Mija--- Wokeness Infests the CIA

Remember Pajama Boy? Remember when the Obama administration, in an absurd effort to redefine what it means to be a man, offered the image of a pathetic looking cocoa-sipper in red and black checked pajamas. Apparently, it was an effort to sell health insurance. Right?

Now we have Mija. The vaunted CIA has just announced its priorities. You will notice that intelligence is not on the list. Wokeness is not just on the list; it is the list.

The CIA no longer cares about collecting intelligence or analyzing data. It is no longer interested in hiring the best that our so-called institutions of higher learning have to offer. It has gone all-in for wokeness and identity politics. 

Being what you are supersedes any noticeable ability to do the job, or even to collaborate with your fellow CIA employees. If you are woke you represent every possible oppressed group. You are an amalgam, a moment where all oppressed groups intersect. You are who you are and if anyone dares ask about your ability to do the job, they will be instantly canceled.

You would think that this is parody. You would think that it comes from the Babylon Bee or the Onion. It does not. It comes from the Biden CIA. If you voted for Biden you now know what you voted for.

Now the CIA is announcing to the world that it is no longer a serious organization, and, incidentally, that America is no longer a serious country. Our enemies around the world are getting a good laugh out of this.

The agent is named Mija. If you look the word up, you will discover that it is not a proper name. It is a pronoun. It comes from Columbian slang, where it means something like “You.” It is an affectionate term that immediately genders an individual.  Funnily enough, Mija has a name that represents a politically incorrect pronoun, in a foreign language. What have we done to patriotism?

The Daily Mail quotes the recruitment video:

Agent Mija tells viewers: 'I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I am a walking declaration, a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her sentences, suggesting that a question has been asked.' 

Not a word about whether she is an American citizen. Who knows what it means to say you are not a box checking exercise when you are checking all of the boxes of the oppressed. And, what does it mean to be a walking declaration-- is it like being a walking shadow. Recall these words, by Shakespeare, who was not woke:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Mija's story continues. We note that this recruitment video does not talk about the job or about qualifications:

The clip does not detail the qualifications needed to work at the CIA or what the role entails. 

Mija adds: 'I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender Millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.'

What the CIA needs now is someone who has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. You will note that Mija is not a wife. That would be politically incorrect. And besides, why would you think that any self-respecting male would marry a woman who describes herself that way.

But, Mija has more important skills, skills that have nothing to do with working in the CIA.

She says: 'I can change a diaper in one hand and console a crying toddler with the other.

Nothing about the ad tells us what Mija does for the CIA. She says that she worked her way up the company ranks, but did she do so by changing diapers. Huh?

'I earned my way in and I earned my way up the ranks.

'I am tired of feeling like I am supposed to apologize for the space I occupy.' 

So, she occupies space. So does furniture. And we are supposed to consider that an achievement. I would like to think that our millennials are not quite this illiterate, but, alas, it looks like I am wrong.

Matt Taibbi suggests that the CIA is doing this because it is now recruiting millennials and that they are all very woke. Thus, it is preaching to the choir:

Matt Taibbi added: 'The really telling thing about this video os that it speaks to the CIA's assessment of who would be interested in working for them. Clearly, they think they have appeal to woke millenials - and they're probably right.'

The other reason for this recruitment ad is to show those who work at the CIA that a new sheriff is in charge. It also tells them that any deviation from woke ideology will impact negatively on their prospects for career advancement.

And you were worrying about QAnon.

The Fall of France

Three weeks ago blogger The New Neo suggested that it looked like France was lost. I registered the thought for further consideration. I would rather not think that France is lost, but the evidence is piling up on the New Neo’s side.

The problem is Islamic radicalism, a separate culture produced by France’s large Islamic population-- around 9% of the nation. This population has its own laws and makes its own rules. It has its own neighborhoods, where civil authorities do not dare to enter. Occasionally, it attacks outside of its precincts, as it did a few years ago with Charlie Hebdo, a Kosher supermarket and the Bataclan massacre.

Now, a group of French military officers has written an open letter suggesting that the armed forces should enter France’s No Go zones and impose French customs on people who are hellbent on imposing their culture on France.

Obviously, the military officers are up in arms, so to speak, against multiculturalism, the suggestion that different peoples from different cultures need not assimilate into the French nation. And they are appalled by identity politics and other forms of wokeness that are being imported from the United States. Heck, even President Macron has denounced these American tendencies.

Yet, most French people agree with the officers that something needs to be done about Islam. Zero Hedge reports:

A new poll has found that a majority of French people support the sentiments expressed in a letter signed by active duty and retired members of the military warning that the country is heading towards a “civil war” caused by failed multiculturalism and attacks on French identity.

Around 1,000 servicemembers signed the letter, including 20 retired generals, warning President Emmanuel Macron of “several deadly dangers” threatening France, including “Islamism and the hordes of the banlieue,” a reference to the fractured suburbs around major cities with high crime and immigrant populations.

The signatories also blame the “anti-racism” movement for seeking to create a “racial war” by attacking symbols of French cultural cohesion and identity, including statues.

The letter blames “fanatic partisans” for seeking to create divisions within communities that have created a vacuum for Islamists to assert their control.

Beware of people tearing down statues. They are showing that they have no interest in being part of the country.

The generals predicted a civil war, a rising up of French people against the nation's Muslim minority. The Macron government and the French media denounced the letter, but the French public largely supports it:

Despite the letter being condemned by the government and the media, a new poll has found that a majority of the French people agree with its substance.

A survey by Harris Interactive found that 58% of respondents “support the words of the soldiers,” reports Valeurs.

A clear majority – 84% – said violence was increasing in society and 73% thought the country was disintegrating.

Almost three quarters think the “anti-racism” movement is having the opposite impact and making race relations worse.

Almost half (49%) also think that the military should be sent in to occupy problem areas, “which would act on its own to restore order.”

Only one in three respondents said the signatories should be punished, despite the minister in charge of the armed forces, Florence Parly, indicating that active duty members would face sanction.

The Politics of Personal Destruction

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as the saying goes. And, as we often note in this blog, one good sign in today’s expanding culture war is the number of serious leftist thinkers who have denounced the tactics being employed by the American left.

Canceling people, destroying their reputations, on the basis of unproven allegations is surely one of the worst perversions of civil order. In principle, people have recourse to the civil courts when they are unjustly defamed. Unfortunately, thanks to the Sullivan decision, media outlets are immune from liability if they are not purposefully lying to destroy an individual maliciously-- as long as the individual is a public figure. As you know, Justices Thomas and Alito have recently called for a reconsideration of Sullivan. Not a minute too soon.

Intrepid leftist Glenn Greenwald notes in his most recent Substack column that today’s media is happy to embrace any unproven allegation directed against anyone who appears to be on the political right, but will happily defend anyone on the left who has been accused of anything whatever. They consider Christine Blasey Ford a truth teller but reject the testimony of a Tara Reade.

So, the American left is practicing, and has been practicing the politics of public vilification. Greenwald is appalled:

That is because in left-wing political culture, evidence is not needed for accusations to be deemed true and to be used to destroy a person’s reputation built over decades. Just like free speech, they do not believe in due process when it comes to vilifying someone publicly — at all — nor do they recognize the importance of not assuming someone guilty without evidence. They are tyrannical cowards who, sheep-like, jump into line the minute they hear an allegation of this type and repudiate the person accused without the slightest regard for whether he actually did anything wrong. They are too afraid of the recriminations from suggesting that evidence should be required.

American culture is being corrupted by this practice. Greenwald concludes:

But the far more important point is that any culture that is willing to destroy reputations and lives based on totally unproven accusations is one that is inherently corrupt and unjust. The ability to destroy someone’s life with nothing more than an uncorroborated claim voiced more than eighteen years after the alleged incident is a power with which nobody should be trusted.

Dershowitz for the Constitution

While the American left has gone all-in on its judicial harassment of Donald Trump, one old school liberal, by name of Alan Dershowitz has consistently defended the constitution.

He has not worried that this has placed him on Trump’ side, as happened during the first impeachment trial; because Dershowitz believes that the rule of law becomes meaningless if it is applied differently to members of different political parties.

One notes that precious few Republican office holders have denounced the recent FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani’s home, but Dershowitz has. And he has told Giuliani that he will happily join the defense team. 

The Daily Mail has the story. First, the event:

Agents seized more than 10 phones and computers from Giuliani's Upper East Side apartment and office, with warrants suggesting the probe relates to Giuliani's freelance 'corruption' investigations in Ukraine on behalf of Donald Trump.

To which Dershowitz replied that this is standard banana republic tactics, worthy of a despot. It is another aspect of cancel culture and the political indoctrination that has now infested many of America's schools.

It’s not just Trump that is the target. Trump's enemies are willing to suspend constitutional rights in order to attack Trump’s friends:

'In banana republics, in Castro's Cuba, in many parts of the world when a candidate loses for president, they go after the candidate, they go after his lawyers, they go after his friends,' said Dershowitz. 

'That's happening in America now. They're going after Rudy Giuliani,' he said. ' An they're going after him in inappropriate ways. A search warrant on a lawyer?'

In part, it’s about judicial decorum, principle that the Biden Justice Department and the Biden FBI has suspended:

‘A search warrant on a lawyer or a doctor or a priest? You don't use search warrants,' he said, arguing that Giuliani likely had information on the seized devices protected by attorney-client privilege.

'You don't use search warrants when people have privileged information on their cell phones and in their computers. You use a subpoena. The difference between a subpoena and a search warrant is like night and day,' he said. 

The process defies the American constitution:

'They're taking everything from his cloud, from his computers, including privileged information. It's just not constitutional,' said Dershowitz.

Dershowitz said that Giuliani had called him on Saturday and asked for him to aid in his defense. 'I said sure I'll help out, I'm in favor of the Constitution,' Dershowitz said.

It’s far too rare that you hear anyone defend the Constitution these days, so it’s worth a post.

Comparing Covid-19 with the 1957 Asian Flu

We all love analogies. What would we do without them? Ever since we took high school tests requiring us to compare and contrast this and that, we are happy to form judgments about the present by comparing and contrasting it with the past.

Now, in an essay adapted from his So does in an essay adapted from his new forthcoming book, Doom, economic historian Niall Ferguson draws some salient analogies. . A prodigiously prolific writer, Ferguson compares the way today’s Americans have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic with the way the Eisenhower administration dealt with the Asian flu pandemic of 1957-58. 

It is, Ferguson explains, a better comparison than the Spanish flu of 1918. Still and all, the Asian flu mostly affected young people, while Covid-19 seems disproportionately to target the elderly. As for the body counts, they are roughly comparable, though the current virus has not yet finished its work. 

More interesting is Ferguson’s rendering of the different policy responses. In the fifties, our president was Dwight Eisenhower. Now our presidents have been Donald Trump and Joe Biden. One thing is clear, during the Eisenhower administration neither political party was playing politics with the pandemic. Now one has the distinct impression that both parties are playing politics with the disease.

What did Ike do? Clearly, he did not shut the country down and did not kill the economy and did not declare an emergency. Even though the risk was disproportionately directed at the young, he did not close any schools.

The policy response of President Dwight Eisenhower could hardly have been more different from the response of 2020. Eisenhower did not declare a state of emergency. There were no state lockdowns and, despite the first wave of teenage illness, no school closures. Sick students simply stayed at home, as they usually did. Work continued more or less uninterrupted.

Given that telecommuting was still in dream stage, people continued to go to work. Thus, government was not required to juice the economy with massive infusions of money:

With workplaces open, the Eisenhower administration saw no need to borrow to the hilt to fund transfers and loans to citizens and businesses. The president asked Congress for a mere $2.5 million ($23 million in today’s inflation-adjusted terms) to provide additional support to the Public Health Service. There was a recession that year, but it had little if anything to do with the pandemic. The Congressional Budget Office has described the Asian flu as an event that “might not be distinguishable from the normal variation in economic activity.”

As it happened, Ike’s policy prescriptions were based on expert opinion:

President Eisenhower’s decision to keep the country open in 1957-58 was based on expert advice. When the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) concluded in August 1957 that “there is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease,” Eisenhower listened. 

Today, of course, no one really trusts the experts. The reason is, most of them seem more concerned with gaining political advantage or advancing a political cause than with fighting the pandemic. If Joe Biden did not see a political advantage in prancing around with a face mask-- a useless appurtenance-- he would not be doing it.

Ferguson then remarks that, however much we are agog over the speed with which our drug companies have manufactured vaccines, the 1950s companies did so with similar speed:

It has become commonplace to describe the speed with which vaccines were devised for Covid-19 as unprecedented. But it was not. The first New York Times report of the outbreak in Hong Kong—three paragraphs on page 3—was on April 17, 1957. By July 26, little more than three months later, doctors at Fort Ord, Calif., began to inoculate recruits to the military.

1950s Americans took it in stride. They did not panic. They did not go all emotional. They did not make it into a cosmic drama.

By Ferguson’s reasoning, with which I concur, today’s Americans have a very low risk tolerance. He does not explain why this is so, and I will offer only a wee bit of speculation. But clearly, the cohort that had defeated the Great Depression and had won World War II saw more value in a cohesive society than does today’s highly individualistic, every person for itself, world. It may be incidental, but, as a rule, and for good Darwinian reasons, women are more risk averse than men. Thus, heightened risk aversion seems to be a characteristic of a more feminized culture.

A striking contrast between 1957 and the present is that Americans today appear to have a much lower tolerance for risk than their grandparents and great-grandparents. As one contemporary recalled, “For those who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four….We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.”

Today's America has a tattered and shredded social fabric. It has been incapable of mounting an organized response. One might add that in the 1950s patriotism was embraced by everyone . Today, it is controversial.

Compare these stoical attitudes with the strange political bifurcation of reactions we saw last year, with Democrats embracing drastic restrictions on social and economic activity, while many Republicans acted as if the virus was a hoax. Perhaps a society with a stronger fabric of family life, community life and church life was better equipped to withstand the anguish of untimely deaths than a society that has, in so many ways, come apart.

Ferguson adds a point that he made elsewhere, namely that today’s government is far less competent than is that of the 1950s. In those halcyon days, most government employees would have had military experience. They would have viscerally respected the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower. Today’s government employees were either Boomers or millennials. They do not know how to organize to win because their experience of warfare has had nothing to do with either organization or victory.

A further contrast between 1957 and 2020 is that the competence of government would appear to have diminished even as its size has expanded. The number of government employees in the U.S., including those in federal, state and local governments, numbered 7.8 million in November 1957 and reached around 22 million in 2020—a nearly threefold increase, compared with a doubling of the population. Federal net outlays were 16.2% of GDP in 1957 versus 20.8% in 2019.

Ferguson concludes:

“To be young was very heaven” in 1957—even with a serious risk of infectious disease (and not just flu; there was also polio and much else). By contrast, to be young in 2020 was—for most American teenagers—rather hellish. Stuck indoors, struggling to concentrate on “distance learning” with irritable parents working from home in the next room, young people experienced at best frustration and at worst mental illness.

We’ve come a long way, don’t you think?

Abusing Schoolchildren

In one sense it’s too soon to estimate the damage done to children’s minds by the current mania about race and gender based indoctrination. In another sense, this new front in the Great American Cultural Revolution-- which I identified in a book a quarter century ago-- has been on the march for decades now. 

In the past it had been limited to colleges and universities. Now it has made its way into kindergartens and elementary schools. As we have reported, kindergarten children are now taught the dogmas of transgenderism. If you think that this is going to end well, you must have gone off your meds.

Erika Sanzi brings us up to speed on some of the horrors currently being visited on America’s schoolchildren. She writes for the City Journal (via Maggie’s Farm):

The contemporary obsession with identity has made its way into elementary school policy, curricula, and standards approved by state boards. While we continue to see poor reading and math scores, schools spend money and time confusing and shaming other people’s children. Many educators and elected leaders have good intentions; they believe deeply that they are part of a necessary and long-overdue movement to teach racial literacy, social justice, equity, and antiracism. But as virtuous as these terms may sound on their face, they mean something else in far too many classrooms. American schools are teaching young children race essentialism: reducing them to identity groups, putting them in boxes labeled “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and often inflicting emotional and psychological harm.

The important point is that America’s schoolchildren cannot read, write or count. Precious few can do algebra. Nearly none can do calculus. And yet, we are filling their minds with radical leftist ideology, because then they will not even be motivated to learn how to read, write or do math. And they will never be able to compete against their peers in the world economy.

At a time when America is up in arms about any and all forms of child abuse, it is countenancing this pedagogical version of child abuse. Parents have called it out, but it continues apace. Someone or other, too few people have understood that you can abuse and damage children without molesting them.

Sanzi offers the example of an elementary school in Bellevue, Washington:

Consider Bellevue, Washington, home to Cherry Crest Elementary School. The school website indicates that students “will have explicit conversations about race, equity, and access” and “will identify culture and begin to recognize and identify white culture through storytelling, sharing, and conversation.” The school promises to hold monthly assemblies that focus on culture, identity, and race, and has created a group called SOAR (Students Organized Against Racism) for fourth- and fifth-graders. These children, who range from ages nine to 11, are tasked with “implementing learning and stratimplementation of school-wide learning and strategies for being anti-racist.” Left unclear is whether these students have been made aware that modern antiracism requires discrimination on the basis of race.

Of course, it’s an obscenity. It is destroying America’s most precious resource. And, in the current political climate, very few people seem to care:

But public institutions funded with public dollars do not exist to groom activists for particular causes, shame children for their immutable traits, or deny them their agency or their childhood. We are talking about eight- and nine-year-old kids who believe in Santa Claus, hide their lost teeth under their pillow for the tooth fairy, and curl up in their parents’ laps for comfort and love. It is immoral—at least—to reduce them to confected racial and gender categories and to teach them to do the same to others. Parents around the country need to understand what is happening in a growing number of elementary classrooms.

Our Caring, Compassionate, Empathetic Economy

Helen Andrews recently published a fine book on the Boomer generation. It is entitled Boomers, and I recommend it highly.

More recently, she wrote an essay on Dr. Who, that would be Dr. Anthony Fauci. Among the salient and intriguing points she makes is this: America has now morphed from a manufacturing economy to a health care economy. The shift is momentous. It's so momentous that most people ignore it. Surely, it is one reason why the Covid pandemic worked so well for the Democratic Party. After all, what I have called the Girl Party is all-in for caring, compassion and empathy. 

The problem is, Andrews explains, that health care is suffocating the American economy:

Today health care sits atop the American economy like Fuseli’s incubus. In 1990, manufacturing was the leading source of employment in most states. Thirty years later, in thirty-three states out of fifty, it is “health care and social assistance.” A country whose dominant industry produces nothing and hardly even creates value in the traditional sense is headed for trouble. The fact that its prices are centrally planned by a committee of doctors in the bowels of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, based on a “Resource-Based Relative Value Scale” that boffins at the Harvard School of Public Health came up with in 1988, is even more redolent of the late Soviet era.

In one sense we underwent this shift because of the advent of highly effective medications. Antibiotics, Andrews notes, only became widely distributed after World War II. Given that we believe in One Nation, under Medicine, we have become avid consumers for the latest medications and the latest health care nostrums. Good consumers that we are, we are so filled with different pills that we are no longer suitable test subjects for new medications. 

One notes, in passing, that our tireless work ensuring our good health has numbed our moral sense. We no longer care about doing the right thing. We no longer distinguish between right and wrong. We know that if we feel badly for doing the wrong thing, if we feel shame, there's a pill for that.

As you might have guessed, Americans’ favorite medications are anti-depressants. You might consider this to be a reflection of the inadequacy of most talk therapy, but that would not be very nice:

Within the lifetimes of the oldest Americans, medicine had barely any drugs worth the name and couldn’t treat a simple infection (penicillin didn’t come into use until World War II). Today, medical trials have moved to Eastern Europe and Brazil because Americans no longer make suitable test subjects; everyone over forty is taking too many pills already. Young women are put on birth control to treat acne, nuking their natural hormones as casually as popping an aspirin. Half the prescription drugs in the world are consumed by Americans, and the most prescribed class, ahead of statins, is antidepressants.

So, I leave it to you to study Andrews’ analysis of the work of one Dr. Fauci, but most importantly, she sees his rise to saintly status to be a symptom of a nation that no longer manufactures very much of anything, but that is hellbent on curing disease, both real and imaginary. 

Making a hero of Dr. Fauci meant the opposite of what people thought it did. Instead of the triumph of facts, it signaled the triumph of a class. These are the people who made health care one-sixth of our economy, because they can think of no better use for the money than to avert death, their greatest fear. One-sixth of the economy is already more than a tithe. Looking at the bizarre fanaticism that Fauci presided over, it may be that they are willing to sacrifice more.