Roger L. Simon: who shot the sheriff?
People are not responsible for all the consequences of their actions, especially those that are difficult to foresee or that are very distantly removed in time or place. But sometimes (as I wrote Monday) they are at least somewhat responsible:
And that’s how we get to Compton, California, and people who support the cold-blooded attempted assassination of two deputies while they sat in their car. It all fits together like the pieces of a puzzle: blue lives don’t matter, cops cannot be allowed to defend themselves, cops need to die.
This is an evil that’s rests – like so many evils – on a lie. Everyone complicit in that lie should be ashamed, but they are very far from shame.
Very very very far from shame.
After I wrote that piece on Monday, it occurred to me that one of those groups “complicit in that lie” – and in fact, very instrumental in disseminating it as far as it possibly could – has been the NY Times, particularly in its dedication to the mendacious and destructive 1619 Project about which I’ve written many times. But the editors were not content to merely make this project the focus of their paper. It is tied into a far-reaching educational program to spread the word as much as possible into the primary grades. And many educators are obliging.
Roger L. Simon weighs in on it, too, particularly the 1619 Project:
:
…[A]n indelible line exists connecting the dots from the NYT’s 1619 Project to the blood-stained sidewalks of South-Central Los Angeles.
That along with such empty and meretricious academic inventions as “critical race theory” and “systemic racism” are the supposedly intellectual underpinnings of a movement yielding nothing but nonstop social unrest cum physical and psychological destruction.
An atmosphere of vengeance has been created, rocketing across the zeitgeist from Antifa to the Marxist leaders of Black Lives Matter to academia to Hollywood to the media to the myriad putatively “liberal” and “progressive” politicians, enabling violence in the streets of their cities, to the crazed individual who pointed the gun into the Compton squad car and plugged the deputies in the face.
Just as you are what you eat, you reap what you sow. And the editors of the New York Times, not to mention their slavish lackeys at the Pulitzer Prize committee, are responsible for the fruits of the theories they toss out with reckless abandon because actual wrecks ensue.
I think Roger is actually being too kind when he accuses them of “reckless abandon.” What else did they think would happen, if they push the message that this nation is irredeemably evil and has been from even before its founding dedicated to enslaving and harming black people? These dots are not difficult to connect – and if they failed to do so, then they are stupider than I thought (the old “knaves or fools” dilemma).
It would be different if the 1619 Project were the truth. Then they would have the defense (and I think it would be a fairly good defense) that when you tell the truth and people get angry at the truth it is unfortunate but you are not really responsible. But if you concoct a lie, with great effort and skill and a large expenditure of time and energy, and contrive to spread it throughout the land, I believe you are responsible for the effects of that lie, much like those who came up with the blood libel against Jews in the Middle Ages.
However, in the Middle Ages, I suppose it’s possible that those who concocted the lie thought it was actually the truth. But I don’t see how anyone at the Times wouldn’t have known that the 1619 Project was a lie. And if they didn’t know at first, they certainly knew once all the criticism from historians (even some on the left) came in. But at that point they barely broke stride, changed a single sentence, and continued to spread the 1619 Project and its message far and wide.
Malice aforethought.
No, the Times knew or should have known exactly what they were doing in making a decision to make this “America is guilty of original sin” message their leitmotif. And they succeeded. Congratulations, NY Times editors.
Of course, the Times is not solely responsible for the violence, although they’ve played a large role. Many many others (and the perpetrators, who bear the most responsibility) have also pushed a similar message. But it would be highly ironic if the Times’ efforts end up contributing mightily to the precipitous decline of New York City as a financial and entertainment and tourist and business center. They probably will consider it worth it, though, if it destroys the hated Trump – a New Yorker through and through by history, but not by political point of view.
What is perhaps most fascinating about the fraudulent and mendacious 1619 Project (and about the woman, bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Bozo the Clown, who actually won a Pulitzer for writing nonsense) is that some of the most interesting criticisms were published on the World Socialist website; what is most disturbing is how many school districts will be imparting these lies to impressionable young students.
I’ll go one step further. The NYT writer behind the 1619 Project is a black woman from Iowa who is a Notre Dame grad. Notre Dame! She probably got most of her nutty ideas at Notre Dame.
Notre Dame has plenty to answer for and it is more than just employing the nutty socialist father of Mayor Pete.
And, in my entirely fair and unbiased view, Creighton has far surpassed Notre Dame in all areas except in size of campus, football team and endowment. We’d crush the Irish in basketball.
Nikole is actually of mixed race (her mother being white) but she seems to identify only as black. This is, in fact, very common indeed, and Obama himself (who was called an “Oreo” while at Occidental) began to object to the idea of having mixed ancestry in favor of a more authentically “black” identity; it is also to be noted that the egregious Colin K, fomenter of so much rancor and stupidity, made strenuous efforts in college to make himself seem “blacker” and thus more acceptable to the black students.
Walter Durante got a Pulitzer for writing lies so why shouldn’t Nicole? That’s only fair. The NYT has a long history of publishing lies. Obviously people want to be lied to because they keep buying the NYT. I stopped buying the Bezos Post years ago because I couldn’t tell the difference between the front page and the editorial page.
I’ll go one step further. The NYT writer behind the 1619 Project is a black woman from Iowa who is a Notre Dame grad. Notre Dame! She probably got most of her nutty ideas at Notre Dame.
She’s from Waterloo. Letters to the editor of the student newspaper at Notre Dame demonstrate that by 1995 she was an exponent of quite vicious political and social sectarianism. I would be interested in discovering if her sisters shared any of it (one sister is alive and living in Iowa, the other deceased; there’s also a pair of late adolescent / young adult nieces around Waterloo).
Note, her maternal side grandparents – Mr. and Mrs. Novotny – were by all appearances a fairly solid pair living and working at the nexus of the middle and working classes. (https://www.thegazette.com/article/20130402/obituaries/304029939)
Her father was employed as a bus driver. In that respect, he couldn’t have been more average for a black man. In other respects, he was atypical: he lived his life in a county with few blacks, married a white woman with a Czech name, sired all his children by her, and remained married for 30-odd years until his death.
One of her sisters has had a messy life (there have been at least three men who were married to her or sired a child by her, though none are married to her at this time). The other sister, now deceased, was in a state of l/t separation from her husband at the time of her death. NHJ’s husband is black; one of her sisters was married to a hispanic man; the other sister seems to have had black men and white men on her dance card at different times.
Cannot imagine what sort of psychodrama has gone on in that family, but it’s difficult to believe her hate-whitey shtick has squat to do with anything she actually experienced in Waterloo.
For some reason when you write about the 1619 project it always makes me think of one of Anderson’s Fairy Tails, “The Snow Queen”. In the introduction to the story it has this passage
later the mirror is broken into a million pieces and if you get one in you eye it has that effect on everything you see.
I feel like the NYT and most of the left have these pieces in there eyes.
Nothing is noble and good everything is horrible, bad, and racist.
Somewhat like the bad guy from Harry Potter. “There is only power and those too weak to seek it.”
From that perspective I don’t understand how a better world can be produced. I don’t think they believe in a good world, just one where they are in power.
It is not the NYT’s success in disseminating Potemkin Village lies that is the heart of the problem, though the NYT owns many smaller-town papers as well, all running NYT stories.
It is the several million direct NYT readers, the subscribers, who have allowed it, nay enabled it, to generate unadulterated grotesque fiction as news.
My brother is one such, living north of Seattle. He swallows all the NYT sh*t without even tasting it. We have ceased all communications, all. I marvel that Neo can still count some Leftists as friends despite their delusions, harmful to all of us.
Martin:
Jesus Christ said, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Matthew 7:1-5
Cicero:
That verse cuts in all directions, perhaps my vision is not clear, although I try. That said I believe that the lies of the 1619 project are beams that the publishers are distributing into as many eyes as possible.
Martin:
That was NOT directed at you in any way whatsoever. Your “if you get one in you eye it has that effect on everything you see” brought it to mind.
Jesus’ charge of hypocrisy and how to fix it was directed at people like my brother, millions like him, and the folks at the NYT, WaPo, LATimes, USAToday, etc., etc. It extends to the WSJ, to which I have stopped subscribing, and to Bloomberg as well.
They are the hypocrites!
Cecero: I misunderstood. Thank you for the clarification.
I do believe that we all have to keep that verse in mind for it is easy to become self-righteous.
Our wonderful Judeo-Christian nation built on the Biblical concepts of right and wrong and English Common Law has done an incredible job of taking care of most of the people all of the time and allowing new ideas to flourish and make our lives better. a lot of our poor people today, are fat, mostly living with air conditioning, most all with running water and electric power for their TV sets, computers and phones, life that was unimaginable 100 years ago.
What kind of demonic powers are trying to bring our civilization to its knees? What the hell is going on that tears a nation apart that has gone into debt to make the lives of those who have less better? I never raised my children to be bigots and they have all had multi-racial friends, even close friends and now most of the media, and the left leaning politicians are making us out to be their enemies, my kids in their forties have become conservatives, they work hard, have done well, are raising good children and they don’t buy into the crap of younger folk who have been fed misinformation about our nation. Many of the people under 40 years old today have no true concept about the history of our nation and how this wonderful country, with people working together has attempted to make things better for every single person.
I am old enough to have lived int the South and I saw the black kids hanging on the fence outside of the public pools watching us white kids swimming and us, the white kids, being told they, the black kids, had a great swimming hole down on the creek across the railroad tracks on the other side of town in what we called, N****** Town, I remember the whites only signs on water fountains and when blacks could not go in and sit down in restaurants and drug stores however we changed, we corrected those things, over 50 years ago in the South, things were wrong and they were changed by good people demanding change.
I am also part of a family that did own slaves going back to the the 1700’s in Orange County, Virginia and when younger family folk moved on out to Missouri they took some slaves with them, some black people, in that part of Missouri, still have the same last name as my mom who was born 113 years ago today, by the way.
Slavery was wrong and we fought a terrible war in the 1860’s and then, because of Lincoln’s terrible assassination, we had a lot of bad reconstruction that took decades to work out. I had family on both sides in the border states and my grandmother on my dad’s side who was born in the late 1860’s told me that she had never seen her father smile, he went to war out of Arkansas and she was told he was happy as a young man but came home a very sad person for the rest of his life. My father born in the early 1900’s remember an uncle who lived with them who had a pice of shrapnel in his sinus cavity that they could kind hear when he shook his head. Those people lived on very poor farms and at times the egg money, by selling eggs in town, my grandmother could make enough money to buy the family cheap, simple food, for their table. Late 1800’s and early 1900’s for white folks and black people too in may places were very hard times.
Doing a lot of genetic stuff we seem to have family which goes all the way back, here in North America, to King Phillip’s War in the 1670’s and we did not seem to, have at least some family member, miss out in any war except the Spanish American War, the rest we seem to have been part of including the sand wars in the past 30 years. My niece has a high school daughter whose dad was killed in Afghanistan so when people working for what used to be newspapers and now are political propaganda sheets try to re-write our history I have to say no, I want for my grandchildren and their children to know the actual history of our long struggle and remember our family’s willingness to give our blood to keep this great nation going.
After three glasses of wine and several false starts this is about what I can do this evening and may our good Lord Bless Us.
Martin,
“I don’t think they believe in a good world, just one where they are in power.”
I think it a bit more complex than that. First, and greatest in number are the well meaning, “useful idiots”. They absolutely wish for a better world. But are either incapable of or too mentally lazy to give serious thought to the issues.
Then there are the idealistic, true believers, who are willfully blind to the absurdities and obvious fundamental flaws in what they advocate. It is they who rationalize the evil they support.
Then and least of all in number are the ones who simply lust for power over everyone and are willing to do anything that furthers themselves toward that goal.
“There is only power and those too weak to seek it.” the bad guy from Harry Potter.
I find myself in agreement with Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster and Robert Heinlein; ‘At base, the human race can be reduced to those who wish to control others and those who have no such wish.’
Geoffrey: I agree and was mostly talking about the last group.
You last quote is very much true and that is often, to my mind, the crux of the problem. How do you get the people who are not intent on controlling others to seek the power to protect us from those who are.
The leftists in academia, the schools and mass media are courting a terrible reckoning. If they’re far luckier than they deserve, they will fail to achieve their agenda. If apparently successful, they will in time discover it to be the most fatal of pyrrhic victories. Even if we on the right utterly fail… between Islam and the ChiComs they will reap the most fatal of purges. And they will be, more than any other group, responsible for destroying man’s last, best hope.
Martin,
“How do you get the people who are not intent on controlling others to seek the power to protect us from those who are.”
All that those who are not intent on controlling others need do is remember that “By their ‘fruits’ shall ye know them”. As example; what are the fruits that NYC Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo have demonstrated? Even by socialism’s standards they are each a disaster.
But people cannot be saved from themselves and if willfully blind to the people they elect or fail to vote for a better choice, then they reap what they’ve sown. However, in a representative democracy, we all suffer from the mistakes of a misguided majority.
Yet there is a limit to what we must endure and that limit is provided by the system our founders bequeathed to us.
While that system relies upon a moral and principled people and is entirely unfitted for any other, yet the brilliance of that system is that it provides for corrective feedback. There are three corrective levels to that feedback.
First, through our representatives. Second, in a legal system based upon our inalienable rights and Constitutional liberties. And finally upon an armed public willing to fight for liberty, which is the final and ultimate corrective.
It is that final and ultimate corrective, which the left is courting.
Hi, OldTexan. Thanks very much for writing that.
I wonder if there really are any true anarchists or communists. Could anyone possibly believe they would be better off in a world where there was absolutely no law, no order? Or where somebody could say to them, “No, you can’t be an actor. Your abilities are to be a sewer worker in East Grottle, Minnesota. These gentlemen will escort you to the train.” No, I think every anarchist/communist is certain that he or she will be among the high and mighty when the revolution triumphs. Even if they’re sincere believers, they’re so ignorant, they don’t even know what always happens to the “first comrades.”
Old Texan: thanks for the family history. Vivid and very personal. The country consists of millions of such stories, or cannot be made sense of without them. Keeping them alive, weaving them together into something not too disharmonious, is a patriotic act.
As someone who finds it hard to look away from the spectacle in the arena of American politics, even though I have spent the second half of my life in Australia, I find Neo’s blog and the commenters here a great comfort. @OldTexan – like you I am old, but not a Texan, a New Yorker like Neo as it happens. Wonderful what a couple of glasses of wine can sometimes do – you even worked in the ‘egg money’. God Bless you too. @Geoffrey Britain for nailing the bottom line of “Islam or the Chi-coms” being the painful correctives if America succeeds in destroying itself. And again @Geoffrey Brittain for pointing out that there will be consequences arising from the second amendment if the coup eventually succeeds. And finally an observation from a resident (and also citizen) of a Social Democracy on a point that I don’t think most Americans fully understand. What distinguishes social democracy from other forms of socialism is that when social democrats lose and election they accept the results. That was true in Sweden when the Social Democratic party finally lost power after about 50 years. And it was true in Australia when the current PM Scott Morrison surprised everyone by winning our most recent election. NOTICE, my fellow Americans, that the Democrats have never accepted the results of the 2016 election, and are promising us not to accept the results of the 2020 election should they lose. Some of them are totalitarian communists like Stalin, and some are the kind you have to pry their cold dead hands off – not guns, but power. Like Comrade Mugabe or Comrades Chavez, Maduro, and Castro.
Here are some skin care tips from Nikole Hannah-Jones:
https://www.glamour.com/story/nikole-hannah-jones-self-care-skin-care-routine
And don’t forget David Brooks’ wisdom re haute cuisine:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/course-catalog-for-david-brooks-elite-sandwich-college
And to conclude my Thursday AM comments – here’s a salient item from the true Paper of Record:
https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-saves-baby-from-oncoming-train-in-blatant-disregard-for-social-distancing
With only a few exceptions, the MSM is now almost entirely Leftist; in effect, the propaganda arm of the Democrat party.
A major one of those increasingly rare exceptions used to be FOX news.
Lately, however, the tide of Leftism had been slowly creeping up–higher and higher–as it engulfs more and more of FOX News–it’s current high tide mark was, I thought, anti-Trump, supposed “journalists” like Chris Wallace, and Neil Cavuto.
Yesterday, however, this sock puppetry, this control by the Left was given extraordinary exposure by the actions of two of the hosts on FOX’s show “Outnumbered,” as Harris Falkner and Melissa Francis just shut down former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—they’d very obviously been given their marching orders.
They’d asked Gingrich about his take on the rioting, and he started to point out the central fact that this rioting was greatly facilitated by the DAs around the country who refused to hold, or to charge rioters, and that many of these DAs had been elected due to a deliberate campaign of large donations and other help from George Soros and his many organizations, designed to put them into power.
Well, as soon as Gingrich started to mention Soros, these hosts immediately jumped in and agreed with their other guest, Leftist hack Marie Harf, that they didn’t think that “…we need to bring George Soros into this conversation,” shut Gingrich down, and you could see by his reaction that New Gingrich was stunned by this development, as they, then, cut away from him.
The masks came off!
This was a remarkable and revelatory moment which laid bare s who increasingly controls FOX News.*
* See https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/thanks_fox_news_for_reminding_us_all_of_the_soros_role_in_creating_americas_leftist_bluecity_das.html
Snow on Pine, I cut the cord on cable precisely four years ago when “Me-Again Kelly” attacked Trump in the first debate. That was it for me. Pulled the plug on the DVR and marched it off to the Cablevision store, voiced my dissatisfaction, and saved a lot of money over time. My wife still watches but mostly Hallmark Channel, no news programs. I don’t miss it at all. We now stay up to date from a variety of sources on the Internet including Neo.
Baier and Stirewalt are also imbibing copious draughts of lefty Kool-Aid.
LeClerc–Only Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs are left at FOX News, and I don’t know how much longer they can continue to broadcast before they, too, are somehow compromised/reined in/intimidated (if I understand what he just briefly mentioned correctly, Tucker Carlson, for instance, has had to move his family out of the D.C. neighborhood he liked because of leftist harassment), or just taken off the air.
The alternative appears to be OAN, but, as of the present, looking at a few of their broadcasts, they appear to be hesitant and still amateurish in their presentations of the news, and what’s up with their long periods of silence and just a screen with their animated logo between news items?
As of yet, just not that many sponsors and commercials?
I see that Harris Faulkner has made a mealy-mouthed, supposed “apology” for her actions yesterday in remaining silent about, and nodding her agreement to censoring Newt Gingrich for trying to point out George Soros’ role in getting Leftist DAs–who are not holding or prosecuting rioters–into positions of power from which they can keep the rioting going.
FOX and Faulkner must have received a whole hell of a lot of criticism to have provoked Faulkner’s phony, non-apology “apology.”
But it’s just too late.
As far as I am concerned–and I bet a lot of other people are concerned–by this one very blatant and clear action both Faulkner and Francis have destroyed whatever pretense they might have made to being fair, objective, and upholders of free speech, debate, and inquiry.
I’m sure they have been told that mentioning George Soros as a funder of left-wing causes is anti-Semitic, which is BS spread by various formerly Jewish, now leftist, organizations.
On behalf of the entire Jewish people, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Zionist Occupation Government, I hereby declare George Soros in cherem – excommunicated!