Adios America: Review of Coulter's New Book

Goodbye to the prosperous country founded by overwhelmingly Protestant colonists in the 18^th century. Hello to the third-world multicultural mélange with a distinctly Mexican accent, appalling cultural norms, and a clearly leftist political orientation. Such is the vision of the United States given by no-holds-barred pundit Ann Coulter in her latest book, Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.

Coulter’s subtitle summarizes her basic thesis—that America’s immigration policies since the decisive Edward Kennedy bill in 1965 have altered our demographic makeup so radically that the nation will be unalterably degraded if immediate changes aren’t made to our legal and illegal immigration practices. Kennedy’s legislation, despite passionate assurances to the contrary, (Coulter: “If you like your country’s ethnic composition, you can keep it.”) soon became the vehicle for fundamentally transforming America’s immigrant population from largely European to overwhelmingly Third World in origin.

Indeed, Coulter observes in her heavily annotated work that about 50 million Mexicans, more than a quarter of that nation’s population, has already migrated, either legally and illegally, to America—a figure derived by employing data other than census forms that folks unlawfully in the country clearly don’t complete at the postulated 90% rate. Overall, thanks to family reunification policies and notoriously lax enforcement of sanctuary laws, “since 1970, nearly 90 percent of all legal immigrants have been from the Third World.” Accordingly, the country now accepts “more immigrants from Nigeria than we do from Britain” and “in just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant—including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.”

The devastating consequences of accepting millions of immigrants from cultural backwaters are evident in crime statistics—stats that Coulter says are incredibly hard to secure since it’s now deemed racist to ask how many incarcerated folks are foreign born. Despite the virtual blackout on such data, it’s clear that immigrants (legal and illegal) constitute a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s prison population. “The U.S. government admits that at least 351,000 criminal immigrants were incarcerated in the United States as of 2011.”  The “at least” in that sentence should be emphasized in view of the importance government officials place on “not” tracking such politically explosive information.

Many of these criminals, Coulter observes with biting irony, are committing crimes that Americans just won’t do. Adios America is replete with atrocities that most news outlets won’t specifically attribute to immigrants. Instead a “man” or “residents” are to blame for gruesome crimes—child molestations, gang rapes, sex-trafficking, et cetera. Consider, for example, a 1998 New York Times story in which the journalist employs a remarkable number of misleading terms in his report on a vicious gang-rape in Fresno, California (“working class city…men and boys…24-year-old man…teen-ager…five adults…seven juveniles) all the while avoiding specifically identifying both the perpetrators and victims of these crimes as Hmong immigrants. To further confuse readers, the reporter throws into his story an inapt comparison to a decade-old fraternity sexual assault of a mentally disabled girl in New Jersey and an irrelevant reference to a white supremacist gang in Fresno. Coulter adds that “over the next year, about three dozen Hmong men were indicted for a series of gang rapes and forced prostitution of young girls in the Fresno area.”  

The truth that PC journalists are loath to admit is that Third World attitudes toward women are generally abysmal when compared with the United States. Thus, the fact that young Hispanic girls in the U.S. are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to give birth between the ages of ten and fourteen is perfectly consistent with Mexican law where “in thirty-one of thirty-two states… the age of consent for sex is twelve.” The lone exception is Mexico State where the legal age is fourteen. Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that Hispanics have the highest unmarried birthrate in the U.S., “even higher than American blacks,” a fact that “accounts for a raft of social problems…that will never be identified as the consequence of mass immigration.” It’s also important to note that in the Third World a child’s (or even a woman’s) “consent” is a very malleable concept.

For Coulter one of the most egregious aspects of American immigration jurisprudence is the notion that any baby born in America, regardless of the mother’s legal status, automatically becomes an American citizen. That baby then becomes an “anchor” used to bring the rest of the family to America. Coulter argues that this reading of the Fourteenth Amendment was “cooked up by Justice William Brennan in 1982” and has given rise to a flood of planned births in the U.S. by illegal immigrants. In Stockton, California, for example, “70 percent of the 2,300 babies born” in 2003 at that city’s “San Joaquin General Hospital’s maternity ward were anchor babies.” Coulter adds to that statistic one more fact: “By 2013, Stockton was bankrupt.”

The policy of bestowing American citizenship on the progeny of individuals who purposely break U.S. immigration laws is so crazy that even Nevada Senator Harry Reid blasted it in 1993: “If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right?” But soon afterward, Coulter notes, “Democrats discovered that parents of anchor babies were voting for them! Suddenly Senator Reid decided it wasn’t insane to give citizenship to children born to illegals…. To the contrary, it was racist not to do so.”

According to Coulter, another journalistic con-job foisted on the American people involves polls about illegal immigration. These surveys typically require respondents to choose between two unreal alternatives: 1) rounding up and deporting all illegal immigrants or 2) granting these same folks a “pathway to citizenship” based on a long list of conditions—paying fines and back taxes, learning English, taking citizenship classes, no access to welfare, et cetera. The first alternative omits the option of self-deportation, a choice that would become much more likely if an E-verify system that checks an employee’s social security card were made mandatory for most employers. The second alternative involves preconditions that are never actually imposed on illegal immigrants. Another possible response omitted from most polls would be letting illegal immigrants remain “in the shadows”—an option most illegals obviously favor over returning to places like Guadalajara.

Coulter’s book also sheds light on the role played by one of the world’s richest men in America’s immigration debate. That man, Carlos Slim Helu, is a Mexican citizen “whose fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally” and sending billions of dollars back to relatives in Mexico. Coulter’s expose focuses primarily on the fact that in 2008 this shady financier “saved the New York Times from bankruptcy.” Following Slim’s quarter-billion dollar loan, the Times became increasingly strident on the issue of illegal immigration. In pre-bailout 2004, for example, a Times article described the nation’s southern border as under siege.” Ten years later, when Latin Americans were more egregiously “pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama ‘go big’ on immigration and give ‘millions of immigrants permission to stay.’ What a difference,” Coulter observes, “one thieving Mexican billionaire makes!”

While accepting millions of Third World immigrants is clearly, on Coulter’s evidence, bad for America, “it’s fantastic for Democrats” as well as for businesses that profit from this vast source of low-wage labor. Wealthy folks seeking cheap maids and nannies also have an interest in maintaining a ready supply of uneducated domestic workers who can be paid off the books and further supported by taxpayers. Incredibly, Coulter informs us that until 1970 immigrants to America actually “made more money, bought more houses, and were more educated” than native-born Americans. That was before Edward Kennedy’s lasting gift to the Democrat Party fully opened the Third World spigot.   

  

Coulter’s advice to America and to largely oblivious GOP Presidential contenders is to “just shut it down. No more family reunification, no more scam marriages, no more refugees, no more phony asylum cases (which is all of them), and no more ‘high-tech workers’ providing slave labor to Microsoft.” A fence on the southern border, an end to “anchor baby” status, and “a timeout on endless immigration from the Third World” are required if America is itself to avoid becoming “a Third World republic that will never elect another Republican—in other words, ‘California.’”

Adios America is full of anecdotes and will doubtless be dismissed as merely anecdotal by folks who profit from our current immigration system or who mindlessly repeat the bogus mantra, “Diversity is our strength.” (Consider the effects of “diversity” in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Rwanda.) In truth, however, Coulter’s book contains a raft of important statistics as well as a number of compelling arguments that should give pause to anyone willing to scrutinize the effects of America’s legal and illegal immigration policies over the last five decades. 

Operation Desert Mirage, Et Cetera

After a number of military vets decried the Obama administration’s failure to name its campaign against Islamic State terrorists, the White House finally muted that criticism by providing one of the most anodyne designations imaginable for its martial effort, “Operation Inherent Resolve.”

One would have thought that the head of the self-designated party of nuance would at least have selected a title that wasn’t oxymoronic. As pundit Tucker Carlson noted, “resolve” is an act of the will and as such shouldn’t be confused with attributes that are inborn or “inherent.”     

In any case, based on an average of seven airstrikes-per-day, there obviously will be no “Desert Storm” under this Commander in Chief for whom “Delayed Restraint” may be an “Inherent” characteristic. One can compare that ratio with the average of 138 sorties per-day during NATO’s campaign against Serbia or the 800 daily airstrikes in the 2003 war against Saddam Hussein.   

Given these facts on the ground (or rather in the air), there are several more descriptive names that could have been attached to the campaign against Islamic State:

Operation Apparent Resolve would point to the gap between appearance and reality in this anti-terror exercise—a gap that also exists between Vice President Joe Biden’s bombastic “follow them to the gates of hell” rhetoric and the administration’s “let’s not call it a war” spin.

Operation Bootless Venture is a title that combines an air of fecklessness with the President’s up-front assurance to the terrorists that no U.S. “boots on the ground” will be employed in its “resolve” to a) “limit and contain” ISIL or b) “degrade and destroy” those same butchers.

Operation Pass the Buck would emphasize for midterm voters that such force as the administration eventually applies to these rapists and murderers of infidels is only the result of President George W. Bush’s invasion policy and the stubbornness of Iraq Prime Minister Maliki for not agreeing to a “Status of Forces Agreement”—this despite the fact that Obama himself claimed credit in 2012 for withdrawing all American troops from the country and leaving behind a stable democratic government.

Operation Apologize in Advance would reflect Mr. Obama’s view of American history as exhibited in the “America Culpa” Tour that he made at the beginning of his presidency. This operational title would let everyone know that the Commander in Chief’s Nobel Peace Prize heart isn’t in this endeavor that regretfully reinforces the leftist image of America as a bellicose power responsible for many or even most of the world’s problems.   

Operation Blame the Video would be nice if it hadn’t already been used to shift responsibility for Benghazi from an organized terrorist group to a pathetic immigrant in Southern California who spent months in a Texas prison for his much-publicized “crime” of defaming Muhammad in an Internet movie trailer.

Operation Leading from Behind would accurately convey the President’s foreign policy strategy and the expectation that someone else will provide ground troops to counter what his own Secretary of Defense described as an “imminent threat” to the country. 

Operation Phantom Coalition would also tout this Leading from Behind meme while taking note of the help we can expect from our international partners—including NATO- member Turkey.

Operation Exit Strategy would emphasize what’s most important to the Obama Administration in any conflict—getting out.  After all, as the President said, all wars must come to an end. And the quickest way to end any war is to exit the battlefield—consequences be damned.

Operation Desert Mirage employs alluring Middle Eastern imagery to summon up a vision of something that isn’t really there. The name also suggests the fanciful hope that the burgeoning Islamic State will disappear like a pathetic J.V. team when confronted with a determined non-American opponent—an army composed of recently-trained Syrian farmers and pharmacists.

Finally, there is the most provocative title for Obama’s containment campaign against ISIL, Operation Political Expediency—a designation that would reflect the administration’s need to do something dramatic in light of Americans’ outrage over the beheading of one of their countrymen.

I can hear Bob Beckel’s Democrat head exploding as I compose the preceding sentence —indignant that anyone would dare suggest his President would put military lives on the line for purely political purposes. As if that same President didn’t withdraw precipitously from Iraq for political reasons and thus set the stage for the nation’s collapse—and as if Mr. Obama didn’t announce a specific date for withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan at virtually the same time he instituted a surge of troops in that supposedly crucial theater—and as if the Commander in Chief and his Secretary of State didn’t promote a palpably false “spontaneous demonstration” story about the terrorist attack in Benghazi to preserve the President’s campaign slogan about a dead bin-Laden and a decimated Al-Qaeda, creating for voters an Internet-video fiction that Hillary had  the audacity to repeat even at the memorial service for Benghazi victims. 

Sorry, Mr. Beckel, for office-holders of that ilk, Operation Political Expediency would have been a perfectly accurate designation—though not, of course, politically expedient to employ.

"The Giver" -- A Philosophical Movie Review

If the sparse morning matinee audience at Murrieta’s California Oaks theater is any indication, Southlanders have little interest in or knowledge about “The Giver,” a philosophically-compelling film starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep. That’s a shame given the flick’s dramatic broadside against the kind of ruthless conformity that permeates college campuses and today’s mainstream media.

Despite the lip-service those institutions regularly give to “diversity,” the truth is that both groups embrace an ideology of fierce intolerance according to which persons of every religion, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation are expected to accept (not just “tolerate”) the same egalitarian, climate-change, pro-choice views of limousine liberals in coastal California. The only “diversity” these politically correct folks embrace concerns things like dress, cuisine, and customs drained of substance. (Thus, Christmas becomes a secular holiday about a chubby guy at the North Pole, and Easter revolves around an egg-dispersing bunny-rabbit.)   

Based on a children’s book written by Lois Lowry and published in 1993, “The Giver” stands in the tradition of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932) – a novel in which a few elites employ genetics, drugs, and conditioning to create a perfectly pacific society.  

The movie also represents a more compelling version of the managed utopia theme that Ed Harris and Jim Carrey brought to life in “The Truman Show.” Unlike the latter film, however, there isn’t a trace of humor in “The Giver.” Instead, human hate and violence are graphically, though briefly, portrayed alongside their much-valued counterparts: love, deep emotion, and cultural variety.   

Meryl Streep personifies and verbally defends the perfectly regulated and peaceful village in which everyone is equal—except for those “elders” who are, as Orwell put it, “more equal than others.”  In her ominous role Streep bears an eerie resemblance, both visually and philosophically, to Hillary Clinton—vastly more than the winsome Tea Leoni ever could as CBS’s “Madame Secretary.”

On the other side of the film’s dramatic divide stands a disheveled Jeff Bridges, “The Giver” who transmits to his young charge (Brendon Thwaites) the knowledge and experiences of otherwise unknown societies where deep emotions and free choices are cherished despite their painful and often destructive corollaries.

The comfortable conformity of Streep’s well-regulated society is depicted in various ways: painfully symmetrical community organization, unembellished architecture, uniform dress, and prescribed daily routines that extend even to meals and bedtimes.  Cinematically, black and white images are employed to reflect the lack of emotion and chromatic perception among these docile, healthy servants of the state.       

Inevitably, the society’s all-powerful rulers also take upon themselves life and death decisions—all for the good of the thoroughly-surveilled population, of course.  Accordingly, the words “die” and “kill” aren’t employed. Instead, the elderly and babes who don’t measure up to the rulers’ benevolent standards are “released”—the former after a community ceremony praising their contributions and implying they’ll soon be headed for a benign future, not a lethal needle. Babies, on the other hand, are similarly disposed of but in sterile medical facilities with no fanfare or compunction.

Though I would have preferred a climax that didn’t require so much suspension of disbelief with respect to minor details (Police-state enforcers, for example, aren’t usually so incompetent.) these distractions don’t obviate the value of this chilling portrait of a pleasant utopian society to which, unfortunately, this country has been moving—the price of which is our very humanity.

“The Giver” warns us to reject this all-too-appealing disaster.  

The Worldview that Makes the Underclass by Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple)

May 2014

ANTHONY DANIELS, who often writes under the penname Theodore Dalrymple, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Born in London in 1949, he qualified as a doctor in 1974 and has worked in various countries in Africa and elsewhere. From 1990 to 2005, he worked as a doctor and psychiatrist in a prison in Birmingham, England. He has written a column for the London Spectator for 14 years, and writes regularly for National Review and the Wall Street Journal. He has published more than 20 books, including Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism, and Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 20, 2014, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Dearborn, Michigan.

I worked for 15 years as a doctor and psychiatrist in a general hospital in a poor area of a British city and in the prison next door, where I was on duty one night in three. The really dangerous people were in the hospital, perhaps because of the presence in the prison next door of very large uniformed men who exerted a strangely calming effect on the prisoners. In the hospital, I personally examined many thousands of patients who had attempted suicide or at least made a suicidal gesture (not quite the same thing of course). They were overwhelmingly from poor homes, and each patient told me of the lives of the three, four, or five people closest to them—and I spoke to many of those people as well. I could not, of course, have spoken to so many people, and heard about so many others, without some general impressions forming themselves in my mind. One abiding impression was of the violence of their lives, particularly that between the sexes—largely the consequence of the fluidity of relations between the sexes—and also of the devastating effect of prevalent criminality upon the quality of daily existence.

Before I did this work, I had spent a number of years working as a doctor in Africa and in other places in the Third World. I also crossed Africa by public transport, such as it was, and consequently saw much of that continent from the bottom up. These experiences also helped me in my understanding of what I was later to see in England. As Dr. Johnson put it, all judgment is comparative; or as Kipling said, “What should they know of England who only England know?” Indeed, what should anyone know of anywhere, who only that place knows?

On my return to England, I used to visit the homes of poor people as part of my medical duties. Bear in mind that I had returned from some of the poorest countries in the world, where—in one case—a single hen’s egg represented luxury and the people wore the cast-off clothes of Europe that had been donated by charity. When I returned to England, I was naturally inclined to think of poverty in absolute rather than in relative terms—as people not having enough to eat, having to fetch water from three miles away, and so forth. But I soon ceased to think of it in that fashion.

In the course of my duties, I would often go to patients’ homes. Everyone lived in households with a shifting cast of members, rather than in families. If there was an adult male resident, he was generally a bird of passage with a residence of his own somewhere else. He came and went as his fancy took him. To ask a child who his father was had become an almost indelicate question. Sometimes the child would reply, “Do you mean my father at the moment?” Others would simply shake their heads, being unwilling to talk about the monster who had begot them and whom they wished at all costs to forget.

I should mention a rather startling fact: By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home. The child may be father to the man, but the television is father to the child. Few homes were without televisions with screens as large as a cinema—sometimes more than one—and they were never turned off, so that I often felt I was examining someone in a cinema rather than in a house. But what was curious was that these homes often had no means of cooking a meal, or any evidence of a meal ever having been cooked beyond the use of a microwave, and no place at which a meal could have been eaten in a family fashion. The pattern of eating in such households was a kind of foraging in the refrigerator, as and when the mood took, with the food to be consumed sitting in front of one of the giant television screens. Not surprisingly, the members of such households were often enormously fat.

Surveys have shown that a fifth of British children do not eat a meal more than once a week with another member of their household, and many homes do not have a dining table. Needless to say, this pattern is concentrated in the lower reaches of society, where so elementary but fundamental a means of socialization is now unknown. Here I should mention in passing that in my hospital, the illegitimacy rate of the children born in it, except for those of Indian-subcontinental descent, was approaching 100 percent.

It was in the prison that I first realized I should listen carefully, not only to what people said, but to the way that they said it. I noticed, for example, that murderers who had stabbed someone always said of the fatal moment that “the knife went in.” This was an interesting locution, because it implied that it was the knife that guided the hand rather than the hand that guided the knife. It is clear that this locution serves to absolve the culprit, at least in his own mind, from his responsibility for his act. It also seeks to persuade the listener that the culprit is not really guilty, that something other than his decisions led to the death of the victim. This was so even if the victim was a man against whom the perpetrator was known to have a serious grudge, and whom he sought out at the other side of the city having carried a knife with him.

The human mind is a subtle instrument, and something more than straightforward lying was going on here. The culprit both believed what he was saying and knew perfectly well at the same time that it was nonsense. No doubt this kind of bad faith is not unique to the type of people I encountered in the hospital and the prison. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edmund, the evil son of the Earl of Gloucester, says:

This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!

In other words, it wasn’t me.

This passage points, I think, to an eternal and universal temptation of mankind to blame those of his misfortunes that are the natural and predictable consequence of his own choices on forces or circumstances that are external to him and outside his control. Is there any one of us who has never resorted to excuses about his circumstances when he has done wrong or made a bad decision? It is a universal human tendency. But in Britain, at any rate, an entire class of persons has been created that not only indulges in this tendency, but makes it their entire world outlook—and does so with official encouragement.

Let me take as an example the case of heroin addicts. In the 1950s, heroin addiction in Britain was confined to a very small number of people, principally in bohemian circles. It has since become a mass phenomenon, the numbers of addicts having increased perhaps two thousandfold, to something like 250,000 to 300,000. And with the statistically insignificant exception of members of the popular culture elite, heroin addiction is heavily concentrated in areas of the country such as the one in which I worked.

Heroin addiction has been presented by officialdom as a bona fide disease that strikes people like, shall we say, rheumatoid arthritis. In the United States, the National Institute on Drug Abuse defines addiction quite baldly as a chronic relapsing brain disease—and nothing else. I hesitate to say it, but this seems to me straightforwardly a lie, told to willing dupes in order to raise funds from the federal government.

Be that as it may, the impression has been assiduously created and peddled among the addicts that they are the helpless victims of something that is beyond their own control, which means that they need the technical assistance of what amounts to a substantial bureaucratic apparatus in order to overcome it. When heroin addicts just sentenced to imprisonment arrived, they said to me, “I would give up, doctor, if only I had the help.” What they meant by this was that they would give up heroin if some cure existed that could be administered to them that would by itself, without any resolution on their part, change their behavior. In this desire they appeared sincere—but at the same time they knew that such a cure did not exist, nor would most of them have agreed to take it if it did exist.

In fact, the whole basis of the supposed treatment for their supposed disease is rooted in lies and misconceptions. For example, research has shown that most addicts spend at least 18 months taking heroin intermittently before they become addicted. Nor are they ignorant while they take it intermittently of heroin’s addictive properties. In other words, they show considerable determination in becoming addicts: It is something, for whatever reason, that they want to become. It is something they do, rather than something that happens to them. Research has shown also that heroin addicts lead very busy lives one way or another—so busy, in fact, that there is no reason why they could not make an honest living if they so wished. Indeed, this has been known for a long time, for in the 1920s and 30s in America, morphine addicts for the most part made an honest living.

Withdrawal from opiates, the fearfulness of which, reiterated in film and book, is often given as one of the main reasons for not abandoning the habit, is in fact a pretty trivial condition, certainly by comparison with illnesses which most of us have experienced, or by comparison with withdrawal from other drugs. I have never heard an alcoholic say, for example, that he fears to give up alcohol because of delirium tremens—a genuinely dangerous medical condition, unlike withdrawal from heroin. Research has shown that medical treatment is not necessary for heroin addicts to abandon their habit and that many thousands do so without any medical intervention whatsoever.

In Britain at least, heroin addicts do not become criminals because they are addicted (and can raise funds to buy their drugs only by crime); those who take heroin and indulge in criminal behavior have almost always indulged in extensive criminal behavior before they were ever addicted. Criminality is a better predictor of addiction than is addiction of criminality.

In other words, all the bases upon which heroin addiction is treated as if it is something that happens to people rather than something that people do are false, and easily shown to be false. This is so whatever the latest neuro-scientific research may supposedly show.

I have taken the example of heroin addiction as emblematic of what, with some trepidation, I may call the dialectical relationship between the worldview of those at the bottom of society and the complementary worldview of what one might call the salvationist bureaucracy of the government. In the old Soviet Union there was a joke in which the workers would say to the party bosses, “We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us.” In the case of the heroin addicts, they might say, “We pretend to be ill, and you pretend to cure us.”

One of the possible dangers or consequences of such a charade is that it creates a state of dishonest dependency on the part of the addicts. They wait for salvation as Estragon and Vladimir wait for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play; they wait for something that will never arrive, and that at least in some part of their mind they know will never arrive—but that officialdom persists in telling them will arrive someday.

Dishonest passivity and dependence combined with harmful activity becomes a pattern of life, and not just among drug addicts. I remember going into a single mother’s house one day. The house was owned by the local council; her rent was paid, and virtually everything that she owned, or that she and her children consumed, was paid for from public funds. I noticed that her back garden, which could have been pretty had she cared for it, was like a noxious rubbish heap. Why, I asked her, do you not clear it up for your children to play in? “I’ve asked the council many times to do it,” she replied. The council owned the property; it was therefore its duty to clear up the rubbish that she, the tenant, had allowed to accumulate there—and this despite what she knew to be the case, that the council would never do so! Better the rubbish should remain there than that she do what she considered to be the council’s duty. At the same time she knew perfectly well that she was capable of clearing the rubbish and had ample time to do so.

This is surely a very curious but destructive state of mind, and one that some politicians have unfortunately made it their interest to promote by promising secular salvation from relative poverty by means of redistribution. Whether by design or not, the state in England has smashed up all forms of social solidarity that are independent of it. This is not an English problem alone: In France the word solidarité, solidarity, has come to mean high taxation for redistribution by state officials to other parts of the population, which of course are neither grateful for the subventions nor find them sufficient to meet their dreams, and which are, in fact, partly responsible for their need for them in the first place. And not surprisingly, some of the money sticks to the hands of the redistributionist bureaucracy.

By a mixture of ideology and fiscal and social policies, the family has been systematically fractured and destroyed in England, at least in the lowest part of the society that, unfortunately, needs family solidarity the most. There are even, according to some researchers, fiscal and welfare incentives for parents at the lower economic reaches of society not to stay together.

Certainly the notions of dependence and independence have changed. I remember a population that was terrified of falling into dependence on the state, because such dependence, apart from being unpleasant in itself, signified personal failure and humiliation. But there has been an astonishing gestalt switch in my lifetime. Independence has now come to mean independence of the people to whom one is related and dependence on the state. Mothers would say to me that they were pleased to be independent, by which they meant independent of the fathers of their children—usually more than one—who in general were violent swine. Of course, the mothers knew them to be violent swine before they had children by them, but the question of whether a man would be a suitable father is no longer a question because there are no fathers: At best, though often also at worst, there are only stepfathers. The state would provide. In the new dispensation the state, as well as television, is father to the child.

A small change in locution illustrates a change in the character and conceptions of a people. When I started out as a doctor in the mid-1970s, those who received state benefits would say, “I receive my check on Friday.” Now people who receive such benefits say, “I get paid on Friday.” This is an important change. To have said that they received their check on Friday was a neutral way of putting it; to say that they get paid on Friday is to imply that they are receiving money in return for something. But what can that something be, since they do not appear to do anything of economic value to anyone else? It can only be existence itself: They are being paid to continue to exist, existence itself being their work.

It has been said that the lamentable state of affairs I have described has been brought about by the decline, inevitable as we now see it, of the kind of industry that once employed millions of unskilled workers, whose wages, though low by today’s standards, were nevertheless sufficient to sustain a stable, though again by today’s standards not rich, society. And I do not think that this view can be altogether dismissed. But it is far from the whole story. One of the curious features of England in the recent past is that it has consistently maintained very high levels of state-subsidized idleness while importing almost equivalent numbers of foreigners to do unskilled work.

Let me here interject something about the intellectual and moral corruption wrought by the state in recent years—and I don’t know whether it applies to America. The governments of Britain, of both political parties, managed to lessen the official rate of unemployment by the simple expedient of shifting people from the ranks of the unemployed to the ranks of the sick. This happened on such a huge scale that, by 2006—a year of economic boom, remember—the British welfare state had achieved the remarkable feat of producing more invalids than the First World War. But it is known that the majority of those invalids had no real disease. This feat, then, could have been achieved only by the willing corruption of the unemployed themselves—relieved from the necessity to seek work and relieved to have a slightly higher subvention—but also of the doctors who provided them with official certificates that they knew to be bogus. And the government was only too happy, for propaganda purposes, to connive at such large-scale fraud. One begins to see what Confucius meant when he said, 2,500 years ago, that the first thing to do to restore a state to health was to rectify the names—in other words, to call things by their right names rather than by euphemisms.

There are three reasons that I can think of why we imported foreign labor to do unskilled work while maintaining large numbers of unemployed people. The first is that we had destroyed all economic incentive for the latter to work. The second is that the foreigners were better in any case, because their character had not been rotted; they were often better educated—it is difficult to plumb the shallows of the British state educational system for children of the poorest homes—and had a much better work ethic. And the third was the rigidity of the housing market that made it so difficult for people to move around once they had been granted the local privilege of subsidized housing.

I will leave you with an anecdote. As Mao Tse-tung might have put it, one anecdote is worth a thousand abstractions.

I had been asked by the courts to examine a young woman, aged 18, who was accused of having attacked and injured her 90-year-old great-grandmother, with whom she lived, while under the influence of alcohol and cannabis. She had broken her great-grandmother’s femur, but fortunately it did not prove fatal. (Incidentally, the homicide rate, it is said, would be five times higher than it is if we used the same medical techniques as were used in 1960.) I asked the young woman in the course of my examination whether her mother had ever been in trouble with the police.

“Yes,” she replied.

“What for?” I asked.

“Well, she was on the social,” she said—“on the social” in English argot means receiving welfare payments—“and she was working.”

“What happened?” I asked. “She had to stop working.”

She said this as if it was so obvious that my question must be that of a mental defective. Work is for pocket money, the public dole is the means by which one lives.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the view from the bottom, at least in Britain: but it is a view that has been inculcated and promoted from the top.

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Copyright © 2014 Hillsdale College. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used: “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.” SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST. ISSN 0277-8432. Imprimis trademark registered in U.S. Patent and Trade Office #1563325.

JFK and the Rape of History

In the old Soviet Union regime skeptics often observed that while true believers knew what the future held, the past was constantly changing. An example of this strange state of affairs is provided by a photo of Stalin standing next to several other Bolsheviks. The picture indicates, however, that one VIP has been airbrushed from the stage. To the chagrin of the artistic revisionist, comrade Trotsky’s uninhabited shoes testify to the renegade’s former prominence.

One wouldn’t expect this kind of deception in the United States, but much the same thing has occurred with the assassination of President Kennedy. The actual portrait of the real assassin—a pathetic loser whose delusions of grandeur are clearly revealed in his “Historic Diary”—has been airbrushed away to make room for grand conspiracies involving persons or institutions that folks like Oliver Stone wish to revile.

Of particular significance is the obsessive desire by leftists—including political wannabes like sportscaster Bob Costas—to connect Kennedy’s assassination to Dallas itself, a city that was then a hotbed of conservative opposition to the President.

The New York Times provided yet another example of this revisionism when it published an odious opinion piece by one James McAuley, a “Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford.” It’s worth noting that the Times employed a callow history student to do the work that most self-respecting historians would not do—designating the city of Dallas as an “actor” and not merely the geographical “stage” for JFK’s assassination.

Not mentioned in this fatuous retrospective is the fact that a communist who adored Fidel Castro and had lived in the Soviet Union longer than in Dallas was the person who actually shot the President from the sixth floor of the building where he had recently secured a menial job. Nor do McAuley and most other “observers” care to note that seven months earlier this unstable fellow who didn’t drive a car attempted to assassinate a right-wing Texas politician, General Edwin Walker, with the same mail-order rifle he clearly fired on November 22^nd.

On that fateful day, after failing to reconcile with his estranged wife, the high-school dropout and twice court-martialed Marine who attempted suicide in the Soviet Union carried an elongated object wrapped in brown paper to work—an odd package that he told his co-worker and driver contained curtain rods. One could continue for hours discussing definitive incriminating evidence like Oswald’s makeshift shooting blind, eyewitness descriptions, bullet cartridges, and the killing of Officer J. D. Tippit. 

According to a commemorative editorial in USA today a while back, evidence related to JFK’s assassination is “sparse” and presumably inconclusive. Those editors, like most Americans, have never seriously reviewed the evidence. Anyone who has read even part of the massive Warren Report could never assert that evidence in this case is “sparse”—a claim that would probably seem foolish even to folks who’ve perused Gerald Posner’s quite manageable “Case Closed.”  

Vincent Bugliosi, author of the monumental assassination work, “Reclaiming History,” demonstrated to a group of lawyers that they weren’t thinking logically about JFK’s murder by asking for a show of hands of those who had reviewed the Warren Report. The sparse number didn’t compare with the scores of hands raised earlier when he inquired about conspiracy proponents.     

Most Americans know little more about the assassination than what they’ve seen in Oliver Stone’s massively dishonest film, “JFK.” I regularly showed this dramatically gripping movie to seniors at the prep school in La Jolla where I taught for twenty years. That screening was followed by a condensed dose of real evidence as organized by Brandeis history scholar Jacob Cohen (“Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy,” Commentary Magazine, June, 1992). The typical result, at least for students who bothered to read Cohen’s article, was shock at Stone’s cinematic rape of history—at the director’s ignoring or twisting of obvious facts to make the event fit his own desires.  

Stone and others, however, get away with these monumental deceptions because journalists, intellectuals, and politicians have for decades been unwilling to provide to the general public, on a regular basis, even basic facts concerning Oswald that are clearly known—only a handful of which have been offered above. Like Stalin, they wish to airbrush out of the picture the “silly little communist” (Jackie Kennedy’s words) who clearly murdered the President and to manipulate a tragic historical event to further their own agendas.

 

CONSCIENCE AND ITS ENEMIES: CONFRONTING THE DOGMAS OF LIBERAL SECULARISM

Robert George is Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and, mirabile dictu, a Catholic and a conservative. His new book, Conscience and Its Enemies, offers a concise and philosophically compelling counterattack against “the dogmas of liberal secularism”—especially the largely unscrutinized beliefs that have recently prompted a redefinition of marriage and continue to provide moral justification for the million-plus abortions that annually take place in the United States since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision transformed a deadly procedure into a constitutional right.

Professor George early on lays out what he sees as the three pillars of a decent society: 1) a fundamental respect for every human being 2) the institution of the family understood as marital commitment between husband and wife and 3) “a fair and effective system of law and government.”

Respect for each individual “as a subject bearing profound, inherent, and equal worth and dignity” begins with the child in the womb and extends to the very old as well as the mentally and physically impaired. George notes that societies that fail to nurture respect for every person will eventually “come to regard human beings as mere cogs…whose dignity may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity.”

This vital regard for the individual, rooted in both natural law and the Judeo-Christian tradition, is best transmitted from generation to generation by means of an intact family. When this basic structure breaks down, respect for human dignity, along with virtues like self-restraint, civility, and compassion, are ultimately undermined.

For traditional families to flourish, a “cultural ethos” that supports marriage and spousal fidelity is required. This ethos is bolstered by mediating institutions like churches and other voluntary associations that stand between lone individuals and the powerful state. Absent strong families and influential private institutions, government inevitably expands to fill society’s pedagogical and care-taking needs. In America this scenario has been playing out for several decades and should give pause to libertarians who don’t see social and economic conservatism as two sides of the same limited-government coin.

George’s third pillar, “a fair and effective system of law,” requires government institutions that value individual liberty and respect mediating associations (like the Boy Scouts or the Catholic Church) whose beliefs may not correspond with the dogmas of secular liberalism.

The author argues persuasively that responsibility for keeping government within constitutional bounds isn’t the exclusive province of the Supreme Court. Indeed, he points out that this Constitutional heresy—a form of “judicial despotism” adamantly opposed by both Jefferson and Lincoln—was only explicitly asserted by the Court in 1958 (Cooper v. Aaron). George insists, by contrast, that judging a law’s constitutionality is “everybody’s business”—including the President, Congress, and even ordinary citizens. Elite opinion, of course, rejects these additional checks on federal power—especially the idea that folks like Tea Party protestors should have a voice in upholding the Constitution.

Far from embracing constitutional limits, George shows how governments and courts now regularly overstep their legitimate spheres of authority. Recent Obamacare insurance requirements vis-à-vis abortion, for example, constitute a major assault on religious liberty. The practical effect of these must-carry mandates is to eliminate conscience-based exemptions for religiously-affiliated institutions and to confine faith to a private closet that lacks the cultural clout or moral standing to challenge ideas promulgated by a growing governmental Leviathan.

On another front, various rights-based arguments have been employed to support the liberal redefinition of marriage as an institution based purely on feelings of affection and to stigmatize religious individuals and institutions that affirm the traditional view of marriage as a “one flesh” male-female union. This feelings-based understanding of marriage, as some of its prominent advocates openly admit, is ultimately destined to undermine the very notion of marriage as an institution intimately connected with procreation and spousal fidelity.

These and other secular ideas, George notes, are seldom critically scrutinized. The philosophical basis for liberal policies typically involves utilitarian sentiments that place personal desire or a vague social calculus of well-being above the sanctity of human life. Princeton professor Peter Singer provides a stark example of this perspective. The controversial ethicist has not only advocated extending “abortion rights” to cover cases of infanticide but has also condoned a theoretical society that breeds children simply to utilize their spare parts. As George observes (and as Singer’s views illustrate in spades) utilitarianism has no use for the concept of natural rights—including the idea that human beings may not be reduced to mere means to achieve other goals.

The last section of George’s work is devoted to brief, morally-focused sketches of a handful of important intellectual figures—including Andrew Sullivan, Richard John Neuhaus, and Elizabeth Fox and Eugene Genovese. These vignettes serve to put human faces on central themes of the book: the right to life, a defense of male-female marriage, academic integrity, and the intolerance and philosophical obtuseness of secular liberals.

Though Conscience and Its Enemies is organized as a collection of essays (several of which were previously published) the book manages to focus consistent attention on the three principles adumbrated in George’s initial chapter. The author’s legal training and philosophical education are both evident in his vigorous defense of these ideas. Rarely, however, does one confront details or arguments that might be considered obscure or daunting for the reasonably informed reader.

In short, it would be hard to find a book that does a better job of providing accessible legal and philosophical defenses of male-female marriage, the right to life, and limited government than Conscience and Its Enemies.

In Prison for Blasphemy in America?

Whatever happened to the Southland’s most infamous YouTube video maker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, aka Mark Basseley Youssef, aka Sam Bacile? As someone who follows the news closely, I was surprised to learn that the rogue producer of “Innocence of Muslims” is now cooling his probation-violating heels in a Texas prison.

According to National Review’s Rich Lowry, the L.A. fraudster is the first person jailed in the United States for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws. In Lowry’s words, “As a practical matter…Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.”

This opinion is bolstered by some highly regarded legal scholars, including Jonathan Turley, who point to oddities in Nakoula’s case that range from a highly publicized perp-walk to the year-long prison sentence assessed for technical probation violations.

One might think the legal status of someone falsely held responsible for the murder of four Americans by the President and his Sunday morning mouthpiece, Susan Rice, would be an item of press interest. But apparently the mainstream media’s political biases preclude serious inquiry into a story about the killing of an American ambassador along with San Diego native Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty of Encinitas and Tyrone Woods of Imperial Beach.

A free press worthy of that title would also show significant interest in the comment of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Charles Woods at a September 14 ceremony honoring his murdered son and the other Benghazi victims. According to Woods, Clinton offered him these words of retributive comfort: “We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted”—a remark apparently aimed at a politically troublesome act of free speech.

Unfortunately, Beltway journalists who magnified the non-lethal outing of former CIA-agent Valerie Plame into a years-long scandal are uninterested in Clinton’s chilling promise to Mr. Woods. Indeed, the non-Fox press and its entertainment surrogates have done everything within their power to disparage reporting about a scandal that harms their man in the White House.

Case in point: Congressman Darrell Issa, head of the House Oversight Committee, was recently lampooned for his group’s Benghazi investigation by the moral deviants at Saturday Night Live. This tasteless spoof echoed the MSM’s constantly reiterated “partisan witch hunt” theme—a political redundancy that only becomes newsworthy when GOP probes target Democrats.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have also offered dismissive comic takes on the Benghazi hearings—but not on former Secretary Clinton’s astounding “What difference at this point does it make?” response to a Senator’s question about circumstances surrounding the September 11 terrorist attack.

Memorial Day reminded us that myriad Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of liberty. That liberty, however, requires diligent journalists who protect free speech and hold lying politicians accountable. Given the performance of the mainstream press to date, America’s liberty is seriously imperiled.

Schools Suspend Common Sense

Last week the Los Angeles Unified School District board voted 5-2 to halt the practice of suspending students for acts of “willful defiance.” Instead of sending kids home, alternative disciplinary methods will be employed—including placing defiant students in “intervention rooms” where tutoring and “reparative justice” conferences are supposed to occur. It’s unclear, however, where personnel for these new psycho-judicial sessions will come from.

Observers should note that “willful defiance” is a catch-all category that includes acts ranging from wearing baggy pants (a euphemism, I suspect, for the blatant display of underwear) to mouthing off in class or refusing to comply with an instructor’s directives. These generic offenses accounted for about half of the district’s 700,000 suspensions issued last year. Serious violations like theft and acts of violence can still result in suspension.

Numerous news accounts link the frequent employment of “willful defiance” suspensions to “zero tolerance” policies that were instituted after the 1999 Columbine massacre. Anyone familiar with education bureaucracies knows that “zero-tolerance” is a popular title for policies applied without recourse to common sense. Accordingly, under such rules plastic knives may be equated with stilettos and Hello Kitty bubble guns with assault weapons.

Given such circumstances, doing away with a vague category that results in automatic suspension doesn’t seem unreasonable. On the other hand, the racial profiling argument proffered by “willful-defiance” opponents is positively perverse.

According to these advocates, the fact that black students account for 26% of all suspensions while constituting only 9% of the district’s school population is prima facie evidence of disciplinary racism.

The elephant-in-the-room that this race-centered logic ignores is that nearly two-thirds of all black children in California now live in homes without a father present—a staggering statistic that politically correct educrats are loath to acknowledge.

Anyone who dismisses the well-documented correlation between father-absence and a host of social pathologies shouldn’t be allowed near children. Yet this is precisely the head-in-the-sand perspective of officials who establish policies for the nation’s largest school district.

This same race-based reasoning was used a few years back to explain why African-American kids in L.A. County wind up in foster care more frequently than other groups—a convenient explanation that’s being abandoned now that most social workers are themselves black or Hispanic.

Schools can’t themselves rectify a community-based disaster, but educators should at least acknowledge the truth and present to students stories and statistics that relate father-absence to crime, health, and educational achievement—a task they are eager to fulfill when it comes to tobacco-related damage.

Unfortunately, the thing most often suspended in today’s public school systems is common sense.

Free Condoms for 12-year-olds

Imagine a wife seeing off her husband on a business trip, giving him a hug at the door, then tucking a package of condoms in his pocket. “Honey, we both feel that being faithful is important, but we also know that spouses are having sex outside of marriage. So I want us to be protected--just in case. Have a great trip!”

That’s doubtless the kind of conversation that takes place in homes occupied by workers at the Condom Access Project—an undertaking run by the California Family Health Council. This group is currently making taxpayer-funded condoms available online for kids as young as twelve years old—no parental consent or knowledge required.

The CFHC’s teensource.org website happily publishes the following headline for young browsers:

“Looking for free condoms? You have come to the right place! The Condom Access Project (CAP) is a free service that provides condoms for youth in California (12-19 years old)…. Enter your info below to find out how you can get free condoms near you.”

By utilizing this service, middle-schoolers in San Diego county can now obtain free condoms delivered in confidential packaging—just to make sure their parents don’t catch on. Kids in Riverside County can view a list of clinics where freebie prophylactics are disseminated.

The rationale for expanding this Internet perversity to San Diego is that the county currently ranks second in the state in chlamydia and sixth in gonorrhea cases. Moreover, we are informed by CFHC that California is rampant with STDs—a state of affairs supposedly facilitated by the fact that “teens continue to face many barriers to accessing condoms including embarrassment and concerns related to confidentiality, cost and accessibility.”

CFHC assures us, based on a study in New York City schools, that giving kids easy access to condoms doesn’t affect sexual activity. The agency doesn’t and can’t, however, provide evidence that a society that regularly undermines parental authority and treats twelve-year-olds as responsible adults has less promiscuity and related problems than a society that honors and supports parents as necessary guardians and educators of kids.

It’s inconceivable that the progressive undermining of parental authority and the proliferation of professional parent-excluding enablers hasn’t negatively impacted the immature psyches of youngsters who are anxious to prove their adult credentials.

Only “progressives” are sufficiently removed from reality to argue that the primary impact of increasing teen autonomy and lessening teen “embarrassment” about securing condoms will be a decrease in STDs. The primary impact of such policies has been the very STD mess the CAP program is supposed to address-- plus kids having more casual sex and soon self-administered morning-after abortions.

Greasing a Pathway to Citizenship

What will they think of next in Sacramento? Moving on from “gender identity” legislation, unwarranted incursions into psychiatric standards, and mandates that impose San Francisco sexual mores on all non-profits wishing to retain their tax-exempt status, the absurdity du jour from the state capital is a bill that seeks to extend jury service to non-citizens.

This legislation, AB 1401, passed the Assembly (45-25) on a largely party-line vote and is now proceeding to the Senate. One of the bill’s supporters, Rep. Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), said the law would expand the pool of prospective jurors and help integrate immigrants into the community.

However, as Assemblywoman Diane Harkey (R-Dana Point) observed, there is currently no shortage of jurors—an assertion that appears to be confirmed by statistics that show only 165,000 jurors were seated in 2010-2011 out of an available pool of 3.2 million Californians who reported for duty.

Moreover, it seems odd to pick jury duty as a way to “integrate immigrants into the community” since this obligation typically arises only once every couple of years and since fewer than half of the Californians summoned end up waiting in a courthouse or being placed on call.

I certainly didn’t find my most recent jury experience in Riverside one that bound me closer to the community—an ordeal that began with an early-morning forty-minute drive and an around-the-building queue for a time-consuming security check that was conducted by inarticulate and unfriendly personnel who expected citizens reporting for duty to magically decode mumbled directives.

Then there was the protracted solitary confinement period in a waiting room with a few hundred other county residents that I’ll never see again—a time punctuated with repetitive announcements apparently aimed at a third grade audience.

Nor can I say I bonded with anyone or found myself brimming with civic pride during the voir dire process which several years ago actually ended up placing me on a jury—even though I had taught the defendant’s daughter in school.

Given the preceding facts and experiences, any reason for extending jury service to non-citizens appears to be more politically than practically based.

I suspect the real reason for this Democrat-backed legislation is to further diminish the distinction between citizens and non-citizens—a precursor to greasing the “pathway to citizenship” for folks who in the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press will no longer be called “illegal” immigrants.

While this proposed jury law does not apply to those individuals Jay Leno labeled “undocumented Democrats,” it will, along with driver’s licenses, welfare assistance, and schooling, serve to make citizenship a critical irrelevancy in California.

Hate-center Head Dispenses Hate

You know things are bad on campus when even Bill Maher can identify the politically correct nonsense that regularly emanates from institutions of higher re-education. In this case the recipient of Maher’s well-deserved barbs was Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Maher is able to call a spade a spade if the truth happens to coincide with his deep anti-religious prejudice—especially in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. For Levin and many of his PC pals, however, all religions are created equal, with tons of hypocrites that make any indictment directed specifically at Islam unacceptable.

Maher’s retort to Levin’s jejune observation that “We have hypocrites across (all) faiths” was that the professor was spouting liberal BS and that there is “only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith.” Maher added, “Talk to Salman Rushdie…about Christian versus Islam.”

Instead of arguing the point, Levin, a putative intellectual, simply implied that Maher was an Islamophobe.

Maher then asked the professor if he had seen the show “The Book of Mormon.” After Levin said tickets were hard to come by, Maher sealed his argument by asking whether a show called “The Book of Islam” could be produced on Broadway.

When Levin incredibly responded, “Possibly so,” Maher asked the former Associate Director at the Southern Poverty Law Center what color the sky was in his world.

This dialogue (available online) is instructive because it illustrates how a professor can be so committed to a PC position, he’s unwilling to speak the obvious truth.

No reasonable person believes most Muslims in the United States are terrorists or support terror. But no honest individual can deny that Islamic cells pose a threat that far outstrips the danger posed by other religious groups.

Were Cal State’s prof devoted to truth, he would acknowledge not only that “The Book of Islam” could never be produced on Broadway but also that Yale University Press even declined to print the cartoon depictions of Muhammad in a scholarly book it published about the widespread violence spawned by those images.

By contrast, Levin’s former digs, the Southern Poverty Law Center, was eager to label the Christian-based Family Research Council a “hate group” based on its support for traditional marriage—a designation that inspired a violent follower of SPLC’s website to enter FRC’s headquarters “to kill as many (FRC employees) as possible.”

It’s ironic that so many academics have jettisoned discourse in favor of insults. Simply calling one’s opponent a hater ends all rational inquiry.

A High-speed Fiscal Train Wreck

Governor Brown, frantic to secure a lasting political legacy, is intent on building a bridge to the nineteenth century—even if it takes Chinese financing to do it.

On his recent trip to the communist country, Brown gushed with enthusiasm about all the building that other one-party state had done—especially the 5000-plus miles of high-speed rail it has laid in the last five years. Said the governor, “When I get back to California, the bulldozers are going to roll.”

What really ought to roll are political heads that pushed this hundred-billion dollar (or more) high-speed choo-choo. The governor, however, ignored China’s infamous find-a-scapegoat political tradition along with the 2011 Wenzhou train wreck that cost 40 passengers their lives and caused the commies to dial back rail speeds to 190 mph.

A recent analysis of California’s bullet boondoggle by the Reason Foundation reaffirms the group’s 2008 findings about the project’s costs, financing, and ridership—findings that show the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s business plans have been “inaccurate, misleading and in violation of the laws guiding the project.”

One such violation is the statute that requires the train to link L.A. to San Francisco in 2 hours and 40 minutes or less. Reason’s study, which takes into account reduced speeds due to tracks shared with other trains, including freight trains, puts the time at around four hours or longer.

Slower speeds mean fewer riders and higher costs. Even CHSRA’s ridership estimate has been dramatically reduced from a minimum of 65.5 million in 2035 to a maximum of 31.8 million and a minimum of 19.6 million. (Decimal points are obviously added to give the false impression of precision.)

Reason’s study, however, notes that even if the train reaches ridership levels in Europe, the number of passengers would only hit 7.6 million. Thus, ticket prices that were first projected at $50 in 2008 and are now put at $81 will go even higher. As prices increase, ridership will decline further.

Given these scenarios, the Reason Foundation estimates the annual subsidy for this white elephant on wheels will be anywhere from 124 to 373 million dollars.

Perhaps the governor can use his political charm to persuade the Chinese to cover some of the exploding costs for his bullet dream by giving them naming rights. CHSRA would doubtless love to market an exotic ride from Merced to Bakersfield on the Orient Express.

Or maybe Brown plans to import non-union Chinese workers to construct and ride his high-speed legacy.

Failing those fanciful options, what California taxpayers will be facing for decades to come is a high-speed fiscal train wreck.

LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION AT COLLEGE IS COMMON

By now most college-bound high school seniors know which institution they’ll be attending. Those students may not, however, be prepared for the one-sided ideological environment they will almost certainly encounter—a place where objectively presenting various sides of issues often gives way to heavy-handed indoctrination.

An example of professorial browbeating and bias was recently exposed by a student at the University of Southern California. The instructor in this case was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science Darry Sragow, a Democrat operative who was secretly taped spewing partisan venom at his mini "re-education camp."

The tape, available online, shows Sragow attacking Republicans as “really stupid and racist” and their party as “increasingly the last refuge of old, angry white people.” The professor even suggests ways to suppress Republican votes: “You lose their information on voting in the mail,” he said, adding that there are “lots of ways to do it.”

Ironically, Sragow (himself an angry old white guy) indignantly offered a speculative anecdote about GOP voter-registration drives in which, when a person registers as a Democrat, “the allegation is that they throw those forms in the trash.” In a court of law such testimony would be dismissed as hearsay.

The not-so-brilliant Sragow also informed inmates in his class that politics is all about power and employed this example: “Al Gore won the Presidency of the United States. Didn’t get to be President. That’s power.”

Presumably Bush people snookered Gore out of Florida’s electoral votes. Overlooked by (or unknown to) Sragow was that most credible reviews of the 2000 Florida vote (including the New York Times) showed Bush would have won a recount. Sragow’s implication that Gore won because he got more votes nationwide represents an elementary mistake, or a deliberate misrepresentation, by a putative political science professor.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Sragow were a rare exception. Unfortunately, a slew of analyses demonstrate that diversity of thought isn’t prized by most universities whose ideological makeup and political contributions tilt overwhelmingly to the left.

Indeed, the chair of the “Africana” program at Cal State University Long Beach, Dr. Maulana Karenga (inventor of the pseudo-African holiday of Kwanzaa) spent four years in prison for felonious assault. Yet shortly after his release this Marxist felon began teaching at San Diego State University and then at UC Riverside. Only fourteen years passed between prison and heading the Black Studies program at Long Beach.

Unfortunately, the academy is packed with radicals like Karenga, UC Santa Cruz’s retired communist prof, Angela Davis, and Northwestern’s former-terrorist law professor Bernadine Dohrn, wife of former professor and fellow-terrorist Bill Ayers. By comparison, USC’s bad-boy is an ideological piker.

California Ranks Next-to-last on Freedom Scale

In a Peanuts-based cartoon traveling around the Internet, Lucy loudly informs Linus that she’s pro-choice. Linus asks if he can smoke, but Lucy nixes the idea for health reasons. Similar exchanges occur about large sodas, dangerous guns, planet-endangering incandescent bulbs, environmentally harmful coal, and offensive God-language. When Linus asks what exactly he’s free to choose, Lucy responds, “An abortion.”

The cartoon provides a darkly humorous summary of freedom in the state of California. A more scholarly overview is available at George Mason University’s libertarian-oriented Mercatus Center.

According to that analysis, the Golden State ranks 49th out of the 50 states on various scales of economic and personal freedom—placing more restrictions on liberty than every state but New York. Only California’s libertarian-endorsed lassitude with respect to marijuana, marriage, and so-called “victimless” crimes saves it from occupying the index’s bottom spot.

Not surprisingly, the union and environmentalist-dominated state ranks dead last on freedom from various types of regulation—a position that dovetails with its cellar standing on factors that affect an individual’s ability to find a job.

Sacramento’s fiefdom also leads the nation when it comes to restrictions on gun ownership, a dubious honor that could be further solidified by new proposals to tax and regulate ammunition.

In addition, California ranks first in nanny laws—and thus last in terms of freedom from a grab-bag of regulations that range from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet requirements.

Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, however, have concluded that all these restrictions are insufficient to safeguard their residents and to create the ideal balance they feel is needed within imaginary ecosystems. Consequently, they’ve instituted bans directed at another public menace—single-use plastic bags typically distributed by retailers.

Not to be outdone by mere municipalities, California legislators are pondering a statewide ban on these inexpensive and convenient petroleum byproducts—another dubious environmental mandate that will force shoppers to pay for paper sacks or pack a number of durable totes in their cars’ trunks. Dutiful “health officials” assure us that the latter conveyances will remain largely free of bacterial contaminants.

All these laws designed to combat an ever-growing list of perceived dangers have contributed greatly to the exodus of Californians to other states—an outflow also documented by the Mercatus Center and indicating, in their words, a desire to find “more employment opportunities or a better quality of life.”

On the other side of the ledger, California legislators are now considering AB 154—legislation that will allow nurses, midwives, and physicians’ assistants to perform the only act of freedom many Californians passionately embrace—the freedom to extinguish nascent human life.

Obamacare Bureaucrat Gets Things Backwards

Folks who work for the government have a talent for getting things backwards. Such is the case with Robert Ross, a board member of the new state agency responsible for implementing the three-year-old federal healthcare law—aka Obamacare.

It seems that this agency, Covered California, needs 20,000 temporary workers to enroll millions of residents in the state’s health insurance exchange. Plans currently call for workers to receive $58 for each application completed.

One might think Americans would rush to put themselves into this historically wonderful program—without assistance from paid recruiters. But such retrograde thoughts only occur to folks who find it disturbing that the government uses ad campaigns to recruit food stamp recipients.

Mr. Ross’ backwards mentality, however, doesn’t involve the sign-up program itself. It rather concerns the fact that these temporary workers will have access to highly sensitive consumer materials—Social Security numbers, birth dates, income and tax information.

Right-thinking persons would want to make darn sure that anyone with access to such data would be fingerprinted and undergo a thorough background check. Mr. Ross, however, works in the government. His primary concern is for the burden a careful background check might impose on the cohort of workers he envisions collecting this fraud-inviting personal and financial information.

Ross prefaces his true agenda with a comment about “bureaucratic mountains that slow us down.” That’s rich, coming from a board member of a new state bureaucracy.

The real problem Ross has with extensive background checks is revealed in this remark: “There are people who have turned their lives around and who are trusted by the most difficult-to-reach populations. Not having their talent and expertise could be a problem.”

Translation: Many of the workers Ross would like to employ have criminal records that would disqualify them from being hired. He thinks it’s more important to employ individuals with dubious backgrounds to get as many people as possible into this program than it is to safeguard Californians from fraud.

For most Americans this Batman-goofy rehabilitation mentality went out with the skyrocketing crime rates it spawned in the seventies. Ross, however, works for the government and shares the same perspective as the non-profit official who insisted that “background checks would create barriers for a lot of communities of color… We need a massive amount of people to help with outreach.”

By the way, “community groups” (think ACORN) and non-profits like the one represented by the quote above (Greenlining Institute), will be charged with hiring sign-up workers.

It isn’t trivial that the latter government-minded officer spoke of human beings as “amounts”—i.e. as volumes, not as fraud-susceptible “individuals.”

Gender Identity Laws vs. Religious Freedom

It’s hard to overstate the arrogance of legislators who regularly fail to take care of basic governmental responsibilities—education, prisons, infrastructure, budgeting—yet impose laws about social mores that have no civilized precedent.

Two years ago our philosopher-kings in Sacramento passed a law, AB 887, that added “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of non-discrimination categories that apply to employers and housing officials.

As that piece of social engineering explained, “Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt internal sense of being male or female. Gender expression refers to one’s behavior, mannerisms, appearance and other characteristics that are perceived to be masculine or feminine.”

In abstract language the provision sounds benign, but when one asks how this idea plays out in real life, questions abound about the wisdom of this radical innovation.

Specifically, this bill requires employers to accept male employees who express themselves by wearing blouses and skirts to work. Conversely, biological females who feel the need to express their inner maleness can dress accordingly without fear of workplace repercussions.

The situation gets stickier when these “let a thousand sexual flowers bloom” rules are applied to students—a scenario now playing out in Massachusetts schools where “gender identity” laws allow gender-questioning students to use bathrooms of the opposite biological sex or to play on the sport teams of the sex with which they identify.

According to Bay State directives, the fact that female students feel uncomfortable about a boy in the bathroom “is not a reason to deny access to the (sincere) transgender student.” The absurdity extends to eliminating gender-based clothing at graduations—a policy that would logically require the elimination of gender-based bathrooms.

One should also ponder the application of these regulations to teachers—a hypothetical that, as one can see on the MassResistance.org website, isn’t entirely hypothetical in Massachusetts.

Not content to extend a middle finger to traditional mores in schools and the workplace, California legislators are now considering withdrawing tax-exempt status from private organizations that don’t follow their unprecedented gender-identity rules.

SB 323 requires organizations with tax-exempt status to abandon any discriminatory criteria related to “gender identity” and sexual orientation. The most obvious group targeted by this recent expression of liberal fascism is the Boy Scouts, but private schools and other groups like the American Youth Soccer Organization are also explicitly mentioned.

Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, describes SB 323 as “an extreme example of intolerance” to the “convictions held by private benevolent non-profit organizations.” He also warned that, if successful, the next target of the LGBT lobby will be non-complying churches.

Thus does “tolerance” reveal itself as intolerant libertine secularism.

DISHING DIRT ON ELECTRIC CARS

California, the epicenter of environmental religiosity, leads the nation in purchasing electric cars. These zero-emission vehicles not only make their owners serious candidates for eco-sainthood, they also bestow on them a number of more tangible benefits.

Being allowed to drive in carpool lanes with only a single occupant is one nifty perk. Other bonuses are the steep government subsidies given to purchasers. The feds dole out up to $7,500 in rebates while the oh-so-green Golden State could kick in an extra $2,500.

Despite these emotional and financial incentives, 2012 sales for electric vehicles came in at only about 50,000. These numbers make President Obama’s nationwide goal of a million EVs by 2015 as unlikely as achieving a balanced federal budget by that date.

The good (or bad) news is that the environmental efficacy of EVs has been vastly overstated. This conclusion comes not from an oil-industry analyst but from “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg’s recent “Wall Street Journal” article on this topic focuses on the entire “life-cycle” of electric vehicles, not just on their post-production carbon dioxide emissions.

Taking into account the carbon emissions needed to produce a vehicle, electric cars begin their exhaust-free existence with more than twice the emissions required to make a conventional automobile (30,000 vs. 14,000 pounds). Then there’s the problem of recharging, a process that typically employs electricity produced from fossil fuels.

Here is Lomborg’s bottom line with respect to emissions: “If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles.”

Another discouraging word for EV aficionados is that the Nissan Leaf has only a 73-mile range per charge and, according to one test, recharging takes so long that on extended trips the average speed is about six (yes, 6) miles per hour. Add to that tidbit the fact that within five years battery degradation brings the car’s range down to 55 miles. Thus, the likelihood of achieving any positive “carbon offset” with this vehicle is slim.

Despite these inconvenient truths, California and the feds continue to generously subsidize these hugely expensive vehicles—more out of blind allegiance to the green lobby and the goddess Gaia than out of a reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

California’s Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors greatly appreciate governments that dish out billions of dollars to battery and electric car manufacturers like themselves—all so that benighted greenies can feel good about themselves.

Informed taxpayers and honest environmentalists shouldn’t feel so swell about these dubious investments.

THE APOCALYPSE AND L.A.’s PROPOSITION A

A voice breathlessly commenting on a dramatic emergency scene declares that “every second counts when it comes to saving lives” and that without Proposition A “your safety is at risk.” Los Angeles’ Police Chief appears on screen and grimly announces: “I’m Charlie Beck. Public safety is now in danger. Please support me by voting ‘yes’ on Proposition A.”

That’s the choice for voters: Support Proposition A or put public safety at risk. What exactly Prop. A is, isn’t stated, but obviously only sociopaths would oppose it. Such is the nature of today’s “my way or the apocalypse” political discourse.

For the benefit of the more than eighty percent of registered Angelinos who sat out this election, Prop. A called for a permanent half-cent increase in the city’s sales tax—a rise that the city council hoped would generate over $200 million in additional revenue.

Buoyed by the success of Proposition 30 last fall, which linked tax increases to the welfare of California’s school children, L.A.’s city council rushed through this local tax measure without public hearings and hoped for a ‘yes’ vote by tying it to emergency responders.

Fortunately, enough sentient citizens went to the polls to defeat this measure (55-45%). At a minimum this new pile of municipal cash would be an important bargaining chip that public employee unions would employ in upcoming contract negotiations.

The issue never addressed by proponents of this and other new taxes is why the most essential and popular government services are in jeopardy if new taxes aren’t approved. Why, in other words, is funding for emergency services, schools, and parks always at risk and not exorbitant pensions, proliferating bureaucrats, and dubious programs?

In his teaching days economist Thomas Sowell told students to “imagine a government agency with only two tasks: building statues of Benedict Arnold and providing life-saving medications to children.” Sowell then asked how the agency would respond to a budget cut. The bureaucrat-savvy answer is that medications for children would be reduced because that action would likely result in getting the budget cuts reversed.

The Obama White House is playing the same cynical game with the puny $85 billion cut to a federal budget projected to be over $3700 billion (3.7 trillion). Thus, school children planning a visit to the White House are turned away in order to make cuts as painful and obvious as possible.

The worst case scenario, as one Obama lackey opined, would be if “the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens”—a result that would confirm the obvious truth that most governments are awash in redundancy, regulatory overreach, and graft.

VIDEO POKER LEADS TO EX-SAN DIEGO MAYOR'S DOWNFALL

The ancient Greeks said to count no man happy until he dies. After all, one never knows what unexpected turns a person’s life might take.

Two years after I moved to San Diego in 1984, the city chose as its mayor a perky 38-year–old woman named Maureen O’Connor. “Mo” was first elected to the City Council in 1971 when she was only twenty-five. She served in that capacity for eight years, and then had a five-year stint as commissioner of the Port of San Diego prior to becoming mayor. In 1977, during her rise to political power, she became the wife of Jack in the Box founder, Robert Peterson.

In short, by the early 90s O’Connor was respected, powerful, and wealthy. Currently the former mayor is facing prosecution for taking over two million dollars from her deceased husband’s charitable foundation—money that she gambled away, along with much of the fortune she inherited.

A deal struck with federal prosecutors allows the 66-year-old O’Connor to defer prosecution for two years as she attempts to repay her debt to the foundation. O’Connor, who underwent surgery for a brain tumor in 2011 and suffers from its aftereffects, now lives with her sister and is virtually broke.

The former mayor suffered the loss of her husband in 1994, and according to her attorney the deaths of several other close friends contributed to his client’s compulsive “grief gambling”—a habit that reportedly began around 2001. During the next decade she wagered, won, and lost over a billion dollars. But her net losses topped $13 million.

It’s hard to imagine the number of hours O’Connor must have been spent in front of lifeless video poker machines to reach those staggering figures. But gambling houses in San Diego, Las Vegas and Atlantic City were happy to accommodate a presumably wealthy patron who would occasionally drop $100,000 in a day. It’s a portrait quite at odds with the happy scenes conveyed by casino ads on TV.

O’Connor likened her gambling habit to heroin addiction and suggested that her brain tumor may have added to the compulsiveness. Federal prosecutor Phillip Halpern, however, observed that a ten-year fuse for a brain tumor is unlikely.

My own guess is that the absence of children, the loss of intimate friends, and separation from the reins of power all combined to create a vacuum for which even millions of dollars could not compensate. A politician out of power can be like an ex-athlete who misses the adrenaline rush of competition, cheers and victory.

And when those “celebrities” find themselves short on close friends, a video poker machine is cold comfort.

Black Gold Versus Green Religion

Gas prices in the Southland are again well above four dollars, and in some regions of California over five. The typical political response to this state of affairs is to blame the dastardly oil companies, as Dianne Feinstein did last October when prices spiked even higher and the senator demanded a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the presumably nefarious cause of this rise.

Even a non-conservative source like NBC news, however, was still honest enough to report that Californians have only themselves and their elected officials to blame for soaring prices at the pump. Boutique gas blends, limited refining capacity, and the second-highest gasoline tax in the country (almost fifty cents a gallon) are three factors that regularly combine to push pump prices into the stratosphere.

Fortunately, the once-Golden State is now sitting on a vast store of oil within the Monterey Shale formation. This geological region measuring 1,750 square miles and stretching from southern to central California constitutes two-thirds of the country’s estimated shale oil reserves and dwarfs the ample supply in North Dakota that has fueled an economic boom in that state.

Unfortunately, the chances that California’s Green political machine will allow this resource to be effectively tapped—to reduce unemployment, erase budget deficits, and eventually trim gas prices—are slim and none.

Hollywood, the prime source of misinformation for many West Coasters, has already launched a major theatrical broadside against the fracking process by which oil is obtained from shale. In the film “Promised Land” Matt Damon is the celebrity employed to show that oil companies are ruthless and will go to great lengths to discredit environmental concerns. The movie, not coincidentally, was largely funded by an enterprise owned by the United Arab Emirates—an OPEC nation that clearly hopes to stifle U.S. oil production.

Ironically, there are significant potential environmental upsides to accessing this huge oil reservoir—like reducing tanker-spill risks and cutting greenhouse gas emissions in refineries due to the quality of Monterey oil. But it’s unlikely the oil-is-evil crowd will care about these considerations since, as one pundit observed, “their opposition is more religious than rational.”

Radical environmentalists have so cluttered the Internet with apocalyptic fracking scenarios that it’s hard to find unbiased expert information. Geologist Ian Duncan’s sober analysis, for example, is buried beneath scores of anti-fracking screeds.

Last October Senator Feinstein declared that forcing motorists to pay dearly for gasoline was “untenable.” But don’t count on Feinstein’s support for accessing a resource that could actually lower those prices. Her position will likely follow the theological urgings of the state’s green, wealthy coastal elite—not the distress of reddish inlanders.