Yesterday, my family and I went to Kalispell, Mt., (gateway city to Glacier National Park) to do our monthly shopping. While on the way, Jared (my son) was driving and all of us were listening to XM Radio’s “80’s-on-8” and, lo-and-behold, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” blasted through the speakers (see link below). The song is a good rocker, but who listens to the lyrics? Right? I paid closer attention to the words and gleaned their meaning. It struck me as a Trumpian anthem: the struggles of a young couple in tough times regardless of identity.
Life sometimes is a “fight”, or perseverance in the face of challenges. America has been beset by decades of neglect, permissiveness, maladministration, and the reemergence of evil ideas that should have stayed dead. Today, the worst of all of it was exposed by the pandemic, and, I suspect, more is to come. Still, we fight on, as we should.
Who can’t identify with that? What young couple, starting fresh in life together, hasn’t struggled to get a foothold into a better life? Some times are more demanding than others, but as the song title says, all of us were “Livin’ on a Prayer”.
The NFL’s building at 345 Park Avenue, New York.NCAA’s corporate headquarters, 700 W Washington St, Indianapolis, IN.
We are on the cusp of permitting them to impose a permanent disfigurement of organized athletics. The entrance of the highly contentious ideology of transgenderism is about to destroy girls’ sports. Big Sports, Inc., won’t allow dissent. If you’re a believer in transgenderism, the full monopoly power of the organization will indulge your beliefs. If not, and you and your daughter aren’t warm to the idea of “gender identity” being used to hand trophies to people who weren’t born female, tough luck.
Terry Miller of Bloomfield, Conn., wins the 200 meter dash with a time of 24.47 in the CIAC State Championship Track and Field Meet in New Britain, Conn., during the 2019 outdoor track and field season. (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)
MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, NCAA – Big Sports, Inc – are clear partisans in the turbulent debates of our time. They ought not be. They tip the scales in support of one side in these contests. This isn’t about the ethical ending of Jim Crow or giving women an equal place at the table of organized athletics. No, Big Sports’ special status as sanctioned monopolies gives them power to impose their favored side. For the sake of our civil order, they should be stopped and their special status revoked till their charters are reformed to prevent the harmful meddling.
They take one side on issues that should be left to the people in their debates and elections. Contradictory standards may result but that just means that Congress must step in and do its duty, not to allow others to usurp that responsibility.
Gov. Kristi Noem, South Dakota.
Gov. Kristie Noem of South Dakota was caught in the vice. She was intimidated from signing a bill to protect girls in girls’ sports. She’s right to see this as a political fight. I agree, and until a broad revolt gains steam, Congress should revoke and revamp Big Sports, Inc.’s permissive charters.
These are matters for the people’s elected representatives to decide and not the province of corporate administrative offices functioning as partisan zealots. The people are quite capable of settling these matters without threats for holding the “wrong” views from those of corporate desk-jockeys.
The California Department of Education building in Sacramento.
In case you missed my post below, in the “comment” section, I posted this in light of the California State Board of Education’s recent approval of pure left wing indoctrination in the curriculum:
“Oh, and one more thing, and I thought that I’d never have to say this: Parents, get your kids out of the government-controlled schools, for the sanctity of their own mental state. Use part of Pelosi’s $2-trillion bailout – the kid and personal money in the monstrosity – and head to a good private school with classical curriculum and instruction. Go to acescholarships.org if you need further assistance.
The government schools are fully immersed in the Left’s revolution. As a public school teacher for 30 years, I’m loath to advise parents to get their kids out the public schools. There used to be individual schools and districts who avoided the worst of it. Not today. There’s nowhere to hide.
Get your kids out them. Now! Use the part of the Pelosi bailout money that comes to you and your kids and if necessary turn to Ace Scholarships, above, or other sources like them.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In case you haven’t heard, Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski was just decided at the Supreme Court. Wow, in a 8-1 decision, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority, the college woke universe was dealt a blow! In a nutshell, as a result of this decision, these bastions of the left’s ministry of truth are skating on thin ice when they attempt to muzzle free speech. It’s about time!
It all started at Georgia Gwinnett College. The College, a new addition (2006) to the Georgia public university system, is modern in more than its buildings. It’s thoroughly modern in its wokeness.
An evangelical student, Chike Uzuegbunam, tried to disseminate literature and engage with fellow students but was smacked down by the school’s Politburo. Check this out: He was told that he must submit an application for a permit three days in advance and then he is to be penned in one of two “free-speech zones”. These so-called zones have a calendar and geographic dimension. The pens are only open 18 hours a week. On a Friday, the clock starts ticking at 11 a.m. and stops at 1 p.m.
Chike Uzuegbunam before the US Supreme Court
That’s not all. After he got his permit and went to the appointed spot at the appointed time, he was stopped by campus cops. They were enforcing the school’s ban on “disturb[ing] the peace and/or comfort of person(s)”. It seems that hearing about the resurrected Christ is harmful to the school’s Wicca followers and anyone else in full rebellion mode against the most prevalent faith in the country, like the majority in the faculty lounge.
He sued, and the Alliance Defending Freedom took up his cause. Here’s an organization worth contributing to. You can donate here.
My only question at this point concerns the campus cops. How can they in good conscience enforce these obviously horrendous administrative decrees? I’m reminded of the defense at the Nuremberg Tribunals in 1946: We were following orders. Are these uniformed personnel willing to commit disgusting acts for a secure job with good pay and benefits? At least for some, it must have dawned on them that this is wrong, clearly, unmistakably wrong. Yet they still carried it out. Shame on them. Shame on them.
Illustration courtesy of Roman Genn, National Review.
Will we have a disunion? Yes, maybe, or somewhere in-between, with plenty of caveats. Sounds indefinite, as most sober projections of this nature should be.
Well, I’ll have to admit that some sort of disunion is taking place. All the evidence is pointing that way. Will it be a hard or soft disunion? A “hard” one would be some kind of constitutional restructure, or a complete break like the old Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The “soft” variety entails some kind of unofficial consensual agreement to live and let live. I’m of a mind to reject the former, but the latter raises some interesting possibilities.
Even more, is the talk of disunion part of a passing phase? All of this could be meaningless chatter. That’s an even more interesting possibility.
Evidence of disunion is all about, though. Some saw it coming at the dawn of the new millennium. Terry Teachout and Gertrude Himmelfarb back then wrote of it as “Republican Nation, Democratic Nation” (Teachout) or “one nation, two cultures” (Himmelfarb). Then, Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing crowned the idea four years later in their book, The Big Sort. Bishop and Cushing noticed that in-migration data showed like-minded people seek to live around other like-minded people. Are you paying attention New York and California?
The hard left turn of the Democratic Party is driving the talk. No, it’s not because the right has suddenly resuscitated Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Policies, laws, and actions in deep blue urban areas and states are forcing many people to make a choice between the comfort of their place of birth and desire to escape the one-party cultural revolution of the chic cliques that dominate their state or municipality.
At root in these havens of the ruling revolutionary thought is a set of prejudices about others not so willing to adopt the hedonism and its concomitant authoritarian rule, people who are loosely defined as traditionally inclined. The libertinism shows as a rejection of standards: traditional morality, the physical determinants of nature (DNA, chromosomes, biological limits, etc.), the elements of merit, etc. Oxymoronically, lying next to this idea of the free-floating individual is the ready submission to the aristocracy of sheepskin-wielding “experts”. Not all “experts”, mind you, just those who feed the libertines’ prejudices. It’s a terribly selective cadre of gurus.
It’s not as if the cool exponents of the philosophy actually live what they preach. The urban professional types, and the uber-rich that rose from their ranks, that dominate the ruling pack, get married and instill self-discipline in their young as Charles Murray so clearly observed in his research. They carry on like Horatio Alger even as they denounce the guy, which proves that consistency is not a readily observable human quality.
When they’re spouting “It’s good for thee but not for me”, they may be onto something. That something is the intuition that at least they and their children can’t prosper under anything goes. The public schools must keep their monopoly at all costs, as their votes and campaign donations proclaim, as long as elite prep schools are open for their young scions. The result is a descent into chaos for many inner-city schools, which matches the chaos in the surrounding neighborhoods that was engineered by bountiful entitlements and a pervasive ridicule of law and order.
It’s starting to ooze out: neither they, nor can anyone live this way. Yet, their indulged offspring fill the ranks of BLM and Antifa to make everyone else’s life a living hell. Their political activism produces permissive DA’s who won’t enforce quality-of-life crimes so the quality-of-life rots. Simple things like roads and the electrical grid crumble as their leaders pursue crusades against the chimerical “systemic racism” and for a greenie utopia. Urban landscapes each day look more like something out of Mad Max or John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. Indeed, many New Yorkers have already joined Snake Plissken (Russell) in the flight from hell. Florida, here we come! Life imitates art.
Where are they heading? It’s to more than Florida. The refugees are going to places where gun ownership isn’t treated as a mental illness, where churches have tendency to be full on Sunday, and where taxes are low, housing is cheap, and jobs aplenty. Sure, some may regret not having a beach nearby, but those boardwalks are beginning to take on the look of the rest of the dystopia anyway. The escapees won’t be missing much.
Some commentators have devoted much ink on extremists at the fringe of both sides. In their reading of the political landscape, the left has its Antifa/BLM to go along with the dynamic duo of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi with their critical-race-theory/systemic racism sermonizing. The right has the ill-defined QAnon and Arian Nation look-alikes. But the two fringes aren’t anywhere near equivalent; the right deserves a 10-handicap. The DiAngelo/Kendi crowd and their Antifa and BLM militias are much more deeply entrenched in our critical institutions than the QAnon devotees and Proud Boys ever were. The lefty militias are perfumed into respectability, DiAngleo and Kendi get rich, and nearly every other large and powerful organization has their own offshoot of the ministry of propaganda. It’s an egregious false equivalence and an affront to sound reason to pretend otherwise.
No other words describe our current divide than revolution (left) and counterrevolution (right), a classic civil war. The two stances are deeply divided into mutually exclusive sets of values. A commissariat-driven holy war to impose equality of result for fashionable identities versus a legal regime of equal opportunity is only part of the story. Another angle is the vague spirituality of my “personal truth” versus the certainties of altar and hearth. Still another one is the exaltation of two n’s – narcissism and nihilism – versus self-restraint and our heritage of compassion. Still another one is the impulse to tear it all down and build anew according to someone’s fanciful conception of heaven on earth versus the inclination to build upon the glories of the past. These approaches are mutually exclusive. Where is there room for compromise if one side, the Left, is hell-bent on forcibly foisting their worldview on the other?
Don’t take solace in the natural live-and-let-live of federalism. The Left from its perch on the cultural commanding heights is feverishly trying to centralize power in DC. Centralization will bury subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity embraces the value of local and regional control as the most efficacious form of governance. It holds that on most matters the more local, the better. Well, that’s on the chopping block in a host of ways.
The US capitol and surrounding buildings in DC.
Will sufficient numbers of people push back? That’ll be hard to achieve once the Left’s dream of legitimizing vote fraud is rigidly imposed on the entire country. At this point, elections as the corrective will be effectively neutered. Opposition will be forced into submission or the various lanes of disobedience, civil or violent. When elections seem to have no meaning, eruptions of less palatable methods of opposition will be more frequent. History is littered with examples.
Watch that space on HR1, the Left’s grab bag of “reforms” making its way through Congress to remove vote fraud from the category of a crime and reconfigure it as a legitimate get-out-the-vote strategy. If it passes, those storm clouds from Mordor will have reached your home.
The “systemic racism” witch hunt knows no bounds. The airbrushing out of memory isn’t limited to long dead white guys on horseback. Ensnared are old lefties like Ted Geisel, “Dr. Seuss”. We are living in a very dangerous time. It’s beginning to look like the frenzy of the Reign of Terror that engulfed France in 1793. Nothing was spared: the Church, nuns and monks, anyone who dressed fancy, the calendar, and even the entombed remains of kings in the crypt underneath the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Our time’s vicious Jacobins are let loose.
*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?
The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.
These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.
Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.
These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.
Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.
Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City was famous for his finger-waving nanny bans on Big Gulps, super-sized fast food, and decrees on salt levels in restaurant foods. He wasn’t content with warning labels. He should have been content with warning labels. In contrast to Hizzoner, I’m suggesting only a warning label be placed on every college application – not in 2-point font in a footnote at the bottom of the page – to caution every parent and student of the danger in going to college in America. It might read something this:
“Warning: Any student matriculating to this college or university may procure revolutionary beliefs and a record of convictions for assault, murder, destruction of public and private property, threats to the rights of others, and other acts of disorder in furtherance of a historically proven dystopia.”
The connection between college and malignant left-wing radicalism is at least as strong as the relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer.
There are many historical instances of crass and brutal left-wing radicalism coming from the ranks of the college-educated with disastrous results. Take Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – aka Lenin – for instance. His dad (Illya) was a college professor at the Penza Institute for the Nobility, and his sons were college students: Lenin at Kazan University and his older brother, Alexander, at College of Simbirsk and the University of Saint Petersburg. Later, Alexander would be executed in the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Czar Alexander III. The radical bona fides of the siblings were insinuated in the college culture of the time. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn amply described the setting in many of his writings. Sound familiar?
Lenin as a university student
If it sounds familiar, it should . . . because it is! Let’s take a look at what happened to Michael Brase, a second-year dental student at the University of Iowa. David Johnsen, the dean of the University of Iowa’s College of Dentistry, mass-distributed an email condemning Pres. Trump for withdrawing federal funding for the propaganda and Maoist struggle sessions known as “diversity training” – in the words of the executive order, “race/sex stereotyping” and “scapegoating”.
Brase responded in a logical reply to Prof. Johnsen’s opinionated missive: “By condemning Executive Order 13950, does the [College of Dentistry] support using federal funds to promote trainings that include race/sex stereotyping and/or race/sex scapegoating?”
For Mr. Brase, the sh#! hit the fan. Brase was quickly ordered to appear before a disciplinary hearing for “unprofessional behavior”. Rather than prostrate himself before his accusers, he went to the press and his elected representatives in the Iowa state legislature whose House Oversight Committee launched an investigation. Facts were made clear and the lefty cabal in the professoriate was exposed. Under the glaring spotlight of public scrutiny, the professorial lynch mob scattered like cockroaches who were startled by the light. The professorial ring leader, Prof. Johnsen, ended up delivering a mea culpa.
Or take the experience of Economics Professor Frank Gunter at Lehigh University. He had the temerity to deliver a talk on poverty in response to the Biden Administration’s request for faculty advice, but his views didn’t jibe with the lefty groupthink on campus (see below). He dared to counter three myths about poverty that are constantly trotted out by lefty faculty and racialized students in furtherance of the revolution. The three falsehoods according to Prof. Gunter are the following: (1) poverty is a matter of race – racial minorities are its chief victims; (2) poverty is a generational curse – once poor, always poor for generations; and (3) the poor have no agency because they are victims of large, impersonal forces (“systemic racism”, articulated in “critical race theory”).
For this, the lefty hive on the U. of Iowa campus erupted into a swarm. Black Lives Matter went to the barricades and the College of Business – Gunter’s teaching assignment – feverishly tried to blunt this exercise in academic free speech and academic freedom. The lesson is clear: stick out your neck for truth and be forever ostracized.
That’s the setting for our young adult freshmen who wish to broaden their minds and opportunities. Parents, they may enter college one way, and may exit completely different. And don’t assume it’ll be an improvement.
The pervasiveness of the above experiences is frightening. It’s also absolutely disgusting. State legislatures get to work and mandate the warning label.
I was there at the beginning, the birth of a luminary. I was a grad student at California State University, Chico, about 90 miles north of Sacramento, Ca. Not a fan of talk radio, occasionally I’d pick up the AM radio signal of Sacramento’s KFBK for news and information. Serendipitously, I happened to be tuning in when the station was auditioning a guest host after their headliner had been forced to resign after making an ethnic joke. The replacement was funny, entertaining, and the style was light and beckoning. He stayed. He was Rush Limbaugh.
My wife remembers me coming home from the campus one day and laughing. I told her of the funniest radio program that I discovered from just cruising the dial. It was the beginning of Talent on Loan from God.
From where did the star of Rush arise? Limbaugh as the beneficiary of a generational rethink that was taking place in the late 1970’s. He came at the right time.
Men of the radical left raise their fists during the “Days of Rage” anti-Vietnam War demonstrations organized by the militant Weathermen in Chicago. Oct. 11, 1969.
Again, in an earlier incarnation as a grad student, this time at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970’s – I seemed to be in perpetual grad-student mode at that time in my life – I attended a campus open-air talk in 1977 or ’78 on the state of national affairs. Hyper-inflation, the humiliation of the fall of South Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the attendant slaughters and holocausts, and the sinking mood in a seemingly impotent country were current events, not the third-to-last chapter in a high school History textbook. When questions were allowed at the end of the talk, I remember shouting a rhetorical query on the cause of our malaise, “What about our rampant consumerism?” That shows where my mind was, as it was for many of my age at that time. It was nonsense, absolute nonsense.
Open-air anti-War speeches, UC Santa Barbara, 1970Anti-War protest, UC Santa Barbara, 1970.The 1970 Isla Vista riots, adjacent to the UC Santa Barbara campus, with the Bank of America building burning in the background behind the line of Sheriff deputies. The campus had quieted considerably by 1977 when I arrived as a grad student.
The horrifying scenes of the fall of Saigon and the ghoulish totalitarian genocides coming out of the place that we abandoned, Southeast Asia, shocked me. My philosophical transition started. I began to discover a new counterculture, one long in existence and counterpoised to the left/liberal Ivy League hegemony, an older relative of the smothering orthodoxy that dominates our cultural commanding heights today. Milton and Rose Friedman, the Chicago School of Economics, Thomas Sowell, Arthur Laffer, George Gilder, Jean Kirkpatrick, Jean-François Revel, and National Review soon followed. The candidacy of Ronald Reagan politically encapsulated the trend. And for the average lunch-pale man and woman, there was Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh became a cultural event. He was the right’s SNL. His stunts offended the liberals in the newsroom at KFBK. In their stunted minds, conservatives were dour people of mundane prospects. But with this guy, they were parodied and they didn’t like it. Still don’t.
Rush standing before a Sacramento billboard that was paid by someone who obviously disliked Limbaugh. Limbaugh was at KFBK from 1983-88.
From his perch in the studio, for instance, he followed the progress of a coast-to-coast nuclear freeze march that was meant to stymie Reagan’s attempt to counter the Soviet’s buildup of nuclear missiles in Europe. Limbaugh would find their location, call someone in the town at random, and ask them about the marchers. He’d crack jokes with the resident about the lefty marchers traipsing through his or her town. It was great radio, and enough to cause you to stop what you were doing and listen.
Who can forget the Rush dictionary? There were “feminazis”, women that he characterized as not able to get a date with a man, nor wanting one. There was the story of watching a woman “farding” in her car. He took awhile to explain that “farding” meant the application of makeup. The Kennedys were a rich vein of humor, particularly Ted who had a hard time finishing a statement without blubbering. Limbaugh did to liberals what liberals have been doing to the rest of the country from their monopoly perch of their own Versailles that stretched from Manhattan to Hollywood to the Ivy League.
And then there was Dan’s Bake Sale in 1993. It started as a conversation with a caller, Dan, who said he couldn’t afford the Limbaugh Letter because his wife didn’t like Rush. Rush borrowed his idea of a bake sale to pay off the national debt and suggested the idea to Dan. The idea caught fire among “dittoheads” and before anyone knew it, 65,000 people gathered in Ft. Collins, Co. Think of it as Rushstock ’93. Rush was rockin’ fun.
Rush was fun and the Left was exposed as killjoys. The left dished it out but couldn’t take it. There’s been a role reversal: the liberal establishment and their media mandarins have become the “Church Lady” without the church. Snowflakes spitting and fuming and disrupting anyone who can’t countenance their inanities were bound to produce real time material for the lively mind of someone like Rush. In those early days, Rush could take these cranks without any self-awareness and turn them into entertainment, and the object of a little deserving ridicule as well.
The “drive-bys” still harbor resentment for receiving what they have been dishing out for half a century. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, on today’s Hugh Hewitt show couldn’t bring himself to say anything positive about Rush when given the opportunity. Crickets. Wikipedia devotes an entire section to his personal problems (divorces and addiction to pain killers) and another one trying to impose the opinions of “fact-checkers” over his. This isn’t fact-checking; it’s opinion cancellation. Julia Wick, Los Angeles Times staff writer, came out with this gem, “… he helped bring conspiracy theories and racist, misogynistic vitriol into mainstream political discourse ….” They hate him for laying bare their pretentiousness. The emperors and empresses have no clothes.
Rush, RIP. We’ll miss you.
If you’ve got time, grab a cup of coffee and take a glimpse of Talent on Loan from God: his 2009 speech to CPAC.
