“Curator” is commonly used today to refer to the arbiters of contemporary culture. They emanate out of our metropolises and are increasingly homogenous in outlook and taste. It’s an accurate word, but doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t address pedigree. Where and how did this outlook originate and grow to dominate the culture? It was slow in coming, gradually birthed in the late 19th century and spread throughout the high priesthood of the high church of art and academia. A verb, “incubate”, serves this purpose better.
Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” unknowingly highlights the process of a person’s conversion (Hemingway) to the pervasive ethos of the chattering classes, the self-appointed curators who incubated “higher” culture. In Burns’ reckoning, Hemingway was a fiercely independent, small government guy in the twenties, but he obviously changed. By the time of the Great Depression, he’s covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist puffing up the socialist-loyalist faction, the same side that became a puppet of Stalin’s Comintern (international communist organization headquartered in Moscow) and therefore an adjunct of the Soviet state, going so far as to pressure his colleagues not to include left-loyalist atrocities in their dispatches. He would repeat the error in quietly favoring Castro’s takeover of Cuba. Everywhere he looked in his artistic, literary universe were leftists.
New York University students in the Lincoln battalion (American volunteers fighting in support of socialist-loyalist side), in April, 1938. (Photograph from AP)Ernest Hemingway (second from left) and Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (left.) visit socialist-loyalist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Notice the loyalist officer leading the way in NKVD (Soviet secret police) uniform.
It’s easy to be of two minds in that situation since, on the one hand, he harbored deep-seated beliefs in masculine self-reliance while being pulled to the left by everyone in his social sphere, resulting in an incoherent amalgam of the head. If his mind was a car facing a fork in the road, it would rematerialize into two and take both roads at once.
Probably adding to his leftward lurch was the left-wing heft generated by the Great Depression. The Depression was more than an economic watershed; it was an intellectual one as well. An already left-leaning faculty lounge and literary world became tilted so far left that it would fall over. Sound familiar? The trend was echoed in Hemingway’s social circles. Not surprisingly, he probably was pulled along by the current.
Burns, himself, reflects the ruling zeitgeist that can be traced back to those bad times. His abbreviated rendition of the Depression in “Hemingway” repeats the unchallenged interpretative cliché: capitalism failed; big government is necessary. Burns caught the preexisting thought-virus, like so many today who accept it as a given, and so did Hemingway long before Burns.
The explanation never made any sense at the time, and still doesn’t today. Just think about it. A market correction turned into decade-long affair with seven-tenths of the time under FDR’s tutelage. For all of the New Deal’s feverish activity with its taxes, regulations, humongous bureaucracies, slaughters of “overproduction”, and a new centralized dole, the thing lingered right up to Pearl Harbor . . . and beyond.
Yes, beyond. World War II didn’t end the nightmare. It was only a timeout – unemployment was sent to boot camp and slack factories made bombers not refrigerators – and was set to resume its familiar hold after the War. Thank goodness that God called FDR home, and the appearance of the immediate post-War Republican Congresses with their loosening of the straitjacket that ultimately led to the economic monster following the forever-president to the grave, and the 50’s boom erupted.
Burns didn’t get the message, repeats the slander, and, looking back on it, the real Hemingway seems to have floated along in the same stream later occupied by our cultural arbiters.
Moving forward to the present, the bias incubated in the thirties would eventually spread to all social groups who absorbed the same cultural groupthink. Think of the occupants of today’s corporate boardrooms tripping all over themselves to condemn Georgia’s new election law. The Walmart of Sam Walton and ol’ Roy is no more. The corporate world is woke, functioning as subcommittees of the Democratic Party. They act as if they see themselves as world citizens, their companies as institutions-without-borders, and increasingly seek the affirmation of a “higher” seriousness in the manner of a Hollywood mega-star desiring accolades in lefty activism.
Patriotism? National loyalty? That’s for the ignorant rubes and not something for our sophisticates in corporate suites aspiring to a higher consciousness.
There you have it: our self-appointed cultural curators of what we ought to believe were incubated in a fiction that is evident in Burns, his “Hemingway”, and in the flesh-and-blood Hemingway. Something about repeated lies, they take on a life of their own in a public made unaware of an unreality that is sold as gospel.
They did it. MLB moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta. I’m done with them! And I’m done with their corporate colluders: Delta and Coca-Cola. They get political, and I get political.
Sports, air travel, and a soft drink have nothing pertinent to say about a Georgia state law that requires voter ID, thereby equalizing the treatment of in-person and absentee balloting. I suppose that Delta and Coca-Cola CEO’s, and their lackeys in MLB, think that liberal Justice John Paul Stevens was the personification of Jim Crow when he wrote the majority opinion in 2008’s Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in support of Indiana’s voter ID law. He said that the law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process'”.
Something that was “amply justified” in 2008 is now Jim Crow to the ignorant oafs in corporate suites. It’s time for the American public to withhold their hard-earned money in like manner as a parent scolds a misbehaving child. If they don’t want to be treated like a child, then they ought not be acting like one. In this case, they are. There is no sound reason to justify corporate meddling in a law that was judged reasonable in 2008. Being the corporate muscle for Marxist BLM sloganeering is not becoming of adults.
Good bye MLB. As for Delta and Coca-Cola, your competitors will get my hard-earned dollars. If the rest of the suits join in, I’m happy with car tours and SodaStream. If you choose political sides, your products will be forever identified with that side. I’m not on your partisan side, and can’t in good conscience use my dollars to bankroll perniciousness.
LeBron James kneels during the national anthem prior to the game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, August 2020. (photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” once famously said, “A date is an experience you have with another person that makes you appreciate being alone.” The disillusionment may have had something to do with his on-air divorce (and real off-air one) as his art imitates his life.
Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
For me, my great love affair with athletics is going through a serious estrangement, and no imitation of life. The drama of athletic competition is increasingly sullied by political sermonizing. That’s just what I want to see: ill-informed millionaires and soon-to-be millionaires (billionaires?), and their managing corporate suits, who know little beyond the playing courts and fields, giving us their chic ruminations on today’s issues-of-the-moment. It’s disgusting when each big event is turned into an opportunity for agitprop. I’ve joined the legions who’ve abandoned Big Sports, Inc., for the pleasures of other diversions – – with the occasional sneak peek, to be honest.
Big Sports, Inc., is in trouble. The problem for them is more long-term than short-term. In the near term, though, their losing older viewers like myself (a baby boomer), whose habits and loyalties are hard-wired. Sports-viewing and sports-playing are in our blood; yet, radical left political demonstrations that were thought to be relegated to college-campus romper rooms were brought into our homes just as we settled into watching the championship run of the Golden State Warriors or SF 49ers or SF Giants. Our sports stars began spouting slogans of the Marxist BLM and besmirching our flag and anthem with open displays of their radicalism. Provocative effrontery will illicit provocative reactions. It’s like they are courting resentment toward their product when they ought to be selling it. Shameful acts started piling up each year after 2016.
San Francisco Giants players and coaches kneel during the national anthem in an exhibition game with the Oakland Athletics, July 20230.
Older fans were taking many punches to the gut of their enthusiasm. The 2016-2017 kneeling protests ignited a fan protest of the player protest. Rasmussen at the time found 32% of adult respondents “are less likely to watch an NFL game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests by players on the field.” Some undoubtedly returned, but many didn’t. Another slice of the fan base gone.
Then George Floyd hit the air waves. The tendentious sermonizing became less ad hoc and more systematized with the full participation of corporate headquarters. It swept across the world of Big Sports, Inc. My beloved SF Giants behaved like college snowflakes down to the coaches at the start of last season. I cancelled my MLB streaming contract. The rest of the oligopoly were equally as giddy about sliming us and our views, taking their cues from the worst of the demagogues in our academic and political worlds. Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers” and Hillary’s “deplorables” and Biden and company’s “white racism, white racism, white racism everywhere”?
According to Forbes in December 2020, in the 2020 sports year, the NBA Finals saw viewership collapse by 49%; the Stanley Cup saw an astounding 71% fee fall; and the NFL’s week 14 ratings dipped another 7%. Surveys at the time pointed much of the finger of blame at player politicization of the athletic field. A Harris poll in the fall of 2020 found 32% of sports fans chose “The league has become too political” among the ten options for their disenchantment. Does LeBron James sense something damaging is afoot when he took to microphones and cameras to condemn the Houston Rockets’ owner for daring to come to defense of the beleaguered citizens of Hong Kong? James, one of the most outspoken of the NBA’s player mandarins, saw evaporating dollars in Red China’s expanding market as he and others of the politicized left in the league ironically worked assiduously to shrink the domestic one. What other plausible explanation can there be for running interference for one of history’s most brutal totalitarian regimes?
Players of the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Clippers took a knee during the national anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, July 2020.
Certainly, another political act – the authoritarian shutdowns in panic response to the virus – has taken its toll. People commanded to conduct life without much of a schedule, zooming at leisure, are more willing to be more impulsive in their viewing habits. Cutting the chord is rampant; Netflix memberships lift off. Combined with the younger generations unaccustomed to games without a hand-controller, Big Sports’ long-term prospects look grim. The leagues are challenged by broad and threatening currents, and their stars go on a jihad to smear a chunk of the fan base. Go figure.
The behavior has tarred March Madness, and this just at the time when the PAC-12 had its best showing in years. Four of the five entrants made it to the Sweet Sixteen. But the coaches’ incessant fiddling with their masks, the gym not much more populated with live human beings than an ancient Roman catacomb, and endless ads based on the juvenile theme of “diversity is our strength” would drive away anyone but the die-hards. Just anticipating that this stuff is coming is enough to dampen the desire to see more. So, I no longer whip myself for missing a game. Que sara sara.
Coming this weekend is the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. I am planning to watch it, but, then again, I won’t seek counseling if I miss it. Que sara sara.
Ole Miss basketball players kneel during national anthem, Feb. 2019.Members of the Georgetown basketball team stand for the National Anthem wearing “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts before an NCAA college basketball game against Kansas, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2014, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
A postscript: As I write, MLB is facing tremendous pressure from lefty CEO’s and our doddering lefty president to join them in punishing Georgia for voter ID, more secure absentee ballot drop-boxes, early voting even on weekends (something absent in Biden’s Delaware), broadening access to voting in a myriad of other ways, and a ban on shot-gunning ballots to all. And they have the moxie to call this Jim Crow? I didn’t know that a Bull Connor lurked in the heart of every legal voter who worries about their elections becoming a Woodstock bacchanalia. If MLB caves, I’ll put myself in the same place in regards to MLB, and its well-heeled collaborators, when dealing with a nasty relative: in a location far away from them.
The NFL’s building at 345 Park Avenue, New York.NCAA’s corporate headquarters, 700 W Washington St, Indianapolis, IN.
We are on the cusp of permitting them to impose a permanent disfigurement of organized athletics. The entrance of the highly contentious ideology of transgenderism is about to destroy girls’ sports. Big Sports, Inc., won’t allow dissent. If you’re a believer in transgenderism, the full monopoly power of the organization will indulge your beliefs. If not, and you and your daughter aren’t warm to the idea of “gender identity” being used to hand trophies to people who weren’t born female, tough luck.
Terry Miller of Bloomfield, Conn., wins the 200 meter dash with a time of 24.47 in the CIAC State Championship Track and Field Meet in New Britain, Conn., during the 2019 outdoor track and field season. (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)
MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, NCAA – Big Sports, Inc – are clear partisans in the turbulent debates of our time. They ought not be. They tip the scales in support of one side in these contests. This isn’t about the ethical ending of Jim Crow or giving women an equal place at the table of organized athletics. No, Big Sports’ special status as sanctioned monopolies gives them power to impose their favored side. For the sake of our civil order, they should be stopped and their special status revoked till their charters are reformed to prevent the harmful meddling.
They take one side on issues that should be left to the people in their debates and elections. Contradictory standards may result but that just means that Congress must step in and do its duty, not to allow others to usurp that responsibility.
Gov. Kristi Noem, South Dakota.
Gov. Kristie Noem of South Dakota was caught in the vice. She was intimidated from signing a bill to protect girls in girls’ sports. She’s right to see this as a political fight. I agree, and until a broad revolt gains steam, Congress should revoke and revamp Big Sports, Inc.’s permissive charters.
These are matters for the people’s elected representatives to decide and not the province of corporate administrative offices functioning as partisan zealots. The people are quite capable of settling these matters without threats for holding the “wrong” views from those of corporate desk-jockeys.
The California Department of Education building in Sacramento.
In case you missed my post below, in the “comment” section, I posted this in light of the California State Board of Education’s recent approval of pure left wing indoctrination in the curriculum:
“Oh, and one more thing, and I thought that I’d never have to say this: Parents, get your kids out of the government-controlled schools, for the sanctity of their own mental state. Use part of Pelosi’s $2-trillion bailout – the kid and personal money in the monstrosity – and head to a good private school with classical curriculum and instruction. Go to acescholarships.org if you need further assistance.
The government schools are fully immersed in the Left’s revolution. As a public school teacher for 30 years, I’m loath to advise parents to get their kids out the public schools. There used to be individual schools and districts who avoided the worst of it. Not today. There’s nowhere to hide.
Get your kids out them. Now! Use the part of the Pelosi bailout money that comes to you and your kids and if necessary turn to Ace Scholarships, above, or other sources like them.
Josef Goebbels, Reich Propaganda MinisterMSNBC, a chief purveyor of our new Big Lie.Photos of Robert Long, the accused shooter in the Atlanta murder spree.
Preamble: I’m going to suspend my normal rule against making reference to the Nazis when drawing a historical comparison to make a point. The parallels with our current mania are too obvious to avoid.
The Big Lie has long been identified with the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and has been used thereafter as a political weapon against opponents. Goebbels’s deceit is much more than the lie. Here’s the fuller Josef Goebbels’ statement on the tactic:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” [my emphasis]
Most of his rendition concerns maintaining the lie, not making it. In short, the success of the lie requires suppression of dissent and control of information and thought. You see, the politically useful lie demands censorship and more than that, a controlling narrative, an imposed foundational story for which no one can evade.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Today’s Big Lie is “White Supremacy”. The supporting superstructure of the story is sheathed in overwrought jargon like “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, “white privilege”, and “white fragility”, and unceasingly propagated everywhere in an unholy alliance among our increasingly uniform political, economic, media, and cultural leviathans. You can’t escape the Big Lie and its supporting story – and that’s Goebbels’s point – even more so than the lie itself.
Everything is crammed into our modish Big Lie of the burgeoning threat of “White Supremacy” whose existence no one can prove. The secret of the Big Lie is to simply repeat it, not prove it, because it can’t be proven. Our Big Lie’s oft-repeated “statistical disparities” aren’t proof of racism, and the “White Supremacy” that undergirds it, because causation for the dubious claim faces the reality of many potential fathers, absent a paternity test, i.e., proof. It’s quite easy to cite more cogent factors to explain the disparity without ever turning to the gibberish coming out of the mouths of VP Harris, Robin DiAngelo, or Ibram X. Kendi. How about the desolation of family life in poor neighborhoods, for instance?
DiAngelo (l), Kendi
No better example of the modern Big Lie can be found than in the treatment accorded the horror in Atlanta on March 16. The actions of a disturbed and confessed “sex addict” are shoe-horned into the Big Lie of “White Supremacy”. Once the culprit’s picture hit the net, off to the land of “White Supremacy” they (the legacy media, our demagogues in high office) went. Violence against Asians began to be spun by our official and unofficial propaganda ministries as an outgrowth of the racial angst of MAGA supporters and angry white males, and an assortment of other illusory villains (QAnon). Traditionalist Christians were slimed. Ironically, the facts about violence against Asians, though, don’t make a neat fit with the propaganda story.
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Watch the video below. The web of propaganda ministries want to make it difficult for you to see the contradicting reality. Jump through YouTube’s hoops to see it. You’ll see that it is no more violent than most of the other stuff on the site. It is relevant to the next paragraph.
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Before we began the frenzied hunt for “White Supremacy”, it was well-known that 85% of assaults against Asian-Americans were perpetrated by African-Americans. The fact was too embarrassing for our web of propaganda ministers so the ministries went into overdrive to repudiate it, and a grand erasure took place. Look up the original reportage today and you’ll find of a Reddit Warning like this:
“Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it. It doesn’t appear in any feeds, and anyone with a direct link to it will see a message like this one.”
SFGate, an online news service affiliated with the San Francisco Chronicle, the original source for the factoid, came out with this bit of cancellation through distancing:
“Editor’s note: This 2010 column originally appeared in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. As of 2019, the Chronicle and SFGATE have been separate editorial operations.”
Maintaining the narrative and Big Lie of “White Supremacy” overrides all other concerns, like honesty. It’s a very familiar story to the one that took shape in the decades before and after the National Socialists’ rise to power. Eugenics by then had seeped into the minds of European elites, and it mingled with atavistic notions of racial hierarchies and the persistent undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Academics like Germany’s H.K. Gunther crystalized a previously existent story of racial superiority into a functioning “science” and belief system. From there, the story is a blood stain on history.
But everything was funneled through the narrow lens of race, just like today. And if the facts don’t fit the story, make the facts fit, or erase them. The shadowy “systemic racism” has much in common with the shadowy “Jewish conspiracy”. Proving the sketchy theory is made easy by simply citing the presence of a white male – or in the case of an enthusiast of Aryan race theory, a person of Jewish ancestry – in the incident. It’s a mental tick familiar to anyone in the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. All other inconvenient facts get weeded out.
We are in a dangerous time. Facts no longer matter, the story does. All competing explanations, even logic itself, are shunned or worse. As such, if history is any guide, a much more appalling injustice is waiting in the wings.
Armenian village leaders executed by Turkish troops during the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, 1915.
From 1937 to 1938, Stalin oversaw the politically-motivated liquidation of “13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, 154 of 186 divisional commanders, 220 of 406 brigade commanders, all 11 vice-commanders of defense, 98 of 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviets, all army political commissars, 25 of 28 corps commissars, 58 of 64 divisional commissars. Even the lower ranks were not spared.” The Communist Party leadership never fully trusted the Red Army partly because it was associated with Trotsky. For purely political reasons, Stalin decimated the officer corps just before their talents would be sorely needed three short years later when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
First five Marshals of USSR; Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilov, Vasily Blyukher, amd Aleksandr Yegorov. Three of the five were either imprisoned or executed.
Is Biden and company copying a page from Stalin’s political playbook in his SecDef’s stand down order to weed out “extremists” in the U.S. military in the face of a resurgent Red China? Are we being laid open to a forcible retreat and catastrophic losses – or worse – like Russia as the Wehrmacht swept across the vast Russian European plain to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? Are we prepared for the real-world consequences of political tinkering with the primary agency responsible for protecting us? The combination of Democratic Party neglect and the evisceration of morale in the ranks could spell our doom.
German tanks deep into Russia during Operation Barbarossa.
There’s much to keep a person awake at night. The rot predated the Left’s recent capture of the two political branches of government. The upper echelons in DC have long been encrusted with careerists whose distance from the rank-and-file and comfy billeting in one of the most financially rewarding playgrounds on earth has nurtured a receptivity to the worst of Lefty ideology. It’s jarring to watch bemedaled and uniformed big wigs talking like college snowflakes.
The sight begs another comparison with the Russian defense establishment, the one before and during World War I. It has been voluminously described as a kind of aristocracy resplendent in personal enjoyments, security of position, and completely divorced from reality. In World War I, dilettantes spelled disaster. In World War II, megalomaniacal politics did the country in.
Same here, or is gestating before our eyes. When riots engulfed our cities this past summer and threatened to overrun the nation’s capital, Trump was condemned by the likes of the retired Mattis, Allen, and Mullen and 280 other retired military officials and diplomats for advocating the use of troops to quell the mayhem. Last time that I looked, not a word was heard from these titans about the over 5,000 troops that Pelosi has ordered stationed around the walls and concertina wire of the nation’s capitol. I smell Lefty political agendas all over the Pentagon, among its comfortable pensioners, and in its academies and war colleges. Hmmmmmmm.
SEC. of Defense Austin with troops manning the wall and concertina wire around the capitol.
Maybe a person ought not to be surprised since our military is highly bureaucratized. Bureaucracies have a history of an ear tuned to chic thought since any threat is far removed from their air-conditioned office. One of the hot reads to appear on the navy’s reading list is Ibram X. Kendi’s trendy How to be an Antiracist – he being the director of Boston U’s identity politics indoctrination center, the Center for Antiracist Research. In complimentary fashion, Biden doubles down on the agenda by mandating a more “inclusive” military, which means more women on the front lines, pregnancy flight suits, and fully taxpayer-funded sexual reassignment surgery. It’s madness.
This is happening at a time when China’s navy is beginning to surpass us, its land and air forces are rapidly modernizing, and its nuclear arsenal is growing larger and more potent. Their advances in high tech and space are proceeding apace. They are manning up as we are manning down.
A fleet of Chinese ships sail out at sea after a joint naval drill with Russia, in September 2016. (Stringer/Reuters)
I’m afraid that we’ll wake up one morning like Russia did on June 22, 1941, facing Operation Barbarossa and find ourselves confronting a full-throated invasion of Taiwan with a couple of our carriers and task forces totally obliterated, the sea lanes left open to Hawaii. Don’t think that it can’t happen simply because we haven’t lost a major war. (Vietnam doesn’t qualify because it was a negotiated settlement, then violated, and we did nothing in response. It was abandonment, not defeat.)
The Pentagon’s reaction to Tucker Carlson says volumes. Here is Carlson’s report that drew their ire.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The “systemic racism” witch hunt knows no bounds. The airbrushing out of memory isn’t limited to long dead white guys on horseback. Ensnared are old lefties like Ted Geisel, “Dr. Seuss”. We are living in a very dangerous time. It’s beginning to look like the frenzy of the Reign of Terror that engulfed France in 1793. Nothing was spared: the Church, nuns and monks, anyone who dressed fancy, the calendar, and even the entombed remains of kings in the crypt underneath the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Our time’s vicious Jacobins are let loose.
“The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances.’ The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing . No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.” President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive icon, 1913
The Democrats are in power, and that means the ideology of progressivism will be in the cockpit. Progressivism is a form of authoritarianism with the rulers being an elect among the clerisy (“a distinct class of learned or literary people”) under the honorific title of “expert”. “Experts” rule, elite colleges coronate the rulers with spurious certificates of competence (degrees), elite coastal social networks in exclusive nodes confer status, and the common people are shunted into the increasingly meaningless debating societies called legislatures in the states and Congress.
This mongrel is the malignant dream of “progressives”, since at least the late 19th century, to unseat the Constitutional mechanisms – separation of powers and checks and balances – that were established to protect the public well-being from inherently flawed human beings in the possession of great power. The “science” of the expert is forever on their tongues. But we aren’t getting dispassionate men of “science” to rule over us, as per the progressive dream. We’re getting the same mediocrity, or worse, but with the gloss of a college resume’.
UC Berkeley BA graduates, 2016
The Founders tried to warn us against placing too much power in the hands of any small group of apparatchiks. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fleshed out the danger in their correspondence.
Jefferson, as the golden jubilee of the nation (50-year) approached, denied the request for his attendance at the festivities due to “ill health”. But he had some weighty words that our aggrandizing progressives would be wise to heed:
“. . . the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
A sheepskin with “science” on it does not bestow boots and spurs for one person to ride another. The flaws of humanity remain in spite of a commencement exercise. Wisdom and moral character are not automatically conferred by a curriculum riddled with lefty bromides, or any other litany of coursework for that matter. Ambition, avarice, vanity, egotism, etc., remain in spite of acquiring a six-figure student loan debt.
Our new aristocracy
John Adams would make sure everyone at his time understood the menace that is posed by our defective nature. He maintained to the end of his life that “human Reason and human Conscience [are] not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” He went further when he wrote that the passions “insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party”. Our politicians’ favorite bromides of “follow the science” or “scientific consensus” is jargon to cover their poorly reasoned ideological prejudices.
Some of Adams’s words would send many of our snowflakes into thumb-sucking safe spaces. The priesthood of critical race theory would rush to their political allies in the Democratic Party to have him air-brushed from history like the old Bolsheviks who were erased from the pictorial record in all Soviet publications after their execution by Stalin.
Adams had no patience for equality of result, and thus no need for an “equity” crusade. He would say that equality in law and soul is not the same as equality in material effects and natural endowments. The former is proper and fitting, the latter isn’t. People aren’t born with equal capacities.
Yes, he would agree that being born into an elite family is an advantage, obviously, but it isn’t determinative. Look at him. He was the son of a cobbler and farmer. As he wrote at the end of his life to drive the point home,
“To teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life is as great a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.”
Inequality of status and wealth is the natural condition of humanity according to Adams. A jihad against inequality can’t eliminate it, only replace one group of barons for another. The equity commissars will be every bit an aristocracy as those inhabiting the grounds of 18th-century Versailles.
Orwell captured the rise of the new privileged ruling class in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal / but some animals are more equal than others.”
Guess who will be “more equal than others”? They’ll be the legions of venal consultants leading the charge against the wreckers of the “systemic racism” conspiracy, or the armies of activists who shifted employment from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Justice Department. It’s the rule of powerful apparatchiks with their secret police and army of sycophantic informers in corporate boardrooms and in all other areas of life.
Robin Diangelo (l) and Ibran X. Kendi, the commissars of critical race theory.
The progressives’ dream seems to be an echo of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s surveillance state and social credit system. Censorship is rampant. It’s lurking underneath the jargon of “misinformation” and “hate”. External control of thought, speech, conscience, and action is everywhere. We were sold on free trade with China in the hope that they would become more like us. Instead, we are beginning to look a lot like them.
CCP large monitor surveillance
In a nutshell, we are living at a time of the near completion of the progressives’ campaign against the Founding. And it sucks.
