The Democratic Party “Left Us”

Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr. and Elon Musk were all solidly behind the Democratic Party until the party became corrupt, abandoning the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law.

RFK Jr. on Gutfeld Friday night: “I think that the people who these days tend to be Republican or Conservative are much more inclined to critical thinking.” “You had said before that we left the Democratic Party, Elon, myself, and Tulsi. But I think all of us feel like the Democratic Party left us.” “Today, the Democratic Party is a party of war. It's the party of censorship. It's the party of Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Data, Big Banking, and the Military Industrial Complex.”

Andrew Sullivan announced his support for Kamala Harris. He has recently expressed that he is reconsidering based on this administrations embrace of gender ideology:

We now discover, from insurance claims, that at least 14,000 minors have been transed either chemically or surgically in the last five years. At a minimum...

It is despicable to take a child who has never gone through puberty and remove from them any possibility of orgasm for life — before they can possibly know what an orgasm feels like. Evil. Bowers admits it’s no different than FGM in its effect. With FGM, much of the pressure to mutilate a child comes from the parents’ religion. The difference between Iran — where they trans young gays and lesbians en masse — and America, is that in one, the parents’ religion is fundamentalist Islam, and in America, it’s wokeness.

And that wokeness overwhelmingly targets gay kids. In Britain they became the vast majority of the children sent for sex reassignment, before it was banned outside a clinical trial. And we know that these “doctors” have no way of objectively knowing whether a child is actually trans or gay or depressed or autistic — and yet they also oppose any broad mental health assessment of a child, if that child has simply declared himself or herself the opposite sex...

But the discovery from a lawsuit against the State of Alabama over its ban on the medical sex reassignment of children has left me reeling. It shows a staggering level of bad faith from the transqueer lobby, and, also, from Rachel Levine — the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS. Read the amicus brief here. Everything in this piece is based on it . . .

I remember very well how all my gender insecurities as a gay kid vanished after puberty. So I urge any gay man or lesbian who, as a child or teen, was barred from this basic human right to be brave and start the lawsuits. It’s the only way. No gay men or lesbians will come to your aid. Kamala Harris and the gay groups sure won’t. “LGBTQIA+” billionaires will sacrifice any number of gay kids if it means not being called “transphobic” at a dinner party.

I look around what was once my community and see such incredible cowardice and indoctrination that it makes me despair at what we have become. A movement that began as a crusade for sexual liberation is now sterilizing gay and trans children and removing their capacity for orgasm forever. A movement that began with defending gay men and lesbians is now sacrificing a generation of gay kids at the behest of trans extremists and critical gender theory.

Forgive me for the passion. But this amicus brief set my head and heart aflame. What has happened — what is still happening — is the worst attack on gay kids since Anita Bryant.

But this time, the danger is coming from inside the house.

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Newly Disclosed Memo Shows that State Department is Policing the English Language at the Behest of Gender Ideologists

Is it in the job description of the U.S. State Department to police the English Language? From National Review:

Making assumptions about another person’s gender identity based on their appearance or name “can be problematic” and send a “harmful, exclusionary message,” Blinken wrote in a February 5 cable, which instructed State Department employees to avoid using common terms like “mother/father,” “son/daughter,” and “husband/wife.”

National Review recently obtained the text of the cable and confirmed its authenticity. Some State Department staffers have questioned why Blinken is spending time promoting far-left gender activism at critical junctures in the raging wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

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The Lies that Destroy Institutions

Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from saying the simple, good-hearted and obvious statement: "All Lives Matter"? It's the modern version of woke totalitarianism. Through the use of lies and cancel culture, it is destroying most of America's institutions.

Michael Shellenberger, author of "Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions. It's time for counter-Wokeism."

Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. . . .

The first salient feature of the above episodes is the willingness of institutional leaders to lie about what they are doing. The first response from Harvard’s Board of Directors was to deny that President Gay had committed any instance plagiarism and to threaten the New York Post with a lawsuit if it reported the opposite of that. The New York Times similarly lied about the op-ed piece it had published and effectively asked the oped page editor to lie about his departure. And similarly, the AAA falsely claimed that the anthropologists who wanted to discuss biological sex on a conference panel had not accurately represented their topic.

In each case, the institutional leaders lied in order to cover up unethical behavior. Harvard was covering up both the plagiarism of its president and the unwillingness of Harvard to do anything about it. The New York Times misrepresented the substance of the op-ed in order to disavow it and, perhaps, to justify forcing out the op-ed page editor. And the AAA lied about what the dissident anthropologists did in order to justify its blatant censorship.

And those lies and unethical behaviors all rest upon a set of underlying lies. Harvard lied when it claimed that it had selected its president on the basis of her qualifications, even calling Gay a “scholar’s scholar” despite her having a below-average scholarly record. The New York Times and the Harvard president, when she was still the Dean of Arts and Sciences, had been misrepresenting Black Lives Matter protests as peaceful and driven by a genuine epidemic of police killings. And AAA’s cancelation of the panel was based on the organization’s claim that biological sex is a spectrum rather than dimorphic. All of this lying is characteristic of totalitarian regimes...

Woke totalitarianism advances values that are contrary to the ones it espouses. It claims to be opposed to racism and sexism and yet promotes them through perpetuating the idea that people, by dint of their race or sex, are either victims or oppressors. It claims to be liberatory and empowering of those individuals designated victims while promoting the idea that they cannot escape their victim identity. And Woke totalitarianism promotes the notion that it is wise and truthful despite promoting such monstrous lies."

What is the solution? It's not going to be pleasant or easy, but we need to confront those who are tearing down our institution with their corrupted language.

Once we understand Woke activists and leaders in elite institutions as being in the grip of an anti-social and dehumanizing dogma which uses dishonest esoteric language to manipulate emotions and people, we can know to take them seriously, but not literally. At an interpersonal level, the best way to deal with narcissists is to ignore them, thereby depriving them of the attention they seek; at an institutional level, they must be confronted in a public way.

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17 Life-Learnings to Celebrate the 17th Birthday of Maria Popova’s “The Marginalian”

This morning I received 17 wonderful gifts. Maria Popova’s website has been one of my places of respite for many years. In her most recent article, she celebrates her 17 years of online writing at “The Marginalian” by crystallizing 17 lessons she has learned along the way. Here is Maria’s introduction to her 17 lessons:

The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)

What follows are merely the titles to Popova's 17 lessons. She discusses each of these more fully at her website. Everything she writes is, somehow, both analytically precise and poetic. I've printed this list and it has gone up on my wall so that I have daily reminders:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone

3. Be generous.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.

5. You are the only custodian of your own integrity.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.”

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively.

11. Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.

12 There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.

14. Choose joy.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself.

17.Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.

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One Approach for Dealing with Vague Verbal Attacks

Notice the simple technique used by this Canadian politician. He asks for examples. He asks the attacker to clarify what he is trying to say. Relentlessly asking for clarity does two things: It reveals the empty rhetoric and it shows that what is really going on is that the attacker is calling other people "bad." The politician was faced with an emotional feeling wrapped up in incomprehensible rhetoric. Not that emotional concerns are invalid. That said, things that look like an analytical argument should always be fair game for testing. We should always be invited to kick the tires and see what's under the hood.

This technique is non-partisan, however. Any person can use this technique to derail any conversation if used to an extreme. All language is inherently rickety, laden with conceptual metaphors. Using this technique incessantly will end almost every conversation. The only conversations that have any chance of surviving will be those involving only basic math and logic propositions (2 + 2 = 4) and "basic level categories," as described by Eleanor Rosch: Conversations like "I have a dog" or "It's raining outside." See also here, here and here.

There is balance to be had in the use of such inquisition and people of good faith do work together to make their conversations understandable and thus meaningful. If only there were more good faith and less suspicion in the world . . .

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