The Right Side of History... by Ben Shapiro

Why are things in America so good, and why are we throwing it all away?  Those are the two questions that Ben Shapiro, the staccato-laced intellectual pugilist, seeks to answer in his new book, The Right Side of History.  That things are actually amazingly good, at least materially, in the U.S. is demonstrated via statistics of which few Americans are aware.  For example, in 1900, ten percent of all infants in the country died before their first birthday, and one out every one hundred mothers died in childbirth.  Today, both infant mortality and death in childbirth are rare.  I might add that the average lifespan for American women increased from around 46 years in 1900 to over 80 today.  Beyond longevity, material prosperity has reached almost Messianic levels.

On the downside, however, Americans are more hostile toward each other than at any time since the Civil War — primarily divided along ideological lines.  In addition, a growing percentage of the population finds itself without any significant meaning in life, an existential void that promotes rapidly increasing drug addiction and suicide rates.  Concurrent with this spiritual deficit are incessant attacks on America's traditional institutions in order to "fundamentally transform" the nation.  Thus, amid tremendous prosperity and freedom, we now see 24/7 vilification of the nation's racist, sexist,  genocidal history conjoined with attempts to squelch any speech that challenges leftist demands for "social justice."  In short, powerful media, academic, and political forces are in the process of destroying the very Constitutional principles and cultural institutions that made America great. 

So what, exactly, made America great?  Shapiro says, correctly, in my view, the union of "Jerusalem and Athens," by which he means the nation's historically mediated incorporation of the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition alongside the reason-based natural law tradition exemplified in Plato and Aristotle.  The creative tension between these two poles produced in America, and less clearly in Europe, societies that embraced both individual freedom and communal goals, both transcendent purpose and the employment of reason to achieve morally sanctioned objectives.  In America, a broad devotion to basic moral and religious principles provided a foundation for the individual "pursuit of happiness" within various religious and community groups.

The philosophical and historical journey that led to this outcome constitutes the bulk of Shapiro's book, material that may be a heavy lift for folks with little or no background in intellectual history.  That's not to say the author dwells on minor or abstruse philosophical points — only that his brisk and insightful overview of important philosophical developments during the last 2,500 years necessarily presupposes a degree of familiarity on the reader's part.  On the plus side, Shapiro's  overview is narrowly focused on the issues he needs to illuminate: the embrace of faith and reason and the negative consequences of rejecting either or both of these two poles.

After more than a century of religious wars in Europe, a creative balance was tentatively achieved that included both the Greek rational tradition and the biblical heritage of Judaism and Christianity.  This fragile coalition was soon destroyed, most grotesquely in the French Revolution, whose rejection of faith and deification of human reason led to a bloodbath whose cruelty should be a clear demonstration of the depths of depravity to which human reason is liable when freed from any transcendent restraints.  (I recommend Ann Coulter's chapters in Demonic for an impressive summary of this revolutionary barbarism.)

In America, however, the world's first philosophically constructed Constitution was made the political foundation of a religiously diverse people overwhelmingly devoted to the broad moral and spiritual ideas derived from the Bible.  These ideas included the conviction that all people are created in God's image and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.  America's Lockean embrace of reason, faith, and limited government provided the dynamism that gave rise to the most productive and religiously conscientious culture (cf. Tocqueville) the world has ever known.
  
Shapiro's final chapters depict the West's and America's descent into materialism, hedonism, and spiritual nihilism.  In Europe, the "death of God" proclaimed by Nietzsche and biologically sanctioned by Darwin created a vacuum that was filled by communism and fascism — ideologies that dismissed the individual and free inquiry for the sake of utopian futures.  In America Progressives also belittled the notion of individual liberty and a Constitution that limits government power, enthralled as they were with Hegelian concepts that touted collective goals.  Progressives thus gave birth to the eugenics movement promoted by Margaret Sanger, the dogma of a "living Constitution," and a government no longer constrained by constitutional boundaries.
   
The deterioration of faith in America and the West also gave rise to a rationalism that views humans as animals, or even bits of matter, with no moral purpose.  Attempts to create one's own personal morality within this godless universe, as with the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre,  have proven to be absurd, since morality is essentially a social concept and implies some penalty, either in this world or the next, for transgressions.  As if all these developments weren't bad enough, today's cultural Marxists are intent on bringing about a new society by overturning all existing institutions in the name of various victim groups.  Those institutions include the family, traditional religion, and any organization that can be viewed as supporting the white male capitalist establishment.  This phalanx of true believers pledges allegiance neither to reason nor to faith in God, but only to its own fantasies.  Thus, people can change their "gender" at will and others must agree that X and Y chromosomes mean nothing — or be punished for transphobic hate crimes.  Goodbye individual freedom, goodbye rationality, goodbye anything like the God of the Bible.

After offering detailed examples of America's cultural and spiritual decline, Shapiro provides scant advice for rectifying the situation.  It's certainly good to instill in one's children an appreciation of the immense historical accomplishments of our country — accomplishments rigorously avoided by leftist academics.  It is also wise to convey to them your conviction that their lives are "guided by a higher meaning" and that "we are all brothers and sisters."  But providing a familial remedy for a cultural disaster seems a counsel of despair.  In addition to pedagogical advice, some thoughts about the "academic and media" sources of disintegration would be in order, a few of which I offer in the closing chapter ("What Went Wrong") of my own book, Moral Illiteracy.

No doubt, the young Shapiro will provide more extensive suggestions in the future for countering and reversing the destructive forces leading us toward a culture that neither fears God nor reveres reason.  For now, his work illuminating the historical and philosophical origins of America's greatness and the sources of its impending doom is well worth perusing.

Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, by David Horowitz

David Horowitz has always been a writer whose work I've appreciated since his compelling political biography, Radical Son, which related the author's break from his communist upbringing after Black Panther associates murdered his bookkeeper friend Betty Van Patter.  But brevity and crisp linkage of multiple intellectual threads were never characteristic of Horowitz's brilliant, often voluminous, exposés of leftist thought and practice.  By contrast, Dark Agenda is a concise, chilling book brimming with evidence that links numerous cultural depredations to one overriding theme:  The left's attack on Christian America's founding in the name of "cultural Marxism." 

"Christian America" is the novel component in Horowitz's analysis, a term that acknowledges the historical fact that America, at its founding, was 98 percent Protestant.  Protestantism, in turn, was intimately linked to the doctrine of "the priesthood of all believers" and to the more broadly Christian idea that all people are created by God.  In view of these beliefs and the fact that Protestant groups were living side by side, it followed that in America there would be no institutional or governmental mediator between the individual and God.  It also meant that each individual's rights were endowed solely by their Creator and that freedom of conscience and speech would be hallmarks of the new republic. 

"Cultural Marxism," by contrast, represents the application of its "oppressor versus oppressed" vision of society to various victim groups:  blacks, "people of color," women, native Americans, homosexuals, transsexuals, and any other group claiming victimhood.  For Marxists what stands between these oppressed groups and a world in which "social justice" and equality is fully realized are the oppressors, those who supposedly establish the laws and mores that keep them in power.  Thus, failure or success isn't the result of individual choices but the inevitable outcome of a system designed to unfairly help one group (white, Christian, males) and harm the others.  Accordingly, what matters politically is destroying the patriarchal Christian system itself with its emphasis on individual moral and economic choices and replacing it with a group-focused system that, in my own words, oppresses the oppressors.  Put quite simply, "Christian doctrines were foundational to the American Republic, which the left despises."

After reading the last two paragraphs, one might think Dark Agenda is highly philosophical and abstract.  This impression couldn't be further from the truth, as these core ideas are given clear expression and development via an array of examples, many of which are doubtless unknown to even the most politically-astute readers.  Who knew, for example, that the $621 million U.S. Capitol Visitor Center that opened in 2008 "is less a monument to the nation's founding and institutions than it is to the antireligious left's vision for America.  When it opened, all references to God and faith had been carefully, deliberately edited out of its photos and historical displays."  For example, the national motto was said to be "E Pluribus Unum" when, in fact, it is "In God We Trust."  Among other historical travesties, a large "image of the Constitution was photoshopped to remove the worlds 'in the Year of our Lord' above the signatures of the signers." Similarly, the "table on which President Lincoln placed his Bible during his second inauguration is on display — just the table, not the Bible."

These examples are picayune compared to the spiteful governmental coercion that's been employed to force The Little Sisters of the Poor, among others, to violate their consciences thanks to Obamacare abortion provisions.  The Supreme Court has been the giant secular lever employed by leftists to fundamentally transform "Christian America" into a state hostile even to a school-girl who joined hands with classmates to give thanks for her food. These politically-motivated  "lawyers," as Horowitz contemptuously labels the high court, began their anti-Christian, anti-Constitutional mission with the expulsion of prayer from public schools in 1962 (Engel v. Vitale).  That assault on the free exercise of religion now extends beyond commencement ceremonies and football fields to a bakery that was  embroiled in legal battles for years for refusing to provide a celebratory cake for a gay ceremony billed as a wedding — a "crime" made possible by Court rulings against the Defense of Marriage Act and in favor of redefining marriage.  

The case of Roe v. Wade (1972), which awakened religious conservatives to the fundamental attack on Christian America, is cogently dissected in Dark Agenda, both from a constitutional perspective as well as through the eyes of Norma McCorvey, the anonymous "Jane Roe" who was intentionally deceived and reduced to a legal prop to secure the Supreme Court's "right to privacy" abortion ruling.  (As Horowitz notes, in Marxist thought it's the grand arc of history and oppressed groups that matter, not mere individuals.)  That ruling officially brought about the cultural civil war that for the anti-Christian left involves not simply a virulent hatred of President Trump but also hatred directed toward his supporters who are regularly vilified as Nazis, sexists, racists, homophobes, and "deplorables" who are rightly denied freedom of speech and conscience.  Trump's Oval Office predecessor did his best to stoke these emotions as Horowitz's litany of anti-Christian comments and actions by President Obama illustrate — from avoiding religious references during a traditional Thanksgiving ceremony to pursuit of a foreign policy that led to the annihilation of the ancient Christian community in Syria.

Among the sidebars accompanying Horowitz's central narrative are insights into the abusive and mendacious character of atheist Madelyn Murray.  For example, in 1960 Murray "set out with her two sons . . . intending to renounce her American citizenship and defect to the Soviet Union." Her repeated attempts at emigration were rebuffed by the Soviets who were probably aware of her emotional instability and violent outbursts.  Murray's revolutionary predecessor, Margaret Sanger, was also a communist sympathizer and racist.  A 1930 article in The New Yorker about Ms. Sanger noted that her monthly newspaper, Woman Rebel, "mixed its birth-control propaganda with a good deal of red-flag-waving, and perorations of the 'Workers of the World, Arise!' variety." The author also observed that she "composed an editorial declaring: 'Even if dynamite were to serve no other purpose than to call forth the spirit of revolutionary solidarity and loyalty, it would prove its great value.'"  

Horowitz ends Dark Agenda with this chilling paragraph reminiscent of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "A nation divided by such fundamental ideas — individual freedom on one side and group identity on the other — cannot long endure, any more than could a nation that was half slave and half free.  The urgency that drew the religious right into politics fifty years ago is now an urgency of the nation itself."  Even individuals well aware of the cultural Civil War that now rages in America would do well do arm themselves with the insights in this book — insights that both explain the ideological  roots of the conflict and document a host of grievous wounds that "Christian America" has already suffered.  Horowitz, an honest agnostic, is doing his best to prevent those wounds from becoming mortal.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/david_horowitz_exposes_the_lefts_dark_agenda.html

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is available on Kindle.

SCRATCH-AND-SNIFF VOTES FOR ALL

After exiting the tax-happy Gilded State, a fair number of its loopy citizens who could no longer afford skyrocketing housing prices and crowded freeways migrated to nearby Oregon, a state that competes with California for the honor of championing the most “progressive” ideas in the nation -- e.g. assisted suicide, legalized weed, rent control, and banning those thin plastic bags that presumably constitute an existential threat to the planet.  

           

Recently Oregon’s legislature began touting a proposal similar to one the late California State Senator John Vasconcellos floated  in 2004.  Back then Vasconcellos proposed giving partial votes to teenagers.  Fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds would receive quarter-votes while their sixteen- and seventeen-year-old siblings would wield twice as much electoral clout.  Oregon’s legislators, by contrast, are considering a bill that would give a full 100% vote to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds while leaving younger kids disenfranchised, at least for the moment.

Any honest political observer knows why Democrats wish to drop the voting age to include individuals who can’t join the military, own firearms, or enter into legal contracts.  The reason is that emotional, easily manipulated teenagers are overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats -- as is undoubtedly the case with those “undocumented immigrants” that San Francisco now includes in local elections.  Rising in opposition to the Oregon bill, the Senate Republican leader observed, “This is nothing more than an attempt to expand the voter rolls to sway elections.” Omitted from his statement were the words “toward Democrats.”  

If Oregon passes this legislation, it may be only a matter of time till its sponsors propose (bit by bit) constitutional amendments that enfranchise, perhaps fractionally, all its citizens -- bills that allow both grade-schoolers and toddlers the opportunity to participate in the “democratic process” in both state and federal elections.  The conservative view that language-acquisition and continence-skills (to say nothing of I.D.) should be voting prerequisites will doubtless be portrayed as a corrupt attempt to suppress the vote by “ageist” opponents of full representation.

Furthermore, since a significant number of high school graduates are already functionally illiterate, extending voting rights to other literacy-challenged teens and pre-teens seems only logical.  Finally, providing diapered Democrats some voice in government is warranted due to the all-but-certain belief that infants have a scant twelve years to live if politicians don’t adopt AOC’s “Green New Deal.”  Surely those “most at risk” kids deserve a voice in their own rapidly-diminishing futures as was made clear by the tots who recently lectured California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

If one asks how pre- and neo-bipeds are supposed to vote, one may argue that a government of “all the people” must accommodate the developmental stages of all citizens by providing height- and age-appropriate selection mechanisms.  A ballot for two-year-olds, for example, could show a scowling face shouting “Bad boy, bad girl!” for binary Republicans and a cheerful nurturing figure labeled “Does baby X want candy?” for Democrats.  Other creative symbols could be used for minor party candidates.  Greens might be represented by Ansel Adams prints and foresty smells.  Sour grapes, on the other hand, would provide an appropriate scratch-and-sniff stand in for Starbucks spoiler Howard Schultz.  A one-tenth vote based on such odio-visual cues would doubtless provide as accurate a reflection of toddler "scentiment" as the butterfly ballot choices made by those Palm Beach seniors who couldn’t tell the difference between Pat Buchanan and Al Gore in the 2000 Bush-Gore Presidential election.

The last refuge of electoral scoundrels, of course, is the intelligence argument. Elitists will claim that children don’t know enough to vote responsibly.  Yet literacy tests were outlawed decades ago.  Surely the Ninth U. S. Circuit Court wouldn’t hesitate to also declare intelligence and maturity unconstitutional standards -- especially if its ruling aids opponents of President Trump.  

The truth is that obstructionists have always been against the expansion of voting rights -- to non-propertied males, to blacks and women, to 18-year-olds.  They always say that the new group isn’t qualified and doesn’t know enough to responsibly exercise the franchise.  To these doubting Thomases there’s an obvious retort: “What’s knowledge got to do with it?  If the adult voters of New York can elect the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, how could incontinent two-year-olds possibly do worse?”

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle 

APOCRYPHAL APOCALYPSES: PUTTING DEPLORABLES IN THEIR PLACE

“Apocalypse Now” doesn’t spook millennials given what they can see with their own eyes and the impossibility of avoiding destruction, but a global warming/climate change cataclysm in twelve years is sufficiently distant for kids near twenty as to be both believable and politically motivating.  Thus the rationale for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s climatological foray into the end times—a venture that is three parts political hokum and one part rehashed Gore blather.

Predictions about the apocalypse have a long history.  The year 1000 A.D. had a nice millennial rationale for terminating history, so much so that an anti-Christian 19^th century French historian, Jules Michelet, related a plethora of cases about benighted believers who awaited the final trumpet blast with a mixture of fear and expectation.  Michelet’s anti-clerical successors “added macabre and colorful details” to the mix, suggesting “that greedy churchmen had encouraged millennial fears deliberately so that people would give their material possessions to the church in hopes of salvation.”  These tales that were created to impugn religion as a baseless superstition now permeate the “educated” West.  Unfortunately for Michelet and his secular disciples, as later research would reveal (cf. Professor Peter Stearns) there was no widespread use in Europe of the calendar that for us designates the year 1000 A.D.  At most, there may have been a heightened sense of apocalyptic urgency in the decades before and after our Y1K.

   

Another apocalypse of sorts was loosed upon the West by the English economist Thomas Malthus in 1798.  His “Essay on the Principle of Population” made the mathematically bolstered prediction that population would inevitably outstrip society’s capacity to produce food, thus leading to a perpetual struggle for survival among the poor who would “be with us always.”  This vision was music to the ears of Charles Darwin and paved the way for his “survival of the fittest” theory of species development.  The twentieth century’s zero-population growth movement (ZPG) also found inspiration in the writings of the man who gave to economics its unwanted disciplinary moniker:  “the gloomy science.”  Not content to live with a scenario of endless poverty, ZPG upped the apocalyptic stakes so much that it foretold birth control by any means necessary!  These anti-begetting zealots must be tickled pink by the abortion-till-uterine-exodus law recently celebrated by New York’s Governor Cuomo.   And they doubtless view “Ethics” Professor Peter Singer’s proposal of “abortion” up to 30 days after birth (i.e. infanticide) as a positive step toward creating a pleasant utilitarian killing field.  

Never mind that Malthus’ prediction was spectacularly wrong—that world poverty has declined precipitously in the last forty years, thanks overwhelmingly to capitalist enterprise in Asia.  Nor have the dystopian predictions of ZPG doomsayers been realized in spite of moderate population growth on the planet.  But failed predictions seldom discourage secular apocalypticists.  Thus, in 1980 environmentalist Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968) made a wager with economist Julian Simon that in ten years the price of five non-government controlled commodities (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would rise based on their increasing scarcity and growing population demand.  Simon, who anticipated a decline in prices, won the bet despite the fact that the globe’s population rose by eight-hundred million during the decade.  That wager was prudent compared to the professor’s other declamations.  In 1970 Ehrlich outdid even Malthus by predicting that population would so outstrip food supply that “at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”  That same year Ehrlich foretold “the Great Die-Off” in the decade of the 80s. Four billion people worldwide and sixty-five million Americans would perish.  Instead of “Mourning in America” what we actually got was “Morning in America” and the collapse of the economically, ecologically, and morally benighted Soviet Empire.  Amazingly, the 86-year-old Ehrlich is unrepentant and has not only jumped on the “climate change” bandwagon but also joined the anti-consumer, low-nutrient, low sperm count, end of civilization leftist brigades.      

As for Ehrlich’s cataclysmic soul-mate, Al Gore, the fact that ocean levels and global temperatures have increased by piddling amounts over the last twelve years, that polar bears are thriving, that the Gulf Stream is going strong, that Mt. Kilimanjaro is still snow-capped, that there’s been no significant increase in extreme weather events since the former VP’s dire predictions in 2006 (a finding that even the U.N.’s  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted in 2013 based on data extending to the mid-20^th century) —none of that has discouraged the carbon-credit-guzzling, now super-wealthy Gore from peddling an apocalypse just beyond the horizon.  Nor has it fazed AOC, who has probably never heard of, much less read, MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen or other prominent “Climate Deniers.”  After all, for AOC the “facts” don’t matter.  Instead, it’s all about the “morality” of government control.  As former Colorado Senator Timothy Wirth confessed in an unguarded moment way back in 1988, “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong . . . we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”  In short, as long as the government can compel folks to do what Wirth and Gore and AOC want them to do, who cares what scare tactics are employed to put Deplorables in their place.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle 

Johann Hari's Lost Connections: The Good, the Mixed Bag, and the Truly Pathetic

After viewing Tucker Carlson's recent interview with Johann Hari, I was ready to read his book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.  Everything in the interview touched on what I firmly believe are commonsense principles that have been neglected and even derided by the leftist intelligentsia, a group in which, I discovered to my dismay, Hari is ensconced.  Certainly nothing warned me that his book, a New York Times bestseller, has cover endorsements by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Elton John, in which case I may not have obtained the book I purchased for two bucks on Kindle.

Part One of this work establishes the primary point made in the Carlson interview: that chemical treatments of depression, including the depression Hari suffered from and still fights, have a small impact overall.  Added to this finding is the distressing observation that Big Pharma essentially controls a largely bogus process by which its products are determined to be effective by the FDA.  Making this portrait even gloomier is the revelation that most psychiatrists, despite longstanding evidence that depression has obvious social and mental causes, have totally ignored these factors and promoted the quick and easy explanation that depression is exclusively the result of a chemical malfunction in the brain, best treated with drugs.

I wasn't surprised by these revelations, especially the information-warping connection among scientific research, government approval, and pharmacological funding – an illicit pay-to-play arrangement often noted by dissenting climatologists whose work will never be funded by government agencies intent on promoting the power-enhancing theory of "climate change."  It was surprising, however, to encounter a study that shows that the benefit of a good night's sleep is three times more effective on average than the relief secured via antidepressants.  Also of interest is the "grief exception" that psychiatrists carved out but later removed from the DSM diagnosis of depression – an exception that pointed, embarrassingly, to the fact that depression can, and often does, have causes rooted in one's life experience.

So far, so good.  Hari is showing what most conservative, traditional folks have believed all along: that the medical profession has reduced a vast number of human problems to diseases or biological imbalances to be treated with chemicals.The next section of Hari's work discusses the various "lost connections" that cause or contribute to depression and anxiety.  It is a mixed bag.  Thoughtful folks wouldn't argue with any of the primary prescriptions – that humans need to be connected to each other in significant ways, that meaningful work is important, that humans require real (not junk) values that include a picture of a better future, that nature is elevating, and that the current cultural focus on the "ego" is essentially isolating and self-destructive.

The intellectual rub comes as Hari begins to interject into his analysis his own scarcely analyzed biases.  The term "conservative," for example, is consistently placed in a negative context.  Moreover, Hari's selective reliance on evolution to bolster his case for "connection" is off-putting.  A section on baboon behavior is designed to show, needlessly, that stress accompanies being at the bottom of the primate's hierarchy.  Elsewhere, the need for human connection is touted as a function of our evolutionary past.  If, however, "evolution" is prescriptive for our needs, why not include the bestial brawls that work out the baboon hierarchy – or the savage winner-take-all struggles that were necessary for survival before the emergence of civilized society only a few thousand years ago?  Hari apparently wants to link all of the "values" that are "internal" to humans to this theoretical and, for many biologists, non-directive process, whose movement is predicated, Hari fails to note, on a species' failure to survive.  By contrast, Hari's references to actual human philosophers (or, God forbid, theologians) who long ago labeled humans social and rational creatures are so fleeting that they wouldn't constitute a whole paragraph in this lengthy oeuvre.

The irritations of Part Two become unbearable as Hari provides his tentative "solutions" to our problem of "lost connections."  A group of social misfits living in a rundown apartment near the old Berlin Wall band together politically to demand a rent freeze and in the process develop a genuine appreciation for and connection with the diverse groups in the tenement – Muslim Turks, gays, and outcasts of various tattooed and mini-skirted varieties.  A co-op bicycle shop where decisions are "democratized" provides a pattern for fulfilling work, alongside reinvigorated labor unions.  Professionally supervised administration of a psychedelic drug (psilocybin) unlocks the vastness of the universe, shrinks the ego, and can reveal paths to personal healing.  The banning of advertising that promotes junk values (like the promotion of "individualism") will help immensely.  Finally, giving everyone a basic monetary grant (almost $20K in a Canadian project) will provide a degree of security that makes life more fulfilling and decreases depression – a whole 9% over the three-year Canadian experiment in a largely conservative, farm-based community.  Then there are the benefits of gardening, nature walks, and a Junk Values Anonymous program.

At least Hari admits that giving everyone $20K would require a huge government expense, though he doesn't consider the effects of inflation or the anxiety induced by the increase in taxes this Obama-endorsed policy for the future might incur.  Furthermore, Hari ignores the fact that many folks in deeply depressed circumstances already receive as much as or more than $20K in benefits – dismissing such analysis with the words "piecemeal" and "safety net."  Most distressingly, Hari, the unmarried atheist, ignores the fact that the leftist policies he obviously endorses have functioned to destroy and disparage the most fulfilling connection most individuals enjoy, the much-derided "nuclear" family – a topic he assiduously avoids, since his own childhood was so traumatic that he began receiving anti-depressants at the age of eighteen.  The second most connective institutions in the U.S. are its religious communities.  (Revealingly, Hari often prefers the political term "collective" to "community," apparently disregarding the linguistic distinction between a non-connected collection of individuals and a commonwealth whose members share in each other's joys and pains.)  Beyond bringing people together into a community, religious institutions have been the primary conveyers of "values" (i.e., virtues) that involve caring for others and not focusing obsessively on oneself or material possessions.

I certainly agree that modern advertising is a destructive force, but not simply as a means for inculcating the junk value that "getting stuff" will make one happy.  In tandem with the powerful entertainment industry, advertising overwhelmingly promotes the "junk values" of "doing your own thing" and "being a rebel" and "ignoring what others think about you" – in other words, a menu of slogans and images designed to separate children from their fuddy-duddy parents, to revile traditional wisdom, and to ridicule religious institutions as havens for hypocritical pedophiles.  Since Hari obviously thinks all wisdom is derived from recent social and psychological studies, he would be well advised to peruse Arthur Brooks's book Who Really Cares, which shows that conservatives are more likely to give blood and to donate time and money to charitable causes than their "liberal" counterparts.  He might consider why that should be the case.

You won't see Hari criticizing any of the elite political allies of upper-crust New Yorkers – Hollywood hedonists, rap musicians, or the countless depraved television and film productions that revolve around the stupidity of parents, the hypocrisy of clergy, the idiocy of tradition, indulging one's sexual impulses, reveling in blood and guts (à la the Roman Coliseum), or the political wisdom du jour that springs naturally from enlightened six-year-olds.  What you will see is an author who, after initially bristling at the notion that his depression wasn't simply a brain aneurism of sorts, but also a function of the way his life had unfolded, swiftly moved from a theory that placed all the blame on a biological or genetic fluke to a theory that transfers responsibility for his depression to a hellish (and for him, conservative) society.

I agree with Hari that our society is messed up.  I am confident, however, that his "collective" solutions will make things much worse and that he has missed the primary causes of and solutions for our current Lost Connections "hell."

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is also available on Kindle.

Female Genital Mutilation and the Commerce Clause

Last month U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman declared that the twenty-two-year-old federal law banning female genital mutilation was unconstitutional.  This ruling took Dr. Jumana Nagarwala and seven others off the legal hook for allegedly “circumcising” the genitals of nine girls from Michigan and two adjacent states, girls who were around seven years old when Dr. Nagarwala, an immigrant from India, performed an operation that most American doctors just won’t do.  Though only nine girls were included in the charges, it is likely that dozens more underwent a genital cutting ritual observed by a Muslim sect based in India and apparently practiced by several worshipers attending a Farmington Hills, Michigan mosque.   

The judge’s legal analysis, curiously enough, was based on a constitutional principle that most jurists have ignored since FDR’s New Deal-pliant Supreme Court ruled in 1942 (Wickard v. Filburn) that an Ohio farmer whose wheat grown solely to feed his own animals was nevertheless subject to federal limits mandated by the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 -- an act based on the Constitution’s Commerce Clause that was originally designed to regulate commerce between largely sovereign states.

In the words of FDR’s Court: “[E]ven if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'" In other words, even if Filburn’s “excess” wheat was consumed only by his own cows and had no impact on interstate commerce, the prospect that thousands of other farmers might follow his example and thus create such an impact  on wheat prices made it lawful for Congress to legislate under the Commerce Clause with respect to Filburn’s bovine-bound crop. 

After this ruling in 1942 it was Katy-bar-the-door on what Congress could legislate under the Commerce Clause, at least until 1995 when the Court nixed use of that clause to ban gun possession near schools (U.S. vs Lopez).  In this case, however, a specific Second Amendment right was at stake.  A more germane decision was handed down in 2000 (U.S. vs Morrison) when the Court struck down a federal law concerning sexual assault victims that was also predicated, remarkably, on the Commerce Clause and was based on the notion that “Congress may regulate non-economic, violent criminal conduct based solely on that conduct’s aggregate effect on interstate commerce.”  At least in this case the Court was refusing to enshrine the idea that the Commerce Clause could be expanded indefinitely to abolish any distinction between national and state power.  In the genital mutilation case Judge Bernard likewise declared that only state governments had the authority to regulate or ban that “procedure.”  And while a slight majority of states had prohibitions against female genital mutilation at the time Dr. Nagarwala performed the “cutting ritual,” Michigan did not then have a law that banned FGM.

While I am sympathetic to almost any attempt to limit federal authority, it is strange that one of the few attempts to actually enforce reasonable limits on the national government’s legislative power should take place in a "multicultural" context.  I would feel much better about Judge Bernard’s ruling if limits on federal authority had been a judicial priority when it came to topics like same-sex marriage, federal incursions into collegiate sports under Title 9 to assure "equal" male-female access to athletic programs, and the unjust federal pressure exerted against pliant university administrators to create kangaroo rape courts that are totally prejudiced against accused males.  I say nothing about EPA incursions of power over every patch of puddle-worthy soil that could possibly be designated "wetlands."

Ironically, the Commerce Clause is a perfectly acceptable vehicle for protecting abortion clinics from protesters since that “procedure” is “both national and commercial,” a conclusion Planned Parenthood will eagerly support -- sotto voce.  Moreover, the Sixth Circuit in its wisdom observed that frustrating pregnant women or doctors from having or performing abortions would definitely have “direct economic effects” (Norton v. Ashcroft, 2002).  Thus, so the judicial logic goes, if only FGM were more widespread, Congress could legislate concerning it via the Commerce Clause.  And in fifty or a hundred years (and with enough of the right type of immigrants in the country) who knows what kind of prohibitions or protections it might craft.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle  protestor

Who’s Killing JFK Today?

James Joyce once remarked that Rome reminded him of a man who made his living “by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.”  It strikes me that this observation also applies to the commercial exploitation of President Kennedy’s assassination.  After more than half a century no scrap of evidence is immune from being dislodged, mutilated, and reconstructed so as to fit more securely into the imaginative web of an aspiring conspiracy theorist. Did Oswald act alone?  Was there a gunman on the grassy knoll?  Did the doctors performing the autopsy alter the forensic evidence? Was Kennedy’s body transferred to another coffin?  Was the assassination a right-wing military coup d’état “with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings”?

This last theory -- concocted by Oliver Stone for the movie JFK -- surpassed all previous efforts in combining ideological rigidity, factual manipulation, and commercial exploitation.  The truthfulness of this assessment is open to any reader willing to peruse the writings of Gerald Posner (Case Closed), Brandeis Professor Jacob Cohen (“Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy,” June, 1992, Commentary) and finally the massive work of lawyer Vincent Bugliosi (Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy).

The sad fact is that the dead president has entered the marketplace as a salable item.  His death is not a question of historical interest but an exploitable commodity that may be packaged with impunity.  Is it really a desire to get at the truth that motivates the never-ending publication of conspiracy books and the periodic production of television specials commemorating that fateful November day?

Why, if the media are really interested in the truth, are most Americans ignorant of even the rudimentary facts about the case?  When, for example, can you remember any prominent member of the Fourth Estate mentioning these critical facts:  Oswald worked at the Texas book depository; eyewitnesses actually saw someone shoot at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the building; a witness 110 feet from the window provided police a description that fit Oswald quite well; no one else was with Oswald at the time of the shooting; Oswald had arranged book cartons to create a shooting blind by the sixth floor window; most aural witnesses heard three shots; Oswald (who didn’t drive and regularly hitched a ride to work) told his co-worker that he had some “curtain rods” wrapped in the brown paper he carried with him that morning; that brown paper, three cartridge cases, and a recently fired rifle were all found on the sixth floor of the book depository building; the rifle had been mail-ordered by Oswald a few months earlier; Oswald alone left the building after the assassination and later murdered a police officer in front of several eyewitness; Oswald kept an “Historic Diary” that made clear his radical political views and mental instability; a few months earlier Oswald had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, a fervent anti-Communist and former Texas gubernatorial candidate; four years earlier Oswald left the United States for the Soviet Union only to return in 1962; by the time of the Kennedy assassination Oswald, who was separated from his Russian wife, had become a great fan of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

I could go on and on.  I mention only a few highlights from the mountain of evidence that convinced three government committees that Oswald alone killed the president. The sad conclusion to which I must come is that most people involved in the mass dissemination of information are not really interested in these facts. That includes the bogus 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations a majority of whom “concluded” (based solely on ridiculously subjective audio evidence from an open police motorcycle microphone) that there were four, not three, shots fired -- and thus, a second gunman.

Former assistant counsel for the Warren Commission, David Belin, provided a plethora of objections to this committee’s findings, noting that there was only one place where people actually saw a gunman and that was the School Book Depository. Furthermore, though many witnesses thought a shot or shots were fired from the grassy knoll in front of the presidential motorcade, no weapon or gun shells were ever found in that area.  Thus, Belin noted ironically, we have a gunman that no one ever saw who fired a single bullet from only 100 to 125 feet away that not only missed the president but also missed the entire limousine. 

As for the acoustical evidence so valued by the Democrat-led committee, Belin observed that the tape contained the sound of chimes, which aren’t in Dealey Plaza, but failed to include the sound of motorcycles speeding off to Parkland Hospital or the sound of police sirens, both of which should have been there.  Finally, Belin pointed out that every microphone in the presidential motorcade was on Channel 2, while the tape in question was on Channel 1.  All of this evidence supports the contention of the Dallas Police that the open-microphone chopper wasn’t even in Dealey Plaza in the first place -- a conclusion buttressed by several subsequent expert panels that thoroughly debunked this acoustical Rorschach data.  But what does evidence matter when a congressional committee wishes to keep conspiracy dreams alive that years later would be blown to gargantuan proportions by Oliver Stone.  The unpalatable alternative would be that JFK was killed, in Jackie Kennedy’s despondent words, by “some silly little communist.”   

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Information constantly rewrote history to fit the party’s ideological requirements.  Our reality is more crass.  History today has become a victim of both ideology and the marketplace.  Truth and decency are the casualties.  In such a society lusting for conspiracies, some people are obviously slain in perpetuity.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle

The Coddling of the American Mind . . . and especially leftist minds from harsh criticism

This book begins with perceptive criticisms of the “Three Great Untruths” that permeate contemporary American society:  1) the belief that humans are fragile and should avoid experiences or ideas that are unpleasant or slightly dangerous, 2) the belief that individuals should always trust their feelings, and 3) the belief that people can be divided neatly into two camps, good and evil.  These ideas, the authors observe, not only contradict ancient wisdom from a plethora of cultural sources but also result in harmful outcomes.  Moreover, perhaps to persuade youngsters and academics who dismiss out of hand the notion of “ancient wisdom,” their introductory chapters note that these great untruths also contradict the findings of cognitive behavioral therapy -- the preferred psychological approach of author Greg Lukianoff.  So far, so good.

Where the analysis becomes irritatingly infected with political bias, diminishing its value with a thousand ideologically-driven cuts, are tedious and unconvincing attempts to show that these misguided beliefs are present equally on the right and left sides of the political spectrum.  This narrative permeates their work despite the fact that all the authors’ detailed examples of campus speech codes, campus violence, and speaker intimidation concern leftist demands for ideological conformity. 

The book is almost worth purchasing for its extensive account of would-be revolutionaries consuming their own at the very progressive Evergreen State College near Seattle.  The authors (who both confess they’ve never voted for a Republican for President or Congress) describe acts of intimidation and extreme incivility by crazed, race-fixated students against a biology professor who, though sympathetic to the intentions of a no-whites-on-campus day, nevertheless declined to join in the group’s misguided means of achieving its objectives.  The up-close threats, vitriol, and involuntary confinements directed toward this professor and others tarred as white supremacists lasted for three days.  Even the ridiculous College President who kowtowed slavishly to the uncivilized mob was insulted and ordered about by these young racial Robespierres. 

To provide “balance” and indicate similar incivility on the right the authors cite “off-campus” groups, regularly described as “alt-right’ and “white supremacist,” that send online threats to political opponents, one to a professor who called for “white genocide.”  This subtle academic term, the authors explain, was taken literally by the ill-informed online bigots.  Another professor’s commencement address, they note, sparked a flurry of fifty hate-filled internet responses, as if that number of electronic threats were extraordinary given the speaker’s use of the celebratory occasion to call President Trump “a racist and sexist megalomaniac.”  Contrast those cyber-insults with the vile face-to-face confrontations and threats that were endured by an instructor at Yale’s Child Study Center who offered the modest email opinion that the school shouldn’t be so paternalistic as to prescribe Halloween costumes for adult students.  Both she and her husband were harassed and insulted by an on-campus mob.  To make matters worse, the couple received no backing from colleagues or administrators and eventually resigned over this picayune questioning of PC orthodoxy,

 

In short, Haidt and Lukianoff have transferred the bogus U.S.A. – U.S.S.R. “moral equivalence” argument to an educational setting, ignoring the fact that there are zero examples of conservative incivility on campus like those routinely practiced by leftists.  Thus, while extreme leftists, including faculty members, speak freely at universities, none need the body guards required by Ann Coulter or meet with acts of violent suppression and harassment like just-the-facts conservative speaker Ben Shapiro. Yet the authors assert, without providing specific examples, that “right-wing” attempts to squelch speech on campus are about as frequent as leftist efforts.  If true, I suspect many of those (doubtless non-violent) petitions involve the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic speakers that have proliferated on campuses in recent years -- speakers like Iran’s Holocaust-denying former Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia.  Such pleas are really pro-Israeli and not technically right-wing.  Moreover, to weigh equally objections to Condoleezza Rice and Ahmadinejad represents a profoundly skewed moral calculus.

 

Haidt and Lukianoff further soften the clear ideological component involved in the censoring and vilification of conservatives by focusing attention on a multiplicity of other causes like social media that have contributed to the belief that “offensive speech” (as subjectively perceived by a single individual) is itself a form of violence which may be countered with actual violence.  While it is doubtless the case that social media helps fan the flames of hyper-partisanship, the book ignores the historical fact that leftist regimes have invariably suppressed dissent and vilified political opponents.  It’s also important to note, as the authors don’t, that while leftists can easily live in ideological bubbles isolated from sophisticated conservative viewpoints, the same isn’t true for conservatives who are inundated with liberal ideas from grade school on.  Finally, throughout the book the term “alt-right” is regularly teamed with the label “neo-Nazi” to imply a false connection between conservative thought and the KKK.  Actually, the latter groups’ numbers, as even Professor Alan Dershowitz has observed, are miniscule, and their cultural impact largely limited to ineffectual tweets whereas the left, as the late Charles Krauthammer repeatedly observed, has long occupied the cultural high-ground of the media as well as education and the entertainment industry.

   

If Haidt and Lukianoff weren’t bending over backward to avoid being burned at the academic stake by their more zealous colleagues, they would have observed that no conservative mobs are harassing the incendiary Congresswoman Maxine Waters like folks on the left have screamed at Mitch McConnell, Sarah Sanders, or, just recently, Tucker Carlson and his family at their home.  They might also have focused attention on the clear leftist bias of big-Tech companies like YouTube that has employed mysterious “algorithms” to limit access to straightforward, conservative Prager University videos (like Victor Davis Hanson’s five-minute overview of the Korean War) while placing no such filters on non-scholarly and often offensive rants emanating from the likes of Bill Maher.

    

Finally, if Haidt and Lukianoff wanted to present a more accurate analysis of the maladies they correctly identify, they might have considered whether President Trump’s election was as much the electorate’s response to leftist oppression as the authors view recent acts of political incivility as unfortunate reactions to Trump’s abrasive rhetoric.  A less-biased analysis would also mention at least one unhelpful Obama comment, like his implicit embrace of the false “hands up, don’t shoot” Michael Brown narrative when he said the incident “stains the heart of black children” who “feel targeted by law enforcement -- guilty of walking while black or driving while black.” Instead, Obama is uncritically presented as a champion of viewpoint diversity.

   

While there are many positive points in this book about demonizing opponents, listening to opposing views, and even a critique of the idea that equal opportunity demands equal outcomes, the authors’ unwillingness to even consider the totalitarian impulse that is baked into the DNA of leftism makes it a difficult read.  And while there is much to praise when topics like overprotective parenting and even cognitive behavioral therapy are considered, the links between these matters and the book’s primary focus on the suppression of political speech are tenuous and function more to divert attention from the factor that most promotes the “three great untruths” -- leftism.  But perhaps diluted versions of the truth is all that can, with trepidation, be expressed among academics and students who regularly vilify and threaten individuals who don’t support authoritative dicta vis-à-vis Halloween costumes.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle