Democrat Lockdowns Exempt Hollywood, Destroy Small Businesses

Daniel Greenfield December 03, 2020   @ Sultan Knish Blog

Before Thanksgiving, Los Angeles imposed a curfew and, in a shocking oversight, asked Hollywood to follow it. While the entertainment industry isn't as big a part of the local economy as it would like you to think, its producers, directors, and stars provide a disproportionate share of the capital that the Democrats politicians who run the place use to get elected to higher office.

After ordering Hollywood to restrict filming to the same curfew as other businesses, a few hours later the order was withdrawn followed by a final plea to film shoots to “to voluntarily limit and/or avoid activities likely to invite a negative community response" which could "jeopardize community confidence in our ability to operate safely."

As if allowing movie studios to shoot around the clock while shutting down small businesses might "invite a negative community response" or raise questions about the corrupt system.

The film permit office now claims that “the State of California has viewed workers supporting the film, television and commercial production industry… as essential for the state’s critical infrastructure.”

What role does shooting movies play in the “critical infrastructure” of California? Money.

Not for the economy. In that regard, the entertainment industry is much less crucial than many of the industries that had been shut down by the lockdowns. With unemployment claims topping 8 million and California Democrat leaders fighting to eliminate freelance workers, that’s a drop in the bucket. If the crews in question were working in restaurants, they wouldn’t matter.

But the critical infrastructure that Hollywood funds is the political ambitions of the Democrats.

During the gubernatorial race, Hollywood poured millions into Newsom’s campaign, and celebrity fundraising helped put Garcetti into the mayor’s office. The Democrat with the biggest haul of industry cash usually wins. Your local pizza shop isn’t going to compete with that.

If only there were some sort of industry dedicated to exposing social injustice using art.

While restaurants spent a fortune prepping to meet the new regulations, only to be shut down anyway, the entertainment industry goes into a new lockdown with nothing to worry about.

All of this is happening under the watch of Muntu Davis, LA’s top health officer who was picked in the wake of the Black Lives Matter race riots to implement “equity”. Equity is now the top value at LA County's Department of Public Health which declares that it seeks to "ensure just systems, policies and practices". That means giving Disney a pass, but shutting down cafes.

This is what social justice lockdowns look like. Not just in LA, but across the country.

"New York City's economy is in a downturn, but film production has been a bright spot," a New York Times article chirps. Even while Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio targeted Chassidic Jews, ranting about weddings and synagogues, the entertainment industry and its allied media were exempted, and the accompanying rules were bent and broken.

Even while Democrat leaders were lecturing about the dangers of church and synagogue services, the Video Music Awards went on and celebrities were allowed to dodge curfew.

Since no election could go forward without Saturday Night Live, the high school talent show staffed by unfunny social justice activists, with occasional celebrity cameos, went forward, along with a live studio audience. Cuomo and De Blasio, not to mention the media, decided not to notice that SNL was flouting the rules by paying audience members so they counted as crew.

Having a live audience of Manhattanites to laugh when you howl insults at President Trump is an essential activity in New York. Unlike irresponsible, non-essential stuff like religious services.

As the New York Times notes, "The major studios... all report that they are full." 559 permits have been granted and 35 series are already filming in the city even though, as one studio boss notes, “one person every week or two test positive somewhere on the lot.” Unlike churches or synagogues, or weddings, these shoots are never described as superspreader events.

In a truly surreal scene, New Amsterdam, a TV drama, was caught filming outside Bellevue Hospital, blocking the path of real doctors and nurses, a population prone to infections. Even while Democrat leaders complain that there aren’t enough hospital beds, the NBC medical drama takes up space in and around hospitals while getting a free pass from the authorities.

The Times story noted that, “the large crew found it impossible to perfectly socially distance” and leaves it at that, while photos show no actual social distancing by the crews.

But the New York Times has its own Hollywood studio deals involving the 1619 Project.

Governor Cuomo is so dependent on entertainment industry cash that he flew out to California for fundraisers, including one organized in Beverly Hills by the MPAA featuring major studio heads with tickets going for as much as $50,000. This year, Cuomo held a fundraiser for his birthday featuring movie stars who praised him for protecting Hollywood's tax credits.

Those $420 million in tax credits are a net loss for the state, but a gain for Cuomo. That tops California’s film tax credit total of $330 million.

Cuomo had been insisting that the “state has no money”, and was threatening to cut first responders. He even tried to tax volunteers who came to help during the pandemic.

"We're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now," Cuomo falsely claimed. Then he called for maintaining the same insane level of Hollywood subsidies, and went further by making sure that only the big studios who fund his corrupt ambitions cash in on the $420 million.

After claiming that there would be no money to pay police, no money for anything, New York State kept the $420 million in subsidies but limited it to studios spending over $1 million.

The “state has no money” for cops and firefighters, but has $420 million for Hollywood.

Just to bring the corruption up to Chicago levels, Cuomo's proposal made sure that Saturday Night Live, but no new productions, would get access to the $420 million subsidy. If only there were some talented political satirists with a weekend show who could mock this crookedness.

Back in California, Disney's Captain Marvel got $20 million in tax credits in California. Netflix's 13 Reasons Why, which has been blamed for encouraging teenage suicide, vacuumed up over $40 million. You can’t expect one of the wealthiest companies in America to set off a spike in teenage suicides and promote pedophilia without some serious taxpayer subsidies.

When California and New York dole out $750 million in tax breaks to some of the wealthiest donors in a powerful industry who fund the political ambitions of top Democrats like Newsom and Cuomo, there’s no reason to expect their projects to be subjected to everyone else’s rules.

That’s why the order to limit film shoots to the 7 AM to 10 PM curfew was quickly pulled in LA. The county may be banning public gatherings, and destroying the last surviving small businesses who were on their last legs, but film shoots are back at half of pre-pandemic levels.

And that’s not just in America.

The UK has some of the most onerous lockdowns around, and its order shut down clothing stores, mobile phone shops, cafes, hotels, museums and “places of worship”, but left open "professional film and TV filming". Religion is non-essential, but television must go on.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the harm caused by the lockdowns to the livelihoods of tens of millions of people, but there’s been little discussion about who has been exempted from lockdown restrictions and their corrupt political and economic rationales.

The best leverage against lockdown self-righteousness is the exposure of the hypocritical and discriminatory treatment that closes small businesses while leaving giants like Amazon and Target, Disney and Netflix, wealthier than ever because of the lockdowns that benefit them.

The LA Film Office warned productions about a “negative community response”. It’s about time.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

 

Tags: California, Coronavirus, entertainment industry, Los Angeles, New York, recent

 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

The Media Corruption, Voter Fraud and Insurrection

Baseless, unfounded, debunked: The Left's Big Lie About Election Fraud

By Daniel Wiseman

Here is the lie that the Left repeats over and over: There was no election fraud and if there had been, it was not enough to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. By controlling the language, the Left controls the narrative. Baseless, unfounded, and  debunked, the Fake News media pontificates day after day about claims of voter fraud, which exists and for which people go to jail for regularly............

TIME WARP: 1969/70 Anarchy Recycle 2019/20 

 

From Weatherman underground to Antifa

By R.W. Trewyn Ph.D.

 Do you think Antifa is anti-fascist? Have you seen the destruction?  Antifa-aligned group cheers alleged arson at police officer's home, Twitter allows tweet............

 In the Fog of a Civil War, Will Truth and Justice Prevail? Will Freedom Survive?

By Dennis Jamison

The nation is plodding slowly along past an indecisive (and what appears to be a blatantly fraudulent) election. And, in the fog of confusion and the shock over the enormity and extent of the collected evidence of election fraud and vote machine manipulation, trust in our electoral process waivers. This election has been one of, if not, the most contentious elections in national history. And yet, some Americans are moving about as if it was just another election, like it was just one more speed bump we had to endure....................

Quote of the Day

Quote: https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/03/david-petraeus-perfect-avatar-for-americas-corrupt-ruling-class/

General David Petraeus, for many years (decades?) lauded as the greatest and most successful soldier of his generation, just insulted, in terms paradoxically both implicit and vicious, the men who made both his military renown and his post-military success and wealth possible.

“The most significant terrorist threat in the United States is not actually from Islamist extremists, it’s from right-wing terrorists in our own country,” he recently said to a gathering of elites...............When was the last time you even heard of a “right-wing” terror attack, much less one that actually inflicted mass casualties?

It’s no exaggeration to say that, without these proto “right-wing terrorists” and the milieus from which they emerge, the United States military would have no combat units at all. To say the least, woke transsexual gender studies majors from the blue coasts are not showing up in droves, or even singly, to Officer Candidate School or basic training. Neither are the children of the upper, upper middle, and increasingly the middle classes. 

The military, at least for its combat missions, is more reliant than ever on that part of America that the ruling class openly despises. What would it do without them? Stop fighting constabulary wars? Either that or scour the rest of the country to recruit men far less committed to the mission, and probably less good at their jobs, than those who volunteered to fight the post 9/11 wars and made the Surge a success.

Democrats Run America’s Rathole Cities

Daniel Greenfield December 02, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Last year, President Trump called Baltimore a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess".

Speaker Pelosi responded by calling Trump’s comments “racist attacks”. Vox claimed that Trump was using “racist tropes” and US News conducted a fact check accusing him of racism.

Now the rat race numbers are in. Orkin, the past control company, ratted out the "rattiest cities" and Baltimore has broken through into the top 10 for the first time. Like a rat clambering after a piece of moldy cheese, Charm City leaped up four places to be America’s 8th rattiest city.

Baltimore has never been able to deny that it’s a rat-infested hellhole. But Democrats and their media are good at deflecting with false accusations of racism and then changing the subject.

"If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone's, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land,” the Baltimore Sun had retorted in an editorial after President Trump’s criticism of the terrible conditions in the city.

But there’s one thing that the rattiest cities in America have in common. And it isn’t Trump.

In Chicago, rated as the rattiest city in the country six times in a row, 83% of residents, dead or alive, legal or illegal, human or rat, voted for Hillary. The last time Chicago had a Republican mayor was 1931 and the ratty city has no official Republican members on its city council.

It does however have multiple socialist city council members.

Despite promises by Democrat officials, the city’s rat problem only keeps getting worse.

In May, rat complaints nearly doubled even as officials insisted that there were no more rats.

“It doesn’t mean that there’s a lot more rats. People are seeing them, and they are calling,” Josie Cruz, the Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Rodent Control, argued.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel had created the bureau with 120 employees and a $10 million budget.

Cruz has been on this job for at least two decades and tens of thousands of rat complaints keep coming in. Chicago has tried dry ice, spears, and rat birth control. The one thing it hasn’t tried is getting rid of the Democrat rats that have burrowed deep into its municipal government.

The number of rat complaints in Chicago rose from 32,855 in 2014 to 50,963 in 2017. That’s 1,876 complaints for every 100,000 people. And since exterminator folklore has it that there are 10 rats you don’t see for every rat you do see, that means Chicago has half a million rats.

If they just registered to vote, the Democrats would never lose Illinois.

What makes Chicago so much more rat-infested than other cities? The answer lies with a corrupt Democrat system in which trash pickup and rodent removal was controlled by local aldermen who could use it for political patronage. The system was finally abandoned in 2013 but the rats had gotten too much of a head start and have burrowed throughout the city.

But that’s just what happens when a city votes for Democrats. First Democrats, then rats.

Hillary Clinton became the first Democrat to get over 70% of the vote in Los Angeles County. Not coincidentally, Los Angeles is once again in second place as the 2nd most rat infested hellhole in the nation. In New York City, Hillary Clinton won 79% of the vote. It’s unknown if the rats voted, but if they did it was probably as a bloc because the city is 3rd in the rat race.

The rat problem in Los Angeles and New York is easily traceable to its vagrant population.

Democrat politicians had embraced living on the street as a protected and subsidized activity. A typhus outbreak followed in Los Angeles. The disease, which is carried by fleas living on rats, centered around Skid Row, the epicenter of the city’s homeless population. The ban on evicting vagrants or preventing them from covering the streets in filth has been a boot for the rats.

And Los Angeles Democrats even took special steps to protect the rats by banning rat poison.

Like every other quality of life problem, New York City’s rat crisis turned critical under De Blasio.

According to Open the Books, there were 44,850 rat sightings in Brooklyn and 33,553 in Manhattan alone. Despite spending $32 million and a trap that drowns rats in liquor, there’s no end in sight. A 2014 study estimated that there were over 2 million rats in New York City. At the rate at which rats reproduce, there will soon be more rats than Democrats in the Big Apple.

In Washington D.C., the 4th rattiest city in America, Hillary Clinton won 86% of the vote. In San Francisco, the 5th rattiest city, 84% of residents voted for Hillary.

It's only fitting that the rats should be overrunning D.C.

When visiting the Lincoln Memorial before President Trump's inauguration, I saw a rat scurrying up the stairs. Even the Washington Post, the city's official rat paper, has run headlines like, "I saw 13 rats in 20 minutes. D.C., we have a rodent crisis."

Rat complaints in D.C. rose from 2,443 in 2014 to 4,097 in 2019.

Mayor Muriel Bowser responded with rat tours dubbed "Rat Walks". They haven’t helped.

To no one’s surprise, Capitol Hill has the third highest number of rat complaints in D.C.

Meanwhile, San Francisco had legalized public vagrancy, resulting in streets that were covered in human waste. Like Los Angeles, Democrats banned some forms of rat poison making it all but impossible to kill them. Exterminators are so in demand that they have waiting lists.

"Poop. Needles. Rats. Homeless camp pushes SF neighborhood to the edge," the San Francisco Chronicle headlined one story. And then there are San Fran locals like "rat girl" who breeds and releases hundreds of rats in the city.

No wonder, San Fran has as many rats as Democrats.

Detroit is once again the 6th rattiest city in America. Motor City rats are also car enthusiasts and have been known to crawl into cars, chew up the fuel injection system, or nest in the dashboard. One mechanic reported 15 cars damaged by rats in six weeks.

And that might not be the only thing the rats are chewing up.

Too many votes were registered in 37% of Detroit's precincts during the 2016 election, but it wasn't enough to hand Hillary a win in Michigan. This time out there might be more rats.

Philadelphia rose 3 places to become the 7th most rat-infested city in the country.

"They look like cats to me," one resident complained. Another neighborhood described “jumping rats” operating in broad daylight.

82% of Philadelphia residents voted for Hillary Clinton and only 15% for President Trump.

While there isn’t a firm statistical correlation between the number of rats per square mile and the number of votes cast for Democrats, any city infested with rats is also infested with Democrats.

And vice versa.

It’s no coincidence that the most rat-infested cities in the country are also the places where Hillary, and any Democrat with a pulse, will walk away with at least 70% of the vote.

Minneapolis, unsurprisingly, Denver, and Baltimore round out the rest of the top 10. What unites all of them is an unswerving allegiance to the Democrats and a massive rat problem. Of the 20 rattiest cities in America, only two have Republican mayors.

Baltimore does indeed have rats. It also has two kinds of elected Democrat officials: those who have already been convicted of a crime and those who have not. Charm City is unique in the number of city officials who have been arrested and tried for assorted forms of corruption.

As long as someone rats them out.

The Baltimore City Council consists entirely of Democrats. Baltimore's last Democrat mayor won three quarters of the vote. Baltimore's rat problem has been growing with its Democrat problem.

A Baltimore City Health Department report conceded that “the rodent infestation rate in Baltimore is six times the national average.” And, unlike other cities, Baltimore has mostly given up. Rats are the city’s unofficial mascot, showing up on souvenir t-shirts and sweatshirts.

From “Charm City” to The City That Reads” to “The Greatest City in America”, Baltimore has tried out many slogans. But there’s only one that really fits it.

Rat City.

Meanwhile the fallout from Mayor Pugh's arrest, conviction and sentencing on fraud and conspiracy charges, continues to reverberate through the Democrat establishment.

Rat City has many rats, but maybe they aren’t Baltimore’s biggest problem. Democrats are.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

 

Tags: Baltimore, Democrats, Los Angeles, New York, recent

 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

Positive Rights vs Negative Rights

Dan Mitchell December 1, 2020 @ International Liberty

Back in 2017, I compared the welfare state vision of “positive rights” with the classical liberal vision of “negative rights.” To elaborate, here’s a video from Learn Liberty that compares these visions.

For what it’s worth, I don’t like the terms “positive rights” and “negative rights” for the simple reason that an uninformed person understandably might conclude that “positive” is good and “negative” is bad.

Needless to say, I don’t think it’s good for people to think they have a right to other people’s money.

That’s why I prefer Professor Skoble’s use of the terms “liberties” and “entitlements,” which we also find in this slide from Professor Imran Ahmad Sajid of the University of Pakistan.

As you might expect, there are plenty of politicians who try to buy votes with an agenda of “positive rights.” Bernie Sanders, for instance, constantly argued that people have a “right” to all sorts of goodies.

But he wasn’t the first to make the case for unlimited entitlements.

Franklin Roosevelt was one of America’s worst presidents, in part because his policies deepened and lengthened the Great Depression. But also because he pushed the idea that people have the right to get all sorts of taxpayer-financed handouts.

Let’s see what some other people have to say about this topic.

In his National Review column, Kevin Williamson looks at the logical fallacy of positive rights.

Positive rights run into some pretty obvious problems if you think about them for a minute, which is why so much of our political discourse is dedicated to moralistic thundering specifically designed to prevent such thinking. Consider, in the American context, the notion that health care is a right. Declaring a right in a scarce good such as health care is intellectually void, because moral declarations about rights do not change material facts. If you have five children and three apples and then declare that every child has a right to an apple of his own, then you have five children and three apples and some meaningless posturing — i.e., nothing in reality has changed, and you have added only rhetoric instead of adding apples. In the United States, we have so many doctors, so many hospitals and clinics, so many MRI machines, etc. This imposes real constraints on the provision of health care. If my doctor works 40 hours a week, does my right to health care mean that a judge can order him to work extra hours to accommodate my rights? For free? If I have a right to health care, how can a clinic or a physician charge me for exercising my right? If doctors and hospitals have rights of their own — for example, property rights in their labor and facilities — how is it that my rights supersede those rights?

And here’s what he says about “negative rights.”

A negative right is a right to not be constrained. The right to free speech, for example, implies only non-interference. The right to freedom of the press doesn’t mean the government has to give you a press. The good of negative freedom is, in the economic sense, not rivalrous — your exercise of free speech doesn’t leave less freedom of speech out there for others to enjoy

And Larry Reed opines on the issue for the Foundation for Economic Education.

America is a nation founded on the notion of rights. …Despite the centrality of rights in American history, it’s readily apparent today that Americans are of widely different views on what a right is, how many we have, where rights come from, or why we have any in the first place. …if you need something, does that mean you have a right to it? If I require a kidney, do I have a right to one of yours? Is a right something that can or should be granted or denied by majority vote?

He helpfully provides a list of negative rights (a.k.a., liberties).

And he argues that positive rights (a.k.a., entitlements) are not real rights.

The bottom line, he explains, is that so-called positive rights impose obligations on other people.

Indeed, they can only be provided by coercion.

The first list comprises what are often called both “natural rights” and “negative rights”—natural because they derive from our essential nature as unique, sensate individuals and negative because they don’t impose obligations on others beyond a commitment to not violate them. The items in the second are called “positive rights” because others must give them to you or be coerced into doing so if they decline. …while I believe neither you nor I have a right to any of those disparate things in the second list, I hasten to add that we certainly have the right to seek them, to create them, to receive them as gifts from willing benefactors, or to trade for them. We just don’t have a right to compel anyone to give them to us or pay for them.

There’s not much I can add to this issue, given the wisdom contained in the video and in the articles by Williamson and Reed.

So I’ll close with the should-be-obvious point that a system based on entitlements only works if there are enough people pulling the wagon to support all the people riding in the wagon.

But that kind of society contains the seeds of its own downfall (think Greece or Venezuela) because it subsidizes dependency and penalizes production.

Which means, as Margaret Thatcher warned us, that positive rights can’t be provided when politicians run out of other people’s money.

A Woke Museum in an Illiterate City Goes for Broke

Daniel Greenfield November 30, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 Baltimore is overrun by murders, rats, and rampant illiteracy. Then its art museum went woke.

Like a medieval monastery after the fall of Rome, the Baltimore Museum of Art is a relic of another time filled with the relics of another era. The Baltimorean merchants, bankers, and railroad tycoons who decided a century ago that their city needed an art museum to boost its civic pride are long gone and Charm City’s favorite work of art is its mascot: a giant rat.

Does a city where a third of the population is functionally illiterate need a large collection of French impressionists? And does one of the nation’s murder capitals need Andy Warhol?

When the woke Visigoths took over the BMA, they came for the white men first. And the museum’s collection is full of the works of white men: precious and worthless both.

"At the BMA we have a singular vision for our immediate future, which is to put equity, diversity, and justice at the forefront of every decision," Christopher Bedford, the museum's very woke curator, declared.

Asma Naeem, a Pakistani immigrant and the BMA's new art curator, attacked a critic for not understanding the “equity-based vision, values and considerations that undergird our decision.”

Art, schmart. Who needs art when you’ve got the creative fires of social justice that made Soviet art into an influential movement that changed the world as we know it burning in your soy belly?

Bedford, who is an extremely white man, announced that the museum would no longer be buying art by white men this year. Between Rembrandt, Titian, and Durer, they've got too many.

“You don’t just purchase one painting by a female artist of color and hang it on the wall,” he insisted. “To rectify centuries of imbalance, you have to do something radical.”

Bedford had already begun purging the collection by putting seven major paintings on sale, including by Warhol, to buy “art” by “artists of color”. Since Bedford wouldn’t know art if it fell on his head, which at the BMA is a possibility, that part was easy. The rest was complicated.

Pesky questions about the sale reared their head, like did Bedford even have a right to sell the art. The sale or ‘deaccession’ as they call it in the art world, was happening under regulations meant to help museums deal with the pandemic. But the BMA wasn’t reacting to the Wuhan Virus, but the Woke Virus, and it wasn’t selling art because it needed money, it needed woke.

And it was unclear if the paintings had been gifted under conditions that would allow the sale.

Prominent voices in the art community, including former key figures at the BMA, protested. Sothebys blinked, announcing the auction would be postponed, and then unblinked, claiming that the postponement had been an error in which it confused an Islamic museum in Israel with the BMA. That’s the sort of natural mistake that happens at a major auction house all the time.

Finally, the BMA’s own board canceled the auction at the last minute blaming the public outcry.

More importantly, the Association of Art Museum Directors made it clear that the BMA was abusing its relaxed guidelines during the pandemic to do something pandemic-unrelated.

“Our vision and our goals have not changed,” the BMA unapologetically declared “It will take us longer to achieve them, but we will do so through all the means at our disposal.”

The BMA will lose $50 million with former board chairs pulling their donations in order to make $65 million. But it’s about the destructiveness of the act more than the actual money. How else can the BMA’s new leadership prove that they’re revolutionary visionaries than through a round of politically correct épater le bourgeois virtue signaling and racial divisiveness by a white man?

“The most important artists working today, in my view, are black Americans,” Bedford declared.

By “important”, Bedford and the museum of an illiterate city don’t mean talented or aesthetically pleasing. When your “lens” is social justice, then important means anti-American. And so the most important artists are the ones who have the most moral leverage for hating this country.

There are few aesthetics at stake in trading one set of nonsensical childish images for another, the broad abstract brushstrokes of Franz Kline’s Green Cross and the green finger painting splatters of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Painting, for Mark Bradford's hyperkinetically colorful visual gibberish, or Amy Sherald, who produced the notoriously terrible Michelle Obama portrait.

The art world dispensed with aesthetics and tradition, leaving nothing but abstract concepts.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is another scene on the woke battlefield, replacing abstract sneering at American culture and religion with abstractions that rage against America.

American wokeness is just pop Marxism. Our cultural revolution is a rerun of Russian and Chinese totalitarianism with corporate sponsors.

During the Bavarian Soviet Republic, there was an abortive attempt to set fire to the museums. The Russian Futurists declared in one of their manifestos that the creative works of the past had to be “thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity.” But all of this posturing ended with the Futurists and everyone else being forced to produce Socialist Realism for propaganda.

The only thing totalitarian regimes really want when it comes to art is mass communications.

The Baltimore Museum of Art, like many institutions public and private, is being reimagined as the projection of a new political order, each part of it meant to articulate a single ideology. The result isn’t an art museum, just as socialist realism’s propaganda posters weren’t art. Art, as a painting or a museum, is meant to inspire and reflect, while propaganda short circuits both.

Propagandists don’t want people to think. What they want is for them to agree.

In art, as in life, the initial revolutionary thrill of destroying the old gives way to the stultifying reality of the totalitarian order. Totalitarian revolutions don’t create, they destroy, and their only message is the familiar one from Shepard Fairey's old "Obey" giant stickers.

Fairey would become much more famous for creating the iconic Obama “Hope” poster.

"How did this work, no matter how righteous or well-intentioned, help George Floyd as he was pinned to the ground by a white man in a uniform, in broad daylight, surrounded by onlookers, as his life faded away over almost nine minutes?" Bedford demanded to know in the Baltimore Museum's new vision statement.

What Baltimore really needs is less traditional art and more art to inspire race riots.

Andy Warhol probably wasn’t much use to George Floyd on account of being dead. Floyd might have tried to hit the officer with a copy of Warhol’s The Last Supper, one of some hundred distotrted yellow reproductions of the famous painting, the BMA wanted to sell for $40 million.

None of the artists being sold off would have helped George Floyd because they’re also dead or fairly elderly. None of them are located in Minneapolis. The BMA’s largest Matisse collection in the world would have been even more useless as Matisse is dead and also not in Minneapolis.

Not to mention every BMA artist from Rembrandt to Picasso. If the purpose of art is to save career criminals high on drugs when they get into confrontations with police, then art is useless.

But that’s activism, not art. And when art melds with activism, it becomes propaganda.

What the BMA’s director was saying is that art is useless unless it’s agitprop. Nothing is of any value unless it serves the cause of Black Lives Matter. Or, as Stalin once put it, artists are the “engineers of souls”. Behind the feeble attempt at poetry was the reduction of art to machinery. Engineers were needed to service tractors and artists would have to service their operators. The goal of art, like farm equipment, was to keep the vast failing machine of socialism running.

Baltimore is almost as much of a disaster as the Soviet Union and needs its own propaganda.

The declaration that art is useless unless it serves a racial agenda is the familiar one of Socialist Realism which declared that art which doesn’t serve the working class is worthless.

Or as the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers declared, “the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism."

But the BMA credo has become that of American culture. Everything, from standup comedy to fashion to literature to journalism to education, must serve a single political purpose. If your comedy routine or your capri pants wouldn’t have saved George Floyd, they must do better.

Woke culture transformed comedy into hysterical political screeds (not in the funny sense) and everything else into a seesaw of pandering and indoctrination that conscends to minorities and badgers white people without ever creating anything of lasting value or merit because it exists purely for the needs of the moment. The irony of jettisoning Warhol for woke agitprop is that the woke art is as disposable as the commercial advertising culture that he was mocking. When everything is a slogan, then nothing has a message that lasts beyond momentary manipulation.

And an art museum, a university, or a national culture built on such things has no future.

Just ask the Soviets.

But Baltimore, like so many American cities, has no future. The old Baltimore that built the BMA envisioned a booming tomorrow and dug into its pockets to show it was as good as New York City. Where is Baltimore headed besides gangs murdering each other on broken streets, sewers full of dead rats, drug deals, corrupt politicians and mobs ravaging what’s left of the fallen city?

When you’re already broke, you might as well go woke. It makes the ride down more interesting.

The looting of the BMA is a perfect coda to a looted city. The old BMA was meant to inspire and some of the museum’s impressive art collection still can and does. But culture can’t thrive without a culture. The Greeks and Romans didn’t lack for great works of art, what they lacked at the end was the character and vision to sustain a culture that had been founded on great things.

An art museum in a national disaster of a city is little more than a medieval monastery holding on to some fragments of civilization while outside warlords and their mobs loot and pillage cities.

And the woke Visigoths have come for the museum even if they don’t understand what’s in it.

"Museums are not mausoleums or treasure houses," a letter co-written by Asma Naeem snippily concludes. Unfortunately, not for Naeem, but for the human race, the BMA is a treasure house of French art, one of the greatest such treasure houses in the country, that is now at risk.

The woke age is a dark age and the pillaging is underway.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

 

Tags: Baltimore, Culture, culture war, recent

 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Stephen Moore: Bad News for Progressives: It's Still a Conservative Country

 By Stephen Moore | December 1, 2020 @ CNSNews

It's not exactly clear how it happened. No one expected it, least of all the media and pollsters. But that promised big blue wave of Democratic victories across the country turned instead into a red tidal wave from coast to coast. Most progressive ballot issues in the states — from tax increases to racial preferences — also came crashing down.

A big reason for this turnaround in the election was the massive turnout for President Donald Trump on Election Day. The irony is that Trump's coattails pulled hundreds of Republicans over the goal line — but they didn't save him from an apparent razor-tight defeat.

So, how deep were the losses for the Democrats? In the U.S. House, Nancy Pelosi thought her troops would gain 10 to 12 seats. Instead, they lost, at last count, nine.

But the real carnage was in the state houses. Hold on to your hats; here is the latest from our allies at the American Legislative Exchange Council. The GOP gained a total of 192 House and 40 Senate seats. Republicans flipped control of three chambers.

As a result of these big and improbable wins, Republicans now have majority control in both House and Senate chambers in 31 of 50 states. Democrats have control in only 18 states. That's a map of the USA that looks awfully red throughout middle America, with only the rusting Northeast and the West Coast colored blue.

What is truly stunning about this story is that Democrats and liberal/progressive donors (Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, et al.) poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the states to take over legislatures with unprecedented spending in Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The American Legislative Exchange Council president, Lisa Nelson, estimates that Democrats outspent Republicans "at least 3-to-1 in the states." And all they got was a lousy T-shirt.

Money just doesn't buy you love with voters.

Speaking of money, voters don't want politicians taking more of it from them. In Illinois, Colorado, and California, major tax hikes lost, and tax cuts were approved by voters. Racial preferences, rent control, and pro-union measures went down in flames in California — the cradle of progressive wacko ideas.

Even Democrats admit that their party's embrace of socialism was a major turnoff to voters. Rep. Abigail Spanberger from Virginia won her race, but she isn't a happy camper.

"We need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again," she says. Democrats, she angrily continued, "lost good members because of that."

Of course, Republicans seemingly lost by a razor's edge the prize of the White House, which is a stinging defeat for conservatism. But no one in modern times has turned out voters like Donald J. Trump. Even USA Today admits that it was the big "Trump turnout" that swung state and local elections in a conservative direction.

If the Democrats govern as the party of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they can expect even deeper losses in 2022. They may even suffer their ultimate nightmare, a return to the White House by Trump in 2024. Trumpism and putting America first are still alive and well.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy."

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Opinion – Get Ready for Power Blackouts Under Biden Administration

By Letters to the Editor November 29, 2020

 

By Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris

The power disaster unfolding in California will soon occur across the country if Joe Biden gets his way. Just as the former Vice-President plans for America as a whole, the Golden State is sweeping away the forms of energy that have been reliable for decades. Power outages are now commonplace in California. Last summer, the state suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years. Imagine if this happened in Chicago in the middle of winter.

California’s trouble is explained by officials who now openly admit to an over-reliance on wind and solar power. The governor said there was not enough wind to keep the turbines going with cloud cover and nightfall restricting solar power. The Los Angeles Times reported:

“… gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them …”

Consequently, the state has fallen thousands of megawatts behind its needs. Governor Gavin Newsom said, “we failed to predict and plan for these shortages” and took responsibility for the rolling blackouts. He wants everyone to conserve while they look for new sources of energy, likely fossil fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

All this is happening while California continues its intent to transition to 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% “climate-friendly energy” by 2045, as required by state law. Indeed, in their October 6^th open letter to Newsom, the heads of the California’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission wrote: “We are unwavering in our commitment to meeting California’s clean energy and climate goals.” And, Biden plans to go even further, committing to making the nation 100% renewable within 15 years.

California’s shift toward so-called green energy, which is actually anything but, is being echoed by politicians across the nation. The result, especially in states that don’t enjoy California’s mostly benign weather, is going to be that those in the poorest neighborhoods and those on fixed incomes may be forced to choose between heating or eating.

Coherent energy systems are designed with the understanding that portions of the system will be offline from time to time. Thus, one compensates for this with reserve power at the ready. However, California has closed its margin for error in response to anti-nuclear sentiments and climate change concerns.

Power outages cannot always be avoided and are more common than one may think. For example, Illinois had 871 outages, the 10th most by state, between 2008 and 2017. Texas had nearly twice as many, giving it the dubious distinction of ranking number two in the list. But these pale in comparison to California which has the least reliable electrical power system in the nation. It leads in power outages every year. Between 2008 and 2017, they had 4,297 power outages.

The origin of the problem is partly California’s Senate Bill 1368 which, in 2006, established the state’s emission standards to reduce greenhouse gases from power plants. Following that year, 11 coal-fired plants were closed and three were converted to biomass. Only one remains. The state also reduced its normal reliance on energy from out of state coal plants.

Yielding to anti-nuclear activists, the state closed all but one nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, as well. That plant generates fully 8.6% of California’s total generation electricity every year.

But Diablo Canyon will soon be closed too. In 2016, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a Joint Proposal to phase out the remaining nuclear power in the state. So, the operating licenses for Diablo Canyon’s two units will not be renewed when they expire in 2024 and 2025. Ironically, the Commission did not approve Pacific Gas & Electric’s proposal for resources to replace the station’s output.

And it gets worse. California wants all citizens to switch their natural gas stoves to electric as part of their global warming initiatives. More than 30 cities have already enacted bans on gas appliances including San Francisco. The state is also hoping to eliminate all gasoline and diesel cars in favor of plug-in electric automobiles.

So, just as Biden promises for the country as a whole, California is sacrificing reliable electrical power as part of their impossible crusade to ‘stop climate change.’ If more rational heads don’t soon prevail, blackouts are indeed coming.

_________________________________________________________

Ohio-based Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Advisor to the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). Tom Harris is Executive Director of ICSC.

The views, opinions, and positions expressed by all columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of NetNewsLedger.

Do you have an opinion you would like to share? email to newsroom @ netnewsledger.com

Sheldon Whitehouse’s Climate Inquisition continues

Senator Torquemada wants to jail those who dissent from his alarmist views on climate

Paul Driessen 

Five years ago, I said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) behaves like Torquemada, using Inquisition-like tactics to harass “manmade climate crisis” skeptics, and threatening to prosecute them for racketeering. Tomas de Torquemada was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition that interrogated, tortured, imprisoned and executed thousands for religious heresy.

The senator took great umbrage, and denounced me in Senate chambers where I once worked. But he didn’t change his ways. If anything, he has become more intolerant and vindictive.

He recently said Democrat control of the Senate would enable him and his colleagues to launch investigations, haul climate realists before committees (for star-chamber show trials), and even employ grand juries and criminal prosecutions – to intimidate, silence and punish climate crisis nonbelievers.

People could certainly conclude that the thin-skinned senator would feel right at home in Inquisition Spain, Stalinist Russia, Red Guard and Xi Jinping China, or book-burning pre-Holocaust fascist Europe. Their history of silencing dissenters, erasing them from history, and sending them off to gulags and salt mines (or worse) is legendary. Their economic and governing ideology is classic fascism:

an extreme, intolerant system, under which an authoritarian government does not own businesses and industries outright, but does dictate what they can make, do, sell and say – while controlling citizens’ thoughts, speech and choices – through intimidation, silencing, arrest, prosecution, and fear of being fined, jailed, fired, sent to penal or reeducation colonies, and being beaten or executed.

These tactics are reprehensible and dictatorial. They are un-American and anti-science. Indeed, science achieves no progress without dissent, discussion and debate. It requires not just hypotheses, theories and computer models, but solid, empirical evidence to confirm or disprove hypotheses, models and predictions.

Discussion, debate, dissent and evidence are especially vital in addressing the assertion that humanity faces an unprecedented manmade climate crisis. That assertion is being used to justify demands that the United States, Europe and developed world eliminate the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of our energy, petrochemical and pharmaceutical raw materials, fertilizers and countless other benefits.

It is being used to justify demands that we replace this reliable, affordable energy and raw material base with wind, solar, battery and biofuel power. Not only are these alternatives intermittent, weather-dependent and far more expensive. They involve extensive mining, land use, wildlife, pollution and other environmental impacts. They are not renewable, sustainable, environment-friendly or climate-safe.

In the United States alone, we would have to replace some 7.5 billion megawatt-hours of electricity and electricity-equivalent fossil fuel use per year; replace enormous amounts of oil and natural gas raw materials; and overhaul our transportation, home heating and other systems. That would require millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of 1000-pound battery modules, tens of millions of acres of corn, canola, soybean and other biofuel crops – and tens of trillions of dollars.

Democrat urban population and voter centers will likely oppose those industrial-scale installations in their backyards. They would have little objection to locating them in what many ruling, media and Hollywood elites imperiously and derisively refer to “flyover country” – western, Midwestern and southern states.

This “transformation” – under the Paris climate treaty, a Green New Deal or a Biden-Harris regulatory program – would massively disrupt America’s economy, jobs, living standards, health and wellbeing, especially for poor, minority, blue-collar, fixed-income and flyover country families and communities.

Climate alarmists insist that any lost jobs would be replaced with “green” jobs. But those would be mostly minimum-wage positions: hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling, removing and landfilling turbines, panels and batteries. Moreover, most of those green technologies would be manufactured overseas, especially in China, because environmentalists battle any mining in the USA, and a climate-focused energy system would provide insufficient reliable, affordable power for factories.

Those huge and unprecedented amounts of mining and manufacturing would require fossil fuels. So the only thing that would change is where the fossil fuel use and emissions occur.

It would be mostly in Asia and Africa, in countries that are not obligated under the Paris climate treaty to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; countries that will build as many hundreds or thousands of coal and gas-fired power plants as needed to lift their people out of poverty  ... and make “green energy” technologies they will happily sell to America, Australia, Canada and Europe.

That means, even if the US went cold-turkey on fossil fuels, it would make no difference to global GHG emissions or global atmospheric concentrations. And that means, even if carbon dioxide is the primary factor in climate change, destroying US and other modern economies would bring no climate benefits.

The EU’s and UK’s unwavering belief in human-caused climate cataclysms is already hammering its industries, workers and families, as numerous articles attest: here, here, here and here, for instance.  

Thankfully, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that assertions of Climate Armageddon have been miscalculated, exaggerated or fabricated. Average global temperatures are rising far less rapidly than predicted by climate models: by at least a half-degree F.

Violent (F4-F5) US tornadoes have actually declined in number the past 35 years (1985-2020) versus the previous 35 years (1950-1984); and in 2018 not one F5 tornado touched down in the United States. For a record twelve years, from Wilma in 2005 until Harvey and Irma in 2017, no Category 3 to 5 hurricane struck the US mainland. Overall, there is little or no trend in tropical cyclone activity or intensity.

All that is not surprising in light of new research by Drs. William Happer and Willem van Wijngaarden that strongly indicates even doubling carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in Earth’s atmosphere would have minuscule effects on global temperatures and climate (but would benefit plant growth).

Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish human influences from natural factors, fluctuations and cycles regarding temperatures, polar ice, storms and droughts. Some scientists certainly claim otherwise – and generally just blame humans. But they have little or no actual, empirical evidence to support their claims, predictions and models. They simply say the science is settled, and we must ban fossil fuels, so shut up.

With so much at stake for America and the world, this is completely intolerable. At the very least, those claiming we face a climate calamity must be required to present solid empirical evidence to support their assertions – and engage in in robust, transparent debates with manmade climate change skeptics.

That is precisely what Senator Torquemada seems determined to prevent and punish, while transforming “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into a Russian Politburo or Chinese National People’s Congress – and an integral part of the $multi-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex.

In that quest he would certainly be aided by the Big Media and Big Tech moguls who share his views on climate change, silencing scientists and evidence that contradicts climate cataclysm catechism, and blacklisting “climate heretics” in government, academic and corporate circles.  

People have been conditioned to kowtow to government lockdown edicts, to save humanity from Covid. Climate alarmists assume we will now be sufficiently compliant about banning fossil fuels to “save the planet,” when we’re trying to recover from Covid. Or their Torquemadas will make us compliant.

It’s time to reject politicized junk science, demand debate, and resist green climate and energy edicts. Perhaps most of all, the US Senate must assert its Advice and Consent responsibilities on the Paris climate treaty, the most far-reaching international agreement Americans were ever asked to ratify.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

 

Why Our Universities Have Failed

Something went wrong with the rapidly expanding university in the 1960s, and the new 21st century, high-tech, globalized campus has made the mess it inherited dangerous. 

By Victor Davis Hanson November 29, 2020 @ American Greatness

Where did Antifa youth rioting in the streets receive their intellectual and ethical bearings? Why are the First and Second Amendments no longer fully operative? How did the general population become nearly ignorant of their Constitution, history, and the hallmarks of their culture? Why do employers no longer equate a bachelor’s degree with competency in oral and written communications, basic computation, and reasoning? How in the 21st century did race and ethnicity come to define who we are rather than become incidental to our individual personas? In answering all these questions, we always seem to return to higher education—the font of much of our contemporary malaise.

The Perfect Storm

A perfect storm of events—many of them reforms with unintended consequences—have conspired to end disinterested education as we once knew it.

The passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18—in response to widespread resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War—turned rhetorical campus activism into real progressive block voting. The campuses were no longer just free-speech zones, but woke reservoirs of millions of young voters, a new political and mostly subsidized constituency with clout, to which universities catered.

Globalization enriched the coasts. Seven-billion-person markets were translated into multibillion-dollar endowments of a magnitude never imagined. The Ivy League, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, the UC system, and dozens of other research universities between Boston and Miami, and San Diego and Seattle, partnered with corporations and solicited foreign government money. They opened up overseas satellites, welcomed in hundreds of thousands of foreign students, and began adjusting their curricula to reflect transnational issues.

So university “development” was no longer the sleepy domain of burned-out faculty, who “went into administration” for a few years before retirement to glad-hand a few wealthy alumni. Instead, it became a massive industry of tapping into the huge global fortunes of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, vertically integrated corporations, and mostly illiberal petro-governments in the Middle East and Chinese-communist approved conglomerates.

Floods of cash created new “centers” and “institutes” on campus. The vast majority were boutique left-wing. The disconnected result was often bizarre: students living in upscale campus dorms, enjoying Club Med gyms and recreation centers, and replete with all sorts of influential internships and overseas enrichment—as they cosplayed Marxist activists.

The legions who staffed the new universities were upper-middle class, affluent and the beneficiaries of the privilege which they trashed from 8-5 before returning home to comfort. Few tenured grandees cared about growing percentages of exploited and part-time lecturers, the campus’ version of the interior deplorables, who taught large courses for little pay and no security. It was about 2008 when I began to notice two growing phenomena when I walked to work on the Stanford campus: in the C/student lots, there was a growing epidemic of student Lexuses, Audis, and BMWs, even as student protests were growing shriller, more radical, and intolerant.

Massive immigration—nearly 50 million current American residents were not born in the United States, including 27 percent of the California resident population—redefined the old 88-12 percent white/black American binary into “diversity.” The melting pot of assimilation, in retrograde fashion, was replaced by salad-bowl segregation.

Class and historical issues faded in the face of a new dogma of “white supremacy.” That now empty banality was the banner for a new constituency of 30 percent of the country. Regardless of their own wealth or absence of past grievance, dozens of ethnic and gender groups now were “victimized” on their claims of a non-white or non-male appearance. And they demanded reparatory redress in admissions and applications, and institutionalized their lamentations in the hiring of faculty and administrators.

Wealthy white females, upper-middle class immigrants from Brazil, and the children of Jamaican or Nigerian doctors, all in theory felt the university should provide them some sort of redress for their intersectional, inclusive victimhood. In the zero-sum game of university curricula, deductive “-studies” courses sprung up to indoctrinate students in “what” to think, rather than inductively how and why. Therapy replaced tragedy in the study of the past and present.

Federal loans (see below) infused billions of dollars into the university, while ensuring ever greater moral hazards of default. Students came to believe that student loans were near-zero interest, “free” money. The loans might not really have to be paid back. And they were a pathway to an impressive salary even if some day they were to be called in.

Many loans easily exceed 5-6 percent of compounded interest. Such guaranteed income greenlighted university price-gouging, and were not forgiven (at least not yet). To justify the illiberal usury and Ponzi schemes, progressive universities winked and nodded that in “our globalized world” a “degree”—i.e., their monopoly on branding students—from a “good” college ensured lifetime higher salaries unavailable to “them,” who worked with their hands, built, assembled, farmed, or delivered. These were to be the new despised “losers” who never were properly prepped in “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”

The Wages of Debt

The result is that students and graduates now struggle under $1.6 trillion in aggregate—and growing—student debt. These millions for the most part are not for Ivy League undergraduates, but for students who ran up their debts at thousands of public universities and small, private undergraduate liberal arts colleges. Current calls to cancel that obligation assume at least three things:

1) Graduates who scrimped and saved either to pay upfront for college or to pay off their debts, are seen as naïve if not delusional. So did paying what they owed prove a chump’s decision?

2) Those who either could never afford college or chose to take their chances in the workplace without a degree, as taxpayers, are now obliged to help pay off what their supposedly better educated counterparts would or could not?

3) The next cohort of students, hand-in-glove with rapacious colleges, will learn what exactly from debt relief—that they too can borrow without worry on the expectation of yet another eventual amnesty?

In fairness, for hundreds of thousands of youth, there is no university assurance that such expensive branding will lead to the sort of job that would allow such staggering obligations to be repaid. Indeed the debt affects us all. It is a drag on half of an entire generation—a fact well known to those who run universities but one that is apparently of little moral concern to them. The ancient formula of four years at a university and a job have metamorphosed into six to eight years now and then in college, as a low-wage job scarcely pays the interest on a student loan.

The result is that our traditional cursus honorum is warped. Marriage? Later than ever. Childbearing? Near record-low fertility. Home ownership? Receding. It is no exaggeration that all the referents of traditionalism and conservatism—the grown-up responsibilities of career, marriage, family, and home ownership—are inert. They seem replaced by ever more prolonged adolescence, as one drifts in and out of near perennial psychological student-hood. And the regression is a particularly dangerous sort of infantilization.

Nothing historically has proven more dangerous to a society than millions of half-educated college students and graduates, indebted, either idle, underemployed, or poorly remunerated, full of pride in their largely suspect majors, and bitter that the supposedly less educated and not as sophisticated cohorts are deservedly making more than they. Their educations ensured that they are glib, but not necessarily industrious. An unemployed sociology graduate, up to his neck in debt, without a good job is a volatile citizen—once he grasps too late in his late 20s that he is no better educated than a plumber or electrician, and far less compensated. Mutatis mutandis, these profiles were the wannabe mid-echelon of the French and Bolshevik Revolutions.

The country is split in two. Red-state conservatives and blue-state progressives roughly balance each other. Not so on campus. Various surveys suggest 95 percent or more of the faculty is left-leaning and often eager to enforce their conformity of thought and ideology on students. The latter enter college worried that their parents’ views may be seen as liabilities by those “enlightened” who grade them. The university makes no attempt to defend its lack of intellectual diversity. By default, one is to assume that it believes that either perfect progressivism needs no balance, or its own biases are properly offset by those of society at large.

Corporate Education

Today’s global research universities are multibillion-dollar enterprises more akin to multinational corporations than to the idyllic undergraduate campuses of traditional lore. Yet huge endowments and their income remain tax-exempt. Few occupations outside academia ensure veritable lifetime employment through tenure—a rarified tradition designed to ensure free expression and diversity of thought, but which may have had the exact opposite effect of guaranteeing unchecked intellectual intolerance and suppression of free expression. The less a tenured scholar produces, and the poorer his teaching will be, so the more likely his idle mind, as recompense for mediocrity, turns to rooting out purporting enemies of the people.

But most importantly, universities no longer inform students of the huge and often dangerous choices they make as teenagers when they enroll. How will they pay off such huge debts? Which majors are likely to earn what sort of income? Can students at least receive an itemized bill of charges to apprise them where exactly their tuition dollars are allocated—and thus where they could be trimmed?

In sum, if universities are increasingly akin to corporations, why then should they assume that the moral hazards of their risky behavior fall on others? Why cannot schools with ample endowments guarantee their own student loans to ensure such exposure reminds them to control the costs they charge students?

If student applicants must submit standardized scores on the theory their prior high schools’ grades are too idiosyncratic to offer reliable constant standards of achievement, then why should not higher education adhere to its own rules?

Why, then, not have exit exams to guarantee employees and professional schools that a BA or GPA from Harvard really is superior to one from a land-grant college, through a standardized national exit exam? Why are GPAs in high schools—but not in colleges—subject to authentication and audit through standardized tests?

Today what is college for?

To teach induction and empiricism, and empower such skills through a common body of knowledge, with shared classical referents of science, mathematics, literature, history, language, and philosophy? To ensure that a student’s future stays inquisitive, enhancing his contribution to his nation? To inculcate a sense of civics and social morality that emphasizes the values of free speech and expression, individualism, tolerance, public service and constitutional government? To seek and reinforce commonalities between citizens of a shared republic?

Progressive Boot Camps

The implicit directive of undergraduate education is so often deductively to enhance progressive values that center on a common but unquestioned core: radical restructuring of the economy to fight “climate change,” the shift from free-market capitalism to state redistributionism, equality defined not as parity in opportunity but in result, the view that the Constitution is fossilized and an impediment to the moral arc of history, the surety that values are mostly race, class, and gender constructs and do not reflect eternal truths of unchanging human nature, identity politics above all, abortion on demand, and real doubt that the American project, now and in the past, has been a force for good.

This is the unquestioned creed of the university, its faculty advocacies, its students’ acquiescence, and the subtext of its themes in internal communiques. If anyone doubts, try the thought experiment of entering a university and throughout those four years suggesting that a heating planet may be primarily a result of age-old and cyclical natural phenomena, or that capitalism has brought far more out of poverty than statism, or praise the Second Amendment, or the melting pot over the salad bowl. Support a ban on partial or late-term abortion, and express faith that America has been good without having to be perfect. At each juncture, a student would not only be questioned but likely would find himself at a disadvantage academically and socially ostracized.

Something went wrong with the rapidly expanding university in the 1960s during the affluence and leisure of the postwar boom. And the new 21st century, high-tech, globalized campus has now made that mess it inherited dangerous.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).