I Used to Think Gun Control Was the Answer

A great, great piece, from Leah Libresco, at the Washington Post:

This is a must-read. Stop simply shouting Australia! and update your knowledge. https://t.co/dwOINpeMJf

— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) October 3, 2017

Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock Was Gambler, Investor, and Mass Murderer

This was in yesterday's paper, so it's probably a little dated, but interesting nevertheless.

At LAT, "The mystery of Stephen Paddock — gambler, real estate investor, mass killer":

He was 64 years old and, to those who knew him, showed no signs of mental illness, extreme political views or an unhealthy interest in guns. He liked to gamble, and had bounced around over the years, living in Southern California, Texas and Nevada. But he seemed to have plenty of money, and had held steady jobs as a mail carrier, accountant, auditor and apartment manager.

Stephen Paddock’s last stop was here, in Mesquite, Nev., a modest desert oasis 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, where he lived in a retirement community with his female partner and kept a low profile, conversing little and maintaining no Facebook or Twitter accounts.

In an era when social media invites full-throated expression of even the most minor annoyance, Paddock gave away no hint of whatever it was that drove him to commit mass murder on the Las Vegas Strip, killing 59 people in an assault on a country music festival late Sunday night.

“We are completely dumbfounded,” said a younger brother, Eric Paddock, who broke into tears in front of his suburban Orlando, Fla., home. “We can’t understand what happened.”

“He was always normal,” said Donald Judy, a former next-door neighbor who said he was struggling to reconcile the friendly conversations about real estate and family with carnage carried out from a hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

Almost every week, Paddock and his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, would go to Peggy Sue’s bar and diner in Mesquite, where they would have a few drinks and she would sing karaoke, other patrons and the bartender said.

“She really could sing – great set of pipes,” Bob Hemley said. “Him? He didn’t affect me. Didn’t stand out.”

Everyone seated at the U-shaped bar Monday evening remembered Danley in particular. Bartender Monique Ortega said that when she learned Paddock was the shooter, she called her boss immediately.

“Now [that] I know that it was him, he seemed kind of creepy,” she said.

Paddock, described by the local sheriff as a “lone wolf” attacker, killed himself inside the luxury suite at the Mandalay as SWAT officers closed in. On Monday, authorities searched his light-orange, single-story stucco house in Mesquite and a second home in northern Nevada and questioned relatives and associates but acknowledged that they had uncovered no explanation yet.

Paddock gambled frequently, and two law enforcement sources said he had made chip purchases in Nevada casinos in the last year that were in excess of $10,000 a day, the amount required to be reported to the government.

But relatives and acquaintances said he was a successful real estate investor who showed no sign of financial problems.

Asked if authorities had a working motive at a news conference Monday afternoon, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo replied, “No, we don’t.”

Investigators have all but dismissed a claim by Islamic State that Paddock was a recent convert to Islam acting at the group’s direction. Law enforcement authorities seized computer hard drives from Paddocks’ Mesquite home and are examining dozens of weapons taken from the hotel suite and the home along with explosive material found in his vehicle and residence.

U.S. Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.), who received a briefing from the multiagency anti-terrorism center, said no new clues have emerged so far.

“Law enforcement were looking through his computer. They couldn’t find a motive. As of a couple of hours ago, there was no motive. That’s all we know,” he said late Monday afternoon.

Before Monday, Paddock had been a nonentity to local police. "We didn't have prior run-ins with him, we didn't have any traffic stops, we didn't have any arrests of any kind," Mesquite Police Officer Quinn Averett said. “It’s a newer home, a newer subdivision, a nice clean home, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Agents hope they may learn more from Danley, 62. Police were initially searching for her in Nevada as a person of interest in the shooting, but later learned she was out of the country.

Lombardo said she was currently in Tokyo, and investigators are arranging an interview.

Paddock grew up in Arizona, the son of a notorious bank robber. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, who went by the aliases “Chromedome” and “Big Daddy,” robbed a bank in Tucson in 1960, when Stephen was 7 years old.

When authorities cornered the elder Paddock in Las Vegas, he attempted to run down an FBI agent with his car, according to press clippings. He escaped from federal prison in Texas, where he was serving a 20-year sentence, on New Year’s Eve 1968. Wanted posters described him as “psychotic,” “armed and very dangerous,” and an avid bridge player and gambler. He was removed from the list in 1977, according to the FBI website.

He was captured the following year in Oregon and died in 1998...

More.

Laura Ingraham: 'It could be something as simple as something inside of him flipped...'

I've been thinking the same thing myself. So far, authorities have absolutely no motive. Not much is known, really, despite the media reporting. The girlfriend's supposed to be landing tonight. I suspect she knows a lot more than folks have let on. So far the tally is 43 guns located, between those at Mandalay Bay and the shooter's home. And a lot of planning --- a whole lot, including the shooter setting up video surveillance cameras outside the hotel room on some kind of food cart, etc. --- went into this massacre. We're still short on answers.

At Fox News:

Ellie Goulding in Red Turtleneck

She's so sweet.

At Taxi Driver, "Ellie Goulding Pokies in Red Turtleneck."

2018 Honda Accord

This is something else, at Instapundit, "2018 Honda Accord First Drive: Feels like home again."

I'm impressed. I'm driving a 2002 Honda Odyssey, which I love, although the van's worn out. I'm looking into a Dodge Challenger V6 at this point, mostly because it's a fast muscle car within my budget. But the wife needs a new car in about a year or so, and perhaps I can convince her to get the new Accord. It's a beauty.

PHOTO: Stephen Paddock Dead of Self-Inflicted Gunshot (GRAPHIC)

This is the allegedly viral photo of the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, at Alex Jones' Twitter feed, "Photo of reported Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock."

It looks like the real thing to me, especially after seeing the photos of Paddock's room at Mandalay, at the Daily Star, via Paul Joseph Watson, "Photos emerge of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s body….and there is a NOTE: PHOTOS have leaked online of the dead body of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock – and he appears to have left a note."

And see Jacqui Henrich at Boston 25 News:

EXCLUSIVE: photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows gun, ammo, hammer, bipod, optics @boston25 pic.twitter.com/4B2iRhquq5

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017

EXCLUSIVE: second photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows another weapon used in worst mass shooting in modern history pic.twitter.com/gD5IHS7Mk2

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017

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BONUS: Dana Loesch, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America.

Leftists Want 'No Truce with the Second Amendment'

Leftist hatred is out in massive force.

Here's the slimeball Adam Gopnick, at the far-left hate-site the New Yorker, "In the Wake of the Las Vegas Shooting, There Can Be No Truce with the Second Amendment":

After the Las Vegas shooting, there can be no truce with the Second Amendment. https://t.co/FfQHXIt4vb

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) October 2, 2017

So far, all signs are that it was just a guy—just one more American killer who got his hands on some collection of weapons designed for the sole purpose of killing people, and who then killed people. We know that if it was a Muslim with a foreign name, we would be in full panic mode and all we would be hearing about is the ever-greater dangers of terrorism. Indeed, the killings in France, on Sunday, which were surely terrorism, have already begun to attract that kind of attention from the right wing here. But when it happens here, what we’re told by the entire power structure of American life—both houses of Congress, the White House, and now the Supreme Court, locked and loaded to sustain the absurd and radical pro-gun ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller—is that there is nothing at all to be done, save to pray.

The facts remain facts. Gun control acts on gun violence the way antibiotics act on infections—imperfectly but with massive efficacy. Yet, even with that knowledge, some of us, in our innocence, proposed a sort of truce about Second Amendment issues in the face of the ongoing national emergency—the Trump Presidency—in which it seemed essential to make common cause, even with those who have the strange American fixation on the right to own military-style firearms. They don’t have a reason for this fixation—no reason can be found. There’s no argument for it—such weapons are useless in sport, except for the sport of using them; they play no role in hunting, or not hunting anything except helpless people; and they protect no one from a tyrannical government, since the tyrannical government, if it would ever come to that, is hardly in need of small-arms fire to assert its will. Absent an argument for it, they merely have a fixation about it, but it remains practically religious in its intensity. Between the consolidated power of the pro-gun right, and the truth that gun control has slipped down the agenda of even anti-violence liberals, this means that the only American response to regular mass gun killings will be a shrug and faked sympathy. It is hard to know how to stay too far ahead of despair.

This is all lies.

In fact there's ample argument for it, most important being that it's your right to keep and bear arms, and no one should decide how much firepower you need than yourself. No one should decide how many rounds you need, what caliber, and for what purpose. The Second Amendment leaves you in control, not the radical leftists, who'll leave guns in the hands of the state. Fuck Adam Gopnick and the goat he rode in on.

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The Left and the Las Vegas Mandalay Massacre: Blood on the Strip

A really powerful editorial, at National Review, "Blood on the Strip":

It may be the case that the killer in Las Vegas acquired his weapons legally. It may be the case that he acquired them on the black market, and it may be the case that he was able to modify legal semiautomatic weapons. But there are no obvious public-policy prescriptions to be had from any of those scenarios.

There were, so far as current reports can show, no obvious red flags in this case. That is unusual. One of the maddening things about violence in the United States is that so much of it is, if not exactly preventable, then at least predictable: The majority of murders in New York City, and most major American cities, are committed by men with prior criminal histories, often for violent crimes and not infrequently for weapons violations. We have straw-buyer laws on the books, but these go routinely unenforced, with federal prosecutors unwilling to invest resources in putting away low-level criminals — or their mothers or girlfriends — on relatively minor weapons charges. In several high-profile mass shootings, the killers were known to law-enforcement and mental-health authorities long before they committed their crimes.

The usual ghouls who deliver gun-control speeches from atop the corpses in these cases put themselves in a funny position: They insist that they do not want widespread firearms seizures or to revoke Americans’ basic constitutional rights, and then they offer what they insist are “commonsensical” gun-control measures that would do nothing to prevent the crimes that command our attention.

The sobering fact is that mass murders have become an ordinary part of our cultural landscape. There are people who, in the depths of some ineffable despair or rage, desire to exit the world in a hail of bullets and a flood of blood. Some of them are clearly mentally ill, some of them have half-formed political notions — and some of them just want to kill a great many people before taking their own lives. If there were some public-policy innovation consistent with the principles of our constitutional order that would prevent this, we’d support it. But there isn’t one. We are not going to convert our country into a police state — and free, open, liberal societies are vulnerable to acts of mass violence, not only in the United States but in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries, including those with stricter gun-control laws. Those Kalashnikov rifles that were used in the Charlie Hebdo massacre are not legal in France.

So, do nothing?

No. There are many things that could and should be done. The vast majority of murders in the United States are not spectacular crimes on the Las Vegas model, but ordinary street crimes in places such as Chicago and Cleveland. We can and should do more to prevent those, both through enforcing existing weapons laws — including cracking down on straw buyers and handing down stiffer sentences for violent gun crimes short of homicide — and through improving our national practices when it comes to parole and probation, mental health and addiction, and local policing. Would that prevent a Las Vegas–style massacre? No, but it might have an effect on the 99 percent of murders that happen every day in a less dramatic fashion. And there are broader cultural issues — for instance, the absence of fathers from so many homes — that are mighty contributors to our national crime scene.

As for Las Vegas: As it stands, the facts do not argue for any particular policy reforms, and while we will withhold judgment until more is known, we should all be open to the possibility that not every crime demands a new law, and that not every ill in a large and complex society such as ours can be solved through public policy. Our friends on the left like to mock those who offer prayers for the victims and survivors of these horrific events, as though there were no Power above politics. We offer our prayers for souls of the lost and for the comfort of the living — and for the prudence and efficacy of those charged with the human response to these inhuman acts.

RTWT.

CBS Vice President Hayley Geftman-Gold Cheered Death of 'Republican Gun-Toters' at Las Vegas Mandalay Massacre

At the Conservative Treehouse, "CBS Senior Vice President Hayley Geftman-Gold Fired for Callous Statement on #LasVegas #Route91 Massacre":

@CBS Are you going to allow your senior counsel to say this?
Hayley Geftman-Gold needs to be terminated, today. pic.twitter.com/7BDm5vm0It

— PrestonGun (@PrestonGun) October 2, 2017

Think in terms or politics and society – the fear behind liberalism is the fear that someone might withhold things (opportunities, money, whatever) from me, fear that if you live your life in a way I dislike that it might affect my life, fear that if you get that job, there will be nothing left for me.

Fear that if you make tons of money, it’s means there’s less money out there for me. So people who believe in liberal ideologies seek control as a means of trying to create guarantees and safeguards against those circumstances they fear.

Modern liberals try to control the world and people to enable their comfort and happiness. Which, as we know, is an endless quest. Trying to control others does nothing in the way of making oneself happy. By extension, voting in this mindset so that government can try to control others will also – shocking – not lead to a happier, more comfortable life.

The conservative (and moderate, independent, but for the sake of expediency, the conservative), on the other hand, relies on himself to meet his own needs. And the trade off of being free to live his life as he wishes is also understanding that he has to make peace with how you live yours.

By extension, aware that he wants to be able to hold onto this liberty and freedom forever, the conservative votes accordingly, so that everyone can remain free and in charge of his or her own life.

But here’s the crucial difference, perhaps, particularly where misery on the left stems: The conservative does not worry, so to speak, about you. The conservative knows that you were born with the same access to self-love, self-empowerment, self-determination and self-reliance that we all were, no matter the circumstances into which you were born. (Think about the millions of people this country has allowed to crawl up from poverty into prosperity – the conservative KNOWS this is possible.) And the conservative believes that if you want prosperity, or a good job, or a good education, you can make it happen – but you have to work hard.

The conservative hopes and intends that the free markets bring you all of the affordable and positive opportunities and resources that you need. The conservative also knows that on the other side of that hard work is great reward – material and, more importantly, emotional, spiritual and mental.

The conservative understands that not only is it a waste of time to try to control you, it’s actually impossible. Humans were born to be free. And if we put a roadblock in front of you, you’ll find another way around it. So we see attempts at control as a waste of resources, energy and time at best, and at worst, creating detrimental results that serve to hinder people’s upward mobility or teach dependence. We see much more efficiency, as well as endless opportunity, in leaving you to your own devices. And we want the same in return.

This is where the media and democrats inappropriately disparage MAGA republicans as heartless. The conservative believes that there is one and one path only to sustainable success and independence – and that is self-empowerment. All other avenues – welfare, affirmative action, housing loans you can’t actually afford – ultimately risk doing a disservice to people as they teach dependence on special circumstances, the govt, or arbitrary assistance (that can disappear tomorrow). And the real danger – they will ALWAYS backfire, and leave the recipient in equally or more dire circumstances. Any false improvement will always expire.

The conservative believes in abundance. The liberal believes in scarcity.

The conservative believes man is born free and will be who he is, no matter what arbitrary limitations or rules are put on him. The liberal believes man is perfectible, and by extension, believes a society at large is perfectible, and command and control is justified in the quest to a “perfect” utopian society. (Sounds familiar!)

The conservative tends to be more faithful – and not necessarily in God, but in the ability of the individual to find great strength in himself (or from his God) to get what he needs and to be successful. Therefore the conservative has an outlet for his fear and disappointment – trust and faith in something bigger.

The liberal believes the system must be perfected in order to enable success. Therefore disappointment is channeled as anger and blame at the system. Voids are left to be filled by faith in the govt, which they surely then want to come in and “fix” things.

And therein lies the roots of love and fear respectively.

For the conservative, when life presents great struggles, he knows he has the power to surmount them. Happiness stems from internal strength and perseverance. For the liberal, when life presents great struggles, the system failed, therefore they were at the mercy of a faulty system, and they believe that only when the system is fixed can their life improve. Happiness is built on systemic contingencies, which they will then seek to control or expect someone else to.

One blames himself. The other blames anyone and everyone but himself.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I'm about 100 pages into Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and it's really good. I rarely use the cliché "impossible to put down," but it's not like I wanna sample multiple books at one time to break up the monotony, which is what I do most of the time when I'm reading: I like to multi-task my books. But I've been straight on Blood Meridian since yesterday, and I'm recommending it heartily. McCarthy's prose style is astonishing. Some sentences are paragraph length, and blood, guts, spit, flies buzzing, snot spurting, guns blazing, buzzards buzzing make up some of the intense scenes of death and decay (like an apocalypse narratives sometimes and frankly bizarre).

In any case, I also picked up a brand new copy of All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, Book 1). I'm keeping these books on my bookshelf when I've finished them. A lot of the other books I've donated or given to my students when I've finished. I'm gonna hang on to McCarthy's though. He's quite a specialist. I'm glad I started in on his stuff.

Jennifer Delacruz's Sunny Sunday Forecast

From last night, at ABC 10 News San Diego, the lovely Ms. Jennifer.

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No, Trump Didn't Botch the Puerto Rico Crisis

It's all politics. Here's the idiot Matthew Yglesias, at Vox, via Memeorandum, "Puerto Rico is all our worst fears about Trump coming real."

Leftists have been out in massive force attacking the administration's leadership and response, but it's all a bunch of bull.

Here's Tobin Harshaw, at Bloomberg, "A Q&A with former Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix on smart preparations the White House and Pentagon made for the looming storm":

Tobin Harshaw: Jerry, before we get to the immediate issue of Puerto Rico, why don't you give us a brief rundown of your own experience in the Navy with disaster relief.

Jerry Hendrix: Like virtually every sailor of the past century, going back to Theodore Roosevelt’s dispatch of the Great White Fleet to respond to a massive earthquake on the island of Sicily, I had several exposures to humanitarian assistance/disaster relief operations during my career. Perhaps the most instructive was when I served with Tactical Air Control Squadron 11 from 2005 to 2008. During that tour, the squadron provided detachments in response to earthquakes and volcano eruptions, including directing air operations in Kashmir following a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The devastation made the roads largely impassable to wheeled vehicles and at that altitude the air is so thin that helicopter cannot lift as many supplies with each flight.

Most of the time, our people operated from light amphibious carriers. But we also supplied detachments to the West Coast-based hospital ship USNS Mercy when she got underway in support of the planned Pacific Partnership summer exercise.

TH: So, it seems like everybody has blasted Trump administration's response to the Puerto Rico crisis. Has that criticism been fair?

JH: No, I don’t think so. First of all, there was a fair amount of anticipatory action that is not being recognized. Amphibious ships, including the light amphibious carriers Kearsarge and Wasp and the amphibious landing ship dock Oak Hill were at sea and dispatched to Puerto Rico ahead of the hurricane’s impact.

These are large ships that have large flight decks to land and dispatch heavy-lift CH-53 helicopters to and from disaster sites. They also have big well-decks -- exposed surfaces that are lower than the fore and aft of the ship -- from which large landing craft can be dispatched to shore carrying over 150 tons of water, food and other supplies on each trip. These are actually the ideal platforms for relief operations owing to their range of assets. The ships, due to their designs to support Marine amphibious landings in war zones, also have hospitals onboard to provide medical treatment on a large scale. That these ships were in the area should be viewed as a huge positive for the administration and the Department of Defense.

TH: On the flip side, others say that sending the hospital ship Comfortwas unnecessary -- purely symbolic and possibly counterproductive -- given that the number of hospital beds was not the problem. What's your opinion?

JH: Comfort can add to the solution, but her lack of well-decks and large boats as well as her limited support of helicopter operations means that she has to go alongside a pier to be effective. In the immediate aftermath of a huge storm, pulling into a port that has not been surveyed for underwater obstacles like trees or cables or other refuse is an invitation to either put a hole your ship or foul your propellers or rudders.

That being said, there was a broad misunderstanding of the Comfort’s mission. She is not an “emergency response ship” but rather a hospital ship. She was built to accompany a large military force into a war zone as part of a buildup over time of capabilities to respond to wartime injuries. She is manned by military and civilian mariners as well as active and reserve medical personnel. It takes time to both man and equip her for sea. Given that there was no certainty where the hurricane would hit, it doesn’t make sense to have readied her prior to its impact.

It is revelatory of where the U.S. group mind is now that when the American public thinks about ships like the Comfort and Mercy, they automatically think of them as part of a civilian emergency response force rather than quietly considering the type of potential conflict that would require a hospital ship with 1,000 beds. I can tell you that when I think of those ships, I internally shudder at the thought of the type of conflict they were intended to support.

TH: Your plaudits toward the White House on all this are surprising to say the least. But where does the response still need to improve?

JH: One area in which the Trump administration could possibly lend additional assistance would be looking at a more robust activation of its assets in the Defense Department's Transportation Command to include more heavy-lift and cargo aircraft, as well as Maritime Administration shipping to move the logistics-heavy large infrastructure items on the ocean. Everything from bulldozers to transformers needs to come by ships, and it's been decades since it was really flexed to its full capacity. This would have the dual purpose of revealing any significant weaknesses in the Transportation Command assets and readiness should we need it in a military emergency down the road.

TH: Many critics feel that Florida and Houston had much better preparation before their storms hit this month. What could have been done better in advance in Puerto Rico, and what can be done in the rebuilding process to help minimize damage next time around?

JH: Puerto Rico is an island that suffers from its position in the middle of the Caribbean and its physical separation from the U.S. Its roads were in disrepair and its electrical grid was antiquated prior to the hurricane. The island has also suffered for years from ineffective local government and rising local territorial debt.

The Navy used to operate a large Navy base there, Naval Station Roosevelt Roads. I spent six months on the island in 1993, but when the island’s population protested the presence of the training range at nearby Vieques Island, the Navy shuttered the base, taking $300 million a year out of the Puerto Rican economy. I have no doubt that the federal government will be taking a hard look at large infrastructure investments and I hope that local governments look at building and general construction codes to make future buildings more hurricane survivable.

TH: What has been the most impressive crisis response/disaster relief operation undertaken by the Pentagon in recent decades? The tidal wave and nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan? The Indian Ocean typhoon?

JH: Without a doubt the Joint Force response to the 2004-05 earthquake and tsunami was the most massive and well-executed relief operation of my professional career. Virtually the entire U.S. Seventh Fleet under the leadership of Vice Admiral Doug Crowder responded with multiple carrier and amphibious strike groups. Water, food, medicine and other supplies flowed to and from disaster sites all over a vast geographical region. Crews worked for weeks on end to bring aid to people miles from the shoreline. The amount of coordination required was on the scale of a small war, and yet the supplies flowed both efficiently and effectively to where they were needed most.

TH:  What other sorts of "soft power" can the Navy and other branches put an emphasis on going beyond reacting to disasters? Things like building roads and health facilities in the developing world?

JH: Exercises like the Pacific Partnership are superb for building good will. Navy SeaBees help to build school buildings and other administrative facilities with local tribal leaders. Wells are dug to provide fresh water and medical teams provide basic measles-mumps-rubella and polio vaccines, greatly decreasing child mortality rates in remote regions. These type of operations provide long term benefits for the U.S. in regions where radical terrorism can easily take hold...

More.

David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 8: The Left in the Universities

Here's the book, at Amazon, David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 8: The Left in the Universities.

And at FrontPage Magazine, "Introduction to Volume 8 of the Black Book of the American Left":

The eighth volume of the series of my writings called The Black Book of the American Left is about one of the underappreciated tragedies of our times: the successful campaign of the left to subvert the curricula of collegiate institutions and transform entire academic departments and schools—including Schools of Education—into doctrinal training centers for their social and political causes. This transformation of the educational system in turn has underpinned the steady dismantling of America’s social contract, which has been the ongoing project of the left since the 1960s.

This is actually the sixth book I have written on the subject of the transformation and its destructive consequences.

In addition to whatever analytic contributions are made in these pages, they provide a compendium of anecdotal evidence about the manner in which progressive activists have taken control of liberal arts curricula and reverted them to their 19th-century origins as instruments of religious indoctrination. The new doctrines differ from their 19th-century predecessors in that they are political and secular, having been shaped by Marxism and its derivatives. These “progressive” doctrines, however, share with traditional religions the same impulse to redeem a fallen world and to suppress what they regard as hostile—therefore heretical—ideas in the name of human progress.

One can measure the current corruption of the academic profession through a summary observation about the views of academic historians that was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Historical Society. The summary appears in an article written by Jennifer Delton, a tenured history professor at Skidmore College—a top-tier liberal arts school. It describes a purported orthodoxy in historians’ views of Cold War anti-communism.

According to Delton, this historical consensus regards Cold War anti-communism as an irrational phenomenon and a species of political persecution. Equally as striking as this problematic characterization is Delton’s assumption that an orthodoxy about so controversial an issue can and should be a normal condition of academic scholarship. Here are her words: “However fiercely historians disagree about the merits of American communism [sic!], they almost universally agree that the post-World War II red scare signaled a rightward turn in American politics. The consensus is that an exaggerated, irrational fear of communism, bolstered by a few spectacular spy cases, created an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria that was exploited and fanned by conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. . . . We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell our students about post-World II anti-communism, also known as McCarthyism.” (emphasis added)

In other words, it is the professional opinion of this tenured professor, the editors of the Journal of the Historical Society and, apparently, academic historians generally that concern about a domestic communist threat during the Cold War was equivalent to “McCarthyism”—a witch-hunting mania about imaginary demons. This, according to Delton, is what academic historians “tell our students,” and not as mere opinion but as a historical consensus, and thus an academic fact. This consensus exists, apparently, in the face of easily established, indisputable facts that refute it: the fact that McCarthy was censured by an anti-communist Senate, including senators who sat on his committee; the fact that he was opposed by an anti-communist president, Dwight Eisenhower, and by anti-communist liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote one of the seminal anti-communist books of the period, The Vital Center; or the proven fact that the federal government had been penetrated by communist agents at the time, and at the highest levels.

It goes without saying that no conservative scholar could agree with the conclusion of Professor Delton and her colleagues, and thus no conservative scholar could be readily regarded by the consensus she describes as a reasonable member of her profession.

To ideologues like Delton, the contents of this volume will seem an extreme view of what has taken place in American liberal arts colleges and graduate institutions. But to recognize the intellectual corruption of the contemporary academy is hardly what is extreme; what is extreme is the politicized state of academic discourse, the confusion of scholarship with propaganda, and therefore the widespread debasement of the academic enterprise. What is extreme is the general comfort level of the academic community with this travesty of scholarship and, worse, with the practice of indoctrinating students in the classroom.

The ramifications of this reversion to doctrinal instruction and pre-scientific standards of scholarship have been destructive not only to higher education but to society at large. Since collegiate institutions are the training grounds for all professions, this corruption has adversely affected a widespread array of policies, both foreign and domestic; it has warped cultural attitudes towards race and gender (see volumes 5 and 6 in this series); and it has intruded political biases into such civically crucial professions as the law, journalism and secondary school education.

The contents of this volume were immediately inspired by a campaign I conducted to counter these trends and promote a restoration of the academic values associated with the modern research university, in particular the identification of scientific standards of inquiry with academic professionalism. The goal of the campaign, which lasted for roughly seven years and ultimately failed, could also be viewed as an attempt to restore a professional standard appropriate to education in a democratic society—that teachers should teach students how to think and not tell them what to think. This standard was established in a famous “Declaration on the Principles of Academic Tenure and Academic Freedom” issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, and until recently verbally embraced by all reputable academic institutions.

The campaign I organized to defend those principles was ferociously opposed by the tenured left, most strikingly by the very organization that had devised the original standard: the American Association of University Professors, whose governance had fallen into radical hands. Although my campaign failed, it revealed the extent of the AAUP’s defection from its original purposes and its determination to protect a new professorial “right”—the “right” of faculty to indoctrinate their students. This was made indisputably clear in the AAUP’s opposition to a crucial passage of the Declaration that I regularly cited in my campaign, and which had been adopted verbatim by Penn State University as its academic freedom policy. There can be no better introduction to the present volume than to recount the fate of this policy at the hands of the AAUP and its academic agents.

Known as HR 64, the Penn State policy read: “It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials, which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.”

The AAUP’s attack on this specific policy was launched in the winter of 2010, just after events in Pennsylvania convinced me of the futility of my reform efforts. Legislative hearings to inquire into the state of academic freedom in Pennsylvania—hearings in which I played a seminal role—were effectively subverted by the AAUP and the teacher unions, while the Republican Party and conservative groups that should have supported the reform effort sat on the sidelines. Without their active involvement there was little more that I could do.

The AAUP’s attack was led by its leftist president, Cary Nelson, whose book No University Is an Island, was published that December. In his book Nelson assaulted me personally and followed his assault with an attack on the Penn State policy I had championed. Nelson described the Penn State policy on academic freedom as an attempt to restrict faculty speech and curtail academic freedom. This was the same Orwellian position the AAUP had advanced throughout the controversy; but it was the first time anyone had made that argument specifically against the Penn State policy I had praised. Nelson and I had debated each other on several occasions, so he was thoroughly familiar with my campaign and the fact that I had made HR 64 and the 1915 Declaration its cornerstones. His attack also targeted the “Academic Bill of Rights” I had attempted to persuade universities to adopt, which was an attempt to codify the principles of the 1915 Declaration. Nelson did not merely criticize the Penn State policy but condemned it as “especially bad” and an example of “McCarthy era rhetoric.” His objection to the policy was that it denied professors the right to advance their political agendas in the classroom.

According to Nelson: “Like Horowitz, Penn State failed at the time to conceptualize the sense in which all teaching and research is fundamentally and deeply political.” This was a candid admission of the anti-academic agendas of both Nelson and the AAUP. To them, “academic freedom” meant a license for professors to use their classrooms as political platforms to indoctrinate their students.

Political agendas aside, Nelson’s smear of the Penn State academic freedom policy and my efforts made no logical sense. Far from seeking to suppress dissenting ideas, the 1915 Declaration, the Penn State policy and my Academic Bill of Rights stipulated that faculty were obligated to present conflicting opinions on controversial matters in a fair-minded manner. In other words, they were statements in behalf of intellectual diversity. Neither document denied professors the right to express their views, or to freely draw conclusions from their research. They did require them to observe a professional standard in the classroom; in particular, to be mindful that students were in the process of forming their opinions and should be allowed to do so. It was only in this sense that it restricted professors’ “freedom of speech”—specifically the  “right” to use their classrooms for political attitudinizing. But this was no more restrictive than the codes governing doctors or lawyers in their professional settings. And it was in accord with the views of the leading academic authority on academic freedom: Robert C. Post, dean of the Yale Law School.

In dismissing Penn State’s policy, Nelson suggested that the AAUP had “more nuanced” methods of determining such matters than the Penn State officials, and that “what Penn State ended up with is nothing less than thought control.” The absurdity of this was transparent. To require professors to present divergent views to their students, and to do so in a fair-minded manner, was hardly “thought control.”

Shortly after Nelson’s book appeared, the Faculty Senate at Penn State went into action to implement his agenda, voting to formally eviscerate policy HR 64 and rewrite it to permit the abuses it was designed to prevent. Specifically, the Penn State Faculty Senate removed the following sentence: “It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects.” The Senate then rewrote the policy, restricting professorial fairness to those controversial viewpoints that were part of the discourse of the academic professions—professions that had effectively purged themselves of non-leftist viewpoints. The revised version read: “Faculty members are expected to present information fairly, and to set forth justly, divergent opinions that arise out of scholarly methodology and professionalism.” (emphasis added) In other words, practically speaking, only the divergent opinions of left-wing academics need be presented fairly and justly.

Other opinions—notably conservative opinions—which were not part of existing “scholarly methodology and professionalism,” would not be covered by this fairness requirement. The instigator of these changes, Cary Nelson, applauded the revision in a statement that made no sense at all: “Penn State had one of the most restrictive and troubling policies limiting intellectual freedom in the classroom that I know of. It undermined the normal human capacity to make comparisons and contrasts between different fields and between different cultures and historical periods.”

Incoherent as this explanation was, Nelson had successfully engineered a policy that formally permitted professors to indoctrinate their students. This remains the policy of the AAUP and faculty throughout the liberal arts academy today. In short, I had to face the reality that my seven year campaign to restore the concept of academic freedom as defined by the AAUP in its 1915 Declaration had led to the formal repudiation of its principles by the same organization.

Part I of the present volume is an essay selected because it frames the subject, a practice I have adopted in previous volumes. It is an edited version of the introduction to The Professors, a book I wrote in 2005 about the unprofessional classroom attitudes of over 100 prominent professors. In the controversy generated by the book, the substance of this introduction was completely ignored. Not a single response from my academic opponents addressed the substantive critiques contained in its text.

Part II recounts my experiences on college campuses in the five years preceding the creation of the Academic Bill of Rights, along with my observations regarding the decline of academic discourse under pressures from the academic left.

Part III describes my campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights. This document was a codification of the principles set forth in the 1915 Declaration. It was inspired by the idea that if professors have an obligation to act professionally in the classroom, then students have a right to expect a professional instruction; in particular, to hear fair-minded presentations of divergent views on controversial issues, along with the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

Part IV continues the account of the campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights and describes the attacks against it by the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and faculty senates like the one at Penn State.

Part V recounts the controversies surrounding two of the books I wrote, The Professors and Indoctrination U., and more of my failed attempts to persuade the academic community of their obligation to present contested issues as controversial and to observe a professional decorum in the classroom.

I have concluded the text with an epilogue containing a proposal for reforming universities and re-establishing standards of instruction in the classroom. I wrote this proposal in 2010, before the AAUP eviscerated the Penn State academic freedom policy. I did not publish it then because I knew that any proposal associated with me would be dead in the water because of the war the AAUP had declared on all my efforts, however modest and reasonable. I publish it now because I have given up any hope that universities can institute such a reform. The faculty opposition is too devious and too strong; and even more importantly there is no conservative will to see such reforms enacted. Therefore there seems to be no harm in publishing the document now, and it does serve to clarify my goals in undertaking my campaign.

Book Sale at Yorba Linda Public Library

From yesterday, at the Yorba Linda Library.

So fun. A great selection of books! And inexpensive --- one dollar for a book, any style, soft-cover or hard-bound. (I prefer soft-cover paperback, but I'll read a hard-back book if I find one I want for a dollar, heh.) As noted, I picked up an old copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye. It was like a blast from the past finding the book. I had the exact same paperback copy back in the day, heh.

The Rocky Horror Democrat Party: 'Erika Heidewald is a German-born lesbian feminist and Democrat Party activist who hates capitalism, Christianity and white males, not necessarily in that order...'

From the irrepressible Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "Feminism 2017: @Rose_Resistance — Communist Lesbians Against America":

Erika Heidewald is a German-born lesbian feminist and Democrat Party activist who hates capitalism, Christianity and white males, not necessarily in that order. Before last year’s election, Ms. Heidewald was busy with her immigrant girlfriend Frida on YouTube promoting homosexuality and also, of course, campaigning for Hillary Clinton.

Like other Democrats who have rejected democracy, Ms. Heidewald was inspired by Mrs. Clinton’s defeat to declare Donald Trump “Not My President,” and create a YouTube program “Resistance News Network.”

Ms. Heidewald denounces Republicans as “fascists” and, after the 2016 election, she created an organization called The Rose Resistance “to fight fascism and white supremacy” and “help protect the people most endangered by the Trump regime.” Ms. Heidewald claims to stand for “democracy” when, in fact, she advocates a one-party dictatorship by her rhetoric that delegitimizes Republicans. She seems to believe, and seeks to persuade others, that the 63 million Americans who voted to elect Donald Trump should have no right to be represented in government.

This rhetoric of “progressive” intolerance (reflecting the influence of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School) is the antithesis of democracy. It is therefore not surprising to see Ms. Eichenwald with an anti-Trump poster from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).

Those readers who recall my coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention will remember that the anti-police protesters in Cleveland waved RCP posters that declared “America Was Never Great.”

“There will be no peace unless there is justice,” Professor Cornell West said Tuesday in a speech to an anti-police rally here organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Speaking through a megaphone amid a crowd of protesters gathered at Public Square in downtown Cleveland, West invoked “the legacy of white supremacy in this country that goes back 400 years” to condemn police. West spoke in front of a giant RCP banner declaring, “Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution. STOP MURDER BY POLICE.” Activists with the RCP held aloft signs that read, “America Was NEVER Great! We Need to OVERTHROW This System!”

The RCP, which advocates the “overthrow” of the American “system,” is a Maoist cult founded by Bob Avakian. The RCP became notorious in the 1980s when it called for the assassination of Ronald Reagan. The RCP and its front group Refuse Fascism have recently made headlines by announcing nationwide protests to “end the Trump/Pence Regime” ...

Keep reading.

Conservative Student Hannah Scherlacher Targeted by Leftist Hate Group Southern Poverty Law Center (VIDEO)

At Fox News:

Professor Caroline Heldman Discusses Trump Administration's Response to Puerto Rico (VIDEO)

At KCAL 9 News Los Angeles: