April 27, 2024

THIS IS THE WAY 1968 ENDS:

Even though all of this is a direct violation of these universities’ alleged codes of conduct, as well as numerous local, state, and federal laws, those who have the power to stop them have refused to do so. Many have endorsed the mob and more still are too terrified to take action against what they know to be evil.

They have good reason. They know quite well that if they were to take effective action, if they were to enforce their own codes, laws, and alleged principles, they would have to expel large sections of their student bodies. They would have to fire equally large numbers of faculty. They would have to cleanse their administrations of enablers and collaborators. They would have to break the regime. This, they are utterly unwilling to do.

The reason is 1968. Even if they know that the mob is immoral and indeed monstrous, those who should know better—who do know better—are still ‘68ers. They believe in the basic tenets of 1968ism: America is corrupted by racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and their attendant evils. Radical action is necessary to change this. There are no enemies to the left. The chickens come home to roost by any means necessary. Ideological deviationism cannot be tolerated. Ideological deviationism is whatever they happen to disapprove of at any given moment. If all else fails, exterminate all the brutes.

The result of all this is now clear: The ‘68ers and the radical left as a whole have collapsed into something very like Nazism. Whatever their protestations otherwise, the parallels are obvious: Theirs is a minority movement that wields the mob to impose its ideology on the majority. It sees the past as compromised and corrupt and will redeem it by any means necessary. It looks to a glorious future of tyrannical virtue. It takes over institutions of education, government, and culture and uses them to destroy those institutions and impose a totalitarian regime. It is perfectly willing to use horrific violence to achieve this. Its capacity to tolerate dissent is nil. And now, it has embraced racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Exterminate all the brutes.

All of this was probably inevitable. Radical movements always compound their radicalism and the world always resists them because that is the nature of the world. In the end, their compounded radicalism results in compounded and enraging failure. Indeed, despite their best efforts, the ‘68ers have succeeded in only partial conquest of elite institutions. A strong conservative movement parries them at every turn. They know that to impose a totalitarian regime on a nation with a 250-year history of political and social liberty is all but impossible. The only recourse is vengeance through apocalyptic violence. If they can’t have the country, no one else can either. They feel compelled towards a seppuku, a glorious suicide, a mass self-immolation, and they intend to take everyone else down with them.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN NOLTE: Biden Appears on the Howard Stern Show After Snubbing the New York Times:

Few things make me happier than this kind of blue-on-blue violence.

If that’s not already awesome enough, imagine the look on Times’ publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s face when he learned that Biden would sit down for a Howard Stern interview, the guy responsible for all this.

Better still, imagine the look on Sulzberger’s face when Biden made news on Stern’s Sirius XM show for finally agreeing to debate former President Trump (at least for now).

Whether it’s a Republican or Democrat doing it, I do not care. Nothing makes me happier than watching the elite corporate media, especially a fake news outlet like the serial liars at the New York Times, treated with contempt because that’s what they all deserve: scorn and contempt.

Whatever it takes to knock these outlets off their unearned pedestals is okay with me.

And the Times is in a real pickle. Normally, to pressure a president or politician to do its bidding, a news outlet will hammer and hammer the guy until the pressure makes him fold. The Times can no longer do that to a Democrat, especially Biden. The tail (subscribers) wag the dog (Sulzberger) over there. If the Times hits Biden too hard or begins to tell too many truths about him, their far-left subscribers will revolt and cancel subscriptions. This is a newspaper beholden to its extremist customers, which has killed its independence.

This means Biden can snub them without any fear of the Times doing something that might cause any serious political damage to his reelection campaign.

Still though, it’s worth asking: What Happened to Howard Stern?

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

A ROGER SCRUTON SAMPLER:

The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below:

1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

2. The hypocrisy of liberals: “Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.”

3. Scruton on when to ignore a writer: “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”

And: Beyond the Culture of Repudiation:

As a modern conservative, Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature—so central to philosophical liberalism—obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom”—doing whatever one wants—is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.

In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.

Getting beyond “the culture of repudiation” seems particularly timely this week.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: BLM activist who went to Capitol on Jan. 6 to ‘incite violence’ sentenced to 6 years in prison.

John Earle Sullivan who previously gave a speech at a Black Lives Matter rally in DC, has been sentenced to 6 years after being charged with felony obstruction of an official proceeding and civil disorder.

Prosecutors in the case said that Sullivan sought to “incite violence” and “foment anarchy” during the Capitol protests on J6, according to NBC News.

​​​​”I brought my megaphone to instigate sh*t,” he told jurors in the case. He previously gave a speech at a BLM rally in DC in 2020.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC CALLED AND SAID THAT IT’S TIME TO HIT THE BRAKES ON 2024:

Related:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALL THE REPUBLICANS HAVE TO DO IS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY CAN’T EVEN DO JUST THAT: Kristi Noem describes killing dog after bad hunting trip in new book.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) in a forthcoming book describes shooting a family dog after a hunting trip, according to a report in The Guardian, which obtained a copy of the book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.”

In the book, Noem, who has been discussed as a possible running mate for former President Trump, describes growing angry with the nearly 14-month-old “Cricket,” a wirehaired pointer, during a hunting trip.

Noem shot the dog after taking it on a pheasant hunt.

She writes that she had taken Cricket on the hunt hoping she would learn from older dogs, but that instead the younger dog ruined the hunt by “chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” per the Guardian.

On the way home, the dog escaped her truck and attacked a local family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another,” Noem wrote.

When Noem tried to grab the dog, she wrote that it whipped around to bite her. Noem said she wrote the family a check for their chickens and helped them dispose of the carcasses “littering the scene of the crime.”

“I hated that dog,” she wrote, adding that Cricket was untrainable, dangerous and worthless as a hunting dog.

“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”

After Jim Treacher’s classic “Obama ate a dog” discovery in 2012, and all of Biden’s woes with Commander, I’d assume that publication of this is battlefield prep by the Democrats to reduce the odds that Trump picks Noem as his veep nominee (“Kristi Noem puppy” is the first autocomplete upon entering her name into Firefox’s Google search bar and according to the search engine, “about 261,000 results” immediately pop up). But why on earth would Noem put this detail into her de rigueur election year book and give them the ammunition?

UPDATE: New campaign poster just dropped!

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S GOOD TO BE IN THE NOMENKLATURA: Arrogant DA refuses to stop for cops after being caught speeding because she ‘didn’t feel like it’ and ‘doesn’t really care.’

An arrogant New York District Attorney refused to stop for a cop after she was caught speeding because she ‘didn’t feel like it’ and was stressed from dealing with murders all day.

Monroe County DA Sandra Doorley had a tense interaction with a Webster police officer on Monday after the cop tried to pull her over for driving 55 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone.

Bodycam footage shows the heated exchange – in which Doorley said ‘I didn’t feel like stopping on Phillips Road at 5:30.’ The officer responded ‘That’s not your choice… you know that.’ Doorley quipped back ‘I made it my choice.’

According to Doorley, instead of pulling over at the time she decided to call Webster Police Chief Dennis Kohlmeier to say she was not a threat and would talk to the officer back at her house.

As the officer informs her that she made the situation a bigger deal than it needed to be by refusing to pull over, Doorley can be heard responding with ‘just write me the traffic ticket.’

The officer reminded her that it was no longer just a traffic ticket – and that not complying with an officer’s order to stop and pull over is an ‘arrestable offense.’

Doorley explained that she didn’t see the point in pulling over when she was so close to her driveway. ‘I thought it would be easier. I was wrong,’ she said.

As she refuses to step outside her garage, she hands the cop the phone to speak with the police chief telling him ‘leave me alone, this is ridiculous’.

The officer can be heard telling her: ‘What do you want us to do? Not do our job because it is you? You broke another law because of that. You should know better.’

Footage of Doorley reminding voters that there are two classes of people in America. Don’t try this if you see red lights in your rearview mirror:

I’m pretty sure that Mike Judge didn’t intend for Office Space to be a how-to guide for good government:

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE RISE OF “PRESCRIPTIVE RACISM.”

I tell it because I am now a mid-career college professor, and these types of bullies have not gone away. They are now academics and administrators at prestigious universities; they are now running HR departments; they are chief editors of prestigious journals. They are prizewinners for their work in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Once, I committed the sin of saying that knowledge of standard written English may be valuable to all students, regardless of skin color. For this, I endured vitriol. Because standard English came from England and was used by imperialists and slaveholders, I was told, it was inherently racist to teach it to nonwhites. On a now-defunct academic listserv, I was accused of white supremacy, of being unconcerned with how such thoughts, coming from my Black body, were doing harm to other Black people.

These academics would deride me to each other while ignoring my explanations and clarifications. Many who did not participate in these online degradation ceremonies cheered on those who did. For wanting to teach standard English, and for wanting to have a real conversation about its efficacy in American life, I was deemed a pariah.
It was remarkably reminiscent of the bullying I experienced while growing up.

Oh, they were bullied in their youth, too, they’re just savoring the opportunity to turn it around. Plus:

To be clear, I was not being denigrated for simply having a particular outlook; my transgression was having that outlook while Black.

This story illustrates a distinct kind of racism that goes unacknowledged in its particularity. I am describing a kind of racism that more easily masquerades as magnanimity, empathy, and righteousness. I am describing a kind of racism that, often, is unwittingly embraced by its very targets. I am describing “prescriptive racism.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

YEP, THE ORIGINAL WOKE:

Always works out the same unless it’s stopped.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds