Is General Flynn’s long nightmare over?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps. At least, he’s certainly gotten closer to that goal:

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to grand the government’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Michael Flynn.

You can read the decision here.

Shipwreckedcrew at Red State points out something that has concerned me for quite a while, which is that the Appeals Court may end up hearing the case en banc – that is, the full court rather than the 3-judge panel. The composition of the court is heavily Democrat-appointed.

Since judges now seem to be almost utterly political in their rulings – particularly on the liberal side – it is possible that if the case somehow goes to the full court, this could continue to be strung out and the ruling could go for Sullivan. There certainly are strong political motives on the left for doing so, and I retain no illusions about the ability of such judges to find a reason for doing whatever it takes to get to the desired result.

Predictably, the “legal experts” on the left are up in arms, and clamoring for an en banc hearing. Their partisan “reasoning” is astounding; they ignore the fact that what Sullivan has tried to do is not only exceedingly partisan (somethihg of which they almost undoubtedly approve) but would up-end our entire criminal justice system as well as the balance of powers. No biggee, I guess, in order to get the nefarious Flynn.

By the way, these “experts” all profess to be “stunned” by the ruling against Sullivan, because they all made the error (a common one, I might add) of putting too much stock in the judge’s questions during the hearing. The fact that such questions and comments are often misleading is one reason I tend not to make predictions based on such information.

One of these lawyers states the method by which the case could be heard en banc, and since I have no reason to think it’s incorrect, I’ll assume it would be this way: it only takes one judge to request a vote on whether to hear it, and then six judges must vote “yes” in order to actually have such a hearing. The basis for the hearing en banc would be the legal importance of the case.

I believe it would not be difficult to get six judges to vote “yes,” considering the predominance of liberals on the full court. And then, all bets would be off.

But for the moment, today’s ruling is a cause for celebration.

As they say in “The Mikado,” modified rapture.

Trained Marxists

The New Neo Posted on by

Most people who have watched this video of one of the founders of BLM focus on the fact that she says that she and one of the other three founders of BLM are Marxists. And although that’s certainly of interest, what interests me more is her use of the word “trained” to modify “Marxists.” It’s an interesting word to use for yourself, isn’t it? She doesn’t say who “trained” her, but it would be instructive to learn the answer.

I don’t think most of the people supporting the movement BLM are aware of the Marxist “training” and aims of its leaders. It has been pitched as a grass roots organization opposing police brutality against black people. Almost everyone opposes that, as well. As such, it has gained tremendous goodwill and support, and the peaceful demonstrators are just following in an old and protected tradition which most Americans think is fine. But unfortunately, the organization itself and in particular its leaders have a much broader – and extremely radical leftist – agenda.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a summary of some of the demands of the less-well-known organization “Movement for Black Lives,” which is an umbrella organization of which BLM is a member. It is obviously a radical far-left movement. Here’s the M4BL website.]

Black Lives Matter and Jonestown

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was talking on the phone to a friend on the right (I have one or two). I mentioned something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, which is that the current BLM/Antifa movement brings to mind many aspects of the Peoples Temple, the cult that culminated in Jonestown (I’ve previously written at some length about Jonestown, here).

You may or many not recall that Jonestown was a leftist operation through and through. It grew in strength once it based itself in San Francisco. Its founder and leader Jim Jones was actually not especially religious, but used religion as a way to found an allegedly Utopian multi-racial community that tuned into a nightmare. He appealed to struggling low-to mid-income black people who wanted a better life, and to the guilty feelings of white people, some of whom were more well-to-do. They were requested to donate their money to the organization on joining, and many did just that.

Jonestown turned into a nightmare, but it was aided and abetted by a combination of the leftist Democratic Party in charge of San Francisco and a pack of even more leftist activists such as Angela Davis. Most people remember the horrific suicides – which in my post I explain were less suicides and more like a massacre – and consider the episode to have been the result of a religious cult. But what is often forgotten is the leftist origins of the entire operation, and the totalitarian mind control and Stasi-like tactics of Jim Jones and his inner circle.

And most people don’t remember that this was done with the help and approval of the Democratic Party. And notice how many of these people are still powerful, or only retired from politics fairly recently (the linked article was written in 2018):

Willie Brown, later speaker of the California assembly and mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Dianne Feinstein joined the rest of the San Francisco board of supervisors in honoring Jones “in recognition of his guidance and inspiration” in furthering “humanitarian programs.”

Jerry Brown, California governor…actually spoke at Peoples Temple. George Moscone, who owed his position as mayor of San Francisco to Jones, appointed Jones to San Francisco’s Housing Authority Commission, where he quickly became chairman…

Before Jim Jones’s victims drank the lethal Flavor Aid in South America, the powerful in San Francisco had already drunk the Kool Aid themselves. In fact, the latter facilitated the former.

I interviewed a number of Temple survivors as part of researching my new book, Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. They reflected that Jones’s associations with the mighty both legitimized him and struck fear into them. Without powerful politicians, in the U.S. and Guyana, running interference for him, Jones could never have been so bold with the murders he committed. And the politicians cozied up to Jones because Jones provided rent-a-rallies for free. He flooded campaign headquarters with “volunteers.” He spoke forcefully for fashionable causes.

He preached the gospel according to Karl Marx. “I call capitalism the devil,” Jones said from the pulpit, “and socialism is God.” The Symbionese Liberation Army, Jones maintained, “moved us a little closer to change.”

And now we’re a lot closer to change, are we not?

I’m apparently not the only one seeing a Jonestown comparison. Today I was alerted to this article by Daniel Greenfield saying much the same thing:

The mad mob scenes in Oakland and across California with the power of the Democrat establishment behind them, the viral videos of white millennials kneeling and confessing their privilege, are the People’s Temple writ large on a nation. Jones, the son of a Klansman, who was inspired by a Communist-allied cult to build a following as a Marxist preacher of interracial brotherhood, joining the California Democrat establishment before going down in flames, has once again become the future.

Jones ran a leftist cult of white leaders who called themselves black and exploited their mostly black congregation, endorsing the Black Panthers and other black nationalist terror groups, while serving as a core political organization for California Democrats, including former Governor Jerry Brown.

The stain of Jim Jones is still all over California. A generation of California Democrat leaders either allied with Jones or were mentored by Jones’ political allies like Willie Brown. That includes both Senator Kamala Harris and Governor Newsom. That’s why, decades later, California is still stuck in Jonestown.

Jim Jones is “what you should see every day when you look in the mirror”, Governor Jerry Brown gushed. It’s not what we see. But it’s what Brown saw. And what so many Democrats see…

The Jonestown model is also the model for the Democrat Party which, like Jones, lures in upscale whites by playing on their idealism and guilt, humiliating them to keep them from seeing that the whole thing is a scam, and using the black people it lured in with promises of a social safety net to claim moral superiority. Add in a streak of terror and thuggery to keep everyone in line, along with a dash of sexual sadism to compromise and destroy the moral integrity of core cult members, and you have utopia…

The ultimate victims of Jonestown were largely black. That’s also true of the Democrat Party.

And it is, unfortunately, already true of Black Lives Matter – not the bona fide protestors, but the violent wing that unites with Antifa to cause major destruction.

Yes, COVID cases have risen

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve had several conversations about this topic recently. A friend mentions worriedly that COVID is on the rise, and I point out that such a statistic has no real meaning. I mention that it was expected, that it’s partly a function of increased testing, that the numbers in most states are down rather than up, and that even in states where cases have risen the death toll doesn’t seem to have risen.

My listeners seem somewhat skeptical, but in general they haven’t been able to counter what I’m saying. Their worry doesn’t surprise me, though, given the obvious efforts of the MSM to keep stoking the panic.

I get the impression, also, that COVID has either gotten somewhat less likely to cause serious illness and death because of some change in the virus itself, and/or because we are getting better at treating it.

All of this makes sense, and is as expected. It could change, of course. But so far these trends have held.

Here’s an article that says much the same thing:

A dozen states have seen record highs in new coronavirus cases, blares the news media, accompanied by dire warnings of a “second wave” of the disease because those awful Republican states reopened too soon. Once again, however, the mainstream press is needlessly scaring the public by hiding the relevant context…

Even if there is a “second wave,” it doesn’t mean anything in and of itself…

For one thing the Centers for Disease Control has long predicted that coronavirus cases would increase as the country reopened, for the simple reason that the lockdowns were never intended to stop the spread of the disease, only to slow it down. Remember? Flatten the curve?…

What’s more, the increase in coronavirus cases matters only if they are going up faster than expected, and whether this is resulting in a second wave of deaths.

Neither of those appears to be true…

So far this month, in fact, the number of new cases on June 21 was 16% higher than on June 1, but the daily number of deaths was 63% lower.

Still, won’t the current spike in cases lead to a subsequent spike in deaths?

That’s unlikely. As Michael Fumento has repeatedly pointed out in these pages and elsewhere, death rates are higher at the start of an outbreak for the simple reason that the disease claims the low-hanging fruit first. This, he says, is known as Farr’s Law.

That there was always a good possibility that COVID would end up resembling a bad flu year, and this was obvious to many people quite early on, although hardly a certainty. But too many institutions – the Democratic Party, most of the health officials in charge of making predictions, and the MSM – were heavily invested in worst-case scenarios. The reasons? Anti-Trump fervor, the lust for greater power, and the desire for clicks.

Don’t be fooled by what the media choose to emphasize…

The New Neo Posted on by

…or by what a small group of attention-getting radicals want.

In the turmoil we’re now experiencing, many people are afraid. That certainly makes sense – it’s frightening. Just a few short months ago things seemed relatively “normal.” Then COVID came, and now the country seems gripped by riots orchestrated by leftists.

Yesterday I posted a video of black conservative Candace Owens. In it she asks – among other things – what do black people want? I don’t profess to know the answer, and I realize the question is mostly rhetorical. But one thing in particular about the question bothers me: “black people” are not a unitary group just because they are in that racial category. It would be just as misleading to ask “what do white people want?”

My guess, though – and it’s completely a guess – is that the majority of black people want the same things the majority of white people or people of any other race want. That is, they would like to live their lives without violence, support their families, have children whom they love and protect, work at jobs, have a decent place to live, see friends now and then, and a host of other “normal” aspects of life in the US in the 21st Century.

Yes, there is a higher percentage of criminals among black people, and a higher rate of father absence (two things that are not unrelated). But the vast majority of black people are not burning their cities down. For that matter, the vast majority of white people are not antifa thugs. As I wrote yesterday, the majority of people of all races prefer “all lives matter” to the phrase “black lives matter.” That’s pretty amazing, considering the full court press to push the latter phrase to the exclusion of the former, and to even demonize those who would advocate “all lives matter” as racists.

When last I checked, Americans reject socialism as well, at least in polls.

The problem is not what the majority thinks. The problem is the power and dedication of that minority of leftists, black and white, and what they are willing to do and how far they are wiling to go to get their way, as well as the wholehearted cooperation of many institutions of US society in recent years, in particular the MSM, the educational system, and the Democratic Party.

So, just to take one example, the MSM is determined to support the rioters, and to make it seem as though Antifa is either a bunch of do-gooders who only want to stamp out real facism, and/or completely uninvolved in riots in which they are quite obviously involved. And to take another example, the Marxist affliation of BLM is hushed up by the media, and any disagreement with BLM or even criticism of it is now labeled as evidence of racism.

I have long believed that the two most dangerous and powerful institutions in our country are education and the press. They are powerful because they shape minds, and if minds are shaped in a certain way there is no real need for armies or a hot war or even a revolution in the classic sense of bearing arms against the government. If minds are shaped to hate the US and to gravitate towards the left, the left can win at the ballot box or intimidate through mild violence (such as arson, for example, and the destruction of national monuments).

Much of this work has already been accomplished, and the hour is very late. But the forces of sanity still have the majority, although those voices are muted and often frightened, as well as confused. For quite some time I’ve thought the 2020 election would be – as Victor Davis Hanson said recently – an existential one to determine which way the country will turn and whether it will survive in any recognizable way:

It’s an existential question, a Manichean choice between whether you want civilization and you believe that America doesn’t have to be perfect to be good and we are not … going to destroy all that people died for, or [whether] you feel it was inherently flawed with a cancer and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy and kill the host to kill the cancer.

Well, yes. But even more than that, the election is only a very small part of it. Trump was elected in 2016, but he has spent way too much of his presidency fighting fabricated attacks from his enemies, amplified by MSM coverage wholly dedicated to removing him. Whether he wins or loses in 2020, the struggle between left and right in the US will not end.

It’s going to be up to the right to become more activist in fighting against the MSM and the entire system of educational propaganda in this country, and it won’t be easy. I don’t have many practical suggestions, but I do think that it’s time to speak up rather than be silent with liberal friends and relatives. Choose a few of the more moderate ones to begin with, stay calm, and see what happens. They may even be more in agreement with you than you might expect about certain issues – for example, defunding the police.

This is what gets a Vermont high school principal booted these days

The New Neo Posted on by

This is scary stuff. They’re getting rid of the blasphemers to the BLM religion, and we’ll be left with no one who thinks for him/herself – or is willing to express thoughts that go against the prevailing memes. Of course, that’s probably what the SJWs want [emphasis mine]:

School officials moved to fire Windsor School Principal Tiffany Riley on Friday after she wrote a social media post seen as critical of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The post, written Wednesday on Riley’s personal Facebook page, said she believes “black lives matter” but “I DO NOT agree with coercive measures taken to get this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point.”

Riley, who became principal of the K-12 school in 2015, wrote, “I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race.”

“While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement?” Riley added, before saying, “just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I’m a racist.”

Ah, but apparently it does.

More (emphasis mine):

[Riley’s] comments, which were shared widely among Windsor community members this week, led to calls for Riley’s resignation, while a group of recent graduates called the message “insanely tone-deaf.”

Outrage culminated in an emergency meeting of the Mount Ascutney School Board on Friday afternoon, where members voted unanimously to place Riley on paid administrative leave, according to Superintendent David Baker.

Baker said the school district will work in the coming weeks to craft a “mutually agreed upon severance package” with Riley.

“They don’t see any way that she’s going to go forward as the principal of that building given those comments and that statement,” he said during a phone interview Friday afternoon. “It’s clear that the community has lost faith in her ability to lead.”

…Baker said he received about a dozen letters from community members and parents expressing concern over Riley’s post. At first, he assumed her account had been hacked.

“I felt like a post like that, with those kinds of racial overtones and what I define as pretty much outright racist in my values system, she would have never posted that,” Baker said, adding that he later confirmed Riley wrote the post.

Among the letter writers were 12 members of the Class of 2020, who signed a joint letter calling on the district to take action.

“I have seen so much good happening in our community lately in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter movement and it has filled me with a sense of pride,” Belle Moulton, the class valedictorian, wrote in an email to Baker. “However, to read such a post immediately made me realize how ignorant some people in our community still are.”

“I would like to see Windsor schools take (the) lead in our greater Vermont community and demonstrate dedication towards inclusivity,” she added. “This means having leaders that value every being and bring awareness and respect towards demographics that are less valued as a whole in our country.”

Oops, Ms. Moulton, class valedictorian! Did you just slip and say that “every being” should be valued? Doesn’t that kinda sorta almost mean that All Lives Matter? Your fellow SJWs may forgive you this time, but watch it in the future. No more mistakes for you!

Our very own little Red Guards are out in force in Vermont, I see. I guess Loyalty Oaths are back in as well, only this time the required loyalty is to BLM.

Certainly not to the US:

Iyanna Williams, 2015 Windsor High graduate, also said she was dismissed when bringing concerns and suggestions to district officials.

She initially contacted the school district earlier this month after noticing an American flag spray-painted into the Windsor School lawn.

“I just thought that that was out of character and given the current circumstances and climate of the world right now, I just wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt with that,” she said.

Williams expressed those concerns in an email, with officials later telling her they would be open to a similar Black Lives Matter display and that the American flag had been planned before the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota sparked national protests. When no BLM flag was displayed by graduation, she penned another email saying she was “saddened” by the district’s response.

“I am unfortunately not surprised. You chose not to hear me much like America has chosen to hear black and brown people across the nation,” she wrote…

…Baker added that the school district had earlier planned to hand out American flag T-shirts and water bottles on graduation day, but abandoned that effort after Williams reached out.

What’s particularly interesting about this is that it seems to be the work of a small group of SJWs. What the community thinks is unclear, but this being Vermont perhaps they’re all far-left and in agreement with Williams that handing out American flag T-shirts and water bottles would be a racist abomination.

Jonathan Turley weighs in here. In the first sentence of the quote, he mentions something I was wondering about (although it’s not clear to me whether Riley is fighting this or not):

As a public employee, Riley could seek judicial relief rather than a severance package under the First Amendment.

As we have previously discussed (with an Oregon professor and a Rutgers professor), there remains an uncertain line in what language is protected for teachers in their private lives. There were also controversies at the University of California and Boston University, where there have been criticism of such a double standard, even in the face of criminal conduct. There were also such an incident at the University of London involving Bahar Mustafa as well as one involving a University of Pennsylvania professor. Some intolerant statements against students are deemed free speech while others are deemed hate speech or the basis for university action. There is a lack of consistency or uniformity in these actions which turn on the specific groups left aggrieved by out-of-school comments. There is also a tolerance of faculty and students tearing down fliers and stopping the speech of conservatives. Indeed, even faculty who assaulted pro-life advocates was supported by faculty and lionized for her activism.

However, there was nothing whatsoever in Riley’s quoted statements (at least, those statements I’ve read so far) that is the least bit racist. If she is racist, then Martin Luther King was racist, and Muhammad Ali’s son is racist. To me, what Ali’s son says in that article is just a common sense point of view that would have been standard and completely non-controversial even as recently as a few years ago.

But now it’s heresy.

Candace Owens speaks on the riots and more

The New Neo Posted on by

And everyone should listen:

Here’s a discussion that I think is very informative and well worth a listen. It’s the sort of thing you could send to some friends who vote Democrat and read the MSM, if you’re so inclined:

I had a discussion recently with a friend who is convinced that the police are purposely massacring black people in great numbers. I mentioned that the numbers are very small, and that white people are also often the victims, and offered to send her a single link to a study about it that was done by a black professor. She didn’t want me to send it, and insisted that the numbers didn’t matter because many of these murders are done in secret and are never reported.

I wonder whether that sort of thinking is frequent. The more common it is, the less likely any discussion such as the above would reach the people who believe such a thing and could ever change the listeners’ viewpoints. Just another example of how hard it is to change a mind.

To the public, all lives matter…

The New Neo Posted on by

…although to the elites, Democratic politicians, and to the left (is that redundant?), BLM is the new religion and “all lives matter” is unforgivable racist heresy against it. The fact the black lives are included in “all lives” is explained away by the left with various sophistic ploys. But believing all people matter is actually quite the opposite of racism in any sane definition of the word.

Here’s the poll:

Twice as may Americans back the “All Lives Matter” slogan over the “Black Lives Matter” slogan, says a new Rasmussen survey of 1,000 likely voters.

Among blacks, a 47 percent plurality picked “All Lives Matter” over the 44 percent who picked “Black Lives Matter.”

The June 15-16 poll asked respondents: “Which statement is closest to your own?”

“Black Lives Matter” was picked by 30 percent of voters, including 35 percent of voters under age 40, and 63 percent of liberals.

“All Lives Matter” was picked by 59 percent of all voters, 58 percent of swing-voters, and 56 percent of “moderate” voters.

“Black Lives Matter” was more favored by wealthier people. It was backed by just 34 percent of people earning less than $30,000 but by 53 percent of people who earn above $200,000. The slogan was picked by just 22 percent of high school graduates but by 41 percent of people with professional degrees.

Even Democrats are fairly evenly split. And even young voters seemed to prefer all lives, as do black voters (more narrowly).

The poll is somewhat comforting, at least as far as I’m concerned. It suggests that Martin Luther King’s message still has more resonance with US voters than that of the BLM would-be replacements. It also, however, indicates something more depressing, a phenomenon that is one of the strange hallmarks of our time – although it’s not just of our time – that so-called “elites” and in particular intellectuals are far more susceptible than other people to propaganda and in particular to leftist propaganda.

I wrote a post twelve years ago (yikes, twelve years!) that’s quite appropriate, and I’m going to quote it here (the “Podhoretz” in the first sentence is Norman, not his son John):

Podhoretz offers some wonderful quotes from Orwell on the subject, and they’ve worn very well over the years. Try this one on for size, from 1937 (appearing in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier):

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker. nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism” is another case in point. There is a fair amount in it with which I disagree, to be sure. But the following is spot on, both then and now. It illustrates the military defeatism of the intellectual Left, its susceptibility to wild conspiracy theories, and the origins of both phenomena in the Left’s hatred of the West [one of Orwell’s most famous remarks on the stupidity of intellectuals occurs here; emphasis mine]:

“The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued “as background” a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also.

Unhinged they are, and unhinged (and pretty much unchanged) they remain.

I said they remain “unchanged,” but I’ll amend that. They’re now worse. Antifa is, among other things, a movement of mostly college-educated youth who think they know better than the stupid populists and are willing to put their fists where their mouths are.

Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

A much-needed dance break

The New Neo Posted on by

One of my favorite ballet dancers of all time, Maya Plisetskaya, with some enticing and energetic cultural appropriation. Circa 1959:

I saw Plisetskaya in person right around the time this was filmed. She tore up the stage. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dancer more exciting.

More on monument destruction: no historical assist allowed

The New Neo Posted on by

I just published this long post on how the current riots and statue-toppling represents a war on Western Civilization.

I want to add something here, on a related topic. John Hinderaker of Powerline has written a piece today on much the same theme (although he’s not as wordy as I). It ends this way:

Every four years it is said that the current election is the most important one in our lifetimes. This time, it is actually true. Not a single Democratic Party official, to my knowledge, has condemned the anti-American madness that is sweeping across the nation. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are fully on board with the extremist elements in their party–I am starting to wonder whether there is any Democratic Party apart from the extremist elements–and the Democrats’ presidential nominee is a senile nonentity who, in office, would be controlled by the radicals. It is absolutely essential to our country’s future that Donald Trump be re-elected.

UPDATE: Hans Bader has more, including this quote from Frederick Douglass about Grant:

“To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass said. Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”

But then, liberals hate Douglass, too.

Similar to the point I made at the end of my post, about Martin Luther King.

I well remember a time in the mid-to-late 60s when I became aware of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers and their messages. One of the things I recall happening is the rejection of white allies who had been with them in their fight for liberty and voting rights and an end to segregation. They were kicked out and not wanted anymore, sometimes even insulted and reviled.

This is the same impulse. Not only do the BLM and Antifa movements and the left hate Douglass (and perhaps Martin Luther King, at this point), but they hate any historic white person such as Grant and Lincoln, not just in spite of what such people did to assist black people in their struggle, but because of it. Assistance from any white person, after all, means that one didn’t do it all by oneself. It means that some white people helped.

The desire to reject that aspect of history is the same impulse that led to the otherwise puzzling choice to vandalize the Robert Gould Shaw monument in Boston. This is not random, nor is it an accident or error. This is the left.