly by other black people, do not earn a snore from these same “civil rights” leaders.

Our woke revolution was contrary to human nature and therefore had to be imposed by force or coercion.

Merit is the great enemy of wokeness. One day SAT tests were blind mechanisms to allow the less privileged to compete on the basis of talent rather than parentage. The next day such tests were deemed counterrevolutionary, racist enemies of the people. Universities boast of rejecting 60-70 percent of those who scored perfect on SATs, as if their excellence was proof of their “privilege”.

Jurisprudence was tarred as racist, as if laws against shoplifting, looting, smash-and-grab, car-jacking, and arson were created only by elite white men who never had the need to steal or loot and who therefore made silly arbitrary laws against them.

Our woke elite deem prisons arbitrary detention centers. So thousands of those arrested for committing violent crimes have either never been charged, never convicted, never sentenced, or never incarcerated. These exemptions rest on the principle that the revolutionaries who destroyed the enforcement of law have the wherewithal to protect themselves from the dystopia they created.

Borders disappeared, apparently on grounds they were 19th-century racist relics. Yet sanctuary cities prove the least welcoming of the tens of thousands they all but invited into distant other towns and counties.

The homeless were no longer deemed vagrants, or selfish in their take-over of public spaces, but the victims of an oppressive society.

So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection were rebranded as mere lifestyle choices of the unfortunate, not to be judged wrong or unlawful by the victimizers who supposedly made thousands homeless. Ancient laws of hygiene and municipal cleanliness were thrown out as bourgeois, as cities reverted to the protocols of their medieval forebears.

Leftists who created these Frankenstein-like monsters, like the fictive Dr. Frankenstein himself, became targets of their own experiments. It was no longer enough to support civil rights for the transgendered. Suddenly any questioning of the wisdom of biologically born males competing in women’s sports or of teenagers with penises undressing among teenage girls in locker rooms, or of state-sponsored drag-queen shows with children in attendance condemned one as transphobic and worse.

Advocating a secure border and strictly legal immigration was proof of nativism. Equal opportunity for all races was racism. Advocacy for the use of natural gas indicted one as a climate “denialist”.

Society itself began to unwind—as expected given America relied on meritocracy, free expression dissent, the rule of law, forbearance, and tolerance.

In less than three years, our major cities became filthy to the point of unhealthiness. Violent crime and thievery drove businesses and commuters away. Subways at night became the domain of the homeless and criminal. Vacancy rates in San Francisco or downtown Portland shot up to 25 percent or more. Millions began leaving  blue cities and states, and headed for sanctuaries in more suburban and rural red states.

Once-trusted and familiar government agencies became weaponized—and inevitably incompetent. The FBI was not interested in the organizers of 120 days of violent looting, arson, murder, and rioting in summer 2020, or the threatening mobs who showed up at the homes of Supreme Court Justices. Instead, it fixated on parents at school board meetings, Latin Mass Catholics, former Trump Administration officials, and anyone daring to question the Russian collusion or Russian disinformation laptop hoaxes.

The Pentagon brass oversaw a flight from Afghanistan, in the greatest military humiliation in modern American history. Yet at the same time, it focused on rooting out white rage and white privilege despite presenting no data to substantiate its accusations.

Former intelligence officers and “authorities” misled the country and warped an election, to ensure Americans did not take seriously the incriminating evidence in Hunter Biden’s laptop of the Biden family’s widespread corruption.

So, the world became topsy-turvy. Throwing a firebomb into a police-occupied patrol car earned a light sentence, while protesting illegally [?] at the Capitol won a decade in prison.

An American who did not get vaccinated was to be thrown out of the U.S. military; an illegal alien crossing the border unlawfully without a vaccination might earn a free phone and free lodging in a big-city hotel.

The more the government printed money it did not have, the more the country was slandered as cruel and mean to its underclass. The more standards were dropped for admission, hiring, promotion, and retention, the more employers were deemed unfair and bigoted.

Few now trust that the graduates of the Ivy League and marquee universities know what they once did. And why not, when students are admitted without test scores, but are assured passing grades, watered-down classes, and graduation to be synonymous with admission?

The U.S. military fell short by thousands of recruits. And why not, when it advertised for manpower with invitations from drag queens, and hounded those as racists who had died at twice their numbers in the population in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Hanson believes that a turning back to liberty – a counterrevolution – is beginning. He cites these signs:

At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum because its continuation would erode all the work of 247 years of American progress and sacrifice.

Joe Biden, the thin veneer of the woke revolution, polls below 40 percent. Even that favorability is propped up by the consensus that he has no idea where he is or what he is saying—and thus at least is deserving of 40 percent support for not being responsible for what he has empowered.

A counterrevolution is building, not just because people are angry at what has become of their country, but because they now are learning that if they do nothing, they will have no country—and soon.

Those should be causes of a return and signs of a counterrevolution beginning, but are they?

Will the next election be free of Leftist cheating? Will the media admit they’ve been wrong and start reporting what really happens? Will indoctrination in the schools and universities stop?

Will the generator[s] of wokeism, the decider[s] of its orthodoxy, the anti-liberty fanatics who enforce it, just give up and silently creep away?

Note: The author compares the order of developments in the current American revolution to that of the French Revolution. We have lightly edited our quotations to omit most references to the comparison – not because we disagree with it, but because we have no comment to make on it.

That excellent conservative writer, Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, asks questions that we too want to know the answers to, in an article* at Canada Free Press:

How did globalism metastasize all over the world so quickly, like a virulent cancer? How was this evil exported around the world in such a short time?

How did the ideology of self-loathing become so pathological, the ideology of putting citizens of another nation ahead of a country’s own interests?

Why are so many governments destroying their own countries on purpose, in unison, to satisfy the directives of the United Nations, a corrupt organization run by representatives of small countries that could not survive without financial help from the west? Their wealth-redistributive climate change industry and the “world without borders” concept have been exported around the world like a blitzkrieg.

Who is responsible for breeding this evil idea of self-loathing and destruction of nations into every corner of the globe? Nobody seems able to resist, they are mesmerized into submission.

And how did the virus of woke-ism spread around the globe so fast, except perhaps in China?

Why would a Yale University Economics professor [Yusuke Narita] suggest that elderly Japanese should commit “mass suicide by disembowelment to help the country deal with its rapidly aging population?”** Where did this insanity originate?

The leftist religion of climate change and planetary apocalypse has also taken over the globe, playing in the hands of elitist billionaires who want nothing but total control of our lives and all businesses, under the guise of protecting the globe from our alleged irreversible damage to the environment.

How did the disgusting critical race theory, in your face anti-white racism, spread so quickly around the United States, the most tolerant nation on the planet?

The author genuinely wants to know the answers, as do we. She does not try to provide them herself.

We are opening a comments page in the hope that if readers have plausible answers, they will tell us.***

Footnotes

* The article discusses other topics, and expresses some opinions that we do not agree with.

** “Narita also has mentioned the possibility of making euthanasia mandatory in Japan.” (From the same linked source.)

*** If again we are deluged with nonsensical comment from bots, we will have to close the page.

If every member of the House and Senate, and the president of the US and every member of his/her cabinet, and all nine justice in the Supreme Court were black, that fact would be of no importance whatsoever if each had qualified for his/her position by fair competitive achievement and was competently performing his/her official responsibilities. But if their only “qualification” is their blackness, it is cause for alarm.

A revolution is in progress in America, an uprising against the country’s established form of republican government, with the aim of destroying it as a nation state and turning it into a black-ruled territory in which whites are subjugated to blacks. In the new dispensation, all whites are to be punished with humiliation and impoverishment because the ancestors of some of them enslaved blacks.

The revolutionaries – with whites their most visible prominent leaders – are succeeding, even though they are encountering some set-backs: a temporarily Republican-majority House of Representatives, certain states effectively frustrating their ploys. White Joe  Biden, a crooked and senile fool, has been maneuvered into the presidency and does what he’s told. Black clothed and masked Antifa thugs riot when ordered to, and beat, burn, shoot, bomb, kill. Schools teach children to be ashamed of themselves as oppressors if they are white and sorry for themselves as victims if they are black. Prosecutors get law-abiding but critical citizens jailed and career criminals released. The mass media toe the line.

The aim is black supremacy.

Who lays down the line? Is there a living mastermind? A chief plotter? An oracle, a guru, a lord of the danse macabre?

Who tells the “president” what to do? He says “they” do, that he will be in trouble of he disobeys – but who are “they”? Or “he” or “she”?

Is it white George Soros? He’s the chief financier of the revolution, but is he the conductor?

Is it black Barack Obama, who promised to “fundamentally transform” America?

Is it vindictive, cruel, white Nancy Pelosi whom uncountable numbers of police officers and tens of thousands of soldiers obeyed until she stopped being Speaker of the House just recently?

Is it not a single person but a cabal that plots the way, makes the decisions, issues the orders? If so, how did its members get into it, and how do they keep themselves secret?

Why do the whites join in the caper? In the hope of saving themselves?

Tides of Africans and Asians are sweeping into Europe, tides of Latin Americans into the United States.

The white race is dwindling. Our civilization is in its twilight.

Heavy pressure is brought to bear on schoolchildren to “change” their “gender”. It is a new and terrible fad on the political left. The authorities of whole school districts have policies to persuade children to “transgender” – by which they mean undergo drastic hormone treatment and physical mutilation – and to keep parents ignorant of the atrocity their children are subjected to.

In an article at Front Page, Danusha Goska gives examples of the appalling suffering of the victims of this cult of human vivisection.

Colleen [in adolescence] … paid a surgeon to snip off her nipples, resize them, and sew them back on.

After which they were insensate.

The surgeon was himself a man who identifies as a woman and a “trans activist” and had had body-altering surgery himself years before. … A man pretending to be a woman did that to a confused young girl. And we are told that if we use the word “mutilation” we are committing a hate crime. … Colleen began a campaign of public disclosures. Graphic sharing of her surgeries and sex life was a crusade to make the world a kinder, more loving place. The crusade featured leftwing economics. It is the fault of the unrighteous US government that girls have to pay out of pocket to have their nipples excised, resized, and sewn back on. In a new Utopia, such procedures would be “free”, that is, the taxpayer would foot the bill.

Colleen was a testifying evangelist; she was going door to door distributing a tract. The contents of her pamphlet were her nipples, her mastectomies, her vagina …

Later, one gathers (it is not explicitly stated) she underwent more surgery.

Colleen reported pain. Depression, confusion, unwanted changes to her body that she had been warned about but that she had refused, in her girl’s immature mind, to believe would actually happen to her after surgery and hormones. Colleen’s testimony worked to transubstantiate her pain into the blood of the martyrs that feeds the church. “Yes, this surgery, these drugs, these regrets, this confusion, these second thoughts, all hurt, physically and emotionally, but this pain is good because it is the pain the caterpillar feels when it transforms into a butterfly. As I report this pain to you, you are becoming more open to the trans future!” That sort of desperate spin. … [Some] young people want to suffer for a cause. Colleen’s literal blood, photographed post-op, was talismanic evidence of her salvific suffering for a worthy cause. Colleen’s audience seemed always to be her mother’s friends. Much older people, gray beards and solicitous old ladies struggling to be hip in a showy way, applauded a girl’s self-mutilation. “She’s teaching us.” …

There are many testimonies on the web that are not as religiously ecstatic as Colleen’s. …  A girl who identifies as a boy chooses a double mastectomy, which she dismissively labels “top surgery”.  She says she woke up with clothes and sheets covered with blood; she passed blood clots the size of a golf ball; her chest “collapsed into a black, hollow cavity; there was discolored tissue spilling out of it”.  A second surgery removed “a half a foot of dead, rotten tissue”.  “They gave me an extra large drain and I had to have it in for over three weeks.”

Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, this girl’s surgeon, pushes her transgender mastectomies for children via aggressive TikTok videos.

Chloe Cole uses the word “butcher” for what doctors did to her young body. … She talks about not only losing her breasts to trans surgery at age 15, but also losing sensation in her entire chest. Cole says she almost immediately began to regret this loss. “I was so ashamed of myself. It was a hard thing to admit.” Through school, “I learned that breast feeding is one of the main ways that you bond with your kid. I never really thought about this before. I never really thought about being a parent, even. I was a kid when I consented to all this and I wasn’t really focused on things like that. Deep down I have a maternal instinct that wasn’t fostered because I was being socialized as a boy. I started to realize what was taken from me. I had no friends in real life by this time. My only friends were online. I said online that I regret my transition and I was met with a lot of hatred from transgender individuals.” Cole felt pressured to silence herself. …

In addition to regretting what they lost, many regret what they got. A man who identified as a woman and now identifies as a man calls himself “Shape Shifter”.  He received a surgically constructed, so-called “neo vagina” that makes sex impossible for him. Shape Shifter spoke for over an hour about his regrets. His interview is an open fire hydrant of medical crises, psychiatric complaints, and suicidal despair.

Scott Newgent, a woman who identified as a man, received phalloplasty, that is a surgically constructed artificial penis built out of the skin in her arm. She “suffered seven surgeries, a pulmonary embolism, an induced stress heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, arm reconstructive surgery, lung, heart and bladder damage … $1 million in medical expenses  …  I spent many nights in the bathroom in too much pain to even make it to the toilet, forced to urinate on the floor, screaming as what felt like razor blades left my body. …

Newgent explained that she cannot sue her surgeon because “there is no structured, tested or widely accepted baseline for transgender health care”. This reason for Newgent’s inability to sue gives the lie to Biden’s assistant secretary for health, Admiral Rachel Levine, MD, himself a man who identifies as a woman, who insists that there are such standards. “There is an evidence-based standard of care for the evaluation and treatment of trans individuals,” Levine insists.

Ritchie Herron’s surgeries [at an age not given] were paid for by Britain’s National Health Service. He says he was brainwashed by health care providers. He now has to spend a great deal of time attempting to go to the bathroom, and doing so causes great pain. He is incontinent and his entire groin is numb. “I am never going to be the same ever again. There is no reversal to this. Do not let anyone tell you that this can be reversed. It is criminal what they are doing to people.”

In October, 2022, Project Veritas released video from a WPATHGEI online conference. WPATHGEI is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Global Education Institute. The video’s star is Dr. Daniel Metzger, …

Most suitably named is this Dr. Metzger!  “Metzger” is the German word for butcher.

… who participates in the medical transing of children. The name of this Canadian doctor’s program is Trans Youth CAN! The exclamation point is part of the program’s name. Dr. Metzger acknowledges that it’s virtually impossible to have a serious conversation with a fourteen year old about post-surgical regret. “Most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really talk about it in a serious way. I know I’m talking to a blank wall.” But, he says, “We want the kids to be happy. Happier in the moment, right?” Metzger acknowledges that he has been approached by former patients in their twenties who suddenly realize, and regret, that they cannot have children. “I don’t know what to do,” he says. He doesn’t know what to do. He has participated in making children sterile, to make them happy in the moment, and he doesn’t know what to do about that. …

In reality, no one ever “transgenders”. No one ever can. There are two only two sexes (“gender” is a grammatical term) and everyone remains the sex they were born no matter what is done to their bodies. A baby’s sex is not “assigned” to it, as the “transgender” fanatics claim; he or she is born male or female.

Though all the medical associations of the Western world are insistently for subjecting children to the torture of “transgendering”, there are doctors who are firmly against it

“We are dealing with what may be the biggest medical and ethical scandal of modern times,” Dr. William Malone, a board-certified endocrinologist, said. “Transgender medicine is big business, and youth who are transitioning today will be medical patients for life, for the next 60-plus years.”

“Transgendering” is enormously lucrative for doctors, particularly for surgeons. (Phalloplasty “can go as high as $150,000.00”)

And “transgendering” is a now a doctrine of Leftist ideology:

On Transgender Day of Visibility (sic!), Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) endorsed sex change procedures for children.

And the Judiciary supports the doctrine:

Judges Across The Country Have Denied Custody To Parents Who Refuse To Give Children “Transgender” Medical Treatments

What about religious leaders? Surely they are against this horror?

No:

Hundreds of religious leaders say they stand with transgender siblings who are being targeted by legislators around the country.

But those “legislators around the country” – they are trying to put a stop to the feverish campaign of cruelty, aren’t they? Surely the states won’t allow it?

Wrong. Many will.

Nineteen states are so much for it, they are  proposing to make laws to prevent anyone from trying to stop it. This how the enthusiasts for the practice word their virtuous support of it:

LGBTQ LAWMAKERS IN 19 STATES HAVE OR WILL INTRODUCE LAWS TO PROTECT TRANS KIDS FROM CIVIL AND CRIMINAL PENALTIES WHEN SEEKING GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE

How many more states will follow that lead?

Florida, under the governorship of Ron DeSantis, is against it.

The media report that story as a vicious wrong. They call the appalling procedure “gender-affirming care”:

The Florida Board of Medicine approved a rule Friday that bans minors from obtaining gender-affirming care—though it will still face additional steps before being adopted—overruling guidance from leading medical groups and making Florida the latest state to target healthcare for transgender residents.

So there are other states  “targeting” the atrocious practice.

What does the American public think about the issue?

One poll finds that –

The majority of Americans say transgender surgeries for minors should be illegal, newly released polling data shows, backing up a movement to ban the practice in states around the country.

And the report lists more states in which Republican legislators plan to “ban the practice”: Utah, Oklahoma, Michigan, Tennessee, Texas.

And, “Arkansas, Alabama, and Arizona have outlawed medical and surgical transitions in youth, with more such laws likely on the way.”

But Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin are all for the maiming of children and the ruin of their lives: Tax dollars from citizens of Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin are funneling into state university health programs that openly provide unproven hormonal injections shown to be exceptionally risky—including possible side effects of infertility, cancer, and death.

Indiana University’s Student Health Center, the University Health Services for University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Illinois’ McKinley Center all provide hormonal injections for students and other services they claim are “gender-affirming care” without parental notification and often with great medical risk.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “Informed Consent” form for receiving “feminizing hormones” contains several contradictions.

In the introduction, the form describes hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, as an “important component of transition” that “can greatly improve quality of life, psychological well-being, and affirm identity.” The form goes on to describe increased chances for migraines, decreased bone density, diabetes, infertility, cancer, and death. … The transgender health association suggests, in documents linked by Indiana University, that children as young as 2 years old begin showing gender dysphoria, and claims that children as young as 9 should be considered for hormone injections.

Any day now, the “Democratic” junta that governs the federation will surely unveil a statue of the Nazi doctor known as “the Angel of Death”.

He conducted medical experiments on thousands of pairs of twins, most of them children, at Auschwitz.

He placed victims in pressure chambers, injected them with drugs and lethal bacteria, castrated them, froze them to death, performed surgery on them without anesthesia, gave them sex changes, and amputated their limbs. And the majority of his victims were children.

His name was Dr. Josef Mengele.

Victor Davis Hanson asks vital questions that desperately need answers – but will get none.

He writes at Townhall:

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan?  Who planned it and why?

What happened to the once trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob of us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.

Perhaps there are answers to these questions of ours – or at least conjectures about probabilities:

Are “we”, as Hanson says, beginning to wake up?

Are there signs that the nightmare is over? If so, what are they?

They are hard to discern. The economy is worsening, sources of ample cheap energy are being abandoned, squadrons of new viruses are pouring out of China, the populations of the West are dying out and our countries are under increasing occupation by barbarians.

The United States is still governed by crooks, idiots, and freaks.

Is there any reason to expect change for the better?

Jillian Becker    December 12, 2022

Do you remember the USA, the nation that was established by a constitution?

Perhaps you imagine it is still in existence?

It is not.

Glenn Ellmers describes the post-constitutional republic that America has become. He writes at American Greatness:

The constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists. Most everyone on the Right seems to agree with that—though we differ about how deep the rot is, and whether we are now living under a new regime that is essentially different in kind, not merely degree.

Most of us also agree that we want to restore the American founders’ principles and institutions. …

But how exactly we recover the founders’ constitutionalism is a question no one has been able to answer with any specificity. …

Elections—and therefore consent and popular sovereignty—are no longer meaningful.

This is the big one, and in a way, everything flows from it. It is helpful to break it down into two discrete pieces.

First, even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people.

Set aside for the moment any concerns about outright fraud and ballot tampering. The steady growth of the administrative state since the 1960s means that bureaucracy has become increasingly indifferent to—even openly hostile to—the will of the people over the last half-century. A clear majority of Americans, including Democrats (at least until recently), has been demanding and voting for comprehensive immigration reform, including strict control of the border, for decades. The Republican establishment in Congress—which made its peace with the deep state some time ago—has made numerous promises to fix this problem, and broken them all, always finding a reason for “amnesty now, enforcement later.” The decision about who gets to be part of the political community was the basic principle of popular sovereignty in the founders’ social compact theory. To the degree that the elites have simply ignored the American people on this point, neither the United States as a nation nor its citizens can still be considered a sovereign people.

Of course, that is only one obvious example. In thousands of other ways, the federal bureaucracy ignores the deliberate wishes of the American people. The regulators, administrators, and policymakers in the alphabet soup of federal agencies set the rules and impose their collective will as they see fit. Regardless of who the people repeatedly elect to reform the system, those politicians and their agendas come and go; the permanent government persists.

Yet even this has not been enough for the leftist oligarchy. Trump’s election in 2016 scared the establishment into taking even more extreme measures to prevent “unacceptable” electoral outcomes. Which leads to the latest antidemocratic development.

Second, elections now represent “manufactured consent”.

Mollie Hemingway showed in her excellent book, Rigged, that the technically legal though unscrupulous maneuvers undertaken by the Left—including legacy and social media propaganda and censorship, last-minute changes to election laws, and private money poured into partisan “voter education” efforts—were more than enough to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.

This new reality became even clearer this month. The highly manipulative practice of ballot harvesting—which reached new lows of cynicism in the recent midterms—makes a mockery of elections as an expression of popular deliberation and rational will. … The Democrats didn’t beat back the red wave because the voters chose them; they won by choosing their voters. It is hard to see how elections under these circumstances are substantially different from the artificial voting rituals practiced by the “people’s republics”, i.e., communist regimes of the 20th century.

The idea that the founders’ institutional arrangements still obtain is a nostalgic fiction today—especially the idea of checks and balances based on federalism and the separation of powers.

As a treatise on constitutional government, The Federalist is and will always be a classic work of political science, with many enduring insights. … [But] what Publius describes about the functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches—as well as the countervailing powers of the states—has almost no connection with current reality.

Congress doesn’t write, the executive does not enforce, and the judiciary does not interpret the laws. Power and wealth have become massively centralized in Washington, D.C. Federalism, judicial review, executive authority, the legislative process, appropriations—none of this remains operational in a way James Madison would recognize. And now, the country’s most powerful corporations are in active collusion with the federal security apparatus to enforce the regime’s authority. That’s practically the definition of fascism. …

Political competence, in the traditional sense, is becoming irrelevant. 

Ignore the current spat between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. A bitter nomination fight would only benefit the opposition. What’s important to note is that any attempt by a Republican president to control his own (nominal) employees in the executive branch would require talents that neither Trump nor DeSantis has demonstrated. In fact, if confronting today’s administrative state, it isn’t clear how even a Lincoln or a Churchill would have exercised effective statesmanship. We are in a post-constitutional, even a post-political, environment.

For all his flaws, Donald Trump at least recognized that defending the sovereignty of the people (the most fundamental and meaningful definition of Americanism) meant striking at the legitimacy of the administrative state, especially its assumptions of rational expert knowledge. Trump correctly perceived that mockery and derision were effective, if indelicate, tools for challenging this hubris.

But Trump erred grievously in thinking he could accomplish everything he wanted on his own. The art of the deal doesn’t work when the other side holds almost all the cards. Trump underestimated this situation. And he was simply foolish and vain in thinking he could overcome it on the strength of his abilities alone and ignoring his duty to fill every available appointment with people loyal to—and willing to fight for—his agenda.

A DeSantis presidency, meanwhile, would have to recognize that while executive experience as a governor was once the ideal training ground for the Oval Office, this is much less true today. To whatever degree overweening bureaucracy has infiltrated the states, the governor of Florida does not have to deal with a national security machine that sets its own foreign policy, abuses classification rules, and engages in shameless leaking to a compliant national press; a Justice Department that weaponizes the resources and capacities of the FBI to undermine an elected president; and a veritable nation of unfireable (for now) subordinates long habituated to regarding themselves as the true representatives of the public will.

Yet DeSantis has shown better instincts than Trump in backing up his words with actions, especially in his willingness to punish powerful opponents, like Disney, when they needed it.

It remains to be seen how either man could translate his virtues, and overcome his shortcomings, to exercise the power of the presidency creatively, with cunning, subtlety, and ruthless determination, in ways that pursue the goals of constitutionalism even while understanding that the old forms no longer apply.

Moreover, any president seeking to restore constitutional government would need large majorities in both houses of Congress committed to reform far more seriously than the current Republican leadership seems to be. This partnership would not involve traditional legislative log-rolling, but would require an alliance in a quasi-political street fight, probably leading to a constitutional crisis, to bring the bureaucracy to heel. It is a big ask to expect congressional leaders who would even understand how this would occur, let alone have the will actually to do it. Massive challenges await at every turn. …

By carrying on with retail politics and accepting the current situation as normal, people on the Right are now legitimizing and strengthening their enemies. 

This may be the hardest pill to swallow.

Our current woke oligarchy becomes more fanatical every month, yet instead of getting weaker or provoking a popular backlash, it seems to grow ever stronger. In part, this is because the elites have maintained a semblance of institutional normalcy. No matter how extreme its policies—COVID lockdowns, chemical or surgical castration of children, open borders—the ruling class carries on with a kind of constitutional kabuki theater. Citizens (or rather “people”) vote, Congress meets and passes “laws”, the president pontificates and signs documents. It is largely just a performance; it certainly doesn’t resemble government functioning as the founders intended. But it looks close enough to the real thing to persuade many people that the situation, if not perfect, is at least tolerable. There is just enough veneer of Our Democracy™ to keep most citizens from acting on their dissatisfactions and justified fears.

But the longer this goes on, and the more phoniness people are willing to tolerate, the more the whole rotten edifice becomes accepted as legitimate. At some point, the people will have consented, by their acquiescence, to anything the regime decides to do. Soon, one suspects, our left-wing masters won’t find it necessary to keep up the charade.

That’s why I disagree with those who say we should simply go tit-for-tat with the Democrats. Julie Kelly and Scott McKay, among others, believe that Republicans need to adopt the Democrats’ ballot harvesting techniques in order to beat them at their own game. In the same vein, Ned Ryun argues, “If conservatives and Republicans want to win again, we had better adopt the only-ballots-matter approach at least in the short term or die. . . . This is now the modern-day political battlefield in America, the rules of the game. One can either howl at the moon about it or beat the Left at it.”

Look, I get it. Nevertheless, this strikes me as a bad idea—practically, theoretically, and morally.

• • Practically, we can never hope to match the maniacal zeal of the Left, which invests millenarian expectations in politics, and is thus always driven to do whatever it takes to win. Acknowledging this does not mean giving up and letting them win. But it does mean recognizing that in a race to the bottom, the Left will always get there first. And having fought tooth and nail to see who can go lower, what do we do when we reach the bottom?
  • Theoretically, this means we will be participating in altering the essential meaning and purpose of elections. Representative, deliberative democracy will become the technocratic accumulation of votes—a clickbait contest that rewards whichever side can best wage computerized demographic warfare.
  • Morally, we will then lose any claim that we are trying to recover genuine self-government. If the argument is that we need to descend to the Democrats’ level in order to gain power, one might ask, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” If power really becomes the only object, and neither side really believes in consent, then the entire pretense will fade away soon enough anyway.

Accepting, even “in the short term”, the regime’s authority to perpetually rewrite the rules of the game is the true surrender. They will always win if we repeatedly acquiesce to their legitimacy, chasing after what they define as normal on their terms. Worse, there won’t be a republic in the long term worth having.

I know that what I am painting here is a pretty bleak picture. But while it reveals a rough road in the short term, I don’t think it necessarily dictates long-term despair, in part because there are certain truths about political life that the Left cannot change.

Ellmers then “offer[s] some ideas about what has not changed, which might provide some grounds for optimism”, including “human nature”! But with that section of his article I disagree. I don’t think human nature or anything else he points to provides grounds for optimism.  Quite the contrary.

The weak showing of the Republican Party in the recent elections [November 8, 2022] should not have come as the shock that it did. Because the elections confirmed what all the world knows: there is a chasm between Left and Right in America.

Kurt Schlichter writes at Townhall:

Much of America is more liberal than we want to accept, and a whole lot of Americans are willing to tolerate the garbage policies Democrats push. Some people just don’t want freedom – they liked the COVID crap and support woke fascism. There are a lot of these people, though not in Florida, and liberals are gonna liberal no matter how poor and miserable that makes them and everyone else.

As he says, there are a lot of these people. Apparently half the electorate. Which means there are now TWO NATIONS between sea and shining sea.

Trump is being blamed not only by the Left which routinely blames him for everything but by disappointed Republicans for choosing and supporting bad candidates.

Trump certainly should own the losses of the candidates he pushed in the primaries … just as he takes the accolades for the ones who won. … There’s no sugarcoating it – Trump was a huge loser yesterday.

Yet at the same time it’s widely acknowledged that the quality of candidates doesn’t matter.

They say candidates matter, of course, but how much do they really? The fact is that Pennsylvania elected a bizarre ogre.
Here’s the thing – party allegiance is enduring in ways it never used to be. That Fetterman won is an indicator. You vote for that freak of nature only if you are purely partisan. … Appeals pointing out the fact that Fetterman is a mutant did not get it done. Sure he’s a mutant, they thought, but he’s our mutant.

Yes, because Americans are divided, and between the two sides there is an unbridgeable chasm.