01/01/2022
[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
The only way to get rid of a temptation, said Oscar Wilde, is to yield to it. I shall therefore begin with some ruminations on the year that has gone. Then I shall turn and speculate about the year that is arriving. As Robert Burns told the mouse:
Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
The year 2021 certainly provided Prospects Drear for us to gaze upon. All too many, in fact. I'll pick a handful:
As I've made abundantly clear, I am in an advanced state of Covid fatigue. I’m sick of hearing about the damn thing. Let’s make proper provision for those most vulnerable — elderly citizens, mainly — and get on with our lives.
There’s a special place in Hell for those who have used Covid to destroy the structure of our children’s lives by shutting down schools. Children need that structure for proper socialization. Parents need it, too, to give them time to do adult things while professionals mind their kids.
(No offense intended to home schoolers, who I know pay attention to socialization with playgroups, sport teams and such. They have way more free time than the average, though, if they're doing the job properly. Looking back at my own kids' childhood, I don’t see how we could have managed it).
And maximum offense intended to the Teachers' Unions, whose leaders should be tossed into pits of boiling oil for pushing this scam.
What a fiasco! After dithering about futilely for twenty years — twenty years! — and spending north of two trillion dollars, we just dumped all our stuff — tens of billions of dollars' worth — and left.
I don’t hold any exaggerated opinion of my own geostrategic insight; but even I could see what a monstrous waste of lives and money that always was. I've been saying so here at Radio Derb for most of those twenty years.
Who’s to blame for this catastrophe? Our military Chiefs, mostly. Sure, I know, they're under civilian command. And yes, I know: the George W. Bush administration was full of neocon war hawks who thought they could make the world a nice place by dropping bombs all over.
The Chiefs were fine with it, though. If you're senior military, war is good for your career prospects. Dubya was too dumb to resist. Then we had Obama and Trump, neither of whom is dumb. The problem was, both of them are sufficiently self-aware to realize that they don’t know diddly about military stuff, so they deferred to the generals.
It’s now plain to all of us, I think, that our most senior military people are all fools and lunatics.
There are two things we could do about this:
I'd vote for option one myself. But I feel sure we shall in fact go through Door Two.
Yes, this was the year that we all found out about Critical Race Theory, and about how our Ruling Class has been quietly enforcing it on our schools, colleges, corporations, and government departments.
What actually is Critical Race Theory? What it actually is the terminus of the Race Denialism bus.
Race differences in social outcomes are plain to the naked eye. Your local college Computer Science department is full of East Asians; your local jail is full of blacks, and so on. What explains this?
Until about sixty years ago, everyone assumed it was just biology, of the kind that shows up when you breed dogs or farm animals. Then our elites declared biology out of bounds. That meant they had to come up with an alternative explanation for group differences. They came up with Culturism: it was nothing to do with biology, it was Culture. We're all the same! Just get the Culture right, anyone can be Einstein!
That was halfway plausible for a while; but as decades passed, the plausibility drained away. The statistics were stubborn. Black kids from stable middle-class homes continued to perform less well than white and Asian kids from same. (That even has a name: the Shaker Heights Effect [Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, by Jerlando F. L. Jackson, Journal of College Student Development, January 2003].) Affluent young blacks went on being incarcerated at higher rates than poor white kids [Data Shows Affluent Black Kids Are More Likely to Be Incarcerated Than Poor White Kids, EJI.org, April 29, 2016].
And while every social reform anyone could think of was failing to shift the differences, news was seeping in from advances in the human sciences, especially genetics, and the news was all race-realist.
So Culturism got a makeover. It got Marx-ified. It wasn’t Culture; it wasn’t that differences in outcome arose from people over here living like this because of history and tradition, while people over there, of equal moral standing, lived like that. It was that one group of people — bad, bad people — were maliciously oppressing another group of good, good people. Moral inferiors were oppressing their moral superiors!
Good old 1980s Culturism will get you canceled nowadays; you could ask Professor Larry Mead about that.
2021 was a great year for show trials — a pretty clear milestone in the politicization of our justice system. Verdicts in our criminal courts nowadays arise less from what you did, more from who you are, who you did it to, and whether you have bad thoughts. We are well on the way to Leninist jurisprudence: Who? Whom?
So Derek Chauvin, who restrained a juiced-up career criminal twice his size while waiting for medical assistance, got decades in prison after guys with thick necks from the state Attorney General’s office called on the county Medical Examiner and told him he had a nice little career there, be a shame if anything happened to it [The controversial autopsy at the heart of the Chauvin trial, explained, by Rachel Ramirez and Fabiola Cineas, Vox.com, April 9, 2021].
Later in the year we got the show trial in Georgia, where an attempted citizens' arrest of a highly suspicious lowlife turned fatal when the arrestee tried to wrestle one citizen’s gun away.
Then at year’s end came the show trial and conviction of that lady cop in Minnesota who pulled her pistol thinking it was her taser.
All this on top of the apparently indefinite detention without trial of the January 6th protestors — and the new turn-'em-loose rules for shoplifters and muggers.
I don’t know that America’s justice system was ever the envy of the world. But today it’s just a political instrument. We could save on salaries by firing all the District Attorneys, prosecutors and judges and replacing them with guest workers from North Korea.
An' forward tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear! What are my guesses for 2022, and what do I fear?
Along with everyone else. I’m guessing that the GOP/ GAP will do well in the November 2022 midterms, even in the teeth of all-out Regime Media support for Democrats and their manipulation of voting systems.
And along with all other National Conservatives, I fear that, having done well, the elected Republicans will relax back into their donors' soft, warm embraces and do nothing much of what so badly needs doing:
What will they do instead? Just what they did the first two years of the Trump presidency: tweaks of the tax system, empty noise about defunding Obamacare, pressure for more foreign wars, and… [snoring sounds].
That’s my fear.
Can the Ruling Class keep up the Covid hysteria for another year?
My guess — and also my fear — is, they can.
Viral infections come with this nifty feature that every few months there’s a new variant. Where human suffering is concerned, it may not amount to much, as we've seen with the Omicron thing; but with the Regime Media, the CDC, and Big Pharma all screeching in the public ear, the hysteria has another year of life in it yet, I’m sure. Pushback is building, but too slowly to win the game in 2022.
I spotted an encouraging example this week on Twitter: a letter to parents from a school only identified on the tweet as CCCA. I believe the school is in Alexandria, Virginia. Wherever it is, the school authorities are bucking the hysteria. Money quote from the letter, quote:
Maximalist measures intended to prevent transmission of COVID may or may not have been effective toward their stated end, but they have unquestionably wreaked havoc across our society.
Home run!
I just said that Critical Race Theory is "the terminus of the Race Denialism bus." I think that’s true and I hope it’s true. The parent revolts against school boards pushing this poison on kids was one of the most encouraging things to happen in 2021.
My fear is that this may be wrong; that just promoting CRT as the smart and cool ideology may not be the endpoint, that we may advance to legalizing Jim Snow.
This has already happened to a degree. The U.S. justice system is now quite brazenly antiwhite, as last year’s show trials illustrate, as also does the absence of any kind of trial for Ashli Babbitt’s black killer.
Likewise the Regime Media: they won’t let us forget Emmett Till from 66 years ago, but they have memory-holed the Waukesha massacre from six weeks ago.
Formal antiwhite discrimination, aka "Affirmative Action," has been the judge-made law of the land for half a century. Earlier this year Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus bill set aside $4 billion in debt relief explicitly and exclusively for black farmers. Academic testing is under attack all over because whites and Asians score too well.
So how far away are we from formal, legalized, institutionalized Jim Snow — separate drinking fountains for example?
I guess — and I fear.
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.