THE COLUMN: DEI, Monster, DIE

Who would have thought that the essence of our modern cold (so far) civil war would not be capturing the radio stations and newspaper offices to proclaim the revolution but rather the acronyms, abbreviations, and contractions—the language itself? During the Eisenhower administration, the newly coined term "bafflegab" was often employed by the pro-Democrat media to describe Ike's often circumlocutory way of speaking. They thought Eisenhower, the victorious Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, was "stupid," especially as compared with their poorly shod wonderboy, Adlai Stevenson, whom Ike beat twice. Little did they know that Eisenhower was deliberately obfuscatory, to keep his real intentions and meanings private.

Milton A. Smith, assistant general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the inventor of the word, defined it as: “multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.” Today we recognize it as the lingua franca of the bureaucrat-educator class, especially those involved in mid-levels of government and those studying for their master's degree in education. A casual glance at the academic writings of Michelle Obama and "doctor" Jill Biden will immediately grasp its essence.

Ah, but such sesquipedalianism and deliberate obfuscation is rapidly going out of fashion, mostly because the TikTok generation can barely speak English, much less comprehend words with Latin roots. Among the young, Ebonics has combined with elision to create a whole new cant, slang, patois and vernacular designed to be understood solely by its adherents and meant to mask its real meaning. But rather than use long, real words, they now create new ones by means of contractions , abbreviations, acronyms, or simple neologisms. If, for example, you don't know what "Yeet the Teet" means, you could look it up. Indeed "transgenderism" will open a whole new linguistic world for you.

Acronyms, of course, date far back—think of Gerald Ford's WIN campaign, "whip inflation now"—but one of the most recent, and insidious, is DEI, which stands for "diversity, equity, and inclusion," the latest totalitarian assault on professional standards. For a time it stood for "diversity, inclusion, and equity" until one of the few non-illiterates on the Left realized that its acronym spelled out DIE," which after all is what they really want us to do. (It reminds me of the scene in Dr. Strangelove, in which Gen. Turgidson wonders what kind of name that is, and gets this response: " He changed it when he became a citizen. Used to be Merkwürdigliebe." To which Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, replies: "a Kraut by any other name, huh?")

Maybe they should have gone with IED, for improvised explosive device, which is really what the whole thing is: a Strangelovian domestic terrorism bomb, which we've learned to stop worrying about and instead love. In any case, here's what they want:

Diversity is the presence of differences that may include race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, language, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment, or political perspective.  Populations that have been-and remain- underrepresented among practitioners in the field and marginalized in the broader society.

Equity is promoting justice, impartiality and fairness within the procedures, processes, and distribution of resources by institutions or systems.  Tackling equity issues requires an understanding of the root causes of outcome disparities within our society.

Inclusion is an outcome to ensure those that are diverse actually feel and/or are welcomed.  Inclusion outcomes are met when you, your institution, and your program are truly inviting to all.  To the degree to which diverse individuals are able to participate fully in the decision-making processes and development opportunities within an organization or group.

I've bold-faced the bald-faced cultural Marxist argot of their terms so you might see through the benign mask of caring and sharing and see the nasty monster's puss beneath it. You will notice that exactly none of these things contributes anything to the advancement of the enterprise; they're simply more Marxist revanchism for the Lost Cause of their beloved Soviet Union, which died of incompetence in 1991, and for which they have never forgiven the Russians.

One aspect of the horror show is, of course, the oligarchic World Economic Forum and its Great Reset, headed up by Klaus Schwab, who in fact is a kraut by actual name. Another is the ascendant, now-institutional Left, which has captured the high ground of the U.S. government, higher education, Protestantism and Reform Judaism, much of mainstream Roman Catholicism, and a good deal of corporate America, which should know better.

Recently, Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University, announced that he is resigning from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, thanks to a new DEI prescription that anyone presenting professional research must push "equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals," the word "anti-racism" having become the new, pro-active version of simple "diversity," seeking to replace one form of "discrimination" with another. "I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable," he said.

As Newspeak has grown in reach, it's become obvious to those who would wish this country ill disguise their harmful intentions with the language of therapeutic Christianity (strange bedfellows indeed). The diabolical Saul Alinsky made this clear with Rule No. 4 from Rules for Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” As Alinsky famously noted: "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."

If, say, a faith preaches "thou shalt not kill" then pester it with questions about war and capital punishment. If the religion preaches equality, they turn it into "equity." If its adherents have fostered a culture of professional excellence, challenge it with "inclusion" regardless of intelligence, skill, or aptitude. And when a business or institution claims to want diversity of thought, accuse them of racism; you really can kill them with this. DEI thus becomes the perfect Marxist weapon against the past, against custom, against family, against societal homogeneity, and against cultural self-defense. In this way does Critical Theory attack the very foundations of Western civilization.

The neo-Marxists' favorite weaponized word, however, is "tolerance." Alinsky-like, the Left has perverted this word from its original meaning, "endurance, the ability to bear pain or adversity; patience, fortitude," and has now come to mean "welcoming diversity, inclusion, and equity"—or else. That is to say, a word that means "acceptance" only in its most dire, involuntary sense, is currently transmogrifying into celebrating vibrant differences until your cooperation and acquiescence is no longer needed in the fundamental transformation of your society. Like the radioactive meteorite  on the Witley estate in the 1965 Boris Karloff film (based on H.P. Lovecraft's story, The Color Out of Space), their assault on the language poisons everything with which it comes into contact, eventually causing the grotesquely disfigured host to burst into flames and burn down the entire house.

So DEI, monster, die: this means you. There's nothing baffling about this gab, and they're not kidding when they say DEI, even if they spell it wrong.

Vignettes From the Cultural Revolution

Have you heard the big news? Superman is now LGBT! Or, is that LGBTQ? Or perhaps, as Justin Trudeau would say, 2SLGBTQQIA+. Whatever the case may be, he's out and he's proud. But more importantly for our purposes, he's gotten really into Greta Thunberg:

I love the guy holding the "There's no Planet B" sign. Didn't Superman himself flee his home planet to come to Earth, gaining super powers in the process? Seems like emigrating to Krypton B worked out pretty well for him.

From the story:

Since becoming Superman, [Clark's son] Jon Kent has battled real-life issues in the DC Universe. Thus far, he's fought wildfires caused by climate change, stopped a school shooting from happening, and has protested refugees being deported.... Jon Kent joining the fight against climate change shows that he gets what being Superman truly means: inspiring and making the world a better place in the process.

Sounds about as exciting as an afternoon watching CNN, and roughly as fanciful. This should really help 10-year-olds escape the drudgery of their mask enforced school days and the impending cancellation of Christmas due to a virus that barely effects them.

In other news, Ford Motor Company is attempting their own Green reinvention, as they launch an electric version of their F-150 pickup, the F-150 Lightning. Year in and year out, the F-150 outsells its competitors due to their superior product and name recognition. As Car and Driver mentioned in their write-up on the best selling cars of 2019, Ram, Chevrolet, and GMC have each significantly redesigned their truck offerings, but the F-150, with hardly a change, still beats them out easily.

So why go electric? Well, it's largely an attempt to chase status and good publicity, and the hope that greenbacks will follow. As Kevin Williamson explains in his write-up on the F-150 Lightning, entitled 'Here Come the Electric Rednecks,'

If you want to know who is really packing the heat on the great American scene A.D. 2021, consider that Elon Musk could, on a good day, personally buy the Ford Motor Company three times over, even though Ford sells about twelve times as many vehicles a year as Tesla, which still loses money on its automobile business — its profits in the first quarter of 2021 came from Bitcoin investments and from selling emissions credits.

That is, Ford generates real money and Tesla imaginary money. These days the latter is preferable to the former. How long that will last, however, is anyone's guess, especially as the entire automotive industry is struggling under the global chip shortage which has stalled production and shocked the market worldwide.

Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth II has now officially joined her fellow elderly monarch and religious leader Pope Francis in naming the "environmental crisis" as our most pressing political concern. The Queen, of course, rarely speaks about contentious topics, but this time she seems to have decided that there is no harm in being publicly on the side of the great and the good. And her move in this direction seems to be responsible for at least some healing, specifically that of the troubled royal family. Environmentalism is reportedly helping bring them together, from her accused sex-trafficker son to her brainless celebrity-hound grandson.

Still, with Britain being roiled by an ongoing energy crisis which is at least partly caused by the environmentalist enthusiasms of her ruling class, one wonders whether this was a prudent course of action by Her Majesty. It might not be long before her subjects come to believe that, like her uncle Edward, she'd chosen the wrong side.

So what do all of these things have in common? They are examples of venerable institutions bending over backwards to gain the approval of the environmentalist movement, and risking the good will of those who have kept them going for so long. Moreover, they're doing so at a time when the Green movement seems to be in real danger. The global energy crisis has environmentalism struggling to keep it's own head above water, but they're acting like it is their life preserver.

At the same time, they are instances of the cultural revolution, which completed its long march through western academia decades ago, colonizing a new host, like some parasitic bacteria. The revolution, which can produce nothing of it's own, is attempting to live off of the cultural capital of its newest targets. Once it's sucked them dry, of course, it will move on, leaving an empty husk in its wake, as it has with education. Before long, kids will stop buying comic books, Americans in rural areas will stop seeing F-150s as an identity marker, Catholics will become (more) alienated from the Church, and patriotic Britons won't go out of their way to speak up for the Queen, and certainly not her heir.

My advice to whoever is making decisions about the future of these institutions: Beware.

Our Black Marxist Murder Spree

Only rarely do present circumstances so align themselves as to reveal the future with clarity. We are in such a period right now, and to those willing to open their eyes to it, the future staring back at them is bleak indeed.

I worked as a police officer in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, and people of my generation may recall with dread the crime wave of the late ‘80s and early '90s, when Los Angeles saw an average of three times the number of murders as have occurred in recent years. In 1992, the Los Angeles Police Department handled 1,092 homicides. Compare this figure with 2020’s total of 349 and you get an idea of how much safer the city became in 28 years, thanks largely to the efforts of the men and women of the LAPD. But even the 349 figure was a significant increase from 2019, when 253 people were killed in L.A. Will we soon look on 2020 as the good old days? All available evidence says yes.

I’ve been writing about the coming crime wave since 2014, when Michael Brown’s death in a Ferguson, Mo., police shooting gave rise to the widely circulated lie – still believed in some quarters – that he had been killed while trying to surrender. Brown’s death and the rioting the followed led to what Heather Mac Donald described as the Ferguson Effect, in which police officers shrink from proactive crime-fighting measures for fear of becoming involved in a controversial incident. The Ferguson Effect lives on, more destructively than ever.

Ferguson, Mo., 2014.

This fact is welcomed, even celebrated, by the Black Lives Matter organization and their myriad acolytes. BLM, formed in 2013 after the death of Trayvon Martin, became the leading voice in opposition to what had been the traditional responses to crime, i.e., arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration.

BLM’s influence has only grown in the years since, most especially after last year’s death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, and today it is the puppet master of the far left. The news media, academia, and the entertainment industry unquestioningly, even gleefully parrot its calumnies, most prominent among which is the claim that the American criminal justice system is irredeemably racist and must be torn out root and branch in order to achieve some utopian vision of “social justice.”

It is important to note that the appending of any modifier to the word “justice” inverts, even perverts, its very meaning, and in no arena has actual justice been more perverted than in “social justice,” which at it core subordinates the interests of crime victims and the law-abiding to those of the criminals who prey upon them, revealing the enduring truth in the Old Testament wisdom that those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind. How else to explain the unhinged reaction among American elites to the April 21 police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio?

Police body camera footage clearly showed Bryant, 16, was armed with a knife and in the very act of trying to stab a girl at the time she was shot. Of course we are saddened by the sight of someone being killed, most especially someone so young, but how depraved must one be to sympathize more with Bryant than with the girl she was attacking? Yet we heard voices from across the American left, from politicians to media figures to professional athletes, denouncing the officer and calling for his arrest. Had that officer not arrived and acted when and as he did, the city of Columbus and the country overall most likely would have recorded another instance of a young black person dying at the hands of another, the type of incident that happens thousands of times every year yet results in no protests, no outrage, and no indignant commentary in the newspapers or on television.

The silence among our elites to this carnage is deafening. Last year brought an alarming rise in homicides across the country, with killings up by an average of 37 percent in America’s 57 largest cities. Some cities were hit harder than others: in New York City the increase was 39 percent, in Chicago it was 55 percent, and in Milwaukee murders nearly doubled over the previous year. All told, there were 7,101 homicides in these 57 cities, the great majority of whose victims were blacks or Latinos who fell to killers of their own ethnicity.

The Washington Post reports 1,021 people in the United States were shot and killed by the police in 2020, and even if one accepts the phantasmagoric proposition that not a single one of these killings was justified, one is still left with problems so different in scale as to question the motives of those who focus on the smaller number and not the larger.

And yet that is what Black Lives Matter and their cult of followers do. Certainly an injustice was done to George Floyd, whose death has been addressed to the extent the legal system is able, but is his death more lamentable than those of the 81 other people murdered in Minneapolis last year? What of the 261 victims in St. Louis, the 437 in New York, and the 769 in Chicago? Were their lives so meanly regarded as to be insignificant to those who lecture their fellow citizens on the value of black lives?

They will not answer this question, and they will impugn the motives of anyone who dares put it forward, for to question them is obstruct the revolution they make no secret of advocating. BLM is merely the latest iteration of Marxist radicals to win the adulation of our political, academic, and media elites, the latest band of misfits to wield “Critical Theory” as a hammer and chisel (hammer and sickle?) against the pillars of Western civilization, among the foundational of which is the rule of law.

Chronicle of deaths foretold.

In his 2017 book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, my friend Michael Walsh tells of the grim harvest brought by these purveyors of Critical Theory. “Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe,” he writes, “and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future.”

As it has in the past, America will one day repudiate the visions espoused by the neo-Marxists, but until it does, how many murdered corpses will litter our shrunken horizons?

Do Fat Lives Matter? Not to Covid

America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s health protection agency, has declared that obesity significantly worsens Covid-19 outcomes. According to its website, obesity reduces immune function, decreases lung capacity, may make ventilation more difficult, and generally exacerbates the severity of Covid. During the first eight months of the pandemic, the CDC reports, at least three in ten Covid hospitalizations were attributed to obesity. As BMI (body mass index) rises, so do Covid-related risks of hospitalization, intensive care admission, mechanical ventilation, and death. 

These are grim facts, particularly so as the CDC also reports that obesity is on the rise, especially amongst America’s poorest, and has been made worse by lockdowns. The highest prevalence of self-reported obesity is among “non-Hispanic black adults,” at a whopping 39.8 percent percent. Nearly four out of ten black Americans are not just overweight, but obese.   

One might expect that in the name of saving lives, a national conversation about reducing obesity would be underway. The CDC website emphasizes the need for “culturally tailored interventions to address poor nutrition, physical inactivity, and tobacco use.” It advises obese adults to limit calories, choose leaner meats and vegetables, engage in regular activity, and reduce alcohol.

In the Covid red zone.

Yet as Michael Fumento recently pointed out in “Obesity: Covid’s Third Rail,” the average person would hardly know of the link between Covid severity and obesity from mainstream reporting, which has largely either remained completely silent about the connection or even denounced those who point it out. “It seems we’ve seen a backlash to linking Covid-19 to obesity without ever seeing the lash,” he notes wryly. 

Fumento is the author of a book about obesity, The Fat of the Land, that devotes a chapter to the popular myth that one can be fat and healthy at the same time. He deplores the tendency to denounce discussion of obesity as more debilitating than obesity itself, noting that “NBC News devoted a long print story to shaming “fat shamers,” but provided no evidence that they even existed beyond an oblique reference to social media trolls.” 

Thanks in large part to a social justice interdiction against what has come to be called “fat shaming,” it is now unacceptable to address the health effects of obesity. Some health officials even claim that so-called “fat shaming” is worse than being fat. A 2018 article in the peer-reviewed medical journal BMC Medicine targeted weight “stigma” as the main driver of the current obesity epidemic, finding “compelling evidence that weight stigma is harmful to health over and above objective body mass index.” The article’s authors were particularly concerned about anti-fat bias amongst health practitioners. 

Stigma and bias are still acceptable in mainstream discussions, of course—just not against the fat. During a pandemic rife with slogans about being “in this together,” divisive shaming tactics have become standard fare in much reporting. In early April of 2020, the Huffington Post’s Richard Stokoe eagerly fueled evidence-free animus by declaring that “The White Male is the Biggest Risk in Spreading the Virus.” Allegedly, white men’s “privilege” and “toxic masculinity” made them less likely to follow health guidelines or care about the safety of others. 

A year later, the specific issue was different but the scapegoating impulse was the same in an April 5, 2021 New York Times article on “How White Evangelicals’ Vaccine Refusal Could Prolong the Pandemic.” This piece of fear-mongering claimed that due to their alleged anti-science prejudices and other irrational objections—none of which were presented as having even a shred of credibility—evangelical whites posed a threat to American national health. The article skipped quickly over the possibility of vaccine refusal by non-white evangelicals.

Toxicity, thy name is white manhood.

Discussion of coronavirus impacts has often been indistinguishable from invidious identity politics. An April 4, 2020 article in the New York Post, “Why Women are Better than Men at Defeating the Coronavirus” showcased a cartoon image of a Super Woman flexing her muscular body next to a 98-pound male weakling. The article sounded a note of unmistakable crude triumphalism in emphasizing women’s greater ability to fight infection, and lesser chance of dying from Covid, due to their XX chromosome.

The tone was very different just a few days later, on April 7, when the New York Times reported that “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.” The subheading noted that even in the absence of sufficient data to draw firm conclusions, the potential that black people were dying at higher rates than whites was worth discussing with “alarm,” and alleged that black infections and deaths illustrated entrenched social inequalities.

An article on the same day in The Washington Post titled “The Coronavirus is Infecting and Killing Black Americans at an Alarmingly High Rate” quoted Donald Trump calling the statistics “terrible,” Anthony Fauci referring to the racial disparity as “unacceptable,” and Surgeon General Jerome Adams saying it broke his heart to hear about higher death rates in the black community.

Reading these latter articles, one would never know that higher rates of obesity in black communities has certainly played a role in the death figures. For when it comes to talking about obesity, nothing that might remotely be seen to cast blame, or even simply to identify concern, is allowed. At a time when being overweight means undeniably greater risk from Coronavirus, it has become near-impossible to talk about the problem. 

Whom we don't don't about when we don't talk about it.

Fumento notes that obesity “has long been politicized.” But the particular ferocity of contemporary reality-denial would have been impossible without the concerted efforts of activist academics, who bear the largest share of responsibility for our present impasse. Thanks to the social sciences’ craze for extreme constructivism, which denies biology and insists that society “constructs” reality, alongside a cultural-Marxist imperative, fat is now considered a category of oppression rather than a medical condition. 

What began in 1978 with Susie Orbach’s bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue, which argued that a sexist society makes women and girls hate their bodies, is now an entire area of identity studies called Fat Studies, complete with its own social justice terminology and a zealously-held ethical mandate to liberate the “stigmatized” from the prison of body-shaming. 

According to the practitioners of "fat studies," bias against fat people is a human rights issue of equal importance to racism, and is expressed in countless micro-aggressions, including even the kindest and least aggressive of warnings or encouragement about weight-related health.

Fat studies’ shocking divorce from reason was strikingly illuminated in a 2016 article by three North American academics with expertise in psychology and health. “Scientific Weightism: A View of Mainstream Weight Stigma Research Through a Feminist Lens,” co-written by Rachel Calogero, Tracy Tylka, and Janell Mensinger, begins from the now-widespread premise that fat stigma, rather than obesity itself, is the real killer. The authors go so far as to deny that there are any negative health consequences of obesity, insisting that although there are correlations between obesity and disease, correlation is not causation. They also deny that obesity is a condition within an individual’s power to control or modify. 

A social-justice issue, in the flesh.

“Weight stigma is a social justice issue,” the authors assert, “because people who are fat are denied their basic civil rights in every aspect of their lives, including their right to be fat and to live free of unfair treatment.” Merely to allege that obesity is medically harmful or undesirable is an example of “unfair treatment” that the authors believe should be outlawed. “It is absolutely essential,” they conclude “that scholars campaign for formal legislation to protect against weight stigma and discrimination.” Such legislation does not yet exist, but a powerful cultural consensus now denounces those who break the taboo against “fat-shaming.”

Even the CDC, though stating the negative health effects (and causes) of obesity unequivocally, has been affected by fat studies’ social justice cant. The website tends to speak about “having obesity” rather than “being obese,” as if obesity were an illness that one could catch unawares. It also frequently soft-pedals the direct connection between individual behavior and obesity, preferring a narrative of group deprivation, as when it alleges that “racial and ethnic minority groups have historically not had broad opportunities for economic, physical and emotional health, and these inequities have increased the risk of getting sick and dying from Covid-19 for some groups.” Such language reinforces the idea that the morbidity of the obese has more to do with oppression by others than with individual choices. 

But at least the CDC actually names obesity as a problem. Many other outlets have remained silent, deliberately rejecting the opportunity to educate the public on a crucial health problem. At a time when many in our society exhibit a near-hysterical concern for safety at any cost, it is bizarre to see our cultural mandarins refusing to provide basic life-saving information. 

'Environmental Racism.' Is It a Thing?

Rashida Tlaib, a member of the House of Representatives and an integral part of the harridan quartet known as the Squad, has enlightened the world as to why the Wuhan virus has disproportionately affected minorities: racism.  "Environmental racism," to be precise.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) Tuesday night on CSPAN blamed “environmental racism” for the higher rates of coronavirus infections and deaths among minorities.

When asked about the disparity, Tlaib said, “Yeah, I mean, look at racial disparities. You look at 40% of the people that have died from COVID in the state of Michigan are African-American even though the African-American population in Michigan is less than 15%. That alone tells you the racial disparities and that they have already been disconnected, maybe coverage of healthcare, maybe they live in what I would call very polluted and very overwhelming community with just corporate polluters all around, so they are already dealing with a lot of these challenges that come into the fact when you have a national pandemic like this, when you have a virus like this, that can really impact someone who has pre-existing conditions.”

She continued, “So, yes, we have talked about environmental racism, but I don’t think we really understood what that really means. If you look at Michigan, where some of the most polluting corporations from Marathon to AK Steel, U.S. Steel, many of these companies, you look in the shadows, it’s African American families that live there.”

Well, QED, as educated Americans used to say. But, of course, it hasn't been demonstrated at all, simply asserted. Not discussed have been the disparities in underlying conditions between the races, including hypertension and obesity, both of which are major comorbidities that contribute to the different death rates.

People died because they lived in communities that were over-polluted. People died because they don’t have access to quality jobs that offer that kind of healthcare coverage. I think there needs to be a full-blown reflection when we get back because I don’t think we go back to normal.

On the theory that you never let a good crisis go to waste, the Squad and the entire Democrat Left have decided to link "environmentalism" with the coronavirus, apparently on the theory that the demon spawn of Mother Nature and the horseshoe bat somehow select black and brown people for special treatment. In this linkage, we see the modern Marxist left at work, tying all their pet projects into one unified field theory that, amazingly, explains everything in precisely the terms favored by cultural Marxists. Much as, one might observe, classical Marxism did, in an economic-political theory that only a conspiracy-minded horseshoe bat-crazy ideologue  could love.

In any case, Tlaib's contention is absurd on its face. The Great Migration of African-Americans northward after WWII brought millions of black Americans from the Deep South to the industrial areas of the North, among them in particular greater Detroit, which Tlaib represents. In Detroit, they found good, steady, well-paying jobs that allowed them to live a middle-class lifestyle in one of the most beautiful cities of the industrial Midwest. Although race relations had been fraught as early as 1943 Belle Isle riots, one place in America where black people were not "in the shadows" was Detroit. The wreckage of Detroit, which accelerated with the race riots of 1967, came when Detroit had just passed its peak, and from which it has never really recovered.

But don't bother mentioning history to the Squad, whose purpose is only secondarily legislative. Their first job is to act as the Four Horseshoe Bat-Faced Women of the Apocalypse, riding at the head of their resentful army and trying to browbeat their enemies into progressive submission.

"It's not just about dismantling... anyone who's committed to the work of building a more equitable and just world is a member of the Squad." But if they have to destroy the country as founded in order to save it, you can bet they will. By any means necessary.

Back to "normal"? If they have their way, not a chance.

 

 

 

How the Wuhan Virus Stopped Global Warming

Or knocked it off the front burner, at least:

The coronavirus crisis calls for an urgent review of Germany's climate targets under goals set by the European Union, the leader of the economic council of the conservative Christian Democrat party (CDU) said on Saturday. The COVID-19 pandemic is "putting the German economy to the test," and the EU should consider a "deferment of climate policy targets," Wolfgang Steiger said in comments published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Steiger said the fallout from the pandemic on the economy could amount to a new "de-industrialization" of Germany. Experts are predicting a global recession as a result of the business shutdown and subsequent layoffs.

The EU's ambitious 2030 climate goals include a 40% cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels and at least a 32% market share for renewable energy. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged that a large amount of the bloc's budget would go towards achieving the EU Green Deal.

Deferring this ruinous course of action would seem to make sense. Germany is loath to give up its ongoing Wirtschaftswunder, which has seen it go from wartime ruination to postwar industrial powerhouse. To destroy a 75-year record of achievement in order to attend to an imaginary future crisis when confronted with a real one in the here and now would be crazy. But fear not, Germany still has plenty of crazies:

However, Germany's environment minister, Svenja Schulze, warned against "connecting climate protection and economic prosperity." It may be possible "to use the exit from the corona crisis to promote climate-compatible and sustainable economic structures," she said.

The radicals, of course, want to go farther, faster:

Jennifer Morgan of the environmental activist group Greenpeace is among those who believe the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the weaknesses of the global economic system. "We are being offered the chance to fundamentally change how things work," said Morgan of the shutdown brought about by the health emergency.

In a meeting on March 26, EU leaders invited the commission to start working on a comprehensive coronavirus recovery plan, incorporating green transition.

Never let a crisis go to waste, indeed. As the Western world emerges from its China-induced economic coma, we need to be vigilant lest the patient, in a still-weakened state, fall prey to an even more insidious and destructive disease, cultural and economic Marxism disguised as "environmentalism."