Remember when Rahm Emanuel was the Chief of Staff for Obama and said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” We are seeing that in real-time with Covid. Vaccine mandates and mask mandates and all the other stuff aren’t about stopping Covid. They are about not letting a crisis go to waste.
This is about resetting our expectations and increasing government control. It’s important to remember, totalitarians thrive on creating disorder and chaos. They swoop in with a new order, and people will fall in line because they are sick of the chaos.
We are seeing signs of chaos everywhere. Covid gave totalitarians the ability to inject a lot of fear in people. Fear is a powerful motivator and can allow totalitarians to control large chunks of people effortlessly.
Here is a public address announcement in a very wealthy Chicago suburban school district. My question to Hinsdale parents, who are supposedly freedom-loving capitalists, is when do you go “full Loudon” on your school board and schools? How much bullshit are you willing to take? How long are you willing to let your children be bullied and hurt? Which one of you has the cojones to get up at a school board meeting and speak truth to power? You pay exorbitant amounts of taxes, so you have certainly paid for the right. They work for you, not the other way around. Are you on team Let’s Go Brandon?
This is being repeated at government-run schools across the United States.
I read with interest this column from Nellie Bowles today. Here is what was interesting to me. She writes,
I started at the Times as a very happy, lauded bulldog liberal of a writer (readers may remember and hate my 2018 profile of a well-known professor, the last point of contention in my marriage). In the years since, my curiosity started getting me in trouble with my coworkers. As America’s power center shifted leftward, as the country was being reshaped by a charismatic new ideology, I was supposed to cheer it on or otherwise carefully ignore it.
When I didn’t, I became suspect. My colleagues started leaking stories to other publications to embarrass me. I would get a call from a magazine reporter: “Your colleagues are mad you went to CHAZ. Any comment?” Efforts by well-meaning bosses to intervene only made it more frenzied. At first it was crazy-making, like a breakup or a betrayal, a feeling so many in my position have written about beautifully already in this newsletter.
It’s a woman who was taught one way, and then suddenly got out in the real world and saw how things weren’t that way. Fortunately, she had some critical thinking skills along with the self-confidence to stand up against the crowd.
Most people won’t do that. This piece from Jordan Peterson about Hitler and the rise of Nazism in Germany is enlightening with regard to people and their proclivity to stand up. I agree with him. Most people today look back at the horrors of Nazi Germany and say, “I would have been one of those that stood up.” It’s really easy to do in the rearview mirror. It’s harder to do in real-time and most people don’t as evidenced by the way we are going on with our daily lives today. They are fearful of what could happen to them. As a matter of fact, at least 50% of France collaborated with the Nazis. The minority was resistance.
People say it’s not happening, but it is. I am sure people in Germany denied it, or tolerated it. I am sure in the days of Mao’s struggle sessions, the same thing happened. People are people and human nature is what it is and will be forever.
Here is another thing I read today about blacklisted Americans. A Cornell University professor is threatening to fail two students simply because they won’t wear a mask. You know, those elite institutions that are supposed to be teaching the best and brightest to critically think and be leaders in society. Instead, they are teaching how best to apply jackboots to a neck.
Just an FYI, masks don’t work. Johns Hopkins studies have proved it over and over again. The article I linked to concludes,
Hiram Powers, the nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptor, keenly observed, “The eye is the window to the soul, the mouth the door. The intellect, the will, are seen in the eye; the emotions, sensibilities, and affections, in the mouth.” The best available scientific evidence suggests that the American people, credulously trusting their public-health officials, have been blocking the door to the soul without blocking the transmission of the novel coronavirus.
When you wear a mask, you are simply complying, or you are trying to virtue signal, or you are trying to use peer pressure to get others to comply. You are the mean girl at the middle school lunch table.
In classic doublespeak after Tuesday’s elections, we saw predictable voices on the airwaves. This is one of the most racist things I have heard recently.
If you are black and don’t fall in line, you are racist. Damned independent thinkers and freedom.
The thing that really piqued my interest which helps focus my mind on how people are not letting a crisis go to waste was this article by Hannah MacDonald, a West Point dropout. As an Air Force Academy dropout, I empathize what she was going through.
For those that don’t know, getting into a service academy is a rigorous exercise in self-determination. You have to want it with the number of hoops you jump through. I had it easy as a recruited athlete and I still had a bunch of hoops to jump through. At the end, you have to earn an appointment from a member of Congress. Virtually every kid that attends a service academy is highly accomplished.
Staying there is rigorous. It’s not typical of the normal collegiate experience.
What West Point brass did to her had nothing to do with science. It had to do with complying. Following orders. But worse, following orders that were inhumane. It was no different than a Mao struggle session. If you don’t know, that’s a ritual humiliation of one person by many in order to get them to do what you want them to do without protest.
In the linked article, the author writes,
The Chinese Catholic Margaret Chu, a medical-lab assistant, was dragged into the office of her labor camp in 1968 and made to answer invented charges. “Their real motive was once and again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes,” she wrote decades later. “ ‘I did not commit any crimes,’ I asserted.” She was accused again, roughed up. She denied her guilt again. “Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half my hair.”
She was tortured, left in handcuffs for 100 days, and imprisoned for years. While being tortured she sometimes prayed for death so her suffering would stop.
The treatment of Cadet MacDonald and her compatriots isn’t something the West Point leadership dreamed up on their own. It comes from on high. General Milley and the Pentagon brass for sure set policy and their underlings put it in action. West Point isn’t some outlier or independent flag operation out in the desert.
At service academies, it’s really easy to go to extremes when you are treating people. Especially when it is done in the name of “the Corps” or “discipline” or some other goal. Things can get “culty” if you don’t watch it.
To be clear, cults aren’t good or bad on the surface. In business school in one class, we were taught about how big corporations turned their workforces and customers into cults. For example, back in the day when Apple was competing head to head with Microsoft, Steve Jobs turned Apple into a guacamole-eating wild-eyed cult. Customers had to be cultish too. Jim Jones would have been proud.
Today there are “cults” around phone operating systems. There are cults around open-sourced code vs using Microsoft code. Cults around cryptocurrency, beer, wine, celebrity, and any number of things. Social media makes it easy to start, organize, and perpetuate a cult.
But, cults, like they are creating with our military leadership and political class today, are dangerous.
One of the first things you learn to do in the military is follow orders. In the first two minutes of being there, you toed a line and were taught what you could say and not say. I used the “No excuse Sir/Madam” response more than anything else.
After a while, you were also taught how not to follow orders. Meaning, if there is a direct order that goes against everything you have been trained to do, there is a way to buck that order and work through the chain of command to preserve your rank and sanity.
Learning how not to follow orders was done in an academic setting. Learning how to follow orders was physical, stressful, and rigorous. By the way, you need to learn this skill before you can learn to lead so it is an important skill to know.
One of the hardest things for high-achieving people is to start at the bottom following orders. There is a lot of friction in the business world today because kids that have grown up being told they are “special” and got trophies all the way through life find out in the rock hard competitive business world, everyone isn’t special and only a few get trophies.
It’s clear that following a non-scientific-based order cannot happen at West Point so this cadet did the honorable thing and opted out. She was lucky she was in the Yearling year. Cadets in their last two years of life at the academy cannot do that without severe financial and professional penalties. She has more courage than Chief of Staff Mark Milley who should have done the same thing when he disagreed with Trump. Except he isn’t a West Pointer, he’s a Princeton man. In the 1930s, Milley would have fingered you and sent you to the train station.
She concludes, I tell my story not to stain the name of West Point, but to raise awareness of the persecution our military is under because of our higher leadership. I do blame the Biden administration for ignoring the pleas of thousands of soldiers. I blame Anthony Fauci for shamelessly lying time and again. I blame Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for his lack of leadership and integrity. And I blame the leaders who have the power to make change and yet remain silent.
Remember, Covid statistics do not fall tightly into the standard normal distribution. There is no 95% confidence interval with the standard bell curve. The distribution for Covid death is highly skewed. If you are under 60 and healthy, you have about a 0% chance of dying of Covid. If you are over 70, you have a much higher chance of dying whether you are healthy or not but if you are healthy you are significantly likely to recover.
Our West Point cadet and all her classmates had a probability of 0% for dying from Covid.
There are some simple facts we have to realize in America today.
America is not a racist country. Not even close
The cult of Covid is not designed to protect us from death, it’s designed to advance the power of government over people.
The vaccine doesn’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. It might make symptoms less. Data from the UK and Israel show this. But, current data also show people who get the vaccine are being hospitalized and dying.
None of the things we are seeing today is compartmentalized. It’s organized. The movement permeates everything from global warming, to schools, to government, to money allocation when allocation is centrally controlled.
If we don’t have the courage to fight back, we don’t deserve to have what we had. I hold out hope that Tuesday night, America began the process of a great awakening. We need to rediscover our founding principles and soul.
Born and Raised in Park Ridge, IL. Now live in AZ. You are the best. Enjoy your blog. Keep it up.
Dorothy Thompson's 1941 article 'Who Would be a Nazi?' summarized, with a good discussion thread, including Peter Drucker's description of people he knew in Germany and their motivations.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/14337.html