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Midnight in the Republic, Volume 6
“[A] significant and growing portion of the American population is losing the virtues required to be functioning members of a free society.” – Charles Murray in Coming Apart (Page 289), 2012
EXHIBIT A: (Provided with no further comment.)
Disturbing video shows teens beating pregnant mom, kicking toddler
EXHIBIT B: (From the “Things aren’t really what they are being portrayed as being” file.)
A Black Portland Cop Says Rioters Are Racist. Leftists Immediately Confirm It.
A black police officer says there are racist white people stage-managing the riots in Portland, Oregon and “they’re not even from here.” …
Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters are being imported to Seattle and Portland. …
It’s been obvious that the violent protests, allowed by a politically pliant Portland city hall, haven’t been about George Floyd for a very long time. The idea is to foment chaos and violence and to keep it going. The willingness of the elected officials to tolerate civil unrest, at the expense of other peoples’ security, is scandalous. The police officers’ union has accused the Leftist politicians in Oregon and specifically Portland of defending the violence.
Officer Jackson said the rioters, most of whom are white, are “using are the same tactics that are used against my people. … White protesters stage-manage the riots.
Oregon Politicos Defend Antifa and BLM Rioters – Politicians find it politically convenient to blame President Trump for riots that have been going on for weeks.
Portland’s mayor and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden have blamed President Trump for injuring an imported antifa protester from Texas who got hurt while attacking federal officers. The federal officers are ordered to protect the federal courthouse, which had been under attack for days.
[Emphasis added]
This story from Officer Jackson in also quite insightful:
A lot of times someone of color – black, Hispanic, Asian, come to the fence and directly want to talk to me. ‘Hey, what do you think about George Floyd? What do you think about what happened about this? I go up to the fence, someone white comes up ‘F the police, don’t talk to him.’ That was the most bizarre thing because I could see it coming. I even had a young African American girl tell me ‘why is it you guys aren’t talking to us?’ Honestly, I think this was the 23rd day of doing it and every time I try to have a conversation with someone who looks like me someone white comes up – blocks them – and tells them not to talk to me. And right when I said that, this white girl pops up…
EXHIBIT C: (From the “Someone needs to obtain the communication records between Elected Democrats and known ANTIFA / Black Lives Matter contacts” file.)
Look at the Evidence: Democrat Lawmakers Pick the Targets for Antifa and BLM Rioters
When Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey withdraws his city’s police officers from the Third Precinct, he … cedes the ground and picks a target for looters and rioters. Black Lives Matter and antifa rioters oblige and set fire to the cop shop, thereby encouraging other members of the mob to loot nearby stores.
It’s been going on throughout the country in cities and states run by liberals long before George Floyd. … The mob is given near-free reign to loot, riot and destroy. Those who are arrested are immediately released. Many have charges dropped against them.
You can see it with more clarity every day. Like the Klan before them, Antifa and the Marxist mob called Black Lives Matter are the shock troops for the Democrats who gladly choose the targets for them to attack.
…
Trump Voters Are ‘White Supremacists,’ So Rioting Is OK – A woman old enough to know better and smart enough to get herself elected to office, Senator Mazie Hirono, this week said Donald Trump voters are “white supremacists, that’s his base.” …
While rioters and looters are literally still in the streets, a sitting US Senator gives the groups that cloak themselves as virtuous anti-racists carte blanche to attack anyone who identifies as a Trump supporter because, after all, they’re evil “white supremacists.”
They all deserve to be beaten, doxxed, gunned down, chased, surrounded, threatened, knifed, and burned out, don’t they? They’re white supremacists…
[Emphasis added]
Epilogue
The essence of the quote at the top of this post can be easily seen at the base level in almost any non-COVID-19 related news report these days. But much of what Murray discusses in this final chapter is directed at failures of the upper (or, more specifically, the Ruling) class. (And if you don’t see the stark difference between the Democrat and Non-Democrat varieties of this creature at this point then you are either completely hopeless or just a shallow Arizona Democrat. But I digress.) Murray notes that while those virtues and the free society itself crumbles:
…the people who run the country are doing just fine. Their framework for pursuing happiness is relatively unaffected by the forces that are enfeebling … society. In fact, they have become so isolated that they are often oblivious to the nature of the problems that exist elsewhere. – Page 289
This isolated minority (See Pelosi, Wyden, Hirono, etc.) then find it easy to slip into a state where they openly cheer for “a rejection of the obligations of citizenship” and “the collapse of confidence in codes of honorable behavior.” Murray zeros in on our “hollow elite”:
A degenerate elite code can inspire contempt and encourage revolution among the rest of the population. – Page 292
[The hollow elite] have abdicated their responsibility to set and promulgate standards. – Page 298
As we follow the behavior of these democrat mayors, governors, and beltway elites it is hard not to employ much of the language that Murray brought into the conversation in mush less violent times. But it is “obscene” and “unseemly.” They continue to play political chess (fundraising, electioneering, etc.) with the lives and livelihoods of so many while intensifying the “schism in the soul” of America. The “disintegration of a civilization is not a monolithic process”; businesses will die, cities will die, the middle class will die, but the corruptocrats like Pelosi (and those striving to achieve similar status) will continue to thrive for quite some time as they devour the rotting corpse of the great experiment they themselves have snuffed out…all because of Orange Man Bad. My contempt for them is complete.
Headline for Wednesday, November 4, 2020: “The American project is dead.”
[Quotation marks indicate items taken from the Murray book. I admit to taking liberties with their intended meaning based on the much-changed state of the Republic compared to when they were published.]
(See also Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, and Volume 5)
Published in General
Almost like clockwork:
From Andy Ngo:
and:
Go read the whole thing.
Pelosi is possibly the most despicable creature to ever walk the halls of American power.
Good post. I agree with most of what you say.
[This is a quote from Charles Murray.]
I think that this is incorrect. The hollow elite is promulgating standards, and they are profoundly bad. The huge and tragic increase in illegitimacy that followed the adoption of radical feminism in the 1960s was not the result of a failure to set and promulgate standards. It was the result of adopting, and vigorously promulgating, a different standard. The same goes for homosexuality.
Now it is trans. Again, a new standard has been set and promulgated — that insanity is to be protected and praised, and that dissenters are to be punished.
Yes, I presume the “high” before “standards” was understood in the original discussion. But point well taken.
Mother defending son who kicked the toddler:
Her defense is that he was trying to jump on top of a pregnant woman. It’s easy to see where he learned right from wrong.
The ACLU joins the engagement…sides with domestic terrorists:
Go read the whole thing.
Meanwhile, back on the (merely) anti-intellectual front:
EDIT: An important note from the Instapundit link:
[Emphasis added]
I agree with the information offered inside the OP and also with the comments.
But the technology is also the problem. We now have young adults whose entire pre-teen hood was spent in front of gaming equipment, and when they socialize, it is thru their cell phones.
Emojis now substitute for forming sentences. In the late Sixties and Seventies, I knew enough people as I was coming of age who did not have good writing skills. But usually they could talk your head off.
Now we have an entire generation of young adults who know little about logic. I will grant anyone saying so that it is true logic was no longer being taught even in the 1970’s version of HS. But when you are part of a verbal society, you do pick up on logic.
I wish Facebook “watch parties” were easy to distribute here on Ricochet. (The fault lying with FB and not R.) One of the film segments that recently went viral was a young black man who called the police to come in and arrest some young white adults who were at the campus and offering up pamphlets and information from Hillsdale college.
The young black guy kept insisting that he had a right to have the police arrest the well informed duo due to “they make me uncomfortable.” The police politely explained that his discomfort was not grounds for arrest. They eventually sent the complainant on his way. The Hillsdale duo remained engaged in the matter, acting quite polite.
They eventually got some satisfaction, over which they did not even appear to gloat. I think they were simply stunned that we have entered an era where feelings are facts, and these “facts” should bring about arrests. As we saw during the Kavanaugh confirmation process, due process is not even required from those on the Left.
Clearly this happened in the still-semi-rational period before June 2020. Future such encounters will (likely) turn out much different.
As an addendum to this, it would be hard to do any better than Jeff Charles in properly framing the current situation:
May 25, 2020 seems like a million years ago already.
Exit question: What percentage of BLM “protesters” across the country on election day 2020 will be able to properly identify George Floyd?
For me the most telling snippet of the mindset of BLM activists is when a young white woman was taunting cops, and one white cop got on his phone and said he was calling his black wife. And the protester had the audacity or ignorance to keep arguing that just because you have a black acquaintance doesn’t mean you’re not racist, implying that the cop’s marriage was so shallow as t o be no more than an acquaintance, and implying that the couple didn’t realize, or overlooked, that the husband was a racist.
Was this the incident?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdrtyVMcH9o
Police Officer: Are they threatening you in some specific way?
Student: No, not specifically. They’re threatening me with their language, with their ideals.
This student probably never did any plumbing, knowing that he had to, on his twentieth try, successfully solder a copper joint in the wall behind a tub, or else waste another day. That’s threatening.
The student was totally unarmed. All he had in the way of argument was to gainsay the Prager U reporter and call to in the adults. When the police officers arrived, he had nothing other than his Maoist script, “This guy is terrorizing us.”
Do his professors look at that video and say, “We’ve failed him,” or do they say, “Mission accomplished”?
The week ends with a key bit of wisdom:
Battles on the Chicago front:
The nation dissolves under the perverse nature of such arrested development…juvenile energies combined with grotesquely malformed cognitive skills. As always, I blame the Comprachicos of the mind.
The big Powerline finish:
Yes I went and re-watched it and of course it is the same. Sorry for attributing the “threatening university student” as being from Hillsdale rather than Prager University.
I loved the comment made, referring to the student who wanted him arrested, that “He was so threatened by ideas I hold that he cannot even describe what ideals those were.” (Paraphrasing a tiny bit.)
Philo, your very challenging assertions remind me of today’s challenge from Sundance over at The Conservative Treehouse:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/07/18/never-live-within-the-limiting-opinion-of-others-that-aint-living/