Statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., after state’s governor announced plans to remove it. (photo: Ryan M. Kelly)
Here’s Tom Payne’s full quote from his tract, The Crisis, in 1776:
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
America is under assault from a small mob of neo-Marxist firebrands rampaging without restraint. We bred this ill-educated, semi-literate horde in our families and schools and now we face the full fury of their ignorance and folly. Now is not the time for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. Now is the time for resolve.
The weak-kneed in elite and influential circles are buckling to the temper tantrum. The hissy fit commands that adults seize the moment and impose discipline. Instead, we get tech giants and other Fortune 500 leaders giving support to the outrageous. We see sponsor-boycotts of conservative oriented programs and flagrant censorship of those who disagree. And even more troubling, the schools will put the heinous thought-molding on steroids. Watch that space when schools reopen this fall.
Read Jeff Bezos’s (of Amazon) response to a customer complaint and the mass of illogic that emanates from one of America’s leading corporate leaders. The “disproportionate risk” is utter nonsense. Black crime victims are reporting black suspects that show in the “disproportionate risk” of run-ins with police. Could the “disproportionate risk” have something to do with the disproportionate share of blacks (70%) raised in single parenthood, school dropouts, and violent crimes? Bezos is proof that a person can be good in one thing (online retail) and completely foolish in other things (public policy). He’s another ignorant buffoon when out of his lane.
The KIPP charter school network, for instance, has promised to incorporate the spittle-laced fulminations of the brats into its curricular and pedagogical design. Go here for Frederick Hess’s (of AEI) account if you’re interested. .
Mom and dad, the “transformation” of America is coming for you and your kids. The poison pill of destroyed futures in socialism, Stalinesque purges of the new kulaks in the form of “systemic racism”, and an end to civic order is about to be foisted on you and your children. Never before in recent memory has the country faced such a dire threat.
Where are the adults in the room? Parents, this is not a time to hide. March to your school board; march to the voting booth; flood the automated message system with our demands; boycott businesses, schools, and organizations who play footsie with the delinquents. Now is the time for you to rediscover your spine and demand “Clean it up!”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joins fellow Democrats from the House and Senate, June 8, 2020.
In 1904, Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, a Moroccan tribal leader, took hostage Ion Perdicaris and his grandson, Cromwell Varley. President Theodore Roosevelt quickly dispatched warships to Morocco. Secretary of State John Hay put the case very succinctly when he declared, “This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”
US newspaper cartoon on the Perdicaris Affair.
The incident is enticingly analogous, though not perfect, to our current situation. Today, the Perdicaris role could be filled by the American people and Democrat eminences are playing Raisuli. I’m waiting for the American voter to take up the mantle of TR.
In reality, could anyone be so calloused as to hold an entire people hostage in the service of a cold and calculated power grab? I am loath to think so. On the one hand, my fellow citizens with a “D” after their name can be just as good-hearted and well-meaning as those on the opposite side of the aisle. On the other, never has their public statements and policy ideas been more sinister: the caress of socialist revolution in the form of wealth confiscation (the “eat the rich” mentality of “D” politicians); the spread of central planning into more areas of life (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, cementing the monopoly of the government schools, et al); the enthusiasm for totalitarian lockdowns and controls on public and private behavior in response to the virus; the coddling of the Marxist Black Lives Matter and Antifa; and the willingness to unleash criminals on their citizens (no bail laws, refusals to prosecute, the withdrawals of police from riot zones, the slashing of law enforcement budgets).
29-year-old Anthony Robinson of East New York, Brooklyn is seen walking with his 6-year-old daughter in the Bronx Sunday, June 5. The little girl is watching as a car pulls up beside them and her father is fatally shot in the chest.
The contemporary Democratic Party appears to be very ambitious. Could a person be excused for entertaining the idea that the party of Mayor Jenny Durkan (Seattle and CHOP) and AOC has a more utilitarian purpose in mind: namely, the Party desires the creation of as much pandemonium as possible to make Trump impotent and win in November 2020? If so, a nationwide emotional and economic depression would suit their purposes quite nicely.
The most heavy-handed clampdowns and inexcusable sanctions of wanton violence occur in deep blue jurisdictions. Trump has offered help and cajoled governors, mayors, and school superintendents to protect our heritage, end the anarchy, and get the kids back into the classroom. They not only rebuff the assistance; the secessionists – for that is what they are – revel in it. They have resurrected the Party’s historic love of states’ rights, something to warm the heart of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” George Wallace … if it was still beating today. Could they be holding the livelihoods of millions, the safety of multitudes in our cities, and the education of our children hostage to their demand for a Biden presidency?
Do you think for a moment that this government-fabricated misery would continue much past November 3 and a Biden victory? Don’t surprised of its magical disappearance if the American people turn over the reins of power to a person of diminished mental capacity and his coterie of socialists and cultural revolutionaries. Consider it ransom paid.
Biden with the “thought-leaders” – the socialists AOC and Sanders – of today’s Democratic Party.
What other conclusion is possible given the promiscuous smear of the Founders, the mayhem on the streets, and the arbitrary shuttering of the schools? It’s so egregious that a person could be forgiven for concluding that some ulterior, insidious purpose is being served – like political extortion. Could anyone be so stupid as to “abolish/defund the police”, unless something more cunning is afoot?
Our time is rife with wacky conspiracy theories. The nuttiness of the alt-right’s QAnon and the left’s Zinn/Black Lives Matter/the Squad/Anifa/college snowflake roils the minds of folks as far afield as Trump to DC’s Russia-collusion hawkers to the Dem grandstanders mouthing the vaguery of “systemic racism”. I wish not to be in their company.
Yet, the thought of manufactured mayhem for political ends is not unknown (excuse the double negative). The Jacobins and Lenin were up to their ear lobes in it.
Mass killing of more than 200 prisoners in the Châtelet on September 3, 1792.Bolsheviks condemn and execute a dissident worker.
Sherlock Homes admonished, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” For me, there are two possibilities for the Dems’ leveraging of ruination: cunning or stupidity. The Dems might be cunning as they play chess to the Republicans’ checkers. Or they are just plain stupid in mistakenly believing that the shutdown of life and assaults on police departments will lead to a summer of love. I am reluctant to believe that somebody could be so brutally calculating. Since there is no cure for stupidity and the symptoms are so widely apparent, my money is on stupid. Still, hostage-taking is a favorite on today’s racecard.
The scientific method begins with a hypothesis. You notice something happening in the world and ask why. You combine prior experience and facts to stitch together a possible answer. Call it an educated guess as opposed to a mere guess. Then, it must be tested and either confirmed, rejected, or reformulated for further testing. The rules of logic apply at every step along the way. So, I hear the cry of “systemic racism” from agitated marchers in the streets and ask why, why are they saying it? More to the point, is it true? They assert it, but historically speaking, mobs are seldom the founts of goodness, truth, and light.
And mobs they are, if you notice the charred remains of entire blocks in our major cities and vandalized monuments. The angry protesters went right from the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy (this therefore that) to the illogic of the general-and-particular confusion (rule of logic: what is true of the particular isn’t necessarily true of the general and vice versa). The angry protesters qualify as mobs not only because of the violence. It’s also because of their track record for irrationality.
Let’s engage the mind of your typical acolyte of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, or your run-of-the-mill college snowflake. The constant pounding of “you (or they) aren’t responsible for your (or their) condition because it’s really the racist man holding you down” is the only truly systemic thing about the mania. The mobsters are voluntary inmates of a reeducation camp, thanks to our schools. They are primed for illogic.
With the unsupported conclusion in tow, they go right to the streets and statues. The only factoid in their cognitive miasma is some number in relation to a group’s proportionality – like police stops in relation to a subject group’s portion of the population. From there, they jump to the “racist man”. Post hoc ergo propter hoc anyone? But could there be any other possible explanation for the factoid other than the racist man? Don’t tax their minds with that question because you will first be met with a pause of blank stares to be followed by spittle-laced shouting in your face or a beating.
A rage-filled protester in Minneapolis.
They’ve turned themselves into Leftist street thugs. As such, they gloss over any alternative hypothesis that might show the blame to lie with the same policies that they hold so dear. It might come as a shock for them to learn that their beloved idea of massive new social programs has already been tried and found wanting. LBJ announced the War on Poverty and proceeded to bulldoze entire neighborhoods and call it “urban renewal”. Welfare budgets ever since have exploded into mountains of cash and new ways to distribute it.
In the meantime, single parenthood became the mainstay in the black community, swelling from 24% in 1965 to over 70% today. In many cities, it’s worse. Alongside of it came increased dropout rates in school and the workforce. Crime rates soared. The litany is too well-documented to deny. Is it more logical to indict a shadowy “racist man” or recognize the fact that a Sherman’s March has been conducted through the families of the poor, many of them black, aided and abetted by the nanny state? Skin color isn’t the cause of these circumstances, but upbringing can be. The little platoons of civilization – the intact family – is an endangered species. How about that possibility?
There is no room in the mind of a late teen or twenty-something for the possibility after the non-stop pounding of tendentious curriculum, teachers, and profs from K to 16 and beyond. I should know. I was witness to it as a functionary in the Education Borg for 30 years.
The indoctrination created a new default position in formative minds. They are ready to plug single instances like a viral video of individual misbehavior into their preset dogmas. Thus, a single bad cop morphs into a cabal of Klansmen in uniform in all police departments and the hair-on-fire protester-run-amok. One or a few cops says little about all cops in much the same way as one shoplifting shopper fails to say anything about all shoppers. The foolishness of the particular-and-general confusion anyone?
Officer Chauvin with his knee on the back of the neck of George Floyd.A sample of police officers killed in the line of duty over the course of 2018. At that time, from 2018 to the start of 2019, the number of gunfire deaths of police officers was up 67% from the previous year. Violence against police officers had been escalating since Ferguson 2014.
Many of the adults in positions of authority aren’t any better. They are the equal of the mental midgets in the streets. If you wait to get your wisdom from Pelosi, Schumer, AOC, the Squad, Lefty mayors and governors (of which there are legions), and the army of mercenary and partisan pundits on CNN and MSNBC, you are setting yourself up for a fall. They similarly jump, for instance, from black over-representation in the crime statistics to the breezy scapegoat of “systemic racism”.
It never crossed their minds that the crime numbers come from black victims. This is supported by stats for victims and suspects by race. Looking at the numbers for violent crime, 45% of assault victims are black while 53% of suspects fit the same bill. The same is true for murders – 56 and 62 – and shootings – 71 and 74. The vast majority of complaints are brought by victims who overwhelmingly are black. Pelosi and company can only square this circle by mimicking Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”
Suspect in the murder of two teenage boys in South Chicago, June 21, 2020.
A wild claim of supplanted and delusionary memory on the part of black victims would fall into the same category of illogic as the hoax of “systemic racism” – unproven, unprovable, and demagogic. Still, it is enough to enrage the inmates of the reeducation camps when they are freed to spill out onto our streets. I don’t blame the dupes. I blame the opportunistic adults, many of them with D’s after their names, many of them in tenured teaching positions, and some with R’s after their names who mistake the mob for the voice of the people. Shame on them all.
Remember that scene in “Singin’ in the Rain”? You know, the one of the switch-a-roo when the audience learns that Lina Lamont’s (Jean Hagen) singing is a fraud because the curtain is drawn to expose Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) as the real voice.
Lina was faux singing in much the same manner as we experienced a faux Fourth in PBS’s A Capitol Fourth. It was a desultory performance of retread performances strung together with satellite social-distancing recitals and no audience anywhere. When it came to the fireworks spectacular at the end, it was spectacular but proved as empty as Lina’s voice because the Mall was a ghost town. A celebration needs a crowd, period.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth 2020 hosted by Vanessa Williams and John Stamos.
Similarly, is this what is meant by the “new normal” for our schools: an hour in front of a computer monitor with the occasional writing prompt and textbook assignments? Some schools may open but your kids will enter a classroom of everyone masked, kept far apart, and wearing gloves, as in a sci-fi horror movie. If so, parents pull your kids out of these schools and away from the silly distance-learning, and run as fast as you can with the kids in tow to more reasonable locales. The tactic is to real learning what child abuse is to proper parenting.
This year’s July Fourth was also Jekyll and Hyde affair. I went from the insipid PBS production on the tube (Hyde) to outside and the vibrant popping and the wonderful flares of explosions and light from skyrockets (Jekyll) all around me. Just knowing that people were gathering with friends and loved ones to ignite the display added so much more to the electricity of the moment. John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, “It [the Fourth] ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Exactly.
The choice of songs in this year’s PBS edition were suspect, especially in light of the ongoing anarchy in city streets. The producers seemed to be keen on a theme of social healing. The show opened with the song, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”. Nothing wrong with that, but rioters, looters, and vandals don’t need love; they need to be arrested. The angry marchers in our Democrat-run cities and states were exploiting George Floyd’s body to advance a series of lies in pursuit of an overturning of America. A socialist revolution is an afront to the America that we love. The cries of “systemic racism” are as easily disproven as “defund/abolish the police” could be shown to be deadly. Our times don’t call for a “healing” but demand a complete refutation of the movement’s falsehoods. Our times don’t call for “healing” but demand the re-imposition of decency through arrests, convictions, and incarceration.
People loot Hot Topic at The Pike in Downtown Long Beach, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Photo by Brandon RIchardson)Protestors demonstrate outside of a burning fast food restaurant, Friday, May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
This mangling of our July Fourth was brought to us by policy proscriptions corrupted by politics. The longer that we make our public spaces ghost towns and mar our faces with masks and treat each other like lepers, the more we destroy economic life. The more livelihoods are smashed, the more resentments grow toward the man in the White House. And that’s the ultimate goal: remove Trump, takeover the federal government and impose high taxes, feverishly pursue a quixotic crusade against a shadowy “systemic racism”, foist the totalitarian Green New Deal on us, and straitjacket us in a quicksand of red tape, thanks to a growing army of the administrative state. The Democrats will succeed in producing the results of a lockdown without a virus, to the detriment for the vast majority of Americans – but not for them since they’ll be the new Soviet nomenklatura.
Heck, the Democrats even want to disarm us by turning the Second Amendment into dead letter as they try to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Neither our livelihoods, our persons, or our children’s future will be safe. Every time somebody’s bad actions goes viral, out comes the angry marchers, looters, rioters, and vandals and up goes the torching of businesses, beatings, killings, and another wave of erasures of the symbols of our national heritage. You can do nothing but run for the hills – and maybe not even that if they succeed in criminalizing the oil industry.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a news conference after several dams breached in Midland on Wednesday, May 20, 2020. (photo: Rebecca Cook / Reuters)
Why else the resuscitation of the Democrat’s enthusiasm for secession, if not as part of the full court press to get Trump? Since Trump’s inauguration, blue-state governors, county commissioners, school boards, and mayors have done all in their power to nullify federal immigration law in their zones of authority. Public health isn’t immune to their designs. While Trump is consigned to the role of helpmate, the blue-state neo-Napoleons in governor’s mansions strap the lives of their residents. They keep a boot heel on the neck of the people’s comings and goings. They gamble that a depressed people will turn against the man in the oval office.
And when it comes to mayhem in their streets, blue-state suzerains turn a blind eye as Trump is made to look bewildered. Pardon me for suspecting that they harbor designs to make Trump appear impotent.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth symbolized the worst of our times in both form and content. The program’s musical content, in some instances, was the wrong message for the wrong time. And its form was an implicit sanction for the continued suppression of American social and economic life. I turned to the antidote of a DVD of James Cagney’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.
The run of the mobs in our cities and campuses has made this July 4th more significant than any other of recent vintage. These hordes are more intent on a disfigurement of our historical memory in the pursuit of horrifying goals, whose dastardliness they are so unaware. For the rest of us, please celebrate the birth of our country, and if you need a boost for those mystic chords that lie deep in the hearts of most Americans, here’s Madison Rising and their rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.
Perhaps we need to be reminded of all the blessings that God has bestowed on us as Americans. Sadly, for others among the young in particular, their mystic chords have gone missing. It’s as if a pedophile has shanghaied the trajectory of their life story and an alternative and scary meaning implanted. A youth’s attachment to the country of their birth has been co-opted by a tale of unrelenting torment. They are primed to be the shock troops of a new and sickening revolution.
It begins with a blanket condemnation of anyone not like them, or not in full agreement with their vision. Easy targets are those no longer living. They can’t fight back. Stalin had his government ministries constantly manufacture a past to fit his preferences. For today’s version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers (communist youth), their targets are most conspicuously the DWM’s – Dead White Males, formerly known as the Founders. All of their storied contributions are mangled to fit an indoctrination that could be traced to such screeds as NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, the foolishness of Howard Zinn, and the mental trash that came off the pen of John Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Antonio Gramsci. Too young and ill-informed to question the rubbish, they deface our great leaders and seek to impose their warped version of reality on the rest of us, and thereby destroy our country. It’s totalitarianism on the march.
Anti-fascist demonstrators gathered in protest at an alt-right rally in Portland, Ore., 2019. (photo: Stephanie Keith)
George Orwell had it right when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
You see, following their ill-logic, nothing and no-one can be honored. The fact is, all of us are flawed, and have been so since creation. If a person, past or present, isn’t an exact mirror image of the activists’ beau ideal, statues are torn down at the same time as curriculums are mutilated to match the new zeitgeist.
But the same holds true for their heroes. Marx was a bloodthirsty and despicable human being, and not much of a loving husband and father. The people that ran the publishing empire that gave us “The 1619 Project” also managed a pipeline for pro-Stalin propaganda in the news feeds of Walter Duranty. Duranty helped to hide the crimes of one of history’s greatest monsters. Martin Luther King probably had a personal history of extra-marital affairs. But MLK stepped up to lead an end to a vile wrong. We are a collection of mixed bags. I could go on.
People don’t live lives of unalloyed virtue from cradle to grave. And things change on us. Some notions that were once considered reasonable and proper are no longer seen in the same light. Notions of racial superiority was once as natural to popular wisdom as the 4 humors of Galen’s writings or the earth-centered universe of Ptolemy. Racial separation for the purpose of social harmony was at one time an acceptable view in polite conversation. Thank God that we outgrew them. But those people, like us, were a product of their time. To condemn them for not having read Marcuse and Howard Zinn, or to have benefited from the musings of Antifa thugs, is the height of folly.
Howard Zinn
And remember, you, the young, are setting yourselves up for defacement as a new worldview grips a another future’s young. Maybe, just maybe, you will be considered as despicable as you hold Thomas Jefferson. Don’t be so confidant in your self-righteousness.
Sen. John Stennis (D, Miss.) was a committed segregationist but would later come around to campaign for Mike Espy to be the first black congressman to be elected from the Old South since Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln pondered what to do with the freed slaves at a time when the “peculiar institution” was a going concern in 15 of 32 states. He quickly dropped the idea and would later lead the nation in a war to end slavery at a cost of 2% of the population dead on the battle field, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and got the passage of the 13th Amendment. Not a bad record, and one far more significant than idle musings. The same holds true for all our real heroes. They may have subscribed to some popular and faulty ideas, and possessed flaws like all of us, but their virtues far outweighed the weaknesses of being human.
Judgments are a weighing in the balance. There may be a number of righteous acts, or just a single big one, to compensate for the wrongs. That’s the reality of a world filled with flawed human beings. James Madison was right when he opined that people are not angels. It’s a lesson that our young snowflakes would do well to consider.
For the rest of us, don’t let them spoil our joyous July 4th.
As you watch the video below please keep in mind that these protesters may reflect another lost generation, or, more accurately, a lost portion of another generation. We are breeding highly confidant, overly opinionated know-nothings. They are coming out of our comfortable homes and families and out of our resplendent public and private schools. Why? Below is my attempt to wrestle with an answer.
Fads infect nearly everything. Trendy grand theories takeover many fields. Academia and its professional appendage – teaching – are especially prone to it. I remember a conversation with a principal many years ago over the voguish pedagogy of HOTS, or “higher order thinking skills”. He believed that the idea held great promise. I was more skeptical. He saw it as a way to constrain the leftward bias in the schools. I viewed it as ongoing cover for more bias, just another rendering of the usual indoctrination with a new twist.
The notion of honing good “thinking” skills in the young, on first blush, has some appeal. But strip away the glossy veneer and you’ll find the same cognitive emptiness and ideological spin. For one, educators never established a good factual and conceptual basis for the students’ logic. A biased rendition of human experience and complete ignorance of history’s contrasting frames of reference makes the entire enterprise nonsensical.
The K-16 academic core – Science, Language Arts, Math, History – remain primers for the making of good little Progressives (maybe less so with Math, but the “experts” are making inroads). Reason or revelation; objective or relative truth; spontaneous human organization or central planning; the positive notion of human nature or a negative one; nature or nurture; humankind as animal or “in God’s image”; collectivism or ordered liberty; and the “scientific” or organic forms of human social development are some of the dichotomies that’ll be absent from their understanding. Chances are, the kids won’t be acquainted with them because the staff never was. The rot is preordained from college on down.
I maintained that the kids already “think” and have been doing it since they first mouthed “I want” to mom. If you doubt it, establish a dress code and watch them devise ways to subvert it. Kids are quite ingenious at playing hooky and avoiding homework. Ask any parent. It’s not that kids don’t “think”. We just don’t give them much to properly think about. And we aren’t about to accomplish that end when we smear “thinking skills” over a deep layer of half-witted indoctrination.
Add a dollop of narcissism in the form of a frenzy of self-esteem instruction and you’ll have all the makings for an opinionated ignoramus. They have opinions but are manifestly ignorant of much of everything outside the dogmas of the Left. They speak in empty rhetoric, so dialogue never happens. It deteriorates into a flinging of accusatory epithets. Insults that they mistake for deep thought are their stock-and-trade.
We brought this on ourselves. If the home is responsible, it’s child abuse. If the schools are liable, it’s child abuse. Either way, this is no way to rear a child. People don’t get this bad by accident.
Are we about to enter a dark age? If so, it’s a weird one. The one that came upon the Roman Empire had the courtesy of suffering from some exogenous forces – you know, the invading Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, the Hun, etc. If true for us, we will have thought ourselves into our own decline. Yes, merely thinking ourselves into civilizational descent. For instance, we have convinced ourselves that the spiel coming out of the mouths of Rev. Al Sharpton and rabble is somehow acceptable … instead of, more accurately, being the canary in the coal mine. To no surprise, and with the sanction of our cultural gatekeepers, the Napoleon of Freddy’s Fashion Mart (Harlem riot, 1995) has added funerals to his itinerary to embolden the wrecking.
Rev. Al Sharpton at the time of the Harlem riot at Freddy’s Fashion Mart.
Al Sharpton was at the pulpit in The Fountain of Praise church in Houston one Tuesday (6/9) to deliver the eulogy for George Floyd. In many ways the performance was the typical race-baiting Al with a few more scriptural references to make the screed go down easier. He mentioned the presence of whites in the protests and disturbances following the death of George Floyd to create the illusion of a popular unity behind Al’s huckster road show. His warped cosmology hasn’t changed since the lynching epidemic of the late 19th century. For him, it’s 1890 Georgia forever.
Bodies of three men lynched in Habersham County, Georgia, on May 17, 1892
The inclusion of whites in the hubbub swirling around Floyd’s death isn’t so much a confirmation of Sharpton’s grand assumptions but the sign of something more troubling. If for Al the KKK never subsided, so they never left the imagination of the Left of all skin tones and hair textures. The same people who founded the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), shut down San Francisco State University (1968), and turned other campuses five decades ago into a cheap knockoff of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror are of the same ilk as the ones who freely roam the streets of Portland, intimidate college deans, desecrate monuments, exploit a singular incident-gone-viral, and gin up riots and pandemonium in our cities.
Al, this isn’t unity on display. It’s the recycling of an insidious view, one in which you, Al, have ridden to ignominy: American civilization is reduced to group oppression and deserving of a complete revolution. Al, in your fevered imagination, everything in that history and way of life is distorted to fit the plot line.
Suburban moms, you may not like Trump, but these folks are coming for you and your kids. The same system that put you in your 3 bedroom/2 bath ranch house is about to be upended if Al and company have their way. They aren’t alone in their efforts. Many of our cultural and economic institutions have been witting and unwitting co-conspirators in the enterprise. Other pundits have rightly mentioned the social homogenization that has taken place among our elites. It’s true. The people running big corporations have more in common with the denizens of a faculty lounge than the average worker scurrying about trying to find daycare for their kids. The same circumstances that gave us the college snowflake also gave us Jeff Bezos (Princeton), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), David Taylor (Procter and Gamble CEO, Duke), Sam McMillon (Walmart CEO, U. of Arkansas), Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO, Stanford), Tim Cook (Apple CEO, Auburn/Duke), Bob Chapek (Disney CEO, Michigan State University), etc.
Their backgrounds might even mirror your own. Al Sharpton preaches the same story of mankind that is embedded in the heads of the Fortune 500, as they benefitted from legacy college admissions and cavorted through their undergraduate coursework of racial/ethnic/”the other” identitarianism. They have the seeds of deringolade sown into them in the same manner as Sharpton fed the embryo to the congregants of The Fountain of Praise church.
If you, suburban moms, think that you can insulate your lids from it by escaping to a better neighborhood, you are fooling yourself. I can vouch, as a 30-year teaching veteran, for the mental smog’s presence in nearly all K-12 schools, public or private.
Suburban moms, to be honest, you weren’t immune either. Your kids and the rest of us are and were immersed in the same old post-60’s ideological brine. The new wrinkle for today is the mainstreaming of the extremist. The Marxism and race militancy of Black Lives Matter has the stamp of approval from nearly everything patronized by your kids – Nike, Apple, Walmart, Disney, Netflix – and this after the kids get 6 hours per day of the same invective in their school down the street. Just think, mom, your dream of them going to college, if realized, will only encase the insinuations deeper into their minds.
College students melt down at a Ben Shapiro talk on campus.
And it’s more than one race-baiting non-profit such as Black Lives Matter. We have to think in terms of networks since funds and personnel in such groups flows like spilt milk on a countertop. If Black Lives Matter leaves a sour aftertaste in the mouth of a suburban do-it-yourselfer, Amazon can hide their rope-selling (to borrow Lenin’s memorable phrase) by laundering its donations through other members of the web.
Amazon will shovel $10 million to Black Lives Matter, the Equal Justice Initiative, and ACLU – not exactly residents in the Republican Party tent. Is there any doubt where they will line up in November? Apple CEO, Tim Cook, proclaimed, “That painful past [racist] is still present today — not only in the form of violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination.” For Cook, like Al Sharpton, it’s 1890 Georgia forever. He promptly announced payday for the hive of race panderers including the Equal Justice Initiative and nondescript others in the “Black and Brown community”. Others like Coca Cola and Nike promise more cash awards to fight the nebulous “systemic racism”.
The scam of “systemic racism” proves useful for these gullible sycophants of modern race demagogues because they won’t be expected to prove it, because they can’t prove it. No one can. It’s so vague as to be absolutely unprovable, and thus a practical tool for revolution. If you can’t find open racists – there are too few to justify torching a civilization – simply shift the blame to a shadowy “system”. In the end, the money spigot will be cranked wide open to bankroll new hordes of marauders who will leave behind an empty husk of a once great civilization.
Militancy and revolution hide behind imprecise and fungible boilerplate like “systemic racism” and “social justice”. The tags function like magical incantations: what was once repulsive all of a sudden becomes righteous under these airy abstractions. Riots, mob rule, beatings, and ignorant defacement tramps the country. Ruin stalks in their wake.
What happens when the last bastions of authority for public order – the police – are smeared as a class? “Defund” and “abolish” are attached to the institution? Who’s doing it? To be sure, the advocates wouldn’t be caught dead at a Republican coffee klatch … if the firebrands weren’t accorded the opportunity to shout and spray spittle into the faces of the attendees. The wards of the Democratic Party are countenancing the spectacle, providing legal and political cover. With no exceptions, the urban scenes of the worst of the outrages have been ruled by Democrats for decades, or more. They have drifted more Left as the sweet center of the party has normalized Bernie Sanders and The Squad (AOC, et al). Flipping the bird and f-bombs are an accepted part of the stage antics at deep blue-state Democratic Party conventions (California circa 2017). Now it’s kneeling (ostensibly for Floyd but in reality, a “go” signal for thugs) and handcuffs for police – not for looters and rioters, mind you – by congressional Democrats.
The middle finger to Trump at California Democratic Party convention in 2017.Kneeling Democratic Party leadership in the capitol.
This isn’t the first time that the Democratic Party has been associated with overturning the Constitution. Remember the slavocracy of the old South and the copperheads up north in the middle of the 19th century? Remember the Civil War’s 2% death toll? Remember Jim Crow? These were Democrats back then. Today, many Democrat-run cities and states are actively seeking to nullify federal immigration law – a replay of South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law in 1832. The party’s leadership openly pushes the central planning and inherent totalitarianism in Medicare for All and The Green New Deal. Our Constitution will be made as witless as the one in Venezuela.
Democrat governors, mayors, and city councils are the ones who abandoned large swaths of their cities to the mob and put their residents at the mercy of the rabble. They are the ones who want to slash or eliminate police department budgets at a time of widespread anarchy. NYC no longer has a plainclothes division. LA’s mayor is shuffling funds from law enforcement to the very groups who have been cheer-leading the chaos. Minneapolis is going for the whole enchilada: a complete repeal of the police department.
And now, their DC comrades are advancing something akin to a police-free future – maybe not in an overt manner, but at least a noticeable facsimile after they’ve made the job of cop exponentially more dangerous and financially ruinous. Who’d want to take the job? You’d have to be insane.
Former police officer David Dorn killed by rioters in St. Louis, June 2, 2020.Dzenan Camovic, 20, allegedly stabbed a cop on anti-looting patrols in Brooklyn in the neck on Wednesday, June 3, 2020, around midnight. Following a confrontation with police, two other cops were shot in the hand and arm. Camovic was shot eight times and is in critical condition. (Daily Mail)
For the general law-abiding public, get a gun and hunker down in your home. If the electricity still flows and your tv functions, you can watch from your couch marauding hordes defile a couple of centuries of glory and human advancement. If the citizens of Rome in the 5th century had live streaming, they would have been able to view the Roman Forum of Augustus’s time turn into the one of today – a pile of mostly rubble. Come November, suburban moms, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute to a replay of that history. If today’s polls are any indication of November’s outcome, Americans of all stripes will get to relive the sacking of Rome by Alaric, king of the Visigoths, in 410 AD. Only this time, we will have done it to ourselves.
The sacking of Rome by the Visigoths under King Alaric in 410 AD. Look familiar?
Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas) and the New York Times.An NYPD police car burns as protesters clash with police during a march against the death of George Floyd in Brooklyn, N.Y., May 30, 2020. (photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
Tom Cotton, Arkansas senator, recently ignited the younger scribblers in the New York Times’s newsroom into paroxysms of rage for daring to present a view that counters their settled and stunted worldview. What’s so outrageous in offering up the option of using troops to quell insurrection-style riots across the country? Then again, the young journos emanated from college, today’s colleges.
A sizeable portion of the populace is expected to go to college, but these places of “higher” (maybe “lower” or “lesser” are more accurate adjectives) learning have been petri dishes for years for the nurturing of skin color, genitalia, sex-changing, bedroom-mate, colonization hyper-sensitivities. Huge blocks of the college catalogue are more than just the inculcation of oppression, oppression everywhere. The newly minted oppression departments and their courses are considered by many a college dean to be replacements for the classics. The traditional academic core, for what remains of it, is no refuge since it is riddled with the oppression-palooza. There’s no escape once you step foot on the campus. The stuff seeps down to K-12.
As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I can testify to the looniness of it all. Long ago, rigor was removed from the curriculum as race, sex, gender, class consciousness filled the void. Think of it as Marxism for hipsters.
I’m reminded of Hitler’s PR guy, Joseph Goebbels, and his big lie theory.
Undated photo of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of propaganda, delivering a speech. (Bengt von zur Muehlen/Yad Vashem Photo Archive)
The idea has two parts: the often-repeated big lie itself and the necessity of suppressing dissenting views to preserve the lie. Here is the full Goebbels quote:
“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.”
So, the first part of the task is accomplished with the 80-year-long marination of the population in the fable of the unceasing oppression of workers, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and the whole host of the nondescript “other” – everyone LGBTQ and interracial and intersexual and intersectional and everywhere the twain shall meet – from age 5 to death. The second part of the Goebbels program is actively underway, and has been for quite some time. Try and present a word of caution and you’ll be inundated with the charge of racism. There will be no place left for you in polite company.
The smothering of free thought isn’t limited to the schools. Mandatory sheltering-in-place has made your home no refuge from the mental miasma. Speaking of a captured audience. You need not go to college to get the balderdash. Bazos and his Amazon Prime caliphate will bring to you Black Lives Matter dogmas with race-conscious banner offerings at the top of Amazon’s Prime’s home page under a title emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter”.
Big tech and its gazillions in cash and omnipresent reach are fully onboard as they penetrate into every hand and home. Lenin’s quip about rope-sellers (the rich will sell us the rope to hang them) comes to mind. Colleges go up in flames, and so do urban streets; the Fortune 500 is aiding and abetting; our media are the revolution’s propaganda arm; and law enforcement are dirty words.
What’s up with this? Well, we need to look no further than the prevalence of a fashionable philosophy. It’s a view of life with tentacles in a sea of demonstrable falsehoods, akin to Goebbels’s manufactured truth. The shoddy myth story surrounding Michael Brown and race-stats contorted into pseudo-scientific proof are invoked to make the unreal look real. Need everything boil down to the imaginings of identity-based oppression, oppression everywhere? Our world has gone insane as we are beset by a real virus and a pervasive, virus-like twisting of the mind. The old aphorism of education being the key to success is made into gibberish as education is no longer education, as commonly understood.
It’s interesting to speculate on the possible relationship between turning the population into 3-month shut-ins and the outbursts of violence in our cities. The tie is more complex than the easy task of disproving the nonsense coming out of the mouths of those running the show in the newest third world state – the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) – smack dab in the middle of Seattle. Heather McDonald’s myth-busting work on the subject has been stellar.
The Black Lives Matter/Antifa gang is predicated on a simple assumption: Blacks as a class are as oppressed today as they were in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Trotted out as proof are numbers in relation to the target group’s proportion of the overall population. The media repeat the inanities over and over again. However, actual social conditions and behavior don’t correspond to the Census Bureau’s percentages for race and ethnicity. 13% of the population shouldn’t be expected to mean 13% of murders, 13% of robberies, 13% of dropouts, 13% of out-of-wedlock births, 13% of drug use, 13% of gang activity, 13% of single-parent families, 13% of …. According to the woke directorate coming out of our colleges and into our institutions, any upward deviation away from the norm is due to racism … or one of many other of the “isms” bouncing around.
Speaking of jumping to conclusions, this rivals Evel Knieval’s (stuntman extraordinaire, 1938-2007) anticipated-but-never-performed leap across the Grand Canyon.
Evel Knievel’s plan for his jump (unsuccessful) across the Snake River Canyon in Idaho, 1974.
It’s a fallacy bordering on self-delusion, a politically convenient self-delusion.
It’s like they put their heads in a box and prevent anything else from interfering with their tunnel vision. Take for example something as simple as traffic stops, leading to the banality of “driving while black”. No attempt is made to correlate stops with racial breakdowns of driving behavior and time of day on the road. Plus, at night when the charge of systemic police racism is mostly made, how can an officer determine race from behind and through tainted windows at 30 feet? The accusation won’t survive a sufficient degree of adult analysis.
And, for sure, those other social conditions aren’t hitched to the racial distributions either. Could those other social conditions – chaotic homes in the grip of out-of-wedlock births (75% of black births), single-parenthood, substance abuse, unstable and frequent romantic relationships in front of the kids, etc. – have greater explanatory power for inordinate black run-ins with the police than the charge of Klansmen in uniform? Race is not a determinant of behavior, but upbringing is. And upbringing stats don’t align with population proportionality.
These are hard truths than cannot be easily explained away. Nonetheless, we are expected by our so-called “enlightened betters” to function as a society on this mountain of deceit. Sadly, the real victims of this crusade into absurdity are the many upstanding black citizens who unfairly wear the stain of the underlying reality. They get lumped into the same category by seasoned cabbies of all races, and maybe too many cops of all races. The War on Poverty came to help but left in its wake the devastation of some of our most vulnerable: people who were chained into slavery, suffered under Jim Crow, endured the lynching epidemic, locked into perpetual serfdom, and then were enticed by the glitter of government mammon. To be fair, the allure has afflicted all groups. But the most impacted were the most historically victimized, and victimized in ways not emanating from the bullhorns of those manning the barricades of CHAZ.
A gathering on Wednesday in the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill, where protesters have established an “autonomous zone.” (photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Indeed, we have created for ourselves a world without reason and are living the consequences.
Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution. (photo: Jean Vincent/AFP)Scenes from a Black Lives Matter rally and march in Falls Church, Va., June 4, 2020. (Staff Photo by Jay Westcott, Tyson’s Reporter)
Prologue
Many things in the present resemble the past. They are not exact replicas for sure, but they have enough in common to make us aware of the existence of human nature. Yes, recurring instances prove our commonness since our creation and/or evolution. The scenes on the streets of our cities circa 2020 strikingly approximate the blind fury of the young that was ignited by Mao in China from 1966-76, something called the Cultural Revolution. The mob personality, the participants’ ages, the modes of behavior, all fitted to a revolutionary cause, transcends group titles and the calendar.
Mao’s Red Guards and Black Lives Matter/Antifa occupy the same category in group genus.
The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 1
We are in a very critical moment in our country’s history. The unthinkable is gaining currency. Namely, the sources of stability, legitimacy, security, and decency are coming under assault. Mobs and protest movements are spreading throughout the country to destroy some of our most critical institutions as they ride on a current of provable falsehoods. Right now, the target are police departments. Violent lunatics are in charge of the streets with chants of “Abolish the police” and “Defund the police”. History provides examples of the horror. From 1966 to 1976 – for ten years – Mao unleashed the zealous young to rid the country of any vestiges, real or imagined, overwhelmingly imaginary, of the fuzzy sin of counter-revolution. Defacing the country’s history was all the rage. Assaults and public humiliations were common.
Sound familiar? Look to your tv screen. We have our own Red Guards rampaging through downtowns and neighborhoods as they destroy any symbol of “oppression”. Public humiliations proliferate like the one inflicted on Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. Mitt Romney disgraced himself by lending legitimacy to the lie with his presence in a Black Lives Matter (BLM) march. They have captured an entire political party, the Democratic Party. It’s shameful and a harbinger of more evils to come.
The video below will introduce you to the reality of Mao’s Red Guards. As you watch, notice the similarities between what racked Red China for a decade and American cities of 2020. More videos will follow, including the public humiliation of Mayor Jacob Frey.
The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 2
Here are more people who participated in Mao’s monstrosity. Notice the Red Guards’s attempt to expunge elements of the past. Notice the fervor and public humiliations. We are replaying a tumult that set China back for decades. The same could be in store for us.
The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 3
After humiliating himself at the alter of the god of “systemic racism” with a confession of his own “privilege”, Mayor Jacob Frey ended up not earning any street cred with the Red Guards 2.0. When he couldn’t, and shouldn’t, commit to abolishing the city’s police department, he was demeaned out of the horde with shouts, cursing, and boos.
To placate the radical left in their party, the Dem leadership in Congress promises “reform” of the police. It won’t matter if their efforts are just tinkering around the edges. Even minor moves to satisfy the Red Guards will send the signal of reward. To borrow a phrase, what gets rewarded gets repeated. Brace yourself for more havoc in our cities, if not now, in the not-too-distant future.
Epilogue
Many things become possible – and horrifying – in a setting of intense, excitable crowds with animated and demagogic firebrands. The goal of this social swarm is the all too common “burn it all down”. The only problem is, the eradication of the old is replaced by systemic thuggery. Systemic thuggery is real, as folks in Russia, Germany, Italy, China, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, et al, can attest. In contrast, systemic racism is a ghost for ideological gangsters to continually resurrect to generate disorder. And make no mistake about it, for these malcontents, disorder is their path to power.
Oscar Wilde was famous for having written, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. Come to think of it, I agree. A super-majority on the Minneapolis City Council – 9 of 13 – are in favor of bringing the plot of the “The Purge” to their fair city by abolishing the police department. More than that, they are anxious to become the next Detroit. When did ruin become so fashionable?
If you’ll recall, the story of the “The Purge” centers on a legal holiday for criminal pandemonium once a year. Kudos to creator/screenwriter James DeMonaco for being so prescient.
The predicate for our current sanctioned anarchy was the sin of commission by one Minneapolis cop as three others performed a sin of omission for not interceding in the killing of George Floyd. All four are charged, but legal action against the four is left in the dust as the video goes viral and the ever-present hair-trigger mob gets another opportunity to display their militant bonafides. The issue has been nationalized and internationalized. It’s no longer the misbehavior of four people but the purported misbehavior of nearly everyone not black – and black too if they don’t hold the prescribed views – and all cops everywhere, no matter the skin hue. It’s a singular incident to feed the “woke” mill.
The officers charged in the killing of George Floyd.
Activists disguised as elected officials, fully marinated in the secular doctrine of perpetual victimhood, have announced their push for nihilism. If you thought that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland couldn’t be placed in the nonfiction section, read this encounter between CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender.
Alisyn Camerota (l) and Lisa Bender.
Camerota (I paraphrase): Are you saying that you want to dismantle the police department, that you want a “police-free” future? Bender: “Yeah, and you know a lot of us were asked if can you imagine a future without police back in 2017 when we were running for office. And I answered ‘yes’ to that question. To me that future is a long way away and it would take an enormous amount of investment in things that we know work to keep people safe.” Camerota pressed (I paraphrase): What if my home was broken into in the middle of the night? Who would I call? Bender: “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”
Besides the wallowing in the mental maturity of a 6-year-old, Bender escapes into cloudy abstractions. These are abstractions without clear definition and therefore not provable, but they don’t have to be in order to be useful in the crusade. One is “systemic racism” (or “institutional”) and the other is “privilege”. The words are thrown about like magical incantations. Just using the words, they believe, will unveil a hidden gnosis to “woke” initiates. And it’s on this basis that public policy is concocted. Amazing.
So, Bender and eight of her comrades on the Minneapolis City Council are in a rush to ape Detroit. Chronic disorder and violence aren’t a selling point to any city’s chamber of commerce. Bender’s recipe of things that “we know work” – the free stuff and counseling galore pumped into the inner city – won’t stem the chaos and won’t stem the desire of anyone (black, white, or otherwise) with even the most meager means to skedaddle. Bender and her colleagues are Jim Joneses dispensing Kool-Aid.
Their model is Detroit, whether they realize it or not. The 1960’s riots were amphetamines for the huge exodus of whites and blacks. Detroit, like many other cities experiencing riots and high crime, violated the diversity god by becoming more monochromatic – overwhelmingly black and poor. From 1950 to 2010 (the last census), the white cohort in the city plummeted from 1.5 million to 75,000. As others have written, median incomes of black families tanked in the city because the middle-class ones fled. Sure, the self-immolation of the Big Three didn’t help, and there’s always a symbiosis between social and economic conditions, but you can’t call barbarity on the streets a harbinger of growth. It matters little whether you are white or black or a millennial or hipster if your kids were forced into a gang initiation or if one of your roommates was beat to a pulp for his wallet. Graffiti and crack houses don’t make for good neighborhood cohesion.
Abandoned home in a neighborhood of abandoned homes in Dertoit.
The scene was repeated in Watts, Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Newark, Atlanta, the South Bronx, etc. Bender and company are a clan of Dorothies prancing down the yellow brick road, the road to a bombed-out city.
*Demonstrators push against a police car after rioting erupted in a crowd of 1,500 in the Los Angeles area of Watts in this file photo taken August 12, 1965. (AP Photo/File)
In an earlier post, I suggested, “Get out of the cities”. If history is any indication, you will. More than that, get a gun and hold it dear. Call it your Bender gun.
