Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Here's LethalLily, at the comments at the Daily Caller:
Well, so another Leftist wacko snapped, huh? Oooops, here's some "inconvenient truth" for you Leftist trolls, slithering around the threads....
~ Nidal Hasan - Ft Hood Shooter: Registered Democrat and Muslim.
~ Aaron Alexis, Navy Yard shooter - black liberal/Obama voter
~ Seung-Hui Cho - Virginia Tech shooter: Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat.
~ James Holmes - the "Dark Knight"/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occupy guy,progressive liberal, hated Christians.
~ Amy Bishop, the rabid leftist, killed her colleagues in Alabama, Obama supporter.
~ Andrew J. Stack, flew plane into IRS building in Texas - Leftist Democrat
~ James J. Lee who was the "green activist"/ leftist took hostages at Discovery Channel - progressive liberal Democrat.
~ Jared Loughner, the Tucson shooter - Leftist, Marxist.
~ Ohio bomb plot derps were occupy Wall St leftists.
~ Harris and Klebold, the Columbine Shooters - families registered Democrats and progressive Leftists.
~ Bill Ayers, Weather Underground bomber - Leftist Democrat.
~Lee Harvey Oswald, Socialist, Communist and Democrat - killed Kennedy...
~ Leon Czolgosz, Leftist/anarchist - killed W. McKinley, 25th president - a Republican.
~ Charles Guiteau, psychopath, felt he was "owed" something, killed Garfield, 20th president - a Republican.
and on and on and on....the Left is chock full o' nuts...
Yep. Frazier Glenn Miller follows a long line of leftist, Democrat cowards and murderers.
Fred Phelps, Westboro Baptist church, committed far left nutball and life long member of the Democrat party who ran for governor of Kansas three times under the Democrat banner...
Curiously, American media outlets like the Chicago Tribune, NPR, CNN, and NBC LA have refused to name the suspect, even though he posted his rant justifying the mass murder before it took place on social media video sites YouTube and Liveleak.
This is incredibly bizarre behavior by a mainstream media that is very quick to speculate on the identity of suspects in high-profile crimes with even the flimsiest of evidence (for example, slandering Olympic Park hero Richard Jewell as the suspect in Eric Robert Rudolph’s 1996 Summer Olympics bombing, and claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was carried out by Adam Lanza’s brother). Here, they seem to have circled the proverbial wagons around this son of Hollywood royalty in a protective measure.
Likewise, the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of Michael Bloomberg-funded citizen control cult Moms Demand Action/Everytown for Gun Safety and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) remain mute on the killings, when such crimes are generally exploited immediately for public relations purposes by these groups.
Why?
I hate being cynical, but it appears that the gun control groups and the mainstream media are more interested in protecting the image of their progressive Hollywood allies than they are telling the story of what happened last night.
The depraved Obama-protection media will be spinning this Elliot Rodger as some kinda of NRA-survivalist tea party conserva-libertarian, or something.
Sorry, but that ain't gonna fly. This guy had the Hollywood leftist silver spoon in his mouth since diapers. Cradled in privilege, he resorted to the only thing leftists know when they don't get what they want: murderous eliminationist violence.
At the root of the “Nice Guy” rationalization is a narcissistic blindness to his own shortcomings and a sense of entitlement to female companionship. He cannot admit (especially to himself) that his own resentments are actually motivated by envy, nor that his rage against women is a type of “sour grapes” rationalization: Frustrated desire expressed as rejection of those who reject him.
There isn’t really a political aspect to this kind of maladjustment although, as with every mass shooting, the Left is trying to play “pin the tail on the right wing,” and conservatives are pushing back..
Indeed, most of the time there's little that's really political about these mass shootings, and even when a political official is involved (Gabby Giffords) the mainstream press botches the story ghoulishly, pinning blame on fictional Republican "target maps" or what not. But because there are huge political implications, conservatives can't sit by idly and let the left's lies take over the popular imagination. These people are not just depraved. They're evil.
Basically, and predictably, the left is jonesin' to portray Rodger as some extreme right-wing white supremacist tea party conserva-libertarian pick-up artist misogynist --- and not necessarily in that order. I mean seriously, leftists are fanatical and delusional about this. The fact is, as I pointed out yesterday, Rodger was marinated in classic Hollywood luxury leftism, and he'd developed the textbook case of clinical psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder. He was an entitled, hate-addled leftist through and through.
But it gets even deeper. It turns out that one of Rodger's favorite YouTube channels belongs to the radical former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur, whose "Young Turks" program broke off from MSNBC in a dispute over Uygur's criticism of the Obama administration from the far left. Basically, "Young Turks" is an MSNBC reject, a spin-off whose followers are "emo progressives" hostile to Democrat accommodation politics at the White House. That is, apparently Rodger, according to his YouTube favorites, didn't think the Obama Democrats were far-left radical enough!
Elliot Rodger posted a crazy video before his mass killing spree titled, “Elliot Rodger Retribution”.
And, Elliot Rodger was a fan of the far left “Young Turks” YouTube Channel.
The Young Turks was one of his favorited channels.
The Young Turk describes itself as “a young progressive or insurgent member of an institution.”
The host of the channel Cenk Uygur is a far left political activist and former MSNBC host.
Rodger's favorites are here. There are no right-wing "Fox News" channels listed.
The simple fact is that Elliot Rodger fits no conservative template, and was in fact a classic Hollywood luxury leftist suffering from a sick narcissistic sense of entitlement. The dude needed help, and bad.
Jamelle Bouie's one of those standard black leftist race-traders who claims moral superiority on the basis of skin color. Seriously, he's been around the leftist fever swamps for sometime now, and very little that he spews is exceptional or original.
But he did go off on a little rant yesterday on Cliven Bundy, slithering down to a pretty sick Biblical attack on Mr. Bundy as some kind of demonic figure of purported boilerplate conservative racism.
Here's his tweet attacking Mr. Bundy as "Cloven," which I forwarded to the editor of Slate David Plotz:
Tis the season of Commencement discontent. Let me count in alphabetical order the number of universities affected by the growing intolerance of bigots on campuses in North America. Among them are Azusa Pacific, Brandeis, Brown, California, Concordia, Haverford, North Carolina, Rutgers, Smith, and Swarthmore. Withdrawals by individuals to be honored or invited to speak, whether due to university action or voluntary, are now as familiar as leftist indoctrination of university students.
There is always an excuse, a feeble excuse, for the protests, whether the rationale is an action or a supposed action by the person to be honored, or some controversial words written or spoken. Among those absurd excuses are: the attempts by administrators to restore order when a protest was disrupting campus life, criticism of some features of Islam, International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies that predated the tenure of the recipient towards developing countries, police racial profiling in New York City, views on immigration policy, disapproval of abortion.
The objects of the intolerance are not extreme political activists, but prominent and distinguished members of the professions and society. They should be named. Robert L. Birgeneau, a former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley who is in fact admired for liberal social views. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, the first woman to hold this position and one of the most powerful women in the world. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born activist who has made critical and controversial remarks about the religion of Islam and the ideology of Islamism from which she has herself suffered. Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State and Provost at Stanford. Charles Murray, distinguished author known for controversial views on race class, and intelligence. Raymond Kelly, former New York City Police Commissioner. Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank. These multiple incidents today are reminiscent of the event in 1983 when Jeanne Kirkpatrick, political scientist and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, was denied a platform at Berkeley.
Although these distinguished people would exemplify the diversity that universities claim to foster, their offence was that they did not agree, or were thought not to agree, with the protestors. They have offended the ideological conformity of the protesting intolerant bigots who would be numbed by hearing views other than their own. The arrogance and close-mindedness of the protestors prevents them from listening to alternative points of view.
The goal of inquiry and research at colleges is to search for truth and challenge accepted points of views. But the dominant mode of protests and of much teaching in the social sciences and humanities is a form of leftist fascism, preventing speech with which one disagrees. The politically correct norm at present is not conservative or status quo views, but rather the opposite, radical intolerant ones. Do those intolerant protests help the growth of social justice? Both practical activity and highly perverse intellectual argument suggest an answer.
The impetus to leftist politicization occurred in 1964 when the radicals in the University of California Free Speech Movement occupied the administration building in Berkeley, the first such “conquest” in the country. It led to the reshaping of curriculum in an overtly radical direction, and hiring of faculty who leaned towards those changes. It has also led to incredible ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry.
The case at hand is that of the several hundred students at Smith today whose protests led to the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde from Commencement. Their absurd message was that the IMF “was a primary culprit in the failed developmental policies implanted in some of the world’s poorest countries. This led directly to the strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” The young women at Smith were not informed about or thought it unimportant to mention the “oppression and abuse” of hundreds of women, not by the IMF, but by honor killings every year in Muslim countries.
The current protestors have taken to heart the answer, even if they cannot take time from their protests to read the actual text, given in 1965 by Herbert Marcuse, who taught for a number of years at Brandeis, in his essay Repressive Tolerance. Among his more engaging conclusions was that, “the objective of tolerance would call for injustice towards prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions.” This logically meant rigid restrictions on teachings and practices with which he disagreed in educational institutions. Perhaps Marcuse did not specifically suggest the shouting down or forbidding of intellectual opponents, but his advocacy of repression or limitation of expression has been taken by the present day bigots to its logical conclusion.
Many objective studies have indicated the host of problems on campuses today: the highly disproportionate number, by very large margins, of far leftist members of university faculty, and sometimes administration; raucous and highly active leftist student groups; one sided teaching if not indoctrination in class and in texts used in many of the social sciences and in history courses; a preponderance of radical campus guest speakers; the incessant activity of radical Islamic campus organizations.
Sixty-five years ago Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote The Vital Center, a book aiming to support liberal democracy against the ideologies of communism and fascism. Though it is not directly relevant to today’s campus intolerance, the book is pertinent for its practical suggestion to “restore the balance between the individual and community.” There is an urgent need for a balance today in campus behavior and for a vigorous response to the changes in recent years in that behavior. Free speech and free thought are being limited by the actions of leftists, many of whom are aging radical revolutionaries left over from the 1960s, and the students they have indoctrinated. The desirable features of intellectual diversity, essential for any real university, are declining. It would be reasonable to argue that this issue of intellectual diversity is as important, and perhaps now more important, than the issues of racial and gender diversity.
A distinction must be drawn between the radical leftists on one hand and true liberals, a group that on the issue of intellectual freedom would include conservatives today. Liberals have to make their voices heard on campuses. They must proclaim themselves as supporters of real tolerance on campuses, the right of speakers who are not leftists to be heard, that ideological indoctrination by faculty and choice of textbooks should be criticized, that conservative faculty or speakers should not be confronted by a hostile environment, that speech codes that ban politically oriented speech be abolished, and even that administrators should question the self-perpetuation of their radical faculty and appoint real liberals and even conservatives...
Not hard.
Just let them speak. As soon as leftists utter a sound the bullshit sirens will be sounding in overtime. These people are nothing but hateful buffoons who wither at calm, cool and collected reason.
I have agreed to participate in a "How to Be an Anti-Racist Book Discussion" on my campus (an event based on the currently "all-the-rage" book by Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist).
Here are the discussion points for the participants for the book discussion, which is to be held on Zoom:
* What did you learn from the book that will help set you on a path to be an antiracist educator? * In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi shares his own experience with racist thinking. How does his honesty help give us space to acknowledge and name our own racist behaviors and attitudes?* Kendi writes, “The only way to undo racism is to constantly identify it and describe it—and then dismantle it.” Why does he believe we need to call out racism when we see it, even if it can be uncomfortable to identify?* The book’s central message is that the opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” The true opposite of “racist” is antiracist. “The good news,” Kendi writes, “is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be racist one minute and an antiracist the next.” What does it mean to have to constantly reaffirm your identity as an antiracist? Is there any benefit to the fact that you can’t just decide you are “not racist” or an antiracist and be done with it?
* What is the first step you, personally, will take in striving to be an antiracist? How will you check yourself and hold yourself accountable if you notice you, or someone else, is being racist?* Anyone who values immigrants from European countries and devalues immigrants from Latin America is guilty of racism. Have you ever been guilty of this type of racism? Discuss the unique resilience and resourcefulness people possess if they leave everything in their native country behind and immigrate to another, as Kendi examines in the chapter on Ethnicity. * Identify two practices at the course level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.* Identify two practices at the department level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.* Identify two practices at the institutional level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.* Why do you think it is so hard for people to not assess other cultures from their own cultural standards? How does doing this trap people in racist ideas?
And I gotta say it: Don't get mad a me, bro.
I know there's a huge push on the right to actually shut down thinking, and, in a few cases, to actually completely embrace and evangelize the most wild claims and conspiracies against the radical left and the Democrats (but I repeat myself). At some point, you have to draw a line on how far you'll go to demonize and destroy the other side -- and to defend yourself against the other side. I'm a good person. I want to make things better: "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, then dwell on these things" (Philippians 4:8).
But being good as I am means I will also defend myself. And to the death. And once again, lately, I'm defending myself against a lot of ideological hatred, obsessive leftist anti-conservative and anti-religious bias, and the once-again leftist condescension and hubris on social media that is even stronger than usual when a leftist Democrat "wins" the White House. Back in 2016, Facebook comments and posts I wrote after the election were reported to my college, and the same trolls have come back out of the woodwork this time around, now that I decided to give Facebook another try (for the new era, same as the old era, alas). But nah. Leftist are not driving me off the site this time. I'm sick and tired of their attacks. Defend against the left's hate. Defend against the left's destruction. Defend against the left's lies: "Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and said to Him, 'All these things I will give you if you will worship me.' Then Jesus said, "Go, Satan! For it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only'" (Matthew 4:8-10).
The left has abandoned the Lord and is doing the work of Satan. There's no other way, as a Christian, to understand this, and thus we must gather strength in faith and gird for the battles ahead.
So I'm defending myself. I'm holding the line for truth and facts. I mean, ask yourself: Do leftists say and advocate things that have any basis in factual reality (for example, L.A. County's latest total restaurant lockdown is entirely devoid of any basis in scientific fact)? Nah. But frankly, if I'm going to remain employed at my college, then I've (somewhat) got to go along to get along. I've got to at least be professional and collegiate, and it's hard. Longtime readers will know that I've been fighting a ten-year war against radical leftist harassment, cancelling, and multiple attempts to get me fired. And I've been fighting against a college administration that rarely, if ever, gives me the benefit of the doubt, one that in the past has investigated the most absurd claims by anonymous trolls who tagged me and my college in the same tweets (this was after I got a lot of viral coverage for my on-the-ground reporting of the ANSWER/HAMAS protest against Israel, for example, "Communists, Hamas Solidarity Protesters Demand Israel's Extermination in Los Angeles — #ANSWERLA"). It was me who was investigated. I mean,fuck! Trolls had gotten the home phone number of the vice president of academic affairs at my school. They harassed him. They claimed I was "stalking" Cassandra Fairbanks, the erstwhile militant SoCal leftist who volte-face went all Cernovich or something shortly before Trump was elected. Now she's the doyenne of the Gateway Pundit set in D.C. (Weird, I know.) In any case, I had my administration threatening me to get this trolling "stopped," even though I literally had nothing to do with these completely anonymous randos working their evil to make things bad for me. I KNOW WHAT EVIL LEFTISTS DO. Seriously. I had an attorney at one point, and I now have an accommodation with the college on my "private First Amendment activities," as my human resources department labeled my blogging and tweeting at the time.
Therefore sometimes I have to just roll my eyes at folks, on either side, who literally can't entertain an idea that contradicts their political ideology and positions. I blame the left most of all. But I see conservatives copying the left when they engage in the exact same kinds of speech suppression campaigns. (Wayne Dupree? C'mon.) It's out of control, and an honest person should and will call it out, from wherever it may come. (And one more time, it comes overwhelming from the left.)
So, yeah, I'm actually reading Kendi's book, with an open mind, for the college's Zoom book discussion, I'm gonna calling be myself an "anti-antiracist" lol.
And with that, here's Glenn Loury and John McWhorter at the Bloggingheads video. McWorther name-drops Coleman Hughes, at City Journal, "How to Be an Anti-Intellectual," and Kelefa Sanneh, at the New Yorker, "The Fight to Redefine Racism."
Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have certainly not shunned the Marxist label, it would seem today’s left is authentically Marxist.
But, except at its edges, the present left is not what it claims to be. Today’s left has a different origin and orientation from what has been historically understood as Marxist or Marxist-Leninist; and using that term to designate the characteristics of our current left is at best problematic. Neither Marxists nor Marxist-Leninist governments evidenced the cultural radicalism that today’s left expresses every day. Although there have been Communist Party members in Western countries who have been sexual exhibitionists, and even a brief period in Russia after the November 1917 Revolution when free love was allowed, generally communists have been on the conservative side of issues like homosexuality and the questioning of fixed sexual identities. The traditional left would have attributed our LGBT activities to “bourgeois decadence.”
In the Soviet Union and for a long time throughout the Soviet bloc, artistic experimentation was frowned upon, including music of the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone technique, as well as abstract expressionism. Communist regimes sent gays to labor camps, and communist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara raged against homosexuality and, in Guevara’s case, blacks.
It is hard to view these Marxist revolutionaries as precursors of the present intersectional left. Indeed, corporate capitalists stand much closer to this force than traditional Marxists do or did. Are the executives at PepsiCo, Citibank, and the NFL, who support Black Lives Matter (BLM) and wish to stamp out opposition from the cultural right, economic revolutionaries yearning for a socialist society? Pardon my skepticism!
Real Marxism has been about socioeconomic contradictions and transformations, not about the need for transgendered restrooms and the abolition of gender roles. Communist parties in Western Europe after World War II vehemently opposed the immigration of cheap labor from abroad, viewing it as an attack on the indigenous workforce. The current left, by contrast, is about open borders and filling Western countries with impoverished Third World populations as an act of contrition for white Christian racism, or as a source of so-called cultural enrichment.
The Soviet regime and Communist parties outside the Soviet Union condemned the Critical Theory philosophy of the Frankfurt School as a distortion of Marxism. One can only imagine what they would have thought of the further evolution of what Lind and others have styled “cultural Marxism.” Lind correctly observes that the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany provided the cradle for this movement, which tried to fuse Freud’s theories about sexual repression with socialist economics. But the result looked much more like a cultural war against reactionary social attitudes than a serious effort to plan a Marxist economy.
After Critical Theory migrated to the U.S. by way of Columbia University in the 1930s, it came to look even less like Marxism and much more like a prelude to our current cultural revolution. Some socialist boilerplate remained attached to this brand of thinking, but it became extraneous to its real message, which is the subversion of what seemed to me as a child in the 1950s to be a normal society.
I am unwilling to concede to cultural Marxists a Marxist pedigree simply because they have claimed that ancestry. Nowadays, media and political celebrities claim all kinds of labels for themselves, and one can easily prove the falseness of most of them. What makes a lesbian feminist on Fox News a “conservative” other than the fact that she appears on a generally Republican channel and claims that she votes for the GOP? What makes a culturally radical commentator on CNN a “liberal” other than the fact that some in high places decided to apply this term to themselves? What does columnist Jonah Goldberg have in common politically or philosophically with Edmund Burke, or for that matter, CNN anchor Jake Tapper with Thomas Jefferson? If I decide to call myself something I am not, it does not become any more true regardless of how much media support I can find to back me up.
I concede to Lind that today’s cultural radicals, who are unfortunately becoming mainstream, are of the left. They are leftists because they are driven by four defining leftist principles or practices. One is globalism or universalism, which in the case of the current left takes the form of a boundless revulsion for Western Christian society and its majority white population. The left in its essence denies particularity and the sanctity of local and national traditions.
The second quintessentially leftist principle that informs our cultural revolutionaries is the worship of equality as the highest value. One can easily imagine non-leftists recognizing some limited good in the idea of equality, for example, granting legal equality to all authorized citizens or subjects of a state. But the left is fixated on equality and seeks to harness political and educational power to obliterate human distinctions.
The third leftist principle or practice is the call for expansions of what they call human rights, since the historically grounded natural rights do not advance equality or “human dignity,” by which they mean the extinction of social and historical distinctions. This inverts Aristotle’s sage advice at the beginning of Book Four of the Politics, that laws (nomoi) should fit specific governments (politeiai). The leftist position is exactly the opposite: Long established customs and conventions should give way to what journalists and academics deem conducive to greater equality.
A fourth leftist belief concerns the putative fluidity and malleability of human nature, seen for example in the insistence that all gender identities are subject to change. Public administrators and courts must defend our right to redefine our gender whenever we want; and others should then be required to treat us in accordance with our changing gender identity. This last leftist belief stands in striking contrast to the conservative notion that human identities are rooted in tradition and nature. Perhaps nowhere more than in this emphasis on gender fluidity do we behold the most radical form of the left, perhaps in an even more grotesque manifestation than in such harebrained schemes as nationalizing the economy...
Nate Silver and his 538 blog became the gold standard of leftist election talking points during the last two presidential election cycles. It was too easy, of course, with Barack Obama rolling up a big win against a pathetically outmatched John McCain in 2008, and also in 2012, when the left's character assassination machine helped destroy Mitt Romney, whose prescient criticism of the Democrat nominee is now playing out in real time on issues from ObamaCare to Russia in Ukraine.
I can remember during those years that leftists, especially bloggers, would respond to any suggestion of Republican electoral success by pointing to the latest projections at 538, which were considered unassailable.
Interesting how no one was slamming Silver for being "ideologically neutral" when he was projecting Democrat electoral victories. Now though, the knives are out. Here's Paul Krugman, the New York Times blogging economist and leftist thought-enforcer, "Tarnished Silver":
Timothy Egan joins the chorus of those dismayed by Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight. I [sic] sorry, but I have to agree: so far it looks like something between a disappointment and a disaster.
But I’d argue that many of the critics are getting the problem wrong. It’s not the reliance on data; numbers can be good, and can even be revelatory. But data never tell a story on their own. They need to be viewed through the lens of some kind of model, and it’s very important to do your best to get a good model. And that usually means turning to experts in whatever field you’re addressing.
Unfortunately, Silver seems to have taken the wrong lesson from his election-forecasting success. In that case, he pitted his statistical approach against campaign-narrative pundits, who turned out to know approximately nothing. What he seems to have concluded is that there are no experts anywhere, that a smart data analyst can and should ignore all that...
Yet, here's Silver right in the sweet spot getting attacked by depraved leftist political assassins who won't tolerate deviance from the accepted Democrat Party line. Joining Krugman at the New York Times is Timothy Egan, "Creativity vs. Quants," and Balloon Juice piles on, slamming Silver for his "unwarranted contrarianism." Really? Unwarranted? Literally everyone's predicting a big Senate romp in November. But poor Nate's projections are "unwarranted," being so at odds with the left's pathetic party line.
F-king leftist partisans and morons. Lucky for the rest of us they're not only stupid but screwed.
I thought James B. Webb was a beaten man by now. But no, he's back with another depraved smear against me, "American Power Powers Down."
Actually, I didn't "power down." It was James B. Webb who was down for the count (after the brutal pounding he took in the last round). He's back up, in any case; but I'm not in the mood to deal with this sick little boy right now, so please take a look at Andrew Klavan's recent dealings with another batch of beasts from the netroots swamps, "Attack of the Leftist Hate Monkeys!":
Last week, my Pajamas Express blog suffered an onslaught by these leftist haters. As far as I can tell, they were spurred on by someone named Glenn Greenwald, whom I don’t know, but who seems to have inspired them with a nonsensical personal attack of his own and then sent them forth like the Wicked Witch dispatching her flying monkeys. Now, my policy has always been to allow all comments on my site. I enjoy the debate, occasionally learn from it and frequently get a laugh from some hostile wit who lands a good one on me.
So at first I shrugged off the Attack of the Leftist Hate Monkeys. As a result, they were allowed to darken the atmosphere for other readers and commenters and detract from the generally free and jovial bellicosity of online discussion. Thus, after a weekend of meditatively beating my wife, relaxing around the men’s room glory hole and skewering babies to watch them writhe and die, I’ve decided I’ll ever-so-slightly modify my policy. All opinions – by which I mean ALL opinions – remain welcome. Snarkiness, sarcasm, satire, pointed wit, commonplace nastiness will still make the grade. Even low-level name-calling is all right if it applies. Nothing wrong with the occasional “boor” or “knucklehead.” But cursing, strangled cries of hate-filled rage, disturbing personal attacks that reveal more about the attacker’s sick mind than we want to know—they’re gone. Send that stuff to my mailbox through my personal website. You can be sure I’ll give it the consideration it deserves.
Earlier this month, Joseph H. Manson, a respected anthropologist and the former winner of a Leakey Foundation Research Grant, announced that he was walking away from his tenured position at the university after what he described as the “woke capture” of the institution.
After writing about the ruthless political persecution of P. Jeffrey Brantingham, a fellow anthropology department academic who was canceled for studying crime patterns, he also listed other purged UCLA faculty.
"Emeritus Professor Val Rust (Graduate School of Education) was banned from campus after incurring the wrath of graduate student adherents of Critical Race Theory. Researcher James Enstrom (Environmental Health Sciences) and lecturer Keith Fink (Communication Studies) were fired from dissenting from the woke orthodoxy. Gordon Klein, after being suspended by UCLA’s business school in Spring 2020 for refusing to use race-based grading criteria, mobilized mass support and legal assistance, was reinstated, and is now suing the university."
Klein came under such sustained attack that he had to be placed under armed guard.
The academic documented campus antisemitism including a talk by bigoted antisemite Rabab Abdulhadi, who had falsely accused a Jewish student of "white supremacy" for supporting Israel resulting in a complaint filed with the Department of Education. UCLA has been the subject of complaints over antisemitism by StandWithUs, the Zachor Legal Institute and others.
UCLA anti-Israel activists, as documented by the civil rights group Canary Mission, have boasted that they're members of terrorist groups, supported terrorism and called for the murder of Jews without any action being taken by the university.
Leftist hate and violence at UCLA has not only been directed at Jews and pro-Israel students.
Manson’s principled resignation comes after Johnathan Perkins, the director for Race and Equity at the University of California-Los Angeles, recently tweeted, "No one wants to openly admit [we all] hope Clarence Thomas dies."
Unlike the academics targeted by leftist campus lynch mobs, Perkins faced no consequences.
Despite UCLA's growing extremism, its core budget in past years was funded at as much as a third by California taxpayers. In 2015, UCLA received $440 million from the state. And the nation's taxpayers, through the federal government, provide a majority of its research grants amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars more in money flowing through the system.
As a public university, UCLA is a non-profit under 501(c)(3) even though it has long ceased to function as a non-partisan institution and has become an aggressive leftist political machine.
UCLA spends over $1 million on political lobbyists.
Its personnel rank as 47 out of 25,950 in political funding and have provided almost $1 million to the DNC, $400,947 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $181,468 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and $151,650 to the House Majority PAC in the 2022 cycle alone. Even though Senator Raphael Warnock, a racist Georgia politician, is on the other side of the country, UCLA's leftists still poured $124,881 into his campaign.
In 2020, UCLA personnel funded Biden to the tune of almost $4 million and nearly another million to Bernie Sanders, along with millions more to various leftist election PACs.
UCLA is no longer a serious academic institution. Its “woke” faculty are purging credible academic figures like Joseph H. Manson and others, while cultivating an atmosphere of hatred on campus and using a taxpayer-funded institution for political and anti-American activity.
It’s time for the IRS to pull UCLA’s non-profit status.
With a $5.1 billion endowment, there’s no reason for taxpayers to fund UCLA either directly or indirectly. If UCLA wants to drive out serious academics while promoting radical discourse, it should do this with its own money and if it wants to function as an arm of the Democrats, it should not enjoy non-profit status while interfering in and subverting our political system.
While the IRS has targeted conservative non-profits, it has continued to allow leftist non-profits, including UCLA to operate without oversight or accountability. Department of Education investigations have failed to clean up UCLA, lifting its non-profit status is the nuclear option.
California and this country deserve great public universities. UCLA and its institutions can no longer claim to be serving any such function. By lifting UCLA’s non-profit status, donors may be redirected to contribute to emerging institutions like the University of Austin that are dedicated to serious academic inquiry and honor free speech: values that UCLA no longer believes in.
I had a brief exchange the other day with Brendan of BJKeefe blog. I don't normally go over there, but his link showed up in my Sitemeter and I found a post suggesting that someone should "take the shovel away from Donald Douglas." Brendon apparently thinks leftist demonization is a barrel of monkeys, and as I disabled comments to avoid the abuse, Brenden writes: "Nothing like the wingnutosphere's love for the frank and open exchange of ideas!" Check the post for what follows. Actually, it turns out Brendan's not so intellectually prepared for the "open exchange of ideas." For starters, I left one of the Sadly No! sample comments from my blog: "... you're nothing but a bag of meat and your thoughts and desires are meaningless and you are a worthless piece of" shit. Sure. And I guess that's quality high-octane exchange for lefties. So I respond to Brendan, "So you wanna debate, bonejobkeefe? Bring it on." And what's he do? Runs from debate!
Thanks also for the invitation to debate. Perhaps someday we shall. I do not think it likely in this case, however. Take whatever admiration you have for David Horowitz and multiply it by -100, and that will approximate how I feel about him. On this matter, to borrow from someone whose name I have forgotten, sorry, but our views of reality do not overlap sufficiently to make discussion possible.
For the record, my own sense of Horowitz is this: If in the past decade he's said anything beyond "Yes, waitress, I'll have some more coffee, please" that isn't utter lunacy, it's escaped my notice. One does not engage with so determined a conspiracy theorist. One simply abandons him to his milk crate at Speakers' Corner and seeks more worthwhile voices elsewhere.
I would say in particular that this phrase from your blurb of his book -- "the freakish nihilism of the radical left" -- doesn't even make sense in light of what this book of his is supposed to be about: "the Left has continued to advance its socialist schemes …" Stipulating for the moment that We have such an Agenda, it can hardly be said to be nihilist to have one -- to seek to advance a different social order (or to foist one upon you, if you insist) is not at all the same thing as wanting to do away with any and every social order, just for the sake of destruction.
Two things of interest right away: (1) The complete dismissal of David Horowitz's ideals as sheer lunacy, and (2) the rejection of my use of the phrase "freakish nihilism" to describe the ideological agenda of the left. There's a word for this: Anti-intellectualism. And that stance marinates in a devilish sauce of hard left-wing hubris and deceit. It's further soaked in hatred, for to hate one's enemies is to categorize them as beyond the pale of reason and civilization. Perhaps there's some psychology at work for Brendan. Someone as esteemed as David Horowitz, who lived through --- in direct participation --- all the cultural revolts of the last couple of generations, is ridiculed as a crazed milk crate screamer? Brendan certainly thinks he's got it all figured out. But I doubt he's actually read the book in question, Horowitz's The Politics of Bad Faith. I respond at the post, in any case:
I guess we have nothing to talk about then, since with the exception of Melanie Phillips, I can't think of someone more penetratingly clear on the left's ideological campaign of death and destruction. (And you're down with that, apparently.)
And seriously, you should at least read the book (cited at the link below) before you blow off "nihilism." The left has recycled Soviet Marxism-Leninism, giving a pass to the murder of 100s of millions. When those apologies for totalitarianism --- what leftist refer to as "actually existing socialism" --- become a defense of a failed ideology, all you have left is utter nothingness, hence nihilism.
Now note something here: This is substantive. There are ideas on the table, postulates to consider. It doesn't matter who's producing them. A hypothesis is just out there, to be evaluated. And how does Brendan respond? With more anti-intellectualism. My comment was caught in the Blogger spam filter, and Brendan takes that as a launch pad for some wise cracks, and then the non-response:
I have to say, now that I have restored your comment of 1:57 PM, September 18, 2010, maybe I am not completely surprised that it got flagged as spam. Because it sure does read just like the wingnut chain emails one sees on Snopes, for example. Are you really a college professor? At an accredited school? And not, say, teaching math or something?
Anyway, our discussion so far:
You: Let's debate! Let's talk about David Horowitz and how great he is!
Me: There, we have nothing to talk about.
You: Let's talk about David Horowitz and how great he is! No, how he's greater than great!!!1! Because left nihilist leftist soviet Marxist death evil left effete dark side BLARGH BLARGH blargh …
Me: Nice milk crate.
And so, David Horowitz, and myself, apparently, are out standing on a corner, on milk boxes, raving like alleged lunatics? This is what Brendan calls debate. As I said, concepts are in play here. Ideas have consequences. Why is it that Democrats utter nary a peep when declared Stalinist ideologues wind up gaining access to the top levels of the Obama administration? These same folks, including many Democrats in Congress --- including dozens who have open affiliations with the Democratic Socialist Party of America --- call for and implement a Castro-style healthcare regime in the U.S. Of course, these people blow off the mass murder and desolation of the such communist thugs. It's not what they do, it's the ideals of humanity and transcendence that count! And thus with Brendan, to contemplate the nothingness in the wasteland of leftist neo-communist ideology is to scream "BLAARRGGHHH!!"
Yeah. And how about that "exchange of ideas" Brendan was pumping up? Not so much, eh?
But that's not all. Brendan tells me to "grow up." No kidding:
I was not typing "Blargh" in response to your effort to twist the definition of nihilism to fit your own preconceived notions. It was in response to everything else.
Seriously, Donald, be your age. Do you really think you're going to interest me in any sort of discussion where you start off by howling how everything Left is irredeemably evil? I'd just as soon discuss spherical geometry with a Flat Earther.
This is pure dismissal. It's definitely not intelligent discussion. Check the link to the post. I'm not going to waste more time on someone who is that closed-minded, at least not at that entry. What you see here is the notion that leftist ideology is UNCHALLENGEABLE. There's nothing that can penetrate the hard-shell of neo-communist ideology. Anyone with a different idea is literally a "Flat Earther."
Truly amazing. Meanwhile, these people and their grand schemes for a nationalization of the U.S. health delivery system under ObamaCare socialism are running for the hills. It's not working. Costs are not going down. Firms are responding by not hiring, precisely at the same time that unemployment keeps rising. It's statism that's failing, and the idea that state planning --- THE CENTRAL COMPONENT OF ALL SOCIALIST IDEOLOGY --- is proving just one more disaster rammed down American throats by the mandarins of the Democrat-Socialist Party in Washington.
I don't know how old Brendan is. He is idealistic. Perhaps the real world will intrude sometime in his life, and he'll learn to appreciate an actual argument for what it is an not the twisting evasion of some wingnut hokus pokus.
In any case, sometimes it's necessary to actually read the writings of your political enemies. (I didn't love wading through Markos Moulitsas' American Taliban, but I don't begrudge him for writing it. I know exactly where he stands now, and I'm all the more determined to resist him.) Perhaps Brendan might actually exhibit a little bit of personal maturity and actually attempt to engage some of these ideas, for example, this passage on Page 57 of The Politics of Bad Faith:
Totalitarianism is the possession of reality by a political Idea --- the Idea of socialist kingdom of heaven on earth; the redemption of humanity by political force. To radical believers this Idea is so beautiful it is like God Himself. It provides the meaning of a radical life. This is the solution that makes everything possible; the noble end that justifies the regrettable means. Belief in the kingdom of socialist heaven is faith that can transform vice into virtue, lies into truth, evil into good. In this revolutionary religion, the Way, the Truth, and the Life of salvation lie not with God above, but with men below --- ruthless, brutal, venal men --- on whom faith confers the power of gods. There is no mystery in the transformation of the socialist paradise into Communist hell: liberation theology is a satanic creed.
From Kevin Williamson, at National Review (with strike-through leftist for liberal), at National Review, "The Liberal Leftist Gulag":
The word “liberal” has taken a beating over the last few days: A Mozilla executive was hounded out of his position at the firm he co-founded by left-wing campaigners resolved to punish him for having made a donation to a successful California ballot initiative that defined marriage in traditional terms; Adam Weinstein, whose downwardly mobile credibility has taken him from ABC to Gawker, called for literally imprisoning people with the wrong views about global warming, writing, “Those malcontents must be punished and stopped”; Mr. Weinstein himself was simply forwarding a dumbed-down-enough-for-Gawker version of the arguments of philosophy professor Lawrence Torcello; Katherine Timpf, a reporter for Campus Reform, faced a human barricade to keep her from asking questions of those attending a feminist leadership conference, whose organizers informed her that the group was “inclusive” and therefore she was “not welcome here”; Charles Murray, one of the most important social scientists of his generation, was denounced as a “known white supremacist” by Texas Democrats for holding heterodox views about education policy; national Democrats spent the week arguing for the anti-free-speech side of a landmark First Amendment case and the anti-religious-freedom side of a case involving the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Lois Lerner, the Left’s best friend at the IRS, faces contempt charges related to her role in the Democrats’ coopting the IRS as a weapon against their political enemies; Harry Reid, a liberal champion of campaign-finance reform, was caught channeling tens of thousands of dollars to his granddaughter while conspicuously omitting her surname, which is also his surname, from official documents, cloaking the transaction, while one of his California colleagues, a liberal champion of gun control, was indicted on charges of running guns to an organized-crime syndicate.
The convocation of clowns on the left screeched with one semi-literate and inchoate voice when my colleague Jonah Goldberg, borrowing the precise words of one of their own, titled a book Liberal Fascism. Most of them didn’t read it, but the ones who did apparently took what was intended as criticism and read it as a blueprint for political action.
They're not "liberal." They're ideological leftists, and they're driven by hatred and a diabolical lust for power. See, "The Left Isn't Pro-Gay — It's Pro-Power."
Santa Cruz, California, where Utopian citizens live in a vacation from reality year-round, until something like the heinous murder of this sweet little girl shocks their leftist "pacifist" sensibilities.
Believe me, crime will surge in California in the years ahead, with criminals being released from the prisons under Prop. 47, and even more so as the Obama administration rushes to empty the jails of so-called "non-violent" criminals nationwide.
Even leftist enclaves push back when their cherished retreats from reality get threatened.
The Tannery Arts Center sprang from the utopian ideal of creating a sanctuary for artists and their families — one intended to shield painters and sculptors from Santa Cruz's rising rents, while providing a cocoon around the creative community's many children.
But the creative Eden could not keep out a parent's worst nightmare. Police on Tuesday arrested a 15-year-old neighbor of Madyson “Maddy” Middleton, saying the boy lured the 8-year-old girl into his family's apartment Sunday and killed her, then hid the body in a dumpster-sized recycling bin.
Many residents had held out hope that Maddy, a vivacious girl last seen riding a scooter Sunday afternoon, would be found alive. The discovery of her body Monday night was a stunning blow to many in the complex.
To learn on Tuesday that another resident was suspected in the killing was too much.
“We're just devastated. These are two of our kids, and one is dead and one has been taken away. And it's horrible. It's just horrible,” said resident Yasmina Porter, a dance professor at Cabrillo College. Her children, ages 11 and 13, played with both the victim and the suspect, she said.
“From the community's standpoint, we mostly feel like these are our babies,” Porter said. “This is the most horrible thing you can imagine.”
Authorities said they believe Maddy willingly went into the boy's apartment, where they were alone.
“She was 8 years old,” said Santa Cruz Police Chief Kevin Vogel. “I think she had a reasonable amount of trust in him.”
Vogel said police were waiting for forensic results and did not give a cause of death.
Authorities did not identify the suspect because he is a minor. Shocked residents described him as “sweet” and said he was well-known for his prowess with a yo-yo.
Porter said the suspect was quiet and polite, and that his mother prepared food and invited neighbors over during holidays.
The eight-acre complex resembles a modern college campus — one especially welcoming for children who play, paint sidewalks with chalk and ride bicycles on its landscaped grounds.
It opened at the site of the historic Salz Tannery, which once supplied more than half of all saddle leather produced in California. The center's 100 housing units were completed in 2009, funded by the Santa Cruz Redevelopment Agency and a nonprofit developer.
Denise Kiser Shaw said she was taking a class Sunday afternoon and remembered seeing Maddy wearing a purple dress and riding the silver scooter.
“She was going back and forth on her scooter,” Shaw said. “She would peek into the door while we were working.”
By the end of the class, there was a commotion in the courtyard about the missing girl.
“We knew that there was something terribly wrong,” Shaw said. “It was like, it must be some stranger who grabbed her.”
Shaw called the complex an oasis for artists that “feels safe.”
“The children are out like little butterflies,” Shaw said. “It's a contained area … it's like, OK, you stay here in the courtyard and you ride around and you wait for your friend.”
Yeah, those leftist "safe spaces" aren't so safe after all.
Freakin' hippies. Idiots and leftist freakin' hippies.
It's particularly good for its extensive and choice selection of crushing leftist p.c. attacks on ideological opponents, to say nothing of the intra-leftist policing that's scaring away many self-identified progressives from participating in contemporary political debates.
But the proof of this piece is in the outraged (if not unhinged) response it's generated from the very leftist types most likely to embody hardcore p.c. intolerance.
There's a lot of inside baseball in "Ping-Pong" Pareene's response, but the bottom line is to validate Chait's argument by nicely illustrating that today's uber p.c. left operates in a rarefied world of epistemic closure on steroids. You simply CANNOT get on the wrong side of radical leftists. You will be destroyed, even if you deign to identify with them.
In sum, contemporary p.c. leftism is a sick, psychotically self-contained movement of ideological hatred and intolerance of difference. Chait simply bored down to the core, causing a catastrophic meltdown among the faithful.
Hmm. *makes shuffling noise with copy of new york magazine* You know, honey, I'm beginning to think this Jonathan Chait fellow is a dumbass.
— Jeb Lund (@Mobute) January 27, 2015
I can't wait till the tribunal executes Jon Chait for word crimes
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) January 27, 2015
This Chait piece is so gloriously bad and self-refuting that it's actually a great joy to read.
— Jonathan Shainin (@jonathanshainin) January 27, 2015
If chait had talked to literally 1 person to his left he might have figured out that nobody calls it "p.c." anymore
— Alison Herman (@aherman2006) January 27, 2015
Wow everything sure is white today!
Oh yeah there’s a blizzard too! Sorry I was just reading this Chait feature...
— Rusty Foster (@rustyk5) January 27, 2015
Finally finished the Chait column and it seems like the point is that the radical left is just as authoritarian as the radical right
— Shane (@shaneferro) January 27, 2015
This rant against political correctness was stale when Rush Limbaugh made his career on it dude. This shit was tired in the 90s.
— Rusty Foster (@rustyk5) January 27, 2015
will reading that Jonathan Chait piece make me want to punch things y/n
— Karen K. Ho (@karenkho) January 27, 2015
And yet nobody's managed to make YOU shut up have they bro
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) January 27, 2015
People are hating on Jonathan Chait's dumb opinions with renewed vigor today. Maybe there are such things as blizzard miracles
— Dan Massoglia (@jujueyeball) January 27, 2015
I'm as critical of some of this stuff as anyone, but sorry, this is ridiculous & half-baked. http://t.co/lEI1aDghO3
— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) January 27, 2015
Yesterday on MSNBC, Representative Alan Grayson alleged that all Republicans have left is "fear and hatred." He then goes on to call for the total elimination the GOP, and not just in November: "We have to put end to the style of politics, and that means getting rid of Republicans entirely."
Timeline of Earth Liberation Front actions Including break-ins, arson, use of pipe bombs, tree spiking, equipment sabotage, willful destruction of property, among other crimes.
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