Hello from the Road
I have been driving across America since May 9th. It’s the best way to get to know this diverse country from coast to coast. It’s easy to see how disconnected our government has become from the states between New York and LA. It feels almost like a different country. I drove through Abilene, the hometown of President Eisenhower. That is the kind of leader we need. He knew Kansas. He knew World War II. He knew McCarthyism. He knew the world of sophisticates. That made him able to be the leader of the entire country, not just the side that supports him.
Now in Brooklyn, I have watched my daughter finally graduate from NYU after her regular graduation in 2020 was canceled. They held the ceremony for the classes of 2020 and 2021 at Yankee Stadium. It was hard not to have a great time. It was a beautiful day. Watching my daughter finally have closure from having lost her last few months of college to being trapped at home during lockdown. It felt so surreal - they canceled NYU? Everyone had to go home? Yes, that is what happened.
She was with me throughout that summer, as helicopters flew overhead and curfews were put in place. Then I drove her to New York to live and this is where she lives now. I feel very lucky to have such a bright, compassionate, funny, interesting person as a daughter.
The NYU graduation was also slightly surreal. In a way, it was like attending a Baptist Revival meeting. The same way evangelical preachers would proclaim someone “healed,” here was a celebration of those who were “healed” by how much they have overcome in what they consider a “systemically racist” “white supremacist” patriarchy.
That meant they were fully committed to pledging allegiance to this new ideology, starting with a speaker who proclaimed her pronouns and thanked the Native Americans for land use. The most popular speaker was a disability advocate who talked about how they were changing the world by changing minds - anyone can do anything.
Did they really mean anyone can do anything though? Was that the message they were trying to send? It did strike me just how much this class, this generation, this movement values and listens to those seen as victims rather than those they see as high achievers. Overcoming obstacles like eating disorders, mental health issues, disabilities, or being non-white matters much more. A standard successful white male has no issues and therefore can’t be celebrated, not in this group anyway. This is true across the board on the Left, from Hollywood to politics and everything in between.
That is how they want to appear anyway. In reality, nothing has really changed that much in this country in terms of who is the richest or the most powerful. To hold onto that power and wealth requires going along with the ideology.
Then came time to hand out the diplomas but because there were both classes of 2020 and 2021 they had to present symbolic diplomas to each school at the university. Each time they would call up two students to accept for their entire class. As usual, in industries controlled by the Left, they had to over-compensate for the white majority, not just in this country, but at the university by selecting non-white students, with one or two exceptions, to accept the diplomas. While this seems well-intentioned, it also has the appearance, at least to me, of being a way of protecting themselves, using people of color as shields to depict a reality they are trying to make true but isn’t exactly true. Does that make it a different form of Black Face? Here is the demographic breakdown at NYU:
The enrolled student population at New York University is 28.1% White, 15.9% Asian, 12.8% Hispanic or Latino, 7.11% Black or African American, 3.07% Two or More Races, 0.144% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.0815% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders.
The only reason I bring this up is that for the entirety of my daughter’s higher education experience, from public high school that was based on Critical Theory - race and gender, through to graduating college she has come of age in a climate and an ideology that doesn’t believe everyone has a shot to be whatever they want if they work hard enough. They believe that this is a hierarchal society, one that benefits only straight white men, and this system needs to be artificially re-ordered to make it fairer, otherwise known as equity, or Marxist-like ideology.
In an inherently unequal society, there can be no best and brightest, only all outcomes being measured exactly the same. Except it isn’t that either. They artifically boost the presence of the marginalized groups, while artificially downplaying the dominance of white students to make it appear fair.
For most of my friends on the Left, this is a utopian ideal finally realized. Despite that, there is still a very strident demand by whites to follow the guidelines put to them:
When I say they were “healed” this is what I mean. They are white people, still very much in power, in charge, and the majority population in the country, who are the most wealthy, proving their virtue for the purposes of salvation. In the same way, they beg for forgiveness for using the lands of native peoples but they are never giving that land back.
That, more than anything, is what defines the new Left, for better and worse.
Spending time away from Twitter and the media feedback loop allows a kind of clarity lacking in my own daily life. One of the ways that mattered was in watching the coverage of the Buffalo shooting. Very clearly in the shooter’s diary about why he went on a racist-fueled mass murder spree was that it was during lockdown that he found himself online and drifting into message boards on 4-Chan where he became radicalized.
Immediately after the tragedy, an angry mob formed to go after Tucker Carlson, Trump, and the entire Republican party. Somehow the Left and their media believe that this will be a good way to scare Americans to vote blue again. I’m not sure it will work. The story here is not that Tucker Carlson’s nightly show is cranking out mass murderers, it is instead, what happened to this young man?
Does anyone really think this is a good path to head down at the moment where the majority in the country - still 60% white - are treated like there is something very bad about them because they were born white? This is hitting young men especially hard and yet it seems almost verboten to talk about it. This is going to lead to even bigger disasters, I figure than Buffalo, and that was bad enough.
Democrats and their propaganda media arm are marginalizing the majority in this country and expecting everyone will go along with it. They won’t. They will rebel one way or another. They are the majority and thus, they will decide elections.
The Democrats are making things worse for themselves by limiting the kinds of people they will allow inside their bunker. That means they will receive fewer votes, among other things like less box office, lower ratings, etc.
And all of this before we even get to just how bad things got for America’s young people during one year of lockdown. That a young white male could become angry and radicalized by his own isolation is less useful to the Democrats than to blame Tucker Carlson. That, to me, is not only irresponsible but dangerous.
I was glad to see my daughter graduate. It was reassuring to see they all had been raised to be so kind and caring that a woman in a wheelchair who had become a civil rights leader was their proudest moment as a generation coming of age. Their hearts are in the right place. I know that they will have compassion for those who were ignored or dehumanized by previous generations. That feels like progress in a way. But we still have to remember that the future still belongs to all of us, no matter our skin color, gender, or ideology. We have to remember that the thing that unites all of us is that we’re Americans. We might be a dysfunctional family, but we’re a family all the same.
I will be spending a few days on the road heading up to Maine and then heading back across the country and landing in Los Angeles, hopefully, by the end of May.
I am working on a few stories I hope to get posted in the coming weeks. In the meantime, enjoy these voices.
How Disagreement Became ‘Disinformation’
America’s enlightened influencers mistake their interpretations of the facts for the facts themselves, giving themselves an excuse for censorship. [Wall Street Journal]
Elon Musk says Democrats have 'become the party of division and hate,' repeats claim that he'll now vote Republican
Either way, it has been nice being mostly offline.
The left has long tokenized designated groups, but not others facing similar discrimination (blacks, not Asians; gays, not Jews). But of late, it's devolved from tokenism to full-fledged fetishization.
I mean, equity represents the value inherent in an object - your home, your car, etc. To speak of "racial equity," then, is to assign a person's inherent value to their parentage.
Which is about as right-wing a value as can be imagined.
Congratulations! A trip across the country sounds like a great way to celebrate and reflect on getting your daughter this far. The ceremony sounds lovely. In my very blue area I wonder what the kids who stayed home over a year, were just told to mask up again after only being unmasked for 2 1/2 months and are terribly depressed and behind in every metric will think of what I call our 'fakequity' during this time. Personally, I think I preferred being screwed by the republicans of the 80's. Atleast they had the character to honestly admit they weren't going to do much for you-pull yourself up by your bootstraps. To be screwed and manipulated into believing you're really not being screwed-you're actually a privileged, opportunity hoarding oppressor...makes the blood boil