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A long time ago, Ben Stein wrote a funny, insightful book (The View from Sunset Boulevard) about the collective mindset of those who make movies and TV shows. It explained why the Puerto Rican kid arrested in the first 15 minutes of a Kojak episode was innocent because it was really the rich white stockbroker who murdered the prostitute with a heart of gold. He described the industry's view of America as a few urban oases in an otherwise dangerous hinterland filled with dangerous racist troglodytes patiently waiting for the appearance of their Führer to give the order to arise. Forty-five years later, the book is still surprisingly applicable.
It turns out that there really is a dangerous mass of malformed intellects in America awaiting a spark or orders to arise but it was not the Red State working class. It was our grossly miseducated, deformed upscale youth.
I propose that the sincerity of the expressions of sympathy for Gazans are about as real, deep, and substantive as is the protestors’ grasp of history, law, religion, geography, and almost everything else that previous generations knew by the completion of elementary school. Gaza was possibly just the long-awaited spark, an event onto which the cartoon concepts of “colonialism” and “white supremacy” could be applied by skillful manipulators to trigger the cognitively impaired masses. The angry youths only know what they have been trained to hate so a focused hatred of Jews as a particularly malignant subset of those possessed of “whiteness” came surprisingly naturally, especially in the absence of any awareness of even fairly recent rather significant historical events.
The ideological context for the elimination of Israel in the name of Dar al Islam is indistinguishable from the outlook of the 9/11 mass murders, the Taliban, or the malignant nutballs who control Iran. Nevertheless, for our malformed hordes, the enemy of my parents, my pastor, and my most annoying high school teachers is my friend.
Blockbuster, 8-track players, Woolworth’s, and now Columbia University were all built to serve markets that suddenly no longer exist. Columbia et al have dispensed with the pleasant anachronism that the ivies turn out well-formed minds, steeped in the best wisdom, methods, and morality of our civilization and replaced it with plush living spaces and a flow of unchallenging trendy Marxist ideological pablum, a product that is both wildly over-priced and highly toxic.
What else should we have expected?
Discussion (38)
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This speaks volumes, in every way. The ideas they've collected are nonsense and simply untrue, and they've let themselves be controlled by their elite. How sad.
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I'm trying to remember a single-panel cartoon I once saw of a mob in Revolutionary French garb, and one of the torch-wavers is saying, "Storm the Bastille! Liberte, Egalite, and... uh, how did the rest of that go again?"
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An elite created but does not control the monster.
The weird alliance of very wealthy perverts, career government/policy types, and tenured academia sees the middle-class normals as their natural political rival and ultimate enemy. Turning the normals' own kids against them was a powerful strategic move.
However, most of the intellectuals and organizers behind both the French and Russian revolutions ended up getting executed, kinda like "open-minded" university administrators and faculty who may well wind up unemployed.
Youths stunted morally and intellectually and cut off from the formative influence of their own culture are not going to happily settle for the vision an Obama-like vision of a benevolent administrative one-party state that socializes life for the lower and middle classes, guarantees the good life for tenured intellectuals and leaves the ultra-rich alone. The currently de rigueur keffiyehs are interchangeable with the pseudo-tough guy ninja ANTIFA costume. It is a matter of visionless raw opposition. And likely to fail precisely because there is no positive endpoint offered. No communist nirvana, no socialist paradise. Just a tantrum against the status quo.
The good news is that the campus disease does not appear to be popular. And the normals don't yet appear to feel personally threatened enough to resort to violence or support of repressive government measures--the healthy good humor of the UNC flag-rescuing frat boys is a very positive response and probably reflective of the majority view.
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[This is not a response to comment 3. Old Bathos and I posted at the same moment. :) :) ]
In a Google search box this week, I plunked in an Ask Jeeves-style query: "What has Israel done to save and protect the Gazan children during the current war?" That is a very specifically worded query designed to elicit a certain type of information. Since the days that Google bought the Ask Jeeves query technology, it's a query style that has always worked very well for me. But not this time. I suggest everyone do this and just scan the results that come back. You don't need to open any of them. You may be shocked at what you see on your screen for results. I was.
The anti-Israel propaganda that the mainstream media and NGOs are pushing right now is wild. It is way worse than I expected. Thank God for Fox News. I mean that as a sincere prayer of thanks. From what I can tell, it is the only news outlet speaking the truth about Israel and the war right now. The only one!
I've seen these kinds of disturbingly distorted search results on any topic related to Donald Trump, but I was shocked to see the same kinds of distortions leveled at Israel.
Also, one afternoon this past week, I was going somewhere with my husband, and he was listening to, I think, Don Bongino (?--I am not entirely sure who it was but I thought it was Bongino--I had dozed off a little bit). He was talking to a guest on his show who conveyed the troubling results of a new poll. The guest said that 80 or 85 percent of the respondents who were over the age of 50 or 60 (I can't remember which) had favorable responses on questions about Israel. Only 40 percent of the respondents under 40 years old did so. The numbers were shocking. When we got home, I attempted to follow up. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the exact poll he was talking about. However, it's the kind of poll Pew Research does, so I looked there. I found one that is close to what the guest reported, but the poll was taken in 2022 so it is not war related:
Obviously, this generational difference was in play long before the war started. When we boomers die off, there will be big problems.
Put that existing negative attitude together with the skewed war reporting by the mass media and the NGOs--it's no wonder the campuses blew up.
The Axis of Goodness--United States, Great Britain, and Israel--is in deep trouble. We need a public relations offensive, but I don't think it is possible to accomplish it given the radical leanings of the boards of directors of the mass media companies.
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I would love to have someone do a poll in the "encampments" to see how many can identify the river and name the sea they keep chanting about.
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