Thomas Sowell:

Years, and sometimes decades, pass between my visits to movie theaters. But I drove 30 miles to see the movie “2016,” based on Dinesh D’Souza’s best-selling book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” Where I live is so politically correct that such a movie would not even be mentioned, much less shown.

Every seat in the theater was filled, even though there had been an earlier showing that day, and more showings were scheduled for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I had to sit on a staircase in the balcony, but it was worth it.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/2016-a-powerful-movie/

(spoiler alert)

I was in Jodhpur, India about a month before the release of The Dark Knight Rises. And yes, there is no doubt the city with the sky-colored houses pictured in the valley below the pit is Jodhpur, known within India as the "Blue City," which left me feeling decidedly underwhelmed. If you're going to build the world's scariest, most hellish prison, you might want to reconsider choosing the area around Mehrangarh Fort(or anywhere near an Indian city in general), where I saw enough enterprising hawkers, noisy peddlers, and crowded tourist establishments that you could probably pay someone to haul you out of the prison in a basket rickshaw for 100 rupees maximum.

The movie is derivative of Batman Begins; the appeals to seriousness and gloom make the stilted dialogue and awkwardly long boxing scenes doubly irritating. And the tragedy that eclipsed Aurora, Colorado on opening day rendered the movie even smaller.  To take it too seriously is almost impossible. 

Which is sad because rarely does Hollywood produce such a counterintuitive thing: a solidly conservative movie which fails to stand on its own. Hollywood's conservative movies are generally not meant to reinforce a conservative message: they are superb works of art that transcend the mind-numbing cliches and conformity of their peers almost unknowingly. This movie is not a superb work of art; it nevertheless chooses to reinforce something worthwhile to remember. 

Society's wealthy, talented, and accomplished are demonized and victimized in the ultimate turnover to mob rule in Gotham City: government fails those whom it is supposed to help. The show trials of Gotham's influential citizens are a specter out of the French Revolution: the movie's villains appear to be out-of-the-closet Marxists who see their triumph as the "triumph of the people('s republic of _____)."  With all this material, a much better movie could have been made. Ultimately, it descends into the usual silliness--pits, nukes that may or may not go off, and Marion Cotillard attempting to make her accent go from suave to evil.  Do Nolan's efforts represent progress or simply a new twist on silliness?

It comes as no surprise that the Left has taken hyperventilation to a new level since Gov. Romney asked Congressman Ryan to run for Vice President. All the emergent lines of attack are as disingenuous as they are easily dismissed, but one particular avenue the Democrats are trying to pursue is so comical as to merit special attention.

Over the past 72 hours, it's become trendy for liberals to complain that Paul Ryan's various and sundry proposals are not sufficiently detailed. They turn from painting the Congressman as a heartless, number-crunching sociopath to insisting that he really hasn't crunched enough numbers at all.

Paul Krugman's recent comments along these lines are – as always with his remarks – typical of the partisan Left:

[Ryan] asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work.

Let's set aside the fact that any conservative familiar with Ryan's work could dispute Krugman's accusation that it's all some giant mystery.

Since when does the same crowd that ardently cheered President Obama in 2008 harbor this abiding passion to make sure that presidential and vice presidential candidates dot every last "i" and cross each and every "t" in their 20,000 page whitepapers?

President Obama fought and won four years ago on a cocktail of policy vagueness and non-germane aesthetics. His 2008 campaign website (archived here) laid out such supremely detailed fiscal policy promises as:

•  "Increase the efficiency of government" through "technology" and "stronger management"
• "Stop funding wasteful, obsolete federal government programs that make no financial sense"
• "Obama will level the playing field for all businesses by eliminating special-interest loopholes and deductions"

How brave! How specific! How controversial!

I can't even begin to count the number of times I exasperatedly complained to an Obama supporter in 2008 that the man was incapable of putting substantive plans behind his bromides and my words were met with a blank stare or shrug.

So as the narrative trickles down to all Democrat supporters, whether among the media elite or among your Facebook friends, that Paul Ryan owes us an explanation of precisely how the mechanics of his premium-support vouchers will work by 2030 and if that really won't impact his proposed caps on non-discretionary spending because if you carry the eight and then when two trains leave Delaware traveling at 70 miles per hour wouldn't Ryan's projections actually fail to account for -- well, feel free to remind them of just how ironic their demand for hyper-specificity really is, given the source.

The nuts and bolts of Ryan's proposals deserve a vigorous defense on the merits, and they will surely receive one. But don't let the Left's newfound obsession with the trees take our eyes off the forest: elections are a competition of governing visions. And with his inspired choice of Congressman Ryan, Governor Romney has made his vision explicit.

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I had just turned 18. Soon after, I was surprised to find that paradise had not been brought about (ok I'm exaggerating, but only slightly). I then started considering conservative arguments put forth mainly by Dinesh D'Souza, Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman. I was "mugged by reality."

D'Souza's book "The Roots of Obama's Rage" was the last nail in the coffin of my faith in Obama. Not only was I wrong in thinking that Obama's policies would restore/increase American greatness, I was deceived by him about his true intentions for America, his true ideology, his core beliefs, his "inner compass" as D'Souza puts it.

To this day, considerable mystery surrounds the man. Liberals and conservatives alike often find his behavior confounding.

In my view, the only one who has lifted the curtain on Obama is Dinesh D'Souza. It turns out our president has written an autobiography, and D'Souza read it! It seems to me like he's the only one sometimes. In "The Roots of Obama's Rage" and more recently "Obama's America" (also the documentary that was produced by Gerald Molen, 2016: Obama's America) D'Souza digs into Obama's past. It seems that Obama got his worldview/ideology from his father and mentors like Frank Marshall Davis. His father saw the colonial, exploitative West as the source of his and his country's (Kenya) problems. He was an anti-colonialist, he saw America as a rogue nation.

Maybe we're reluctant to dig into Obama's past because it leads to Africa, to race, to thinking about the "black man" and his exploitation by the "white man." These are "no-go" zones (taboo) for many of us. But we must understand Obama if he is to be defeated in 2012.

A good introduction to D'Souza's ideas about Obama:

discussion/debate with Jonathan Alter

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Souz

(I know it's Glenn Beck, but D'Souza presents his ideas well here I find)

part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQUHPukWFLU&feature=channel&list=UL

part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoZf3RJPa8&feature=channel&list=UL

http://2016themovie.com/

at CPAC 2.5 M views on YT!

Hat tip MoveOn.org:

What’s a president gotta do to get the truth told around here? Watch:

One of the main arguments used against conservatives nowadays is about conservatives nowadays: they've completely gone off the Right-wing deep end compared to their predecessors. Progressives will claim they've been stagnant in their approach and steadfast in their outlook; if anything, Democrats have been pulled slightly to the Right. Jonah Goldberg wrote a great column about this a couple months ago, and I recommend giving it a read.

But, in listening to The Dennis Prager Show this afternoon, I was struck with something during his interview with Sen. Joe Lieberman. Here we have a Senator who was an elected Democrat for nearly 40 years, since being elected to the Connecticut Senate in 1970 and eventual US Senate seat in 1989. And it wasn't like Lieberman was some irrelevant Senator over these years, one who the party bigwigs knew little about or didn't associate with; he was the Democratic Party's pick for Vice President in 2000.

Then, six years later, in his fourth run for the Senate and in a surprisingly contested Democratic primary, Lieberman found himself unaligned with his lifelong party and running as an Independent. Through a combination of his views having changed along with the voters' views, Lieberman had a hard time calling himself a Democrat. What does this tell us, that a once-considered true blue Democrat was suddenly out of place within his own party? Was it that, after so many years in Washington, he'd suddenly become more conservative? (We know how often that happens, right?)

In the interview, Prager asked Lieberman a few questions regarding the Democrats' feelings on the national debt, and when Prager suggested that Reid and Co. weren't too preoccupied with the escalating debt, or placing it as a high priority, Lieberman did not refute it; Prager later suggested that the Left prioritized equality (as in making people equal) over prosperity, and Lieberman all but agreed without openly saying so.

Former Rep. Arthur Davis also comes to mind as someone fairly prominent who has waved goodbye to the Democratic Party recently (so much so that, after being out in front in endorsing Obama in 2008, he's now supporting Romney). But in both Davis' and Lieberman's cases, I think their inability to really identify with a party they were once so devoted to isn't so much that they left the Democratic party first to establish a new identity, but that the Democratic Party left them first and allowed them to find this new identity away from it.  

I find it interesting that for his very own campaign website, it reads "President Obama has done his part", and that "Now it's in our hands..." After blaming Bush, the weather, the Arab Spring (only after praising it), the Eurozone, Fox News, and Congress for his presidency's woes, he's seemingly setting it up so that he can shove the responsibility for a failed reelection campaign into "our hands." He's already "done his part," and coming up short in 2012 would be on someone else.

Law professor and Obama advisor Cass Sunstein is leaving the White House and high-tailing it back to Harvard. If one were feeling uncharitable, one could point out with a smile that, in migrating back to academia, the man has rediscovered perhaps the only profession in which personal respect, compensation, and job security are even less dependent on one's actual productivity than in government service.

But I don't really want to beat up on Sunstein. He's an indisputably interesting thinker who basically does deserve the reputation of "bright, cross-genre polymath" that is frequently bestowed on him. What's more, as far as Ivy League celebrity professors go, there are plenty quite a ways to Sunstein's left: his pet theory of "judicial minimalism" is something that plenty of legal conservatives can get behind, for example.

What does merit pointing out is the remarkable degree to which Sunstein partakes of an increasingly familiar strain of collectivist economic philosophy:

In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully "ours"? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without support from bank regulators? Could we spend it (say, on the installment plan) if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live? "Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes," 1999

If this doesn't sound eerily familiar, you haven't been paying attention. This is an intellectual carbon copy of the President's infamous "You didn't build that!" tirade against those self-congratulating small business owners, and of the YouTube tirade along similar lines that incited the far-left to lavish Elizabeth Warren with hero worship.

Eloquent ideological arguments against such a deep emphasis on collective responsibility abound in the center-right space these days; there's no need for me to crudely rehash them here. Suffice to briefly highlight just how ubiquitous the exact same doctrine, framed exactly the same way, is among the upper echelon of liberal intelligentsia.

Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and Cass Sunstein are precisely what pass for celebrities in the academic world: they deftly hop back and forth between the ivory tower and the corridors of political power, and are admired more by the junior colleagues for whom they provide intellectual cues with every fundraiser they headline, every op-ed byline they accumulate (as long as it's the New York Times, of course!), and every political "win" they chalk up.

And just look at the disturbing line these immensely powerful and widely admired figures all, in unison, toe.

If he is, he is succeeding handily. Mike, when we accused of you expanding the nanny state, we didn't expect you would take it this literally.

Mayor Bloomberg is pushing hospitals to hide their baby formula behind locked doors so more new mothers will breast-feed.

Starting Sept. 3, the city will keep tabs on the number of bottles that participating hospitals stock and use — the most restrictive pro-breast-milk program in the nation.

They're not prohibiting bottle-feeding, they're just trying to encourage breast-feeding. All the same, what ever happened to government getting in between women and their health decisions? This just sounds like the patriarchy dictating to women what to do with their bodies.

According to multiple polls, the top priority of American voters in the coming election is to elect a president that will "create jobs."It is no coincidence that"job creation" is currently the single most important phrase in Mitt Romney's lexicon. He talks about himself as a job creator; his surrogates routinely refer to the "creation of jobs," and prominent conservative commentators, including the normally-hard-to-please Ann Coulter, tell us to "forget the blather. Romney will create jobs."

I would like to inject a slightly tasteless note into the proceedings. Our nation's biggest economic problem is the lack of growth that nurtures unemployment. It is well and good that 'jobs' is our top concern. But bragging contests about who personally created and will create more jobs are unsettling, mostly because no president has ever created a job, other than in the federal government. Presidents can take steps to push policies that foster growth and innovation, reward job creators, and incentivize hard work. But that's really about it. 

And it's not just linguistic sleight of hand. The choice between "understanding what promotes growth" and being the "world's best job creator" is actually pretty significant. One would refer to a president, the other to a multinational corporate CEO.  When candidates focus the language of the debate on a personal ability to generate jobs, they are essentially focusing on themselves and their willingness to exercise power to deliver on promises. Perhaps we now may understand why the federal government grows under Democrats and Republicans alike. They're "job creators," you know.  

 "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall didn't get around to coining that legendary phrase until 1906, but the Enlightenment values she paraphrased with that famous one-liner had already served as the cornerstone of principled American liberalism for more than a century.

In contrast to classical conservatives (in the vein of Edmund Burke) who encouraged communities to reinforce their cultural visions and moral norms through rules and regulations, classical liberals (in the vein of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson) insisted that a slightly less uniform, slightly more chaotic society was a small price to pay for granting individuals fuller freedom to speak and write as they pleased. 

For decades and decades, American liberals managed to stay somewhat connected to this honorable heritage. Imagine a family game of "Twister":  while the Left contorted itself to embrace this policy or that dogma, it managed to keep one foot planted in the common-sense libertarianism from which it was born.

Don't believe me? Think it over. Of all the Democrat voters I know, around half of them – particularly those middle-aged or older – still partake of these values in a big way. There are plenty of Americans who feel compelled to agitate for a bigger safety net, but who nevertheless roll their eyes right along with the rest of us at when asinine measures like the Fairness Doctrine or a lawsuit brought by militant atheists offend the common sense we all share.

And as much as cultural conservatives scoffed at the teenagers who just had to wear Vietnam protest clothes to high school in the 1960s, or bristle when the ACLU insists than neo-Nazi groups can march in Independence Day parades, this old-school liberal fixation on equal treatment and free dialogue helped to protect rights and keep the country honest.

But the days when those values defined the American Left are now but a faint and fond memory.  Consider this report:

A Chicago politician said he will block Chick-fil-A from opening a restaurant in his ward, following anti-gay marriage remarks by the fast food chain's president.

Which was followed by this one:

[Mayor Rahm] Emanuel told the Tribune in a statement he agreed with Moreno, noting “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.”

And, while we're at it, have a look at this one:

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino's July 20 letter to the president of Chick-Fil-A has become an internet sensation, drawing thousands of comments [. . .] Menino [pledged to] block the chain from opening in Boston because of Cathy's opposition to gay marriage.

Are all businessmen and women to open franchises only in cities where a majority in local government hold political beliefs identical to theirs? Can anyone who thinks it through possibly find such economic hostage-taking remotely justifiable?

The standard-bearers of modern liberalism have abandoned  "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" in favor of "I disapprove of what you say, and now I will make your life real unpleasant until you shut your frickin' mouth."

The old liberals were egalitarian to a fault. These new liberals practice naked extortion.

The old culture war saw defenders of the old order argue with those eager to relax traditional standards. This new culture war unites conservatives, moderates and old-school liberals against hyper-activists who marshal the forces of government power to impose their particular agenda and drum out deviants without giving it a second thought.

This virulent strain has metastasized throughout liberal thinking. The New Left clamors for a Supreme Court ruling that would invalidate California's Proposition 8 and force every state in the Union to redefine the centuries-old concept of marriage in lock-step. It cheers on a feckless Mayor who, unable to address an unending tide of brutal urban violence, settles for bashing conservative restauranteurs in time to make the evening news. And the first President cast from this new mold devoted precious political capital to forcing Catholic institutions to sacrifice their core principles on the altar of agnostic uniformity.

Forget about "live and let live" – the other side now marches under a banner on which they have unmistakably printed "Live Like Us – or Pay the Price!" In doing so, they have not only declared war on traditional values, but on all well-meaning Americans of conscience.

And so, if Americans all along the political spectrum rise to the occasion and stand up for the open society we all treasure with sufficient clarity and force, they have picked a fight they cannot win.

The Times of Israel is passing along preliminary Bulgarian reporting that the suicidal terrorist who valued the opportunity to slaughter innocent Israeli tourists more than his own life was a Swedish citizen by the name of Mehdi Ghezali.

After horrific incidents like this one transpire, it is commonplace to hear leaders and ordinary folks alike lament: If only somebody had known. If only someone could have stopped him.

But somebody did know. Someone could have stopped him.

Us.

Ghezali was reportedly a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He was also reportedly among 12 foreigners captured trying to cross into Afghanistan in 2009.

This story underscores a recent worry of mine: as the center-right movement continues the interesting and important struggle to flesh out a coherent post-Bush Doctrine vision for U.S. foreign policy, we risk losing sight of the reasons why we moved to the hawkish position in the first place.

Recent years have seen the Right interject more Nixon-style, calculating realism (e.g., the growing impatience among Republicans with our Afghanistan mission) and more civil libertarianism (e.g.,the principled revolt by much of our base against the NDAA that would have authorized the President to detain citizens indefinitely) into our views. And that's probably a beneficial swing away from the single-minded Wilsonian interventionism to which the Bush administration dedicated itself. But stories like this serve as chilling reminders that America – and, indeed, the West as a whole – still desperately needs courageous voices to unapologetically articulate the hawkish, assertive vision for national security and foreign policy that our nation deserves.

And one man's famous comment in 2008, denounced in that inhospitable climate as a painful gaffe, actually looks today to be far more prescient than any of the dovish rhetoric on which our current President then chose to stake his reputation:

I am glad they're are at Guantanamo. I don’t want them on our soil. I want them on Guantanamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we ought to double Guantanamo.

If these early reports hold true, a long-brewing conversation about the growing prominence of Islam – and yes, some of it very radical – within Scandinavia, and Western Europe more broadly, will finally be brought to the forefront. (Paging Mark Steyn, anyone?) But even while that discussion plays out, conservatives will do well to remind our countrymen that it was during the supposed heyday of unilateral American hawkishness and national security overreach when we let this monster slip between our fingers.

Civil libertarianism and calculating realism are valuable instincts to re-emphasize. But that doesn't diminish the considerable importance of commonsense toughness and assertiveness. All of the illusory "win-win" talk notwithstanding (Sticking up for terrorists' rights and erring on the side of releasing suspects will really make us more secure in the long run! I promise!), we need to heed Thomas Sowell's timeless reminder that "There are no solutions, only tradeoffs." When you prioritize the Kindler, Gentler America posture, you will sometimes be trading off your security.

Or that of innocent Israeli tourists.

So playing nice for the sake of playing nice comes at a cost, occasionally a steep one, as five mourning families can now attest. Sometimes, particularly when it comes to security, less really isn't more.

The fantastic Ricochet team has gotten the College Feed up and running again, and I thought it might be fun to celebrate by taking a quick trip down memory lane.

Think back to Summer 2008. Polls were consistently forecasting that then-Senator Obama was likely to claim a massive share of youth and minority support in the fall election. And Senator Mitch McConnell, as we will all recall, stood on the Senate floor in July and vocally denounced Obama's growing coalition as "a bunch of angry young blacks who are trying to overrun America."

Oh, wait. Never mind. That didn't happen, because that would be insane. Such a crass and demeaning generalization would have offended all Americans' sensibilities, and would certainly not have earned applause from any mainstream conservatives. And that statement would have been pounced on and torn apart by the mainstream media like a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti.

Surely, then, we can count on the media and our friends on the Left to proffer a similarly full-throated denunciation of the perfectly parallel invective recently spouted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

[Reid] says a group of "angry old white men" is bankrolling conservative outside groups that are spending millions to influence the fall elections.

"If this flood of outside money continues, the day after the election, 17 angry old white men will wake up and realize they've just bought the country," Reid said on the floor. "That's a sad commentary."

But we should not, of course, hold our breath. Nothing like the condemnations such garbage would engender in a fair, good-faith political dialogue will be forthcoming. Liberal blogs' comment sections and social media timelines are overflowing with "Give 'em Hell, Harry!" cheerleading, and all the supposedly more reputable NPR could muster was an amused eyeroll and a knowing smile:

In a world of highly calibrated political messaging, it would be difficult to find a politician less likely to deliver safe, poll-tested lines than Reid

There he goes again! A straight shooter even when he should know better, God bless him. Please. Senator Reid is propagating a socioeconomic and racial caricature to further his political agenda. The older, white, uninformed conservative who hates the foreigners and the ethnic folk – a  "bitter clinger," you could say – is a blatant stereotype, one no less offensive and no more accurate than the Angry Inner-City Black Man archetype that we can all agree is beyond the pale of any civil conversation.

Sure, the particular mega-donors to whom Reid refers are not perfect iterations of the textbook slur: Mr. Friess, Mr. Adelson, and company are obviously intelligent, informed, and successful men. But the Senator's remarks are obviously a dog-whistle, designed to provoke visceral dislike of his political opponents based solely on the demographic boxes into which they can be conveniently sorted.

In America, in 2012, such personal and racial put-downs can either generate a firestorm of righteous indignation, or can earn you points for hip self-awareness and be green-lighted as fair rhetorical game. It all depends on who is slurring whom. But it should not.

I wait eagerly for the evolution of American political culture to a point where these destructive slurs are completely off-limits, regardless of who is speaking or on which side of the aisle he makes camp. But until then, we can take at least some small comfort: if somebody was going to crudely blast angry, old Caucasian men of means who wield outsized political influence for nefarious purposes, I can think of no spokesman more qualified than the Senate Majority Leader.

Jay Nordlinger nails one of the big problems with historians, or at least some of them, over at NRO: [full disclosure: I will be history grad student as of this fall]

A classmate of mine asked a distinguished historian, “Barbara Tuchman: Is she a historian?” The professor reflected for a moment. Then he said, “She’s a writer.” Some of the students snickered. At that moment, I figured Tuchman must be worthwhile. Which she is.

It's true that some historians can be perhaps a little snooty about the uninitiated treading on their turf and exceeding them in recognition. It's certainly no accident that some of the most-recognized and greatest American historians- Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough, and Shelby Foote come to mind- have been writers by trade rather than credentialed historians. The best academic historian I've ever read is probably James McPherson, whose Battle Cry of Freedom is both historically sound and very readable, as is his lesser-known For Cause and Comrades. Readability and writing quality have a lot to do with how successful historical writing is.

As with any class of academics, however, historians are rather easy to pick on. History is a bit like political punditry in that anybody with a basic understanding of sentence construction can pretend excellence at it. It is also true of history that doing it badly is quite easy, and I think this is part of the reason historians can come across as a bit snobbish with regards to "non-historians" intruding on their bailiwick.

There have no doubt been great historians who are not "professionals." There are also, however, lousy historians who are not "professionals." Take Joy Masoff, the author of the grade school textbook Our Virginia: Past and Present, for example. Masoff landed herself in hot water in October 2010 for writing a sentence including the words "Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks," a phenomenon not thought to be widespread by most historians who have studied the subject.

So where did this claim come from? Internet research, and her apology was just delightful:

"It's just one sentence. I don't want to ruffle any feathers, If the historians had contacted me and asked me to take it out, I would have."

Basically, she couldn't be bothered to do much in the way of rigorous research on the topic.

Do historians need to get off their high horses periodically and remember that even those who don't sit at the cool kids table often have intelligent things to say? Absolutely. They are also, however, justifiably leery of those who tout themselves as serious history writers, yet don't really know what they are talking about. Some of the best history out there is by "non-historians," but many non-historians are more than capable of producing utter tripe.

Hat tip Jonah Goldberg, writing on The Corner:

Although it's about a week old, this Shepard Smith clip from FNC still caught my eye.

The notion of being on the "right" or "wrong" side of history is one of the most pervasive and most profoundly silly historiographical fallacies thrown around by a Progressives, not to mention a good many old-timey Liberals and some Conservatives. To many, History is a stern governess who passes judgment on the unenlightened tykes who linger too long in her gaze, and who graciously bestows adoration on those wise enough to predict her course. I have found such intellectual smugness particularly common with regards to the same sex marriage issue. Doesn't everyone want to be on the "right side of history?"

The problem with passing such broad judgments through the historical narrative is that history is invariably written by those in a position to observe it. It has never been the case that history's course, if such a thing can be said to exist, has been readily apparent to everyone at the time events were taking place.

Take, for example, eugenics. It was once possible in this country to be a eugenicist and be taken seriously. It was, in fact, at one point fashionable. To many, the "course of history" suggested that the historical narrative was in favor of Social Darwinism and those who wanted to forge and protect a society of "fit" citizens. Birth control and eugenic practices were supposed to help us make the great leap forward down the shining path. In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly passed two laws in furtherance of these goals, the Racial Integrity Act and the Sterilization Act.

Three years later, the US Supreme Court heard the case of Carrie Buck, a woman who had been ruled feeble-minded and had been scheduled to be sterilized under Virginia's policy. The resulting case of Buck v. Bell, in the eyes of eugenicists, vindicated their cause. An eight justice majority that included Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Chief Justice William Howard Taft voted to uphold the law; the lone dissenter, Pierce Butler, was Roman Catholic. Eugenics was taken so seriously and was so well respected that a Supreme Court decision actually included the words "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Eugenicists probably thought they were on "the right side of history."

And then, of course, World War II happened. Forcibly sterilizing people  became something people in the western world were not okay with, and eugenics has, for the most part, been rightly consigned to the junkyard of bad ideas. Time has passed, and now eugenicists are widely perceived as having been on "the wrong side of history." I'm not saying that what is ethically right or wrong is fundamentally relative. What I am saying is that the Whig Theory, the idea that things are basically always getting better, is wrong.

The point here is not that same sex marriage, or traditional marriage, is in any way like forced sterilization or genocide. The point is that regardless of the merits to the arguments on either side of the marriage issue, history itself shows us that it is silly to suppose that it is making a judgment in a particular direction. I don't think that advocates or opponents of same sex marriage are any more or less on the right side history than were John Adams or Thomas Jefferson in 1800. History just happens, and whatever future historians make of it is quite up to them, and will probably bear little relationship to where we think it is headed today.

I am blessed to have been asked to start contributing to PragerU, which is a fantastic source of conservative videos, and I just made my inaugural post.  This post regarded a conversation I had with some friends of mine at Dartmouth, and I hope it can encourage you to do the same.  While we are in college we don't have money or power to influence our peers, but we do have our passion.  If we believe that our friends are willing to engage in a conversation, then we must not wait until we have the "resources" to make a difference, but instead engage in the battle for America's future today.

Via PragerU Facebook Page:

In my fraternity at Dartmouth some friends and I were having a discussion about the merits of a progressive income tax and eventually started debating the ideas of socialism vs. capitalism. When several of my friends started saying that the selfishness of capitalism and free markets is its main flaw, the Prager U video I had just seen the day before instantly came to mind. There were roughly 15 students, and I suggested that we all watch the "Welfare State and Selfish Society" video and then finish our discussion. My friends agreed, and I played the video for them. 
Videos like this are very helpful when introducing people to new ideas. Most of my well-meaning liberal friends all derive their information about conservatism and free market capitalism from very left-wing sources and have a distorted view on what it actually means. After the video, many people said things like "They had never thought of it like that before" or "I appreciate the clarity and examples". Overall, I would say the reactions were very positive. I don't think it made anybody change their worldview on the spot, but I believe it encouraged question asking and truth seeking, which is a great starting point. The truth, after all, is on our side.
Dartmouth is certainly not a bastion for conservative thought, but over my four years here I have seen the evolution of a campus captivated by hope and change to a place where more and more students are thinking critically about the implications of a national debt crisis, economic security, and personal responsibility. This shift is only possible through the tireless efforts of conservative champions like yourselves. I have the easy job of just leading the horses to water, you are already providing the plentiful spring of knowledge. The social and cultural battles will be long and rigorous, but not insurmountable. Freedom certainly is never more than a generation away from extinction as Reagan stated. 
It is in the defense of the poor and middle class that we must fight for capitalism and return to a society that promotes charity, selflessness, and gratitude.

From the NY Post:

Accepted to Harvard? Shhh, don’t tell anyone! In an attempt to ease the blow of a student’s first big rejection, New York prep schools are instituting dress codes and Facebook guidelines barring excited seniors from broadcasting their acceptance to top-tier colleges because it would hurt their classmates’ feelings. At the hyper-competitive Horace Mann School, students are not permitted to wear college apparel, including status Ivy League sweatshirts, on campus until after May 1, when most students have settled on what school they’ll attend.And at the Packer Collegiate Institute, students are instructed not to update Facebook with university news until after school lets out. “It can be bad and it can get weird,” said Darby McHugh, college coordinator at Bronx HS of Science. “We send a notice out to all faculty telling them, ‘Please don’t congratulate students in public, no high fives, no hugging, and please be sensitive so that if you see someone crying, you refer them to the college-adviser office immediately.”

What our wise school administrations seem to not understand is that failure builds character better than anything else.  Building fake self-esteem does nothing but create entitled victims.    The things in life that actually make people dig deep and work hard are rejection, trial and error, and a desire to not get rejected again the next time.  

I started seeing this my senior year in high school when in gym class after playing dodge ball, basketball, and anything where score was kept.  We were not allowed to call ANYONE a loser.  At my public school there were only winners, and 2nd place winners.  Now look at what it has progressed to.  You can't even celebrate one of the biggest accomplishments in an individual's life by wearing a shirt or updating your Facebook status.  Pathetic. 

Where have you guys seen the wussification of America happen?  Seems like it's everywhere these days. 

Exit Question: Was I hurting my friends feelings in high school when I wore a Dartmouth shirt and she wasn't accepted anywhere yet? I think I might have ruined her life and will to live that day.

Unlike Derbgate, the recent divorce of National Review Online and Robert Weissberg has gone relatively unnoticed on Ricochet. The interesting connection here is that Bob Weissberg worked in academia- that is, University of Illinois- and thus his Professor Emeritus status is facing criticism: (this is taken from what seems to be a U of I radio station's website)

Peter Nardulli, who now heads the U of I’s Cline Center for Democracy, says Weissberg spent much of his time running a retail store in Champaign.  He suggests university trustees strip him of emeritus status, calling it his only claim to credibiilty.

“That would be my basis for dissociate himself from the university,” Nardulli said.  “I mean, emeritus status does not bring with it anything but a title, but when your title is affiliated with a particular institution, that institution should have something to say about it.”

But policies from the U of I Provost’s office for granting emeritus status do not include language for removing that title. 

Note that this U of I employee is head of the U of I "Center for Democracy." Whenever I see the word democracy in the title of a group, I roll my eyes.

A question for Ricochet: Was Weissberg's sin going to the American Renaissance event in the first place, or was it the content of his speech that got him cut from the Phi Beta Cons roster?