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Achieving Absolute Power Through Selfish Selflessness
While all of us admire selfless acts of sacrifice, the left takes it a step further: They use the combination of innocence, weakness, and perceived selflessness to achieve absolute power. I suspect that some of those that are used in this manner don’t fully understand the overall game plan of the left at the time. I offer you David Hogg.
Mr. Hogg is a teenager who is famous for his extremely public and strident calls for gun control after a school shooting at his school, Stone Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He struggled academically due to his dyslexia (he learned to read at nine years old) and was known as a quiet kid. Then after all this happens, and he becomes another child celebrity to the left a la Greta Thunberg, he magically is accepted not to Central Florida, but to Harvard! That is amazing. What is more amazing is that he declined their offer. He rejected their offer of a spot in the most prestigious college in the world because, as he put it, “I don’t feel comfortable going to college until we have at least $50 million to fund gun violence research annually.” I’m guessing that’s the first time that Harvard has heard that reasoning in a rejection letter.
Remember, Mr. Hogg was 17-years-old when he said that. And not a straight-A child prodigy. But he figured out – quickly – that the only way for him to keep earning the big bucks (he’d reportedly been offered six and seven-figure salaries by media outlets and non-profit organizations) was to:
- Take advantage of his 15 minutes of fame, and stay in front of the cameras as long as possible.
- Maintain appearances of a self-sacrificing spiritual leader of sorts.
- Stay a high school kid in most people’s eyes for as long as possible.
So due to the random chance of a shooting happening at his school, this kid is granted what would be the opportunity of a lifetime for most of us – acceptance into Harvard University. But he refuses it, because he figures (correctly) that he can earn more money by not going to Harvard.
Bill Gates made that same decision, but for different reasons. Mr. Gates had a stratospheric IQ, extraordinary work habits, good business sense, and well-connected parents. He was also really good at computers, which as it turns out, were vitally important to the economy of the last 30 years. Mr. Gates had obvious reasons to leave Harvard. Mr. Hogg has, umm, a teen-idol face and a gift for sanctimony.
But Mr. Hogg is right. That’s enough.
At least, that’s enough for today’s left. And that says more about the left than it does Mr. Hogg.
I think I understand Mr. Hogg, to a degree. When I was a teenager, I was not crippled by self-doubt. I knew everything. Old people (like those over, say, 30 years old) just didn’t understand. I was right, about everything, and I was absolutely sure.
That’s just being a teenager. I thank God that my behavior as a teenager was not publicized on the nightly news. Good heavens. I’m not sure how I would have handled Mr. Hogg’s situation when I was 17 years old, but I can tell you this: I would have handled it worse than Mr. Hogg. Without question. Thank goodness I was just an arrogant jock in a small town somewhere.
But in Mr. Hogg’s case, his teenage passions have made him a public figure. For various reasons: The left needs to protect its horrifying policies behind the innocence of children. Our current media outlets value bombastic certainty over nuance or discussion. Mr. Hogg’s pet issue – gun control – just happens to be as important to today’s left as computers were to the economy of the last 3o years. He’s perfect. It’s not his fault. But he’s perfect for what the left needs right now.
Or he was, at least. For a moment. After walking away from Harvard, Mr. Hogg reportedly changed his mind and started school at Harvard the following year. Perhaps Mr. Hogg later determined that our research on gun violence is, in fact, adequately funded. Or perhaps he determined, upon further reflection, that he could more effectively advocate for gun violence research funding if he had a Harvard degree.
Or perhaps those lucrative job offers dried up for some reason.
That which the leftist media granteth, the leftist media also can taketh away.
I haven’t seen much of Mr. Hogg recently. He seemed to disappear as quickly as Christine Blasey Ford. Once he was no longer useful, he was removed from the media outlets. So maybe he wasn’t that important after all, right?
But he was. He dominated public discourse for a period of time. He was a very powerful young man, and had a significant impact on public discourse. He helped the left a great deal. Until he didn’t.
It’s easy to just roll your eyes at David Hogg and Greta Thurnberg. Even AOC and Christine Blasey Ford and other ridiculous heroes of the left, as they come and go. But to dismiss them is a mistake.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is a commonly misunderstood quote from Lord Acton. He didn’t mean that those with absolute power were absolutely powerful. He meant that when one had absolute power he became untouchable. And even unchallengeable. And at that point, not only is the one in power corrupted but so is everyone else. Everyone overlooks the mistakes and flaws of the powerful because they are unchallengeable. Everybody just agrees. With whatever. Which means that everyone is corrupted. Everyone. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
How does the left create these absolutely powerful figures?
With the innocence of youth. The street cred of being present during a school shooting. The harmlessness of appearing weak, like Ms. Thurnberg (oversize clothes) or Mr. Hogg (waif-like appearance). The purity of their message – the Christ-like effort to save us all from ourselves.
And most of all, the obvious self-sacrifice. Remember when Greta Thunberg had pictures taken of her sitting on the floor of the train when she had been given first-class seats? She only sat there for a few minutes, to get the pictures taken. The rest of her trip, she was treated like the celebrity that she is, in first class. That seems silly. But it’s not. It’s vitally important. Ms. Thunberg understands this, instinctively.
Even a child can understand. At least, a child of the left. To them, it’s as natural as breathing.
They know that their selfish desires for more money and power can be achieved only through the appearance of selfless sacrifice. Power can be achieved only by appearing weak. Everyone roots for the underdog. Christian culture is an odd thing.
The appearance of selfless sacrifice leads to absolute power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now it’s not just them – we’re all in on it. So around and around we go.
And it can’t be stopped. Until we acknowledge the selfish motivations behind leftist selflessness. And we obviously can’t do that. I mean come on – are you going to publicly criticize a selfless, innocent child? Are you evil? No, of course not.
So around and around we go…
Published in General
My guess is he knew he wouldn’t cut it and didn’t want the embarrassment of flunking out . . .
Thank goodness I still do . . .
I often say I wish I could have practiced medicine when I was a teenager, when I knew everything.
They are over at Cindy Sheehan’s house.
“I know exactly what that feels like.”
-Cindy Shill, er, Sheehan
Kids once and a while say brilliant obvious things, like the the Emporer has no clothes, but it isn’t really insight as much as honesty. In those cases the child actually knows something that can be proven. The Emporer has no clothes.
God did not commission Christ until he was 30. I keep that in mind, and believe that we still aren’t ready for adult leadership roles until we are that age.
Absolute power gets you assassinated. See, Roman Emperors.
The greatest problem facing America is not racism or climate change but the widespread character illness that causes its victims to believe that narcissism fastened onto an ideological vehicle is the same as principle.
It is a social pathology. We can’t fight it with some ribbons, 5k fund-raisers and PSAs in large part because those we would normally select as spokespersons are often the most afflicted.
Mr. Hogg is a has-been in-the-making. It is rather sad.
There is much wisdom in this quote (probably falsely) attributed to Mark Twain:
On the subject of Twain’s authorship: I looked into this one wanting it to be true. It doesn’t turn up in his writings that anyone can cite, and it is not autobiographical, because Twain’s dad died when Twain was 11.
But it’s still a great line.
As I understood it, Hogg applied to go to school in the U-Cal system and was rejected there, and was later taken in by Harvard for his political activism — after they admitted his fellow Stoneman Douglas HS student, Kyle Kashuv, based on his actual grades, then took away his admissions because he opposed the types of gun control and other progressive political measures that Hogg supported.
As for Hogg, he and Greta have the exact same angry scowl-high forehead look that in itself is a form of virtue signaling. They’re mad, so everyone has to listen to them. The problem is the left is always coming up with the new big thing of the moment (it’s why their ADD keeps them from staying on one Trump outrage at a time and go scurring to try and come up with a new one every 24-48 hours), and that includes new heroes of The Cause who are granted Absolute Moral Authority, in hopes that person will finally be the one who persuades the masses to give their souls to the progressive cause.
Greta’s was the hot new face of 2019, who’s been reduced to running around yelling “Hey, everyone! I think I have coronavirus!” in order to get attention, now that the public’s no longer focused on first world faux-crisis that’s going to destroy the planet, and on something that actually is threatening lives. When the COVID threat is over, she might return to the limelight, or progressives may find some hot new face that makes Thunberg yesterday’s news, just as Hogg was not longer the teen America had to listen to once Greta arrived (though I suppose they could regain some media buzz by becoming an item, and going on tour as the virtue-signaling lovers who will teach the world how to behave).
Great post, Doc.
I wonder about the Leftist mentality that finds this convincing. It generally seems to me that Leftism consists of proposing overly simplistic solutions to problems, with little or no analysis of either cost or effectiveness. It is childlike thinking, frankly, and perhaps this is why they are attracted to children as spokesmen.
My typical prejudice is to dismiss the positions of the young, because they are ignorant and inexperienced and uninformed. Obviously.
Peter Hitchens has a great comment about this, which I’ll paraphrase. He was asked to explain his progression from wild-eyed atheistic Trotskyist revolutionary in his youth, to Anglican Tory in his old age. He said that this is not surprising at all. This is the normal progression of growing up. He said that the interesting question is why the rest of his generation did not grow up.
I think David Hogg looks like a incel. This kid is desperate to hang onto his 15 minutes. Greta is different in that she is clearly not well and is being cynically used by the professional left and sadly encouraged by her parents, who seemed to be at their wit’s end with her. They sadly took the route of indulging her worst behavior. Hogg will fade away like Cindy Sheehan but I expect a much more sad ending to Greta’s story.
How to regard those who hold these children up as icons? I can’t fathom it. Aside from the cynicism, how can you not know how it will end? Those who preach about caring for the weak among us use these people us like Kleenex.
It probably was a Twain quote, using embellishment for emphasis. However . . .
There are a lot of web sites out there dedicated to “quote-doubting”, saying “he didn’t say that”. Take the example of Einstein’s quote on insanity. Even if someone else said it first, it could be Einstein popularized it, or did say it first. I think these people are of the same vein as Shakespeare “deniers” (like the late Joseph Sobran). They want to garner the spotlight by “proving” something someone everyone knows isn’t true.
Holocaust deniers are the worst . . .
Even David Hogg can’t be nutty enough to do that:
Reverend: I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.
Hogg: [smoooooooch!!!]
Thunberg: How dare you! [slap]
Hogg [rubbing his cheek]: That hurt! You’re lucky I’ve banned all guns from our sailboat.
Both of those children have ambitious parents pushing them. I think I read the Hogg’s father is an FBI agent in Florida and St Gretchen has equally ambitious parents who seem to be coordinating the scam.
Preceded by Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow and critic of Pres. Bush.
But did we see any of these during the administration of Pres. Obama?
Cindy took a run at it. She was ignored.
I believe he also applied to University of Florida who also didn’t take him.
That’s why it’s always a good idea to have a safety school. Like Harvard…
She thought Pelosi would follow through on her defund the Iraq War promises after the 2006 election, and primaried her in 2008. That’s when she went from having Absolute Moral Authority to being treated by the Democrats about like they’ve treated Bernie Sanders over the past month. Hogg won’t get that type of treatment, unless he goes after a Democrat mainstay, but unless he ups his own progressive hype machine, he’ll simply fade into the crowd as the Democrats find someone new to try and present to the public as a higher form of human life.
Does the Biden sexual assault give anyone the idea that Cuomo is looking better to the DNC ?
Biden’s biggest worry is his poll numbers vs. Trump slipping, because his future is totally transactional. Other Dems and the media don’t care about Tara Reade right now, but if Biden’s sinking in the polls and struggling in public appearances a couple of months from now, you might see a newfound media interest in Reade’s allegations, as a way to convince Biden he needs to spend more time with his family in his Golden Years.
Republicans also do the same. Remember Joe the plumber?
Wurzelbacher didn’t get much national support when he ran in 2011-12. But he ran in a D-heavy district (Obama +37 in 2012, Hillary +22 in 2016) — the equivalent to Sheehan would have been if he had challenged John Boehner in the 2012 primary after helping the Republicans regain control of the House, because he said Boehner wasn’t conservative enough, and then got non-personed.
Isn’t that little thug’s 15 minutes done by now?
I bet after a couple of years, Hogg calls and asks if the offer is still good. I can hear a Boston Brahmin Dean of Admissions say, “Sorry old chum, but there was a shelf life on the invitation. Perhaps Yale will accept you.”
You can’t flunk out of Harvard. It makes the admissions people look bad.
Harvard, from what I know, should just bill the applicant four years tuition and give the diploma since Harvard freshmen are better informed than seniors.
I’ve despised Hogg since the moment he jumped into the limelight.
He wasn’t even at school the day of the shooting. When he heard about it on the news, jumped on his bike, and moved at speed to the school.
I would like to think the little weasel was genuinely concerned about his fellow students. But based on his subsequent actions, I can’t help but think that his brain was turning as fast as the sprocket on his bike ‘ginning up ways to exploit the situation for personal gain. Uncharitable, I know.