Let’s do a monologue. Are we coming apart at the seams because of Democrat regimes? When important stuff gets neglected it falls apart as expected. Escaping the failed city of Baltimore got a little harder this week after a freighter plowed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. And as far as metaphors go, that’s more on the nose than the powder on Hunter Biden’s schnoz. We’re still piecing together what happened, but already activists sprung into action.
A writer at theroot.com says once it’s rebuilt, the bridge should be renamed after a prominent African American instead of the white guy who wrote the Star Spangled Banner, but once owned slaves. Well, they could replace it with P. Diddy, he also wrote songs, and he also owned slaves. Yeah, I’m going to get worried. And so with President Biden pledging taxpayer money to rebuild it, everyone will be on the hook for the privilege of erasing Francis Scott Key.
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And with that kind of focus on useless, woke virtue signaling, it’s no surprise things are falling apart right in front of us.
SONG: Every damn thing is broken, since America let woke in. They’ll take your money to fix it and still call you a racist dip****. Infrastructure’s left abandoned. Don’t expect no help from Brandon. Everything is falling apart.
Nice. True. Lately it feels like everything’s coming apart at the seams. And not just if you’re Joy Behar’s moo moo there aren’t even seams to a moo moo. But think about it, cities, borders, planes, trains, automobiles, bridges, ships, the justice system, the economy, biology, education, housing, our aging politicians. Meanwhile, we used to have trains that stay on track. Doors that stay on planes. Crooks who stay in jails. Squatters who stay out of homes. Perves who stay out of schools. Lawmakers who didn’t inject embryonic fluid to get through the day.
But that’s what happens when the people in charge focus on identity politics, foreign wars, social media and women with boners. Granted, that’s a technical phrase. Granted, some of the stuff on this list obviously isn’t all on Biden, but it feels like this is what happens with chronic neglect. And we saw that phenomenon this week with the literal collapse of the bridge. It wasn’t the first time that ship crashed into something.
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In Belgium, it collided with a container terminal. Luckily, nobody was injured or killed that time. This time, not so lucky. And things are more likely to go wrong when all the other systems are failing and they’re failing because of neglect, as all our attention is paid to other things. The only thing that seems to be working just fine is our smartphones. Isn’t it hilarious that the things that are bad for our children are also made by children? Circle of life people.
But when activists in the media who enable them jump to talking about renaming the bridge, it’s just another sign of how unserious we are as a society. The shortest distance between two points is a fatal accident and an accusation of racism. But don’t worry, Mayor Pete is on the case. He hasn’t blamed this on racism yet, but give him time.
PETE BUTTIGIEG: If a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or would have been in New York, was designed too low for it to pass by, but that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.
Fine, fine. Okay, okay, but people like Pete can focus on the past because they’re far removed from the real present world. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to live in the system he neglects.
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A theory by a scientist named John Ioannidis sheds light on why stuff like this keeps happening. He compares this to an army of ants caught in an ant mill, where whole societies are trapped in a death spiral, a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behavior marked by continuous, flawed decision making, single minded focus on one set of solutions denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking, and learned helplessness. But that’s a lot of big words. But they render a very simple explanation.
We took our eye off the ball. Our ancestors built an amazing system based on reciprocity, where we could overcome our differences if we focused on a mutually beneficial collaboration. Some call it capitalism. Many call it imperfect. But despite its flaws, it remained the greatest system this world has seen, mainly because it got rid of conflicts over lineage in favor of trade, commerce, we built cities, towns and bridges pretty fast.
Some people they got more than others, but if everyone was equal, which is an impossibility, there would be no incentive to collaborate at all. We’d expect to get paid for doing nothing, which is how a lot of our systems appear today. The goal, of course, was equal opportunity, and we’re trying hard to get there. But this success made the offspring of our ancestors bored and complacent and armed with bad ideas churned out by a misery conveyor belt known as college.
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They decided that what’s far more important in improving things that worked was the trendy crap that would tear them apart. Identity politics, wokeism, the eternal stain of oppression. It’s fun to be outraged, and it’s easy when you don’t have to get your hands dirty, but when you don’t deal with concrete problems, you get concrete problems and the foundation starts to crumble.
Focus only on the window dressing and not the smashed windows. What do you expect? It’s ironic when you think about it. Only after those windows are gone are we able to see things clearly. And it’s certainly not a view worth bragging about.
Greg Gutfeld currently serves as host of Gutfeld! (weeknights, 11PM-12AM/ET) and co-host of cable news’ highest-rated program The Five (weekdays, 5-6PM/ET).