Vox Popoli: An indictment of the Boomers

(Unfortunately,  DaBoomers in general will not read it; of those who do, most will not comprehend it and certainly not accept it as valid because........they consider themselves to be the high point of history! Lack of self awareness is the definitive characteristic of DaMeGeneration.

Blindness to reality is a recurring affliction that has cursed man throughout history......especially when they have been the beneficiaries of prosperity which they claim to have caused....but in actuality was a temporary phenomenon created by their co-generational money manipulators. 

Pride comes before the fall - as reality arrives at its appointed time. - CL)

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Peter Hitchens reviews Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, a book written in the style of the highly influential Eminent Victorians:

While not quite impaling (among others) Steve Jobs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor, she deals brief, eviscerating sideswipes at the ideas and follies that brought such people into being and sustain them now. For this reviewer, a partially reformed 1960s bohemian, Bolshevik, and general scapegrace, these sideswipes were pure joy, the sort that make me cry out with recognition, or pound the arm of my chair. I say “partially reformed” because the things once inside me that the 1960s broke remain forever broken. I cannot be what I would have been if this had not happened, and I am not at all sure I would want to be. My main use to civilization, as a resister and critic of these things, comes from knowing who and what is now my enemy, in a way that very few conservatives do. It is a skill I largely retain, which is why I think that “Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll” is a much clearer statement of the revolutionary program than “Workers of all Lands, Unite!”

So I saw repeated flashes in this volume of another book I very much hope Andrews will write, a lament for the great loss we have all suffered and which cannot possibly be repaired until we admit it, if then. Such a book will be so sad that it will make the sound of bagpipes played after a funeral on a windy hillside sound cheerful. But it has to come from someone at the beginning of life, not from some gnarled survivor of the lost world before the revolutions. Her opening chapter, a general segment on Boomers rather than on any individual, is the best part. Here is perhaps the most poignant passage in the book:

As a woman, if I had been born in another century, my schooling might well have stopped at age twelve. On the other hand, in this age I attended some of the best schools in the world until I was twenty-one and still didn’t receive an education those benighted eras would have considered standard. Is this necessarily an improvement?

Andrews cannily observes another often overlooked convulsion in thought: “The most glaring objective consequence of the boomers’ embrace of mass culture has been the death of both folk culture and high culture. Earlier generations felt obliged to graduate from the good-time music of their youth to opera and classical, upon reaching a certain age. Not the boomers.” I had never seen anyone make this point before. Yet it was exactly my decision to graduate in this way that opened a tiny gap between me and my contemporaries, which has widened over fifty years into an immense gulf. I am glad to have even a poor and sketchy knowledge of a part of the musical classics, but I think what I gave up is even more important than what I gained. For in abandoning it I learned how not to conform, and how not to care when found out. And I also ceased to hear that incessant pied piper, with his false promises of untold joys to come if I would just follow the others.

This brings us back to the destruction of formal education, the acquisition of defined knowledge based upon authority. I was caught in the middle of this change and am cursed and blessed with a constant painful knowledge of what I have lost. But those who came very soon after me do not even have that. They live unaware of it, in a fog of unknowing. It was this incredibly rapid removal of all landmarks, signposts, objective measures and maps which left us where we are now, lost boys and girls trying to invent our own ideas of the good, condemned to repeat every stupid mistake in human history, which really defines our age. Yet in the world of the boomers, the uneducated think they are educated. As Kingsley Amis long ago pointed out, we are at a party where the wine tastes like kerosene, the canapés are stale, the music is badly played on inferior instruments, the conversation is lumpish and dull, the clothes ill-fitting—but nobody cares because nobody has experienced anything different or knows that it could be any better.

The histories of the wicked g-g-generation are already being written, and the general tone of the verdict is already clear. They will whine and snark until they completely f-f-fade away, but it will all be in vain.

If I ever write a book on the Boomer g-g-generation, I don't think I'd focus on the famous individuals as archtypical examples of the whole. While the approach is informative and can unquestionably be very effective from the rhetorical perspective, which is why even serious historians like Paul Johnson have utilized it, I tend to view it as an unnecessary distraction from the more significant points at hand.

And in his criticism of the book, Hitchens explains why it is so important to indict and prosecute the Boomers in the court of intellectual history, contra the incessant complaints from the guilty parties. There are few things more tedious than Boomers crying about the younger generations damning them for their damnable choices, behavior, and social mores, especially doing so is a vital part of convincing those younger generations to reject the Boomers' collective path toward societal and civilizational suicide.

Any proper discussion of the cultural and moral disaster of our age cannot really concentrate on that age and those who grew out of it. That is just a tour of the ruins, without an explanation of why they are ruins. It needs to look a little further down, into the minds of those who inherited an ordered, free civilization and chose to throw it away. This is the mystery and tragedy of our time, and until we can solve it, it will go on forever, and perhaps be repeated in civilizations to come.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2021/06/an-indictment-of-boomers.html

PARTIALLY REFORMED - BY PETER HITCHENS

 Helen Andrews

Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster
Sentinel, pp.256, $27.00

 

Helen Andrews just is not mean enough. She originally set out, in this enjoyable and often moving set of essays, to emulate Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and deflate the great balloon of 1960s self-righteousness by puncturing some of its tenderer parts. But—and this is to her credit—she lacks Strachey’s hissing, feline spite. Strachey is of course highly enjoyable if you have any malice in you, and I certainly do. Yet his achievement in undermining Victorian rectitude was a bad thing. After nearly a century of Bloomsbury ideas about culture, morals, and religion dominating our lives, many of us might seriously consider asking the Victorians back to clean up the mess we made. Imagine Victorian morals armed with twenty-first-century innovation and science. I can hardly wait. But Helen Andrews genuinely loves justice too much to barbecue her victims until they actually scream, and so her book succeeds in a way she perhaps did not intend.

While not quite impaling (among others) Steve Jobs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor, she deals brief, eviscerating sideswipes at the ideas and follies that brought such people into being and sustain them now. For this reviewer, a partially reformed 1960s bohemian, Bolshevik, and general scapegrace, these sideswipes were pure joy, the sort that make me cry out with recognition, or pound the arm of my chair. I say “partially reformed” because the things once inside me that the 1960s broke remain forever broken. I cannot be what I would have been if this had not happened, and I am not at all sure I would want to be. My main use to civilization, as a resister and critic of these things, comes from knowing who and what is now my enemy, in a way that very few conservatives do. It is a skill I largely retain, which is why I think that “Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll” is a much clearer statement of the revolutionary program than “Workers of all Lands, Unite!”

So I saw repeated flashes in this volume of another book I very much hope Andrews will write, a lament for the great loss we have all suffered and which cannot possibly be repaired until we admit it, if then. Such a book will be so sad that it will make the sound of bagpipes played after a funeral on a windy hillside sound cheerful. But it has to come from someone at the beginning of life, not from some gnarled survivor of the lost world before the revolutions. Her opening chapter, a general segment on Boomers rather than on any individual, is the best part. Here is perhaps the most poignant passage in the book:

As a woman, if I had been born in another century, my schooling might well have stopped at age twelve. On the other hand, in this age I attended some of the best schools in the world until I was twenty-one and still didn’t receive an education those benighted eras would have considered standard. Is this necessarily an improvement?

I will return to this, as so much flows from it. But I should also mention the brief, brilliantly perceptive reflections on mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, which have become so central to the world the Boomers made. The great unexamined scandal of antidepressant prescriptions is in fact part of their revolution—which is why any attack upon it, however powerful, well informed and well argued, dies in silence. The person to whom the writer proposes such an attack is very likely to be a drug user himself, or to be closely related to one. So is the potential reader. “One in six of all Americans is on some kind of psychiatric medication: this would not have been possible without the boomer era’s broader embrace of mind-altering drugs.”

And then there is her simple and clear understanding of the betrayal of rational, reforming feminism by the zealots who have seized that banner. “Boomers promised that employment was the only way for women to be fulfilled and independent, when any socialist could have told them that there is no one more dependent than a wage worker . . . the net effect of boomer feminism has been to restrict the choices of typical women, taking the choice that was making most of them happy and removing it from the set of options.” What a non-surprise that Betty Friedan turns out to have been a communist fellow-traveler. It was in the communist world that today’s socioeconomic hell—the hideous love-child of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher—was pioneered. The Soviets had the compulsory two-earner household, with its children condemned to government nurture and raised to love the Party above their parents. They had its weak parents and state-dependent adults, and its incessant divorce, all leading to an eviscerated and futile caricature of marriage, to the point where marriage was drained of all meaning and power. They just did not have the post-1990 combination that almost nobody saw coming: the endless electronic consumerism, through which we may try to buy back our lost happiness and freedom in the form of pleasure and drugged stupor. If they had managed that, the U.S.S.R. would still be there, as Mao’s China is. Marxism really is not the enemy of consumerism. When it realized it needed to care more about the mind and morality than about money, it rejuvenated itself and made the future its own again. That was what the 1960s were really about. Capitalism, understanding this, has made its peace with the revolution. Having grasped that it can flourish in the absence of freedom and Christianity, it also now understands that it has no need or wish to keep its proletarians poor. On the contrary, they need to be affluent or indebted enough to purchase its products.

Andrews cannily observes another often overlooked convulsion in thought: “The most glaring objective consequence of the boomers’ embrace of mass culture has been the death of both folk culture and high culture. Earlier generations felt obliged to graduate from the good-time music of their youth to opera and classical, upon reaching a certain age. Not the boomers.” I had never seen anyone make this point before. Yet it was exactly my decision to graduate in this way that opened a tiny gap between me and my contemporaries, which has widened over fifty years into an immense gulf. I am glad to have even a poor and sketchy knowledge of a part of the musical classics, but I think what I gave up is even more important than what I gained. For in abandoning it I learned how not to conform, and how not to care when found out. And I also ceased to hear that incessant pied piper, with his false promises of untold joys to come if I would just follow the others.

This brings us back to the destruction of formal education, the acquisition of defined knowledge based upon authority. I was caught in the middle of this change and am cursed and blessed with a constant painful knowledge of what I have lost. But those who came very soon after me do not even have that. They live unaware of it, in a fog of unknowing. It was this incredibly rapid removal of all landmarks, signposts, objective measures and maps which left us where we are now, lost boys and girls trying to invent our own ideas of the good, condemned to repeat every stupid mistake in human history, which really defines our age. Yet in the world of the boomers, the uneducated think they are educated. As Kingsley Amis long ago pointed out, we are at a party where the wine tastes like kerosene, the canapés are stale, the music is badly played on inferior instruments, the conversation is lumpish and dull, the clothes ill-fitting—but nobody cares because nobody has experienced anything different or knows that it could be any better.

Yet the targets which Andrews has chosen do not really back up the powerful case she makes at the outset. She plainly admires Camille Paglia far too much, for instance, to do to her what Strachey did to Cardinal Manning. Even more alarming, she reveals a soft spot for Al Sharpton and the lost joys of Tammany. No doubt there is a case to be made for this sort of politics, but it is not a case that conservatives should be making in the limited time and space we have left to us. I have some other specific complaints. She is plain wrong about the sectarian problem in Ireland, which still seethes and splutters and has not been solved but only bought off by weak concessions to gangsters. Her attack on Jeffrey Sachs and the undoubted catastrophe of idealistic post-colonial intervention is entertaining and clever. But America’s self-righteous hostility to the European empires, especially Britain’s, long predates the boomer era. (She also says that “no one ever quotes” George Santayana’s warning that it would be a “black day for the human race” when “scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls and fanatics” supplanted the British Empire. May I point her to page ninety-two of my book The Abolition of Britain, where I do that very thing?) And I think it is odd for her to say that the “fundamental attitude of the counterculture was, and is very Protestant,” apparently because membership of the Roman Catholic Church is uniquely able to provide the experience of identifying with some continuously existing institution from the past. Most of my early (Protestant) life was spent in or around continuously existing institutions from the past.

But these are quibbles. My main difficulty with this book is that the hors d’oeuvres are better than the main course. Any proper discussion of the cultural and moral disaster of our age cannot really concentrate on that age and those who grew out of it. That is just a tour of the ruins, without an explanation of why they are ruins. It needs to look a little further down, into the minds of those who inherited an ordered, free civilization and chose to throw it away. This is the mystery and tragedy of our time, and until we can solve it, it will go on forever, and perhaps be repeated in civilizations to come.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday. This review was originally published in the Septuagesima 2021 issue of The Lamp magazine.

https://thelampmagazine.com/2021/06/03/partially-reformed/

Powerful Jewish Groups Demand Biden And Democrats Unilaterally Grant Citizenship To Illegal Migrants | Christians for Truth

Powerful Jewish supremacy groups are increasing their pressure on President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress to award U.S. citizenship to illegal, undocumented migrants — without the approval of Republicans:

In a letter sent Wednesday addressed to Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the groups said such a pathway [to citizenship] should be included in “in any economic recovery or infrastructure legislation.”

Bend the Arc, a liberal [Jewish] social justice advocacy group, initiated the letter. Organizations representing the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist [Jewish] movements signed on along with a number of major mainstream groups, including HIAS, the main Jewish immigration advocacy group.

Others included the Anti-Defamation League, the National Council for Jewish Women, Jewish Women International and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for public policy groups. In addition to 19 national groups, a number of state-level Jewish groups signed.

“Permanent protection for individuals who live under the fear of detention and deportation, as well as the constant threat of exploitation, is not just the moral action but also the most sensible choice,” the letter said.

The letter requests that the pathway [to citizenship] be included in a bill that can be passed via “budget reconciliation,” which would not require any Republicans to sign on. “Reconciliation” is a Senate maneuver that allows the majority party — currently the Democrats — to pass measures deemed spending bills without first gaining the 60 votes needed to bypass a filibuster.

Notably the letter is not addressed to the GOP minority leaders in each chamber. Republicans in recent years, and particularly since the Trump presidency, have vigorously resisted pathways to citizenship for undocumented migrants.

It’s not clear whether the Senate parliamentarian would allow a pathway to citizenship to be included in a spending bill. The parliamentarian has nixed previous such efforts to bypass the filibuster.

Jews are the greatest exploiters of illegal Third World migrants — they cynically use them as “golem” to undermine and destroy the cohesion and stability of White Christian nations.

Mainstream “conservatives” accuse “liberals” of encouraging “immigration” as a way of expanding their voting base — but they are always careful never to bring up the racial identity of these migrants.

These so-called “conservatives” are all for immigration — after all, America is a “nation of immigrants” — but only as long as immigration is done legally — in other words, “conservatives” also support the “browning” of America, but only the “legal” browning of America.

Oddly, Jews aren’t concerned that China and Japan don’t have enough Mexicans or Arabs — only White nations are allegedly on the verge of collapse without the constant infusion of rivers of “energetic” Third World blood.

A racially homogeneous White nation cannot be dominated by Jews — and White nations will always look upon the Jews as a “foreign” and subversive element — and while Jews revel in being that foreign and subversive element, they don’t want the White society at large to know that — for fear of Pogrom #110.

Through Third World immigration and encouraging race mixing, Jews can ensure that soon almost every White family in America will have a non-White member — which will make that family susceptible and sympathetic to further browning of America at large.

And White Christians have enthusiastically jumped on this Jewish immigration bandwagon — after all, nothing makes a White Christian feel more condescendingly virtuous than “uplifting” brown people out of their savage darkness — and lead them to worship the God of White People — Jesus Christ.

Eric Kaufman, the Jewish author of the dystopian book White Shift, which predicts in the near future formerly White nations will become majority mixed race — ruled over by “elite” Jews like himself — just as the Kalergi Plan predicted would happen 100 years ago.

Full text:  https://christiansfortruth.com/powerful-jewish-groups-demand-biden-and-democrats-unilaterally-grant-citizenship-to-illegal-migrants/

Escape from America: 18 Years and Counting, by Linh Dinh - The Unz Review (LD is always an interesting read. - CL)

I just interviewed an American who’d traveled for five years straight, but you have been outside the US for 18 years altogether. Why, first off, and how have you been able to sustain yourself? Was there no place you wanted to settle? Will you ever return to the US to live?

I had always wanted to travel and see the world. I liked the idea of learning new languages, meeting different people and experiencing life in other countries. So, with a degree in literature I decided to go to Latin America and teach English. I worked in several small Latin American countries. The contrast between life in the USA and Latin America was striking. I was in Caracas soon after the banking crisis there. Students at the school where I taught had come to class crying after losing their life savings; the whole country became impoverished. I recall one morning a teacher showing up late for work because the police had literally kidnapped him off the street, taken him downtown, put a bag of cocaine on the table and said, “If you don’t pay us $200, this belongs to you.” That happened to a couple different people I knew in different countries. It almost happened to me, once. The trick is to be polite but firm, not to give in. “Officer, you say my papers are not in order? Let me show you again the visa stamp.” They don’t want a scene. I also worked in Ecuador, when, after just months in power, President Abdalá Bucharam embezzled millions of US dollars, held a party celebrating his young nephew’s own first million working as customs officer, then put out a CD of himself singing his favorite songs, which looked like an incredibly stupid distraction tactic. To the Ecuadorian people’s credit, Bucaram’s antics sparked a mass popular uprising. My boss told me not to go outside during the protests, because they might turn violent, but I couldn’t resist. There were marches and chants, tires burning in the streets, Bucaram hung in effigy. The Ecuadorian Congress voted him out of power on the basis of mental instability, and he fled to Panama with tens of millions of dollars. I saw how in Ecuador and many other Latin American countries, people didn’t trust each other, there was a higher tolerance for dishonesty, the public services were dysfunctional, there was endemic corruption, bad medical care, public littering, not much in the way of intellectual culture, but a good dollop of crime, and no shortage of people blaming America for their countries’ screw-ups. I didn’t want the United States to become like that.

When I went back to the USA in the mid-90’s, I tried talking to people about the problem of mass illegal immigration from Latin America. Back then, immigration was still a taboo topic. Pat Buchanan hadn’t been able to get the Republican nomination in ’96. Republicans let themselves be convinced he couldn’t get elected. I mean the guy actually wanted to build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants, for Christ’s sakes! I still tried to persuade people that our immigration policies, especially mass illegal immigration from Latin America, were going to cause real problems. I remember having a conversation with a young woman who had just graduated from Duke University. She was smart, well-adjusted, and good-looking. After explaining to me that the USA was a white supremacist country, I thought: another one off the deep end. But later, I remember watching a TV news segment on “whiteness”. It featured a traumatized teenage white girl emerging from some struggle session, whimpering through her tears and snot, “I’ll never take advantage of my whiteness again!” I remember the moment. I was stunned. The virus was spreading. I didn’t understand why so few people appreciated the risk posed by this rising tide of anti-white sentiment mixed with poorly controlled mass immigration of people of color.

I didn’t see the immigration-moderation movement having the power to effect much change. So, I left for Asia. China was my first stop. I taught English in Guangzhou. That was a great experience. 

Read it all: https://www.unz.com/ldinh/escape-from-america-18-years-and-counting/

Let Me Just Talk to Jesse, by Vito Klein - The Unz Review

 

Every Friday late afternoon there is a protest against police brutality in front of the main police headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. On this particular Friday, before the protest gets started, two young men are unloading placards from a car and setting them up against a statue of a police officer carrying a little boy on his shoulder. The statue is wrapped in cling wrap. It was spray painted a couple of times, explains Jesse, one of the men setting up the placards. They care about their monuments more than they care about the people, he says.

On the placards are the pictures of Kansas City residents shot and killed by Kansas City police officers. Some of the victims don’t look to be much more than a few years older than the boy being carried by the officer depicted in the cling-wrapped statue.

Why are American cops so much more lethal than cops in other countries, I ask Jesse. You know, like in Germany or Japan or someplace. Our cops kill way more people every year than theirs do. Of course, they get killed way more than cops in Germany and Japan, too, but why is there so much killing involved with American policing?

Jesse says he isn’t sure how they do things in other countries. He focuses on the United States. The structure of the police force is rooted in racism, he says. Our police system is directly descended from slave patrols.

Around on the north side of the police headquarters building, sitting between it and the municipal courthouse, is another statue. It is by a Wichita-born sculptor named Terry Allen. The piece is titled “Modern Communication” and depicts a business man standing on his brief case with his fingers in his ears. His tie, eight feet long and wrapped around his head, is a blindfold. His shoe is in his mouth. The statue is jarring.

In an interview with WCUR, the local public radio station, Mr. Allen said he intended the piece as social commentary. He wants those who view his sculpture to think about how we as a society don’t communicate.

But, social commentary succeeds when it says something true about our social condition, and Terry Allen’s sculpture misses the mark. Just since you started reading this article, an ocean of communication was uploaded and made immediately available to anyone anywhere in the world. Aside from eating, if there is one thing “we as a society” do plenty of, it’s communicating. As individuals, however, it is a different story. There is too much too many of us are not allowed to communicate.

At the end of the row of placards Jesse set up was one that didn’t display pictures of shooting victims or the cops who shot them. Instead, it displayed pictures of Kansas City’s Board of Police Commissioners, which is appointed by Missouri’s governor. The police department was put under the control of the governor in the 1930s, Jesse tells me, due to corruption.

This is what I object to, I say, pointing to the picture of Board Commissioner Cathy Dean. A quote bubble depicts her saying, “My fragile white tears.” I tell him I think it is wrong to use someone’s race in a derogatory manner in order to denigrate them.

Oh, I don’t think that’s what the people who made this were trying to do, says Jesse. They were just trying to… His voice trails off.

I point to the other instances on the poster where “white” is used derogatorily and remark that only whites are victims of that kind of open racial denigration. Well, they do have the power, Jesse replies.

I tell him I think Jews have the power.

You kind of lost me there, says Jesse. Jews are… are the victims of marginalization, too.

C’mon, I say, seven out of eight Ivy League presidents are Jews. Jews completely dominate Hollywood. The media. The highest incomes. Half of US billionaires. Ten of fifteen cabinet positions in the current administration. How are Jews marginalized victims?

The Holocaust? Jesse replies pointedly in the manner of a true believer, as if nothing in the world could be more obvious.

Which holocaust? I ask. The Nazi Holocaust that started in 1939 and killed six million Jews? Or the Bolshevik Holocaust that started twenty years earlier and killed 66 million Christians? Jesse makes a noise that sounds like surprise.

How is it Jesse isn’t aware of the gigantic bloodbath that was the Bolshevik Holocaust? The Bolsheviks were worse—far worse—than the Nazis by any reasonable measure, whether you compare the number of people murdered, the number of people tortured to death, the number of people in concentration camps, the number of people in forced labor, the number of intentional famines, the number of minority groups exterminated, the number of populations displaced, the amount of economic damage done, or the amount of private property stolen. The Bolshevik Holocaust started earlier, lasted longer, and dwarfed the Nazis in every category of atrocity.

Danzig Baldaev: Drawings from the Gulag

The Bolsheviks were purposely dysgenic, targeting those, regardless of previous contributions to the revolution, who they believed comprised the most intelligent Russians—university faculty, engineers, doctors, successful businessmen, bankers, lawyers, artists, college students, writers, landowners, and, especially, the Christian clergy. Members of these groups—the so-called intelligents—were deemed “enemies of the people,” and were exterminated en masse often with their wives and children. The Bolsheviks, depraved monsters that they were, sometimes executed the children in front of their parents before killing the parents, and sometimes executed the parents in front of the children before killing the children. One Bolshevik commissar, Mikhail Kedrov, insisted on executing the children himself.

And yet, “Bolshevik” on Google receives no search interest at all compared to “Nazi.”

In academia, too, there is the same disparity of interest between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. A search of the course offerings at Harvard for “Nazi” yields eight hits on things like “Jews and Christians: The Holocaust and the Christian World”, which is taught by Kevin Madigan and described:

This course will focus on the relationship of the Christian churches to the Holocaust. After a brief historical overview of the Holocaust, the course will focus on the following themes: the evolution of classical Christian Jew-hatred to modern antisemitism…

But a search of the course offerings at Harvard for “Bolshevik” yields nothing despite the fact that during the Bolshevik Holocaust, thousands of churches were razed or used as livestock enclosures[1] while the synagogues were left untouched[2], even receiving state funding to run Yiddish-language schools.[3]

Powerful interests can and do manipulate public opinion by deciding what information we receive and what is hidden from us. On July 27, 2020, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, probably the dominant player in the process through which “we as a society” communicate, told Congress under oath that Google’s search engine is politically neutral, that Google “does not put its thumb on the scales.” His sworn testimony turns out not to be true. Not even close. Google jumps on the scales with both feet as proven at the website, unGoogle.us

unGoogle.us

To test Sundar Pichai’s claim, unGoogle took “a few random words from a few random articles by a few random writers” and then ran searches on those words on five different search engines: Google, Yippy, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo. They noted the position of the original article in the results and compared Google’s results to the results of the other search engines.

For left-wing writers, Google’s search results place the original article in line with the other search engines or higher. Articles by conservative writers, however, that ranked in the first or second position on all the other search engines didn’t show up at all on Google! This censorship of conservative writers and non-censorship of liberal writers held true without a single exception. The data are fully documented on the unGoogle.us website.

Jesse, I’m guessing, is in his 20s. We are failing him. The history he has learned is not just inadequate, it is dangerously distorted. The public discourse in which he grew up was sanitized for him; he has only ever encountered viewpoints approved by the ruling class and taught to him by its sycophants in the schools he attended. His entire cultural milieu is a Potemkin village and he sincerely believes the lies necessary to support it.

Jesse is the product of censorship, and while his faith is sincere, his view of our social condition does not conform to reality. Thus, to the extent his social activism is determined by this distorted view of the world around him, it is irrational, proportionally less beneficial to society, and more capable of great evil.

In contrast to the censors, those whose motives are unassailable and who are on the side of truth never seek to silence dissenting voices. Rather, the good guys seek debate. The aims of Sacha Baron Cohen, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and others who actively work in the cause of censorship are noxious to the greater good. They are guilty of an unforgivable betrayal of Jesse and the millions of his generation.

On Sunday, June 6, late in the evening, I could hear faintly from my apartment building the sound of distant music, drumming, and someone on a loudspeaker. I got in my car and drove toward the sound but found my way blocked by police. I pulled into a gas station parking lot, parked, got out, and walked over to where two 20-something white cops alone held the intersection. What’s going on, I asked.

Multiple gunshots, the blond cop responded. Did they know anything more? That’s it. We’re from North Kansas City. They just told us to come down here and block this intersection.

There were many cars in the parking lot and the cops stood with their weapons displayed and ready. As I walked back to my car I noticed other cars pulling in, a steady stream, every driver discernible through the tinted glass was black. I backed out of my parking space and it was immediately filled by another car. By now there was only one pathway in or out of the parking lot, but the steady stream of cars coming in made it impossible to exit. Every empty space in the parking lot was being filled in. At the very last moment before I would have been blocked from leaving, there was a slight break in the stream just enough for me to zip out, the next car coming in having to brake to avoid hitting me.

The seemingly coordinated occupation of that parking lot by black drivers, many, in this violent city, undoubtedly armed, just steps from the two white cops was, in my experience, unique, unexpected, and ominous. I imagined the fear those two North Kansas City cops must have felt, and thought to myself they needed more cops there. A lot more.

Blood? Let there be blood, said Vladimir I. Lenin, the man at the root of the Bolshevist horror, and Russian civilization was swallowed up in a sea of it. In 1902, fifteen years before he took power in Russia, Lenin advised his fellow Marxist revolutionaries, already including arch-criminals, Stalin and Trotsky,

Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less “widely applicable” as a means of “drawing in” the masses.[4]

In other words, to achieve your blood-drenched utopia, demonize the police at every opportunity.

As someone who has experienced jail on three continents—in China, Venezuela, and the US, I know I can convince Jesse cops are pretty much the same everywhere and he should drop the absurd and poisonous blood libel that the Kansas City police force is “descended” from slave patrols. But, I can convince him only if I am allowed to talk to him.

“Vito Klein,” a resident of Kansas City, Missouri and unwavering opponent of political censorship, believes the continued detention of courageous journalist Julian Assange at the behest of the US government bathes the country in shame. theklein@protonmail.com

Notes

[1] A collection of reports on Bolshevism in Russia : Great Britain. Foreign Office., April 1919

[2] American Hebrew, Nov. 18, 1932, p. 12

[3] Peter Drucker, reviewing Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk by Elissa Bemporad

[4] V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done (1902) 35

https://www.unz.com/article/let-me-just-talk-to-jesse/