HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Fighting Behind Enemy Lines: Three Tactics for Resisting Wokeness from Within.
Archive for 2021
December 23, 2021
December 22, 2021
SIMON JESTER LIVES: Someone Interrupts Live Fox Broadcast With an Important Reminder: FJB!
OPEN THREAD: We’re about ready to rock steady.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington Post Discovers World War II-Era Survey, Cancels the Greatest Generation.
Fox News noted, however, that there seemed to be an ulterior motive in the presentation of this “uncensored” material. “Critics took to social media to blast The Post’s framing of the surveys, with some questioning the desire to view people in the 1940s through a 21st-century lens, and others suggesting that there was now an ongoing effort to cancel the grandparents of some Americans.” Nick Timothy, a columnist for the UK’s Telegraph, tweeted: “Next you’ll be telling me William Wilberforce wasn’t in the Parliamentary LGBTQ society, and Gandhi didn’t support Black Lives Matter. Historical figures lived with different social and moral norms. This is not news, or a novel academic discovery.”
Indeed. It is noteworthy also that the Post saw fit to highlight, out of 65,000 pages of surveys, racist and sexist remarks, rather than material that might have provided insight into the challenges that the men who won World War II faced and the difficulties they overcame. The Post’s article, and apparently the entire Virginia Tech project, if its focus is reflected accurately in the article, is akin to the pulling down of statues that has become a fad all over the country. The Left wants Americans to be ashamed of our history. Washington? Jefferson? Not statesmen, not men of courage, not key framers of the most successful republic and freest society the world has ever known, but just racist slaveowners, to be repudiated and abhorred, not respected or celebrated. Lincoln? He didn’t free the slaves; that’s the “white savior complex.” He, too, must be rejected as a racist, paternalist white supremacist. The Greatest Generation? Yes, they fought and won World War II and came home and made the United States the greatest power on earth, but you see, they did not hold woke attitudes.
In accordance with the prophesy:
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As I’ve noted before, our elites are now promoting the kind of history one would impose on a conquered nation, to break its people’s spirit.
UPDATE (From Ed): As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018, “Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.”
The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.
What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.
And plenty of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” as well. “It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’”
(Updated and bumped.)
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Does this mean Antifa is officially racist now? Woke Journalists Compare Antifa Riots to D-Day Landings.
MANCHIN IS DRIVING LEFTIES CRAZY: The New Yorker seems to think that there’s something “Imperial” about a houseboat, and something proletarian about . . . kayakers?
Like toddlers, they go crazy whenever their impulses are thwarted.
IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL, Y’ALL; IT’S JUST BIDNESS: A writer with Dallas roots unravels the rare secrets of the best movie ever — The Godfather.
Before The Godfather began shooting, the film’s producer, Al Ruddy, was being threatened. Constantly. He and his staff “would trade cars,” Seal says, to avoid being trailed. One night, his female assistant parked Ruddy’s car in front of her home, only to hear gunshots blasting out the windshield, with a note attached “saying they didn’t want the movie made.”
And that, the author says, “was only the beginning.”
Coppola wanted to shoot, not in the Midwest, as his bosses fervently hoped he would to keep costs as low as possible, but in New York City, where the Mafia was headquartered.
Soon, Ruddy was forced to meet with Anthony Colombo, head of the Italian American Civil Rights League, who as Seal says was fighting hard against the “stereotyping of Italian Americans in popular culture.” And making headway.
Ruddy was badly in need of keeping the Mafia at bay. Prime locations were being denied. Truck drivers were threatening a work stoppage. There were bomb scares.
So, Ruddy made a proposal that felt a bit like a Hail Mary. By his agreeing to omit the single word “Mafia” from any Godfather script, Colombo was satisfied. “One deletion,” Seal says, “led to a world of cooperation. From that point on, doors opened.”
And then, a new surprise: Real-life mobsters all but demanded being cast.
At the center of it all was Coppola, who badly needed a break. Initially, Coppola was skeptical of Puzo’s novel becoming anything more than a marginal motion picture. A breakthrough came when the director finally began to see it as the saga of a king and his sons, a Shakespearean story of family, which in Seal’s view gave it the magic it needed.
Even so, moments after its release, Coppola felt less like a potential Oscar winner and more like a doomed failure. It wasn’t until his wife phoned him in Paris, where he had traveled to write the screenplay for another Evans-Paramount film, The Great Gatsby, that he began to see what soon became obvious — that he’d created something great. His wife told him that, in New York City alone, people were lining up around the block, clamoring to see his movie.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Anthony Colombo was actually a Mafia member, as was his father — who was actually shot at a rally opposing steretyping of Italian-Americans as mobsters.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Christopher Rufo: Florida v. Critical Race Theory. Governor Ron DeSantis takes a stand against racialist ideologies in public institutions and businesses.
Yesterday, I accompanied Florida governor Ron DeSantis on an early-morning flight from Tallahassee to The Villages retirement community, where he was scheduled to deliver a policy address on critical race theory. During the flight, DeSantis reviewed talking points for his speech, edited communications materials, and, after the plane touched down, selected a red-and-blue sign that would hang on the podium: “STOP WOKE ACT.”
DeSantis warmed up the crowd of approximately 100 people at Ezell Regional Recreation Center and outlined the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” which would ban critical-race-theory indoctrination in public schools, prohibit racially abusive training programs in the workplace, and provide parents and workers the right to sue institutions that violate these prohibitions.
The governor framed the rise of critical race theory as a mortal threat to the United States. “I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” he said. “And they basically want to replace it with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country.”
As illustrations of critical race theory in American institutions, DeSantis cited seven of my reports for City Journal: Arizona claiming that babies are racist; Santa Clara County denouncing the United States as a “parasitic system”; Philadelphia teaching students to celebrate “Black communism”; San Diego telling teachers “you are racist”; Bank of America teaching that the United States is a “system of white supremacy”; Verizon teaching that America is fundamentally racist; and Google teaching that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”
Read the whole thing.
INNATE IMMUNE SYSTEM RESPONSE: Rapid immune response in children protects them from COVID-19, genetic study finds. “The study, published in Nature, is the most comprehensive single-cell study to compare SARS-CoV-2 infection in adults and children across multiple organs. Researchers found that a stronger ‘innate’ immune response in the airways of children, characterized by the rapid deployment of interferons, helped to restrict viral replication early on. In adults, a less rapid immune response meant the virus was better able to invade other parts of the body where the infection was harder to control.”
Here at InstaPundit we’ve been talking about this for many months.
OF COURSE, NOW WE HAVE THE MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES, WHICH ARE BETTER: Study: Blood plasma given early reduces risk for hospitalization from COVID-19.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Covid Debate: They worked with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration.
In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.
That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”
These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate. A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts.
Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw man—they weren’t coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned.
Dr. Fauci also emailed an article from the Nation, a left-wing magazine, and his staff sent him several more. The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works.
On CBS last month, Dr. Fauci said Republicans who criticize him are “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” He isn’t “science.” And it’s also dangerous for scientific officials to mobilize to quash dissent, without which it’s easy to make tragic mistakes. A scientific debate over pandemic policy was and still is in the public interest, especially during a once-in-a-century plague.
Focused protection of nursing homes and other high-risk populations remains the policy road not taken during the pandemic. Perhaps this strategy wouldn’t have prevailed if a debate had been allowed. But it isn’t enough to repeat, as Dr. Collins did on Fox News Sunday, that advocates are “fringe epidemiologists who really did not have the credentials,” and that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”
More than 800,000 Americans have died as much of the country followed the strategy of Drs. Collins and Fauci, and that’s not counting the other costs in lost livelihoods, shuttered businesses, untreated illnesses, mental illness from isolation, and the incalculable anguish of seeing loved ones die alone without the chance for a family to say good-bye.
Rather than try to manipulate public opinion, the job of health officials is to offer their best scientific advice. They shouldn’t act like politicians or censors, and when they do, they squander the public’s trust.
All of our institutions have been corrupted.
A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY: The short and long-term effects of aerobic, strength, or mixed exercise programs on schizophrenia symptomatology. “We concluded that 3 weekly sessions of a moderate to vigorous progressive exercise program for 16 weeks improved the symptomatology of individuals with schizophrenia in all three groups, with no differences between them. However, the effects had declined to baseline levels by the 10-month follow-up, suggesting that exercise interventions should be maintained over time.”
Yes, exercise stops working if you stop doing it.
HOW IT STARTED: New bill funds mental health experts, not police, to respond to emergencies: ‘mental illness is not a crime.’
Congress wants to make it easier for state and local governments to defund the police by instead funding mental health services and empowering them to respond to emergency calls instead of armed officers.
“We should be connecting people in crisis to care, not tossing them in jail,” Rep. Katie Porter, who reintroduced the bill on Thursday, said in a statement. “Mental illness is not a crime, and we have to stop treating it like one. Most police officers are not trained to care for individuals experiencing mental health crises, which too often tragically leads to unnecessary violence.”
The Mental Health Justice Act has the backing of Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Tony Cardenas (D-Calif.) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), as well as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.).
—The Hill, February 26th.
How it’s going: U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon carjacked and robbed in South Philly after touring FDR Park.
—The Philadelphia Inquirer, today.
GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Biden Claims Economy Today Is Stronger Than Before Pandemic.
I’D LIKE TO SEE IT TESTED SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE ORIGINAL TINY CIVIC: Tested: 2022 Honda Civic Si Evolves but Remains a Driver’s Car. I hated those original Civics, which I regarded as a VW Beetle without the character, but the modern ones are very nice cars. In the Seventies they would have almost qualified as exotics. . . .
I PRACTICE OUT TO 25 METERS OCCASIONALLY; BEYOND THAT I FIGURE I’LL JUST RUN: Why You Should Practice with a Handgun at Distance. Normally I practice at 5, 7, or 10.
IF THIS WERE JUST THE START OF A HORROR MOVIE, I’D ENJOY IT: Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong faster than an AI.
IF SO, WHAT A MERRY CHRISTMAS! Hmm … Is Durham Planning to Charge Team Hillary?
BE PREPARED RESQME The Original Keychain Car Escape Tool, Made in USA. #CommissionEarned