The Weimar Republic

True Leadership Stops It

People talk about the Weimar Republic that gave rise to Adolph Hitler but very few understand what the Weimar was all about. Victor Davis Hanson wrote a great piece on this phenomenon.

I do think that the best summation of the culture of Weimar Germany comes from deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

The Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s was a world leader in most fields of art, science and intellect. Berlin was a center of theater; with the assistance of the famous producer Max Reinhardt, playwrights and composers of the caliber of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill flourished. Berlin had three opera houses, and Germany as a whole no less than eighty. Every middle-sized city had its own orchestra. German poets and writers included Hermann Hesse, Stefan George, Leonhard Frank, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In architecture, Germany was the cutting edge, with Gropius and the Bauhaus school. It boasted painters like Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer. Musical composers like Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Hindemith. Conductors like Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Wilhelm Furtwängler. And in science, of course, the Germans were preeminent….

The Germany of 1920 had a significantly higher per capita educational level than most of the Western countries. Berlin was a great place to be in the 20s if you were an intellectual. In his book “Escape to The Futures”, Leo Melamed writes about how his parents tried to assimilate and not be overtly “Jewish”. Melamed was in Poland but Jews in Germany did the same.

Drawing a Venn diagram around groups that support each other and believe in each other’s causes is pretty easy. Our sitting VP loves Venn Diagrams.

Do the anti-semites who testified before Congress, the anti-women people who testified before Congress, the advocates for using the power of government against political enemies people have anything in common with the Covid discriminators and fear mongers, the climate change cultists, the BLM supporters, the big government advocates, and the Socialists and Marxists?

Put them all in the same Venn diagram circle. They are the same.

In their perfect world, if you disagreed with them openly or bucked the system, they would easily send you to a gulag.

All of them are afraid to condemn and call out the pro-terrorist Hamas protests that are taking place in front of Jewish-owned businesses across America. Those protests are not a bridge too far from Kristallnacht.

Leaders do entertain and feel the emotion of fear, but they know how to overcome it.

America was not founded on some loose principles. The principles were bedrock and based on Judeo-Christian values combined with the interpretations of those same values by people from the Scottish Enlightenment. The Founders were learned in the fundamentals of Classical Western Civilization and had seen where the Greeks and Romans screwed up. They had seen how monarchy didn’t work for the common man.

They created a system of freedom, not systemic racism and oppression. Systemic racism is a bullshit concept created not from empathy, but from a point of advocacy to try and overturn the entire system the Founders created. The Founders created a system of laws that were blind to your station in life. They created opportunity. The American Dream isn’t some legend or figment of your imagination. It is deliberate. It still exists if you seek it out. They wanted competition because they knew that competition makes you better, and creates better outcomes for people.

There are plenty in America that were born on our soil and educated in our government-run and funded educational systems that seek to destroy what the Founders created. They will stop at nothing to destroy it.

We have evidence.

I am sick of being tongue-in-cheek about it. I am sick of satires about it. It is time for action and there was an alarm clock ringing clearly yesterday. George Santos was unqualified to be in Congress but is he any worse than the Congressman who pulled the fire alarm to disrupt a vote? What was the difference between them?

Yesterday, there were several testimonies and Q+A’s in Congress that should jar you. If you were not awake before, you ought to be awake now. For conservatives like me, we have been awake since at least 2005 or so. I have been warning people and my warnings have fallen on deaf ears.

Our government, our elite credentialed institutions, and our elite non-profit Civic organizations in America are disgustingly sick. They are prejudiced and anti-American. They do not believe in the founding of America, nor the Bill of Rights attached to our democratic republic. They will use the power of government, the power of social media, or the power of personal gossip to discriminate against people who don’t fall in line with them. Conversely, there are those that think similarly to me and hold their silence for fear of being discriminated against and losing opportunity or their way of life.

I want to be very clear about this. It is not just elite Ivy League institutions that testified before Congress yesterday. It’s all Ivy League institutions. The rot doesn’t stop there. This culture is at most educational institutions from K-post doc in America. This culture exists in our civic organizations, like the Economic Club of Chicago, across the entirety of America. It exists in our non-profit charity organizations.

Leaders of those organizations might pay lip service to the opposite but watch their actions. See who is invited to speak. See what the topics are. See who they parcel out leadership roles to. The University of Chicago is supposed to be famously on the side of free speech but who leads their school of political policy? Who’s invited to speak? Who’s speeches are shut down by activist students and those actions are tolerated by the leadership of the school. Again, I don’t want to single out U of C. Stanford is worse. Like Savoir Faire, it’s everywhere.

I have experienced it and witnessed it firsthand.

First up, Senator Josh Hawley and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The Biden Administration has used the power of the FBI and the power of the DOJ to target political enemies. In case you don’t understand, that is fascism.

This hearing didn’t get a lot of play because of the other bombshells. But, rest assured if there is a Republican majority in the Senate, and in the House, more of these kinds of things will continue to be uncovered. Not that Republicans are immune, see Thomas Massey’s record yesterday. But, the Democratic Party has institutionalized the rot and is the primary driver behind it.

Next, women who compete in athletics ought to lie back and take it when losing to men. Fatima Goss Graves said that men should have the right to compete against women. For what it’s worth, her husband is leading the prosecution of the J6 political prisoners who marched on the Capitol in January of 2021. Now that all the tape is out, anyone can see that the march was far more peaceful than any Black Lives Matter riot during Covid.

Also in the hearing, swimmer Riley Gaines confronted Pennsylvania Democratic Congresswoman Lee and exposed her for what she is. It was a brilliant exchange and the Congresswoman came off so poorly she wanted it stricken from the record. The people advocating for men to compete with women are misogynists. They are sick.

The real fireworks happened between Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and the female Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. These are the leaders of credentialed, sterling, and elite institutions setting the pace for education and research across the world. Their institutions are private, but they accept government money and subsidies for all kinds of things. Their endowments are not taxed.

I will agree that we have to be very tolerant of free speech. I might not like what you say, or the way you phrase what you are saying. Freedom isn’t free everyone is fond of spouting. But, freedom also has a couple of sisters. They are called consequence and responsibility.

The leaders, the department heads at these elite institutions, and many of the professors have abdicated their responsibility to lead. They allow children to have “freedom”, without a shred of consequence.

To be clear, anti-semitism, anti-conservatism, and anti-objectivity travel like electricity from the President’s office right down to the books professors choose to use in their classrooms. It’s a total culture.

Only the President can change the culture and all three of these Presidents should be tendering their resignations today.

Leadership comes in a lot of forms. Where are the board members that oversee the President’s office? Why aren’t they speaking out vigorously, or resigning from the board?

If you are an investment fund, hedge fund, private equity fund, or venture capital fund manager that has taken money from the endowments of universities like this, why aren’t they returning the capital on the most efficient basis they can back to those endowments? The profits they generate go to fund the anti-classical liberal values the elite credentialed institutions espouse and support.

One of the things you learn when you learn about leadership is that you can have all the great strategy, data, and other easily grasped things. The one part of leadership that is very hard is having a moral compass. That’s the emotional intelligence of the leadership puzzle that truly separates great leaders from good or mediocre ones.

It’s why when we look at leadership, we lionize great leaders and try to figure out how they led. Eisenhower is a perfect example. He had all the physical tools, support, and money he needed to get a job done. What separated him was his emotional intelligence and his moral compass.

A person who was elected to lead, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsome, abdicated his responsibility of leadership again yesterday when he caved to pro-Palestinian protestors and decided not to light a Christmas tree in the state of California. He has no spine. Leaders have spines.

Leaders are not afraid to be singular. They are not afraid to face the herd. They are not afraid of voicing an unpopular opinion if that opinion is rooted in objective logic.

To lead, you must first learn to follow. It’s why the service academies used to be so good at teaching and molding leaders. Today, those same academies are off the rails and have gone woke. Like other institutions in our society, they wear the skin over a hollowed-out body.

When something is right in front of your face and obvious, you need to at least acknowledge it because then you form a constructive argument to debunk it.

When you see something truly evil, you must call it out by name. Isolate it. Identify it. Kill it. We have a lot of evil in America today but they spell it Amerikka.

Our current predicament has other parallels to Weimar. Runaway deficits. Big government people that advocate for taxing the wealth of people even when they don’t earn income from that wealth. We have an uncontrollable unelected centralized bureaucracy that has usurped power from people, and Congress. There are others.

We must have high objective standards. Expectations are worthless because you never are satisfied with them. They are wishy-washy. When 80% of the grades at Yale are “A’s”, there are no standards. We have seen the go-along get-along society define standards lower and lower for more than two decades. That has to end.

We have time to fix it. It’s going to take level-headed leadership that has a moral compass.