Tag Archives: culture

Our Woke DoD Managers

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Here’s Lloyd Austin’s Pentagon in action, via a memo he had sent to the public affairs offices of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and National Guard on Feb. 10:

In recent years, many sponsors of sporting events have instituted a tradition of requesting uniformed military members to unfurl and hold giant, horizontal US flags during events as an expression of patriotism and love of the country[.]
While many, including military members, view these displays as inspiring and patriotic…uniformed service members may not participate directly in the unfurling, holding, and/or carrying of giant, horizontal US flags that are not displayed during community outreach events.

View these flag displays as patriotic. Not just view them as patriotic, these flag displays are patriotic. Austin’s memo is disgusting. Barring our military personnel from participating in these flag displays—displays of the flag which symbolizes the nation for which these men and women are sworn to defend, even to die in the defense—is too woke by half. Austin needs to be dismissed. Not allowed to resign, dismissed.

Full stop.

In Which I disagree with DeSantis

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has written in his new book, The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for American Revival, that (Fox News‘ paraphrasing)

…left-wing company employees pressuring their executives to reflect their political values and “woke” CEOs using their corporate bully pulpit to exert their influence.
“This is especially true as the movement for [ESG] responsibility within corporate America has gained traction[.]”

I disagree, and this is a much broader problem than the ESG movement. Company executives who understand who is in charge of the companies they run only feel the political or “social justice” pressure of their employees that they choose to feel. The employees work for them, and they work for the companies’ shareholders. There is no bidirectionality to the governing hierarchy.

Company executives who surrender to their employees’ political/social justice demands are unfit for their roles in company governance: they’re abject cowards.

“Ran out of Time”

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The Washington, DC, City Council, dominated by the Progressive-Democratic Party as it is, voted a month ago to allow non-citizens, including illegal aliens, to vote in city elections, so long as they have been “resident” in the city for at least 30 days.

Congress has a 30-day review window during which it can override DC Council-passed laws and remove them.  The Republican-led House did so, but the Progressive-Democrat-led Senate…did not. As Fox News meekly put it, the Senate ran out of time before the review period ended.

No, the Senate didn’t run out of time. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) wouldn’t even let the matter come to the floor for a vote. Apparently, he didn’t want his majority caucus to have to be on the record as favoring non-citizens voting in American elections.

This needn’t be the end of the matter, though, the 30-day window is a statute, not a constitutionally set limit. Here’s what Art I, Sect 8, of our Constitution has to say on the governance of the District of Columbia:

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States….

That exclusive legislation over the District means that a later Congress can withdraw DC laws allowed under prior Congresses. This business of allowing non-citizens—including those illegal aliens—to vote in American elections, a quintessential factor in being an American citizen, needs to be rescinded. Elections have consequences, and we have another one coming in a year-and-a-half.

I have a caveat to this, though. Some might suggest that DC’s voter rolls might be useful things to search for illegal aliens in the District, round them up, and deport them. That must not happen. Government must not run around searching jurisdictions’ voter rolls to find illegal aliens, no matter how convenient such a search might seem.

Government must never be allowed to any search voter roll for groups of folks of whom Government, from administration to administration, disapproves and…silencing…them. The only purpose for a voter roll, the only legitimate purpose for local government searches of them, is to establish eligibility to vote in a jurisdiction and to remove individuals who are not eligible from those rolls. The Federal government must not be involved in such searches.

Gun Control and Racism

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Jacob Gershwin opened his Wall Street Journal piece on gun control with this lede:

Historical, racist gun laws are taking on new relevance in legal battles over modern-day gun regulations, following a Supreme Court ruling that expanded the right to bear arms.

He followed up [emphasis added]:

In the 1700s and 1800s, states across the country passed laws to keep guns out of the hands of slaves, free Black people, Native Americans and Catholics. Such discriminatory gun restrictions would be unconstitutional today, but they have entered the gun-rights debate as judges look to apply the Supreme Court’s decision last June that said gun restrictions must be anchored in historical traditions.

Now, despicably, many Federal and State government “lawyers” are claiming that those old, ugly, and by-design racist and anti-religion—those Evil Catholics—are part of that historical tradition as they continue their efforts to disarm all of us average Americans, in toto. US prosecutors in front of an appellate court:

They [[those racist gun control laws] nevertheless show that the Framers understood that legislatures could make such judgments to categorically disarm groups of people deemed to be dangerous.

Dangerous groups of Americans like those of us who might want to demur from Government behaviors, behaviors like the IRS targeting conservative American political groups, like the Department of Justice targeting mothers disputing with local school boards as domestic terrorists, like the FBI targeting traditional Catholics (those folks again…) as right-wing extremists and “investigating” them.

What prosecutors like those so carefully ignore is that that prior set of laws, that prior “tradition,” was wholly erased from the American body politic—the honest body politic—by the Civil War, the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments, and the recognition that all Americans are equal under American law—under all American laws.

For those persecutors prosecutors to argue that those racist gun control laws are somehow still part of our historical traditions is for them to ignore critical parts of gun control law history: the part that had post-Civil War South and too many jurisdictions in the North enacting gun control laws explicitly to disarm and keep unarmed and helpless black Americans—freed and newly freed—along with their white supporters against depredations, that ranged from rape through lynching, at the hands of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Those prosecutors are showing their own invidious racist bent.

Sometimes

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The FBI doesn’t engage only in pernicious activities—investigating mothers and traditional Catholics as terrorists, for instance, or lying to FISA courts.

Sometimes FBI personnel are just incompetent, and along a number of axes.

  • One agent left a highly lethal M4 carbine unsecured in his government car during a Starbucks run and had the weapon stolen…. “Although there was a lockbox in the trunk for storage of weapons and sensitive items,” the agent chose to store the rifle bag behind the car’s front passenger seat, one report shows.
    • [and] three dozen agents reported guns being lost, stolen or handled unsafely….
  • one agent who accidentally discharged his weapon and shot a hole through the floor of his hotel room….

If any Americans should have their guns taken away from them, maybe it should be FBI personnel. [/snark]

  • …inappropriate [sexual] affairs with felons in prison, confidential sources and subordinate employees.
  • agents and Bureau staff driving under the influence (DUI)….
  • One [agent] stole drug evidence to feed a heroin addiction….
  • [An FBI] employee pulled a gun on a private citizen during [the employee’s] road rage.
  • an [FBI] employee who shot and killed his neighbor’s dog….
  • [An FBI agent sent] “a threatening and vile email to his girlfriend’s ex-husband,” was faced with a temporary protective order. The agent then threatened to shoot the process server….

And so on. And on.

There’s this, too, which should saucer and blow the whole…affair:

The extensive reports were in fact so impactful that the FBI suspended distributing them for seven months in 2021-2022, due to complaints that the “employees harmed by misconduct” might feel shamed.

The FBI needs to be disbanded and certain of its investigative facilities transferred to a different, independent facility located in Middle America and created from scratch.