One of the biggest, bestest, most surprisingest things about being “retired,” is the opportunity to do tons of reading. Which is to say, discovering the damndest things.
Having pasted too many syllables together, let me share with fellow Dissenters a few of my recent finds...
Rufo on the case again
Christopher Rufo is a writer for the must-read Manhattan Institute web site’s City Journal, where he drops the bomb on various nutty preoccupations of progressives: critical race indoctrination, the transgender fad, HR thuggery, and the woke military.
His latest post…
…ought to be required-reading for parents with kids in the tender embrace of the Portland Public Schools. It’s a document-dump from a national organization called the GSA Network, which says it’s…
…a next-generation LGBTQ racial and gender justice organization that empowers and trains trans, queer, and allied youth leaders to advocate, organize, and mobilize an intersectional movement for safer schools and healthier communities.
That wandering sentence is for public consumption—anything to keep the parents off-guard—but Rufo makes a powerful case that they’re up to something else altogether…
The individual chapters, which operate in elementary, middle, and high schools, often use the language of “LGBTQ inclusion” and “anti-bullying” in their public relations, but behind the scenes, the central organization is driven by pure left-wing radicalism that extends far beyond sexuality.
…and into standard brainwash territory.
Read it and you will begin to see the outlines of what’s powering the current “trans” fad.
Rufo’s piece prompted a quick tour of our Portland schools...and guess what we found…
As the old-time Bolsheviks said: Get ‘em young.
Doom Comes in Many Forms
Josh Lehner is the state’s Economist and one of the few bureaucrats who deals with hard numbers, as opposed to soft feelings. His column’s another must-read…and today’s drop was a doozy…
When Mr. Lehner allows a bit of emotion—yikes!—to pass, it’s a cue that something merits attention.
Especially if you’re familiar with the last Portland census numbers—which indicated that that our supposedly magnetic city is losing its mojo.
Golly! Who’ll be around to pay taxes and retire the flood of bond-issues?
Who will spend dough in a service/bureaucracy-based economy that doesn’t really make anything?
Who’ll fill up all those socialized-housing “affordables” being built by multinational corporations behind the veil of their non-profit cut-outs?
And let’s not forget that one rapidly-growing population in Portland is…well, you know who.
The Umbrella Frays
One of our favorite Substack neighbors is Glenn Loury, another economist and a straight-thinker in the Thomas Sowell tradition. Here’s a recent column that ought to be considered by anyone wondering about the current “people of color” nonsense…
It’s the POC-party busily being monetized by non-profit outfits such as Communities of People of Color, which now includes “Slavs” under their umbrella. With a straight face.
And how come they don’t give a thought to people of Jewish heritage—who surely have issues with history. Where’d they go?
If, as the Tribune reminds us tirelessly…
…the Klan was hardly a fan of the people who were escaping Europe’s endless pogroms and petty persecutions. Many of which were perpetrated by—hate to say it—Slavs.
Funny thing about whose ox got gored.
It has long struck us, as students of ethnic machine politics in places such as Detroit and Chicago and Southern California, that there are never-to-be-mentioned-out-loud animosities among most “people of…” A cursory look at the connections between the construction industry and ethnicity, or of other too-obvious clusters of certain ethnics in certain occupation and businesses, or of grade-averages in our schools, or any of the many other social datums that progressives can’t bear to look at (or just stop gathering) ought to set you straight.
And let’s not pretend that ethnic groups are often united by different traditions and views about family, faith, sexuality—you name it. How about those Hispanic defections from the party ‘o’ the people?
It’s gonna be interesting to read the position of the CCC on those quotas limiting Asians (to allow the miracle of “diversity” to take place) in our leading universities when the Supreme Court blows them sky-high in its next term. And which the universities will then try as hard as they can to subvert.
Ditto the well-known (sotto voce) divisions within all of the many letters of LGBTetc. As the number of letters (and now symbols (kinda like an uncrackable computer password) grows, so do the tensions. Ever wonder about the folks “who are..” who don’t prance through downtown in the annual “Pride” parade?
Read Dissenter Ollie Park’s piece and get back to us.
"It has long struck us, as students of ethnic machine politics in places such as Detroit and Chicago and Southern California, that there are never-to-be-mentioned-out-loud animosities among most 'people of…' "
Precisely! That's why I've been railing against the most absurd of all progressive bundling of conflicting and unrelated nationalities, "AAPI".
AAPI stands for "Asian American and Pacific Islander. The term encompasses a diverse group of identities, including people with a heritage rooted in all Pacific Islands and all parts of Asia, including South and Southeast Asia." https://www.dictionary.com/e/acronyms/aapi/
Originally coined by the US government, presumably for demographic purposes, AAPI is now firmly established in the progressive identity-group lexicon. Believe it or not, the web is replete with references to the "AAPI community."
Accepting that there could be such a thing as an AAPI community would require the same high level of reality denial as nominating Will (aka Lia) Thomas for the honor of female athlete of the year.
So great are the historical animosities between and among some of the components of AAPI that decency prevents me from going into them lest I reopen old wounds. Likewise, Easter Island in the Pacfic is almost twice as far from its fellow AAPI member Beijing as it is from Washington, DC. These are hardly the building blocks of a true community.
But it's self-evident that "community," as used by progressives, is a political fiction, a phantom constituency of none. Pull back the curtain and the "community" is reduced to a handful of leftist politicians, activists and their most gullible friends. It’s real only to other progressives such as most Portland-area elected officials and their bureaucracies, the progressive media and the inattentive public.
It says a lot about progressives' tunnel vision that they fail to see how vulnerable the AAPI conglomerate is to a leftist critique. After all, who else but a colonizing imperialist would look at a disparate collection of nations and ethnic groups and lump them together as one for administrative convenience?
Every hothouse-flower navel-gazer, every West-hating (read: parent-hating) dilettante, every twenty-six year-old basement idler, every shallow, entitled modern hedonist, is "anti-bullying" in the sense wrought by a few generations of ingrates living in a society with unprecedented, unrivalled comfort, security and freedom, built on the labor and sacrifice of those of every sort who went before. That anti-"bullying" credo, the grand legacy of the Sixties in a nutshell?
If it feels good, you have the right to do it; if it doesn't feel good, you have the right not to do it.
With guidance from our nobly resentful non-white, non-cishet American identitarians, let's invert E Pluribus Unum. It should not be, "out of many, one", but "out of one, many". Heck, a house divided SHOULD fall. No house at all is better....well, so long as access to anonymous orgies, streaming services (those are different) food stamps and historical fabulism remains unimpeded.