Giorgia Meloni as Italian PM

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The rise of Giorgia Meloni and her coalition of the right has struck fear into the hearts of the EU and the left everywhere. God forbid that a political movement arise that would challenge globalist dogma. As Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission said before the election, “If things go in a difficult direction— and I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland—we have the tools.”

So  Meloni has definitely made the right enemies. I was quite impressed about her statement on identity, which flies in the face of globalist dogma and reflects what sensible people on the right have been saying for some time.

“Please answer me these questions. This is about what we are doing here today. Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening? There is a single answer to all these questions. Because it defines us. Because it is our identity. Because everything that defines us is now an enemy for those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to be perfect consumer slaves.”

“And so they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identify, they attack family identity. I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No.”

“I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be a number. Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer.”

“That’s the reason why. That’s why we inspire so much fear. That’s why this event inspires so much fear. Because we do not want to be numbers. We will defend the value of the human being. Every single human being. Because each of us has a unique genetic code that is unrepeatable. And like it or not, that is sacred. We will defend it. We will defend God, country and family.”

“Those things that disgust people so much. We will do it to defend our freedom, because we will never be slaves and simple consumers at the mercy of the financial speculators. That is our mission. That is why I came here today.”

“Chesterton wrote, more than a century ago… ‘Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.’ Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.'”

“That time has arrived. We are ready.”

And from another speech:

“Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death, no to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people.”

Of course Islam and the rest of the immigrants have no problem with their very strong racial/ethnic/religious identities—encouraged by elites throughout the West. It’s only Europeans who are condemned for having them—obviously a losing proposition long term.

Some on the right have criticized Meloni because she and the rest of the right have adopted very pro-Israel attitudes and are firmly on board with supporting Ukraine against Russia.

And to be sure, she has pictured her movement as center-right. From the Guardian:

In a video message issued on Wednesday, Meloni, who leads Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist origins, said the Italian right had “handed fascism over to history for decades now” and “unambiguously condemns the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws”.

In the video, spoken in English, French and Spanish and directed at the foreign press, she said Brothers of Italy was nowadays more akin to “the British Tories, the US Republicans and the Israeli Likud”.

It would be great if she was really as nationalist and ethnocentric as Likud, but I suspect it’s merely a ploy to gain legitimacy by invoking Israel. And we all know how worthless the Tories and the GOP are.

But I am optimistic. Politics is the art of the possible, and if she had openly come out against Israel, deporting migrants, or in favor of Russia she would never have the opportunity to really change things. And of course there will be constraints from outside. The hostility of the EU is obvious and it does have considerable financial power over member states. And Italy is already in dire financial straits because of its debt, and the worsening economic condition around the world will certainly not help.

But it’s encouraging nonetheless. There is now also a coalition of the right in Sweden, but it seems to promise little or nothing worthwhile. The Swedish Moderates sound like typical American Republicans, even promising to exclude the Sweden Democrats from ministerial positions.

After Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted defeat and conceded the election to a coalition of right-leaning parties, conservatives across Europe are celebrating. The Scandinavian nation, which was once one of the most left-leaning countries in Europe and well-known for accepting the most refugees per capita during the 2015/16 migrant crisis, has made a radical turnaround.

Of course, the reasons behind this turnaround are well known despite heavy censorship in the country. The utopian multicultural future envisioned by many Swedes has come crashing down over the last few years, and as Remix News has exhaustively documented, the shootings, murders, drug dealing, clan crime, attacks on women, honor killings, random assaults, and rising sexual crimes have left the once-peaceful nation shell shocked. The deteriorating security situation even led Germany’s top-selling newspaper, Bild, to label Sweden the “most dangerous country in Europe.”

Out of the turmoil of the last years, the Sweden Democrats have emerged as the second-largest party in Sweden with over 20 percent of the vote. As a result, much of the domestic and international media are openly acknowledging the much maligned party is the biggest winner of the entire election.

However, there are a number of challenges ahead, and the conservative party will have to walk a tightrope to succeed during a troubling time for Europe. For one, despite the party’s enormous victory, a version of the cordon sanitaire remains in effect. Historically, all parties refused to work with the Sweden Democrats, and in truth, all the parties in the new government will do their best to maintain that policy. That means that despite the Sweden Democrats being the biggest party in the new four-party right-wing government, the SD’s leader, Jimmie Åkesson, will have no opportunity to become prime minister. Instead, that right will go to Ulf Kristersson, who leads the Moderates party, which saw only 19.1 percent of the vote, an embarrassingly low result for what was once the “mainstream” conservative party in the country.

Even more importantly, the new government plans to lock the Sweden Democrats out of any ministerial positions [despite being the largest party in the coalition]. That represents a major check on the party’s power and ability to influence policy. If the Sweden Democrats are not careful, they risk having little power in the new government while still being shouldered with the blame if crime levels continue to rise, immigration continues unabated, and inflation and a recession wrack the Swedish economy over the coming year.

Still, things are moving in the right direction, if only slowly. As an incurable optimist, I still think there are good things on the horizon.

The Wickedness of Whiteness: Leftist Minority-Worship Preaches the Innate Evil of Whites

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What’s the connection between cakes and leftism? Until last week, I would have found it impossible to give a good answer to that question. Then I picked up a new book by the British mathematician Ian Stewart (born 1945) and read the following:

The classic example [of fair division], from which everything else flows, is that of two children arguing over a cake. The problem is to divide the cake between them using a good protocol — a set of rules specified in advance — that is provably fair. The classic solution is “I cut, you choose.” … When I mentioned this method in an article, one reader wrote in to say that he’d tried it on his children, and Alice (not her real name) had promptly complained that Bob (not his) had the bigger piece. When her father pointed out that this was her fault for cutting badly, the news didn’t go down terribly well — in her eyes it amounted to blaming the victim — so her father swapped the two pieces. Only to hear her wail: “Bob’s piece is still bigger than mine!” (Ian Stewart, What’s the Use? The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, Profile Books, 2021, chapter 2)

That might seem a funny but trivial story. In fact, it’s more than that: it captures the way millions of adult leftists think about “social justice” and “equality.” In particular, it captures the way Blacks and other non-Whites think. Nothing Whites can do will ever be enough to satisfy their demands or appease their anti-White hatred, resentment and envy. Whites will always be racist and White nations will always be unjust to non-Whites. Here’s an example of that kind of thinking from the Guardian:

Amy Mae Baxter was still a publishing trainee in 2019 when she founded Bad Form, an online magazine for writers of colour. … This March was a “huge month” for Bad Form, thanks to a flurry of black-authored titles commissioned in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests finally hitting the shelves. Her worry, however, is that they’re all now competing with each other, meaning some might not sell as well as they otherwise could have. (“The book that tore publishing apart: ‘Harm has been done, and now everyone’s afraid,’” The Guardian, 18th June 2022)

How do you satisfy a leftist like Amy Mae Baxter? You can’t: the only solution is to get people like that out of your society. Even better is not to let them into your society at all. In other words, prevention is better than cure. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán believes in prevention, not cure, and refuses to open the borders of his White Christian nation to Blacks and Muslims. That’s why he is demonized by leftists around the world for his “racism” and “xenophobia.”

The toxicity of truth

Orbán has the truth on his side, but that doesn’t fully explain why he is successful. As I’ve argued before, having the truth on your side can be enervating and unhelpful, in part because you can subconsciously fall into the trap of thinking that truth will do the work for you. And believing in obvious truths doesn’t require any emotional investment or activate any of the religious modules that seem to be built into the human brain. No religion has ever been based on the claim that water is wet or that the sun rises in the east. It doesn’t take any effort to believe those things. But the very successful religion of Christianity is based on the claim that a man rose from the dead. That claim defies common sense and demands effort to believe. Once you’ve made that effort, you have an emotional and cognitive investment. Naturally enough, you then want to defend your investment and protect your belief against its critics.

Leftism also makes claims that defy common sense and demand emotional investment: we’re all the same under the skin; Blacks fail only because of White racism; East Asians flourish despite White racism; and so on. In short, leftism is a quasi-religion that activates those very powerful and ancient religious modules in the brain.  Old religious concepts like sin and blasphemy re-appear in the form of racism and hate-speech. Indeed, leftism is in part a Christian heresy or a perversion of Christianity, drawing on Christian ideas of spiritual equality but failing to accept the Christian idea that we’re all sinners. In fact, some Christians don’t accept that idea either. Calvinism has the concepts of an elect minority, bound from birth for Heaven, and a damned majority, bound from birth for Hell. In Calvinism, we’re all predestined to celestial bliss or infernal agony, and nothing we do will alter our fate.

Rhetoric as route to power

Leftism has re-created that Calvinist concept and founded what Gregory Hood at AmRen has called the Church of the Damned, where nothing Whites can do or say will ever cleanse them from their hereditary taint—their original sin—of racism. Leftism mandates both that Blacks and Whites are born equal and that only the innate evil of Whites explains why Blacks don’t have the same high achievements as Whites. In other words, leftism has two big lies that contradict each other: first, that we’re all born equal; second, that Whites are innately evil. The contradiction doesn’t weaken leftism but strengthens it, because it trains leftists in deceit and allows them to preach one thing while practicing another. They use the rhetoric of equality and justice as a Trojan horse to get themselves into power. Once they’re in power, they impose inequality and injustice on their enemies. A cult of minority-worship goes naturally with a cult of majority-demonization. An anonymous French writer long ago described how leftism operates:

« Quand je suis le plus faible, je vous demande la liberté, parce que tel est votre principe ; mais quand je suis le plus fort, je vous l’ôte, parce que tel est le mien. »

“When I am the weaker, I ask you for freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”

Free speech in the U.S. is a classic example. In the 1950s when Jews had relatively little power compared to the present, Congressional committees were grilling Jewish communists and communist sympathizers on their ideologies and connections. It was the period of the notorious Hollywood blacklist. At that time, Jewish activist organizations were all for free speech. It’s a distant memory now that the left has power and the ADL is partnering with social media companies and payment processors like PayPal to get right-wing and even conservative messages off their platforms. And the Biden administration is actively pressuring social media companies in the same direction—a clear violation of the First Amendment. So now there is a very different kind of blacklist, one reserved for people who do not conform to leftist narratives.

Leftism is an ideology based on lies and run by liars. Look at the topic of slavery, where leftists work tirelessly to encourage White guilt and non-White grievance. But neither the guilt nor the grievance can be justified on the central leftist principle of human equality. If human beings are, as leftists insist from one side of their mouths, innately and absolutely equal, it follows that the roles of slave and master are determined entirely by accidents of history and geography. White Europeans enslaved Black Africans in our reality, but that was pure chance. If the historical and geographical dice had rolled differently, it would have been the other way around: Black Africans would have enslaved White Europeans.

The stench of White history

But there is no hint of any of that in the endless propaganda pumped out by the Left about White enslavement of Blacks (they ignore the Muslim enslavement of Blacks and much else). Kris Manjapra, a Black professor of history at Tufts University, has asked “When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity?” in the Guardian. But he doesn’t preach the first big lie of leftism, namely the equality of all so-called races. He doesn’t talk about historical contingency and the decisive role of chance in determining who enslaved whom. Instead, he uses rhetoric about the “stench of British historical amnesia and of institutionalised racism” to promote the second big lie of leftism, namely, the innate moral superiority of non-Whites over Whites. The implication of his rhetoric is that the innately evil Whites of Europe enslaved the innately virtuous Blacks of Africa. But he also says something very interesting at the beginning of his anti-White polemic:

On 3 August 1835, somewhere in the City of London, two of Europe’s most famous bankers came to an agreement with the chancellor of the exchequer. Two years earlier, the British government had passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in most parts of the empire. Now it was taking out one of the largest loans in history, to finance the slave compensation package required by the 1833 act. Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore agreed to loan the British government £15m, with the government adding an additional £5m later. The total sum represented 40% of the government’s yearly income in those days, equivalent to some £300bn today. (When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity?, The Guardian, 29th March 2018)

Manjapra then complains that all of this huge loan, which wasn’t paid off by ordinary White tax-payers until 2015, was used to compensate the White beneficiaries of slavery rather than its Black victims. He leaves two very interesting historical questions hanging in the air. First, how were Rothschild and Montefiore, members of the tiny and oppressed Jewish minority, in possession of such a vast sum of money? Second, in what other ways were Jewish plutocrats using their wealth and influence over  gentile politicians? Manjapra couldn’t explore those questions, of course, or he would have been denounced as an anti-Semite. But a lot of that vastly disproportionate Jewish wealth came from slavery, which Jews have practiced and been enriched by for many centuries. As Andrew Joyce has described at the Occidental Observer, Jewish slave-dealers worked in Europe from Roman times before turning to the profits to be made in Africa. Among much else, they “bought and sold Christian slaves and kidnapped and castrated Christian youths for the Muslim markets in Spain.”

Listening, Learning, Lying

You wouldn’t guess any of that from anti-White propaganda-films like Amistad (1997), which was directed by the proudly Jewish Steven Spielberg and is about Blacks mutinying against cruel Whites as they are carried into slavery. In Hollywood, Jews are not simply over-represented but overwhelmingly dominant, and they have been promoting minority-worship and majority-demonization for decades. That propaganda will increasingly shift from denying history to outright reversing it. Leftism is abandoning the rhetoric of equality to insist on the wickedness of Whiteness. In August 2022, the White American historian James H. Sweet made a doomed attempt to criticize this trend:

The Elmina [Ghana] tour guide claimed that “Ghanaians” sent their “servants” into chattel slavery unknowingly. The guide made no reference to warfare or Indigenous slavery, histories that interrupt assumptions of ancestral connection between modern-day Ghanaians and visitors from the diaspora. Similarly, the forthcoming film The Woman King seems to suggest that Dahomey’s female warriors and King Ghezo fought the European slave trade.

In fact, they promoted it. Historically accurate rendering of Asante or Dahomean greed and enslavement apparently contradict modern-day political imperatives. (President of American Historical Association Dares Doubt the 1619 Project, Quickly Apologizes, Steve Sailer, 20th August 2022)

The video below is a classic summary of African culpability in the British slave trade that dumbfounded Don Lemon, a CNN anchor — Africans rounding up Africans and depositing them in cages on the beach, the costs to the British navy for policing their ban on the slave trade [2000 dead British sailors], and the uniqueness of the British anti-slavery policy at a time when slavery was essentially universal.

As Steve Sailer has noted, Prof. Sweet was quickly forced into a groveling apology. He announced that “I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends” and promised that “I’m listening and learning.” One of the things he is “learning” is that traditional White standards of scholarship have no place in modern academia and must exercise no influence on portrayal of the past. Yes, it’s historically true that King Ghezo and his female warriors promoted the European slave-trade rather than fighting it. But so what? If it serves the purposes of leftist propaganda and the promotion of Black grievance to invert the truth, that is precisely what must be done. Virtue trumps veracity and it is virtuous to sanctify Blacks and demonize Whites.

History isn’t a science, as you can see from the inability of historians to make accurate and useful predictions of the future based on their study of the past. But I’m an amateur historian and I will confidently make this prediction: that the demonization of Whites will not lessen as ever more power and wealth are taken from Whites. On the contrary, it will intensify. George Orwell also described how leftism operates: “The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.”

Not by words but by war

Black leftists like Kris Manjapra are not seeking justice and equality. No, they’re seeking revenge. And their anti-White rhetoric will increasingly translate into anti-White action. Manjapra and countless other non-Whites share the psychology of the Black criminal Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), who made this boast way back in 1968: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women — and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.”

Revenge and resentment are what power leftism and motivate the Black and Brown foot soldiers of leftism. That’s why leftists were so eager to open the borders of formerly cohesive and conservative Western nations. Hungary can defend its native Whites and maintain its ancient traditions because anti-White barbarians are outside its gates. America, Britain and France can’t emulate Hungary because anti-White barbarians are inside the gates. And those barbarians are growing in numbers, aggression and arrogance by the day. Separation is the only solution and separation will not come by words but by war.

Schooling and Education Amid the Siege: A Perspective

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This writing sketches out a perspective on schooling and education (they are different things; more on that later on) for your consideration, including what, if anything, to do about it.

Me: Retired after a career in schooling, first as a high school teacher and later a professor of education.  Late in life, the birth of a daughter, now eighteen, who grew up with her mother in another state from where I live.  I stayed in contact with my daughter from long range through email and regular visits, which included observing her classes in school and talking with her teachers, and I read the frequent communiques schools sent to parents.   A couple of weeks ago as I write this, she started college near where I live.  All to say, I bring a parental as well as a professional perspective to bear on this concern.

The context: The full-bore campaign I’ve witnessed up close to shape the hearts and minds of students in its favored direction by what, over the half-century span of my career, have become politicized-left American elementary and secondary public schools.  (It’s going on in universities too, don’t I know, but that’s not the focus here.)   If you’re reading this publication you know the thrust: schools have taken it upon themselves—who needs a mandate?—to disparage and demonize this country and its political and cultural heritage as racist, sexist, and oppressive, and use the school and its captive students as a venue for promoting a brand of identity politics that includes beating up on White people and getting them to beat up on themselves.  I’m sorry to report that it’s being done effectively—not that it takes any great skill to propagandize and browbeat children—and with, I worry, lasting negative impact on the young people who have been subjected to it and—scary thought—on this country.  I don’t have the space here—or, frankly, the energy—to do more than affirm that I consider what’s going on to be an alarming turn of events.  I’ll leave it with a recommendation of a book I have come upon recently and found useful you may not know about: The Anti-Fascist Classroom: Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 by Benita Blessing.1

With that brief introduction as a backdrop, below is a perspective that has come out of my experiences in schools and as a parent that I think might give direction and impetus to combatting what’s going down currently in our schools.   See what you can take from it.

School people are employees.

Teachers, school administrators, counselors, and the rest, like to see themselves as autonomous professionals and the school they work in as their school, and they’ve been good at selling that idea to the public.  They call the shots—it’s their classes, their students, their programs.  They tell parents what’s up and what is going to go on and it is the parents’ job to go along with it and support their efforts.  Students do what they are told, including nights and weekends.  It’s called homework and we all know what a good thing that is, don’t we?  With homework in place as a hallowed activity, teachers have a claim on your child 24/7.  Microsoft doesn’t presume to have that power over its minions, plus it has to pay them and they can quit.

They don’t want to hear this, but school people aren’t Mussolinis.  They are salaried employees.  And who hires them and who do they work for?  In this country, the basic idea is that it’s the local community (or anyway should be), who have directed their elected representatives, the school board, to build a school with funds they provide and set up its curriculum (learning goals and areas of study) and hire people to bring it off.  In an immediate sense, the school employees work for the parents and students in a particular school.  They serve them, they don’t order them around.   Students aren’t their lab animals (“I’ll train them up to do the dance I like”).

The central actor in a school is the individual student. 

Think about something you really know about.  It could be fixing cars or the Civil War or sculpting or classical music or mathematics or astronomy, you name it.  Think about how you came to be so up on it.  You may have taken a class in it and been inspired by a teacher, but very quickly, and most basically, you did it.  You had the goal, the intention—you owned it, it was yours—to get better at whatever it was and you took responsibility for getting it done, and you worked hard at it and had a good time doing it, it wasn’t sleep-inducing drudgery.

You tinkered with carburetors and learned from that and improved the next time you fixed one.  If it was writing, you reviewed what you put together and ran it by people whose opinions you respect and learned from that, and then you wrote some more and saw how it went.  You read books by the finest writers looking for how they brought it off and saw what you could take from them.  You sequenced the process: you did the next thing you needed to do, whatever it was.

Tellingly, you didn’t show up to class at 9:50 a.m. and dutifully do what the teacher came up with for you to do.  You didn’t get together with a bunch of people to do activities (“Let’s us break into groups and roleplay”).  You didn’t do the exact same thing as everybody else.  The relationship that mattered to you wasn’t with the teacher—isn’t she nice?—but with mathematics or painting and mastering it (mastering it;  you had high standards).

I get my laptop fixed by a university tech team, as they call themselves.  It’s university undergraduates.  I marvel at how much they know about computers.  I’ve asked several of them how they got so good with computers.  “Did you take courses in them?” Invariably it’s been, “No, I just picked it up.”  Teachers think the wheels turn because of their daily lesson plans and assignments, when in fact they get in the way of what needs to be done: individual students taking on the job of learning biology.

It’s best to think of schools as places where students learn rather than teachers teach and see where that takes you.

The learning process isn’t tricky.

The education profession thinks it takes years of university study to get a handle on how to make learning happen.  Bullcrap.  Back to how much you know about, let’s say, gardening.  Getting so good at gardening was a matter of common sense.  You checked out examples of good gardens, sought out good gardeners and picked their brains, read books on gardening you got from the library, and tried things that worked and didn’t work and learned from that and did it better the next time.

You didn’t need a bachelor’s degree in teaching gardening to figure out how to get good at gardening.  You didn’t need someone to write up a syllabus that told you precisely what to do for the next three months.  You just got on with it, prompted by an interest and hope (an image in your head of a great garden and the satisfaction and pride that comes from creating one).

Schools can serve a good purpose.

What I’ve said so far may sound like I’m for bagging schools or making a pitch for home schooling.  I’m not doing that.  Important, significant learning can go on in schools.  Teachers can be inspiring examples of people who are really into what they teach—literature, art, science, and so on (which too often isn’t the case).  Teachers can suggest good work for students to take on and be supportive when they take it on.  Teachers can be kind, moral, upright people and exemplify what a good human being is like.  It’s good for students to be around their peers—they can learn a lot from them, including social skills and the value in looking out for other people and how to go about it.  And simply, it is good for students to get out of the house every day, a place that in too many cases isn’t a healthy place for them.   Covid and the remote learning that schools imposed in its name—which never should have happened, but that’s not the topic here—resulted in regrettable outcomes, including child abuse and mental distress.

Schools can encourage students to learn the basics.

What are the basics?   I offer this list:

  • Reading capability. I’m thinking of at least a fifth-grade level. The ability to read a news article, understand written instructions, that kind of thing.
  • Writing capability. The ability to write coherent, grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs.
  • Mathematical capability. The ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, know what a percentage is, run a cash register—you know what I mean.

So far, this sounds like readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, and so it is.  If you don’t have those skills going for you, and a lot of people don’t, you’ve got big problems, and you’re very likely to be a drag on society.

  • Political literacy. This country is a constitutional republic (not a democracy, by the way). You need to have a basic understanding of what this political arrangement is about, because it is the game that’s on your table and you’d best learn to play effectively by its rules.  Absent dictates from on high, this system is grounded in personal freedom, liberty, and the opportunity and challenge to make something out of your life and be good for the people around you in the process.  It depends on you to keep the system going and not be coaxed, bullied, or conned into turning it into an authoritarian, “elite”-dominated, hostile alien-controlled, conform-or-else wet blanket and roadblock.  You need to know what the Founders, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and federalism are really about, and what the ideal of republican citizenship is really about (concurrently looking out for you and yours and doing what you can at the local, state, and national political levels), rather than what the marionette string-pullers tell you they are about.
  • Good character. I’m thinking of three character traits that schools should promote:

Personal responsibility.  You don’t whine, blame, play the victim, or lay back and wait for someone or something to make things good for you.   You don’t take handouts.  You don’t demand special favors.  You have jobs to do and people to care for and you shut the hell up and get on with it.

Hard work.  You do things the absolute best you can.  When you sweep the floor, you sweep the floor!  If it is a McDonald’s job, the uniform is clean and pressed and you’re there early and they’ve never seen anybody flip a hamburger as well as you.  If you’re writing something, you proof the hell out of it.  I watch NFL games and these days the players have sayings on the back of their helmets—“fight racism,” “inspire change,” and the like.  I’d suggest “go to work,” though I don’t suppose that would go over very well.

Decency.  You are kind, giving, you help people out, you don’t hurt people (or animals), you protect them.  You are a good human being.  Sounds like the Boy Scout Oath?  Fine with me.

How can a school promote those qualities?  It can go public that it believes in these things and wants students to exemplify them in the way they live their lives.  The people who work in schools can embody them.  They can note and affirm good examples of these qualities—in books, the news, wherever it is.  They can celebrate when students exhibit good character.  A big part of good teaching (and good parenting) involves catching somebody doing something right and making a big deal of it.

You’re picking up on what isn’t in this list—no left-wing (or right-wing, for that matter) political indoctrination.  No ethnic and race bashing (“privileged Whites and their evil ways”).  Schools need to butt out with that stuff, or better, be forced to butt out.  They aren’t ever going to get off what they are doing until it becomes detrimental to their perceived self-interest to keep doing it, and that state of affairs is going to have to come from the outside (I’m thinking of politicians and parents); what’s going on is too locked in place to come from the inside.

Schools should offer rich learning opportunities for students.

What opportunities?  I have a bias toward the traditional academic subjects, including for students from less advantaged backgrounds.   I see them as personally liberating as they empower individuals by informing and disciplining their minds: history, literature, science, math, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and fine art.  Students are invited to study them and are provided support and encouragement as they embark on their individual learning quests.  I worry about a vocations-directed focus prior to the post-secondary years because it can pre-judge and channel the scruffier students, if you’ll pardon the label, into slots that don’t match up with their highest possibilities.  To get personal, knowing that Beethoven created music not just Chuck Berry served to keep me off the assembly line at the local Ford plant where I was headed.  I’m intrigued by the K-12 curriculum of Michigan’s Hillsdale College. It calls for “a classical American education” and invites you to look into it.

I’m enamored of physical education of a certain sort.  Not the usual competitive team sports where you wear a number and a coach calls the plays and runs you in and out of the game.  I mean activities that bring you into contact with your corporal being and its potential.  I’m thinking of such things as yoga and dance and meditation and hiking and rock-climbing and sailing.  Getting personal again, I either didn’t know about the activities just listed or assumed they weren’t for the likes of me, and as I think back on it, the schools I went to were just fine with that.   I was cut out, so it was assumed, for trying to hit a curve ball and sink a jump shot, neither of which I was any good at doing, and trying to do them got me nowhere.

Schooling and education are not the same thing.

We need to keep in mind that important education—the kind that   makes a difference in how people think and live—goes on in other contexts than schools.   Peers educate, as do politicians, the clergy, friends, libraries, movies and TV shows, websites, and recreational activities—the football team, the drama club, and sailing promote different ways of thinking and being.   I’ll shine a light on two elements of modern life that educate: modes of communication, such as texting and social media, and parents.

Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian communication theorist prominent in the 1960’s became famous for the phrase, “The medium is the message.” His point was that forms of communication greatly affect people and thus deserve to be areas of serious study.

To illustrate, I get a lot of emails from people who have read my writings in books and online (I’m hearing impaired and can’t use a phone).  Over the last fifteen years or so, those emails have changed greatly.  Correspondents used to write me in crafted sentences and paragraphs that spelled out what they took from what I wrote and ideas it brought up for them.  They would ask me to expand upon or clarify something in my writing.

Not now.  Now, I get what appears to be a dashed off sentence or two—shallow, simple—that says something about them, not what I wrote.  I recently wrote a website thought about the old-time movie and television cowboy Roy Rogers.  Or nominally at least; it wasn’t really about Roy.  I used him as a metaphor to get into a consideration of childhood neglect and isolation.  Anyway, a typical response to what I put together has been, “I watched Roy’s show when I was a kid.”  That’s it.

I speculate that these kinds of communications, and the level of thinking behind them, such as it is, have been shaped by texting and social media posts.  Quick, casual self-presentational, off the top—this is what I’m like, this is my favorite kind of music, here’s a picture of me and my friends, etc.  On the run, from my phone.   These ways of communicating have resulted in people being less thoughtful, less perceptive, more malleable and conformist (like me, oh please like me), a worrisome outcome if you are concerned about personal autonomy and self-direction in a time of mind management and social engineering.

In an earlier writing, I outlined ten downsides of being heavily—as in every waking moment for a lot of school-aged people—engaged with social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest.

The ten downsides:2

  1. The Opportunity Cost. One way to compute the cost of anything you are doing is the worth of everything else you could have been doing instead. If you are sprucing up your Facebook account, you are not spending the afternoon curled up reading Dostoevsky, taking a walk in the woods and learning Nature’s truths, or engaged in serious thought and reflection.
  2. Never Completely in the Room. With social media, you are always someplace other than in this place, here, now. You are always in the virtual world. In that realm, your focus is on the picture you just sent out on Instagram and reviewing your text messages and sending texts and anticipating what responses you are going to get to what you just sent.
  3. “Let Me Tell You What I Think.” Social media are centered on off-the-top commentaries and self-references. They are about what I think, what I prefer, how the world looks to me. They are about telling my story and letting people know what somebody else’s story brings up for me. Subjective truth, what’s true for me, my opinion, my reactions, takes precedence over the search for the truth outside myself. Social media prompt engaging other people’s ideas just enough for them to prompt what I want to say about myself with regard to whatever or whoever it is.
  4. Easy Does It. Tapping little keys with your thumbs, no heavy lifting in that. In fact, effortlessness is a central value in social media, as well as one of its appeals. Another social media value: shallowness. No need to dig deeply into anything.
  5. Affinity for the Pop Culture. The social media message (both pronunciations) people in the direction of the popular culture. Being on top of contemporary mass entertainment and its messages and ways is a major value in social media.
  6. “Nowism.” Social media are all about this time, now. What’s on for today, that’s the ticket. Who cares about the past? They know no history.
  7. Puts You in Show Business. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter put you and Jimmy Fallon in the same line of work; you are both in show business. You and Jimmy are both engaged in self-promotion, exhibiting yourself in such a way as to get attention and go over big with your audience and being popular. Popularity is a major value in the world of social media; get that lineup of friends expanded, get a lot of action coming your way. The way to do it: get along, go along.
  8. Imprecise Word. Social media is about tossed off, ungrammatical, on-impulse tweets and chatty, informal, two- line text messages. A free society depends on people who think hard about things and act accordingly.
  9. Groupthink. Social media breed a collective, identity; you become a member of a virtual community and absorbed into it. With social media, you are never private. You are always on display: nine o’clock on a Thursday night, there you are, they can see you.  A life in public contributes to an increased need to belong, and the way to belong is to go along with the crowd, conform. Social media involves self-disclosure.  The more you talk about yourself—in any context, not just the internet—the more you reveal about yourself, especially negative self-disclosures, the more subject you are to control by others. Social media breed a kind of networked intelligence: accepted, and acceptable, thought is whatever the wisdom of the collective happens to be. Morality becomes shared morality. Truth, proof, becomes social, what is in the wind, or better, what is in cyberspace.
  10. Why Grow Up? There is a stress in social media on youth, newness, immaturity. We all have to figure out how to pitch who we are to the world, and to ourselves, and many people these days have decided to “play it young,” and the social media push them in this direction.    Children are especially prone to manipulation and intimidation.

Personally, I won’t have anything to do with texting and social media.  Bottom line in this writing: if you are the Pied Piper, social media obsessions provide you with good prospects to entice.

Of special mention in this context is TikTok.  Owned by a Chinese company, launched outside China in 2016 and aimed at young people, it became the most popular website in the world in 2021, surpassing Google.  If you want to understand who/what is educating today’s youth, check out TikTok.  One way of seeing the schools’ use of Covid to justify locking down children in their homes is turning them over to TikTok.

This is not the place to go into a long discourse on TikTok.  I’ll leave it that as a parent I find it addictive, vulgar, and base.  I watched my respectful, hard-working, National Honor Society, academic- and athletic-achieving daughter turning into a snippy, “show-offy,” “consumerized,” sexualized, lower-element-emulating urban teen.  Ouch.

And last but absolutely not least, parents as educators.   The people doing the talking center stage in society these days love to get across the idea that parents don’t matter for much in their children’s lives (“Back off and leave your children to me”).  My working life that got me around young people surfaced just the opposite reality, at least potentially.  Mom and Dad can have an enormous and lasting positive educational influence.   It’s not so much what they say that has the impact on their children.  Rather, it is what they are.  The challenge for parents is not so much pointing the way as being the way.  What does your life example teach your child?

What do you do with any, all, of this?

I don’t know what you do.  You have to decide that.  I only know what I decided to do: write this up.  Given my age (advanced), circumstances, obligations, ambitions, and capabilities, it was the best thing I could think of to do.  What you do depends on who you uniquely are as a person, where you are in your life’s journey, your particular situation and responsibilities and possibilities, and your beliefs and commitments.  Maybe you do something, maybe you do nothing.  “Somethings” that come to mind include publicly critiquing what I’ve written here and improving on it, setting out to become more informed about schooling and education, expressing your views to your family, friends, and neighbors, giving your children good books to read of the sort that schools aren’t about to give them, speaking up at schoolboard meetings and parent conferences, writing online or in articles and books, organizing other parents, participating in a schooling-oriented organization, supporting a politician or running for office yourself, and taking your role as a parent more seriously.  Whatever you do, nothing is too small; everything matters.  It could be voting in the next school board election when you haven’t in the past, fine.  Little things you and I do encourage other people to do little (and big) things and it snowballs.  What’s most important is that we take ourselves seriously and get in the game and do the best we can while we still have the gift of life.

Endnotes

  1. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Expensive, get it from a library.
  2. Robert S. Griffin, Personal Computer Use in Our Time: An Addiction?, 2014. In the writings section of my personal website, www.robertsgriffin.com

Show Us the Way, Rich Liberals!

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Show Us the Way, Rich Liberals!

    It’s been awe-inspiring to see the bottomless generosity of Martha’s Vineyard residents after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent them 50 illegal immigrants from Venezuela last week.

     WE LOVE YOU, YOU’VE ENRICHED OUR LIVES, NOW GET THE F–K OUT OF HERE.

Unlike angry, White MAGA voters upset about their towns being flooded with illegals, Vineyard residents would LOVE to be sort of a — what’s the word? — “sanctuary” for illegals. Really, they would. But that won’t be possible.

As Lisa Belcastro, manager of the Vineyard’s homeless shelter, succinctly put it: “We are definitely supplying them with a lot of love … They need to be off island.” The illegals “need” to hustle off because “Their immigration appointments are not here.” (Are their appointments in the Trump-supporting working-class town they were bussed to?)

In any event, GREAT NEWS, LISA! Nearly half of released illegals don’t appear for their hearings anyway. And guess what? There are absolutely no consequences. (A dozen anti-American websites claim that vast, gigantic numbers of illegals show up for their hearings, but they’re counting illegals who are being held in detention.)

On NPR, Vineyard radio host Eve Zuckoff also began with a testimonial about how “the community rallied”! But unfortunately, “there isn’t the infrastructure.” What do these great humanitarians imagine dirt-poor towns in south Texas have in terms of “infrastructure”?

Every single objection Vineyard residents have raised against the illegals being allowed to stay is precisely what ordinary Americans — not privileged enough to live in Martha’s Vineyard — have been screaming from the rooftops for 30 years. Those 50 illegals represent less than a millionth of the “enrichment” that’s already been foisted on the rest of America. (They’re 1/100,000th of the illegals admitted just under Biden.)

Vastly poorer towns have been forced to turn nearly their entire annual budgets over to feeding, housing, educating — and incarcerating — great heaping portions of Third-Worlders, while douchebags in places like Martha’s Vineyard (88% White; 3.7% Black and 1.7% Hispanic) preen about their higher morality.

For 20 years, hospitals on the Mexican border have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year caring for illegals — some of whom are driven directly to American hospitals by Mexican ambulances. I have nine kids all with an ailment that they call diseaso expensivo back in Xochitl. And I heard something about free cable?

In 2002, a small community hospital in Arizona serving the Tohono O’odham Nation alone was spending $1.5 million a year treating illegals.

With some border hospitals devoting two-thirds of their entire operating budgets to illegals, forcing them to reduce staff, increase rates and cut back services, how about Martha’s Vineyard pony up a little of its budget on their beloved illegals?

Nah, they’ll just pat themselves on the back for proclaiming the island a “sanctuary city” before teeing off at the Mink Meadows Golf Club. Why? Because they’re better than you.

In case ordinary Americans weren’t enraged enough about bossy illegals and the hypocritical elites who enable them, the 50 Venezuelans sent to the Vineyard are suing Gov. DeSantis for the indignity of being flown to a wealthy resort town. (Maybe the media shouldn’t have spent the last week raving about how fabulously the illegals were being treated in the Vineyard — at least until they had to get the hell out.)

The Venezuelans are demanding $75,000 per illegal, which should go over well with Americans living on $40,000 a year, already taxed to support the tens of millions of poverty-stricken third-worlders living in our country.

But my gosh, the Venezuelans assimilated to America quickly! They break into our country and, Week One: Oy, my back! My back!

Similarly, the 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota assimilated with amazing speed to scamming our welfare system. The land of Walter Mondale and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” is now the land of 100,000 Somalis, helpfully moved there by our State department beginning in the 1990s. In short order, clean, high-trust, homogeneous Minnesota became a hotbed of crime, terrorism and welfare fraud.

But surely this is small price to pay to rescue our fellow human beings from the horrors of Somalia! What’s that? You say the “refugees” are vacationing in Somalia? Help! Help! Get me out of here! Also, I’ll be needing a government check to fund my trip back to Somalia every winter.

Yes, these desperate “refugees” are cheerfully visiting friends and relatives in the country where they allegedly fear for their very lives! We only found out they were vacationing in Somalia because they asked for a break on their government-subsidized rent while they were away. (Request approved!)

Of course, they weren’t all going back to Somalia. Some were going to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. A 2015 House Homeland Security Committee report found that Minnesota contributed the most foreign fighters to ISIS of any state. Two of every four Somali-Minnesotans intercepted at New York’s JFK airport on route to an ISIS training camp had used federal financial-aid funds to pay for their travel.

This week, the Daily Mail reports that “Minnesotans” stole more than a quarter BILLION dollars in pandemic relief funds from the U.S. taxpayer, for such pandemic-related needs as 20 cars, 40 properties, guns, cryptocurrency, a week at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and dozens of luxury items. And this is interesting: also a luxury apartment in Kenya.

The pandemic thieves appear to consist of one white woman and 46 Somalis:

— Aimee Marie Bock

— Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh

— Salim Ahmed Said

— Abdulkadir Nur Salah

— Ahmed Sharif Omar-Hashim

— Abdi Nur Salah

— Abdihakim Ali Ahmed

— Ahmed Mohamed Artan

— Abdikadir Ainanshe Mohamud

— Abdinasir Mahamed Abshir

— Asad Mohamed Abshir

— Hamdi Hussein Omar

— Ahmed Abdullahi Ghedi

— Abdirahman Mohamud Ahmed

— Abdiaziz Shafii Farah

— Mohamed Jama Ismail

— Mahad Ibrahim

— Abdimajid Mohamed Nur

— Said Shafii Farah

— Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin

— Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff

— Hayat Mohamed Nur

— Qamar Ahmed Hassan

— Sahra Mohamed Nur

— Abdiwahab Ahmed Mohamud

— Filsan Mumin Hassan

— Guhaad Hashi Said

— Abdullahe Nur Jesow

— Abdul Abubakar Ali

— Yusuf Bashir Ali

— Haji Osman Salad

— Fahad Nur

— Anab Artan Awad

— Sharmarke Issa

— Farhiya Mohamud

— Liban Yasin Alishire

— Ahmed Yasin Ali

— Khadar Jigre Adan

— Sharmake Jama

— Ayan Jama

— Asha Jama

— Fartun Jama

— Mustafa Jama

— Zamzam Jama

— Bekam Addissu Merdassa

— Hadith Yusuf Ahmed

— Hanna Marekegn

Your loss, Martha’s Vineyard!

Note to Gov. DeSantis: Keep the flights going. Never stop. And in about three years, remember the words “immigration fraud” and “repatriation.”

Seeing Some Old Friends and Acquaintances

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Going to a gathering of old friends and acquaintances is always sort of bittersweet. The sweet part is seeing the friends and getting some positive attention rather than a lot of negative attention as I have become accustomed to when not around people who are already on board. The sad part is contemplating the political implications. I can only conclude that the vast majority of my generation are completely clueless about our issues—White identity and interests, Jewish power and its consequences, and multiculturalism combined with mass non-White immigration and its consequences—consequences that are apparent to anyone paying attention and looking at the available information. Instead, they are far more interested in their families (especially women)—how many children and grandchildren do you have?—and in sports (mostly men)—I got a quick refresher course in all the local teams. Their media were things like MSNBC, Meet the Press, and the local newspaper—all Left-liberal. To the extent that they care at all, their opinions reflect these media sources. A couple people dropped hints to being conservative, but I didn’t hear anything that seemed to offer a glimmer of hope that they had been red-pilled.

To the extent that they care at all. The reality is that huge numbers of people are not really all that interested in politics. They care far more about their careers, their leisure activities, their families, and dealing with everyday life.  Voter turnout for the 2020 election was around 67% if you believe the narrative in an election that was engineered to be insecure under the cover of the Covid scare.  This means millions of people didn’t bother to vote. And many people who did vote know next to nothing about the issues or how the government works. And far too many can be easily swayed by sophisticated political advertising funded by activist billionaires, many of whom are Jews who have contributed the bulk of the money for the Democrats and far too much to ignore for the Republicans.

And they are economically comfortable, so you hear a lot about second homes and leisure travel to far-off places. Many of them are religious and at least some of their politics is religiously motivated. And the great majority are overweight and out of shape—sort of easing into old age and the supposed inevitability of decline.

I can’t even imagine trying to proselytize to them. It’s like they are on the other side of the moon. Where would you start? I suppose you could suggest some reading, some podcasts, or internet sites, but their first reaction is likely bewilderment and even moral outrage, and it would be hard to get past that. It’s hard to get past that because the default way that White people evaluate political issues—especially if they are on the Left and especially among women—is very often moral. Moral judgments are deeply intertwined with emotion and with personal identity. Facts become irrelevant. The whole point of the vast literature depicting victimization of non-Whites and gender minorities is based on inculcating moral revulsion by depicting particularly egregious examples of White misbehavior—like the way the media framed the George Floyd incident. So you are in a deep hole to start with. Exposing them to the realities, say, of Black IQ and short time perspective would be met with blank stares followed by moral revulsion. Forget about citing data.

And of course they are insulated from the effects of the ongoing disaster. They live in suburbs, small cities, or rural areas. I saw maybe one or two non-Whites the entire visit until I got to the big-city airports. Their media doesn’t cover issues like the surge in illegal immigration, crime in the cities, and much else. Re immigration, the arrival of 2–3 million illegals in the past year is an issue that would never even be mentioned in the mainstream liberal-Left media. Gov. DeSantis’s strategy of shipping needy illegals off to sanctuary cities like New York, DC, and Chicago is great and is certainly resulting in the entire gamut of mainstream media covering the issue (with—surprise!—moral revulsion on the Left [human trafficking!!] and gleeful coverage on Fox News).  Better is sending illegals to smaller places like Martha’s Vineyard that wear their sanctuary status as a moral badge and are suddenly confronted with an influx of people in need of social services—certainly not something that well-heeled liberals should ever have to endure, even if jobs are available. The migrants DeSantis sent to the Vineyard were of course dispatched elsewhere by the national guard within a couple days during which the Vineyardians claim to have been greatly enriched.

This may wake up some Whites to what is going on at the border and may well help the GOP in November, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the ongoing, decades-long replacement of the White population via legal and illegal immigration. The electoral replacement of Whites is essentially irreversible at this point barring a political cataclysm—and to be sure, there is no shortage of talk about a civil war.  (The Left, which always plays for keeps, is well advanced in purging the military and security agencies in anticipation of such an eventuality.) But even assuming the GOP benefits enough to do well in November, it doesn’t change the reality that the GOP is worse than useless as far as seriously trying to change the present trajectory. (It’s the same in Sweden where a conservative coalition will form a government but exclude the further-right Sweden Democrats, whose main issue is immigration and its disastrous effects, from ministerial positions. The cordon sanitaire in Europe is alive and well.)

So I have to say it’s not looking good right now. Most White people need to get hit over the head to get them to change at all—which is why the strategy of some GOP governors to ship illegals to sanctuary jurisdictions makes political sense. But again, the GOP has a long record of being worse than useless.

Some Psychology  

Speaking of hitting people over the head with issues that affect them, there is evidence, summarized in Ch. 8 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, that White people informed that they will soon be a minority (another issue that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media except for a few examples of Leftist triumphalism) tend to adopt more conservative attitudes. I suppose this is positive because in the long run, the disastrous consequences of the current direction of the West will be apparent to ever-increasing numbers of White people.

But of course, there are a lot of countervailing psychological forces in play, also discussed in the above-mentioned book and all related to the unique Western tradition of individualism. Chief among these is that the social glue of Western societies is based on establishing moral communities rather than communities based on kinship (e.g., clan-type cultures or groups, such as Jewish groups, with high levels of ethnocentrism resulting in strong ingroup identifications and negative attitudes toward outgroups). (The uniqueness of Western individualism, our relative lack of ethnocentrism, and our lack of social organization based on extensive kinship are also a theme of Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.) The moral communities of the West are a powerful force for social cohesion. Westerners are peculiarly prone to feeling guilt for contravening the moral attitudes of their cultures. In the environments we evolved in, violating the moral sensibilities of the group was an evolutionary dead end. So my old friends and acquaintances going along with the current anti-White zeitgeist are simply conforming to the morally tinged messages of suffering minorities and evil Whites they see every day in their media.

In the contemporary West, these moral communities are created by the messages disseminated by the media and the academic world—top-down control of culture processed by our higher brain centers able to inhibit evolved tendencies, e.g., toward ingroup racial identity. And at this time people are inundated with messages that race doesn’t exist, that all groups have the same genetic potential and are only held back by White racism, etc. And of course, there are huge incentives for going along with these ideas and increasingly dire penalties to those who voice opposition.

Women are particularly prone to the primacy of moral attitudes in politics. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this—personality differences related to being higher on nurturance and love important for rearing children and cementing long-term relationships, but for women in individualist cultures it means also being empathic to the suffering non-Whites they see in the media which can easily lead to pathological altruism, such as after the Haitian earthquake of 2010. And of course there is no shortage of men who have the same reaction.

It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue. [Should Haiti Be Rebuilt]

There are also sex differences in proneness to fear and desire for safety, with women higher. As they say, there is safety in numbers, so going along with the views of the majority of your moral community offers protection, whereas going against such views may have a variety of negative consequences—form getting fired from your job or getting ostracized from friends and family. And these days, a reincarnation of the gulag for political dissenters in the West is a real possibility and is already a reality in much of the West where there are no Constitutional guarantees of free speech.  The Left, which once championed free speech, is now adamantly opposed to free speech on sensitive topics like race and multiculturalism. And throughout the West, the views championed by elites in control of the mainstream media and the judicial system conform entirely to the anti-White zeitgeist. There’s a natural tendency to look up to elites—and to fear their power. We live in an oligarchy presiding over a faux democracy.

These lock-step moral communities produce a hive-mind, cult-like mentality. Tobias Langdon provides a particularly graphic example of the hive mind based on moral certitude and illustrated by constant virtue-signaling. Quoting a Guardian columnist attending a book fair:

You will never meet a group of people more consistent in their views, and not because most of them also go to the same pilates class. Every man jack of them voted remain [on Brexit], and they are considerably more leftwing than those at any meeting of any political party. … The audience absolutely hate being politically misidentified, and they spend those first 10 minutes desperately signalling, with spontaneous clapping and foot-stamping, to indicate that nobody hates the [the “conservative” Conservative] government more than they. … The atmosphere, it probably goes without saying, is electrifying.

So we are up against it. But never say die. The future cannot be predicted.

Fetterman’s Murderous Campaign Aides: How it Really Happened

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FETTERMAN’S MURDEROUS CAMPAIGN AIDES: HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED

Dr. Mehmet Oz, Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, recently attacked his opponent, the ridiculous Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, for a pro-criminal record that would embarrass George Soros. Specifically, he criticized Fetterman for employing as aides on his campaign Dennis and Lee Horton, who spent 27 years in prison for a horrific armed robbery murder.

Drunk on his own self-righteousness, Fetterman sanctimoniously responded: “Does Dr. Oz believe that the wrongfully convicted should die in prison?” He added that the brothers “spent 27 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Members of the media, who fervently believe our prisons are just bursting at the seams with completely innocent men, didn’t need to hear more. Suddenly, the entire media-big tech-entertainment conglomerate was screaming at Oz: HOW DARE YOU, YOU MORALLY BANKRUPT DOUCHEBAG! THESE TWO MEN WERE PROVED INNOCENT!

Were they now?

Here’s how the media tells “the actual story,” as somberly delivered by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who majored in “Easily Fooled” studies at Brown University:

“According to brothers Dennis and Lee Horton [and who would know better?], on Memorial Day 1993, they were out for a joyride when they picked up their friend, a guy named Robert Leaf.

“The police involved with the case were accused of using a whole host of problematic tactics during the investigation [yes, they were “accused” — accusations laughed out of court by Democratic judges]; eyewitnesses changed their story [they did not] after prosecutors tried to pin the crime on all three of them — the Hortons as well.

“And the district attorney’s case file, which was not made available till 2018 [I think we know why, Larry Krasner!], included a note stating Leaf is the shooter and a police note indicating Leaf acknowledged his role — all seeming to clear the Hortons. [total B.S.]

The Horton brothers, who are black, refused a plea agreement because they said they didn’t want to plead guilty to a crime they did not commit.”

Below, I have edited Hayes’ description to include only those parts that are relevant and actually true:

“on Memorial Day 1993 …

“a guy named Robert Leaf

“They were … pulled over and all three men were arrested.

“The Horton brothers … are black.”

Luckily for people interested in knowing the truth — a group that decidedly does not include Chris Hayes — the Horton brothers spent their years in prison clogging up the courts with frivolous appeals, so it’s possible to find out how these innocent lambs were somehow convicted of A CRIME THEY DIDN’T COMMIT!

“On May 31, 1993, [Dennis Horton], his brother Lee Horton (‘Lee’), and a co-conspirator Robert Leaf (‘Leaf’) robbed Filito’s Bar located at 5th Street and Hunting Park Avenue.

“During the course of the robbery, [Dennis Horton], who was carrying a rifle, shot Samuel Alemo multiple times. Alemo later died from his gunshot wounds. [Dennis Horton] also shot Luz Archella and her daughter Luz Martinez, injuring both. Leaf brandished what appeared to be a black pistol while Lee took money from bar patrons. After leaving the bar, the three men fled in a blue automobile.

“A passerby was able to supply police with a description of the vehicle and a partial license plate number. A radio call was sent out, which included a description of the three assailants, their vehicle, and the last four digits of the license plate. A police officer observed the vehicle a short time later only a mile from the crime scene, and placed [Dennis Horton] and his companions under arrest.

“Police recovered a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle from the backseat of the car, as well as a black pellet gun under the front passenger seat. Ballistics testing identified the rifle as the same weapon used during the robbery at Filito’s. [Horton], Lee, and Leaf … were taken to the hospital where Martinez and her daughter, as well as another bar patron, Miguel DeJesus, identified them as the robbers.”

(The judges, incidentally, were all Democrats, including the only black woman on the 38-member appellate court, who subscribes to the theory that prison is “The New Jim Crow.”)

As you can see right away, one problem with the media’s version of events is: What the hell happened to the other two guys?

This was a daytime robbery of a bar, where two of the perpetrators walked around, taking the patrons’ wallets at gunpoint — not a nighttime mugging witnessed from 20 yards away. The victims had plenty of time to observe the perps. However much criminal defense lawyers attack eyewitness testimony, the patrons certainly knew it was three guys, not one; that they were black, not white; and they were male, not female.

But more important, right after the murdering thieves sped off, a passerby called the police with a description of the car, including four of six numbers from the license plate. Within minutes, that very car was stopped by the police a mile from the bar. And you’ll never guess what they found in that car … three black guys and a recently fired rifle!

Explain, again, how the Horton brothers happened to be in that car?

Right after their arrest, all three men were positively identified at the hospital by the people they’d shot at earlier that day. But even without that identification, again: They were caught in the getaway car, mere minutes after the crime.

So if I understand it correctly, the media’s theory of the crime is as follows:

Immediately after the robbery — and I mean immediately! — Leaf told his REAL accomplices: I’ve got a fantastic idea! You guys get out of the car. I know these two brothers — the Hortons — who look exactly like you and I’m pretty sure are wearing the exact same clothes. Also, their car is identical to yours and — you’ll never believe this — their license plate number is only off by two digits. I’ll just call them to come pick me up and wait here by the side of the road with the long-barreled — and easy to conceal! — rifle we just fired — OH CRAP! IT’S THE POLICE!

Look, it would be one thing if Fetterman defended his years-long PR campaign on behalf of the murdering Horton brothers by saying, They’ve served long enough! Everybody deserves a second chance. I would disagree, especially because the brothers continue to deny their guilt — but in that case, at least Fetterman would only be a gullible fool, and not a despicable, bald-faced liar.

     COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER

Putin’s Narrowing Options

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Putin's Narrowing Options

Early in this war, Russia’s hawks talked openly of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. That talk has begun anew.

A desperate Vladimir Putin is a dangerous Vladimir Putin, and there are signs Putin’s situation in Ukraine may be becoming desperate.

In the last week, the Russian army in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine was driven out of some 2,200 square miles of territory, according to the Ukrainians, whose soldiers are now two miles from the Russian border.

The Kharkiv battle was a rout for the surprised Russians who tore off their uniforms, threw down their weapons and fled, some on stolen bicycles. For Russia, it was the worst defeat of the war.

That Moscow sustained a stunning setback is attested to by the news that Russian nationalists back home have begun to grumble openly about Putin’s management of the war he launched on Feb. 24.

Where does Putin stand now?

He is in the seventh month of a war he launched last winter, and he appears to be headed into this coming winter with no victory and no end to the war in sight.

His early offensives, while successful north of Crimea and in the Donbas, failed to capture Kiev, Kharkiv or Odessa on the Black Sea, Ukraine’s three largest cities, which were Russia’s strategic objectives.

Putin’s gains in the Donbas are the one great prize he has. But his army is now demoralized and on the defensive. The momentum of the war has shifted in Kiev’s favor.

Western and, in particular, the U.S. weapons Ukraine is being provided have proven devastating to the Russian forces, whose losses in tanks, armor and troops are major.

Thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured. Putin has no available reserves in Russia without imposing conscription to replace them.

The Ukrainians now appear to be guaranteed an endless supply of the modern U.S. weapons they have used to decimate the Russian army.

The present prospect for Putin is thus no victory, no end to the war, no end to the weekly casualty lists of dead, wounded and missing, a continued stalemate now, and the prospect of eventual defeat ahead.

Could Putin survive perceived defeat in a war he launched, and the personal, political and national humiliation he and Russia would sustain from such a defeat? Would Putin be able to survive that and remain president of Russia after 22 years in power?

In short, in a war history will call Putin’s War, the tide is turning against the Russians, and Putin faces the prospect of having been the ruler who launched Russia’s least necessary and lost war.

What are Putin’s options?

The first is to stay the course, cut off oil and gas exports to NATO Europe, and hope Ukraine’s losses and Europe’s hardships this winter compel Kiev and its allies to accept a truce that allows Russia to retain some of the new territory it has gained since Feb. 24.

The problem with this course of action is that it is Ukraine’s army that appears to have time on its side now and the wind at its back.

The alternative to a war that lasts as long as the Ukrainians are willing to fight to drive the Russians out is for Russia to escalate and win, and force an end to the fighting.

How could Moscow do this?

First, Putin could raise the stakes, say we are at war with NATO, call up Russian’s army reserves, as in World War II, and conscript enough new soldiers to replace those already lost.

Second, there is the Grozny option, the devastating artillery, air and rocket assault the Russians visited upon the Chechen capital to bring an end to a separatist moment in 2000.

But would the Russians, before the eyes of the world, do to Kiev or Kharkiv what they did to Grozny a quarter century ago?

Beyond the Grozny option, there is the nuclear option.

Russia has thousands of tactical atomic weapons, the largest such arsenal in the world, and the threat to use, or the actual use of one or more of these weapons, would raise the stakes in the war exponentially.

Early in this war, Russia’s hawks talked openly of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. That talk has begun anew.

The basic question comes down to this:

Would Putin threaten or use nuclear weapons to prevent a defeat and humiliation for himself and Russia? And, if so, how and where would he use them? And how would Kiev and the West respond?

America, Britain and France are all three both NATO and nuclear-weapons states. But none has a vital interest in the outcome of this Ukraine war to justify a nuclear war with Russia, even if Russia resorts to first use of such a weapon.

The longer this war goes on, and the sooner the Russian bleeding becomes intolerable to Putin, the more likely it is that he will escalate, rather than capitulate and accept defeat and humiliation for his country and himself, leading to his removal from power.

Again, a desperate Putin is a dangerous Putin.