Here’s an article that’s well worth reading. Towards the end the author says that if you think that things have gone too far – that wokeness has become “a danger to the traditional American understanding of civic law and liberty” – you need to do more than say it, and more than vote in November:
But obviously, voting in November is no real response at all. If “enough” is truly enough, then simply resolving to take the trouble to cast a vote in November seems wholly inadequate to countering the excesses of the Left. Donald Trump can’t stop this. Only the citizens who have had “enough” can do it. Voting isn’t enough.
My friend from Texas was right to ask me: “Adam, have you reached your [breaking] point? What are your public actions?” Well, of course, I vote. My writing—essays like the one you’re reading—are one way that I try to combat the zealots. As a teacher, I don’t adopt any “antiracist pedagogies.” But I do teach the tradition of Western thought, and I stress that taking this tradition seriously will equip my students with the most effective means of fighting racism. I speak out on campus—when I feel that doing so might be effective. I give some money to organizations that I believe might effectively counter the Left’s assault on America. I could probably do more though. And you probably can, too.
When you’ve answered Lindsey’s question (if you can answer it—and if you can’t, you’re with the mob on the road to Utopia, come hell or high water—probably the former) ask yourself the next question: “Well? What am I going to do about it?” A friend on my chat (referring to my comments) cautioned the others, saying to be wary of people suggesting you must do X, Y, or Z. I’m not asking anyone to do X, Y, or Z.
If you have had “enough,” I’m asking that you do something. Ask yourself: given my own gifts and my own limitations, how can I contribute? For all of us, this will require some sacrifice. This means you also have to consider what, specifically, you are willing and able to sacrifice. But if you’re unwilling to sacrifice anything—if you’re unwilling to respond in any way other than casting a ballot—then it doesn’t matter what you say: you haven’t had enough.
I know what I do, although it feels inadequate: I write for public consumption, and I’ve been doing it for over 15 years for many many hours a day. During past elections, I’ve done some phone-banking, which I found a waste of time. I did a little demonstrating about ten years ago. I used to do a lot of talking to people I knew, trying to persuade, but that did nothing except frustrate me. However, I’ve been taking that up again lately, although I’m not at all sure if it will have any better effect this go-round.
I have said before, and I’ll say again: whether or not Trump is elected in 2020, the problem is huge and will remain huge. This is indeed, as that linked article says, about a lot more than this election. Sometimes I think that if the election is lost, the forces of the left will have won. Sometimes I think they have already won. And sometimes I think that’s just my tendency to pessimism, and that it is an attitude that must be fought against with great vigor.
There’s some interesting legal reasoning from Roberts in the case, which struck down a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges. Roberts was relying on precedent:
“The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike,” Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion. “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”
What’s he’s saying there is that the Louisiana law was almost exactly the same as a Texas law which had been declared unconstitutional by the Court in 2016, and therefore absent some sort of unusual circumstances the present case had to be decided in accord with the previous one. And yet, in that 2016 case, Justice Roberts had voted against declaring the Texas law unconstitutional. Now he is saying, essentially, that he is required by precedent to vote against himself – not to mention against the legislature of the state of Louisiana. And this is the same Justice Roberts who just the other day had no problem whatsoever overturning precedent to find that “sex” means something quite different, legally, than it has in the past.
Justice Thomas remarked on today’s ruling and pointed out the liberal wing’s (and I include Roberts there) situational and shifting allegiance to precedent:
The plurality and THE CHIEF JUSTICE ultimately cast aside this jurisdictional barrier to conclude that Louisiana’s law is unconstitutional under our precedents. But those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.
Absolutely true. The proper way to have gone about making abortion legal would have been to have an amendment to the Constitution, or to just accomplish it state by state. Instead, the Court reached deep into its creative inspiration and created a federal right that did not previously exist and had no foundation in the Constitution.
This is the kind of New Yorker I remember from my youth. You didn’t mess with them. The young man doesn’t quite know what hit him:
Somewhere I read that the lady in the video is named Vickie Paladino, and she’s a well-known activist on the right in New York City. Not a job for the faint-hearted. She ran for state office in 2018 and the local Republican Party (there is one?) didn’t support her:
On Aug. 28, Queens GOP Chairwoman Joann Ariola came to the QNS office in Bayside to voice the party’s concerns about State Senate District 11 Republican candidate Vickie Paladino, who is running against GOP-endorsed candidate Simon Minching in the primary.
Ariola pointed out several areas of concern the party has with Paladino, including her tax records, her affiliation with fringe political groups, her behavior on social media and past remarks she has made at campaign events.
“Vickie Paladino represents everything that we are not,” Ariola said.
The party’s distaste with Paladino dates back to her involvement in Bo Dietl’s independent mayoral campaign in 2017. Paladino first joined Dietl’s campaign after a video of her shouting at Mayor Bill de Blasio after a press conference in Whitestone went viral.
Once she began working for Dietl, Paladino was asked numerous times to delete Facebook posts that were offensive, John Haggerty of the Queens County GOP claimed, and her personal Twitter account was eventually shut down. Haggerty accompanied Ariola to her visit with the QNS office.
Since launching her own political campaign, Paladino has created a new Twitter account that was briefly suspended this year for reasons unclear. On Facebook, some of her supporters have spread anti-Semitic and borderline racist speech on her page, as seen in screen shots shared by Ariola. Haggerty remarked that Paladino’s failure to denounce these supporters is “disgusting.”
Paladino actually defeated Minching in the primary, but lost by a tremendous margin in the election. This was pretty much a foregone conclusion, if you look at the recent history of elections in that district, won by Democrats with an overwhelming margin. As for the supposedly racist and anti-Semitic comments by supporters, it’s certainly possible, but the article doesn’t show them nor does it have links to them, so I don’t know what their content was.
But the left only dislikes anti-Semitism when they can pin it on the right. Otherwise, it’s all good.
The following incident may have been the start of Paladino’s political career. Note that she asks of that de Blasio, “Why did you stand with the Communists, with the anarchists, with the socialists?” Good question, even back in 2017 when she asked it, and even more so now:
[NOTE: This is a slightly revised repeat of a previous post – and today’s attempt to get away from politics.]
When I was in junior high school, there was a large poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements that hung in the science classroom in front of a little-used blackboard spanning the right side of the room, next to where I sat.
I’m not sure whether anybody in the junior high ever learned what the chart was about—we certainly didn’t. But it was a grim reminder of what awaited us in high school, when we’d be required to take Chemistry and Physics and Geometry and Trigonometry and a bunch of other subjects that sounded Hard, and sounded like An Awful Lot of Work.
I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. In my more bored moments in class (and I had quite a few of them) I would glance at that chart on the wall and idly ponder its arcane mysteries. It looked like a more old-fashioned and slightly yellowing version of this:
That chart was the sort of thing that made me nearly sick to my stomach whenever I looked at it, something like slide rules and drawings of the innards of the internal combustion engine, and the long rows of monotonous monochromatic law books in my father’s office.
But then time passed—as time often does—and I found myself a junior in high school, sitting in chemistry class and finally and reluctantly about to penetrate the secrets of the Periodic Table. The teacher, a small, elderly (oh, he must have been at least fifty), enthusiastic, spry man, explained it to us.
I sat awestruck as I took in what he was saying. That chart may have looked boring, but it demonstrated something so absolutely astounding that I could hardly believe it was true. The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was “beautiful.”
I did very well in chemistry, and even thought of majoring in it in college, although in the end I stuck to psychology and anthropology. But I never forgot the lesson of the Periodic Table – although actually, it taught many lessons, and some of them I did forget. But the one I remembered most was that appearances can be deceptive, and that what lies beneath a bland and stark exterior can be a world of magic.
And now I’ve finally discovered a Periodic Table worth its salt—or, rather, its sodium chloride. Take a look at this, a Periodic Table nearly as lovely as the elemental wonders it illustrates (click on the photo to enlarge):
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
I’m not sure it’s all ye need to know. But I know that the Periodic Table became beautiful to me.
Last night I was watching a YouTube video by Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. Weinstein is the guy who defied the Evergreen crowd a while back. He’s on the left but with a strong libertarian streak. One thing in particular struck me: towards the end, Weinstein (no Trump admirer, to say the least) says that Tucker Carlson (whom I know has been ragging on Trump lately) quotes Trump as having said he’s enjoying watching the blue cities implode, and that’s why he’s not stopping it.
Here’s the passage; it’s short:
When I heard that, I thought it would be a pretty dumb thing for Trump to say, but I also wondered why I hadn’t heard about it before if indeed that’s what he said. How had I happened to miss it? So I did a search (on Google initially) and couldn’t find it; the closest I came was something quite different, part of the speech Trump gave to the crowd at the Tulsa rally [emphasis mine]:
And we did something in Minneapolis after watching for three or four days, I called, I said, “You got to get … you can’t protect yourselves.” I got them to take 8,000 National Guardsmen. And in one hour it all ended and they rode through the next three weeks with no problem.
And we did the same thing in other cities. But how about Seattle? Isn’t that great? So they take over a big chunk of a city called Seattle. I mean, we’re not talking about some little place, we’re talking about Seattle. Have you ever been to Seattle? They took over a big chunk and the governor, who’s radical left, all of these places I talk about are Democrat, you know that, every one of them, every one of them. And I’d have an offer out, I said, “Anytime you want we’ll come in, we’ll straighten it out in one hour or less.” Now I may be wrong, but it’s probably better for us to just watch that disaster.
I flew in with some of our great congressmen, who we’re going to introduce it a second. And I said to them, “Congressmen, what do you think? I can straighten it out fast, should we just go in? No, sir. Let it simmer for a little while. Let people see what radical left Democrats will do to our country.” But Americans have watched left wing radicals, burn down buildings, loot businesses, destroy private property, injure hundreds of dedicated police offices.
Nothing there about enjoying watching anything – just that people need to see the horrible things that leftists do, so they will learn. And when he says “it’s probably better for us to just watch that disaster,” Trump is talking specifically about the “big chunk” of Seattle known as CHAZ or CHOP, and calling it a “disaster.”
After quite a bit more searching (including DuckDuckGo, which I generally find to be superior not only in privacy but in efficiency) I was able find the source for what Tucker Carlson had said. Here’s the Carlson quote that Weinstein was supposedly repeating:
On Friday, Vince Coglianese of “The Daily Caller” interviewed Donald Trump in the White House. Coglianese asked the president why he hasn’t sent federal troops to stop the chaos in cities like Seattle. Here’s what the president answered: “Right now, I think it’s great sitting back and watching this catastrophe.”
We understand the point he was making. These are liberal cities, and they’re destroying themselves. Their policies don’t work. This is what you get when you vote for liberals.
But it’s still the wrong answer.
So the word “enjoy” was never used. Trump said “great,” and it was clear that he meant that the greatness lay in enabling people to see what the left does when it is in control. Carlson also says that Trump was referring to “cities like Seattle.” But actually, at least in the Tulsa speech, Trump was referring specifically to the small CHAZ section of Seattle.
But that’s just Carlson’s paraphrase/quote. What about the original of what Trump said? The speech in Tulsa didn’t seem to be it, because Carlson is referring to a Daily Caller interview. It took further searching on DuckDuckGo to find it. It still is not a transcript, though; it’s selected quotes from an interview. But here it is [emphasis mine]:
In recent days, Trump has urged Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to deploy National Guard troops to retake CHAZ and said that he himself “will take care of it” if Inslee fails to act. The president said Monday that he had discussed the situation with Attorney General Bill Barr. When asked by the Caller what Barr is “advising” him to do, POTUS answered, “right now, I think it’s great sitting back and watching this catastrophe.”
So here again we have the same important detail that’s been left out by both Carlson and Weinstein: Trump appears to only be talking about the specific situation in CHAZ/CHOP when he says “it’s great sitting back.” Unlike what Carlson suggests, Trump is not talking about the wholesale destruction that has gone on and is going on in various cities around the country. And he calls CHAZ a “catastrophe.” So the interview remark is almost identical to the one in his Tulsa speech (where he says it’s a “disaster”); he’s quite consistent.
More quotes from the Daily Caller article [emphasis mine]:
The Caller asked, if [Trump] indeed isn’t currently planning on intervening, why continue with the tweets and statements indicating he would do so.
“Well, because we can do it anytime we want,” Trump answered. “But when I watch, it’s showing how bad that city system of government is because they’re all leftist Democrats running all these places that have these problems.”
“Seattle’s a disaster,” he continued. “Minneapolis has been a disaster, and you know if I didn’t strongly tell them, ‘get the National Guard in there,’ Minneapolis would still be under siege.”
Again, Trump suggested Inslee “should be able to take care of it very easily, but he’s a radical left too.”
“The amazing thing is though that, think of it, they allow it to happen, and they’re actually considering ‘isn’t it a wonderful thing?’ I watched last night where store owners, their stores have been taken away, their livelihood has been destroyed.”
That’s a rather sloppily written passage, which is not unusual these days. I’d rather have heard the actual interview in full, of course, but it appears that the discussion from Trump was going back and forth between the specific situation in CHAZ/CHOP and then the situation in the other cities and then back to CHAZ/CHOP. Also, the only people praising it and calling it “wonderful,” according to Trump, are the leftist Democrats in charge of places like Seattle, where the mayor had praised CHAZ/CHOP and so had the press. So if anyone is “enjoying” it, according to Trump, it’s them.
I’m nitpicking about this because it’s a fractal of the way we get our news these days – a game of telephone that ends up misinforming us. We go from Trump’s words to the Daily Caller’s excerpts, and then from them to Carlson’s remarks on them, and on to Bret Weinstein’s misquote of Carlson and the original quote.
What’s more, Carlson’s on the right, and Weinstein is at least somewhat sympathetic to the right’s position on this. What the left does with Trump quotes is far worse. Plus, it took me at least an hour to begin to get to the bottom of it, and I still haven’t found a transcript of the entire interview with Trump, which I’d much prefer to see. Who knows what the Daily Caller did or didn’t leave out?
Weinstein is a man who tries to be careful with his words and with whom I often (although certainly not always) agree. Here he’s speaking in a podcast that, ironically, is about the power of words to mislead. If you watch the whole thing, you’ll see Weinstein and Heying have some interesting things to say about the subject. And yet Weinstein ends up misquoting Carlson and thus Trump, and although Carlson himself has quoted Trump properly, he has misstated the context somewhat in terms of how general or specific it was.
I don’t think there’s any way to stop this sort of thing except to be aware of the fact that it happens constantly. It seems to be in the nature of human communication, which almost inevitably involves a lot of miscommunication, some of it purposeful but some of it unintentional (for example, I doubt Weinstein was aware of or intended his error, but it may have occurred anyway because he seems to detest Trump).
Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
That said, Trump often speaks in a kind of telegraphese that makes it somewhat easy to misunderstand him, especially for someone who hates him to begin with.
And by the way, I looked for a site that would give that Popper quote in its larger context so that I could better understand exactly what Popper was saying and why. But you’re probably not surprised to learn I couldn’t find it.
The NY Times and the left (but I repeat myself) would have you believe that America’s founding principle of the most basic kind was slavery, and that all along slavery and racism have been the driving forces behind the US.
I’m not a Christian, as I’ve said many times before. But I went to school in ancient times, when Christianity was talked about in public schools without any sense of irony or distaste. We also had to memorize the Battle Hymn of the Republic—and I mean four stanzas of it (minus the third one; see this). Because I was rather good at memorizing poetry and lyrics, I still remember it, and these words (in bold) from the 4th stanza as we learned it came to mind recently, for obvious reasons I think:
In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom
That transfigures you and me; As He died to make men holy,
Let us die to make men free;
While God is marching on.
Those lines are a statement—written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe and adopted as an anthem by the Union soldiers—of one of the explicit reasons men fought for the North during the Civil War. They were willing to die (and many of them did) to “make men free.”
Yes, there were other reasons and other issues in that war. But freeing the slaves was a big one of them.
During the Civil War, the “Battle Hymn” became a rallying cry of the northern cause, reprinted a million times, and sung on a thousand marches.
I find the Times more repugnant than I can express in words. And of course, the sentiment of the Times is now abroad in the land.
It’s only a small group, really, making the trouble. So why is it being allowed to wreak havoc? Two reasons. The first is that this group – let’s call them the Blue Guard – call their opposition “racists,” which apparently has become a magic word of such power that it blocks any action from those thus labeled, through the use of two psychological mechanisms: guilt (of the white variety in particular) and fear.
The second is that they have the support of most of the large institutions of our present society: the MSM, academia (where much of this originated and is disseminated), the Democratic Party, the entertainment and sports worlds, and large corporations.
I don’t think most people agree with what’s going on right now. But to resist it requires a person to ignore all those pressures brought to bear by the above groups, which control the bulk of the content we see and hear. To do so can require courage, depending on where a person works and in what community he or she lives. Sometimes it requires annoying or even defying friends or family.
I keep hearing talk about a “silent majority” once again, another echo of a Sixties I well remember and certainly didn’t want to see come round again in this bizarro form. There really was a silent majority back then, but that was before a half century of an intense leftist march that has come to affect and now dominate nearly every aspect or our culture. Does this majority still exist? Will it speak, and when, and how?
[NOTE: The following is a somewhat revised version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.]
Unbelievable that it’s been eleven years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here who don’t remember Fred must necessarily increase, so for those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these.
Fred’s death was extremely tragic for his family. But it was tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left, and a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him often, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last eleven years.
Every year on the anniversary, I offer some excerpts from his many comments here.
This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:
It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.
…this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.
The comment is from October 28, 2008. The election was getting close:
Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all.
This was a comment of Fred’s from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, but I think it’s worth mulling over today:
For me, Western Civilization is an incredibly complex work that has eclectically and also seamlessly borrowed the excellence and the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Enlightenment. The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance also made important contributions. In its totality it is a meritocracy and a liberation of humanity that has resulted in ever greater learning and material prosperity and health for most of the people who live under it. It is not an unblemished history. Yet in its totality it gleams with advancement when juxtaposed against civilizations which enslave humanity.
I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.
These are chosen somewhat randomly, but so very much of what I looked at that Fred had written was on target.
RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.
There have been other commenters here who may have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one else did I actually get official word of that person’s death. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about ten years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure. Another prolific commenter who disappeared many years ago was Occam’s Beard. I was never able to contact him after that, and so I fear something tragic may have happened.
There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out. Sometimes people just stop commenting because they get busy or they get tired or they get turned off. But it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them.
That is the question – or at least, one of the questions.
I know that some of you – maybe most of you – are feeling some despair right now. Maybe a lot of despair. What we’ve been seeing – and what I’ve been writing – in the last couple of months and especially the last few weeks has been discouraging, and that’s really a very mild word for it.
I can only write honestly about what I see. I can’t be a false cheerleader. But that doesn’t mean I’m a seer. I can’t know the future, and I’ve been surprised before. I hope I’ll be surprised again, this time pleasantly.
The Reign of Terror will end and the Thermidor reaction is on the horizon. Today’s opportunist virtue-signaler will be tomorrow’s gullible fool. Tonight’s brave looter and edgy arsonist will be tomorrow’s matter-of-fact felon. This morning’s memo-writing social justice executive and administrator will be seen as tomorrow’s rank abettor of McCarthyite persecutions. And the coveted and esteemed racial arsonist of the moment soon will become the ostracized segregationist.
Americans believe there is one thing more regrettable than a falsifier—and that is an opportunistic and careerist falsifier.
But I’m not sure what Americans believe anymore – that is, the majority. I’m not sure it even matters, because the mob speaks loudly, the Deep State has its own agenda, and too many governors and mayors seem to have lost their minds as much of the nation watches, nearly hypnotized.
I think it will come down to core beliefs in mankind, in destiny, perhaps even in guidance from above. I don’t know which way the turning will go. I do know that this is a time of crisis.
Once again, let’s hear from Yeats, in a poem written almost exactly 100 years ago, during a time of bleakness and crisis right at the end of the First World War. It’s not a hopeful poem, to say the least. But notice that it ends with a question rather than an answer:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Long ago, in another time of despair (the late 1960s), I read a book of Eastern philosophy that mentioned that those Hindu statues of goddesses and gods, the ones with all the arms, always depicted one hand placed palm forward in an attitude that is meant to symbolize “Fear not; all is well despite whatever you may temporarily see that tells you otherwise.”
What’s the war on statues about? It’s a case of “venting,” of course, in the emotional sense. But it’s much much more than that. The pulling down and/or defacing of statues is not some emotional spur-of-the-moment impulse, although I suppose it functions that way for some hangers-on. However, it is just one of many tactics in an overall strategy that has been coldly and methodically executed over many decades by the left, and has been reaping great rewards: to destroy actual history and create a narrative more desirable to them.
This is not about Confederate statues, in case anyone ever thought it was. That much is clear. It’s not about slave owners, either. Those were just the beginning tactics, the opening moves to lull people into a false sense about what going on.
Now it is decreed by the leftists that a statue of Lincoln next to a kneeling slave in the act of rising and with his chains finally broken, about to stand in freedom, must be destroyed. A statue paid for by actual, real life freed slaves, who gave their money to commission it. The left says it can’t be allowed anymore because the slave is kneeling, you see, and Lincoln is a white man liberator who had a few racist ideas typical of the “woke” of his time. We can’t place him in history, celebrate his accomplishments and his sacrifice, and the fact that slaves were freed, and be done with it.
No, that’s not the story the left wants told, and what the left wants it gets or you’re a racist, too. The same goes for statues of Robert Gould Shaw and all the abolitionists. Wipe em out, and obliterate the memory of their sacrifices and deny their help with the struggle for freedom, because the new story that must be heard throughout the land is that the slaves freed themselves.
There’s no question that black people were part of the process and were instrumental in it as well, particularly black freemen and freewomen. Robert Gould Shaw led the first black regiment that fought for the Union in the Civil War, and Shaw died in that endeavor. History consists of all of the above, not either/or.
But the left says that we can’t have that.
Today Scott Johnson of Powerline has published the speech of Frederick Douglass at the dedication of the statue in 1876. I’m going to except just the beginning, although the whole thing is worth reading [emphasis mine]:
I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today. This occasion is in some respects remarkable. Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.
Frederick Douglass was a brilliant man who had been born in slavery and escaped prior to the Civil War, fleeing north. He lived through the events that today’s leftists only read about in their carefully constructed politically correct histories. I doubt he ever imagined what would be happening a hundred and fifty years later in the name of anti-racism. He assumed the continuity of the “wise and thoughtful.” Little did he know.
Note also that Douglass keeps saying “man,” even to the point of adding “manly pride.” And yet, even back then, some abolitionists were women. I suppose that, as a woman, I could get angry at Douglass himself for that viewpoint. But you know what? I could not care less. We all are people of our times, and Douglass and Lincoln were visionaries and great great men who saw further than most of their contemporaries. I salute them both and don’t demand that they conform to some later standard of speech and thought dictated by the woke, who are most definitely not men – or women – who are “wise and thoughtful.”
If you ever looked at the 1619 Project pushed by The New York Times to rewrite American history as motivated by love and promotion of slavery, you may have wondered why the Times has persisted in pushing the tale despite widespread and bipartisan criticism of it from historians. Well, wonder no more. The Times could not care less what historians say, because the editors are not at all interested in telling accurate history. They are interested in pushing the story they wish had happened, and even more importantly, the story they want all Americans and their children to believe and to pass on to their children some day.
I fear they are succeeding – and in fact may have already succeeded. I see the evidence all around me.
[NOTE: The woman in charge of the 1619 Project, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has now been outed as being not just an anti-white racist, but one who has long subscribed to some extremely bizarre rewrites of history, such as the idea that black people discovered America first, befriended the natives, and that the pyramids in Mexico are somehow evidence of this and monuments to this early friendship. You an read the whole letter here.
This is the person heading the 1619 Project, a “history” that will be taught in many schools across the land.]
“According to Hesiod’s Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes [Furies] (along with the Giants and the Meliae) emerged from the drops of blood which fell on the earth (Gaia), while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. According to variant accounts, they emerged from an even more primordial level—from Nyx (‘Night’), or from a union between air and mother earth.”
“In Greek mythology, maenads…were the female followers of Dionysus and the most significant members of the Thiasus, the god’s retinue. Their name literally translates as ‘raving ones’…
“In Euripides’ play The Bacchae, maenads of Thebes murder King Pentheus after he bans the worship of Dionysus. Dionysus, Pentheus’ cousin, himself lures Pentheus to the woods, where the maenads tear him apart. His corpse is mutilated by his own mother, Agave, who tears off his head, believing it to be that of a lion. A group of maenads also kill Orpheus.”
I am reminded of the Furies on reading this piece by Jonathan Chait, who seems to have recently swallowed just a few tiny molecules of a red pill. Chait’s piece is entitled “An Elite Progressive LISTSERV Melts Down Over a Bogus Racism Charge,” and it’s worth reading because it offers a window into how our current Furies and maenads of the left set out to destroy anyone who doesn’t meet their standards of extreme wokism.
Here’s the setup:
On May 28, progressive election data analyst David Shor tweeted about a new paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow, showing that peaceful civil-rights protests moved public opinion toward protesters while violent protests had the opposite effect. The tweet violated a taboo in some left-wing quarters against criticizing violent protest and led within days to his firing.
What happened after that was even more bizarre. On June 11, I wrote an article briefly describing Shor’s tweet and firing. Four days later, “Progressphiles,” a LISTSERV for left-of-center data analysts, kicked Shor off. In a message to the group, the moderators described his tweet as “racist” and further accused him of having “encouraged harassment” of another member of the list…
Got that? There is a taboo against criticizing violent protest. That taboo extends to research – just as Larry Summers, for example, got booted for even suggesting research on the forbidden topic of why women aren’t more often in the ranks of the most elite scientists.
The rest of Chait’s article consists mostly of the messages in this listserv around the issue, full of typical jargon and black/white memes and unreason. In fact, “reason” is a dirty, dirty word – and remember, these are supposedly data analysts. One can assume that “left-of-center” manages to trump (pardon the expression) “data analyst” every time.
An example:
For those of you who don’t realize what makes the tweet problematic, try not to overanalyze the statistical validity of the research paper and think about the broader impact it will have if people perceive it to be true. Democrats will wave this tweet urging people to protest their oppression peacefully, which will conveniently ignore how the majority of the most visible of these actions have occurred in areas where we have Democrats running the city council. Shor had initially defended his tweet by saying “Helping Trump get re-elected is not going to lead to better behavior by cops,” and I’m certain many people here would be inclined to agree. But it is this sort of binary thinking that we have that can be so oppressive as well. Helping Trump get un-elected (in itself) is not going to lead to better behavior by cops, when the goal of abolitionist work isn’t to have better-trained/nicer/POC cops but to systematically dismantle the very institution of policing to begin with.
Or take this one:
…[I]n our spaces, racism isn’t always loud. It isn’t always brash or demanding, spewing racial slurs with a foaming tongue. Sometimes it’s quiet; steeped in seemingly innocuous data and facts. Racism can wrap itself in the trappings of credible logic and I swear it can make sense. But when you see how data can and has been used to oppress, undermine and devalue movements, it’s impossible not to offer a critical eye. The context to anything is everything. Just because it was written by a “type of person,” or has a decimal point means nothing.
Here’s the initial statement by the moderators, which is more general (my comments are in brackets):
David Shor, a member of this community, knowingly harassed and bullied another member of this space. In response to a well-deserved call in over a racist tweet [the racist tweet being the link to research that shows that riots depress Democratic votes, research that apparently was done by a black person), he encouraged harassment that led to death threats instead of choosing to learn and grow from his mistake [like Winston Smith did]. We as the Progressphiles Moderators, professionals in this industry, and as people, absolutely condemn this behavior. It is unacceptable to make people on this list and in this community feel unsafe for calling out wrongdoings [Shor is responsible for the response to his tweet, and no one – except Shor, the accused, and his ilk – may ever be criticized, because criticism makes them feel “unsafe” and by gum, we cannot ever feel unsafe]. We cannot begin to decolonize our minds if we do not create safety for those fighting against white supremacy [that is a rather complex sentence, packed full of so much jargon that I’ll leave the task of deciphering it to you]. It is on all of us to do this work, but especially to show up [your support will be required] for those already doing it and make sure they are safe. By not acting, we are perpetuating the racism and sexism we know exists on this list [“will these hands ne’er be clean?”] and in our community at large. As such, we have removed David Shor from Progressphiles.
Chait adds:
The “racist tweet” was of course a straightforward summary of a respected professor’s work. The moderators have not publicly substantiated the accusation that Shor encouraged harassment, nor have they responded to my request for comment on the charge.
Why would he think the Furies would deign to answer him? They have other work to do, and he is a passe member of the Old Guard, although he’s only in his late 40s. That’s not old in my book, but I bet it’s ancient to the newer generation of Woke Furies.
Why am I even writing about this? It’s another warning of the extreme irrationality and vindictiveness of those who are now gaining more and more power. They feel very bold right now. The fury of this particular listserv is engaged in purging and purifying its own ranks, but they are also trying to move the Overton Window and they have been going out into the larger world and engaging in their mission of destroying western civilization and the values on which our country was founded.
Make no mistake about it; they mean business, and they are getting stronger than ever.
In a lighter vein, just to relieve a little tension, here’s one of my favorite clips on the subject:
One element of the joke in that clip is the tiny size of the groups. Well, they’re not so tiny anymore.
