DEMOCRAT DIRTY TRICKS ESCALATE AS ELECTION DAY DESPERATION TAKES HOLD:
In North Dakota, conservative radio host and blogger Rob Port reported this week that the state Democratic Party there is telling hunters that if they vote, they could jeopardize their hunting licenses. “A reader alerted me to this curious message on Facebook which tells voters they may lose their hunting licenses in other states if they vote,” Port said.
Read the whole thing.
PC CULTURE: How Progressive Elite Control of Education Embitters Americans.
Modern America is characterized by an intense grassroots distrust of American elites — with red America especially disdainful of progressive elite institutions. Much ink has been spilled explaining the reasons for this distrust, and I don’t intend for a single short piece to encompass the whole of the argument, but I do think we underestimate the extent to which prolonged exposure to a flawed and biased elite-ordered and elite-controlled education system is profoundly dispiriting and embittering for millions of Americans.
Public education has been marked by diminished local control, top-down reform driven by ideological and educational fads, and failed experiment after failed experiment. For example, the intense opposition to the Common Core in the recent past was driven in part by the too-fresh memory of other grand ideas and technocratic national movements.
As for higher education, its gatekeepers are often explicit ideological radicals. At their worst, they attempt to micromanage a freshman class’s racial and socioeconomic background (and sometimes its political composition) based on theories about privilege that are utterly at odds with the lived experience of the American families at their mercy.
Yep.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academia Is A Cult:
I “blew out” of the cult — to use its own lingo for leaving — after my senior year to attend a Catholic university 20 miles away. I still read the Apostle Paul, but Jane Austen and James Joyce, too. Then I earned a PhD in English at the University of Minnesota, where I rehearsed Marx’s and Freud’s critiques of religion. Simmering with smug resentment, I was certain that I, an intellectual, was on the right side of history, a sworn opponent of the oppressive ideologies I ascribed to organized religion.
But I had to climb only so far up the ivory tower to recognize patterns of abuse that I thought — in my new, secular life — I had left behind. Because academia, I slowly realized, is also a cult.
Cults are systems of social control. They are insular but often evangelical organizations whose aims (be they money, power, sex or something else) are rooted in submission to a dogma manifested by an authority figure: a charismatic preacher or, say, a tenured professor. The relationship between shepherd and sheep is couched in unwavering commitment to a supposedly noble, transcendent cause. For the Living Word Fellowship, that meant “the Lordship of Jesus Christ”; for academia, “the production of knowledge.” In both cases, though, faith ultimately amounts to mastering the rules of the leaders, whose infallibility — whether by divine right or endowed chair — excuses all else.
Looking back, the evidence was everywhere: I’d seen needless tears in the eyes of classmates, harangued in office hours for having the gall to request a letter of recommendation from an adviser. Others’ lives were put on hold for months or sometimes years by dissertation committee members’ refusal to schedule an exam or respond to an email. I met the wives and girlfriends of senior faculty members, often former and sometimes current advisees, and heard rumors of famed scholars whisked abroad to sister institutions in the wake of grad student affairs gone awry. I’d first come in contact with such unchecked power dynamics as a child, in the context of church. In adulthood, as both a student and an employee of a university, I found myself subject to them once again. . . . The Ronell scandal should alert us to the broader ways in which the 21st-century university is an absolutist institution, a promoter of sycophancy and an enemy of dissent.
Yep.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT WORKING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Cocaine Back in a Big Way, DEA Warns, with Rising Overdose Deaths.
HAS MANCHIN GIVEN UP? He says he will vote against a proposed amendment to the West Virginia constitution that would make it illegal to use state tax dollars to support abortion, according to Washington Free Beacon’s Bill McMorris.
Either Manchin thinks he’s so far ahead of his Republican opponent, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morissey, that opposing the amendment won’t prevent his re-election. Or Manchin’s internal polls have picked up the Trump effect and he knows Tuesday is not going to be a good day for him.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Sure, Let’s All Unify…Around Donald Trump. “In these troubled times, so many of our betters in our beloved and respected elite have cried out that Americans must put aside our petty differences and come together, and I agree. Let’s unify around the conservative agenda of the guy we elected president, Donald Trump. Now, we have to unify around something, right? So, if we’re going to unify around something, shouldn’t we do it around the policies of the guy who won the presidency? Around the party that currently holds both houses of Congress? Around the side that holds the majority on the Supreme Court?”
That’s crazy talk.
EDGY STATEMENTS FROM 1887: Dartmouth prof: ‘If we don’t abolish capitalism, capitalism will abolish us.’
FLASHBACK: Why Can’t Our Ruling Class Do Its Job? “Our elites care more about what their peers think of them than about what they’re supposed to be doing. No wonder so many institutions are failing.”
FOUR ‘BIG BANGS’ MAKE FOR ONE HUGE QUESTION: It’s Sunday morning, so here’s a question for you — Why is there “something” rather than “nothing?” It’s today’s question on the HillFaith blog. It’s something a lot of smart people on both sides of the science/faith divide have considered over the years. And it’s much more significant than the one about whether a problem is solved if a congressman offers a solution but nobody hears it on C-SPAN.
SOVIET TANKS ROLLED INTO BUDAPEST ON THIS DAY IN 1956, thoroughly crushing the Hungarian Revolution. About 200 Hungarians were executed for their part in the effort to get out from under Soviet domination (including Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who had announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact only days before). About 20,000 were imprisoned and about 200,000 fled the country.
Some had thought that Khrushchev, unlike Stalin, might permit Hungary to leave the Soviet orbit in peace. They were proven wrong.
SO WHAT’S THE DOWNSIDE? You Can’t ‘Fix’ Twitter Without Breaking Twitter.
Related: Social Media As Social Disease.
‘YOU’LL GET TIRED OF WINNING.’ YET ANOTHER FAILED PREDICTION FROM DRUMPF: Veteran unemployment rate hit near-record low in October.
(Classical reference in headline.)
OPEN THREAD: Work your magic.
WALKOUT AT WORLD’S WOKEST COMPANY: “Frightened of their own company, Google staff this week put on a global pity party.”
It’s Tim Blair — with a cameo from Iowahawk — so read the whole thing.
CHRIS WALLACE DEMANDS COLBERT ANSWER: ‘Do You Believe in Open Borders?’
Narrator voice: He does.
SCOTLAND YARD PROBES CLAIMS OF ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE LABOUR PARTY:
The dossier passed to Scotland Yard by LBC radio contains reports of 45 incidents, such as a Labour member allegedly saying a “Zionist” member of Parliament was going to “get a good kicking”. The threat is understood to have been aimed at Luciana Berger, a Jewish Labour MP who has also received death threats.
Another activist allegedly claimed a prison sentence for a former Nazi SS guard at Auschwitz was “a disgusting travesty of justice”. And a serving councillor was accused of calling a child “Jew boy”. The details were understood to have been leaked from a meeting of the party’s disputes panel.
Why is the left such a cesspit of anti-Semitism?
THIS IS CNN: CNN Interviews ‘Random’ Gillum Rally Person — His Mother.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Scottsville woman charged with making false sexual assault allegations. “Carlotta Lynn Merchant reported on Oct. 18 that someone wearing a ski mask and clear gloves forced entry into her home on N. 6th Street and sexually assaulted her. On Oct. 23 police say Merchant called the detective assigned to the case and confessed to staging the crime scene and making up the sexual assault so she could get sympathy from an estranged boyfriend.”
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