The war on Western Civ: why destroy statues of Ulysses S. Grant or Francis Scott Key?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “AesopFan” calls attention to this:

I have little doubt that there are some people who “just want to break things.” But no; the mobs are not going after Grant and the others (including Junipero Serra, Cervantes, Francis Scott Key, and some abolitionists) because they “just” are destructive. They are destructive of some very particular things: Western culture as a whole, which they label as “white supremacist.”

They started with Confederate monuments, to which most white people and people in general had no particular attachment. Now it is Western civilization as a whole, and in particular statues of those people with the following characteristics: (1) anyone having owned even one slave, even for a short time (note the seamless segue from Confederates to slaveowners, which can include a far larger group of Americans and even several Founding Fathers) (2) anyone who can be labeled as colonial (Serra would fall into that group) (3) anything that celebrates the US and its history (its history also being irredeemably based on “white supremacy” and slavery, a la the mendacious NY Times 1619 Project, coming soon to a school near you).

This is an international undertaking, too. It’s happening in Britain, for example. And the vandals count on the passivity of authorities, particularly in very blue cities. In that, they have not been disappointed.

I called them “vandals,” but this is not “mere” vandalism as the term is ordinarily used in casual conversation. It has a great deal more resemblance to the historic group who gave the word its name and sacked Rome in 455. The parallel is certainly far from perfect; for one thing, most of the current group are Americans (I suppose there might be some foreigners, but I doubt their numbers are great). From that Wiki page [emphasis mine]:

A cause of significant controversy is the claim that the sack was relatively “clean”, in that there was little murder and violence, and the Vandals did not burn the buildings of the city. This interpretation seems to stem from Prosper’s claim that Pope Leo I managed to persuade Genseric to refrain from violence. However, Victor of Vita records that a number of shiploads of captives arrived in Africa from Rome, with the purpose of being sold into slavery. Similarly, the Byzantine historian Procopius reports that a church was burned down. Some modern historians like John Henry Haaren stated that temples, public buildings, private houses and even the emperor’s palace were sacked. Besides taking many Romans as slaves, the Vandals also committed other depredations like taking immense quantities of gold, silver, jewels and furniture, destroying works of art, and killing a number of citizens.

I won’t even weigh in on the controversy; suffice to say that the current crop have bigger fish to fry than just looting a city. They want to topple the government and they want to rewrite history according to their lights.

Some coverage of the San Francisco event (remarks in brackets mine) in a Bay area paper:

Protesters [note the euphemism] in Golden Gate Park toppled statues of Fr. Junipero Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant on Friday night, spurring a national debate [oh, so what they really want is that great supposed goal of liberals and the left: debate and “dialogue”] over the complex legacies of those historical figures amid a broader movement to remove what critics say are monuments to white supremacy [indeed it is a very broad movement that labels the figures of American history and their accomplishments as being examples of white supremacy that therefore must be obliterated and their memory sullied].

A group of roughly 100 people [very few, but enough – if there is no defense mounted against them by authorities] pulled down the monuments displayed in the park’s Music Concourse near the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences, an eyewitness said. Police were called to the area just after 8 p.m., and said people in the group threw objects at the officers. The crowd dispersed around 9:30 with no arrests or reports of injuries [no arrests for assaulting officers or destroying public property – and I wonder how many officers were there, and what their orders were, although I can guess the number was small and their orders were to do nothing].

One video posted to Twitter showed the group using a strap to topple the statue of Serra. Photos also showed people vandalized a monument to Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes [his selection was probably either a mistake, or considered an example of Western culture, all of which must be destroyed], the author of “Don Quixote.” And parks officials said the group vandalized several other features in the Music Concourse as well, including sculptures, benches and a fountain [that’s the part that is the more pure destructive impulse, trying to ruin a public space for everyone and put one’s mark on it – which IMHO is the same impulse that leads to a lot of graffiti].

And this sort of response from the mayor is exactly why they do it, and why this will continue in blue cities (remarks in brackets mine):

“Every dollar we spend cleaning up this vandalism takes funding away from actually supporting our community, including our African-American community [about which they could not care less, as evidenced by all the destruction recent rioters have wreaked in black communities in particular],” [Mayor] Breed said. “I say this not to defend any particular statue or what it represents [of course not; can’t do that], but to recognize that when people take action in the name of my community, they should actually involve us [Breed is black, and she was indeed raised in the projects in poverty, so when she says “my community” she means it. She also was by no means one of the most radical of the candidates for mayor when she ran, and my guess is that she is walking a very fine line here because she actually is well aware that this is not going to help the black community].”

Breed continued, “I have asked the Arts Commission, the Human Rights Commission, and the Recreation and Parks Department to work with the community to evaluate our public art and its intersection with our country’s racist history [so in other words, the rioters/vandals win and are going to be rewarded for their behavior].”

Who is doing the vandalizing? It’s obviously a combination of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, with a mixture of some of those people who “just want to break things.” But this is organized and this is a serious attack on US history, an attack helped along by the educational system and the MSM, two fronts on which it is already quite well advanced. That is what allows it to flourish.

It wasn’t enough to banish Western Civ from the required courses. Nor was it enough to establish departments of Black Studies or units in elementary schools on Black History and its heroes. The persistence of actual Western Civ and its fruits in science, art, liberty, and the like must be destroyed, and the symbols of US and Western history pulled down and replaced by history as written by the liars at the NY Times and the haters in the academy, as well as the fake historian Howard Zinn.

I wonder – and I am serious here – how long Martin Luther King’s statues can stand. And I do not mean that they will be threatened by white people, although I suppose the few remaining actual white supremacists might stage something. What I mean is that Antifa and Black Lives Matter, as well as progressives everywhere, have roundly rejected King’s message of “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” King’s dream has died – at least for now, and for the foreseeable future – and only the statues remain.

Clever slogans: Black Lives Matter

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night when I awakened several times, thinking, it occurred to me that although the left fights on all fronts, one of them is in the matter of words, in particular the names it gives organizations. For example, Black Lives Matter. Who but the most rabid neo-Nazi could ever object, if the name is taken at face value? Of course black lives matter. The name is one of the reasons that BLM is attractive to so many people and has gained so much support so quickly. Almost no one would disagree with the sentiment.

But nothing is just face value for the left. For example, implicit in the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as a rallying cry by the left is the idea that there is some vast array of people (not just the minuscule number of actual real live neo-Nazis) who think that Black Lives Don’t Matter. After all, Black Lives Matter the organization (which I’ll henceforth abbreviate in this post as BLM) has to be set in opposition to something order to make sense as the name of a protest movement.

So BLM is implying some version of these things: black lives don’t matter to police, black lives don’t matter to the right, black lives don’t matter to white people, black lives have never mattered in America, and perhaps also the all-important if you don’t agree with what BLM is doing and saying, then you think that black lives don’t matter and you want black people to suffer and to die. Oh – and also, if you don’t display our sign, then you might just be a racist who doesn’t think black lives matter.

There’s quite a lot packed in there, isn’t there, in what appears at first to be a straightforward slogan with which almost everyone can easily agree? BLM has become much more than the name of a protest movement. It’s become a sacred phrase. Any disagreement with any aspect of it, or of the program being pushed under its name, is equivalent to blasphemy and/or heresy. In that respect, BLM is a quasi-religion. A strict one, at that, in which one can question neither the tenets nor the clergy.

Why else would saying “All Lives Matter” get people fired from their jobs, unfriended on Facebook, and in some cases raked over the coals until they commit an act of penitence? Consider that “all” actually includes “black” rather than excluding it, so it is not a contradiction to the BLM message. Unsuspecting and naive people, who take the BLM slogan at its word, have made the error of assuming that an inclusive “All Lives Matter” message does not conflict with BLM, and have uttered the “all” word without realizing that they are calling down the wrath of the BLM faithful on themselves by speaking heresy rather than agreement.

Is the corollary of BLM – with its rejection of even the possibility of saying with inclusive goodwill that all lives matter – the idea that white lives matter less (or not at all)? You’re not allowed to even ask the question. Nor are you allowed to point out the indisputable fact that black-on-black crime is a huge problem causing great suffering in the black community. Such crime is re-defined by the left as the fault of white racism as well, and mentioning it is a racist deflection from the problem of blacks being killed by white police officers, which matters even more because the black lives that matter most are the ones killed by white people.

Another look at Robespierre

The New Neo Posted on by

This was first written in 2006. But it’s a very timely piece.

Unfortunately, I fear that taking a look at Robespierre will always be timely [comments in brackets mine]:

Robespierre’s constituency outside the Convention was the mob, roaming the streets of Paris, the center of the Revolution…The mob in Paris consisted largely of destitute sans-culottes (“without knee breeches”), who maintained themselves by a mixture of crime, prostitution, begging, and odd jobs. Robespierre and his followers incited them to action whenever political expediency called for it. But even when unincited, having nothing better to do, they formed the crowd that watched the public executions, jeered and abused those about to die, rejoiced at the severed heads, adulated the leaders temporarily in power, and cursed them after they fell…

What Robespierre had unloosed were the most depraved urges of society’s dregs. The resulting anarchy temporarily served his purpose, much as the Kristallnacht served Hitler’s, the purges Stalin’s, and the cultural revolution Mao’s. Each perpetrated the terror to frighten opponents into abject submission and establish himself more firmly in power…

These atrocities were not unfortunate excesses unintended by Robespierre and his henchmen but the predictable consequences of the ideology that divided the world into “friends” and less-than-human “enemies.” The ideology was the repository of the true and the good, the key to the welfare of humanity. Its enemies had to be exterminated without mercy because they stood in the way. As the ideologues saw it, the future of mankind was a high enough stake to justify any deed that served their purpose. As Loomis puts it, “[A]ll who played a role in the drama . . . believed themselves motivated by patriotic and altruistic impulses. All . . . were able to value their good intentions more highly than human life. . . . There is no crime, no murder, no massacre that cannot be justified, provided it be committed in the name of an Ideal.”

The ideal, however, was simply what Robespierre said it was. And the law was what Robespierre and his followers willed it to be…The justification of monstrous actions by appealing to a passionately held ideal, elevated as the standard of reason and morality, is a characteristic feature of political ideologies in power… The shared feature is that the ideal, according to its true believers, is immune from rational or moral criticism, because it determines what is reasonable and moral…

…All the current political choices, consequently, were choices between good and evil, allowing Robespierre to demonize his opponents…

This piece of sophistry was then new, but to those who look back on the twentieth century [or forward into the 21st] it is depressingly familiar from the use that many murderous regimes have made of it. They all claimed that their aim was human well-being, but that incorrigibly wicked enemies, who have disguised their true nature and conspired against the noblest of aims, threatened its achievement. The supposed threat was so serious, and the aim so important, as to warrant extreme, albeit temporary, measures—to identify enemies, unmask their conspiracies, and exterminate them. To a handful of clear-sighted and courageous heroes of the revolution—like the KGB, the SS, and the Red Guard—falls the duty of performing these necessary tasks. They must harden their hearts and do what needs to be done in the interest of the greater good. The grave threat averted, the extreme measures will no longer be necessary, and then human well-being will be within everyone’s reach.

That’s why process and the rule of law are so important.

But the Robespierres of the world would be nothing without their followers and/or collaborators. Why would people follow or at least not oppose such a person?

Many followed because [Robespierre] let them act on their worst urges, which they had to suppress when law and order prevailed.

Others—overwhelmed by the political changes, by the widespread chaos and uncertainty, by the blood that had already been shed—yearned to understand what was going on, what justified it, and what its aim was. Many people accepted Robespierre’s explanation, bombast and implausibility notwithstanding, because any explanation of what they were living through was better than no explanation.

But the chief reason that people followed him was fear. No one was safe, and people hastened to testify by words and deeds that they were loyal, enthusiastic supporters. Robespierre wielded his power over life and death as arbitrarily as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did. Arbitrariness is the key to terror: if there are no rules, justifications, or reasons, then everyone is at risk. People can try to minimize the risk only by outdoing others in toeing the line. Dictators understand that, and it explains much of the “spontaneous demonstrations” and public adulation that they extract from the duped and terrified people at their mercy.

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Rayshard Brooks shooting charges

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another excellent article by Andrew C. McCarthy.

Also, here’s a comment I found in the thread there. This is the question I’ve been wondering about, too: why would any sane person want to be a police officer, at this point?:

Who would sign up for a job where you’ll be hated by those you serve, not allowed to protect your own life or health, and assumed guilty in any instance where your interactions with criminals go badly for the criminals?

And although so far this police-are-evil phenomenon seems to mostly affect blue cities, I fear that police around the country will begin to feel a generalized disillusionment and betrayal, and recruiting good police officers will be that much harder everywhere in the US.

Not to mention crime going up. That seems inevitable, too. The number of violent confrontations with police may go up, too, not only because of the rise in crime but also because of the spread of the idea that cops are your automatic enemies. And if a black person thinks a white police officer is by definition out to kill him, that could be a motivation to resist arrest. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here’s what Burke County, Ga., Sheriff Alfonzo Williams (who is black) has to say about Officer Rolph and Rayshard Brooks:

“Five seconds; 1,001, 1,002, 1,003, 1,004, 1,005. That’s five whole seconds. If an officer is hit with that Taser that he, all of his muscles will be locked up and he’ll have the inability to move and to respond. And yet he is still responsible for every weapon on his belt.

“So, if that officer had been hit, he still has a firearm on his side and the likelihood of him being stomped in the head or having his firearm taken and used against him was a probability. And so he did what he needed to do. And this was a completely justified shooting,” Williams said…

“We’re sending the wrong message to our black youth. We’re telling them that it’s OK, that they can run from the police, that they can take a weapon from the police, they can fight with the police, and point their weapon at the police, and expect nothing to happen. That is the wrong message to send to black youth.”

I think many of the people sending this message know they are sending this message and that it will lead to more killings of black men and more murder arrests of white officers, as well as more hatred against police and between the races. That is their goal, I believe, bread and butter for those who gain fame and money from stirring up such feelings. For some, it’s a matter of fame and fortune. For others it’s a matter of aiding the leftist revolution they so desire. The two motives are not mutually exclusive, either. They can easily co-exist in one person.

Indoctrination – this was in 2007. Since then, this sort of thing has taken over campuses.

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a fascinating video because it seems almost archaic. It documents the leftist, racist indoctrination occurring on a single campus in 2007, and how some students and faculty, along with FIRE, helped stop it when they learned of it.

Back when this was made, the viewers were probably shocked and surprised, and the content of the thought programming probably seemed extremely far-fetched and unusual. Now it’s standard, mostly accepted, and widespread.

FIRE has lost on campus and the leftists have won. At least, that’s the way it looks at the moment, and unless there’s a massive backlash I don’t see much of a change for the better.

In addition, at this point most of the faculty has changed, as well, and fewer professors have either the courage or the inclination to speak out against indoctrination. Sometimes, it’s because of fear; they are silent or compliant in an attempt to avoid becoming the next target of the organized leftists on Twitter and elsewhere. The rise of Twitter is only one of the differences between then and now, but it’s an important factor.

Without further ado – the video:

What happens in the university hasn’t stayed in the university

The New Neo Posted on by

For a while years ago, it seemed to the casual observer as though the worst excesses of cancel culture and the attacks on free speech and academic freedom were confined to the university, and that the forces behind them were weaker outside the university.

That made sense, in a way. After all, a great deal of leftist thought took hold early on in the university and came to dominate, affecting the minds of the students there. But it has gone on for decades, and now we’re reaping the reward – that is, the whirlwind.

Now a couple of generations steeped in leftist thought have gone out into the world. They are not just voting, but working in many fields and dominating in some: journalism, education, law, the government of blue states and cities, entertainment, dot coms, many other businesses, and increasingly the upper levels of the military. The older leftists and liberals, some of whom actually did care about things such as free speech, are retired or retiring or dead or dying out or being frightened into silence and/or acquiescence.

So what was once behavior confined to universities is everywhere now. They are ignorant and they are entitled and they want to take over. They have older and more entrenched allies in power in blue states and blue cities, who will act in concert with them and protect them. They do not respect the rule of law except when it benefits them, they are intolerant of anyone (even on the left) who disagrees with them, and they are aggressive against those they consider their enemies. That aggression includes widespread false charges of racism under a ridiculously expanded definition, and they are just fine with destroying that person.

Twitter and other social media facilitate their task greatly. In fact, I doubt this would be happening now, and certainly not on the present scale, without it. But it began in the university, and that is still the far-left’s most potent tool of indoctrination.

[NOTE: I personally observed some of this thirty years ago when I was in graduate school and spoke out against it (to no avail), although at the time I had no framework to understand it and didn’t put it into a political context. By then it was actually already fairly well advanced, but I’d been mostly away from the university setting prior to that, and quite unaware that it had been going on all that time.]

Vengeance, they name is Paul Howard

The New Neo Posted on by

DA Paul Howard of Atlanta took overcharging to a whole new level in his press conference on Officer Rolfe, who shot and killed Rayshard Brooks.

Shipwreckedcrew at RedState has written at length on this in several posts. From the first one:

The idea that the elected District Attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, would prostitute himself to the mob by filing idiotic felony murder charges – which carry a potential death sentence under Georgia law — against Atlanta PD Officer Garrett Rolfe would be hysterically funny if it wasn’t so outrageous.

But the words that came out of DA Paul Howard’s mouth in explaining the rationale behind the charges reveal him to be a duplicitous, money-grubbing, vote-hungry, and allegedly a thief and lecherous sexual harasser who recognizes Garret Rolfe as the “meal ticket” by which he might hold on to his position come August. Within the last couple hours the Georgia Bureau of Investigation — who Howard had asked to conduct the investigation of the shooting — issued a public statement that it was unaware that a press conference was going to take place, and it was not consulted on the filing of charges. GBI stated that its investigation is still ongoing.

What follows at that point is a description of the trouble Howard himself has been in well before the killing of Brooks. I’ll skip all of that; you can go to the link to read it. Later on:

I’ve watched the 45-minute press conference from earlier today. I can’t believe other prosecutors were willing to stand behind him while he embarrassed them all. But it might just be the case that they all know their positions in the office ride on the back of him winning re-election in 9 weeks so it’s just a matter of their own self-preservation.

Basically, Howard misrepresented Brooks’ demeanor by leaving out the facts that he resisted arrest by starting a physical fight, grabbing a taser and using it – you know, those little details. He also reminded everyone that Rolfe now faces the death penalty.

In the second post in the series, shipwreckedcrew writes:

As I sat down to write what was going to be Part 2, I continued to watch the press conference where DA Howard said things I would not be surprised to hear coming out of the mouth of a first-year law student — but only if that law student was in the process of flunking his/her Crim Law or Evidence classes — or both. I then had a chance to catch the interview of the attorneys of the second officer, Devin Brosnan, by Fredo Cuomo on CNN, and later the interview of Off. Rolfe’s attorney on the Laura Ingraham show. What they added to the factual puzzle here made the commentary of DA Howard during his press conference even more farcical. Rolfe’s attorney is going to chew up any Assistant District Attorney who tries to bring this case to court.

It’s almost impossible to write coherently about this story because the comments and explanation by DA Paul Howard in the press conference were legally incoherent. I don’t know which of his idiotic statements to deal with first. Or do I deal with his fabrications?

True, and I also saw that interview with Rolfe’s attorney on the Ingraham show.

This egregiousness and obviousness of Howard’s lies are so blatant that I faced a similar feeling of being overwhelmed in trying to deal with writing about them. That’s really why I’m relying heavily on shipwreckedcrew, who’s done his/her homework and also knows more about the details of the law than I do. But one thing I do know is that our legal system is now hopelessly compromised, and that a DA can stand there and recite such misleading propaganda with a straight face – and not have anyone but the right criticizing him – is evidence of how far gone it is.

More from the link:

The second officer involved in the incident, Devin Brosnan, has now been charged with one count of aggravated assault, and two counts of failure to comply with his oath. DA Howard could not have been more clear or direct in his statement that Officer Brosnan had agreed to “cooperate” and become a “State’s Witness”. He said that Off. Brosnan was going to put out a statement in a few days about Off. Rolfe’s conduct, but he was not emotionally prepared to do so today. Near the end of his comments, DA Howard came back to this point and said Off. Brosnan would be “one of the first APD officers willing to testify against someone in his own department.”

CNN’s Fredo Cuomo’s interviewed the two attorneys for Brosnan. When asked about Howard’s claims, their disgust at DA Howard’s comment was evident. They said Brosnan had given a statement to investigators and had met with the DA’s office for an interview on Tuesday. Fredo Cuomo asked if a deal had been made for his testimony, and the attorneys were incensed. They said Brosnan should not have even been charged, much less talk about whether he should cut a deal. They said he is not a “State’s Witness” and they have no agreement with DA Howard or anyone else. They said “He’s a witness. He’s given a statement and voluntarily sat for an interview.” They said he’ll continue to do both for any legitimate investigation. If subpoenaed he’ll testify. But to say he was testifying for one side or the other was just a lie.

One of so many lies told by Howard it would be hard to list them all.

Another interesting fact from that link:

[Officer Brosnan’s lawyers] also claimed that Brosnan had been diagnosed with a concussion suffered during the fight with Brooks prior to Brooks escaping with Brosnan’s Taser. They then added a new fact that I hadn’t seen reported yet — during the fight, Brooks was able to use the Taser on Brosnan, causing Brosnan to collapse forward, landing on his head, and that was how Brosnan suffered the concussion. Brosnan told other officers and paramedics at the scene that he was still dizzy and seeing stars. He said in his statement that when he was following behind Rolfe, he didn’t know who was firing when he heard gunshots. He ducked behind a car in the drive-thru lane for cover, and then made his way over to where Brooks was laying in the parking lot with Rolfe standing over him. The attorneys said that Brosnan’s statement was that he didn’t even realize at first that Brooks had been shot because of his head injury. All he remembered was that Brooks had fought with them, he ran off, and then seeing Brooks collapsed in the middle of the parking lot. The attorneys said DA Howard and his office were uninterested in Brosnan’s medical records showing he’d been diagnosed with a concussion during the Tuesday interview.

Much more at the link. And see also this.

They’re still trying to cancel William Jacobson at Cornell

The New Neo Posted on by

Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection reports on the latest in the campaign against him:

Earlier this week, the Black Law Students Association circulated an email statement to the Cornell Law School community repeating many of the false and misleading accusations against me that I have covered in earlier posts.

But it went beyond that. They refused my offer to debate their representative and a faculty member of their choice, issued a call to boycott my course, and demand the law school screen faculty hires for ideological purity…

You can read more of the letter at the link. Here’s an excerpt:

…[W]e further urge the administration to critically examine the views of the individuals they intend to employ. Faculty members who challenge students to debate them on the motives of those fighting to preserve Black life are clearly more interested in amplifying their own agendas than engaging in thoughtful and reflective discourse. Professor Jacobson has claimed no expertise nor any specialized training on matters of race and racial justice, rendering any future discussions on the matter entirely unproductive. We are not interested in subjecting ourselves and our community members to dialogue that reinforces the false dichotomy of “right” versus “left” when it comes to our humanity.

And another email, this time from the leftist National Lawyers Guild, called for a boycott of Professor Jacobson’s classes at Cornell.

In his post, Professor Jacobson writes:

With the slogan “Silence is Violence” being used at the law school, there will be enormous pressure for student groups to go along. Not to do so would be deemed an act of “violence.”

This is an attempt not just to scare students away from my course, but to scare students away from speaking their minds, and to create a faculty and student purity test.

I have received numerous emails from students telling me I have a lot of “quiet” support at the law school, but that students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism. I deeply appreciate the expressions of support, and I understand why you cannot speak out. You don’t want to be subjected to the type of smear campaign to which I have been subjected.

This toxic atmosphere didn’t need to take place. At a time when the law school desperately needs an adult in the room, so to speak, we have faculty and a Dean who denounce me.

These elements are all too familiar: the inappropriate labeling of disagreement as racism, the refusal to debate the labeled person (can’t have that person actually defend him/herself in the court of public opinion), and the acquiescence and cooperation of an administration that either agrees or is too frightened to disagree.

Some of these elements were already outlined by Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind. It was written in 1987, but a large section of the book discussed events that had taken place in 1969 at – of all places – Cornell.

I’ve written a lot about Bloom and about Cornell, which I consider the template for what’s been happening on campuses ever since, accelerating in the last five years or so. Please read this previous post of mine, which starts out by discussing a program at UCLA from the 60s, but then segues into a discussion of Cornell in 1969. I suggest you read the whole thing, and I strongly suggest you read this City Journal article that goes into some depth on the subject.

But here is Allan Bloom’s description, which I offered in this post (you may be puzzled by Bloom’s mention of Alan Keyes; he was at the time a Cornell student, black, who was being threatened by the militants for not standing with them; much later Keyes was Barack Obama’s hastily appointed opponent in his Senate race after the other Republican nominee was forced out) [emphasis mine]:

The [Cornell] provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance. He, of course, fully sympathized with the young man’s [Keyes’] plight. However, things were bad, and there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association…He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.

…The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger…At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student [Keyes] clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student [the student was Keyes]. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so…No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later—immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected—the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.

It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it [academic freedom] could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university…These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them…To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were—that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger…There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible.

As I said, that was written in the late 1980s. I think that at present the dangers of standing up for academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the right to disagree are more serious. I also think we continue to have some people of courage, and Professor Jacobson is one of them.

[NOTE: In this article, Steven Hayward of Powerline describes a related recent experience of his at Berkeley.]

SCOTUS rules for the continuance of DACA

The New Neo Posted on by

The way it went:

“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. ‘The wisdom’ of those decisions ‘is none of our concern,’” Roberts wrote in his opinion. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.”

Roberts wrote that the administration “failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance,” as well as the impact the decision would have on DACA recipients who have relied on the program.

“That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner,” Roberts wrote. “The appropriate recourse is therefore to remand to DHS so that it may consider the problem anew.”

Clarence Thomas, in the dissent:

Without grounding its position in either the APA or precedent, the majority declares that DHS was required to overlook DACA’s obvious legal deficiencies and provide additional policy reasons and justifications before restoring the rule of law. This holding is incorrect, and it will hamstring all future agency attempts to undo actions that exceed statutory authority.

I’m in agreement with Thomas.

It’s certainly possible that the order could be reworded so that it would be considered “reasonable” by the Court. But that doesn’t fix the problem of what the Court did today (and of course if Trump isn’t re-elected, it’s not going to happen). It seems to me that the Court is basically saying they don’t like Trump’s order and therefore they won’t allow it to stand, even though Obama’s order was almost certainly deeply flawed.

One thing this decision underlines is that at this point Justice Roberts (a Bush nominee to the Court) is a reliably liberal vote, or at the very least the new swing vote.

Another thing it underlines is that the liberals on the Court have consistently applied subjective feeling standards (as well as mind-reading, in some of its decisions) to reach the goal it happens to like. Aeons ago when I was in law school, I had to read many appellate decisions and a large percentage of them were SCOTUS decisions. I agreed with the results of some and disagreed with the results of others. I found some arguments more persuasive than others, as well. Sometimes I would have liked a different result in terms of the ruling’s effect, and yet the argument for it was so solid that I had to admit that, my personal preferences aside, it was the correct ruling.

But very seldom if ever in those days did I find that a ruling with which I disagreed had really poor reasoning behind it, rather than just questionable reasoning. In recent years, though, that’s been happening more and more frequently – the rulings with which I disagree involve either some sort of tortuous and convoluted reasoning/sophistry, or the application of a subjective and arbitrary judgment.

ADDENDUM: In 2018 I wrote a post about Roberts, and I’d like to repeat here something I said back then:

I believe that there are at least three more things operating with Roberts…The first is that most people, especially ambitious people—and that includes SCOTUS justices—are attracted to power. Power is enticing, and increasing one’s own power is always tempting. So what could be more powerful for Roberts than becoming a swing justice? It would mean that a great many huge and important cases would turn on what Roberts thinks.

Secondly, Roberts was nominated by George Bush. What better way for Roberts to prove that he’s no “Bush judge” than to vote with the liberals? So that’s another motivation…

Thirdly, I’ve noticed a tendency in Roberts—long before Trump became president—to vote in the way that is least likely to upset the status quo apple cart. For example, in the case of Obamacare, Roberts found a “creative” way to avoid a bold overturning of a bill that had been passed by Congress…

Today’s decision by Roberts falls along those lines – to choose the least disruptive path in terms of keeping the status quo.

Jonathan Chait’s misleading guide for liberals trying to figure out what happened

The New Neo Posted on by

I have a clue for Jonathan Chait: he knows very little about conservatives. For example:

One universal fact of political life is that people tend not to enjoy highlighting faults committed by their own side, and often respond to others bringing up behavior they don’t want to defend outright by deflecting blame.

Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan – you must not have done much hanging out on the right, because the right’s favorite occupation (perhaps even more beloved than trashing the left) is to trash the Republican Party.

Chait continues:

…[W]while few leftists go so far as to explicitly advocate violent or destructive acts, refraining from criticism of violent protests is, among parts of the far left, almost a social norm.

A social norm. In other words, it’s become required groupthink to wink at violence and excuse it away. And I would say that many leftists are also explicitly advocating destructive acts these days.

More:

The preconditions that permitted these events to go forward are the spread of distinct, illiberal norms throughout some progressive institutions over the last half-dozen years. When I wrote about the phenomenon in 2015, a common response was to dismiss it as the trivial hijinks of some college students, a distraction from the true threats to democratic values. It certainly was (and remains) true that the right poses a vastly greater danger to liberalism than does the far left.

Chait basically has no idea what he’s dealing with. As someone who’s looked at political life from both sides now, I can say in no uncertain terms that old-fashioned liberalism – the kind I grew up with, the kind that valued free speech and liberty, the kind that would never condone violent riots and destruction of property – has far more in common with conservatism than it does with the far left. Conservatives are Chait’s friends here, not his enemies. But he’s utterly unaware of it.

Chait continues:

Nonetheless, it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing authoritarian racism is far more important to the conclusion that left-wing illiberalism is completely unimportant.

The cluelessness continues. Chait equates “the right” with “right-wing authoritarian racism.” I guess he believes his own propaganda.

Both American public opinion and many institutions have moved left on race and gender during this time. It is a positive change opening humane new possibilities for reform, but it has come along with some illiberal side effects.

No Jonathan dearie, they’re not “side effects” that will fade away once the wonderful humane goal is reached. The goal will never be reached, and the side effects are essential and will not be dropped from the program. Some day you may find yourself the target. Do you not study history at all?

…[The left] frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

I feel like it might be time to start screaming at Jonathan, because maybe if I talk louder he’ll hear me. That distinction may be “the foundation of the liberal model” – a foundation that conservatives share, by the way – but it is not the foundation of the leftist model. The foundation of the leftist model is “whatever gets us power.”

I’m going to stop there, because anything I’d say about the rest of Chait’s piece is either irrelevant or redundant.

But why, you might ask, do I care about Chait’s inability to understand the danger the far left represents not just to the right, or to the US, but to beliefs and values he professes to hold? Because, at least theoretically, old-fashioned liberals who believe in those old liberal values like freedom of speech, and the difference between words and acts, could – if they stopped thinking that conservatives are their evil racist enemies – find common ground with them to fight the evils of a far left that threatens us all.

I doubt it will ever happen. And Chait’s article is a good example of why.

Education and the New White Man’s Burden of the Left

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the way the leftist mantras go:

All white people are responsible for the sins of every white person throughout time.

Unlike whites, not only are all non-white people not collectively responsible for the sins of other non-white people, but non-white people are responsible for no sins. Even the individual non-white person is not responsible for his/her own individual sins.

Instead, white people are responsible for the sins of non-white people as well. If a non-white person commits a crime, for example, it’s because he/she has been driven to it by a condition caused by white people, such as poverty, injustice, and unemployment.

I wrote the above before I saw this letter from an anonymous person self-identified as a UC Berkeley professor of history. Here’s an excerpt:

…I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam.

These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department…

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

Near the end of the letter, the author – who describes him/herself as a “person of color” – writes:

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites.

This is the same message Shelby Steele delivered in the video I posted previously today. It’s something various black conservative academics have been saying for quite some time now. To me, it rings true and makes psychological sense. But it’s been drowned out, for the most part. Why is that?

I believe it’s because it’s a tough-love type of message, hard to hear and even harder to act on. It is also more cerebral than the competing message, which is deeply emotional and shouted to the rooftops by the MSM and just about every cultural institution in the US today. How can the quiet message of the Shelby Steeles of the world compete?

The NY Times was clever in pushing its deeply mendacious 1619 Project to rewrite American history. Never mind that historians across the land – even historians sympathetic to the left – spoke out against it and tried to correct it. Their cries of “False!” haven’t won the day, because I’m sorry to say that there are way too many people uninterested in the facts as opposed to the emotionally satisfying narrative, and believing history is just a bunch of competing narratives anyway. Why not come up with the narrative you want to be true, and spread it around?

All one has to do is watch the statues being pulled down or defaced these days – including those of abolitionists and people such Lincoln – to understand that the “America and its history are irredeemably evil” message has won the day, at least with enough people willing to act on it and enough people supposedly in charge of our institutions willing to step aside and let them do it.

How else to explain the inclusion of the destruction of monuments to those who fought against slavery? No heroes are allowed to remain – certainly no old white heroes – in the story of America’s original sin of racism. All are collectively guilty.

The seeds of this were planted long ago – even earlier than this passage from Allan Bloom’s 1987 work The Closing of the American Mind:

Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus…All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal…

But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

Again, contemplate that that was published in 1987 and probably written somewhat earlier. The ground was prepared long ago, and what Bloom wrote in his book could be considered a sort of prophetic vision of things to come, but a prophecy of the logical rather than the extra-sensory variety.