As the shadows fall, is our republic in genuine peril?

I used to be eternally optimistic. These days, not so much.

Apr 12, 2024

There was an article today by Christian Schneider in the National Review, When Older Doesn’t Mean Wiser. It’s behind a paywall, but if you are a NR subscriber, I recommend it as a worthy read. The gist of the article may be ascertained from its eponymous title. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are exhibits A and B for the proposition.

And why not? One is a doddering old fool, a liar, and a crook; the other is a megalomaniac, a liar, and a crook. Neither belong anywhere near the Oval Office. And yet, for the second time in four years, these two candidates, both eminently unqualified for much of anything outside of shilling snake oil on the carnival circuit, will square off against each other to determine who’ll be the most powerful man on the planet. It boggles the mind.

For most of my life, I have been an optimist. I’ve lived by the Pangloss dictum that this is the best of all possible worlds. Occasionally, upon waking up in the morning, I used to pinch myself just to make sure that it was all real. I still do that, but now it’s to snap out of troubled dreams.

Let’s just start at the top of the list of reasons for pessimism and work our way down. The Biden-Trump redux is the rematch that almost no one wants to see. I’m not just opining on that either; I’m quoting. From Ballotpedia: “President Biden's overall approval average at this point in his term is 43.9%, 1.6 percentage points higher than President Trump's average of 42.2% at this point in his term.”

That’s objectively terrible. Yet, barring unforeseen and highly unusual circumstances, one of these two nimrods will have their second opportunity to exercise political malpractice from the oval office until 2028. Mind blown.

Now, go down a level in government and take a look at Congress. A few days ago, at a solar eclipse event for schoolchildren in Houston, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) dumbfounded her audience by claiming the moon is a “planet” that is “made up mostly of gases.”

“You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases, And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?

The sun is a mighty powerful heat, but it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.

I don’t think we’ve been on the moon the last 50 years. So we will be landing on the moon. What you’ll see today will be the closest distance that the moon has ever been in the last 20 years. Which means that’s why they will shut the light down because they will be close to the Earth.

I don’t know about you, I want to be first in line to know how to live and to be able to survive on the moon. That’s another planet which we’re going to see shortly.”

I had to check the video of the speech myself to make sure that she actually said these things. I’m so used to seeing comments taken out of context anymore that I’m suspicious, no matter how low my regard for who’s involved. It’s simply stunning that Jackson, the former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, would express such profound ignorance of a topic on which I’m quite sure that the 5th graders to whom she was speaking understood more clearly.

So much for my quarter century as a science educator. It’s dismaying to discover, in your final chapters, that your life’s work was for naught. The only thing I can say in my own favor is that with a performance like this, Jackson would have flunked my PHYS152 Astronomy class, no matter how much she complained about systemic racism in science.

Watching congressional Democrats throw Israel under the bus these days is a legitimate pukefest. It’s almost as if October 7 never happened. Some members of the United States government even seem to think that they know more about who should be running Israel than the Israeli people. I watched one of them on CNN yesterday claim, with a straight face, that nobody knows how to lose a war better than the United States (as in Afghanistan), so Israel needs to listen to us when it comes to Gaza.

I wanted to defenestrate this dingbat from the Capitol building, then unscrew his head and dropkick it into the Grand Canyon. We need a new word for ludicrous these days because we're in 5-sigma territory now when it comes to beltway nitwits. Any illusion that you, me, or anyone else ever had that our leaders are smarter, harder-working, or more virtuous than we ought to be as dead as the lone atom that once vibrated in this knucklehead’s cranium.

Let’s talk education. Higher education is no longer about building the country’s economy and expertise with the aid of things like the G.I. Bill. Higher education has become a woke enterprise dedicated to the transfer of wealth from young students to college administrators, with the encouragement of the United States government and at the expense of taxpayers and students. In most other contexts, expensive loans to consumers for questionable purposes would be considered usury.

It’s easy to not feel sorry for contemporary college students when you read about antics like those of UC Berkeley law school students who were recently invited to the home of School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, law school professor Catherine Fisk, for a dinner they hosted to make up for events that were canceled for these soon-to-be graduates during COVID.

The dinner devolved into a fracas after a Palestinian American law student stood up in front of guests with a microphone and attempted to give a speech about Gaza while condemning her hosts as Jews. Chemerinsky asked the student to stop disrupting the dinner and to leave. The student, Malak Afaneh, refused, accusing Fisk of assaulting her and denying her free speech rights. Other students joined her.

Evidently, the UC Berkeley School of Law ain’t what it used to be since Afaneh, who is about to graduate, apparently doesn’t understand that she has no First Amendment rights at a private dinner party. Chemerinsky and Fisk have, to their rue, become the latest faculty to discover that when dealing with coddled and propagandized minds devoid of real-world experience, no good deed goes unpunished.

That being said, I don’t think that Afaneh and her cohorts come anywhere close to representing the average college student in this country. But their actions are also far from unusual. And she’s about to graduate with a law degree from one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. That’s a problem.

Contemporary higher education is, in many ways, a moral and intellectual dystopia that's failing not only students but our society as a whole. Even at private universities, much of this nonsense ends up on the taxpayer dole.

At Oberlin College, for instance, it’s considered appropriate to employ a former Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who has been tied to both the execution of Iranian political prisoners and the fatwa to murder Salman Rushdie, as a professor. A law firm hired to investigate numerous charges against Mahallati somehow cleared him. The only reason he’s not still a professor at Oberlin is a sex-for-grades scandal.

What is not considered appropriate at Oberlin is for the bakery across the street to attempt to stop Oberlin students from shoplifting.

Then there was the recent adventure at UCLA Medical School, which is one of the best in the world, where first-year medical students were forced to attend a two-hour presentation by a Hamas supporter and “housing injustice” advocate, Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, not a doctor or medical educator in any way, shape, form, manner, or style, who referred to modern medicine as “white science” and made the conscripted students pray to “mama Earth” while ranting about social injustice and Gaza.

Gray-Garcia didn’t just wander in off the street (though she looks as if she could have). Someone found her, invited her, and paid her to waste two hours of these students lives that they can’t get back. Someone who makes a lot of money to educate medical students at a prestigious institution thought that this was a good idea. That’s the kind of trouble higher education is in.

I could go on about Claudine Gay, Francesca Gino, and others, but it’s too depressing. If you are counting on the nurturing of bright minds at our colleges and universities to bail us out of our current travails, I would not hold your breath if I were you.

Science, which has for decades been the gold standard for trust in this country, has committed professional seppuku in the past decade by providing the public with false information. After the partisan takeover of science during COVID and currently through climate alarmism, the bullshitification of science is in full swing. I can’t blame anyone who’s not so keen on “the science” anymore. Retraction Watch, a publication that tracks problematic scientific papers, has tens of thousands of publications in its database, which is just a few years old. How can anyone expect the public to trust science when even scientists don’t trust a lot of it anymore?

Another pillar of society—laws and courts—are failing as well. Our legal system has become partisan, and the parts of it that are not already in someone’s pocket are used by partisans to punish the opposition. Partisans across the board don’t seem to care much anymore about the rule of law, which is part and parcel of what we as a nation are supposed to be about, unless they can use it to their advantage. I maintain that you either care about the rule of law or you don’t, and halfway is the same as not at all.

I’ve left the worst for last, because there’s a non-zero chance that my head might physically explode when talking about the media. A well-functioning, critical, independent media is essential to a democracy. We haven’t had that for a long time. In fact, we have almost the opposite: a system in which media companies compete with each other to collude with the government in order to spread disinformation and silence critics.

The biggest purveyors of misinformation or disinformation during the COVID pandemic were the government and the media, not critics or average people. And yet now, in the fullness of time, when it’s been shown conclusively that almost every position taken by the government and uncritically parroted by the media over the past few years concerning COVID, gender-affirming care, climate alarmism, and other issues, we are told to “trust the science” or be dismissed as nutcases, denied the right to speak, and fired from our jobs.

Orwell himself could not have written a better script. When I first read 1984, decades ago, I thought that it was a chilling novel that depicted things that would never happen without war, murder and violence. Now I see that it’s being facilitated with little resistance in meeting rooms by people in suits with computers instead of guns.

The last thing I’m going to declaim about is something that scares me arguably as much as all of the above because it’s what I deem most likely to start a shooting war. President Biden just announced yet another likely illegal attempt to forgive billions in college student loan debt.

This is astounding in many ways, not the least of which is the fact that it was Senator Joe Biden who, at the behest of lenders in Delaware a few decades ago, ushered legislation through Congress that removed the ability to discharge student loan debt through bankruptcy.

Now Biden wants to take unitary action through executive orders to transfer money from taxpayers who either never went to college or went but paid off their student loans and give it to those who can’t repay. This is a form of taxation without representation. It’s blatantly illegal and a naked attempt to appeal to a specific voting bloc.

We fought a war with King George III and the British over the same thing two and a half centuries ago. I’m starting to worry that we may be on the verge of the same once again.

Martin Hackworth - Howlin' at the Moon in ii-V-I

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