Letter From Charlottesville: Can Left and Right Realize, in Time, the Existential Need to Unite?
I’ve been traveling in America, that poor beleaguered superpower, for the last week or so. This is a postcard for you from the war.
I left Brooklyn, New York, a week ago. On January 10, 2024, James Madison High School, up the road from where we are staying, had been commandeered by New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams. The kids who were supposed to have been learning math and English and science, were forced to stay home — once again — for “remote learning”, as their classrooms were occupied by people who had come into our nation unlawfully. The school, the kids were told the day before it happened, was to be used as a “temporary overnight respite center.”
‘“To ensure a smooth transition for families temporarily sheltering overnight in the building, our school building will be closed on Wednesday, January 10 and school will be in session remotely for all students,” Principal Jodie Cohen said in a statement to families.” ‘
Irate parents held a rally at the school. A mom called the closure and takeover “unacceptable.” The woman, who did not use — feared to use? — her real name, said that she was “very angry.” She made the case that the city “put our children last” and were instead “prioritizing the migrants.” State Assemblyman Michael Novakhov, whose district this is, told NBC that the decision to move kids out, and illegal migrants in, was “just really wrong. The school is not a right place for migrants, for anyone except the kids.”
New York City has taken in 170,000 illegal immigrants — or what NBC inaccurately calls “asylum-seekers” — in the last two years. 70,000 are still in the care of the city, and New York expects to spend $4.7 billion to provide shelter, food and services to “asylum-seekers” in fiscal year 2024. (The reason “asylum-seekers” is an inaccurate term for the migrant influx is that there are narrow legal grounds for seeking asylum or refugee status — you must prove that you are fleeing torture or will be imprisoned for political reasons if you return to your home country, for instance. Requesting asylum status is a legal process that takes years. The people who are here now, overwhelmingly, having walked across the border and been shipped via bus and plane to US cities, are here without the legal recognition of seeking asylum.)
Who are the families whose kids have been displaced, and who are dealing with the disorienting and unsafe-feeling realization that their home rooms, their science labs, their bathrooms and playgrounds, were inhabited by thousands of strange adults, displacing the students and deprioritizing their education? The ‘asylum-seekers’ have not replaced the teens at Dalton, the famous private school on the Upper East Side. No, the American kids whose education was disrupted, because of people who chose to break the law to enter our country, are exactly the kids whose education receives so much lip service: brown and black kids, from one of the poorer neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
I see some of these children in the morning when I walk Loki to the corner, and step into the nearest bodega to buy my coffee. They are quiet. They stand patiently in line, wearing their heavy backpacks, waiting to pay for inexpensive drinks and processed snacks.
I worry about them. I worry that for some, perhaps, the food they will get at school for lunch won’t be nutritious enough to sustain them throughout the school day. For many low-income kids, the hot meal at school is the main nutrition they receive daily. Those kids who depend on daily hot lunch at school, are the kids who likely went hungry when unlawful migrants’ needs commandeered their educations.
These are the American kids who are trying to get an education — at the mercy of psychologizing and diagnosing and prescribing third parties trying to medicate them, at the mercy of grooming NGO’s putting unbelievably pornographic materials in their health classes, at the mercy of erasures of history and civics altogether, and in the face of the dumbing-down of English literature classes, and the fragmenting of math and science, confronting the stripping away of art and theatre and music education; these innocent American children, who are doing, with their families, their best.
These are the American kids who got kicked out of their school and were given the message by their own city, that as scholars they were interruptible, their working moms and dads’ time and energy were equally disposable, and that as citizens (the parents) and as future leaders (the kids), they were all — equally — less than unimportant.
In Florida — West Palm Beach — I stayed in a chic, renovated airbnb, lush with tropical landscaping, in an historic district, built up of bungalows from the 1910s and 1920s. To my right, a major new luxury shopping, office and apartments development was rising quickly; Starbuck’s and LA Fitness; and Pura Vida — chic expensive green drinks, taken in white-paneled interiors, with cascading plants and raw wood shelving everywhere.
To my left, though, not half a mile away from the elegant shopping, a food pantry was open, in what looked like an industrial building in a field. Hundreds of immigrants stood in line to receive food.
The houses in the bungalow district, that had once been working people’s cottages, now sold for a million dollars each, or more.
When I took Ubers, the drivers told me about the collapses of their home countries — the ruination of the rule of law, the rise of crime, with criminals facing impunity from judges and from the incarceration system; the corruption of elites via bribes. They described the established power now of gangs and cartels, and the strip-mining of natural resources by multinational conglomerates. They said that the employment rate in their home countries was now only ten per cent, that no one can open a small business, that everyone who could get out and come to the US, was doing so. “Who can blame them?” said my driver. From his perspective, he had a point.
I realized sadly that our open borders so close by to so many troubled countries, created conditions that were ruining those countries along with our own, as there was now no incentive to make conditions there better; and a resources drain was underway, leaving shells of nations in its wake, even as our own nation was being destabilized. I also realized that the conditions of lawlessness and the easy rise of gangs and cartels, in the vacuum of policing and criminal justice systems, in the Caribbean and Latin America, foreshadowed what was happening to our own nation. “Defund the Police!” The craziest slogan ever, unless you want exactly this: chaos and crisis, which is also a rich condition for subverting and hollowing out a nation, as other countries have learned so well to their sorrow.
Ten years ago when I travelled in America, we had problems, of course. But I saw a middle class and a working class, having productive lives, replete with pride and even prosperity at times; lives beyond suffering and mere survival. I saw kids being educated in public schools.
Now I could not see any of that any more. I saw in America, a nation so much more like the banana republics I had visited, in which working and poor people scarcely survive, and their kids have no hope of upward mobility; and the rich hide in gated communities. And the gangs rule all.
I arrived yesterday in Charlottesville, Virginia, disoriented from a long flight. At once, I felt hopeful, as the Blue Mountains, visible from the plane in all their brooding, dreamy splendor, sheltered us, and the city itself, built on small hills, harboring its Georgian architecture, with the fanlights and brick, and white pillars, reminded me of the beauty of our history; of our Founders’ best hopes. This is the city where Thomas Jefferson created a great university in what was a near-pristine wilderness. His own home, with its memorialization of the best of the Enlightenment, is close by.
I was taken to an inn downtown, with gracious 12 foot ceilings, and four-poster beds, and cozy fires in original fireplaces. Beautiful American domestic architecture; unruined history.
But I was also told about the erasure of history here, and in Richmond. Incredibly, “woke” forces, many newly arrived in the area, had insisted on dismantling a statue of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea, a beautiful work of art, depicting an indigenous teenager who had accomplished one of the greatest tasks in our nation’s history. The reason for the removal, per the critics? Sacagawea was depicted as kneeling. (She could have been pointing the way ahead and tracking, but critics saw her as “cowering”and subservient.) The City Council devoted a million dollars to the removal of that statue, along with two confederate generals’ statues: Robert E Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson. These were not rehoused in a museum somewhere, with full explanation to schoolchildren of the future, of the bitter and divisive history that they represented. No, they were simply melted down.
So children will never learn about Sacagawea, and Lewis and Clark, and General Robert E Lee, from asking questions about monuments, or visiting museums. And history is easier to erase entirely and revise, when it is only digital.
On the downtown pedestrian mall, I saw a statue that depicted a workman, in silhouette, carrying high above him a head — a statue bust? — a beheading? that looked as if it belonged to Thomas Jefferson.
How are Charlottesville’s public schools doing?
They are cutting costs due to financial setbacks.
I was due to speak at a fundraising event for RFK Jr, in a private home.
My hosts drove me up a hill outside the city, to a magnificent private home from the 1930s. The event was hosted by Barbara Sieg, Libby Whitley and Gray Delany, my publisher at All Seasons Press. In the elegant, welcoming interior, a range of people from the city had convened to hear the candidate. Among the attendees was a local doctor who had refused to go along with unlawful mandates; he couldn’t visit his patients at UVA hospital because he was unvaccinated; his grateful patients had arranged for him and his wife to be at the event. There were teachers and nurses and Navy veterans. There was a famous organic farmer from the Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatin, who has been heroic in educating the public on the dangerous concentration of power in the food supply chain. There was a nutritionist, and a dentist. And there were traditional MAGA loyalists. In sum, there were people from all walks of life — I could not place or stereotype anyone politically. They were Americans, concerned about America.
RFK Jr spoke. It is difficult to summarize his replies to questions put to him, as they were so wide-ranging. But the essence of his argument was a return to the American values that are the philosophical core of our freedoms and equality of opportunity. For instance, when asked about DEI — “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, he talked about how the current program of promotions and demotions on the basis of race, would have been very disappointing to Dr Martin Luther King. He spoke about the urgent importance of our remaining a meritocracy. For program solutions to racial disparities, he spoke about model public schools and about bringing investment capital to banks in communities of color, so mortgage seekers and business owners could get access to capital. When asked by Delany about the fact that people of his (younger) generation had trouble affording housing, let alone having the quality of life of their parents, Kennedy described a program to block BlackRock and Vanguard from scooping up homes, so that young Americans could buy in an even playing field; and about offering 3 per cent mortgages. He described decentralizing the Fed and ending the policy of quantitative easing.
RFK Jr spoke about reforming agencies, including the CIA.
He spoke, shockingly, about the fact that the Biden White House had refused him Secret Service protection, though his security team had submitted to the Secret Service 200 plus pages of credible threats, including dangerous home intrusions. The Secret Service, highly concerned, had assured him that assistance was on the way; but then there was silence from the White House. So now, half of his fundraising dollars have to go to the flotilla of security experts that surround him, in this dangerous environment. He was the only candidate, historically, refused protection at that point in the campaign.
I thought of how strange and sad it was that in every event, people ask him about the violent history suffered by his own family – a history that includes the murder of his own father when he was 14 — and that the candidate calmly engages with the question about his own mortality, his own risk, as if observing it from a distance. That is beyond courage — but knowing the stresses and terrors of a normal campaign, in which any candidate is surrounded by lunatics, I felt deeply the double burden on this particular candidate, and no doubt on his family, of his having to deal with his unique security risk profile, even as his own President leaves him to fend for himself in a vulnerable security situation.
When RFK Jr was done speaking, receiving enthusiastic applause, I stepped forward and said what I had to say about our historical moment, and about what I saw as his possible role in it. Again, I am not endorsing anyone — I can’t. DailyClout is nonpartisan, and I feel that I myself can be most useful to the country in a nonpartisan role, worrying only about the Constitution.
But I left the event feeling hopeful for our country. Something is changing; something is in the air. As I said in my remarks, people are waking up to the fact that the battle is not between left and right, but between those of us who remember and care about America — and the handful of oligarchs and globalist monsters, who wish to do away with our nation and our values — and our population — altogether.
This brings me to a wish.
I am in touch with, and respect, very senior people on both “sides.”
I’ve said before that the only hope for this country right now, is for the independent movement led by RFK Jr — many of them disaffected former liberals — and the MAGA grassroots — and even the MAGA candidates and leaders and influencers — to align and work together.
There is a battle raging at our Southern border. Twenty-five governors have added their affirmation — and some are sending National Guardsmen — in support of Texas’ Governor Abbot, who is defying as a matter of states’ rights, the Federal direction to open the border as millions, including hundreds of terrorists, flood our nation. JJ Carrell, a former border agent and my husband Brian O’Shea’s cohost for their podcast “Unrestricted Invasion,” has been sounding the alarm about thousands of “special interest aliens” — terrorists or men aligned with terrorists — who are not being arrested and deported, but who are rather, unprecedentedly, being sent on into the heart of our nation. Recently the role of the UN and the WEF has been revealed, in organizing the mass invasion at our southern border.
Indeed, the UN devoted hundreds of millions to funding and organizing this inflow across our border:
“In a nutshell, the UN and its advocacy partners are planning to spread $372 million in “Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA)”, and “Multipurpose Cash Assistance (MCA)” to some 624,000 immigrants in-transit to the United States during 2024. That money is most often handed out, other UN documents show, as pre-paid, rechargeable debit cards, but also hard “cash in envelopes”, bank transfers, and mobile transfers the U.S. border-bound travelers can use for whatever they want.”
Europe too is in a populist uprising that could turn dangerous, with farmers from at least seven nations, blocking motorways, lined up on beaches, spraying manure on government buildings, and engaged in other dramatic actions, to protest EU policy around “green” restrictions on farming. The EU flag is going up in flames, in some of these protests. Paris has, reportedly, three days left of food.
Radio host (and DailyClout commentator) Shannon Joy asked, on Twitter, in relation to the faceoff of states and the Federal government at the Southern border, something like: “Is this a war or a trap?” My answer: “Could be both.”
One of our country’s most important freedoms is that of free speech.
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