University of Missouri president Wolfe confirms the death of the university…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that was noted by Allan Bloom decades ago in The Closing of the American Mind.

I’ve written about Bloom’s book and thesis many times, particularly here and here. If you read those posts, you’ll immediately see their relevance to what’s happening now at the University of Missouri.

Here’s a summary of the Missouri situation:

The president of the University of Missouri system resigned Monday with the football team and others on campus in open revolt over his handling of racial tensions at the school.

President Tim Wolfe, a former business executive with no previous experience in academic leadership, took “full responsibility for the frustration” students had expressed and said their complaints were “clear” and “real.”…

The complaints came to a head a day earlier, when at least 30 black football players announced that they would not play until the president was gone. One student went on a weeklong hunger strike.

So now Wolfe’s gone, having taken responsibility for what happened. What was it that happened? Initially the AP story was a bit vague:

For months, black student groups have complained of racial slurs and other slights on the overwhelmingly white flagship campus of the state’s four-college system. Frustrations flared during a homecoming parade Oct. 10 when black protesters blocked Wolfe’s car, and he did not get out and talk to them. They were removed by police.

Students at the university are quoted in the article as expressing solidarity. Here’s one girl:

Katelyn Brown, a white sophomore from Liberty, said she wasn’t necessarily aware of chronic racism at the school, but she applauded the efforts of black students groups.

“I personally don’t see it a lot, but I’m a middle-class white girl,” she said. “I stand with the people experiencing this.”

And after all, what do middle-class white girls know? All they can do now is “stand with the people” experiencing whatever it is that the people say they are experiencing.

And what might that actually be? Here are some more details:

The protests began after the student government president, who is black, said in September that people in a passing pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him. In early October, members of a black student organization said slurs were hurled at them by an apparently drunken white student.

Also, a swastika drawn in feces was found recently in a dormitory bathroom.

Many of the protests have been led by an organization called Concerned Student 1950, which gets its name from the year the university accepted its first black student. Its members besieged Wolfe’s car at the parade, and they have been conducting a sit-in on a campus plaza since last Monday.

Two trucks flying Confederate flags drove past the site Sunday, a move many saw as an attempt at intimidation.

Okay, let’s recap:

There was an allegation that a truck of people drove past a black student and shouted racial epithets. We don’t appear to know whether (a) this in fact happened (b) whether the shouters were students (c) the identity of those students; and (d) whether they represented a widespread group or just themselves. But I doubt anyone except a few old curmudgeons like me are interested in the answers to those questions, or the same questions for that “apparently drunken white student,” and those Confederate flags. I’d also dearly love to know who put the fecal swastika on the wall, and why, and who it was actually aimed at.

And if the origins of that swastika are anything like many such incidents in the recent past at other universities, the perpetrator could actually have been one of the protesters or a sympathizer. For example:

…Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller News Foundation broke the story that a number of supposed racial incidents at Oberlin College in Ohio this spring [2013] were, in fact, a hoax. Oberlin certainly took the incidents seriously, even canceling classes on March 5 to convene a “day of solidarity.” However, Oberlin city police reports obtained by Ross made it clear that at least some of the material that had Oberlin up in arms, including a large swastika banner that was hung in the science center under cover of night, was in fact done by one or two Oberlin students as a “joke/troll to get an overreaction, in the context of the racist crap that has been going on on campus.”

As an example of joking or “trolling,” the latter of which is loosely defined as “deliberately provoking people in order to get an angry response,” putting up a swastika banner, hanging up anti-Muslim flyers, printing out “niggermania” cards, etc. is in spectacularly bad taste. It’s not funny, it helped put the entire Oberlin community in an uproar, it alarmed many students and faculty members, and it’s morally obtuse…

Oberlin is not the only campus that has suffered in recent times from hate incident hoaxes. New examples seem to pop up every year, sometimes more than once.

The article goes on to describe a number of fake “hate crimes,” not all of them racially tinged. That doesn’t mean the University of Missouri incidents are staged or faked; it means they need to be authenticated in some way, and it could be difficult to do so.

But beyond that, there’s another question: so what if these things happened? So what, even if they were committed by students? If the students can be identified, there are proper remedies and disciplinary action to follow, I’m almost certain—and no doubt they would be followed. If the incidents can’t be authenticated or the students identified, though, does that mean that, unless a campus reacts as Oberlin did to its hoax incident—canceling classes to convene a “day of solidarity, and the like—it’s an insufficient response? President Wolfe had already stated that his administration was meeting “around the clock” to study changes that were needed, and that many of them were already included in a “systemwide diversity and inclusion strategy” that had been in the works even prior to the incidents, and was due to be announced in spring of 2016.

Not good enough; not even close. Here’s what the University of Missouri protesters felt would have been a sufficient response (or rather, responses). I offer them in their entirety:

I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten apology to the Concerned Student 1-­9-­5-0 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1-9-5-­0 demands. We want Tim Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators, consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.

II. We demand the immediate removal of Tim Wolfe as UM system president. After his removal a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.

III. We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community.

IV. We demand that the University of Missouri creates and enforces comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff, and administration. This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.

V. We demand that by the academic year 2017-2018, the University of Missouri increases the percentage of black faculty and staff campus-wide to 10%.

VI. We demand that the University of Missouri composes a strategic 10 year plan by May 1, 2016 that will increase retention rates for marginalized students, sustain diversity curriculum and training, and promote a more safe and inclusive campus.

VII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding and resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals — particularly those of color, boosting mental health outreach and programming across campus, increasing campus-­wide awareness and visibility of the counseling center, and reducing lengthy wait times for prospective clients.

VIII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding, resources, and personnel for the social justices centers on campus for the purpose of hiring additional professionals, particularly those of color, boosting outreach and programming across campus, and increasing campus-­wide awareness and visibility.

Perhaps that would be enough. For now.

By the way, the student government president at this school (whose undergraduate population is 79% white and 8% black) is black. One would think that might be evidence of a lack of systemic racial prejudice at the school, but apparently not nearly enough to save President Wolfe. Only turning the University of Missouri into a re-education camp will do. And I doubt that would be the end of it, either; the left rarely stops there.

This is very ominous. But it’s only the current manifestation of a trend that has been going on at least since the late 60s; the incident Allan Bloom was describing occurred at Cornell in 1969, after all. I’ll close with his words from The Closing of the American Mind, which I had quoted in a post I wrote last June entitled “Student Power and its Origins”:

[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

We no longer hear much about academic freedom; it’s dead. It died quite some time ago, after becoming fatally ill in the late 1960s. President Wolfe didn’t want to be made into a dancing bear (demand #1), so he’s gone. That’s another kind of dance, but to the same tune.

[ADDENDUM See this for more dancing bears of the Ursus universitatis variety.]

Trump, Politico, and the West Point story

The New Neo Posted on by

And what of Donald Trump? He Jumped right onto ye olde Politico bandwagon, unlike the other Republican candidates:

WOW, one of the many lies by Ben Carson! Big story,” Trump tweeted, the latest in a string of attacks on Carson by the business mogul.

And then there was this:

IS CARSON HALLUCINATING? NOW LIES ABOUT WESTPOINT?

Just another reason to love Donald Trump, right?

I haven’t seen any walkback on the accusations from Trump yet, either. I’d say the odds are very poor that any will ever come.

Now, let me just say that it’s possible that some real dirt will be unearthed on Carson, something that will be important and verified, a material lie or something else that matters. But so far that’s not happened, and Trump is being opportunistic and cynical in seizing on Politico’s story without any sort of critical eye—despite the fact that Trump himself denounced Politico roundly about six weeks ago, when he tweeted the following:

@Politico, which is not read or respected by many, may be the most dishonest of the media outlets— and that is saying something.

The failing @politico news outlet, which I hear is losing lots of money, is really dishonest!

Not so dishonest that they can’t be treated as extremely trustworthy when they’ve got a hit piece on your main opponent, right?

I’m wondering what Trump’s defenders say about all of this. They have a few choices. One is to ignore it and pretend it’s not happening. Another is to say he’s right and Politico is right, and the evidence is compelling that Carson is a lying liar who lies. That shows an ability to ignore evidence and logic that would seem worthy of a leftist, and that’s not a compliment. A third option is to say it doesn’t matter because Trump is the only candidate who (fill in the blank with the praise of your choice).

As for me, it only strengthens my dislike of Trump and my conviction that he would be a terrible terrible president, and that he is no conservative either, and cannot be trusted. It is also possible, as some have asserted, that he’s actively working for the election of Hillary Clinton if he himself doesn’t make it as president. His attacks on his rivals have certainly had more force and repetitiveness than any critiques he’s made of her.

The media plot re Carson thickens…

The New Neo Posted on by

…or thins, depending on how you look at it.

The way the story stands right now is this, as best I can glean:

Almost all of Politico’s assertions about Carson and West Point have been walked back. No, the Carson campaign did not admit fabricating anything. Carson claims that he talked to Westmoreland at a dinner in 1969, and he was verbally offered a scholarship, not in the formal sense of an offer on paper but as a verbal assurance that if he wanted to apply he would be admitted and would get (as did every other cadet at that time) a free ride.

All the rest of it seems to boil down to nitpicking over the date of the meeting—was it Memorial Day, as Carson has held, or was it a few months earlier at a different banquet that Westmoreland attended in Detroit, as is more likely the case?

Wow, he probably got the date wrong by a few months for something that happened when he was seventeen. Run him out of town on a rail; the man should never be president!

The other stories that cast disparagement on Carson’s veracity are all of the “he said it happened, and we can’t find anyone who witnessed it” variety. These incidents were not for the most part things that could be verified by random people in the community, or even by anyone but Carson and the other person or people (usually rather few) involved, and none of those people has said he is lying. Of course, it’s possible that at some future point an actual lie of Carson’s that’s material in some way will emerge. But if not, it won’t be for lack of trying on the part of the MSM.

So far there’s very little, if any, red meat here. But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage. We on the right side of the blogosphere have followed this with interest and in detail, and have seen the slowly emerging retractions and Carson’s defense (some of those retractions have been from bloggers and pundits on the right who initially bought the Politico story).

But if you look at the MSM, you’d hardly know all of that was happening. I just did a search, and a vast number of papers that managed to cover the original “Carson the liar!!” story haven’t quite gotten around yet to taking any of it back. For example, at least as far as I can see, the NY Post and the Daily News still have only their original accusatory “Carson the liar” stories up without any updates or corrections, and in some cases have started on new stories in the same vein. This is the same media which failed to pursue Obama’s history—a history that was far more politically relevant, and featured a host of lies, then and now. For that matter, when did you last hear them talking about Hillary on the tarmac in Bosnia? And you won’t, either.

Politico did what it did to Carson with its eyes open. Writers know how to write, and they know what a word such as “offer” means versus words such as “application” and “acceptance.” They know that “scholarship” is not ordinarily some arcane and technical term of art. When used by most people, it means what we commonly understand it to mean, which is an education that’s paid for by the school or some other grant rather than by the student. When they printed that story yesterday about Dr. Carson, it was part of a concerted effort on the part of the media to sling enough mud at him that some of it was bound to stick. In the past, that sort of thing has worked; why not now?

And it has stuck. Commenter “K-E” wrote yesterday that “Politico should be ashamed of itself.” My reply was that not only was it very unlikely that Politico would be ashamed of itself, it probably would be very proud. That’s true whether Politico has had to change it’s story (which it did) or not:

UPDATE IV: Politico has now gutted its original piece, scrubbed the original title, removed the claims cited in this article as false, and added the following editor’s note:

Editor’s note: POLITICO stands by its reporting on this story, which has been updated to reflect Ben Carson’s on the record response. The original story and headline said that Carson’s campaign had admitted he “fabricated” a “full scholarship” from West Point, but now Carson denies that his campaign’s statement constituted such an admission, and the story and headline were changed to reflect that. POLITICO’s reporting established that Carson said he received a “full scholarship” from West Point, in writing and in public appearances over the years ”” but in fact he did not and there is actually no such thing as a “full scholarship” to the taxpayer-funded academy. And today in response to POLITICO he acknowledged for the first time that was not the case. Carson never explicitly wrote that he had applied for admission to West Point, although that was the clear implication of his claim to have received an offer of a “full scholarship,” a point that POLITICO’s initial report should have made clear.

Sadly, this Editor’s Note is still untrue. Politico obviously didn’t stand by its reporting, given that they changed the central claims. Their ridiculous attempt to pass off their editorializing as a possible interpretation of Carson’s campaign’s response is nonsensical. Furthermore, Politico did not establish that he did not receive a “full scholarship” offer from West Point — informally, he did receive such an offer, and in colloquial terms as well as West Point marketing materials, free tuition constitutes a scholarship. As for the notion that Carson implied he had applied to West Point, this is blatantly false — he says in both his own book as well as on Facebook, and has for years, that he applied only to Yale.

But that first headline that readers saw is the one that would tend to stick in the brain, “Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship.” The point of all of this is not to print the truth, it’s to damage Ben Carson’s candidacy by the death of a thousand cuts. And if you look around the blogosphere and on YouTube, there are plenty of commenters jumping on the “Ben Carson is a liar/fabricator” bandwagon, just as Politico knew they would and planned that they would.

It will not end here. Carson must be destroyed, as John Nolte (and others) predicted shortly before yesterday’s news broke:

Let me be very, very clear about one thing: The DC Media cannot allow Dr. Ben Carson to become President of the United States. And if the DC Media has to put on white robes, burn crosses, grab firehoses, and sic German Shepherds on Carson, they will. In fact, they already have. Not literally, but the tactics and the goals are exactly the same: By any means necessary, destroy the free-thinking black man who threatens our power.

It is just a historical fact, settled science if you will, that since the days of slavery, and straight through to Jim Crow and Segregation, that Democrats have sought to personally destroy any black person who dares threaten their power base. Dr. Carson is a huge threat to the Democrat Party, almost all of the DC Media is populated by leftwing Democrats, and therefore he must be destroyed ”” he must be Clarence Thomas’d.

Carson is a big threat to the Democrats, and they know it. So they are going about the neutralizing of that threat in the easiest and most effective way they know. Because they can.

[NOTE: I’ve entertained the thought that next up with Carson will be an accusation of sexual harassment or other misbehavior against him. Could be. But I actually think they’ll stick to with this “he’s a liar” tactic, because it hits him where it hurts, and his autobiography provides tons of fodder for this sort of attack. As would anyone’s, including Barack Obama’s, if they cared to do so.

Of course, once they’ve established Carson as a liar, then they might go to the sexual accusations because the ground will have been prepared, as it were.]

Democrats are trying to figure out what happened last Tuesday

The New Neo Posted on by

It may seem like small potatoes, but the election defeats last Tuesday stunned them, particularly the unexpected loss in Kentucky. In non-presidential election years, Democrats always tell themselves that the vote totals don’t really reflect the makeup of the electorate, because a higher percentage of voters are Republican in the off-years and Democratic turnout soars in the presidential years. Well, that’s true, and it accounts for their successes in presidential elections and their lack thereof the rest of the time, and thus their decreasing share of state offices.

But even local and state elections matter. We see that fact reflected in the lack of depth in the Democratic presidential field this year. Democrats have to be wondering how they can increase their turnout in the off-years. Apparently, a great many of their voters just don’t care enough to vote, except for a president. What does that say about their voters? Nothing very good. How do Democrats propose to fix the problem?:

We live in a world, like it or not, where there are more conservatives than there are liberals,” said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. “The idea that we can win elections just by turning out our base, to me, doesn’t make a lot of sense. We have to win elections by having an agenda that’s compelling not only to Democrats, but to independents and even a few Republicans.”…

That’s where the Democrats’ propaganda wing, the MSM, comes in. But so far it hasn’t worked well enough in the local sense, perhaps because people are more likely to feel the actual consequences of their government up close and personal on the local level. It’s harder to talk them out of what they’ve experienced for themselves.

So here’s another idea:

“We need to think of new ways to systematically boost turnout and expand the electorate” in off-year elections, said Hari Sevugan, a Democratic strategist who worked on President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. “I’m not talking about campaigns having more robust [get-out-the-vote] programs. More systematic than that. We need to look at election law and enable an expanded electorate with new ideas that work at a large scale.”

Several Democrats pointed to states where the party has advanced voting reforms, like Washington and Colorado, which conduct elections entirely by mail, or Oregon and California, which will automatically register qualified citizens to vote.

Watch for it.

Yes, I know that some of you will say all they have to do is increase the amount of cheating they do. But I’m not convinced that there’s been enough of that to matter so far, except in very close elections (Al Franken, anyone?). It is rather common, however, for Democrats to use propaganda or charges cooked up by the judicial system to influence the outcome of elections.

Terrorism and the Russian plane crash in Egypt

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been holding off writing about the Russian plane crash in Egypt until we get more definitive news about the possibility of a bomb. But with the announcement that Russia, which had been downplaying the bomb rumors, has now halted all flights to Egypt, it’s looking increasingly likely that the plane’s downing was an act of Islamic extremist terrorism.

It makes sense. I’ve written before about the fact that previous terrorist attacks in Egypt (and Tunisia) have targeted one of those countries’ biggest sources of income: tourism. This airplane incident has the potential to deal a huge blow to Egypt in that arena, which in turn would hurt its economy. What’s more, it would be a twofer, punishing the Russians as well for their anti-terrorist stance.

Of course, if it turns out that a bomb was the cause of the crash, Putin and the Russians may not be quite as turn-the-other-cheek as Europe and the US in its current manifestation have been.

Trying times

The New Neo Posted on by

It keeps hitting me that this coming election is the last one that matters.

Actually, I felt that way last time. But this time the hour has gotten even later.

But maybe it was always too late. When we play the game of “when did it all go irreparably wrong?” it’s hard to know how far to go back. Was it the 60s? Perhaps; I was around then, and I remember it as a watershed. Or was it the FDR years? Maybe. Or Wilson’s presidency? Could be.

Then again, maybe it was the passage of the 17th Amendment which established the direct election of senators, allowing more tyranny of the majority. That deserves some consideration as a turning point, I think, as does the 16th (income tax, anyone?).

We can go on. There are other possibilities. But I’ll stop there, because maybe such a trajectory is always inevitable. Maybe it’s baked into the cake of human nature to veer towards tyranny one way or another.

These desperate, last-ditch-effort feelings of mine are shared by a lot of people these days. It’s the impulse that drives a great many to Donald Trump. It doesn’t drive me in that direction, not at all; the direction it drives me in is toward several of the other candidates. At the moment, for me the leaders are Cruz and Rubio, but Carson and Fiorina are in there too.

But the feeling of urgency is not confined to this election or even to this country. The issue is nothing less than the future of Western Civilization, and the possible (probable?) revenge of Gods of the Copybook Headings; Kipling’s poem bears repeating. You’ll notice if you read it that Kipling believes that it is inevitable that people will ignore the lessons of the past, and will repeat the same mistakes again and again (“the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”). The result? “As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

But who wants that return to happen on their watch?

[NOTE: In researching that Kipling poem, I came across this, which mentions that Pierre F. Goodrich used to give out a copy of the poem to associates, along with the following notes:

History has built the civilization we enjoy by accumulating small pebbles of wisdom based upon experience. Every once in a while, some misguided action tears down years or centuries of progress by ignoring or misunderstanding the basic truths that underlie all that has gone before.

I’d never heard of Goodrich before. But looking him up I discovered he was a conservative businessman of the mid-20th century who established two foundations and a think tank dedicated to promoting liberty. He also published a pamphlet about education in a free society, which promoted the idea that what was required was a dialogue centered in the great ideas of civilization.]

Oh, and by the way: attacking Rubio about his finances…

The New Neo Posted on by

…seems to me like Corzine attacking Christie for being fat, and you know how that turned out.

A bad idea, in other words. These things just enhance Rubio’s and Christie’s appeal to the regular voters. You know, the ones who don’t have unlimited money, and who struggle with their weight.

You must know one or two people like that, right?

The media that was decidedly uncurious about Obama’s past…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has nevertheless become obsessed with nitpicking at everything that has ever emanated from Ben Carson’s mouth or his pen.

Case in point.

It would be another thing if everyone was subject to the same level of scrutiny, but it’s not even close. This is the equivalent of reporters parking near Palin’s house and going through her garbage, while at the same time giving Obama a pass on every lie he ever uttered, including his assertion that he sat in mentor Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years without hearing any of the hate-filled and radical remarks that were his stock in trade.

Carson isn’t my first choice as a candidate, but I like him and he was doing well (that’s why all of this is being unearthed now; because he’s doing well). I wonder how much this will hurt him. It’s the equivalent of the sort of exaggeration almost every politician engages in (perhaps I should make it every politician). He said that he had an offer of a scholarship from West Point, and it was assumed that he meant a formal offer rather than an informal one. The latter appears to have been the case, but he never corrected the record on that.

[NOTE: Remember Biden’s plagiarism? It fell down the memory hole, too; didn’t seem to hurt him one whit as a candidate for Vice President.]

ADDENDUM: See this. I suggest you read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

When, if ever, has Carson claimed he actually applied and was admitted to West Point?

The lede [to the Politico hit piece] says Carson has claimed to have both applied and been admitted to West Point, and Cheney [the author of the piece] reports West Point has no record of him applying or being admitted. But quotes drawn from two of Carson’s books, as well as statements from his campaign, do not support Cheney’s claim…

Has Politico somehow verified what Westmoreland promised Carson in that conversation?

Carson’s story, as quoted in Cheney’s piece, is that Westmoreland “opened doors” and offered him a “full scholarship” to West Point, and that he considered the offer but ultimately “did not seek admission.” Has Politico somehow verified whether Westmoreland, who is now deceased, made the offer?

Carson spokesman Ben Watts attacked the story, telling The Daily Caller News Foundation, “The Politico story is an outright lie. Dr. Carson as the leading ROTC student in Detroit was told by his commanders that he could get an appointment to the academy. He never said he was admitted or even applied.”

Will these facts matter? The story is out there. Most people aren’t going to analyze it to that extent. My initial impression, before I read the Daily Caller article I’m quoting in this addendum, was very similar to what it is saying: Carson was talking about Westmoreland’s verbal offer, not some official offer of a full scholarship. I haven’t gone over all of Carson’s utterances and writings on the subject, but that’s my impression from the quotes I’ve seen, including those in the Politico hit piece, which I would assume contain the most incriminating ones.

But once the accusation is out there, it has a life of its own. That’s the point; that’s why the media works so hard on going through everything an opponent has said in order to locate some sort of vulnerability it can then exploit.

ADDENDUM II: Also see the update here:

Liberal (but often reasonable) reporter Dave Wiegel notes this — three months ago, Ben Carson said he had only applied to one school.

Yet Politico claims that Carson claimed in “Gifted Hands” that he applied to West Point — which he never claimed.

ADDENDUM III: See also this and this.

And pay particular attention to this:

(1) The headline is misleading. The Carson campaign statement does not admit he fabricated anything. Here’s the statement: “Dr. Carson was the top ROTC student in the City of Detroit,” campaign manager Barry Bennett wrote in an email to POLITICO. “In that role he was invited to meet General Westmoreland. He believes it was at a banquet. He can’t remember with specificity their brief conversation but it centered around Dr. Carson’s performance as ROTC City Executive Officer. He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC Supervisors,” Bennett added. “They told him they could help him get an appointment based on his grades and performance in ROTC. He considered it but in the end did not seek admission.”

(2) The lede is outright false. Politico’s Kyle D. Cheney starts with this claim: “Ben Carson’s campaign on Friday admitted, in a response to an inquiry from POLITICO, that a central point in his inspirational personal story was fabricated: his application and acceptance into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.” But no where in the piece does Cheney tell the reader where Carson made this “application and acceptance” claim.

(3) It is, of course, very easy to show that Carson never applied to or was accepted to West Point, if in fact he never applied. Thus, the entire piece hinges on this missing piece of information: where and when did Carson say that he applied to and was accepted to Westpoint?

Read the whole thing. It’s not long.]

More on Europe’s determination to commit cultural suicide

The New Neo Posted on by

David Solway quotes Pope Benedict from 2007 (that’s not the current pope, it’s his predecessor):

There is a self-hatred in the West that can be considered only as something pathological. The West attempts in a praiseworthy manner to open itself completely to the comprehension of external values, but it no longer loves itself; it now only sees what is despicable and destructive in its own history, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure there.

Now that self-hatred is playing itself out:

Deputy Chief executive of the Human Relief Foundation (HRF), Kassim Tokan, seems puzzled by the fact that many of these claimants come from “certain countries, which are safe, [where] they can work.” Another report reveals that approximately 90 per cent of the Muslim “refugees” from “certain countries,” packing a train from Budapest to Vienna, were men between the ages of 18-45, who threatened, beat and stole from other passengers — a harbinger of things to come. The mayhem they will visit upon the West — which German Chancellor Angela Merkel ludicrously deems an “opportunity” based on “the principles of dignity, human rights and the right to political asylum” — will be nothing short of cataclysmic.

But the malignant farce goes on. Syrian migrants are now suing the Berlin state government for lagging on benefit payments. Carol Brown provides some of the details of the German catastrophe: school children have been indentured to clean up garbage and human waste in public places; trains are out of service until they can be disinfected; girls have to cover up lest the invaders be offended or lose control of themselves; and mysterious illnesses have begun to circulate. Thomas Lifson has re-posted a video of these Muslim interlopers showing them trashing the free housing they received, a handsel of what Europe may look like in the course of time. The graphic images of the Austrian town of Nickelsdorf, mounded with refuse and smeared with fecal matter, present an even clearer picture of Europe’s future.

And, as usual, the media are traitorously complicit.

Those who voice concerns about the situation Solway is describing are of course labeled racists or worse. But truth is not racist. Truth is truth.

The situation reminds me of a quote from none other than poet Robert Frost, whose Collected Works appears in the photo at the top of my blog, along with William Manchester’s Churchill biography:

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Of course, liberals ordinarily have no problem taking their own side in a quarrel against conservatives. What they often do have trouble with is defending their own civilization and its great accomplishments against those who would destroy it, and against the third world. These are the rules of PC thought on the subject, in case you need a brush-up course.

[ADDENDUM: Speaking of suicide, it seems that the bishops of the Church of England are not only determined to commit suicide, but they’d like the British government to be more helpful in assisting them with that suicide. Let’s just call them the anti-Crusaders:

Church of England bishops have accused the Government of an ‘increasingly inadequate’ response to the migrant crisis and called for at least 50,000 Syrian refugees to be taken in over the next five years.

The C of E has released a letter, signed by 84 bishops, which was sent to Prime Minister David Cameron in September, urging him to make a ‘meaningful and substantial response to the scale of human suffering we see daily’.]

Canned goods

The New Neo Posted on by

I love this Greg Brown song about visiting his grandmother and eating her canned food. The patter in the middle of the song is very funny; Brown could be a stand-up comic. But the song’s poetry, too, particularly these lines:

She got magic in her, you know what I mean
She puts the sun and rain in with the green beans…

…She cans the pickles, sweet and dill
And the songs of the whip-or-will
and the morning dew and the evening moon
I really gotta go down and see her soon
Cause the canned goods that I buy at the store
Ain’t got the summer in em anymore
You bet Grandma as sure as you’re born
I’ll take some more potatoes and a thunder storm…

Here’s the song, plus the comedy bit in the middle:

When I listen to that song, I sometimes think of this poem by British poet Philip Larkin, addressed to his late father. It couldn’t be more different in tone. As warm and loving and nostalgic as Brown’s song is, that’s how depressed and time-burdened, how despairing, Larkin’s poem is. The last stanza of Larkin’s poem illustrates why the Greg Brown song conjures it up in my mind:

An April Sunday brings the snow
Making the blossom on the plum trees green,
Not white. An hour or two, and it will go.
Strange that I spend that hour moving between

Cupboard and cupboard, shifting the store
Of jam you made of fruit from these same trees:
Five loads ”“ a hundred pounds or more ”“
More than enough for all next summer’s teas.

Which now you will not sit and eat.
Behind the glass, underneath the cellophane,
remains your final summer ”“ sweet
And meaningless, and not to come again.

More thoughts on Ben Carson as candidate

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t want to make too much of a single poll, but this recent one by Quinnipiac indicates some very interesting trends about Ben Carson’s support. Carson is leading the field nationally in that poll when pitted against Clinton (as he is in many polls at the moment, and as are several other Republican candidates). But if you look at his numbers, his secret in surpassing the other Republican candidates against Hillary is in his support among two groups of voters: women and black people.

Carson doesn’t draw more black voters than Clinton does; there’s still a huge advantage for Hillary over all the Republicans with that demographic, which has voted overwhelmingly Democratic for many decades. But Carson pulls more black voters away from her than any of the other candidates do: 73% for Hillary and 19% for Carson. That’s a big shift from Obama’s 93% share of black voters in 2012.

Carson’s not the only one who does somewhat better with black voters than Romney did; in fact, all the Republican candidates asked about in the poll do at least slightly better. But Trump only gets 6% to Clinton’s 91% in this poll, which makes Trump’s showing among blacks worse than, for example, Cruz’s (81% for Hillary, 8% for Cruz). Not all the Republican candidates were mentioned in this poll, but of the ones who were, Christie was closest to Carson among black voters at 77% for Hillary and 17% for Christie.

As for women voters, Carson really does well with them in this poll, actually beating Hillary among them by a 1% margin, 45% to 44%. That’s startling, since Hillary’s reported strength is that it’s women who are her most stalwart supporters. And they usually are, so far—unless she’s running against Carson.

Why is this, I wonder? Is it Carson’s kindly, soft-spoken fatherly doctor mien that has special appeal to women? Whatever it is, with female voters Carson’s running very competitively against Hillary, who beats Christie among women by 4 points, Cruz by 9, Rubio by 4, and Trump by a whopping 20 points (Trump does somewhat better with men than the others, who also do well with men, but it doesn’t make up for his low support with women).

In trying to account for Dr. Carson’s popularity in general, his likability and low negatives are the first thing that comes to mind. His honesty is also apparent. His dramatic and inspiring personal story grabs people and makes them admire him, as well.

But there’s another factor I haven’t seen talked about very much, and it’s something I think counts for a great deal of his appeal: he’s the un-Obama. He’s the matter to Obama’s anti-matter (or vice-versa, if you prefer), the person most able to undo the Obama years, not so much in policy (although there’s that) as in persona. I’m talking about something emotional—and, like it or not, elections have a large emotional component.

If Obama has been a black man who fosters racial divisiveness, Carson is a black man who offers racial healing. Obama talked that “let’s come together” talk when he ran for president, and some people actually believed him. But he hasn’t walked that walk; au contraire. Carson says similar unifying things, but it feels as though it could actually happen (or we could at least begin to move in that direction) if he were president. It’s as though much of the country feels he offers a chance to do it over again, and to get it right this time.

Carson is certainly aware of his possible advantage with black voters, and what it could mean. I had already written the bulk of this post when I saw that Carson has released a rap ad to appeal to young, urban black voters (which is not his usual demographic of Christians, younger families, and women over 40):

The Carson campaign is convinced that if he gets 20 percent of the black vote, Hillary Clinton would not win if they are head to head in the general election…

The campaign says it will pursue this medium and particularly this demographic aggressively, especially through the March primaries.

Of course, now that Carson has come up in the polls, a Palinesque attack is being mounted on him as being an ignorant, Bible-toting fanatic, playing up his belief that the pyramids were originally built to store grain.

Highly relevant to the presidency, right? But it elicits the expected responses, such as this one in the comments section of the just-linked article, “This religious nut job scares me more than ISIS.”

Perhaps Hillary Clinton is scared, too, but for a different reason.