When do businessmen start cooking the books? Exactly: when they have sustained a horrific loss and need to hide it from the CEO or the stockholders or the bank.
When do politicians start to cheat? Exactly: when their glorious movement, for some reason, starts to fade.
When did the Democrats start their tactic of Borking Republican Supreme Court nominees? Right after they won back the Senate, in 1987, after six years of Ronald Reagan.
When did the current wokey cancel culture really get started? When the First Black President failed to bring in the millennium, and when the Tea Party populist revolt of 2010 indicated that Something Was Rotten in the State of Progressive Denmark.
When did the current social media censorship begin? After the unthinkable election of Donald Trump. And why has social media suddenly decided to censor an October Surprise? Because it targets the Democratic candidate.
Yesterday, I quoted a bit from Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, written in 1843-44, where Dickens satirizes the New York City press of the day. He comments on that well-known paper, the New York Sewer, and writes of
the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse.
Charles Dickens went on a tour of the United States in 1842. So his experience was fresh in his mind when he wrote Chuzzlewit. But really, after the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight, with accusations of high-school shenanigans, not to mention the tales of Mitt Romney's high-school bullying antics, you can see that nothing has changed.
But you see, I think all these Supreme Court nomination shenanigans, and social media censorship shenanigans -- not to mention the Democratic attempts to muck around with the voting system -- criminal as they are, are worse than a crime, a blunder. They are attempts to reverse the tide of history.
But nobody knows the meaning of history, or what it will do next. The only thing we can be sure of is that a high tide is likely to be followed by a low tide.
Progressives have had a pretty good run since the 19th century. They have enacted huge government programs, they have erected huge regulatory bureaucracies, they have turned education into a progressive seminary, they have turned sex against gender and race against race. And yet the millennium has failed to arrive.
Instead, all over the west, populist movements have arisen to counter the rule of the experts and the educated. In general, these populist movements have been rather inchoate: unorganized movements of Commoners, middling sorts of people, that just feel that something is wrong and nobody is listening to them.
But our progressive friends just can't get their brains around this. I remember back in the days of the Tea Party, Nancy Pelosi grumbled about "AstroTurf" groups, fake groups ginned up presumably by right-wing billionaires. Do you see? Nancy had no idea. Nobody had any idea; the Tea Party just happened. Republicans were just as clueless about the Tea Partiers as Democrats.
Whatabout the Trump Car Parades? This NPR story tries to be as negative as possible, but certainly suggests that the parades are spontaneous efforts by ordinary Commoners. Are they? Maybe after the election we will find out who the evil genius is that came up with the idea.
Maybe, despite the best efforts of the social media giants, conservative Commoners are finding ways to organize and find each other.
You can see why the left would be ignoring the elephant in the room. In their simplistic religion of Ally-ism, of "allies" helping "oppressed peoples" in their fight against "white oppressors," there is no existence, no category, of just ordinary people that aren't allies, aren't oppressed, and aren't oppressors.
So, when you have a simplistic world view like that you are simply not going to notice things that don't conform to your expectations.
And yet, one of the things that humans are supposed to be good at is "noticing" when something unexpected happens. But, in part, the whole point of religion is to help people ignore unexpected or frightening things, because, for the believers, everything is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, Candide. Nothing to see here, move right along.
But should we be cavalier about this, about the damage that the woke left might cause? I think that, a century ago, when the left was fresh and new, we should have been. But now the left is old and corrupt, an ancien régime. I expect the left to stumble and bumble in their efforts to wound and deflect the populist rebellion.
Rather like the efforts of Twitter and Facebook to censor the reports of Hunter Biden's corruption and his father's involvement in his son's shenanigans. Now it's the Chinese!
Unfortunately, as happens when failing businesses cook the books, the efforts to stave off disaster usually make things worse as the cheaters double down.
And so the only question is: How big the butcher's bill?
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