Framing Is Everything

These Faux Conservatives Get It Wrong

David Brooks went to the University of Chicago but he forgot what it means to take a step back and critically think. He put his foot in his mouth again as the show pony conservative on the liberal pundit circuit. If I were a graduating address speaker, I would remind graduates that they not only came to this academic environment to learn their major, but they should be able to think critically.

That means changing the usual framing which invites personal confirmation bias and turning an issue over to see if you can uncover something different and new that helps you learn about the issue.

That concept is bastardized by DEI and other movements like it when someone is told they can’t talk about a topic since they don’t see the world through someone else’s eyes or lived experience.

That sort of tactic fragments thinking and makes room for a centralized bureaucracy to set policy and make decisions on your behalf through the lens of benefitting the centralized bureaucracy. David Brooks doesn’t understand that concept.

I wrote about him here.

David Brooks and people like him set the conservative movement back in America. They discredit it. They are useless vessels. Marxists use them as Trojan horses to get inside and then discard them like a bag of peanut shells.

The Trump verdict isn’t about justice. Instead, it was a blatant attempt to destabilize the nation further. In the 1930s, the country was already destabilized and FDR seized the moment to institute a gigantic bureaucracy to make it all better. How’d that turn out? His effort led to the creation (Under Jimmy Carter) of the Department of Education which employs 4400 people, has a budget of $81 Billion, and does nothing to improve education in the United States.

Most of the other agencies he started have done nothing to improve American life. The logic he used led to things like the War on Poverty which has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars and done nothing to improve American life.

Ironically, the reason free markets work is the actions of individuals. Individuals pursuing their own self-interests create a market that publishes a non-corrupt transparent price that guides our actions. As Gary Becker showed, it doesn’t have to be money-related. It can be social norm-related. There are markets for everything.

When Democrats defended Bill Clinton for getting a blow job in the Oval Office from a 19-year-old intern, they sent a price signal to the marketplace.

Brooks and the people of Brooks ilk prize institutions over the individual. They have no reverence for the individual rights enshrined in the first words of the Bill of Rights. They don’t understand that by empowering individuals, you empower institutions. It’s not the other way around.

Marxists go into respected institutions, get into leadership positions, and then change them. They wear the silk suit of respectability while underneath changing the entire focus and effort and the raison d’etre of why that institution existed in the first place.

If you are honest about global warming you will recognize that an evil cabal of scientists and government bureaucrats worked to discredit and harm individuals who disagreed with the core thesis around global warming. You’d recognize the early statistical models and math surrounding them were incorrect. That might cause you to rethink the “solutions” being proposed for global warming and cause you to think differently and take a different path.

Yes, I am calling the leaders of the global warming cabal Marxists. They indeed are and are using fear and the idea that the planet might be getting warming as a cudgel to institute more control over people.

If you are honest about Covid, you will recognize that there was a deliberate cover-up of information. You will recognize that millions of dollars changed hands between private industry and government officials in the form of payouts and grants. You will further recognize that if someone took an opposing view, they were denounced, character assassinated, and even lost their job. If we critically thought about Covid and their wasn’t corruption from the very beginning we might have taken a different path to solve for it.

Instead, Marxists wanted to exert more control over individuals. They won. We can never let them win again.

It’s why when I read the Chicago Booth Review, most of the articles deal with woke bullshit. I receive pure stupidity from the likes of Professor George Wu on why witnesses don’t intervene to stop microaggressions. Screw that. Tell me how I can better predict a market, do operations more efficiently, or lower my marginal costs. When I get the weekly mailing from the Polsky Center it is full of celebrating the woke. Chicago Booth and plenty of other business schools have lost their way.

For the record, it’s not the entire school but the leadership at the school and schools like it. Two days ago at the U of C graduation, a group of students marched and walked out to protest in favor of the terrorist group Hamas. A group of professors joined them. Why do those professors have jobs today? If you marched in support of Nazis you wouldn’t and Hamas is no different than the Nazis.

When institutions lose their way, movements become unhinged and that is precisely what happened to the “conservative movement” in America, and worldwide.

I think you can look at Israel and Trump and other hot-button issues with different framing to learn things. But, when you see corruption, you must recognize it and call it out. You cannot put the institution ahead of anything when it is corrupt or has lost its way.