The Cultural and Political Wars, Part I

Where's the evil? The New York Times put up this Tweet, before taking it down under pressure: "Eighteen years have passed since airplanes took aim at the World Trade Center and brought them down." Those evil airplanes! Do not blame the perpetrators, who were radical Muslims who wanted to kill as many Americans as possible. No, 9/11 was about planes taking down buildings. The same "analysis" is used by the Left when it comes to guns. The guns do the killing, not the evil perpetrators. Where's the call to ban airplanes? Never mind; the Green New Deal proposes just that.

Speaking of guns. The Board of Supervisors for the County of San Francisco. actually passed a resolution describing the NRA as a "domestic terrorist organization." The resolution asserts that the NRA uses "its considerable wealth and organization to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence." Incite gun owners to acts of violence? When? Where? If this were even partly true we would have millions of gun deaths a year. (Just under 40,000 gun deaths occurred in 2017. Most were suicides.) The NRA expressed their disappointment that the Supervisors do not care about "the real problems facing San Francisco, such as rampant homelessness, drug abuse and skyrocketing petty crime, to name a few." The NRA also sued, seeking court action "to instruct elected officials that freedom of speech means you cannot silence or punish those with whom you disagree." The Left does not care about the First Amendment, or the Second Amendment, or much else of the Constitution.

The mainstream media (MSM) tries to help. The MSM was, apparently, quite concerned about the 10 Democrats engaging in the last debate. Prior to the debate, two of the main MSM papers had Op-Eds on 9/9/19 intended to help the candidates. The USA Today Op-Ed was titled "2020 is a referendum on Trump. Full stop." The writer made several suggestions, including: "...if you're not focused on the Electoral College and only the Electoral College, resign yourself to a decade of Trumps in the White House." And this: "Heart, guts and being great on TV beat brains and policy over and over again." Not bad.

The New York Times chimed in. The Op-Ed in the self-described "paper of record" was titled "Democrats Need to Get More Ruthless." Interestingly, the writer recommends that the Dems drop proposals that are not supported by a majority of Americans. They tell us that 67% of Americans oppose decriminalizing border crossings, 63% oppose reparations for slavery, and 55% oppose getting rid of private health insurance. If you watched the debate you know that advice did not work.

Medical school too? In an Op-Ed in the 9/13/19 Wall Street Journal, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania medical school, was lamenting the intrusion of left-wing ideology into the school. For instance, he was criticized for failing to include a course on climate change. But the former dean tells us that is only the beginning, as "curricula will increasingly focus on climate change, social inequities, gun violence, bias and other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness." Says the writer: "the prospect of this 'new,' politicized medical education should worry all Americans."

Racism, again. Mayor Pete Buttigeig told us that if we support immigration policies that are racist, then we are racist also. Let's analyze that. Clearly, Mayor Pete was referring to support for Trump and his policies. What if, hypothetically, I disagree with Trump on immigration (I don't), but agree with him on other matters. If I vote for him based on those other issues am I still a racist? And why should anyone accept his conclusion that supporting a stricter immigration policy is racist? Heather MacDonald commented in an 8/19/19 Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal with this retort: "to the academic and democratic left, however, a commitment to border enforcement can only arise from 'hate.' Such a pre-emptive interpretation is a means of foreclosing debate and stigmatizing dissent from liberal orthodoxy."

The 1619 Project. The New York Times made a big hoopla with their 1619 Project, telling us that American history began when the first slaves were brought over 400 years ago. Others in the MSM picked up on it, as did the Dems, and we've heard quite a bit about slavery and racism since. Robert Woodson is the founder and president of the Woodson Center. The Center was established in 1981 to "help residents of low-income neighborhoods address the problems of their communities." In an Op-Ed in the 8/29/19 Wall Street Journal, Woodson made this observation: "Barraging minorities with constant reminders of the injuries their ancestors suffered only discourages them from working to surmount the obstacles in their way." I have often held that so-called Black leaders who tell Black youth that the "system" is stacked against them, are committing evil. They are discouraging an entire generation from achieving.

Woodson continued. "Black America's history of success and achievement - and its continuing legacy today - is a vital, inspiring part of our nation's past. It's sadly overlooked in 'The 1619 Project.'" Woodson closes with this, which he says is paraphrasing C.S. Lewis: "some prisons have locks that are on the inside." Robert Woodson is 82 years old; and he is Black.