Your first mistake was thinking that the 60s protests were somehow noble. I was there. They weren't. They were ostensibly against the then-raging Vietnam War but they were fomented and led by dedicated leftists. Then, as now, resolute in their zeal to weaken and destroy the United States; the one beacon of hope against one-world, authoritarian rule. Woke is merely the latest excuse for and iteration of that ignoble campaign. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I'm glad you brought that up. I was there too. My freshman year at Brooklyn College. 200 students, or fewer, brought the college to a standstill because the people in charge had no backbone.
It is my firm opinion the student protests at Brooklyn stemmed from inadequate preparation to be there. I recognized several of the "protesters" as low achieving students from my high school. Over the summer, many students who hadn't met the qualifications for entry to CUNY campuses were sent letters advising them of "open enrollment." The freshman class became huge. I had some of these "invited" students in my classes. They could not keep up and continually engaged the instructors in useless, angry, unintelligent arguments. When midterms drew near they did a protest which shut down the college.
It is a huge mistake to stack the deck against some students by pushing them into an academic environment they can't compete in. They could do marvelously in a second or third tier school but will come out angry, resentful, and aggrieved from a top highly competitive school. As we see.
I remember those exact days at Brooklyn College. All through high school I studied vigorously because you needed at least an 80+ Average to get into Brooklyn College. I averaged 91 and was thrilled to get in, but then like you said, that summer they suddenly announced open admissions = it became "Super High School"
I will say, in my experience, after you got past the intro courses which were held in auditoriums with like 200 students, the "open admission"students failed and eventually dropped out and the advanced courses felt like real college to me.
I did enjoy hanging out in SUBO, playing cards in the Boylan Hall Cafeteria, and smoking pot at the Little Lake behind Ingersoll Hall and watching for the Wackenhut Security guys in their stupid golf carts. I remember seeing shows like George Carlin, The Beach Boys and Poco in Gershwin Theatre for $5. good times!!
The protests of the 1960s were cinematically great but in real life they were manned (literally, women played subservient roles) by white, affluent males whose parents had deep pockets with bail money. For those who remained at home, we were drafted into the military, went to work after high school, or attended local colleges while working. In many cases, these protesters were the true elitists. Two generations later, we saw the same thing during the summer of 2020's violent protests that included the burning down of cities. There were no consequences for those who committed these acts.
Something I noticed at Berkeley in the 70s was that certain majors were too busy working to participate. Think engineering. It would be fascinating to look at social/class majors of those most involved and see whether patterns emerged. Too late for those years, but still perhaps of interest.
I remember most of those protesting were political science and sociology majors. I was dating an engineering major who was attending CCNY. He and most of his friends were from working class families; many were the first in their families to attend college.
That's really nice of you to say. But there some really gifted people posting here and I think Bari's genius is in bringing people of divergent views together. I've learned a lot from people here. Some even administered some healthy doses of humility
I knew one of the Ohio Guardsmen who was at Kent State the day of the shooting - a shooting which to this day is somehow held out as this condensed symbol of all that was "noble and tragic" about the antiwar protestors. What he told me utterly contradicts the more popular narratives - outsiders agitating and pushing students forward, egging students on to throw rocks while themselves staying a bit behind the front lines (much as Antifa does its riots today), and basically trying to get students hurt or killed.
I lived overseas as a kid, where it would be expected that soldiers holding rifles would indeed shoot. Disembarked from a charter flight in Frankfurt in 1977, to find that we were surrounded by armed German soldiers. There was no doubt they would shoot. (Germany had been having problems with terrorists.) Walked through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on that trip, were there were three different armed uniformed groups on patrol. Any one would have been happy to shoot. My reaction to the 1970 Kent State shootings was that it took coddled Americans to believe armed men would not retaliate. And to this day foolish Americans believe they are somehow immune from the consequences of their actions.
During the Berkeley and Fresno state riots, the same tactics were used. Only they didn’t have cell phones, just walkie-talkies. A newspaper man friend of mine tried to warn Fresno state cops and FBI. They laughed at him. So he posted reporters in the back and got pictures of the leaders. 36 were arrested. His paper was bombed. He laughed at them. So predictable.
Throwing rocks and hurling epithets in an antiwar protest does not justify Guardsmen pulling the trigger on unarmed students, whether there were 'outsiders' there or not.
Never said it was justified, only that most people haven’t heard the full story, and of how the riot organizers had their own share of blame because they actually wanted dead college students (which they got). The guy I knew, like I said, was there that day, and knew the officer who gave his troops live ammo. My friend said it was (his words, as near as I can remember now, it has been a good 20 years and he is long gone) “a just stupid dumbass thing to do, and totally unnecessary.” He went on to describe how they were supposed to do crowd control, which his own unit did elsewhere on campus without incident. “You don’t give live ammo unless you mean to use it, ‘cause someone WILL use it.” My friend was a WWII vet who had migrated to the Guards as a reservist, but most of the Guards had not ever seen real combat, so the riot was terrifying to them. Those guys didn’t know to NOT pull the trigger when terrified.
Fascinating and sad. In my opinion, many of the people behind most, perhaps all, recent protests hope that someone gets maimed or killed. Not them, of course! No, they will direct the justified response to the terrible violence they helped instigate. I am surprised at how few people have actually been hurt (or, in the BLM riots, killed). I expect worse this summer...
As a Guardsman, I was activated to the BLM protests in Washington DC during June of 2020. I had one lady insult me, call me every name in the book, and threaten to identify me and find my family. All I did was stand there and stare blankly at her until she went away. I can almost guarantee she was a paid instigator.
I do not think we will ever know how many were killed or maimed for life by the riots of 2020. The media simply never reported this. My guess is at least 30, just from the videos and stories with photos I saw from all the alternative online reporting. Ask the courageous Andy Ngo who suffered serious brain damage from the beatings he took doing genuine journalism at the BLM/antifa riots. And know that the Crips and Bloods play a role in the violence, at least benefiting from the absence of police preoccupied with the riots. My pharmacist whose pharmacy was destroyed explained this to me. There is so much we do not know about the relationship between skyrocketing crime and these so called "peaceful demonstrators."
The essay was excellent. My concern is that very few people look ahead to see what is in store for us now that nearly all authorities in the US do NOT use their responsibility to protect the innocent.
We are being driven from the public squares, physical and social media, by brown shirts. The authorities are clothed in somewhat different rhetoric, but their behavior is the same as the Nazi authorities. They barely cover up their delight of the violence going on in this country with a few generalities about being "against all violence." At this point, it is obvious what is coming unless more Americans become courageous enough to stand up to it.
So many accept the ubiquitous woke propaganda, reversing this is getting less likely every day
I hope this summer won't be so bad. I think a lotta what came out last summer was because people just couldn't take any more-a being locked in. ICBW, of course.
With the large contingent of military age males pouring across the border since the Obama Biden cabal took office, we had better be a lot wiser than just hoping nothings going to happen. What worries me is they will also have access to what Biden and Milley left behind in Afghanistan. A real summer of love.
I certainly agree that the Guards were poorly commanded. Even with real ammo, under proper leadership those weapons would never have been used, unless and until they saw weapons in the hands of the students, which to my knowledge, they never had.
Your friend's perspective is an interesting one, as contrary ones usually are.
I witnessed firsthand several Portland protests in 2020-2021 that went on for hours at each event. The intent was to draw violence from a very disciplined and restrained police force. There was no violence relative to the voracious extent of violence from the agitator. This is exactly what Skip is talking about. How long can a crowd remain peaceful, when the venom is constantly applied & sheep are pushed forward?
I used to know a retired cop from Portland (he retired about 2015 or so, I think). The Portland and Seattle cops had, at least prior to 2020, many many veterans experienced in riot control (the cities long being the favorite haunts of malcontents, and subject to frequent riots). My friend had a lot to say on the subject - the key with riots is to get the people in the riots to switch mental modes from "we" to "me", at which point the mob mentality collapses (the psychology is very similar to when an army line breaks, turning a retreat into a rout). Sadly, in the 2020 nonsense, orders came from above to cease what had hitherto been SOP, and decades of hard won experience and discipline was just lost.
Kent State was a classic example of inexperienced troops with poor leadership at the small unit level. I would venture to guess that if there had been at least a couple SNCOs or a few NCOs who knew what they were doing, the tragedy could have been avoided.
It's pretty closely following the model. They capture and indoctrinate the elites, and when they come to power, to no great surprise, those same elites will also be among the first to slaughtered, muttering the whole time about how loyal they were. Maybe keep the STEM grads; someone has to service the system. Those in the humanities are immediately expendable.
Elites are trained to believe they are special, destined, entitled and sure to rise above. They're just a chattering class, sheep, indeed, and they will never understand how vacuous they are, until they are staring their fate in the face.
They are the future informers of the authoritarian state, doing anything to remain alive.
I want to take another whack at Bruce's post, building on a post from Lee Morris which I liked. In the 60's we protested against denying a race the right to vote, the right to a good education, the right to sit wherever they chose on the bus. To protest was noble. To not protest was ignoble, truly. People who compare those Civil Right protests to protests against alleged systemic racism in police departments in 2020 are, in my opinion, living fact-free lives.
There were millions of young (and some old) protesting the war in the 60s. The 'zeal to weaken and destroy' hardly existed, maybe in the minds of the chattering class and perhaps some SDS leaders who were mostly leaders in their own lonely parades. Mostly we wanted the d*** war to stop. By 1971, the country was pretty aware that the war had been started through a series of lies and deceptions. Johnson didn't know how to stop it and quit. Nixon said he was going to bring us together and then he invaded Cambodia and told us it was because he was just that smart.
People comment on unfairness; elitists marching while the working class kids died. That was what was insidious about that war. College deferment meant Washington could prosecute that war for a decade and keep their own kids safe. It divided the country. It figuratively put everybody in a mud pit. Nobody was clean. The war needed to stop and the protests were intended to do that.
Also I want to suggest that leftists today follow a new philosophy which very few in the 60s would have subscribed to. You're on shaky grounds comparing today's leftists to liberals in the past, where objective reality, the possible perfection of mankind, freedom of speech, and civil liberties were still ubiquitous virtues and ideals.
Strong comment, Jim. And of course the cruel irony was that the elitist marchers, clamouring for the war to end, ignored and abhorred the very soldiers coming home from Viet Nam- conflating their presence there as somehow being supportive of the war - when in fact they were mostly all draftees, and didn't want to go at all.
Yes and I remember standing on the sidelines of a protest in NYC at 14th ST and Fifth Ave in front of the New School. The protesters were mostly white kids like me, college age or a little above, some "adults". And then there were the "hard hat" firemen and I guess police there who were visibly furious and disgusted by the college/elite kids protesting, ostensibly for "them". This image is imprinted on my brain and made me, at a young age, wary of protests to ostensibly better the working class or poor.
Protests since at least the day of Voltaire have largely been by the children of educated wealthy people on behalf of poor and/or working people they did not know and often did not even want to know, and about whose real wants and lives they knew nothing. Same with the white college-educated women constantly championing (in their minds, anyway) "BIPOC" causes. Leaving their schools or families, working and living among the people they claim to want to help? That's for saints and social workers.
This is the best thread I have read in a long time. People with hands-on experience and an understanding of how insurrections work. Many are fun and I like some George Soros who gets away with it anyway.
Good points, but all the reading I've done into the majority of the CRM's leaders and the Anti-War protestors has led me to believe that modern-day American 'wokeism'/'leftism' all started in the 1960s. To protest an unjust war and racial discrimination is one thing, but to wave a Vietcong flag and label all police officers as 'pigs' is another thing entirely.
I'm not saying that you and many other people like you didn't have noble intentions, but I think the fact remains that the 1960s was a time dominated by Leftist ideology.
By the way... did you know that calling police officers 'pigs' is a racial slur? Protestors called police officers in Chicago that because it was a racial slur against Polish-Americans (which many working-class police officers happened to be). I read that in Amity Shlaes' book "Great Society". Incredibly good read. I would highly recommend it.
Although I agree with much if what you say, especially about the civil rights marches, you also cannot deny that the anti-war protests had significant backing by foreign entities and that many of the leaders were committed leftists.
Sure. That changed little. It was only significant to the chattering class. Similar to Russian Facebook posts is 2016 election. It happened. It interfered. It changed at most one maybe 2 votes out of 160 million. Leftists now are more powerful and more insidious and less American than in the 60s. The war was a cluster….
So 100% Bruce. Compare the 60s and today. Leftists now are far more powerful and more Maoist. today’s idealism rests on , well what the author describes. That is not the same case in the 60s where idealism sprang from skepticism born from penetrating beyond official dogma. Almost the opposite of today
Russia and enemies always jump in and stir the pot. That’s no reason to not protest the war or not vote Trump in 2016.
I was there too Jim. I think you underestimate the impact of committed leftists in the managing of many protests/riots. A lot of people were there for social reasons, some for good idealistic reasons as you cited, some to watch, some to say they were there. The protestors, us, were, alas a cross section of people and motives.
Yup. Read David Horowitz’s book, “Radical Son,” and you’ll know. Another motive behind those ‘sixties protests was to avoid the draft. It paid off. A tiny percentage of kids at elite schools went to Vietnam.
The Red Pilled America podcast has a good multipart breakdown of this, called Woke Army. The university protest culture that emerged in the 60s was planned and executed by smart people behind the scenes and required dopey, bored, privileged kids - you might say, sheep? - to take root.
Back in the late 70's a pastor loaned me a book about the strategy communists employ to take over. It was a short book. I remember it had a red cover. The strategy was to infiltrate the entertainment and education industries. They knew it would take decades.
Or Gramsci's "long march through the institutions". Which has, on the corporate level and much to my surprise, included HR departments. In retrospect it's a no-brainer.
Bruce, even Nixon understood he had to get American troops out of Viet Nam. He spoke of an 'honourable peace' in 1968 or later 'peace with honour' in 1973. He sought peace talks with the North Vietnamese. He saw the protests against Johnson, the largest reason Johnson didn't seek re-election, and did not want that in his presidency. Nixon attempted to get the South Vietnamese to defend themselves (and of course we saw how that worked out).
You say the protests were 'ignoble'- but the war itself was not a noble one, as ignoble as Iraq thirty years later. America lost world wide credibility in both cases.
Lee, the war was foolish and poorly executed. But the 58k American boys who died there didn’t think it was ignoble. They were betrayed by Johnson, McNamara et al.
But I still have to think that most of the soldiers there were there not of their own volition, but were drafted to fight in a war they poorly understood, and for a cause not their own. Did Americans serve well? Hell, yes. But they fought in a war of survival, and attempting to overcome the logistics of an unwinnable conflict, given the constraints placed upon them by the US government.
And you are right in the end, Bruce. Americans who served there were betrayed by Johnson and McNamara and Nixon (who promised to end the war but took five years in doing so..)
Most of the Vietnam combat vets I met- and I've met a lot of them, beginning with knowing them as college students in the VEEP program in the early 1970s- did not have strong political views on the war one way or another. In the field, they fought very fiercely to keep their buddies alive. One of them told me "I ain't killed but two people in my whole life, and it was him or me."
The South Vietnamese did a pretty good job defending themselves against the North Vietnamese offensive of 1974. But in 1975, with Nixon out of office, Jim Wright and the Democract-led Congress cut off all military support for the South. The South Vietnamese forces ran out of fuel and ammunition and collapsed.
It led me to believe that although Nixon got us out of the Viet Nam was, he deceived the public and kept us in the war longer. That timeframe led to, of course, many more deaths of our soldiers. Is this true?
Yes, Nixon extended the war after being re-elected, both on the ground and in the air. Once in office, he decided to give escalation one last try, with "incursions" by US ground forces into Cambodia and Laos, and by intensifying the bombing of North Vietnam. On June 28, 1972, he directed the DoD to stop sending draftees to Vietnam- an indication that the American ground presence was going to be drawn down, but also a move related to the impending elections, and a policy that he might have reversed. But then Watergate began looming large, and other priorities took over.
Who gives credence to such a comical oversimplification?
Baby boomers weren't even a plurality of members of Congress until the 104th Congress, 1995-96 (47.5%). The combined categories of their elders still outweighed that percentage (51.1%).
As recently as the 102nd Congress, 1991-92, boomers accounted for only 31% of members of the House and Senate.
Another factor that's at least as important as age demographics: whether Democrats or Republicans, most of the Boomers elected to office have been products of a Protege system within their respective parties. They didn't get into office and overturn the status quo of their elders; for the most part, they sustained it. You might say that a large fraction of them were excellent sheep. Whether Democrats or Republicans.
I was there. At some point, say 1972, it became unconscionable to not join in the protests. The dead demanded our response. Perhaps the war lasted as long as it did independent of the protests. Perhaps the war would have dragged on and killed many more had the protests not occurred. Futile or not, the protests were a good thing, educating, liberating, and soul-satisfying. The SDS leaders wanted a socialist utopia and wanted to 'use' us, but the country wasn't into socialist utopias (at that time), and by the mid-seventies, the SDS leaders had sold out faster than discount gasoline.
100% agree on soldiers. Me and my friends in college had other friends who went to Nam, came back and partied with us, and we saw how wounded they were and felt for them. Of the millions who protested the war, only some were wrong-headed and wrong-hearted enough to take their anger out on soldiers. I can only hope they have recognized their errors and atoned in some way for adding to the already terrible burden carried by the soldier. Remember, politicians set up this insidious division. There should never have been college deferment.
US Marines over the years have done a magnificent job of making America proud and Making America great they are the true sons of America God bless them where ever they are
If you protested against the Vietnam War, I hope you accept your share of responsibility for the boat people, reeducation camps and killing fields that resulted from the American defeat there.
Good point TxF. I worked with Vietnamese "boat people" for a while. Their stories of life under communist rule were terrifying and soul-draining. The ones I knew resettled in the Houston area, worked hard and became Americans. Their kids are college-educated professionals. One silver lining of that war was a wave of hard-working Vietnamese immigrants who appreciate the opportunity this country provides to those with eyes to see.
Brilliant, Bruce, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq with all the ensuing treasure and blood spent for what? And whose blood paid the bill for these wars, it sure as hell wasn’t Donnie bone spur Trump!
It's definitely the case that the organizing nexus of the antiwar protests was comprised of members of the hardline Marxist Left. They're still the main organizers of the largest antiwar rallies, including the demonstrations against the Iraq War. People can't even get on their stages as anarchosyndicalists, much less as libertarians or just plain ordinary people with no special partisan viewpoint who oppose bogus militarism.
But most of the people I've actually met at antiwar rallies are not buying the agenda that's attached to the organizers. Not that this stops the doctrinaire Marxists from fantasizing that they are, based on nothing other than "the optics." An opinion that was shared by much of the paranoid Right Wing, at least in the 1960s. Extremists are all about psyching themselves up with hyperbole. A dopamine boo-yow. When connected with politics, that has a bad way of going viral.
I never attended an anti-Vietnam War rally as a teenager. For one thing, my father was an army officer who did a tour over there (mostly rear echelon, although a lot of helicopters were involved; his serious combat experience was Korea.) For another, I didn't harbor any doubts about the war at all until the early 1970s; my initial bias was in favor of American military involvement.
Also, I was a high school kid, who at least had some inkling that I didn't know enough to arrive at a settled position on the question. For crying out loud, teenagers are ignorant and gullible. No political activism should ever be centered as a "youth movement." (Not that American adults particularly distinguish themselves as being much more well-informed, temperate, or politically mature than teenagers; all that ad conditioning to keep an affluent consumer base in a state of perpetual adolescence has been scarily effective.)
By now, I've done a lot of study of the Vietnam War. It was a terrible idea for the US to supply any fighting forces for a corrupt regime with a military officer corps of urbane beneficiaries of French colonialism who actually preferred US air strikes and free-fire zones directed at wide swathes of the countryside- with wholesale disregard for the inevitable civilian casualties among the Vietnamese peasantry- to leading their own soldiers into battle. Then LBJ doubled down, by confabulating the Tonkin Gulf incident and sending in a large contingent of US ground troops to do the heavy lifting- instead of the ARVN, who were supposed to be handling it. Then Nixon got elected with his secret plan to end the war, which turned out to be bombing the hell out of North Vietnam and the Indochinese supply routes and staging areas. Escalating the madness.
On the other hand, it made no sense for the US Congress to cut off all military aid to the South Vietnamese in 1975 as part of the military withdrawal. Most reports say that the competence of the ARVN had improved markedly, at least in some regions. The South Vietnamese should have been given a fighting chance to defend the regime against the North. Which is a strange thing to say, I guess, given that my inclinations are pacifist, and given the likelihood that the conflict would have been obviated in 1956 with that UN plebiscite that never happened. But the fait accompli of a war is not to be reset to the beginning. The bloodshed in South Vietnam didn't end simply because the South Vietnamese government collapsed.
At any rate, from the first visits of Cardinal Spellman in the 1950s to the cutoff of all military aid by the Congress in 1975, the one consistent thread of American involvement is that we made the Indochina war all about US. The usual blunder.
(well, nothing left to do but lay back and harvest those upvotes...)
I was a teenager too. I didn't understand that war and still don't. I have read at least two histories of it and still don't understand it. What I found deplorable was the way our soldiers were treated when they came home.
I remember John Kerry. He threw someone else's medals over the fence. I remember his testimony before Congress. There were claims his "wounds" in Vietnam were superficial and self inflicted. Only he knows the truth.
It's easy for political activism to be centered on a "youth movement" because teenagers are easily manipulated by propaganda and emotions.
Isn't it interesting that the Civil Rights movement was not primarily a youth movement. When you see the marches the people participating were adults.
"Isn't it interesting that the Civil Rights movement was not primarily a youth movement. When you see the marches the people participating were adults."
The 1960s Civil Rights movement definitely emphasized gravitas and dignity. Both the leadership and the ranks were filled with people who actually worked for a living. Some of the most heroic activism- like the Freedom Riders and lunch counter sit-ins- was done by very young people. But they had training; they were disciplined, and their level of commitment was sober and authentic, rather than superficial and performative. It wasn't a tantrum, the way so many of the 2020 protests were.
The Greensboro Four- the students who began the lunch counter sit-ins, in the 1960- were freshmen in college.
Understand that I take your basic point. The youngest frontline activists of the 1960s civil rights movement in the South showed a maturity beyond their years. They left all the cussing and the arrogance and the violence to the other side, and that drew a clear distinction between their conduct and their opposition. That was an extraordinarily wise tactic, in my opinion. (The wisdom was later derided by more radical and impatient factions, who fell for the temptations of immediate gratification through violence. Something that also happened in the arena of antiwar protests.)
"I remember John Kerry. He threw someone else's medals over the fence."
I don't think that's necessarily true. The US armed forces provide personnel who earn medals with more than one set.
"There were claims his "wounds" in Vietnam were superficial and self inflicted. Only he knows the truth."
Kerry's wounds were not particularly serious. But they don't have to be, in order to get a Purple Heart. Any claim that his wounds were self-inflicted without corroboration or evidence offered in support deserves to be discounted as a pernicious falsehood. I'm sick of the rumor mill on issues like these.
That said, John Kerry held ambitions for high political office early on, and based on his subsequent career moves, I think he's a jiveass. I know of many other Vietnam combat vets whose whistleblowing about US war crimes contained no hint of private ends, and they deserve a lot more recognition than they've gotten.
Long story short: if Kerry threw someone else's medals and combat ribbons over the fence, it was because they asked him to. And the medals and ribbons he threw included at least some of his own.
Baloney. The man has been a two bit fraud his entire life. He has a real talent of picking wives. First wife was worth a few million. Teresa Heinz was worth far more than that.
Similar principle-a lot of the nice white people I know who support BLM would look at me like I have three heads if I suggested they give up some leisure time to tutor an African American third grader struggling with his reading.
I would not support BLM, ever. Anyone who checked it out knew they were a communist organization. Lived in Soviet Union so I know a communist organization when I see it. Big payoff for the leaders and nothing for the little people. I have done mentoring in inner city schools. I would highly suggest it for the liberals everywhere.
"Environmentalists" using plastic water bottles to begin with? At the first Human Be-In in San Francisco under the direction of Alan Ginsberg and others, thousands of stoned hippies actually took the time to clean up the entire field of trash when it was over. We didn't leave it to someone else to do. Because we were that "someone else". We were idealistic kids then and many of us chose to become adults and continue to take responsibility. I only hope that this new generation of sheep breaks out of the illusion that they are relevant and actually make something of their lives. Growth has a lot to do with who you chose as your role models. Choose wisely. Wokeness is really a wolf in sheep's clothing anyway.
I don’t give a fuck what you think Jerry. I see your point, and even agree with it to some extent. Honestly, I’m just quoting Rick and Morty. I’m Pickle Rick! Jerry is going to Jerry.
You're playing to the comment crowd here. I don't know anyone claiming environmental concern who ever did that.
The real problem is that bottled water rose to prominence as a mass market consumer item in the 1980s, in the wake of the rising popularity of the luxury consumer offerings of Perrier, Pellegrino, Poland Spring, etc. And then nearly all of the companies switched to plastic- for soda pop, too- with no alternative options.
I was always disturbed by the bottled water boom, which strikes me as an invented desire with the subtext that American tap water isn't fit to drink. Granted, in some places it isn't all that palatable, and 20 years of infrastructure neglect by the US Congress and various state governments continue to degrade the situation.
Usually, I filter my tap water, and have metal canteens for it. I admit to still buying seltzer water, having given up soda pop of any kind some years ago. But my bottles go into the recycling bin.
I will disagree that colleges are creating sheep, they are creating zealots of woke religion.
Wokeness at this points is a religious dogma for our elites. Thus it is complety normal that they they want want to create religious fanatics and not thinkers. Anyone who dears to think different or refused to fall in line will be dealt with ferocity. Sadly for years, I thought that this was a phase that will pass, in 1960-1980 there were communists and hippies, but those were only ideologies, not replacement for religion, which is far more dangerous than simple ideology. Religion doesn't require proof but only faith, it cant be sicentifly validated, but if misused it creates zealots who will stop at nothing, to defend the "Faith" from dirty non-believers who dear speak against and those zealots cannot be reason with.
Worse thing is, that those zealots after graduation go to positions of power in MSM, Universities and large companies even politics and continue to spread their religion with evermore increasing zeal. And will destroy anyone who dears to question dogma, very similarly as inquisition used to do. Even though the methods are different, results are the same in both cases.
Inquisition lasted for over 350 years, lets hope that our woke religion has significantly shorter shelf-life.
In a sense, though, zealots ARE sheep. They're just vicious sheep. But they are still following along, not questioning those who are converting them to Woke-ism.
Ayn Rand was a brilliant writer and thinker. Although she over-emphasized intelect at the expense of emotion. Intellect is critical in developing society, but it's only one facet of a human being. Still, I give her a pass because of the trauma I believe she suffered in the Soviet Union and also in adjusting to a new country, new values, new language. She was formidable, but also emotionally crippled. (And yes, I am aware of the Institute.)
I’ve had them read Animal Farm, 1984 is next up. If there are any woke professors here please enlighten me, which is the micro-aggression: “All Animals Are Created Equal” or “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others?” Asking for a friend.
For sure. Larry Elder can have an egg thrown at him by a white woman wearing a gorilla mask, but if you criticize BLM for its misappropriation of funds you're a racist.
For sure. That seems to be a common trend with the radical Left. They believe that you are the aggressor ready to pounce. I recently saw that the National School Board Association was willing to request National Guard troops in response to parent's protests at meetings. I wish I could say I was surprised.
To which I may add, Smits, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - to help inoculate and educate kids against the banning of books (such as in school libraries), of which we are seeing too much of lately.
Thank you for adding that. I began to collect books for my children and grandchildren, in hard copies, so they can't be digitally erased. We see the troglodytes want to ban books like Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, while at the same time pushing sexually explict books that promote alternative lifestyles on elementary age children. There's a plan.
I will be eternally grateful to my eighth grade English teacher for assigning us Animal Farm to write an essay on. I'm willing to bet almost no K-12 teacher assigns that book today. I read 1984 in high school on my own. Those two books forever inoculated me against Socialist/anti-Capitalist activism, for lack of a better word.
I had my kids read it when they were teenagers. 1984 and Animal Farm. My son recently re-read both books and I gave him Brave New World to read as well.
I read when I was 11. I saw the cover and figured a relatively thin book called "Animal Farm" was for my age group. My dad was perplexed to come home and see me reading it, and encouraged me to finish it. I would tell him what was happening in the book, and he would explain the symbolism to me.
I just brought up Harrison Bergeron the other day. That’s another story worth reading again. I read that in middle school back in the ‘80s and never forgot it.
So true. Last night Tucker had a segment with Candace Owens. Candace is doing a documentary on BLM and had gone with her camera crew to a property listed as a BLM building. Apparently Ms. Cullors lives there and did a selfie crying about how "threatened and scared' she was and how "afraid for her children's safety." This from the woman who orchestrated the wholesale destruction of quite a few American cities.
Yes, it did, and then Candace Owens published the video of her speaking cordially with the security guard at Patrice Cullors' front gate (who did not allow Owens to enter). It was all very civil and Cullors used the incident - and completely embellished it - to incite her followers to harass/target Owens. Cullors' sheep-like followers don't even question her side of the story.
I think what I'm enjoying about the comments here is pointing out that the lack of dialogue and absence of open-minded debate is the real issue - I know many people on the left side and they won't even have a conversation, they're so embroiled in their own certainty of moral superiority.
Very, very true. As I was reading, I was thinking this is stuff we've heard a thousand times, but one thing the article makes clear are the INCENTIVES for the noxious behavior. Yes, these chronological adults are spoiled children, but so long as they get rewarded in the Clerisy marketplace for behaving that way, absolutely nothing will change.
Want to cure Woke? Try another Great Depression. Believe me, no one will give a shit about pronouns anymore...Looking around, I'd say we have a good chance.
The problem is that our government has stopped even pretending that money doesn't grow on trees. There will be bread and circuses provided until the government collapses altogether.
"not questioning those who are converting them to Woke-ism." If you are woke, you don't question your woke leaders. Just like you didn't question the Catholic Church during inquisition. If you did the Church would torture you to near death and then burn you at the stake. I am sure these woke snow flakes who are against the death penalty for horrible psychopath murderers, would love to burn heretics who criticize the woke movement at the stake.
Unfortunately, the Inquisition persisted for centuries.
Movements of coercive repression have a way of developing their own momentum and rolling out out of inertia, long after the original rationale expired or was discredited.
Has anyone seen Benjamin Boyce’s documentary of the Evergreen College riots of 2017? The documentary is very long (thorough), but it has a lot of relevant footage that provides for an excellent case study of how the ideology manages to take over institutions. You can describe the behavior of the students involved as part tantrum, part religious indoctrination (along with recitations, preaching, confessions), and a fervor expressed as a fierce protectiveness of the narrative. The utter lack of rationality and rejection of dialogue from the “believers” also stands out. What starts with demands that Black/Brown individuals are heard, in the blink of an eye spirals into only allowing the “right” Black/Brown individuals to speak. Also memorable is the footage of Robin DiAngelo talking to the faculty saying something along the lines of: you can believe what you want to believe—however—while you are at work are going to “grapple” with my approach because that is what your employer wants. She also expresses her concerns about not creating a hostile environment for “children” (this is the world she uses to refer to the students, indeed)…5 years ago this footage would have been shocking; what is shocking now is how quickly (5 years!) many of these ideas have become mainstream.
Yes! The analogy I use is Mao's Red Guard. The children were propagandized and radicalized to blame every wrong (real or imagined) on their parents and teachers who were not pure enough. Reading Freddie deBoer and other 30-somethings I understand the 20 yr olds despise the 30 somethings for being "complicit" in whatever. Old classical liberals like me are beyond contempt. We can't die off soon enough. I tell my kids, who are now having children, that the one thing I would fear if I were a young parent is the schools (and their comrades in media etc) turning my children into people I despise, and who despise me.
Also, as you point out, The Woke control every institution, Fortune 500 and Russell 2000 company. The only institution they do not control is SCOTUS and many Federal courts. But, with the Law Schools churning out SJWs (who, btw, get their tuition forgiven), it's only a matter of time.
I read a lot of dystopian literature growing up (Orwell, Vonnegut, Solzhenitsyn, etc). Always saw dystopia around every corner. Finally, about 20 yr ago, I realized it likely would never happen. And now, here we are. Life can be ironic, no? : )
Communism has always been about religion, it's one of the reason why Marx singled out religion as the "opiate of the people" in order to discredit existing sects and replace with his own.
They are both sheep and zealots. Zealots in the sense of rabid to the point of foaming at the mouth. Sheep in the sense of not an original thought in the bunch, merely regurgitating what they are fed. I think they are to be marginalized at all costs. If that means disavowing the woke corporations that support them, so be it.
Exactly. They may debate how many angels can dance on the head of a Woke pin, but they are still presuming angels.
Most people need a reason to stay engaged in life. As Camus said, the only true philosophical question is whether to continue to exist or not. So, we all find meaning in our lives. Back when 80-90% of people identified as religious, their religion was their source of meaning; socializing; structure; self-definition. Now that number is like 30-40%. That 50% didn't go on to embrace rational humanist lives. They merely substituted some form of politics for religion. And the worst religious scolds of old didn't become tolerant humanists; they became SJWs; The Woke; The permanently aggrieved, intolerant and hyper-judgmental. The swapped one pre-made belief system for another. They get their meaning, self-definition, self-esteem and socializing in this manner. That's why rejecting it, or even questioning it, is psychic suicide.
This brings to my mind what happened after the English Reformation. The loss of Catholicism did not merely change how people worshiped. Social life was organized almost entirely around the Church, including groups of citizens who organized in name of various patron saints for charitable as well as social purposes. Without that foundation, the whole social life of English people was cut adrift.
The result can be seen in the religious fanaticism that drove the Puritan forces in the English Civil War. The same fanaticism drove the hunting and burning of "witches," which even in Europe was largely a Protestant phenomenon, rather than a Catholic one.
People who are driven will always find a cause to drive them. And heaven help anyone who gets in their way.
My friend, we had talked about this before: “social justice” scholarship centers around the “critical consciousness” you know, the same one that is part of my kids’ state-mandated critical pedagogy. This worldview revolves around power dynamics and the language/narratives that sustain such dynamics and—as such—it tends to separate individuals into oppressor/oppressed. First and foremost, the ideology criticizes enlightened liberal ideals and it is subjective, rather than objective. I thought we had talked about this before, have you forgotten already?
I think it is quite obvious that Raziel and I are on the same page on many things. I am just reminding you of things I had already shared with you. If you understand that the “social justice” ideology is subjective and criticizes enlightened liberal ideals, then the cultural changes that this substack generally discusses (the undermining of academic freedom, demonization of dissent, politicization of science) make a lot of sense. The illiberalism that follows when this ideology is implemented is by design.
Put succinctly: the only truth acknowledged on this worldview is the existence of ever-present power dynamics.
Yes. Sort of. The trick is that the power dynamics are as perceived by the "disempowered". If a black feels disempowered, he is. If a white feels disempowered, it's "white fragility" or some such. There is a pecking order.
Young woman I'd known for several years went off to an Ivy League college. Came back after Soph year spouting all the "I'm for free speech unless it hurts someone or threatens them.". I told her "What you just said threatens me, so now you can't say it.". She looked at me doe-eyed. Clearly they had never discussed this or thought it through. Just regurgitated it, gleefully.
Standpoint epistemology (or standpoint theory) is the approach many “social justice” scholars use in which identity status (specifically, being identified as “oppressed”) is seen as the source of a person’s authority. Since “lived experiences” are contradictory by nature, the big caveat for standpoint epistemology is that those voices perceived as “marginalized” but who question the “social justice” narrative are very quickly dismissed as “internalized” oppressors. Hence, this makes the ideology’s claims unfalsifiable.
Look no further that my kids’ culturally responsive sustaining education framework—it is quite thorough with its explanation of the critical conscious lens. If you find the piece riddled of jargon, keep in mind that the framework is meant to be implemented on kids pre-kindergarten to 12.
Lets try this again, you need to read, reading expands your understanding and is used to aqure knowledge .
When you read following articles you will get general idea of beliefs, principles and doctrine of woke religion. You will especially see how they deal with non-believers
I would recommend by starting reading following article
- Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex
Then this one
- The Takeover of America's Legal System
Others you can read in any order you like. Have fun.
Raziel, I asked you, I repeat, you, “what are the tenets of this woke religion?” It is nonsensical, to ask you a question, and me, answer it! If you feel you don’t have the skill to answer the question, I’ll understand!
My niece graduated from Yale in 2019. I love her dearly but she exemplifies some of the worst aspects of what you're talking about. She's now enrolled at Georgetown Law, another woke enclave, where she will undoubtedly thrive by encountering exactly zero views that challenge woke dogma. To me, the "best and the brightest" are like delicate, brittle dolls who break easily because they have never dealt with conflict or adversity.
Also, she and I have agreed not to discuss certain issues because she gets too upset by my views, which in all but the bluest of blue places would be considered center left but in her eyes, are very right wing.
Has she ever considered that her views might upset you? Nit that you'd be upset by different opinions but it's always their feelings that are so fragile. And it's always someone else at fault for upsetting them.
I'll ignore your snide remark but I'm glad to see now that you're simply arguing in bad faith. It's people like you who continue to drive me further and further to the right. At this point, I may become a non-voter because I truly hate both sides.
Please do not do that. Then you will have been truly silenced. And even.if you don't vote at the top of the ticket the down ballot offices count too. Now more than ever.
It’s not our job to constantly validate our kids. Sometimes admonishment is appropriate, it’s called parenting. Again the feelings thing. Always at the forefront of an issue is how we made someone feel. We need them to feel validated constantly by reminding them all the time...why? I’m not against encouraging my kids and acknowledging their achievements and I do when appropriate, but it’s not all I have to say nor should it be.
I see it in my own kids’ school, they emphasize “mental health” above everything else but the definition of mental health is now so broad and obscure that it’s getting washed away in the perceived “safety” of real surface-thought-out ideas. It’s BS. Penny, I think they really DO believe what they say. They just can’t get away from this terrible emotional state that they’ve been living in for years.
It is not helped by the absolute assumption that mental health is driving the school shootings. So many of the comments to the post about the Uvalde shooting assumed mental illness, but I see little to no evidence of it with that young man. Some people are just bad. But we have become a very fear-driven society - fear of guns, fear of viruses, fear of our political oppsition.
I am sorry for your sadness. It is his loss though. Your vote is yours. And the failure to exercise it IS a statement. It is not subject to his direction or anyone else's.
I think you are 100% right on this. They may really believe that they believe, but they don't. Good opinions and ideologies can stand up to robust scrutiny. If they face that Wokeism is a sham, they are rejecting their social groups and resigning themselves to be social pariahs.
One of the strengths of Bari's feed is a high quality of debate and the willingness to disagree respectfully and to resort to facts more often than not.
The single most important thing that needs to happen in our culture is debate and discussion. Sadly, neither "side" is generally capable of it. While true that many progressive people believe that their viewpoints are the inarguable truth (thus not up for debate), I also find that those on the "right" are intolerant of those who think differently from consensus (just watch how conservatives who speak out against Trump are treated.) So if you are somewhere between right and left, and don't really fit into the full consensus view of either, you are often the one who suffers in attempted discourse. Oh what a world it would be if everyone entered a conversation more to listen than to speak.
But don't quit trying. Discourse and debate are carried out among individuals to see which "side" we support on any given topic or issue. People unwilling to hear your thoughts and ideas are not worthy of you. One of the best things thst ever happened to me was deciding that I would not allow toxic people a role in my life.
Discussed BLM with my daughter. She became furious. You are very wrong if you think the problems are on both sides. The intolerant woke left cannot stand an honest discussion.
Per usual, You progressives got it back-arsewards. The one that can't stand their feelings being hurt *are* the Progressives. Because they never grew up, because...
I actually tried to talk about my opposition to transwomen in elite sports but was told that transwomen are women and that I am transphobic for doubting this "truth." I told her I believe transwomen and transmen deserve all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of everyone else BUT that does not mean a man who goes through male puberty and then competes as a woman doesn't have an advantage. She disagrees vehemently with this and now we don't talk about it. Do you want more examples?
I wish people would stop using words like "transwomen" to describe people who are not women in any sense - and "transmen" to describe people who are not men. Everyone has rights but we do not have to buy into a whole Gender Ideology!
The vagueness stems from the fact that most of us know what we are talking about. What the ideas and policies in question are. We don't spell it out for the sake of brevity, and because why would we sing to the choir?
Here are a few specific issues that concern myself and other commenters:
Language and speech are not literal violence.
In competitive sports the value of "inclusion" is non-sensical.
Learning new ideas and thoughts are not compatible with "safe spaces". Being made uncomfortable is an important part of the process.
Free speech is absolutely essential to our country.
I would wager that any random person in this thread has a rant and debate points ready to go on any of these topics.
Our entire point is that it has now become career suicide to even discuss these issues at universities, not to get into the weeds with the discussions themselves.
How would college students learn to be independent? They go from parents who do everything for them to a college that does everything for them. In hiring recent grads, I've tried to get away from prestige to getting people to look more at the local state commuter college. I find those grads to be much more adult. Most are first in the family college graduates, nobody guided them through the process, and they had to get to school everyday (rather than roll right out of bed into the classroom) while managing a life outside the campus. In short, they are 22 year old adults ready to work instead of children who still need their office to feel like a campus safe space.
Helicopter parenting is pretty much an upper middle class thing. It gets press for the same reason we’re reading so many stories from fancy schools: journalists write about themselves.
I've seen it to some extent in the working class. Working class parents aren't able to schedule their children's days quite as completely, since they can't afford a lot of extracurricular lessons. But a lot of working class moms are over-involved in taking care of every little thing for their children. Sometimes they have to be in order to avoid being accused of neglect.
I tried to practice the same "benign neglect" with my kids that my working class parents used on me, but all too often it was easier for me to step in and do things for my kids instead of leaving them to figure it out for themselves. But during their teen years, my husband and I made a point of reminding ourselves that we were raising future adults. And although our kids haven't grown up quite as fast as we did, they are still waaaaay ahead of many of their peers.
While I agree with most that was written here, (and btw I was totally shocked with the video re Prof. Christakis - that student should have been expelled right then and there), I have to disagree with the following statement: “ Your parents aren’t your friends; be skeptical of any authority that claims to have your interests at heart.” A) In most cases parents are friends, and B) I would not say “be skeptical” I would rather say think about any advice that you are offered, whether by parents or others. Be humble - you don’t need to reject it outright, the same way you don’t have to accept it outright - just think well before you accept or reject. The core of not being sheep is gather information, make sure it’s not biased to one side or the other, and think. And today, more than ever, be careful with social contagion.
Parents can't be friends until children are brought safely to adulthood. Then if the the fates align and justice reigns, parents and children can have deep friendships.
I would argue that 'friendship' between parent and child is an adults-only thing. There should be boundaries -- just as there should be boundaries between teachers and students, captains and crew. It could even be part of the problem that the 'friend' parents are largely responsible for the 'trauma' and 'mental health' issues that are so prevalent these days. It also makes a huge difference whether it's a female 'friend' or a male 'friend.' Female friendships -- unfortunately -- require agreeing with everything. The female friend who does not agree is 'not supportive.' (In my own experience, rare is the female friend who allows me to unpack current social phenomena in an honest, critically holistic way -- they are authoritarians over what can be discussed and how it can be discussed -- men are generally far more open to unpacking things, capable of disinterested inquiry. Women -- not so much, or it's extremely rare). I'd also go so far as to say that it's the matriarchal takeover that fosters the domination of woke and "safety" and all else -- you have to agree you're not a friend -- and you're making the speaker "feel unsafe" if you challenge her -- she wants to leave her kids and husband? You have to SUPPORT her...or you're cruel and don't understand her. This infantilization of young adults is matriarchal, period. And any parent trying to be a 'friend' to their kid before the kid has reached adulthood is very likely infantilizing that kid, a strange paradox indeed.
Perhaps this is more individua-based than you think.
I am blessed with very high quality women in my life, sisters and friends. All of us challenge each other, None of us agree on everything, and we have been known to spend literally days unpacking things and analyzing them. This has been true for my 54 years upon this earth.
I believe with all my heart and brain that women are every bit as capable of disinterested inquiry. I think that to believe otherwise is sexist and perhaps a result of not having known women of excellent intellectual character.
I agree with this 100%. Hell, this Substack is not only authored and named by one such woman, but the comments section is full of them as well. Despite the dire looking future of our next generation outlined in this article, all have not been lost. I am still young - just 33 - but I too have a wonderful panel of female friends and acquaintances that love nothing more than debating and dissecting hot button topics at an intellectual level for hours on end. We fall across a wide political spectrum, from Bernie supporters to Trump loyalists, yet walk away from our discussions still warm friends with new perspectives and points we may not have considered.
Well, I'm happy for your good fortune. And because I don't want to believe it's sexist, I keep trying and keep getting the same response: "I only want to talk about clothes, men and food." Or "I don't want to talk about ideas" or "Why are you interested in that? It has nothing to do with YOU." And so on. I was thrown out of the group in 6th grade for questioning whether it was appropriate for a sixth grader to wear hot pants to school. I could go on and on. And "sexist" is a silly argument. Men and women are obviously different and it makes biological sense why women would censor others -- so that their precious children don't get the wrong ideas (except when it comes to lopping off their son's penis for status points -- better not disagree or it's the gulag for you!)
However I believe that we’ve lifted up the mostly feminine qualities in our society and have made anything not fitting into that seen as ‘toxic masculinity’ which I find abhorrent. Agreed men and women are very different in our ways of thinking speaking etc. It’s the way we were made imo.
Whenever the couples I hang with get together it’s like clockwork, the men all end up together and the women do too. It happens completely spontaneously. No one cares and sometimes on our camping trips we all are talking around the campfire at night together and have a great time. Lots of laughter
I know the phenomenon of which you speak but believe it is more prevalent in woke cities and certainly not a universal truth. To that point I would commend the comments of many women posting here who would definitely not fit that description. Their "matriarchy" would be as stern as any patriarchy, perhaps more so. Lots of Spartan women who would have no problem advising "with your shield or on it." But yes, the problem with the nanny state is that it is fostered and embraced by far too many nannies.
Heather MacDonald has made several good arguments about women's roles in promoting safetyism. If you haven't already, you should check out her work. Completely agree with you.
As a female who has engaged in this exact conversation--woman leaving her husband and kids--with a group of women on a mini vacation in wine country in CA...you are exactly right (in some cases). I essentially said "try harder" when my opinion was asked, and for the rest of the night pretty much followed suit by saying what I thought on other topics that came up, thinking maybe there was a desire for actual conversation. But the women wanted support and for everyone to agree with everyone else...they were truly upset that I didn't play along and felt "hurt." These are women who had those dumbass "In this house, we believe in..." signs in their lawns, who are professionals that graduated from Stanford and Berkeley, who laughed and then backpedaled into some sickening display of fake empathy when I said I was going to quit my job and become a farmer, who live their lives on Instagram. What's worse, they exchanged looks of pure malignant joy whenever I would disagree with or challenge a view, as if to silently titter and signify to one another "oh, poor girl, she doesn't know how to play the game." There was no discussion, just a sit-down in the restroom about the importance of their overly-touted rallying cry of the weekend--"no judgment." It was, of course, very passive-aggressive in its delivery to me.
I've seen some discussion on Ayn Rand here, and I'm diffident as to my opinion of her, but one trenchant theme in her books that has always stayed with me--pity as something not to be embraced but dreaded--comes to mind when I think about that weekend again. Ironically, I do pity them, just as they wanted me to, just not in the way they expect to be pitied. And I wanted to just write them off as a-holes, but I can't do it. They choose this way of existence, to think the way they do, and they are free to do so. But don't tell me I have to think like that, too, or that I'm wrong or misogynistic for not doing so.
Incidentally, another conversation that weekend involved one of the women saying "Do you think your kids are proud of you? I really want my kids to be proud of me."
You sound kind of bitter about women to me. But I agree that much of this is driven by women. I do not appreciate being stereotyped that way however. Perhaps your female friend is just a toxic person and you are imputing that to all women. semester. Are many female commenters here that do not espouse woke idealogy.
Actually my impression is that there are more males who do. My(unsolicited) advice would be to treat each person as an individual and keep trying. The feminine POV has much to offer. I think we have lost something by polarizing the sexes.
I think there's been some confusion here because of the lack of a definition of "friend". So, what is a friend? For me, a friend is someone I can be open about issues, discuss them, argue, listen to and be listened, agree or disagree. But a friend will always be there for all those things. So yes, my parents were my friends.
At the end of the day, you can be open about issues, discuss them, argue and agree to disagree with a friend. You cannot do that as a parent. Because you cannot dictate to friends but you must as a parent. Are you really suggesting that you can discuss, argue and disagree or agree with your two-year old's tantrum in a supermarket? I doubt it.
“Bring children safely to adulthood” is an oxymoron. Adulthood is unsafe, and parents are not responsible for making adulthood safe or ensuring a child arrives there “safely.” Hopefully, a child will embrace adulthood with its freedom, imperfections, and responsibilities organically utilizing the life lessons and values instilled throughout childhood.
Yeah, quibbling Andy. Of course adulthood is unsafe. But getting a child there is the duty of parents through teaching the lessons and values that they need.
Instead of going straight into college after high school, I served an enlistment in the Marines. Since then, I was going to a college in South Carolina, but I had to drop out before I finished one semester. I just couldn’t take it seriously for the precise reasons highlighted in this article.
What really got me was the low quality of education. I’ve always been an avid reader, so writing papers and such was never that difficult for me. The breaking point at school came when I devoted weeks of time and energy into writing a paper about the long-term cultural effect of Brown v. Board. As per instructions, we had to submit the paper to someone else as a “peer-review”. The guy’s paper I got was quite literally an incomprehensible mass of bad grammar and left-wing talking points. It dawned on me then that that was the norm. I dropped out two days later.
What truly demoralized me was finding out how astoundingly poorly educated your average college graduate is.
Probably 75% of college students should not be there. In Germany, they still have a multi-track system in secondary school, to direct students into the trades if they are more trade-oriented, and others into college prep if they are brainiacs. Thus, Germany has retained a strong industrial manufacturing economy and relatively sane administration, whereas the U.S. has become top-heavy with millions of useless degrees in gender studies and such.
Interesting system. I also believe not everyone is ready at 18. Nothing wrong with working a few years then going to college. In addition, it seems “entry” jobs are fading away. My first job was my best job. Peeling potatoes for 8 hours in the back room of a restaurant at 13 years old makes you value education more highly.
I spent a summer working in a public park that had a stable for horses. Had to shovel the manure at times. Had to carry picnic tables around, mow grass in the heat, pick up trash, work with rough and ready guys. Other summers, I worked in hot kitchens. I'm forever grateful.
My 17-year-old is just starting to look at colleges, and wants to do a "gap year". I'm supporting that, also encouraging her to consider two years of community college then finish up at a 4-year, saving a ton of money.
At a recent college fair, there was a table advertising a "gap year". It was pretty stunning. It cost what a year at college would, and instead was a year long European vacation. The organizers would make all the travel arrangements, book hotels, etc. Of course a ton of kids came home begging for a gap-year.
Yeah my kid will probably be working at McDonald's and saving up to pay for tuition. Any surplus will go into long term growth funds and saving up for a house.
I've been glad to see the "gap year" concept making its way to the U.S. Unfortunately, for the upper middle class, a "gap year" is often spent playing instead of working.
Well, I live in Germany and must tell you that we have the same problems here, maybe in slightly milder form as yet. The German school system used to be good, lo, these many years ago, but we're getting into wokeness, equity etc., too. Spelling and math skills, writing compréhensible texts, what used to be considered general knowledge are all on the ropes now. And there are something like ten chairs for engineering but over two hundred for gender studies. Germany's manufacturing has been outsourced, and all but three of the nuclear power plants ( I think there were about twenty) have been shut down. The last three are scheduled to bite the dust on December 31. All because of Fukushima and the insane idea that wind and solar can fill the energy gap. Oh yes, electric cars and electric heating are being pushed, but where will the extra power come from? At least the Germans can feel virtuous when everything breaks down.
Heide...you stated a lot right there, i've been hearing the same. i use to be happy when i saw "made in Germany"...and the energy/climate, to a degree, hoax, is much a UN push.
Nobody says "no warming", but when 1/2 the world goes south on fossil, while the other 1/2 continues to increase fossil fuels, spells "fake/ false leadership.
I agree. I don't think history will be kind to Angela Merkel, both for her immigration clumsiness and her paranoia about nuclear energy and willingness to embrace Russian energy without even any contingency planning.
The number of college graduates with degree majors in race/ethnicity/gender/territorial studies is actually a very small percentage. In the tens of thousands, perhaps, but nowhere near "millions."
My belief is that it should be mandatory for everyone to serve, in some capacity or another, after high school. *Preparation* for college and adulthood. That's just me.
I was a TA in a psych class, way back in the mid-Eighties. EVEN THEN, most of my students wrote incomprehensively. It was like "reading" stuff monkeys might type out at random. I'm told things are infinitely worse now...
When I taught college writing in the late 00s, in any given class there was almost invariably a student who thought it was okay to write papers in "text speak." Like "b4 U go home." I always had to nip that in bud early in the semester.
This is a very astute assessment of the problem. But I think it may have started even earlier than Mr. Deresiewicz suggests.
The 1950s was the first time in our country that children were absolutely lavished with childhood. The Greatest Generation had very little in the way of a childhood, and in the booming economy of the post-war era, they were able to give their children everything they themselves never had.
But the end result of this was a generation for whom childhood was the pinnacle of life; adulthood was all downhill from there. I think this is part of what drove the rebellions of the 60s--a desire to make adulthood more like childhood. And those rebels, eventually forced to do something resembling growing up, inflicted the same permanent childhood on their kids, only worse.
Very interesting insights, William. I think an underappreciated difference between current generations and my boomer generation was how we spent whatever time was not dedicated to school or sleep. Most of my friends had before or after school jobs, for example. Paperboy, grocery bagging, drugstore deliveries (on bicycles), yard work. They may have protested in the 60's, but they all knew where money came from, what was expected at work and how to deal with the small adversities you have in any job. Good lessons. Today, kids are chauffeured from soccer to gymnastics to baseball, tutors etc. on a year around basis, and given priority as if they were working. They're acting like a privileged class because we're treating them like a privileged class. We also didn't have all the fantasy screen time, because the only "screen" was a TV, and the few shows there were on 3 channels - gasp - reinforced community and family values.
You are so right. My husband is of a later generation, born in the late 60s, but he grew up in a suburb of NYC and he started working at age 12. His parents were financially comfortable but they didn't indulge him, and he figured out if he wanted a stereo and a car and a little sailboat and money to take girls out, he had to go hustle for them. By high school he had already done a paper route (picking up bundles in frigid predawns, rolling them, delivering them, maintaining customer accounts, collecting payment, arranging subs when he'd be out of town, all with no involvement from his parents), washed dishes at the country club, pumped gas for tips, delivered pharmacy orders, and managed the stockroom at the shoe store. He put himself through college, earning a hard science degree while working two jobs and living on his own. He's now a very successful executive and occasionally encounters younger colleagues who want his salary and title, but have not done a self-directed or self-initiated day of work in their whole lives and literally do not grasp the concept.
Sorry - a second point: Sports experiences for most kids were going to the park and picking up games with whomever was there. You had to negotiate, work with people you didn't know, dodge bullies or fight as there was no adult supervision, and generally navigate competitive social relationships with whatever skills you had or developed along the way. Today's kids seem - I hope I'm wrong - too fragile for that era.
Sorry, You aren't wrong. One whole *lotta* 'em would be on the sidelines suckin' their thumbs. The boomers screwed up a lot, but those of us who had to got by.
I'm 60 and my classes at U.T. Arlington are naturally filled with very young adults. In an I.R. seminar last semester, a class made up of 'all colors of the rainbow,' the only student with an opinion that deviated from the stock woke banalities was from El Salvador. To say there was no other 'diversity of opinion' is an understatement. Black, white, brown, trans, cis - whatever, if there was any variation it was carefully concealed. It was depressing. The other thing was how dark each of the students were. Here was a class composed of the children of bourgeois America; young people who had never missed a meal, seen a war or had a 'lived experience' of material discomfort, and who could afford a graduate program at a public university were filled with despair and utter hopelessness. To a man - except the student from El Salvador. I remember saying to the class: "you know, this country is not Weimar Germany." They disagreed. America for them is place of unremitting oppression and agony for the 'marginalized' masses with a pogrom in the offing at any moment.
What percentage of the student body do you think really believes that modern day America is an apocalyptic hellscape of racism and oppression and what percentage is just spitting out what they know the professors want to hear?
Depends entirely on the department. This was a Poly Sci graduate seminar. It is likely different in the MBA program, Geology or Engineering. The liberal arts dominate university administrations - Sociologists in particular, and sets the tone for much of our institutional life. Nevertheless, I don't think students were in 'suck-up' mode. I think they were quite sincere. I would describe them as Oliver North in reverse - steeped in anti-American sentiment but like any nationalist convinced that the U.S. is the center of the universe and that our policies determine the destinies of every nation on earth.
I appreciate the comment but cannot "like" it. This is so very sad. I do not believe in pie-in-the-sky optimism but neither do I believe in dour pessimism.
I raised two adults. They were not raised in child care; they were raised at home. I remember reading, probably John Rosemond, that it is the job of parents to raise competent adults. I never forgot that. I also never gave in to the "law of the soggy potato chip." Children want attention and they will seek it any way they can get it. The absolute worst thing to do is to reward (with attention and giving in), bad behavior.
Even worse? These students then expect the same "safe" environment from their workplace, environments free of open discussion, ideas, or counter-arguments that they might find "threatening". And workplaces are complying.
I’m more convinced I could not teach at a so-called elite secondary school; I would be too demanding for the parents. They would protest their child’s earned ‘C+‘ vs. the gift ‘A’ they want on the transcript.
Ron Clark, co-founder of the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, describes this generation as “wussified”; ultimately this is an adult problem, not a child problem.
This is an adult problem. Best words written today. Of course this is an adult problem. Each of the schools being discussed has an alumni. Tens of thousands actually have graduated Yale, Harvard, Princeton. How many of these alumni continue to support these schools? How many continue to donate hard cash to them? How many are demanding change?
We all hear about professors being thrown to the wolves. How many alumni reach out to support these professors? We hear the administrators are the problem, how many alumni have reached out to trustees and called BS?
How many of you have done so? As the saying goes, asking for a friend.
A college professor who I know tells me that both students and parents pressure instructors over B+ grades, and sometimes even A- grades. A habit they apparently picked up, earlier at the secondary school level. Maybe even before, who knows...
As for a C+, they're practically unheard of where she teaches.
I have a C+ and a D+ on my early 1990s college transcript. I deserved them. (Still managed to get a B+ average.) But I wasn't in it for marks on paper. I wanted to learn new things.. And I learned more from the class where I got a C+ than from some of the courses where I got an A; my A grades, I often already knew much of the material. Whereas the course where I got a C+, I kept assimilating the points long after the course was over.
I think the "excellent sheep" problem looms largest for students pursuing advanced degrees in liberal arts and humanities; there's a pronounced tendency for those grad students to be groomed ideologically, as a Protege cohort. Of course, that was also true in the days when the deck was stacked in favor of "straight white males", judging from my reading of history. The problem is that those departments and colleges of postmodern academia have gone for the fallacy of imagining that "the Master's house can be dismantled with the Master's tools" of ideological conformity, policing for orthodoxy, selective discrimination on the basis of categorical biases, fealty to pre-existing status hierarchy, and institutional Power as the ultimate arbiter of Truth.
That "outcome-based" result is not an improvement. It's a house built on sand.
Excellent essay. As the parent of three teenagers, I try hard to teach them independence and critical thinking. But, when they go against the norms of woke thinking, they are punished by peers and the system. Currently, trying to find a university for my 17 year old where her free thinking will be accepted.
For what it's worth, my impression of Hillsdale is that they are a tough liberal arts college with a challenging curriculum. They definately embrace the Judeo-Christian basis of Western Civilization, but I don't believe they espouse a particular denomination.
I missed the Sixties in a way, because instead of going to college I went into the Army. There, you didn't get to reject the authority of adults—or, if you did, the price was high. Its travails, frequent bouts of boredom and periodic small stupidities notwithstanding, military service, particularly in wartime, administers a sharp and salutary reality check. You're not special. Life is unfair. There ain't no free lunch. Unhappily for them, most young people today have never been forced to face these facts.
I was struck by the irony of the situation that Professor Deresiewicz describes. And it's true now that I come to think of it: Young people today are passive consumers of "social justice." They're not themselves willing to do the work—to borrow a phrase from Woke progressivism. They demand as a right the solution of problems by others. That, after all, is what university administrations, corporations and government exist to do: service the consumer. For young woke progressives, "our democracy" is kind of like Amazon.
Your first mistake was thinking that the 60s protests were somehow noble. I was there. They weren't. They were ostensibly against the then-raging Vietnam War but they were fomented and led by dedicated leftists. Then, as now, resolute in their zeal to weaken and destroy the United States; the one beacon of hope against one-world, authoritarian rule. Woke is merely the latest excuse for and iteration of that ignoble campaign. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I'm glad you brought that up. I was there too. My freshman year at Brooklyn College. 200 students, or fewer, brought the college to a standstill because the people in charge had no backbone.
It is my firm opinion the student protests at Brooklyn stemmed from inadequate preparation to be there. I recognized several of the "protesters" as low achieving students from my high school. Over the summer, many students who hadn't met the qualifications for entry to CUNY campuses were sent letters advising them of "open enrollment." The freshman class became huge. I had some of these "invited" students in my classes. They could not keep up and continually engaged the instructors in useless, angry, unintelligent arguments. When midterms drew near they did a protest which shut down the college.
It is a huge mistake to stack the deck against some students by pushing them into an academic environment they can't compete in. They could do marvelously in a second or third tier school but will come out angry, resentful, and aggrieved from a top highly competitive school. As we see.
And I quote the Honorable Elihu Smails: "The world needs ditch-diggers, too."
Nobody likes to think about sewers…until they’re clogged.
More then these crazed elite over privilege kids who will probably contributing zero to the economy
So true. And only fools look down on such hardworking people.
Foolproof test of the inherent worth of an individual - watch how they treat waiters, waitresses and those who bus the tables.
I remember those exact days at Brooklyn College. All through high school I studied vigorously because you needed at least an 80+ Average to get into Brooklyn College. I averaged 91 and was thrilled to get in, but then like you said, that summer they suddenly announced open admissions = it became "Super High School"
I will say, in my experience, after you got past the intro courses which were held in auditoriums with like 200 students, the "open admission"students failed and eventually dropped out and the advanced courses felt like real college to me.
I did enjoy hanging out in SUBO, playing cards in the Boylan Hall Cafeteria, and smoking pot at the Little Lake behind Ingersoll Hall and watching for the Wackenhut Security guys in their stupid golf carts. I remember seeing shows like George Carlin, The Beach Boys and Poco in Gershwin Theatre for $5. good times!!
Wow...we may have shared a class or two.
The protests of the 1960s were cinematically great but in real life they were manned (literally, women played subservient roles) by white, affluent males whose parents had deep pockets with bail money. For those who remained at home, we were drafted into the military, went to work after high school, or attended local colleges while working. In many cases, these protesters were the true elitists. Two generations later, we saw the same thing during the summer of 2020's violent protests that included the burning down of cities. There were no consequences for those who committed these acts.
Something I noticed at Berkeley in the 70s was that certain majors were too busy working to participate. Think engineering. It would be fascinating to look at social/class majors of those most involved and see whether patterns emerged. Too late for those years, but still perhaps of interest.
I remember most of those protesting were political science and sociology majors. I was dating an engineering major who was attending CCNY. He and most of his friends were from working class families; many were the first in their families to attend college.
Agree. You explained it far more eloquently than did I.
Thank you, Bruce. I'm a big fan of your posts.
That's really nice of you to say. But there some really gifted people posting here and I think Bari's genius is in bringing people of divergent views together. I've learned a lot from people here. Some even administered some healthy doses of humility
I knew one of the Ohio Guardsmen who was at Kent State the day of the shooting - a shooting which to this day is somehow held out as this condensed symbol of all that was "noble and tragic" about the antiwar protestors. What he told me utterly contradicts the more popular narratives - outsiders agitating and pushing students forward, egging students on to throw rocks while themselves staying a bit behind the front lines (much as Antifa does its riots today), and basically trying to get students hurt or killed.
I lived overseas as a kid, where it would be expected that soldiers holding rifles would indeed shoot. Disembarked from a charter flight in Frankfurt in 1977, to find that we were surrounded by armed German soldiers. There was no doubt they would shoot. (Germany had been having problems with terrorists.) Walked through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on that trip, were there were three different armed uniformed groups on patrol. Any one would have been happy to shoot. My reaction to the 1970 Kent State shootings was that it took coddled Americans to believe armed men would not retaliate. And to this day foolish Americans believe they are somehow immune from the consequences of their actions.
During the Berkeley and Fresno state riots, the same tactics were used. Only they didn’t have cell phones, just walkie-talkies. A newspaper man friend of mine tried to warn Fresno state cops and FBI. They laughed at him. So he posted reporters in the back and got pictures of the leaders. 36 were arrested. His paper was bombed. He laughed at them. So predictable.
Throwing rocks and hurling epithets in an antiwar protest does not justify Guardsmen pulling the trigger on unarmed students, whether there were 'outsiders' there or not.
Triggers were pulled when they didn't have to be.
Never said it was justified, only that most people haven’t heard the full story, and of how the riot organizers had their own share of blame because they actually wanted dead college students (which they got). The guy I knew, like I said, was there that day, and knew the officer who gave his troops live ammo. My friend said it was (his words, as near as I can remember now, it has been a good 20 years and he is long gone) “a just stupid dumbass thing to do, and totally unnecessary.” He went on to describe how they were supposed to do crowd control, which his own unit did elsewhere on campus without incident. “You don’t give live ammo unless you mean to use it, ‘cause someone WILL use it.” My friend was a WWII vet who had migrated to the Guards as a reservist, but most of the Guards had not ever seen real combat, so the riot was terrifying to them. Those guys didn’t know to NOT pull the trigger when terrified.
Fascinating and sad. In my opinion, many of the people behind most, perhaps all, recent protests hope that someone gets maimed or killed. Not them, of course! No, they will direct the justified response to the terrible violence they helped instigate. I am surprised at how few people have actually been hurt (or, in the BLM riots, killed). I expect worse this summer...
As a Guardsman, I was activated to the BLM protests in Washington DC during June of 2020. I had one lady insult me, call me every name in the book, and threaten to identify me and find my family. All I did was stand there and stare blankly at her until she went away. I can almost guarantee she was a paid instigator.
You are being too kind in calling her a lady
I do not think we will ever know how many were killed or maimed for life by the riots of 2020. The media simply never reported this. My guess is at least 30, just from the videos and stories with photos I saw from all the alternative online reporting. Ask the courageous Andy Ngo who suffered serious brain damage from the beatings he took doing genuine journalism at the BLM/antifa riots. And know that the Crips and Bloods play a role in the violence, at least benefiting from the absence of police preoccupied with the riots. My pharmacist whose pharmacy was destroyed explained this to me. There is so much we do not know about the relationship between skyrocketing crime and these so called "peaceful demonstrators."
The essay was excellent. My concern is that very few people look ahead to see what is in store for us now that nearly all authorities in the US do NOT use their responsibility to protect the innocent.
We are being driven from the public squares, physical and social media, by brown shirts. The authorities are clothed in somewhat different rhetoric, but their behavior is the same as the Nazi authorities. They barely cover up their delight of the violence going on in this country with a few generalities about being "against all violence." At this point, it is obvious what is coming unless more Americans become courageous enough to stand up to it.
So many accept the ubiquitous woke propaganda, reversing this is getting less likely every day
You could be right, M. Finke.
I hope this summer won't be so bad. I think a lotta what came out last summer was because people just couldn't take any more-a being locked in. ICBW, of course.
With the large contingent of military age males pouring across the border since the Obama Biden cabal took office, we had better be a lot wiser than just hoping nothings going to happen. What worries me is they will also have access to what Biden and Milley left behind in Afghanistan. A real summer of love.
I certainly agree that the Guards were poorly commanded. Even with real ammo, under proper leadership those weapons would never have been used, unless and until they saw weapons in the hands of the students, which to my knowledge, they never had.
Your friend's perspective is an interesting one, as contrary ones usually are.
I witnessed firsthand several Portland protests in 2020-2021 that went on for hours at each event. The intent was to draw violence from a very disciplined and restrained police force. There was no violence relative to the voracious extent of violence from the agitator. This is exactly what Skip is talking about. How long can a crowd remain peaceful, when the venom is constantly applied & sheep are pushed forward?
I used to know a retired cop from Portland (he retired about 2015 or so, I think). The Portland and Seattle cops had, at least prior to 2020, many many veterans experienced in riot control (the cities long being the favorite haunts of malcontents, and subject to frequent riots). My friend had a lot to say on the subject - the key with riots is to get the people in the riots to switch mental modes from "we" to "me", at which point the mob mentality collapses (the psychology is very similar to when an army line breaks, turning a retreat into a rout). Sadly, in the 2020 nonsense, orders came from above to cease what had hitherto been SOP, and decades of hard won experience and discipline was just lost.
Indeed, and at least two of the dead weren't even part of the protests, they were just walking by.
How is this known or decided in a split second moment? There are no totally safe areas in time, which is true for us all.
Kent State was a classic example of inexperienced troops with poor leadership at the small unit level. I would venture to guess that if there had been at least a couple SNCOs or a few NCOs who knew what they were doing, the tragedy could have been avoided.
Rocks can be deadly. Just saying.
But bullets have a slightly longer range.
Which is why they were invented.
And a lot more effective than rocks. And against guns, I don't think rocks have much of a chance.
Guns against rocks? Come on Celia, you can do better than that.
So can your hands
It's pretty closely following the model. They capture and indoctrinate the elites, and when they come to power, to no great surprise, those same elites will also be among the first to slaughtered, muttering the whole time about how loyal they were. Maybe keep the STEM grads; someone has to service the system. Those in the humanities are immediately expendable.
Elites are trained to believe they are special, destined, entitled and sure to rise above. They're just a chattering class, sheep, indeed, and they will never understand how vacuous they are, until they are staring their fate in the face.
They are the future informers of the authoritarian state, doing anything to remain alive.
I want to take another whack at Bruce's post, building on a post from Lee Morris which I liked. In the 60's we protested against denying a race the right to vote, the right to a good education, the right to sit wherever they chose on the bus. To protest was noble. To not protest was ignoble, truly. People who compare those Civil Right protests to protests against alleged systemic racism in police departments in 2020 are, in my opinion, living fact-free lives.
There were millions of young (and some old) protesting the war in the 60s. The 'zeal to weaken and destroy' hardly existed, maybe in the minds of the chattering class and perhaps some SDS leaders who were mostly leaders in their own lonely parades. Mostly we wanted the d*** war to stop. By 1971, the country was pretty aware that the war had been started through a series of lies and deceptions. Johnson didn't know how to stop it and quit. Nixon said he was going to bring us together and then he invaded Cambodia and told us it was because he was just that smart.
People comment on unfairness; elitists marching while the working class kids died. That was what was insidious about that war. College deferment meant Washington could prosecute that war for a decade and keep their own kids safe. It divided the country. It figuratively put everybody in a mud pit. Nobody was clean. The war needed to stop and the protests were intended to do that.
Also I want to suggest that leftists today follow a new philosophy which very few in the 60s would have subscribed to. You're on shaky grounds comparing today's leftists to liberals in the past, where objective reality, the possible perfection of mankind, freedom of speech, and civil liberties were still ubiquitous virtues and ideals.
Strong comment, Jim. And of course the cruel irony was that the elitist marchers, clamouring for the war to end, ignored and abhorred the very soldiers coming home from Viet Nam- conflating their presence there as somehow being supportive of the war - when in fact they were mostly all draftees, and didn't want to go at all.
Everybody let the Nam vets down. I don't think PTSD was even known about back then, and a *lotta* them suffered from it big time.
PTSD was well known then -- there was a lot of it after both WWI and WWII (they called it different things, but they had it).
I stand corrected. But I don't think it got as much attention back then as in the recent wars.
Just American boys doing their duty
And now, of course, American girls..
Yes and I remember standing on the sidelines of a protest in NYC at 14th ST and Fifth Ave in front of the New School. The protesters were mostly white kids like me, college age or a little above, some "adults". And then there were the "hard hat" firemen and I guess police there who were visibly furious and disgusted by the college/elite kids protesting, ostensibly for "them". This image is imprinted on my brain and made me, at a young age, wary of protests to ostensibly better the working class or poor.
Protests since at least the day of Voltaire have largely been by the children of educated wealthy people on behalf of poor and/or working people they did not know and often did not even want to know, and about whose real wants and lives they knew nothing. Same with the white college-educated women constantly championing (in their minds, anyway) "BIPOC" causes. Leaving their schools or families, working and living among the people they claim to want to help? That's for saints and social workers.
This refers to a protest somewhere around 1972!
This is the best thread I have read in a long time. People with hands-on experience and an understanding of how insurrections work. Many are fun and I like some George Soros who gets away with it anyway.
Good points, but all the reading I've done into the majority of the CRM's leaders and the Anti-War protestors has led me to believe that modern-day American 'wokeism'/'leftism' all started in the 1960s. To protest an unjust war and racial discrimination is one thing, but to wave a Vietcong flag and label all police officers as 'pigs' is another thing entirely.
I'm not saying that you and many other people like you didn't have noble intentions, but I think the fact remains that the 1960s was a time dominated by Leftist ideology.
By the way... did you know that calling police officers 'pigs' is a racial slur? Protestors called police officers in Chicago that because it was a racial slur against Polish-Americans (which many working-class police officers happened to be). I read that in Amity Shlaes' book "Great Society". Incredibly good read. I would highly recommend it.
Although I agree with much if what you say, especially about the civil rights marches, you also cannot deny that the anti-war protests had significant backing by foreign entities and that many of the leaders were committed leftists.
Sure. That changed little. It was only significant to the chattering class. Similar to Russian Facebook posts is 2016 election. It happened. It interfered. It changed at most one maybe 2 votes out of 160 million. Leftists now are more powerful and more insidious and less American than in the 60s. The war was a cluster….
Jane Fonda was not a one-off, Jim. Most of the protesters had decent motives. But many did not.
So 100% Bruce. Compare the 60s and today. Leftists now are far more powerful and more Maoist. today’s idealism rests on , well what the author describes. That is not the same case in the 60s where idealism sprang from skepticism born from penetrating beyond official dogma. Almost the opposite of today
Russia and enemies always jump in and stir the pot. That’s no reason to not protest the war or not vote Trump in 2016.
I was there too Jim. I think you underestimate the impact of committed leftists in the managing of many protests/riots. A lot of people were there for social reasons, some for good idealistic reasons as you cited, some to watch, some to say they were there. The protestors, us, were, alas a cross section of people and motives.
These are really great points. Another reason why I love the Common Sense comment section.
Yup. Read David Horowitz’s book, “Radical Son,” and you’ll know. Another motive behind those ‘sixties protests was to avoid the draft. It paid off. A tiny percentage of kids at elite schools went to Vietnam.
I haven't read his books but have listened to him over many years.
The Red Pilled America podcast has a good multipart breakdown of this, called Woke Army. The university protest culture that emerged in the 60s was planned and executed by smart people behind the scenes and required dopey, bored, privileged kids - you might say, sheep? - to take root.
Back in the late 70's a pastor loaned me a book about the strategy communists employ to take over. It was a short book. I remember it had a red cover. The strategy was to infiltrate the entertainment and education industries. They knew it would take decades.
Antonio Gramsci referred to it as a “war of position”.
Or Gramsci's "long march through the institutions". Which has, on the corporate level and much to my surprise, included HR departments. In retrospect it's a no-brainer.
Bruce, even Nixon understood he had to get American troops out of Viet Nam. He spoke of an 'honourable peace' in 1968 or later 'peace with honour' in 1973. He sought peace talks with the North Vietnamese. He saw the protests against Johnson, the largest reason Johnson didn't seek re-election, and did not want that in his presidency. Nixon attempted to get the South Vietnamese to defend themselves (and of course we saw how that worked out).
You say the protests were 'ignoble'- but the war itself was not a noble one, as ignoble as Iraq thirty years later. America lost world wide credibility in both cases.
Lee, the war was foolish and poorly executed. But the 58k American boys who died there didn’t think it was ignoble. They were betrayed by Johnson, McNamara et al.
But I still have to think that most of the soldiers there were there not of their own volition, but were drafted to fight in a war they poorly understood, and for a cause not their own. Did Americans serve well? Hell, yes. But they fought in a war of survival, and attempting to overcome the logistics of an unwinnable conflict, given the constraints placed upon them by the US government.
And you are right in the end, Bruce. Americans who served there were betrayed by Johnson and McNamara and Nixon (who promised to end the war but took five years in doing so..)
Most of the Vietnam combat vets I met- and I've met a lot of them, beginning with knowing them as college students in the VEEP program in the early 1970s- did not have strong political views on the war one way or another. In the field, they fought very fiercely to keep their buddies alive. One of them told me "I ain't killed but two people in my whole life, and it was him or me."
The South Vietnamese did a pretty good job defending themselves against the North Vietnamese offensive of 1974. But in 1975, with Nixon out of office, Jim Wright and the Democract-led Congress cut off all military support for the South. The South Vietnamese forces ran out of fuel and ammunition and collapsed.
Has anyone watched Ken Burns’ The Viet Nam War?
Why do you ask? Yes.
It led me to believe that although Nixon got us out of the Viet Nam was, he deceived the public and kept us in the war longer. That timeframe led to, of course, many more deaths of our soldiers. Is this true?
Yes, Nixon extended the war after being re-elected, both on the ground and in the air. Once in office, he decided to give escalation one last try, with "incursions" by US ground forces into Cambodia and Laos, and by intensifying the bombing of North Vietnam. On June 28, 1972, he directed the DoD to stop sending draftees to Vietnam- an indication that the American ground presence was going to be drawn down, but also a move related to the impending elections, and a policy that he might have reversed. But then Watergate began looming large, and other priorities took over.
Thank you for this answer. I thought this was the case. You know your history. Very much appreciated.
Indeed, the 60s were the epicenter of what has gone wrong in our world.
Yes, true but the seeds were planted in the 50's with the Beatniks.
I think it goes back to at least the 20s.
That's just crazy talk.
The Baby Boomers have been terrible for America.
Their feelings have been harming us since the 60s, and they still won’t leave political office.
Hey, I'm a Boomer. NOT ALL OF US.
True but too many!!!
So sadly true!! 70%of the Senate is over 70 yrs. And then there’s Brandon.
And then there is Brandon watching him in Japan today was cringe worth
I beg your pardon! If you feel so harmed, maybe that's on you. What exactly do you believe you were owed that Boomers kept from you?
Who gives credence to such a comical oversimplification?
Baby boomers weren't even a plurality of members of Congress until the 104th Congress, 1995-96 (47.5%). The combined categories of their elders still outweighed that percentage (51.1%).
As recently as the 102nd Congress, 1991-92, boomers accounted for only 31% of members of the House and Senate.
https://lifecourse.com/goal/udef/bycong.php
Another factor that's at least as important as age demographics: whether Democrats or Republicans, most of the Boomers elected to office have been products of a Protege system within their respective parties. They didn't get into office and overturn the status quo of their elders; for the most part, they sustained it. You might say that a large fraction of them were excellent sheep. Whether Democrats or Republicans.
I was there. At some point, say 1972, it became unconscionable to not join in the protests. The dead demanded our response. Perhaps the war lasted as long as it did independent of the protests. Perhaps the war would have dragged on and killed many more had the protests not occurred. Futile or not, the protests were a good thing, educating, liberating, and soul-satisfying. The SDS leaders wanted a socialist utopia and wanted to 'use' us, but the country wasn't into socialist utopias (at that time), and by the mid-seventies, the SDS leaders had sold out faster than discount gasoline.
Jim C...the problem with those protesters. they Protested the Soldiers. the war made no sense, but the soldiers were Great. thanks.
100% agree on soldiers. Me and my friends in college had other friends who went to Nam, came back and partied with us, and we saw how wounded they were and felt for them. Of the millions who protested the war, only some were wrong-headed and wrong-hearted enough to take their anger out on soldiers. I can only hope they have recognized their errors and atoned in some way for adding to the already terrible burden carried by the soldier. Remember, politicians set up this insidious division. There should never have been college deferment.
US Marines over the years have done a magnificent job of making America proud and Making America great they are the true sons of America God bless them where ever they are
If you protested against the Vietnam War, I hope you accept your share of responsibility for the boat people, reeducation camps and killing fields that resulted from the American defeat there.
Good point TxF. I worked with Vietnamese "boat people" for a while. Their stories of life under communist rule were terrifying and soul-draining. The ones I knew resettled in the Houston area, worked hard and became Americans. Their kids are college-educated professionals. One silver lining of that war was a wave of hard-working Vietnamese immigrants who appreciate the opportunity this country provides to those with eyes to see.
True refugees forced to leave horrendous circumstances not merely to seek a "better life".
My conscience is clean.
Brilliant, Bruce, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq with all the ensuing treasure and blood spent for what? And whose blood paid the bill for these wars, it sure as hell wasn’t Donnie bone spur Trump!
Preach, brother.
It's definitely the case that the organizing nexus of the antiwar protests was comprised of members of the hardline Marxist Left. They're still the main organizers of the largest antiwar rallies, including the demonstrations against the Iraq War. People can't even get on their stages as anarchosyndicalists, much less as libertarians or just plain ordinary people with no special partisan viewpoint who oppose bogus militarism.
But most of the people I've actually met at antiwar rallies are not buying the agenda that's attached to the organizers. Not that this stops the doctrinaire Marxists from fantasizing that they are, based on nothing other than "the optics." An opinion that was shared by much of the paranoid Right Wing, at least in the 1960s. Extremists are all about psyching themselves up with hyperbole. A dopamine boo-yow. When connected with politics, that has a bad way of going viral.
I never attended an anti-Vietnam War rally as a teenager. For one thing, my father was an army officer who did a tour over there (mostly rear echelon, although a lot of helicopters were involved; his serious combat experience was Korea.) For another, I didn't harbor any doubts about the war at all until the early 1970s; my initial bias was in favor of American military involvement.
Also, I was a high school kid, who at least had some inkling that I didn't know enough to arrive at a settled position on the question. For crying out loud, teenagers are ignorant and gullible. No political activism should ever be centered as a "youth movement." (Not that American adults particularly distinguish themselves as being much more well-informed, temperate, or politically mature than teenagers; all that ad conditioning to keep an affluent consumer base in a state of perpetual adolescence has been scarily effective.)
By now, I've done a lot of study of the Vietnam War. It was a terrible idea for the US to supply any fighting forces for a corrupt regime with a military officer corps of urbane beneficiaries of French colonialism who actually preferred US air strikes and free-fire zones directed at wide swathes of the countryside- with wholesale disregard for the inevitable civilian casualties among the Vietnamese peasantry- to leading their own soldiers into battle. Then LBJ doubled down, by confabulating the Tonkin Gulf incident and sending in a large contingent of US ground troops to do the heavy lifting- instead of the ARVN, who were supposed to be handling it. Then Nixon got elected with his secret plan to end the war, which turned out to be bombing the hell out of North Vietnam and the Indochinese supply routes and staging areas. Escalating the madness.
On the other hand, it made no sense for the US Congress to cut off all military aid to the South Vietnamese in 1975 as part of the military withdrawal. Most reports say that the competence of the ARVN had improved markedly, at least in some regions. The South Vietnamese should have been given a fighting chance to defend the regime against the North. Which is a strange thing to say, I guess, given that my inclinations are pacifist, and given the likelihood that the conflict would have been obviated in 1956 with that UN plebiscite that never happened. But the fait accompli of a war is not to be reset to the beginning. The bloodshed in South Vietnam didn't end simply because the South Vietnamese government collapsed.
At any rate, from the first visits of Cardinal Spellman in the 1950s to the cutoff of all military aid by the Congress in 1975, the one consistent thread of American involvement is that we made the Indochina war all about US. The usual blunder.
(well, nothing left to do but lay back and harvest those upvotes...)
I was a teenager too. I didn't understand that war and still don't. I have read at least two histories of it and still don't understand it. What I found deplorable was the way our soldiers were treated when they came home.
I remember John Kerry. He threw someone else's medals over the fence. I remember his testimony before Congress. There were claims his "wounds" in Vietnam were superficial and self inflicted. Only he knows the truth.
It's easy for political activism to be centered on a "youth movement" because teenagers are easily manipulated by propaganda and emotions.
Isn't it interesting that the Civil Rights movement was not primarily a youth movement. When you see the marches the people participating were adults.
"Isn't it interesting that the Civil Rights movement was not primarily a youth movement. When you see the marches the people participating were adults."
The 1960s Civil Rights movement definitely emphasized gravitas and dignity. Both the leadership and the ranks were filled with people who actually worked for a living. Some of the most heroic activism- like the Freedom Riders and lunch counter sit-ins- was done by very young people. But they had training; they were disciplined, and their level of commitment was sober and authentic, rather than superficial and performative. It wasn't a tantrum, the way so many of the 2020 protests were.
They weren't teenagers. They were young people in their 20's many college students.
The youngest Freedom Rider was 18. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/freedom-riders-john-lewis-work.html
The Greensboro Four- the students who began the lunch counter sit-ins, in the 1960- were freshmen in college.
Understand that I take your basic point. The youngest frontline activists of the 1960s civil rights movement in the South showed a maturity beyond their years. They left all the cussing and the arrogance and the violence to the other side, and that drew a clear distinction between their conduct and their opposition. That was an extraordinarily wise tactic, in my opinion. (The wisdom was later derided by more radical and impatient factions, who fell for the temptations of immediate gratification through violence. Something that also happened in the arena of antiwar protests.)
"I remember John Kerry. He threw someone else's medals over the fence."
I don't think that's necessarily true. The US armed forces provide personnel who earn medals with more than one set.
"There were claims his "wounds" in Vietnam were superficial and self inflicted. Only he knows the truth."
Kerry's wounds were not particularly serious. But they don't have to be, in order to get a Purple Heart. Any claim that his wounds were self-inflicted without corroboration or evidence offered in support deserves to be discounted as a pernicious falsehood. I'm sick of the rumor mill on issues like these.
That said, John Kerry held ambitions for high political office early on, and based on his subsequent career moves, I think he's a jiveass. I know of many other Vietnam combat vets whose whistleblowing about US war crimes contained no hint of private ends, and they deserve a lot more recognition than they've gotten.
He threw someone else's medals over the fence but I am not going to try to locate the source. My statement stands.
Why should your statement stand, if you aren't going to supply reference support for it?
I did your legwork for you: a firsthand recollection from Boston Globe reporter Thomas Oliphant https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/04/27/i_watched_kerry_throw_his_war_decorations/
Long story short: if Kerry threw someone else's medals and combat ribbons over the fence, it was because they asked him to. And the medals and ribbons he threw included at least some of his own.
Baloney. The man has been a two bit fraud his entire life. He has a real talent of picking wives. First wife was worth a few million. Teresa Heinz was worth far more than that.
Similar principle-a lot of the nice white people I know who support BLM would look at me like I have three heads if I suggested they give up some leisure time to tutor an African American third grader struggling with his reading.
I would not support BLM, ever. Anyone who checked it out knew they were a communist organization. Lived in Soviet Union so I know a communist organization when I see it. Big payoff for the leaders and nothing for the little people. I have done mentoring in inner city schools. I would highly suggest it for the liberals everywhere.
If we could get a dollar for every "environmentalist" who tossed a plastic water bottle out the car window.......
Ever seen the environment after Earth Day celebrations?
One Earth Day, I proudly returned a couple kegs to the party store so they could be reused!
Give this man an award!
What a guy! Empty, I hope...
They were for a rugby party so completely drained before being returned.
Filthy
Yes. More than once. It got cleaned up.
"Environmentalists" using plastic water bottles to begin with? At the first Human Be-In in San Francisco under the direction of Alan Ginsberg and others, thousands of stoned hippies actually took the time to clean up the entire field of trash when it was over. We didn't leave it to someone else to do. Because we were that "someone else". We were idealistic kids then and many of us chose to become adults and continue to take responsibility. I only hope that this new generation of sheep breaks out of the illusion that they are relevant and actually make something of their lives. Growth has a lot to do with who you chose as your role models. Choose wisely. Wokeness is really a wolf in sheep's clothing anyway.
""Choose wisely. Wokeness is really a wolf in sheep's clothing anyway"" or a man in womens clothing winning sports events , same difference
I don’t give a fuck what you think Jerry. I see your point, and even agree with it to some extent. Honestly, I’m just quoting Rick and Morty. I’m Pickle Rick! Jerry is going to Jerry.
So beautifully said.
Plus, if you timed your trip right, that garbage was beautiful, man.
trust me, the real beauty was the clean lawn at the end of it.
We would be billionaires 😄😄
You're playing to the comment crowd here. I don't know anyone claiming environmental concern who ever did that.
The real problem is that bottled water rose to prominence as a mass market consumer item in the 1980s, in the wake of the rising popularity of the luxury consumer offerings of Perrier, Pellegrino, Poland Spring, etc. And then nearly all of the companies switched to plastic- for soda pop, too- with no alternative options.
I was always disturbed by the bottled water boom, which strikes me as an invented desire with the subtext that American tap water isn't fit to drink. Granted, in some places it isn't all that palatable, and 20 years of infrastructure neglect by the US Congress and various state governments continue to degrade the situation.
Usually, I filter my tap water, and have metal canteens for it. I admit to still buying seltzer water, having given up soda pop of any kind some years ago. But my bottles go into the recycling bin.
Make your own bed.
Yep although not a huge fan of Adm. McRaven's recent politics, his explanation of the importance of making one's own bed is brilliant and telling.
I will disagree that colleges are creating sheep, they are creating zealots of woke religion.
Wokeness at this points is a religious dogma for our elites. Thus it is complety normal that they they want want to create religious fanatics and not thinkers. Anyone who dears to think different or refused to fall in line will be dealt with ferocity. Sadly for years, I thought that this was a phase that will pass, in 1960-1980 there were communists and hippies, but those were only ideologies, not replacement for religion, which is far more dangerous than simple ideology. Religion doesn't require proof but only faith, it cant be sicentifly validated, but if misused it creates zealots who will stop at nothing, to defend the "Faith" from dirty non-believers who dear speak against and those zealots cannot be reason with.
Worse thing is, that those zealots after graduation go to positions of power in MSM, Universities and large companies even politics and continue to spread their religion with evermore increasing zeal. And will destroy anyone who dears to question dogma, very similarly as inquisition used to do. Even though the methods are different, results are the same in both cases.
Inquisition lasted for over 350 years, lets hope that our woke religion has significantly shorter shelf-life.
In a sense, though, zealots ARE sheep. They're just vicious sheep. But they are still following along, not questioning those who are converting them to Woke-ism.
Inoculate your kids: Give them copies of "Animal Farm" and "1984" in their junior years in high school, and discuss at length with them.
A little Ayn Rand doesn't hurt either.
She was my great aunt- and not a great person. I would advise skipping her and doing the George Orwell.
I have "done" the George Orwell. Both my children have read it as well as Animal Farm. I gave my son "Brave New World" as well.
Mid...Many great leaders, to the young, seem off base. It is the leader with "ice Crean" that's the problem. The same people get sucked in everytime.
Did she give you cake or THE Broom?...waaa
Agree. Am a dyed in the wool conservative and lover of great fiction but I never took to Rand.
Ayn Rand was a brilliant writer and thinker. Although she over-emphasized intelect at the expense of emotion. Intellect is critical in developing society, but it's only one facet of a human being. Still, I give her a pass because of the trauma I believe she suffered in the Soviet Union and also in adjusting to a new country, new values, new language. She was formidable, but also emotionally crippled. (And yes, I am aware of the Institute.)
wont...
Naomi...love Ayn Rand, along with a little "of mice and men".
I’ve had them read Animal Farm, 1984 is next up. If there are any woke professors here please enlighten me, which is the micro-aggression: “All Animals Are Created Equal” or “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others?” Asking for a friend.
omg you're a something-a-phobe lol
For sure. Larry Elder can have an egg thrown at him by a white woman wearing a gorilla mask, but if you criticize BLM for its misappropriation of funds you're a racist.
That is a telling example of how twisted things have gotten.
Partisanship. It's an obscenity.
The ones on the South Side of Chicago do not seem to matter much.
Ironically, I’ve seen a lot of protesters with “1984” t-shirts on.
Serves to point out how ill educated and ignorant they are.
The Left seems to make a habit of this. They accuse the other side of exactly what they are doing.
They seem to prefer mass murderers and despots such as Mao or romantic failures such as Che.
These are people who believe--against all evidence--that we are inches away from a Far-Right theocratic dictatorship.
For sure. That seems to be a common trend with the radical Left. They believe that you are the aggressor ready to pounce. I recently saw that the National School Board Association was willing to request National Guard troops in response to parent's protests at meetings. I wish I could say I was surprised.
Seen any 'Make Orwell Fiction Again' shirts? That's the one I want.
Gaslighting is their strong suit.
They would... Sheesh on THEM.
To which I may add, Smits, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - to help inoculate and educate kids against the banning of books (such as in school libraries), of which we are seeing too much of lately.
Thank you for adding that. I began to collect books for my children and grandchildren, in hard copies, so they can't be digitally erased. We see the troglodytes want to ban books like Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, while at the same time pushing sexually explict books that promote alternative lifestyles on elementary age children. There's a plan.
Oh yeah, there's a plan.
And "On the Beach" for a reminder of why it all matters.
I will be eternally grateful to my eighth grade English teacher for assigning us Animal Farm to write an essay on. I'm willing to bet almost no K-12 teacher assigns that book today. I read 1984 in high school on my own. Those two books forever inoculated me against Socialist/anti-Capitalist activism, for lack of a better word.
I had my kids read it when they were teenagers. 1984 and Animal Farm. My son recently re-read both books and I gave him Brave New World to read as well.
I have a copy of Animal Farm on the bookshelf. My daughter (seven) seemed curious about the pigs on the cover. “One day”, I told her.
Let her explore it NOW while she is curious. “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” Aristotle.
I read when I was 11. I saw the cover and figured a relatively thin book called "Animal Farm" was for my age group. My dad was perplexed to come home and see me reading it, and encouraged me to finish it. I would tell him what was happening in the book, and he would explain the symbolism to me.
And Brave New World and Harrison Bergeron.
I just brought up Harrison Bergeron the other day. That’s another story worth reading again. I read that in middle school back in the ‘80s and never forgot it.
So true. Last night Tucker had a segment with Candace Owens. Candace is doing a documentary on BLM and had gone with her camera crew to a property listed as a BLM building. Apparently Ms. Cullors lives there and did a selfie crying about how "threatened and scared' she was and how "afraid for her children's safety." This from the woman who orchestrated the wholesale destruction of quite a few American cities.
Naomi...nooooo, don't tell me that happened
Yes, it did, and then Candace Owens published the video of her speaking cordially with the security guard at Patrice Cullors' front gate (who did not allow Owens to enter). It was all very civil and Cullors used the incident - and completely embellished it - to incite her followers to harass/target Owens. Cullors' sheep-like followers don't even question her side of the story.
I think what I'm enjoying about the comments here is pointing out that the lack of dialogue and absence of open-minded debate is the real issue - I know many people on the left side and they won't even have a conversation, they're so embroiled in their own certainty of moral superiority.
Very, very true. As I was reading, I was thinking this is stuff we've heard a thousand times, but one thing the article makes clear are the INCENTIVES for the noxious behavior. Yes, these chronological adults are spoiled children, but so long as they get rewarded in the Clerisy marketplace for behaving that way, absolutely nothing will change.
Want to cure Woke? Try another Great Depression. Believe me, no one will give a shit about pronouns anymore...Looking around, I'd say we have a good chance.
The problem is that our government has stopped even pretending that money doesn't grow on trees. There will be bread and circuses provided until the government collapses altogether.
I fear we are well on the way. And both parties have created the coming fiasco. It is time to clean house.
"not questioning those who are converting them to Woke-ism." If you are woke, you don't question your woke leaders. Just like you didn't question the Catholic Church during inquisition. If you did the Church would torture you to near death and then burn you at the stake. I am sure these woke snow flakes who are against the death penalty for horrible psychopath murderers, would love to burn heretics who criticize the woke movement at the stake.
But ultimately the Inquisition did fail and it was because people continued to question.
Unfortunately, the Inquisition persisted for centuries.
Movements of coercive repression have a way of developing their own momentum and rolling out out of inertia, long after the original rationale expired or was discredited.
But it ended. All human endeavors are subject to peril.
Has anyone seen Benjamin Boyce’s documentary of the Evergreen College riots of 2017? The documentary is very long (thorough), but it has a lot of relevant footage that provides for an excellent case study of how the ideology manages to take over institutions. You can describe the behavior of the students involved as part tantrum, part religious indoctrination (along with recitations, preaching, confessions), and a fervor expressed as a fierce protectiveness of the narrative. The utter lack of rationality and rejection of dialogue from the “believers” also stands out. What starts with demands that Black/Brown individuals are heard, in the blink of an eye spirals into only allowing the “right” Black/Brown individuals to speak. Also memorable is the footage of Robin DiAngelo talking to the faculty saying something along the lines of: you can believe what you want to believe—however—while you are at work are going to “grapple” with my approach because that is what your employer wants. She also expresses her concerns about not creating a hostile environment for “children” (this is the world she uses to refer to the students, indeed)…5 years ago this footage would have been shocking; what is shocking now is how quickly (5 years!) many of these ideas have become mainstream.
Yes! The analogy I use is Mao's Red Guard. The children were propagandized and radicalized to blame every wrong (real or imagined) on their parents and teachers who were not pure enough. Reading Freddie deBoer and other 30-somethings I understand the 20 yr olds despise the 30 somethings for being "complicit" in whatever. Old classical liberals like me are beyond contempt. We can't die off soon enough. I tell my kids, who are now having children, that the one thing I would fear if I were a young parent is the schools (and their comrades in media etc) turning my children into people I despise, and who despise me.
Also, as you point out, The Woke control every institution, Fortune 500 and Russell 2000 company. The only institution they do not control is SCOTUS and many Federal courts. But, with the Law Schools churning out SJWs (who, btw, get their tuition forgiven), it's only a matter of time.
I read a lot of dystopian literature growing up (Orwell, Vonnegut, Solzhenitsyn, etc). Always saw dystopia around every corner. Finally, about 20 yr ago, I realized it likely would never happen. And now, here we are. Life can be ironic, no? : )
Communism has always been about religion, it's one of the reason why Marx singled out religion as the "opiate of the people" in order to discredit existing sects and replace with his own.
“If religion is the opium of the masses then Marxism is the methamphetamine of the masses” - Dr. Jordan Peterson
You'll note that the leaders of the French Revolution attempted to do the same.
They are both sheep and zealots. Zealots in the sense of rabid to the point of foaming at the mouth. Sheep in the sense of not an original thought in the bunch, merely regurgitating what they are fed. I think they are to be marginalized at all costs. If that means disavowing the woke corporations that support them, so be it.
They are both sheep and zealots
Exactly. They may debate how many angels can dance on the head of a Woke pin, but they are still presuming angels.
Most people need a reason to stay engaged in life. As Camus said, the only true philosophical question is whether to continue to exist or not. So, we all find meaning in our lives. Back when 80-90% of people identified as religious, their religion was their source of meaning; socializing; structure; self-definition. Now that number is like 30-40%. That 50% didn't go on to embrace rational humanist lives. They merely substituted some form of politics for religion. And the worst religious scolds of old didn't become tolerant humanists; they became SJWs; The Woke; The permanently aggrieved, intolerant and hyper-judgmental. The swapped one pre-made belief system for another. They get their meaning, self-definition, self-esteem and socializing in this manner. That's why rejecting it, or even questioning it, is psychic suicide.
This brings to my mind what happened after the English Reformation. The loss of Catholicism did not merely change how people worshiped. Social life was organized almost entirely around the Church, including groups of citizens who organized in name of various patron saints for charitable as well as social purposes. Without that foundation, the whole social life of English people was cut adrift.
The result can be seen in the religious fanaticism that drove the Puritan forces in the English Civil War. The same fanaticism drove the hunting and burning of "witches," which even in Europe was largely a Protestant phenomenon, rather than a Catholic one.
People who are driven will always find a cause to drive them. And heaven help anyone who gets in their way.
Interesting viewpoint. If correct, our little college lambs will be looking to attack ... and that may be exactly what they're doing.
Please God very short
Raziel, what are the tenets of this woke religion?
Read several post on this Substack following are very good
- I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated
- My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit.
- He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He's Collecting Unemployment.
- Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over Racism
- The Takeover of America's Legal System
- Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex
Raziel, let’s try this again, tenets: a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true.
My friend, we had talked about this before: “social justice” scholarship centers around the “critical consciousness” you know, the same one that is part of my kids’ state-mandated critical pedagogy. This worldview revolves around power dynamics and the language/narratives that sustain such dynamics and—as such—it tends to separate individuals into oppressor/oppressed. First and foremost, the ideology criticizes enlightened liberal ideals and it is subjective, rather than objective. I thought we had talked about this before, have you forgotten already?
Alejandra, are you trying to answer for Raziel?
I think it is quite obvious that Raziel and I are on the same page on many things. I am just reminding you of things I had already shared with you. If you understand that the “social justice” ideology is subjective and criticizes enlightened liberal ideals, then the cultural changes that this substack generally discusses (the undermining of academic freedom, demonization of dissent, politicization of science) make a lot of sense. The illiberalism that follows when this ideology is implemented is by design.
Trying? She did a lovely job.
Put succinctly: the only truth acknowledged on this worldview is the existence of ever-present power dynamics.
Put succinctly: the only truth acknowledged on this worldview is the existence of ever-present power dynamics.
Yes. Sort of. The trick is that the power dynamics are as perceived by the "disempowered". If a black feels disempowered, he is. If a white feels disempowered, it's "white fragility" or some such. There is a pecking order.
Young woman I'd known for several years went off to an Ivy League college. Came back after Soph year spouting all the "I'm for free speech unless it hurts someone or threatens them.". I told her "What you just said threatens me, so now you can't say it.". She looked at me doe-eyed. Clearly they had never discussed this or thought it through. Just regurgitated it, gleefully.
Standpoint epistemology (or standpoint theory) is the approach many “social justice” scholars use in which identity status (specifically, being identified as “oppressed”) is seen as the source of a person’s authority. Since “lived experiences” are contradictory by nature, the big caveat for standpoint epistemology is that those voices perceived as “marginalized” but who question the “social justice” narrative are very quickly dismissed as “internalized” oppressors. Hence, this makes the ideology’s claims unfalsifiable.
Is that, might makes, right?
Look no further that my kids’ culturally responsive sustaining education framework—it is quite thorough with its explanation of the critical conscious lens. If you find the piece riddled of jargon, keep in mind that the framework is meant to be implemented on kids pre-kindergarten to 12.
Lets try this again, you need to read, reading expands your understanding and is used to aqure knowledge .
When you read following articles you will get general idea of beliefs, principles and doctrine of woke religion. You will especially see how they deal with non-believers
I would recommend by starting reading following article
- Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex
Then this one
- The Takeover of America's Legal System
Others you can read in any order you like. Have fun.
Raziel, I asked you, I repeat, you, “what are the tenets of this woke religion?” It is nonsensical, to ask you a question, and me, answer it! If you feel you don’t have the skill to answer the question, I’ll understand!
You are in luck :). JP just made video you will be able to understand.
https://youtu.be/OP1vosHA1jE
My niece graduated from Yale in 2019. I love her dearly but she exemplifies some of the worst aspects of what you're talking about. She's now enrolled at Georgetown Law, another woke enclave, where she will undoubtedly thrive by encountering exactly zero views that challenge woke dogma. To me, the "best and the brightest" are like delicate, brittle dolls who break easily because they have never dealt with conflict or adversity.
Also, she and I have agreed not to discuss certain issues because she gets too upset by my views, which in all but the bluest of blue places would be considered center left but in her eyes, are very right wing.
It’s clear watching any of these protests that these progressive women filled with righteous fury are nothing more than glass canons.
Has she ever considered that her views might upset you? Nit that you'd be upset by different opinions but it's always their feelings that are so fragile. And it's always someone else at fault for upsetting them.
It would seem tolerance is a one-way street
What does that tell you about the legal system if she and other people with her perspective are going to be lawyers?
It tells me our legal system is completely and utterly broken.
We live under unequal justice. Our FBI is corrupt. Much work to be done
The adherence to the Rule of Law is what has held us together thus far. I am.frightened at the rampant disregard therefor.
Yeah, with the ABA leading the charge...
... backwards.
It's your duty to break that agreement.
I'll ignore your snide remark but I'm glad to see now that you're simply arguing in bad faith. It's people like you who continue to drive me further and further to the right. At this point, I may become a non-voter because I truly hate both sides.
It's the people in the center who end up decided which way the mop flops.
🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯that’s exactly right jt
Please do not do that. Then you will have been truly silenced. And even.if you don't vote at the top of the ticket the down ballot offices count too. Now more than ever.
It’s not our job to constantly validate our kids. Sometimes admonishment is appropriate, it’s called parenting. Again the feelings thing. Always at the forefront of an issue is how we made someone feel. We need them to feel validated constantly by reminding them all the time...why? I’m not against encouraging my kids and acknowledging their achievements and I do when appropriate, but it’s not all I have to say nor should it be.
Dan, vapid and annoying are a bad combination.
Mebbe her political views need to be admonished. Mebbe Yours too.
You could-a expressed Your views below to Midwest Nurse, and You evaded the opportunity. So I'm just guessing what they are.
I see it in my own kids’ school, they emphasize “mental health” above everything else but the definition of mental health is now so broad and obscure that it’s getting washed away in the perceived “safety” of real surface-thought-out ideas. It’s BS. Penny, I think they really DO believe what they say. They just can’t get away from this terrible emotional state that they’ve been living in for years.
It is not helped by the absolute assumption that mental health is driving the school shootings. So many of the comments to the post about the Uvalde shooting assumed mental illness, but I see little to no evidence of it with that young man. Some people are just bad. But we have become a very fear-driven society - fear of guns, fear of viruses, fear of our political oppsition.
They can't support their views and fall apart when challenged.
I'm sorry You feel sad. Lost friendship is.
You should also feel proud You didn't cave which is, frankly, what most people do these days, right?
I am sorry for your sadness. It is his loss though. Your vote is yours. And the failure to exercise it IS a statement. It is not subject to his direction or anyone else's.
Were they really a friend if they did that to you?
I think you are 100% right on this. They may really believe that they believe, but they don't. Good opinions and ideologies can stand up to robust scrutiny. If they face that Wokeism is a sham, they are rejecting their social groups and resigning themselves to be social pariahs.
One of the strengths of Bari's feed is a high quality of debate and the willingness to disagree respectfully and to resort to facts more often than not.
Yes debate appears to be a word stricken from our vocabulary. How do you learn and grow without debate and discussion??
They can't. Their ideas don't hold up. They are shallow and unworkable.
The single most important thing that needs to happen in our culture is debate and discussion. Sadly, neither "side" is generally capable of it. While true that many progressive people believe that their viewpoints are the inarguable truth (thus not up for debate), I also find that those on the "right" are intolerant of those who think differently from consensus (just watch how conservatives who speak out against Trump are treated.) So if you are somewhere between right and left, and don't really fit into the full consensus view of either, you are often the one who suffers in attempted discourse. Oh what a world it would be if everyone entered a conversation more to listen than to speak.
Has it ever really been otherwise?
They did condemn Socrates to death, after all...
Not to mention Christ
But don't quit trying. Discourse and debate are carried out among individuals to see which "side" we support on any given topic or issue. People unwilling to hear your thoughts and ideas are not worthy of you. One of the best things thst ever happened to me was deciding that I would not allow toxic people a role in my life.
Because if you view every contrary opinion as a personal attack, this is nonsense what you get!
*this nonsense is what you get!
Civil discourse. I wanted to do a show with that title
You get to see the show right here.
Interesting. Seems like a reasonable explanation.
Very well put, Penny
Discussed BLM with my daughter. She became furious. You are very wrong if you think the problems are on both sides. The intolerant woke left cannot stand an honest discussion.
You asked for an example and I gave it. Then you discount it. Not fond of your operating style. Vote for whomever you like
Per usual, You progressives got it back-arsewards. The one that can't stand their feelings being hurt *are* the Progressives. Because they never grew up, because...
Read the article again, is why "because."
I actually tried to talk about my opposition to transwomen in elite sports but was told that transwomen are women and that I am transphobic for doubting this "truth." I told her I believe transwomen and transmen deserve all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of everyone else BUT that does not mean a man who goes through male puberty and then competes as a woman doesn't have an advantage. She disagrees vehemently with this and now we don't talk about it. Do you want more examples?
I wish people would stop using words like "transwomen" to describe people who are not women in any sense - and "transmen" to describe people who are not men. Everyone has rights but we do not have to buy into a whole Gender Ideology!
Dan...you complain about what you are doing...i suspect, nothing is new
Views I would like discussed with ‘these people’...
1. Gender identity
2. Public education including said gender identity into its curriculum
3. Systemic racism
4. Police brutality & real stats
5. Income inequality
6. Feelings and why they do or do not matter in matters of public policy
7. Examining our beliefs with a wider lens and why it matters to have debates
8. What does freedom of speech or freedom of or/from religion mean and why does it matter
9. What are the realities about human nature based on empirical data
Those are the ones off the top of my head.
And the 2nd amendment and why it matters.
I didn't know you wanted our manifestos! I'll bet we can all easily come up with specifics.
The vagueness stems from the fact that most of us know what we are talking about. What the ideas and policies in question are. We don't spell it out for the sake of brevity, and because why would we sing to the choir?
Here are a few specific issues that concern myself and other commenters:
Language and speech are not literal violence.
In competitive sports the value of "inclusion" is non-sensical.
Learning new ideas and thoughts are not compatible with "safe spaces". Being made uncomfortable is an important part of the process.
Free speech is absolutely essential to our country.
I would wager that any random person in this thread has a rant and debate points ready to go on any of these topics.
Our entire point is that it has now become career suicide to even discuss these issues at universities, not to get into the weeds with the discussions themselves.
How would college students learn to be independent? They go from parents who do everything for them to a college that does everything for them. In hiring recent grads, I've tried to get away from prestige to getting people to look more at the local state commuter college. I find those grads to be much more adult. Most are first in the family college graduates, nobody guided them through the process, and they had to get to school everyday (rather than roll right out of bed into the classroom) while managing a life outside the campus. In short, they are 22 year old adults ready to work instead of children who still need their office to feel like a campus safe space.
Helicopter parenting has destroyed a generation.
Helicopter parenting is pretty much an upper middle class thing. It gets press for the same reason we’re reading so many stories from fancy schools: journalists write about themselves.
I've seen it to some extent in the working class. Working class parents aren't able to schedule their children's days quite as completely, since they can't afford a lot of extracurricular lessons. But a lot of working class moms are over-involved in taking care of every little thing for their children. Sometimes they have to be in order to avoid being accused of neglect.
I tried to practice the same "benign neglect" with my kids that my working class parents used on me, but all too often it was easier for me to step in and do things for my kids instead of leaving them to figure it out for themselves. But during their teen years, my husband and I made a point of reminding ourselves that we were raising future adults. And although our kids haven't grown up quite as fast as we did, they are still waaaaay ahead of many of their peers.
You're right. Tho I would venture two generations, and working on the Alphas. That's just me.
While I agree with most that was written here, (and btw I was totally shocked with the video re Prof. Christakis - that student should have been expelled right then and there), I have to disagree with the following statement: “ Your parents aren’t your friends; be skeptical of any authority that claims to have your interests at heart.” A) In most cases parents are friends, and B) I would not say “be skeptical” I would rather say think about any advice that you are offered, whether by parents or others. Be humble - you don’t need to reject it outright, the same way you don’t have to accept it outright - just think well before you accept or reject. The core of not being sheep is gather information, make sure it’s not biased to one side or the other, and think. And today, more than ever, be careful with social contagion.
Parents can't be friends until children are brought safely to adulthood. Then if the the fates align and justice reigns, parents and children can have deep friendships.
I would argue that 'friendship' between parent and child is an adults-only thing. There should be boundaries -- just as there should be boundaries between teachers and students, captains and crew. It could even be part of the problem that the 'friend' parents are largely responsible for the 'trauma' and 'mental health' issues that are so prevalent these days. It also makes a huge difference whether it's a female 'friend' or a male 'friend.' Female friendships -- unfortunately -- require agreeing with everything. The female friend who does not agree is 'not supportive.' (In my own experience, rare is the female friend who allows me to unpack current social phenomena in an honest, critically holistic way -- they are authoritarians over what can be discussed and how it can be discussed -- men are generally far more open to unpacking things, capable of disinterested inquiry. Women -- not so much, or it's extremely rare). I'd also go so far as to say that it's the matriarchal takeover that fosters the domination of woke and "safety" and all else -- you have to agree you're not a friend -- and you're making the speaker "feel unsafe" if you challenge her -- she wants to leave her kids and husband? You have to SUPPORT her...or you're cruel and don't understand her. This infantilization of young adults is matriarchal, period. And any parent trying to be a 'friend' to their kid before the kid has reached adulthood is very likely infantilizing that kid, a strange paradox indeed.
Perhaps this is more individua-based than you think.
I am blessed with very high quality women in my life, sisters and friends. All of us challenge each other, None of us agree on everything, and we have been known to spend literally days unpacking things and analyzing them. This has been true for my 54 years upon this earth.
I believe with all my heart and brain that women are every bit as capable of disinterested inquiry. I think that to believe otherwise is sexist and perhaps a result of not having known women of excellent intellectual character.
I agree with this 100%. Hell, this Substack is not only authored and named by one such woman, but the comments section is full of them as well. Despite the dire looking future of our next generation outlined in this article, all have not been lost. I am still young - just 33 - but I too have a wonderful panel of female friends and acquaintances that love nothing more than debating and dissecting hot button topics at an intellectual level for hours on end. We fall across a wide political spectrum, from Bernie supporters to Trump loyalists, yet walk away from our discussions still warm friends with new perspectives and points we may not have considered.
Well, I'm happy for your good fortune. And because I don't want to believe it's sexist, I keep trying and keep getting the same response: "I only want to talk about clothes, men and food." Or "I don't want to talk about ideas" or "Why are you interested in that? It has nothing to do with YOU." And so on. I was thrown out of the group in 6th grade for questioning whether it was appropriate for a sixth grader to wear hot pants to school. I could go on and on. And "sexist" is a silly argument. Men and women are obviously different and it makes biological sense why women would censor others -- so that their precious children don't get the wrong ideas (except when it comes to lopping off their son's penis for status points -- better not disagree or it's the gulag for you!)
Most men I know or have known don’t want to discuss anything deeper than sports or their jobs. So we’ve had opposite experiences in life.
However I believe that we’ve lifted up the mostly feminine qualities in our society and have made anything not fitting into that seen as ‘toxic masculinity’ which I find abhorrent. Agreed men and women are very different in our ways of thinking speaking etc. It’s the way we were made imo.
Whenever the couples I hang with get together it’s like clockwork, the men all end up together and the women do too. It happens completely spontaneously. No one cares and sometimes on our camping trips we all are talking around the campfire at night together and have a great time. Lots of laughter
Sounds more like you need to pick better women friends.
Read carefully before commenting.
I know the phenomenon of which you speak but believe it is more prevalent in woke cities and certainly not a universal truth. To that point I would commend the comments of many women posting here who would definitely not fit that description. Their "matriarchy" would be as stern as any patriarchy, perhaps more so. Lots of Spartan women who would have no problem advising "with your shield or on it." But yes, the problem with the nanny state is that it is fostered and embraced by far too many nannies.
Thank you for this!
BM...ok, move the love seat back in...be happy
Heather MacDonald has made several good arguments about women's roles in promoting safetyism. If you haven't already, you should check out her work. Completely agree with you.
As a female who has engaged in this exact conversation--woman leaving her husband and kids--with a group of women on a mini vacation in wine country in CA...you are exactly right (in some cases). I essentially said "try harder" when my opinion was asked, and for the rest of the night pretty much followed suit by saying what I thought on other topics that came up, thinking maybe there was a desire for actual conversation. But the women wanted support and for everyone to agree with everyone else...they were truly upset that I didn't play along and felt "hurt." These are women who had those dumbass "In this house, we believe in..." signs in their lawns, who are professionals that graduated from Stanford and Berkeley, who laughed and then backpedaled into some sickening display of fake empathy when I said I was going to quit my job and become a farmer, who live their lives on Instagram. What's worse, they exchanged looks of pure malignant joy whenever I would disagree with or challenge a view, as if to silently titter and signify to one another "oh, poor girl, she doesn't know how to play the game." There was no discussion, just a sit-down in the restroom about the importance of their overly-touted rallying cry of the weekend--"no judgment." It was, of course, very passive-aggressive in its delivery to me.
I've seen some discussion on Ayn Rand here, and I'm diffident as to my opinion of her, but one trenchant theme in her books that has always stayed with me--pity as something not to be embraced but dreaded--comes to mind when I think about that weekend again. Ironically, I do pity them, just as they wanted me to, just not in the way they expect to be pitied. And I wanted to just write them off as a-holes, but I can't do it. They choose this way of existence, to think the way they do, and they are free to do so. But don't tell me I have to think like that, too, or that I'm wrong or misogynistic for not doing so.
Incidentally, another conversation that weekend involved one of the women saying "Do you think your kids are proud of you? I really want my kids to be proud of me."
My theory is that mean girls never grow up.
I think you're right! It's funny, but I do remember feeling like I was back in high school that weekend.
You sound kind of bitter about women to me. But I agree that much of this is driven by women. I do not appreciate being stereotyped that way however. Perhaps your female friend is just a toxic person and you are imputing that to all women. semester. Are many female commenters here that do not espouse woke idealogy.
Actually my impression is that there are more males who do. My(unsolicited) advice would be to treat each person as an individual and keep trying. The feminine POV has much to offer. I think we have lost something by polarizing the sexes.
Agree. But when the parents themselves are sheep, then what
Who has the responsibility to bring you safely to adulthood if not your parents?
Parents should do that. But they cannot do it by being "friends" of their children. They need to lead and guide.
I think there's been some confusion here because of the lack of a definition of "friend". So, what is a friend? For me, a friend is someone I can be open about issues, discuss them, argue, listen to and be listened, agree or disagree. But a friend will always be there for all those things. So yes, my parents were my friends.
At the end of the day, you can be open about issues, discuss them, argue and agree to disagree with a friend. You cannot do that as a parent. Because you cannot dictate to friends but you must as a parent. Are you really suggesting that you can discuss, argue and disagree or agree with your two-year old's tantrum in a supermarket? I doubt it.
I don't think that's what he means. But, yes, parents should be the authority in the family.
Lord knows how many parents actually do. You can tell by the adult product
I think we are mixing apples and bananas here. Do you really think I was talking about a two-year old?
Surely not the Department of Education or the teachers union
“Bring children safely to adulthood” is an oxymoron. Adulthood is unsafe, and parents are not responsible for making adulthood safe or ensuring a child arrives there “safely.” Hopefully, a child will embrace adulthood with its freedom, imperfections, and responsibilities organically utilizing the life lessons and values instilled throughout childhood.
Yeah, quibbling Andy. Of course adulthood is unsafe. But getting a child there is the duty of parents through teaching the lessons and values that they need.
Hear, hear!
When your children are minors you are both a friend and an authority figure. Too.much or too little of either is problematic.
This article is spot on.
Instead of going straight into college after high school, I served an enlistment in the Marines. Since then, I was going to a college in South Carolina, but I had to drop out before I finished one semester. I just couldn’t take it seriously for the precise reasons highlighted in this article.
What really got me was the low quality of education. I’ve always been an avid reader, so writing papers and such was never that difficult for me. The breaking point at school came when I devoted weeks of time and energy into writing a paper about the long-term cultural effect of Brown v. Board. As per instructions, we had to submit the paper to someone else as a “peer-review”. The guy’s paper I got was quite literally an incomprehensible mass of bad grammar and left-wing talking points. It dawned on me then that that was the norm. I dropped out two days later.
What truly demoralized me was finding out how astoundingly poorly educated your average college graduate is.
Probably 75% of college students should not be there. In Germany, they still have a multi-track system in secondary school, to direct students into the trades if they are more trade-oriented, and others into college prep if they are brainiacs. Thus, Germany has retained a strong industrial manufacturing economy and relatively sane administration, whereas the U.S. has become top-heavy with millions of useless degrees in gender studies and such.
Interesting system. I also believe not everyone is ready at 18. Nothing wrong with working a few years then going to college. In addition, it seems “entry” jobs are fading away. My first job was my best job. Peeling potatoes for 8 hours in the back room of a restaurant at 13 years old makes you value education more highly.
I spent a summer working in a public park that had a stable for horses. Had to shovel the manure at times. Had to carry picnic tables around, mow grass in the heat, pick up trash, work with rough and ready guys. Other summers, I worked in hot kitchens. I'm forever grateful.
My 17-year-old is just starting to look at colleges, and wants to do a "gap year". I'm supporting that, also encouraging her to consider two years of community college then finish up at a 4-year, saving a ton of money.
The two years at Community College is a brilliant idea. Essentially a 50% off sale for a degree
At a recent college fair, there was a table advertising a "gap year". It was pretty stunning. It cost what a year at college would, and instead was a year long European vacation. The organizers would make all the travel arrangements, book hotels, etc. Of course a ton of kids came home begging for a gap-year.
Yeah my kid will probably be working at McDonald's and saving up to pay for tuition. Any surplus will go into long term growth funds and saving up for a house.
Hilarious.
Wow. Takes the "bumming around Europe" gap year concept to the next level.
I've been glad to see the "gap year" concept making its way to the U.S. Unfortunately, for the upper middle class, a "gap year" is often spent playing instead of working.
Well, I live in Germany and must tell you that we have the same problems here, maybe in slightly milder form as yet. The German school system used to be good, lo, these many years ago, but we're getting into wokeness, equity etc., too. Spelling and math skills, writing compréhensible texts, what used to be considered general knowledge are all on the ropes now. And there are something like ten chairs for engineering but over two hundred for gender studies. Germany's manufacturing has been outsourced, and all but three of the nuclear power plants ( I think there were about twenty) have been shut down. The last three are scheduled to bite the dust on December 31. All because of Fukushima and the insane idea that wind and solar can fill the energy gap. Oh yes, electric cars and electric heating are being pushed, but where will the extra power come from? At least the Germans can feel virtuous when everything breaks down.
Heide...you stated a lot right there, i've been hearing the same. i use to be happy when i saw "made in Germany"...and the energy/climate, to a degree, hoax, is much a UN push.
Nobody says "no warming", but when 1/2 the world goes south on fossil, while the other 1/2 continues to increase fossil fuels, spells "fake/ false leadership.
I agree. I don't think history will be kind to Angela Merkel, both for her immigration clumsiness and her paranoia about nuclear energy and willingness to embrace Russian energy without even any contingency planning.
Trump was called deranged for telling the Germans not to cozy up to the Russians for energy. So unpresidential, so unstatesmanlike, yata yata yata
Not that I doubt you, but I'd like to see the cite for that.
Heide - I'm sorry to hear that.
Sehr traurig zu horen.
I am so very sorry to hear that. Everything is crumbling.
Great comment, Terry, that should be studied more. Switzerland works the same way.
The number of college graduates with degree majors in race/ethnicity/gender/territorial studies is actually a very small percentage. In the tens of thousands, perhaps, but nowhere near "millions."
My belief is that it should be mandatory for everyone to serve, in some capacity or another, after high school. *Preparation* for college and adulthood. That's just me.
I’d like to agree, but I can’t see that happening with our culture today.
You can agree anyway. :-)
I was a TA in a psych class, way back in the mid-Eighties. EVEN THEN, most of my students wrote incomprehensively. It was like "reading" stuff monkeys might type out at random. I'm told things are infinitely worse now...
Sure are, man. I was expecting the one-sided leftist view on things, but I wasn't expecting the astoundingly poor quality of the education itself.
When I taught college writing in the late 00s, in any given class there was almost invariably a student who thought it was okay to write papers in "text speak." Like "b4 U go home." I always had to nip that in bud early in the semester.
They know nothing and hold those views strongly
This is a very astute assessment of the problem. But I think it may have started even earlier than Mr. Deresiewicz suggests.
The 1950s was the first time in our country that children were absolutely lavished with childhood. The Greatest Generation had very little in the way of a childhood, and in the booming economy of the post-war era, they were able to give their children everything they themselves never had.
But the end result of this was a generation for whom childhood was the pinnacle of life; adulthood was all downhill from there. I think this is part of what drove the rebellions of the 60s--a desire to make adulthood more like childhood. And those rebels, eventually forced to do something resembling growing up, inflicted the same permanent childhood on their kids, only worse.
Spot on. My Dad went from the Depression to Guadalcanal and the Philippines.
And so what did we do with the campus radicals of the 60s?
Why we put them in charge of the very institutions they tried to destroy.
What could possibly go wrong?
Bruce...gees, that is funny...but not funny, um
"Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times.”
-- G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
Anacyclosis, man.
Thank you, I just learned some new and useful terms.
Very interesting insights, William. I think an underappreciated difference between current generations and my boomer generation was how we spent whatever time was not dedicated to school or sleep. Most of my friends had before or after school jobs, for example. Paperboy, grocery bagging, drugstore deliveries (on bicycles), yard work. They may have protested in the 60's, but they all knew where money came from, what was expected at work and how to deal with the small adversities you have in any job. Good lessons. Today, kids are chauffeured from soccer to gymnastics to baseball, tutors etc. on a year around basis, and given priority as if they were working. They're acting like a privileged class because we're treating them like a privileged class. We also didn't have all the fantasy screen time, because the only "screen" was a TV, and the few shows there were on 3 channels - gasp - reinforced community and family values.
You are so right. My husband is of a later generation, born in the late 60s, but he grew up in a suburb of NYC and he started working at age 12. His parents were financially comfortable but they didn't indulge him, and he figured out if he wanted a stereo and a car and a little sailboat and money to take girls out, he had to go hustle for them. By high school he had already done a paper route (picking up bundles in frigid predawns, rolling them, delivering them, maintaining customer accounts, collecting payment, arranging subs when he'd be out of town, all with no involvement from his parents), washed dishes at the country club, pumped gas for tips, delivered pharmacy orders, and managed the stockroom at the shoe store. He put himself through college, earning a hard science degree while working two jobs and living on his own. He's now a very successful executive and occasionally encounters younger colleagues who want his salary and title, but have not done a self-directed or self-initiated day of work in their whole lives and literally do not grasp the concept.
Great story! Sounds like he did it all. Is it any surprise he's been successful? Not to me.
Sorry - a second point: Sports experiences for most kids were going to the park and picking up games with whomever was there. You had to negotiate, work with people you didn't know, dodge bullies or fight as there was no adult supervision, and generally navigate competitive social relationships with whatever skills you had or developed along the way. Today's kids seem - I hope I'm wrong - too fragile for that era.
Sorry, You aren't wrong. One whole *lotta* 'em would be on the sidelines suckin' their thumbs. The boomers screwed up a lot, but those of us who had to got by.
I'm 60 and my classes at U.T. Arlington are naturally filled with very young adults. In an I.R. seminar last semester, a class made up of 'all colors of the rainbow,' the only student with an opinion that deviated from the stock woke banalities was from El Salvador. To say there was no other 'diversity of opinion' is an understatement. Black, white, brown, trans, cis - whatever, if there was any variation it was carefully concealed. It was depressing. The other thing was how dark each of the students were. Here was a class composed of the children of bourgeois America; young people who had never missed a meal, seen a war or had a 'lived experience' of material discomfort, and who could afford a graduate program at a public university were filled with despair and utter hopelessness. To a man - except the student from El Salvador. I remember saying to the class: "you know, this country is not Weimar Germany." They disagreed. America for them is place of unremitting oppression and agony for the 'marginalized' masses with a pogrom in the offing at any moment.
What percentage of the student body do you think really believes that modern day America is an apocalyptic hellscape of racism and oppression and what percentage is just spitting out what they know the professors want to hear?
Depends entirely on the department. This was a Poly Sci graduate seminar. It is likely different in the MBA program, Geology or Engineering. The liberal arts dominate university administrations - Sociologists in particular, and sets the tone for much of our institutional life. Nevertheless, I don't think students were in 'suck-up' mode. I think they were quite sincere. I would describe them as Oliver North in reverse - steeped in anti-American sentiment but like any nationalist convinced that the U.S. is the center of the universe and that our policies determine the destinies of every nation on earth.
Have zero clue. 50/50?
I appreciate the comment but cannot "like" it. This is so very sad. I do not believe in pie-in-the-sky optimism but neither do I believe in dour pessimism.
I raised two adults. They were not raised in child care; they were raised at home. I remember reading, probably John Rosemond, that it is the job of parents to raise competent adults. I never forgot that. I also never gave in to the "law of the soggy potato chip." Children want attention and they will seek it any way they can get it. The absolute worst thing to do is to reward (with attention and giving in), bad behavior.
At the most basic level I think the problem.is as a society we are rewarding lots of bad behavior. Individual, corporate, political, academic.
Even worse? These students then expect the same "safe" environment from their workplace, environments free of open discussion, ideas, or counter-arguments that they might find "threatening". And workplaces are complying.
I’m more convinced I could not teach at a so-called elite secondary school; I would be too demanding for the parents. They would protest their child’s earned ‘C+‘ vs. the gift ‘A’ they want on the transcript.
Ron Clark, co-founder of the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, describes this generation as “wussified”; ultimately this is an adult problem, not a child problem.
This is an adult problem. Best words written today. Of course this is an adult problem. Each of the schools being discussed has an alumni. Tens of thousands actually have graduated Yale, Harvard, Princeton. How many of these alumni continue to support these schools? How many continue to donate hard cash to them? How many are demanding change?
We all hear about professors being thrown to the wolves. How many alumni reach out to support these professors? We hear the administrators are the problem, how many alumni have reached out to trustees and called BS?
How many of you have done so? As the saying goes, asking for a friend.
I'd be fired within the first month. I have no patience for special accommodations for snowflakes.
A college professor who I know tells me that both students and parents pressure instructors over B+ grades, and sometimes even A- grades. A habit they apparently picked up, earlier at the secondary school level. Maybe even before, who knows...
As for a C+, they're practically unheard of where she teaches.
I have a C+ and a D+ on my early 1990s college transcript. I deserved them. (Still managed to get a B+ average.) But I wasn't in it for marks on paper. I wanted to learn new things.. And I learned more from the class where I got a C+ than from some of the courses where I got an A; my A grades, I often already knew much of the material. Whereas the course where I got a C+, I kept assimilating the points long after the course was over.
I think the "excellent sheep" problem looms largest for students pursuing advanced degrees in liberal arts and humanities; there's a pronounced tendency for those grad students to be groomed ideologically, as a Protege cohort. Of course, that was also true in the days when the deck was stacked in favor of "straight white males", judging from my reading of history. The problem is that those departments and colleges of postmodern academia have gone for the fallacy of imagining that "the Master's house can be dismantled with the Master's tools" of ideological conformity, policing for orthodoxy, selective discrimination on the basis of categorical biases, fealty to pre-existing status hierarchy, and institutional Power as the ultimate arbiter of Truth.
That "outcome-based" result is not an improvement. It's a house built on sand.
The primary curricula at "elite" prep schools and colleges includes:
A. Entitlement 101
B. Bitterness Studies
C. How to Piss Off Your First Boss
D. All of the above
Excellent essay. As the parent of three teenagers, I try hard to teach them independence and critical thinking. But, when they go against the norms of woke thinking, they are punished by peers and the system. Currently, trying to find a university for my 17 year old where her free thinking will be accepted.
Hillsdale?
Yes I've thought about that one. Just wondering whether too religious for her.
Maybe University of Austin will have something to offer soon.
I've read there is a new University of Austin dedicated to conservative principlkes.
For what it's worth, my impression of Hillsdale is that they are a tough liberal arts college with a challenging curriculum. They definately embrace the Judeo-Christian basis of Western Civilization, but I don't believe they espouse a particular denomination.
I missed the Sixties in a way, because instead of going to college I went into the Army. There, you didn't get to reject the authority of adults—or, if you did, the price was high. Its travails, frequent bouts of boredom and periodic small stupidities notwithstanding, military service, particularly in wartime, administers a sharp and salutary reality check. You're not special. Life is unfair. There ain't no free lunch. Unhappily for them, most young people today have never been forced to face these facts.
I was struck by the irony of the situation that Professor Deresiewicz describes. And it's true now that I come to think of it: Young people today are passive consumers of "social justice." They're not themselves willing to do the work—to borrow a phrase from Woke progressivism. They demand as a right the solution of problems by others. That, after all, is what university administrations, corporations and government exist to do: service the consumer. For young woke progressives, "our democracy" is kind of like Amazon.
Nice. Like Amazon indeed.
The return policy sucks though.