Disrupting the Narrative of the New Left, its allies in Academia, Hollywood and the Establishment Media, and examining with honesty the goals of cultural Marxism and the dangers of reactionary and abusive political correctness.
THE NARRATIVE AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”-George Orwell
Feminists across the globe condemned Taylor for his "offensive," "appalling" garment. They slammed his insensitivity to women. Using the hashtags #ShirtStorm and #ShirtGate, Twitter activists expressed their horror at the offending piece of cloth, which was, somewhat ironically, designed and crafted by a woman and gifted to Taylor for his birthday."This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields," huffed Chris Plante and Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge. "They see a guy like that on TV and they don't feel welcome."
By Friday, Taylor was so browbeaten that he offered a tearful apology, broadcast to the world. "I made a big mistake," he said, choking up. "I offended many people and I am very sorry about this."
Taylor's colleague, embarrassed and stiff, patted his back. The Internet, coiled taut like a cobra, slowly began to unspool. Rose Eveleth, a technology writer for The Atlantic and enthusiastic participant in previous Taylor-bashing, responded accordingly: Now that Taylor had "recognized his mistake and apologized," she wrote on Twitter, "we can both move along with our lives."
In the last week alone, we saw the social media outrage machine (with assists from friendlyjournalists, of course) force TIME to apologize for including "feminist" in a cheeky poll of which words should be "banned" from overuse or misuse. (It had won the poll by a wide margin before the thought police cracked down and forced its removal.) Bloggers and writers at The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books all called on Time to renounce the inclusion of "feminist" in the poll.
We witnessed a mob of online feminists harass a male scientist to the point of tears because of his sartorial choices. Dr. Matt Taylor helped land a spaceship on a comet hurtling through space at the clip of 135,000 kilometers an hour, the first time humans had come even close to accomplishing such a tremendous feat.
The outrage couldn’t have been more over-the-top. "I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing," read a real headline that humans with no sense of reality actually wrote and published.Shrill outrage site Jezebel claimed that Atlantic reporter Rose Eveleth, who started the "#shirtstorm," had been subject to death threats. Their headline "Woman Gets Death Threats for Tweeting About Disliking A Dude's Shirt" led to a story of a few people being mean to her and saying stuff like "jump off a cliff." As one Jezebel commenter noted, "they're death threats in the same way that saying 'go f— yourself' is a rape threat." Trigger warning: A review of Eveleth's outrage-tweetsover a shirt someone wore might make you embarrassed to be human.
When University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds simply wrote an op-ed for USA Today criticizing the feminist bullying, he was accused by feminists of egregious behavior, including "doxxing" — the practice of revealing a person's private information for the purpose of intimidation. When people pointed out that there was literally not one shred of evidence to support the claim that Reynolds had done any such thing, claims were revised to (falsely) say he'd encouraged "his flying monkeys" to misbehave. Feminists tried to suggest that Reynolds' employer should be upset about what he wrote...
My second-grade daughter's class recently wrote and read aloud their "autobiographies." It was an opportunity for them not only to capture some of the highlights from their young lives, but also to forecast their plans for the future. Unsurprising was the number of girls who wanted to be fashion designers and of boys who wanted to be soccer stars. More striking was that almost every boy in the class described how he would eventually get married and have a family.
What prompted so many boys to mention this? It perhaps seems surprising that having a weekly "Friday night movie night" would be as important a goal as winning the Stanley Cup, as one boy announced he wants. But for this group, that was no surprise at all. All of these children come from homes where marriage - and siblings - is seen as a good thing, even as a foundation for a happy life. The room was packed with caring and attentive parents. A family that makes them feel "loved and safe," as one little boy put it, is (thankfully) the norm for this group of students.
In recent months, there has been a crescendo of anti-male rhetoric that is deeply worrisome. From the hysteria over a "rape culture" on college campuses, to the #YesAllWomen social media campaign that took off after the horrific Elliott Rodgers shooting spree, to the more recent uproar over "street harassment," the narrative is that men are perpetual abusers of women. They badger, sexually assault, and sometimes even kill.
Looking at my three-year old son, I wonder what will happen if he hears this narrative enough. Will he and his peers expect misogyny and violence against women to, in fact, be the norm for boys and men? If people expect boys and men not to be fathers and providers, but instead predators and abusers, will that soon actually become the norm?
For more useful insight I encourage you to watch the videos here and here as well as the one below!
Here are three columns written by Thomas Sowell this week, published in Capitalism Magazine (and elsewhere) on the subject of race in America. Since false accusations of "racism" are essentially the only "arguments" that the Left is capable of vomiting up these days, Dr. Sowell's views are especially pertinent. Race-Hustling Results
A painful moment for me, years ago, when I was on the lecture circuit, came after a talk at Marquette University, when a young black student rose and asked: "Even though I am graduating from Marquette University, what hope is there for me?"
Back in the 1950s, when I was a student, I never encountered any fellow black student who expressed such hopelessness, even though there was far more racial discrimination then. We knew that there were obstacles for us to overcome, and we intended to overcome them.
The memory of that Marquette student came back to me, years later, when another black young man said that he had wanted to become a pilot, and had even planned to join the Air Force in order to do so. But then, he said, he now "realized" that "The Man" would never allow a black guy to become a pilot.
This was said decades after a whole squadron of black fighter plane pilots made a reputation for themselves in World War II, as the "Tuskegee Airmen." There have been black generals in the Air Force.
Shelby Steele's best-selling book "White Guilt" provides sharp insights into the many counterproductive consequences of white guilt that can be exploited by race hustlers, to the detriment of blacks and whites alike. The sports team gambit is just one of many.
So long as the race industry - the Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons, and their counterparts in various minorities - can get political or financial mileage out of being offended, they are going to be offended. The only thing that will put a stop to this racket is refusing to be taken in by it or intimidated by it.
Looked at in isolation, Bob Costas' opinion about the names of sports teams is one that reasonable people might agree or disagree with. But, unfortunately, this issue is not something that exists in isolation. It is part of a whole grievance-generating campaign that poisons race relations. That campaign is conducted not only by the race industry but also by all too many in the media and in the education system, from elementary schools to the universities.
More dangerous than these highly publicized episodes over the years are innumerable organized and unprovoked physical attacks on whites by young black gangs in shopping malls, on beaches and in other public places all across the country today.
While some of these attacks make it into the media as isolated incidents, the nationwide pattern of organized black on white attacks by thugs remains invisible in the mainstream media, with the notable exception of Bill O'Reilly on the Fox News Channel.
Even when these attacks are accompanied by shouts of anti-white rhetoric and exultant laughter at the carnage, the racial makeup of the attackers and their victims is usually ignored by the media, and public officials often deny that race has anything to do with what happened.
These attacks have sent many people to the hospital, and some have died, but the attacks are often carried out in a festive atmosphere. What are called "troubled youths," in this and other contexts, are often in fact young people enjoying themselves greatly by creating big trouble for others.
In spite of these facts, two remarkable beliefs have come to be widely held about free, Western societies.
The first is that human beings are naturally selfish creatures, and that they can only become virtuous by overcoming their natural self-partiality. This moral opinion descends from some versions of Christianity, was powerfully taken up by French moralists in the seventeenth century, contributed to satirical views of commerce in the early eighteenth century, was influentially refuted by Adam Smith, and was revived to plague us once more by the Marxists (and other ideologists) in the nineteenth century. But the individualist, in pursuing self-interest, is not, according to our critics, overcoming self-partiality.
The second and related view is that Western Civilization is technically prodigious but has basically failed to overcome prejudice, superstition (e.g. religion), bigotry, racism, imperialism, national selfishness, and other such evils from which only the wisdom of international organizations can save us. This curious form of civilizational self-hatred results not from judging that we are worse than others but from the belief that since we have more control over our nature, we ought to have been able to do better.
One oft-overlooked aspect of the Constitution's genius is the Framers' humility. They had two animating ideals to guide the Republic they designed. The first, of course, was liberty: The United States would be the first Republic in history in which sovereignty was vested in "We the People," not the central government; in which the central government's function was to serve rather than rule the people; and in which the citizen's autonomy over his life and property was presumed - the central government permitted to burden it only in limited and strictly defined ways. The second ideal was separation of powers: The recognition that power was necessary but inherently corruptive. For liberty to survive, power would need to be divided in a calculated manner, not just among the three branches of the new central government, but also among the central government, the states (which were to retain sovereignty notwithstanding the creation of the Union), and individual citizens.
The Framers were confident about these enduring ideals for a flourishing, free society. Nevertheless, they were sage enough to realize they were mere men. They had undoubtedly made errors. Though they disagreed with the anti-Federalists, the persuasive force of many contentions lodged in opposition to the Constitution was not lost on them. Moreover, even if the compromises they made and the balance of power they struck were suitable to the conditions of the late eighteenth century, they understood that those arrangements might not be suitable forever. History is dynamic. To persevere, a Constitution would need a process for self-correction and for maintaining its animating ideals through changing times.
Grimly reconciled though one may be to the annual flood of books by and about the Beat Generation, it's particularly depressing to see Jack Kerouac's poetry, of all things, enshrined in the Library of America, that magnificent series designed to preserve for posterity the treasures of our national literature. To read through these seven hundred–odd pages of Kerouac's staggeringly slapdash effusions set in elegant Galliard, outfitted with the usual meticulous editorial apparatus, and bound - like Twain's novels and Lincoln's speeches - in a beautiful Library of America volume is enough to trigger a serious attack of cognitive dissonance.
Earnest souls who are prepared to give Kerouac's outpourings every possible chance, and who yearn for guidance and insight from someone who admires them, can expect no help from the editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, whose introduction mixes pages and pages of quotations from the poems themselves with doses of hyperbole about the composition of verse. ("To be a poet's poet is to hurt. To hurt singularly, to hurt incomprehensibly, to suffer a wound that never heals, a wound not meant to heal because bleeding is the very nature of this wound - it is a divine gift - it is the wound of a savior.") She does manage to make a couple of coherent points - namely, that Kerouac was deeply Catholic and grew up surrounded by death - but this doesn't even begin to help us figure out what to make of these poems, throughout which, consistent in his indifference to technique, Kerouac is clearly speaking to no one but himself.
Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic artist from the former USSR, is the author of Shakedown Socialism, of which David Horowitz said, "I hope everyone reads this book." In 1994 he moved to the U.S. with the hope of living in a country ruled by reason and common sense, appreciative of its freedoms and prosperity.
To his dismay, he discovered a nation deeply infected by the leftist disease of "progressivism" that was arresting true societal progress. American movies, TV, and news media reminded him of his former occupation as a visual propaganda artist for the Communist Party -- a job he reluctantly held, as he knew that no intelligent person would take such art-by-numbers agitprop seriously.
Oleg is the creator of a satirical website ThePeoplesCube.com, which Rush Limbaugh described on his show as "a Stalinist version of The Onion." His graphic work frequently appears in the American Thinker (and The New Counter-Culture!)
Long story short: This man knows of what he writes and his 3-part examination of Leftist techniques is must-read information.
In a society shaped by the government's mind games of manipulative illusions, a dissenter sticks out like a sore thumb. Once the resistance has been demonized, its members will be quickly identified and denounced by the compliant citizenry, labeled as the enemy, and be dealt with by law enforcement.
In the end, the self-preservation of modern-day totalitarianism is ensured, not so much by the secret police with its army of snitches and brutal enforcers, as by modern technologies of psychological manipulation through the media, education, and entertainment.
Most modern-day leftists in Western countries have abandoned the idea of a violent revolution, having replaced it with "the long march through the institutions" as part of the culture war to transform the society through cultural hegemony. Instead of commanding firing squads, they play mind games of manipulative illusions, in which the demonization of dissent plays a crucial role. The basic premise hasn't changed: as much as the statists want you to love them, they want you to hate their opponents even more.
From the economy to crime prevention to education to foreign relations, America's policies today are based on the Marxist premise that crime results from poverty, economic crisis results from greed, injustice results from capitalist exploitation, corruption results from the free markets, and militant Islamism results from Western colonialism. Therefore, peace and harmony can only be achieved through equal redistribution of wealth, appeasement, and a global effort to reshape human nature through politically correct, collectivist indoctrination.
Predictably, a faulty premise leads to a faulty outcome: the economy is stumbling, education is failing, corruption is spreading, crime is rising, and militant Islamism is gaining more ground. Instead of creating the New Man, the suppression and demonization of natural human traits breeds moral and intellectual freaks. Where normalcy is outlawed, abnormalities flourish.
The most damaging outcome of this fallacy, however, is also the least visible -- and thus rarely mentioned: the government effort to demonize our individual thoughts, impulses, and human nature itself can only result in the eventual dehumanization of our society, turning independent American citizens into mindless statistical units, spiritless cogs in the machine, and powerless subjects of the state, ripe for abuse by any sociopathic government official with dictatorial tendencies.
"From the age of Big Brother, from the age of the Thought Police, from a dead man...greetings."
In 1952, Hans-Joachim Geyer, a low-level courier secretly working for the West German Federal Intelligence Service, was captured in East Berlin by agents of the Stasi, the spy network of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Geyer, a former member of the Nazi Party, had little difficulty in switching allegiances. According to now available Stasi files, Geyer quickly admitted his work on behalf of the Federal Republic and went so far as to offer up his services to the GDR. With his assistance, the Stasi was able to roll up over 100 West German spies operating in East Germany and seize hundreds of valuable documents. So helpful was Geyer (whose work lasted only a year before his cover was blown) that the GDR paid a large pension to his widow after his death.
It took Mao Zedong's New China about four years to carry out the "Great Leap Famine," the greatest single crime in the history of the world. The term itself, now widely used, derives sardonically from the Great Leap Forward, a campaign begun in 1958 to transform Communist China into a modern industrialized state in less than a decade. Central to this campaign was a massive reordering of China's countryside, especially the forced movement of the hundreds of millions who lived there into so-called People's Communes. Mao's agricultural policies mirrored those of his inspiration and mentor, Joseph Stalin, whose ruthless rural collectivization campaign in the 1930s caused more than 10 million deaths in the Soviet Union. In the People's Republic of China, over the decades, historians and demographers have come to estimate the deaths caused by Mao's collectivization campaign at about 40 million.
The term "politically correct" entered the American vocabulary in 1991, following a widely discussed New York magazine cover story on higher education, and has become applicable beyond the campus. The Associated Press, for example, announced this year the banishment of "illegal immigrant" from its stylebook. One linguist suggested "unauthorized migrant" as a more respectful substitute. Jay Leno, who is not politically correct, preferred "undocumented Democrats." Perhaps "joggers without borders" will catch on.
The Left's Central Delusion Its devotion to central planning has endured from the French Revolution to ObamaCare.
The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.
A never-ending source of grievances for the Left is the fact that some groups are "over-represented" in desirable occupations, institutions, and income brackets, while other groups are "under-represented."
In the old Dr. Faustus story, a young scholar bargains away his soul to the devil for promises of obtaining almost anything he wants.
The American media has done much the same thing with the Obama administration. In return for empowering a fellow liberal, the press gave up its traditional adversarial relationship with the president.
But after five years of basking in a shared progressive agenda, the tab for such ecstasy has come due, and now the media is lamenting that it has lost its soul.
It is now 45 years since that momentous year 1968, one of the turning points of contemporary world culture, if not quite of contemporary politics. Not unlike 1848–49 in Europe, 1968 was marked by events that involved student and political protests in several places. There was a dire sense of crescendo and momentum: the heightening of protest against the Vietnam War, the violent turn of the civil-rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the utopian libertinism of the hippies. To have been close to its center is an ambiguous experience impossible to forget.
Radicals and their sympathizers then and now have loved the parallels with 1848 and especially with 1789 — "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," wrote Wordsworth 20 years later of his revolutionary experience in France, "but to be young was very Heaven." The English writer Hugh Kingsmill was to call such people "dawnists," always on the verge of the utopian day. Yet upon realizing the outcome of the French Revolution in Napoleonic tyranny, Wordsworth repented and returned to Christianity. Few of the American "dawnists" seem to have seen that light, so different from their own.
SDS leader Mark Rudd at a Columbia University protest, 1968
The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator. Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal. The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men.
There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins – equally despising "the bourgeois," sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds.
The defining characteristic of tyranny is the diversion of power from the people to the unelected elite. The elite can claim to be inspired by Allah or Marx; it can act in the name of racial purity or universal workers compensation or both. The details don't matter, because in all instances, tyranny derives its justification from the superiority of the rulers and the inferiority of the people.
There was plenty of quality material in theWall Street Journalthe past couple of days. Here are links and excerpts from three articles that are well worth the read:
How's the president's game going? What's new is that almost everyone does seem to understand he's playing games. He used to get more credit. His threats of coming mayhem and his lack of interest in easing it have dimmed his luster.
Certainly in the past few weeks he's become more aggressive and gameful. A crisis is coming—a series of crises actually, with more ceilings and the threat of a government shutdown—and he is not engaging or taking ownership. The "We're not speaking" thing with Congress is more amazing and historic than we appreciate. Only a president can stop that kind of thing, and he doesn't. He doesn't even seem to think he owes the speaker of the House—the highest elected official of a party representing roughly half the country—even the appearance of laying down his arms for a moment and holding serious talks. He journeys into America making speeches, he goes on TV but only for interviews the White House is confident will be soft.
He doesn't have time for Congress, but he has time to go on Al Sharpton's radio show and say Republicans care only about protecting the rich from taxes. Which is the kind of thing that embitters, that makes foes dig in more deeply.
But here's what seems really new. Past presidents, certainly since Ronald Reagan, went over the heads of the media to win over the people, to get them to contact Congress and push Congress to deal. Fine, and fair enough. But Mr. Obama goes to the people to get them to enhance his position by hating Republicans. He's playing only to the polls, not to Congress, not to get the other side to the bargaining table. He doesn't even like the bargaining table. He doesn't like bargaining.
Where does that get us? We are in new territory. There is a strange kind of nihilism in the president's approach. It's a closed, self-referential loop. And it's guaranteed to keep agreement from happening.
Normal Americans awoke Friday to find that the veneer of civilization had not fallen away. If the federal government does end up spending $44.8 trillion over the next decade instead of $46 trillion, they may not notice at all. This may explain Mr. Obama's morning-after concession that "what's important to understand is that not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away," and that the gruesome cuts that the President had been invoking are now merely "a slow grind that will intensify with each passing day."
One reason the grind may intensify is that Mr. Obama spurned GOP offers Friday morning to grant him even more executive discretion than he already has to prioritize federal spending. Or as his own Simpson-Bowles commission put it, he could always choose among the "patchwork of thousands of duplicative programs, nearly impossible to track and even harder to evaluate for effective outcomes." This he does not want to do.
What he is trying to do instead is implement the sequester as rudely as possible so that he can extract another tax increase. As the President put it, the problem is that Republicans have adopted "an iron-clad rule that we will not accept an extra dime's worth of revenue."
But not so iron clad that the GOP didn't reluctantly consent to 6.2 trillion dimes in tax increases only this January in return for zero dimes of spending restraint. Mr. Obama wants Republicans to commit political harikiri by doing it again. Asking the other party to commit suicide is not typically a good basis for bipartisan accord.
Mr. Obama pitches his tax increase as "tax reform" and merely cutting "tax loopholes" and "tax breaks for the well off and well connected." He also said he doesn't want to "raise tax rates." But the Senate Democratic bill he endorsed on Thursday included the "Buffett rule" that is effectively a minimum tax of 30%, which means another increase in the tax rate on capital gains and dividends. Real tax reform means reducing rates in return for closing loopholes. Mr. Obama wants to raise rates instead.
But the primary reason today's liberal Democratic coalition will fade is because the very policies it pushes sow the seeds of its own destruction. The coalition can survive over time only by allocating slices of our nation's economic pie in a way that favors and placates its constituent members. But people, being human, will continually want larger slices of our economic resources, so continued success in placating those members, while at the same time adding the necessary new members, requires a continuing and ever-growing economy. A flat or shrinking economy will never generate the resources needed to feed the coalition.
Yet the White House and congressional Democrats are working to stifle economic growth. From their views on taxes and redistribution, to their policies on energy and regulation, liberal Democrats are standing in the way of the strong economy their coalition needs.
Instead of pushing policies that spur innovation and risk-taking, the left advances policies that discourage them. Instead of lower marginal tax rates and less complication in the federal tax code, we see higher rates and more complication. We see new taxes in ObamaCare and the partial expiration of the Bush cuts. California's new tax on millionaires brings the state rate to more than 13%, and the combined federal and state rate to almost 52%. The high rates are discouraging at least some wealthy taxpayers from staying in or moving to the state. As federal rates increase, such economic discouragement will be found across the nation.
Instead of policies that lead to the available and affordable energy supplies required for a growing economy, we see onerous new regulations on coal-fired electricity plants, foot-dragging in the permitting for oil and gas drilling, and a surprising lack of interest in the hydrofracturing process that has revolutionized the extraction of natural gas and worked to lower energy costs.
Instead of thinking of the government's role in the economy as one of providing the minimum rules for fairness, ensuring those rules are enforced, and then getting out of way, we see efforts to push federal bureaucrats—and their ever-expanding government programs, regulations and mandates—into more and more facets of the world in which we live and work.
The toll on the economy is real. According to a report by Sentier Research released last fall, inflation-adjusted median household income has fallen more since the end of the recession in mid-2009 (down by 4.8%) than it did during the actual recession (2.6%).
