An intelligent article apart from the following stupid statement:
"Meanwhile, battle-scarred Donald Trump is a heavy favorite to become the Republican presidential candidate: this would pit a septuagenarian against an octogenarian in the 2024 contest, each of whom can be expected, if he wins, to try to put the other in jail. It’s enough to make one wonder whether the Zoomers have a point."
If you want to encourage nihilism, then, conflating the persecution of Trump on blatantly contrived charges with the failure to prosecute Biden and Co despite overwhelming evidence, is a good way to continue the downhill slide. This is morally on a par with saying that both Hamas and the Israelis have killed people and both should stop.
I am more pessimistic. The initial response (on the 7-th) of the university heads was very revealing. The moral backbone is gone, even they don't know which way is up. The fish is rotting from the head. The course corrections after that is just triangulation, money worries and the like - they don't matter that much.
"The American people have lost their way before and always returned to a place of decency and sanity."
I don't think we have ever lost our way so completely as we have now. And with our youngest adults, as a generation, rejecting decency and sanity as the values of "oppressors," how can we possibly hope to have a future that is sane and decent?
I find it telling that a former CIA analyst can’t see that we’re witnessing the purposeful and “fundamental transformation” of America put in motion the day Barack Obama was sworn in.
Only a complete outsider had a chance at putting a stop to the process in place, but that hope born in November of 2016 was thwarted before it even began. The powerfully entrenched and generously enriched of our nation, whose hubris and greed were effectively harnessed, were set to destroy that hope the renegade administration brought.
The intelligence agencies - including that of Mr Gurri (once CIA, always CIA) gleefully targeted the renegade with bizarre stories of prostitutes peeing and clandestine activities with Russkis that haters were all too eager to believe.
Bizarre machinations of gender and race infected college campuses - which spread the disease down to the littlest among us and now we have grownups arguing that porn is acceptable shelf stock for elementary schools.
The inmates have loosed their bonds and are marauding a town near you! Don’t worry, they’ll be close enough for you to see very soon!
Don’t you see that the Emperor-in-waiting is sitting back, naked, enjoying the show, just waiting while he surveys all that he put in motion?
We've been shown the exit from one hundred nine nations so far. Why does anyone think this is new. As my Father used to say, the only new thing tomorrow will be the date.
Meanwhile the proactive way to go for me is to understand that the US Federal government is an abject failure and in no way beneficial to me.
Due to the time I have left I'm fairly nonplussed regarding the inevitable collapse the imbecilic leftists will force. In discussions with my progeny I say look to the saner States. God will judge the American people. Change is coming as change is the only constant.
The fight for America needs to come from those younger than about 50. People with kids, people with 30+ years ahead of them. But here’s the rub, I don’t think enough will step up. They are too consumed with their lives to notice, or in the case of the 20 somethings, they are fine with having the whole thing collapse. So all I can say to them is, I’ll probably be dead. This is your problem. But they are in denial and totally unequipped to face it. Amazon’s Black Friday sale is happening soon, so.....
If you paint with a broad brush and use capital letters, the Grand Institutions of our society seem Beyond Hope, especially Academia.
But here on the ground, in the classrooms and offices of lower-case academia - my own stomping grounds - the situation is much more complex, and there are more opportunities to restore what is best about essential institutions than stories like this might suggest.
Yes, the Cult of True Victimhood has made serious inroads in many places, and many of the most elite colleges and universities may be all but lost, at this point. But it's important to pay attention to where precisely the problem is coming from, and where the points of resistance are . . . and note well a lot of us are all but immune to the enticements and inducements of the Cult, even in the humanities.
While stories from Harvard and Yale and Oberlin and Hamline might feed the narrative of Institutional Decay, giving us all a most gratifying sense of Impending Doom, it might be worth looking at your own nearest public college or university, to see what's actually going on there. Or look at the Chronicle of Higher Education. or Inside Higher Ed, or the FIRE report on campus free speech for a more nuanced view.
Or, if you want something really bracing and encouraging, check out Heterodox Academy.
How can anyone have faith that our country will heal from this when the American left despises fundamental Christianity, but supports fundamental Islamism? I always come back to identity politics. I think the American left looks at Palestinians as nothing more than people of color, and Jews as whites. So they will never be objective about anything that involves the Jews. To them the white man is the devil. Therefore, the Jews are devils. This is what American academia has done for the past fifty years. They have divided us by infiltrating education.
A brilliant review of our current dystopia that ends with “there is always hope.” As has been said many times before, however, “hope is not a strategy.” The fact is that World War III began in the 60’s when the education industry embraced the works of Karl Marx as a framework to indoctrinate the young into a Manichaean world of oppressed and oppressor. In the pursuit of better profits, the business community shipped the future of the working class young overseas, effectively eliminating hope in vast parts of the country. The creation of the internet and social media destroyed the guardrails of community standards as guides to acceptable behavior and personal responsibility. Worst of all, meritocracy as a criteria of electing those who run the government disappeared, producing demonstrably incompetent individuals selected because they represented an “oppressed” community. We live in a time best described by another as one of “intellectual sloth and moral cowardice.” This will not be addressed by arguing over who is more dangerous: Biden of Trump. It will require far more drastic action. We must stop electing and appointing demonstrable idiots, we must stop supporting business that utilize slave labor and fill their management ranks hoping to gain approval from the DEI believers (who will never approve, thanks the point). We must recognize that social media has resulted in far more deaths that drugs or guns, which are prohibited to those under 18. Most important of all, we must stop allowing our children to be indoctrinated and stupefied by a demonstrably Marxist education system. The real question is whether we have the will to do this. That remains to be seen.
There is another possibility you didn't countenance as out institutions collapse:
Civil war and a breakup of the United States. The right half of the country feels powerless as all our institutions are now controlled by the far left. For all intents and purposes, we are now a Communist country. Even if Republicans control the government - the government bureaucracy, news media, Big Tech, educational and cultural institutions (all controlled by the radical left) and the leftist states effectively can and will veto whatever they do. For Free America to regain control, it has to create its own institutions. And the only way to do that now is to create its own country.
I think it is beyond doubt that the differences between Free America and Marxist America today is greater than those between the North and the South in 1860. We can't even agree on what a woman is. The North and South essentially had the same Judeo-Christian belief system, although there was a problem in that one side saw fit to include slavery as part of their belief system.
Our differences now are both cultural and religious - and Leftism/Marxism is a brutal, intolerant religion. We can't survive in a place where it is the state religion.
The role of a prophet includes holding a mirror up to society, and this article brilliantly does so.
One of only a few positive developments over the past few weeks is that some college students, who have lost job offers, etc., have learned their actions can have consequences--that's a step in the right direction. This situation has also revealed the blind stupidity of the "oppressed" and "oppressor" binary. The fallacy of that world-view must continue to be hammered.
Not so good is that the MSM and certain independent journalists, who do wield influence, are still striking a strong anti-Israel tone which doesn't draw a very clear distinction between "we just don't like Bibi" and "Israel is an occupier with no right to exist." We're also seeing the presentation of very selective "history." If you're going to talk about Palestine in the last 100 years (looking at you WAPO), it's fair game to include the Palestinians' support for HItler and the Holocaust (see Simon Sebag Montefiore's "biography" of Jerusalem for more on that).
We're reminded daily of the abject failures of our leaders, but little attention seems to be paid to the fact that the crumbling of America is also physical. A decade ago the idea of a freeway catching fire so severe it had to be closed would be unimaginable. People working 2 or 3 jobs just to make the basic essentials of life is now a current reality. And enough people are here illegally to equal the size of our largest cities. We don't know where they are from, or what they plan to do, but we give them food, housing, and medical care, as well as a mobile phone. These are the things that will motivate the public to force a change. It won't be pretty.
Your faith that we will wake up and demand a return to sanity is misplaced I fear. There is one factor that has led us to the brink of chaos. Our moral foundation has completely rotted. The traditional family has been largely abandoned, marriage is ridiculed and the role of the church in our society has declined to a level of irrelevance as a result of cowardly leadership and societal hubris. Protecting the right to abortion is more important to most people than stopping the flow of fentenal into our country. Getting my debts forgiven is more important than having a financially accountable government. What’s wrong with selling influence everybody does it? One side defends and re-elected a President having an affair with an intern and then claims the moral high ground when opposed by a 3x married playboy whose womanizing reputation is legendary. We debate free speech and the need to control fake news while pornography flourishes and school teachers quit to star on TikTok. History shows that moral decay is only reversed through tragedy and if it is our guide Our day of reckoning is near.
To better understand the 'short march through the institutions' that this philosophy has had, I would recommend reading The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk. He gets just about right -- he did miss the significance of the first Maya Forstater verdict in December 2019 when the tribunal judge incorrectly determined that a belief/fact held by an overwhelming majority of citizens namely that one can not alter one's biological sex was not a worthy belief to hold in a democratic society. Because of the slowness of the British judicial system, it took until June 2022 for this to be overturned. In the meantime, it appeared that age old belief systems could be arbitrarily declared unworthy through concerted efforts from people who believed in Strategic Essentialism and Progressive Separatism. This held to lay the ground for what happened in 2020/21 imho.
The book does explain about the abandonment of the belief in universal truths, including the ability to understand people who might have a different background (thus the need to be told what these people and how they should be treated by the 'experts'). It also explains why the research on in/out groups since WW2 has been completely ignored and overlooked.
An intelligent article apart from the following stupid statement:
"Meanwhile, battle-scarred Donald Trump is a heavy favorite to become the Republican presidential candidate: this would pit a septuagenarian against an octogenarian in the 2024 contest, each of whom can be expected, if he wins, to try to put the other in jail. It’s enough to make one wonder whether the Zoomers have a point."
If you want to encourage nihilism, then, conflating the persecution of Trump on blatantly contrived charges with the failure to prosecute Biden and Co despite overwhelming evidence, is a good way to continue the downhill slide. This is morally on a par with saying that both Hamas and the Israelis have killed people and both should stop.
I am more pessimistic. The initial response (on the 7-th) of the university heads was very revealing. The moral backbone is gone, even they don't know which way is up. The fish is rotting from the head. The course corrections after that is just triangulation, money worries and the like - they don't matter that much.
"The American people have lost their way before and always returned to a place of decency and sanity."
I don't think we have ever lost our way so completely as we have now. And with our youngest adults, as a generation, rejecting decency and sanity as the values of "oppressors," how can we possibly hope to have a future that is sane and decent?
I find it telling that a former CIA analyst can’t see that we’re witnessing the purposeful and “fundamental transformation” of America put in motion the day Barack Obama was sworn in.
Only a complete outsider had a chance at putting a stop to the process in place, but that hope born in November of 2016 was thwarted before it even began. The powerfully entrenched and generously enriched of our nation, whose hubris and greed were effectively harnessed, were set to destroy that hope the renegade administration brought.
The intelligence agencies - including that of Mr Gurri (once CIA, always CIA) gleefully targeted the renegade with bizarre stories of prostitutes peeing and clandestine activities with Russkis that haters were all too eager to believe.
Bizarre machinations of gender and race infected college campuses - which spread the disease down to the littlest among us and now we have grownups arguing that porn is acceptable shelf stock for elementary schools.
The inmates have loosed their bonds and are marauding a town near you! Don’t worry, they’ll be close enough for you to see very soon!
Don’t you see that the Emperor-in-waiting is sitting back, naked, enjoying the show, just waiting while he surveys all that he put in motion?
We've been shown the exit from one hundred nine nations so far. Why does anyone think this is new. As my Father used to say, the only new thing tomorrow will be the date.
Meanwhile the proactive way to go for me is to understand that the US Federal government is an abject failure and in no way beneficial to me.
Due to the time I have left I'm fairly nonplussed regarding the inevitable collapse the imbecilic leftists will force. In discussions with my progeny I say look to the saner States. God will judge the American people. Change is coming as change is the only constant.
The fight for America needs to come from those younger than about 50. People with kids, people with 30+ years ahead of them. But here’s the rub, I don’t think enough will step up. They are too consumed with their lives to notice, or in the case of the 20 somethings, they are fine with having the whole thing collapse. So all I can say to them is, I’ll probably be dead. This is your problem. But they are in denial and totally unequipped to face it. Amazon’s Black Friday sale is happening soon, so.....
If you paint with a broad brush and use capital letters, the Grand Institutions of our society seem Beyond Hope, especially Academia.
But here on the ground, in the classrooms and offices of lower-case academia - my own stomping grounds - the situation is much more complex, and there are more opportunities to restore what is best about essential institutions than stories like this might suggest.
Yes, the Cult of True Victimhood has made serious inroads in many places, and many of the most elite colleges and universities may be all but lost, at this point. But it's important to pay attention to where precisely the problem is coming from, and where the points of resistance are . . . and note well a lot of us are all but immune to the enticements and inducements of the Cult, even in the humanities.
While stories from Harvard and Yale and Oberlin and Hamline might feed the narrative of Institutional Decay, giving us all a most gratifying sense of Impending Doom, it might be worth looking at your own nearest public college or university, to see what's actually going on there. Or look at the Chronicle of Higher Education. or Inside Higher Ed, or the FIRE report on campus free speech for a more nuanced view.
Or, if you want something really bracing and encouraging, check out Heterodox Academy.
How can anyone have faith that our country will heal from this when the American left despises fundamental Christianity, but supports fundamental Islamism? I always come back to identity politics. I think the American left looks at Palestinians as nothing more than people of color, and Jews as whites. So they will never be objective about anything that involves the Jews. To them the white man is the devil. Therefore, the Jews are devils. This is what American academia has done for the past fifty years. They have divided us by infiltrating education.
A brilliant review of our current dystopia that ends with “there is always hope.” As has been said many times before, however, “hope is not a strategy.” The fact is that World War III began in the 60’s when the education industry embraced the works of Karl Marx as a framework to indoctrinate the young into a Manichaean world of oppressed and oppressor. In the pursuit of better profits, the business community shipped the future of the working class young overseas, effectively eliminating hope in vast parts of the country. The creation of the internet and social media destroyed the guardrails of community standards as guides to acceptable behavior and personal responsibility. Worst of all, meritocracy as a criteria of electing those who run the government disappeared, producing demonstrably incompetent individuals selected because they represented an “oppressed” community. We live in a time best described by another as one of “intellectual sloth and moral cowardice.” This will not be addressed by arguing over who is more dangerous: Biden of Trump. It will require far more drastic action. We must stop electing and appointing demonstrable idiots, we must stop supporting business that utilize slave labor and fill their management ranks hoping to gain approval from the DEI believers (who will never approve, thanks the point). We must recognize that social media has resulted in far more deaths that drugs or guns, which are prohibited to those under 18. Most important of all, we must stop allowing our children to be indoctrinated and stupefied by a demonstrably Marxist education system. The real question is whether we have the will to do this. That remains to be seen.
Mr. Gurri:
There is another possibility you didn't countenance as out institutions collapse:
Civil war and a breakup of the United States. The right half of the country feels powerless as all our institutions are now controlled by the far left. For all intents and purposes, we are now a Communist country. Even if Republicans control the government - the government bureaucracy, news media, Big Tech, educational and cultural institutions (all controlled by the radical left) and the leftist states effectively can and will veto whatever they do. For Free America to regain control, it has to create its own institutions. And the only way to do that now is to create its own country.
I think it is beyond doubt that the differences between Free America and Marxist America today is greater than those between the North and the South in 1860. We can't even agree on what a woman is. The North and South essentially had the same Judeo-Christian belief system, although there was a problem in that one side saw fit to include slavery as part of their belief system.
Our differences now are both cultural and religious - and Leftism/Marxism is a brutal, intolerant religion. We can't survive in a place where it is the state religion.
Inexorable, inevitable result of the bush-cheney-obama-biden-harris uniparty.
Only one solution in the current political milieu and it isn't any democrat that has it.
The role of a prophet includes holding a mirror up to society, and this article brilliantly does so.
One of only a few positive developments over the past few weeks is that some college students, who have lost job offers, etc., have learned their actions can have consequences--that's a step in the right direction. This situation has also revealed the blind stupidity of the "oppressed" and "oppressor" binary. The fallacy of that world-view must continue to be hammered.
Not so good is that the MSM and certain independent journalists, who do wield influence, are still striking a strong anti-Israel tone which doesn't draw a very clear distinction between "we just don't like Bibi" and "Israel is an occupier with no right to exist." We're also seeing the presentation of very selective "history." If you're going to talk about Palestine in the last 100 years (looking at you WAPO), it's fair game to include the Palestinians' support for HItler and the Holocaust (see Simon Sebag Montefiore's "biography" of Jerusalem for more on that).
The American people will either save us, or destroy us.
Isn’t this why we have institutions ?
I’m a little more than fearful in relying on my fellow American given recent events.
After all, people are what make institutions.
If these institutions are rotting from the inside, what makes you think the same people will save us ?
We're reminded daily of the abject failures of our leaders, but little attention seems to be paid to the fact that the crumbling of America is also physical. A decade ago the idea of a freeway catching fire so severe it had to be closed would be unimaginable. People working 2 or 3 jobs just to make the basic essentials of life is now a current reality. And enough people are here illegally to equal the size of our largest cities. We don't know where they are from, or what they plan to do, but we give them food, housing, and medical care, as well as a mobile phone. These are the things that will motivate the public to force a change. It won't be pretty.
Your faith that we will wake up and demand a return to sanity is misplaced I fear. There is one factor that has led us to the brink of chaos. Our moral foundation has completely rotted. The traditional family has been largely abandoned, marriage is ridiculed and the role of the church in our society has declined to a level of irrelevance as a result of cowardly leadership and societal hubris. Protecting the right to abortion is more important to most people than stopping the flow of fentenal into our country. Getting my debts forgiven is more important than having a financially accountable government. What’s wrong with selling influence everybody does it? One side defends and re-elected a President having an affair with an intern and then claims the moral high ground when opposed by a 3x married playboy whose womanizing reputation is legendary. We debate free speech and the need to control fake news while pornography flourishes and school teachers quit to star on TikTok. History shows that moral decay is only reversed through tragedy and if it is our guide Our day of reckoning is near.
To better understand the 'short march through the institutions' that this philosophy has had, I would recommend reading The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk. He gets just about right -- he did miss the significance of the first Maya Forstater verdict in December 2019 when the tribunal judge incorrectly determined that a belief/fact held by an overwhelming majority of citizens namely that one can not alter one's biological sex was not a worthy belief to hold in a democratic society. Because of the slowness of the British judicial system, it took until June 2022 for this to be overturned. In the meantime, it appeared that age old belief systems could be arbitrarily declared unworthy through concerted efforts from people who believed in Strategic Essentialism and Progressive Separatism. This held to lay the ground for what happened in 2020/21 imho.
The book does explain about the abandonment of the belief in universal truths, including the ability to understand people who might have a different background (thus the need to be told what these people and how they should be treated by the 'experts'). It also explains why the research on in/out groups since WW2 has been completely ignored and overlooked.