Dots. Connected.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” - Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, true life hero of millennials, made this comment as part of his 2005 Stanford Commencement address. He advised the newly minted grads to pay attention to their intuition, pursue their passion, and use both to discover what they were good at. Unfortunately by 2005 college grads were ill-equipped to understand his fairly simple message. They got the part about following their heart – they’d been told that from the time they were in pre-school. What they didn’t get was the “work really, really hard” part and the “pick yourself up after you’ve failed and try again” part. By 2005 the education system had already been demolished and was no longer even pretending to teach people how to think but rather what to think. And since what they were to think was proscribed this critical piece of advice from Job’s speech also fell on deaf ears:

Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Dogma was all they’d ever learned. Fifteen years later and things have only gotten worse; dogma has completely replaced truth in the realm of ‘education’.

Daniel Henninger discusses this exact thing in his column this week.

How did the capitulation happen so fast? In fact, it was a long time coming. It is hardly an insight by now to blame this on the schools. But revisiting 30 years of educational irresponsibility seems necessary, insofar as the reality of the moment represents an erasure of history. If U.S. Grant, just toppled in San Francisco, was a racist, American history has indeed ceased to exist. History has a way of returning, and some day it will record how a generation of university presidents produced this result.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, when the notion of speech-codes emerged with formal restrictions on words and speech, the seeds of today’s cancel culture were planted with the acquiescence of university leaders.

When liberal professors embarked on tenure denials for conservative colleagues, who were important ballast to the growing groupthink, campus administrators caved.

Then when the students turned on some of these same liberal professors, with accusations of racism, they caved again.

I take umbrage with his referring to this moral failing as “education irresponsibility” however. It was a carefully calculated inculcation of Marxist principles into every step of education. Quite simply it was the lifework of people like Bill Ayers - an American hating communist -

and his cronies. We let them take over and run all the country’s major education schools, write all the country’s text books, rewrite all the country’s history: and then we wonder why they want to tear down statues of old white men like Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.

And we’re shocked when an anti-white racist like Nikole Hannah-Jones heads up the despicable New York Times 1619 Project.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is simply following her passion, her truth. That’s what happens when the education system eliminates “truth” and replaces it with relativity.

“Connecting the dots” means to understand one’s past, and to know how to put past decisions into context. When you change history, when you cancel the past, nobody learns nuthin’. And that’s just the way the Progressives like it.

No Selfies, Please

Here’s a shocking headline: Pew Analysis Shows Only 1 In 6 BLM Protesters Are Black

What? You mean white guilt is still a thing?

You know what isn’t real? White privilege.

Apparently so.

White folk prostrating themselves in protest in Boston

Seems an odd way to get a suntan, but as it turns out,

Demonstrators protesting police brutality marched onto I-35 from Austin Police headquarters

a pretty good way to get the get the Wuhan Cooties:

H/T Instapundit: click image to embiggen

As many people have noted, young women, millennial and Gen Z, make up one of the most vocal elements of the current Outrage Movement. My working theory is that they discovered the fun of roaring during their Pussy Hat phase,

and now they can’t shut up.

About anything.

  Put your phone down honey, there’s no crying in baseball and no selfies at the White Privilege/White Guilt rallies.

But please, stay focused on the current outrage. This isn’t about you.

An Immodest Proposal

Some Definitions:

Cancel: delete, annul, invalidate, nullify, abolish, void, revoke, negate, scratch

Cancel Culture: Canceling and cancel culture have to do with the removing of support for public figures in response to their objectionable behavior or opinions.

"“Cancel Culture” originally referred to having someone “canceled” from social media platforms for putting forth “objectionable behavior or opinions” but quickly mutated to a higher stakes game. Soon the woke mob was demanding that people whose opinions somehow offended them or they simply didn’t agree with be silenced not just on socials but in reality. They demanded they be fired from their jobs, their lectures, performances, writings be canceled, their products boycotted and ultimately their prior achievements negated.

The angry mob, feeling their unchecked power, quickly up their demands. Now they want police departments  canceled (because – oppression!) and statues (because, oppressors!) toppled.

So allow me, if I may, to make an immodest proposal: as we are clearly rewriting the history of this country anyway, and as it appears to be at the root of the angry mob’s animosity, why don’t we simply cancel slavery? Holocaust denial seems to work for Muslims so why can’t slavery denial work for Americans? We wouldn’t have to go so far as to claim it was a hoax, we can simply cancel it in its entirety – like it never even happened!

Just think of it as history restoration.

Quote of the Week

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." - Marshall McLuhan

Case in point:

FBI agents tried to find out who left a noose in Bubba Wallace’s garage stall over the weekend. The stock car series was left reeling and angered by the racist act that came less than two weeks after it banned the Confederate flag on its properties at Wallace’s urging. It has vowed to permanently bar the person responsible, but the investigation was in its early stages.

However:

The FBI says the noose found in Bubba Wallace's garage stall at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama had been there since 2019 -- and they've determined "no crime was committed."

In fact, NASCAR says the item in question is a "garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose" that had been positioned in the garage since last Fall. - TMZ

All of which demonstrates another famous Marshall McLuhanism:

“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” 

I’d say mission accomplished.

The 26-year-old Wallace was surrounded by all 39 other drivers in the moments before the race and they were joined by their crews in a march down pit road as they pushed his No. 43 to the front of the line. Wallace climbed out of his car and wept.

There’s a great metaphor in the headline: NASCAR Drivers Join Together To Push Bubba Wallace's Car To Front of the Line.

Dr. Sowell Asks A Simple Question

Some of us of a certain age have been asking the same question for a long while now. Since when are Americans so compliant, so acquiescent, so, so…fearful?

Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.

— Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) June 22, 2020

Worse than silent really, complicit. Whether we are talking about COVID or BLM, facemasks or prostration, people can’t wait to get onboard the train.

Good training for your lives under Islam rule, you idiotic tools

It seems to make no difference if the train they’re jumping on is driven and conducted by “authorities” or “activists” nor do they seem to care where it’s ultimately headed.

Yeah, let’s have more CHOP/CHAZ zones. That should provide economic well being and safety to one and all. Because this looks highly “sustainable.”

and safe.

And I note that 80 years on historians are still trying to figure out the answer to Dr. Sowell’s question with respect to Nazi Germany. The answer then and now is distressingly easy: sheeple.

Calvin, Hobbes and Victor Davis Hanson on Good and Evil

From Victor Davis Hanson’s The Looming ‘1984’ Election: 

Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.

The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.

One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple. -

We seem to be fine in the evil department, what man could use a little help with is the good.

When the media…reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?

When the violence of Antifa is quietly—or sometimes loudly—condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?

If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?

Next, They Came For The “Colinizers”

The mob mentality that has been on display for the past month culminated last week with the execution of statues across America. In one night alone San Francisco mobs managed to de-platform (literally) 3 statues and deface many more. First came President Ulysses S. Grant – who fought for the Union but married into a family that owned slaves before he fought to free the slaves. 

For the record, Michelle Obama also married into a family that once owned slaves.

Next, the statue of “Star Spangled Banner” author Francis Scott Key – slave owner, so no wonder we all need to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem.

All that’s left of Francis Scott Key in Golden Gate Park

“Kill All colinizers” – really? Too bad that’s what they’re teaching kids these ‘daze’ instead of spelling.

Also in Golden Gate Park the statue of Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes was defaced for the crime – I’m guessing here – of being an exponent of the Spanish (colinizers) culture.

Then came the statue of Catholic saint Father Junipero Serra, which was both vandalized and de-platformed for the sin of converting (colinizer) Native Americans to Roman Catholicism. Too bad he wasn’t a proponent of the religion of peace instead.

Fr. Serra, before and after

The Left’s march to madness is so highly predictable: first you abolish the crime, then you abolish I.C.E., then you abolish bail…pretty soon you’re arguing to abolish the police. None of this is hard to call; the progression of the cancel culture from Confederate flags to Confederate statues to…statues of the country founders.

And President Trump called it, years ago: 

When Donald Trump wondered whether it would be “George Washington next week” and “Thomas Jefferson the week after,” he was treated to haughty and dismissive dispatches in the mainstream press explaining why these Founders were more than just their proximity to slavery. These were valuable missives, but Trump wasn’t the right audience. They should have been directed at the activists who have taken their campus-based maximalism with them into the workforce.

The failure on the part of polite liberal opinion makers to anticipate this attack on America’s foundations is a failure of imagination and an act of hubris. They assumed they spoke for the mob when it was the mob that spoke for them. – Commentary

Statue of George Washington toppled in Portland OR last week

The mob is committed to bringing all of us ‘colinizers’ to our knees in recognition of our white privilege.

Ah well, Happy Father’s Day to the Father of the country anyway, as well as all good fathers everywhere.