Rage against The Outrage Machine
Leave GMU, Cracker Barrel, John Bolton, and the Fed alone please
I know George Mason University because it has one hell of an indoor percussion (drumline) corps. I don’t know anything about allegations that the school has gone “woke” with some kind of DEI-inspired antisemitic nonsense. GMU is not in the headlines with pro-Gaza terrorist cells taking over administration buildings. It is a public university in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Its 16-member Board of Visitors was appointed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, many of them hail from the Heritage Foundation. It is almost unthinkable that GMU is hiding an active hive of wokeness.
Yet the Trump administration is going after Gregory Washington, the school’s first Black president, for exactly that reason. But Washington, unlike University of Virginia president James E. Ryan, is refusing to step down. He’s also refusing to step back from diversity. He defended his school in the media, and then after a media gag order, he had his attorney respond in an eleven-page letter to the Board of Visitors, calling the Department of Education findings “legal fiction.” The end of this battle is far from clear, but it’s not unlikely that if the Board can fire Mr. Washington, at least he can walk out with his convictions intact.
This isn’t the only tempest spinning in a teapot this week. Don’t even get me started on Cracker Barrel. Jonah Goldberg over at The Dispatch put that one fairly to bed in his latest G-File, noting that the “new” logo is actually the original one when the restaurant/tchotchke store was also a gas station in 1969. I am no fan of the latest design trend toward minimalism. I think logos should have some flavor of branding and uniqueness, which the new Cracker Barrel logo, in my unstudied opinion, lacks. But whether that matters or not isn’t relevant. The décor of this particular restaurant is not a participant in the “woke” culture war. I doubt Donald Trump has ever eaten at a Cracker Barrel—and to be fair, he hasn’t weighed in on the issue. But his minions have vowed to “break the barrel” over the logo and décor announcement.
I like Cracker Barrel. It’s one of the few places you can buy original Hydrox cookies, which are Oreos, but the original version of the cream-filled chocolate cookie sandwich. And Hydrox cookies are better. If Cracker Barrel decided not to sell Hydrox cookies anymore, that would be reason to protest. If they stopped selling little lighthouses, old-timey kid toys, overpriced women’s clothing, and Elvis vinyl albums, that would be a real change in the branding. I haven’t heard if any of that is going to happen. Perhaps, as the customer base ages (and dies off), Cracker Barrel will have to change things. Changing the logo to follow the minimalist corporate crowd is not something to get your stars & bars Underoos in a twist about. But that’s exactly what is happening in MAGA land.
President Trump is trying to take over the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, one seat at a time. He couldn’t fire Chairman Jerome Powell, despite threatening to try. But now he has found a pretext to fire Lisa Cook. The U.S. President has the legal power to do this, but doing it on weak pretext is really an abuse of power. Then again, the Republican-controlled House and Senate lacks the will, spine, and cojones, to do anything about it. So Trump will likely get away with this. Cook’s crime? She claimed that her home in Atlanta was her primary residence when she had also made the same claim about her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On its face, this is falsifying residence status on a mortgage application. For a senior banker at the Fed, I suppose this is something serious enough to be investigated. In anyone’s mind, it’s not serious enough on its own to fire a Fed Board of Governor member. But that’s exactly what Trump is doing.
Trump, the one fresh off a legal victory that overturned his $500 million fine for regularly lying on every bank loan application he’s ever put pen to paper on. Trump, the one who said his net worth depends on how he feels that day. Trump, the one who has played fast and loose with banks, investors, and customers, for his entire career, is firing the first Black woman to ever have a seat on the Fed’s Board of Governors. Trump, whose multiple felony convictions for doing things similar to what he claims Cook did, have not been overturned.
After all these little storms, does anyone feel like I do? Do you feel like you’re being fed a script, in order to maintain a proper level of outrage, or opposition outrage? Do you feel like you’re being given an intravenous injection of distraction potion so you can ignore some really important things that might be going on? Do you think you’re being led by the nose on fairly inconsequential, stupid issues when our national debt stands at 120 percent of GDP, our foreign policy favors Russian aggression and empire-building, and…there is no “and.”
My father would say “it’s time for a war.” He’s not really wrong, in the sense that policies leading to impossible situations can only be solved by war. If we can’t service or pay our debts, if we can’t obtain decent agreements for foreign trade, if we can’t manage our own democracy in voting and who is allowed to live here, then the only option is war. Eventually we will run out of stupid distractions. The only question is if we will tire of them before Trump is out of office. (Jay says “nope!”)
My thoughts are to simply rage against the outrage machine that is constantly inventing new ways to waste our time and kill our brain cells. You’d be better off watching the Savannah Bananas play Bananaball than dealing with the stupid things coming out of Washington, D.C.
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I do not worry about Cracker Barrel. Years ago, the standing joke was the construction parking lot was full of cars waiting for the new restaurant to open. Now, the food is not quite so appealing, prices are high, and service is slow.
It's possible that some people assume George Mason U is becoming woke because it has a black president. My guess is he's no more woke than the president of Georgia Tech. Anyone who, like me, was a fan of Walter E. Williams knew making assumptions because of race is folly. Williams was a black professor of economics at George Mason and a widely published voice for conservatism. Williams was the first to point out that Blacks were being converted to victims by the progressive movement.
Sorry, Steve, but Oreos are 100 times better than Hydrox. When I was young, we couldn't always afford Oreos, and so we had to settle for Hydrox, and they were terrible.