Orion's Cold Fire

Writing a daily post is a daunting task.  I’ve been writing this blog for over five years.  Granted these have been very unusual even unique times with strange things happening quite often.  Things like a national pandemic lockdown and nationwide, FBI approved race riots and looting.  Things like these give you a lot to think and write about.  And a politician like Donald Trump and the response of the administrative state to him is pretty unique.  Granted there are similarities to what happened to Richard Nixon but the reaction to Trump is orders of magnitude more violent and nakedly partisan.

All that being said eventually you run out of ways to say the same things differently.

Eventually what you find yourself writing is almost a stream of consciousness of what you are thinking as you experience the world around you.  And the trick is to make what you write relatable enough and interesting enough that other people will find it worthwhile to read.

Well, that’s a tall order.  How many times can you say that Joe Biden is a lying, thieving, senile shell of a hack politician?  Everybody in both parties knows it.  Even the people who vote for him, even the people who work for him don’t mistake him for an honest man or a talented individual.  They know he’s a hack who hung on long enough for the crooked party he works for to punch his ticket one last time.  It’s been said too many times to be interesting.

And likewise for discussions of Congress, the administrative state, the woke corporate world, the fake news media and on and on.  It has all been said.

So, what I’ll do from now on is talk about whatever pops into my head.  Maybe a news story will interest me.  Something about crime or something about reform.  Maybe it’ll be a piece of bad news or good news.  I’ll say what it makes me think or feel.  I’ll just look at the world as if it were the viewfinder of my camera and if I think it’s an interesting composition, I’ll snap the picture.  And just like trying to take a different picture every day is damn difficult so will telling a different story every day.  But every picture is slightly different.  And so, finding a new story is always possible too.

The thing that I was thinking about today was the Anti-Israel demonstrations and the reaction of Jewish Americans.  Bari Weiss had an essay about DEI and the current state of progressive politics.

She was and is a progressive.  But she has seen the radicalization of the Democratic party and this has had an effect on her.  It has frightened her into seeing where all the progressive programs that she formerly supported have led.  And so, she renounces what she thinks of as the overreach of progressivism; wokeism.

“It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.”

But the problem is how do you do that if you still keep voting for Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump?  And she (and the people in her comments section) have no answer to this.  Now this is not to say that all Jewish Americans vote Democrat.  I personally have Jewish friends who vote Trump and are conservative in general.  But Jewish progressives and progressives in general who are shocked by the support for Hamas will not be motivated by their shock to vote Republican.  They will look for a Democrat who will rescue them from Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.  But they won’t find one.  Just look at the White House’s answer to questions about antisemitic attacks and threats over the last few weeks.  Karine Jean-Pierre’s answer was that the administration was aware of the high numbers of Islamophobic incidents that had occurred recently.  In other words, in the intersectionality calculus Muslim public opinion was more important than Jewish public opinion.  No one would do anything to stop the demonstrations and acts of violence.  Basically, their importance isn’t high enough to protect them from the group with higher intersectional value.  And Weiss addresses this:

“People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.””

And the impact of this hierarchy has been on display with anger over these inequalities in several groups in the leftist coalition.  Women and even lesbians are angry over the privileges “trans-women” receive in being considered actual women.  They get to compete in women’s sports where they have unbeatable physical advantages over actual girls and women.  And they demand that lesbians accept them as sexual partners regardless of the fact that they possess male genitalia.  Inner city black and Hispanic poor are outraged that illegal aliens are provided with housing and benefits that take away resources from them.  Asians are being discriminated against in education on account of their academic discipline and aptitude.  And finally white women are finding themselves treated almost as badly as white men because of their “whiteness.”

So, all of these groups are suddenly waking up to the unfairness of the woke agenda.  But guess what?  They won’t be voting for Donald Trump.  It will take tremendous dislocation and pain brought about by the Democratic agenda to finally get any of these people to vote out the Democrats.

They hate Donald Trump viscerally.  He “irks” them.  Just seeing his face makes them angry.  When they get into the voting booth their programming will kick in and Joe Biden will get their vote.  Because of that we are all going to have to suffer a whole bunch more before any of this will end.  Strap in.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.