Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

There was no switch in the 1960s making Republicans the racist party

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Letting the losers in a war write the history causes fake histories, such as the one claiming that a 1960s switch turned Republicans into the racist party.

Racist Party Political switch Southern DemocratsIn the context of world affairs, victory doesn’t always belong to the side that won the actual battles; it really rests with the side that writes the history. Viewed in that light, the last shot fired in the Civil War didn’t take place on the battlefield. Instead, it took place in 1936, when Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind hit the shelves.

GWTW took the South’s mythology and nationalized it. The epic 1939 movie was a force multiplier. Suddenly, the South, rather than being the losing side in a war fought primarily to end slavery, a foul institution in its own right and one made especially awful in America because it betrayed the promises in America’s founding documents, was a romantic entity, built upon unending charm and graciousness. Moreover, thanks to Margaret Mitchell, readers were well-schooled in two facts that perpetuated black subordination: (a) good slaves loved their masters and (b) bad slaves were evil and/or stupid.

The hold that Margaret Mitchell’s dynamic, romantic, fascinating narrative had on the popular consciousness probably started weakening during WWII, when Americans outside of the South got to see blacks in action, in factories and on battlefields. Truman’s executive order integrating the military, causing black and white troops to serve side by side further educated white Americans about their black fellow citizens.

The final rewrite was the Civil Rights movement. Thanks to television, Northern whites got to see a different side of blacks. They were no longer Margaret Mitchell’s plaster saints, grateful for the chance to serve their white masters or Topsy-esque fools. Instead, they were people of immense dignity, led by a man of God whose words burned themselves into American souls.

People understand the outlines of the Civil Rights, but too many do not know that, in the 1950s, it was the Republican party that drove that train. And it was the Democrat party that fought tooth-and-nail against any effort to remove the legal and social impediments imposed upon blacks, mostly in the South, but also throughout America.

This political division was unsurprising to people at the time. The history of the Democrats from their founding to the Civil Rights movement was as a slavery party, dedicated entirely to ensuring that blacks remained subordinate in America. It was open and proud about its status as the racist party. Meanwhile, the Republicans came into being as an abolitionist party, with Abraham Lincoln becoming their first standard-bearer.

Why then, are Republicans tarred as the racist party today? After all, Republicans won the Civil War, freeing blacks from slavery, and the Civil Rights war, freeing blacks from Jim Crow and the myriad other discriminatory laws in America. Shouldn’t they be viewed as the non-racist party? [Read more…]

A Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon that’s an Obamacare Rorschach test

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Obamacare Scott Adams DilbertSince I don’t have a license to reproduce Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons, I won’t. Still, I very much want you to see his cartoon for July 21. The comments indicate that Adams’ readers think he was making a dig at Norton products or similar computer programs.

I think differently. I took one look at the cartoon and thought, “Obamacare. He’s completely attacking Obamacare.”

What do you think? Was Adams specifically making an Obamacare joke or is he really just ragging computer programs?

[VIDEO] Paul Joseph Watson takes on Linda Sarsour

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With panache, Paul Joseph Watson delivers a punishing takedown against Linda Sarsour, an antisemitic, misogynistic, anti-American Muslim progressive.

Linda SarsourBefore January and the Women’s March, I’d never heard of Linda Sarsour. Since then, she’s everywhere — and the more one sees of her, the more repulsive she becomes.

Nevertheless, despite her antisemitic, misogynistic, anti-Western statements (or perhaps because of them), she’s still receiving full protection from many on the Left, including a United States senator. That’s why it’s a pleasure to see Paul Joseph Watson expose what a vile woman she is:

The next generation of young conservatives is on YouTube

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Yes, there are young conservatives, but they’re not at college or watching TV. Instead, they’re working hard and watching conservative YouTube videos.

Sargon of Akkad screenshot Young ConservativesThere’s a young man I’ve known and admired for many years. I met him through one of my children’s activities and quickly sized him up as extremely bright and incredibly hardworking. He also has a brilliant sense of humor; one, moreover, that is perfectly attuned to children. When he left the job through which I met him to start his own business, I didn’t follow him, because doing so would have involved a lot more driving. That was a bad decision because my child’s interest in the activity vanished when the young man left.

It’s been many years since I last saw this man, but I keep up with him on Facebook. He doesn’t post often, but when he does, I’m always blown away. He may be a millennial, but he’s a rock solid libertarian-conservative-classic liberal and he’s not shy about defending his viewpoints. He has a mastery of the issues and will expand upon them if he feels it’s appropriate.

Because I find this young man interesting and his conservativism heartening, I reached out via Facebook to learn a little more about him. He gave me some fascinating information about young conservatives. Here’s what I learned:

My friend believes that young conservatives in his age cohort (people under 40) are much more common than anyone realizes, as evidenced by Trump’s huge victory across America. As far as he’s concerned, the perception that his generation automatically hews Left is a byproduct of the Left’s own self-referential world view in entertainment, media, and the universities, each of which relentlessly promotes and reinforces its own cultural dominance.

Because his job involves teaching skills to young people, my young friend has seen a lot of young people grow up over the years. He therefore sees a trajectory that has them sucked into Leftism through school, and then finding their way out of it again when they hit the real world. He breaks this arc down as follows:

From 15-18, young people are fairly centrist politically and rely on common sense.

From 19-22, young people go “off to indoctrination sleep away camp…. errrr…. I mean University.” There, peer pressure, combined with a system that punishes dissent, pushes them so far Left that they actually view Leftism as a centrist political position.

From 23-25, these kids hit the real world. There, they discover that the real world is unlike anything their education told them it would be. Nevertheless, they are slow to realize what’s going on.

Only after reaching the second half of their twenties do young people start figuring out that they really do live somewhere in the center, and that the whole “institutional racism” issue is not the problem. The problem, instead, is the people relentlessly complaining about “institutional racism.” At this point, it hits them that the far Left isn’t fighting “the man;” it is “the man.”

Fascinating take on things, right? Especially because it comes from someone who lives in the middle of the young demographic.

But here’s the most interesting thing the young man told me: We old people still look at television as a driving force, which is why we’re so exercised by the crap spewed on the major news networks. His generation, however, isn’t really a TV generation, especially for young conservatives, who feel locked out of television. For that reason, young conservatives go someplace entirely different: YouTube. According to my friend, “there is a huge grass roots Conservative-Libertarian-Classic Liberal movement going on now on YouTube and on podcasting formats.” [Read more…]

It never was about gay marriage; it was always about destroying religion

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Feeling the wind at their backs, gay marriage advocates are increasingly open about their true agenda: destroying Judeo-Christian faiths in America.

Gay marriage gay weddingMe, in 2008:

The second problem right now with the emphasis on changing [the civil definition of marriage to include same sex marriage] is the risk that there will be direct challenges between church and state. A lawyer I know assured me that this couldn’t happen because, for example, the Catholic church does not get sued because it opposes abortion.  That was facile reasoning.  While abortions may be a civil right, the Catholic church does not provide abortions.  What the Catholic church provides is communion, which is not a civil right, so the church can withhold it at will.  What happens, though, when the church provides something which is both a core doctrinal belief (marriage) and a state right (marriage)?  It’s a head-on collision, and I can guarantee you that the courts will get involved and that some activist judge will state that the Catholic Church is constitutionally required to marry gay couples.

Gay activists in 2017:

Openly gay LGBT activist Tim Gill, who has poured $422 million into the homosexual movement since the 1990s, recently told Rolling Stone why he won’t allow Christians to opt out of participating in same-sex weddings.

“We’re going to punish the wicked,” Gill told Rolling Stone. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage across the country, Gill turned his activism apparatus against religious freedom restoration acts (RFRAs) and toward a legal mentality that would penalize Christians, and anyone else in business, who refuse to participate in a same-sex wedding.

[snip]

Under Obergefell, same-sex couples can get married. But a wedding ceremony is still a private event, and people should not be forced to celebrate it, if such a ceremony is opposed to their convictions. This isn’t just an issue of religious freedom — it also involves free speech and free association.

But public accommodation laws have become a cudgel by which LGBT activists attempt to force people to violate their consciences. Indeed, an LGBT group in Ohio actually announced plans to try to force churches to host same-sex weddings on their property. A Christian farmer and his wife in Michigan were excluded from a farmer’s market because they posted on Facebook that they would not host a same-sex wedding on their own property.

Read the whole thing here. [Read more…]

President Trump — like Churchill, the indispensable man

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The upcoming Winston Churchill biopic reminds us that a nation’s elite tend to have nothing but disdain for an indispensable man — a man such as Trump.

Winston Churchill Donald TrumpI tend to be leery of biopics because I hate having my history filtered through Hollywood. It always grates on me when I hear a parent explain to a child that this or that movie “is history.” No, it’s not. History is history. All books and movies are merely interpretations and retellings of that history, with some retellings being a whole lot better than others.

Hollywood has always taken liberties with its biopics. There’s the happily married, completely heterosexual Cole Porter in Night and Day (Porter’s homosexuality got better treatment in the otherwise awful De-Lovely);  the cutely Irish, completely heterosexual, almost impressively non-Jewish Lorenz Hart in Words and Music (Hart was a brilliant, anguished Jewish homosexual); the charmingly goyish Jerome Kern in Till the Clouds Roll By (Kern was another Jewish kid from New York); and on and on, in an endless parade of movies both old and new in which history takes a backseat to marketability and prejudice.

I tend to know old musicals, but if you’re really interested in the liberties Hollywood takes, I recommend History v. Hollywood, a website that tackles the challenge of separating historic fact from Hollywood fiction. (The Desmond Doss/Hacksaw Ridge post is especially compelling.) Some of the changes make sense, such as time compression or composite characters. After all, a two-hour movie can only touch the high points of a real person’s life or a history event. Other changes, though . . .  well, I have a three-letter word for you: JFK.

Knowing Hollywood’s general tendency to bastardize stories, and its modern tendency to go hard-Left in its rewrites, explains  why I’m not 100% enthused about the upcoming film Darkest Hour, which is the newest Churchill biopic, due out at Thanksgiving. Gawd alone knows what the movie will do to Churchill’s amazing ascendency in the early months of World War II. Still, the first trailer hints at a movie in which the historic license might be reasonable and the historic facts might be true:

What I find fascinating about the trailer is that it seems to focus so tightly on the elite’s contempt for Churchill. After all, technically speaking, he was one of them — he came from wealth and the uppermost of upper castes in an aristocratic society — yet in practical terms he was not of them at all. He fundamentally offended their values, values that, in the years following WWI, leaned to pure pacifism and a naïve faith in the power of words and sophistication to face down predators.

Is it just me or does that remind you of what’s going on now with Donald Trump? Technically, he should be seen as one of the elite. He came from a monied background that, while not making him a member of America’s self-styled blue bloods, was certainly enough to make him a natural candidate for America’s elite.

But instead of constantly congratulating himself on his sophistication and elegance, Trump instead turned into a scrapper. His wealth wasn’t based on paper exchanges through banking deals or tinkering about with electronics; it was made in the hard-charging world of New York property development.

Moreover, once had made his billions, Trump didn’t endow universities that already have more money than God or subsidize symphonies that can’t make in the free market. Instead, he spent his money on parties, beauty contests, and gilt-furnished penthouses in shockingly excessive buildings.

Trump is a class traitor. No wonder the upper echelons of the American Left, the ones who call the shots with help of all the useful idiots they’ve engineered in America’s colleges and universities, despise him as they do. [Read more…]

Don’t forget to check out WOW! Magazine, with content from the Watchers’ Council

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Watcher's Council WOW! Magazine

I can never remind you often enough that, if you’re looking for insightful analysis about today’s political, social, and economic trends, you can’t do better than to check out WOW! Magazine, the online home of the Watcher’s Council (and their friends). Here are just some of the things you can find there today: [Read more…]

[VIDEO] Scott Adams demonstrates how the Russia collusion smear works

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Lacking evidence that Trump or his team were guilty of actual Russia collusion, they resort to smears. Scott Adams shows how this technique works.

Don Lemon Russia CollusionAlthough the election is over and Scott Adams is no longer making predictions, I still check his blog on a regular basis. He thinks entirely outside of the box, but not in a crazy, unrealistic way. Instead, his clever ideas open up new ways of thinking about things.

This video-podcast he did shows him taking on the Russia collusion meme that dominates progressive thought. His targets CNN’s Don Lemon, which is a lovely thing, because Lemon is at the head of the pack when it comes to the Russia collusion smear:

Also, here’s some food for thought from John Hinderaker about the whole Russia collusion meme: [Read more…]

If cultural appropriation had existed in 1852, blacks might still be slaves

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Black Progressives who decry cultural appropriation might want to remember that a white woman’s empathetic rendering of slavery helped spark the Civil War.

Cultural Appropriation Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe — a white novelist

The Los Angeles Review of Books published an anguished rumination from Arthur Krystal (a white, Jewish guy), wondering if cultural appropriation ever has merit or if it is always an original racist sin. The genesis for this guilty meditation was the fact that he had written a screenplay about a most fascinating man: Tom Molineaux, a freed American slave who showed up in Regency England, a time and a place in which men were obsessed with boxing, and then proceeded (literally) to knock the socks off the British boxers. (As an aside, Molineux’s rise followed that of England’s other great boxer — Daniel Mendoza, a Jew.)

Because Molineaux’s story is fascinating in its own right, and because Krystal has worked the story up into a six-part British historic drama, he did get a big agency to shop it around. Unfortunately, there’s a problem:

Nothing unusual about this, but this time something new had been added to the mix. As one well-known producer put it, the fact that neither the director nor the writer is black is “a huge red flag.” People in the industry, he said, are going to be wary of green-lighting the project.

Yes, it’s true, I am engaged in “cultural appropriation,” which, according to some moral custodians, makes it both unseemly and illegitimate for a Caucasian, however well-meaning, to depict a person of color. I, quite literally, don’t have the bloodlines to portray Tom Molineaux, at least not in a creative or fictional format.

From this starting point, Krystal works his way through Lionel Shriver’s brave challenge to the censorship that cultural appropriation places on creative people, only to land upon, and spend most of his essay with, William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, which James Baldwin (a black man) encouraged him to write. Even back in the 1960s, Styron, who was white, caught flack from the Left for writing a story about blacks, but the broader culture was more forgiving.

Ultimately, despite his manifest (and, I think, wrong-headed) sympathy for the cultural appropriation movement, Krystal concludes that there’s nothing wrong with an author delving into his imagination and our common humanity to write a convincing and sympathetic portrait of another’s experience. I think the guts of it are in these three paragraphs: [Read more…]

Marin goes all-in on climate change, wasting money and suing Big Oil

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Even as evidence builds that climate change is a scam, hyper-educated Marin spends money to prevent it and starts a major shakedown against oil companies.

Climate Change post Marin County Tiburon shorelineScott Adams keeps saying America has two different movies playing, one that progressives watch and the other that conservatives watch. In the progressive movie, proliferating CO2 in the atmosphere is turning the earth into a giant sweat box from which no one will escape alive. Seas will rise and deserts proliferate. Ninety-seven percent of all scientists agree that, unless we turn our economy over to the United Nations, we’re doomed. Doomed, do you hear?!

In this particular movie, the fact that one prediction after another has consistently failed for the past twenty years is irrelevant. Too many hurricanes? Too few hurricanes? Doesn’t matter. Now that we’ve withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, the end is near no matter what.

Conservatives have a somewhat different notion of things. While the progressives watch a climate horror movie, conservatives focus on documentaries with real news, not fake. To that end, they keep harking back to stupid little things like actual data and (sadly) equally actual scientific fraud. For example, conservatives like to point out that — per a peer-reviewed study conducted by exceptionally qualified scientists — government temperature adjustments have been, in a word, fraudulent (my word, not theirs, probably because they don’t want Michael Mann to sue them):

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published [global average surface temperature (GAST)] data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

[snip]

In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.

“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”

Conservatives also make much of the fact that the claim that 97% of all scientists support global warming is also totally bogus:

In 2013, Australian blogger John Cook reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011, concluding that 97 percent of the authors who stated their position on the subject believed that human activity was responsible for some warming.

  • However, when University of Delaware geography professor David Legates reviewed Cook’s papers, he found that only 41 of them (0.3 percent of all of the abstracts, and just 1 percent of those that expressed an opinion) believed human activity was causing most current warming.

On the other hand, write Bast and Spencer, the Petition Project — a group of physicists and physical chemists in California — has collected more than 31,000 signatures from scientists agreeing that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of…carbon dioxide…or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

Another “inconvenient truth” conservatives keep harking back to is that, as even the most fraudulen… er, most fierce climate change advocates have had to admit, there has been no warming for the entirety of the 21st century (to date, of course):

The ‘Pause’ in global warming is real and the computer models predicting dramatically increased temperatures have failed.

This is the shocking admission of a paper published this week in Nature Geoscience. It’s shocking because the paper’s lead author is none other than Ben Santer – one of the more vociferous and energetic alarmists exposed in the Climategate emails.

According to the paper’s abstract:

In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble.

And:

We conclude that model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.

Translation: the real-world temperature increases were much smaller than our spiffy, expensive computer models predicted.

Ice is not vanishing, polar bears are not vanishing, Himalayan glaciers are not vanishing, and our withdrawal from the Paris Accords will change nothing. As to that last point, the reality is that the proper name for the Accords really ought to have been the “Destroy the American Economy Accords” because that was the unspoken goal behind Obama’s unconstitutional treaty. While other CO2-producing nations were essentially unhindered when it came to producing greenhouse gases, Obama bound American industry hand and foot and, at the same time, handed over vast chunks of American wealth to fund other countries’ expanding greenhouse-producing efforts. [Read more…]

Progressive sex ed revisited: The Left wants your children more than ever

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I warned 7 years ago that Progressive sex ed is intended to destroy your child’s sense of physical inviolability and privacy. It’s gotten worse since then.

Progressive Sex Ed, Sex and State Power, Leftists, Children, Masturbation

The makers of the video blurred the dildo. I’ve blurred the faces of those ill-used children.

Sex and children have been in the news a lot lately, and I don’t just mean the endless stories of surprisingly pretty female teachers, many in their 20s and 30s, having sex with their middle school and high school students, both boys and girls (or just being too sexy). Bad as that is, there’s something worse. Instead of isolated incidents of horny, predatory women, Leftist culture is mounting a significant attack on your child’s sexuality.

A dispiriting article reporting on parents who took to YouTube to show the graphic ways in which they teach their elementary school aged children to masturbate helpfully sums up a series of other examples of Progressive sex ed, all of which is part of a concerted effort to sexualize children as early as possible:

Two notable attacks on the sexual innocence of children took place this week: Teen Vogue‘s disgusting promotion of “the right way to do” anal sex, and a popular YouTube video in which parents tell children about masturbation, complete with sex toys.

“So, sometimes people will say ‘playing with themself,’ or ‘jerking off,’ or ‘choking the one-eyed trouser snake,” a father tells his son, who looks to be about 8 years old. “Masturbating is when you touch your privates in different ways to make yourself feel good,” a mother tells two young ladies, who might be 8 years old and 10 years old.

The YouTube video flits backs and forth, showing five different parent-child groupings, with parents telling children about masturbation, including how-tos, discussions of how many times they masturbate, and sex toys. Many times, the parents mime the actions of sexual intercourse and masturbation to illustrate how dildos and other sex toys are used.

[snip]

Many conservatives see videos like this one, and articles like the one in Teen Vogue, as blatant attempts to sexually corrupt children. “The left wants to turn your child into a sexual deviant,” commentator Matt Walsh warned at TheBlaze.

Unfortunately, it seems that much of that fear is well-placed. Parents have protested “graphic” sex ed classes for their kids. Bill Nye’s Netflix show featured a segment encouraging all sorts of sexual deviance. Oregon has an official sex guide for teens, written by teens. Last December, National Geographic put a nine-year-old transgender girl on the cover of a magazine marketed to children.

Last month, children as young as 5 years old were exposed to the sexual gyrations of a drag queen at a grade school talent show. Oh, and a Bloomington, Indiana, library is hosting an event this month where drag queens will read to children between the ages of 2 and 6.

Although the above examples of Progressive sex ad are disgusting and inappropriate, none of them surprise me. Indeed, as I wrote seven years ago at American Thinker, this type of Progressive sex ed is precisely what we can expect from a political party dedicated to a Borg-like effort to strip people of their individual identities and assimilate them into a tightly-controlled, monolithic state. Incidentally, you can see in the essay, which I reprint in its entirety below, that I made references to the then-nascent “transgender” movement that, like some carefully buried IED, is now dominating our cultural conversation. [Read more…]

David Brooks: Further thoughts on his discriminatory cultural arrogance

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If David Brooks wants to close the cultural gap in America, he should preach what his class practices: education, jobs, marriage, & children, in that order.

David Brooks Pretention Formal Place SettingsDavid Brooks has been ridiculed (and rightly so) for offering readers this steaming heap of arrogance:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

Arrogant people live in a world of assumptions. He’s assuming his friend is overwhelmed by sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro.” You know what I’m assuming? I’m assuming she’s shocked and disgusted by the price tags attached to those pretentious concoctions of bread and cold cuts.

I don’t know whether you’d call me cheap or thrifty, but the fact is that I really hate paying lots of money for attitude rather than product. Indeed, I often find that attitude doesn’t taste very good. I still haven’t recovered from a Michelin meal a few years ago at which the chef served a positively insulting “foam” amuse-bouche consisting of chocolate, lime, and something nasty I couldn’t identify. My bouche, I have to say, was not at all amused. People who commit criminal culinary acts against chocolate should be called out, rather than feted and enriched.

All of which is to say that, when I go into a pretentious restaurant and my eyes bug out, it’s not the French or Italian dotting the menu that shocks me, it’s the prices. I’d rather have a good BLT for $10 (the average price in Marin) than some pricy “Padrino” sandwich for $20 (the average for any sandwich shop that has things such as “Padrino,” “Pomodoro,” and capicollo on the menu).

Perhaps David Brooks’ friend with “only a high school degree” (his nasty phrasing, not mine) baulked at paying an ungodly sum for a sandwich. Moreover, even if she knew that Brooks, who “took” her to lunch, was paying, she might have been raised as I was — not to impose financially upon ones host. That’s good manners, not an inferiority complex.

If you’re interested in my bona fides, in addition to living (and being intensely grateful for) a very upper middle class life, I have a college degree, a graduate degree, and was raised in a home of ridiculous European-style pretension and sophistication. The family money may have vanished during WWI and WWII, but the pretension lived on. My mother had been taught how to dine with royalty and, damn it!, I was going to learn that skill too. [Read more…]