I argued in my last post that we’re living through a period of “societal ataxia” in which “the left and right side of the body have entirely lost coordination.” Under those conditions, I said, “our ‘political’ chasm is a massive breach in social mechanisms.” To add to that: I’m extremely wary of “in the old days” arguments, and I tend to say that nothing is unprecedented.
Please stay in constant contact with your daughter.
Mine went off to UCD and by graduation was non-binary and fully ensconced in the Church of Woke. I regret not being more present during those years. Luckily blood is thicker than politics in our family. But I only want her happiness and Woke precludes her attaining it.
If you send your kid to a PC-Prog institution--most colleges--you've just abandoned them to the monsters.
Don't throw your good money into a pit of hatred and delusion. Give your kid choices--of schools that are grounded in reality. The kid may hate you for it, and you may even lose the kid for a few years. But some contact with reality will bring them around, and they'll thank you in a while.
Caution against over-emphasizing all this culture war material, though, because it can happen at the cost of recognizing real suffering. That earthquake in Myanmar a week ago killed at minimum 3 thousand people, but we hear much less about it than about, say, Hunter Biden's struggle to sell his art these days.
I would argue the culture war here at home is more important and has more impact on the day to day lives of Americans than giant tragedy elsewhere in the world. It is a tragedy that 3000 people died in Myanmar but if 3 million people died in Myanmar it would not appreciably impact the day to day life of the vast majority of Americans. However the culture war and its consequences impact almost every aspect of the day to day life of Americans.
We live on a planet of 8+ billion people, it’s time to quit acting like we can actually care about every tragedy that hits the planet or every person on it. It’s also time we prioritize our country and our communities over the global populace.
296 Americans die a day of overdoses, which means in eleven days more Americans will be dead than those who died in Myanmar so if it is the scale of human suffering that concerns you, American drug deaths are a far greater human tragedy than the earthquake was.
Yes. Thank you. I remember thinking about this in the 80's once I was old enough to realize there was a never ending cascade of tragedies that I was supposed to care deeply about.
The more you care about the tragedy far away (caring often not done for the right reasons) the less you begin to care about the little tragedy next door. How many people think, "Yeah, that family is struggling BUT THINK OF THE PEOPLE WHO DIED IN THE EARTHQUAKE!!!! THINK OF THEM!!!!".
Yeah, go ahead and think of them and pray for them. But how about taking a meal to the family....that would actually matter.
Claiming concern for them, over there has long been an excuse to ignore these, next door. The world has dealt with catastrophes since long before America was around to compound / solve all the problems.
I don't understand your point. Is it that all of us should for the next few weeks talk only about the earthquake in Myanmar? If I say I want to eat lunch an hour earlier than usual, is it my wife's job to inform me that over 3 thousand people have died in an earthquake in Myanmar and therefore when I eat lunch is of no consequence? Wow, and six people so far actually liked your comment. Amazing.
Of course he struggles to sell his art now. But I’d venture to guess that is due to it no longer being representational of services rendered or offered by the Biden enterprise. Cultural and political warfare being waged on Americans & America are similarly criminal, deceitful and deadly serious at their much larger scale. Understanding this is critical to the survival of the country and its people. Academia, lawyers/judiciary and media have always been crucial to the emergence of totalitarianism. Likewise have the cluster B and dark tetrad psychopathologies. Far better to face the realities of universal institutional capture and the ongoing covert war against us than let our attention and empathy be captured and directed suicidally, by psychological warfare operations
Academia quite naturally selects for cowardice and DEI etc. filter out any who are not willing to affirm their cultic allegiance and bondage. Land acknowledgments mean hatred of country and culture. Stating pronouns signifies obeisance to the scapegoat cult of elevated victimhood. It all tracks parallel to cluster B/dark tetrad psychopathologies. Dysfunctional family syndrome gone feral… These lock step, specious, and sophist authors of “all the same book” are the extremity of ivory Tower, intellectual cope, disembodied through existential fear. They are the victims and perpetrators of deadly self-defensive idealism. I find little consolation in the fact that these witch hunt mobs always wind up eating their own.
Reality bats last.
Meanwhile, we do well to speak the truth as that may lessen the entrancement and forestall atrocity.
Indeed. Luckily words aren't violence. They are only words; things we use to disagree with others. It is only the left that gets upset about such things.
Sigh. My alma mater, though it was light years less woke back in the late ‘70s. We used to pride ourselves on being Aggies, and not like the flakes at Berzerkely. Or worse yet, those Snodfarts.
When I read Jason Stanley and his ilk all I see is wish fulfillment and oppression envy—he is going to be a leader of the French Resistance, even if he has to conjure this from his imagination, and even if it disbanded in 1945.
Most of this is affluenza but it's also because before Trump these were pretty dull times for our campus radicals and "engaged intellectuals", no Soviet Revolution to support, no Chairman Mao to idolize, not even a Fidel or Che to toast at a banquet. How are you supposed to save the world with your theories, if the world seems to be running pretty well already?
The modern professoriate combines the obtuseness of the aristocrat, the fragile vanity of the starlet and the boundless entitlement of the rich teen who never leaves the house without Dad's credit card. They really believe deep in their souls that they're prophets with the divine right to rule and guide us, they are shocked and appalled if someone even mentions the idea of being held accountable to the taxpayers who subsidize their lush lives—Well, I never!—and most infuriating of all is when they're forced to encounter smelly peasants who think or vote differently. Fascism!
I'm sure in Jason Stanley's house he's in one room scribbling his feverish screeds while his kid is next door playing a videogame where he chooses a character, picks up a weapon and enjoys an evening fighting all the (virtual) bad guys. I wonder if they ever notice the similarities.
"How are you supposed to save the world with your theories, if the world seems to be running pretty well already?"
You could call that the "Gramsci Paradox", since that's the reason he and his generation of academic Marxists did what they did in the ways they did it:
The working classes rejected liberalism, progressivism, and Marxism wholesale. They were staunch traditionalists and materialists, and wanted honest pay, fair treatment, vacation and not being fired for getting pregnant, and some other basic stuff.
The rest is post-WW2 history: the people don't want what we're shilling, and don't know what's best for them so we have to change out the people and force-feed them, momma bird-style.
“Oppression Envy”: Clever Pseudonym, think you just coined the perfect term for the George Floyd worship, BLM vandalism and affluent Antifa children cosplaying as revolutionaries. I’m definitely going to borrow it.
These and other movements were created by intelligence operatives who understood the unrequited need for relevance and heroism among the “everyone gets a trophy” generation. If the actual “oppressed” are not feeling oppressed enough to rise up organically, just finance opportunities for the non-oppressed to strive for relevance and heroism in the name of the oppressed. Maybe today’s real intellectuals are not the mental midgets who write books regurgitating propaganda, but the invisible minds who perceived an organic crisis of purpose in millions of too-easy, too-affluent lives, and conjured up oppression by proxy as a way to to harness and weaponize the pent up craving for meaning. Perhaps the “intellectuals” who actually possess intelligence and insight nowadays have been swallowed up by the blob.
Yes, I think we need to be careful when focusing on these cosplaying people idiots without also thinking about how they and their particular obsessions came to be.
Lest I sound too conspiratorial, think back to the first wave of p.c. in universities, that started in the late 80s/90s when my husband was in grad school. It was the era of the impenetrable prose of Judith Butler, etc. But the widely mocked awfulness had a purpose: to drive anyone out of academia who was by some mishap actually interested in their subject, and not a true vanguard operative or an utterly craven piece of clay. The first sexual harassment accusations began at the same time for the same purpose. That's how the left cleared the field for their "march." DEI loyalty professions serve the same purpose today.
There is indeed intelligence behind how all this dumbness and insanity was crafted.
Academic postmodernists are of course terrible writers and terrible thinkers, they wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near an original thought, their entire output is a game of Mad Libs where you fill in the blanks with awkward jargon, and they are the opposite of scholars—they proceed from answer first then work backwards—but they are true masters of academic politics and in-fighting. Whisper campaigns, anonymous claims and petitions, cold shoulder, playing wounded victim etc all backed up by their superweapon, the bigotry accusation—this is their great passion and true specialty.
It's not a coincidence that their guru and lodestar is Foucault, who claimed that nothing existed but power—his acolytes are just as power mad.
France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise is a detailed look at what is never discussed. The French resistance was a nice story for the people who needed to build up a functioning French State and ally after the war, but the collaboration of France as a whole was minimized and quickly forgotten.
I am sickenby the easily available images of Big Brave Surrender Monkeys French men (sic) shaving the heads and humiliating French women after liberation.
I expect we have been there before in the 1790s and the 1900s when bored intellectuals railed against the pretend fascists and were blind to the real fascists they were busily incubating.
Yeah. I don't think most of the people who read these books Chris talks about are politically knowledgeable. I think for a lot of them the word "fascist" is only an epithet. They don't really know what it means. It is an "attack word".
I've got a Gibraltar sized chip on my shoulder about education. Did my undergrad and grad school at night in a 'foxhole' (that's hyperbolic, but I did do some reading with red-filtered light in a foxhole once).
Always have felt insecure for such a lackluster education--until we went to combat. My XO was a long-tab, short-tab (SF & Ranger), USMA graduate (Academy officers are our Elites, our betters) with an MBA--worked at a bank. Guy makes BOAT LOADS of money.
I was the S3 (operations officer), a mustang officer who chewed Copenhagen, cussed often, and was referred to as 'CPT Dude' by all the Soldiers of 10th MTN. (The Army was never able to change my 'Tsup bro, tsup dude, hey bro, hey dude' lingo...I call everyone bro or dude. 80s Cali language for sure. I also got my education out of a Cracker Jacks box.
I was super nervous when we deployed. I had never worked staff--and when it mattered the most, I had the most (arguably) critical staff job in the battalion. I was 'fired' as a company commander and made the three 2 weeks before we mobilized.
Long story short. I had hoped to be able to measure up to my pedigreed XO--8 months into the deployment, and he didn't know the difference between a few of our MI fields (HUMINT and CI). He wasn't bright. He wasn't creative. He wasn't insightful. He was an AI bot. He was an algorithm.
Almost every USMA graduate I know has TDS.
Now that I'm learning to build a house (we will build 4 tiny homes this quarter!!!), I just think our entire education system is in DIRE need of significant disruption. My contempt for these people is down into my mitochondria. I despise them. Part of me wants the 4th turning or some cataclysmic event to watch them suffer because they cannot change a lightbulb, but were great about telling us how to think.
Because I have no vested interest nor any historic allegiance to any university--I'd prefer to see 75% of them go bankrupt. I'd like to see K-12 school districts splinter into no more than 5000 students per district, with codified 75% of school board members are parents with children in the district. Once your kid graduates--you're out.
Unlike Chris, I hold the institutions and the people in disdain. But, then again, I'm, at the core, a Copenhagen chewing (finally did give that shit up 5 years ago), cussing, dirty, nasty, mustang...
"...codified 75% of school board members are parents with children in the district. Once your kid graduates--you're out."
Very good idea!
Here's another one: make it mandatory that all parents (rotating schedule) "do time" as janitors, cleaners, cafeteria staff, dishwashers, et c at the local school their kids attend.
Vandalism and such tends to take a nose-dive when it's your mom having to clean it up (to say nothing of the nosebleeds ensuing when someone objects to their mom having to clean up some other bozo's mess!).
I went to Montessori and so did my kids. It’s become an idealogical cesspool over the past 10 years, sadly, but there’s a job chart starting in pre-K. Nothing cures mess making and destruction quicker than being the person who has to clean it up.
I think school rooms need to be all grades, one room school houses.
Peer group cohort training is killing adult understanding of age limited capability. You can have as many as you want in a district, no more than 200 in a school. Also, children under 6 should be allowed INSIDE offices. Let moms have their kids with them all day, let people with no kids see kids and help out.
Interesting. I hadn't ever thought of that. I would also speed up the pace. The students shouldn't drown, but swallow water daily. We patronize people when we slow things to a crawl to the lowest common denominator.
I attended the Defense Language Institute, like taking a drink with a firehose. A lot spills from your mouth, but A LOT gets shoved all the way down to your toes.
When I was a younger man in the Army telling someone they were likely a 'single child' was a great insult. Spoiled, self-centered, narcissist was the meaning wrapped into one descriptive accusation. "You're a single child aren't you?"
I think you're onto something with this observation.
Jason, I wasn’t very clear in my last message. I live in Tacoma, WA—I just saw a number of posts on X about the Amish making shit happen in N. Carolina. Amazing.
Dude! You touch an important issue, at least to me, that's constantly ignored, or looked upon with disdain. You're learning to BUILD a house! What an invaluable skill, and one that modern day academicians (nor your XO apparently) do not possess or care to understand. The current culture disregards the type of skills needed to build and repair. The best training is on the ground from someone who's done the work; an apprenticeship program. My father taught me how to fix a car, to paint a house, how to build cabinets. Others have taught me how to fly a plane, write software, troubleshoot and test a complex system, plumb a house, plow a field, shoot and gut a deer, ride a horse, raise chickens. Belonging to a fellowship/brotherhood I've learned not to be so arrogant and so self centered and to understand others. We need more apprenticeship options so people like Chris' daughter have other choices than Reed College.
I'm gonna DM you...I've got an idea since I returned to school to learn construction. I'm having the absolute time of my life! I truly had no idea that work could be so intrinsically rewarding...I could watch a table saw eat a line on boards ALL DAY! It is mesmerizing.
The sense of sovereignty I am beginning to feel! We are also learning residential electrical and plumbing--I recently identified and fixed two kitchen outlets that had me befuddled (the 'upstream' outlet's neutral had come out of the pig-tailed wing nut), replaced my buddy's hot water heater, and fixed the dining room chandelier by isolating another 'upstream' outlet issue.
Thank God I have remaining GI Bill to pay for this, my only regret is I waited years post retirement to start.
I needed COVID to wake me from the narrative--it still hurts so much to know that most of what I learned/believed was a lie--but at least I'm no longer asleep at the wheel.
I think there is a significant demand for the skills you named: construction, engine repair/maintenance, gardening, canning, 1st Aid (combat lifesaver in the Army)...etc, etc, etc--I could go on and on.
I am so blessed to have stumbled into this opportunity, it seems stumbling around has been my COA my entire life.
Very cool. You building these on location or off site? I retired and started buying and renovating starter houses with a partner. It's good to look back at the end of the day and see what you've done. Might only be a trail of sawdust some days ..
Off site at the tech college. There are a few there on skids from previous classes, not sure what the intent is with the finished product. So far, everything we build we tear down--framed walls/floors, rough-ins of electrical, small decks, etc.
This will be the first thing we build that isn't destroyed. I'll find out next week what the intent is, we are in Tacoma, Washington.
Thanks Steve. Kind words. Appreciate it. Copenhagen had me by the short hairs for decades...I still use Smokey Mountain caffeine pouches these days. Something in my mouth...
I’m an 80s/90s/early aughts rock guy, so I had to look it up. TOO FUNNY!
Stopping after so many years rocked me harder than anything—it was 4-5 months of elevated HR, BP, restlessness, anxiety, depression—I cannot believe how effective nicotine is/was for my own anxiety/depressive moods/appetite suppression. It was my primary crutch, often still miss it.
When you see a video of someone interviewing the people out protesting at Tesla dealerships or at the Hamas encampments and any anti-‘Trump protests, it becomes immediately clear that these people have no arguments, can’t give any examples of the fascism they are screaming about, and immediately stop participating because they realize they can’t answer. I’m guessing most of these people have at least a 4-year degree and probably many are grad students or have graduate degrees. I appreciate your argument that we want and need good people in academic institutions. I fear it is too late. I think the institutions need to die—or at least have a near-death experience.
a 4-year degree used to really mean something. The majority of adults did not go to a 4-year college. Some went to trade school or a 2-year college for an associates degree. Then on-the-job training sufficed for most careers. The trades we used to teach in high school (home ec, typing, metal and wood shop, auto repair, electricity, and so on -- yes, they still had those in the 1970s) have been eliminated or reduced to a few, "special" high schools where it's understood your kid ain't college material (as though that's a bad thing). Everyone now is "college material" and expected to go, to incur great debt, to be indoctrinated, and not be able to get a foot in the door to interview for an entry-level job without that 4-year credential (and in some cases, a master's or Ph.D to even apply for that job). We are over-credentialing, it is such a waste in terms of time, talent, money, and it is creating these narrow, over-specialized people who then are helpless at getting any other kind of position than the super-duper high level one they've been trained for..... or be a barista. It's insane, and it's generational. For two generations now, people have come to expect this is normal. Training people for a "service economy" and this is all they know and all they expect in life. How to unwind from this menticide?
I live in this world. It's not a culture that gives empirical examples. What you will experience in direct interaction is a kind of puritanical obsession with word choice, the labelling of things correctly (with names that don't seem to fit and also change from time to time).
I think your framing is the problem. These people are not important, and they're not leading. They're just wearing skinsuits.
The institutions they infested were gutted, hollowed out, flayed, scraped clean of intellectual content, immersed in a brew of excrement, hung out to dry, stretched thin, cut and stitched into grotesque little uniforms for grotesque little people. They're dressed in costumes of prestige.
Increasingly, nobody cares what they "think" or say. They're not our elite. They're an embarrassment. And the more they parade around in their morbid outfits the more we see what they are and reject them for it.
They're outraged that nobody cares. They bought those uniforms fair and square(ish) and they demand attention and respect, but nobody cares.
They took over publishing, so nobody reads. They took over media, so nobody watches. They took over gaming, so nobody plays. They're trying to buy out new media, but nobody pays attention. They routinely pay for fake engagement from bot farms and everyone knows it's fake. They whined and threatened and bribed and falsified their way onto the front page of every website, so everyone skips to page 2.
These people are radioactive. They stink of death and everything they touch turns to shit. The fastest way to empty out a room is to invite one of them into it, so they have to pay people to turn out for them and aim the cameras carefully to keep the empty seats out of frame. Potemkin intellectuals. If you stop looking they stop existing.
Two thoughts, neither of which help fix this. 1) Lying liars lie. It’s what they do. All the time about everything. 2) Given what we now know about USAID and all the millions ($billions?) paid by them to MSM (Administration Media?), it is highly likely all of these lying authors - whose books say the same thing in the same way about Trump and fascism - were paid to lie. It will be interesting to see if the Mockingbird Media-written books dry up after the USAID grift has dried up.
I know, wherever I am, when I search local radio stations, which ones are NPR affiliates…they all sound the same…they all sound identical…it’s almost like the left is following the fast food model. Rapid expansion, crap quality, no nutritional (intellectual) value, just empty, fat-laden calories that are identical from coast to coast.
I think we are altogether too academic about these academics, we are thinking too hard. After reading those passages and then reading them aloud to a friend just to see how hard they would laugh, I've settled on these people are mentally retarded: Can't tie their shoes, boil water, or be trusted around power tools retarded...and some people consider them our most educated, expert, elites. The Bible talks about leaders that are children, and women ruling over them constantly, especially in Isaiah. I'm starting to think that dude was onto something.
I keep referring to Chris’s previous article where he posted a photo of himself trying to imitate the pose of “thinking man.” I just laugh and laugh because Chris is so damn funny, and the best way to win is to mercilessly mock these people.
At the small town TV station where I worked many years ago we hired an anchor-reporter fairly fresh out of a community college broadcasting program. His main job as newbie was to anchor the late local news. He decided it was appropriate to place his hand on his chin and look thoughtful (the ridiculous “thinking man” pose) when the camera came back to him after a video taped report about some cattle sale or a flooded culvert or something equally as mundane. He thought he was Knowlton Freaking Nash * or something (*well respected veteran Canadian national news anchor of the late 1970s). This coworker, to further cement his cred among us nobodies, clipped and pasted the “How to Read the Stock Tables” legend from the Globe and Mail business pages inside the personal nursery school style cubby he’d been assigned. The guy was gone in about six weeks.
Political correctness, which we now call woke, began 40 years ago in the 1980's and hate speech became part of our legal system 30 years ago under Clinton. Both of these movements expanded and took root at the same time as the country was being emptied of its productive manufacturing capacity as it was moved to foreign regions.
The elite know very well that the best way to focus attention away from themselves is to have the population angry within itself and thus accusations of racist! misogynist! fascist! etc. divide people into tribes and shut conversations down. Emotionalism and victimhood are emphasized in education and slavery is underlined as an original, unwashable sin of the American people so no solution can ever make amends, no forgiveness possible.
Our nobility of academia and culture have been formed in this diet and the incentives and rewards have molded them intentionally to serve as the Swiss guards to the invisible and uber wealthy managers of the proles.
Until people are knocked from their perches through the defeat of the puppet masters and the incentives become ashes, no change is foreseeable.
UC Davis is bad even for the UC system. The townies have deep roots in domestic terror that Berkeley, a much more cosmopolitan place, cannot match. Whatever variety one might find in Berkeley is infinitely more than that found in Davis. The academic Left in Sacramento converged to Davis once it became a university campus: it was originally an agricultural station and its classes were all taught in Berkeley.
Note that international terror is strong in Berkeley. You just don't have the angry, bitter small-town and rural lefties you'd have in Davis.
They have reason to be angry... they've been displaced. All of those places have become gang infested and full of illegals. [More recently, so have the slums of Stockton, a much larger city farther north and west that has a very large number of poor and badly educated people.] English has vanished. I remember visiting King City, and it had changed almost beyond recognition in less than a year. In those days, AAA published a guide every year and most of the Anglo businesses that were listed were simply gone. After dark, the bars were rough and dangerous and the Monterey County Sheriff's office was talking about gang task forces and how King City had become a hotbed for Spanish-speaking gangs.
Just for clarification, Stockton is southeast of Davis, (south of Sacramento). Not really that close to Davis.
And about King City, I drive through there on the 101, at least twice a year on a road trip from SoCA to NoCA. (There’s a great Mexican restaurant in downtown King City called Guadalajara, BTW.) All those small towns in the central coastal valley, like King City, Soledad, Greenfield, up to Gilroy, and even over in Watsonville, are predominately Latino now. That’s due to the influx of Latinos that work in agriculture or businesses that are involved in agriculture. This has happened over the past 20 years all over California, where there is agriculture.
Even where I come from down the Imperial Valley, which is located in the SE corner of CA on the AZ/Mexico border, the population in all the towns of the IV are predominantly Latino. Back in the 50’s and 60’s, the IV was a good 60/40 mix of whites and Latinos.
I have no problems with the Spanish speaking people. I am afraid of the gangs. I would like more legal immigration of people that can support themselves and do not have gang ties.
No need to be afraid of the gangs. Your comment sounds so ‘white’. They mostly go after each other in their ‘turf wars’. Though I am not traveling or hanging out in these towns at night, I just pass through them in the day, and haven’t observed any ‘vato locos’. But I’m sure in large metro areas like Stockton and Sacramento there is a lot of ‘gang activity’, because they are large cities. Davis is a relatively small town, and most of the population consists of students and faculty of UC Davis and the businesses that are supported by the University.
And if there is ‘gang activity’ in the Imperial Valley, (which I’m sure there is), it’s not obvious in my hometown. Shoot when I was in high school, in the 60’s, the Mexicans regularly went over to Mexicali and brought back small “balloons” of heroin and kilos of pot, as did some of the white kids I knew as well.
Guess I was fortunate to go to school at Davis when I did, before it got this bad. Used to be a nice college town back in the middle of farm country in the ‘70s. But then again, CA was way different back then.
One of my favorite professors at Illinois went to Davis so long ago that he got his Ph.D. from Berkeley because Davis was still the Davis Experimental Station. He did not have to go to any classes in Berkeley. There were farms not all that far from campus for a long time.
“They’re so free and brave and iconoclastic that they’re essentially identical, chanting in intellectual unison.”
This is a knock-on effect of forcing compliance with complete irrationality (covidianism, genderism, etc.). Everyone who wants to maintain status is being taught that expressing perspectives derived from their own reason risks social destruction and exile (with concomitant economic ruin). There is a flight to safety in total conformity: say what everyone else is saying to not get cancelled.
Yeah but what seemed like a strength is now a weakness. They kicked everyone out, now they are eating each other.
For the longest time I was mad about all the "straight white men" stuff. Now I realize it was a blessing. It clarified. It defined what they are, who they are, and how they get their food. So now we know.
Here's something from a lying liar. My esteemed senator from NM. The other one is even worse. This is his response to my request that the US stop arming the Israelis and Ukraine. Just look at his lies and rationalizations. It beggars the imagination.
Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s efforts to shut down USAID are unlawful and immoral. USAID saves lives, counters extremism, provides education to girls, prevents diseases, and aids after natural disasters. This decision is reckless, and I remain committed to ensuring the U.S. continues to lead in humanitarian aid, global stability, and the fight against poverty. That is why I joined my Senate colleagues in introducing a resolution reaffirming that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is essential for advancing the national security interests of the United States. The 1% of federal spending provided to USAID supports Americans. Preventing crises abroad keeps us safe.
There are bookstores, and then there are libraries. Check what books are featured and on display at the library. Try to find one that is pro Trump and anti-woke. You are not likely to find such a book even in the racks.
Somebody (I forget who) checked school libraries for books by/about recent presidents and candidates. Books by/about Obama, Hilary, Kamala and their ilk were abundant. Books by/about either Bush or Trump were all but nonexistent, except when they were derogatory.
A privately owned bookstore can feature whatever it wants. But public libraries and school libraries have a social, cultural, moral, intellectual and professional duty to be impartial. They don't even come close. Keep that in mind when your schools and libraries plead for more funding.
The current climate - the one you so eloquently describe- depresses me if I think on it. So mostly, I look for contra-indicators. Like the ongoing decline in college enrollments…down 15% between 2010 and 2023. College administrators cite declining birthrates as the main factor. I believe it’s also, and just as importantly, the ever-increasing college tuition for ever-decreasing levels of classical and meaningful learning. There are so many other avenues for gaining wisdom and so few institutions that deliver the balanced effectiveness that benefited those of us who graduated in the last century. Let’s hope and assume these vapid, uninformed pseudo intellectuals are preaching to the choir (those who can read anyway…) and their books languish on the sales floor.
Enrollments decline but budgets never seem to. As to college applicaions, by the time of high school graduations or the completion of 2 years of JC, a lot of white guys know that "the fix is in".
I think the majority of reason for the decline is the price tag. A four year degree at our local state university costs almost $100k. In my state the average teacher’s salary is $58k. It’s simply not feasible to make those economics work. It’s even worse for professionals like doctors and lawyers and vets etc. When the theoretically useful degrees don’t even pay for themselves then forgoing university is a pretty clear and obvious choice.
See also, on the same point:
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/04/04/leftist-mob-on-uc-davis-campus-destroys-conservative-group-display-and-tent/
Please stay in constant contact with your daughter.
Mine went off to UCD and by graduation was non-binary and fully ensconced in the Church of Woke. I regret not being more present during those years. Luckily blood is thicker than politics in our family. But I only want her happiness and Woke precludes her attaining it.
When you send your son (daughter) to be educated by Caesar, don't be surprised when he (she) comes back a Roman.
Well, she may come back still a virgin. Caesar, you know ...
If you send your kid to a PC-Prog institution--most colleges--you've just abandoned them to the monsters.
Don't throw your good money into a pit of hatred and delusion. Give your kid choices--of schools that are grounded in reality. The kid may hate you for it, and you may even lose the kid for a few years. But some contact with reality will bring them around, and they'll thank you in a while.
Good luck. Hope reality reasserts itself. Wish me luck in return.
Best of luck bud! I have faith the tempest will pass.
Caution against over-emphasizing all this culture war material, though, because it can happen at the cost of recognizing real suffering. That earthquake in Myanmar a week ago killed at minimum 3 thousand people, but we hear much less about it than about, say, Hunter Biden's struggle to sell his art these days.
I would argue the culture war here at home is more important and has more impact on the day to day lives of Americans than giant tragedy elsewhere in the world. It is a tragedy that 3000 people died in Myanmar but if 3 million people died in Myanmar it would not appreciably impact the day to day life of the vast majority of Americans. However the culture war and its consequences impact almost every aspect of the day to day life of Americans.
We live on a planet of 8+ billion people, it’s time to quit acting like we can actually care about every tragedy that hits the planet or every person on it. It’s also time we prioritize our country and our communities over the global populace.
296 Americans die a day of overdoses, which means in eleven days more Americans will be dead than those who died in Myanmar so if it is the scale of human suffering that concerns you, American drug deaths are a far greater human tragedy than the earthquake was.
Yes. Thank you. I remember thinking about this in the 80's once I was old enough to realize there was a never ending cascade of tragedies that I was supposed to care deeply about.
The more you care about the tragedy far away (caring often not done for the right reasons) the less you begin to care about the little tragedy next door. How many people think, "Yeah, that family is struggling BUT THINK OF THE PEOPLE WHO DIED IN THE EARTHQUAKE!!!! THINK OF THEM!!!!".
Yeah, go ahead and think of them and pray for them. But how about taking a meal to the family....that would actually matter.
Amen, Dr. Tara. AMEN.
Life is not without suffering, period. It's the constant state of humanity.
We need to focus on what's happening in our country, state, county, city, town, etc. This is where we can make fundamental changes.
Claiming concern for them, over there has long been an excuse to ignore these, next door. The world has dealt with catastrophes since long before America was around to compound / solve all the problems.
💯🎯
I don't understand your point. Is it that all of us should for the next few weeks talk only about the earthquake in Myanmar? If I say I want to eat lunch an hour earlier than usual, is it my wife's job to inform me that over 3 thousand people have died in an earthquake in Myanmar and therefore when I eat lunch is of no consequence? Wow, and six people so far actually liked your comment. Amazing.
Of course he struggles to sell his art now. But I’d venture to guess that is due to it no longer being representational of services rendered or offered by the Biden enterprise. Cultural and political warfare being waged on Americans & America are similarly criminal, deceitful and deadly serious at their much larger scale. Understanding this is critical to the survival of the country and its people. Academia, lawyers/judiciary and media have always been crucial to the emergence of totalitarianism. Likewise have the cluster B and dark tetrad psychopathologies. Far better to face the realities of universal institutional capture and the ongoing covert war against us than let our attention and empathy be captured and directed suicidally, by psychological warfare operations
Fiat currency is like that, it loses its value when it loses its value
Academia quite naturally selects for cowardice and DEI etc. filter out any who are not willing to affirm their cultic allegiance and bondage. Land acknowledgments mean hatred of country and culture. Stating pronouns signifies obeisance to the scapegoat cult of elevated victimhood. It all tracks parallel to cluster B/dark tetrad psychopathologies. Dysfunctional family syndrome gone feral… These lock step, specious, and sophist authors of “all the same book” are the extremity of ivory Tower, intellectual cope, disembodied through existential fear. They are the victims and perpetrators of deadly self-defensive idealism. I find little consolation in the fact that these witch hunt mobs always wind up eating their own.
Reality bats last.
Meanwhile, we do well to speak the truth as that may lessen the entrancement and forestall atrocity.
🙏🙏🙏
Remember, Kids...
The Left is the Home of Violence.
Indeed. Luckily words aren't violence. They are only words; things we use to disagree with others. It is only the left that gets upset about such things.
Sigh. My alma mater, though it was light years less woke back in the late ‘70s. We used to pride ourselves on being Aggies, and not like the flakes at Berzerkely. Or worse yet, those Snodfarts.
The fights we kids had playing street hockey back in the 70´s, were WAY more violent.
When I read Jason Stanley and his ilk all I see is wish fulfillment and oppression envy—he is going to be a leader of the French Resistance, even if he has to conjure this from his imagination, and even if it disbanded in 1945.
Most of this is affluenza but it's also because before Trump these were pretty dull times for our campus radicals and "engaged intellectuals", no Soviet Revolution to support, no Chairman Mao to idolize, not even a Fidel or Che to toast at a banquet. How are you supposed to save the world with your theories, if the world seems to be running pretty well already?
The modern professoriate combines the obtuseness of the aristocrat, the fragile vanity of the starlet and the boundless entitlement of the rich teen who never leaves the house without Dad's credit card. They really believe deep in their souls that they're prophets with the divine right to rule and guide us, they are shocked and appalled if someone even mentions the idea of being held accountable to the taxpayers who subsidize their lush lives—Well, I never!—and most infuriating of all is when they're forced to encounter smelly peasants who think or vote differently. Fascism!
I'm sure in Jason Stanley's house he's in one room scribbling his feverish screeds while his kid is next door playing a videogame where he chooses a character, picks up a weapon and enjoys an evening fighting all the (virtual) bad guys. I wonder if they ever notice the similarities.
"How are you supposed to save the world with your theories, if the world seems to be running pretty well already?"
You could call that the "Gramsci Paradox", since that's the reason he and his generation of academic Marxists did what they did in the ways they did it:
The working classes rejected liberalism, progressivism, and Marxism wholesale. They were staunch traditionalists and materialists, and wanted honest pay, fair treatment, vacation and not being fired for getting pregnant, and some other basic stuff.
The rest is post-WW2 history: the people don't want what we're shilling, and don't know what's best for them so we have to change out the people and force-feed them, momma bird-style.
YES 💯🎯
“Oppression Envy”: Clever Pseudonym, think you just coined the perfect term for the George Floyd worship, BLM vandalism and affluent Antifa children cosplaying as revolutionaries. I’m definitely going to borrow it.
These and other movements were created by intelligence operatives who understood the unrequited need for relevance and heroism among the “everyone gets a trophy” generation. If the actual “oppressed” are not feeling oppressed enough to rise up organically, just finance opportunities for the non-oppressed to strive for relevance and heroism in the name of the oppressed. Maybe today’s real intellectuals are not the mental midgets who write books regurgitating propaganda, but the invisible minds who perceived an organic crisis of purpose in millions of too-easy, too-affluent lives, and conjured up oppression by proxy as a way to to harness and weaponize the pent up craving for meaning. Perhaps the “intellectuals” who actually possess intelligence and insight nowadays have been swallowed up by the blob.
"affluent Antifa children cosplaying as revolutionaries"
You nailed it. Regardless, revolutionaries are unstable and potentially dangerous as a group.
Yes, I think we need to be careful when focusing on these cosplaying people idiots without also thinking about how they and their particular obsessions came to be.
Lest I sound too conspiratorial, think back to the first wave of p.c. in universities, that started in the late 80s/90s when my husband was in grad school. It was the era of the impenetrable prose of Judith Butler, etc. But the widely mocked awfulness had a purpose: to drive anyone out of academia who was by some mishap actually interested in their subject, and not a true vanguard operative or an utterly craven piece of clay. The first sexual harassment accusations began at the same time for the same purpose. That's how the left cleared the field for their "march." DEI loyalty professions serve the same purpose today.
There is indeed intelligence behind how all this dumbness and insanity was crafted.
Academic postmodernists are of course terrible writers and terrible thinkers, they wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near an original thought, their entire output is a game of Mad Libs where you fill in the blanks with awkward jargon, and they are the opposite of scholars—they proceed from answer first then work backwards—but they are true masters of academic politics and in-fighting. Whisper campaigns, anonymous claims and petitions, cold shoulder, playing wounded victim etc all backed up by their superweapon, the bigotry accusation—this is their great passion and true specialty.
It's not a coincidence that their guru and lodestar is Foucault, who claimed that nothing existed but power—his acolytes are just as power mad.
There was very little French resistance until after the surrender at Stalingrad in early 1943 when it became obvious that Germany would loose the war.
Lots of collaboration during the war and lots of lies after the war.
France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise is a detailed look at what is never discussed. The French resistance was a nice story for the people who needed to build up a functioning French State and ally after the war, but the collaboration of France as a whole was minimized and quickly forgotten.
Thanx for the book recommendation. I am going to pick up a copy.
I am sickenby the easily available images of Big Brave Surrender Monkeys French men (sic) shaving the heads and humiliating French women after liberation.
I expect we have been there before in the 1790s and the 1900s when bored intellectuals railed against the pretend fascists and were blind to the real fascists they were busily incubating.
Yeah. I don't think most of the people who read these books Chris talks about are politically knowledgeable. I think for a lot of them the word "fascist" is only an epithet. They don't really know what it means. It is an "attack word".
“I was Miep Gies in a past life.”
I've got a Gibraltar sized chip on my shoulder about education. Did my undergrad and grad school at night in a 'foxhole' (that's hyperbolic, but I did do some reading with red-filtered light in a foxhole once).
Always have felt insecure for such a lackluster education--until we went to combat. My XO was a long-tab, short-tab (SF & Ranger), USMA graduate (Academy officers are our Elites, our betters) with an MBA--worked at a bank. Guy makes BOAT LOADS of money.
I was the S3 (operations officer), a mustang officer who chewed Copenhagen, cussed often, and was referred to as 'CPT Dude' by all the Soldiers of 10th MTN. (The Army was never able to change my 'Tsup bro, tsup dude, hey bro, hey dude' lingo...I call everyone bro or dude. 80s Cali language for sure. I also got my education out of a Cracker Jacks box.
I was super nervous when we deployed. I had never worked staff--and when it mattered the most, I had the most (arguably) critical staff job in the battalion. I was 'fired' as a company commander and made the three 2 weeks before we mobilized.
Long story short. I had hoped to be able to measure up to my pedigreed XO--8 months into the deployment, and he didn't know the difference between a few of our MI fields (HUMINT and CI). He wasn't bright. He wasn't creative. He wasn't insightful. He was an AI bot. He was an algorithm.
Almost every USMA graduate I know has TDS.
Now that I'm learning to build a house (we will build 4 tiny homes this quarter!!!), I just think our entire education system is in DIRE need of significant disruption. My contempt for these people is down into my mitochondria. I despise them. Part of me wants the 4th turning or some cataclysmic event to watch them suffer because they cannot change a lightbulb, but were great about telling us how to think.
Because I have no vested interest nor any historic allegiance to any university--I'd prefer to see 75% of them go bankrupt. I'd like to see K-12 school districts splinter into no more than 5000 students per district, with codified 75% of school board members are parents with children in the district. Once your kid graduates--you're out.
Unlike Chris, I hold the institutions and the people in disdain. But, then again, I'm, at the core, a Copenhagen chewing (finally did give that shit up 5 years ago), cussing, dirty, nasty, mustang...
bsn
"...codified 75% of school board members are parents with children in the district. Once your kid graduates--you're out."
Very good idea!
Here's another one: make it mandatory that all parents (rotating schedule) "do time" as janitors, cleaners, cafeteria staff, dishwashers, et c at the local school their kids attend.
Vandalism and such tends to take a nose-dive when it's your mom having to clean it up (to say nothing of the nosebleeds ensuing when someone objects to their mom having to clean up some other bozo's mess!).
I love it Rikard. Plus, there is something about cleaning/maintaining that promotes an ownership unlike simply occupying.
bsn
Why the parents and not the kids?
I went to Montessori and so did my kids. It’s become an idealogical cesspool over the past 10 years, sadly, but there’s a job chart starting in pre-K. Nothing cures mess making and destruction quicker than being the person who has to clean it up.
Oh I have no objection to having kids/students clean up their own messes or being assigned labour as punishment detail either.
National child-labour laws may have to be modified though.
I don’t know you but I already like you.
Thanks Whip! What a great thing to read!
bsn
Trump should appoint you to help Linda McMahon run DOE... into the ground.
..
LOVE IT Considerist! Let's hope Trump, Musk, and DOGE can maintain their disruptive behavior.
bsn
Please do!
I think school rooms need to be all grades, one room school houses.
Peer group cohort training is killing adult understanding of age limited capability. You can have as many as you want in a district, no more than 200 in a school. Also, children under 6 should be allowed INSIDE offices. Let moms have their kids with them all day, let people with no kids see kids and help out.
Interesting. I hadn't ever thought of that. I would also speed up the pace. The students shouldn't drown, but swallow water daily. We patronize people when we slow things to a crawl to the lowest common denominator.
I attended the Defense Language Institute, like taking a drink with a firehose. A lot spills from your mouth, but A LOT gets shoved all the way down to your toes.
bsn
Single child home or two kids within five years has changed things.
When I was a younger man in the Army telling someone they were likely a 'single child' was a great insult. Spoiled, self-centered, narcissist was the meaning wrapped into one descriptive accusation. "You're a single child aren't you?"
I think you're onto something with this observation.
bsn
Welcome to being Amish. This is no new concept.
They sure impressed us all in N. Carolina.
bsn
Yeah, good folk mostly. How is rebuild going out there? Guessing reaidential will be recovering for a lot of years.
Jason, I wasn’t very clear in my last message. I live in Tacoma, WA—I just saw a number of posts on X about the Amish making shit happen in N. Carolina. Amazing.
I grew up among them in PA. Good folk, we could learn something.
Why just moms? Couldn’t the kids be with their dads?
agree! i should have said parent.
Dude! You touch an important issue, at least to me, that's constantly ignored, or looked upon with disdain. You're learning to BUILD a house! What an invaluable skill, and one that modern day academicians (nor your XO apparently) do not possess or care to understand. The current culture disregards the type of skills needed to build and repair. The best training is on the ground from someone who's done the work; an apprenticeship program. My father taught me how to fix a car, to paint a house, how to build cabinets. Others have taught me how to fly a plane, write software, troubleshoot and test a complex system, plumb a house, plow a field, shoot and gut a deer, ride a horse, raise chickens. Belonging to a fellowship/brotherhood I've learned not to be so arrogant and so self centered and to understand others. We need more apprenticeship options so people like Chris' daughter have other choices than Reed College.
I'm gonna DM you...I've got an idea since I returned to school to learn construction. I'm having the absolute time of my life! I truly had no idea that work could be so intrinsically rewarding...I could watch a table saw eat a line on boards ALL DAY! It is mesmerizing.
The sense of sovereignty I am beginning to feel! We are also learning residential electrical and plumbing--I recently identified and fixed two kitchen outlets that had me befuddled (the 'upstream' outlet's neutral had come out of the pig-tailed wing nut), replaced my buddy's hot water heater, and fixed the dining room chandelier by isolating another 'upstream' outlet issue.
Thank God I have remaining GI Bill to pay for this, my only regret is I waited years post retirement to start.
I needed COVID to wake me from the narrative--it still hurts so much to know that most of what I learned/believed was a lie--but at least I'm no longer asleep at the wheel.
I think there is a significant demand for the skills you named: construction, engine repair/maintenance, gardening, canning, 1st Aid (combat lifesaver in the Army)...etc, etc, etc--I could go on and on.
I am so blessed to have stumbled into this opportunity, it seems stumbling around has been my COA my entire life.
bsn
Very cool. You building these on location or off site? I retired and started buying and renovating starter houses with a partner. It's good to look back at the end of the day and see what you've done. Might only be a trail of sawdust some days ..
Off site at the tech college. There are a few there on skids from previous classes, not sure what the intent is with the finished product. So far, everything we build we tear down--framed walls/floors, rough-ins of electrical, small decks, etc.
This will be the first thing we build that isn't destroyed. I'll find out next week what the intent is, we are in Tacoma, Washington.
bsn
Cool. Sounds like fun. Unfortunately, SS has many broken parts including finding one's way back to comments so I hope this gets to you.
Dude. Never in the military but was a LEO for 48 years. I’d take you covering my 6. I quit chewing 3 years back but, damn I miss it.
Thanks Steve. Kind words. Appreciate it. Copenhagen had me by the short hairs for decades...I still use Smokey Mountain caffeine pouches these days. Something in my mouth...
bsn
You my man, bro! Thanks, dude, and stay away from Skoal.
Copenhagen satisfies, Skoal burns the lip!
bsn
Copenhagen never a problem with worms or long relationships.
Ref-copenhagen song cover by Robert Earl Keen
I’m an 80s/90s/early aughts rock guy, so I had to look it up. TOO FUNNY!
Stopping after so many years rocked me harder than anything—it was 4-5 months of elevated HR, BP, restlessness, anxiety, depression—I cannot believe how effective nicotine is/was for my own anxiety/depressive moods/appetite suppression. It was my primary crutch, often still miss it.
bsn
When you see a video of someone interviewing the people out protesting at Tesla dealerships or at the Hamas encampments and any anti-‘Trump protests, it becomes immediately clear that these people have no arguments, can’t give any examples of the fascism they are screaming about, and immediately stop participating because they realize they can’t answer. I’m guessing most of these people have at least a 4-year degree and probably many are grad students or have graduate degrees. I appreciate your argument that we want and need good people in academic institutions. I fear it is too late. I think the institutions need to die—or at least have a near-death experience.
a 4-year degree used to really mean something. The majority of adults did not go to a 4-year college. Some went to trade school or a 2-year college for an associates degree. Then on-the-job training sufficed for most careers. The trades we used to teach in high school (home ec, typing, metal and wood shop, auto repair, electricity, and so on -- yes, they still had those in the 1970s) have been eliminated or reduced to a few, "special" high schools where it's understood your kid ain't college material (as though that's a bad thing). Everyone now is "college material" and expected to go, to incur great debt, to be indoctrinated, and not be able to get a foot in the door to interview for an entry-level job without that 4-year credential (and in some cases, a master's or Ph.D to even apply for that job). We are over-credentialing, it is such a waste in terms of time, talent, money, and it is creating these narrow, over-specialized people who then are helpless at getting any other kind of position than the super-duper high level one they've been trained for..... or be a barista. It's insane, and it's generational. For two generations now, people have come to expect this is normal. Training people for a "service economy" and this is all they know and all they expect in life. How to unwind from this menticide?
And democide
I live in this world. It's not a culture that gives empirical examples. What you will experience in direct interaction is a kind of puritanical obsession with word choice, the labelling of things correctly (with names that don't seem to fit and also change from time to time).
I think your framing is the problem. These people are not important, and they're not leading. They're just wearing skinsuits.
The institutions they infested were gutted, hollowed out, flayed, scraped clean of intellectual content, immersed in a brew of excrement, hung out to dry, stretched thin, cut and stitched into grotesque little uniforms for grotesque little people. They're dressed in costumes of prestige.
Increasingly, nobody cares what they "think" or say. They're not our elite. They're an embarrassment. And the more they parade around in their morbid outfits the more we see what they are and reject them for it.
They're outraged that nobody cares. They bought those uniforms fair and square(ish) and they demand attention and respect, but nobody cares.
They took over publishing, so nobody reads. They took over media, so nobody watches. They took over gaming, so nobody plays. They're trying to buy out new media, but nobody pays attention. They routinely pay for fake engagement from bot farms and everyone knows it's fake. They whined and threatened and bribed and falsified their way onto the front page of every website, so everyone skips to page 2.
These people are radioactive. They stink of death and everything they touch turns to shit. The fastest way to empty out a room is to invite one of them into it, so they have to pay people to turn out for them and aim the cameras carefully to keep the empty seats out of frame. Potemkin intellectuals. If you stop looking they stop existing.
"Potemkin intellectuals."
Oh yes, how apt!
But whose useful idiots and tools are they, I often wonder.
Or are they an autonomous motion in the system itself, perhaps?
The Devil's.
Word.
Two thoughts, neither of which help fix this. 1) Lying liars lie. It’s what they do. All the time about everything. 2) Given what we now know about USAID and all the millions ($billions?) paid by them to MSM (Administration Media?), it is highly likely all of these lying authors - whose books say the same thing in the same way about Trump and fascism - were paid to lie. It will be interesting to see if the Mockingbird Media-written books dry up after the USAID grift has dried up.
I know, wherever I am, when I search local radio stations, which ones are NPR affiliates…they all sound the same…they all sound identical…it’s almost like the left is following the fast food model. Rapid expansion, crap quality, no nutritional (intellectual) value, just empty, fat-laden calories that are identical from coast to coast.
Thats some damn good work product, Chris.
You put a finger on it.
I think we are altogether too academic about these academics, we are thinking too hard. After reading those passages and then reading them aloud to a friend just to see how hard they would laugh, I've settled on these people are mentally retarded: Can't tie their shoes, boil water, or be trusted around power tools retarded...and some people consider them our most educated, expert, elites. The Bible talks about leaders that are children, and women ruling over them constantly, especially in Isaiah. I'm starting to think that dude was onto something.
All I have to do is look at the picture of that guy in his ridiculous “thinking man” pose and I can tell that he’s full of shit.
I might use the pages of his book as toilet paper or to line the litter box.
It does bring the bully out in me. I have this deep seated need to punch his face.
bsn
I keep referring to Chris’s previous article where he posted a photo of himself trying to imitate the pose of “thinking man.” I just laugh and laugh because Chris is so damn funny, and the best way to win is to mercilessly mock these people.
1000%. Mocking is the BEST! It is the most effective tool for the truly powerless/oppressed. Seriously!
bsn
And as a woman, I would love to see you do it lol
...my kinda gal...
bsn
Yeah that would feel good.
At the small town TV station where I worked many years ago we hired an anchor-reporter fairly fresh out of a community college broadcasting program. His main job as newbie was to anchor the late local news. He decided it was appropriate to place his hand on his chin and look thoughtful (the ridiculous “thinking man” pose) when the camera came back to him after a video taped report about some cattle sale or a flooded culvert or something equally as mundane. He thought he was Knowlton Freaking Nash * or something (*well respected veteran Canadian national news anchor of the late 1970s). This coworker, to further cement his cred among us nobodies, clipped and pasted the “How to Read the Stock Tables” legend from the Globe and Mail business pages inside the personal nursery school style cubby he’d been assigned. The guy was gone in about six weeks.
Lol, I’ll bet he was “mortified” about having been let go.
Political correctness, which we now call woke, began 40 years ago in the 1980's and hate speech became part of our legal system 30 years ago under Clinton. Both of these movements expanded and took root at the same time as the country was being emptied of its productive manufacturing capacity as it was moved to foreign regions.
The elite know very well that the best way to focus attention away from themselves is to have the population angry within itself and thus accusations of racist! misogynist! fascist! etc. divide people into tribes and shut conversations down. Emotionalism and victimhood are emphasized in education and slavery is underlined as an original, unwashable sin of the American people so no solution can ever make amends, no forgiveness possible.
Our nobility of academia and culture have been formed in this diet and the incentives and rewards have molded them intentionally to serve as the Swiss guards to the invisible and uber wealthy managers of the proles.
Until people are knocked from their perches through the defeat of the puppet masters and the incentives become ashes, no change is foreseeable.
This is a brilliant comment.
100% true
UC Davis is bad even for the UC system. The townies have deep roots in domestic terror that Berkeley, a much more cosmopolitan place, cannot match. Whatever variety one might find in Berkeley is infinitely more than that found in Davis. The academic Left in Sacramento converged to Davis once it became a university campus: it was originally an agricultural station and its classes were all taught in Berkeley.
Note that international terror is strong in Berkeley. You just don't have the angry, bitter small-town and rural lefties you'd have in Davis.
They have reason to be angry... they've been displaced. All of those places have become gang infested and full of illegals. [More recently, so have the slums of Stockton, a much larger city farther north and west that has a very large number of poor and badly educated people.] English has vanished. I remember visiting King City, and it had changed almost beyond recognition in less than a year. In those days, AAA published a guide every year and most of the Anglo businesses that were listed were simply gone. After dark, the bars were rough and dangerous and the Monterey County Sheriff's office was talking about gang task forces and how King City had become a hotbed for Spanish-speaking gangs.
Just for clarification, Stockton is southeast of Davis, (south of Sacramento). Not really that close to Davis.
And about King City, I drive through there on the 101, at least twice a year on a road trip from SoCA to NoCA. (There’s a great Mexican restaurant in downtown King City called Guadalajara, BTW.) All those small towns in the central coastal valley, like King City, Soledad, Greenfield, up to Gilroy, and even over in Watsonville, are predominately Latino now. That’s due to the influx of Latinos that work in agriculture or businesses that are involved in agriculture. This has happened over the past 20 years all over California, where there is agriculture.
Even where I come from down the Imperial Valley, which is located in the SE corner of CA on the AZ/Mexico border, the population in all the towns of the IV are predominantly Latino. Back in the 50’s and 60’s, the IV was a good 60/40 mix of whites and Latinos.
I have no problems with the Spanish speaking people. I am afraid of the gangs. I would like more legal immigration of people that can support themselves and do not have gang ties.
No need to be afraid of the gangs. Your comment sounds so ‘white’. They mostly go after each other in their ‘turf wars’. Though I am not traveling or hanging out in these towns at night, I just pass through them in the day, and haven’t observed any ‘vato locos’. But I’m sure in large metro areas like Stockton and Sacramento there is a lot of ‘gang activity’, because they are large cities. Davis is a relatively small town, and most of the population consists of students and faculty of UC Davis and the businesses that are supported by the University.
And if there is ‘gang activity’ in the Imperial Valley, (which I’m sure there is), it’s not obvious in my hometown. Shoot when I was in high school, in the 60’s, the Mexicans regularly went over to Mexicali and brought back small “balloons” of heroin and kilos of pot, as did some of the white kids I knew as well.
Sorry to hear about King City. It use to be the perfect small town.
If the day comes where these people can’t get a latte, packaged chicken and artisan bread most of them will lie down in the street and die.
Guess I was fortunate to go to school at Davis when I did, before it got this bad. Used to be a nice college town back in the middle of farm country in the ‘70s. But then again, CA was way different back then.
One of my favorite professors at Illinois went to Davis so long ago that he got his Ph.D. from Berkeley because Davis was still the Davis Experimental Station. He did not have to go to any classes in Berkeley. There were farms not all that far from campus for a long time.
That’s a LONG time ago! I have a B.A. in History from UCD. Great department back then.
“They’re so free and brave and iconoclastic that they’re essentially identical, chanting in intellectual unison.”
This is a knock-on effect of forcing compliance with complete irrationality (covidianism, genderism, etc.). Everyone who wants to maintain status is being taught that expressing perspectives derived from their own reason risks social destruction and exile (with concomitant economic ruin). There is a flight to safety in total conformity: say what everyone else is saying to not get cancelled.
The digital panopticon never sleeps. One unapproved word and that's it—off to the gulag!
Yeah but what seemed like a strength is now a weakness. They kicked everyone out, now they are eating each other.
For the longest time I was mad about all the "straight white men" stuff. Now I realize it was a blessing. It clarified. It defined what they are, who they are, and how they get their food. So now we know.
Here's something from a lying liar. My esteemed senator from NM. The other one is even worse. This is his response to my request that the US stop arming the Israelis and Ukraine. Just look at his lies and rationalizations. It beggars the imagination.
Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s efforts to shut down USAID are unlawful and immoral. USAID saves lives, counters extremism, provides education to girls, prevents diseases, and aids after natural disasters. This decision is reckless, and I remain committed to ensuring the U.S. continues to lead in humanitarian aid, global stability, and the fight against poverty. That is why I joined my Senate colleagues in introducing a resolution reaffirming that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is essential for advancing the national security interests of the United States. The 1% of federal spending provided to USAID supports Americans. Preventing crises abroad keeps us safe.
There are bookstores, and then there are libraries. Check what books are featured and on display at the library. Try to find one that is pro Trump and anti-woke. You are not likely to find such a book even in the racks.
Somebody (I forget who) checked school libraries for books by/about recent presidents and candidates. Books by/about Obama, Hilary, Kamala and their ilk were abundant. Books by/about either Bush or Trump were all but nonexistent, except when they were derogatory.
A privately owned bookstore can feature whatever it wants. But public libraries and school libraries have a social, cultural, moral, intellectual and professional duty to be impartial. They don't even come close. Keep that in mind when your schools and libraries plead for more funding.
The current climate - the one you so eloquently describe- depresses me if I think on it. So mostly, I look for contra-indicators. Like the ongoing decline in college enrollments…down 15% between 2010 and 2023. College administrators cite declining birthrates as the main factor. I believe it’s also, and just as importantly, the ever-increasing college tuition for ever-decreasing levels of classical and meaningful learning. There are so many other avenues for gaining wisdom and so few institutions that deliver the balanced effectiveness that benefited those of us who graduated in the last century. Let’s hope and assume these vapid, uninformed pseudo intellectuals are preaching to the choir (those who can read anyway…) and their books languish on the sales floor.
Enrollments decline but budgets never seem to. As to college applicaions, by the time of high school graduations or the completion of 2 years of JC, a lot of white guys know that "the fix is in".
I think the majority of reason for the decline is the price tag. A four year degree at our local state university costs almost $100k. In my state the average teacher’s salary is $58k. It’s simply not feasible to make those economics work. It’s even worse for professionals like doctors and lawyers and vets etc. When the theoretically useful degrees don’t even pay for themselves then forgoing university is a pretty clear and obvious choice.