The Nihilism of the Ruling Class

It's Curtis Yarvin, at Compact, with a review of David Rothkopf's, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation.

An Oral History of the 1968 Columbia Uprising

This is actually pretty fascinating.

At VF:

The @1968CU protests, recalls one participant, came out of a moment in time in which “it was a question of whether the country would survive a civil war” https://t.co/Ku0KhMlDi5

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) March 30, 2018

In April 1968, hundreds of students at Columbia University took over campus buildings in an uprising that caught the world’s attention. Fifty years later, they reflect on what went right and what went wrong.

At Columbia University in April 1968, about a thousand students forcibly commandeered five campus buildings, effectively igniting the mass student revolts of the 60s. The events that began haphazardly on April 23 soon grew into a public crescendo of awakening that changed the course of the American student protest movement. It was a year when political, racial, sexual, and cultural forces exploded into a “revolutionary volcano,” as novelist Paul Auster, then a junior at Columbia, described it. It was also the year when two widespread movements—civil rights and anti-war—combined forces to stoke a flame of youth rebellion not seen domestically in half a century.

That spring 50 years ago, Columbia’s compact, six-city-block campus on Manhattan’s bohemian Upper West Side became a petri dish, fermenting and fomenting discord that would engulf the nation. By the end of the year, American deaths in Vietnam exceeded 35,000 soldiers. Anti-war protests multiplied, the draft continued to loom like a Sword of Damocles over the lives of 27 million young men, the peaceful civil-rights movement intensified along with the increasingly militant Black Power movement, the sexual revolution and early feminism movement transformed gender roles, and the unstoppable popularity of psychedelic drugs and rock music (the musical Hair opened on Broadway that month) created an unbridgeable chasm of a generation gap. All of these movements for social change—including the conservative counterrevolutionaries—were out in full force on the Columbia campus that April.

University president Grayson Kirk “was a walking anachronism,” says Paul Cronin, editor of the new, definitive book on the Columbia student uprising, A Time to Stir: Columbia ‘68. “He was clueless and unresponsive to the attitudes, needs, and demands of his students.” It turns out that Kirk and his board of trustees, members of New York’s corporate and media elites, were as out of touch with youth culture as President Lyndon Johnson and his F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was so threatened by what he saw at Columbia that, in May, he ordered his agency to initiate a secret counter-intelligence program, 2,000 F.B.I. agents strong, aimed at anti-war demonstrators and the New Left.

Not since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964–65 had a campus of a major university been shut down by its students. The student rumblings of 1968 started in February, when two black South Carolina State University students, protesting a segregated bowling alley, were shot and killed by state troopers in Orangeburg. (A third young black man, a high school student, was also killed, as he waited to walk his mother home from work.) In March, students at the historically black Howard University, in Washington, D.C., staged a four-day protest and sit-in. But Columbia captured the attention of the nation because of its stature as an Ivy League college situated in the media capital of the world. The protest was so large (720 students arrested), it lasted so long (a week of building occupations, followed by a month-long strike), and the police reaction was so brutal and bloody, that it was seared into the national conscience.

As tens of thousands of high-school students all over the country organize demonstrations demanding gun-control reform from politicians in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, we may now be witnessing the first full-fledged American student protest movement since the late 60s. “I got chills when I heard Emma González speak about her generation’s fledgling movement to stop gun violence,” said former ‘68 Barnard/Columbia Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) activist Nancy Biberman. A lifelong housing and social-justice advocate in the Bronx, Biberman is heartened by the new wave of protest that has roused high-school students from decades of apathy. “Imagine that a student movement might emerge again and play a catalyzing role in ending the slaughter of innocent people.”

Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority, from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.

— Columbia University president Grayson Kirk, April 12, 1968

Dear Grayson, . . . You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism. There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”

Yours for freedom, Mark [Rudd] April 22, 1968

More.

Julian Assange's Nihilism (VIDEO)

From Sue Halpern, at the New York Review, "The Nihilism of Julian Assange":

Sue Halpern reviews ‘Risk,’ Laura Poitras’s documentary portrait of Julian Assange https://t.co/tgEwRkGF1q

— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) June 20, 2017

About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”

By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential election—first with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clinton—elevated Assange’s profile and his influence.

And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.

n 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assange’s four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning.

The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didn’t know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a source’s identity. Assange’s goal was to hold power—state power, corporate power, and powerful individuals—accountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this “radical transparency.” Manning’s bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.

Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeaks’s young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a £12 million penalty if it were breached. “[I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign,” Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assange’s “impulse towards free speech,” according to Andrew O’Hagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assange’s failed autobiography, “is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.”

Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assange’s own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an “administrative error.”

Most egregious, perhaps, was Assange’s collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamir’s “access to the WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus.” WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. “Most people with principled stances don’t survive for long,” Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. It’s not clear if he’s talking about himself or others...

I've never liked nor respected Assange, who I consider an enemy.

But note how Halpern gets the basic background wrong: That "graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis" was actually a video of anti-American journalists embedded with Iraqi insurgents armed with RPGs. The Apache took them out in self-defense, following strict rules of engagement. That story's been totally debunked. But as with most other things in the news, the initial lie becomes the official truth for the radical left. That's why you can never let your guard down.

Keep reading, FWIW.

Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama

It's brother Cornel West, at the Guardian U.K., "Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility":

Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.

This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville – the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America – wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny (“sow a character and you reap a destiny”).

The age of Barack Obama may have been our last chance to break from our neoliberal soulcraft. We are rooted in market-driven brands that shun integrity and profit-driven policies that trump public goods. Our “post-integrity” and “post-truth” world is suffocated by entertaining brands and money-making activities that have little or nothing to do with truth, integrity or the long-term survival of the planet. We are witnessing the postmodern version of the full-scale gangsterization of the world.

The reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump – but it did contribute to it. And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility.

A few of us begged and pleaded with Obama to break with the Wall Street priorities and bail out Main Street. But he followed the advice of his “smart” neoliberal advisers to bail out Wall Street. In March 2009, Obama met with Wall Street leaders. He proclaimed: I stand between you and the pitchforks. I am on your side and I will protect you, he promised them. And not one Wall Street criminal executive went to jail.

We called for the accountability of US torturers of innocent Muslims and the transparency of US drone strikes killing innocent civilians. Obama’s administration told us no civilians had been killed. And then we were told a few had been killed. And then told maybe 65 or so had been killed. Yet when an American civilian, Warren Weinstein, was killed in 2015 there was an immediate press conference with deep apologies and financial compensation. And today we still don’t know how many have had their lives taken away.

We hit the streets again with Black Lives Matter and other groups and went to jail for protesting against police killing black youth. We protested when the Israeli Defense Forces killed more than 2,000 Palestinians (including 550 children) in 50 days. Yet Obama replied with words about the difficult plight of police officers, department investigations (with no police going to jail) and the additional $225m in financial support of the Israeli army. Obama said not a mumbling word about the dead Palestinian children but he did call Baltimore black youth “criminals and thugs”.

In addition, Obama’s education policy unleashed more market forces that closed hundreds of public schools for charter ones. The top 1% got nearly two-thirds of the income growth in eight years even as child poverty, especially black child poverty, remained astronomical. Labor insurgencies in Wisconsin, Seattle and Chicago (vigorously opposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a close confidant of Obama) were passed over in silence.

In 2009, Obama called New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg an “outstanding mayor”. Yet he overlooked the fact that more than 4 million people were stopped-and-frisked under Bloomberg’s watch. Along with Carl Dix and others, I sat in a jail two years later for protesting these very same policies that Obama ignored when praising Bloomberg.

Yet the mainstream media and academia failed to highlight these painful truths linked to Obama. Instead, most well-paid pundits on TV and radio celebrated the Obama brand. And most black spokespeople shamelessly defended Obama’s silences and crimes in the name of racial symbolism and their own careerism. How hypocritical to see them now speak truth to white power when most went mute in the face of black power. Their moral authority is weak and their newfound militancy is shallow.

More.

PHOTO: That's me and brother Cornel, at Long Beach City College, October 21, 2016.

Islamic State Shows Mastery of 'Full-Spectrum Terrorism'

At the Telegraph UK, "Paris attacks: Isil have shown their mastery of the full spectrum of terrorism":

Analysis: In the space of 13 days, Isil destroyed a Russian airliner, bombed Beirut and brought carnage to Paris, inflicting a combination of attacks unmatched by any terrorist group.

Among the many terrible facts about the bloodshed in Paris, one stands out. No terrorist group has ever previously inflicted the combination of attacks claimed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

The carnage in Paris must be placed alongside other recent events for its real significance to become clear. True enough, Isil’s claims of responsibility should always be treated with caution, but if they are accurate, then consider what its operatives have inflicted in the space of just 13 days.

Since Oct 31, Isil has destroyed a Russian passenger plane over Egypt, wrecked a street in Beirut using two suicide bombers, and brought terror to Paris by carrying out near simultaneous assaults on at least six separate targets across the capital.

If its claims are true, Isil has carried out three complex acts of mass murder in three different countries – spread across two continents - in less than a fortnight. Along the way, its terrorists have killed 393 people from nations as disparate as Lebanon, Ukraine, France and Russia.

When David Cameron said that events in Paris showed Isil's appetite for “mass casualty attacks” and a “new degree of planning and coordination”, he was making the point in mild terms. There is simply no precedent in the modern history of terrorism for the rapid succession of havoc that Isil appears to have wrought.

The group’s recent attacks are unique in several respects. The fact that they happened quickly and in far flung countries is important, but not, in itself, decisive. Al-Qaeda never actually struck three targets in three countries in 13 days, but Osama bin Laden’s followers might have been capable of doing as much their heyday before 2001 – provided, that is, we are talking about the kind of bomb attacks that the network had made its speciality.

What makes Isil’s onslaught unique is how different the three operations were – and how each demanded a particular range of skills.

Most terrorist groups come to specialise in one method of bloodshed. Under bin Laden’s leadership, al-Qaeda developed a near obsession with destroying civil airliners - a compulsion that reached its apogee on September 11 – or planting large bombs in unsuspecting capitals. For the first two decades of its existence, Hamas concentrated almost exclusively upon carrying out suicide bombings in Israel.

The events of the last fortnight appear to demonstrate that Isil has mastered all of these black arts and more. The destruction of the Russian airliner showed that its operatives can subvert airport security and infiltrate explosives on board a passenger plane.

The deaths of 41 people in Beirut last Thursday once again displayed Isil’s ability to inflict a tragically familiar brand of terrorist attack, namely a double suicide bombing in a Middle Eastern capital.

And then came Paris. On Friday night, Isil’s terrorists used automatic weapons and bombs to carry out an assault which appeared to owe as much to the “urban guerrillas” of 1970s Europe as to the Islamist brand of nihilism.

Four decades ago, young Germans and Italians joined the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhof gang and fought gun battles in city streets. They took hostages and murdered passers-by, causing Italians to use the term "Years of Lead" for that era of their history, so named because of the empty bullet casings that lay scattered in the streets after every incident.

Isil’s terrorists followed a similar modus operandi in Paris, except that they focused solely upon killing innocent bystanders - not police officers or government officials - and their murderous exertions were ended only by their own deaths.

But the conclusion is unmistakable: when it comes to destroying a plane, taking hostages, dispatching suicide bombers to Beirut, or running amok in a European capital, Isil’s operatives can do all of the above in quick succession. They have shown their mastery of the full spectrum of terrorism in a way that no group – not even al-Qaeda - has ever done before...

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Islamic State Is Modern Islam

From Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine, "There Is No Modern Islam":

Like math and the Midwest, ISIS confuses progressives. It’s not hard to confuse a group of people who never figured out that if you borrow 18 trillion dollars, you’re going to have to pay it back. But ISIS is especially confusing to a demographic whose entire ideology is being on the right side of history.

Raised to believe that history inevitably trended toward diversity in catalog models, fusion restaurants and gay marriage, the Arab Spring led them on by promising that the Middle East would be just like Europe and then ISIS tore up their Lonely Planet guidebook to Syria and chopped off their heads.

But ISIS also believes that it’s on the right side of history. Its history is the Koran. The right side of its history is what Iraq and Syria look like today. It’s also how parts of Europe are starting to look.

Progressive politicians and pundits trying to cope with ISIS lapse into a shrill incoherence that has nothing to do with their outrage at its atrocities and a lot to do with their sheer incomprehension. Terms like “apocalyptic nihilism” get thrown around as if heavy metal were beginning to make a comeback.

Those few analysts who admit that the Islamic State might be a just a little Islamic emphasize that it’s a medieval throwback, as if there were some modern version of Islam to compare it to.

Journalists trying to make sense of ISIS demanding Jizya payments and taking slaves ought to remember that these aren’t medieval behaviors in the Middle East. Not unless medieval means the 19th century. And that’s spotting them a whole century. Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from the United States. Its labor market and that of fellow Petrojihadi kingdoms like Kuwait and Qatar are based on arrangements that look a lot like temporary slavery… for those foreigners who survive.

Non-Muslims paid Jizya to Muslim rulers until very recently. Here is what it looked like in nineteenth century Morocco from the account of James Riley, an American shipwrecked sea captain.

“The Mohammedan scrivener appointed to receive it took it from them, hitting each one a smart blow with his fist on his bare forehead, by way of receipt for his money, at which the Jews said, ‘Thank you, my lord.’”

Those Jews who could not pay were flogged and imprisoned until they converted to Islam. An account from 1894 is similar, except that the blows were delivered to the back of the neck. Only French colonialism finally put a stop to this practice as well as many other brutal Islamic Supremacist laws.

Morocco was one of the Arab countries where Jews were treated reasonably well by the standards of the Muslim world. It’s one of the few Arab countries to still retain a Jewish population. When ISIS demands Jizya from non-Muslims, it’s not reviving some controversial medieval behavior. It’s doing what even “moderate” Muslim countries were doing until European guns and warships made them stop.

If the French hadn’t intervened, the same ugly scene would have gone on playing out in Morocco. If the United States hadn’t intervened, the Saudis would still openly keep slaves.

Islam never became enlightened. It never stopped being ‘medieval’. Whatever enlightenment it received was imposed on it by European colonialism. It’s a second-hand enlightenment that never went under the skin.

ISIS isn’t just seventh century Islam. It’s also much more recent than that. It’s Islam before the French and the English came. It’s what the Muslim world was like before it was forced to have presidents and constitutions, before it was forced to at least pay lip service to the alien notion of equal rights for all.

The media reported the burning of the Jordanian pilot as if it were some horrifying and unprecedented aberration. But Muslim heretics, as well as Jews and Christians accused of blasphemy, were burned alive for their crimes against Islam. Numerous accounts of this remain, not from the seventh century, but from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those who weren’t burned, might be beheaded.

These were not the practices of some apocalyptic death cult. They were the Islamic law in the “cosmopolitan” parts of North Africa. The only reason they aren’t the law now is that the French left behind some of their own laws.

Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia that were never truly colonized still behead men and women for “witchcraft and sorcery.” Not in the seventh century or even in the nineteenth century. Last year.

The problem isn’t that ISIS is ‘medieval’. The problem is that Islam is...

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Distorting Christian History to Defend Islam

From Michael Ortiz, at the Wall Street Journal, "Secularism didn’t save the West from religious excesses, and it won’t save us from jihadists":

In an attempt to find a peaceful alternative for those in the Islamic world who advocate violence for political and religious goals, Christians in the West shouldn’t distort the history of Christianity, or stand idly by while others do so. Letting this version of events shape perceptions of Christian history invariably means a portrait of religion as a force of darkness, while science and technology will always be beacons of sanity and light.

The narrative portraying religious conviction as antithetical to reasoned comity among people and nations is easy enough to fall into. At the national prayer breakfast last week, for instance, President Obama compared the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the terrorism of today’s radical Islam. The president went on to condemn (rightly) those who advance their religious convictions with violence.

But what he and many others miss is the conviction that Western core values come from a faith in which God enters into human history precisely to save the world from the erring reason that fails, among other things, to recognize that terrorism is an affront to God and humanity.

The all-too-common narrative goes like this: Centuries ago, Catholics and Protestants gladly burned heretics up and down Europe by the thousands until, thank God—or All Powerful Goodness, as Ben Franklin would put it—the rise of Enlightenment thinkers banished the barbarity that is somehow native to religious fervor. Only with the liberalizing mandates of Vatican II (1962-65), we’re told, did Catholicism—usually the main boogeyman in this version of history—come to grips with the idea of democracy and religious freedom, and finally extinguish the last embers of the Inquisition.

This narrative is false according to the historical record and to the origins and abiding ethos of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. Historians call this the la leyenda negra—the “Black Legend”—because it blackens the name of Catholicism in particular and religion in general. According to this legend, the Inquisition is on a continuum with the Holocaust and the terrors of Stalinism.

Yet objective historians realize that in the most infamous example, in Spain, several popes condemned the Inquisition’s excesses. Moreover, the 6,832 members of the clergy executed by the Spanish Republican Red Terror in 1936 is more than twice the number of those executed in 345 years of the Inquisition in Spain.

Far from being an enemy of reason and peace, Christianity’s overwhelming message through the centuries has been one of tolerance, a message that underpins many of the values that people of all faiths, and of no faith, can live by. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI ’s work as a theologian has done great service in trying to correct the erroneous view that faith and civil tolerance must always be opposed.

He looks forthrightly at the negative aspects of the rise of democracies in the West, while not forgetting their positive legacies. As then- Pope Benedict pointed out in a 2005 address to the Roman Curia—the church’s governing body—popes of the 19th century condemned democracy because so many of its exponents were claiming “to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make” God completely “superfluous.” He thus reminds us that a Western culture beset by nihilism cannot provide a way out of the nihilism of the jihadist...

Still more.

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation

There's an enduring vitality to the work of David Horowitz. Folks may recall that in fact he's not popular among many on the right. And I take seriously the personal, professional repudiation of Horowitz by those among whom I count friends (including some very close friends from the right blogosphere). But be that as it may, when pondering the perplexing continued influence of the radical left in America, you're not going to fall astray by reading Horowitz's updates. I've read a number of his books, including those written with his long time colleague Peter Collier. The combination of personal bitterness and historical memory makes for very compelling reading. And having met Horowitz and listened to him speak on a number of occasions, I know that his words express unsurpassed first-hand experience. It's why he's so widely reviled by those on the left. He's got their number down to a tee.

Here's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. These are discrete essays. I recommend starting with Chapter 6, "Divided Loyalties: The Fifth-Column Left," which brilliantly chronicles the historical continuities of the left's treason and subterfuge over the decades. (And readers will be amazed at how some of the Democrat Party's top leadership today populate the history of New Left radicalism going back decades.)

And check the authors' essay at FrontPage Magazine, "Destructive Generation":

The Left that the Sixties created tends to lose the battles: whether it is the push to erase the differences between the sexes, or to take away Everyman’s SUV, or to define down the terrorism of those who would bring their war into the heartland of this country. When they have the opportunity, the American people usually reject such ideas. But the Left wages a permanent war, and therefore often seems to be winning in the midst of its losses. Its survivorship comes from the fact that even as radicals were losing the decade-long referendum on their radical plans in the Sixties, they seized cultural citadels that allowed them to continue a stealth fight later on.

One of these citadels was the “elite” media, whose commitment to leftish ideas is so complete that it has become a series of scandals: Dan Rather’s bogus “exposé” about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, for instance, or Newsweek’s fraudulent report that Americans guarding al-Qaeda soldiers at Guantanamo desecrated the Koran—a story whose retraction did not keep sister publications such as the New York Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Los Angeles Times from editorializing, in essence, that Newsweek was right even though it was wrong or from continuing to pursue the Gitmo story like a vendetta.

Another citadel is commanded by the big foundations, notably Ford and Rockefeller, which have invested vast sums in movements carrying more than a whiff of the Sixties—a separatist Hispanic movement with an ethnic agenda rather than an assimilative one; and groups such as Catholics for Free Choice, created out of whole cloth to oppose the Catholic Church on abortion and other issues.

But nowhere is the entrenchment of the Sixties mentality more complete or more destructive than in the university. That the Left should now dominate the academy involves a savage irony, of course. It was only after failing in their intent to burn down the university in the Sixties that radicals decided to get on the tenure track in the Seventies. Unimpeded in their long march through these institutions by fair-minded centrists of the sort they themselves now refuse to hire, these Leftists have brought a postmodern Dark Age to higher education—“deconstructing” objective truths to pave the way for chic academic nihilism; creating a curriculum of contempt for American history and culture; and transforming many classrooms into chambers of inquisition and indoctrination. Some of them now profess to be embarrassed by the “excess” of a Ward Churchill, and no wonder: his sin is to reveal by his blatancy the agenda they try to disguise through stealth and subtle misdirection.

Former SDS president Todd Gitlin, currently a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia whose academic work has centered on mythologizing the Sixties, candidly acknowledged the Left’s academic coup in a recent essay he called “Varieties of Patriotic Experience.” Writing about the failure of his—and our—former comrades to produce a revolution in the streets during the Sixties, Gitlin comments:

My generation of the New Left—a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on—relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss … . All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked “political correctness” of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost—we squandered the politics—but won the textbooks.

Gitlin is as wrong in implying that the New Left, even in its earliest moments, ever had a “righteous” plan as he is in suggesting that establishing an atmosphere of political intimidation in the universities is simply a trivial pursuit. The “consolation” offered by the takeover is revolution by other means. And not least among the Left’s objectives now that the university is under its thumb is consolidating its fantasy of the Sixties as the Last Good Time. There are literally hundreds of college courses devoted to the history of the decade, but the growing literature of second thoughts—along with other dissident views—is virtually absent from the course lists.

Our book is no exception. Running for President in 2000, George W. Bush said that Destructive Generation was one of the three books that had formed his worldview on how America veered off course in the postwar era. But university professors have consigned this book to the memory hole, along with other books of second thoughts like Commies: My Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh, and Professing Feminism: Indoctrination and Education in Women’s Studies, by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, former professors of women’s studies.

The erasure of an entire side of a critical argument calls to mind Stalin’s famous trick of airbrushing opponents out of photos so that they simply ceased to be part of history. The consequences can be measured by what is now the conventional treatment of two groups we wrote about in Destructive Generation, the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground. Both were central to the meaning of the Sixties; both are now treated by the academy in a way that reverses novelist Milan Kundera’s famous formulation about the power of memory over forgetting. Forgetting—an induced amnesia—is exactly the point of the current pedagogy...

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And pick up your copy at Amazon.

The Nihilist in the White House

Obama's the chief far-left nihilist.

They tear down. Never build up. They destroy. Never unite. Like Walter James Casper III.

From Peggy Noonan, at WSJ:

Historical vindication happens. The Obama White House assumes it will happen to them. Thus they can do pretty much what they want.

What they forget is that facts largely decide what history thinks—outcomes, what happened, what it means. What they also forget, or perhaps never knew, is that the great ones are always constructive. They don’t divide and tear down. They build, gather in, create, bend, meld, and in so doing move things forward.

That’s not this crowd.

This White House seems driven—does it understand this?—by a kind of political nihilism. They agitate, aggravate, fray and separate.

Look at three great domestic issues just the past few weeks.

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Democracy Requires a Patriotic Education

From Donald Kagan, at the Wall Street Journal:

These values [of honor and democratic merit, of civic participation and self-sacrifice for community] have not disappeared, but in our own time they have been severely challenged. With the shock of the 9/11 terror attacks, most Americans reacted by clearly and powerfully supporting their government's determination to use military force to stop such attacks and to prevent future ones. Most Americans also expressed a new unity, an explicit patriotism and love of their country not seen among us for a very long time.

That is not what we saw and heard from the faculties on most elite campuses in the country, and certainly not from the overwhelming majority of people designated as "intellectuals" who spoke up in public. They offered any and all explanations, so long as they indicated that the attackers were really victims, that the fault really rested with the United States.

As most of us have come to know too well, the terrorists of al Qaeda and other jihadists regard America as "the great Satan" and hate the U.S. not only because its power stands in the way of the achievement of their Islamist vision, but also because its free, open, democratic, tolerant, liberal and prosperous society is a powerful competitor for the allegiance of millions of Muslims around the world. No change of American policy, no retreat from the world, no repentance or increase of modesty can change these things.

Yet many members of the intelligentsia decried the outburst of patriotism that greeted the new assault on America. The critics were exemplified by author Katha Pollitt, who wrote in the Oct. 1, 2001, edition of the Nation about her daughter wanting to fly the American flag outside their window after 9/11. "Definitely not," Ms. Pollitt replied. "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."

Such ideas still have a wide currency, reflecting a serious flaw in American education that should especially concern those of us who take some part in it. The encouragement of patriotism is no longer a part of our public educational system, and the cost of that omission has made itself felt. This would have alarmed and dismayed the founders of our country.

Jefferson meant American education to produce a necessary patriotism. Democracy—of all political systems, because it depends on the participation of its citizens in their own government and because it depends on their own free will to risk their lives in its defense—stands in the greatest need of an education that produces patriotism.

I recognize that I have said something shocking. The past half-century has seen a sharp turn away from what had been traditional attitudes toward the purposes and functions of education. Our schools have retreated from the idea of moral education, except for some attempts at what is called "values clarification," which is generally a cloak for moral relativism verging on nihilism of the sort that asserts that whatever feels good is good.

Even more vigorously have the schools fled from the idea of encouraging patriotism. In the intellectual climate of our time, the very suggestion brings contemptuous sneers or outrage, depending on the listener's mood. There is no end of quoting Samuel Johnson's famous remark that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," but no recollection of Boswell's explanation that Johnson "did not mean a real and generous love for our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."

More.

Crestfallen Repsac3 Fails Miserably in Gambit to Flip Conservatives Against the Target of His Obsessions

Well, it was an all-too obvious attempt to make wine out of sour grapes, but hey, the drama's quite entertaining.

ICYMI, here's the background from yesterday morning, "Walter James Casper, Hate-Troll and Pathological Liar, Lamely Tries to Score Political Points With Hilarious Make-Believe Abomination."

For some reason depraved stalker Repsac3 thought he'd be able to get Robert Stacy McCain --- and perhaps other conservatives as well --- to denounce me after I suggested the idiot back the f-k off. Oh well, style points for the junior high school drama queen with this headline, "I Defy Anyone to Defend or in any way Justify This Creepy Threat by Donald Kent Douglas."

Um, not sure here, but Ima hazard that this counts as defiance:

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, @repsac3 gotta troll. http://t.co/TGo5mJBB2H via @AmPowerBlog
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 11, 2014

And boy, I think Ima cry after seeing poor old Reppy with the sads:

One can only tell the truth. Whether other people hear it or continue believing (or telling) lies after you do is up to them.
— J. Casper (@repsac3) January 11, 2014

Yes, one can only tell the truth --- a lesson the lying psycho hasn't learned quite yet, obviously. See, "Bwahaha! Robert Stacy McCain Eviscerates Egghead Avatar Hate-Troll Walter James Casper III."

Repsac3 has established literally a miles-deep reservoir of ill will. It's simply astounding how he convinced himself he could flip people against me. And what's even more funny is that I don't really care. Truth floats to the top. And once again, Walter James Casper's hard-left nihilism has him flailing under the waves, gasping for breath. Meanwhile, American Power's moral clarity is bursting bubbles out of the water. Poor Casper. A loser and regressive dolt. Great lulz though, heh.

The Depravity of the Anti-Israeli Left

I read the Lustick commentary at the New York Times, "Two-State Illusion."

But see the outstanding response from Jonathan Marks, at Commentary:

Let me set aside Lustick’s argument against the two-state solution and begin with what is most shocking in his op-ed, his own proposed solution. Lustick argues that the U.S. and others should abandon the two-state solution and let the parties fight it out. The key passage must be quoted at length:

With a status but no role, what remains of the Palestinian authority will disappear. Israel will face the stark challenge of controlling economic and political activity and all land and water resources from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The stage will be set for ruthless oppression, mass mobilization, riots, brutality, terror, Jewish and Arab emigration and rising tides of international condemnation of Israel (my emphasis).

Lustick makes explicit the nihilism of the anti-Israeli left. He has no strong reason to believe that the bloodbath he wishes on the Israelis and Palestinians will have results favorable to either. But why not break a few eggs if there’s some prospect of an omelette? Like many on the anti-Israeli left, but more explicitly, Lustick is prepared to entertain a morally satisfying position, which costs him nothing but means a blood sacrifice for those whose best interests he professes to have in mind....

Lustick does not really think a two-state solution impossible. Instead, he thinks that when confronted with a choice between two difficult ways forward, one should choose the one that results in the end of the State of Israel. Again, Lustick says out loud what his crowd thinks:

The disappearance of Israel as a Zionist project, through war, cultural exhaustion, or demographic momentum, is at least as plausible as a two state solution.

Lustick’s op-ed should be required reading for anyone who thinks that to stand with the anti-Israeli left is to support of the rights of Palestinians. To stand with the anti-Israeli left is instead to hope for an open conflict that will result in the end of Israel. It is not just friends of Israel who should be disgusted with academics who hope to foment such a conflict, knowing, unless they are complete fools, that in making a poorly thought out, long-odds bet on a one-state solution, they gamble with the lives of Palestinians and Israelis.

One other point: Lustick constantly compares Israel to South Africa, and in so doing reveals not just his anti-Semitism but his ignorance. He's attacking Israel as an "apartheid state" that deserves destruction, while of course saying nothing of the totalitarian pathologies of Islam that form the foundations of the so-called "Palestinian" identity. Behold the core of the left's anti-Israel depravity: The lies and double standard that are handmaidens to evil.

Equally disgusting to me is that Lustick's a political scientist. There are certainly a great many political scientists who are champions of Israel. But it's especially bothersome that there are so many nihilists like the depraved Lustick --- glorified as "experts," there're little more than propagandists for a new Holocaust. Sick.

Christopher Lane Murder Update — Dramatic 911 Call From 'Thrill-Kill' Murder Scene

Picking up on story of the murdered Australian ballplayer, here's Moonbatty, "What Australians Ought to Be Boycotting":

In Australia, moonbats like former Australian deputy prime minister Tim Fischer are milking the Chris Lane shooting for all they can get, calling for a boycott of travel to the USA to punish us for upholding the right to bear arms. But it wasn’t a gun that killed Chris Lane for no particular reason so much as it was an ideology and a subculture, both exported from corrupted parts of the country into the otherwise decent town of Duncan, Oklahoma.

Yeah, a subculture alright, a "black" subculture of nihilism and death. And recall, "Just 'Three Bored Teens'? No, It's 'Three Bored BLACK Teens' Who Gunned Down Australian Ballplayer 'For the Fun of It...'"

More at the New York Post, "Chilling 911 call reveals moments after Australian baseball player was shot by 'bored' Oklahoma teens."

Click that link to listen.

And see Jammie Wearing Fools, "Three Teens Who Could Look Like Obama’s Son Murder Australian Man, NRA Gets Blamed," and "Jesse Jackson Frowns Upon Execution Murder of Christopher Lane."

Pamela Geller: 'With Friends Like These...'

There's been some significant developments since Britain banned Pamela Geller.

At Atlas Shrugs, "WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE ......"

Also, "MORE FRIENDLY FIRE."

It turns out that Melanie Phillips had some not so supportive things to say about the whole thing, at her blog, "The British government's jihad against free thought." It's an otherwise quite excellent denunciation of the cowardice of the British government, all except Phillips completely declaims Pamela and Robert Spencer. If anyone is diminished it's Ms. Phillips:

By banning from the country as extremists the American anti-jihadis Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, the Home Secretary Teresa May has not only made herself look ridiculous but has sent the enemies of the United Kingdom the message that they have it on the run.

I do not support the approach taken by either Geller or Spencer to the problem of Islamic extremism. Both have endorsed groups such as the EDL and others which at best do not deal with the thuggish elements in their ranks and at worst are truly racist or xenophobic.

The result has been a serious blow to the credibility of these two writers, with particular damage being done to Spencer whose scholarship in itself is scrupulous. It has also split the defence against Islamic extremism, and handed a potent propaganda weapon to those who seek falsely to portray as bigoted extremists all who are engaged in the defence of the west against the Islamic jihad.

The bitter irony here is that Ms. Phillips is nearly as reviled as is Pamela, and if she wasn't British she'd long ago have been banished from the country one way or another. The Times of Israel has more on that, "The woman Britain's left loves to hate." She has a new book out called "Guardian Angel." And from what I've been reading of her lately she's attempting to reposition herself on the left, hence, she's been frequently seen as softening her attacks on Islam. It's too bad, but it's not easy standing up for truth, consistently and with no prevarication.

In any case, I took to Twitter this afternoon to express some thoughts about all of this:

Enemies of freedom are winning, people. I #StandWithPamelaGeller when weaselly so-called freedom fighters say they do but really don't.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

@AmPowerBlog I couldn’t believe Melanie Phillips. I expected better from her.

— Natasha (@mooseandskwerl) June 28, 2013

@MooseandSkwerl She's really a leftist who's upset with social change. She can't go all the way and defend people like Pamela Geller.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

I stand with @MaroonedInMarin too. A great blogger and patriot freedom fighter. #FF

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

Freedom fighters don't whine about counter jihadists being "shrill." That's adopting the tactics of the left. Resist that. Stand and fight!

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

If conservatives have learned anything it's that the left will use any means necessary to destroy patriots and freedom fighters. Don't cave.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

It doesn't mean you have to pick a fight with everyone who has a difference of opinion. Simply that you there is a time to stand and fight.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

Thank you my friend! RT @AmPowerBlog: I stand with @MaroonedInMarin too. A great blogger and patriot freedom fighter. #FF

— Marooned in Marin (@MaroonedInMarin) June 28, 2013

This is one of those times. When you are banned from a democracy based on the lies of the left, no one is safe. People will come for you.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

And regarding Britain, we can now only loosely apply the democratic label. Home Secretary Theresa May has cravenly capitulated to true evil.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

I stand with @AmPowerBlog a great writer & Patriot #FF

— Marooned in Marin (@MaroonedInMarin) June 28, 2013

And the lies are so thick you'd need an ICBM to break through them. This is not new, friends. Terror-enablers stop at nothing to push jihad.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

Why do you think leftists back the most hardened terrorists and demonize counter-jihadists? They both want the same thing, destruction...

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

...and by destruction, I mean destruction of goodness, decency, values and tradition. That's what stands up to nihilism and relativism.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

And bet your bottom dollar the MSM goons are in on this, for they attack @PamelaGeller with a glee that's truly criminal. Stand against it.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

Have people forgotten the warnings of Pastor Martin Niemöller? This isn't fun and games. You have skin in the game without realizing it.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

My friend @RSMcCain is standing up as I write all this. See his post, "The Face of Cowardice: Theresa May." http://t.co/vPW6yUb4VB #Freedom

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

#FF @Sultanknish @MarkTapson @CraigR3521 @Vermontaigne @ZillaStevenson @JihadWatchRS @SouthSalem @BigFurHat @BlazingCatFur @MadJewessWoman

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 28, 2013

And click on this:

RT @MrsShitrit: I want to post this again by hope not hate - controversial twitter Auschwitz post https://t.co/YayqWtYeRT

— Pamela Geller (@pamelageller) June 28, 2013

And this:

A gross double-standard over hate-speech: http://t.co/8FxoggY5zc

— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) June 27, 2013

BONUS: There's further background, with embedded tweets, at the New York Times, "American Declared Blogger Non Grata in Britain for Anti-Islam Crusade."

China's Xi Jinping is Maoist Ideological Hardliner

Well, I'm sure he'll hit it off with our Dear Leader then.

At LAT, "China's Xi Jinping appears more Maoist than reformer so far":

At a Politburo meeting in April, Xi announced an effort to reeducate party cadres, using language that harked back to Mao's "rectification" campaigns of the 1940s when he was consolidating power at his revolutionary base in Yanan.

Trying to boost morale in the military, Xi decreed all generals and officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel must do stints of at least 15 days as rank-and-file soldiers. Mao used almost exactly the same tactic in 1958.

In public speeches, Xi tends to elevate the Communist Party above the nation and even above the Chinese people. He's tried to clamp down on criticism of Mao.

"To completely negate Mao Tse-tung would lead to the demise of the Chinese Communist Party and to great chaos in China," Xi told a high-level forum in January, according to an article last month in Study Times, an official publication of the Central Party School in Beijing.

Just to show that he is not Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Xi blames the collapse of the Soviet Union on wavering from Communist convictions.

"It's a profound lesson for us. To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the party's organizations on all levels," he said in another unpublished speech from December that was widely leaked.

Xi's predecessor for the last decade, Hu Jintao, was a bland figure. But political analysts believe he may have been more inclined toward political reform.

"Xi Jinping is very good at public relations, much better than Hu, who acted like a robot," said Willy Lam, a political analyst based in Hong Kong. "But ideologically he is really a Maoist, who wants to maintain tight control over the party and the military and to put a freeze on Western values."

Nobody expects Xi to reverse the opening of China's economy and, in fact, many are predicting reforms this year to loosen the grip of state-owned enterprises. But unlike Hu, he rarely speaks about rule of law.

Tighter controls were in evidence June 4, a sensitive day marking the anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989. To much ridicule, censors deleted all references to the anniversary on the Chinese Internet — including a doctored photograph of yellow rubber ducks marching like tanks toward the square. Hong Kong journalists were detained briefly and prevented from filming the daily ceremony for the raising of the Chinese flag.

Authorities made sure no commemorations took place, rounding up activists and putting others under house arrest.

Boy, that sounds familiar. No doubt Xi's even getting a few pointers from President Dronekiller.

How the Tories Are Screwing the Pooch — And Screwing Britain

From Melanie Phillips, at London's Daily Mail, "Why failing to stand up for marriage is the reason Tories are always in crisis":

The Tories are in ferment. Plots against David Cameron appear to be seeding like dandelion spores. Rebellion looms in the division lobbies.

The list of Mr Cameron's apparent crimes lengthens by the day.

The threatened triple-dip depression. Gay marriage. Labour's lead in the opinion polls. And the fact that the Prime Minister looks like a loser.

To which one might marvel at just what a shower these Tories are.

For they have behaved mutinously towards every one of their leaders since they toppled Mrs Thatcher in 1990.

The reason for this never-ending uproar surely lies deeper, however, than indiscipline among power-crazed MPs or the deficiencies of individual leaders.

Indeed, it explains why the Tories just can't seem to produce a leader they do support.
It is that conservatism itself is in crisis.

With some honourable exceptions, today's Tories don't appear to know what conservatism is for and what it is against.

In the last century, they all knew they had to defend Britain against socialism.
But when the Berlin Wall fell and Labour started speaking the language of market economics, the Tories seemed to conclude that their fox had been shot.

Fiasco

They could not have been more wrong. The attempt by the Left to undermine and topple Western society had merely shifted from political revolution to social and cultural issues.

And at the very centre of that systematic onslaught lay the intention to destroy the unique importance of the married family and replace it by a lifestyle free-for-all.
Not understanding the full significance of what was happening, the Tories made a total mess of the issue in the 'back to basics' fiasco under John Major, and then staged a full retreat under a barrage of attacks from the Left....

For at the heart of the decades-long onslaught by the Left against the core tenets of Western society lies the doctrine of 'non-judgmentalism', under which it has become forbidden to suggest that anyone's lifestyle is more socially desirable than any other.
Worse still, those whose behaviour lies outside conventional social norms are deemed to be 'victims' and their demands have been relabelled 'rights'.

So views that mothers and fathers are better for children than lone parents or step-parents, or that deliberately having babies outside marriage is selfish and irresponsible, have became unsayable.

The fundamental need children have for their own mother and father has simply been trumped by the selfish desires of adults.

Breakdown

To mask this abandonment of children, their core need was redefined as being 'lifted out of poverty' - which merely made their mothers ever more dependent on state benefits, and thus promoted sexual anarchy even further.

The result has been an unmitigated disaster. In some areas, several generations of family disintegration have resulted in a total breakdown in parenting, so that children are becoming horrifyingly incapable of even basic functions.

According to the Government's adviser on problem families, Louise Casey, some three-year-olds are unable to walk because they are habitually parked in their buggies in front of the TV.

And Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers, has spoken of children who, when they come to school, can only grunt as they haven't been taught to speak; and who may also still be in nappies at the age of five.

Ms Casey laments that no official initiatives seem to get through to such families. Of course not - because the one thing that is needed above all, to remove the perverse incentives that have destroyed marriage in such areas, is the one policy that will never be enacted.

The real reason the Tories won't properly address this is not just the inane social nihilism of Nick Clegg. It is surely because the Tory leadership itself has such a shallow and reductive view of marriage - including among its supposed cheerleaders.

Look at the reasons they give for supporting marriage - that it promotes stability, unselfishness and self-sacrifice. That was the substance of Michael Gove's paean of praise for the institution yesterday, as he made the case for extending it to gays.

RTWT at that top link.

And also, "DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Gay marriage and a split no one wanted."

Marcy Wheeler's Pro-Union Thuggery — And a Raging Homosexual's Blast From the Past!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Obama's Long March

From Ron Radosh, at PJ Media, "It’s the Culture, Stupid: Facing the Long Road Ahead":

If we can turn away from the elections for a moment, and the future of the Republican Party, a more fundamental problem exists. It is nothing less than the nature of the American culture. By the term “culture,” I am not referring to the social issues that usually come up when one talks about culture wars; i.e., abortion, gay rights, religion, etc. Rather, I am talking about the perception and outlook that stand beneath the way our American public define the very nature of civic life in our democratic capitalist society.

That is why I regularly borrow from the Left, as some astute observers of my previous column noted in some comments, the works of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and particularly his theory of cultural hegemony. As I wrote in my concluding paragraph, we have to “wage a war of position on the cultural front and to do all possible to challenge the ascension of a failed intellectual liberal ideology, whether it is in the form of Progressivism, liberalism or socialism.” I’m referring to the kind of work Fred Siegel carries out in a new book he has just finished writing, and which I had the pleasure of reading in manuscript form, on the nature of American liberalism. When it is eventually published, I believe it can have the kind of impact that great works of history like Richard Hofstadter’s books had in the 1940s and ’50s.

Siegel shows that from its very inception, liberalism was a flawed ideology whose adherents substituted its would-be virtues as a way of distancing themselves from most Americans and their workaday lives; an ideology based on a view whose believers saw themselves as superior to most Americans, including those who were merchants, workers, or regular folk, who could not be counted on to comprehend the backwardness of their beliefs.

Continuing on through the post-war decades, Siegel deals with liberalism’s failure to accurately confront the issue of race; its love affair with the New Left and its moral collapse in the face of its anarchism and nihilism; the effects of McGovernism on the political collapse of the Democratic Party, and the resulting politics of “rights-based interest groups” and the new power of public sector unionism, a far different breed than that of the old labor movement of Walter Reuther and George Meany. If we want a different kind of social polity than the one we have now — based on catering to the power of competing interest groups that compose the core strength of the Democratic party — we have to address first the essential question of the kind of social order that liberalism has built.

I’m also referring to the work the intellectuals who edit National Affairs and those who edit The Claremont Review of Books — solid theoretical and analytical work on social policy, education, and law, all of which challenges the intellectual foundations of contemporary liberalism.

If you doubt that this intellectual work is necessary, you might ponder the question of why college-educated Americans are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats or among those even much further to the political Left. An answer appears in this article by Richard Vedder, which appears today in Minding the Campus. Vedder shows that the majority of professors who teach our young people in the humanities are primarily on the Left, as he writes, “62.7 percent of faculty said that they were either ‘far left’ or ‘liberal,’ while only 11.9 percent said they were ‘far right’or ‘conservative.’ The notion that universities are hot beds for left-wing politics has a solid basis in fact. Moreover, the left-right imbalance is growing — a lot. The proportion of those on the left is rising, on the right declining.” The latest research reveals that there are 5.7 professors on the left for each one on the right!

The irony is that this occurs only in the academy, since studies also show that more and more Americans define themselves as basically conservative rather than liberal. So it should come as no surprise that the suburban middle-class and university-educated Americans, having learned their liberalism and leftism at college, vote the way that they do. One study shows that 41 percent of Americans call themselves conservative while only 21 percent call themselves liberal. Thus, as Vedder says, the university faculties are truly “out of sync” with the country at large....

Another realm of mis-education is that of the popular media. This week, I have written about this in an article published in The Weekly Standard, which fortunately the editors have not put behind their firewall. It is titled “A Story Told Before: Oliver Stone’s recycled leftist history of the United States.” Stone’s TV weekly series premiers Nov.12th on the CBS-owned network Showtime, and will eventually be used by leftist professors in their own history courses on our campuses. It is, I show, nothing less than a rehash of old Communist propaganda from the 1950s offered up as both something new and as the true hidden history of our country’s past.

Imagine how many television viewers, many of whom know virtually nothing about how we got to where we are, will learn from this expertly edited documentary how and why the United States is basically an evil nation, on the wrong course, and supported the wrong side in all foreign policy crises throughout its modern history. We cannot disregard the effect this kind of miseducation has on the knowledge of our fellow citizens. Do you wonder why the polls show that most Americans think Barack Obama’s foreign policy the past four years was successful? It is because they are a generation educated from “historians” like the late Howard Zinn, political theorists like the linguist Noam Chomsky, and now from filmmaker Stone and his historian co-author, Peter Kuznick.

Finally, I have a recommendation. For your left-leaning friends and associates, I highly recommend a new e-book written by my friend, the eminent historian Martin J. Sklar. It is called Letters on Obama (from the Left):The Global Revolution and the Obama Counter-Revolution. Sklar is sui generis. He calls himself a Marxist historian and a socialist. Yet the positions he takes — which he argues are those in defense of liberty — are positions regularly associated with conservatives and Republicans. You might consider this naiveté or an oxymoron. But any serious reader should take into consideration the insights he presents and the intellectual case that he musters...

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube, "October Revolution: This Time We Can Make It Work!"

Dems Tone Deaf on the Moral Crisis

From Star Parker, at WND:

Maybe Democrats have some slick salesmen, like Bill Clinton and our current president, who can sell you swampland and have you convinced that you’ve bought choice beachfront property.

But the omission of any mention of God and recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the Democratic Party platform, which were in it in 2008, and then the almost failed attempt to add them after the fact, showed the clear truth about the 2012 Democratic Party.

It took three boisterous floor votes to add these principles to the platform – and listening to the ayes and nays in the third vote, it is questionable that they actually got the two thirds that were needed.

The omission of these key principles from the Democratic platform was the party equivalent of what journalist Michael Kinsley calls a political gaffe – when a politician inadvertently says what he really believes.

Party operatives panicked when they realized that the platform, as initially drafted, showed today’s Democrats exactly for who they are – the home base for the nihilism, radical moral relativism and welfare statism that defines today’s far left.

But the Democrats are the party of the entertainment industry. They know how to create fiction and appeal to fantasies.

So the party of the radical left brands Republicans as extremists...

Hmm...

Nihilism? Check. Radical moral relativism? Check. Welfare state dependency? Check.

Looks like Parker's hit the nail on the head. The progs no doubt will be coming after her for speaking truth to power. She must be destroyed!

5 Ways Liberalism Destroys Virtue

Well, as always, I like to say "progressivism," but see John Hawkins, at Right Wing News:

The more completely a person, group, or organization embraces liberalism, the less virtuous it becomes. It’s almost like a mental sickness in that respect. People or groups who are lightly infected can soldier on without having it eat them alive. However, the deeper the sickness goes, the more it changes them. Eventually the liberal disease inside of people can grow so much that it warps their morals, their religious beliefs, and their way of thinking until they can no longer tell right and wrong. This destruction of virtue is a natural consequence of the fundamental beliefs that go along with liberalism.

And that reminds me: "The Left's Celebration of Nihilism," and some of those real life examples.