Home » I know you may be sick of hearing about the Covington affair, but please read what VDH has to say about it

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I know you may be sick of hearing about the Covington affair, but please read what VDH has to say about it — 52 Comments

  1. And the professor, a woman just a couple of years younger than I, was clearly on their side. I have never forgotten it, and although at the time I didn’t put it in a political left/right context (that came later), I realized it was a frightening development and it made me feel very, very uneasy and quite alone.

    And then you became a Republican. For me it was talking an Economics class in college, about 1959. I doubt an Economics class in 2019 would bee of any use.

  2. Mike K:

    It took me over 10 years and a lot more thinking and reading to turn to the political right. At the time that incident happened, I didn’t see it as a left-right issue. I wasn’t especially political, and I didn’t put it into it a political context, nor was I aware of the history of how such thinking had come about. I’d been away from academia at the time for 20 years.

    It was a very memorable incident though, and it made a deep impression on me. Not only did I feel totally alone, but I was surprised that no one had agreed with me (at least, publicly and vocally, or even privately and vocally; perhaps some agreed in secret, but if so even then they were afraid to speak up).

  3. Years ago I read a book on the psychological origins of political correctness and the author pointed out that when you become PC you have to deny reality and live in fantasy land. He also pointed out that the PC believe they are victims of oppression and persecution. This may be because people living in fantasy land perceive reality as oppression and persecution.

  4. I have a minor in sociology (whatever that is?) that I though would go well with my BBA in management. I was older, about 26 years old when I went back to finish college after four years of Army and this was in the early 1970’s. I took a class about race and ethnic relations which the teacher at time, a total looney tune was telling us that it was all misguided perceptions that various races existed and prejudices caused by white peoples fears. I had lived for three years in Germany and tried to explain that some different nationalities identified themselves with their own countries in spite of what she wanted to think about all mankind. I also stated that folks in Northern Europe tended to have lighter hair and fair skin and those further South like in Italy tended to have darker complexions and hair and even in different parts of Germany locals have their own look. The professor went nuts on me because I was a racist even when I had worded my phrases that it was just a personal observation and I was told that was not up for discussion.

    I was a bit annoyed at the whole situation, spoke to another Sociology professor who had become a friend and he gave me excellent advice. He told me it would be best for me to go grovel a bit and thank the lady prof for setting me on the right path and then feed her what she wanted to hear and get an A for the semester because she was an easy A for those with right thoughts and she loved to mess up grade point averages for those who were morally wrong prejudiced people who might deserve to make a C. I received an A for the class and never looked back, and that was in the good old days.

  5. So-called “identity” politics a.k.a. diversity or color (i.e. unprincipled) judgments that denies individual dignity and intrinsic value under the State-established PC (politically correct, politically congruent, politically convenient, progressively confused and corrupt) Church and Twilight Amendment to The Constitution.

  6. No one should tire of hearing about this. It marks a watershed moment in increasing leftist hate. They must pay and be shamed into civility. They came for white men, then women and now kids.

  7. neo: Great story … which I don’t mean disparagingly.

    I too have gone up one-to-many against the comrades, when I didn’t realize I was no longer a comrade.
    ______________________________________

    kumrads die because they’re told)

    kumrads die because they’re told)
    kumrads die before they’re old
    (kumrads aren’t afraid to die
    kumrads don’t
    and kumrads won’t
    believe in life)and death knows whie

    (all good kumrads you can tell
    by their altruistic smell
    moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
    kumrads enjoy
    s.freud knows whoy
    the hope that you may mess your pance

    every kumrad is a bit
    of quite unmitigated hate
    (travelling in a futile groove
    god knows why)
    and so do i
    (because they are afraid to love

    –e.e. cummings
    _________________________________

    It may not be as simple as that and cummings had his own antisemitism with which to contend.

    Still the old boy was on to something.

  8. The hatefulness and the absurdities upon which it is built are frightening and dismaying — at first. But watching that Gillette parody video that Mike K posted on the prior Covington thread reminded me of something. They are unbelievably silly.

    If you turn your head one tiny fraction, everything becomes comical. The colossal silliness of that oh-so-serious TV newswoman talking about how standing is aggressive…. c’mon, no sensible American can take that seriously for two seconds. The people who still do are so dumb, and they half-know it, so that once they see a few more people mocking the idiocies, they will mumble an objection and maybe glare a little, but even those dopes will drop the pose when they realize everyone else finds it laughable.

    Someone commented about Venezuela — dictatorships look impervious to change until five minutes before they collapse.

    It’s the same thing here. That little bit from the half-crazed Black Hebrew Israelite — c’mon, he was funny in his weirdness and I think he knew it himself. He loved having a bullhorn or whatever microphone he was using. “Peckerwoods!” He was out of the 1940s. I found him endearing in his own wacky way, grumbling and faking some threatening persona that was as far from his country-boy beard as Moses is from Curly Joe.

    LOL.

  9. It’s not only white people they go after — the black kid from Covington got even worse hate from the Black Hebrew Israelites, and just check out what the Lefties say about black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, or Tim Scott, to say nothing of bloggers like Diamond and Silk, Kevin of Kevin’s Corner, Anthony Brian Logan, or the Walk Away Movement.

  10. I’ve been out of town again & not paying much attention here…so if this is already buried in a thread somewhere already…I apologise…but I do like Sarah Hoyt & I do think she’s onto something here.

    https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/01/26/rules-of-the-game/

    She’s asking the hard question of lefties…Do you really want to play this game of “destroy righty whitey”? Do you really want to loose the dogs of war on high school kids who are minding their own damn business? Do you really want to lie your way into a cage match with people who are mighty tolerant up to that point that their kids & livelihoods are threatened & then just may lock the cage with you trapped in their with them?

    I’ll quote her final paragraph:
    “Because it’s way later than you think.

    Once the game starts, you can’t back out. And there is no arrow of history. There is no scripted end. That only happens in your head, and the world is not inside your head. You can choose to look outside your head, question what you’ve been told, engage real people. Or you can carry on in this path with the understanding that people not inside your head get a say.

    So again, are these your rules? Is this the game you want to play?”

  11. You discovered something was wrong…
    had a feeling this train had no brake…
    and as is normal, everyone is left to the fate of the movement

    Funny….
    The ladies neutered all discussion like “the reserve of intelligence”, demographics, inconvenient medical facts, legal, etc. – and spent a whole branch of science trying to prove feminisms correct… taking over whole area of inconvenient medical areas where they can always conform and get along….

    the infinite goof: they self exterminated their privileged existence and future power away, and have been fighting every battle and every side so long, they are fighting cross purposes, and cross benefits, and are quite confused at some really contradictory contradictions… hmmmmmmm

    He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers?out of unorthodoxy.

    – George Orwell…

    putting aside the fact we forget that in his society (like ours now?) sex was dangerous
    [Isnt that what was applied to frat houses, kavenaugh, etc?]

    as far as the women who looked back at you neo? Orwell had that covered too…

    To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

    The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. 1984

    “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
    ? Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

    “No social stability without individual stability.”
    ? Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
    [and no individual stability if no familial stability, right? just asking]

    the really hysterical thing is that there is not even a way to have a discussion over things as the ladies in that class and later classes made such a mish mosh mess of the science area, no one knows if a point proven is really proven or not, and yet, its interesting to see how much its used in law, and policy, and to undo other sources…

    oh, ya cant even discuss causes unless they are acceptable…
    so, no way to fix things in no mans land…

  12. Lincoln, commenting on the degradation of the concept of liberty, said, “When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy”. As with so many things, Mr Lincoln saw things so very clearly.

  13. “‘From now on the Left feels it has the material resources and informational clout to construct any reality it wishes. We can see that clear enough, from Phillips’ apologists who never backed down, but instead insisted that the kids’ faces and “attitude” nonetheless exuded privilege and thus culpability.’

    I hate to be so pessimistic, but that is my strong sense as well. The left smells conservative blood everywhere, and they are in a feeding frenzy.”

    Respectfully I must disagree. I see the same frenzy, but I smell fear. They have all the money and yet they aren’t winning. For instance, more young people are pro-life. There’s a long-running General Social Survey (GSS) that is taken every two years that has asked the same abortion related questions since the early 70s. It asks whether abortion should be legal option: 1) if the woman is raped, 2) if there is a strong chance of a fetal defect, 3) if the pregnancy poses a risk to the woman’s health, 4) if the woman is low income, 5) if the woman is unmarried and does not want to marry the man, and 6) the woman is married and does not want more children.

    This is a survey widely used by social scientists (if you believe the social studies approach any semblance of science). During the 70s, 80s, and 90s young adults were more likely than any other age group. But after y2k things shifted and young adults were less likely than any other age group to think abortion should be legal under the same circumstances.

    But maybe I’m more optimistic because I have to be. I did, after all, join the Navy.

    “What, are you suggesting we go to sea riding a sweating armpit full of explosives and fuel that can go off at any second, and if the explosion doesn’t kill us we’ll be stranded thousands of miles from land in a desert filled with water we can’t drink because it’s so salty if we drink it we’ll actually get more dehydrated, then drink more, leading to brain damage and death, and we’ll be surrounded by large predators known as sharks which will kill us outright or bit by bit? Where do I sign up for that!”

    I added the sweating arm pit part in tribute to the great Native American Nathan Philipps. Who when he wasn’t a “Recon Ranger” was a refrigerator mechanic. And here’s where I get serious. If any of you reading this were refer mechanics, or really any kind of electrician, you have everything to be proud of. Because every man no matter if their service considered them “special” or not knows just how miserable it is to go without working refrigeration in the God awful places we had to sweat and stink through summer.

  14. Neo, you just posted about a law that New York state passed in case Roe v. Wade was reversed. I ask you. If the left really thought it was on the ascendant, would they pass such a law?

  15. Next hegelian battle cuing up…
    Feminism vs another culture

    “If a woman gets raped walking in public alone, then she, herself, is at fault. She is only seducing men by her presence. She should have stayed home like a Muslim woman.”
    – Dr. Abd Al-Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan, Professor of Islamic Law, Saudi Arabia.

    not to mention all kinds of new trends
    An African practice of “ironing” a girl’s chest with a hot stone to delay breast formation is spreading in the UK, with anecdotal evidence of dozens of recent cases, a Guardian investigation has established. The perpetrators, usually mothers, consider it a traditional measure which protects girls from unwanted male attention, sexual harassment and rape..

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    Now that the feminists of western civ have invited all kinds of interesting people, hegel has been real busy. turns out that now they have done what they were told to and believed what they were told to, the reality is a bit more uncooperatively troublesome… (not to mention the laws preventing full reporting in their press… )

    Thr?ee teenage girls, aged 15, 16 and 17, were visiting a central s?hopping mall, the Sophienhof, in “broad daylight” when two young Afghan asylum seekers, aged 19 and 26, began to follow an??d film them with their cell phones.

    Evidently, the criminals then posted these films on their soc?ia?l networks with the result that more and more men came to a restaurant area of the Sophienhof in order to per?secute, sneer at them and to frighten them,” reported the newspaper, Die Welt.

    Like the women in Cologne and those participatin?g in the anti-Morsi demonstrations on Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2013, the three Kiel teenagers were at first probably un?aware they were being hunted, and that a pack of hyenas was slowly surrounding them.

    In total, between 20 and 30 m?en of “migration background,” a?s German papers described them, ?were involved?.
    ?Police report there were no acts of sexual violence, but papers sta?te the teenagers were “very hard pressed.”

  16. I was initially shocked by the level of implacable rage I feel over the Covington smears, but I’ve realized why. It’s because there is now no question that they are coming for my kids…MY kids. Specifically, my white, Catholic-private-school educated son. He’s a smart, funny, quirky, creative young man and has always had the sweetest, purest heart (not just my opinion) and none of that would matter one bit to those who would seek to use, dehumanize, and destroy him. If caught in this scenario, he would probably freeze and smile and look unsure and try not to be antagonistic to an older dude getting in his face with a drum—-and his life as he knows it would be forfeit if the wrong picture went viral. What would stop my rising rage at those who speak of punching my son in the face, of ruining his life–my CHILD–and feeding him into the wood-chipper? What would I not do to protect him?

  17. RigelDog, you do realize that you and your kids are only white as long as you and they are Christian. You could be a Zulu from Zimbabwe and if you’re Christian you and they, sir, are white.

    On the other hand, you could be Ibrahim Hooper. A blond, blue-eyed Canadian of Scandinavian descent who converted to Islam and became the national communications director and spokesman for the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood front group Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). He automatically became one of the sacred Brown other.

    Your choice, my friend.

  18. Steve57: They are definitely coming for the Christians, too, and color is no protection. Being a swarthy-complexioned Jew (which is my husband’s ethnicity but not religion) means you are also “white.” It also means that my husband and our kids would be on Hitler’s list but who has time for such niceties when people like us are obviously “Nazis” because we support free speech?

  19. VDH states, “The reason so many lynchers did not apologize is because their targets were guilty of who they were, not what they did.

    True, we are guilty because of who we are and what we support.

    VDH asserts, “The progressive cause feels it is close to victory.

    They are ever closer to a confrontation they cannot win. They think that they can vote away our inalienable rights. They think that our desire to preserve the Republic will remain, even after they have eviscerated our Republic. They think we will “go quietly into the night”. They are gravely, fatally… mistaken in that delusion.

    “This may be because people living in fantasy land perceive reality as oppression and persecution.” Ray

    Indubitably so. People who seek to forcibly impose their fantasies upon others, eventually encounter the most unpleasant of realities.

    “They must pay and be shamed into civility.” Ken

    They are incapable of shame because their ego finds shame intolerable, which is why virtue signaling is for them an existential imperative. It is why they crumble into acquiescence when criticized by the mob.

  20. My back-to-school story isn’t as good as yours, but…early on, I realized how different we were, when I went back after 20 or so years.

    We read in America Lit, a true account of enemies taking babies out of mothers’ arms and dashing them against rocks. The day after, talking before class, I said to a girl “I had a hard time finishing….the part about the babies.”

    She looked at me with total lack of comprehension and after several seconds said, “It’s only a STORY.”

    I only realized then how desensitized people had become since the first time I was in school. Have noticed it since then– all the books winning awards from school librarians feature graphic violence…in one, a transgender (yes) had his lacy skirt set on fire by a POC boy, and they became friends. Lots about the burned kid in the hospital. In another, a girl’s father had put her face against a hot stove as a child, to teach her to be “tough,” and one side of her face was all melted.

    It’s like, it’s not lit now, if it’s not graphic. I find it disgusting for elementary school kids to be exposed to such ugliness and cruelty. But in an age of 9-yr-old drag kids — part of why I now despise the left I was once part of.

  21. Steve57:

    Yes, they would pass it. The law takes effect whether or not Roe is overturned. It takes the place of the previous NY law.

    If SCOTUS throws the decision back to states, the new NY law would stand. But if Roe is never challenged, the NY law is compliant with it and extends it in NY. So the law works either way.

  22. ken on January 28, 2019 at 5:21 pm at 5:21 pm said:
    No one should tire of hearing about this. It marks a watershed moment in increasing leftist hate. They must pay and be shamed into civility. They came for white men, then women and now kids.
    * * *
    Geoffrey is correct that the left cannot be shamed (the right-wing h8ters have apologized for their defection; there is no guarantee they won’t defect again unless they are shamed into pretending civility).
    But – yes – no one should tire of hearing about this: it was a watershed moment for at least some people; it ought to become a tipping point for many more.

  23. justStoppingBy on January 28, 2019 at 9:31 pm at 9:31 pm said:
    My back-to-school story isn’t as good as yours, but…early on, I realized how different we were, when I went back after 20 or so years.

    We read in America Lit, a true account of enemies taking babies out of mothers’ arms and dashing them against rocks. The day after, talking before class, I said to a girl “I had a hard time finishing….the part about the babies.”

    She looked at me with total lack of comprehension and after several seconds said, “It’s only a STORY.”

    I only realized then how desensitized people had become since the first time I was in school.
    * * *
    This is oddly incongruent with the wilting snowflakes, who need safe rooms to protect them from nasty evil conservative speech.
    The only thing consistent about the left’s useful idiots is their inconsistency.
    Death penalty for heinous killers, bad; abortion of babies, good.
    Taking care of beloved pets, bad; grilling dogs to make a point, good.
    Wolf-whistles on the street, bad; Fifty Shades of Grey and Game of Thrones, good.
    etc etc etc

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6626065/Sydney-children-left-terrified-PETA-protesters-pretending-barbecue-dog.html

  24. RigelDog on January 28, 2019 at 8:49 pm at 8:49 pm said:
    …If caught in this scenario, he would probably freeze and smile and look unsure and try not to be antagonistic to an older dude getting in his face
    * * *
    https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/319993/

    JOHN ALTHOUSE COHEN: Why I’m Still Talking About Covington.

    You could give various responses about the larger significance of the debacle, that some people haven’t adequately recanted, etc.

    But I want to add something, which is that this feels personal because it could so easily happen to any of us. The encounter was so mundane that you have to wonder what other non-events will be used to try to destroy you or me. It happened to be video-recorded not because it mattered, but because that’s just so easy with 2019 technology.

    I didn’t have to worry about that when I was 16, but I can’t help thinking: what would it have been like if this had happened to me when I was 16? Are some people not having that thought because they see him as the Other, and consequently lack empathy for him?

    I also think about what will happen if I ever have a kid. Would my 16-year-old always stay on the right side of the face police? Or might he occasionally be awkward at that age? What if he had some kind of a mental or physical disability that caused him to have facial expressions or body movements that people took the wrong way? (I say “he” because so much of the vituperation that’s been directed at the Covington kids has been explicitly based on their gender.)

    Go to the link to see the associated pictures of another older dude harassing teens.
    It wasn’t called “smirking” by the left back in the day.

  25. Another bit of good thinking from Jaltcoh, even if he is a leftist most days; also in line with my comment about the inconsistency of the left.

    https://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2019/01/amid-all-talk-about-how-covington-story.html

    “Respect your elders”?
    Amid all the talk about how the Covington story was falsely reported and how the mob against those kids summed up everything wrong with social media, one point seems to have gotten lost: no matter what version of the facts we believed, it was always absurd to say, in response to seeing a Native American in his 60s, that the teenagers needed to “respect their elders.” That phrase can be used to mean many different things, but I’d suggest that it’s so problematic it should be replaced by clearer statements that don’t rely on cliches.

    We should not respect anyone based on what demographic group they belong to, whether it’s age, ethnicity, or anything else. Each individual either does or doesn’t deserve respect based on what they’ve specifically said or done.

    Ironically, it isn’t very respectful to leap to a positive judgment about someone based on their ethnicity. Is seeing a Native American of a certain age and immediately saying, “Respect your elders!” really that different from meeting someone who’s Asian and quickly praising them for “speaking good English,” or routinely mentioning that “some of my best friends are black” during any conversation about race? Those kinds of statements might sound positive on the surface, but it’s well-known that they’re insidiously patronizing. They treat people as ethnic placeholders instead of as fully formed individuals who contain unique strengths and weaknesses.

  26. Hanson’s article at American Greatness was acccompanied by one of Roger Kimball’s posts, which quoted his own first reaction to the Covington Melt-down, and a post by Mark Steyn, both of which remarked, essentially, that Sandmann and the other boys had nothing to apologize for.
    This excerpt is along the lines of the “watershed” comment above, which will only happen if we don’t let the bigots (which they are, left and right) drop this story down the memory hole.

    https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/26/a-better-guide-than-elite-opinion-is-public-revulsion-at-it/

    Stepping back from the episode, one gets the sense that most conservative commentators are inexpressibly grateful for the the release of that longer video. It offered a the perfect instrument of expiation. “If only we had known about the Black Hebrew Israelites,” they seem to have said, “if only we had known that Nathan Phillips was the instigator, and a mountebank to boot, then we would not have come down on these boys like a ton of bricks and tried to ruin their lives. Thank God for the video.”

    Except that neither Nick Sandmann nor the other Covington Catholic boys required the longer video to be exonerated. As I noted above, even the original clip, although it does not show the BHIs or Nathan Phillips’ instigations, shows nothing incriminating about the boys. They neither say nor do anything untoward. The Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad underscores this aspect of the episode. “Suppose,” he asks us to ponder, “the second video had never come out and the Covington Catholic High School boys had not been exonerated.” What then? “What exactly would the boys have been guilty of based on the 3 minutes and 44 seconds of footage in that first video?”

    Answer: nothing. “No one laid a finger on Nathan Phillips and the other two Native Americans banging their drums and chanting. No one yelled at them. No one insulted them. No one asked them to leave. The boys chanted along and acted silly. They surrounded the men in order to see what was happening, the way any crowd would if someone was making noise or playing an instrument in public. They were all smiling and being rather good-natured.”

    A Moment to Reassess Political Correctness
    So, why the hysterical rage? Why the calls to destroy these boys? Why the eructation of moral preening, from the Right just as much as from the Left?

    I think there is a specific answer and a more general one. The specific answer is Donald Trump, for whom the MAGA hats were effective metonymies. Donald Trump has driven certain segments of the American public, especially the elite American public, mad, as exhibitions over the Covington Catholic boys vividly illustrates.

    <b?The more general answer has to do with the poison of political correctness and identity politics, which have warped our civic discourse and blinded us to elementary truths.

    A middle-aged Indian beating a drum and chanting wildly has no greater presumption of moral dignity than a white, Trump-supporting boy who participates in a pro-life march. But that is precisely what the imperatives of political correctness demand we acknowledge.
    The public—though not, for the most part, the academic elite—has reacted with condign disgust at the treatment of the boys from Covington Catholic. It knows that Nathan Phillips is no more “native American” than Nick Sandmann: both were born here and have equal title to American natality. And it senses that the culprit is the political correctness that has distorted our common life and even our ability to speak the truth about sensitive issues. If there is a silver lining in this disturbing episode, it is that public revulsion at this episode may, just possibly, spark a reconsideration of our ill-advised and demeaning adherence to the tenets of political correctness.

    As to the reconsideration of PC by the bigots (left and right), I’m not holding my breath.

  27. https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/27/adults-are-cannibalizing-the-covington-kids/

    The most frightening element of the Covington Catholic affair is the adults versus kids aspect of it. Strip away all of the racial and cultural elements, and we are left with the one abiding lesson: children must, at all times and under all circumstances, make the adults in this society feel good.

    When the first video clip was published on Twitter the day after the 2019 March for Life, our collective sensitivity reflexively rushed to protect the adult, the Boomer, in his time of great need defending his feelings and his self-worth against the assembled teenagers. These teenagers, devoid of life experience and therefore almost completely without prudence, are expected to be stoic and mature while surrounded by geriatric toddlers throwing public fits about the various things that make them feel bad.

    Children used to be free to grow up before they merited serious political attention and commentary.

    Commentators have been roundly condemned for jumping to conclusions and getting things wrong based on the viral, and as we now know, incomplete and misleading video that started this nationwide existential crisis. But suppose the first video had been an accurate depiction of what really happened? The reaction of the adults still would have been self-serving, self-congratulatory, self-centered. Childish. No one, including the Covington Catholic High School administration, the local Catholic bishop, our social and cultural talking heads, took responsibility for these kids. No one offered to be the old-fashioned, reassuring adult standing in front of the accused child, offering to take the punishment on himself because the child is too young to be totally culpable, and too young to be offered as a victim to an angry mob. Our legal system holds children to a different standard, but our public discourse does not.

    The corrosion of politics from something we do with our heads to something we do with our gut reactions has enlisted children into our total political war. The reason for this is simple: when emoting is all that counts, children’s feelings are on par—equally felt, equally earnest—with those of the most sophisticated adults. And in such a total political war, showing the correct feelings isn’t a request—it’s a command.

  28. And just because National Review was one of those childish groups of adults:

    https://medium.com/@dmaxashman/national-review-self-destructs-over-covington-catholic-483529d416bd

    Daniel Ashman
    Jan 22
    National Review may have just irreparably damaged their reputation. Their response to Covington Catholic?—?where innocent kids were framed, doxed, and then threatened with mob violence?—?is a total mess.

    National Review brands itself as the moral arbiter for Republicans. For instance, their editor in chief, Rich Lowry, wrote that the primary reasons for opposing Trump included his “character” and “temperament” while their senior editor, Jonah Goldberg, explained he would never vote for Trump because he is intent on “keeping a clear conscience.”

    This makes their response to Covington Catholic especially shocking.
    ..
    Lowry is a grown man, tweeting to a national audience of over one hundred fifty thousand Twitter followers, which then gets amplified by his colleagues at National Review who retweet him. He is speaking to a national audience.

    What code of morality, exactly, indicates that Lowry should nationally shame a group of kids on a field trip? There is something bizarre going on when a man demands apologies from children he doesn’t even know.

    I’m not an editor of a national publication like Lowry is, but it seems to me, he should fact check something before sharing it across the world. This seems even more important given that the target of his attack were boys on a field trip.

    National Review wanted to lead American conservatives. The Covington Catholic crisis was an opportunity for them. Innocent Christian boys were framed, doxed, and smeared. People even offered bounties to incite mob violence against them. National Review could have responded with bold leadership to protect the Covington Catholic boys.

    Instead, National Review failed. Various National Review leaders failed repeatedly in catastrophic and systematic ways. Legitimate editors at legitimate publications don’t smear innocent children.

  29. VDH and Neo are right to fear the Long March Through The Institutions is near its culmination and triumph.
    Neo, usually pretty optimistic and inclined to give the Adversary the benefit of doubt, now says, “I hate to be so pessimistic.”

  30. “I hate to be so pessimistic, but that is my strong sense as well. The left smells conservative blood everywhere, and they are in a feeding frenzy.” (–neo)

    Respectfully I must disagree. I see the same frenzy, but I smell fear.

    Steve57: That’s my take as well.

    True, the left has the high cards when it comes to the media, tech, Hollywood, academia and big money. Plus the House since 2018. But for all that Trump was elected and is still President, though not without all-out resistance.

    The left can “create any reality it wants” but it doesn’t fool everyone. The moderate media backtracked on Covington after the longer video came out. The Rolling Stone UVA story was publicly debunked and RS paid out a hefty sum. And so on.

    In the meantime liberal media outlets are dying, non-STEM college courses are dying. Colin Kaepernick isn’t quarterbacking anywhere and NFL kneeling appears to be over.

    I think the left has hit its high tide and they are desperate.

  31. But they have the means to cheat at the elections.

    And the motivation.

    And—best of all!—it works!!!

    It’s proven to work time and time again. (Hillary didn’t push it as much as she could have because she didn’t have to—she was a shoo-in….)

    Electoral fraud (yawn) will again be used by the Democrats to distort, warp and pervert elections in the future…unless something can be done to stop it. (IOW, to put teeth back into the voting laws.)

    To be sure, anything attempted to “put teeth back into the voting laws” (AKA to uphold the law) will be viciously and hysterically attacked by the Democrats as a fascist, racist, deplorable—TRUMPIAN!!— attempt to “distort, warp and pervert elections” by denying “THE PEOPLE” the vote.

    Count on it.

    Related:
    https://pjmedia.com/trending/texas-says-58000-non-citizens-cast-ballots-in-2018-elections/

    And this is (together with post-election “vote harvesting”) CAN ONLY BE tip of the iceberg.

  32. It is a mistake to think of this as left/right.

    It’s a cult. The Cult of Critical Theory. And it’s the most successful cult in history.
    It’s a cult because it actively damages people’s self image, or finds people whose culture creates damaged self images, and patches them together with the ideals of Critical Theory into a quasi-human. A quasi-human who cannot think outside of the realm of Critical Theory without risking the destruction of their own psyche. This explains many things, including their desperate need to eliminate contrary opinion.

    Even those on the right who came grew up in feminism, raised by damaged parents, reared in public schools, who miraculously end up right-leaning are tainted … their minds incapable of objectively evaluating certain ideas.

    It’s important to understand this … that it’s not left vs right. It’s a viral cult. The fight must be different.

    Or the fight will be over.

  33. Theophany here is right, it’s a mistake to think of this in terms of Left/Right. The Left/Right distinction in and of itself is anodyne, it’s just about political horse-trading between the classes.

    The really dangerous element is ideology. In the early 20th century it was ideologies that took indifferently from Left/Right tropes (Fascism was invented by former Marxists, So-called “international” Communism was almost functionally indistinguishable from Fascism in terms of nationalism, hierarchy, cult of personality and militarization).

    Now the descendant of those ideologies is a cult, plain and simple. The cult of political correctness, the cult of Cultural Marxism, the cult of Critical Theory, the cult of Postmodernism, the cult of Intersectionality, the cult of Feminism – call it what you will, they are all the same thing. But its not a Left/Right thing in any meaningful sense, because the cult is totally in bed with crony capitalists and big business – they are all part of the same stupefying, life-choking phenomenon.

    Where before the effects of the PC cult’s ideological ancestors threatened only limited, national regions with conformity, boredom and mass murder, now it’s a transnational, global phenomenon, that’s going to turn the entire world into a charnel house if it’s not beaten fairly soon. And the window of opportunity is narrowing.

  34. It’s going to take something more than talk to stop the Left. Be prepared to show them your teeth, not your belly. Remember what the Jews always said about how things would have gone if every German Jew had met the SS men at the door with a pistol and ready to shoot. Remember what Solzhenitsyn said about those who cowered in the face of the NKVD and how they got what they deserved because they didn’t love freedom enough.

    Most of all, know who is in your local SS. Know your enemy, because he will certainly know you–and your family.

  35. It’s a cult. The Cult of Critical Theory. And it’s the most successful cult in history.

    Theophany: I dunno. Islam has had a good run and communism really kicked ass in the 20th C.

    Cult is a tricky word. Whether one wishes or not to call Christianity a cult today, it was a fringe group in 50 AD with peculiar beliefs compared to the Roman mainstream. Although Christianity was a demanding religion compared to paganism, it triumphed and changed world history.

    Things don’t always run downhill. Not even communist countries teach Lysenkoism anymore. I rather suspect today’s Critical Theory nonsense will end up on the ash heap with Lysenko.

  36. Cult.

    Ideology.

    Yes, all very true.

    To put, perhaps, a finer point on it, what we are currently witnessing—and embroiled in—in large part due to the ubiquity and instantaneity(?) of “social” (heh!) media (should be “anti-social” media, certainly, perhaps even “ultra-destructive media”) is the brutal Ideology of “Virtue”….which could just as easily be described as the Cult of “Virtue”.

    And since “virtue” in this case is ever mutable (involving ever-changing hierarchies and newer and newer “flavors”), no one, ultimately, is safe…. Except those with the power to enforce the “hierarchy (or flavor) of the month”.

    “Morality”, “goodness”, “decency” and “Truth”—all brutally enforced by bullying, by threats, by intimidation:
    “…a [Birkenstock] stamping on a human face, forever.”

    In simpler terms, a hate-fest motivated and inspired by “virtue”, a hate-fest that has been weaponized and accelerated, spread globally and intensified by the Internet and social media.

    But then we’ve seen all this before. More correctly, we’ve seen the poisonous, debilitating, inhuman—ultimately murderous, either of body, or reputation, or soul— phenomenon; but not the extraordinary speed with which it can be spread.

  37. Huxley, Islam is not comparable because the psyche-disabling brainwashing primarily happens in the jihadis. In the Critical Theorists, it’s intrinsic to the entire belief system, and acceptance of any part of the belief system is self-reinforcing and spread within one’s own mind (in other words, the physical stuff we see in the bullying, etc. is a symptom, not a vector.) Truly viral.

    Frankly, I would not be surprised if the lessons of MK-Ultra as researched at Harvard were not utilized to extend the reach of the original Frankfurt School CT.

    God, I sound like a nut. Cassandra the nut.

  38. Democrats used tribal-racist feelings as part of the Ku Klux Klan to lynch blacks.
    Today, Dems us tribal feeling as part of their PC-Klan to e-lynch their various targets of opportunity.
    They suffer from Democrat Derangement Syndrome.

    Yes, they’re a cult, of various types. VDH says it was a techno lynching. How did the PC queers take over the word “gay”? But agreeing, in use, on the terms they wanted to use. With their Dem media, academia, and deep state supporters.

    How to fight it? One important step is to recognize it, and name it, and name it well. Note that the 2003 coined Bush Derangement Syndrome is no longer useful, except to compare with Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s the same disease which is driving the techno e-lynching of the PC-Klan — we should call it Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
    When it flares up over Kavanaugh, and the assault-lie, now in the Covington lie, and even the day before there it was a Mueller investigation lie.

    We should call these flare ups something descriptive and consistent – Dem Derangement Syndrome. Which Reps can suffer from, too – like at Nat Review. And when whoever suffers from it promotes a lie, or retweets a lie, they are damaging reality. And their on-line mob – the PC-Klan. Ready to do an e-lynching of some non-PC person.

    They hate normals. See Kurt.

    https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/01/28/what-will-it-take-to-make-you-understand-and-accept-that-they-hate-you-n2540309

    We need to peacefully resist, fight back with words. Defining terms is key to winning arguments.
    Dem Derangement Syndrome, DDS. PC-Klan. e-lynch / e-lynching.

  39. The left does indeed feel like it is winning — despite that they don’t control the White House, the Senate, or the Supreme Court, or many legislatures… or much of anything in reality.

    The reason for this is that they do still control The Narrative, and they have increasingly discovered that they can always brazenly lie with impunity. They will never pay a price for simply making things up, and discussing those things for days. By the time they are unequivocally exposed, the lie is ancient history, because they have come up with three other lies during that time.

    They are the ones who decide what happened this morning, and yesterday, and in 2016. This power does not always immediately translate to legislative power, but they are confident it will eventually. It’s nice to control the present moment, but if you don’t yet, being able to control every moment in history leading up to it is a nice thing to fall back on.

  40. On terminology, I like “Covington lie” more than “Covington affair”. And calling each of these Dem dishonest smears an “x lie” will assist normal folk in understanding how the Dems keep lying.

    Plus, when the Dems come back “Trump is so often lying…” one can ask – like what? I actually don’t know what Dems think are his “biggest” lies.

    None as bad as this Covington lie, as far as I see.

  41. Great column by VDH, and yikes, Neo, that story is depressing!

    One thing I’ve noticed recently (though maybe it’s not such a recent trend?) is that the people who were so quick and so committed to demonizing the Covington Catholic students have already decided white, heterosexual men are useless at best, a menace that needs to be removed at worst.

    Read these tweets by our young journalist set, compiled last summer when Sarah Jeong was hired, and it is no surprise that they jumped on the “death to the smirky white dude!” social media bandwagon with enthusiasm. It’s already a given in their worldview that the whites in any confrontation are the bad guys and the non-whites are the good guys.
    *Warning: some crude language in the tweets. Also, it’s a really depressing read!

    “Buzzfeed is racist”: https://twitter.com/i/moments/1033547403620757504
    “Sarah Jeongs tweets about white people”: https://twitter.com/i/moments/1025792822467801088

  42. Plus, when the Dems come back “Trump is so often lying…” one can ask – like what? I actually don’t know what Dems think are his “biggest” lies.

    What I have found, from both parties’ Trump haters, is that disagreements are what they call lies. I finally left Patterico’s blog after ten years because he is a full-on Trump hater and anything that disagrees with him is a “lie.”

    It’s not just Democrat politicians. My sister has a lawyer friend who was going on about the Covington boys and, when she objected to the characterization, was unfriended.

  43. Pingback:They hate normals – the PC-Klan hate you – Tom Grey – Families, Freedom, Responsibility

  44. For a group that personalizes so much, it is amazing how the leftists and the less vigorous “progressives” ignore the ramnifications of the ideas that they embrace. Trash white men, historical and present-day…you just trashed my father, grandfather, uncles, husband and sons! Are you kidding me? These people are my most treasured on earth. The former, nurtured and directed me and were responsible for my very well-being and handed down the framework of priniciples upon which I stand and base my life. The latter, are the very people I nurtured and handed down the truths and virtues that I received. Early on, when I would listen to the so-called feminists putting down men, I would pray my sons would never marry anyone that believed or spouted such stupidity. Thankfully that prayer was answered.

  45. Hope hangs by a single thread; and that is the nature of pendulums.
    The Left is pushing the limits. So will the metaphorical thread break, or will the ideological pendulum reach a natural limit and swing back?

    Neo could give us some cause for optimism by documenting her own experience in which she recognized logical fallacies and faulty facts, and resisted the tide that flowed to the Left. Optimism is tempered by knowledge that young people today have been willfully kept ignorant of so many critical subjects, and lack the philosophical foundation and historical context to think through conflicting ideologies. (Mallard Fillmore, as thoughtful as any current philosopher, observed that “the youth love Socialism even though they cannot define it.) And the Left is much more aggressive in persecuting any who stray from their definition of ideological purity. So, I suspect that the country will have to sink into the mire a bit more; then, hopefully, will find the national will to climb out.

  46. I finally left Patterico’s blog after ten years because he is a full-on Trump hater and anything that disagrees with him is a “lie.”

    I’m surprised he didn’t lecture you on alternative medicine. Man’s a Dunning-Kruger exemplar. (I was banned by Patterico about 4 years ago).

  47. The significance of the Covington imbroglio is that a great many liberals have a venomous reaction when the Benighted refuse to offer gestures of deference to the mascot groups of the Anointed, thus denying the Anointed’s status allocations. I’d like to see more refuseniks like the Covington kids, causing educational administrators as much indigestion as possible.

  48. New info! — See that 16 y.o. Nick has crooked teeth. When I was 16 with teeth like that, I also smiled with my mouth closed. It probably looked like a smirk to some people (I thought more sardonic).
    http://bannedinformation.com/covington-libel-attorney-announces-potential-lawsuit-targets/

    I’ve added a copy to my own blog, too (They hate normals):
    https://wordpress.com/post/tomgrey.wordpress.com/230

    Added here because I haven’t seen any stories address the state of Nick’s teeth, but three of my four kids need braces, like I did and also my wife. People’s smiles are influenced by the state of their teeth.

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