The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale. …

… [W]e found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.

The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”

Is it any wonder that so many young people are so down on this country? Although I must say that most of the old people I know are also reflexively critical of America.

This would be a good time to revisit a passage written by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, back in the 1980s. In it, he describes an incident he experienced when he was in school in the 1940s. Here you can see the naive origins of the kind of thinking that’s now rampant in academia:

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

And I’ll close with a verse from Robert Frost, first published in 1947:

A CASE FOR JEFFERSON

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

The post Anti-American studies appeared first on The New Neo.

For most of its history, America’s higher-education system, for all its flaws, operated around a hard but fair rule: Raw intellectual firepower mattered. Talent mattered. The ability to retain information and apply it correctly mattered. Academic excellence was the surest path to opportunity. You didn’t need family connections (although they certainly helped). You didn’t need a billion-dollar last name (again, that didn’t hurt either). You needed results.

Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier.

Today, that operating system is being systematically dismantled. Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier. In the modern Ivy League, identity is currency. Grievance is gold. Merit, once the only metric that really mattered, is treated like a relic of an oppressive past.

That’s been true for quite some time, and the article indicates that despite Trump’s efforts, nothing has really changed. Well, it’s early yet. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t change, because colleges are now dedicated not to learning but to destructive leftist goals.

The article doesn’t say too much else although it does give some details. But it brought to mind once again the fact that one of the main goals of today’s education in most Western countries is learning to hate your own country. It’s taught in lower levels and in higher ones, and it’s certainly not unique to the United States. In fact, it’s not only the US that is labeled hateful; it’s western civilization as a whole, and all its traditional values – one of which is meritocracy.

Which in turn reminds me of an old post of mine based on some work by Allan Bloom. I reproduce the relevant portion here (it constitutes the remainder of the present post), but you might want to read the whole thing.

[Here’s Allan Bloom] again [emphasis mine], with an important and telling anecdote from his own past: …

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization. If you read the book [The Closing of the American Mind], pay particular attention to those uprisings, which were the template for what’s happening today.

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It’s hard to say how many states have experienced this degree of change in the goals of public education. What percent of the whole? Is it happening only in bluer-than-blue states, or has it penetrated elsewhere? My guess is the latter, at least to some extent.

Here’s part of the story in Minnesota (MDE stands for the Minnesota Department of Education):

When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.

These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system — as drafting committee member Jonathan Hamilton, of Education for Liberation Minnesota, has described it — as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is (emphasis added).”

Activists’ weapon of choice in taking our schools apart is Ethnic Studies. Forget about teaching students about the historical leaders and events that shaped our democracy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and America-led victories in World War II. MDE’s new “fifth strand” trains K-12 students to view our nation’s social and political institutions with suspicion and hostility and seeks to enlist them in what Hamilton has referred to as a “political struggle” to change the social, economic, and cultural system that underlies our polity.

How will Ethnic Studies play out in Minnesota classrooms?

When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools.” By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable,” and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.

But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts. Under the new Ethnic Studies standards, one of which is entitled “Resistance,” for example, students are instructed to “organize” to resist America’s “systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against “marginalized,” oppressed groups.

“Education for Liberation Minnesota” – Minnesota is in need of liberation, but not the kind that Jonathan Hamilton seeks. No wonder the left is so against Florida, DeSantis, and what’s happening there, as well as demonizing writers such as Christopher Rufo who have been hard at work exposing the left’s racist education game. The left is well aware that most Americans are against this sort of pedagogy, but the hope was to accomplish it under the sneaky guise of something that sounds righteous such as “ethnic studies.” Now more and more of America is becoming alerted and alarmed.

I am reminded of some passages from Allan Bloom’s prescient 1980s book The Closing of the American Mind. He knew what was happening and what it meant, and tried to warn us. Here’s a passage of Bloom’s that I quoted in this previous post:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

In my post, I added this observation:

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization.

So here we are.

The post How the left is further taking over public schools in Minnesota appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve just spent a fruitless hour trying to find the source from which I’d copied the following Allan Bloom quote some time ago. Somehow I’d lost the link, and now I can’t find it again.

But I thought I’d present the quote anyway because—like so much of Bloom’s oeuvre—it shows his uniquely facile mind and brilliant observations.

It was from an audio recording of a lecture that Bloom had given back in (to the best of my recollection, anyway) the mid-1980s. I had tried to transcribe it faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:

You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.

Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.

Bloom was not a cultural relativist; he believed it was a pernicious influence that had taken over American education. Time has proven him correct, has it not?

That’s where the original 2013 post ended. But I’ll add a 2021 addendum, which is that so many students – perhaps even the majority – no longer say, or no longer are allowed to say, “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on.” The prevailing notion is that students are too outraged and violated by even hearing about history that doesn’t conform to current standards and that the remedy is to not learn about it or even be reminded of it, except in the context of how evil it was and how the current descendants of those evil people must pay a price. The price can be monetary and/or to stand at the back of the line when jobs and influence are handed out and/or the need for public confession of sins.

I would also add that Bloom, when speaking in the 80s, mentioned that history was then seen as the “history of the enslavement of women.” That way of teaching history isn’t gone, but it has now been at least partially eclipsed by the idea of history as the history of the enslavement of black and brown people at the hands of white people. The NY Times’ 1619 Project is an excellent example of the latter, in which American history was rewritten and distorted in order to fit the all-important prevailing narrative that is meant to shape the minds and policies of generations to come.

The post We are so much smarter and better now than past generations, right? RIGHT? appeared first on The New Neo.

…[I]n December, the Illinois State Board of Education, or ISBE, passed a new rule that would require culturally responsive teaching and leading standards to be incorporated in all Illinois teacher preparation programs. Critics of the proposed standards have said they require educators to embrace left-leaning ideology and prioritize political and social activism in classrooms at a time when Illinois students are underperforming on basic skills tests…

Critics have pointed out that the requirements essentially impose an ideological litmus test on educators, making any teacher who does not espouse certain views unwelcome in Illinois schools. In their original form, the provisions were explicitly left-leaning, and educators were required to “embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives.” After opponents of the new rule brought public attention to the language, the word “progressive” was replaced with “inclusive,” but this has not alleviated the concern that the standard is aimed at pushing a political agenda on Illinois educators and schools.

Yes, changing the language does not change the intent.

Critics of the new rule have also expressed concern that at a time when so many Illinois students are failing to achieve basic competency in reading and math – exacerbated by pandemic-related learning loss – pushing regulations on “politically-charged topics, including race, gender identity and the role of power, privilege and student activism” is not the proper focus of Illinois’ education establishment. As of 2019, only 38% of Illinois students in grades 3 through 8 met or exceeded Illinois Assessment of Readiness standards for English language arts, according to ISBE, and a mere 32% of students met or exceeded standards in math.

Ah, but first things first, and indoctrination in leftism is more important. In fact, the more ignorant the children are, the easier it will be to indoctrinate them. So the situation is win-win for the left.

Note also the predominance in the regulations of jargon that obfuscates the message, and probably bores most readers to tears. I would wager both things are purposeful:

Similarly, “leveraging student advocacy” is not necessarily a commonly accepted purpose of PreK-12 education among parents of schoolchildren, particularly when basic reading and computational skills are not being uniformly transmitted. The original version used the term “activism” rather than “advocacy” in this section, but “advocacy” is used as a synonym for activism elsewhere – for example, where the rule admonishes educators to be “aware of the effects of power and privilege and the need for social advocacy and social action.”

Nor are most parents likely aware that under the rule, teachers would be called on to “curate the curriculum” and work with students to “co-create content to include a counternarrative to dominant culture.” The standard further directs educators to “implement and integrate the wide spectrum and fluidity of identities in the curriculum” but does not provide specifics to give parents an indication of what this might mean for their children’s instruction.

On February 16, there was a vote in which the Illinois General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules had a chance to reject this program. You may be unsurprised at what happened:

Eight of the committee’s 12 members would have needed to vote to suspend the rule to prevent its implementation, and only the six Republican members voted to do so.

So all the Republicans voted “no” and all the Democrats voted “yes.”

I wonder what the teachers in Illinois who are not onboard with this leftism will do. Will they find another profession? Will they pretend to comply but sneak in a little heresy once they get into the classroom as teachers? And if so, what will happen to them then?

Compare and contrast:

New Hampshire lawmakers are debating a bill that would prevent educators from teaching about systemic racism and sexism in public schools and state-funded programs.

HB 544, titled an act “relative to the propagation of divisive topics,” seeks to limit public schools, organizations or state contractors from discussing topics related to racism and sexism, and would specifically ban teaching that the state of New Hampshire or the U.S. is racist or sexist. Lawmakers discussed the bill in a hearing of the Executive Departments and Administration Committee that began Feb. 11 and continued Thursday.

“This puts guidelines on what are the limits, especially under the auspices of the state apparatus, what are the limits in presuming that someone was born to be an oppressor or someone was born to be oppressed because of their sex,” said Rep. Keith Ammon, a Republican from New Boston, who introduced the bill. “If that’s the assumption we are going to make as a society, then we are never going to get to unity.”

New Hampshire is currently a purple state that votes Democrat on the national level (presidency, House representatives, and senators) and Republican on the state level (governor, state legislators). This sort of split personality means that it’s possible that the state will have voted for Biden, who rescinded Trump’s order banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory in federal agencies, and yet the New Hampshire state legislature may vote to ban it in the state’s public schools. I can’t find anything that indicates the vote has occurred yet, so I don’t know what actually will happen, but there is a GOP majority right now in the NH legislature.

West Virginia is considering a similar bill to that of New Hampshire.

As so often happens, this news regarding education reminds me of a passage from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987 [emphasis mine]:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

Bloom was in college during the late 1940s. And that passage makes it obvious that, by the 1980s, the current leftist anti-American trends were already firmly in place.

But not so firmly as they are today, and as they will be tomorrow, if the left has anything to say about it.

The post “Culturally responsive” Illinois teacher training appeared first on The New Neo.

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.]

The post They’re still trying to cancel William Jacobson at Cornell appeared first on The New Neo.

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.

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…[The left adheres to] the idea that, as our knowledge and capabilities have grown, our human nature has also changed–evolved–and that over the last 250 or so years our basic human nature has undergone some kind of “fundamental transformation,” one which requires that we be governed by new principles and a vastly modified and expanded Constitution; one more suited to our new enlightened views, needs, and behaviors.

I, on the other hand, would argue that while the means to achieve our ends have changed, expanded, and grown—as have some of those ends—our basic needs, drives, and motives, what directs us, our basic human nature, has not changed, nor can it (absent some ill-considered and catastrophic “fundamental transformation” of the genetic basis of our nature as human beings), and that the Constitution that was crafted to govern us then, is the same Constitution that we need to govern us now, because our basic nature and fundamental needs, motives, and behaviors have not changed.

That made me think of this older post, featuring some quotes from Allan Bloom that I had written down after listening to a recording of a Bloom lecture from the mid-80s. I lost the link to the recording and couldn’t provide it then, and I can’t provide it now, either. But here’s the relevant portion of the post:

I had tried to transcribe [Bloom’s words] faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:

“You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know ‘that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,’ but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.

“Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.”

Bloom nailed it, about thirty-five years ago.

And meanwhile, progressives are blind to, or adamantly in favor of, the evil they themselves commit.

The post Progressives and progress appeared first on The New Neo.

What I have seen a lot of discussion about is not the game, but the halftime entertainment, and the consensus is that it was an empty, sad, soft-porn, would-be-titillating mess. Ace – not known for puritanism – has this take on it (and a video of the proceedings can be found here). I only watched about a minute or so because it both bores and saddens me that this is what entertainment – “family” entertainment? – has come to.

But Jeb Bush loved it. Go figure. Is he planning another campaign, or is this the inner Jeb Bush finally coming out?

The halftime act made me think about some of the writings of Allan Bloom, and I was all set to write a long post linking the empty sex demonstration of the halftime show to some of Bloom’s much older critiques of rock and roll. But a faint bell of familiarity starting ringing in my head, and it occurred to me that I might be repeating myself.

And sure enough, when I did a search on the blog, I discovered that I had passed this way before, back in September of 2015. And so without further ado I will repeat the post I wrote then, which constitutes the rest of this post.

I’m a little late to this party, but I wanted to say a few words about the Chrissie Hynde brouhaha:

…Chrissie Hynde has waded into another contentious area ”“ the overly sexualised nature of modern pop music.

In an obvious reference to scantily-clad stars such as Miley Cyrus and Rihanna, the former Pretenders lead singer branded them ”˜sex workers’ for selling music by ”˜bumping and grinding’ in their underwear. The 64-year-old also accused them of doing ”˜a great deal of damage’ to women with their risque performances…

Miss Hynde added: ”˜I don’t think sexual assault is a gender issue as such, I think it’s very much it’s all around us now.

”˜It’s provoked by this pornography culture, it’s provoked by pop stars who call themselves feminists. Maybe they’re feminists on behalf of prostitutes ”“ but they are no feminists on behalf of music, if they are selling their music by bumping and grinding and wearing their underwear in videos.

”˜That’s a kind of feminism ”“ but, you know, you’re a sex worker is what you are.’

There are two messages here. One is that today’s female pop stars go so far in their sexual come-ons, and their scanty dress, that they effectively are porn stars of the soft-core variety. The second is that this behavior creates an atmosphere that provokes and increases sexual assault.

I pretty much agree with the first. I’m not at all sure about the second, and it’s a subject so vast (what encourages sexual assaults and what decreases them, and also how broadly one should define the term “sexual assault) that I’m going to shelve it for now and concentrate instead on the first.

Over the years I’ve watched pop music degrade to the point that it’s so sexually explicit as to be virtually indistinguishable from what was considered to be soft-porn entertainment in my youth. That sort of thing is now mainstream, accepted, and even considered by many feminists to be empowering. Who was the entertainer who made it that way—Madonna (whom I’ve always found coldly repellent—but then again, I’m neither a heterosexual male nor a lesbian woman, nor even a gay guy)? Whoever it was, it’s in full flower now, and even pre-pubescents get to watch, right in the comfort of their own homes.

When I read what Hynde had said, I immediately thought of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind (not necessarily an obvious segue, I know). The book has long been one of my favorites, and I’ve written about it and recommended it many times, usually in the context of a discussion of education (especially colleges) and PC thought, and the takeover of the university by special interest groups.

Bloom’s book was focused on the university and its effect on our society. In fact, it’s subtitle was “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” You can see the emphasis on colleges, but what is sometimes lost is the second half of the subtitle, the part about impoverishing the souls. In the service of that idea, Bloom mounted an attack on rock and roll music, a critique I thought odd at the time I first read it, and which I haven’t discussed much on this blog when I’ve written about him because it hasn’t been relevant. Now I look back on it and I think I understand better what he was getting at:

Civilization…is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art…Music, or poetry…always involves a delicate balance between passion and reason, and even in its highest and most developed forms—religious, warlike, and erotic—that balance is always tipped, if ever so slightly, towards the passionate. Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guiter. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt. Out of the music emerge the gods that suit it, and they educate men by their example and their commandments….

[Rock music] has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions…[R]ock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children’s emerging sexuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimizing them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later…

…[A]n enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flow of fresh material for voracious appetites…

I could go on and on and on quoting Bloom, but I’ll stop there and just say you should read the book, or reread it (Bloom has a whole chapter entitled “Music,” from which I got those quotes). He further ties the sexuality fostered by rock music, and the rebellion against parents and authority that it both reflects and engenders, as generalizing to a more blanket condemnation of parents, authority, tradition, and society, and also to the embrace of leftism: “From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform…In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”

Bloom’s book was published in 1987, and it was based on his lectures and notes that in some cases were even older. The rock music of that time was chaste compared to that of today (and much of the music was better, too, IMHO). Going back even further, the rock music of my 50s/60s youth was, comparatively speaking, a celebration of puppy love (“I Want to Hold Your Hand”). And yet it contained the seeds of the blatant and loveless sexuality we see today.

I like quite a bit of pop music, especially the music of my youth. However, I find today’s explicit and coarse sexuality in music, that Hynde deplores and blames—and that Bloom already seemed to foresee, although I wonder whether even he would have been stunned by how far it’s come so fast—deplorable. But I’m not the demographic it’s appealing to, and that demographic celebrates and is affected, influenced, and shaped by it.

[NOTE: And yes, the left intends these developments, which suit their purposes admirably.]

[NOTE II: See also this about the 2020 halftime show.]

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