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.
Protesters gather around after setting fire to the entrance of a police station as demonstrations continue after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., May 28, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
It’s everywhere. The story of America is reduced to “systemic racism” to such an extent that the chants of Black Lives Matter are made mainstream. Logging onto my Facebook page confronted me with “Act Against Racial Injustice: We stand with the Black community and against racism. Together we can support causes working towards racial justice and equality.” Going to the Bing search engine brought out the announcement, “We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those working toward racial equality. A message from our CEO.” At least the techies are all in for a campaign against the alleged pervasiveness of racism.
The headliner for an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
And then we have the New York Times weighing in with “The 1619 Project”. It’s an unadulterated attempt to boil the story of America down to racism. The tale is directed at the kiddies in K-12 curricula from the screed’s website. So, the kids get a bald-faced version ladled on top of what they receive daily from intellectually corrupted teachers, textbooks, and supplemental materials. The story is the same: Racism persists everywhere in an overt/covert and individual/institutional manner. To keep the story rolling, it’s better for the cause that the supposed threat be imprecise, vague, hidden, and forever true no matter what.
Sen. Tom Cotton penned an op-ed to the New York Times on the entirely reasonable option to use federal troops to quell our current wave of riots. The Constitution, The Insurrection Act, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Rock during Eisenhower’s White House residency are testament to its feasibility and legality. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether this is the time for it. In my view, we are getting there. Still, the reaction in the Times’s newsroom was open rebellion. The woke crowd in their work stalls had their sensitivities enflamed and threatened mass resignation.
But is the story of endemic racism true? Color me skeptical. Maybe you too.
Andrew C. McCarthy’s article in National Review Online, “The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard”, puts lie to the charge. His case is strong. Quoting Heather McDonald, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
Andrew C. McCarthy
There’s more. A quarter of unarmed suspects killed by police are black, even though blacks make up 13% of the population. An argument for the Left? No. The lawlessness of many of our urban neighborhoods is illustrative of the fact that blacks compose 53% of murders and 60% of robberies. They have many more run-ins with the cops and a much higher potential to fall into the killed-by-police category. And the victims are overwhelmingly black and so are the ones reporting the crimes. It’s amazing that the number is “only” – but still sad – 9 unarmed blacks killed in contrast to 19 whites in 2019. The whole story that the marchers and rioters are bull-horning is manufactured.
Why does the story have resonance? In military parlance, the ground has been prepared. Decades of K-18 victimhood is extracting a price in combustible cities and hijacked minds. The matriculants filter into Fortune 500 boardrooms, cultural institutions, journalism, the arts, and everywhere people occupy positions of influence.
Undeniably, most impactful factor is the philosophical bias in the schools.
One person (David Bahnsen) even speculated on the role of colleges and universities in making California left wing from top to bottom and in and out. The more pervasive the campuses, the more pervasive the ideology. This circumstance might partially explain the uncompromising leftward tilt of the state.
Other blue states may periodically vote a split ballot: an occasional Republican for governor or mayor and Dems down-ballot (Mass., N.Y., N.J., Maryland for instance). Colleges are present in these states but not so wall-to-wall as in the Golden State. 115 community colleges exist in the state with 1 out of 4 community college pupils in the U.S. attending one in California. 119 4-year colleges and universities of a variety of shapes and sizes exist in the state, including the massive 33 public ones of over 670,000 full-time enrollees. No state has the capacity to disseminate leftist thinking as does California. There’s no corner of the state to escape the culture-smog. It penetrates everywhere and a super-majority of the electorate.
Students of UC Berkeley.
All kinds of nonsense and maliciousness sprouts in the pervasive academically-influenced soil of California. New and novel ways to repeal the Second Amendment in the state; outlawing separate boy/girl toy isles in a store; attempts to ban any alternative to the government schools; ham-handed efforts to force abortion and the LGBTQ agenda onto religious organizations and their social mission; environmental central planning; declaring war on preexisting and longstanding industries in favor of a destructive utopia; the nullification of federal immigration law; and the scare story of racism, racism everywhere, are taken seriously in this peculiar hothouse.
Do we need any more proof of the damage caused by the deformation of learning in our schools? Build more colleges in your state in this day and age and watch your politics go to hell. Real reform that moves us away from the precipice of perpetual victimhood, riots, falsehoods, and malignant crusades begins with the real reform of our schools. An unchallenged and malicious ideology shouldn’t be allowed to take root and then undermine the state and nation. This is no demand for the rule of another monolithic ideology, but rather a call for balance. Now that’s real reform.
The cry of “throw the bums out” begins with a focus on those in critical public agencies in education and the teacher-training colleges. Stop the madness by going to the source.
A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of a AutoZone store in Minneapolis in May of 2020. (photo: Carlos Gonzalez/AP)
And, I might add, get out of any deep blue state.
In an earlier post, I mentioned the odd reality of the government requiring everyone to be masked. Now we have it! Rioters in cities across the country are masked as they pillage, burn, loot, maul bystanders, and hunt down cops. It’s doubly difficult now to do any facial recognition to bring to justice any of the miscreants.
Masked or unmasked, if you live in any of the liberally governed American cities, and if those cities reside in a deep blue state, get out and get out now. The governing classes in these places are moving to cripple the thin blue line. Once the line has been reduced to a wispy strand, you can’t even get a gun to defend yourself, family, and property. A ten-day waiting period awaits you in California … and the purchase could very well be rejected by Commissar Becerra (California AG) anyway. New York City dictates a city permit to own a handgun, and if you have the patience of Job and get one, don’t dare take it out of the safe. If you happen to defend yourself with it, you’ll experience the full force of the law, something not to be applied to a mauler and pillager of the innocent public.
38-year police veteran, police captain, and police chief, David Dorn, was murdered helping to defend a friend’s business from rioters.A Las Vegas police officer was shot and critically injured late Monday as police attempted to take protesters into custody. He was identified Tuesday afternoon as 29-year-old Shay Mikalonis.
This comes at a time when the activist base of the Democratic Party cries for the defunding of the police. They say, “If you want an AR-15, join the police.” Well, there won’t be much of a police force to seek employment, and you still won’t have anything to defend yourself. Absent a cop and gun, prepare to prostate yourself before the mob. If that is an unappealing prospect, move!
LA mayor Garcetti announced today a $150 million cut in the LAPD’s budget. His message for the residents of LA is simple: you had better wear a mask as you get pummeled by the mob.
I don’t know what else to tell you. In other similarly governed nations, people risk dangerous deserts and the Florida Straits to escape the chaos of the drug cartels, MS-13, and the workers’ paradises. You have ample company.
Cuban refugees fleeing to Florida in a raft, August 24, 1994.
A protester runs past burning cars and buildings on Chicago Avenue, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Ross Douthat, no admirer of Donald Trump, has penned an op-ed for the New York Times that is a clear warning to left/progressives to watch out (see below). If they soft pedal the violence, they may face a similar backlash as in 1968 when Nixon won a close election on a wave of the “silent majority”. Then, in my view, Douthat goes off the rails when he predicts Biden is better positioned than Trump to win in 2020.
Ross Douthat
Anyway, the crime spike in Obama’s last years in office, the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, the current conflagrations in our cities, and the screeches coming out of a much more radical Democratic Party should be dire warnings to any Democrat of longstanding.
Demonstrators stand in the middle of West Florissant as they react to tear gas fired by police during ongoing protests in reaction to the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, August 18, 2014. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)
Sure, as others have noticed, Trump’s mouth is his own worst enemy. He grates against the sensibilities of the vast middle of the electorate. His rhetorical mannerisms can frequently upset an otherwise judicious message. Thus, he makes his reelection tougher by the day.
But, no matter Trump’s faults, they don’t take place in a vacuum. The center of today’s Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962. It’s a radical party that is morphing into a revolutionary one.
A little backgrounder is necessary. For those who’ve either forgotten or were never taught, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a direct descendant of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of 1905. Here’s the genealogy: Intercollegiate Socialist Society > League for Industrial Democracy > Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) > Students for a Democratic Society.
The SDS national council meeting, 1963; Tom Hayden at far left. (Photograph: C Clark Kissinger)
No red-baiting here. People who would be comfortable in the SDS – Bernie and his bros, and the dominating activist base in deep blue states – are in the driver’s seat of the party. The Port Huron Statement – the constitution of the 60’s radical left – could very well be the party’s 2020 platform, with concessions to the lunacy of identity politics. How repellent would that be to middle class voters just wanting to get back to work and their kids in school? Do I have to answer?
Biden can’t run from that. Biden can be made into a comforting figure for the general election but he can’t run from the party who chose him. The duty of the Republican Party in the fall campaign would be to make Biden and the Democrats more indefensible than Trump’s tweets. The radical and preening Squad is one thing, but burning cities threatening to spread to the suburbs, and the spawning of a crime wave from no-bail and non-prosecution policies may do to the Dem Party what happened to them from 1968 onward. When a party cements a reputation as a threat to civil order, they’re in trouble … big trouble.
California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton leads a “F***k Donald Trump” chant at the California Democratic Party Convention in May of 2017.
Trump’s greatest ally is his opponents. Douthat underestimates the moral corruption of the Democrat side of the political equation.
Protesters run away when police move forward near the White House during a protest over the death of George Floyd in Washington D.C., the United States, on May 30, 2020. Demonstrations and riots have spread to cities across the United States after a video went viral of George Floyd being suffocated to death by a white police officer in the midwest U.S. state of Minnesota on May 25. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
Right now, riots and General Flynn are competing with the epidemic for headline news space. All of them can only be reasonably processed by taking a breath and waiting for pertinent facts to arise and a cooling-off period to assess the situation in an adult fashion. Understanding the George Floyd case will take more serious and steady minds than those possessed by Democrat firebrands and a crowd of urbanites-turned-street-thugs. We’re quickly coming to realize for the umpteenth time that it doesn’t take much for chaotic home lives to become chaotic streets.
On the Flynn front, the suave Obama may turn out to be what he was all along: a smooth-talking community organizer who made the upper echelons of the federal government an arm of his Democratic Party. Bad news for General Flynn and the 2016 victor over Obama’s anointed successor. It’s only beginning to tumble out. Frequently, first impressions are wrong in love and headlines.
Former U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn departs U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., December 1, 2017. (REUTERS/Jonathan ErnsC)
It’s no less true about the virus shipped to us from China. The reaction of our “better” people was lackadaisical at first and then immediately went to Nigel Tufnel’s (Spinal Tap) “11”. I have long suspected that big decisions were made on very little evidence, and much of that false.
A good deal of the reaction depends on where you sit, as I’ve said before. Our media central nervous system centers in New York City and runs up and down the Bos-Wash spinal cord, the most densely packed region in the country. .2% of New York’s population was killed by the bug. The inhibitions to a surrender of the mind to raw emotions was dramatically lowered by simply looking out the window (or, more properly, the “window” of our many connected devices). Can you really say that the view wouldn’t overwhelm a person’s rational calculus?
Sure, the same can be said of someone living in a lightly affected region, like my Montana. Both perspectives are probably wrong, but can we ignore the reality that more facts have emerged and more alternative voices have had a chance to weigh in? The virus is contagious and not nearly as lethal as Oxford’s crystal ball gazing that gave us 2.2 million deaths. The disease has trended downward from the Black Death apocalypse to something just above flu season.
The common cold.
I can’t help but wonder that the huge numbers of infected are at least partially a result of the massive total war approach for dealing with this particular candidate for mayhem. We know more about the reach of this virus than probably any of the more recent varietals of flu, including the strange strains of fall 2019. We have always been swimming around in a sea of pathogens. That won’t change when this culprit fades. By concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, we exaggerate its relative magnitude. Great and highly focused efforts inherently distort perspective.
The 100,000 deaths figure demands reexamination. Not that the number is wrong (even though it can be contested from a number of angles) but we have no reliable comparison with other infectious diseases because they were never accorded this level of rectal examination.
The trigger for this piece was the discovery on the CDC website of a “case fatality rate” (CFR) of 0.26% for corona (thanks Robert Verbruggen). That contrasts with the run-of-the-mill CFR ranging from 0.5 to 1.0. What’s up with that? Another example of the downward progression of the disease’s lethality.
Are we about to experience another round of disappointment for those panting for the next “Moral Equivalent of War” so as to stampede us into the Green New Deal or a woke utopia? Ignoring the ski slope fall in the actuality of a cataclysm, some still act as if the mirage of the March state-of-play has magically become as true today as it was false back then. They are as stuck in the past as Bernie Sanders and AOC are wallowing in their long-dead Scandinavian socialism. AOC’s “Scandinavia” has the same totemic value for her as the use of “selfish” and “reckless” by today’s wannabe authoritarians.
Was it all worth it? You now, the shutdowns, shelter-in-place, masks, social distancing; the loss of 10-25% of small businesses; the movement of millions of workers from the workplace to unemployment; the rise in depression, suicides, domestic violence, and substance abuse; the release of “nonviolent” inmates to “nonviolently” prey on their neighbors; and the damage to the health care of anyone not suffering from a fever and pneumonia. And let’s not forget the destruction of social life by the loss of grandma’s hugs, big-family dinners, the social bonding of the handshake, antiseptic romance through a mask, and human interaction reduced to a digital image on a screen. We may as well go all-in for sex-bots and any motorized version of a person in grey hair.
She’s a model … James with Harmony in The Sex Robots Are Coming. James is among the protagonists of The Sex Robots Are Coming, an investigation into the development of animatronic, AI-enabled silicone sexbots, and part of Rise of the Robots season on British tv.
More of the same is likely to come. These geniuses have yet to distinguish this contagion from any prior, contemporaneous, or future one. If the strangulation of society is justified for this rapidly declining threat, buckle up for the next fall/winter. As some addicts have said, taking the first hit of coke makes it easier to snort the next line, and the next, and the next, and ….
I am not sure if we are careening toward Orwell’s Oceania or Huxley’s World State. Either way, I’d hate to see the books moved from fiction to nonfiction on the Amazon website.
