Reflections on Memorial Day 2023

 

Reflections on Memorial Day 2023

We should never take for granted the willingness of Americans to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the republic.

Mackubin Owens, American Greatness 

Today, we celebrate Memorial Day. What does that mean? Unfortunately, for many citizens, it signifies just another three-day weekend, the beginning of the summer season, and an excuse for a weekend cook-out. Sadly, we have lost even the vestiges of the meaning of this holiday: a solemn time, serving both as catharsis for those who fought and survived, and to ensure that those who followed would not forget the sacrifice of those who died that the American republic might live.

Americans have forgotten how to honor their war heroes and to remember their war dead. As my friend and fellow Marine, “Bing” West observed several years ago in his remarkable book about Fallujah, No True Glory, stories of soldierly courage deserve “to be recorded and read by the next generation. Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”

What we now call Memorial Day was established by General John A. Logan’s “General Order No. 11″ of the Grand Army of the Republic dated May 5, 1868. This order reads in part: “The 30th day of May 1868 is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers and otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.” Logan’s order served to ratify a practice that was already widespread, both in the North and the South, in the years immediately following the Civil War.

Memorial Day should cause us to ask why Americans are willing to fight and die. In his book, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Glen Gray provided one answer: “Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their posts and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale.”

My own experience validates Gray’s observation about what men think about in the heat of combat: the impact of our actions on our comrades consumes our minds. For those who have not been to war and want to get a sense of the bond that binds comrades both in life and death, I always recommend the film “Saving Private Ryan” and the two HBO series “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” And I always make it a point to rewatch the splendid HBO film “Taking Chance” which more than anything else I can think of captures the essence of Memorial Day.

But although the individual soldier may focus on the particulars of combat, properly understood, Memorial Day permits us to enlarge the individual soldier’s view, giving broader meaning to the sacrifice that was accepted of some but offered by all, not only acknowledging and remembering the sacrifice, but validating it in the same way that Pericles, in his Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War, gave meaning to the Athenian dead by praising the excellence of Athens, and Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, gave meaning to the Union dead by praising that for which they fought.

Lincoln did so by giving universal meaning to the particular deaths that had occurred on that hallowed ground, thus allowing us to understand Memorial Day in the light of the Fourth of July, to comprehend the honorable end of the soldiers in the light of the glorious beginning and purpose of the nation. The deaths of the soldiers at Gettysburg, of those who died during the Civil War as a whole, and indeed of those who have fallen in all the wars of America, are validated by reference to the nation and its founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

But doesn’t linking Memorial Day and Independence Day glorify war and “sentimentalize” American war deaths? The soldiers who have died in America’s wars joined the service for many reasons. But all were motivated at least to a certain degree by a sense of duty and honor arising from patriotism. At a time when patriotism is under attack by such forces as critical race theory (CRT) and the claim that our founding was unjust, the explicit denigration of patriotism is a serious mistake. There are things worth fighting and dying for. A country founded on decent principles—something that no other country shares—is one such cause.

Elevating the cause for which American soldiers have died does not trivialize individual loss and the end of youth and joy. To this day I remember the inconsolable pain and grief of the mother of one of my fallen Marines with whom I corresponded in 1969. Her grief put me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Epitaphs of the War, verse IV, “An Only Son”: “I have slain none but my mother, She (Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me.” Kipling, too, lost his only son in World War I.

But as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said in his Memorial Day address of 1884,”[G]rief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death—of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope and will.”

But we should never take for granted the willingness of Americans to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the republic. We should insist on a foreign policy that is worthy of that sacrifice, one based on U.S. national interests, one that does not oblige us to pursue chimeras dictated by international institutions and the mythical “international community.” 

By all means, have that burger. Enjoy the cookout. But also take some time to watch “Taking Chance” to remember how to honor those who died to make your weekend possible.

Mackubin Thomas Owens is a retired Marine, professor, and editor who lives in Newport, RI.

The Left Has Pushed the Envelope

 

The Left Has Pushed the Envelope

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice.

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges.

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign—while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely “Russian disinformation.” That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multiyear audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden’s purported tax irregularities.

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden’s appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar “reparations” payout to the state’s black residents.

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have.

One of the reparations board leaders asserts blacks might be willing to accept an “installment” plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a “travel alert” advising blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ announcement of a presidential bid.

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis—all outside Florida—have the highest black murder rates in the nation.

Florida in contrast, with a black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP’s board of directors is himself a Florida resident!

Black Lives Matter has just announced it lost millions of dollars in investments and ran up huge deficits.

The culprit was its former corrupt leadership.

It's extravagant spending, plush homes, and family hangers-on have nearly bankrupted the advocacy group. It cannot account for the millions of dollars in corporate guilt and protection money it leveraged following the George Floyd riots in 2020.

In New York, a threatening subway career criminal with 42 prior arrests was subdued by a bystander and died during the confrontation. The criminal is now deified. The would-be Samaritan is charged with felony manslaughter.

The deceased’s uncle is vocal about his late nephew’s confrontation. But he himself was just arrested with stolen property and armed with a knife. He was mysteriously still roaming the streets despite 70 prior arrests and current active arrest warrants.

In almost every American city and town, biological males, with enormous advantages in size and musculoskeletal mass, routinely win women’s sporting competitions.

They are systematically destroying decades of progress that sought to ensure parity between men and women’s sports.

Corporate America has joined this cultural revolution hysteria. Companies are apparently now hellbent on destroying their brands, profits, and net worth.

Under pressure from the LGBTQ activists, the Los Angeles Dodgers reinvited the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” to celebrate Pride night at Dodger Stadium.

Catholics and Christians had objected to the invitation because the group’s notoriety hinges on its sexualized and often pornographic mockery of Catholic ritual, the Holy Trinity, and Christian faith.

The supposedly courageous group would never dare extend its street-theater blasphemy to other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus.

The Dodgers apparently do not care that Greater Los Angeles may be home to 6 million Mexican American citizens and resident Hispanic immigrants. Most are Catholic and many were avid Dodger fans.

Anheuser-Busch has nearly destroyed its best-selling Bud Light brand by hiring transgender performance-art activist Dylan Mulvaney to hawk the brand—and his own transitioning—to America’s working classes.

The Disney corporation, for decades, has enjoyed multibillion-dollar concessions and a veritable 40-square mile private fiefdom gifted from the taxpayers of Florida.

No matter. Disney has rebranded it films, amusement parks, and television offerings to reflect radical transgendered, gay, and race advocacies.

The results so far are billion-dollar losses in Disney stock, subscribers, and viewers.

A woke CNN has all but destroyed its once-global audience. It now has fewer viewers than certain popular podcasts.

All these implosions are not just shocking but surreal. Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide—to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?

AP Climate Change Media Corruption

 

AP Climate Change Media Corruption

The explosion of AP climate change stories following $8 million environmental grant

Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner

In the year following a grant of more than $8 million to the Associated Press from key climate change advocates, the news service has poured out at least 64 stories warning of environmental calamity, according to a new media study.

Media Research Center Business charted the stories and language used following the multimillion-dollar grant and found that AP also used over 500 environmental extremism buzzwords in the stories.

The media giant, which feeds news outlets worldwide, received grants totaling $8 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation in February 2022.

AP said it would hire 20 new environmental writers with the money to create a climate swat team to “enhance the global understanding of climate change and its impact across the world.”

So far, it has lived up to its promise, said MRC Business, a branch of the conservative media watchdog.

In its study, provided to Secrets, MRC Business wrote, “The term ‘Climate Change’ itself appeared a whopping 212 times. ‘Warming’ and ‘Global Warming’ appeared 140 times collectively. ‘Extreme(s)’ emerged 32 times and ‘Disaster(s)’ and ‘Climate Disaster’ appeared a collective 30 times. One Dec. 9, 2022, AP story was headlined: ‘New abnormal: Climate disaster damage down to $268 billion.’”

AP pledged it would keep total control of stories despite the infusion of cash.

Reporting supported by philanthropic donations has increased recently as advertising has dried up. Even the New York Times uses it.

While reporters have expressed concern, editors have promised not to cave to the politics of donors. All those that provided the grant money to AP have been climate activists.

Hewlett, for example, said on its webpage that its grants “focus on cleaning up power production, using less oil, using energy more efficiently, preserving forests, addressing non-CO2 greenhouse gases, and financing climate-friendly investments.”

The MRC Business study authors wrote, “The so-called ‘journalism’ AP has been doing on climate involves behaving like the de facto mouthpiece for its major left-wing donors who have an obsession with pushing apocalyptic climate narratives on the internet.”

Washington Secrets works with MRC every Monday to come up with the best example of media bias for the weekly “Liberal Media Scream” feature. While the focus is usually politics, the feature includes "woke" politics, such as climate change extremism.

In its study, MRC Business highlighted one story about a United Nations report that included several climate buzzwords. “Deadly with extreme weather now, climate change is about to get so much worse,” it opened. “It is likely going to make the world sicker, hungrier, poorer, gloomier and way more dangerous in the next 18 years with an ‘unavoidable’ increase in risks, a new United Nations science report says,” it added.

MRC Business said that while the AP has noted its funding on related stories, a concern is that a partner does not also include that note.

Tucker Carlson, The Truth, and The Spiritual Battle

 

Tucker Carlson, The Truth, and The Spiritual Battle

David P. Deavel, Association of Mature American Citizens 

Right before his top-rated show’s cancellation from Fox News a couple weeks ago, Tucker Carlson gave a fascinating speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala held in Oxon Hill, Maryland. At least one article (in Vanity Fair)in the wake of his ouster claimed that Carlson’s speech, the transcript of which was titled “‘Include Country In Your Prayers,’ Carlson Tells Heritage Foundation Gala” by The Daily Signal, might be the real reason for cancellation. The speech was, reported Gabe Sherman of Vanity Fair, “laced” with “religious overtones that even Murdoch found too extreme.”

What Carlson said that purportedly bugged Murdoch was that for engaging many on the left in America, there is no possible debating about facts or political policies. What is called for is something stronger.

Tucker asked Americans to pray.

As Sherman’s source, said: “That stuff freaks Rupert out. He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk.”

It’s not clear this account is correct. Sherman only reported it as “a new theory.” And what does it signify that a source “was briefed on Murdoch’s decision-making”? Briefed by whom? And how does that person know?  (Too much journalism reminds us today of the girl in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off who explains to the teacher played by Ben Stein, “My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.”)

Whether it’s true or not, however, it rubs a raw nerve these days. For a long time, it was a truism that while liberals thought conservatives were evil, conservatives simply thought liberals were misguided. We are all aiming at the same things! We just differ on the means! All of us everywhere are on the same team, no matter where we are or what party we belong to.

What Carlson said, however, contradicted this directly. Made up of his usual running grab bag of funny stories, self-deprecating jokes, sincere tributes to others, and what can only be called a personal wrestling with what he thinks to be the truth about what’s going wrong in America without fear or favor of Democrats, Republicans, or any of the DNC-regime “media reporters,” Carlson’s speech ended with a stirring meditation on why it is that the two things we need these days are courageous truth-tellers and people who beg God’s help for our country.  

“So, when I started at Heritage,” he said, “the presumption was, and this is a very Anglo-American assumption, that the debates we’re having are rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes…And so, we write our papers, and they write their papers, and may the best papers win.”

Today, however, things are different. He talked about how our public life that is now filled with constant lies and the pressure to repeat them over and over again: “If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine War, raise your hand. Oh, nobody? Right. You all know what I’m talking about.”

While Americans might see the hollowness of many of these too-long-but-temporary bundles of falsehood, our culture now has what are purported to be timeless dogmas about gender, diversity, equity, and inclusion—many of which don’t even make any logical sense—to which we must bow our heads and add our amens. While we certainly have need of people to rationally explain the false premises and faulty logic that permeate this false dogmatic core, we all can take part in resisting the evil falsehoods about what it means to be human.

Reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” Carlson encouraged people to try and tell the truth. “Try it. Tell the truth about something. You feel it every day. The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become. That’s completely real. It’s measurable in the way that you feel.”

He lauded ordinary people, executives, and others in big organizations who refuse to engage in the dangerous and destructive lies that are damaging our economy and the soul of our nation. “No one is trained to stand up in the middle of a [diversity, equity, and inclusion] meeting at Citibank and say, ‘This is nonsense.’ And the people who do that, oh, they have my deepest admiration.”

But it is because so many of the positions that are not lies are actually something else that Carlson recommended that what we need is not more policy papers but prayer. About transgenderism, he said: “If you have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.’ I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. What? That’s nothing to do with politics. What’s the outcome we’re desiring here? An androgynous population? Are we arguing for that? I don’t think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome, but the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that.”

Like abortion, such a position seems to be some sort of strange theological position. Carlson alluded to Janet Yellen’s 2022 testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in the wake of the leaked Roe v. Wade draft opinion in which she argued that eliminating legal abortion was bad on economic grounds since it “would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.” Carlson described her testimony thus: “But when the Treasury secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.’ Well, that’s like an Aztec principle, actually.”

Given that Yellen’s argument is that our economy advanced because women could kill the children in their wombs, perhaps Carlson was slightly misleading. But only slightly. Perhaps a policy paper could show that the economy didn’t quite advance as much as she said it would. But her argument as stated is that a woman’s temporary advancement economically is worth destroying unborn human life. This is indeed a moral and theological judgment that comes out of a deep spiritual sickness.

It is not clear that any policy paper or argument marshaling facts will work simply on its own. Carlson lamented, “I’ve tried. That doesn’t work.” That’s why, in addition to his lauding of those bearing heroic witness, he added what supposedly shook Rupert Murdoch to his core: “…maybe we should all take just 10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it. I’m serious. Why not?”

I don’t think we have to want to set up Calvin’s Geneva or a Catholic confessional state or some sort of explicit Christian nationalist polity to agree with Carlson, an Episcopalian, on this. Our country needs politics rather than an unelected administrative state; she needs intellectual argument rather than screaming.

But if she is to get them back, America needs to recover the notion of truth under God. And the way to get that truth is to speak and listen to God. The problem, as Solzhenitsyn put it in his 1983 Templeton speech, is that “men have forgotten God.” In order to have debates about the goods toward which we as a country should work, all involved must believe that there are in fact objective goods and an objective truth.

Americans are looking forward to Tucker Carlson’s return to commenting on what’s happening in our country. No theologian or great literary artist, he often plays the ordinary man, the investigator, the jester, even the fool. But in his Heritage speech he proved he can play the prophet, too.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative.

Homework Stupidity

Homework Stupidity

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

All,

Let us clear up this anti-homework stupidity.

First, homework is synonymous with practice. And no one can become a professional without practice.

Fully mastering educational standards without homework is impossible for all but a fraction of gifted students -- and you can bet they are smart enough to practice on their own.

Which gets to the second point: Involved parents will ignore the stupidity of not doing homework.

They will continue to help their kids outside school to ensure they get a quality education against the headwinds of the increasingly dysfunctional public school system.

And that leads us to the last point: When you teach new concepts mastery is NOT just narrowly learning the topic at hand. 

Equally important is preparing the student to be educated for life.

That means two other goals must be pursued: Developing the student's ability to (a) master new concepts more quickly in successive grades and (b) memorizing information. That is where homework reaps its greatest life-long rewards.

Failure in the last two areas in essence shuts the door to professionalism and given our poor public school system, that means the most at-risk children will reap the whirlwind.

It will be a national disaster for as the old adage goes: The Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions.

America’s state media

 

America’s state media: The blackout on Biden corruption is truly ‘Pulitzer-level stuff’

Jonathan Turley, The Hill https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/4003066-americas-state-media-the-blackout-on-biden-corruption-is-truly-pulitzer-level-stuff/

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.

Last year, I wrote a column about how the media were preparing a difficult “scandal implosion” to protect the Bidens and themselves from the backlash from disclosures of this influence peddling operation.

The brilliance of the Biden team was that it invested the media in this scandal at the outset by burying the laptop story as “Russian disinformation” before the election. That was, of course, false, but it took two years for most major media outlets to admit that the laptop was authentic.

But the media then ignored what was on that “authentic laptop.” Hundreds of emails detailed potentially criminal conduct and raw influence peddling in foreign countries.

When media outlets such as the New York Post confirmed the emails, the media then insisted that there was no corroboration of the influence peddling payments and no clear proof of criminal conduct. It entirely ignored the obvious corruption itself.

Now that the House has released corroboration in actual money transfers linking many in the Biden family, the media is insisting that this is no scandal because there is not directly proof of payments to Joe Biden.

Putting aside that this is only the fourth month of an investigation, the media’s demand of a direct payment to President Biden is laughably absurd. The payments were going to his family, but he was the object of the influence peddling. 

The House has shown millions of dollars going to at least nine Bidens like dividends from a family business. As a long-time critic of influence peddling among both Republicans and Democrats, I have never seen the equal of the Bidens.

The whole purpose of influence peddling is to use family members as shields for corrupt officials. Instead of making a direct payment to a politician, which could be seen as a bribe, you can give millions to his or her spouse or children.

Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10 percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates warning not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like “the Big Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are referenced as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from Hunter.

Indeed, Hunter complains that his father is taking half of everything that he is raking in.

None of that matters. The New York Times ran a piece headlined, “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.” That is putting aside evidence against all the family members around Joe Biden. It also ignored that other evidence clearly shows Biden lied about this family not receiving Chinese funds or that he never had any knowledge of his son’s business dealings. 

Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10 percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates warning not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like “the Big Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are referenced as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from Hunter.

Indeed, Hunter complains that his father is taking half of everything that he is raking in.

None of that matters. The New York Times ran a piece headlined, “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.” That is putting aside evidence against all the family members around Joe Biden. It also ignored that other evidence clearly shows Biden lied about this family not receiving Chinese funds or that he never had any knowledge of his son’s business dealings. 

Years later, Ukraine and various groups demanded that Duranty’s prize be rescinded, but the Committee insisted that there was no “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”

What is most impressive about this week is that all but a few outlets seem to be angling for the next Duranty Pulitzer. 

In discussing modern Russian propaganda, researchers at the Rand Corporation described it as having “two distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

Sound familiar?

Today we are seeing a much more dangerous phenomenon. The coverage this week has all the markings of a state media. The consistent spin. The almost universal lack of details. The absurd distinctions. 

It is the blindside of our First Amendment, which addresses the classic use of state authority to coerce and control media. It does not address a circumstance in which most of the media will maintain an official line out of by consent rather than coercion.

The media simply fails to see the story. Of course, it can always look to the president for enlightenment. Just before his son received a massive transfer of money from one of the most corrupt figures in Romania, Biden explained to that country why corruption must remain everyone’s focus. “Corruption is a cancer, a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy,” he said. “Corruption is just another form of tyranny.”

It is just a shame that no one wants to cover it.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

Street Thugs and the Intellectual Thugs Who Enable Them

 

Street Thugs and the Intellectual Thugs Who Enable Them

Criminals who endanger our safety should know they are taking their own lives in their hands.

Alexander Zubatov, American Greatness

On a Sunday morning two weeks ago, I was riding the F train from Manhattan into Brooklyn when I witnessed an incident that is typical of the kinds of unpleasant interactions to which normal New York City subway commuters are routinely subjected. A large black man got on, hip-hop music with profane lyrics blasting from a speaker hooked up to his phone. Two young gay men—one white, one likely Hispanic—who had been carrying on a conversation near where the newcomer sat down looked visibly annoyed and one of them threw a stern look in the new rider’s general direction. The black guy caught the look and immediately sprang from his seat.

“You got something to say?” he shouted.

Met with silence and an averted gaze from the two seated men, he persisted.

“You got something to say, say it, cuz I’ll fuck you up right here, nigga!”

The two men stared forward and downward uncomfortably. The man who had confronted them remained standing, continuing to blast his music, until getting off the train a few stops later. Only then did the two riders resume their conversation.

On May 1, riding a different F train near the Broadway-Lafayette stop in Manhattan, was 30-year-old Jordan Neely, a homeless black man with a history of mental illness who had been arrested 42 times, including for punching a 65-year-old woman in June 2021 and a 67-year-old woman in November of the same year. I should note here that someone who has been arrested 42 times has proven beyond any doubt that he cannot be trusted in society and should be confined either to a prison or a mental hospital for his own safety and ours. But he was out and about and, on May 1, he was aboard that F train threatening riders, up to no good yet again. Witnesses report that he was yelling, tossed down his jacket, was throwing around garbage and shouted that he was “fed up,” that he “didn’t care” if he went to “prison for life” and that he was “ready to die.”

That kind of behavior would make almost anyone on that subway car apprehensive. Fortunately, unlike the incident I had witnessed a few weeks earlier, in which we had to sit silently and hope that the threatened violence would not materialize, in the case of Jordan Neely, a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny happened to be on the train and, with the assistance of other riders, managed to subdue Neely and put him in a chokehold. Unfortunately, the Marine squeezed too hard or held on too long, and Neely passed out and later died.

Neely did not deserve to die, of course. But neither did his death represent some wholly unexpected and shocking turn of events. When you get on the subway and start threatening riders and act like a dangerous lunatic—and, given Neely’s criminal record, engage in such risky behavior repeatedly—the possibility that sooner or later, something bad could happen to you or others around you is necessarily higher than it would be during afternoon tea.

Absent some startling revelations, there would seem to be no doubt whatsoever that Penny did not leave home that day looking to harm or kill anyone. It is doubtful he was itching to partake in some white-on-black violence or expecting to play the role of hero or subway vigilante. Nor is this one of those exceedingly rare cases in which a police officer charged with upholding the law crosses the line and engages in an act of what amounts to state-sanctioned violence against an unarmed citizen. 

Here, instead, what we have is a case of an unarmed civilian acting in reasonable apprehension for the safety of himself and fellow subway riders, and working in concert with others who clearly had the same concern, to restrain an unstable and dangerous man. The unintended consequence was that it resulted in his death. Needless to say, the incidents in which black criminals engage in violence against white civilians—what is more, intentional, malicious violence rather than self-defense resulting in accidental death—are far more common and never garner the sort of publicity that has accompanied Neely’s sad demise.

The way this unfortunate incident has played out since is the reason we cannot have a safe city and subway system in New York. 

A CNN story about the incident ran under the absurd headline, “Jordan Neely, the man killed in chokehold on NYC subway, is remembered as an entertainer shattered by his mother’s murder,” and quoted New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who utterly mischaracterized the incident. “I do want to acknowledge how horrific it was to view a video of Jordan Neely being killed for being a passenger on the subway train,” and then irresponsibly concluding that Neely’s family “deserves justice.” The usual outspoken and unrepresentative activists and “journalists” have likewise crawled out of the woodwork to demand that the Marine be charged with a crime. The hate-mongering Black Lives Matter goons have also reappeared on the scene.

These, undoubtedly, are many of the same people who rose up in protest at Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to do more to institutionalize mentally ill people who are a danger to themselves or others. Now, hypocritically, they accuse the city of having failed to give Neely the mental health assistance he needed. Ever more concerned with the rights of thugs and miscreants than with the rights of everyday New Yorkers, these people resist all calls to have dangerous nutjobs institutionalized and treated. When the predictable result is 1) an incident in which an innocent person gets hurt or killed, they react as if there’s nothing to see here, or 2) an incident in which the miscreant himself is hurt or killed, they invariably blame the police officer or, as in this case, the concerned citizen who intervened to stop the madness.

And this why we find ourselves at the mercy of thugs, bums, and psychos who threaten and bully us with impunity. Like the two guys on my F train, we are scared to stand up to the boors who endanger us, and on those few occasions where someone like the Marine on Jordan Neely’s F train exhibits the bravery necessary to confront the miscreants, the intellectual thugs swoop in to defend the street thugs with whom they have an obvious affinity. The intellectual thugs’ message is clear: if you dare stand up to the street thugs, we will finish the job and beat you back down.

Just like the street thugs, the intellectual thugs are far outnumbered by ordinary citizens of the sort who have still not lost their fundamental moral compass. Like all bullies, however, the activists succeed in keeping the majority silent through intimidation and fear. We face the threat of physical violence from street thugs. Then, if we dare to raise our voices or our fists in protest, we face the threat of intellectual violence—pressure campaigns, smear campaigns, threats to have critics fired and deplatformed, and so on—from the intellectual thugs.

If we have any hope of reclaiming our cities and our nation from these malefactors, it lies in collective action, using the strength of numbers in our favor by presenting a united front against the civilization-destroying mob. To accomplish that, however, we will need to send a very clear message that seems positively revolutionary in today’s hijacked political environment. 

That message is this, and it must be stated without reservation or apology: 

The rights of ordinary, law-abiding citizens—people who work and commute and support families and communities and generally make our cities healthy, productive, and vibrant metropolises—are worth more than and must be prioritized over the rights of the parasites, idlers, vagrants, junkies, thugs, bums, hoodlums, and criminal miscreants who value neither themselves nor anyone else, who befoul our public spaces and make our daily lives more difficult and unpleasant than they need to be.

That sound, sane principle used to be so universally accepted and uncontroversial that it went without saying and did not need to be stated explicitly. But it can no longer be taken for granted in a society in which governments accord convicted criminals first priority in applying for coveted commercial licenses, tolerate known open drug scenes, and even enable illegal drug users (without regard for the toll on local communities and businesses) by providing free injection sites in the guise of cutting down on overdose deaths, while rogue prosecutors refuse to pursue misdemeanors or impose cash bail and let serial offenders roam the streets so that retailers can do little to curb an epidemic of shoplifting and the general public must endure more dangerous streets and subways.

In the end, we as a society have to ask ourselves the simple question of what message we want to send. If the intellectual thugs’ demands are met, and Daniel Penny is charged with causing Jordan Peely’s death, we will be sending a clear message that we must let the dangerous street thugs in our midst threaten and endanger us as they please while we sit in silence, avert our gazes, tremble in fear as crazy incidents like this occur on a daily basis and hope for the best. Woe be to us if we lift a finger against them. But if brave people stand on principle and reject the intellectual thugs’ clamor today, we will be sending a very different message every street thug among us needs to hear: when you threaten us and endanger our safety, you take your life in your hands.

The new ugly Americans

 

The new ugly Americans

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald's, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors.

But these businesses spread because they appealed to free-will consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down.

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 amid the greatest American military humiliation in modern history. A billion-dollar new embassy was abandoned. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of new infrastructure at the huge Bagram Airbase was dumped.

We still do not know how many billions of dollars of sophisticated new weapons were left to the Taliban and now are making their way through global terrorists' marts.

Yet, in our skedaddle, the LGBTQ flag still flew high from our new Kabul embassy. A George Floyd mural was prominent on city streets.

And gender studies programs — to the tune of $787 million in American subsidies — were showcased at Kabul University, in one of the most conservative Islamic countries in the world.

Rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners have hung from our embassy in South Korea.

Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first.

The woke Left has now weaponized the country's diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.

American foreign policy toward other nations seems now to hinge on their positions on transgender people, LGBTQ promotion, abortion, climate change, and an array of woke issues from using multiple pronouns on passports to showcasing transgender ambassadors.

The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.

Apparently, our diplomats felt it violated our own New Green Deal orthodoxies. So we imperialists interfered to destroy a vital project of our closest allies.

The White House manifesto called the "National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality" offers a blueprint for how to massage nations abroad to accept our values that are increasingly at odds with much of the world's.

Do Americans really believe that embracing drag-queen shows at military bases, abortion to the moment of birth, transgender men competing in women's sports, and the promised effort to ban the internal combustion engine are effective ways to ensure good relations with the United States?

No wonder the Biden Administration's new cultural imperialism is proving disastrous for a variety of reasons.

One, these imperialistic and chauvinistic agendas are pushed abroad at the very time the respect for the U.S. military is at an all-time low. It was humiliated in Afghanistan. It is now unable to recruit sufficient qualified soldiers. Its stocks of critical weapons are depleted.

The Pentagon leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, along with Joe Biden, do not radiate competence.

But they do exude woke pieties.

While we offend Middle East oil exporters and Central Europeans, China allies with Russia and Iran. India and Turkey triangulate away from the United States. Sanctimonious hectoring while appearing weak is a bad combination.

Two, these warped standards are incoherent. Is an abortion-on-demand, totalitarian China therefore an ally? How could we damn supposedly non-woke Saudi Arabia as we begged it to pump more of its non-green oil before the 2022 midterms?

Some of our most loyal allies are in Eastern Europe — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania. These countries have experienced traumatic histories on the front lines against Islamic Ottoman expansionism, czarist and Soviet aggression, and German Nazi bullying and invasion.

They are democratic and pro-American. Yet they are now targeted by our woke imperialists because they remain steadfast as the most religious and traditional of our European allies.

Yet these nations would be more likely to dispatch credible forces for NATO's defense than many of our left-wing, woke, and militarily less capable Western European nations.

Three, most of the 7.9 billion people in the world are not woke. They are aspiring to obtain a modicum of the luxury and affluence taken for granted in America.

The rest of the planet worries whether it will have enough food, energy, security, and shelter to live one more day. For most, the incessant, woke virtue-signaling from affluent Americans comes across as the whiny bullying of pampered, self-righteous — and increasingly neurotic — imperialists.

Four, traditionally the party that controls the State Department does not politically weaponize its embassies with wedge issues that have not won majority support among Americans.

Such abject politicalization rattles and alienates foreign nations. They do not want to be drawn into the American Left's internal propaganda efforts that they know are bitterly controversial inside the United States.

How odd that those on the Left who in the past decried "American imperialism" are now proving the greatest imperialists of all.