Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans players meet on the field during a moment of “unity” before an NFL football game Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020, in Kansas City, Mo. J.J. Watts called the boos from fans “unfortunate”. Watts naively thought the word to be innocent enough. In reality, the word is politically charged and synonymous with “systemic racism”. Unbeknownst to Watts, it is laden with political sloganeering. The booing fans had a better understanding than him. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Jason Whitlock’s post on Outkick.com about the NFL’s season opener says it all. It can be found here.
Jason Whitlock
Here’s the opening paragraph from today’s Daily Mail on the NFL’s opening night of the 2020 season: “Kansas City Chiefs fans booed a moment of silence aimed at promoting racial justice, the Houston Texans remained in the locker room during the Star-Spangled Banner, and the reigning Super Bowl champions lined up for a singing of ‘the black national anthem’ on Thursday night as the NFL opened its 2020 campaign under dramatically different circumstances than any other season in league history.”
I didn’t watch the game since I don’t have a taste for mixing left-wing politics with athletics. Make no mistake about it, the whole thing legitimized a left-wing agenda.
In the write-ups on the game, a ritualized justification for the politicized antics at the start of the game hovered around the words of “unity” and “solidarity”. What nonsense! Unity and solidarity for what? The lexicon is cover for the development of a group mind, the kind of group mind found in past and present ideologized tyrannies. Do places like Berlin, Moscow, Havana, and Pyongyang remind you of anything?
North Korean students perform in front of Kim’s statue at Changdok School in Pyongyang in 2012.
The words cover a pack of monstrous ideas, the kind of ideas that insult the mind. “Systemic racism” is inherently improvable but politically useful in a power grab. So were Marx’s “worker alienation”, Galton’s “genetic determinism”, Lenin’s “revolutionary theory”, National Socialist “racial inferiority”, and the like. Such words appeal to the worst in us, and not surprisingly bring out the worst in our behavior. Look at our college campuses and urban conflagrations. Disgusting!
BLM, ChicagoLooters smashing a window of a store front on School street after the Black Lives Matter rally at the Massachusetts State House. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
The catch-words remind us of humanity’s past sins while ignoring how our political legacy paved the way for enormous betterment of all people. What will they replace it with, an energized central government with them in the catbird seat? The spectacle was appalling. It deserved to be booed, and I hope the ratings are terrible.
Goodbye NFL. You have managed to spoil a once good thing.
Allan Bloom wrote “The Closing of the American Mind” in 1987. He surmised that there was something wrong in American education, and he was right back then as he would be today. In fact, it’s only getting worse.
It’s no secret that totalitarian regimes push for universal literacy in a vast expansion of the government schools and the destruction of independent ones. Universal literacy is part of the totalitarian arsenal to control minds and behavior. Once literacy has been achieved, these tyrants carefully concoct and sift what is allowed to be read. Literacy without a First Amendment becomes a horror show.
A classroom in the “The Republic of Cuba” under the control of the Popular Socialist Party (formerly the Communist Party of Cuba).
The situation isn’t limited to far off lands. That dreadful spectacle has been taking shape in our schools for decades, only to see it advance further in a misleading reaction to our current riots and shootings. Curriculums are seized for partisan revolutionary advantage.
And there will be no escape as progressives proceed in their assault on charter, private, and denominational schools. They want all children to be herded into a group mind similar to Star Trek’s Borg.
Showing their true colors, progressives applaud Castro’s successes in literacy. Once the kids have been corralled in government schools under their direction, then the spigot will be turned wide open for indoctrination. Parents, it is happening right now as our schools begin a new academic year.
Indoctrination under the guise of “anti-racism” pedagogy.
Some private schools have jumped on board. KIPP charter schools mothballed their slogan of “Work Hard, be Nice” and replaced it with full-throated campaign to dismantle the amorphous “systemic racism”. Since it can’t be proven or disproven because the thing is so ill-defined, it’s the perfect vehicle for mind control. Parents, beware of KIPP.
Other lunacies abound. The superintendent of New York’s East Harlem Scholars Academies discourages white teachers from talking about successful black Americans because to do so would be to diminish the “systemic” sufferings of all blacks. Got it?
Attributes such as “hard work”, “persistence”, “objectivity”, “decision-making”, and “politeness” are routinely degraded as acting “white”. “Systemic racism” has been expanded to encompass learning to become a good, thoughtful person.
At the forefront of this nasty campaign are Ibram X. Kendi and his screed “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and Robin DiAngelo and her “White Fragility”. The education Borg has fully embraced them and DiAngelo’s maxim: “A positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.” What absolute nonsense … and racist besides!
This isn’t education; it’s mental child abuse. Much of the abuse is occurring in Language Arts and the Social Sciences. It’s getting to the point where parents, in order to protect their children, will have to tell them to ignore their teachers of grammar and literature and any of the Social Sciences. I’m loath to say this as a 30-year veteran of the public schools in roles as a teacher and Social Science Department chair.
Or teachers could rescue the integrity of their classes by rebelling against the brainwashing. I’m not optimistic. More likely, it’ll come down to parents refusing to let their schoolhouses churn out good little racial Bolsheviks.
Veteran or veterinarian, what’s the difference to our Che-loving hipster?
The prophet: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), British historian, philosopher, writer.
If you’re interested in plowing deeper into the causes of the current spate of riots, statue toppling, and angry mobs from Trump’s inaugural through the Kavanaugh hearings to the mayhem in our cities, one need look no further than a recent piece in National Review (August 29) by M. D. Aeschliman. In a nutshell, today’s urban street thugs – always half-literate despite privileged college admissions and comfortable upbringings – are unknowingly devotees of the 18th century’s Jean Jacques Rousseau, a man who dumped his children on the doorsteps of orphanages for someone else to be burdened with their upkeep. Rousseau is responsible for much of the secular dogmas and liturgies of today’s left. It’s a direct contradiction to Christianity and nearly all norms that have made human flourishing possible.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau would make two things broadly popular: hedonism and a coercive state. On the one hand, he dispensed with the truth of human corruptibility in the doctrine of original sin and replaced it with a benign emotionalism that was, in his mind, ruined by centuries of traditions. And off our angry urchins go running to the latest gang assault on a statue, a re-imbibing of the NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, and the erasure of anything older than last hour’s Twitter storm. The shattering of norms – that old stuff again – points the way to a radical individual autonomy and a sanctioning of depravity. For Rousseau, nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of self-defined sensualism.
Nicolas Poussin, Bacchanal before a Statue of Pan, 1631 – 1633.
On the other hand, if we aren’t to be governed by anything older than last night’s leftovers and life is one continuous bacchanalia, Rousseau deposits in tradition’s stead the shadowy, spectral-like “general will”. The people according to Rousseau have a mind, or “general will”, but how do we know what it wants? Good luck … and run to the hills. Flight is the only practical option because there will always be someone to step forward with the power to decipher the national brain. Der fuhrer would make much of the all-conquering national will as embodied in him. Lenin’s will was not safely questioned. Longevity as a real or imagined opponent of Mao was an alien concept. Need I mention others who drank from Rousseau’s well? Tradition- and norm-bashing seem to lead to ugly places.
The historian Thomas Carlyle, the real prophet of today’s woes, writing in the middle of the 19th century did more than anyone to accurately plumb the depths of the French Revolution – the child of Rousseau’s mendacious thoughts – in his book of the same name. As a radical to the Tories and Tory to the radicals, he could fathom the errors of a barnacle-encrusted society while at the same time appreciate the fragility of the social order. The Jacobins destroyed the old social order and created tyranny.
Depiction of the storming of the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792 (artists: Jean Duplessis-Bertaux ).
Are BLM, Antifa, and the radicals now firmly ensconced in the leadership of the Democratic Party taking the place of yesteryear’s Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge, Hugo Chavez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), and Castro’s Cuban Communist Party? Or are we to separate the Democratic Party and place it alongside Kerensky’s Socialists? And you ought to know what happened to them. For the Bolsheviks, two’s a crowd and off to the gulag and execution squads for moderates and competitor extremists.
Please read the article … and reread it. You’ll get more out of it the second time around. If you don’t want to work that hard, turn in your citizenship card because a republic requires its citizens to do the heavy lifting, or be horrifically ruled by the few who will. Lenin had a name for them: The Vanguard Elite.
The Vanguard Elite: 1920 Bolshevik Party meeting: sitting (from left) are Enukidze, Kalinin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Lashevich, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Lenin and Rykov.
A family wearing masks walks in downtown Los Angeles on March 22. (Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images)
Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to America in 1831 to initially examine our penal systems. His observations quickly expanded to include the distinctive nature of the American character in contrast to Europeans. He described an American as more rambunctious, independent, and more likely to accept risk. Using sailing ships to illustrate the point, even though the seamanship and vessels were quite similar, American ships got to Canton for a load of tea with one stop at port in a two-year voyage while European voyages consisted of multiple stops. Needless to say, Americans had a higher return-on-investment.
As he writes, “… the European navigator is cautious about venturing onto the high seas. He sets sail only when the weather is inviting.” An American “sets sail while the storm still rages” and “often ends in shipwreck, yet no one else plies the seas as rapidly as he does.” Further, highlighting self-reliance, “Americans are taught from birth that they must overcome life’s woes and impediments on their own.”
Daniel (1734-1820) and his wife Rebecca travelling westwards to Kentucky, by George Caleb Bingham, 1851 or 1852. In the 18th and 19th centuries, our ancestors flooded over the Appalachian Mtns. How many Americans today could withstand the ardors of the trek and cut a living out of the wilderness? I suspect a diminishing few..
Are we the same people as our ancestors? I wonder. Some have concluded that we have been “feminized”, meaning that we increasingly dread risk in the same manner as a mother is apoplectic about the most minimal discomfort to her baby. We might be about as far removed from our 19th century predecessors as the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is from its gray wolf ancestor (Canis lupus), about 14,000 years, for good or for ill.
Take for instance the ready submission to the wearing of masks in regards to COVID-19. One pundit referred to the compunction for mask wearing as “walking billboards of fear”. She’s right! Many of these people are strolling advertisements of gripping phobias.
The docility doesn’t stop there. It extends to the willing acceptance without questioning of authoritarian decrees for lockdowns, six-foot social distancing, an end to common worship, etc. The meek may inherit the earth, but our inheritance will resemble an existence in a padded cell overseen by a cadre of wardens and guards.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of the indispensable role of the entrepreneur as economic adventurer. Everyone else rides in his or her wake, not everyone being so compose by temperament or ability. These economic adventurers aren’t mommies but swashbucklers of risk and innovation. We still produce them but they are easily counterbalanced by a growing army of power-hungry “experts” and a growing national population inured and dependent on the credentialed with political power.
The ground has been prepared for a new public ethos. It’s a mental state among a critical mass of the population that hovers between three semi-mystical orders: the cults of safety, the “expert”, and the state who embodies them. Combine the longing for a zero-risk utopia, a class of certified shamans with the hidden gnosis, and an authority with the power to make it happen and you have a society more at home in the World State of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the Federalist Papers. Safety and little tolerance for risk surpasses every other consideration and the public timidly goes along.
Helicopter parents of today – a byproduct of the cult of safety.Kids on bikes in helmets. Today, to jump on a bike without one is considered recklessness of the highest order.Kids on bikes in a photo from the 1950’s. How did we ever survive?
We have a population riddled with the submissive and the dependent, a dependency on the state and its credentialed overseers. The situation cultivates a population in paralysis when the promised services disappear because state and local authorities reneged on their civic responsibility in places like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, etc., etc., etc. Few citizens are willing, able, and emotionally ready to stop the annihilation of their communities. They have boxed themselves into a corner with the only recourse being the scramble to flee. Popular docility means that we go from the acceptance of authoritarian decrees to a bewilderment in the face of mobs who rampage with the quiet endorsement of the powerful.
This is not meant to be a piece against the wearing of masks. The use of masks should be, like all mitigations, conditional, conditional, conditional. It should not be a papal bull emanating out of the state capitol or DC. And if it does, there will be moments when the surviving residue of self-reliance and personal responsibility will have to rear its head to check an overweening state.
Can we recover from the stupor inculcated by the modern, progressive state? I don’t know. We are becoming a different breed of citizen. Indeed, are we more subject than citizen?
Portland woman getting dowsed with white paint after challenging “protesters” for damaging property.
We are sorting each other out; however, events have accelerated the process, like the coddling of violent anarchists by woke metropolitan governing establishments. Moving vans have been pulling out of California for decades, and now the itch to relocate has spread up and down the Pacific coast from Seattle to San Diego. The driving force, unbeknownst to urban politicos, is something that they like to call “progressivism”, but in reality it’s “socialism” (public control – not ownership – of economic activity). Combined with the cultural leftism that is resplendent in urban public policies, a noxious brew of codes and mandates is offered up that is not conducive to healthy living.
Here is one mother’s account of what has happened to her beloved Portland.
Signs at a protest against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Ore., July 30, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
It’s better to put a face and life (and lives) to the great migration. Her rendition of the situation indicates that the problem is much broader and lies much deeper than a particular set of city councilmen or mayors. Granted, local elections aren’t attention-getters and turnout is low, but the majority who does show up at the polls is remarkably, consistently, and militantly of the left down to their personal values. These are popularly-elected governments. And as a result, the tolerance of the Sermon on the Mount has been turned into open and pervasive hostility for the few remaining holdouts of tradition.
“Joanna” in the article describes the stance of her liberal/left neighbors change from friendliness to sneers and bitterness for her support of Republicans and Trump. 2016 was a watershed in her mind. Everything went south as many residents on her street became surly after the rest of the country seemingly rejected their vision of the better world. To borrow a woke term, many urban denizens were “triggered” by the folks in flyover country actually voting their interests and values.
Trump sign vandalized in Eastern Shore, Md., Juyly 4, 2020.
The scene, in my mind, must have been reminiscent of Bolshevik agents in the 1920’s and 30’s stoking hatred among peasants for the ones who happen to be a little better off. Only in this case it isn’t Central Committee operatives doing the dirty work. Minds have been shaped for years in the fashionable media-saturated existence of our urban complexes and too much formal public education without wisdom. Portland has been a basket case for years, and the rest have been teetering on the edge of oblivion for quite some time.
The Great Skedaddle II, ironically, is now starting to include more than the few remaining Republican holdouts in our metroplexes. As one pundit (a Democrat) put it, law-abiding Democrats are joining the caravans. Even they can’t stomach the consequences of their beliefs.
Li Zhensheng at the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
We are experiencing a collective amnesia. As the Democratic Party descends further into a mania for a collectivistic dystopia, reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and as the movement’s younger zealots deface the public square and intimidate alternative voices, our country seems adrift on what to make of it all, having forgotten or never been informed that history is rhyming, as Mark Twain would have put it.
It takes monumental courage to persevere in the face of brutalities from the mob, like the ones currently pillaging our public squares. There are a few such people who deserve our everlasting praise for their stand for decency. One such person was Li Zhensheng, the sometimes covert photographer of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who passed away June 23 of this year in Queens. He gave voice to millions of voiceless victims who, without him, would have remained nameless and unknown abstractions.
He showed in good resolution what a crowd of mostly young and indoctrinated zealots can mutilate in the name of their narrow, close-minded cause. Thank you, Li Zhensheng, for reminding us of the danger posed by street-thugs-with-a-cause.
The Cultural Revolution poster says it all: “Destroy the old!”
Please view the photographs with an eye for their resemblance to what is happening today in places as diverse as our Senate Judiciary Committee during the orchestrated sliming of Brett Kavanaugh to the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC, and beyond. Today’s mobs take no second place for wanton depravity.
Beatings and public humiliations. Sound familiar?Youthful zealots. Look familiar? Youthful zealots. Look familiar?Public beatings and humiliations. Look familiar?Assault, battery, and humiliation. Remind you of anything on the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, NYC, etc.?More of the same, like more of the same on our urban streets.More of the same.Pity the victim who falls to the mob.More beatings and public humiliations. Welcome to the world of BLM and Antifa. The scope of their vision is totalitarian.More of the same. I could flood the zone with Li’s photographs, every one a precursor of our current and thuggish street theater.
Rioters throw back tear-gas canisters fired by federal law-enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., July 29, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
Please read the interview between National Review’s Michael Brandon Dougherty (a man of the right) and Michael Tracey ( a left-leaning independent journalist) found here.
Michael Brandon DoughertyMichael Tracey
What you have been reading and viewing in mainstream media about our current urban disorders is a sham. It is the duty of the responsible citizen to ferret out fact from fiction, there being much to filter and uncover. The needs of our current moment require something more than quips on Facebook.
A party line was evident since the disturbances first erupted in our cities a couple of months ago. The Democratic Party line is to characterize the events as “peaceful protests”, with emphasis on “peaceful”. Jerry Nadler (D, NY), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, went so far as to characterize contrary reports of violence as a “myth that’s being spread only in Washington DC.” The word “peaceful” is ubiquitously attached to “protest” in Dem Party circles and throughout much of our biased legacy media: CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and big city urban dailies like the NYT and WaPo. But is it true?
No, no, no! Tracey went across the country reporting on the events. He didn’t find “peaceful protests”. He discovered something that can only be described as an insurrection. While ostensibly the “protests” started as an outcry against racism, at the tip of the spear were white middle-class urban twenty-somethings, and the victims were overwhelmingly minorities, many black. Far from there being only marches and speeches, Tracey discovered a bombed-out, boarded-up, and vandalized urban landscape stretching for blocks, a hulking mass of dystopia.
A portion of downtown Minneapolis after the riots.
Portland he describes as “unique”. It has been in a permanent state rebellion for years. So, why are the Democrats so keen on hiding the truth about Portland, et al? One answer: politics! Since the election of Trump, the “Resistance” became the “Movement”, not that there’s much difference between the two. The “Movement” encompasses more than the armed militia of the Democratic Party on the streets of Portland – BLM, Antifa, and other muscular utopians – but also the cores of our major cultural institutions. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Russia at the dawn of revolution depicts a similar malign disorientation. The threat is real and broad based.
Louis Vitton store front, downtown Portland, May 29.
We are facing a real revolutionary march down the well-traveled road of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror and the Bolshevik’s Red Terror. This will not end in a pretty place if allowed to fester and grow. The American people will have to steel themselves against an onslaught of misinformation meant to advance a huge totalitarian-like power grab. So, please read.
Priest and landlord condemned before a Red Tribunal during the Bolshevik Red Terror..
Undated photo inside the original wooden memorial at Choeung Ek. We see the remains of the victims of the Khmer Rouge.
From the politicization of science to further a centrally planned future in grand schemes like the Green New Deal to the New York Times’s “The 1619 Project” refashioning of our self-identity as a nation to fit the leftists’ prefabricated, all-purpose explanation for western civilization and America, we are getting very close to the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero as frighteningly displayed in 1984’s “The Killings Fields”. Maybe you have heard of Democratic Party politicians (most recently at the Barr hearings before the House Judiciary Committee) and left wing activist academics claiming that you are a racist because of the race of your supporting staff or for making the simple truism that all lives matter. We have seen pastors leading their congregations in groveling acts of submission or confession of sins for which there is no sinful act. In fact, your melanin count alone is enough to condemn you. The radical dogma has penetrated the universities, teacher colleges, your child’s classroom, and Big Sports. It’s everywhere.
White citizens and police officers wash feet of black leaders, ask for forgiveness in Gary, NC, June 7.
It’s an eerie world, and it’s descending on us very rapidly. The Democratic Party is the revolutionary party for this new totalitarianism. The revolution isn’t solely on the streets of Portland, et al. It’s appearing on your ballot in November 2020.
The Killing Fields clip below was one of a few that I would use in my World History class to introduce students to the real nature of 20th century totalitarianism. Of particular note is the dismantlement of the family in the camp’s school scene. A signature doctrine of BLM also belonged to the Khmer Rouge. Key to constructing the utopia is mind control (the radicalized curriculums) and supplanting memory (statue toppling and the imposition of their “History”) in order to mold the minds of the people so they will better fit into their new world order. Please watch the minute and a half clip for it could be in your and your children’s future.
Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles said Monday (June 8) they support a movement to eliminate the Los Angeles School Police Department, a force of about 400 that serves the L.A. Unified School District , Incoming UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz said, “We have to dismantle white supremacy.”
I was a teachers union local president. I know what teachers unions are all about. They are about maximizing rewards for their members, not students, as they push lefty curriculum. Circa 2020, they want to keep the schools closed, their full pay for “distance” instruction, with as few work hours as possible, and no accountability. Plus, plus, this from the microphone of incoming United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) president, Cecily Myart-Cruz: they are all-in for defunding police, the district’s campus police that is. UTLA is a combination of CHAZ (of Seattle fame) and La Costra Nostra. Give them what they want or they will extort the education of your children.
The prospect of more loosey-goosey “distance” learning is driving more parents to abandon the public schools. Some are turning to self-help by forming learning pods for their children. They might even learn that they don’t need Myart-Cruz and her UTLA cohorts.
When schools reopen, and they will have to reopen – probably after the Biden/AOC regime wins the White House – these teachers might wake up to fewer kids in the classroom. With budgets crimped by the lockdowns, and ADA numbers falling, many of those teachers in the photo might be looking for barista jobs. My guess: math and economics won’t show up in the college transcripts of the pink-slipped.
UTLA, CTA, and NEA are to the education industry what the UAW was to the American auto industry by the end of the 20th century. Sometimes, poison is self-administered.
One thing that I told my sons when they were younger was that the adolescent’s lack of self-control and impulsive judgment when possessed by an adult can lead to a life in and out of the criminal justice system. Now fuel that impetuousness with an enthusiasm for new ideas that aren’t new. Many of the notions have deeply troubled histories, unbeknownst to the excited zealot. So, pile ignorance on top of rashness. Now we have quite the noxious brew of a personality. Have I accurately described the malicious clowns laying waste to the city centers around the country?
Maybe add pampered to the list of personality traits of the miscreants who are pillaging our public squares. Here’s the cartoonist Michael Ramirez’s succinct portrayal that does a better job in making the point.
