It’s Monday, July 12th, 2021…but before we begin, we’ll take intemperate tweets and boorish behavior over insensate rambling and patent prevarication any day of the week:

46* wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit him on the a*s, nor are his MSM enablers interested in holding him to it!  Given the time and opportunity, we’ve no doubt this doddering old dolt would have regaled his sycophants in the Fourth Estate with a stirring account of having flown in with Corn Pop alongside SEAL Team Six and taken out Osama himself.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Keith Calcotte, the Editorial Board at the WSJ relate the improprieties inherent in…

Hunter Biden’s Secret Art Sale

You won’t BELIEVE what the White House thinks is an ethical solution.

“As President Biden’s son Hunter prepares for an art exhibition this fall that could include selling his paintings at prices up to $500,000, the White House is reportedly working with his attorney on a strategy to avoid ethical compromises. Here it is: Keep everything secret. Yes, for real, that’s the plan.

The New York gallery hosting the sale, media reports say, will refuse “suspicious” offers, including those over list price. The names of the buyers and bidders will be kept confidential, even from Hunter. As the paintings sell, apparently hundreds of thousands of dollars will simply appear in his bank account, and neither he nor the public will know where it came from.

You don’t feel reassured? Sources in the art world say the prices being floated—from $75,000 to $500,000, depending on the piece—are seriously high, especially for an unknown painter doing a first sale. So the question is who might be quietly trying to funnel money to President Biden’s son.

The art sale is a bad idea (“bad”? Just “bad“?!?), full stop. But at least transparency would let bids be scrutinized in real time, preferably before a sale is final. Instead the White House is proposing opacity, even as its press aides brag that President Biden “has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history.”…”

Though the editors at the Journal still grant Hunter the benefit of the doubt, we’re nowhere near as charitable, instead concluding this latest influence-peddling enterprise from the Biden crime family, along with its leader, STINKS…

The Biden family: Not only do they lie like dogs, but they’re all as crooked as a hound’s hind leg.

Next, in a follow-up to our earlier items regarding the Marxist origins and purpose of Critical Race Theory, writing at American Greatness, Mackubin Owens echoes our assertions as he asks and answers…

What’s Wrong With CRT?

Critical Race Theory rejects the principles that underpinned all advances in the rights of Black Americans, from the Civil War constitutional amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“…Contrary to the claims of some of its defenders, CRT is not simply a benign academic theory that marks another milestone in the advancement of civil rights for African Americans. I believe one of the main reasons that some dismiss concerns about the destructiveness of CRT is that they confuse it with “critical thinking,” an educational concept that stresses reason, the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking, and understanding the logical connection between ideas.

If CRT were a species of critical thinking, that would be fine. But it isn’t. Instead, it is a species of what Marx called “kritik,” which in the guise of “critical theory,” rejects the validity of rationality and objective truth. For Marxists, critical theory has a distinctive aim: to unmask the ideology that justifies some form of social or economic oppression—to reveal it as ideology. Critical theory posits two categories: oppressed and oppressors. In Marx’s original formulations, the lens was economic class. The bourgeoisie was the oppressor class and the proletariat were the oppressed.

A 20th-century sect called the Frankfurt School—which included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas, following in the steps of Antonio Gramsci—developed and refined this Marxian project, expanding its application beyond economic class. Thus, CRT as a subset of critical theory substitutes race for class. According to CRT, the entire system of a society is defined by those who have power (whites) and those who don’t (people of color).

As such, CRT cannot be seen as just a contribution to expanded civil rights. It is fundamentally at odds with the principles that underpinned all advances in the rights of black Americans, from the Civil War constitutional amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964: that all Americans should be treated equally, regardless of race, color, creed, or religion. These are philosophically linked to the Declaration of Independence, which holds that human beings are equal in their possession of natural rights and that, accordingly, no one has the natural right to rule over another without the latter’s consent.

But CRT attacks the American founding. Advocates of CRT do not wish to fulfill the promises of the American founding, which they regard as racist. Instead, they want to replace the principles of the founding with something radically different, for instance, replacing such concepts as “equality” with “equity” and subverting the meaning of “justice.”

As far as learning about CRT, that’s fine as long as it is treated as a real “theory,” subject to testing and falsification. That is the essence of a theory. A good theory accomplishes at a minimum, two things: it explains phenomena; and it predicts future outcomes. If a theory accomplishes these two things, it can also serve as the basis for policy prescriptions. But CRT fails on the first criterion. It denigrates African Americans by stripping them of all agency or free will. According to CRT, blacks are simply inanimate objects, ciphers who are victims of forces over which they have no control. Nothing could be more demeaning to an entire group of American citizens, many of whom have risen to high status, than the claim that they are helpless victims of impersonal forces.

…But CRT’s shortcomings as a theory are also illustrated by the fact that it cannot be questioned. The normal methods of testing a hypothesis are not permitted when it comes to CRT, which employs a rhetorical tool developed by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, called “repressive tolerance.” According to Marcuse, to tolerate all ideas—the essence of reasonable discourse that traditionally has defined the mission of education—is, in fact, repressive, since it does not “privilege” the “correct” ideas. True tolerance, Marcuse argued, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” 

Adopting Marcuse’s logic, CRT brooks no dissent. To argue against CRT is itself fundamentally racist, evidence of the dissenter’s “white fragility,” “unconscious bias,” or “internalized white supremacy.” Thus rather than offering a perspective that invites debate, CRT “education” is essentially ideological indoctrination…”

We realize we’ve covered this ground before, but here’s the juice: Neither the architects of CRT nor most of its proponents believe the bullsh*t they’re peddling.  For them, it’s simply a tool with which to achieve an end: Revolution resulting in the overthrow of capitalism and democracy in our nation and the establishment of a totalitarian Marxist state in which they will be the animals more equal than others.  The Who had it right:

The difference being, unlike The Donald, once having achieved power, the new boss won’t willingly…or easily…surrender it.

In a related item which, though rather lengthy, is a must-read well worth your time, courtesy of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Mark Steyn recounts…

Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization

“I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin.

I don’t know how this happened, but it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.

Look at just three things we have lost.

One is equality before the law, something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.

Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15 years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.

And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free government.

And here’s the thing. It is not at all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.

Over the same period as the pandemic lockdowns, we have seen an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if you look at one of the most startling manifestations of this, transgender fanaticism—which involves, after all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m sorry to have to say it, the physical mutilation of children—one notices that America is farther down this road than any other country in the Western world. In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling the wrong way…

…I’ll end by pointing out that the Left wins because it seizes language. Take the policy of letting people vote who are not U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be voting. The Left calls this policy “counting every vote.” Therefore someone who wants to make sure voters are citizens is opposed to “counting every vote.” If we don’t take back the language, we will lose the truth. Even on FOX News, I have noticed, news anchors now talk about “gender assigned at birth,” as if that’s something different from one’s biological sex. There may be 57 genders, but there are only two biological sexes.

Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the first step to recovering our civilization.“

There’s so much more to this transcript of Steyn’s speech, we again urge you to read it in its entirety.

Since we’re on the subject of the inevitable fruits of despotism, Jim Geraghty details…

Why Russia, China, and Iran Are All Screwed by the Pandemic

SPOILER ALERT: It’s as Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German High Command, once observed of Hitler:

“A dictator, as a matter of psychological necessity, must never be reminded of his own errors in order to keep up his self-confidence, the ultimate source of his dictatorial force.”

Along with a willingness to pour out the blood of their people like water.

Next, we offer a septet of selections specially screened to ensure maximum interest for inquiring Conservative minds: 

(1). A majority of Americans now believe the Wuhan virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China…CHINA…according to a poll by Politico and Hahvahd University.  The survey found 52% of Americans believe COVID leaked from a lab, compared with 28% who think the scamdemic started following human contact with an infected animal.  Trust us, that 28% is largely composed of the same people you see driving alone in their car still wearing a mask.

(2). George Lawlor forwarded the latest inanity uttered by Kommielaa, which truly causes one to question in what alternate reality these people exist.  First The Left declared inner-city Blacks and Hispanics incapable of obtaining photo IDs; now they’re claiming rural Americans cannot access photocopiers and scanners.  After reading the lead, scroll down to the comments section, as they’re the best part. 

(3). Writing at The Washington Times, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker relates why we’re only one generation away from losing America, at least the America in which many of us were blessed to be born and raised.

(4). The following graphic…

…brought to mind the probably apocryphal scene between Shoeless Joe Jackson and a young Black Sox fan:

…along with Joe’s fabled reply: “Sorry, kid, but it is.”  Heaven help us…literally!!!

(5). Meanwhile, at the same time domestic Socialists are seeking to impose their failed ideology on Amerika, a mere 90 miles south across the Straits of Florida those who’ve experienced decades of misery at the hands of one foreign practitioner are demanding their freedom, leading the regime to shutdown the imprisoned island’s internet service.  Though 46* pretends he’s with the Cuban people, what Bernie and he are really concerned with is what state of emergency they can declare which will enable them to shut down internet access across the fruited plains.

(6). So many notables descended upon little Sun Valley, ID this week to discuss, among other things, the junk science of anthropogenic global warming, the FAA reportedly had to place a temporary hold on flights into the resort town.

(7). Speaking of those who don’t practice what they preach, Chicago’s idiot mayor is under fire for allowing top aides time off ahead of the deadly July 4th weekend after not only vowing to tackle violent crime with an “all hands on deck“, but “banning top leadership at the police department from taking time off during the summer, arguing it set a bad example for rank-and-file officers“.

“In response to the criticism, Lightfoot’s office issued a statement Friday as the mayor was returning from a political fundraising trip in California.”  You couldn’t make this sh*t up if you tried!!!

Which brings us, appropriately enough…and in more ways than one…to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these from Jeff Foutch…

…Geoff Griffith…

…and G. Trevor…

…along with three pearls of wisdom and insight forwarded by Ed Hickey:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Day Late and a Dollar Short segment, courtesy of the buzzkillers at the Departments of Wildlife Resources and Conservation in Virginia and Missouri respectively, as we learn…

Large goldfish caught in the wild across multiple states spark warnings from local officials

Officials issued warnings against dumping pets in the wild

Seeing as the first goldfish were likely introduced to the United States in the early 1800s…and were identified as a potential problem back in 1941, we’d suggest wildlife officials are attempting to close the door on a horse that left the barn…or, perhaps more accurately, fish that fled the bowl…some time ago.

Magoo

P.S. On an administrative note, come July 30th, we’ll be taking an extended period of personal time, with contact likely being restored sometime in mid-August.  Consider it a period of rest and relaxation during which we’ll recharge our batteries to continue the fight for truth, justice and the American way.

P.S.S. We truly appreciate all of you who’ve increased our following by forwarding The Gouge to your like-minded friends.  And while we hate to beat this drum too frequently, the more the merrier.  And, as always…

Video of the Day

Tucker highlights a form of politically-correct insanity which infects every branch and level of government, from the Oval Office on down to your local school board.

Tales of The Darkside

Courtesy of James Nichols, we present the Rise of the Moops…er,…Moors, the scariest story you’ll never learn from the MSM.

On the Lighter Side

Since we’re on the subject of the Rise of the Moors, here’s one of our favorite Seinfeld scenes.