Wheat and chaff columns - today's edition

Trying to inject some clarity into matters on post-America's plate

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How I ended the first post bearing this title:

. . . the entanglements are going to get thicker as the year unfolds.

It’s probably useful to have some kind of wheat-column / chaff-column formulation for sorting things out.

Maybe this is the beginning of an occasional Precipice series.

And indeed, in the short time since then, the entanglements have indeed gotten thicker.

For any completely new readers, what this is about is the paramount importance of distinguishing the features of actual conservatism from those of Trumpism.

In that June 18 piece, I also said this:

Donald Trump has only ever mouthed fealty to any conservative positions on issues, much less foundational principles, because it looked like the fastest way to stoke personal loyalty to him.

So we will see, from time to time, the Very Stable Genius saying things that the Right-inclined voter will respond to with a thumbs up, because it sounds like what appealed to him or her even prior to the VSG era. Remember that he utters them vacuously.

Let’s take a few matters currently on the nation’s plate and parse what about each of them falls on one side of the ledger or the other.

Relationship between education and religion:

Wheat: While it’s true that a number of the Founding Fathers were deists rather than being specifically sound-doctrine Christians, it’s obvious that most colonists / citizens of the states of the new nation were indeed Christian. Whitefield and Wesley were touring the cities of the east coast at that time and drawing rock-concert-size crowds. George Washington was indeed a regular church-goer. I’ve seen the special presidential booth built for him in the sanctuary of the little church at the top of Wall Street. The Second Great Awakening got underway at the advent of the new century (1800s), with the Cane Ridge Revival. The major universities of the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s were founded as explicitly Christian institutions. Presidents used to lead the nation in prayer to the Judeo-Christian God, right up to FDR’s radio broadcast the night before D-Day.

Chaff: My June 20 post titled “Once Again, the 2020s Right AttemptsTo Make a Perfectly Valid Point in the Most Boneheaded, Ineffective Way Possible,” focused on the new Louisiana law mandating the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Since then, the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction has given us a textbook-case demonstration of how to self-sabotage the project of countering cultural secularization:

I very much support what Louisiana is doing. I would tell you though, frankly, a lot of our inspiration came from President Trump. President Trump has been very supportive. As a matter of fact, he tweeted out last week supporting the work that I’m doing and the state’s doing here in Oklahoma on education.

You pathetic, drool-besotted leg-humper, you’ve fallen for it hook, line and sinker. That may get “base” voters in your state all excited, but you’ve made it possible for the Left to say this is a yay-hoo move rather than something steeped in an understanding of cultural history.

What needs to happen is that the notion of “public instruction” need to wither on the vine. It’s completely beholden to teachers’ unions and the federal-level Department of Education. It’s turning out kids who never read novels, much less Shakespeare, are utterly unacquainted with actual history, much less philosophy, and have heads full of militant identity politics pollution.

Vigorous development of classical schools and homeschooling needs to happen - but, hey parents, leave the guy with the orange squirrel sitting on his head completely out of it.

The environment:

The wheat: Pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord. Yes, I know Squirrel-Hair did it, but an actual conservative would have done likewise. It’s no good to have pointy-headed bureaucrats and “experts” in international bodies dictating what kinds cars we can drive, what kinds of energy sources are available in the free market, how we set our thermostats, and what we eat.

California offers a great case study in what happens when government interferes with economic freedom. A coalition of business groups is saying uh-uh to the requirement to estimate as closely as possible companies’ greenhouse-gas emissions as well as those of their suppliers. I spent some time, years ago, in the manufacturing world, and I know that keeping records for all kinds of doo-dah, s well as obtaining same from a company’s supply chain, eats up resources and contributes nothing to shareholders’ return on investment. But more fundamentally, government has no business making private organizations report anything about their operations.

And speaking of raising costs:

As California pushes consumers to drive electric vehicles, the state is also moving away from fossil fuels, making electricity—and charging those vehicles—more expensive.

California has ushered in a nearly 70 percent spike in electricity costs since 2010 when the state began its big break from fossil fuels due to its cap-and-trade regulations, mandates on utilities to procure higher-cost renewable energy, crackdowns on oil and gas, and taxpayer subsidies for solar panels. And while Californian households use less electricity than residents of other states, their rates are nearly 63 percent higher than the national average.

Now the price hikes are hitting EV owners, in some cases nearly doubling the charging costs since 2022, even as regulators ready a 2035 ban on the sale of gas-fueled autos. EVs still represent just a fraction of the cars on the road—just over 903,000 of California’s 14.3 million registered automobiles were electric as of 2022. The soaring costs come as President Joe Biden models his own administration’s green energy policies on California’s, with an aggressive target to cut carbon emissions, and push for electric freight trucks and EV sales. But critics of California’s renewable energy push say it’s ultimately an example of the state’s myriad climate policies undermining one another.

"Policy choices have driven up electricity prices in California, which is completely inconsistent with their desire to put people into electric vehicles," said Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.

Others say the dilemma is another sign California may be barreling toward a dead end with its goals of eliminating gas and diesel vehicles while powering the electric grid with renewable sources like wind and solar.

"To convert California’s transportation fleet to all-electric … you’re going to have to drastically increase electricity supply—and they don’t have any idea how to do it," said Edward Ring, cofounder of the California Policy Center and longtime energy policy analyst.

The chaff: Coming at the issue from a purely cost-benefit lens, without putting the economic-freedom principle front and center.

(By the way, in the course of research for this piece, I came across a site of which I was previously unaware, Compliance Week. It’s “for the well-informed chief compliance officer and audit executive.” Can you imagine a drearier way to make a living than to spend your days focused on “compliance” and the auditing thereof?)

The Supreme Court:

The wheat: It’s still composed of nine people who have demonstrated serious constitutional scholarship, and, while not seeing eye-to-eye on how closely we should hew to the original intent of the Framers, respect each others’ commitment to responsibly approaching that document. (This is not to say that some of the justices don’t bring feelz to their work, such as Sotomayor saying in an interview that she sometimes closes her office door and cries after a decision goes counter to the way she desired.)

The chaff: This mentality, harbored on both right and left, that expects justices nominated by particular presidents, to deliver the ideological goods when reaching decisions.

The VSG’s throne sniffers got a big dopamine rush from the decision about presidential immunity, and lefties correspondingly howled like a coyote with its leg in a trap. In truth, it really doesn’t move the needle that. much. It reasserts what has always been the interpretation of presidential powers: that official acts are immune, but stuff that doesn’t relate to presidential duties can be gone after. The “will be wild” tweet has nothing to do with carrying out presidential duties. Ditto the January 2, 2021 call to Georgia officials about finding 11,000 more votes. Stuff like that can still be pursued and surely will be.

The Chevron overturn likewise caused the left to engage in shrill hyperbole. The decision itself is a “wheat” move. This goes back to conservative arguments of the 1950s. The pointy-headed “experts” at executive-level agencies have been arrogating powers nowhere found in Mr. Madison’s document. The argument that courts are now going to arrogate those powers is just plain silly. The powers now stand a better chance of being placed in the hands of citizens, through their elected representatives.

Consider Amy Coney Barrett. Both actual conservatives and Trumpist yay-hoos got excited when she was nominated and confirmed. She has subsequently confounded the latter. Originalist jurists ought to confound with some of their conclusions.

Let me also say that I wish Clarence Thomas were married to someone other than the wife he has. He’s a principled originalist in the mold of Antonin Scalia. She’s an election denier.

That’s probably enough for today, but, as I said on June 18, this will probably be an ongoing series.

Clarity is at a premium in post-America. Precipice will do its part to inject some into what passes for our national conversation.