90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, July 30, 2020

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Our Summer Of Cultural Suicide

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws like thrift, moderation and transcendence.

Take professional sports. Over the last century, professional football, basketball and baseball were racially integrated and adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA and MLB had become global multibillion-dollar enterprises.

Then hubris ensued.

The owners, coaches and players weren’t always racially diverse. But that inconvenient truth did not stop the leagues from hectoring their fans about social activism — even as they no longer honored common patriotic rituals.

All three leagues have suffered terribly during the viral lockdown, as American life mysteriously went on without them. And they have almost ensured that they won’t fully recover when the quarantine ends. Many of their often-pampered multimillionaire players refuse to honor the national anthem. In the NFL they now will broadcast their politics on their helmets. They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans — as if to ensure that their sources of support flee.

Lots of American universities became virtual global brands in the 21st century. Sky-high tuition, rich foreign students, guaranteed student loans and Club Med-like facilities convinced administrators and faculty that higher education was sacrosanct. The universities preached that every successful American had to have a bachelor’s degree, as if the higher-education monopoly deserved guaranteed customers.

But soon, $1.6 trillion in aggregate student-loan debt, lightweight and trendy curricula, ideological hectoring, administrative bloat, reduced teaching loads, poor placement of graduates and the suspension of the Bill of Rights on campus began turning off both students and the public.

If students can Zoom or Skype their classes from home this fall, why pay $70,000 a year for the campus “experience”?

Supposedly woke and informed rioters this summer incoherently toppled or damaged the statues of everyone from Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Douglass and Miguel de Cervantes. So the public might begin to wonder how the nation’s multitrillion-dollar investment in higher education actually served the country.

Soon, popular fury will beget more dangerous questions for American universities. Maybe the country should subsidize the training of more essential electricians, plumbers, contractors and masons instead of unemployable environmental and ethnic...

Sound Familiar? Allegations Of Campaign Finance And Ethics Violations Emerge Against McCloskey Prosecutor

She made headlines by charging Mark and Patricia McCloskey for defending their property, but St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner might have legal problems of her own. Over the last two days, multiple allegations of ethics and campaign violations have erupted against Gardner, and not exactly from defenders of the McCloskeys. The CBS affiliate in St. Louis details a number of trips Gardner took, paid for in part by progressive political supporters, that she never disclosed. KMOV reports that Gardner’s junkets were “prolific and problematic,” at times interfering with her public duties:

Sources tell News 4 Gardner is a frequent flyer. At times during her tenure as prosecutor, sources say, she has often been gone from her office a couple of times every month, jetting around on someone else’s dime.

Social media snaps show Gardner posing for pictures in Portugal, listening to conversations in New Haven, Connecticut, smiling with other prosecutors in Houston and linking arms in Selma, Alabama.

They are trips she apparently took in 2018 and 2019, but did not disclose on travel reports, as required by law.

Sources tell News 4 that some of the trips were paid for in full, or in part, by an organization called Fair and Just Prosecution, a group that professes to support progressive prosecutors. The organization has repeatedly applauded many of Gardner’s actions, including the charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey for brandishing guns in the Central West End last month.

Why not just report the trips? That might have given her political rivals some ammunition at election time. Unfortunately for Gardner, she provided them with more ammunition by allegedly violating campaign finance regulations. That accusation comes from Democrats supporting her primary rival, Mary Pat Carl. And it’s not the first time Gardner has done so — in fact, she’s on probation for a previous violation:

The Hill is out with a poll showing a massive majority — 77% — of Americans now concerned about rising crime.

And there’s more.

“At the same time they see an increase of violence and crime and are concerned that prosecutors are not prosecuting the crimes — they blame the protests and the high unemployment when asked what is responsible for the spike in violence,” said Harvard CAPS/Harris polling director Mark Penn. “They also single out social media for being used to coordinate violence and in their view not doing much to curb it.”

Mark Penn was Hillary Clinton’s pollster during her run for president in 2008.

Penn’s mention of the prosecutors is interesting. Democrat prosecutors in the nation’s riot zones have been clear that they will release “mostly peaceful” protesters whose peaceful protests intensify into arson, looting, assault, and the like. In Travis County, Texas (Austin), the Democrats handed victory in their primary to Delia Garza, who explicitly ran on that very platform. Local prosecutors’ open support for the hardly peaceful protesters is what led to federal action, which the Democrats are now claiming is some foreboding portent of “martial law.”

They could have prevented the need for federal action by upholding the laws they swore to uphold. They chose poorly.

The message is getting through. It already got through to the “mostly peaceful” protesters, who have intensified their protests into nightly assaults on federal officers and the federal courthouse in Portland, and much of downtown in Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities as well.

Now it’s getting through to the rest of America, and they don’t like it.

The development comes as calls to defund police departments amid nationwide protests over racial injustice grow louder.

Those calls are growing louder among hardcore leftist activists and the activists they put on city councils, plus the mainstream media. The majority of Americans do not support defunding the police.

They also don’t like social media’s role in helping intensify these protests into kinetic and pyrotechnical activity. And Americans do explicitly blame the protests as one source of the surge in violence.

It’s all having an effect.

Musk just announced that he’s building his new Tesla plant in Texas, where the business climate is still strong, and...