21 Dec 2022

It Is No Longer the America I Grew Up In

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Our politics has changed. Our ruling establishment has changed. The leadership of our institutions has changed. And entirely everywhere for the worse.

The media, of course, used to be biased, but the bias was unconscious back then. Today, it is calculated, deliberate, and ruthless.

The American establishment was Country Club Republican, liberal but with some moderation and common sense. The establishment today is a Marxist devoutedly treasonous clerisy that hates the rest of America and that has every inclination to impose its positions by force. The liberals have been purged.

Patrick Maines discusses what has happened to Free Speech.

Of the several unwelcome revelations in the past six years, the most politically significant is that liberalism as a political philosophy is dead.

Oh, there may still be some individuals who identify with it, but for the most part they are old, retired, or cowed into silence by the howling mobs of progressives, the “woke,” and the identitarian left.

And how do we know this? We know it by the collapse of colleges and universities as places of open debate and inquiry. And we know it by the abandonment of any kind of honest and principled journalism by the vast majority of the legacy and social media. For decades these two institutions, the press and the academy, have been the white hot center of American liberalism, and their metamorphosis into woke and progressive fortresses signals the end of it.

How else to explain the spectacle of acceptance, if not the promotion, of censoring, shadow banning, and cancelling? Or the spread of CRT concepts in education from elementary school to college? Or the hostility shown toward Elon Musk’s stated goal of reinstating free speech on Twitter? Or the thuggish and uniform media lies regarding stories like the origin of COVID-19 and authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

You don’t have to admire or share the philosophy to know that liberalism is, or was, popularly likened to virtues like tolerance and broad-mindedness. But none of the examples above reflect any of those qualities. Just the opposite.

In the summer of 2020, Harper’s magazine published an open letter signed by 150 or so people, most of whom would then have been regarded as liberals. In it, the signers made clear their dismay over the attacks on freedom of speech:

    The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture; an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

    More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

At the time of its publication the letter looked like it might be the beginning of a powerful liberal backlash against the illiberal machinations of progressives and the like. In hindsight it looks like the last gasp of an exhausted stock.

RTWT

The reptiles and invertebrates running places like Yale today are burdened with inherited commitments to Free Speech dating back to a different time. At Yale, they have not quite nerved themselves up to the point of repudiating the Woodward Report, they only ignore it in practice then obfuscate and pay a little hypocritical lip service to Free Expression that they no longer support. They gave a good citizenship award to one of the Shrieking Students who hounded the master of Silliman College out of office because his wife defended free choice of Halloween costume. Open and frank repudiation of every kind of free speech and expression is just around the corner.

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9 Feedbacks on "It Is No Longer the America I Grew Up In"

Seattle Sam

Pretty much what universities were like during Mao’s rule.



OneGuy

After America collapses and is probably overrun by Huns and Vandals the survivors will look back to 2020 a say “we should have seen the signs”. The signs are there. The Democrats are decidedly anti-American. Our FBI and intelligence community is decidedly anti-American. Our serious problems are too many to list. We make banana republics look good. This may well be the end times.



Hairless Joe

Agreed with the above, but in America the population is armed– heavily armed. There may be massacres, but they will pay for them. And I suspect that our volunteer soldiers, when ordered to fire on civilians, will in many cases turn on their officers. When all is said and done, “all power comes from the barrel of a gun” as a famous Marxist once said. We have quite a few guns, and many of us can shoot pretty damn well, so we are not quite as powerless as populations were in the past.



Gerard vanderleun

“DRIVE THEM fast to their tombs.”



Butch

I would not bet on many of our volunteer soldiers refusing to fire on citizens. They are the products of an education system that hates us.



ruralcounsel

Butch may be right, but there plenty of veterans out there who know which direction the muzzles should be pointing.



Dispatches #2

[…] Never Yet Melted サ It Is No Longer the America I Grew Up In The American establishment was Country Club Republican, liberal but with some moderation and common sense. The establishment today is a Marxist devotedly treasonous clerisy that hates the rest of America and that has every inclination to impose its positions by force. The liberals have been purged. […]



booger

Maybe the Russians can liberate a few States that would vote to secede from USA? I will bet a dollar that Putin is more honest than the people presently calling the shots here.



JDZ

Putin’s been lying his ass off lately on a scale that might embarrass even a democrat.



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