Angela Merkel, Stalin in Drag

 Back in the Pleistocene era in 1989 the Berlin wall went down.  Most of the East Germans, who had likely contemplated with envy the “freedom” enjoyed by the Jurgens and Gretas next door in the West, must have wondered with great anticipation what life in a post-Stalinist world would be like.  No Stasi knuckle crushing snoops in every crevice to monitor and record what you read, said, or might be thinking, no need to pretend that the stupid government propaganda was anything more than attempted manipulation and control.  How relieved and optimistic they must have been, and no one trying to peer into the future then, even with the wildest imagination, could likely have conjured up as a Frau-Fuhrer so ghastly a phantasm as the Teutonic Stalin-in-drag, Angela Merkel. 

A Stalinist world, such as the USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, or Erich Honecker’s DDR, is an alternative universe, one where everything is the opposite of what it is said to be and where just pointing that out amounts to a serious crime.  “Democracy,” majority rule, is the imposition of diktats by the bosses in the Politburo. “Equality” is rigid caste system of privileged party overseeers.  “Freedom” is a one-way ticket to forced labor in the Gulag for those unenthused about life in the workers’ paradise, getting shot trying to escape from East Berlin, or sliding off a crude raft and drowning in the waters off Havana.    

Which bring us to today’s Germany where Boss Merkel has resurrected and summoned the Stalinist Stasi who now pursue the unenlightened ones who exhibit, shall we say, inappropriate emotions.  No room for Germans who do not like the way that they are told to feel about what the apparatchiks are doing to them, a bit like it was in back in the DDR.  Consider, below, this Orwellian description of what German politicians and German police do to German people who fail to understand the proper boundaries of expression.  From a report on recent German government crackdown on social media users.

“In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism. The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action,” Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement. “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”

As officialese goes, this is hard to top for its sheer self-contradictory stupidity, and its bullying, sinister intonations. To begin, “The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action.”  "Hate posting"?  Well, this does sound serious: police action must ensue to stamp out, yes, hate posting. The German people are in grave danger.  But then, try not to laugh, as we learn that the Federal government launched a “coordinated campaign across 14 states” in a country of no less than eighty-one million people, to ensnare a grand total of 36 folks plunking away on social media. Sounds eerily like the Stasi of the DDR, searching far and wide, making sure that no one steps out of line with the approved thinking and guidance of Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker.  This does not describe the action of a government protecting the security and interests of its citizens: it is the work of a propagandizing regime of ideocrats chasing down a few hapless, harmless dissenters. With highly publized punishment for the recalcitrant few, you can cower the many.

These 36 people were “accused of hateful postings over social media” and please note the anonymity, a Kafkaesque nameless specter which accuses but cannot be identified, questioned, countered or even understood.  Who were the accusers and what was the exact nature of the accusations beyond the big old umbrella of “hateful”?  Vague and general works best for government enforcers.  “Hateful” in its normal usage is pretty subjective, but Merkel and the German political establishment have politicized the word so that it is objective, precise and, most important, applicable – “hateful” is disapproval or criticism of state-defined victims – but yet conveniently vague and abstract – producing “a climate of fear” – so as to be able to criminalize whomever they have determined has dissented from the state-imposed multi-cultural orthodoxy.  “A climate of fear” is a nice tool for the government bosses. They can pull it out when needed, supplemented with the lexicon of invectives – “xenophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “nativist” “fascist” -- and unleash their repressive organs, selectively, on whomever offends the the noble sensibilities of the moment.  

“Incitement to racism” as a crime is particularly troublesome to contemplate since “racist” is now applied so promiscuously, particularly by leftwing politicians all over the planet, as to be meaningless beyond its intent as an insult, shorthand for “a stupid, mean-spirited right-winger, lacking in compassion for the unfortunate who has no place in our progressive society.”  In the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed that half of Donald Trump supporters were “racists” and hence, “irredeemable,” which to a lot of people sounded rather hateful, not to mention, threatening. Unlike other crimes, e. g. murder, assault, burglary, jury tampering, it is impossible for one to prove that he is not a racist (no one I have ever heard of has of yet ever pulled off this feat), which makes it so handy and versatile.  Safe to say, no leftwing politician in the U.S in the last twenty years has not at some time resorted to calling someone he or she didn’t like a racist. And, speaking of “incitement,” and “hate speech,” reeved up on a steady stream of Trump-hatred from the likes of the NYT scribblers and CNN, MSNBC talkers, a leftist from the Bernie Sanders camp recently attempted to murder a couple of dozen Republican congressmen in suburban Washington DC.  

Let us now hear from the head German policeman, Herr, Holger Münch, speaking like he was trained by the editors of Pravda.  “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”  Orwellian Newspeak like this leans toward first-person plural pronouns – “Our free society…” –  there is, of course, no “our”, in possession of a "free society."  This is an intentional misdirection which camouflages the master-slave relationship of the German people and their German governors, the actual power exerted by an elite, privileged class over those whom they regard as their inferiors, some of whom, many perhaps, who resent the imposed mass migration of needy third-worlders and who don’t feel free to complain about it. Of course, we don’t know what the “threats,” “criminal violence” and “violence” are that filled the social media messaging of these now 36 criminals tracked down by the German Feds, but one suspects that the laws upon which the prosecution will be based have been written with  a maximum, "enemy of our freedom" scope and flexibility as to assure conviction and that the presiding magistrates will spare no effort to inflict maximum punishment.  Examples must be made.   

One “climate of fear” that does not seem to trouble Holger Münch much comes from the spectacle of secular, liberated German women accosted in mass by young immigrant Muslim males whose views of women are shaped by the texts of a seventh century prophet from a desert, and whose behavior, coming from German men, would put them for long stretches in prison.   From New Year’s Eve, 2016:

“The world reeled following reports that as many as 1,000 women had been sexually assaulted - groped, robbed, intimidated and separated from their friends - at Cologne's central train station on New Year's Eve. Many of the perpetrators, it was alleged, appeared to be of North African or Arab descent…”  

Oh, yes, no jumping to conclusions too quickly: the “alleged” North African and Arab-descendent robbers, gropers and sexual assaulters numbered at least 1,000.  They collected around one gathering place in a single city in contrast to the 36 Die Herren und Damen in 14 different states at home on laptops posting mean, angry stuff on their Facebook pages, probably read only by the flunkies in the governments' PC surveillance department who sicced the policemen on them.  Who, really, should be afraid of whom?  In the new DDR only Angela and her Handlangeren get to say.  But let’s pursue the conversation about fear.  There was a lot of it on the streets of Cologne and elsewhere in Germany from the criminal violence of Merkel’s protected class of victims.  The perpetrators, however, are not the concern or target of the nouveau Stasi Federal police chief.  Instead, room for more of them must be made so that Frau Merkel’s globalist, multicultural, bona fides remain in tact.  This is a “climate of fear” that the Germans will be expected by Merkel and her crew to get used to.

The hate-speech/hate crime legislation that Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada and other western European countries have put into place is a predictable, logical extension of their capitulation to third world mass migration.  In the U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, who was instrumental in the passage of the 1965 immigration law that led to the flooding of the country with third world immigrants, later became a strong advocate in the Senate of hate-crime legislation.  Mass immigration and hate-crimes are hand in glove measures for leftists. First you flood the towns with aliens and then punish the locals when they complain.

In the same news release cited above, Heiko Mass, the German Justice Minister, is now said to be pushing for a new law that targets “hate speech” on social media.  As the elites’ strategy of the ethnic replacement of their native populations becomes a painful reality to them, it becomes politically necessary to ramp up the criminalization of the inevitable expression of resentment that results, and to punish resistance and opposition to the planned destruction.  The criminalization of speech based on emotion is one more step toward completing the soft totalitarian society desired by the left with its coerced uniformity of thinking and behavior.  Somehow, somewhere down the road we will all be equal the way, God, no, sorry, history intended.  Don’t worry, be happy.

Hillary Clinton & Nicholas Kristiof: Bringing Self-Pity and Self-Righteousness Together

To put your gag reflex to the ultimate test, try watching the entire 55-minute interview of Hillary Clinton at the Women in the World  Summit  Women conducted by New York Times columnist and fake humanitarian, Nicholas Kristof.  It is hard to say which of the two is more revolting.  Hillary Clinton,  just when we thought she might go away, like Jason in the Friday the 13^th horror franchise – is  back, or, Nicholas Kristof, the Walter Duranty of our time, a relentless self-promoter, a tireless virtue signaler and a full-time water carrier for Hillary.  

The New York Times was one of the leading propaganda outlets for Hillary’s most recent failed bid to become the North American counterpart to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the Argentine (now, ex-) President, currently under indictment (Kirchner-corruption).  For those who don’t closely follow the horrors shows that make up South American politics, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner were the Bill and Hillary of the Pampas. This ambitious duo began as law school classmates. They married and quickly morphed into ruthless, leftist kleptocrats who ascended to the highest office in Argentina, governing as good Peronists always do, which is, to paraphrase President Obama  in 2010 addressing his adulators, “punish your enemies and reward your friends.”  

Cristina was luckier than Hillary, and not having the personality of an East German border guard probably didn’t hurt her either.  Unlike our own Lady Brezhnev of Chappaqua, la Señora Kirchner was able to succeed her husband, Nestor, as the first-elected woman President of Argentina in 2007.  He was bogged down by scandals and ill health and stepped aside after this first term for his wife to run. Nestor then in 2010 finally did his patriotic duty and died of a heart attack at age 60, leaving Cristina alone to complete the looting and exit office with multiple felonies hanging over her head.  One cannot help but wonder: if Hillary had won the recent election how soon Bill would have followed his Latin doppelganger to the great beyond.  The timing would have been perfect for her.  She no longer needed him. She never trusted him. She enjoys revenge and he did plenty to make her want it. Being a grieving widow for the Great Slickster would boost her poll numbers. No downside.

Back to the interview. The testosterone deficient Kristof who talks and comes off, for the lack of a better word, like a big sissy, one of those, goody-goody, suck-up-to-administration nerds from tenth grade student council, is always painful to watch.  A long-time Hillary court-lackey, Nicky was the right “woman” interlocutor in this Woman in the World Summit to bring out the inner-Hillary, the very best we have come to expect from the only Presidential candidate of a major party to run for office while under a major Federal investigation. 

Thus, he opens the conversation with the woman (shoe-in candidate) who shocked the world by losing to the man who Kristof spent months in his columns mocking as a clown, a buffoon, Mussolini-redux, who had no chance of winning: “We should offer you condolences, but maybe you should offer us condolences.”  This is vintage Kristof, oily, ingratiating, and, of course, needing to articulate at the beginning the premise of what this Summit is all about – holier-than-thou rituals of the privileged down-trodden, or as Bertrand Russell put it, the superior virtue of the oppressed.

Next comes the question we have all been breathlessly waiting for: “My social media followers want to know how Secretary Clinton is doing. So, [with a gentle therapist inflection] how are you doing?” Again, this is Kristof at his best.  Granted, he is a certified, high-placed Hillary-worshipper, but also being a Walter Duranty-style self-promoter, he wants everyone to know about his many “followers”.  He is not just any ordinary NYT leftwing know-it-all columnist like Tom Friedman: he feels your pain.  He is the voice of the voiceless, the personification of a movement.  Kristof knows well how his role in this encounter is to be played.  He must, Oprah-like, hit all the right therapeutic, inspirational cords.  Everyone has to feel good -- self-esteem can be fragile.  Shortly after the November election one of Kristof’s columns was “a 12 Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.”  In the interview Kristof also had to adroitly channel the audience’s warmth, admiration and affection, but most importantly, the appreciation for Hillary’s goodness and selflessness had to be enhanced.    

This lead-off question, the “humanizing” question, is also the entrée into the perfectly choreographed, perhaps, first ever coronation of a loser.  Hillary’s response is, well, very Hillary with a minute or two about “long walks in the woods”, being a grandmother and some smelling the roses falderal.  The irony, of course, is that Hillary’s efforts to humanize herself simply make her look even more like what she really is and always has been– a soulless, political robot. Her answer comes off as – “let me get this obligatory and annoying preliminary Grandma nonsense quickly out of the way, and get down to the fundamentals: how wonderful I am, how terrible for the country that I lost and how unfair it all is to me.”  Welcome to a vast, collective spectacle of self-righteous self-pity.

What is so remarkable about this interview is how timeless it is, capturing Hillary as we have known her for decades.  There is not the slightest trace of humility. She always projects her short-comings on to her enemies who thwart her at every turn.  She appears to have no sense of responsibility for her failure and a barely dissimulated, pathological resentment for any and all who might question her sense of entitlement to power.  In her mind and in those of her followers, she did not lose the election. It was stolen from her.  She had underestimated the size of the “basket of deplorables” and the depths of its depravity.  A country with more of the right kind of people in it would have responded to her with a landslide. America last November was just not good enough for her.  With her superior virtue, talents, experience, whatever political legitimacy remains in the land rightfully belongs to her, and now, after a couple of “walks in the woods” she is rested and back. She intends to be “the real” President: Trump is the pretender.

Lest this be doubted, view the portion of the interview which is really the only piece in this self-serving farce that matters. Kristof finally gets to the point:  will you ever run for office again?  Everyone knows in advance what the real answer is.  Disappointing but entirely predictable is the artless response starting with fake hyperventilating, frantically clutching her bosom and some spastic head bobs, followed by several minutes of the usual sort of incoherent verbal smog that Hillary blows out whenever she gets a question she does not want to answer.

The question is not, will she run for office again, rather, it’s how much millage is left in the Clinton political machine.  As long the rich donors (foreign and domestic) give her money, potential rivals back off, and the stooges in the commentariat like Kristof continue to faun over her she will never give up.  There is nothing inside of her other than her sociopathic drive to be in power.  Right now it looks as if once again, we need to be Ready for Hillary.                   

              

Nicholas Kristof -- Away with the Hitler Metaphors

You have to give the devil his due, and the devil I speak of is Nicholas Kristof, a preening, self-righteous ideologue who pretends to be a journalist. He belongs to a very exclusive troupe of professional pontificators known as New York Times columnists.  These haughty sycophants serve the Democrat party in a Pravda sort of way, predictably parroting its officially sanctioned propaganda talking points and relentlessly hectoring and smearing any and all outliers who might resist the iron fisted orthodoxy peddled by the “progressives”.  For the shills who man the loud speakers of progressive politics the only obstacle to the complete institutionalization of the progress they envision for all of the lesser lights under their tutelage is the moral malignancy of the political opposition, immersed as it always is in the evil of racism and its progeny, sexism, homophobia, and on we go to infinity. There can be no good faith opposition to progressive policies which embody everything that is good, just mean, selfish people who discriminate and hate. Boiled down to its essence progressive politics is about really good people who should be in charge (them), and very bad ones who should not (us). 

By my count there are nine of these regular pulpiteers, the best known likely being the globe-trotting, blow hard, Thomas Friedman, a prolific but mediocre wordsmith unsurpassed in being able to say so much about things of which he knows so little.  A close second might be the supremely arrogant and condescending Paul Krugman, a master of vitriol who at some point forsook economics to become a party scribbler, a hack ideologue who preaches only to his own little choir.  Oh yes, and there is the NYT-designated resident “conservative” in the claque, David Brooks, who in 2008 swooned over the “crease” in Obama’s slacks, an intellectual pretender who seems to be taken seriously only by himself.

But my favorite, as suggested above, is Nicholas Kristof who is the complete New York Times columnist package, political correctness incarnate. He is more akin to the “good cop” of the NYT enforcers and goes busily about, hither and yon, proclaiming himself as the “voice” of the oppressed, specifically, those “victims” chosen by the Democrats and most recently by Hillary Clinton.  These are the various mythically persecuted legions who needed protection from the rampant bigotry of the millions of “deplorable” voters who for some inexplicable reason could not stomach the prospect of a professional grifter and her sexual predator consort once again polluting the rooms of the White House.  

More in contact with reality than Friedman, more condescending but less openly arrogant and vitriolic than Krugman, less ponderous and intellectually pretentious than Brooks, Kristof is the perfect progressive -- earnest, oozing with compassion, his sensitive moral antennas ever alert to pick up the faintest signals of any of the “isms” or “obias” (racism, sexism, xenophobia, “you name it”, as Hillary croaked to her LGBT groupies in New York) wafting up from and infesting those vast regions of the country outside of the DC Beltway, Manhattan, Boston, Hollywood, and our staunch bastions of free-speech and moral courage, the universities.    

You have to experience Kristof in person – his irritating, prissy sounding voice and goody-two-shoes demeanor -- to really appreciate what a smarmy, self-promoting, snake oil salesman he is. Some years ago I sat through a slide show he gave at a university in Ohio, the content, as I vaguely remember, the tear-jerking details of one of his many sojourns through a third world hell hole.  All in all, however, the talk was all about Kristof.  He is a master of what now is called “virtue signaling” – following the proper grievance mongering protocols, publically voicing your deep concern for the oppressed, the point being that everyone needs to know that goodness beats in your heart -- and a university audience was the perfect venue for him to hit all of the right notes to demonstrate his compassion for the right kinds of people, who are, of course, victimized by the worst sorts of people, and, we all know who those people are.

Kristof’s columns as well are tributes to his virtue.  The best of his most recent efforts came shortly after his world came a tumbling down with the election of Donald Trump.  Thus: “A Twelve Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/a-12-step-program-for-responding-to-president-elect-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fnicholas-kristof&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection&_r=0

This piece is vintage Kristof, just the title alone with Kristof playing the therapist for the traumatized millions who, unfortunately, believed the the New York Times pundits as they confidently proclaimed that Hillary would follow Obama into the White House.  Things didn’t quiet work out the way the wise men thought they were supposed to, and the surprise election of the “racist”, “sexist”, “xenophobic”, “you name it” Trump was not simply an electoral defeat for the progressives. It is now, you see, January 30, 1933 once again, and Adolf Benito Grand Kleagle Trump will soon be resting his jack booted feet on the White House coffee tables. When you make every possible effort to paint your opponent as Hitler, Mussolini, the voice of the Klan, too vicious, stupid and incompetent to win – and he wins, yikes! – well, “it’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” But reality must at some point intrude even for Saint Nicholas. The Reichstag is not on fire. Time for the grief counselors to go home.  Kristof must rally the cry babies.

 “A Twelve Step Program” does not read well on a queasy stomach, but it does capture the essence of the ideology that defines Kristof’s New York Times hermetic world. Here we go.

“I will accept that my side lost, but I won’t acquiesce in injustice and I will gird for battle on issues I care about.”  Yeah, “gird for battle” -- wouldn't you like to see Nicky in a You Tube video girding himself up. As noted above, the opposition does not operate in good faith and its victory in the election means the subversion of justice. The “battle” will continue which means the racism-sexism propaganda barrage will be ramped up.  Much of what Kristof writes turns into verbal smog:  what exactly would he be doing if he “acquiesced in injustice”?  As if anyone would suggest that he would – more virtue signaling.

“I will avoid demonizing people who don’t agree with me about this election, recognizing that it’s as wrong to stereotype Trump supporters as anybody else.” Well, this sounds nice and civil of him, but don’t get your hopes up, because … “I’ll call a local mosque to offer support, or join an interfaith event. I will sign up for an “accompany my neighbor” list if one exists for my area, to be an escort for anyone who is now in fear.”  The horror, the fear, yes, indeed.  Kristallnacht is next on the agenda.  You see, those Trump supporters he instructed you not to demonize are now out on the streets hoping to be able to beat up your Muslim neighbors on their way to prayer.  As I recall, the last ethnic people in the U.S. to be rounded up and placed in detention camps were Japanese Americans, done under the administration of … wait a minute …. Democrat Patron Saint, Franklin D. Roosevelt, opposed by Democrat arch villain, J. Edgar Hoover.

“I will avoid Hitler metaphors, recognizing that they stop conversations and rarely persuade.”  This one is really worth parsing.  The Nazi name-calling tactic didn’t work so well for the election. “Nazi” and “Republican” have been interchangeable for long time, so maybe a different approach is needed. Kristof counsels his readers to eschew Hitler metaphors not because he believes they are wrong, but because those rubes who voted for the Klansman aren’t buying it. 

“I’ll do my part to support the society I’d like to see. I’ll eat Chobani yogurt because its owner has been subjected to racist attacks for his willingness to hire and promote refugees. Likewise, I will give blood and register for organ donation — for at least they’ll make me feel better. As will a tub of Chobani.”  This might be the best one of all.  You eat the politically correct food, feel good about yourself, (feeling good about yourself is really what this is all about) and …. “support the society [you’d] like to see”. Clearly, he doesn’t like the society he sees now. And, what kind of society might that be?  One without racists. Kristof is a one trick pony and yet once more, the de rigueur “racist” smear.  Of what race are refugees?

“I may not be able to prevent a sexual predator from reaching the White House, but at events I attend, I may be able to prevent a sexual predator from assaulting a drunken partygoer.” Whoa, where did this come from? Maybe Kristof is laying awake nights in anguish, worrying that President Trump will be lounging in the Oval Office commandeering blow jobs from the twenty-something interns he keeps in tow and ejaculating on their dresses. With Hillary and Bill back in the White House, this, of course, would never have been a concern. But we will look forward in the times ahead for reports from Kristof’s heroic efforts at stopping sexual predators from assaulting drunks at parties. Perhaps there are a lot of them in the parties he goes to.  Maybe Bill Clinton will be at some of them with his travel pal from the “Lolita Express,” convicted sex-offender, Jeffrey Epstein.    

“I will not lose hope. I will keep reminding myself that politics zigs and zags, and that I can do more than shout in the wind. I can fight for my values even between elections, and even at the micro level I can mitigate the damage to my neighbors and attempt to heal a social fabric that has been rent.”  This is step 12, the last chirp in this particular installment of “fight the good fight” from the ideological cocoon Kristof lives in.  What is he hoping for? What is the “social fabric that has been rent”, and how does one "heal a social fabric"? This is some sort of therapeutic-sounding babble. What is “damage” that has been done his neighbors? The person they voted for lost the election.  In an election someone has to lose. “What is the “mitigation” involved?  None of these questions Kristof could answer in language that connects with anything other than the abstract, anodyne pieties that he constantly employs to bolster his delusions of moral heroism and perfection. His agony is now that the wrong people are now in charge, and he will continue toiling away with his non-stop accusations of hatred and bigotry.

Islamophobia versus Christianophobia

A Thought Experiment: let us imagine that for the past 20 years or so in many and various parts of the world we see young men proclaiming their devotion to Christ and the advance of Christianity as a prelude to murdering groups of unsuspecting Muslims they encounter in public places such as airports, workplaces, night clubs, etc.  In these massacres sometimes Christians are killed as collateral damage.  These men commandeer airplanes and crash them into skyscrapers.  They invade mosques and behead elderly Imams.  They make YouTube videos of beheadings, immolations, drownings – all preceded by the cry “Jesus Christ is Lord.”  Certain groups of them are also intent on setting up by military conquest a “Christian Republic” where Christian morality will be strictly enforced with severe penalties for adultery, homosexuality as well as apostasy. Let us assume that these Christian zealots are a minority of all Christians and the majority of Christian believers are law abiding people who have made accommodation with secular society.    

Let us also assume that many of these young Christian mass murderers are being incubated in many parts of Europe where Christianity flourished in its youth, especially Italy, the Iberian peninsula, but also in Protestant enclaves in Sweden, Norway and Germany. 

How then would the politicos,  New York Times, the Washington Post and the remainder of the commentariat, from the mass media syndicates and academia to the entertainment industry, have responded after a massacre on American soil, let’s say a mass shooting of 50 gays in a Florida night club by young man claiming affiliation with one of the major Christian terrorist groups?            

Allow me to speculate how they would not have responded.  Then President Obama would not have referred to the victims as “some random folks” killed by a disturbed person. The American people would not discover that all religions have their share of fanatics and that this massacre has nothing to do with Christianity.  In reporting the story, The New York Times would not omit the fact that before open firing the young man was yelling “Jesus Christ is Lord” and reciting Old Testament condemnation of sodomy.   The NYT editorials would not refer to those individuals who talk about Christian terrorists and the problem with Christianity as “Christianophobes” and remind us that the majority of Christians are peaceful and law abiding.   The Democrats would not be encouraging the immigration of millions of Christians from those incubating European countries.  Republican leaders would not be condemning as bigots those who urge a moratorium on immigration from those countries that are breeding terrorists.  Hollywood would not be making movies that feature Muslim bigoted vigilantes who kidnap and murder innocent Christians.

The following is the more likely response.  From Barack Obama, a press conference announcing the formation of a Federal agency to combat Christian terrorism and to conduct surveillance of Tea Party and other Christian extremist groups. Christians will then be barred from Federal employment.  From the NYT editorial staff, a piece that decries the inevitable culmination of Christianity as a religion of violence, oppression and hate. The Washington Post publishes articles predicting an escalation of Christian violence and warns non-Christian readers to arm themselves in anticipation of further attacks. From the Republicans, endless apologies for having been Christians and groveling petitions for forgiveness.  University presidents across the country announce the establishment of “Christian-free safe zones,” Students on the campuses demonstrate and demand that the universities require “trigger warnings” on the syllabi of courses with content that relates to Christianity.  From the DNC a declaration that public affirmations of Christian faith should be deemed as hate speech.      

Thomas Jefferson and the Grievance Mongers

           Download the free Slavery at Monticello App

                      

                  From the Monticello official website

Grievance = by definition: a feeling of having been treated unfairly; a reason for complaining or being unhappy with a situation; a statement in which you say you are unhappy or not satisfied with something.

We are amuck in the age of grievances, grievances of gargantuan proportions that cut vast swaths across times, places and peoples, grievances of tiny magnitude, registered these days under the heading, “micro-aggressions.” The grievance mongers lie in ambush everywhere.  Grievances multiply to open up coveted space in today’s “Pantheon of Victimhood”.  Installation in the Pantheon as a certified victim means you get to wear a permanent moral halo and remain immune from criticism of any sort. You possess the “superior virtue of the oppressed”, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell put it.  New York Times columnist David Brooks recently concluded his review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, Between the World and Me, an anti-white diatribe by an angry black man by asking himself if he, “as a white man has the moral standing to question any part of it?” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/white-america-dons-the-shroud-of-guilt/article25971483/). The answer to this absurd question is painfully obvious: David, quit writing reviews or anything else. Join a monastery. Devote yourself to good works for the poor.  Of course, you have no “moral standing”. Not because you are a white man, but because you have completely surrendered whatever slim capacity you once may have had to grasp basic facts, reason and think straight. This is the same David Brooks, by the way, who after interviewing then Presidential candidate, Barack Obama back in those halcyon days of “Hope and Change” wrote: “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant … and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” (http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/31/the-obligatory-david-brooks-really-impressed-with-obamas-pants-post/) And I’m thinking, (a) do we ever want to hear from this New York Times deep thinker again and (b) if we did, why would we take him seriously?

White guilt, like that displayed by groveling idiot-intellectuals like Brooks, gives an enormous boost of legitimacy to the blustering maestros in the thriving grievance industry, experts in the practice of the art of moral blackmail. (See my blog, The Left: Masters of Extortion)

(http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-left-masters-of-extortion.html) These guys you provoke at your own peril! They are “professionals” fermenting in the juices of resentment, always in a permanent high dudgeon, always wanting to remind you of how insensitive you are. They are the self-selected representatives of the burgeoning legions of the righteously aggrieved. They give “voice” to their feelings of being treated unfairly and their unhappiness with the raw deals that are the standard fare in America for anyone who is not a white male. They now maintain vast inventories of “micro-aggressions”, invent new ones, and make lots of demands, non-negotiable ones. 

Consider the ruminations of Desiree H. Melton, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame of Maryland University specializing in critical race theory and feminist philosophy, a fully credentialed grievance professional. She does not disappoint.

 A recent tour of Monticello aroused her critical race theory ire which then led to the appearance of “Monticello’s Whitewashed Version of History” in the Washington Post listed as an opinion piece. That the Washington Post would publish such a mindless piece of bilious, self-righteous posturing masquerading as serious thinking is evidence that for our intellectually elite gatekeepers of opinion white guilt trumps any standard of dispassionate reflection and critical insight that might be applied to the “conversations on race” they keep insisting that we have.  No connection with reality is required (David Brooks, case in point).  Equally depressing is that Ms. Melton gets paid to transmit her tendentious, resentment-laden drivel to young college students.   

For Ms. Melton, the Monticello tour was painful from the beginning as she complains that the other, “mostly white folks” on the tour were insufficiently somber. “To my surprise, I was not saddened by the experience. I did, however, get angry. I was angry at the utter lack of reverence and solemnity.”  Anger for grievance mongers is always the first reflex. You see, the critical race theorists of the world, like Ms. Melton, cannot comprehend why everyone else around them does not vibrate as they do with the same exquisite sense of moral outrage that comes from ruminating every waking moment on how awful it is to be a black person in America.  “Reverence and solemnity among its white visitors were missing from Monticello because it did not demand it of them.” It is not clear that there is an “it” behind Monticello that can make these sorts of “demands”. Aren’t reverence and solemnity supposed to come from within? Perhaps the tour guides at Monticello are supposed to replicate the sessions of quivering, angry, uncensored, unmasking of America’s fake, whitewashed heroes that the students in her in her 101 classes at Notre Dame are subjected to. No pedestal can remain occupied. ”Why,” she asks, “does Monticello allow visitors to tour the house and then skip over its related slave sites? Why? – well, maybe because visitors to historic sites might have their own priorities, interests and perspectives that don’t quite match up with those of the angry professor.  Maybe it is because the visitors to Monticello are not (yet) political prisoners to be perp walked through the grounds, reeducated and forced to confess (Chinese, Cultural Revolution style) that American history is nothing other than the ugly story of racism and the subjugation and exploitation of black people. 

Ms. Melton’s is in a great wrath over Monticello’s supposed whitewashing of Jefferson’s slaver ownership. Did she even bother to look at the official Monticello website which gives ample considerable attention to the many aspects of slavery at Monticello? (http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery) Included are a number of online exhibitions such as: Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello; Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty; Getting Word: African American Families of Monticello  Also, on the website there were a number of articles relating to the reality of slavery at Monticello, Jefferson and Slavery and Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  What is lacking? Reality, it seems, makes no impression on this professor-visitor. She seems determined to enjoy her anger and bitterness.  Grievance professionals are about grievances – facts do not matter.

The problem Ms. Melton opines is that white people just don’t want to face the truth. “If white people cannot accept the awful truth that one of the nation’s cherished founders held people as property, and that slavery was indeed horrific, why would they acknowledge the covert ways in which blacks are still oppressed?”

.    

This is clearly a trick, “if-then” question. Let’s respond by turning it back around with a different “if-then” question. So:  IF black critical race theory professors are unable to grasp some simple obvious facts (a) that it makes absolutely no sense to talk about what truths white people as a single, collective race accept or do not accept because there are none, (b) that most white people do know and accept the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, (c) that most white people as well as all other people would strongly aver that slavery is horrific (d) that the ancestors of many white Americans today, those particularly in the immigrant waves of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – Italians, Greeks, Jews from the Russian pale, etc. – had nothing to do with American slavery, many of whom were serfs and peons back where they came from, (e) that slave trading and ownership were not solely practiced by white people, (f) that white Christian abolitionists in England and America were primarily responsible for ending slavery in the western world,  THEN should critical race theorists, like Ms. Melton attempt to acquire a basic grasp of logic and critical thinking, study more history, work at becoming a little less censorious and self-righteous or perhaps, just find a more productive line of work?