Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
From Peggy Noonan: A Point Worth Pondering
As I was wandering through the news headlines this morning, I came upon an item that recounted MSNBC “journalist” Joy Reid’s interview with Pete Buttigieg. Don’t ask me how the topic came up, but Reid took Buttigieg to task for a recent tweet of his that said, in part, that America needed a president shaped by “heartland” values. Poor Buttigieg did not anticipate her response which was that the word “heartland” was “like a dog whistle for white voters.” When I read that, I thought of a recent opinion piece by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal that said in part:
The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture, and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. Their entire program is accusation: You are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over. They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral. Actually they’re not. They’re mean and seek to kill, and like all bullies are cowards.
Although I agreed with Ms. Noonan, the thought struck me; do we really have 10 years before this woke progressivism renders this country incapable of any intelligence in any field? We can look back on any number of watershed moments in American history. Take, for instance, Joseph Welch’s masterful rebuke of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (“At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”), which many historians believe was the turning point in the history of McCarthyism. Would the woke progressives (or even those less woke) even recognize such eloquence? More importantly, would they even want to recognize it? I’m not so sure.
I want, with every fiber of my being, to believe that we have not descended so far into chaos that we can still preserve this republic. However, when I see the idiocy of Ms. Reid and hundreds of those like her, I cannot help but think that we, as a nation, have been educated far beyond our intelligence.
Published in General
Maybe. It was used as a line in Star Trek VI. I don’t think Nicholas Meyer is as comparatively woke but he’s definitely a lefty. I never knew it until recently that the moon Praxis is named for a Marxist term. He also gives Spock the line “As with all living things, each according to his gifts.”
BTW, here’s the interview:
The Army-McCarthy Hearings took place in 1954. The problems at Monmouth happened in the 1940s as did the Amerasia case. Whittaker Chambers had it right, McCarthy set back the cause of anti-communism through his recklessness, accusing many unfairly, including George C Marshall, of commie sympathies, while allowing his aide, Roy Cohn, to pursue a vendetta against the Army on behalf of his boyfriend. Destroying McCarthy with ad hominem attacks is perfectly appropriate given McCarthy’s tactics.
You do. Tell them to go to hell.
Blink was the best episode, by the way. Nice.
I’ll have to respectfully disagree and reiterate that a scalpel was called for rather than a blunderbuss. I don’t believe you could call Ronald Radosh a “fellow traveller” but he referred to Mr. Evans book by stating that “his own exaggerations and unwarranted leaps parallel those made by McCarthy.”
If you have some concrete substance against McCarthy, share. Otherwise, complaints about McCarthy’s style are on a moral plane with complaints about MLK’s hair or William Wilberforce’s taste in clothes. McCarthy was the hero to expose the vilest ideology creeping into the US government.
(edit – Comment #32 would count as substance. Thanks.)
Many people do not feel that way.
Rooting out evil is one thing, but when there is obsessiveness involved, and an unchecked grab for power and control, the citizenry then realizes how totalitarianism is staring them down, to the point that the life blood of the Republic is sucked away.
The parallel now exists, that because there is White Supremacism in our society (although possibly at a level of less than 0.02% of the society) then such an atrocity needs to be wiped out of our society. This is resulting in how some arbitrary arbiters are allowed to create language distortions and decide, as is being discussed in this topic, that the okay sign means the user is a racist, and that using the expression heartland is also racist.
If McCarthy had gone after specific targets in a meaningful way, that would have been valid. But you had people being forced to confront their “communist sympathies” just because as a college student they attended a single meeting in NYC’s east side. Friends ratted out friends in order to keep their jobs in Hollywood. As a writer, I sympathize with the actors the most. Some writers simply used pseudonyms, while actors had no way to stay employed.
Charlie Chaplin even decided that our culture was going to hell in a hand basket and left the country.
With the benefit of hindsight, that may well be so. Radosh deserves much credit for following the evidence where it led on the Rosenbergs. But his assertions about Evans are not only unsupported by the facts, they are often distorted and even false. Radosh still acts like an anti-anti-Communist and is not to be relied on about McCarthy.
Evans:
There is a scene in Modern Times that I think is a great illustration of the Marxist idea of alienation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9ESFJTnHs
It’s got the dehumanizing of work and the dehumanizing of people through work. (In case you miss it look closely at the shape of the women’s buttons.) It even has the proletarian rising up, with nothing to fear but his chains.
There was nothing wrong with Pete’s answer, but a lot wrong with the question. You are right – everything is a dog whistle and her question to Pete made him feel like he had to clarify and defend a simple thing like getting back to the heartland. But now we have been over-sensitized to making everything about what Peggy Noonan described. We don’t have ten years to fix this.