Reclaiming the culture: a national imperative
'Things are stirring'
The Friday Letter / No. 473 / Dec. 31, 2021
New Year's Eve
Next week we will welcome the new year by examining a phenomenon that liberals have understood for most of a century that conservatives don't understand even today: how the Republican Party wins elections without ever gaining control of, or even having much influence on, the culture.
“Traditional moral values have long since fled from the public square, every new constituency claiming persecution has received special political rights, the welfare state is in a permanent state of growth, and there is no obvious limit to what the federal government will spend in pursuit of liberal aims,” Barton Swaim wrote in the Nov. 20-21 Wall Street Journal.
Donald Trump discovered that one man can't change the culture when up against academia, public school teacher unions, the permanent state bureaucracy, Big Business, Big Tech, social media partners of the Democrat Party, news and entertainment media, professional sports, much of mainline Protestant churches, even his own party.
For now, we feel the need to keep pounding on the imperative that non-leftist voters who want real change in 2022 will have to do more than talk. It's a perpetual cause of angst on these very pages, the uneasy feeling that our readers mostly agree with us, that we aren't changing any minds.
At the same time, conservative, pro-constitution commentary has little or no effect on the hard core left, those who will never stray from their belief that all Democrats are good and all Republicans are bad. We know. We have some of them in our own family and circle of friends. Trying to reason with them is pointless.
And so we love them and laugh with them and enjoy their company, but we would no more engage them in a serious political discussion than touch an electric fence.
People with ossified brains aren't open to new ideas. Government school teachers know this, which explains why indoctrination is beginning as early as kindergarten. Discussions at the dinner table – discussions, not lectures – are important inoculations against the poison that spews from the government school (and even some private schools).
I know from spending time with college students that preaching doesn't work. While I never allowed political discussions in my writing classroom, I did engage in whatever topics that interested them in our informal sessions after class or in the courtyard. Instead of preaching, I like to use the Socratic method of asking questions.
“Why do you suppose this is so?” invites your child into the conversation. Increasingly, classroom discussions have been replaced by diktats. Civil back-and-forth conservations in the home provide an antidote.
Try this: “In New York and some other cities, you are not allowed to enter a business without wearing a mask. But we let two million illegal immigrants enter the country in 2021 and didn't require even one of them to wear a mask. Why do you suppose this is so?” Don't offer your answer. Listen to the child's, and go from there.
People who pay close attention to these matters appear to be optimistic that a groundswell of parents and others will get this ship back on course. Let's hope so. “Things are stirring,” former Education Secretary Bill Bennett said last night on “Fox Prime Time.”
What passes for logic on the left
A law passed earlier this month will ban natural gas from new buildings in New York City. Here is how The City explains it:
“The City Council on Wednesday passed a bill making New York the largest city in the United States to effectively ban the use of gas in new buildings and to turn to electricity for power.”
State radio NPR said much the same thing in a friendly interview with a climate activist who said New York will have to switch from gas to electricity to heat its new buildings.
Both stories are true but misleading. It is true that gas won't be allowed to heat new buildings of a certain size in two years and later in new buildings of all sizes. But these stories are deceptive and dishonest: Gas is a fuel; electricity is not. They are not comparable. Electric energy is the end product, not the fuel that produces it.
The stories are dishonest because the advocates responsible for them – print writer, radio interviewer, climate scare activist – want you to think that electricity just magically appears from nowhere. They conveniently forget to explain that electricity requires fuel. Con Edison, which serves most of New York City and part of Westchester County, buys energy in the wholesale marketplace, with about 40% coming from natural gas, coal, and other fossil fuels, 34% from nuclear, 22% from hydro-electric dams, and less than 10% from wind and solar.
Like a little boy waiting for Santa Claus, the climate-change warrior fantasized of a Utopian world fueled by wind and the sun – something that may occur but long after he has departed – ignoring the reality that when you outlaw fossil fuels and nuclear reactors, expect the cold winter that Joe Biden so eagerly anticipates.
Because leftists think like small children, they think electricity comes from a plug in the wall. They don't know, or won't acknowledge, that electric heat and the batteries of government-subsidized cars depend on power mostly generated by burning coal and gas.
The Left is getting its way
Now that Entergy has closed the last of its three reactors at the Indian Point Power Plant, New York State is left with just four reactors at three plants – a joyous development to the anti-prosperity crowd. Now, as the story above suggests, they are moving to shut down natural gas. Indian Point had served New York for 59 years, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Entergy shuttered the last of its reactors as part of a settlement with the state, which challenged the utility's license renewal. Market forces contributed as well, as gas became plentiful and cheap during the Trump Administration.
“Sustained low wholesale energy prices have been the driving force behind Entergy’s desire to exit the merchant power business,” the energy trade magazine Power reported in 2017. But just when we were getting used to cheap and plentiful gas, Biden's handlers moved quickly to drive up prices and create shortages – all while supporting the extreme left's attack on nuclear power and waiting for the next wind to blow through.
Banning gas has everything to do with leftwing politics and nothing to do with saving the planet.
“Burning natural gas for energy results in fewer emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide (CO2) than burning coal or petroleum products to produce an equal amount of energy,” the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) reports.
“About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil. The clean burning properties of natural gas have contributed to increased natural gas use for electricity generation and as a transportation fuel for fleet vehicles in the United States.”
France gets it right
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin shut down a mosque after its imam gave sermons “targeting Christians, homosexuals and Jews,” Just the News reports. The imam also called Islamic terrorists “heroes,” the story reports.
Quote for today
“I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught.”
-- Nikole Hanna-Jones, the discredited New York Times reporter who wrote the historically false 1619 Project, now used as anti-U.S. propaganda in 4,500 of the nation's schools, on “Meet the Press.”
Milestones
Died: Naturalist and ant expert Edward (E.O.) Wilson, the Harvard entomologist who warned of the biodiversity crisis, Dec. 26 at his home in Massachusetts. A Birmingham, Ala., native, Wilson wrote in his book Consilience that people in the humanities should understand science, and scientists need to understand the humanities. In addition to his five recognized seminal contributions to science, Wilson headed a campaign to unite scientific and religious communities as the world's best hope for preserving Earth. Early in his career near the Port of Mobile he was the first to discover the fire ant invasion from South America. Two of his more than 30 books won Pulitzer Prizes. He was 92.