(lots of good links in the last few days, thanks)
But when the young understand that they’ve made mistakes, what will they start to believe then?

I’d wager the majority wouldn’t grasp the problem if they were asked
to find it on a map of Japan. 😀

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ

Freaking dunderheaded idiots, with zero spine or actual capacity to endure any kind of difficulty at all.

When The Shit Hits The Fan — as it seems inevitable at this point — they are all going to go catatonic when faced with real conflict.

Yes, it’s definitely satire approaching reality. I can’t decide whether it is more apt as a slightly exaggerated depiction of the average college freshman or of Joe Biden ad libbing it on any given day.

AesopFan:

This was a banana peel, as a leftist in the 70s/80s, I kept slipping on. I wanted to denounce Middle of the Road (MOR) Americans, but they just kept being moral and reasonable.

The nerve!

T J on December 19, 2023 at 5:37 pm said:
How US Public Schools Teach anti-Semitism” — and not just schools, K to pre-K.
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-us-public-schools-teach-antisemitism

The stories in that post are frightening; as one Jewish mother concerned for the safety of her bullied child said: “I’ve said things to her that someone would have told my family in the 1940s,” she said. “This is lunacy. This is New York City in 2023.”

No thinking job is safe. The slaughter will be deep and wide. AI will go from an aide to a replacement very quickly. When the AI legal aide knows more than the lawyer, why do you need a human? Many big writers book series are cowritten by a collaborator and edited by the author. Sounds like a job for AI.

We sincerely hope that a lot of them get much smarter very soon.

Did you see this post at Powerline on the adapting / changing of a prominent leftist from the past? I found the story to be fascinating, and encouraging.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/a-collier-remembrance.php

At the time I met them Peter [Collier] and David [Horowitz] had already written three of their best-selling family biographies and were at work on one more, this one on the Roosevelts. For me, however, their abandonment of the left, where they had first made their names, and their eloquent support of conservative causes — they had come out as conservatives in support of President Reagan in 1985 — had served as a thrilling inspiration.

I am thinking especially of Peter and David’s essay “Lefties for Reagan,” originally published in a Sunday edition of the Washington Post on March 17, 1985. It is a wrenching essay that had a substantial impact on me and others at the time of its publication. Peter and David later gave us permission to post it on Power Line under the original title they had given it, “Goodbye to all that.”

Peter went on to found Heterodoxy Magazine with David. Wanting to encourage us, Peter published the first of several articles John and I wrote on the abominable Donald Barlett and James Steele in an early edition of Heterodoxy and sent us a check that was drawn, as I recall, on his personal account. We were more than encouraged. We were ecstatic.

Peter also went on to found Encounter Books and to write more books of his own, including a moving biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick (C-SPAN interview here). Encounter’s page on Peter is here.

Peter reflected long and deeply on his days as a radical. My favorite of these reflections is his essay “Coming Home,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties. In this essay Peter recalled the trip he took with his laconic father to South Dakota, where his father had been born, while his father was dying. During one long stretch of Nevada highway, his father announced: “You know, I’m glad I was born a South Dakotan and an American. I’m glad I saw the beginning of the twentieth century. I’m glad I lived through the Depression and the War. I think these things made me a stronger person. I’m glad I came to California, because I met your mother there. I’m glad we had you for a son.”

Peter commented: “It was the longest speech I’d ever heard him make…It was a moment of acceptance and affirmation by someone whose life had often been disfigured by hard work and responsibility and for whom words had never come easily. What he said and how he said it was so different from the chic bitterness and facile nihilism of my radical friends that I was shaken. It was like hearing speech, real and authentic speech, for the first time in years.”

I know Horowitz, of course, but was not familiar with Collier. Their post about becoming Reagan Republicans is here:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/collier-horowitz-goodbye-to-all-that.php

The instruments of popular culture may perhaps be forgiven for continuing to portray the 1960s as a time of infectious idealism, but those of us who were active then have no excuse for abetting this banality. If in some ways it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times, an era of bloodthirsty fantasies as well as spiritual ones. We ourselves experienced both aspects, starting as civil¬rights and antiwar activists and ending as co¬editors of the New Left magazine Ramparts. The magazine post allowed us to write about the rough beast slouching through America and also to urge it on through non¬editorial activities we thought of as clandestine until we later read about them in the FBI and CIA files we both accumulated.

Like other radicals in those days, we were against electoral politics, regarding voting as one of those charades used by the ruling class to legitimate its power. We were even more against Reagan, then governor of California, having been roughed up by his troopers during the People’s Park demonstrations in Berkeley and tear¬gassed by his National Guard helicopters during the University of California’s Third World Liberation Front Strike. But neither elections nor elected officials seemed particularly important compared with the auguries of revolution the left saw everywhere by the end of the decade—in the way the nefarious Richard Nixon was widening the war in Indochina; in the unprovoked attacks by paramilitary police against the Black Panther Party; in the formation of the Weather Underground, a group willing to pick up the gun or the bomb. It was a time when the apocalypse struggling to be born seemed to need only the slightest assist from the radical midwife.

When we were in the voting¬booth this past November—in different precincts but of the same mind—we both thought back to the day in 1969 when Tom Hayden came by the office and, after getting a Ramparts donation to buy gas masks and other combat issue for Black Panther “guerrillas,” announced portentously: “Fascism is here, and we’re all going to be in jail by the end of the year.” We agreed wholeheartedly with this apocalyptic vision and in fact had just written in an editorial: “The system cannot be revitalized. It must be overthrown. As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary.”
…
How naive was the New Left can be debated, but by the end of the 1960s we were not political novices. We knew that bad news from Southeast Asia—the reports of bogged¬down campaigns and the weekly body¬counts announced by Walter Cronkite—was good for the radical agenda. The more repressive our government in dealing with dissent at home, the more recruits for our cause and the sooner the appearance of the revolutionary Armageddon.

Our assumption that Vietnam would be the political and moral fulcrum by which we would tip this country toward revolution foresaw every possibility except one: that the United States would pull out. Never had we thought that the United States, the arch¬imperial power, would of its own volition withdraw from Indochina. This development violated a primary article of our hand¬me¬down Marx¬ism: that political action through normal channels could not alter the course of the war. The system we had wanted to overthrow worked tardily and only at great cost, but it worked.

When American troops finally came home, some of us took the occasion to begin a long and painful reexamination of our political assumptions and beliefs.

Their title is identical to that of the autobiography of the English poet Robert Graves, which is also fascinating reading, although personal rather than political in nature. That the Washington Post felt it necessary to retitle it “Lefties for Reagan” speaks to their belief, even then, that their readers would be too ignorant to understand the connection and thus some of the subtle implications of the essayists.

Somin’s cautions about the poll are well taken. It appears to me that the majority of protesters, especially in colleges, are jumping on the trendy bandwagon without any idea what they are actually talking about, because the genuine anti-Israel anti-Semites (having had much practice) made promoting The Cause their top priority.
That they were able to hit the ground running before Israel had even responded to the Hamas attacks, with professionally printed signs and other accessories (as they have in other “spontaneous grass-roots” demonstrations), is a testimony to the fact that, for the Left, politics is their day job.