POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

Walter Reed 'cease and desist' order for Catholic priests violates the First Amendment, GOP lawmakers say

Two dozen Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon after Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) sent a "cease and desist" letter to Catholic priests to stop providing care during Holy Week, slamming the move as a violation of the First Amendment.

Twenty-four Republican members of Congress penned a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In the letter, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, the lawmakers blast the Biden administration’s "attack on the Christian faith."

"Last week, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Holy Name College Friary, a group of Catholic priests, ordering them to stop providing pastoral care at their facility," the letter reads. "The same group of priests have served at Walter Reed for almost 20 years, and this order came days before Easter."

"Forcing priests to stop providing care during Holy Week is not only morally wrong, but also a violation of the First Amendment," the members of Congress wrote.

The lawmakers praised the Catholic priests who have "stood alongside our service members through the darkest days of our history."

"They joined American service members on the battlefield and provided care to all in need," the letter says.

The lawmakers are demanding answers from Austin on why the Biden administration sent the "cease and desist" letter and why the administration chose to "terminate the contact" with the Holy Name College Friary.

The lawmakers also claim that the Archdiocese of the Military informed them that the contract for providing pastoral care was "awarded to a for-profit, secular company that does not provide pastoral care."

"Who was awarded the contract and why?" they asked, requesting further contract terms, applications, review comments, the award letter and all internal emails and documents related to the contract.

"This attack on the Christian faith by the Biden administration during Holy Week is unconscionable," the lawmakers wrote, demanding answers by April 21.

The Defense Health Agency told Fox News Digital that there "was no cancelation of Catholic services at Walter Reed, especially during Holy Week."

"Palm Sunday mass was conducted by the Catholic priest assigned to the hospital and there were services on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, confessions were offered as well as mass celebrated by a Catholic priest," the Defense Health Agency spokesperson said.

The Defense Health Agency also told Fox News Digital in an email that "a contract was NOT terminated."

"As with most contracts they have a beginning and an end. This contract originally ended on December 31st and was extended until March 31st. The contractor was aware of the contract end date," the spokesperson said. "A new contract was awarded to a different company effective April 1st."

"When the previous contractor continued to provide services after April 1st, a cease and desist letter was sent stating the former contractor could not perform services since they were not under contract," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added: "The current contract is under review to ensure the right services are being provided. But there was absolutely no loss of Catholic Services to the community."

Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., gives remarks after receiving an endorsement during a Save America Rally with former President Donald Trump at the Adams County Fairgrounds in Mendon, Illinois, on June 25, 2022.
Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., gives remarks after receiving an endorsement during a Save America Rally with former President Donald Trump at the Adams County Fairgrounds in Mendon, Illinois, on June 25, 2022. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

The letter to Austin was sent by Reps. Mary E. Miller, R-Ill.; Jim Banks, R-Ind.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Byron Donalds, R-Fla.; Tom Tiffany, R-Wis.; Scott Perry, R-Pa.; Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.; Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.; Warren Davidson, R-Ohio; Matt Rosendale, R-Mont.; Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.; Ralph Norman, R-S.C.; Bob Good, R-Va.; Keith Self, R-Texas; Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz.; Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.; Josh Brecheen, R-Okla.; Brian Babin, R-Texas; Ben Cline, RpVa.; Andy Harris, R-Md.; Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn.; Michael Cloud, R-Texas; Eli Crane, R-Ariz.; Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla.; and Alex X. Mooney, R-W.Va.

"Priests and pastors guided our troops through the darkest days of our toughest battles. The Biden administration chose Easter weekend to kick Catholic priests out of Walter Reed, violating their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion," Miller told Fox News Digital. "I am proud to lead this letter to Biden's Defense Secretary to demand answers on this unconscionable attack on Christian service members and the First Amendment."

The Pentagon, though, said there was an active duty Army priest providing Catholic coverage for Holy Week and Easter at Walter Reed after the cease and desist letter.

But two senior U.S. defense officials told Fox News that the decision surrounding the renewal of the contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was not handled by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and did not involve the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The officials said the decision was not made by the Pentagon.

Instead, an official said the contract was handled by the Defense Health Agency.

The letter from the lawmakers came after the Catholic archdiocese said in a statement that Walter Reed issued the cease and desist order against Holy Name College Friary, a Franciscan community of priests and brothers that has served at the center for nearly 20 years.

Walter Reed said the contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was terminated at the end of March, just as Holy Week was about to begin. Walter Reed replaced the contract with a secular defense contracting firm that the Catholic archdiocese argues will not be able to provide adequate care.

Walter Reed, though, defended the move over the weekend, saying that Catholic Easter Services were provided to those who "wish to attend," and included a celebration of Mass and the administration of Confession by an ordained Catholic priest.

"For many years, a Catholic ordained priest has been on staff at WRNMMC providing religious sacraments to service members, veterans and their loved ones," Walter Reed said in a statement. "There has also been a pastoral care contract in place to supplement those services provided."

"Currently... the pastoral care contract is under review to ensure it adequately supports the religious needs of our patients and beneficiaries," the Walter Reed statement said. "Although at this time the Franciscan Diocese will not be hosting services on Sunday parishioners of the Diocese while patients at our facilities may still seek their services."

The AMS was created by St. Pope John Paul II to provide the Church’s services to veterans and service members in the U.S. and overseas. The archdiocese, which does not have geographical boundaries, is responsible for the care of 1.8 million Catholics across the globe.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-lawmakers-say-walter-reed-cease-and-desist-for-catholic-priests-is-violation-of-the-first-amendment

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Expel Them Again

Ann Coulter

The vote to expel two Democrats from the Tennessee House of Representatives last week reminds us of one of the immutable laws of politics: Whenever Democrats accuse anyone of racism, demand to see the videotape.

Hey -- remember the 2016 racist bus attack on three black coeds at the University at Albany that caught Hillary Clinton's attention? They claimed a group of white men shouting racial epithets started hitting them, but no one on the bus cared! Foolishly, in retrospect, they didn't check to see if the bus had cameras. It did. Rallies, hysteria, a Hillary tweet ... and then it turned out they were the ones beating up a white girl.

Or how about the Princeton professor who claimed she'd been the victim of a vicious racist policeman in 2016? "Many women who look like me," she wrote on Twitter, "have a much more frightening end to such arrests." After a hue and cry, the police released the officer's dashcam footage. The officer had been almost comically polite to her, despite her going 20 mph over the speed limit, as well as driving on a suspended license.

In 2015 in Connecticut, another BIPOC lady professor decided that, instead of simply paying a small traffic fine, she'd wreck a cop's life. In a blizzard of letters to government officials, she accused the policeman of racism and demanded that "action be taken against the officer." The police released a recorded transcript of the entire interaction -- and guess what? The officer never said any of the racist things she'd alleged. He, too, was a model of professionalism.

The list goes on and on and on. And on and on. And on and on ... (Though it's important we avoid reflexive cynicism. Only the most callous among us would doubt Jussie Smollett.)

In any case, the moral of the story: Democrats say RACIST!!, you say "Show me the video."

Which brings us to the allegedly racist Tennessee Republicans who expelled two of their colleagues this week just because they were black! (Didn't Republicans notice these guys were black before now?)

MEDIA: The expelled lawmakers did nothing that others didn't do!

Normal people: Show us the video.

MEDIA: Trust us, these lawmakers were the picture of decorum.

Normal people: Show us the video.

MEDIA: We must have left it in the car. We'll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.

There's a reason Tennessee Democrats frantically tried to prevent the playing of the video.

What it shows is two black Democrats, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, on the Tennessee House floor carrying on for more than an hour, shouting into a bullhorn, waving protest signs, banging on the podium like a drum, and leading chants with protesters in the gallery:

Power to the people! Power to the people!

No justice, no peace! No action, no peace!

Whose house? Our house! Whose house? Our house!

Gun control now! Gun control now!

Please explain how the Jan. 6 QAnon Shaman showed more contempt for the democratic process than Jones and Pearson did. How about compared to a representative sending naughty texts to female colleagues outside of business hours -- the casus belli of the last expulsion in 2016.

But according to MSNBC, the only reason Jones and Pearson were expelled was because the "predominantly white, predominantly male" lawmakers refuse to "coexist with representatives who are female or young or black" -- as Nicole Wallace put it. (Nicole: Relax. You've got the job.)

In bafflement, Wallace asked, "Why did they have to be expelled? Why did this come to this?"

Idea: Show the video, Nicole!

Rep. Gloria Johnson, the body-positive white representative, begged not to be expelled, pointing out with some justice that, unlike Jones and Pearson, she broke no House rules -- never shouted, pounded the podium, displayed a protest sign or used a bullhorn.

But as soon as her argument succeeded and she wasn't expelled, Johnson rushed to MSNBC to say racism was the only reason she wasn't. The sole deciding factor, she said, was "the color of our skin."

If so, then why did she flap her gums about not breaking any House rules? Why not just say, Hey, guys! I'm white! (Amazon is now accepting pre-orders for her forthcoming memoir, "Profiles in Craven.")

Some conservatives say the Republicans should have expelled the white lady just to avoid (false) charges of racism. Yes, and innocent whites and Asians should be sent to prison so no one can say our criminal justice system is racist.

I'm sorry if black people break rules out of proportion to their numbers in the population, but we don't punish the innocent to achieve some childish idea of "equity."

Rep. Johnson is a liar, but she didn't break any House rules. Jones and Pearson did.

Johnson defended the assault on democracy by her black colleagues, saying, "The younger generation has a different way of speaking. They have a different way of addressing things." So get used to bullhorns during legislative sessions, America! It's just black style.

Apparently, we've returned to the Treating-Black-People-Like-Children phase of "Diversity." I just wish liberals would state their racism plainly: We simply can't expect black people to abide by white norms of dignity and decorum.

https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2023/04/12/expel-them-again-n2621890 ?

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The new elite: the rise of the progressive aristocracy: Identity now trumps talent

A new form of Leftist oppression

In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them – ‘The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate’, in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before.

The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of attacks on the meritocracy, starting with criticisms of the workings of the 11-plus exam and then broadening into denunciations of social hierarchy and social mobility. Egalitarians argued that meritocracy replaced a proper socialist idea – equality of results – with equality of opportunity. Radical activists argued in favour of collective rights (based on gender or skin colour) rather than equal opportunity for all based on ability.

The first black studies department was founded at San Francisco State University in 1968 and the first women’s studies department in San Diego State University two years later. Michel Foucault and like-minded thinkers on the far left questioned every imaginable distinction – between the sane or the mad, the criminal and the non-criminal – on the grounds that they were expressions of the sinister workings of power.

The assault on the meritocracy paused for a while at the highest level of politics, though not before doing the immense damage of destroying grammar schools. Margaret Thatcher argued that the real engine of meritocracy is not the well-organised state but the market. Tony Blair embraced league tables and academic schools. But now we are confronted with a new wave of attacks on the meritocratic idea that is far more serious than the one that occurred in the 1960s.

The right has renewed its assault on meritocracy in the form of populist rage rather than High Tory worry about social mobility. A section of the Brexit right rails against the educated elites on the grounds that they are airy-fairy liberals who don’t know the price of a pint of milk. Middle-of-the-road philosophers have also turned against the idea, as seen in two newish books – Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap.

The radical left is now presenting a critique of meritocracy that is far more extreme than anything that has gone before it, but which also wields far more cultural heft: a woke assault on meritocracy. It starts by repeating standard leftish complaints about meritocracy: that it protects social inequality by dressing it up as cognitive inequality, thereby adding to the already intolerable pressure of modern life. Then it throws the explosive question of race into the heart of the debate. This rests on the demeaning claim that the best way to promote members of ethnic minorities is through ‘equity’ rather than ‘excellence’. It also makes it far more difficult for ordinary people to discuss the subject dispassionately and far easier for radicals to engage in demagoguery and polarisation. Even more importantly, it creates a new hierarchy of virtue at the heart of society. We are thus moving to a more ambitious stage in the left’s long social revolution: from simply dismantling meritocracy to creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.

Meritocracy is ‘racist’ and ‘the antithesis of fair’, pronounced Alison Collins, a former commissioner of education in San Francisco. And the old idea of judging people as individuals? That’s the white man’s game of divide and rule. ‘Colour blindness’ – what we used to regard as the absence of discrimination – is dismissed as a con, designed to draw a veil over millennia of exploitation. The entire machinery of meritocracy is rejected as a legacy of the eugenic movement or imperialism. Or, perhaps, the ‘white’ way of looking at the world. ‘The use of standardised tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade black minds and legally exclude black bodies,’ writes Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby.

The woke revolution does not simply aim to remedy past injustice. ‘The only remedy to racist discrimination,’ writes Kendi, ‘is antiracist discrimination.’ The idea is some groups by virtue of their history of marginalisation and exploitation are wiser and more moral than others. The belief that racism is not confined to intentional acts of discrimination but woven into the DNA of society implies white people are automatically guilty of harbouring racist thoughts and seeing the world through racist eyes. Racial minorities inevitably enjoy a higher moral status than whites but they also enjoy something equally important – greater access to understanding and moral wisdom. This is why the woke habitually invoke ‘lived experience’ and ‘my truth’. Conversely, white people are guilty of original sin until they do what the kulaks were supposed to do and abolish themselves as a class. ‘Abolish whiteness!’ says Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. ‘White lives don’t matter. As white lives.’

These race-based arguments bring with them the exhumation of the pre-modern habit of judging people based on group characteristics rather than individual achievement. History is repeating itself as both tragedy and farce at the same time.

Rather than progressing towards a post-discriminatory future, we have a pyramid structure once again, but this time it’s inverted. Rather than the upper classes sitting at the top and the lower classes as the bottom, the former outcasts occupy the commanding heights. Under the new hierarchy, the more oppressed groups that you belong to, the more moral virtue you possess. Similarly, the more privileged characteristics you hold, the lower you are on the moral scale and the more you have to do to make amends for the past.

Being born into an oppressed group is not enough in itself. Indeed, minorities who don’t share woke beliefs are treated with particular disdain (as black conservatives have long known and gender-critical feminists are painfully discovering). You must have faith. That means more than just subscribing to a set of beliefs. It means having a heart that has been awakened through a process of conversion and ceaseless struggle. An aristocracy of faith is superimposed upon an aristocracy of caste: struggle can change your place in the caste system, though people who are born into a privileged caste will obviously have to struggle much harder than those who have the privilege of being born unprivileged. Whatever you think of Prince Harry, he is clearly ‘doing the work’.

This aristocracy of faith is hypervigilant and hyperactive – forever discovering signs of racism in even the smallest things and forever organising demonstrations and cancellations. At the same time, it’s also extremely patient. The woke aristocracy’s march through the institutions is an exercise in long-term social change that should put short-term conservatives to shame.

The old notion of IQ is being replaced with WQ – a woke quotient. This phenomenon is at its most advanced in the US, particularly at its universities. University students are selected for their WQ as revealed by their personal statements and extracurricular activities (‘I spent my vacations fighting racism in Guatemala’), as well as by their academic grades. Indeed, a growing number of universities are reducing the weight placed on standardised test scores while increasing their emphasis on more subjective criteria. Aspiring professors are required to submit diversity statements when they apply for jobs as well as conventional academic resumes.

Yale now has as many academic administrators as it does tenured staff. Many of them have titles which include the word ‘diversity’, as in ‘chief diversity officer’ and ‘deputy chief diversity officer’. Chief diversity officers have become such a familiar part of the university scene that one executive recruitment firm, Hunt Scanlon, gushes they occupy ‘one of the most important positions for shaping the vision, culture and very face of institutions of higher learning from coast to coast’.

It’s a golden rule of academia that what US universities do today British universities will do tomorrow, but in a secretive and cut-price manner. A commitment to diversity is increasingly used as a tiebreaker in making academic appointments. When making applications for grants – the bane of the British academic’s life – candidates know that they have a much better chance of success if they explore woke themes. Some subjects – all those ‘studies’ – are predicated on the assumptions of the inverted pyramid of virtue. Others, such as history, have replaced the old history of progress and promise with a new one of oppression and guilt.

British universities may not have access to the same gargantuan bureaucracies as their US cousins, though the bureaucrats they have are cut from the same ideological cloth. But they have got into the habit of relying on pressure groups to do some of the work for them. Stonewall stands ready (for a fee) to certify whether our seats of learning are LGBT+ friendly by measuring them against a diversity index and then enrolling them in its Diversity Champions scheme. Universities cannot receive research grants, the lifeblood of academia, unless they employ Athena Swan accredited ‘leads’ who use Athena Swan accredited measures to show they are inclusive employers. The organisation’s definition of diversity and inclusion involves hitting goals to increase the hiring of minorities, even if minorities constitute a majority of employees, and submitting employees to unconscious bias training.

The global business elite is also screening people for their WQ not just by using ‘diversity’ as a criterion for selection but by soaking everything it does in woke ideology. Business schools devote far more effort to teaching about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) than about maximising shareholder value. Bain, the management consulting firm, celebrates ‘Womxn’s History Month’. Consultants McKinsey talks about ‘equity’, conveniently ignoring that its business model depends on shovelling money into the pockets of partners while new recruits do all the grunt work. HSBC’s advertisements tell a rapturous story about our multicultural future. The ever-expanding list of companies that sponsor the annual gay pride celebrations include BAE, an arms manufacturer.

Human resources departments are expanding their role in corporations from old-fashioned bread-and-butter questions – making sure that everyone is on PAYE, for example – to shaping the workforce. These diversity champions find it just as natural to employ a woke framework in making appointments as the old gatekeepers found it natural to employ an academic or professional framework. ‘Do our latest hires help us to hit our diversity targets? What can we do to eliminate the ever-present danger of discrimination? Are we being inclusive enough? What if our older employees harbour all sorts of unconscious biases?’ The assumption is always the same: that members of ethnic minorities will not be able to make it on the basis of their own merits, but need a helping hand from a virtuous bureaucracy.

The public and charitable sectors are even more prone to such thinking. The NHS employs ‘lived experience’ tsars on £115,000 a year despite the health service’s dire financial state. Oxfam recently found the resources to publish an inclusive language guide that included convoluted arguments about when you can use the term ‘womxn’ and when you can’t. (‘Some trans people object to the phrase on the basis that trans women are women and the use of “womxn” might suggest otherwise.’)

All this is not only changing the criteria whereby people are selected for elite positions; it is changing the people who are doing the selecting. This is not merely a struggle between the educated elite and regular people for control of the culture. It is a struggle within the educated class, with a new class of woke bureaucrats seizing power from the traditional gatekeepers of professional society, taking advantage of a combination of moral power (nobody wants to be accused of being a racist) and the growing self-absorption of professionals (many academics are more interested in publishing research than taking part in time-consuming admissions processes).

The return of inverted-pyramid thinking is replacing the concept of ‘inclusion’ with something more sinister. It is becoming commonplace for US campuses to offer racially segregated orientation programmes, dormitories, graduation ceremonies and social events. ‘People of colour need spaces without white people,’ proclaims Kelsey Blackwell, a writer, teacher and certified Somatic coach. The University of California at Santa Cruz not only has a Social Justice House but a LGBTQ&A floor within the house. Goldsmiths University in London has hosted events which debar white men from attending. A 2018 Young Labour Equalities conference excluded people who were not ‘diverse’. Sir Keir Starmer is doing his best to muzzle such thinking in his party in order not to frighten Middle England, but we can be sure that such ideas will return with force if he wins the next election.

The morality of all this is up for debate. (Though I personally find the return of race-based rights deeply worrying, I realise that many profoundly moral young people disagree with me equally strongly.) But the morality of replacing the old aristocracy of talent with an aristocracy of woke also needs to be weighed against two practical consequences. The first is that it will reduce economic efficiency, as we stuff more square pegs in round holes. Meritocratic societies and institutions are much more productive than non-meritocratic ones. Singapore is a more productive society than Sri Lanka (the two had roughly the same GDPs in 1960 before Lee Kuan Yew pioneered Singapore’s meritocratic revolution). The Nordic countries are more productive than Greece and Portugal. Public companies are more productive than family companies (unless family companies bring in professional managers or subject the younger generation to a vigorous weeding-out process).

The brain drain only flows in one direction: from the non-meritocratic to the meritocratic world. This process will be self-reinforcing. One of the most reliable laws of social affairs is Rowse’s law (named after the great historian A.L. Rowse), that without first-rate people to pull in the right direction, second-raters will always appoint third-raters and fourth-raters and so on in an accelerating avalanche of mediocrity.

Reducing your economic efficiency is a foolish thing to do at the best of times, because it condemns our children to a lower standard of living than we have enjoyed. It is suicidal at a time when an increasingly belligerent China is rediscovering the virtues of meritocracy, but this time by producing scientists and technologists, not Confucian scholars.

The second is that it politicises the distribution of opportunities and jobs. One of the virtues of meritocracy is that it takes some of the heat out of job allocation: people with power try their hardest to give jobs to those who deserve them and people who are disappointed can take comfort from the fact that the system tried to be objective. But once you say there is nothing to the distribution of jobs and opportunities but the raw exercise of power, you encourage a free-for-all. And once you start deliberately privileging some groups over others on the basis of race, you reinforce ethnic enmity and reward ethnic power politics.

The new woke elite, if it continues to gain strength, is destined to rule over an increasingly divided and embittered society as people advance their interests through collective agitation rather than individual effort, and as economic growth becomes a thing of the past. Perhaps we should think a little harder about replacing the aristocracy of talent with the aristocracy of woke

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-attack-on-meritocracy/

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The politics of social class are now reversed: The affluent are now Leftist and the workers are now conservative

In the recent US midterms (and the just-held Wisconsin Supreme Court vacancy election), the Democrats massively outspent the Republicans, in some races by as much as six times more than the Republicans spent. Add in the indirect expenditures and the Democrat spending advantage may have been larger. I’ve been saying it in these pages for some time but the simple truth is that (in general terms) wealthy people now vote left. This is true in the US, in Britain, in Canada and here. Moreover, in the US the richest of the rich give huge money to the Democrats. Let’s be honest; Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cooke, Mark Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, yes Warren Buffet and a host of non-celebrity capitalists are functional Democrats. (I leave to one side the pernicious effect Bill Gates had in pushing lockdown authoritarianism and other woeful aspects of the pandemic years.) Put differently, George Soros has lots of company on the political left.

Or ask yourself whether you think Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Entertainment, Big Law, Big Energy and Finance align more with the political Right or the political Left these days. It’s not even close, is it? Every fad originating with the hard left of the Democrat party seems eventually to make its way into the corporate boardroom, first in the US and then around the rest of the anglosphere. Certainly all these Bigs seem to have quietly signed on with Biden. You can bet they’ll be going all in to stop the Republicans from winning in 2024.

But let’s just consider Australia. Already some of the big corporates are coming out for a Yes as regards the Voice. Take Coles. Even now they have a poster up in Cairns taking the Yes side. Isn’t that incredibly virtuous of this company, using shareholders’ money (not the board members’ personal money or the CEO’s but shareholders’) to push for a Yes vote on an issue that is party political and that will be a close run thing, at best, for the affirmative case? Can you even imagine a big corporation 50 or 60 years ago taking a side in a constitutional referendum that split the political parties? Yet today this is apparently perfectly fine, certainly no different to, say, Zuckerberg aligning with the Biden administration on, well, near on everything. Or Disney spending shareholders’ money to attack Ron DeSantis over legislation that forbade sex education for children aged six to eight. Disney jumped in bed with the hard Left that called this law the ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill’ though there is no distinction at all about the sort of sex education being disallowed; it was all banned. (DeSantis, at least, pushed back against these woke corporates and took away the special Disney legal exemptions from normal zoning and tax laws which hurt enough that the new Disney CEO Bob Iger last week called them anti-business. Gee Bob, if you’re going to take explicit sides on political issues then being anti-your-political-opponents means being anti-business, doesn’t it?)

Those of us who are conservatives need to realise that the winning conservative coalition today is very different to what it was 50 years ago. We are now the party not just of small business but of the lower-middle and working classes. (Good! For one thing they don’t wallow in insufferable, unendurable virtue-signalling.) We conservatives are now the party of the suburbs. Just as Boris did in 2019 and Trump did in 2016, we can put together winning coalitions of voters who want cheap energy, some backbone on culture issues, protected borders, lower mass immigration and some Thatcher-like husbandry when it comes to the budget (the last of these clearly being more honoured in the breach than the observance, or in the manifesto more than in the execution).

But designing Liberal party policies for the Teal seats is a sure loser. Do that and you lose big chunks of the rest of your conservative coalition in the many more seats that matter. And then you lose big time in WA, SA, Victoria, NSW, nationally.

So ignore the Teal seats. If the economy implodes – a far from implausible possibility with this current Labor team at the helm – then the rich folk in the Teal seats will come back to Team Libs regardless of the non-woke, non-Green policies the party has adopted because these virtue-signalling Teal voters draw the line at losing too much of the moolah, dough, swag, green stuff. If that happens, fine. But making policies explicitly to save Josh Frydenberg’s old seat was plain stupid.

Here’s what follows. For one thing, I like what US Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri said to a big corporate type who was complaining about some Biden administration regulations that were taking money out of the pockets of the corporate class. I paraphrase, but Hawley’s response amounted to this: ‘You’re against us Republicans on all the crucially important culture stuff and protecting the borders and non-activist judges and on free speech issues but now you want us to help you on economic stuff. I agree with you, by the way, on your free market economic positions but why would I lift a finger to help you? You’ve made your bed. Go and lie in it.’

That is exactly my view. If Labor stupidly starts raiding the superannuation accounts and nest eggs of these big corporate types who are spending shareholder monies to push a Yes on this incredibly divisive and horrible-for-Australia Voice referendum, I cannot think of a single digit on either of my hands that I would lift to help them. Stupidly bad policy to attack super? You bet it is. Worth helping these corporates who basically hate our social and cultural and pro-democracy views? Nope. I’m with Senator Hawley.

Meantime here in Australia there is something all of us voters can do who think that this Voice proposal deals in malicious group rights (based on race or whatever you wish to call it), will undermine democratic decision-making, will lead to rent-seeking, will deliver the exact opposite of reconciliation (just look at the name calling galore from the Yes camp already), the list goes on.

We can inconvenience ourselves enough to avoid the corporates who are taking sides in this debate. Coles is out for me. If Woolworths goes down the same road then it’s IGA. You have to put your money where your mouth is a little, readers. And get ready for all sorts of charities to come out in favour of the Voice (since it’s more virtue-signalling that’s cheap and easy for the people who run them).

Well, they ultimately need charitable donations. Don’t give them a penny of your money. And if any university comes out in favour, write to the vice-chancellor and say that you are stopping all donations to your alma mater.

Remember, for the virtue-signalling lefty elites money still talks. DeSantis has the right idea. We only have our tiny spending but we can choose where it goes.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-lefty-corporate-class