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Dispatches from Facebook: Or, Very Bad News
I’m 24. I didn’t create a Facebook account until my last year of college. When I did finally give in, I curated my feed carefully to avoid politics, and I stayed away from the most politically active people. All this (mostly) worked… until about four days ago.
Over the last few days, I’ve unfriended almost every person I knew in high school since all of them were posting either explicit justifications for the current riots or intersectional propaganda. (You know the kind.) The once staunchly Republican daughter of a family friend has now taken to calling out “privilege.” Just now, I logged into Facebook and found myself staring at the “pyramid of oppression” charts being non-ironically shared by Hillsdale students. Yes, you read that correctly: Critical race theory has arrived at Hillsdale. Some fraction of the school’s literary elite has gone woke.
What the bleepity-bleep is happening? I’ve witnessed a gradual radicalization of my peers since high school, but this… this is just bizarre. And when classically educated Catholics start sounding like Ta-Nehisi Coates, we’ve really fallen through the looking glass.
I submit that we’re doomed. Doomed, doomed, doomed, doomed.
Published in General
I have three teen age grandchildren. They are heavily into sports and are good kids. The oldest was in Phoenix for the weekend for a soccer tournament. She was driving back to CA yesterday and called her mother worried about the violence. She suggested maybe they should move to a gated community. Fortunately, they live in south Orange County which is fairly safe. Her father, my son, is a fireman and has been working extra overtime because his wife’s company is having financial trouble with the lockdown. My DIL reassured her daughter and commented that they had guns in the house if needed. Since dad was at work, the son, who is 15 and 6 foot 3, can handle the guns. He learned to shoot an AR 15 when he was 12.
http://abriefhistory.org/?p=6584
Those kids are pretty safe.
They’ve never been monolithic, and I always counted that as a good thing. My freshmen year, I met plenty of people who didn’t fit the usual Buckleyite/fusionist mold. We all got along. Our disagreements were academic, and they didn’t really seem to matter, since we all had plenty in common.
This feels different. Here were are, watching the very real destruction of our cities and institutions, and these people are cheering it on. They’re declaring allegiance to an ideology which, taken to its logical conclusion, regards the very things they’ve chosen to study as evil. Why come to Hillsdale to learn the classics if you hold the classics to be little more than arbitrary and illegitimate expressions of power? What do institutions like Hillsdale exist to preserve if not a humane vision of the good life — one untainted by the sneering, contemptuous, debunking attitude that now pervades the academy?
Kids rebel and then they grow up. Lets see how many communists they are once they start working for a living.
I’m 58 and I’ve yet to create a Facebook account. I have no clue as to how it works, and don’t give a darn. And yes, what the heck has happened to your generation? We send you to college, of which the costs are incredible, and this is how you guys come back?
As a middle aged guy (“middle” assumes I’ll live past 100), I am supposed to be the one looking at your generation and saying that. You on the other hand, are supposed to be reassuring me that it’s not that bad.
I’ve been having the same experience. People who I assumed were good conservatives and my fellow church-goers are suddenly posting garbage about how “White Supremacy created the suburbs!” and sound like they’ve all been brainwashed by Marxist cults.
It’s really depressing.
Yesterday I tried several times to come up with a good response to one of my old friends who was posting links to critical race theory garbage with “Here’s some great information!” . . . and in the end I decided that it wasn’t worth damaging friendships to respond . . . and reminded myself of the old saying that you can’t reason someone out of a position he didn’t arrive at through reason.
Maybe a “Classic” for them is The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf. You keep strong and sure @christopherriley because what some of these fellow students think they know is really nothing at all. The human being yearns to be free and freedom cannot exist without private property. Anyone who would wantonly destroy other’s property has no respect for their fellow man and, thus, no respect for themselves.
You’re getting very close to the answer here.
People of the left believe, strongly and with commitment, in magic. They do not have faith in reason.
I’ve not been experiencing it myself, but our three (18-21) inform us that social pressure is very intense on the Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, etc., (aka, what the kids use). They have all commented how they reject the demand to virtue signal to prove their bona fides as someone who doesn’t support people being killed when they could have been thrown in the squad car, but who knows how long they can hold out in the face of “silence is violence” and other crazy talk. Even Ben Shapiro has historically said to tell “them” what they want to hear so you can get the Harvard JD.
Another thing I am picking up on is this part of history talk – what will you tell your grandkids you did in 2020? The kids mention it, as well as certain elected officials. Lots of people are suckers for that kind of talk – completely eliding over the fact that NO ONE supports that poor Mr. Lloyd was killed. This is not segregated water fountains but bad local cops. Just like the ones that took the life of Tony Timpa.
All this stuff becomes weirdly metaphysical. I mean, consider their conceptions of justice and injustice.
A policeman kills someone in his custody. This, I’d agree, is an injustice. Correcting this injustice, in a sane world, would involve punishing the one who perpetrates the injustice. But critical theory gives its adherents a permission structure to decouple injustice from any specific context. If I buy into this nonsense, I can now wield Floyd’s “injustice” against anyone and anything I want, because everything is connected by mysterious “power structures.”
In other words, it’s an elaborate scheme to justify temper tantrums.
I’m going to get called one anyway so I longer give a rats a……..
On the Left: Train young women up to think this way, and young men will double down on it to earn demonstrations of their approval. This is true whether the young women are part of the young mens’ social life, or, as is often the case these days, their teachers and managers.
My twenty something daughter is under intense pressure to go out and join her friends whom she thought knew better in the rioting. Silence is Compliance or so they say. Arguing with these kids is futile and can easily erupt into a very nasty confrontation.
My daughter has silenced her Instagram account and has tried far away from posting.
On the Left, nice post from Wretchard:
“To the question ‘where did the destructiveness come from?’: it was there all along. What was once dinner party nihilism has lost it’s inhibitions. The the riots are a ‘coming out party’ for all the doctrines taught in many a school.”
Yep. Many of these kids think that rioting is the highest form of patriotism. They are telling each that “you don’t want to tell your grandkids that you were quiet during the George Floyd” riots.
“That “tell” indicates this is not just about a man murdered by the Minneapolis police. This is about something deeper; that although the disquiet may die down having exhausted the immediate fuel the crisis will last a long time.”
My daughter feels a lot of the rioting is an acting out by many of these kid’s inner anger at how poorly and aimless their live is going. Many have come from a dysfunctional family traumatized family life background where they have been hurt and traumatized , and they have raised in school on a fashionable nihilism where rioting is seen as a natural response. As MacKenzie Phillips say” people who have been hurt often hurt others” and many of these hurt kids want to hurt others to somehow assuage their inner pain. Remember almost 40% of babies are now born without a father and almost half of the kids born with a father, lose theirs to divorce.
I’ve seen that statement posted on Facebook a few times. It drives me crazy! Almost as much as the “We’re all in this together” mantra I keep hearing over the grocery store’s speakers.
I just dumped a series of professional culinary Instagram feeds. Not interested in their latest “spicing” if you will.
Some of this may be a “Stockholm Syndrome” by people who don’t understand what is happening and are trying, without enough information, to get back to a peaceful existence with people who don’t want one.
Plenty. Look around. Lots of 30+ year olds out working still want “socialism”.
Leaving the kids to marinate in this from grammar school through college has led us to this point.
That means all Ricochet people should get on Twitter and Facebook to express their views there, rather than remain silent behind a paywall.