It's no coincidence that the plot to impeach Justice Clarence Thomas comes at the same time as Ketanji Brown Jackson's appointment to the Supreme Court.

Conservatives see the Supreme Court as a forum for legal arguments about government power, while leftists see it, like all institutions, as a forum for moral arguments about the urgent measures needed to address the victimhood of oppressed groups. The former see legal arguments as moral because they are grounded in the Constitution and the nation’s founding while the latter see legal arguments as tools for achieving moral outcomes for the oppressed.

The 1619 Project was built to attack conservative moral legitimacy with the tools of leftist moral legitimacy. That’s also what leftists have been doing by transforming the Supreme Court.

Unable to regain a numerical majority, leftists have taken to attacking its moral authority using the familiar argument of identity politics by using minority politics to outweigh the majority.

Stephen Breyer was the last white male seriously nominated by a White House Democrat to the Supreme Court (Merrick Garland's nomination was a publicity stunt and Hillary Clinton indicated she would not pursue the nomination). Now Breyer has been forced out by leftist activists who bullied him into making way for a black woman or have his legacy tainted by charges of racism.

Breyer is likely to be the last white male, not to mention Jewish male, Democrat on the Court.

Of the five Democrat nominations in the last two decades, four out of five were women. That’s not because Bill Clinton or Joe Biden, career sexual predators, are feminists, but because making the bench look like a contest of boys vs. girls is a moral, rather than a legal argument.

That’s also why one Senate Democrat voted for Kavanaugh, but none voted for Amy Coney Barrett. Had Ginsburg not died and Barrett not taken her seat, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson would have made for a compelling political, not legal argument, with a boys vs. girls dissents on abortion and any other issues that would have been spun as sexist.

These showdowns would have scored no legal points, but they would have made for great culture war fodder and considering Chief Justice Roberts’ willingness to accede to identity politics arguments on everything from illegal aliens to gay marriage, it would have worked.

Barrett’s appointment stole that perfect gender war lineup leftists had spent two decades working on. It’s the unspoken reason why she makes them fume so much. After all that work put into building a gender war deck, one Republican appointment ruined everything for decades.

It’s also why Democrats are frantically trying to force Justice Thomas off the Supreme Court, or at least onto the sidelines in crucial cases. Having assembled a dream team of a “Wise Latina” and the latest “broken ceiling” in the form of a black female justice, the presence of Thomas on the bench denies Supreme Court Democrats the power to speak for all minorities.

As long as Thomas remains on the bench, he ruins the perfect legal race war they wanted.

Without Thomas, the Democrats could have their diverse “dream team” pitted against a bunch of Republican white men. And while they likely don’t seriously believe that he can be ousted, with Biden likely to lose in 2024, they would settle for Republicans pressuring him into retiring.

Affirmative action nominations and identity politics representation may seem like petty obsessions, but they are central to how the Left seizes and exercises power over us.

Conservatives are constitutionalists while leftists are revolutionaries. Their revolutions have allowed them to seize enormous amounts of power while radically redefining the relationship between Americans and their government by asserting that they are liberating the oppressed.

The identity politicization of the Supreme Court is not a trivial matter, it’s a game changer.

Leftists have to assert that they are fighting in the name of women, even while they deny their existence, or black people, Latinos, Indians, gay people, transgender people or any number of designated victims, real or invented, because all leftist powers are really emergency powers.

The Constitution has effectively been suspended for three generations due a permanent state of victimhood emergency. When the urgency of one emergency appears to fade, another one emerges. And so #BlackLivesMatter gives way to #MeToo and then to #StandWithTransKids with each emergency serving as the impetus for another power grab, political or cultural.

The emergency can never be allowed to end otherwise the Constitution would be restored.

The Supreme Court over the decades played a major role in dismantling our legal rights and the rule of law in order to remedy some alleged practice of discrimination against some designated victim group, but they did so from the distance of fashionable D.C. cocktail parties. The next step is embedding identity politics conflicts directly into the body of the Supreme Court.

Justice Breyer’s ousting by leftist activists who accused him of blocking the nomination of the first black female justice was the first shot. The campaign against Justice Thomas is the next shot. The kinds of tactics that were previously reversed for blocking confirmation of justices are being utilized against sitting justices and before too long the attacks will be coming from within. If you thought accusations of sexual harassment and racism were bad coming during confirmation hearings, imagine them being directed against sitting justices by other justices.

Even if matters don’t escalate quite so far, identity politics will be used to delegitimize majority rulings. If Democrats can force Thomas off the bench, they will have a racial dream team, and coverage of every unfavorable decision will depict it as a white majority oppressing a racial minority. As Democrats continue to calculatedly nominate women and minorities to the bench, they will reduce the Supreme Court and its decisions to a permanent racial and gender conflict.

If they win, their decisions, no matter how unlawful, cannot be challenged because they will be grounded in “lived experience” rather than the law, and to disagree will be racist and sexist. And when they lose, the defeat will be attributed to systemic racism, sexism, and all the usual tropes.

And then the equity logic of identity politics will eclipse and replace the Constitution.

Identity politics equity has always been at war with constitutional equality. Over the generations during which Americans have suffered from the fighting, the Supreme Court has remained apart, issuing decisions without truly experiencing the ugliness, hatred, and abuses of power. Now the bubble that made identity politics and culture wars external things ‘out there’ is about to pop.

From Greta Thunberg to children put on puberty blockers, the victims of the war on childhood are everywhere. They show up at environmental or gun control rallies holding up giant signs in their little hands, they’re indoctrinated at school to enlist as child soldiers for the latest cause.

Adults tell them that unless they save the world, they won’t even live long enough to grow up.

At the heart of the exchange of political buzzwords of the culture war is a simple question about whether childhood should exist. Leftists believe that no one may evade political commitments, and that therefore the idea that childhood should be a space apart from adult causes and concerns is a privilege that it is the job of teachers and popular culture to shatter into pieces.

And that is the war on childhood that we see all around us waged from Disney to kindergarten.

What this is really about is the leftist conviction that children cannot be allowed to be children, occupying a separate world of imagination and wonder, but must be indoctrinated into the fight as soon as possible with The Anti-Racist Baby Book and Baby Loves Green Energy. The only way to save the world is by politicizing childhood and turning children into little adults worrying about microaggressions, experimenting with sexuality, and fearing that the world will end.

Utopia, the fantasy land of progressive adults who act like children, has no room for children.

It is the job of adults to save the planet, assuming it needs saving, to debate political causes, to explore whatever sexuality needs exploring, and to build or wreck their lives how they please.

And it is their primary job to protect children from living in that threatening adult world.

Play is the business of childhood. From the Victorian era onward, civilized societies worked to create safe spaces for children to grow and learn before that became a term for whiny adults. Reformers and muckrakers took children out of factories. Growing prosperity enabled the rise of a children’s culture in which a multitude of toys and books meant for children filled shops.

Adults protected children, preserving their innocence while they developed into unique people.

Baby Boomers, a generation whose name is of an era of progeny, may have enjoyed the last golden childhood in American history. And many never grew up. The generations that followed came of age during the breaking of the American family and now the very idea of family. The indirect damage done to children is now being eclipsed by the direct assault on childhood.

The radical leftists who demand safe spaces for themselves are taking them away from children. Children are being put to work again, not in factories, which would be kinder by comparison, but in radical causes, they are being told that they are on the verge of death, that their country is evil, and the world is about to be destroyed if they don’t do something at once.

That’s where the traumatized children screaming angrily at rallies come from.

Children, especially young children, implicitly trust adults and their parents. If they’re told that the world is about to end, that they’re racists, or have to experiment with gender, they believe it.

The adults who deprive them of their innocence and their childhood are the monsters.

Instead of growing up feeling safe and protected, leftist children are traumatized at an early age by being forced to think of the world as a dangerous and evil place their parents can’t protect them from, but that they must take on the responsibility to change or else everyone will die.

The “parentification” of children began as Baby Boomer despair in the wake of the end of “Camelot”, the death of leftist culture heroes, and the collapse of the counterculture, followed by the conviction that the next generation had to take over and fix things. Adults who acted like children insisted that children had to become adults. And these days the precocious children and the immature adults are all around us. They’re also two halves of the same tarnished coin.

Adults who lacked a safe childhood assert the privileges of childhood as soon as they’re economically secure enough to supply themselves with one. They surround themselves with toys, exclusively pursue the most direct pleasures, and clamor for safe spaces and trigger warnings, for the emotional security they lacked as children. But they deny that emotional security to actual children and selfishly traumatize them for their own actualization.

Teachers on TikTok freely assert that their feelings matter more than the safety of children.

The aggressive push to embed sexual politics into elementary schools is how dysfunctional adults, including some teachers, prioritize their own sexual identity over the welfare of children.

It’s also on a par with pushing politics in general on children at the youngest possible age.

The transgender war on children is only the latest in a series of assaults on childhood by politicising everything. When African warlords enlist 8-year-olds to fight for their causes, we think that’s monstrous, but when leftists turn Greta Thunberg, an unstable teenage girl, into a heroine and encourage even preschoolers to protest over global warming, that’s activism.

Activism is how the educational war on childhood began. Now the war is not just about how children see the world, but against their bodies. Child soldiers are expected to be willing to die. The sexual identity political movement expects children to have their minds damaged and their bodies mutilated, taking away their ability to have their own children, as a political commitment.

Even African warlords would find that unfathomably barbaric.

The ancients sacrificed children to the fires of Moloch while progressives sacrifice them to their passion for wokeness. Either one is a symbolic assertion that the obsessions of the adult are more important than the safety of the child. Civilized adults don’t act this way. Barbarians, which is another way of saying children who inhabit the bodies of adults without the disciplined ethics of adulthood, do things like this because they live in a Lord of the Flies world of emotional turmoil, fearful insecurity, and angry selfishness. They see every encounter as a threat to their fragile identities, their insecurities surround them with humiliating microaggressions, and they retreat from their conviction that the world is a threatening place by escaping into fantasies.

Fantasies are supposed to be the business of children, but in the post-modern age, fantasies, supernatural, conspiratorial, political, and utopian, are all around us. And adults sacrifice children to utopian ideologies that promise that a better world is just around the corner.

All it will take is destroying childhood and then children.

 As the first days of another Passover conclude with the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" recited at the Seder nights ringing in our ears, we know that freedom is a lot more than being able to board a plane and fly off to Jerusalem.

Slavery did not end with the fall of Pharaoh. Since then we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age of oppression ends. What is this freedom that we gained with the fall of a Pharaoh, his drowning armies, and the last sight of his pyramids?

Freedom, like slavery, is as much a state of mind as a state of being. It is possible to be legally free, yet to have no freedom of action whatsoever. And it is possible to be legally a slave and yet to be free in defiance of those restrictions. External coercion alone does not make a man free or slave. 

Slavery, as all our ancestors learned at one time or another, is a state of mind.

What is a slave? A slave is complicit in his own oppression. His slavery has become his natural state and he looks to his master, not to free him, but to command him. He does not want to be free and he resents the very idea of freedom. The Jews in Egypt were not merely restrained by chains and guards. If they had been, then the task of their liberation would have been much simpler. But just as an addictive drug crosses the barrier from physical to psychological dependency, they were enslaved not just with external, but internal chains. They moaned not at the fact of slavery, but at the extremity of it. When their taskmasters complained to Pharaoh, it was not about being enslaved, but of not being given the straw with which to build the bricks that had become their duty.

The worst slavery is of the most insidious kind. It leaves the slave able to think and act, but not as a free man. It leaves him with cunning, but not courage. He is able to use force, but only to bring other slaves into line. And most hideously, this state of affairs seems moral and natural to him. This is his freedom.

The true slave has come to love big brother, to worship at the foot of the system that oppresses him. It is this twisted love that must be torn out of him. It is this idolatry of the whip before which he kneels, this panting to know who his superiors and who his inferiors are, this love of a vast order that allows him to be lost in its wonders, to gaze in awe at the empire of tomorrow which builds its own tombs today, that must be broken. These are his gods and he must kill them within himself to be free.

The Exodus is not the story of the emergence of free men who were enslaved, but the slow painful process by which slaves became a nation of free men, a long troubled journey which has not yet ended. That is why we celebrate Passover, not as an event of the past, but as of a road that we still travel on our long journey from slavery to freedom. Not just the journey of the Jews, but of humanity.

Having escaped from Pharaoh, the Jews built a glittering calf, and having left the desert behind, they sought out a king. Every idol and tyrant was another token of slavery, a desire to put one's ear up against the doorpost and become slaves for life. The idols have changed, but their meaning has not. There is still the pursuit of the master, the master of international law, of a global state, the expert gods of the superstate who rule over the present and the future and dispose of the lives of men.

There are far too many synagogues that worship the Democratic Party, rather than G-d, that bow to the ghost of FDR, and whose scriptures are to be found in the smeared ink of the New York Times. And in Jerusalem far too many eyes look longingly to Washington and to Brussels, to the cities on the hill which offer order, truth and peace.

It is easy to slip into this kind of slavery. The pyramids are grand, the slogans are clever and the future seems assured. It is only when the dusty messenger comes along to whisper that "He has remembered". that those who have not forgotten gather and some among those who have forgotten, remember that they are slaves.

In Egypt the system of the state had to be smashed, not just smashed, but discredited. The war between slavery and freedom could not end until the system of slavery had become ridiculous, until Pharaoh appeared a buffoon and his power no more than organized madness. And yet even so for a generation liberated from slavery, this majestic system, the only one they had ever known, remained their template, and in times of crisis, their immediate instinct was to retreat back to the only civilization they had known.

The slavery of the present is a more subtle thing. It grips the mind more tightly than the body. It still remembers that men enslave themselves best. It knows also that true power comes from making all complicit in its crimes so that they are also complicit in their own degradation. The system only asks that each man enslave himself and kill his own children. And once he has done that, he will only feel it right to demand that everyone else do likewise.

Do it for the environment, for social justice, for the Pharaoh of every age and his ideology. Enslave your mind. Kill your children.

This is the slavery of the system. It requires few whips and many words. It nudges men to be their own taskmasters and to reach out their hands to the new Pharaoh in the hope that he will save them. It is this slavery which is so pervasive, which Passover wakes us from, if it has not already been perverted into the Passover of the slave, into civil rights seders and eco-matzas with donations to Planned Parenthood which will do what the midwives did not.

"Once we were slaves," the ancient words call on us to remember that we have been freed. That it is no longer Pharaoh who enslaves us, but we who enslave ourselves. "Now we are free men." But what is freedom really? Is it the freedom to worship G-d or to worship the system? The system proclaims that it is god. And that is the great lie which ends in the death of the system and its slaves.

Like the slaves of ancient Egypt, we are shaken, dragged out of our everyday routine and commanded to be free. But how do you command men and women to be free? You can lead them through the habits of free men and women who think of themselves as kings and queens, who drink wine while reclining, who sing loudly in defiance of all oppressors, who boldly proclaim "Next year in Jerusalem" while the pharaohs and czars of D.C. and the EU bare their teeth at the Jews living in Jerusalem.

You can unroll the scroll of history and show them how they were taken out, but all this routine is useless unless they understand and are sensible that they are free. Free not in their habits, but in their minds. Ritual is the gateway to a state of mind. A ritual of freedom only succeeds when it invokes a state of mental freedom. Otherwise it is a rite, a practice, a habit whose codes may help some future generation unlock its meaning, but which means little today.

Passover is the beginning and the end. It is the start of the journey and the end of it and we are always in the middle, on the long road out of Egypt, discovering that there are more chains in our minds than we realized a year earlier or a hundred or a thousand years ago. Each step we take toward freedom also reminds us of how far we still have to go.

It is the ritual that reminds us that we are still on the journey, that though we have been lulled by the routine of the system, the trap of the present that like the soothing warmth of an ice storm or the peaceful feeling of a drowning swimmer, embraces us in the forgetfulness of the dying moment, concealing from us the truth that the journey is not over. The desert still lies before us.

This journey is the human journey. It is the recreation of what mankind lost when it defied G-d, when it turned with weapons on each other, when it built towers, created systems and tried to climb to heaven on the backs of slaves and pyramids. It is a transformative road that requires us to not only endure, but to learn.

Surrounded by willing slaves who preach the creed of slavery, we must speak for freedom. Though few seem to remember the journey or the chains, it is our duty to remind ourselves. The message of Passover fully begins only when the holiday ends and its habits carry over into our daily lives. 

Once we were slaves, now we are free

“Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children," Walt Disney once said.

Walt’s unique strategy of building an entertainment empire for kids once made Disney a trusted source of family entertainment. That didn’t last long after Walt's death as Disney started releasing R-rated movies and adult television programming under the Touchstone label.

A decade later, Disney bought Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. During the 90s, while Disney's more family friendly brand was releasing animated cartoons, Miramax featured Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, and the Scream sequels. During this time Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment and assaults. Some of this was taking place even as Disney’s “family friendly” brand released The Hunchback of Notre Dame with its depiction of a lecherous Catholic villain praying before a cross while ranting about his lusts. This was what Disney had become.

In the new century the barrier between the two schizoid faces of Disney has come down.

Disney isn’t for kids anymore. Its movie business is dominated by Marvel blockbusters. Half of Disney+ subscribers, its big bet on the home streaming future, are adults with no children. ‘

What about the theme parks?

60% of Disneyland visitors were adults with no children. Only 36.7% of Disney World visitors had children under 18. The largest demographic for the theme parks, like the movies, are millennials. They are also members of the fandoms who are likeliest to spend money on licensed merchandise, and on toys and movie tie-ins that are Disney’s bread and butter.

And Disney is rapidly adapting with theme parks and resorts that emphasize its Marvel and Star Wars properties more than classic fare. Its Galactic Starcruiser hotel, aimed at Star Wars fans, costs $4,809 for two adults. Why bother with kid stuff when you can sell $13 beers?

Disney may have started out feeding the imaginations of children, but now its business model is acquiring intellectual properties with active fandoms and milking the adult fans for every cent.

Its political opposition to a Florida law barring teachers from pushing sexual issues on kindergarteners might be out of tune with the old family values Disney, but the company’s actual base, like that of virtually every entertainment corp in the country, is a narrow slice of upscale urban millennials with lots of disposable income and no families. Wokes are Disney’s base.

In 1966, the idea that a single adult would spend more money on Disney merchandise than a family of four would have seemed ridiculous. In 2022, it’s just the new normal. If you doubt that stop by a theme park and see how many of the adults with no children wearing every single piece of Disney merchandise on sale would love to lecture you about queer theory.

These are the people Disney caters to now. Not little girls who want to be princesses. That’s why its theme parks will no longer address little girls as princesses. That’s also why rides like Pirates of the Caribbean or Jungle Cruise are being revamped to be more politically correct. Disney’s new woke demographic is much pickier than even the pickiest child could be.

It’s also sexually creepy.

Disney’s new demographic are adults who have never properly grown up and on some level still think of themselves as children. That’s also the profile for the average child molester. And of the kind of adult who insists that schools force children to “explore their sexual identities”.

Healthy adults raise, protect and care for children. Deeply unhealthy ones erase the barriers between themselves and children in ways that can be merely immature or outright evil.

Disney is a messed up company with a messed up base. This is no secret to theme park employees who will, anonymously, spout about it at forums. But some of those employees have also been caught up in child sex investigations. Disney has the clout to make much of that go away through its advertising budgets and the incredible power its theme parks wield over local governments in California and Florida (though Gov. DeSantis has warned that’s going away.)

The growth of Disney paralleled a post-war child-oriented family culture. The collapse of that culture into counterculture sent the company astray. And after decades in the wilderness reemerged with cartoons full of show tunes that catered as much to Broadway lovers as to children, to an indie film movement with a seamy underbelly, and finally perpetual fandom.

Disney found its post-Walt success in moving beyond selling universal family entertainment to tapping into obsessive subcultures. As a company that had nurtured fandom in children, it was uniquely positioned to capitalize on the transformation of adults into overgrown children.

None of this is good for adults, for children, or for the culture. Neither is Disney.

American birth rates are lagging and the family is in a poor state. Only 3 in 10 millennials are living with a child and a spouse. Much of the demographic growth is coming from immigrant childbirths, not Americans. Seen from this vantage point, Disney’s bet on diversity in children’s entertainment and on catering to adult fans willing to drop $5,000 on a hotel with lightsaber training or sing-along sessions to cartoon show tunes from their childhoods makes sense.

The Walt Disney business model depended on a healthy national family. Shareholders are not going to bet on a growth segment in the American nuclear family that doesn’t exist. Betting on dysfunctional adults with sizable disposable incomes makes a whole lot more sense.

Americans are more atomized than ever. Families are drifting apart. Religious faith is imploding among millennials and zoomers. The fictional characters and entertainers of popular culture are taking the place of family and faith. Fandom provides a sense of belonging and culture that community no longer does. Main Street is being replaced by The Avengers and Mos Eisley.

And who can blame a generation born into a broken nation for choosing fantasy over reality?

Peter Pan, like the Narnia books, concludes with the reality that children have to leave fantasy behind, grow up and become adults. But what happens when the children never grow up?

Disney still has a profitable kids segment, but its real profits come from overgrown children born into broken families, prematurely coming of sexual age, who are eager to embrace leftist utopian causes and fantasies, who are seeking an identity and an escape at the same time.

The company isn’t for kids, it’s for broken adults. And it’s only natural that Disney would seek to create more broken adults to perpetuate its business model. A healthy functional adult isn’t nearly as profitable for the entertainment giant as a dysfunctional one addicted to its product.

Advocating that schools push sexual identity on kindergarteners is a cause that the entire entertainment industry, which wouldn’t exist without dysfunctional adults, can get behind.

What’s bad for America is great for Hollywood.

Functional people don’t spend all of their time in front of a television set. And functional families don’t plant their children in front of one and then buy them whatever they want to get them to shut up. Functional people are not very profitable for Disney or for the rest of Hollywood.

The entertainment industry went from a leisure enterprise to one that thrives on dysfunction, that is less interested in having 60% of the country watching something for an hour than having 10% of the country binge watch it for six hours. Ratings and demographic profiles of the industry reflect a profound shift away from entertainment as a past time to entertainment as a lifestyle.

And even an identity.