Culture – Page 5 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

May 31, 2024June 1, 2024

Progressivism’s Totalitarian Streak Exposed: The Trump Verdict

May be an image of 2 people — Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (l)

What is totalitarianism? Some described it this way: authoritarianism wants obedience; totalitarianism wants belief. An authoritarian controls what you do; a totalitarian controls that and what you think, what’s in your head and heart. Today’s progressivism is developing before our eyes the authoritarian means to pursue totalitarian ends. The Trump verdict is the latest piece in this sordid puzzle.

The case is absurd. The highly debatable misdemeanor bookkeeping violations in New York law were legally dead having gone beyond New York’s statute of limitations. The “fraud” was Trump doing what Bill Clinton did: allegedly attempting to hide adultery. The shame of adultery is not a crime. Perjury is; nondisclosure agreements are not. According to Andrew C. McCarthy on the principal Bragg allegation of fraud in the bookkeeping to hide a campaign expense, “… [a campaign] expense has to be an obligation that relates directly to the campaign and would not exist absent the campaign” (see #1 below). This clearly wasn’t, which explains why the feds didn’t pursue it. The 34 charges were one charge cloned 34 times to embellish this Bragg quackery. The resuscitation of the defunct minor allegations, and the elevation of the flummery to felonies, was conjured by connecting these to a mysterious fraud in hypothetical and uncharged federal campaign finance violations or some other unknown and unproven derelictions, a clear and unmistakable violation of the Sixth Amendment’s right of a defendant to know the charges, even the hidden one used to leap over the statute of limitations and into a felony. The judge’s behavior was egregiously partisan. This trial and verdict have “reversible error” (overturned on appeal) written all over them.

But the dam of restraint on political prosecutions has been breached. A hideous precedent is set. Blue-state and blue-precinct soviets are quickly becoming the ruling norm in pockets around the country. The template to be the target of this Beria brand of persecution (Stalin’s NKVD head: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”) is now established: be conservative, occupy a position of influence, be outspoken, and be a political threat to the reigning soviet, and “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” comes into play.

Lavrenti Beria – Soviet politician - Russian Personalities — Lavrenti Beria (l) and Stalin, 1930s or 40s

Stalin only carried the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party throughout his entire tenure at the head of the country. So, a powerful party is essential to spearhead the complete revolution in thought and action. We have one in the Democratic Party as the ideological home for this revolution. And now they do not shrink from Beria-like actions, rule of law be damned.

The Party is not alone in the endeavor. Their sympathizers dominate in newsrooms, academia, much of the c-suite, the media, and entertainment, almost complete domination of the cultural commanding heights, to assist the Party in building their new order. They’re free to sexualize your kids into transgenderism, indoctrinate them in the neo-Marxism of oppressor/oppressed, shoehorn every facet of your existence into their eco-vision, and reserve the power to force not only compliance but also love for their revolution. And this isn’t totalitarianism in practice?

China’s CCP only replicates what Bragg achieved before a Manhattan judge and jury in the CCP’s recent arrest and persecution of dissidents in Hong Kong. It’d be rank hypocrisy for anyone in the donkey party to complain. The jargon of “hatred” and “incite netizens [sic] to organize or participate in illegal activities” could have easily come out of Bragg’s or Jack Smith’s offices (see #2 below). Our soviets in New York and Washington, D.C., have no grounds to condemn Red China’s CCP after imitating them in a Manhattan courtroom. Beijing has “courtrooms” too.

None are safe from the drumbeat. The conservative, original-intent majority on the Supreme Court is particularly in the Party’s crosshairs. After decades of dominating the Court, they now want to pillory the new majority that might contest the Constitutional worthiness of the Party’s designs. From attacks on flags to accusations of “extreme closeness to his wife” (see #3 below), the Party’s minions shower invective to silence opposing voices. In Congress, they strive to pack the Court with fellow travelers, impeach and recuse dissenters, and extend an unconstitutional executive and legislative branch jurisdiction over the Court, anything to force the Court into conformity, like everyone else.

It’s enough to turn a Trump skeptic into a Trump supporter, if for no other reason than to stop this totalitarian trainwreck. John Yoo of UC Berkeley’s school of law put it succinctly (see #4 below): “To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind.” In order to reestablish deterrence against this kind of behavior, the revolution’s partisans must experience the sting of a political prosecution that they enunciated. Think of it as engendering a new respect for mutual assured destruction. Watch out Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, et al, as one red state AG or DA after another hauls you before a local grand jury and into a local criminal court before a local judge. I can envisage criminal charges stemming from the assassination of an American citizen overseas, criminal misuse of sensitive government communications (emails), influence peddling as Vice President or acting as an unregistered foreign agent, being a middle man funneling bribes to the “big man”, inflicting harm on border communities due to willful dereliction of legally mandated responsibilities, etc.

Additionally, Republican officeholders, don’t step foot into DC, New York City, Chicago, California, any city dominated by a college campus, or any other blue bastion. Go further. Move all federal offices outside the reach of the Alvin Braggs and Fani Willises of the world. If need be, Zoom it.

In the meantime, prepare for a hurricane.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bragg Falsifies Business-Records Charges against Trump”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 3/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/bragg-falsifies-business-records-charges-against-trump/
2. “Hong Kong police arrest 6 people accused of violating the city’s new national security law”, Kanis Leung, AP, 5/28/2024, at https://www.abc27.com/international/ap-hong-kong-police-arrest-6-people-accused-of-violating-the-citys-new-national-security-law/
3. “New York Times Op-Ed: Does Clarence Thomas Love His Wife Too Much?”, Noah Rothman, National Review, 5/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-op-ed-does-clarence-thomas-love-his-wife-too-much/
4. “Trump’s Trial Has Already Damaged the Office of the Presidency”, John Yoo, National Review, 5/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/trumps-trial-has-already-damaged-the-office-of-the-presidency/

May 27, 2024

Memorial Day, 2024

Below is a rendition of Major Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife before he was killed in the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. It captures the loss that we must feel as we visit the graves of the fallen on this Memorial Day. As we walk among the headstones, we realize that war took another brother, son, father, daughter, but not for nothing. It’s a sad commentary on humanity that war has been necessary to stop the worst of our fellow man. Someone must step forward to block them. These graves are of those who did, at the cost of their future years.

Please remember, please commemorate, and please view Sullivan’s last letter home.

RogerG

May 25, 2024May 27, 2024

Next Stop for Carnage: UCLA’s Medical School

The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California. Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.

Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable. In no educational measure is the state an exemplar. From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):

“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack. California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”

The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below). But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below). It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area. Forget about a coastal bungalow.

So, why the stratospheric cost of living? It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking. The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing. “Transitioning the economy” is central planning. DEI is central planning. Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning. What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?

And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one. It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities. It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.

California is centrally planned into a housing crisis. Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves. The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs. Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face. Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups. They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe. The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”. Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation. For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).

Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools. UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs. The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below). No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers. But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room. Do you think I’m kidding?

Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools. The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School. A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding. The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).

They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up. The Free Beacon writes,

“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”

At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'Americar AmericanSocietyof can Society Anesthesiologists JENNIFER LUCERO, MD, MA ANESTHESIOLOGY AND PERIOPERATIVE MEDICINE'

She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers. From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”

She’s a mess creating a mess. Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office. They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment. Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation. One admissions committee member recounted,

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything. People get in and they struggle.”

One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked. She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot. One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Anecdotes abound. And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation. The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship. Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests. Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.” If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.

Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots. I may not fly again. Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.

The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites. It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans. All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections. People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff. A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected. The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.

I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.

It’s the difference between government and regime. Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper. Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies. A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms. Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.

You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism. You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault. What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies? California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible. If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.

Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified. But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron? California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. We are left with a rule of thumb. If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from. A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.

May be an image of ‎1 person, helicopter, blimp and ‎text that says '‎IEVCaIC TLIAVEOKGREVIEW-JOURNAL. REVIEW-SOTRNAT, 20200 20200. com CUT! WENEED CUT!WENEED NEED WE SOME TRANSGENDER NUNS and A ACOUPLE တ ASIAN VONTRAPPS... are ALIVE ת TheHILLS The HILLS SOUND of MUSIC... WITHthe 県花 @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com‎'‎‎

RogerG

Sources:

1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/

May 23, 2024May 27, 2024

This Is What College Kids in America Support

3 minutes of horror – Chilling footage from kidnapping of IDF female troops aired — Screenshot of female IDF soldiers taken captive by Hamas on 10/7

Below is raw Hamas footage of the taking of female IDF soldiers at a base near the Gaza/Israel border on 10/7. How many of them were raped? How many of them will survive? It’s hard to say.

But we don’t need to see American politicians and a bunch of college kids preaching to us about “genocide” and a “ceasefire”. The only genocide occurred on 10/7 and a ceasefire is a Hamas rescue mission.

Let’s not forget that these savages took them back into Gaza for more torture amid the cheers of Gazan spectators along the way. The savages then hunkered down among the mostly cheerleading civilians, using the population of Gaza as one big human shield, waiting for our decrepit youth and politicians to come to the rescue.

Many of our college kids are proving themselves to be underserving of the largesse showered upon them. They are proving that much of college is toxic.

Please watch the video. Double click or got to youtu.be/PZRlrWHHRoU?si=bsJDjkcgHOumb3mw to see the video.

RogerG

May 15, 2024May 23, 2024

From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

Family Farms Continue to Power U.S. Agriculture | USDA — Georgia small farm

Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon. You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people. It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls. It’s happening across the country. And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.

Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket. Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.

It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations. The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility. If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.

The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided. The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence. No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her. That, or the streets.

Tenement Housing: 10+ Photos Show the Tragic Lives of New York City’s Immigrants in the 1800s ... — Tenement, New York City, undated

The desire for control doesn’t stop there. The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback. Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow. Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state. Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables. The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.

USA_AG_BEEF_15_xs.jpg | Peter Menzel — Harris Ranch, Ca., feedlot for 100,000 head of cattle

Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins. Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism. Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.

Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.

RogerG

May 9, 2024May 23, 2024

Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part II

Previously, I painted a picture of the mindset that gave us our urban hellscapes. Referring to this social element as the “REI crowd”, they live in an artificial world that breeds an outlook favorable for the creation of dystopia. Below is a touch of reality for those whose view of nature is a park. They’d never bring a gun on the hike, and REI won’t sell you one.

This guy got off easy. Others didn’t. Those that survived don’t look the same.

Come on, let’s get real. Guns are handy things to have in a nature that is truly like nature. And now, additionally, they’re really handy in those urban enclaves under threat of a new kind of apex predator, the kind nurtured under the banner of “social justice”.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

May 9, 2024May 23, 2024

Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part I

Black Lives Matter - BLM Yard Sign | Passion Works Studio

I’ve noticed it during my college years and into my 30-year stint in teaching. Noticed what? It is the values and outlook of people divorced from many of the very real cruelties of life. These people live in an insulated social womb, free to think of the wilderness, for instance, as a park. Quiet, leafy suburbs and districts of swank penthouses, and jetting from suburban high school or elite prep school to higher ed to white-collar status, allows flights of fancy and grand ideas similarly divorced from the real world. The pampered lifestyle breeds pampered politics and pampered voting patterns.

It reminds me of my last visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, Ca., and the view of the park from the fifth floor of the park’s hotel. Anaheim by the first decade of the 21st century had become a grimy and seedy place. Inside the park’s fences, it was an oasis surrounded by an increasingly man-made dystopia.

Sadly, the cosseted life produces the stilted politics that abets the breakdown of civil order and broad prosperity. The love affair with “sustainability” and “equity”, for example, is an attack on upward mobility for anyone but themselves. It’s how just yesterday’s savagery becomes today’s victims in the minds of many on our college campuses. It’s how the gradual warming of the climate after the Little Ice Age can be turned into a full-frontal assault on your car and home appliances, and the pursuit of single-family residential for me, but not for thee. It’s how workers, shoppers, residents, and businesses must flee the gauntlet of the drug-addled, mentally troubled, and troops of barbarous urban youth that are allowed to congregate under the banner of “compassion” and “tolerance” and “social justice”. It’s how the call of “rights” now includes teenage genital mutilation. It’s come full circle: the eradication of the dangers of the real world incubated new dangers of the real world.

I’ve referred to this naïve and blinkered social set as the “REI crowd”. Recreational Equipment, Inc., (REI) epitomizes a business model for these babes in the woods. They don’t sell guns. They sell the great brands that keep you comfy as you walk through and sleep in nature, not a thing that’ll stop an apex predator that resides in that nature. Forget about bear spray. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it . . . . Well, let’s just say that at that moment nothing really matters, except a helicopter ride to a trauma center if you’re lucky.

E.g., REI recently tried to equate nature-love with “gender equity”, a trendy cause for those who devote much of their disposable income on trendy hiking paraphernalia. Watch it below. Then, on the accompanying post, look at nature’s reality. The experience must be similar to the hellscape that they’ve created for themselves inside their bubble.

RogerG

May 6, 2024May 23, 2024

The Radicalization Began Much Earlier

NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)

In many cases, if not most, the students (and non-students) occupying buildings, entire swaths of many campuses, supporting the barbarism of Hamas and expressing Jew-hatred, were radicalized before they arrived in higher ed. They didn’t suddenly discover their inner Marx in their college Sociology class. Predating the college acceptance letter, they were long marinated in the revolutionary dialectic, probably without even knowing it.

Parents, dropping your kids off at school for six hours and off you go on your merry way meant relegating their minds to God knows what. Well, we’re getting a glimpse of the consequence at places like Columbia, et al.

Robert P. George, professor and scholar at Princeton and other schools, acknowledges as much. See at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6352285225112.

Red Mass speaker Robert P. George announced - Today's Catholic — Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton University

RogerG

May 4, 2024May 23, 2024

Charles Malik, A Christian Clairvoyant

May be an image of 3 people and text that says 'Elan abdalih CA GRTAR YOU YOUWILL WILL NEVER ERASE PALESTINE' — Charles Malik (l) and today’s “student” protesters

Who was Charles Malik (1906-1987)? A devout Christian, he’s a man of public service with a distinguished academic pedigree at a time when the academy wasn’t so overwhelmingly sullied in doctrinaire neo-Marxism. Of Lebanese nationality, an escapee from Nazi Germany and move to the US to complete his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard, he taught at the school and other American universities. He returned to his native Lebanon to serve as the country’s ambassador to the US after WWII and helped author the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And he proved to be a prophet of things to come at our colleges.

In 1980, he delivered an address at Wheaton College warning of the moral chaos of the current reign of philosophical materialism and nihilism (rejection of objective standards, the basic guideposts for human flourishing) that he saw conquering the campuses 40 years ago (see #1 and #2 below). He put part of the blame at the feet of intellectual Christians, and Christian leaders in general, who abandoned the academy to the philosophical barbarians. Much of evangelical Christianity embraced political activism – the Moral Majority, et al – but at the same time scurried off into their own social silos, leaving the intellectual training grounds for future generations to be swamped by militant secular collectivists of all stripes. As he put it, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”

The Humanities (literature, philosophy, languages, theology, art, etc.) were mangled beyond recognition. While declining in funding and enrollment, even in their tortured form, they still proved to be influential in shaping the minds of the next couple of generations down to the present day. There is no alternative to the rule of materialism’s atheism from K to grad school. It’s what happens when you abandon the field.

In response, a kind of anti-intellectualism took root in many Christian circles. Honestly, who can blame them after what they’re seeing in posts and broadcasts today from campuses around the country? Charles Malik warned us, though. It’s a consequence of a sin of omission of the Christian community: a surrender of the field to the brutes.

By the faithful’s flight from the campuses, we allowed a takeover that would breed future generations of pillagers of our civilization. It isn’t pretty as the next crop of young people will be robbed of the benefit of a more robust learning experience that more fully enriches our sense of ourselves. Instead, we have encampments that extoll savagery.

Indeed, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”

RogerG

Sources:
1. “The Two Tasks”, an address delivered by Dr. Charles Malik at Wheaton College, 1980, The Charles Malik Institute, at https://charlesmalikinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Two-Tasks-green.pdf
2. Thanks to Joseph Loconte, scholar in residence at New College of Florida, for bringing the subject to my attention in “A Christian Prophet’s Unheeded Warning to the Academy”, National Review, 5/4/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/a-christian-prophets-unheeded-warning-to-the-academy/

May 3, 2024

An Israeli PhD Student at Stanford Mugged by Reality

May be an image of 10 people and phone — A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)

Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”

Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”. His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).

A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.

“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America]. No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction. A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness. No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”

The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses. High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below). Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools. Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole. How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed? The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks. When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.

And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s. Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.

It’s everywhere. It’s on YouTube. For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes. It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more. No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad). It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good. 16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”. You know the banter.

This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away. Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself. For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings. Quoting him:

“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes. I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth. They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly. They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”

Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth. You might be surprised at the answer.

There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind. The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first