Bookworm Beat 2/25/17 — “Things are feeling Apocalyptic” edition

Can you smell something a bit Apocalyptic in the air? Things are getting fraught as the Left pushes the social and political system closer to the edge.

Apocalypse ApocalypticOur we at end times? I’ve got a few well-written, fact-laden posts to share with you here, all of which are quite worried that the Left is building up to something apocalyptic:

Victor Davis Hanson, who is no hysteric, looks at the concatenation of a deep state doing anything to preserve its power, an openly post-truth media (that my Progressive friends nevertheless believe absolutely no matter how often its proved wrong), and a Democrat party that’s determined to destroy the duly elected president of the United States . . . and he’s worried.

I was alive and sentient during the 1960s and 1970s, and yet, other than the whole Patty Hearst thing, I have no memory of the truly epic violence Leftists were visiting on America in those decades. My defense is that I was a child and a teen but, really, you’d think that, watching the news every night as I did with the family (always Walter Cronkite) I should have remembered something. Indeed, one of the police stations caught up in the violence was about a mile-and-a-half from my childhood home! And Angela Davis’s role in murdering a Marin County judge also played out very much in my neck of the woods. (You’ll read more about Angela Davis later in this post.)

Oh, wait! I bet you have no idea what I’m talking about when I say I ought to have remembered an extraordinary level of violence. My ignorance, and almost everyone else’s, is the whole point of davidzhines’ absolutely epic post summarizing the highlights of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, a book that’s definitely going on my reading list.

The post is unusually long, but so compelling that I hung on every word. davidzhines reminds us that the Left has had decades to put in place tight organizations that oversee people without conscience determined to use violence to achieve their “people’s paradise.” Conservatives who talk about taking out weenie pajama boys fail to understand the subterranean terrors at which the Left is so practiced — and davidzhines fears that those subterranean terrors are once again waiting to emerge, only this time they’ll include the jihadist obsession with high mortality figures for every terrorist act.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, which is what the American Left keeps hoping America will become, things are not pretty. It appears that part of Sweden’s rape problem might be that, rather like an American college campus, Sweden defines rape to include “he looked at me funny.” On the other hand, you can’t escape the fact that daily life in Sweden has not improved thanks to a Muslim influx.

And there’s that “little” antisemitism problem. Sweden’s always had an antisemitism problem, but the Muslim influx has turned it from a smoldering ember into a scarily violent flame. Every time I see a Progressive bemoan the rise in antisemitism under Trump, I like to point out the years, decades, even, that these Progressives been ignoring antisemitism’s rise, at home and abroad, in Leftist and Muslim strongholds — most notably in America on college campuses.

Remember how I said you’d hear more about Angela Davis. Kyle Smith points out that those stupid “pussy hat” women’s marches aren’t just useful idiot insanity. They are, instead, are a national jumping-off point for truly evil people who are getting incorporated into the elitist power structure:

In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist. Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS: Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted, in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods. However, she won the right to a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator.

You can see why she’s a hero to the left. Another co-author, Angela Davis, is a Stalinist professor and longtime supporter of the Black Panthers. Davis is best known for being acquitted in a 1972 trial after three guns she bought were used in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of a judge. She celebrated by going to Cuba.

A third co-author, Tithi Bhattacharya, praised Maoism in an essay for the International Socialist Review, noting that Maoists are “on the terrorist list of the US State Department, Canada, and the European Union,” which she called an indication that “Maoists are back in the news and by all accounts they are fighting against all the right people.” You know you’re dealing with extremism when someone admits to hating Canada.

Please, read the whole thing. Know the enemy.

With all the craziness, serious people are becoming true believers. The funny thing about all of the apocalyptic noises the Left is making is that Trump is the antithesis of the Nazi fascist the Left is describing when it speaks of him. For example, Andrew McCarthy points out something incredibly important about Trump, which is that he supports a return to the Rule of Law.

Even Trump’s fiercest critics, if they are principled, are coming around. Thus, David French, with whom I don’t always agree but whom I always respect, has noticed something I’ve been saying for a while: to the extent Trump is shucking power and returning it to the states or turning that power off entirely, he is much less authoritarian than Obama. In my estimation, Trump, despite his bombast, is shaping up to be the least authoritarian president since Calvin Coolidge.

Charles Krauthammer has also caught up with my theory that Trump explicitly embraces a madman style of governance to keep people, especially his enemies, off balance. Ask yourself this: Which president is scarier: Barack “erase the red line, lead from behind” Obama or Donald “whatever I do is going to be huge, but you won’t know until it happens” Trump? Preemptive surrender is not a safe option, while scaring your enemies has its advantages.

Why CNN and the NYT were not invited to Sean Spicer’s little media confab. On Facebook, my usual Progressive friends are crying “Nazi” because Trump pulled an Obama, and excluded from a news confab two media outlets. Unlike Obama, of course, Trump had a basis for doing it. He wasn’t just spinning propaganda to drooling lovers, as Obama did. After all, the media Trump assembled included plenty of haters.

Nope. Trump was making a point, which is that those outlets that blatantly lie about him using dubious anonymous sources are not welcome.

Obama is second only to Franklin Roosevelt. . . . At least, he’s second when it comes to leaving the country in debt. Obama came into office blaming Bush for everything, but after eight years in power, Obama totally owns the debt his administration left behind.

What’s really bad is that Obama left us with debt that has nothing to show for it: no rebuilt infrastructure, no won wars. We’ve got a poorer country, with a poorer military, a crumbling traditional infrastructure, and a modern electric grid that never did get hardened.

Is it a smart politician who puts it all out there? In a “gotcha” age in which nothing is secret or sacred, one Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Arizona has opted to let it all hang out, making it impossible for his opponents or the media to embarrass him later. It strikes me as a smart strategy.

And surely this is a sign of a coming Apocalypse. Be sure to read the asterisked information:

vagina-monologues-no-vagina-necessary

For more on this anti-science, gender ridiculousness, go here. And to read the instant classic post I wrote (yes, I’m blowing my own horn) about a male response to The Vagina Monologues — by which I mean males with all the traditional equipment — go here.

Science and Tucker Carlson. One of the more amusing aspects of our general cultural collapse is to watch the Left, the same party that insists it’s all about science, collapse into a screaming, whimpering heap at the mere thought that it might be called upon to use the scientific method to prove things such as apocalyptic anthropogenic climate change or its assertion that there are more than two sexes. Regarding that last point, Tucker Carlson does one of his best turns yet as a perplexed, intelligent “Everyman” when confronted with a Leftist who insists that there are more than two genders and that (as my Progressive friends, all college educated, will dutifully parrot) gender is determined, not by biology, but by feelings:

Apropos Tucker Carlson, I’ve decided he’s not just “Everyman” — he’s me. Honestly, reading this Atlantic piece about him is kind of like reading about my own life here in the Deep Blue:

Indeed, throughout the 2016 election cycle Carlson routinely deployed his anonymous neighbors as a device in his political punditry [Bookworm:  I do that all the time] —pointing to them as emblems of the educated elite’s insular thinking. He scoffed at their affection for Marco Rubio in the primaries, and he ridiculed their self-righteous reactions to the Republican nominee in the general. “On my street,” he wrote in Politico Magazine, “there’s never been anyone as unpopular as Trump.”

[snip]

To the extent that Carlson’s on-air commentary these days is guided by any kind of animating idea, it is perhaps best summarized as a staunch aversion to whatever his right-minded neighbors believe. The country has reached a point, he tells me, where the elite consensus on any given issue should be “reflexively distrusted.”

 “Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”

“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”

And on and on. Like me, Carlson is himself educated and comes from an elite background (mine was European class elite, although merely middle class, barely, money), but he’s turned his back on where he came from because he’s recognized its narrow, unthinking, reflexive, snobbish blindness.

Where Tucker and I differ, of course, is that he has a cheerful temperament and a knack for poking people without getting nasty about it. I’m still working on those two things, which may explain why I blog for free and he’s becoming a national (and, I hope, well-paid) presence.

The useful idiots are so easy to con. All of my Progressive friends are just thrilled about the Muslims who raised money to help repair the Jewish cemetery that vandals destroyed. All of them are assuming, of course, that the so-called “vast” band of 5,000 or so true Neo-Nazis in the U.S. are responsible for the damage. All of my friends insist, news reports notwithstanding, that there is no antisemitism on American college campuses and that American Muslims don’t harbor hatred for Jews. Talk about living in an alternate — one might even say “fact free” — reality.

In my reality, the one with actual facts, I can’t help but see this Muslim fundraising as a stalking or Trojan horse. After all, the people behind it are passionate antisemites who vocally support Israel’s destruction, and pall around and laud terrorists with actual Jewish blood on their hands. Now maybe I’m a stupid conservative, but when someone who celebrates dead Jews raises money for a cemetery — in a very public way — I think “propaganda” not “moral decency.”

Child sex scandals in the news. Self-righteous rightists, along with Leftists and other people, gleefully destroyed Milo Yiannopoulos, one of the best people around exposing Leftist fascism, because he stated a truism about the gay world which he thinks is okay (older men/young men); accurately defined pedophilia, which he has done a great deal to combat; and came down on the side of age of consent laws, although arguing correctly that they suppose a bright line that doesn’t really exist in human biology. Meanwhile, something very strange is going on when it comes to actual pedophilia.

First of all, you might want to look up “Pizzagate” and decide whether it’s a thing. Here’s an article to get you started. (And here’s another one.) Be careful when following the links. Some are disturbing.

Here’s something to think about — a lot of the stuff in the article to which I linked sounds stupid, with code words like “handkerchief” and “pizza” that popped up when the DNC and John Podesta emails went public last year. What made me sit and up notice that maybe there was more here than meets the eye were two things: First, the type of musical acts booked to perform at Comet Pizza; and two, the type of art that John Podesta collects. Both are disturbing, to say the least. Here’s a video putting some of the stuff together.

Suddenly, Pizzagate may be a “thing” again. According to Zero Hedge (the reliability of which I leave up to you when it comes to sourcing), DHS and ICE are going after child sex trafficking in a big way — and even put out a video which, coincidentally or not, opens and closes with a shot of a pizza restaurant. It’s all very strange, as I said.

The reality about these high level child trafficking rings is that they always sound like the worst kind of urban lore — until you discover, as England did, that Jimmy Saville molested hundreds of children and the establishment covered it up, or that Jerry Sandusky got away with it for years, and nobody spoke up. People in positions of power get away with bad things when it comes to children. At the Zero Hedge link, there’s even a claim that former British PM Sir Edward Heath was a known and prolific pedophile.

Don’t record me! I’m stupid. A student at Orange Coast College in California recorded his teacher doing a hate-rant about Trump. When he went public with it, the college, rather than chastising the teacher for wasting classroom time (for which the student was paying) with her political insanity, tried to suspend the student for daring to record her, as recordings without permission are against the rules. The public uproar was such that the school has since backed off that position.

Dennis Prager thinks there’s more to what happened at that school than just hiding ugly political indoctrination or claiming complete ownership over a product that the student (and taxpayers) actually bought. He posits that the schools are afraid to let people see how terrible their teachers are:

Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights.

Students, therefore need to understand that when their professor objects to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professor is, in effect, saying to his or her students:

“Listen, I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based, propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if enough people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.”

Judging by the ignorance my children’s teachers too frequent displayed, at elementary school, middle school, high school and, now, college, I’m sure he’s right. Too many are not educated people. They lack data and they lack reasoning skills.

I said all along that gay marriage was a stalking horse for destroying churches. And I was correct.

On the lighter side. . . . Perhaps weapons researchers can figure out how to harness the mind-numbing volume and pitch of a teen girl’s happy squeals.  Also, even existential crises can make us laugh. This one certainly made me laugh:

Photo by micadew