Tolerance or Acceptance Isn't Agreement

There Is A Difference

I am finding that social media is a real drag on conversations. It gave a platform to extremists and it gave a platform to put some really shitty comparisons out into the wild. People are so busy and their attention spans so short, they just accept whatever is put out into the wild and don’t critically think about it.

As my acquaintance Wendy Gramm once said about headlines in a board meeting I was at, “the devil is in the details”.

A few instances have happened recently that illustrate that point. Also, the statements and actions of people illustrate what is going on in society these days.

Start with this assumption. The leftists want a Civil War. Social unrest gives them a license to come in and institute martial law which will lead to total government control over everything. It has happened time and time again in human history. The Founders knew it well which is why we don’t have a “democracy”, we have a “democratic republic”.

There are plenty of examples of how they are agitating to get the thing going.

You can lose your career if you are on the wrong side of the left wing today. The message that used to be sent out is “keep your mouth shut”. Today, the new message is not only keep your mouth shut but overtly demonstrate through some virtue signal that you are on our side and believe what we believe in total. If you don’t, you lose your career.

You are immediately castigated as a racist or a Nazi if you don’t kneel down before the left wing. It is not enough to kneel, you must pledge fealty to them.

It should be no surprise the state of Illinois is run by left-wing extremists. Many are Marxists. The old corrupt Democrats that built the “City that works” are largely gone. The supermajority and highly gerrymandered Democrats recently passed a “Truth in Politics Act” and if you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, or 1984 you ought to because this edict they passed sounds like something out of science fiction.

caseybmulligan @caseybmulligan

Will @UChicago say anything against IL's "Truth in Politics Act"? It would outlaw, i.a., "a written or verbal statement that tends to expose a living person to hatred, contempt, ridicule, or obloquy...."

Here is a link to the legislation. It was passed because Dan Proft published a bunch of newspapers that JB Pritzker didn’t like. I am not a Constitutional law scholar, but after reading the act it doesn’t seem to pass the muster of free speech. A true test is would the Illinois Democrats use it against people in their own party. Remember when Democratic Senator Harry Reid bloviated the lies about Mitt Romney? Think he would be prosecuted under this act? The question is rhetorical.

Here is a link to the free speech doctrine that the University of Chicago follows and advocates for.

To give you some context for the tweet, Casey Mulligan is a professor of Economics at UChicago. Obviously, UChicago is in the state of Illinois so the legislation that was passed conflicts directly with the doctrine that is advocated for at U of C.

Frankly, I don’t think U of C will say a word. They tend to follow the “shut-up” advice and won’t make a big stir or issue in the mainstream. I think that their doctrine is more for show and not for practice. When they hire a conservative to pair with David Axelrod it will show that they are putting their money where their website is.

Freedom of speech is not tolerated in academia anymore. Neither is the freedom to research. Try going against the global warming cult if you are a research scientist. Bari Weiss’ Substack had an editorial by a research biologist you should read. She also posted things on private secondary schools. Bari is no conservative firebrand.

It’s so bad, Stanford professor John Cochrane led a conference on Academic Freedom and people on the left were afraid to even sign on to it. He used to be at the University of Chicago. Remember, the cadre of professors at United States colleges and universities is overwhelmingly from the left wing! They had to do the conference behind closed doors so it wouldn’t be disrupted and they could have a free and open debate. No video has been released yet to protect the reputations and careers of people who participated.

Yesterday, the US Senate passed a gay marriage bill that will go to the House. The bill is 1000 pages long. The language is broad. It certainly can be construed to mean that a business can be penalized for not recognizing gay marriage. It can also be construed to mean a house of worship that doesn’t allow gays to be married inside it and authorize that marriage can have their tax-exempt status taken away along with other rights and privileges granted to houses of worship in the United States.

This bill could have been one sentence long and one page long and I don’t think anyone in the US would have been against it. Here is what they should have passed:

If you are a person over the age of consent (18) and are not being forced to marry another person, and willfully consent to being legally married to only that person, the state recognizes that union.

Bam.

Instead, they passed a Christmas tree bill with broad language that a left-wing judge could interpret the way the leftists want it interpreted so they can enforce the beliefs they want to be enforced. The bill doesn’t have a lot to do with a person’s freedom or rights at the end of the day.

Personally, I am not against gay marriage. I don’t care as long as two people over the age of consent (18) decide they want to marry. But, that doesn’t mean I want to see businesses and churches have to get in line and change their beliefs to toe the line of the government.

Here is an example of shitty data by someone that doesn’t understand the difference between a monopoly and a non-monopoly being spewed out into the universe by social media. To clarify, Apple has a monopoly on its App Store. The bakery doesn’t. There were plenty of other bakeries the gay couple could have gone to but they chose that one to force a point, and to get that bakery to bend their knee.

Tristan Snell @TristanSnell

So if a bakery refuses to do business with a gay couple, that’s free speech, but if a large consumer brand refuses to do business with a social media platform, that’s censorship? Got it.

Ironically, the gay marriage bill that was passed was voted on with the idea of promoting more freedom when in practice it will usurp freedom. I thought this tweet had a perfect pitch.

𝙹𝚞𝚕𝚎𝚜 ☕️ 𝙳𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚛© @JulesDiner

@lone_rides They want more than mere acceptance. They want wholehearted approval.

In today’s Wall Street Journal there was an editorial by a lawyer that lost their career because on the firm’s conference phone call discussing the Dobbs decision, she voiced her opinion that the right decision was made by the Supreme Court. She also opined that many commentators and people felt that abortion was a “Black Holocaust” since a very high percentage of abortions are with black women. A search on search engine Freespoke turned up this result for “Was Margaret Sanger a racist?”. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood and there is debate about her true intentions.

Here is her editorial.

Here is a dissenting view.

There is no denying the data that abortion is high among Black women. 22% of all US pregnancies end in abortion and 37.1% of all abortions are performed on Black women who make up only 14% of the total population of U.S. women of child-bearing age.

If abortion is supposed to be “rare”, 22% isn’t rare.

What is striking to me is the reaction of left-wing people when they hear a differing opinion. They can’t breathe. They get totally offended as if you were doing something unreasonable to them. It is comical. They are like two-year-olds having temper tantrums. As me and my old trading buddies say when we get together and reminisce, “If that generation were on the floor today we’d have eaten them for breakfast and disposed of them by lunch.” The money we would have made….sigh.

You shouldn’t lose your career because you cite objective data.

When lawyer Paul Clement from Kirkland and Ellis won the SCOTUS case on guns, Kirkland and Ellis asked him to leave the firm. Lawyers inside the firm were upset they were defending the 2nd Amendment, and corporate clients threatened to pull business from the firm if he stayed on. This supposedly is antithetical to the core values of the legal profession. John Adams would not be proud. Could you imagine the outrage over Adams if the same events happened today? His career would be over unless he acquiesced to a sham trial.

Other examples that are non-correlated but have the same end goals:

• Corporate America is now starting to require vendors to go through things like CRT training. They already implemented that on employees.

• Refusing a Covid vaccine that clearly did not work to stop the spread of Covid or stop you from getting Covid cost you your job

• Big Investment America is changing the rules to eliminate responsibility from money managers for losing money if they pursue ESG investments.

• The NCAA allowing males to compete as females

• The University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach not playing BYU because a Duke female athlete totally made up a racist act that never happened.

• Promoting because of race, sexual orientation, or gender, and not merit in both business and government. Equity is not equality.

• Getting rid of standardized test scores for colleges and graduate schools. No standard means there are no standards.

• Teaching CRT in medical schools

• Twitter was great until Elon Musk bought it. Now, Apple might kick it out of the App Store in a monopolistic move. What about the Washington Post? Is their mobile app in danger of being removed?

If you want to know what real modern-day sacrifice in the name of freedom is, read this account of Jimmy Lai who is rotting in a Hong Kong prison waiting for the Communists to sentence him. His crime? A quote from the article:

This trial is the culmination of two years of prosecution on lesser charges, including a conviction for business fraud. There is a logic here, because prosecutors want more than a conviction and prison sentence. They want to paint Jimmy as a corrupt businessman who worked with foreigners to undermine China.

Under the new national security law, Jimmy faces the possibility of life in prison. There is not a man, woman or child in Hong Kong who doesn’t believe the verdict is already in. The authorities are taking no chances either, having Jimmy tried before three national security judges rather than a jury.

Now, go re-read the new law I linked to passed by the leftists in Illinois and revisit what is going on in the United States. China isn’t becoming more like us because of “free trade” and “open markets”, we are becoming more like them.

The leftists won’t rest. Mere acceptance or tolerance is not enough. The generation that is taking control of the levers of power in corporate America and in other firms is not tolerant at all. Buckle up, it’s not going to get better, and cancel culture will take a while to fall upon itself. It will eventually, just like the Jacobins in France.

It affects all relationships, not just business relationships. In my experience, the leftists shut down the relationship. They don’t have the psyche to be tolerant and they have no “understanding”. When they want to have a “conversation” it is really their way or the highway.

I am not willing to go to Civil War over gay marriage or abortion. I am pro-life and am willing to compromise on a 12-15 week window for an abortion. I personally find it abhorrent, but my friend John feels the same as I said, “we live in a pluralistic society”. We don’t get everything we want the way we want it all the time.

As to marriage, as long as churches aren’t forced by an overreaching government to perform acts that are anathema to their beliefs and that act isn’t disruptive to civil society, I don’t care. But, don’t force me to put a placard in my front yard announcing that I agree. Don’t force my bake shop to service you when there are plenty of other bake shops nearby that can do the exact same thing.

For those that are wondering, being gay is not like being a person of color. I can’t tell you are gay when you walk in the door. If you vehemently disagree with me and are having trouble breathing, please read this editorial by Thomas Sowell.

Tolerance is not agreement. Ask the Muslims that used to run Turkey before the extremist Erdogan came to power. They tolerated other religions in their country but they certainly didn’t agree with them.

However, I’d ask everyone to look really hard at China today. The government is using Covid policy to control people and exert even more influence over them. China is run by a Communist government. Communist governments by definition are corrupt and hostile to individual liberty and free enterprise. What if China had the US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment? Could the government do what they are doing?

If you say “No”, I might disagree with you. There are plenty of those on the left that would happily send you to the gulag for disagreeing with them over simply saying the Covid vaccine doesn’t work. Of course, all the data shows that it doesn’t work.

All the data on Covid shows that the policy pursued by the United States was wrong. We should never have shut down. When I went to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale the last couple of days it was comical to me that masks were required and every employee had them despite all the data that shows masks do not work. It is funny to me that there are plexiglass screens up all over the place despite the data that shows they don’t work either. Virtually no one under the age of 50 died of Covid if they were previously healthy.

Not only did the US pursue crappy policy but the US government actively lied about it, intentionally corrupted data, and penalized anyone that didn’t agree. Then, they actively engaged Corporate America to take up arms with them. That is fascism folks and if you don’t realize it then you better revisit your understanding of the way it is practiced.

Or better yet, go to Canada. Remember when the Prime Minister crushed the truckers? Not only did he take away their liberty, but he took away their bank accounts and made it impossible for them to transact.

There are those that look to the government to solve every single problem in our lives. We know from the data that the approach is fruitless. But, as I said the leftist never rests. They won’t stop. We are one government program away from eutopia.

Currently, they are pushing to “amend the 2nd Amendment” with “reasonable” ideas. They also are pushing to end free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion ideas in the 1st Amendment by limiting those freedoms in some way. The Gay Marriage bill just passed by the Senate is one example of that.

Of course, predictably the leftists ignore the 10th Amendment. If you believe strongly in it, you are a fascist, racist, or Nazi.

I think that getting rid of or amending the 2nd Amendment is how the Civil War will start. It is akin to the 3/5ths compromise in the US Constitution at our nation’s founding that paved the path to the Civil War 71 years later. I don’t know how. I don’t know when. But, I don’t think it is avoidable given the current path of culture in the United States. I just hope I am not around for it. But, things move faster these days and social media gives a big soapbox to the radicals that want it.