Implicit bias is all the rage in social policy circles. The rationale for the crusade is based on the assertion that we do something more than overtly act like racists (homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.). We harbor hateful prejudices deep in our subconscious. It’s not enough, it is said, to control the racist behavior. We must expunge the lurking bad thoughts swimming around in those vast unconscious reservoirs in our brains. The field is more than a rich source of consulting income for the high priests of the endeavor. The dogma branches off into innumerable calls for the checking of privilege and other forms of sloganeering. But is it true? There’s good reason to say wowwww!
David Berreby
This came to mind while reading in my April 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine the article, “The Things That Divide Us” by David Berreby. A natural logic could lead one to rightly assume that evil behavior has tentacles in evil thoughts. Fair enough. The problem lies in ferreting out the purported bad biases. Further, there appears to be a tenuous connection between the lurking prejudice and behavior.
And there’s good reason to question the attempts to measure the hidden bias. Please read the following article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not”, by Tom Bartlett, Jan. 5, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/…/Can-We-Really-Measure-Im…/238807.
What we have in the National Geographic article is another non-scientist author claiming the certitude of a scientist with, in reality, an ideological ax to grind. Berreby has nothing but a BA in English from Yale to his credit. He uses the tendentious claims of some psychologists to support what is in essence his political crusade.
Since the 19th century, we have experienced the attempt to marry science to politics. The regions of the world laid waste by Marxism, eugenics, and National Socialism are a testament to its abject failure. Informed decisions are one thing; totalitarianism is another. It’s amazing that we have discovered a new way to construct Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love.
PBS’s “Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”, my assessment: very misleading. If you haven’t seen it but plan to, don’t! There are better biographies out there. The thing exudes with the ideological partisanship that grips today’s academic and media hothouses. The program says more about them than Il Duce.
One of the contributors to “The Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”.
Politically corrupted academics littered their commentary with derogatory parallels to anyone who has serious doubts about multiculturalism, the many tentacles of political correctness, and the fantasyland socialism of the green movement. In the intro, the creators set the stage by connecting Mussolini to the modern rise of populist and nationalist parties in Europe. They couldn’t help but boil their beliefs down to “xenophobia”, as if there’s nothing to worry about in the sudden influx of millions of unassimilated immigrants. Check the crime stats and terror cells coming out of Scandinavia’s “especially vulnerable areas”.
Watch the clip of violent Muslim youth confronting Swedish police in Stockholm.
Trump illusions pervaded, like two profs’ summary of Il Duce’s program as one of “making Italy great gain”. It’s repeated often enough to make sure you get the idea. But think about it: what leader would be opposed to making their country great, from George Washington to Obama? If they weren’t about that, they would have to keep it secret or nobody would entrust them with the keys to the White House.
Mussolini’s political platform is reduced to violence, love of war, violence, nationalism … and did I say violence? One glaring plank missing from the script is summed up in the Fascist Party motto, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. The Fascists’ love of the state was conspicuously absent from beginning to end. I suspect that modern Progressives are a bit uneasy knowing they share the same love. When you’re too busy lambasting Trump, sometimes you muff the more obvious connections.
Elizabeth Warren and Ocasio-Cortez might very well have a Mussolini problem. All you have to do to see the line of descent is substitute “free” (for all the stuff that they want to give people: healthcare, college, reparations, high wages, you name it) for “the state”. And, indeed, nothing is to be outside “the state”, as Hobby Lobby, Jack Philips, and any traditional Christian who takes 2,000 years of church history and the Bible seriously should now know. Today’s Dem-Left would be uncomfortable with the marching, uniforms, and martial vigor, but not much else.
FDR didn’t have much of a problem with Mussolini’s corporatism. He tried it in the National Industrial Recovery Act and its commissariat, the National Recovery Administration. Likewise, the Dems of today are marching toward a greater fulfillment of the motto with state-aggrandizement in the Green New Deal. Could that be the reason for the slipshod treatment of Il Duce?
A sad scene at National Geographic Magazine headquarters after the 2016 election …. Not! It could have been given the way these people write.
Distraught Hillary campaign workers on election night, 2016.
I’m not sure how much more I can stomach of the corruption of science in popular publications like National Geographic. The magazine is not about the furtherance of geographic knowledge. It’s opinion journalism. It’s newfound mission is the chaining of the subject to a political agenda. The agenda is one that could be found among the babblings of campus social justice warriors or The Resistance.
“Social justice warriors”, also referred as the “Resistance”, protesting the Trump administration in New York City, 2017.
Time and again, issue after issue, the magazine never fails to disappoint. Pior issues led with cover stories like “Why We Lie”, “Gender Revolution”, and “Black and White”. “Why We Lie” came hot on the heels of the howling from the Left about Trump’s exaggerations and misstatements. Come on, when has hyperbole become unusual for politicians and activists? “Gender Revolution” pushed the “T” in LGBTQ. “Black and White” advanced Marxism with “people of color” replacing the oppressed and alienated proletariat. A favorite hobbyhorse is what I like to call “totalitarian environmentalism”.
What chaps my hide is the complete absence of peer review. Claims are made without any caution. The words “scientists” and “experts” are used without modifiers like “some” (I saw it only once in the cover story in “Black and White”). Opposing views are treated as if they don’t exist. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since the articles are written by non-scientists with an all-too-often reliance on politicized scientists. Going back to the aforementioned cover story, the author – Elizabeth Kolbert – was a literature major at Yale. Surely she has great interest in the study of race, but she is no scientist and has a definite ideological bias. There’s no filter of the scientist as she writes.
If you sit on the left side of the political spectrum, by all means, subscribe. In this instance, you would be approaching National Geographic as you would Mother Jones. Indeed, there’s not much difference between the two.
The “Society” in the title refers to a loose body of people and organizations who have similar backgrounds and enough of a common orthodoxy to distinguish as an identifiable social element, like, for instance, Protestants. In this case, it’s the background identifiers of degreed/middle-to-upper-class/urban/seemingly-professional and progressive/left in their philosophical orthodoxy. The “Puff Piece” in the title is the all-too-familiar journalistic softball interview with overtones of saccharine flattery that’s reserved for prominent people in the news who confirm the Society’s biases.
Case in point: “Seeking a Safe, Green Colombia” in National Geographic Magazine of January 2018 about Colombia’s ex-president, Juan Manuel Santos. He gets the treatment because he’s said to be about “peace” and he chants the clerisy’s doctrines on “climate change”. He knows the lingo and says all the right things. Thus, he’s beatified. Look at the magazine’s saintly photo from the article.
Saint Juan Santos
The “peace” part of his beatification has to do with his cramming down the throats of Colombians a detested agreement with FARC, the narco-terrorist organization. When put on the ballot, Colombians rejected it despite the weight of the world coming down on them to approve it. So, Santos got around those pesky voters with a jam-down in the legislature.
And what of the agreement? First off, Colombians hate FARC. Next, the settlement gave amnesty to murderers, bribed the killers to stop the killing and mayhem, and rewarded them with seats in parliament. For millions of FARC’s victims, what’s not to like?
Victims of FARC protest in Colombia during the peace talks with FARC.
And for that, the guy wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But what really earns his elevation to sainthood is his expressed worship of the clerisy’s iconography of “climate change” with statements like “… we are destroying Mother Earth”. For the Society’s parishioners, that’ll do it.
No such treatment was accorded the previous president, Alvaro Uribe, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. But he doesn’t sing the Society’s doctrines and he opposed the terrorist cave-in. What a flawed world we live in.
Ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Pres. George W. Bush in 2009.
I know, I know, it’s faulty thinking to draw grand conclusions about an entire generation on a sample of one or a few individuals. For millennials, they’ve been given a bad rap for a host of alleged sins. Yet, a certain type is beginning to recur among them in my explorations of news and information: the ill-informed college-educated in positions of societal influence. A classic example of the phenomena appeared yesterday in an interview of Luke Zaleski by Hugh Hewitt.
Luke Zaleski with son.Hugh Hewitt in his broadcast studio.
Zaleski seems to be in his mid-to-late 30s, a U. of Delaware graduate in Philosophy, and is currently Legal Affairs Editor for Condé Nast publications. He exhibits much of the hyper-progressivism of the deeply-entrenched left in today’s media, replete with a dislike for Trump and Republicans, an embrace of identity politics, and rampant victimology. And its all wrapped in a thin verneer of knowledge and understanding.
For example, here’s Zaleski on Hewitt’s lack of “diversity” in the previous day’s guests – Mike Lupica (sports writer), Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas), and Sen. John Cornyn (R, Texas):
“I feel like the sports world … would benefit from having more people of color and women … prominent in the conversations.” The diversity schtick on parade, eh? As for Cotton and Cornyn, he says, “… these guys are kind of the enemies of progress”.
Zelaski on his level of understanding of history as it relates to today’s issues and climate of opinion:
Hewitt asked him, “…was Alger Hiss a communist spy?” Zaleski dodged the question by mentioning Wikipedia and “I’m not a historian. I’m not an expert. I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. I’m not interested in debating Alger Hiss”. Mmmmm.
Another example of more recent history, Hewitt asked him, “Have you read The Looming Tower?” The quick and short of it, No! Since he didn’t mention any other book on the rise of international terrorism, I can assume he doesn’t read in depth, particularly on that topic.
Zaleski’s unfamiliarity with the principal characters involved in Iran’s export of its brand of Islamic extremism was evident when Hewitt asked him, “What is your opinion of Qasem Soleimani?” Zaleski’s answer: “I’m not familiar with that person.”
Remember that this guy, Zaleski, is an editor in a major media organization (look up Condé Nast).
Zaleski showed profound ignorance of nuclear weapons. Hewitt asked him, “So which part of the nuclear triad needs fixing the most?” Zaleski jumped to an unresponsive generality, “I’d like to see global denuclearization.” Related questions about our weapons systems were similarly met with befuddlement.
As a “Legal Affairs Editor”, one would think Zaleski has some legal training or even a law degree. Well, no. His background is as a “fact checker” for 20 years. Since “legal” is his beat, you’d think that he would be aware of the Supreme Court’s recent 8-0 smackdown of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its abuse of the Endangered Species Act. But no.
I could present more on the interview but I think that you get the idea. A modern college education does not, ipso facto, dispel ignorance, let alone promote wisdom.
RogerG
Here’s the link to the transcripts of the interview: http://www.hughhewitt.com/luke-zaleski-legal-affairs-editor-at-conde-nash-former-director-of-research-at-gq/?fbclid=IwAR3Scthy-2tCxV5gKtPCKq5A79eMp-FkG7mK5R0n7UrtrbZSDqtqBEhiq3A
Watch this scene of traumatized Googlers trying to make sense of the fact that a good chunk of the country doesn’t have their “values”, and it showed by putting Trump in the White House. By all means, Googlers, don’t question the universality of your peculiar beliefs; question the motives of those who disagree with you. Heck, Googlers can’t even recognize their views as “peculiar” since they aren’t likely to rub elbows with those who think different. They get their prejudices reinforced, and reinforced ….
The leftist stream of consciousness on the Google campus stage on that November day of 2016 was littered with politicized code words. Take the word “values”, as in “our values” by Sergey Brin. The word is freighted with other words like “diversity”, and it ain’t the diversity of the opinion kind. For this monocultural groupthink, all diversity is limited to race, genitalia, and sexual appetites. Mix enough hijab-wearing lesbians into the workplace and, voilà, the only meaningful kind of “diversity” is created for this diversity-is-our-strength gang. Conservatives are tolerated … so long as they lie low. The other kind of diversity – as in diversity of thought – will be a casualty. In fact, it might be excised as “hate speech”.
James Damore, ex-Google senior engineer, after his 2017 firing for publishing on the company’s “free speech” forum an essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
It’s as if Googlers found themselves rejected by the election results, and rejection is a powerful source of anxiety for those ensconced in their self-reinforced and pampered cocoons. How to make sense of it since the mind must still grapple with the reality? Well, brand your opposition as morally and intellectually deficient. The other side is said to suffer from “tribalism” and “fear”. It’s not that adversaries simply disagree, but their disagreement is a product of an unrestrained id, a libido run amok. People like our Googlers have such a high self-regard that no concession can be made to the validity of an opposing point of view. Therapy on the Google campus was reduced to fortifying the attendees’ sense of superiority and convincing them that Darwin’s missing link resides in red America.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the post-election confab.
There was an early light-hearted moment. A rousing cheer came from the crestfallen when Brin announced the success of pot legalization. Now that says something. Either intoxication is a preferred state of mind for Googlers, or many of them have all the seriousness of Animal House’s Bluto at a frat party. Or it could simply be a Brin joke. Anyway, it probably isn’t Joe Sixpack material.
The expected response came out of the Google inner sanctum after the video went viral. The declaration went along the lines of “we’re biased but trust us”. Here’s a good portion of it: “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias [we’re biased] ever influences the way we build or operate our products [trust us]. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint [trust us]”.
Maybe the word “monoculture” is inadequate. The Borg of Star Trek fame is gaining relevance as the more appropriate metaphor.
The Borg or Silicon Valley/blue America?Borg drones or the Google workforce?
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The term “monoculture” had its origins in farming with the production of a single crop. A monoculture does exist, but it isn’t a horticultural one or the type often measured by melanin counts or genitalia by hyperactive SJW’s. Socially speaking, we have a singular, smothering orientation to the world – a monoculture of the mind – chauvanistically present in the leadership and dwellers of our key social institutions: media, arts, entertainment, education, government agencies, foundations, etc., with tentacles deep into the corporate boardroom. Today’s left is obsessed over a monocultural patriarchy. Ironically, it is they, left-progressives, who have prevailed in creating an unacknowledged monoculture of the mind. In the video below, Zuckerberg admits to Silicon Valley being “an extremely left-leaning place”.
I bring this up not to parrot the crowd in the Sean Hannity zone. Heaven knows, Zuckerberg is in a difficult spot with Facebook’s problems with privacy and complaints of political censorship. Before the Senate, he looked like an exposed adulterous husband trying to keep his marriage together. Pity is only natural as he occupies the lonely seat in front of our elected publicity hounds.
Next comes the tortuous ritual of admitting the left-wing preeminence while denying any effect of it. It’s a claim of superhuman qualities once reserved for the heavenly host. Apparently, left-wing people don’t produce left-wing products. Mark me skeptical.
I just saw the full Nike ad on Thursday Night Football. It was repeated in college football broadcasts Saturday. It was a seemingly innocuous message mostly in homage to the “marginalized”, replete with a girl boxer wearing the mandatory hijab — I don’t know how that squares with the early feminist sacramental act of bra-burning. The whole kaleidoscope was emceed by a resurrected Kaepernick, the guy who soiled himself by soiling the flag. The message was never to be dissuaded from your “dreams”, an adolescent primal scream without an inkling of mature judgment if there ever was one.
Honor goes to Michael Ramirez for his capture of the ludicrous spectacle in a single image. Here it is:
Sorry, I can’t leave the gun debate alone. The reason: the people most stridently supporting gun-control are simultaneously most ignorant about them. They say stupid things like, “These guns [AR-15’s] are killing machines” (Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC, last week in a radio interview).
Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC
Here’s a question: Comparing the 2 gun pictures below – #2 and #3 – which one is more likely to kill you? Answer: It depends on which one is pointing at you. Dahhhh! A bullet out of a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words) acts the same way as one heading toward a deer.
Hunter with a bolt-action rifle.Sighting-in an AK-47.
Okay, one is a semi-auto AK-47 (pic #3) and the other is a bolt-action hunting rifle (pic #2). But many sport rifles are semi-auto. Depending on the direction of the barrel, either one could be a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words). See below, pic #4, of a Browning semi-auto and an AR-15.
A current incarnation of the urban sophisticate is the “hipster”. If I may be excused for engaging in a loose generalization, like other versions of the breed, they are equal parts confident, media-savvy, and clueless. Prime examples of the cross-fertilization of fashion and politics, they are susceptible to pleas to prohibit almost anything presented as irritating and outside of their lifestyle experience. They are one for the constituencies for ban-o-mania.
Don’t like something? Ban it! Why ban it? Simple: it’s too jarring to the mind of your average urban and self-anointed sophisticate. That mind is riddled with the prejudices, half-baked ideas, and unexamined assumptions of a person limited to the secular equivalent of a mountaintop monastery … without the serious study of real monks (“echo chamber” keeps popping into my mind). Ban-o-mania reigns supreme as the preferred option for anyone within the materialist abbey, while adversely affecting everyone not so mentally and geographically insulated.
The locations for the secular monasteries generally matches the 2016 election map. Below is a precinct-by-precinct rendering of the 2016 election results. (1)
2016 election results by precinct. Blue is for the Democratic candidate, red for the Republican.
The blue dots on the map are outposts serving as the intersection of radical chic in culture (some might call it “lifestyle”) and politics. The journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe had a great time back in 1970 with an exposé of cosmopolitan affections for radical left politics of the time. (2)
New York Magazine cover, 1970, with Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” essay.Leonard Bernstein (seated at center), his wife Felicia Montealegre (left) and Don Cox (standing), Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ 13 room penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan, January 14, 1970
I won’t speak to the map’s much rarer blue blobs – I suspect these to be mostly concentrations of post-1965 Immigration Act ethnic and racial minorities and Indian reservations- but today’s metropolitan islands have persisted in the habit exemplified in Leonard Bernstein’s fête to the Black Panther Party.
Though, a vocabulary update to “radical chic” is in order. Yesterday’s “radical chic” is today’s “cosmocialist”, a marriage of “cosmopolitan” and “left-liberal”, typically among our tech elites but also littered throughout most of our corporate and academic boardrooms (hosannas to Reihan Salam for bringing the term to my attention [3]). The “left-liberal” side of the equation is an infatuation with imperial environmentalism, high taxes, and almost anything “anti-poverty”. “Cosmopolitan” is a reference to suspicion about regulation (except, of course, of the enviro variety, a huge contradiction), big labor (even though the teachers’ unions are 100% socially and 80% politically aligned) , and a fondness for open borders and multicultural everything.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) with California AG Kamala Harris in 2015. (Reuters photo: Robert Galbraith)
Oh, let’s not forget their contempt for traditional institutions. The Bible as the Word of God, Christianity as understood for millennia, marriage, and morality don’t stand a chance in these micro-universes. Currently, transgenderism has pride of place. As a matter of fact, they have conjured “equality” into behavioral license. Any coupling and self-concept among and within humans must be granted sanction by the state. Those who disagree face ostracization, loss of livelihood, and censorship. Is confinement next? Has it already started?
Now we are well on our way to ban-o-mania – the frenzy to prohibit counter-thought, and counter-things. If only Orwell was here to see it.
It’s become next to impossible to talk about these kinds of things without mentioning California, ground zero for cosmocialist social and political tinkering. Bans on things previously considered innocuous are becoming increasingly common in this political zoo. Examples are many. The state couldn’t refrain from an assault on, of all things … free plastic shopping bags. The usual suspects crafted Prop 67 – the always fashionable environmental lobby – and the always fashionable electorate, dominated by its always fashionable coast, approved it in 2016.
Grocery shopping in the not-so-golden state instantly changed from this:
to this:
Bring your own bags: filthy, torn, too small, not enough, or spill out cash to buy some more. People in the zoo will adapt, no doubt. But grocery shopping instantly became a bit more of an annoying experience.
Another example, this time from the elected “geniuses” in the state’s madhouse, called a “legislature”: marketed as an animal welfare measure, the inmates passed AB 485. It would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits if they didn’t come from shelters. In essence, due to the way the law is written and it’s probably effects, say “bye, bye” to the ritual of taking the daughter down to the pet store to buy a puppy. For Patrick O’Donnel (D-Long Beach), the bill’s author, pet militants like him can’t envision themselves doing it, so ban anyone else from doing it. Such is the auto-reflex of the ban-o-maniac. The legislation’s fate is in the lap of Gov. Jerry Brown, another cosmocialist. (4)
Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and rescue dogs.
For the cosmocialist, dogs are cute; Christian fundamentalists are not. The progressive fatwa against them has already begun. With dim-witted sleight of hand, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) sought to impose her social opinions on the entire faith community in California. Through legislation, she tried to nullify the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision that buttressed a church’s religious freedom exemptions to government’s contraceptive and abortion mandates. (5) She preposterously claimed that the Court didn’t say what it said. For the Court, religious freedom reaches out to longstanding church functions beyond the sanctuary. She didn’t get the message. Fletcher’s logic is the equivalent of a child’s attempt to make a parent’s admonishment of “no” into “yes”.
If mangling the Court didn’t convince, she tried the gender equality angle. For her, the moral code in the Torah, Quran, and the Old and New Testaments must be sacrificed because a woman can show the results of a sleepover with her boyfriend. Since women get pregnant, and men can’t (there’s no place to put the fetus), scripture must now go into the garbage disposal. The minister can preach God’s law from the pulpit – I think – but, according to her, he shouldn’t be able to do anything about single moms and womanizers staffing his school (Was she trying to improve the job prospects for Bill Clinton?). And this passes for serious thought in the California legislature?
A reprieve for Baptists was granted by Gov. Brown’s veto of Fletcher’s abortion to logic. Don’t think for a moment that she and her compatriots have given up.
The Old Testament, evangelicals, pet stores, and traditional institutions are verboten to the tin-eared metro-chic. Similarly verboten is a healthy skepticism about wild-eyed climate-change apocalyptics. They won’t shrink from criminalizing, or subjecting to civil forfeiture, anyone who happens to make the mistake of conjoining a position of authority with cynicism about enviro end-times. Metroplex electorates appear to have affection for Maduro-type (of Venezuela fame) DA’s and AG’s to accomplish the desired end.
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris in September 2015.
Not wishing to leave California out of the scrum, former AG Kamala Harris (now Senator) joined the AG’s of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, and Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to form an Inquisition to ferret out “counter-revolutionaries” to Al Gore’s fashionable doctrine. It’s the latest craze sweeping the blue-dot jurisdictions: spend millions of dollars to haul into court the petroleum industry for questioning the supreme leader. (6) Ban-o-mania encompasses the campaign to silence opinions.
For everyone else without a corporate lawyer, loss of tenure, livelihood, or excommunication awaits. It’s a reincarnation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They’re making Mao proud … if the old bloody tyrant was alive today.
Public humiliation by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).Cultural Revolution poster. Smashing the old to make way for the new.
The same is true for guns. Guns are as gauche to the chic denizens of metropolis as the climate views of anyone not in tune with the fashionable orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, respect for the 2nd Amendment fades as fewer and fewer people among the self-described “betters” in urban America have knowledge and experience with the things. This is their mental picture of gun owners, a product of too much late-night tv viewing (late-night comedians, SNL).
Yes, it’s a plain old prejudice, but it matches their ignorance. They live a life without firearms and so conclude nobody needs them. It’s easy for urban electorates to grant the state’s vast prosecutorial powers to AG’s giddy with the prospect of hanging a few gun manufacturers. The aforementioned Maura Healey of Massachusetts set her sights on Glock.
Massachusetts AG Maura Healey with Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, 2016.
Whatever their rationale, come on, it boils down to, “We don’t own them; therefore, you can’t either”. Really, lifestyle is their governing north star.
The corporate boardroom is as populated with hyper-sensitive ban-o-maniacs as deep blue state attorney general offices. The tekkie industry is particularly infected with them. “Caution” is the watchword for any true free-thinker in these occupational habitats. Just as Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, learned in 2014. He was run out of his own company when it came to light that he contributed $1,000 to the California Prop 8 campaign to defend traditional marriage in 2008. The lefty hive in Mozilla and Silicon Valley swarmed at the knowledge.
Brendan Eich
Ideological cleansing targets anyone outside the metro groupthink. In Eich’s case, he cavorted with those who think that marriage is by nature heterosexual, and can only be homosexual if sodomy is accepted as the act of consummation. Of course, consummation could be dispensed with, but then marriage is reduced to a state-sanctioned friendship pact with the option of wide open conjugal behavior. The whole concept of “gay marriage” enters the grammatical territory of “non-sequitur”. Such thinking, though, is assigned to the Klan in the blinkered imaginations of cosmocialists.
The lefty piranha weren’t satisfied with the corpse of Brendan Eich. They will always need to feed on anyone with the temerity to express a different point of view. James Damore fell into the infected waters at Google when he sought to explain the small presence of women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) industries in words different from the politically correct orthodoxy. (8)
James Damore and Google
He presented the proposition that women are underrepresented due to the fact that fewer girls have inclinations for STEM, not because of some overhanging pall of misogyny. (9) The snowflakes erupted and the impromptu inquisitors at Google went on a rampage. Damore found himself out of a job, fired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Steve Jobs juxtaposed to Google’s Sundar Pichai amid the Damore firing, by LA street artist Sabo.
The “diversity” police went into action mode to defend the sanctity of the party doctrine. Every one of the tech biggies has a Ministry of Diversity Truth. They sprang in defense of Google. At Google, its commissar is Danielle Brown. Intel has commissar Barbara Whye. Maxine Williams is installed at Facebook’s commissariat. Helping the biggies is a nomenklatura of consultants. Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson is an example. All of them are the keepers of the diversity holy grail.
Paradigm Consultancy’s Joelle Emerson
The whole diversity shtick is profoundly open to question. Yet, it is accepted as the closest thing to a self-evident truth among a class of people who have long ago rejected such truth when Thomas Jefferson in 1776 tried using the concept. Their’s is a pseudo-science meant to perform an ideological function: widely propagate the dogma while simultaneously swamping disagreement. They are the practitioners of the ban-o-mania of thought.
The tennis aficionado John McEnroe recently stepped in it when he declared what is obviously true. Men and women aren’t physical equals on the tennis court. For that, this time it was the equality police that leapt into action.
John McEnroe appearing before the press about controversial remarks.
McEnroe offhandedly stated in response to a question that Serena Williams would be ranked 700 among professional men’s tennis players. (10) Boy did that get the ant hill all abuzz. But for the equality commissariat, there was the disconcerting face-off in 1998 with a 203rd ranked men’s player, Karsten Braasch of Germany. The Williams sisters were teenagerly brash and over-confident, bragging in the ATP men’s office that they could whip any tour player ranked in the top 200.
Karsten Braasch (center) and the Williams sisters at the 1998 Australian Open.
Braasch, ranked 203 at the time, overheard the remark and took up the challenge in a lark. After playing a round of morning golf, Braasch arrived to play each sister one set. The event attracted quite a crowd. During changeovers, he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer. He bested Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. The Williams’ points had all the appearance of gifts. (11)
Was McEnroe all that wrong?
There is a sense of unreality in the blue-dot world. The here-and-now must be made to conform to ideological fantasies. In movies, women punch out burly men with skeletal and muscle structures that would collapse on contact if it didn’t occur before cameras and with the assistance of computer assisted graphics. We might be able to accept these illusions since, after all, it’s the movies. But the fantasies don’t dissipate after leaving the theater. There’s legions of prosecutors, politicians, consultants, and academics devoted to making the movie unreality a real life reality.
To make it happen, massive mind control and social engineering are required. All the tools of ban-o-mania are enlisted in the effort. Ostracize, prosecute, legislate, fire, and propagandize (the Bolsheviks called it “reeducation”) anyone not in conformance with the cosmocialist zeitgeist. The sad part is their push to take the campaign national. Their appetites won’t be satiated with dominance over metropolis.
Watch out red America. You’re one election away from being forced into living and thinking like a Greenwich Village hipster. You may not know it, but you have a metaphorical bulls-eye planted on your forehead.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
The 2016 precinct map was garnered from “Creating a National Precinct Map”, 4/30/2017, https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe, New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review, contributing editor of National Affairs, advisor to the Energy Innovation Reform Project and Niskanen Institute. “Cosmocialist” first came to my attention in his article, “Democrats and Plutocrats”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451463/democrats-silicon-valley-rich-entrepreneurs-changing-partys-working-class-image
“California pet stores may be required to only sell rescue animals if this bill passes”, Courtney Tompkins, The Los Angeles Daily News, 9/15/2017, http://www.dailynews.com/2017/09/15/california-pet-stores-may-be-required-to-only-sell-rescue-animals-if-this-bill-passes/
“Anti-discrimination measure or blow to religious freedom? California bill sparks debate on employer codes of conduct”, Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-an-anti-discrimination-measure-or-blow-1490826757-htmlstory.html
“Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law”, Jim Copeland and Rafael A. Mangual, National Review Online, 9/29/2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440542/state-attorneys-general-political-abuses-power
“Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues”, USA Today, 4/4/2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/
“Google Episode Sends a Message: Diversity Is a Tough Sell in Silicon Valley”, Georgia Wells and Yoree Koh, WSJ, 8/10/17, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-episode-sends-a-message-diversity-is-a-tough-sell-in-silicon-valley-1502383625; also at http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Google-Episode-Sends-a-Message-Diversity-Is-a-Tough-Sell-in-Silicon-Valley-24924773/.
The complete text of James Damore’s offending email can be found here: “Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]”, Kate Conger, Gizmodo, 8/5/2017, http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp
“John McEnroe: Serena Williams world’s best female tennis player but would rank ‘like 700’ among men”, Scott Allen, The Chicago Tribune, 6/25/2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenroe-serena-williams-tennis-20170625-story.html
The episode is recounted here: “Serena Williams once challenged men’s player at Australian Open”, Sandra Harwitt, USA Today, 1/21/2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
