Woke Olympics

 This year’s Olympics was one of the strangest, most disquieting Olympics since the 1972 Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by the Palestinian terrorist group, Black September.  While nothing as wrenching took place this year, the Olympics were bitterly divisive.

For the first time, many Americans rooted against many of their teams and athletes.  Social Media lit up with glee as the favored but hopelessly Woke women’s soccer team, led by the insufferable Queen of Malcontent, Megan Rapinoe, got crushed by Sweden 3-0.   The Canadians then knocked them out of gold medal contention.

The U.S. men’s basketball team, a perennial juggernaut likewise went out with a whimper, losing to France.  Gone are the days of the Dream Team.  Again, the reaction was one of delight.

Similarly, Gwen Berry, another athlete that turned her back on the flag, failed to medal.  Raven Saunders also protested and then twerked for the cameras (although she did medal). 

For the athletes that failed, there was an incredible amount of schadenfreude and contempt in the air for them and their disrespect for the country.   It seems as though these athletes decided to turn their backs on their country and their countrymen returned the favor.  It was a most disturbing thing.

The strangest turn of events was the New Zealand transgender weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, who competed in the women’s events though she was a biological male.  While the “breaking barriers” media crown swooned, much of the saner world stood perplexed as the Woke IOC opened the door to the destruction of women’s sports.

In the end, Hubbard failed to medal and in an almost comically embellished performance failed to snatch a weight that she should have easily handled.  She smiled and left the stage, almost as if it had been scripted to fail.  Indeed, several knowledgeable people, familiar with the sport were convinced that she took a dive so that the Woke crowd could say, “See, transgender athletes do not automatically have an insurmountable advantage.”

One of the few bright spots was Tamyra Mensah-Stock, winner of the gold medal in women’s wrestling.  Her beaming smile lit us all up as she draped herself in the American flag and proclaimed how proud she was to wrestle for the United States.

Meanwhile, viewer ratings of the Olympics dropped by nearly 50% and Subway franchisees are pushing Subway to drop pickle puss Rapinoe as their spokesperson.  Rapinoe whined that Trump was rooting against the U.S. women’s team.

I hate to break this to Megan, but a lot of us were rooting against you.

Because you root against us.  It’s a mutual thing.

Ella French

 

I’m writing this on about 3 hours of sleep.  Last night I saw the post on Twitter that 2 officers had been shot on the South Side.  Someone then posted the dispatcher call that responded to the shooting.  The call will haunt me for a long time.   It is not often that I am brought to tears anymore, but listening to this call did it.  You can find it easily on Twitter but I will not post it here as I prefer to spare my readers the pain.  Today, Officer French’s photo is on Twitter and it brought me to tears again.  The photo is of her in uniform, beaming, beautiful young smile while she is holding a small dog.  It crossed my mind that this could be my daughter.  Indeed, she was Chicago’s daughter.

A little while later, we learned that 29 year old Ella French had died and her partner was in the ICU at The University of Chicago hospital, struggling to stay alive, having been shot in the shoulder, back and eye.   Apparently, all three of the perpetrators are now in custody.  The incident occurred during a routine traffic stop.

Police Chief David Brown was in Dallas, attending his mother’s funeral and did not respond for several hours before sending out an email.  Mayor Lightfoot made some tepid, perfunctory comments last night, then took to Twitter to immediately begin to spin the narrative:

“Some say we don’t do enough for the police.  Others say we do too much.  All of this must stop.

We have a common enemy: it’s guns and the violence they bring.”

Lightfoot has it precisely backwards.  It’s the thugs and gangs that they’ve unleashed that bring the guns and violence.

Governor Pritzker has, to my knowledge, not bothered to comment but continues to blather on about keeping us safe by vaccine.

We do have a common enemy—it’s the feckless politicians chasing a false narrative and the despicable media that provides the spin.

Since coming into office, the triad of Pritzker, Lightfoot and prosecutor Kim Foxx have done everything in their power to handcuff law enforcement, empower criminals and gangs and turn Chicago into something that resembles Mogadishu rather than the great American city it once was.

Pritzker gleefully signed a criminal reform bill just a few months ago that eliminated cash bail, restricts officers from pursuing suspects, restricts officers from detaining individuals suspected of Class B and C misdemeanors, and allowed anonymous complaints against officers, among other things.  Lightfoot never missed a chance to deflect criticism of her handling of the crime wave in the city by calling for more gun control and pushed away Donald Trump’s offer of federal help.  When young gangbanger Adam Toledo was shot, she restricted the ability of officers to pursue suspects on foot, requiring them to call a supervisor first.  The laxity of Kim Foxx is now legendary.  Charges are dropped about 1/3 of the time and about 30 criminals out on felony bond have gone on to commit violent crimes.   Clueless Police Chief David Brown dissolved the gang crimes unit, among other things.

All of these things and more met young mother Ella French on 63^rd and Bell last night.  It’s on all of you, the entire lot.  It’s not about gun control.  It’s about savage control.  Weekend after weekend, it happens. Over 4^th of July, a University of Chicago student was murdered.  A few days before, a 9 year old girl was shot in the head and killed.  A few weeks ago, a young woman was stabbed to death a few blocks from Sears Tower.  It goes on and on.  Car jackings. Hold ups.  Shootings. And all they’ve done is shackle the police.  

But this started much earlier.  While Officer French was being shot in the face, former president Barack Obama was yukking it up with 700 of his closest friends at Martha’s Vinyard for his 60^th birthday party.  It was Barack that jumped on the Cambridge police for “acting stupidly” when they came upon professor Henry Louis Gates breaking into his own home and asked him for ID.   He famously asserted that if “he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” after the young punk assaulted George Zimmerman and was shot in the altercation.   If you read firearms expert Massad Ayoob’s analysis of the case, you will see that it was a case that should never have been brought against Zimmerman.   Of course the worst affront was hosting BLM representatives in the White House only weeks after they were filmed marching through the streets chanting: “What do we want? Dead cops.  When do we want it? Now,” and “Pigs in a blanket. Fry ‘em like bacon.”  

At every level of government, the police were demonized and criminals empowered.

The media have been willing accomplices in this narrative.  It desperately wanted to crucify the officer that shot and killed little 13 year old gangbanger Adam Toledo, until the bodycam indisputably showed that the officer had used deadly force appropriately and legally on “Little Homicide.”   The wanted another show trial as they had with Officer Van Dyke to buttress their fact-free narrative that police are wantonly targeting minorities for mistreatment.  It had to give up on the Adam Toledo incident.

The murder of French and shooting of her partner is taking this to another level.  My heart aches for Ella’s family and her newborn baby.  

And it aches for this once great city that is rapidly descending into a Mad Max dystopian nightmare, willingly, knowingly and purposefully by Obama, his acolytes, the governor, mayor, and chief prosecutor.  It will soon be past the point of no return.

Bye Bye Biles

 

Simone Biles is being lionized for her withdrawal from the Olympics, citing “mental health issues” and that her “mind and body weren’t in synch.”  In her press conference, she bemoaned that she “wasn’t having fun.” Biles is to Olympic gymnastics what Tiger Woods is to golf and Tom Brady is to football.  She is the face of the sport and was expected to wow us all with a gold medal performance.   Her performance was much needed after the belly flops of the women’s soccer teams and the men’s basketball teams.

I have decidedly mixed views of her withdrawal, particularly since the MSM is gushing over her courage and “taking ownership of her mental health.”

Yes, there is a certain amount of bodily risk involved in gymnastics.  Slip ups have caused devastating, paralyzing injuries.   While some sports present more risks than others, gymnastics is not alone in presenting risks to athletes.  Hockey, downhill skiing, luge, ski jumping, among others present dangers to athletes. 

And Biles is not the first top level performer to take a pass.  Temperamental Bobby Fischer, it will be recalled, showed up late to the first game and lost and, after making ridiculous demands on the match organizers forfeited the second game with Boris Spassky before turning the match around and finally defeating Spassky.

Sure, it’s her body, her choice.  And, of course, I have a great deal of empathy toward her after she was victimized by the dastardly Dr. Nasser.  She made the best decision for her.

The media is all ablaze with support for her and her decision to withdraw.  “Thank you for finding your voice and staying true to yourself,” proclaimed one.  WaPo, of course, was compelled to racialize and genderize the whole affair, “Black women are apparently still expected to sacrifice themselves for a country that refuses to see them as fully human.”  Another opinion piece read, “Men could learn a thing or two about what it means to be truly strong.” 

But there’s another perspective.  Competitors compete.  Real competitors can’t be held back.  The sports world is replete with stories of athletes refusing to be held back by physical or emotional issues.  Many athletes have competed immediately following the death of a parent.  Michael Jordan famously turned in a stellar performance in the NBA finals despite having the flu.  Duncan Keith was smashed in the mouth with a puck, and despite losing several teeth, returned to play the same night.  Nolan Ryan continued to pitch even after being hit in the face with a line drive, blood splattered all over his jersey.  Ronnie Lott of the San Francisco 49ers had a part of his little finger amputated after it was severely dislocated so he could continue to play.  Of course, there were the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys who played in the famous Ice Bowl on the frozen tundra in Green Bay with a wind chill of minus 36 degrees.  Many players suffered frostbite.  Tiger Woods overcame age and personal issues to win the Masters two years ago.  Plenty of other athletes have competed when battling internal demons.  That’s what it’s all about.

It is in the overcoming and prevailing that makes the best sports stories.

Perhaps the greatest display of grit and will was by Babe Dietrich Zaharias.   Incredibly Babe won the 1954 U.S. Women’s Open Championship in golf a month after colon cancer surgery and while wearing a colostomy bag. 

Biles is a superb athlete and it’s a shame that she chose to duck out.   But the media shouldn’t be fawning over her decision.   If she didn’t wish to compete, she should have pulled out a long time ago and let someone else take her spot.   

Biles was the face of our team at the Olympics.  She let her team down and her country down.  When it was time to step up, she stepped aside.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

 

For those of you waiting patiently for life to go back to the way it was pre-COVID, I have some bad news for you.  It’s not.  Sure, we’re inching back.  Facemasks are not required everywhere.  People are drifting back into their offices.  Large gatherings like concerts are happening again.   But Europe and Australia are still imposing brutal restrictions and the specter of the Delta Variance is being held over our heads like the Sword of Damocles.  COVID ignited or uncovered other currents and, in my view, life will never quite be the same again.  It remains to be seen exactly how all this will play out, but our society has been changed permanently, and most of the effects are not positive.   Still, there are some changes that will turn out to be beneficial, although they will be vastly outweighed by the deleterious outcomes that will occur as a consequence of COVID and the drive for Wokeness.  Over the next three posts, I will outline what I think are the good, the bad and the ugly that will be permanent changes to our lives.

The Good

At first, I was disillusioned by the apparent suicide attempt by pro sports, beginning with Colin Kaepernick.  Why would a sport seem to go out of its way to offend a large part of its fan base?  It is all the more perplexing because all professional sports is, essentially, is brand management and the anti-American and anti-patriotic symbols and gestures seemed to tarnish to brand.  Yet, the NFL, NBA and MLB seemed quite willing to absorb a huge dent in their viewership to prove sufficient Wokeness.

Except for the NHL, UFC and PGA, major pro sports seem to be outdoing themselves to demonstrate their commitment to Wokeness, rather than their fan base.

The NBA went all out in its BLM messaging last year and showed more fealty to the Chinese Communist Party than  to ordinary Americans.  The NFL announced that it will play the Black National Anthem before games.   MLB moved its All-Star game out of Atlanta and changed the name of the Cleveland Indians to the bland Guardians.

All three leagues are seeing a bleed off in ratings with the NBA suffering the biggest loss.

This is all good in the long run.

Because of the anti-trust exemptions granted these leagues, the salaries of these Woke players have gone into the stratosphere.   In contrast, the retired pro athletes that I had gotten to know – Bob Asher and George Seals of the Bears, Cliff Koroll, Grant Mulvey and Reggie Fleming of the Blackhawks all played for modest salaries and had to get real jobs after their playing careers ended.

I hope the downward trend in ratings continues.

I, for one, have turned my attention to other activities such as hiking, chess, and live music.

Who needs to watch LeBron shoot free throws at the end of a basketball game?  Why watch 300 pound linemen give each other CTE?  Or watch an interminably dull baseball game with your team 8 games out in July?

Our Olympic team was even worse.  After tripping over themselves to show how much contempt they have for the nation they supposedly represent, the women’s soccer team got pasted by Sweden 3-0 and the men’s basketball team got horsewhipped by….France.  I guess this is what global “equity” is all about.

Why do I think this is good?  Because we have become a nation of spectators, rather than doers.  We have turned athletes into members of the elite, as distant from us as the political elite, and every bit as contemptuous and disdainful of the rest of us. 

The other good development is working remotely.  The progressives have made urban living unlivable.   There was always a bit of an implicit deal—you would put up with the traffic and congestion, or being herded into commuter trains like cattle.  But the city offered a robust cultural life—restaurants, music, theater and such.  But now most cities are dangerous places since the defund police movement.  My own Chicago has 50-100 shootings a weekend, carjackings and robberies galore.  Downtown looks like a scene out of The Walking Dead.   So the implicit deal is dead.  The cultural benefits of the city are no longer available as a practical matter.  

Working remotely means you can minimize your time in the city, do away with the grinding commute and have more time for yourself and your family.  We have learned how to conference via Zoom and close transactions via Docusign.

I believe this trend will continue and that we can start drifting back to small town and rural life without too much difficulty and that is a good thing for families and communities.

Finally, another positive development is Podcasts.  While Mollie Hemmingway is undoubtedly correct—that the mainstream media has been irredeemably corrupted and social media is divisive and tyrannical (more on this later), podcasting has emerged as a wonderful and engaging development that enables lengthier, more thoughtful and nuanced discussions about complex ideas than merely a 180 character tweet. The recent interview of Bari Weiss by Jordan Peterson on his podcast  ran about 2 hours and the New Discourses podcasts by James Lindsay can run nearly as long.  Podcasting is a great vehicle with which to explore ideas more fully and (assuming deplatforming doesn’t occur) are a welcome development in an era starved for civil discourse.

Despite all the social and political turmoil, there have been some very positive developments since the onset of COVID19.  That is the good.  My next post will deal with The Bad and The Ugly.

Women and Children First

 Like most sane Americans, at this 245^th birthday, I worry a lot about the state of the union now.  A substantial minority has decided to displace Independence Day with Juneteenth (and don’t disingenuously tell me it’s not meant to be a displacement) and bump off 1776 and put 1619 in its stead.  Faux hyphenated historian Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded tenure at UNC just for that work of revisionist and false narrative.

But the pathology that most concerns me is the obliteration of our society’s longstanding protections for women and children.   “Women and children first” was the cry on the Titanic and, ironically, is the name of the uber progressive bookstore in Chicago.   Sadly, the progressive movement has steamrolled those protections.  The gender-disoriented now come first.

With women, permitting biological males to compete with them in sports is simply absurd.  There are perhaps 300 high school boys that would eclipse Florence Griffith Joyner’s world record.  And now the Olympics are going to permit a biological male to compete with women in weightlifting.  In New Jersey, the family of a high school girl is suing the state because two athletes that were male just last year defeated her in her sprint event.  Girls and women fought hard under Title IX to have athletic opportunities and now they are being stripped away.

The Woke gender movement not only is destroying athletic opportunities, it’s flat out dangerous.  In athletics, the disparity in speed, strength and muscle mass in sports where there is contact will mean a greater likelihood of injury.    In other contexts, the risks are even greater.  In California, biological men can self-identify as women and get placed in women’s prisons.  A society that would put these vulnerable and already at-risk women at greater risk of sexual assault is one that is on the road to pathological breakdown.   The push to allow biological men in women’s restrooms is likewise wrong-headed and dangerous.   As a society, we have always offered special protections around womens’ privacy issues.  In addition, a restroom is an enclosed space in which an assault on a lone women is easier to perpetrate.   For adolescent girls that are self-conscious about their bodies anyway, permitting boys in their locker rooms and bathrooms is permitting a minority to tyrannize the majority.

With children, things are even worse.

With COVID19, the government is now pushing vaccination for children and adolescents despite the absence of any long term studies about its effects.  Bret Weinsten and Heather Heying have been lone voices raising alarm about this.  COVID19 carries very little risk for young people and the incidents of myocarditis that have popped up are enough to put the brakes on for young people.  We should not be exposing young people to unknown risks to protect old people.   In a healthy society, older people take risks so young people don’t have to.

Similarly, in Illinois, and many other places, kids lost an entire year of in person school, mostly due to stubborn teachers’ unions that adamantly refused to go back to work, even as COVID19 receded.  Many of these students will never make up the lost year.  In Illinois, it was even worse.   Governor Pritzker shut down high school sports in the fall, even though all adjacent states played a full season with no outbreaks.  Most obscenely, I saw soccer and lacrosse teams out practicing while fully masked.  These were the healthiest, lowest risk people in the population pool, yet were sentenced to be deprived of a full education, socialization and, in the case of athletes, entire seasons of play with no science behind it whatsoever.

We have made a policy choice to push risks on to young people and deprive young people of intellectual, emotional and physical development to protect older people.  That’s immoral, wrong, and a sign of a society in decline.  But it’s even worse.  Since February 2020, the national debt has increased by nearly $5 trillion.  Yes, government wonks all have rationales behind the gargantuan increase--- “stimulus” and all that.  But the fact remains that the economic slowdown was caused by deliberate government action which many believe was completely unnecessary.   And this debt burden will need to be borne by guess who? Young people.   It is a complete inversion of the American dream.  We work to secure a better future for the next generation.  Our policymakers have reversed it all.  We are stealing from them for current consumption.

The most egregious example of the failure to protect women was the breakdown at Michigan State that allowed the monster Larry Nasser to abuse so many women athletes.  Now we learn that the F.B.I. failed to alert law enforcement or take action against Nasser, thereby enabling him to continue to sexually abuse these girls.

So the university AND the F.B.I. both failed to protect them—two large bureaucracies whose primary mission is nurturing and protecting.   After reading the inspector general’s report, I wanted to scream out loud, “YOU HAD ONE JOB.”   This was done under the sanctimonious Jim Comey, whose book carries the obscenely title “A Higher Loyalty” and who now teaches a course in ethical leadership at William and Mary.   He should have been banished and shamed for allowing the catastrophe at Michigan State under his aegis.

Our society is tearing down basic protections for women and children.   Civilized societies put them first. 

Outdoor Spaces

 

It was quite a revealing juxtaposition of events that occurred over the past week.  I visited upon the website of the Chicago Botanic Garden to check on their summer hours and happened upon the institution’s statement “Our commitment to racial justice and equity,” which I found a bit odd for a garden.

The statement included the following sentences:

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement catalyzed a process of self-examination and learning at the Garden.   We recognize that people of color often feel unwelcome in gardens, forest preserves, and parks, a direct result of historical oppression and violence in outdoor spaces.

I have questions and some observations about this remarkable assertion.

The statement chose to recognize BLM in all caps.  I wonder if it occurred to them that one of its founders, Patrice Cullors, leveraged her position to build a nice little real estate portfolio and that BLM while raising millions has, to my knowledge, while provided absolutely zero support for the expansion of outdoor spaces and outdoor programs for urban black youths.  Go figure. 

I’m not sure how the Garden came to the conclusion that people of color feel unwelcome in gardens, forest, preserves, and parks.  Did they do a survey?  How do they know this?  Every time I have visited the Chicago Botanic Garden, I have observed quite a panoply of people “of color” and not “of color” – whites,  African Americans, Indians (are they “of color”?), Asians, Middle Easterners both in hijabs and kippas, and actual Africans.  Once last summer, I saw a small trio of Africans playing African music with a group gathered around them, enjoying a balmy summer evening.  I saw no hint that any of them felt unwelcome.

There is tremendous irony in the last phrase of this absurd statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden.  In Chicago last 4^th of July weekend, nearly 100 people were shot, 17 were killed, 8 of them children.  Many of these incidents of violence are taking place in parks and outdoor spaces.  In my own old neighborhood, a 13 year old was shot in the head riding his bike on a Sunday morning.  Shootings routinely take place in and around Washington Park and Garfield Park. 

The statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden echoes the purported complicity in the normalization of violence against people of color by literature in the original faculty statement by the English Department at the University of Chicago. 

So, universities and gardens are unsafe places for people of color.

The hard truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that the violence of which these institutions decry is perpetrated by people of color, with people of color most often being the victims.  At the University of Chicago, two students have been violently killed… by people of color.  Last weekend, young Max Solomon was shot and killed on the “L” on his way to his summer internship.   The Woke organizations are beating their breasts about historical violence, yet ignore the violence that is going on each and every weekend…. and won’t discuss the perpetrators, and, in an era where even tulip bulbs and ferns are racialized, adeptly sidestep talking about their race.

As if to put an exclamation mark on things, a Chicago police officer and 2 ATF agents were shot directly in front of a police station on the South Side. 

Overlayed on this bloody weekend was the visit of our addled president, Joe Biden, to Illinois.  Biden, famously stated, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” and “[Republicans] want to put y’all back in chains.”  Yet, visiting Illinois a few days after the black community suffered one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago history, Biden stayed far enough away from the South and West sides of the city that radiation from a nuclear blast wouldn’t reach him.  He assiduously avoided any contact with any black person that didn’t hold political office.

As more institutions like the Chicago Botanic Garden and the American Writers Museum go Woke, they, like their president, remain a safe distance from the actual, relentless violence that is occurring every week in Chicago.

Erasing Naivete

 

Somehow, I have gotten behind in everything.  I’m behind at work.  I’m behind in blogging.  And I’m woefully behind in summer reading… and it’s not even July 4^th yet (Is July 4^th still a thing?).  I just picked up Lawrence Wright’s new book, The Plague Year.  Wright is a talented writer who, like Lionel Shriver, never disappoints.  I like The End of October and God Save Texas and I’ll be interested to read his take on this past year.

But before I set sail on Wright’s journey, I’m going to spin out a few of my own observations—more like surprises, I’d say, as we weathered pandemic and the social unrest of the past year.  Listening to one of Bret Weinstein’s podcasts a few weeks ago, I was struck by one of Weinstein’s quotes, “No matter how cynical I get, I find that I am still naïve.”   I’m with you on this one, Bret.  I suppose the first big surprise has been my own naivete. I mistakenly thought of myself as prudent and appropriately skeptical, but the past year showed that I fell far short.   Here are a few of the areas in which I was taken by surprise.

 

·        I wholly underestimated the number of tyrannical politicians and government officials.  As a bit of an amateur U.S. history buff, I have been fascinated by the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, the writing and thinking of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton.  I understood the need to constrain government and the propensity of people to abuse power.  But I mistakenly thought that people raised in America with American ideals and values would exercise some restraint.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  With the COVID19 as their pretext,  the Governors Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, and J.B. Pritzker steamrolled the individual liberties of their citizens.  Under the rubric of “flatten the curve,” religious liberty, freedom of association, freedom to travel all got flattened.   As I write this, J.B. Pritzker just extended yet again the 30 day “emergency” with no input from the legislature as COVID19 is receding.   Even worse, was the power grab of the Administrative State—the CDC putting a halt to evictions and Anthony Fauci basking in unelected and unaccountable power.

 

·        The reciprocal of the power grab has been the submissiveness of the American people.  This was a nation founded on rebellion and disobedience.  Yet, we witnessed a great deal of blind obedience to dictates that were not founded on empirical evidence or actual science.  Early on, we learned that there was very little risk of transmission out of doors.  Gyms and restaurants stayed shut with no evidence that they were incubators.  Still, people yelled at other people across the street and admonished them to mask up.   And I still see people walking around downtown Chicago alone, with masks on.  Even more ludicrous are people biking or driving alone with masks on.   I was astonished at how many citizens meekly submitted to their government… and how many turned into willing enforcers.   One day, I was at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, and inadvertently stepped about a foot over the spacing line that was taped on the floor.  A rather rotund, 260 lb. woman immediately gave me the death stare and wagged her finger at me.  She promptly ordered 3 doughnuts and a coffee with cream and sugar.  I could not resist, “If you’re serious about the risk to your health, you might want to rethink those doughnuts.”  Needless to say, I was hit with a barrage of expletives.

 

·        The third surprise was the collapse of higher education.  It was merely a dozen years ago that I read Jonathan Cole’s book The Great American University in which Cole made a wonderful case, extolling the excellence of America’s university system.  The American university system was the one area in which public and private institutions ran in parallel and made each other better.   He cited Columbia University and The University of Chicago as the best of the best because of their core curriculum requirements.   But fast forward a dozen years and the university system has quickly devolved into a network bloated wokeness indoctrination camps.  Even at the University of Chicago, wokeness has overtaken the school.  The heralded Booth School of Business is now running “white privilege” and “unconscious bias” workshops (with no empirical evidence that such a thing exists).  The English Department announced that it would only admit students interested in Black Studies in its graduate program next year.   The university launched an investigation into economist Harald Uhlig for evidence of “racism” because he had the temerity to assert that BLM was wrongheaded in its demand to defund the police.  And the university is contemplating establishing an entire department devoted to Critical Race Theory.   This is happening all over the country.  Harvard admitted activist David Hogg, who couldn’t get into a number of 3^rd rate schools.  Princeton just deleted its Greek or Latin language requirement for classics majors because it’s not “inclusive” enough.  Yale stopped offering its Western music class for the same reason.  The university system is now leading the way in the illiberal push.  Schools that once taught critical thinking are now purveyors of doctrinal orthodoxy… and overly expensive ones at that.

 

·        Finally, there is the corruption of media.  Media outlets always had a tilt, but now they are engaged in propagating straight falsehoods and distortions.   Donald Trump did not refer to the white supremacists at Charlottesville as “fine people.”   Nicholas Sandmann was portrayed as harassing the old Native American when it was actually the reverse.  Officer Sicknick was not killed by a fire extinguisher during the January 6 protests.  The summer of rioting, looting and burning was ludicrously referred to as peaceful protesting following the death of George Floyd.  The New York Times ran off Bari Weiss with her resignation letter becoming a sort of modern day Declaration of Independence.

 

(https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter)

From the false assertion that Trump urged people to drink fish tank cleaner to its failure to follow up and ask incisive questions about the Nashville bombing or the Las Vegas shooter, or what the mayor of Moscow’s wife was paying for when she wired $3.5 million into Hunter Biden’s account, the media as become corrupt beyond repair.

 

These developments and the depth of the corruption and decline in higher education caught me by surprise.

Maybe they shouldn’t have.