The Bookworm Beat 4/24/17 — “watching as the Left continues circling the drain” edition

This Bookworm Beat has all shades of Progressive insanity (fake data, attacks on free speech, Chelseamania), complete with links and my trenchant comments.

Bookworm Beat logoKeep circling that drain. Before I get into the meat of this post detailing the worst emanations from the Democrats and their fellow travelers on their Left, I want to lead off with Kurt Schlichter’s article begging the Democrats not to change their current trajectory and tactics:

Look, Democrats, speaking sincerely as your friend, understand that everyone who says you need to take a deep look at yourselves is a racist, sexist, homophobe who won’t even ask about your preferred pronoun. Whatever you do, don’t you ever change.

[snip]

The problem isn’t you. It’s those stupid idiots who won’t obey you because they’re stupid idiots. How can those idiots be so stupid?

Who knows? But what’s clear is that it’s not your fault. It’s theirs. So when the going gets tough, and you aren’t making progress – in fact, when you’re moving backwards – what’s the smart play? Double down!

Hey, the dealer’s showing an ace in a face-heavy deck and you’ve got a six, what do you do? Double down!

Can I boast? I had the pleasure of meeting Kurt a couple of weeks ago and he’s every bit as smart, funny, and personable as his writing. Lord, but I do envy a brain like that.

Statistically illiterate accusation that Trump voters are racist. You know all about American colleges and universities by now. They’re the places in which self-regard exceeds accomplishments, feelings trump rational thought, antisemitism is great than that found anywhere else in America (except, probably in Dearborn and the DNC), and the First Amendment is subordinate to students’ feelings (provided, of course, that those feelings are consistent with the Democrat Party platform).

Thomas Wood, an assistant professor at Ohio State University, has emerged from this sewer to announce that Trump voters are racists. He thought perhaps they were mere Nazi-style authoritarians but it’s worse — they’re racists. He knows this because he’s got charts.

Why are Trump voters racist? Because Wood specifically defined racism in such a way as to apply to Trump voters. That’s how they do it at universities nowadays:

To test this, I use what is called the “symbolic racism scale” to compare whites who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate with those who voted for the Republican. This scale measures racial attitudes among respondents who know that it’s socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced. Rather than asking overtly prejudiced questions — “do you believe blacks are lazy” — we ask whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility.

In other words, if you believe that only government can save perpetually hapless and helpless minorities, you’re not a racist. However, if you believe that minorities are rational, sentient beings who respond to incentives and disincentives in the same way as everyone else, and that they therefore deserve to be respected as our equals and not demeaned as perpetual wards of state, you’re racist!

You always win the game if you get to write the rules after the play is already run. Woods is a perfect example of why I keep saying that the best way to get America back on a track dedicated to individual liberty, free enterprise, and constitutional governance is to take every bit of federal money out of American “higher” education.

Perhaps we can work with the NYT’s attack on free speech. You will not be surprised to learn that my Facebook Leftists are incredibly excited about Ulrich Baer’s New York Times opinion piece saying that we really need to do away with free speech in order to protect people who can’t handle free speech. You also won’t be surprised to learn that Baer is a Vice Provost at New York University. He’s a Progressive academic Borg. Here’s the nub of Baer’s argument:

Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.

[snip]

The rights of transgender people for legal equality and protection against discrimination are a current example in a long history of such redefinitions. It is only when trans people are recognized as fully human, rather than as men and women in disguise, as Ben Carson, the current secretary of housing and urban development claims, that their rights can be fully recognized in policy decisions.

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. Free-speech protections — not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.

Having read and digested this paean to having Progressives limit speech that it never offends the tender sensibilities of their designated victim classes, one of my Facebook friends sagely opined that, henceforth, she would not support any speech that denigrates or delegitimizes people. I commented that, under her standards, all of the speech from Democrats towards Republicans in the last year or so needs to be stopped. After all, I said Democrats flooded the public square with such derogatory expressions deplorable, racist, bigoted, homophobic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, stupid and evil — all of which truly nasty expressions were aimed at an entire class of people.

Much to my surprise, the two of her friends who commented on my comment (both self-described Trump haters) agreed with me! Apparently politely expressed logic has its uses.

Fight, fight, fight!! My shtick for the last few days has been the fact that we have to fight hard to defend free speech. Considering my sniper tendencies, my idea of fighting hard is going out on Facebook and directly, but politely, challenging Leftists’ inanity about free speech. Kurt Schlichter (yup, the one I praised above) also advocates fighting the good fight, although he, bless his heart, is a much more in-your-face, open, and quite happy warrior:

Understand that if America is stupid enough to let liberals take power again, they will persecute and prosecute normal Americans like us who dare to dissent. That’s not a guess or a prediction – that’s a commitment they have made to their fascist followers. They’ve seen what the truth can do to their schemes. After 2016, there’s no way they are going to take a chance on another electoral rejection by us normals, so they don’t even pretend to support free speech anymore. It will be one gender neutral being-one vote, one more time, and then never again.

[snip]

Liberals should be ashamed of themselves, but then they wouldn’t be liberal if they were born with shame genes. So, since we patriots are the only ones who actually support free speech, what do we patriots do to protect it?

Whatever it takes.

We fight peacefully in the political arena, in the courts, and in the shrinking marketplace of ideas while we can, but we must also be ready to fight in the streets when those punky puffboys try to shut us up. No quarter, no compromise, no surrender – we fight and win, or they shut us up forever.

Read the whole thing, get your blood roused, and go out and challenge some stupid Lefty on Facebook. As my unexpected success shows (see above), a reductio ad absurdum argument, especially when politely phrased, can be useful.

Yom Hashoah. As I write these words, Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — is winding down. Because I feel the world is paying lip service to it, all the while pandering to Muslims who want to repeat the Holocaust, I haven’t said much on the subject.

As it stands, I’ve written before about the Holocaust experiences of those I knew growing up, and I know that all of you are joined with me in fighting for individual liberty. Individual liberty and small government, after all, are the greatest bulwarks we have protecting us from a new Holocaust. There are, however, three things I’d like to share with you:

Sultan Knish (Daniel Greenfield) understands that all this “Never Forget” talk is meaningless as long as the world (read: the Left) panders to Muslims and pressures Israel to sign on to a two-state “solution” that is, in practical effect, the slo-mo equivalent of Hitler’s final “solution.”

At Seraphic Secret, you can read a very short, incredibly painful description of the death march two teenage boys took from Auschwitz to Dachau. I wrote “can read,” didn’t I? That’s wrong. You should read; you must read. This is what people of conscience should never forget.

Several months ago, I figured out that the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect is a fraudulent organization. Now it’s official: the organization’s chairman of the board has admitted as much.

How can you tell if a Progressive is lying? Because his lips are moving and he’s allegedly got the pictures to prove his story. For example, if you saw the pictures purporting to show a poor, harmless, antifa woman getting decked by a Trump supporter, and you thought there was something off about that . . . you’re right.

Flopping Aces has the whole story on that delicate little lady and it’s ugly, really ugly. I won’t give any of it away here. You have to read the whole thing in context.

Do not believe anything Debbie Schlussel says. Debbie Schlussel decided to get into the act and accuse Sean Hannity of sexual harassment. She then withdrew the claim, saying he was just creepy when he asked her out.

The thing about Debbie is that she’s not sane. I had the misfortune to run afoul of her about a decade ago. She started sending me daily, sometimes hourly, strikingly abusive hate mail. For all I know, she may still be doing so. The fact is that I did something to her I’ve never done to anyone else: I instructed Google mail to delete her emails automatically without my ever having to see them.

I’m sure Hannity did nothing legally or socially wrong with Debbie. However, if he did ask her out on a date, he’s not a good judge of character . . . unless he likes crazy people.

North Korea is obscene. Even Leftists are starting to get frightened about North Korea (although the WaPo, which has consistently called Trump variations on the “tyrant” theme is now perplexed that he actually wants to speak with the Senate about dealing with the threat).

Aside from the nuclear risk that the Norks are now posing to the whole world, thanks to multiple presidents who kicked the can forward, Claudia Rossett points out that the regime is also a moral obscenity.

The is the “man” who wants to share a bathroom with your little girl: A man attacked the College Republicans at Berkeley and they got lovely video of him in action. In a better world, he would be arrested or, given his delusions, possibly placed in a straight-jacket and padded room (language warning, of course):

How bad is Chelsea Clinton? She’s so bad that a Leftist writing at Vanity Fair has penned an incredibly funny take-down begging her to go away:

What comes across with Chelsea, for lack of a gentler word, is self-regard of an unusual intensity. And the effect is stronger on paper. Unkind as it is to say, reading anything by Chelsea Clinton—tweets, interviews, books—is best compared to taking in spoonfuls of plain oatmeal that, periodically, conceal a toenail clipping.

Take the introduction to It’s Your World (Get Informed! Get Inspired! Get Going!). It’s harmless, you think. “My mom wouldn’t let me have sugary cereal growing up (more on that later),” writes Chelsea, “so I improvised, adding far more honey than likely would have been in any honeyed cereals.” That’s the oatmeal—and then comes the toenail:

I wrote a letter to President Reagan when I was five to voice my opposition to his visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, because Nazis were buried there. I didn’t think an American president should honor a group of soldiers that included Nazis. President Reagan still went, but at least I had tried in my own small way.

Ah, yes, that reminds me of when I was four and I wrote to Senator John Warner about grain tariffs, arguing that trade barriers unfairly decreased consumer choice.

At first glance, of course, Chelsea seems to be boasting that at age five she was interpreting the news with the maturity of an adult. But we should consider whether it’s instead a confession that as an adult she still interprets the news with the maturity of—well, let’s just submit that perhaps she thinks what other people tell her to think.

Mike Rowe on the elite’s disdain for working people. I have heard a rumor that Mike Rowe lives in my neck of the woods, so it might be my local Nordstrom’s (at which I will no longer shop) that he writes about in this post: