Category: Culture

The run of the mobs in our cities and campuses has made this July 4th more significant than any other of recent vintage. These hordes are more intent on a disfigurement of our historical memory in the pursuit of horrifying goals, whose dastardliness they are so unaware. For the rest of us, please celebrate the birth of our country, and if you need a boost for those mystic chords that lie deep in the hearts of most Americans, here’s Madison Rising and their rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.

Perhaps we need to be reminded of all the blessings that God has bestowed on us as Americans. Sadly, for others among the young in particular, their mystic chords have gone missing. It’s as if a pedophile has shanghaied the trajectory of their life story and an alternative and scary meaning implanted. A youth’s attachment to the country of their birth has been co-opted by a tale of unrelenting torment. They are primed to be the shock troops of a new and sickening revolution.

It begins with a blanket condemnation of anyone not like them, or not in full agreement with their vision. Easy targets are those no longer living. They can’t fight back. Stalin had his government ministries constantly manufacture a past to fit his preferences. For today’s version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers (communist youth), their targets are most conspicuously the DWM’s – Dead White Males, formerly known as the Founders. All of their storied contributions are mangled to fit an indoctrination that could be traced to such screeds as NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, the foolishness of Howard Zinn, and the mental trash that came off the pen of John Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Antonio Gramsci. Too young and ill-informed to question the rubbish, they deface our great leaders and seek to impose their warped version of reality on the rest of us, and thereby destroy our country. It’s totalitarianism on the march.

George Orwell had it right when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

You see, following their ill-logic, nothing and no-one can be honored. The fact is, all of us are flawed, and have been so since creation. If a person, past or present, isn’t an exact mirror image of the activists’ beau ideal, statues are torn down at the same time as curriculums are mutilated to match the new zeitgeist.

But the same holds true for their heroes. Marx was a bloodthirsty and despicable human being, and not much of a loving husband and father. The people that ran the publishing empire that gave us “The 1619 Project” also managed a pipeline for pro-Stalin propaganda in the news feeds of Walter Duranty. Duranty helped to hide the crimes of one of history’s greatest monsters. Martin Luther King probably had a personal history of extra-marital affairs. But MLK stepped up to lead an end to a vile wrong. We are a collection of mixed bags. I could go on.

People don’t live lives of unalloyed virtue from cradle to grave. And things change on us. Some notions that were once considered reasonable and proper are no longer seen in the same light. Notions of racial superiority was once as natural to popular wisdom as the 4 humors of Galen’s writings or the earth-centered universe of Ptolemy. Racial separation for the purpose of social harmony was at one time an acceptable view in polite conversation. Thank God that we outgrew them. But those people, like us, were a product of their time. To condemn them for not having read Marcuse and Howard Zinn, or to have benefited from the musings of Antifa thugs, is the height of folly.

And remember, you, the young, are setting yourselves up for defacement as a new worldview grips a another future’s young. Maybe, just maybe, you will be considered as despicable as you hold Thomas Jefferson. Don’t be so confidant in your self-righteousness.

Sen. John Stennis (D, Miss.) was a committed segregationist but would later come around to campaign for Mike Espy to be the first black congressman to be elected from the Old South since Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln pondered what to do with the freed slaves at a time when the “peculiar institution” was a going concern in 15 of 32 states. He quickly dropped the idea and would later lead the nation in a war to end slavery at a cost of 2% of the population dead on the battle field, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and got the passage of the 13th Amendment. Not a bad record, and one far more significant than idle musings. The same holds true for all our real heroes. They may have subscribed to some popular and faulty ideas, and possessed flaws like all of us, but their virtues far outweighed the weaknesses of being human.

Judgments are a weighing in the balance. There may be a number of righteous acts, or just a single big one, to compensate for the wrongs. That’s the reality of a world filled with flawed human beings. James Madison was right when he opined that people are not angels. It’s a lesson that our young snowflakes would do well to consider.

For the rest of us, don’t let them spoil our joyous July 4th.

RogerG

Are we about to enter a dark age? If so, it’s a weird one. The one that came upon the Roman Empire had the courtesy of suffering from some exogenous forces – you know, the invading Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, the Hun, etc. If true for us, we will have thought ourselves into our own decline. Yes, merely thinking ourselves into civilizational descent. For instance, we have convinced ourselves that the spiel coming out of the mouths of Rev. Al Sharpton and rabble is somehow acceptable … instead of, more accurately, being the canary in the coal mine. To no surprise, and with the sanction of our cultural gatekeepers, the Napoleon of Freddy’s Fashion Mart (Harlem riot, 1995) has added funerals to his itinerary to embolden the wrecking.

Al Sharpton was at the pulpit in The Fountain of Praise church in Houston one Tuesday (6/9) to deliver the eulogy for George Floyd. In many ways the performance was the typical race-baiting Al with a few more scriptural references to make the screed go down easier. He mentioned the presence of whites in the protests and disturbances following the death of George Floyd to create the illusion of a popular unity behind Al’s huckster road show. His warped cosmology hasn’t changed since the lynching epidemic of the late 19th century. For him, it’s 1890 Georgia forever.

The inclusion of whites in the hubbub swirling around Floyd’s death isn’t so much a confirmation of Sharpton’s grand assumptions but the sign of something more troubling. If for Al the KKK never subsided, so they never left the imagination of the Left of all skin tones and hair textures. The same people who founded the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), shut down San Francisco State University (1968), and turned other campuses five decades ago into a cheap knockoff of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror are of the same ilk as the ones who freely roam the streets of Portland, intimidate college deans, desecrate monuments, exploit a singular incident-gone-viral, and gin up riots and pandemonium in our cities.

Al, this isn’t unity on display. It’s the recycling of an insidious view, one in which you, Al, have ridden to ignominy: American civilization is reduced to group oppression and deserving of a complete revolution. Al, in your fevered imagination, everything in that history and way of life is distorted to fit the plot line.

Suburban moms, you may not like Trump, but these folks are coming for you and your kids. The same system that put you in your 3 bedroom/2 bath ranch house is about to be upended if Al and company have their way. They aren’t alone in their efforts. Many of our cultural and economic institutions have been witting and unwitting co-conspirators in the enterprise. Other pundits have rightly mentioned the social homogenization that has taken place among our elites. It’s true. The people running big corporations have more in common with the denizens of a faculty lounge than the average worker scurrying about trying to find daycare for their kids. The same circumstances that gave us the college snowflake also gave us Jeff Bezos (Princeton), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), David Taylor (Procter and Gamble CEO, Duke), Sam McMillon (Walmart CEO, U. of Arkansas), Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO, Stanford), Tim Cook (Apple CEO, Auburn/Duke), Bob Chapek (Disney CEO, Michigan State University), etc.

Their backgrounds might even mirror your own. Al Sharpton preaches the same story of mankind that is embedded in the heads of the Fortune 500, as they benefitted from legacy college admissions and cavorted through their undergraduate coursework of racial/ethnic/”the other” identitarianism. They have the seeds of deringolade sown into them in the same manner as Sharpton fed the embryo to the congregants of The Fountain of Praise church.

If you, suburban moms, think that you can insulate your lids from it by escaping to a better neighborhood, you are fooling yourself. I can vouch, as a 30-year teaching veteran, for the mental smog’s presence in nearly all K-12 schools, public or private.

Suburban moms, to be honest, you weren’t immune either. Your kids and the rest of us are and were immersed in the same old post-60’s ideological brine. The new wrinkle for today is the mainstreaming of the extremist. The Marxism and race militancy of Black Lives Matter has the stamp of approval from nearly everything patronized by your kids – Nike, Apple, Walmart, Disney, Netflix – and this after the kids get 6 hours per day of the same invective in their school down the street. Just think, mom, your dream of them going to college, if realized, will only encase the insinuations deeper into their minds.

And it’s more than one race-baiting non-profit such as Black Lives Matter. We have to think in terms of networks since funds and personnel in such groups flows like spilt milk on a countertop. If Black Lives Matter leaves a sour aftertaste in the mouth of a suburban do-it-yourselfer, Amazon can hide their rope-selling (to borrow Lenin’s memorable phrase) by laundering its donations through other members of the web.

Amazon will shovel $10 million to Black Lives Matter, the Equal Justice Initiative, and ACLU – not exactly residents in the Republican Party tent. Is there any doubt where they will line up in November? Apple CEO, Tim Cook, proclaimed, “That painful past [racist] is still present today — not only in the form of violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination.” For Cook, like Al Sharpton, it’s 1890 Georgia forever. He promptly announced payday for the hive of race panderers including the Equal Justice Initiative and nondescript others in the “Black and Brown community”. Others like Coca Cola and Nike promise more cash awards to fight the nebulous “systemic racism”.

The scam of “systemic racism” proves useful for these gullible sycophants of modern race demagogues because they won’t be expected to prove it, because they can’t prove it. No one can. It’s so vague as to be absolutely unprovable, and thus a practical tool for revolution. If you can’t find open racists – there are too few to justify torching a civilization – simply shift the blame to a shadowy “system”. In the end, the money spigot will be cranked wide open to bankroll new hordes of marauders who will leave behind an empty husk of a once great civilization.

Militancy and revolution hide behind imprecise and fungible boilerplate like “systemic racism” and “social justice”. The tags function like magical incantations: what was once repulsive all of a sudden becomes righteous under these airy abstractions. Riots, mob rule, beatings, and ignorant defacement tramps the country. Ruin stalks in their wake.

What happens when the last bastions of authority for public order – the police – are smeared as a class? “Defund” and “abolish” are attached to the institution? Who’s doing it? To be sure, the advocates wouldn’t be caught dead at a Republican coffee klatch … if the firebrands weren’t accorded the opportunity to shout and spray spittle into the faces of the attendees. The wards of the Democratic Party are countenancing the spectacle, providing legal and political cover. With no exceptions, the urban scenes of the worst of the outrages have been ruled by Democrats for decades, or more. They have drifted more Left as the sweet center of the party has normalized Bernie Sanders and The Squad (AOC, et al). Flipping the bird and f-bombs are an accepted part of the stage antics at deep blue-state Democratic Party conventions (California circa 2017). Now it’s kneeling (ostensibly for Floyd but in reality, a “go” signal for thugs) and handcuffs for police – not for looters and rioters, mind you – by congressional Democrats.

This isn’t the first time that the Democratic Party has been associated with overturning the Constitution. Remember the slavocracy of the old South and the copperheads up north in the middle of the 19th century? Remember the Civil War’s 2% death toll? Remember Jim Crow? These were Democrats back then. Today, many Democrat-run cities and states are actively seeking to nullify federal immigration law – a replay of South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law in 1832. The party’s leadership openly pushes the central planning and inherent totalitarianism in Medicare for All and The Green New Deal. Our Constitution will be made as witless as the one in Venezuela.

Democrat governors, mayors, and city councils are the ones who abandoned large swaths of their cities to the mob and put their residents at the mercy of the rabble. They are the ones who want to slash or eliminate police department budgets at a time of widespread anarchy. NYC no longer has a plainclothes division. LA’s mayor is shuffling funds from law enforcement to the very groups who have been cheer-leading the chaos. Minneapolis is going for the whole enchilada: a complete repeal of the police department.

And now, their DC comrades are advancing something akin to a police-free future – maybe not in an overt manner, but at least a noticeable facsimile after they’ve made the job of cop exponentially more dangerous and financially ruinous. Who’d want to take the job? You’d have to be insane.

For the general law-abiding public, get a gun and hunker down in your home. If the electricity still flows and your tv functions, you can watch from your couch marauding hordes defile a couple of centuries of glory and human advancement. If the citizens of Rome in the 5th century had live streaming, they would have been able to view the Roman Forum of Augustus’s time turn into the one of today – a pile of mostly rubble. Come November, suburban moms, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute to a replay of that history. If today’s polls are any indication of November’s outcome, Americans of all stripes will get to relive the sacking of Rome by Alaric, king of the Visigoths, in 410 AD. Only this time, we will have done it to ourselves.

We breed our own barbarians.

RogerG

Oscar Wilde was famous for having written, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. Come to think of it, I agree. A super-majority on the Minneapolis City Council – 9 of 13 – are in favor of bringing the plot of the “The Purge” to their fair city by abolishing the police department. More than that, they are anxious to become the next Detroit. When did ruin become so fashionable?

If you’ll recall, the story of the “The Purge” centers on a legal holiday for criminal pandemonium once a year. Kudos to creator/screenwriter James DeMonaco for being so prescient.

The predicate for our current sanctioned anarchy was the sin of commission by one Minneapolis cop as three others performed a sin of omission for not interceding in the killing of George Floyd. All four are charged, but legal action against the four is left in the dust as the video goes viral and the ever-present hair-trigger mob gets another opportunity to display their militant bonafides. The issue has been nationalized and internationalized. It’s no longer the misbehavior of four people but the purported misbehavior of nearly everyone not black – and black too if they don’t hold the prescribed views – and all cops everywhere, no matter the skin hue. It’s a singular incident to feed the “woke” mill.

Activists disguised as elected officials, fully marinated in the secular doctrine of perpetual victimhood, have announced their push for nihilism. If you thought that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland couldn’t be placed in the nonfiction section, read this encounter between CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender.

Camerota (I paraphrase): Are you saying that you want to dismantle the police department, that you want a “police-free” future?
Bender: “Yeah, and you know a lot of us were asked if can you imagine a future without police back in 2017 when we were running for office. And I answered ‘yes’ to that question. To me that future is a long way away and it would take an enormous amount of investment in things that we know work to keep people safe.”
Camerota pressed (I paraphrase): What if my home was broken into in the middle of the night? Who would I call?
Bender: “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”

Besides the wallowing in the mental maturity of a 6-year-old, Bender escapes into cloudy abstractions. These are abstractions without clear definition and therefore not provable, but they don’t have to be in order to be useful in the crusade. One is “systemic racism” (or “institutional”) and the other is “privilege”. The words are thrown about like magical incantations. Just using the words, they believe, will unveil a hidden gnosis to “woke” initiates. And it’s on this basis that public policy is concocted. Amazing.

So, Bender and eight of her comrades on the Minneapolis City Council are in a rush to ape Detroit. Chronic disorder and violence aren’t a selling point to any city’s chamber of commerce. Bender’s recipe of things that “we know work” – the free stuff and counseling galore pumped into the inner city – won’t stem the chaos and won’t stem the desire of anyone (black, white, or otherwise) with even the most meager means to skedaddle. Bender and her colleagues are Jim Joneses dispensing Kool-Aid.

Their model is Detroit, whether they realize it or not. The 1960’s riots were amphetamines for the huge exodus of whites and blacks. Detroit, like many other cities experiencing riots and high crime, violated the diversity god by becoming more monochromatic – overwhelmingly black and poor. From 1950 to 2010 (the last census), the white cohort in the city plummeted from 1.5 million to 75,000. As others have written, median incomes of black families tanked in the city because the middle-class ones fled. Sure, the self-immolation of the Big Three didn’t help, and there’s always a symbiosis between social and economic conditions, but you can’t call barbarity on the streets a harbinger of growth. It matters little whether you are white or black or a millennial or hipster if your kids were forced into a gang initiation or if one of your roommates was beat to a pulp for his wallet. Graffiti and crack houses don’t make for good neighborhood cohesion.

The scene was repeated in Watts, Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Newark, Atlanta, the South Bronx, etc. Bender and company are a clan of Dorothies prancing down the yellow brick road, the road to a bombed-out city.

In an earlier post, I suggested, “Get out of the cities”. If history is any indication, you will. More than that, get a gun and hold it dear. Call it your Bender gun.

RogerG

And, I might add, get out of any deep blue state.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the odd reality of the government requiring everyone to be masked. Now we have it! Rioters in cities across the country are masked as they pillage, burn, loot, maul bystanders, and hunt down cops. It’s doubly difficult now to do any facial recognition to bring to justice any of the miscreants.

Masked or unmasked, if you live in any of the liberally governed American cities, and if those cities reside in a deep blue state, get out and get out now. The governing classes in these places are moving to cripple the thin blue line. Once the line has been reduced to a wispy strand, you can’t even get a gun to defend yourself, family, and property. A ten-day waiting period awaits you in California … and the purchase could very well be rejected by Commissar Becerra (California AG) anyway. New York City dictates a city permit to own a handgun, and if you have the patience of Job and get one, don’t dare take it out of the safe. If you happen to defend yourself with it, you’ll experience the full force of the law, something not to be applied to a mauler and pillager of the innocent public.

This comes at a time when the activist base of the Democratic Party cries for the defunding of the police. They say, “If you want an AR-15, join the police.” Well, there won’t be much of a police force to seek employment, and you still won’t have anything to defend yourself. Absent a cop and gun, prepare to prostate yourself before the mob. If that is an unappealing prospect, move!

I don’t know what else to tell you. In other similarly governed nations, people risk dangerous deserts and the Florida Straits to escape the chaos of the drug cartels, MS-13, and the workers’ paradises. You have ample company.

RogerG

Ross Douthat, no admirer of Donald Trump, has penned an op-ed for the New York Times that is a clear warning to left/progressives to watch out (see below). If they soft pedal the violence, they may face a similar backlash as in 1968 when Nixon won a close election on a wave of the “silent majority”. Then, in my view, Douthat goes off the rails when he predicts Biden is better positioned than Trump to win in 2020.

Anyway, the crime spike in Obama’s last years in office, the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, the current conflagrations in our cities, and the screeches coming out of a much more radical Democratic Party should be dire warnings to any Democrat of longstanding.

Sure, as others have noticed, Trump’s mouth is his own worst enemy. He grates against the sensibilities of the vast middle of the electorate. His rhetorical mannerisms can frequently upset an otherwise judicious message. Thus, he makes his reelection tougher by the day.

But, no matter Trump’s faults, they don’t take place in a vacuum. The center of today’s Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962. It’s a radical party that is morphing into a revolutionary one.

A little backgrounder is necessary. For those who’ve either forgotten or were never taught, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a direct descendant of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of 1905. Here’s the genealogy: Intercollegiate Socialist Society > League for Industrial Democracy > Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) > Students for a Democratic Society.

No red-baiting here. People who would be comfortable in the SDS – Bernie and his bros, and the dominating activist base in deep blue states – are in the driver’s seat of the party. The Port Huron Statement – the constitution of the 60’s radical left – could very well be the party’s 2020 platform, with concessions to the lunacy of identity politics. How repellent would that be to middle class voters just wanting to get back to work and their kids in school? Do I have to answer?

Biden can’t run from that. Biden can be made into a comforting figure for the general election but he can’t run from the party who chose him. The duty of the Republican Party in the fall campaign would be to make Biden and the Democrats more indefensible than Trump’s tweets. The radical and preening Squad is one thing, but burning cities threatening to spread to the suburbs, and the spawning of a crime wave from no-bail and non-prosecution policies may do to the Dem Party what happened to them from 1968 onward. When a party cements a reputation as a threat to civil order, they’re in trouble … big trouble.

Trump’s greatest ally is his opponents. Douthat underestimates the moral corruption of the Democrat side of the political equation.

RogerG