RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the going gets stupid, the stupid turn pro. On Monday, in an essay due to appear in the forthcoming print edition of National Review, I wrote, “The Christopher Columbus protests are coming.” That very day, a vandal in Baltimore took a sledgehammer to what is believed to be the oldest Columbus monument in the United States, a 225-year-old work whose cornerstone was laid in 1792. For maximum publicity value, the vandal or an associate brazenly posted the video of his handiwork to YouTube as he gleefully narrated. If you’re not disgusted by the horrific damage to the monument, you might be a member of the “concerned activist” community that enjoys making its political points by smashing things to bits.

On the same day, the Christopher Columbus statue towering 76 feet over New York City’s Columbus Circle learned that his status is under review because he triggers the most powerful two officials in town.

As George Orwell saw it, in 1984: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

New York City in 2017 is a one-party place where high elected officials literally parade down Fifth Avenue next to terrorists who were convicted of shocking crimes in the 1970s, but where an inanimate hunk of metal commemorating Christopher Columbus that has stood in the city for 125 years is declared a menace to society. The hard-left city-council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito — who last made headlines when she appeared next to convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera on a float at the head of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in June — called for taking down the Christopher Columbus statue that stands on a column overlooking the vast roundabout named after him. The statue has been a proud symbol of the city since 1892, when it was first installed in honor of the 400th anniversary of his landing in the New World, and is closely associated with New York’s large Italian-American contingent.

“There obviously has been ongoing dialogue and debate in the Caribbean — particularly in Puerto Rico where I’m from — about this same conversation that there should be no monument or statue of Christopher Columbus based on what he signifies to the native population . . . [the] oppression and everything that he brought with him,” said Mark-Viverito on Monday.

That inspired the equally far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio, who marched behind Lopez Rivera in the Puerto Rican Day parade, to chime in that the Columbus statue “obviously is one of the ones that will get very immediate attention because of the tremendous concerns about it.” De Blasio has announced a 90-day review of “all statues and monuments that in any way may suggest hate or division or racism, anti-Semitism — any kind of message that is against the values of New York City.” One assumes that when de Blasio orders Columbus to be toppled from his perch, he’ll do so in the middle of the night (à la removals in Austin and Baltimore) for our own safety.

Start pulling on one strand, and pretty soon the cloth becomes unrecognizable. If the statue over Columbus Circle must go, why should the name Columbus Circle remain, or New York’s annual Columbus Day Parade? Why should that federal holiday be named after him anyway? Why indeed should the District of Columbia retain its name when calling it the District of Cesar Chavez would be so much more in tune with our times? Shifting political currents already forced one name change on Columbia University (when Alexander Hamilton was a student, it was King’s College). Once was seemingly enough. But administrators had better think twice before they order new stationery.

Dennis Prager conducted the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra last Wednesday night, and what had threatened to become another dispiriting episode in the culture wars turned instead into an evening of passionate advocacy for high culture and classical music. Santa Monica is one of the most liberal cities in California, so it was not wholly surprising that when the orchestra’s conductor invited Prager, a conservative talk radio host, to conduct a Haydn symphony for an orchestral fundraiser, a rebellion broke out among some musicians and the city’s political class. Two violinists in the ensemble, both UCLA professors, penned a letter suggesting that their fellow musicians boycott the upcoming performance. “A concert with Dennis Prager would normalize hatred and bigotry,” wrote Professors Andrew Apter and Michael Chwe in their March 27, 2017, letter. A webpage asked readers to urge their friends not to attend the concert, since attending would help “normalize bigotry in our community.” Local politicians weighed in. Councilman Kevin McKeown warned that the orchestra’s decision to invite Prager may “affect future community support for the Symphony.” Mayor Ted Winterer sniffed that he had “certainly . . . not encouraged anyone to attend.”

Fortunately for the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra, the boycott attempt, despite sympathetic coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, was a dud. And the concert was a rousing success that ideally won new converts to classical music and to the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra itself.

On Wednesday evening, no protesters showed up outside or inside Disney Hall, Frank Gehry’s famed curvilinear eruption of steel designed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The orchestra’s affable full-time conductor Guido Lamell polled the house, virtually full, before the music began. How many audience members were Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra attendees? he asked. A good number of people clapped in affirmation, leading Lamell to offer his sympathies for their having made the “cross-country trip” from Los Angeles’s Westside to downtown. How many were attending their first classical concert? Another burst of applause. Then came the key demographic question: Are there any fans of Dennis Prager here? The response was thunderous. “OK, I get the message,” Lamell laughed. “I won’t keep you away from him for too long.”

Lamell opened the program with a lively reading of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro overture, which he rightly introduced as one of the greatest opera overtures of all time (actually, its only competitor for first place is the Don Giovanni overture). Then he turned over the podium to Prager. Two string players joined the welcome, clapping with their free hand on their knee. Prager told the audience about attending his first classical music concert, which brought him to tears and led to a lifelong love affair with Haydn. The Classical period, he said, represents “controlled passion,” in contrast with the Romantics, who did not control theirs—yet passion will break out in the fourth movement of this Haydn symphony as well, Prager explained. Wonderfully, Prager had chosen a work from the criminally underperformed middle period of Haydn’s prodigious symphonic output. These so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies contain some of Haydn’s most pathos-filled, dramatic writing, and the Symphony No. 51 in B-flat major, composed in 1771, was no exception. It opens innocently enough with a brief, quizzical exchange between frisky strings and mournful horns before bursting forth into agonizingly poignant and dark harmonies. Cleverly syncopated passages in the first movement make the rhythm tricky. Major and minor keys interweave, adumbrating Schubert’s bittersweet longing.

Hillary Clinton’s memoir of the 2016 presidential campaign will arrive this fall, and NBC News has a preview:

In audio clips of Clinton reading from the book, “What Happened,” which were first obtained by MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, Clinton recounted her thoughts as she toyed with the idea of telling her Republican rival to “back up, you creep” as he stood behind her during the second presidential debate.

“My skin crawled,” Clinton said.

No doubt a lot of reporters have similar reactions to America’s 45th President. Tuesday night in Phoenix must have presented a particular challenge for any journalists who are still trying—or at least pretending to try—to cover Mr. Trump objectively. That’s because he spent much of the evening criticizing the news media.

According to the Washington Post:

“I mean truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories,” Trump said. “ … They don’t report the facts. Just like they don’t want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and the KKK.”

The Post described the scene inside the Phoenix Convention Center:

Three times, the crowd burst into chants of “USA! USA! USA!” And once, at the mention of Trump’s former rival Hillary Clinton, they chanted: “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” Several parents put their young children on their shoulders so they could get a good look at the president.

But as the night dragged on, many in the crowd lost interest in what the president was saying.

Hundreds left early, while others plopped down on the ground, scrolled through their social media feeds or started up a conversation with their neighbors. After waiting for hours in 107-degree heat to get into the rally hall — where their water bottles were confiscated by security — people were tired and dehydrated and the president just wasn’t keeping their attention.

This seems plausible. Political speeches that run more than an hour are almost always tiresome, even when the audience is hydrated. Still, given the fact that Mr. Trump’s opponents constantly seem to be able to field energetic, angry crowds at public events all over the country, it is bound to cause more chatter about which political party’s base is more energized.

By one important measurement, it’s still not close. With the arrival of July fundraising reports for the major parties, it appears that Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez may be on his way to setting a record—but probably not the one he intended. According to the Post:

After a strong $12.2 million raised in March — the first full month of Perez’s chairmanship — fundraising has dried up considerably. The $4.7 million it raised in April was the lowest for that particular month since 2009. The $4.3 million raised in May was the worst for that month since 2003. And now the $3.8 million raised in July is the worst for any month since January 2009.

While we are fighting the battle of the monuments and picking over the political corpse of Steve Bannon, a terrorist killed 14 people in Barcelona, the Mueller fishing-inquisition continues to grind on, the DOJ is slow-rolling the release of documents about the Lynch-Clinton tarmac powwow, Hillary Clinton is not being held accountable for the manifest betrayals of her oath to the Constitution, Obamacare repeal and replace is dead and tax reform seems moribund, and the left continues its assaults on the First Amendment. The circus tent is on fire and we just keep watching the acrobats and jugglers.

We can debate whether or not all this misdirection is being cleverly manipulated by Donald Trump so he can work on his policy reforms under the radar. Leftists have so many outrage-buttons to punch, it’s often impossible to resist pushing them and then watch their heads explode in shrieking dudgeon. But we won’t know the cumulative effects of this 24/7 demonization of the president until next year’s midterms. One thing is for sure, there had better be a big legislative win, say on tax reform, if the Republicans want to keep control of Congress. The president needs a substantial victory in order to overcome the fallout from the various conflicts over symbols and bad manners that the Trump-haters are perpetually fomenting.

The current squabbling over Confederate monuments is a perfect example. Emboldened by the alacrity with which so many Republicans piled on the president for his reticence in condemning white supremacists, the race hacks and their various street enforcers have moved from attacking statues of Confederate soldiers and generals to widening the bronze and marble rogue’s gallery to include slave-owning founders like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. And of course, many Republicans and conservatives are meekly going along. They can’t miss an opportunity to preen morally, flaunt their sympathy for the long-dead oppressed, and distance themselves from an uncouth president many of them argue won only because he appealed to déclassé Republican xenophobes and racists.

As usual, there is more heat than light in this preposterous conflict over public statues. For the shrewd activists behind the push to scrub public spaces of reprehensible historical figures, it’s all about demonstrating their political power. The anti-monument sentiment is not widespread among the people, black or white, nor is there a grassroots movement to destroy politically incorrect statues. More materially significant is the fact that eliminating every monument memorializing a Confederate general or a slave-owner will do absolutely nothing for the black underclass. Those black men will not stop slaughtering each other; they won’t be finding jobs; they won’t be raising the children they father; they won’t stop destroying themselves with drugs; they won’t be graduating from college at a rate higher than the current dismal 40%; and they won’t be escaping the dependency reservations onto which they’ve been herded by the Democrats and so-called black “leadership.”

Like black studies departments, black history month, school curricula filled with victim melodramas, MLK Day, or endless movies about noble black victims from our benighted past, clear-cutting monuments will not change one bit the social and cultural dysfunctions created and funded by a patronizing and virtue-killing welfare industry, one abetted by a duplicitous race narrative that benefits the black politicians, activists, professionals, public employees, school teachers, and professors – most of whom have no intention of figuring out how to save their so-called “brothers” and “sisters” languishing in ghetto hell-holes. It’s much easier and cheaper to chant yet again the “whitey did us wrong” mantra, flagellate guilty whites, and then watch stupid white people hand over more political leverage and power, so that the race tribunes can continue the policies that are destroying the lives of millions of less well-connected black people.

Then there was the Google employee who circulated an internal memo challenging the “diversity” orthodoxy that corporations like Google––and now it appears the State Department––repeat over and over despite the lack of any empirical evidence that a superficial diversity of sex, sexual preferences, ethnicity, or skin color among an ideologically and socially homogenous group is useful for anything other than Silicon Valley robber-baron virtue-signaling. But as Harvard president Larry Summers learned more than ten years ago, supposedly oppressed upper class feminists are a formidable enemy you don’t want to provoke. Feminist identity politics is predicated on victimhood and grievances, so to suggest that a disparity in any profession or pursuit might result from differences between the nature of the sexes or personal preferences, is to blaspheme against an article of faith, and bring down the inquisitorial wrath of these presumed powerless victims. No, misogynist patriarchal men are to blame for a lack of female programmers, or the mythical inequities in compensation. These are the wages of an inveterate sexism that oppresses the freest, richest, healthiest, best-educated, longest-living women in the history of the planet.

Back in May, a New Orleans statue of Joan of Arc was tagged with “Tear it Down” graffiti.

Why Joan of Arc? Any famous historical figure is by definition controversial. Joan is a French national symbol, but Shakespeare depicted her as a malicious witch. The French Quarter where the statue stands is a mostly white neighborhood. France was dealing with a controversial election.

This is what happens when you open a can of historical, religious and nationalistic worms.

The war on Confederate memorials quickly escalated into attacks on Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln Memorial was vandalized in Washington D.C. and in Chicago, a statue of Lincoln was burned. Abraham Lincoln fought the Confederacy. But from a black nationalist perspective, Lincoln and Lee were both racist white devils. And to the left, they both embody white supremacy.

What began with tearing down General Lee, escalated to vandalizing statues of Junipero Serra.

Serra was an 18th century Catholic priest who set up missions in what is now California. He’s hated by some American Indian activists who accuse him of racism and colonialism. There are statues of Serra all over California. And while most Americans have never heard of him, a pitched battle is underway between Catholics who venerate him as a saint and left-wing activists who call him a genocidal racist.

These leftist activists began by vandalizing Columbus statues and then Junipero Serra. But Serra was also America’s first Latino saint. To Latinos, Serra is a hero. To some American Indians, he’s a villain. And Christopher Columbus is in the same boat. The statues of Columbus spread across America were often put up by Italian-American associations. Italian-Americans marched in Columbus Day festivals. Serra pits Latinos against American Indians. Italian-Americans and American Indians face off over Columbus.

The battle over Junipero Serra is a microcosm of the gaping national and religious fault lines on which so many statues stand. Our towns and cities are full of statues celebrating some group’s version of history. The civil society we used to have allowed different groups to each celebrate the heroes of their history.

It’s not just Confederate memorials that are the controversial remnants of an old war. The Hundred Years War that Joan was part of had its own winners and losers. And if that seems like ancient history, our cities are full of memorials and statues featuring Irish, Italian and Latin American nationalist figures.

Springfield, Massachusetts has a garden dedicated to the 1916 Easter Rising. There’s a statue of Irish nationalist Robert Emmet in Washington D.C.’s Triangle Park. Three miles away stands a statue of Winston Churchill near the British Embassy. There is a great deal of national history that separates both men, but they can coexist together in our civic spaces because of mutual historical tolerance.

There can be a statue of James Connolly in Chicago and of Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri.

What’s the highest pleasure known to man? Christian theologians talk about the visio beatifica, the “beatific vision” of God.https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/22/rage-trump-builds/

Alas, that communion is granted to very few in this life. For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest pleasure is moral infatuation.
Like a heartbeat, moral infatuation has a systolic and diastolic phase. In the systolic phase, there is an abrupt contraction of sputtering indignation: fury, outrage, high horses everywhere. Delicious.

Then there is the gratifying period of recovery: the warm bath of self-satisfaction, set like a jelly in a communal ecstasy of unanchored virtue signaling.

The communal element is key. For while individuals may experience and enjoy moral infatuation, the overall effect is greatly magnified when shared.
One case in point was afforded by the mass ecstasy that accompanied Maximilien Robespierre’s effort to establish a Republic of Virtue in 1793.

The response to Donald Trump’s comments about the murderous violence that erupted in Charlottesville last week provides another vivid example.

Trump’s chief tort was to have suggested that there was “blame on both sides” as well as “good people” on both sides at the Charlottesville protest. I am not sure there were an abundance of “good people” on either side of the divide that day, although Trump’s main point was to distinguish between lawful protest and hate-fueled violence. But forget about distinctions. The paroxysms of rage that greeted Trump were a marvel to behold, as infectious as they were unbounded. One prominent commentator spoke for the multitude when he described Trump’s response as a “moral disgrace.”

I didn’t think so, but then I thought that Trump was correct when he suggested that the alt-Left is just as much a problem as the alt-Right. Indeed, if we needed to compare the degree of iniquity of the neo-nazis, “white supremacists,” and Ku Kluxers, on the one hand, and Antifa and its fellow travelers, on the other, I am not at all sure which would come out the worse. Real Nazis—the kind that popped up like mushrooms in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s—are scary. But American “neo-nazis”? They are tiny bunch of pathetic losers. The Ku Klux Klan was a murderous Democratic terrorist group in its earlier incarnations. Now it too is a tiny bunch (the Anti-Defamation League says it has 5,000-8,000 members) of impotent malcontents.

Antifa has brought its racialist brand of violent protest to campuses and demonstrations around the country: smashing heads as well as property. I suspect that paid-up, full-time members of the group are few, but the ideology of identity politics that they feed upon is a gruesome specialité de la maison of the higher education establishment today.

I also thought that Trump was right to ask where the erasure of history would end. This week it was a statue of Robert E. Lee. But why stop there? Why not pronounce a damnatio memoriae on the entire history of the Confederacy? There are apparently some 1,500 monuments and memorials to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United States. Some of them were erected during the Jim Crow era, something else that was brought to you courtesy of the Democratic Party.

“Many reputations are now tied to a false version of what Donald Trump said, and a version of events in Charlottesville that may or may not survive careful documentation. Do not expect moral courage or any apologies. Mobs are mobs. Nazis whose every thought is reprehensible will still quail in the face of a lawless crowd. CEOs of publicly traded companies are not in the business of being brave. And yet the natural order is holding. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists may be a continuing American embarrassment and eyesore, but they are not today’s most pressing threat to our civil liberties.”
Well, that was a bit embarrassing. Antifascist liberals mounted thousand-strong counter-rallies all weekend against a Nazi threat that proved nonexistent or thin on the ground. Leftists imagined themselves to be modern-day versions of the Czech resistance or the Warsaw uprising, but it turns out they were the majoritarian mob shouting down a handful of losers who’ve been an execrable but small part of the American pageant for as long as most of us can remember.

We don’t know what speakers at Saturday’s “free speech” rally in Boston might have said. It was organized, according to the local papers, by libertarians protesting campus speech codes, though they opened their platform to anybody, left and right. The meeting ended early; the speakers were all drowned out. Nazis and white supremacists, if any were present, were shown to be vastly outnumbered by Americans who reject such doctrines.

To state another obvious point, our civil liberties are meaningless if they don’t protect unpopular views. It’s not the mob but the mob’s targets that need protection.
For the record, of the 20th century’s malign ideologies, Nazi ideas of who should be murdered and why strike me as slightly more odious and frightful than Maoist or Stalinist ideas of who should be murdered and why. The applicability to current U.S. events is slender, though.

More relevant is the principle that large mobs are more dangerous than small mobs, and likely to harbor more psychopaths. Apparently running out of Nazis to resist, Boston protesters threw rocks and urine-filled bottles at police. Any shortage of white supremacists can always be corrected by expanding the definition. Opponents of a $15 minimum wage are racist. Skeptics about a pending climate crisis are racist. Anyone questioning the utility of pulling down old statues is racist.

The slippery slope of civil-rights erosion is manifest every time certain members of the vituperative left open their mouths.

Hard to escape is a lesson about incentives: Majoritarian violence is the predominant risk even when its targets are people otherwise impossible to sympathize with.

Which brings us back to Charlottesville. Serious professionals in every field know first reports are unreliable. We aren’t counting certain modern-day news sites, of course. Their job is manipulating passing, news-related symbols in ways that pleasure their target audiences. Bandwagons are their profession.

For the record, however, Donald Trump’s press conference, in its entirety, is available online and takes 23 minutes to watch. He did not fail to denounce Nazis and racists.

An account of events in Charlottesville is also taking shape. Mr. Trump feels he has been treated unfairly. Guess what? That’s politics. Your opponents aren’t required to give you a break. Outsmart them. President Obama would have spoken carefully, starting with: Though we don’t have all the facts, one thing Americans can agree about is that Nazi ideology and racial hatred are offensive to American ideals. CONTINUE AT SITE

As readers may know from my various articles over the years on the Holocaust, Nazis and neo-Nazis, there is no group that I believe are more repellent than right-wing fascists. President Trump was wrong not immediately to condemn in an unambiguous way the 200 or so ultra right-wing white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville 10 days ago.

But I have also long campaigned against the hateful human rights abuses in left-wing regimes from North Korea to Venezuela, and in addition have pointed out the anti-Semitism of leftists in many countries, including some in America. On this dispatch list I have also highlighted far-left rallies in Europe in recent years where placards showing Stars of David turned into swastikas have been on display.

Below, I attach three articles in left-leaning publications (The Forward, Haaretz, and The Atlantic) from recent days, noting the dangers of left-wing anti-Semitism.

Indeed many of the threats against American Jewish institutions made earlier this year, wrongly attributed to Trump supporters, were carried out by a left-wing journalist (Juan Thompson), and a deranged self-hating Jew.

SHARING THE SAME METHODS AND ATTITUDES

From Haaretz:

The far left’s presumption to be the only true opponent of the far right hides the fact it share the same methods and attitudes to the media and democracy

They hate the police and the government. Put no trust in the mainstream media or the financial system. They’re in favor of limiting freedom of speech, outlawing what’s “dangerous” or “offensive.” They condone political violence (though they call it “protecting the community” or “direct action”).

On foreign policy, they are fans of Vladimir Putin, Assad’s regime and Iran. Generally, they’re fine with most dictators. They oppose free trade agreements, abhor NATO and if they’re European, the European Union as well. If they’re American, they didn’t vote for “corrupt” and “warmongering” Hillary Clinton.

Oh, and they don’t like most Jews (for whom they usually use labels like “Zionists,” “globalists,” “Soros financiers” and “Rothschild bankers” instead), and will accuse them of overusing the Holocaust for their own interests…

The far left’s presumption to be the only true opponents of the far right covers up the fact that it shares the same methods and attitudes to the media and democracy, believes in the same conspiracy theories.