W.E.B. Du Bois vs Barrack Obama

Last year for Black History month I wrote a post that was a bit more entertainment related, but promised I would do something serious later.

Now is later (whut?).  Anyway…

W.E.B. Du Bois was born shortly after the Civil War to free Blacks and for the times, lived a fairly integrated middle class life in Massachusetts.  Needless to say, going to an integrated school and playing with white friends growing up wasn’t common for young Black kids at the time.  He coined the term “talented tenth” and was a very early voice in pushing for full integration and equal rights.  Naturally enough, things didn’t work out for him and became a socialist and moved to Ghana.

But before that he, as someone who was about as “privileged” as an African American could be at that time, fully accepted the culture he was raised and educated in; a Western one.

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of [the] stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. 

-W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk

Du Bois clearly saw himself as a Western man.  He had a BA in History from Harvard, did post graduate work at the University of Berlin where he traveled Europe extensively, an returned to the US to get a PhD from Harvard.  He saw no incompatibility between being a Black man and embracing the Western canon.

Compare that to another prominent and privileged African American who many decades later, came to a different conclusion.

For three weeks I had traveled alone, down one side of the continent and up the other, by bus and by train mostly, a guidebook in hand. I took tea by the Thames and watched children chase each other through the chestnut groves of Luxembourg Garden. I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its De Chirico shadows and sparrows swirling across cobalt skies; and watched night fall over the Palatine, waiting for the first stars to appear, listening to the wind and its whispers of mortality.

And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine.

-Barrack Obama, Dreams From My Father 1995

Class, compare and contrast the differing views of Western culture by two prominent African Americans.  Du Bois, who spent his adult life during probably the most racist period in American history, regarded himself as part of Western civilization.  While Obama, who spent his adult life in an America in which Du Bois’ wildest dreams had been realized, saw himself as an outsider to Western Civilization.

What to make of this?

First of all, in 2021, is there even a single African American public intellectual who would say, “I sit with Shakespeare?”  Is there one who would say, “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius?”

I would say that’s unlikely.

I’ve always felt that the Western canon was open to all races if they chose to accept it.  That doesn’t seem to the trend however.  As noted in The New York Times Magazine, Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, wants to cancel the classics because “Systemic racism is foundational to those institutions that incubate classics and classics as a field itself.” 

This idea of burning down the idea of Western culture doesn’t even make sense in its own terms.  It’s not like African-American scholars are rushing off to Africa to sup at the table of African language, history, art, or culture.  No, they want their own victimization studies that do nothing but demonize what is actually their very own culture.

None of this is sustainable, and it gets loonier as time goes on.

Progressives in 2021: Stop Critically Thinking!

I almost couldn’t believe this article when I read it. From (you guessed it) The New York Times:

Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole

For an academic, Michael Caulfield has an odd request: Stop overthinking what you see online.

“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”

So what does he want us to do instead?

Influenced by the research of Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Mr. Caulfield argued that the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.

So what does this mean? He uses the example of investigating claims by anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy…

He probed deeper into the method to find better coverage by copying the main claim in Mr. Kennedy’s post and pasting that into a Google search. The first two results came from Agence France-Presse’s fact-check website and the National Institutes of Health. His quick searches showed a pattern: Mr. Kennedy’s claims were outside the consensus — a sign they were motivated by something other than science.

In other words, DON’T CRITICALLY THINK! Simply go to the nearest establishment consensus, and sign up with that; no thinking required.

I think in previous years progressives might have strenuously argued against believing what you’re told simply because that’s what you’re told, which is why I titled this as about “Progressives in 2021.”  Progressivism, liberalism, leftism, whatever you want to call it, has changed pretty radically over the past few years.  Wokeism being the biggest change, which made race and identity primary over every other societal aspect.

Instead of critical thinking, the author recommends an alternative, SIFT:

1. Stop.
2. Investigate the source.
3. Find better coverage.
4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but notice in the article, in the author didn’t do any of that.  They simply went to number three, “find better coverage.”  In other words, simply accept the word of the mainstream sites.  In this case Agence France-Presse and the NIH.  I’m sure The New York Times will always work as a substitute.

Progressives have jumped off the critical thinking train and on to the accept establishment sources train because they are the establishment.  That’s actually been true for a while but I’m not sure your average progressive understood that until the Trump era.  As we saw the term “fake news” come into flower and went from 2016:  The election is stolen-fact!  to 2020: The election is stolen…deplatform anyone saying that!

I think we’re all clear where the establishment is now.

And we’re clear that they don’t want any critical thinking going on around here.  The establishment will do your thinking for you.

There will be no Replacement for Rush

The opening of the Rush Limbaugh Show started with an unfamiliar voice that when she identified herself as Rush’s wife, immediately told me that Rush had died.

In short, end of an era.

There has not been a single radio broadcaster who so dominated his medium in the way that Rush has.  In our atomizing society it’s hard to imagine there being another one.  Rush had been a singular voice defining the right for over 30 years and that may well be the last one.  Of course, there is no equivalent to a Rush on the left because they dominate each and every institution in the country; they don’t need a Rush. But conservatives did.

Rush Limbaugh’s last show before the Christmas break on December 23rd sounded like a farewell episode, as if he wasn’t sure he had many, or any shows left in him.

The day’s gonna come, folks, where I’m not gonna be able to do this. I don’t know when that is. I want to be able to do it for as long as I want to do it.

I want to, but the day will come where I’m not going to be able to, and I want you to understand that even when the day comes, I’d like to be here. ‘Cause I have this sense of needing to constantly show my appreciation for all that you have done and meant to me.

Is that good bye or what?

He also ruminated on the scope of his over 30 year career, and not in a good way.

You know, I’ve for 30 whatever number of years… Folks, I consider… (groans) How to talk about this? I consider… (sigh) Oh, how to say this? On one hand, looking at me from outside you think, “Wow, overwhelming success. Successful radio program, most-listened-to show in history.” AM radio? People thought it was dead. “Limbaugh comes along and it’s saved,” they say.

You know, I’m not gonna sit here and deny that. But, folks, I gotta tell you, there’s a large part of me that feels like I have failed in such a major way, in a political sense. I’ve had 30 years here to try to convince people, to try to persuade people, to try to encourage people to think — critically think — on their own, to realize the difference between conservatism and liberalism, the difference between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party as it relates to conservative versus liberal.

I know there’s RINOs, and I know that the Republican Party in the establishment wing of Washington, it’s not that different from the Democrats. But conservatism versus liberalism.

He was both right and wrong on that.

I recently wrote about his legacy noting that for all his efforts, he failed to key in on the major issues that has ended up killing traditional conservatism, how to handle immigration and how to handle the left’s conquest of every American institution, most importantly the education system.  A Rush Limbaugh who had taken those issues seriously in the early nineties might have helped form a conservatism that could have defended itself.

Or not.

I suspect that a version of Rush that could have altered the course of the country also probably wouldn’t be the major AM broadcaster in the country with the opportunity to introduce millions to conservatism, at least the acceptable version he actually talked about 3 hours a day.  A paleo-conservative version of Rush may have found himself isolated to a few, or one radio station, with no real national presence.  Rush offered an optimistic, Reaganesque version of conservatism that was attractive, but ultimately not sustainable in a post-cold war environment where the biggest enemies to the country were not in Tank Divisions on the Fulda Gap but in your own universities, government agencies, and magazine and newspaper publishers.

Rush leaves a country far more left leaning, and more open to left leaning ideas and policies than when he started his career,  but that’s not a personal failure on his part, that’s the tides of history.

As for who can replace him…I’m of the opinion that he’s not replaceable.  He was a unique presence and broadcaster who won’t have a real successor, no matter who takes over his spot on the radio.

The Harris-Biden Era isn’t going to be good for Free Speech

I’ve been concerned about the decline in interest by the left in free speech issues for quite a while.  One of my early posts on this blog a decade ago was about the First Amendment and the left’s abandonment of it. It’s only gotten worse since then.  We’ve come a long way from the 1970’s, when the ACLU defended Nazi’s (actual Nazi’s, not simply Republicans walking too close to an antifa riot) and their right to march.

Nothing like that would happen today.  The heart and soul of the left now belongs to the book burners and the censors.  Antifa protested a bookstore selling a book that..exposed Antifa.  Squad member Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bugeyes) suggested some version of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to “figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation…”  Well that’s just what we need, the government determining what disinformation and misinformation is.

But now that the Harris but also Biden administration is in place, the fight against the First Amendment can really get started.  From The Washington Post National Security section (yes really!):

Trump supporter charged in 2016 Twitter scheme to undermine Hillary Clinton

NEW YORK — A far-right social media influencer was arrested Wednesday and accused of interfering in the 2016 election through an organized campaign to boost Donald Trump’s candidacy by conning supporters of his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, into voting through illegitimate means such as text message or online.

Prosecutors allege that Douglass Mackey, 31, used an alias, reportedly derived from actor Charlie Sheen’s character Ricky Vaughn in the 1989 film “Major League,” to circulate messages on Twitter that encouraged Clinton’s supporters to “Avoid the line. Vote from home,” according to charging documents. Nearly 5,000 people fell for the ploy, according to the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, which announced the arrest.

William Sweeney, assistant director in charge the FBI’s New York field office, called Mackey’s alleged efforts “nothing short of vote theft.”

This is, of course, insanity.  “Ricky Vaughn” was a meme maker during the 2016 Great Meme War, not a conspirator in vote stealing or election fraud.  I don’t want to minimize how important memes were to winning the 2016 election.  In fact I think memes were vitally important in turning a tiny bit of online culture into the Trump camp.  I couldn’t guess how many votes that actually translated into, but the 2016 campaign was a brilliant, creative time for clever funny memes. Several passed my view via Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis during the election, and they did a good job mocking the left in general and Hillary and the Democrats in particular.

Now comes payback time.

From the criminal complaint:

“In or about and between September 2016 and November 2016, both dates being approximate and inclusive, in the Eastern District of New York and elsewhere, the defendant DOUGLASS MACKEY (“MACKEY”), also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” together with others, conspired to injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States, to wit, the right to vote, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 241.”

And how exactly did Ricky Vaughn “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” Hillary voters?  With this:

 

 

Besides the obvious absurdity that these memes could have moved Hillary voters one way or another, it’s highly unlikely that any Hillary voter ever saw these memes.  These were shared on right leaning sites, chats, and forums, not posted to liberal sites.

The Washington Post reported that “nearly 5,000 people fell for the ploy.”  I’ve no doubt 5,000 people actually texted the number on the meme, but was even one of them a Hillary voter thinking that they were “voting?”  The answer will obviously be no and if this goes to trial, the failure to present a tricked Hillary voter as victim will become obvious.

But this doesn’t even need to go to trial.  Mackey was arrested by the FBI, bonded out for $50,000, and now faces months or years of legal wrangling and costs.  Even if this whole thing is dismissed two or three years from now, Mackey will have been ruined.  It makes you wonder exactly who is being injured, oppressed, threatened and intimidated here.

Another thing to consider is that this entire case had been sitting in the bowels of the Justice Department for 4 years, and mere days after the inauguration, the FBI arrests Mackey.  I guess it just goes to show that the Justice Department was never Trump’s. It was biding its time, waiting to get its revenge on its perceived enemies.

This is a useful reminder that in our new era, we don’t really have any rights.  Exercising enlightenment concepts like “rights” is simply staying below the notice of the Permanent government’s eye of Sauron. Being too clever, funny, or effective might get yourself a visit from the FBI.