Race, racism, and how to teach our children about it has roiled school districts across the country. Here in Central Oregon, the Bend-LaPine School Board election school board election became a scrum over the purported threat of the infiltration of Critical Race Theory into local curriculum. The issue has been raised, albeit in muted form, in […]

In this brave new age, when we are daily assaulted by the aching sanctimonies of The Church of the Holy Woke and the militant orders of the School of Point and Screech, those of us who value liberty over lemmings are faced with some navigational challenges. These are both physical and intellectual. Avoiding the purity tribunals that dot the landscape like Taliban roadblocks has perhaps never been so difficult in our country, which seems largely to have shunned any remaining bias for either reasoned debate or the freedom of ideas.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to spend most of my time this last year unmasked and unashamed, chasing cows and filming The Len Babb Movie Project. We’ve managed to visit seven states and can hours of film we will soon start editing into a rough cut of the film. That work has created great new friendships, a deeper understanding of my own convictions, and a salve for the slings and arrows of life in a nation apparently hell bent on a life of cutting, burning, and any number of the sundry indicators of self-harm.

I’ve been trying to figure out how it is I will navigate the asteroid belts of the Imaginarium – dodging the tumbling balls of frozen wokeness, the careening boulders of political duplicity and outright stupidity. In that process I’ve come to realize that in order to survive these hazards, and to pilot my family through them into what will certainly be some kind of mincing, fragile, and thoroughly deconstructed American future influenced, if not controlled, by the Chinese Communist Party, I must adopt at least some and maybe all of the mindset of the Star Wars smuggler and anti-hero Han Solo.