Good morning, kids. In the parlance of one of the most execrable people which, worse is a direct reflection of the attitude of far too many of the younger generations, "82 years ago today, some people did some things somewhere in Hawaii, and we probably deserved it."
I've resigned myself to the fact that the remembrance of Pearl Harbor as a nearly sacred, cultural touchstone has all but disappeared from our culture and collective memory. I do not expect the corporate propaganda mills to even mention it in passing, but the fact that in aggregating today's links I did not find even one link on the subject within the conservative blogosphere is really depressing (there is one at the very end but it only mentions the date in context to a story about the Korean War). I hope this is just a factor of outlets waiting to publish on the actual day, but this is surprising given the usual volume of stories from previous years.
It is only natural that over the course of time, as older generations pass into history, that the power and immediate connection to events that have shaped our lives and our history gradually lose some of their impact and meaning, especially on those who did not directly experience them. It was always part of our culture that generations that came after momentous events like the Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression and Pearl Harbor understood their significance and meaning in their own everyday lives.
Obviously that is no more, and it has very little to do with older generations passing into history. For at least the past 60 years, via our schools and the simultaneous/symbiotic cultural rot of that time in general, America's children have been gradually and now massively lobotomized into hating who they are, their heritage, history and way of life. That was intentional and has become painfully evident in the wake of the 10/7 mass pogrom against Israel given the violent cheering on of the barbarity on our own campuses and streets.
It's a powerful coincidence that tonight begins the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which like many other Jewish holidays is a celebration of an historical event. Some are joyous, like this one, but sadly many mark the remembrance of tragic events that have befallen the Jewish people over the course of millennia. The salient point, though, is remembrance. Remembrance and perseverance in the face of overwhelming tyranny, suffering and persecution, and the determination to keep the faith when all seems lost. I'm no great rabbinical scholar but if I were to crystallize it down to its essence, I think that that is what has kept us going for nearly 5,800 years.
It's why when there is neither memory nor understanding of the significance of December 7th, 1941, you get high school and college kids egged on by their teachers into not only celebrating the rape, torture and slaughter of innocent people as somehow the justified expression of some righteous cause, but feeling "empowered" to verbally and physically assault anyone they perceive as racist, sexist, homophobic . . . or simply being identified as a Jew. Yes, we've now come full circle my friends. Ditto all the topsy-turvy Orwellian madness of everything we are witnessing here, most distressingly the distortion and perversion of the civil rights movement and race relations into an intentional ginning up of race-hatred that can and will lead to disaster.
Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred? After the George Floyd riots, reparatory admissions—the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population—increased. Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20 and 40 precent, despite whites making up 68-70 percent of the general population.
The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy. Brilliant high school transcripts and test scores no longer warrant admissions to so-called elite schools. One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20-30 percent of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10-15 percent. Jewish students are also currently stereotyped as “white” and “privileged”—and thus considered as fair game on campus.
At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared on campuses. Most are subsidized by their homeland governments. They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities. Huge numbers of students have entered universities, who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.
Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of topflight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs. Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by Diversity/Equity/Inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading— or all three combined. The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students, and student bodies who demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work to accommodate their unease with past standards of expected student achievement. And, presto, an epidemic of anti-Semitism naturally followed. . .
. . . All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances, and poorly educated graduates who have had little course work in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic, or the traditional sciences. Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income. Nearly $2-trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion. . .
. . . What is the ultimate result of once elite campuses giving 70-80 percent of their students As, becoming hotbeds of dangerous anti-Semitism, and watered-down curricula that cannot turn out educated students? The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light. They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature. But the erosion is already occurring—and accelerating. At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.
I think the estimable, and Ace cruelty fanboi, Victor Davis Hanson kind of misses the mark in his conclusion. While as he states, and accurately, that "so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light," who could have imagined even a few short years ago that those two icons of American culture would themselves degenerate they way they did? Ditto the woke retailers and even former industrial giants like Ford that are embracing to greater or lesser extents the climate change bullshit? Corporate America circa 1970 or even 1980 certainly would be scared off by these worthless degrees. But Corporate America 2023?
America itself is going down the tubes because of the very thing VDH is correctly identifying, vis a vis the hijacking of academia and its transformation into the world's most effective and terrifying mass brainwashing mill. This does not bode well for the continued functioning of a healthy society, economy and nation. Unless and until we can figure out a way to un-fuck the minds of the past several generations of American youth, the future does not look promising.