This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career. As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change. That’s not the end of it. What follows is a train wreck of logic. Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”. And “change” is synonymous with “reform”. And “reform” is “good”. That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it. When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning? Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.
To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries. Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”. A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.
The terms are also labels. What fits under the label can change over time. A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day). However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers. Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.
If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”? It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing. A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history. For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present. An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope. It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.
Some serious implications soon follow. For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory? Academics, of course. They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment. It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty. Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us. Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets. Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.
The administrative state.
The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth. It was called central planning.
“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions. Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”. Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism. The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.
So, what do we have? We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws. Does the Old Testament sound familiar? Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do. By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform. Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment. Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.
The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism. I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature. The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us. A social miasma will descend on life.
Steve Forbes in “Forbes” (April 30, 2019) reviewed Rich Karlgaard’s book, “Late Bloomers”. In the book, Karlgaard makes the point that there is no hard timetable for human flourishing. When we act as if there is one, we disfigure our kids and their future. We go further in creating a cult of youth and shuffling the old out to pasture. In the end, I can’t help but think that we are fashioning our young into future clients of the therapy and counseling industry, and increasingly dragging in the government as financier. Taxpayers, watch out, for the taxman cometh.
Evidence of the mauling is all around. Parents will stretch themselves into bankruptcy court to move into a “nicer” neighborhood for the so-called “good” schools. The schools aren’t better; the student body is just better dressed with better cars in the parking lot.
And the kids are more likely to do the homework. But what’s in the homework? It’s the same deficient curriculum for the most part.
Guess what? This is all about cosmetic resume-building. Make sure to get the AP on your high school transcripts; go to the right summer camp; crowd your kid into as many organized sports as possible; do a charity for the way it’ll look to the college admissions officer. When does the kid have the breathing space to simply be a kid?
The college entrance cheating scandals are a sign of the trend. Do all of the above, and if that doesn’t work, or if the kid hasn’t done it, cheat. We’re creating a world of facile and sterile expectations.
But where does wisdom fit into the grand plan? It doesn’t. In a world of only looking good, wisdom has no place. Wisdom doesn’t arise from a mad race to fill a resume. Life, family, and faith have a much greater bearing on personal resilience and true happiness. And for some, maybe most, that takes awhile.
A Stanford prof is quoted as saying that the incoming freshman are increasingly “brittle”. Indeed.
Students in Los Angeles protest the November 2016 election result.
Anita Hill testifies at the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas. 1991.
Please read Mollie Hemingway’s piece in The Federalist, “Joe Biden on Anita Hill in 1998: ‘She Was Lying’”. At the time in 1991, there was good reason for 58% of polled Americans believing Clarence Thomas and 24% Anita Hill. All this is forgotten in the recent resuscitation of Anita Hill as the patron saint of #MeToo. The history of the time paints a radically different picture, and exposes Joe Biden to the charge of craven political groveling. Ironically, the lightweights of deep thought on The View brought it to light.
Joe Biden with the ladies on The View, Friday, 4/26/19.
Hemingway compares Biden’s comments on The View with Sen. Arlen Specter’s account from his 2000 memoir.
Sen. Arlen Specter on the Judiciary Committee from 2007.
Specter (deceased in 2012) and Biden were on the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the 1991 Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court. Specter quotes the Biden of 1998 contradicting the Biden of 2019. The 1998 Biden confessed to Specter, “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying”. The 2019 Biden confessed to leftie high priestess Joy Behar, “I believed her from the beginning”.
So, we have A and not-A, matter and anti-matter, and I still don’t know how to bring the two together without exploding.
Anita Hill receives counsel from Charles Ogeltree while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October, 1991. (Greg Gibson/AP)
Hill’s liberal beatification doesn’t come out of this unsoiled either. Her answers before the committee on cross-examination were, to put it mildly, disturbing, even to those anxious to “Bork” Thomas. She tried to deny prior complimentary comments of Thomas that were corroborated by multiple witnesses. She denied that she knew one witness who said that Hill’s charges “were the result of Ms. Hill’s disappointment and frustration that Mr. Thomas did not show any sexual interest in her”. Later she was forced to admit that she knew the witness after others were willing to come forward with confirmation.
The contradictions don’t stop with denials of knowing people. Her statements before the committee were far more colorful and dramatic than those given to the FBI, something she had trouble explaining.
Then she was asked about a USA Today article that described an arrangement proffered to her by a Senate Democratic staffer for her to make a deposition against Thomas and it would be discreetly divulged to Thomas resulting, presumably, in him asking to withdraw his nomination, all done with anonymity for Hill. It’s a repeat of the 1987 play against Reagan’s nomination of Judge Ginsburg. She denied any knowledge of the offer and became evasive. This is what prompted Biden in 1998 to confess to Specter that she was lying.
Robert Bork at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on September 18, 1987. (CNP/Getty Images)
Remember, the Thomas nomination came just 4 years after the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg fights. The Democrats were beginning the slide into the political tar pits for Supreme Court nominations. What worked against Ginsburg was redeployed against Thomas and later against Kavanaugh.
Sen. Joe Biden confers with Sen. Edward Kennedy. Kennedy would lead the fight to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork.
Anita Hill isn’t a saint. The 1998 Joe Biden was correct in catching the putrid smell of her testimony. The 2019 Joe Biden shows another side of the man. He’s a craven politician. If he has to be a SJW (social justice warrior), he can do that.
Joe Biden ain’t “lunch-pail Joe” since the real lunch-pail Joes are the “basket of deplorables” to today’s “woke” Democratic Party. Call him shape-shifter Joe.
Kudos to Mollie Hemingway for removing the vail obscuring both the real Joe Biden and the real Anita Hill.
Gun bans and heavy regulation are well-intentioned, but as effective as repairing a watch with a sledge hammer. Another case in point: Kenya’s wildlife has experienced a catastrophic decline despite national gun bans and extensive regulation (see here). A minuscule ownership rate of 1.5 guns per 100 people hasn’t stopped the poisoning and poaching of some of Africa’s signature wild animals into near extinction, as mentioned in a “60 Minutes” story of 2009 and in National Geographic Magazine (Aug. 2018).
Poisoned young male lion in Kenya. (National Geographic Magazine)Kenyan elephant killed by poison arrows.
People get guns, illicitly or otherwise. And if people can’t get their hands on one due to the expense or regulation, they turn to poison. It’s cheap and effective. The only problem is that the neurotoxins move down the food chain to scavengers like lions, leopards, elephants, birds, and people. At least a bullet is limited to the target.
A Kenyan vulture who died after eating poisoned carrion.
What’s the moral of the story? People who are motivated to kill won’t be dissuaded by a gun law. They’ll still kill, but mostly with other means that are cheaper and with broader ill-effects. So, we attempt to solve one problem by creating bigger ones.
People can be very dangerous without guns. Timothy McVeigh didn’t need an assault rifle to kill 168 and injure hundreds more in the Alfred P. Murrah Bldg. in Oklahoma City. Weaponizing fertilizer in a garage was all that was necessary. Tomorrow is the sad anniversary.
Alfred P. Murrah Bldg., Oklahoma City, after McVeigh’s bomb.
9/11 proved that box cutters and hijacked airliners can be homicidally effective.
Stripping the population of guns won’t settle your problems. It won’t even come close. One solution to assist our overburdened police officers would be to deputize the law-abiding with open-carry and accessible ccw laws. Just a thought.
If it’s the safety of your kids in school that worries you, harden them. Sadly, we live in a time when our society is getting ragged. Civil society’s little platoons of civilization are in decline. Many of those very same kids, if they survive the abortion gauntlet, are born into an increasing array of chaotic home environments. Now that doesn’t bode well, with or without more gun laws.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) pegged. Yes he did, without ever laying eyes on the spirited millennial.
Solzhenitsyn in his 3-volume novel on Russia in the runup to the Bolshevik Revolution (August 1914, November 1916, and March 1917) sought to explain how Russia could turn into the 74-year nightmare called the Soviet Union. In so doing, he spends much time on the fashionable currents of thought among college students in the few years before the Revolution. His account is fascinating for its parallel with our own youth’s growing affection for socialism and a host of chic causes. In both generations, the enthusiasm for their infatuations is matched by an unwarranted confidence in their judgment.
Some might rightly use the word “arrogant” in describing the mental disposition of more than a few of our most hearty firebrands, then and now. Humility would require something other than an absolute faith in their youthful “answers” to life’s real or imaginary problems. Sounds like AOC. Combine the cock-suredness with a prescription that centers around the empowerment of the state and we have all the makings for disaster.
First, let’s take a look at an MSNBC townhall with AOC from April 1, 2019. Watch the whole thing to have a feel for the march of unexamined assumptions and faulty reasoning.
Now, compare the above with the book. In a scene from August 1914 (pp. 334-348), two university students on a Moscow holiday before they were to report to artillery school run into an elderly college acquaintance and professor on the street. The three agree to go to a pub for beer, food, and conversation. The back-and-forth is enlightening.
The two university students in the story are Sanya and Kotya and the elder sage is Varsonofiev. Here’s Varsonofiev making one of the young minds realize their affection for the state.
Varsonofiev: “But if you are a Hegelian you must take a positive view of the state.”
Kotya: “Well, I … I suppose I do.”
Kotya was unaware of this basic assumption in his thinking till the old guy brought it to his attention. He would have to embrace the state as savior for his reasoning to make any sense.
Does AOC show any evidence of a similar “Oh, I see” moment? Nowhere in her unchallenged comments on MSNBC does she say anything like, “We must give government more power”. Instead, it’s left unstated and abstract. Her favorite word is “mobilize” – a verb – as in mobilize everyone to the cause (her climate-change cure). Who’s doing the mobilizing? It won’t be AOC and her merry band of climate-change barkers who’ll convince the nation’s entire populace to voluntarily jump on board the train to the carbon-free utopia. If she’s relying on that, the growing number of dissenters will exercise an early-term abortion on the scheme. Clearly, she’s not telling the audience that an omni-competent state will have to be created to manage the people’s lives in the minutest detail. And, of course, AOC and kindred spirits will do the managing. It’s sooooo unstated.
What’s the historical experience of activists who created such all-powerful governments? The 20th century showed that the supposed failures of the marketplace were pale next to the ensuing government failures. Such a thought will never grace the mind of the youthful zealot. That would require the humility of recognizing the possibility of being wrong. Don’t expect it from AOC.
Another aspect of these conversations – whether in a Solzhenitsyn novel or AOC interview – is the prevalence of the procrustean fallacy. To be “procrustean” (adj.) is to enforce “uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”. For instance, activists frequently use “people” as if the people are an undifferentiated mass. The same would be true with the litany of ethnic, gender, and racial groups: all African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and evangelical white Christians think this or that. AOC does it with “all scientists”, along with the rest of the demography in tow. It’s how she tries to make her opinions incontestable.
Varsonofiev catches Kotya in the same falsehood. Here they are talking about the “people”.
Kotya: “What we need is a strict scientific definition of the people.”
Varsonofiev reminds him of the foolishness of attempting to know “the people” as a uniform whole: “Yes, we all like to look scientific, but nobody has ever defined what, precisely, is meant by the ‘the people’. In any case ‘the people’ don’t just comprise the peasant mass. For one thing, you can’t exclude the intelligentsia.”
Kotya responds by compounding the error: “The intelligentsia also has to be defined.”
Varsonofiev counters: “Nobody seems capable of that either. We would never think of the clergy, for instance, as part of the intelligentsia, would we?”
Trying to make Kotya understand the problematic nature of his thinking is doubly difficult when his answers are so obviously true … to him! Ditto AOC. Her responses to her self-defined prediction of environmental doom are festooned with “We’ve got to do ….” Our young congressional zealot gets away with it when MSNBC lines up on the stage (see the above video) fellow travelers in the climate-change apocalypse movement and create the false impression that all questions are settled and now all that’s left is building the omni-competent state … on the q.t. of course.
The scene wasn’t an exchange of views but more like the mutual reinforcement of the like-minded. The program had all the atmospherics of an evangelist’s tent-meeting revival.
More to the point on the arrogance of the young, in an exchange on the proper form of social organization, the old master set the record straight for our young interlocutors on our ability to make the best form of government.
Kotya: “So you don’t think that the rule of the people is the best form of government?”
Varsonofiev: “No, I do not.”
Kotya: “What form of government do you propose then?”
Varsonofiev: “Propose? I wouldn’t presume to do that. Who is so rash as to believe that he can invent ideal institutions? Only those who suppose that nothing valuable existed until the present generation came along, who imagined that whatever matters is only just beginning, that the truth is known only to our idols and ourselves, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is a fool or a scoundrel.”
I’ll get to the direct reference of youthful arrogance in a moment. It’s coming. But here Sozhenitsyn goes after another favorite gambit of people like AOC. It’s the “right side of history” thing. AOC is symptomatic of a kind of person who sees that their views are especially ordained since history, in their adolescent reasoning, leads to the present moment and their opinions. They are therefore justified in dismissing and silencing opposing views. Now that’s arrogance!
Varsonofiev continues: “Still, we mustn’t blame our Russian youngsters in particular, it’s a universal law: arrogance is the main symptom of immaturity. The immature are arrogant, the fully mature become humble.”
Pow! The eight-ball is sunk in the corner pocket. In AOC’s mind, the answers are so simple, and she won’t hesitate to bull rush her solutions down the throats of any who disagree. She has all the arrogance of the immature.
The presence of AOC on the national stage gives us a chance to peel back the scab on the festering wound that is the intellectual bankruptcy generated by our failed schools. AOC throws out terms from a textbook as if their presence in a textbook is all one needs to know of their veracity. She uses “market failure”, “externalities”, and “social cost” as if their use is ipso facto proof of any claim that utilizes them. Her understanding is that of a textbook and not the workings of a critical mind. She throws out the terms to impress her audience. It’s another form of arrogance recognizable to Solzhenitsyn.
A truly thoughtful mind would be more skeptical. Completely absent from her thought process was a limiting principle, the simple idea that there are other concerns to limit their application. If “market failure” condemns free markets, then its replacement, government, also elicits “government failure”. If “externalities” (effects on those not a party to an action) condemns capitalism, then what of government’s “externalities” of illegitimacy and crime stemming from the Great Society programs? If “social costs” (the costs that befall society as a whole) condemns free markets, do such negatives accrue to government actions, and are the alleged social costs a sufficient excuse to ignore the benefits of the action in question? For AOC, she appears to be ignorant.
Maybe Varsonofiev’s maxim should be altered. Instead of limiting the adage to the factors of maturity and arrogance, we need to add ignorance. Thus, immaturity leads to arrogance because it is based on ignorance.
The making of the omni-competent state democratic can’t paper over the hot mess. There are certain things that shouldn’t be a matter of democracy. Democracy can’t make the immoral moral. Democracy oughtn’t willy-nilly confiscate my property or invade my freedom of conscience. Democracy isn’t a license to trample on my God-given rights. Indeed, they come from God (or Nature according to Locke and Jefferson) and not the state.
If all this is true, we’ve just laid the foundation for free markets. Are you listening AOC?
“News media bias is real. It reduces the quality of journalism, and fosters distrust among readers and viewers. This is bad for democracy.” So says Timothy P. Carney in an op-ed in the New York Times back in 2015 as the Republican presidential primary season was heating up. If it was true in 2015, the presence of Donald Trump has etched it into granite as Moses’s missing eleventh commandment.
My window into this state of affairs in the broader media is National Geographic Magazine. Under the generalship of Susan Goldberg, the magazine never fails to put on full display its Left bonafides. I’d say “liberal”, but in today’s America “liberal” ropes in “Left”, “socialist”, and “progressive”. These folks aren’t about “freedom” – the old and forgotten Latin root of the word – since they can’t resist feeding more power to the state. If they can’t tax it, they want to control or ban it, and sometimes own it – and, more likely, all of the above. For them, the only solution for life’s troubles, real or imagined, is another dollop of the state in the form of a New-Deal-This-Or-That. It’s their go-to fix.
The unveiling of the “Green New Deal” on Feb. 7, 2019.
But I digress. As is my habit of reading the magazine cover-to-cover, the August 2018 issue (I’ve fallen behind) had right out of the gate what would have been an old-fashioned newspaper op-ed in more bucolic times. Augustin Fuentes’s “Are We as Awful as We Act Online?” raises a poignant question. He’s right for asking the question if he means that much online conversation takes a detour into the sewer. The only problem is that his answer to the question is “No”.
Augustin Fuentes, Notre Dame Anthropology prof, National Geographic explorer alum, and magazine contributor.
How does he get to “no” when he could have gotten to “yes”? Maybe a clue is found in the postscript bio at the end of the article. Leveraging his credential as a Notre Dame anthropology professor, he authored Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths About Human Nature. It seems that he’s determined to set the record straight on “human nature” lest the rubes (of which he might consider me one) continue to think it’s real. In the land of the unawares where we find Mr. Fuentes – the GPS setting is a college faculty lounge – human beings are as fungible as Playdough. The ideologically partisan notion is cemented in his head as Jimmy Hoffa’s cement gollashes were to his feet. There is a fixedness (“hard-wired”, his words) to us in the form of cooperation, but that evolved. The whole thing is contingent on physical and social circumstances. So, it really isn’t fixed. It’s forever fungible.
The counterpoint to the Fuentes weltanschauung is two thousand years older. Humans are flawed … by nature. Christians call it original sin. And those failings apply to Mr. Fuentes and his colleagues at Notre Dame. It applies to the civil-service protected and unionized government employees who will be increased and empowered to manage more of life according to the preferences of Mr. Fuentes, et al. A paper credential or government office doorway don’t magically confer a free pass from our defects, be it ignorance, prejudices, emotional excesses, or the Peter Principle. To think otherwise is to channel Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the National Socialist goons, and every other utopian despot who has soiled our recent times.
Excavation pit filled with skulls of people killed by the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia.
The “nurture” bias in the age-old nature/nurture debate is a ruling banality in ed schools and the host of the other soft sciences, with emphasis on “soft”. It’s become the favorite weapon for the politicized professoriate. The target is anyone who dares to challenge the hokum. Take a look at Mr. Fuentes’s screed in NGM.
When mentioning the trolls, he chronicles only examples of the crazies on the “right”, from the Twitter abuse of a feminist professor to the glorification of Martin Luther King’s assassin. Of course, he couldn’t leave Pres. Trump out of the deplorables file. When it came to his prescription for the proper response to the brutes, his models for proper comportment, not surprisingly, were #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and gun-controlling high school students in Florida. They were praised by Fuentes because they “acted to collectively to punish and shame … bullying and abuse”. Translation: they hounded opposing viewpoints into silence.
Apparently, the fact that legions of trolls inhabit the environs of his favorite causes never crossed his mind. Nicholas Sandmann and his fellow Covington students were slandered in the media and Twitter. Self-proclaimed Muslim activist Reza Aslan alluded to Sandmann, “Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”. Comedian Ben Isaac Hoffman expounded, “I know I have fans in Paris Hills, Ky. If you know this little s????, punch him in the nuts and send me the video of it and I’ll send you all my albums on vinyl, autographed.” StreetCorner Music owner Uncle Shoes tweeted, “IF WE COULD WIPE THESE FAMILIES OUT WE WOULD BE IN A MUCH BETTER PLACE. F??? THIS S???”, followed by “LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT B???? TO THE GROUND”. The Twitter universe is littered with lefty trolls, and many have super-rich/coastal zip codes.
Lest we forget, what about Judge Kavanaugh’s treatment in the Left’s production of Orwell’s “The Two Minutes Hate”? Wild and unsubstantiated stories of gang rape were leveraged into more than Twitter incontinence. Mobs roamed the streets and hallways of DC. “We Believe [the women]” became the rallying cry for the Left’s version of vigilante justice. The digital form of the hate was bad enough, but the zealots went in for the physical form as well. Talk to Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Joe Manchin. Fuentes found it easy to ignore the Left because he’s a man of the Left.
I maintain my National Geographic Magazine subscription for many reasons, and none have to do with aboriginal nudity. Honest. For one, I do so to monitor the intellectual bankruptcy that afflicts our media. Some sectors can no longer be trusted. After a while, people begin to turn them off. That’ll hit them in a sensitive spot: their pocketbook. For the time being, I’ll continue to monitor National Geographic‘s mimicking of Mother Jones.
Did you hear what the governor (Washington State) and Dem presidential aspirant, Jay Inslee, had to say on Monday about the “deplorables”, aka Trump supporters? He called them people from “non-enlightened area[s]”. What are they “non-enlightened” about? Why of course, it’s the chic hobby horses of the beautiful people: something called “implicit bias”, the climate-change apocalypse, and Green New Deal Stalinism. More directly, he connected the word to the hidden bigotry of “implicit bias”, a form only perceived by mystics on the Left, like him. Interesting.
Bigotry exists in America. Dah! And it exists in many places, including the heads of Washington State governors. A bigot can have “non-enlightened” thoughts about more than skin color and mosques. Sometimes, it can be directed at people who like a good macro-brew, NASCAR, pickup trucks, and live in farm country. My guess about Inslee is that his blue-collar familiarity is limited to SNL skits – or at least he became that way.
Inslee and company don’t hesitate in slamming folks who don’t accept their poorly-thought-out ideas. If he can’t find racist actions in an opponent’s behavior, then he’ll do a whirlybird incantation on their opinions with the magical words “implicit bias”. Thus, any view that runs counter to three-quarters of the ladies on The View is contorted into the Left’s long list of isms and phobias.
Bigotry reigns supreme, and it is abundant in our cultural “commanding heights”, to borrow from Lenin (which the Dems are fond of doing anyway).
Christian persecution: Mourners carry coffins following an attack earlier this year (Image: GETTY)
The recent terror-horror in New Zealand reminds me of the blinkered outlooks that infects our urban centers. Our cities, with very few exceptions, are essentially one-party (Dem) states enthralled by a left-wing zeitgeist. Anything that can feed into the preferred phobia-angles of modern leftism will be disseminated by our urban-centered media. Other news is ignored. The result is a distortion of the mind.
The New Zealand episode fits the story line since Islamophobia has entered the approved list of the causes for chic resistance. Clearly, the Christchurch act is detestable but rare is the word about actions against Christianity in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Scarcely a word passes the lips at CNN/MSNBC/3-network-sisters and the scribblers at the WaPo/NYT/wire services. Recent stories of massacres of Nigerian Christians by Boko Haram and Fulani Islamists gets little ink. The decimation of Christians in the Middle East is a saga with daily incidents of genocide. Christians are entering the same list with the passenger pigeon in large parts of the world. Again, that kind of inhumanity goes down the memory hole.
(Read here from the New York Post of April 14, 2017.)
But when a nut case blasts his way into a mosque, it’s a media circus. I wish that our news-and-info organizations went back to being about news and information, and not furthering the ends of a narrow zeitgeist.
A few decades is more than enough time to evolve a system to game – or cheat – the rules. With the so-called “undocumented”, it’s as simple as getting into the country by whatever means at hand and a network of fraudsters will greet you with jobs, crooked documents, sanctuary, and the open arms of sympathizers. Maybe even before long, the right to vote. For today’s haute couture mavens, it’s greasing the skids for their kids. Well, they got caught. A slew of blue-America’s finest were indicted in Boston federal district court on charges of bribery to advance their kids to the front of the line into America’s allegedly “elite” schools, ahead of any of the more meretricious hoi polloi. Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites.
All the gnashing of teeth for the marginalized and oppressed is a mere pose that they mistake for virtue. They do this as they steamroll a tiger mom’s child or a young family’s struggles with two jobs to save enough for their kids’ education. It’s disgusting!
I understand the pull to cheat. They want the prestige of an elite school’s piece of paper (degree), not necessarily wisdom, for their kid. Chances are, the kid won’t get much enlightenment anyway. The curriculums are too corrupted with ideologized nonsense. It’s particularly true of the big-time schools with big-time sports and big-time endowments.
So, what are they cheating about? It must be all about how to get the piece of paper. No wonder we have kids flocking to socialism in spite of its history as a hot mess. Go figure.
What’s the difference between Ilhan Omar’s (IO) comments about the Jews and the slurs of more famous vintage? Not much that I can tell. As a historian, she draws from the same scurrilous anti-Jewish tropes that would reach a crescendo of hate in National Socialism.
Here she is in comments before a microphone and in tweets:
“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
“It’s all about the Benjamins baby” – IO tweet, 2/10/2019.
“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza#Palestine#Israel.” – IO tweet in 2012.
Take a look for yourself. The Nazi posters below were typical of the disgusting genre, and are emblematic of a growing sentiment in the Democratic Party.
However, Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie would find objectionable the negative aspersions directed at the USSR in one of the posters.
Best of buds: Ocasio-Cortez and Omar.
For these rising stars in the Dem firmament, they might agree with Lincoln Steffens’s assessment in a visit to the USSR (1921?), “I have seen the future, and it works”. The USSR is probably the “shining city on a hill” in the Bernie/AOC/Omar wing of the party.
