Ex-Marine Daniel Penny is the spitting image of “The Dying Gaul,” one of the most famous statues from Hellenistic Antiquity. The Capitoline Museum has a Third Century B.C. marble copy found in the early 17th Century of a Fourth Century B.C. bronze original by Epigonus.

What could possibly be a more classic heart-warming American story than an occasion in which a dangerous psychopath with a lengthy criminal record, currently wanted for arrest, begins menacing the passengers on a New York City Subway car and is forcibly subdued by a former US Marine who happens to be on hand?

Clearly they don’t make bad guys today the way they used to, since in this case, just like in several other recent cases of low-life scumbags being forcibly restrained, what do you know? the public menace who never will be missed upped and died.

And what could possibly be more infuriating and depressing than today’s government and established media response to the Good Samaritan’s actions?

The older, mentally-normal America I grew up in would have smiled at the Marine’s heroism and shrugged dismissively at the loss of the deceased, the public menace and public nuisance with the huge criminal record, who fell through his own fault in the course of being up to no good.

Today’s crazy-out-of-its-mind Woke elite Establishment looks upon minority psychos and career criminals the way Hindus look upon their sacred cows. They are holy, untouchable beings who must be permitted to go their own way and do their own thing, law-breaking, stealing, looting, assaulting people, because they are officially-designated VICTIMS. Nothing they do, nothing they are can possibly be their own fault. It’s the rest of us, Society as a whole, that is to blame.

Jordan Neely, you see, was crazy and justifiably angry, because he was born poor. He was naturally, just like everybody else, entitled to have been born to an affluent Ivy league background family residing in Greenwich or Chevy Chase or La Jolla. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Sullivan writes:

In 1971, the proportion of Londoners who were “White British” was 86.2 percent. Fifty years later, it’s 36.8 percent. That’s not a population change; it’s an entire paradigm shift.

Some of the friends I saw last week love this. “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me,” one told me, “that I can go around London and never hear English spoken!” And there are times I see her point: London is far more dynamic, diverse, and prosperous than it was in my childhood. I love much of it too — I’d much rather live in the London of 2021 than 1971 — and feel pride in my native land’s capacity to be so inclusive. But this is little short of a cultural revolution in a tiny, already densely packed island, which knew minimal immigration for centuries until the 1950s and 1960s.

Philip Larkin wrote a poem in 1972, “Going, Going,” about the pace of change in his native land:

It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn’t going to last

He was talking about putting economic and population growth before cultural and environmental stability, and not specifically about demographic change (though his views on the latter were similar, if not downright reactionary).

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

But the change he lamented was utterly trivial compared with what is happening now, let alone what is now baked in for the next few decades. The phrase “great replacement” is rightly abhorred for its racist, anti-Semitic inspirations. Larkin eschewed any idea of a conspiracy of some kind:

Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely;

But an accidental revolution is still a revolution. And I would just ask those who rightly denigrate the term “great replacement” to provide an alternative phrase to describe a city which was 87 percent “White British” a half-century ago and 36 percent today? It’s the kind of demographic change only previously seen in other parts of the world in times of plague, invasion, or campaigns of ethnic cleansing.

And then I think of George Orwell’s passionate defense of Englishness, his fusion of that patriotism with socialism, his detestation of the kind of left elites who now foment not just demographic but cultural revolution out of hatred of the past, performative virtue-signaling and thinly veiled contempt for so many of their stodgier countrymen. I think of his conviction that “it needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture.”

Orwell backed huge structural changes in British society in 1941 and yet insisted that a nation could retain its cultural integrity:

The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

I hover between these two visions of pessimism and optimism as I watch the English-speaking world transform.

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Let me offer a quotation of my own.

“Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living… are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.”

–James FitzJames Drephen, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” 1874.

Andrew says that he hovers between pessimism and optimism, but that’s complete malarkey.

When today’s Trans-Atlantic Community of Fashion runs off the tracks, effects another atrocity, delivers “un autre jolie cadeau de la Révolution française,” you will always find Andrew in the front row of the media choir warbling Hallelujahs to the river god.

Andrew was once, long ago, professionally conservative, but he had another, deeper affiliation, and between Conservatism and Sodomy there was ultimately no contest. Going over to the other side was de rigeur for affiliates of Andrew’s subculture, and Andrew will never ever be found dying in defense of any hill assailed by what Curtiss Yarvon likes to call “the Cathedral.”

Andrew is glib. Andrew is clever. But Andrew is not tough.

It is enormously ironic that even timid little Andrew, with his fondness for performing ceremonial nods in the direction of his long-discarded conservatism was unfortunate enough to provoke the Woke Inquisition which brutally liquidated him from New York Magazine despite his in-the-end invariably reliable Gleichshaltung.

It just goes to show that the Revolution/”the river god” is a jealous and unkind deity.

Would say I’m shocked to hear these facts but sadly not https://t.co/kqSnsi4zpt

— Matt Le Tissier🌸 (@mattletiss7) December 1, 2022

For some reason, the media did not publish a picture of Moose, the deceased Golden Retriever.

Even the NY Times is a bit amused at Urban fashionista liberals squabbling over the “correct” perspective to be taken when a minority crazy wino attacks a bourgeois female in the park and kills her dog.

Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white; the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.

In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?

Here’s what happened in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when real-life residents faced this situation.

On Aug. 3, Jessica Chrustic, 40, a professional beekeeper, was walking her dog in Prospect Park a little after 6 a.m. when she saw a man rifling through the garbage outside the Picnic House. She had seen the man before — tall, with dreadlocks wrapped in a turban, carrying a long staff and often muttering to himself or cursing — and she usually kept her distance. But this morning there was no room to avoid him.

According to Ms. Chrustic, he started yelling about immigrants taking over the park, then grabbed a bottle of what she later concluded was urine and sloshed it at her and her dog. She tried to run away, but Moose, her 80-pound golden retriever mix, was straining toward the man, trying to protect her.

The man started swinging the stick, she said. One blow hit her, not seriously. Another connected solidly with the dog’s snout. Mary Rowland, 56, a hospital manager who was walking her dog nearby, said she heard the crack of wood on bone and came running toward them, screaming at the man to get away.

Both women called 911, and four patrol cars arrived within a few minutes. But by then, the man was gone. “Moose was bleeding from his mouth and pulling to get home,” Ms. Chrustic said. “My focus was just on caring for him.”

Ms. Chrustic was physically unhurt, but she was shaken. How could this happen in a park where she had never felt unsafe, even walking her dog late at night?

Moose had a shattered tooth that needed to be pulled. Ms. Chrustic posted a description of the encounter on the neighborhood social network Nextdoor, warning others about the man and asking them to report any sightings to the police. Her post elicited more than 280 comments in the coming weeks, mostly expressing sympathy. A total stranger on the forum offered to make her a bracelet with the name Moose on it.

But then the next weekend, Moose developed sepsis from a perforated intestine, caused by a blow Ms. Chrustic had not noticed. After emergency surgery, Moose died.

Weeks passed, and the man who attacked the dog was still at large. People on Nextdoor, working from Ms. Chrustic’s description, posted that they had seen him in one part of the park or another. Ms. Chrustic, who used to visit the park four times a day, now found it too traumatic to enter unless necessary.

She was especially frustrated that the man, who was well known to people in the park, had not been arrested. “You have a person who is walking around the park who is violent and needs to be removed,” she said. “He’s known by the community. It’s disheartening.”

It was a random incident that might once have been discussed by a group of dog owners. But now it had a forum for a much wider community, with arguments about policing, vigilantism, homelessness, mental health care and progressive obstinacy all feeding into a conversation that evolved beyond the crime that set it off.

“It’s complicated,” said S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University. “It’s a conflict of values, between wanting security and social justice. Everybody has a responsibility in some ways.

“There are a bunch of issues here, a bunch of threats,” he added. “We can deal with them in a compassionate way, or a not compassionate way.” …

Nextdoor, which claims an average of 37 million users per week, started in 2010 with the promise of connecting people with their neighbors and neighborhoods. One slogan went, “When neighbors start talking, good things happen.”

One thing they talked about, a lot, was local crime. In Nextdoor forums for communities all over the country, this included suspected crime and sightings of “suspicious” characters, leading early critics to say that what the platform really propagated was white fear. After complaints about racial profiling in 2016, the company instituted diversity training for its operations staff and new protocols for posts about crime and safety. But even in 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized it as an outlet for privileged white people to vent criminal fantasies about their Black and brown neighbors. She tweeted, “@Nextdoor needs to publicly deal w/ their Karen problem.”

A Nextdoor spokesperson said the company enables users to report any posts that they find offensive or discriminatory, which are then reviewed by volunteer community moderators or staff members. In 2021, only 1 percent of posts were reported as hurtful or harmful; about half of these were removed.

When Ms. Chrustic posted about the attack, the first responses were mostly notes of condolence and support. People with dogs posted that they had seen the man in the same area where she was attacked — why weren’t the police arresting him? Donations poured in to offset her veterinary bills.

But gradually, other voices emerged. A vocal minority asked why Park Slope residents, mostly white, were calling for the police to take down a man who appeared to be homeless and emotionally disturbed. Others called the man a “monster,” a “predator” or a “psychopath.” As on other social media platforms, the most ardent voices made the most noise.

Martin Lofsnes, 52, a dancer and choreographer who moved out of the neighborhood in 2020, came across the conversation while trying to sell some stuff and was appalled by the vitriol directed at an impoverished man, and by what he called “this vigilante attitude.”

He urged people on the thread to put their emotions aside and consider “400 yrs of systematic racism which has prevented black people from building generational wealth through homeownership resulting in the extreme disparity we see today.” Arresting the man, he wrote, would solve none of that.

With all the affluence in Park Slope, he posted, maybe critics should raise money to help the man, not throw him to the lethal jail system, from which he would most likely emerge more dangerous, or not emerge at all.

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President Obama appointed the first black female Librarian of Congress who, naturally, is a fan of Rap music, and who therefore invited rapper/flautist “Lizzo” to sound a few notes on a rare and valuable crystal flute presented to President Madison in 1813.

The grotesquely obese Lizzo performed enthusiastically and indecently attired, accompanying her flute performance with the kind of sexually-explicit movements referred to in the lamentable popular culture of today as “twerking.”

NPR, as you might expect, was overjoyed:

As all iconic moments go these days, it started with a simple social media exchange. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden tweeted out an invitation for Lizzo to visit the world’s largest flute collection, housed at the Library of Congress in D.C.

“@Lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week,” Hayden tweeted. “Like your song they are “Good as hell [with a winking face emoji].”

The singer responded with gusto.

IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!! <link>
— FOLLOW @YITTY (@lizzo) September 24, 2022

After making a stop at the Library of the Congress to tour the collection and practice on a few instruments, Lizzo’s dream became reality when she got the chance to play the historic flute on stage Tuesday night. …

“You never know what you’re going to see with the U.S. Capitol Police!” the agency tweeted Wednesday morning. …

Handlers brought the flute onstage at Lizzo’s concert. She carefully accepted the instrument and carried it to the standing microphone, saying “it’s like playing out of a wine glass, so be patient.”

She performed on the flute, adding a few of her signature moves, of course, as the audience wildly cheered, and then Lizzo gave back the historical flute and ran back to her mic.

“B***h, I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” she shouted. “We just made history tonight!”…

Lizzo took the time to thank the Library of Congress for “preserving our history and making history freaking cool.”

Video link.

I’m obviously a racist old fogey since I think placing a relic previously belonging to the Father of the Constitution in the hands of a popular entertainer of the lowest order who accompanies a performance with the kinds of dress and public behavior that for most of my own lifetime would have gotten her arrested is insulting to Mr. Madison, to the country’s history, and to decency and public morals. In a properly governed America, that librarian would be fired.

Today’s Jacobin “elite” culture, of course, absolutely delights in these kinds of revolutionary gestures. That culture systematically inverts all values. James Madison is an evil dead white man, who owned slaves. Lizzo is black and therefore the giant economy-size embodiment of everything great and admirable! For them, the profanation of Mr. Madison’s flute is “historic,” “an iconic moment,” and “freaking cool.” What an age we live in!

————————

Seeing someone like Lizzo disporting herself pantsless on stage reminds me of the story of the crusty old New Englander who spied an unusually ill-favored woman in church one Sunday, and remarked, loudly, “My God! that must be the ugliest woman in six counties!” “Hush!” admonished his offended wife. “You know the poor thing can’t help it.” “Yes, but, she could, by golly, stay home!”

1880 Frederick Burr Opper Cartoon from Puck, titled: The Bankrupt Outrage Mill (showing bloody shirts, lynchings, and other forms of racial violence).

* “Waving the Bloody Shirt” was a phrase used by their opponents to mock efforts by post-Civil-War left-wing radicals to sow national division and stir up animosity against the defeated South by invoking memories of the war, and particularly through painting emotional images of black victimhood.

Coleman Hughes quite brilliantly analyses the bizarre role of metaphor as identity underlying the contemporary psychodrama participated in by complaining blacks and pious white liberals.

Though the question seems naïve to some, it is in fact perfectly valid to ask why black people can get away with behavior that white people can’t. The progressive response to this question invariably contains some reference to history: blacks were taken from their homeland in chains, forced to work as chattel for 250 years, and then subjected to redlining, segregation, and lynchings for another century. In the face of such a brutal past, many would argue, it is simply ignorant to complain about what modern-day blacks can get away with.

Yet there we were—young black men born decades after anything that could rightly be called ‘oppression’ had ended—benefitting from a social license bequeathed to us by a history that we have only experienced through textbooks and folklore. And my white Hispanic friend (who could have had a tougher life than all of us, for all I know) paid the price. The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? Do all black people have P.T.S.D from racism, as the Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist Donald Glover recently claimed? Is ancestral suffering actually transmitted to descendants? If so, how? What exactly are historical ‘ties’ made of?

We often speak and think in metaphors. For instance, life can have ups and downs and highs and lows, despite the fact that our joys and sorrows do not literally pull our bodies along a vertical axis. Similarly, modern-day black intellectuals often say things like, “We were brought here against our will,” despite the fact that they have never seen a slave ship in their lives, let alone been on one. When metaphors are made explicit—i.e., emotions are vertical, groups are individuals—it’s easy to see that they are just metaphors. Yet many black intellectuals carry on as if they were literal truths.

One such intellectual is Michael Eric Dyson, who recently shared the stage with Michelle Goldberg in a debate against Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry. Though the debate was ostensibly about political correctness, it ranged everywhere from Marxism to ‘white privilege.’ Around halfway through the debate, Dyson said:

If you have benefitted from 300 years of holding people in servitude, thinking that you did it all on your own…”Why can’t these people work harder?” Let me see…for 300 years you ain’t had no job! So the reality is for 300 years you hold people in the bands…you refuse to give them rights. Then all of a sudden, you ‘free’ them and say, “You’re now individuals.”

Taken literally, Dyson’s claims make no sense. No person has ever suffered 300 years of joblessness because no person has ever lived for 300 years. Of course, Dyson wasn’t speaking literally. His ‘you’ refers not to identifiable, living humans, but to groups of long-deceased individuals with whom he shares nothing in common except a location on the color wheel. But by appropriating a grievance whose rightful owners died long ago, and by slipping between the metaphorical and the literal, Dyson was able to portray himself as a member of an abstract oppressed class and Peterson as a member of an abstract oppressor class. In his reply, barely audible over Dyson’s sanctimonious harangue, Peterson put his finger on this rhetorical sleight-of-hand: “Who is this ‘you’ that you’re referring to?”

Many black progressives use the myth of collective, intergenerational transfers of suffering to exempt themselves from the rules of civil discourse.

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Via Nellie Bowles:

Protestors gathered to express their rage that police shot Andrew “Tekle” Sundberg, a black man who was shooting into his neighbors apartment where Arabella Yarbrough and her children live, leaving bullet holes in their kitchen. As Yarbrough stands outside trying to get the crowd to disperse, protestors scream at her: “You’re alive, shut up!” When she says, “there’s bullet holes in my kitchen,” a protester shouts back: “Not in you, though!”

Things boiled over during Saturday’s rally and march for Tekle Sundberg, when the 24 year old woman who says he was shooting into her apt. showed up voicing her frustration with those gathering in front of her building on Sundberg’s behalf. @kare11 * video contains profanity * pic.twitter.com/qdi1vbgO7k

— Deevon Rahming (@DeevonRahming) July 16, 2022

Am hearing that Brentwood, prestigious private school in LA, is in chaos after almost zero white seniors got into to UC schools. When friends went there in happier times, UC acceptance was like 80%. This year, bipoc kids only.

Parents who spent $60K/yr+ for 6 years little upset

— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) March 23, 2022

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Vince Everett Ellison demonstrates that not all African Americans buy into the MLK myth.

After finding evidence that the “man of God” and “moral conscience of our nation,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., participated in the rape of a parishioner, engaged in numerous sex orgies, received cash payments from known communists, and admitted that he was a Marxist, King biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Garrow wrote of King, “There is no question that a profoundly painful reckoning and reconsideration inescapably awaits.”

Black Democrats and White liberals rail about the gains derived from the Civil Rights Movement. I ask, “What gains?” If murder, poverty, and mass incarceration are gains, you may have a point. In an attempt to make him untouchable, liberals have protected King’s counterfeit legacy by sealing his FBI files until 2027. Nevertheless, his reckoning is here.

But that reckoning shouldn’t occur exclusively because of King’s immoral behavior. It shouldn’t happen because the “Good Reverend’s” best friend, Ralph Abernathy, in his book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, described King beating a woman and sleeping with two others at the Lorrain Motel the night before his death. Or because Arthur Schlesinger recorded Jackie Kennedy saying he was “terrible, phony, and tricky.” Or that Black Major League Baseball player Don Newcombe reported to the FBI that King was a “drunk” and had an illegitimate child by a woman married to a sterile Los Angeles dentist. Or because King allowed the dirty world of politics to turn the Black church into a puppet of the atheist and racist Democrat party.

No. This reckoning should happen because Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement have failed Black people. They managed only to elect many Black Americans into office, with most of them belonging to the same evil Democrat party that had necessitated the Civil Rights Movement by enslaving, raping, castrating, and oppressing Black Americans for over one hundred and fifty years.

After fifty years of following King’s failed ideology, consider these results. On June 4, 2020, the Washington Post reported “no decrease in Black and White citizens’ wealth gap since 1968.” The Brookings Institution reported that in 1965, only 24% of Black children were born out of wedlock. In 2020, it was 69.4 (approximately a 300% increase). Between 2019 and 2020, Blacks made up 11% of the population but 50% of all murders. In May 2019, Penn State and UCLA reported that school segregation is getting worse.

This is King’s legacy. Why are we celebrating it?

In explaining how to recognize a false prophet, Jesus said, “A tree is known by the fruit it bears.” He said you cannot get bad fruit from a good tree. The fruits of the Black community, almost unanimously, are rotten to the core.

What good has come from Martin Luther King’s movement for Black America? The American Black community is at the bottom of nearly every socio-economic statistic. The Black family is weaker. The Black church is more apostate. The Black economy is nonexistent. Black government is corrupt. Black education is terrible. Are we celebrating failure, or was this their intention?

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Fox News (not the Babylon Bee) reports on another democrat milestone in establishing Racial Equity.

Washington state lawmakers introduced a bill this month that would reduce penalties for drive-by shootings with the aim of “promoting racial equity.”

The bill, introduced by Democratic Representatives Tarra Simmons and David Hackney ahead of the state’s 2022 legislative session, would eliminate drive-by shootings as the basis for elevating a first-degree murder charge to aggravated murder in the first degree, which carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

Drive-by shootings were added to the list of aggravating factors for murder charges in 1995. Other aggravating factors include the murder of law enforcement officers, murders committed by inmates while they are behind bars, and murder-for-hire schemes.

Seattle police responded to a third shooting incident Tuesday evening in the 200 block of Yesler Way in the Pioneer Square neighborhood in September.

Seattle police responded to a third shooting incident Tuesday evening in the 200 block of Yesler Way in the Pioneer Square neighborhood in September. (Seattle Police Department)

The aggravating factor that the bill would eliminate reads: “The murder was committed during the course of or as a result of a shooting where the discharge of the firearm… is either from a motor vehicle or from the immediate area of a motor vehicle that was used to transport the shooter or the firearm.”

Rep. Simmons, who represents a district in western Washington, argued that “it’s clear that it was targeted at gangs that were predominantly young and Black.”

“I believe in a society that believes in the power of redemption,” she told Fox News Digital in a statement. “Murder is murder no matter where the bullet comes from but locking young people up and throwing away the key is not the answer.”

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KATV:

A self-proclaimed “militant” who apparently supports “Black Lives Matter” took to social media to say the incident at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin may be the start of a “revolution”.

39-year-old Darrell Brooks, a black man, is suspected of being behind the wheel of the SUV which barreled through the parade. He is due to appear in court on Tuesday.

Five people were killed and almost 50 were injured by the SUV. Authorities have yet to release any information which points to a clear motivation for the violence.

Vaun Mayes, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a community activist, battle rapper, militant, and tattoo artist, among other titles, said on a Facebook Live on Monday “it sounds possible that the revolution has started in Wisconsin. It started with this Christmas parade.”

Connecticut Hall on Yale’s Old Campus was completed in 1752.

Yale Officialdom ought to feel ashamed for its hypocrisy on Free Speech, its swooning embrace of Left-wing Intolerance and Mob Rule, its eagerness to climb onboard any form of fashionable irrationality and hysteria.

Yale should apologize for letting a mob of snowflakes hound the Master of Silliman and his wife out of office. Yale should apologize for renaming Calhoun College, for modifying the College Master title, and for naming one of two new colleges for a mentally-disordered radical nobody not a communist had ever heard of.

If we want to go back historically, Yale ought to be ashamed at supporting the Communist subjugation and enslavement of Indochina (which still persists) and the subsequent genocide in Cambodia. Yale should be ashamed for closing down the two ROTC programs, tearing down both their buildings, and selling the French 75mm Field Gun awarded to the Yale Artillery Battalion by the French Government in commemoration of their service in WWI for scrap. Yale ought to look at the history of Kingman Brewster saying that the Panthers couldn’t get a fair trial and being proven correct in an ironical sense when acquittals and a few slap on the wrist convictions were handed down by a New Haven jury to the accused unquestionably guilty of murder and torture.

But, no, Peter Salovey thinks we ought to feel simply awful over there being Negro slaves in Colonial New Haven almost three centuries ago. It also requires investigation, and regret, that Yale circa 1915 actually participated in a general era of National Reconciliation during a time in which the last combatants in the War Between the States were passing from the scene.

In the Gothic and Georgian lunatic asylum bordering New Haven’s Green, so thoroughly has the Left’s absolute obsession with Identity Group Victimhood taken possession of the inmates and staff that professional scholars no longer view certain particular aspects and periods of History with objectivity and detachment. Instead, they might as well adopt period costumes because they are fanatically determined to connect with that History as active partisans and they are equally determined to inflict injury upon and punish their long-deceased (and, at this point, essentially imaginary) opponents.

Yale News:

For the past year, Yale scholars, librarians, New Haven community members, and student researchers have been digging through Yale’s own past for a deeper understanding of the university’s historical relationship with slavery and its legacy.

During a three-day academic conference starting Oct. 28, experts from across Yale and the nation will discuss what they’ve learned so far, including new insights into the construction of Connecticut Hall, an iconic Old Campus structure built in part by enslaved Africans, and the “reconciliationist” approach to Yale’s Civil War memorial in Woolsey Hall. …

Salovey has described the “Yale & Slavery” project — part of an ongoing national discussion about racism and discrimination — as an urgent reckoning with the university’s history, and an important opportunity to analyze, understand, and publicly communicate it.

“Like many of America’s oldest institutions, Yale has seldom, if ever, recognized the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people and their descendants to our university’s history or our present,” Salovey said. “For generations, we have looked away from what is in plain sight. But now we are acknowledging that slavery, the slave trade, and abolition are part of Yale’s history.

“It is important we shine a light into every concealed corner of our past, because moving forward requires an honest reckoning with our history, and because the purpose of our university is to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. The fundamental work we all share applies as much to Yale’s past as anyone’s.”

The conference is hosted by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, part of the MacMillan Center at Yale. Founded in 1998, the Gilder Lehrman Center is the first such center in the world to study such international historical questions.

Topics during the conference will include the university’s 18th-century theological roots; the economics of slavery-created wealth; the place of Southern slaveholders at Yale during its first two centuries; medical and scientific legacies of race at Yale; forces of abolition at the university; the history of labor in building the campus; and why the inclusion of Confederate veterans was central to the purpose of the university’s Civil War memorial when it was created in 1915.

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