The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (No. 12)

June 12, 2021

I’m definitely gonna need a bigger blog. I had hoped to publish a shorter version of the “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” this week, but the news has just blown up in the last couple of days.

Remember me kindly: I’m doing all this work so you don’t have to!

The Good

I attended Brown University for graduate school from 1986 to 1990 and then was a resident vagabond at Harvard for two years. If you think those were the halcyon days before things went bat-guano crazy, you’d be wrong. Yes, many of the professors were much better back in the day than they are today. Compare the Brown and Harvard history departments today relative to what they were thirty or forty years ago. The decline and fall of these departments have been dramatic. (I was remarkably fortunate during those years to have taken classes with four of the all-time great scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, Gordon S. Wood, Bernard Bailyn, Harvey C. Mansfield and Ralph Lerner, and I also spent signficant time talking to Donald Fleming, Oscar Handlin, Stephen Thernstrom, and Judith Shklar, but the rot had already set in.

In 1987, during my second year at Brown, a group of student radicals broke into one of the grand old buildings on campus and defaced ten historical portraits of distinguished Brown personages from centuries past. These “social justice warriors” spray-painted one large white letter onto each portrait, visually adding up to the words “ELITE? WHO US.” Pathetically, as is typically the case with leftist vandalism on campus, the Brown administration did nothing to identify, much less arrest, expel, or prosecute the criminals. Although a few administrators and faculty members huffed and puffed about the incident, the general tone on campus combined with the inaction on the part of the administration indicated that many were secretly supportive of this faux act of revolutionary violence.

You are no doubt now wondering why I’m writing about all this “bad” stuff in a section on “the good.” Well, because R. R. Reno published a fine essay this past week in the Wall Street Journal on what to do with today’s Ivy League graduates. I think it’s a pretty good idea: “Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates.” If we all stopped hiring people from the Ivies, America would no doubt be a better place. To be honest, the students graduating from the Ivies these days are just not that interesting.

Piling on against the precious ones. This just might be the start of something beautiful. “'Woke' Ivy League teaches young Americans how to be 'totally unemployable': Douglas Murray.”

Mothers of the world, UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your children. I’ve always known that the fate of America depended on the fighting spirit of its women. Momma Bear has come out of hibernation. This is going to get ugly (but in a good kind of way) real fast. I would not want to be on the receiving end of this (watch the imbedded videos): “Critical Race Theory: Diverse Group of mothers from across the country speak out.”

If you do nothing else today, read the following article and, more importantly, watch the video imbedded in the article. Listen to an Asian-American mom tell the Loudon County School Board (VA) how the CRT virus sweeping across America is just like what happened in Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Here’s what she said:

I’ve been very alarmed about what’s been going on in our school. You are now training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history. Growing up in Mao’s China, all this seems very familiar. The Communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people. The only difference is they used classes instead of race.

During the cultural revolution I witnessed students and teachers again turn against each other. We change the school names to be politically correct. We were taught to denounce our heritage; the red guards destroyed anything that is not communist. Statues, books and anything else. We were also encouraged to report on each other just like the student equity ambassador program and the bias reporting system.

This is indeed the American version of the Chinese cultural revolution. The Critical Race Theory has its roots in cultural marxism; it should have NO PLACE in our schools.

Full article and video here.

I’m putting this in the “the Good” category because it is good. American higher education is corrupt and there needs to be a sorting out process. This is the beginning. Demographics are destiny: “Undergraduate Enrollment Plummets 727,000 (4.9%); Graduate Enrollment Rises 124,000 (4.6%).”

Please respect everyone’s identity: “Man Identifying As 6-Year-Old Crushes Game-Winning Homer in Tee-Ball Championship.”

I’m not even sure I know what to say or think about this as a sport or athletic event, but I’m quite sure about two things: 1) even when I was young and in good physical condition, I could never do this; and, 2) even when I was young and in good physical condition, I would never want to do this even if I could. Still, total RESPECT:

America would be a much better place if we had less CRT in our schools and more of Marcus Gause, the principal at T. Wingate Andrews Hight School in High Point, N.C. who surprised his graduating seniors with a wonderful rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” The guy can sing.

The Bad

By the way, if you need more than just my word about the Ivy League, check out this article on Harvard as the Mother Ship for Critical Race Theory. “Critical Race Theory’s Poisonous Roots Trace Back to Harvard University.”

Ideas Have Consequences. What happens at Harvard will eventually trickle down to the local K-12 schools. “Massachusetts high school forces students to accept concept of 'systemic racism' in essays.”

Oh, and let’s not forget Yale. Yale Law School has become a hornets’ nest of woke psychosis. If we taxed the endowments of all the Ivy League schools, we could eliminate world hunger. Think about it. (Just kidding!) “Yale isn’t America’s only top institution facing a meltdown.”

Follow the science, they said. The Covid Lockdowns just may prove to be the greatest political fraud/scandal of our lifetimes. The new-new (true) science says, “Lockdown had ‘no effect’ on Coronavirus pandemic in Germany.”

Turns out the political “scientists” working for the WHO, NIH, CDC etc. were just wrong. Real scientists follow, ya know, the science: “No point vaccinating those who’ve had COVID-19: Findings of Cleveland Clinic study.”

We live in a constitutional republic, which means we get the Ruling Class we deserve—and we’re getting it good and hard. The most incompetent and corrupt ruling class in its history now governs the United States of America. Here is a case of thieves stealing from the King John Ruling Class, but the only real victims are the forever forgotten ordinary men and women of America who work hard every day only to have the fruits of their labor transferred to others by force and incompetence. “Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen.”

Cheerleading comes to the Olympics . . . as a sport and not to cheer on the real athletes doing real sports. I’m pretty sure the International Olympic Committee did NOT read my essay “On the Hierarchy of Sports.” I will say, though, that cheerleading does require more athletic ability than golf!!! “IOC Executive Board proposes full recognition of six International Federations.”

The IOC has also added a new “sport” to the Olympics that I’d never heard of or seen before. It’s called Ice Stock, which is the lazy man’s version of curling, but without the broom. NEWS FLASH: Canadians playing outdoor Ice Stock in the middle of the winter without massive quantities of booze is NOT a thing. Trust me on this one.

Check it out:

America’s higher-ed debt bomb is tick, tick, ticking. Paraphrasing the late-great Herb Stein, “what can’t go on forever, won’t!”

For millions of Americans, there’s an unwelcome side of the return to business-as-usual after the pandemic: They’ll have to start repaying their student loans again.

More than 40 million holders of federal loans are due to start making monthly installments again on Oct. 1, when the freeze imposed as part of Covid-19 relief measures is due to run out. It covered payments worth about $7 billion a month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated. Their resumption will eat a chunk out of household budgets, in a potential drag on the consumer recovery.

Americans now owe about $1.7 trillion of student debt, more than twice the size of their credit-card liabilities. Politicians recognize it’s not sustainable. Yet for all the talk of loan forgiveness during last year’s election campaign — including from President Joe Biden, who promised to write off at least $10,000 per borrower — there’s been no progress toward shrinking the pile.

Time to pay the piper. “Millions Will Have to Start Paying Off A Certain Debt Again...And I'm Sure Libs Will Have a Meltdown.”

The Ugly

English universities are going full Mao. Never go full Mao. This is bad—really, really bad, which makes it ugly: “‘Woke snitching forums’ used to report lecturers' microaggressions could land universities in court.”

And now the American Psychoanalytic Association has gone full psycho!!! From the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, an article “On Having Whiteness.” “Whiteness” is now a disease that must be cured institutionally and systemically. How much longer before it’s a crime? The American Psychoanalytic Association is now approaching the level and quality of Soviet psychiatry.

Read this abstract slowly and carefully.

I know what you’re thinking. This article must be one of those infamous satire essays submitted by Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay a few years ago to various pretend academic journals. Maybe this is one of their essays that was forgotten and then slipped through the cracks years later. Nope! Boghossian has declared publicly on Twitter that Moss’s article is not his:

Calling this article nuts or academic psychobabble is actually an evasion of one’s moral responsibility. The article requires a “right-proper”—as they say in northeastern England—moral evaluation and judgment. Before we render that assessment, however, I ask you to consider—seriously consider—where the ideas contained in the article are leading us.

What are the policy implications of this article?

Would it be too much to describe the ideas contained in this article as evil?

Again, what are the policy implications of the Moss article?

Finally, I wonder if the author of the article, Donald Moss, knows Dr. Aruna Khilanani, the NYC psychiatrist who spoke at Yale recently about committing genocide against whites. Physician, heal thyself.

Seriously, what could go wrong?  This is what national suicide looks like: “Whistleblowers Explain How Biden's Woke 'Extremism' Training Is Tearing the Military Apart.”

It’s not just the military, K-12 students, and college students who are being indoctrinated. The Ruling Class is also coming for America’s two-year-olds: “Federal government hosted professors’ talks on anti-racist education for young children.”

Wait, what? Apple Pie is RACIST and leads to EXPLOITATION and GENOCIDE??? Yes it DOES. Writing for The Guardian, Raj Patel says we need “food justice”:

Guardian readers ought by now to be familiar with the exercise of undoing the commodity fetish. Scratch the surface of a bar of chocolate, a tuna sandwich, or even a chicken nugget, and you find the horrors of international trade: violence, exploitation, poverty and profit. Capitalist logic is everywhere the same, but countries are capitalist in their own ways. The apple pie is as American as stolen land, wealth and labour. We live its consequences today.

I’m not making this up, nor is it from the Babylon Bee. Read the article here. Food justice demands banning apple pie, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, and Hershey bars. If you think about it long enough, is there any food that has not been complicit in genocide?

The rules of common decency apply to you but not to the Ruling Class. In what sane world does Jeffrey Toobin get rehired after going to the time-out corner for indecent and lewd acts on a Zoom call with colleagues. On the decline, fall, and RISE of the creepy, Jeffrey Toobin, see here.

. . . and the Beautiful

These two videos from Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli, show the profound beauty of the human soul, which is greater than nature’s beauty. Mrs. Redneck does not think these two videos demonstrate beauty. She only sees the tragedy. She is wrong.

“How fast can you run . . . ?”

“Then let’s see you do it”:

Thank you for spending time with The Redneck Intellectual.

Don’t forget to submit your aesthetic recommendations to: redneckaesthetic@gmail.com. Please always use as your subject line: “The Beautiful.”

Have great week!