53percenter's Blog

On Thursday, former President George W. Bush spoke at the “Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World” event in New York. There, he delivered a barnburner address taking on the ideologies of both the left, the “nationalist populist” right, and the alt-right. Naturally, the press focused solely and exclusively on his attacks on “nationalist populism” (the scare quotes signify that this is not an actual ideology, but a pastiche of attitudes and ideas having little to do with a thoroughgoing philosophy) – Trumpism.

And, to be fair, Bush did excoriate elements of so-called Trumpism.

Bush explicitly and cogently attacked the West’s declining confidence in economic freedom and political democracy, condemning Europe’s “identity crisis,” which he said bred “insolvency, economic stagnation, youth unemployment, anger about immigration, resurgent ethno-nationalism, and deep questions about the meaning and durability of the European Union.”

He seemed to be referring to President Trump when he stated:

We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism – forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade – forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism. We have seen the return of isolationist sentiments – forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places, where threats such as terrorism, infectious disease, criminal gangs and drug trafficking tend to emerge.

But Bush did far more than that.

He led off by recognizing that the populist left and populist right had both forgotten some basic truths: that “America has encouraged and benefited from the global advance of free markets, from the strength of democratic alliances, and from the advance of free societies.” And he noted that the left particularly had ignored the lessons of the Cold War: “There are some signs that the intensity of support for democracy itself has waned, especially among the young, who never experienced the galvanizing moral clarity of the Cold War, or never focused on the ruin of entire nations by socialist central planning.”

He explained that the divisions of Americans into tribal classes are quashing the American spirit:

Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication…We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions – forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.

In the end, Bush stated, all of this was a “combination of weariness, frayed tempers, and forgetfulness.”

Bush’s speech wasn’t perfect. He continued to express the unsupportable idea that “the desire for freedom is not confined to, or owned by, any culture; it is the inborn hope of our humanity.” That is obviously untrue, simply by glancing at either history or contemporary cultures around the world, many of which value purity or equality before freedom.
But Bush reminded Americans that “Freedom is not merely a political menu option, or a foreign policy fad; it should be the defining commitment of our country, and the hope of the world.” Both the nationalist populists and the modern-day left have ignored that moral reality.

So while the media rush to point out Bush’s opposition to so-called Trumpism, they were willing to ignore his just-as-harsh attacks on Democratic leftism. Bush clearly called for hardening our defenses, including cyberdefense against Russia; he called for renewed American leadership around the world based on principles of freedom; he talked up globalization as both inevitable and desirable in economic terms. Most of all, he talked up education in virtue:

Our identity as a nation – unlike many other nations – is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility. We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson by accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence. We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U.S. Constitution. We become the heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed. And it means that the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation.

Bush condemned the media for failures of accuracy and fairness; he condemned religious institutions for abandoning the playing field; he condemned colleges for shutting down free expression.

Bush’s speech, in other words, was a ringing re-emphasized Reagan conservatism. The media ignore that the populist left has more in common with the populist right than with Bush’s perspective; they take advantage of the (R) next to Bush’s name to use him as a club against Trump. But Bush stood against both Trumpism and Obamaism; he stood in favor of a founding vision rather than the demagoguery of the moment.

And the media will never bother to headline that little fact. It might remind Americans that traditional conservatism is a better solution than either of the currently ascendant alternatives.

“What is the difference between a socialist and a Democrat on taxes?” asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during Wednesday’s CNN-hosted “town hall debate” in Washington, D.C.

Sanders could not or would not answer the question; “I don’t know the answer to that,” said the self-described “democratic socialist” senator from Vermont.

Sanders heralded “Denmark, and Sweden, and Norway, and Finland,” falsely framing the Scandinavian countries as having a “higher standard of living” than America.

America’s “free enterprise system,” said Cruz, has been history’s greatest generator of prosperity, adding, “Bernie likes to glorify socialism, but if you look at the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever seen, it’s the American free enterprise system. There’s a reason millions of people risk their lives to come here.”

Socialist government policies, said Cruz, stultify economic development and exacerbate poverty.

At no point in the debate did Cruz describe Sanders as a communist or neo-Marxist. The Texas senator also neglected to specify “class warfare” as Sanders’ political tactic in appealing to jealousy and covetousness.

Watch part of the Cruz-Sanders exchange below.

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In both January and March of 2016, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked Hillary Clinton a similar question. Both times, Clinton could not or would not answer the question.

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Neo-Marxism is the Democrat Party’s foundational ideology; pushing a refacing of the classically Marxist class struggle paradigm in which assorted arbitrarily-defined groups – some as oppressors and others as oppressed – are framed as competing against one another in a zero-sum competition for wealth and power.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

Michael Bennett, a defensive end for the Seattle Seahawks, said on Monday that NFL owners who require their players to stand for the National Anthem remind him of the Dred Scott case. I understand where he’s coming from. I couldn’t get a frosty at Wendy’s last night because the machine was broken and it reminded me so much of the Great Famine.

Bennett elaborated, saying the prohibitions on Anthem protests interfere with his “ability to be a person” and make him into “property” of the NFL. He’s not alone. Al Sharpton, Michael Wilbon, Adrian Peterson, Rashard Mendenhall, Doug Baldwin, and various leftist media outlets have all made this connection. The NFL is modern-day slavery, according to a lot of people who’ve never been within 100 yards of a history book.

This is what the Anthem issue has turned into. It was originally (allegedly) about police brutality, then it evolved into a protest of Donald Trump, now it’s morphed into debate about whether business owners are allowed to limit the political speech of their employees while their employees are on the clock.

The answer, by the way, is yes. And that’s an answer we need to verbalize because this has consequences beyond the NFL. There are already a great many people, especially in my generation, who think they have the right to waltz into their job with a whole list of non-negotiable demands. “Give me more money.” “Give me more time off.” “Let me wear pajamas to the office.” The fundamental difference between employer and employed seems to be lost on most of us.

Whether you’re for or against the Anthem protests, it should be clear to any rational person that this issue has nothing at all to do with “free speech.” You don’t have free speech at your job. The idea that you have the right to say whatever you want while on your employer’s dime is among the most asinine things I’ve heard in at least the last five minutes. Michael Bennett has no more “right” to sit for the Anthem while wearing his Seahawks jersey than I’d have the right to get a job working the cash register at Walmart and then spend my shift hectoring the customers about the collapse of the nuclear family. I can do that with my current job because that is my current job. But even in a job where political speech is the whole job, I could still be fired if the Daily Wire decided that it no longer wanted to be a platform for my brand of blabbering.

Yes, I have a right to blab. I just don’t have a right to do it on this website, which is owned by someone else. You have a right to wear pro-abortion t-shirts. You don’t have a right to wear them while working as a bank teller. NFL players have a right to their opinions about the police or Donald Trump or the moon landing conspiracy, but they don’t have a right to use the NFL as a megaphone to amplify those views. Simple as that.

Now, in case Michael Bennett and Al Sharpton are still confused, let me explain in greater detail why NFL players are not slaves, even if they’re forced to stand for 2 minutes during the Anthem:

1) You choose to be there. You signed a contract. You came to the NFL and asked them for a job. You didn’t have to. You could have taken a massive pay cut and become a blogger and spent all day sharing your opinions on any topic at all. But you chose a different job (wisely). You chose a job where your opinions are not only irrelevant but may be harmful to the bottom line. You were hired under the assumption that you’d help the bottom line. If you hurt it, you can be fired.

2) You can leave. You may not be able to go to another team whenever you want, but you can quit and do something else with your time. It is an infamous fact of slavery that slaves did not have this option.

3) You are not owned. Your team is owned. The jerseys are owned. The stadium is owned. The league you’re playing for is owned. Everywhere you go in your capacity as an NFL player, and everything you use, is owned by someone other than yourself. But you are not owned. Just because there are rules governing the things that are owned does not mean that you yourself are owned when you’re asked to follow them. If the NFL has enslaved you, then I guess I’ve enslaved you when you come into my house and are forced to refrain from smoking in my living room or kicking my dog. Those are my house rules, strictly enforced. If you want to follow different rules, go back to your own house.

4) You’re paid millions of dollars. Slaves were generally not paid anything. That’s really the whole point of slavery. I’d like to meet a slave owner who gives his slaves 60 million dollar contracts. I may have to see if he’s hiring. Or “enslaving,” I guess.

Now, I admit that if we were to put these small differences to the side, suddenly there is very little distinction between a millionaire athlete in 2017 and a plantation slave in 1845. Just as there is no difference between a mild case of acne and the Bubonic Plague if we ignore literally every fact about the Bubonic Plague. It’s funny how that works.

CNN hosted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for a debate on the GOP’s tax proposal on Wednesday night, and, as expected, Cruz made Sanders look like a fool most of the night.

Sanders tried to attack Republicans’ plan for tax cuts by saying it was “a Robin Hood proposal in reverse.”

Cruz responded by shredding Sanders’ Robin Hood tax analogy, pointing out that Sanders was unable to comprehend even the basic idea of what Robin Hood was trying to do.

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The reaction over social media following the debate was overwhelmingly positive for Cruz and mostly negative for Sanders who struggled most of the night.

On Wednesday evening, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) issued a hypothetical: “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she asked, if Mitt Romney “were president of the United States?”

Thanks a lot, lady.

Pelosi, of course, spent most of 2012 castigating Mitt Romney as the scourge of the earth, a racist, immoral homophobe seeking to crush the poor with his car elevator. After Romney was booed at the NAACP convention, she said, “I think it was a calculated move on his part to get booed at the NAACP convention.” She suggested that Romney was leading a “Republican assault on women’s health.” She said that it was a myth that Romney had respect for women. Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accused Romney of cheating on his taxes. The media accused Romney of strapping a dog to the top of his car, forcibly cutting the hair of a gay high school kid, and giving a man’s wife cancer, as well as slapping women into binders. Vice President Joe Biden said Romney wanted to put black people back in chains.

And now they want Romney back?

On Thursday, former President George W. Bush spoke in New York City, where he forcibly condemned isolationism, white nationalism, and populism. The press immediately reacted with spasms of joy – here was a man! That followed hard on Pelosi wishing Bush were president back in June.

The media and the Democrats spent eight full years calling Bush a Hitlerian figure and a war criminal. Democrats regularly talked of impeaching Bush. Hillary Clinton took to the Senate floor in 2002 carrying a copy of The New York Post and yelling, “The president knew what? My constituents would like to know the answer!” The media and the Democrats chortled in glee as Donald Trump mirrored their charges in 2016, and laughed along as Trump routinely insulted Jeb Bush for his brother’s real and unreal failings.

But now they love Bush again.

All of which suggests that all of these people are simply full of crap. It’s one thing for conservatives to believe that Donald Trump is a difference in kind from George W. Bush. He is. Bush failed conservatives on many policy fronts, from No Child Left Behind to Medicare Part D to campaign finance reform, from blowing out spending to his attempts at immigration reform to the financial bailouts. But Bush was a mensch. He may have failed to implement his philosophy, but his philosophy was classical conservatism, based in creed rather than empty nationalist sloganeering.

The same holds true for Mitt Romney. I opposed Romney in the primaries in 2012. That’s because he was the only Republican candidate who had created Obamacare. But Romney was a good man, an honest man, perhaps the most decent man to run for president in my lifetime.

It’s fair for conservatives to distinguish between Bush and Romney on the one hand and Trump on the other.

But the same Leftists who insisted Bush was the devil, that Romney was the devil, cannot now turn around and fete these men. Their hatred for Bush and Romney inured Americans to their catcalls; after calling Bush and Romney racist sexist bigot homophobes, the charges sounded like more of the same with Trump, because they were. If Ted Cruz had been the nominee, he would have heard the same charges. And that’s why Republicans nominated the only candidate who didn’t seem to care about the catcalls, and was willing to throw mud in the other direction.

So, no, Democrats who slandered Bush and Romney, you don’t get to wish for Bush or Romney now. You broke the country. You bought this.

To coddle the snowflake, or not to coddle snowflake, that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer. The slings and arrows of outrageous sensitivity, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubled youth, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep.

Snowflakes are now too sensitive to suffer through a performance of Shakespeare without being given a trigger warning first.

According to The Telegraph, students at Britain’s prestigious Cambridge University are now being warned of “potentially distressing topics” in plays by Shakespeare, with English Literature undergrads being cautioned that lectures about Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors include “discussions of sexual violence” and “sexual assault“.

The U.K.’s Independent noted that some professors have not exactly welcomed the new change in policy, arguing that the trigger warnings will not do the students any favors when they graduate. Others claim that it will help students who may have a panic attack should it remind them of a personal traumatic experience.

Even so, Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, called it “fundamentally dishonest” to allow students to skip out on learning about uncomfortable parts of history and literature.

“We have to encourage students to be able to face that, even when they find they’re awkward and difficult for all kinds of good reasons,” she said.

David Crilly, artistic director at The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, said students who are that triggered have no business even studying Shakespeare.

“If a student of English Literature doesn’t know that Titus Andronicus containts scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on the course,” he said. “This degree of sensitivity will inevitably curtail academic freedom. If the academic staff are concerned they imght say something students find uncomfortable they will avoid doing it.”

Perhaps more disconcerting, the trigger warnings were put in place without a reasonable discussion amongst the faculty, according to one Cambridge lecturer.

Cambridge University maintains that that the English Faculty has no official policy on trigger warnings.

“Some lecturers indicate that some sensitive material will be covered in a lecture by informing the English Faculty Admin staff,” said a Cambridge spokesman. “This is entirely at the lecturer’s own discretion and is in no way indicative of a Faculty wide policy.”

Issuing trigger warnings before Shakespeare pales in comparison to some policies being instituted here in the United States, where students have outright called for a ban on teaching Shakespeare for being a white, European male.