Last Thursday, Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota) appeared on the Glenn Beck show with a troubling message.  “We’re losing badly,” Bachmann said about the fight against the Gang of Eight amnesty bill for illegal immigrants.  “A lot of your viewers don’t even know we are in the middle of that fight right now,” Bachmann told Beck.  “We need your viewers to melt the phone lines and say ‘Don’t vote for any immigration bill until the border is secure.’”

“This is the most important item in the next four years, what’s going to happen in the next couple weeks,” she said, “We have a very short window, six weeks, to kill this bill.”

Congressman Steve King (R–Iowa) called the immigration bill “far worse” than Obamacare:

If somehow there was an offer that you’re going to get one or the other . . . I would take Obamacare before I’d ever accept this amnesty plan.

King said that amnesty now would lead to perpetually open borders: “If you grant amnesty, you can never promise that you can enforce immigration [laws] again.”

“The [immigration] bill is worse than universal healthcare, “ warned Glenn Beck, “Listen to me, it is worse than universal healthcare, and in the coming days as we get closer, we will explain why it’s worse than universal healthcare. It is the death knell of the country.  There is no recovery from this one.  None.  No recovery.”

Rush Limbaugh said the bill would add millions of “instant Democrats” to the electorate.

So where are Beck’s viewers, Tea Party and 912 activists?  Why aren’t they “burning up the phones” as Bachmann is calling for, and leading the fight against the movement to grant citizenship to 30 million people who have or will come here as illegal aliens?

Did election losses fray nerves?  Are Tea Partiers demoralized by the parade of turncoats (Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Kelly Ayotte) among people they helped elect, especially Rubio?  Are the lies peddled in advertisements aired on conservative talk radio and TV by the fake conservative group, Americans for a Conservative Direction, taking a toll?

I think all of these things are true.  Also true is that social conservatives and Tea Party activists are sick of being tarred with false accusations of racism, which happens whenever they try to weigh in on virtually any social issue.

As Democrats pile on with their usual, visceral “Racism” charge against those who oppose mass amnesty, I couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to avoid such ugliness.  It’s not easy to stare down public officials and smirking editorial page editors shrieking “racist” at you.

But the immigration bills is a transformational event, far more important than any other issue in Washington right now.  It is time for the grassroots to pay attention, as Bachmann says.

The “racism” charge simply needs to be ignored.  It won’t go away, no matter what we do or say.  Every single person in the Tea Party could pack up and go home, unplug their computers, and stop voting tomorrow, and ten years from now, President Holder and the Southern Poverty Law Center would still be holding blue-ribbon conferences at the White House to discuss the Rising Tide of Tea Party Hate.

You’re a racist is the eternal default of people who have no intention of speaking honestly about what will happen if we grant citizenship to enough low-income, low-education, illegal immigrants to increase America’s population by 10%.  That’s 30 million people — the equivalent of entire population of Canada, or fully 1/4 of the current population of Mexico (Arnold Ahlert observes that both pro- and anti- amnesty groups agree on the 30 million figure).

But it’s not just liberals and Democrats throwing the “R” word around.  You also hear it, or some coded equivalent, from many political operatives on the Right, and this is a terrible development that needs to be looked at carefully.  Some in the Republican Party and and some (not all) national libertarian groups are using the same shame tactics as leftists to pressure others on the Right to not weigh in on the immigration debate.

I’ve heard stories on the ground from people who have been told that if they speak out on immigration, the whole movement will be seen as racist.  Don’t let anyone pressure you that way.

Last Friday, Rush Limbaugh explained the willingness of many Republicans to support amnesty this way: “The Republican Party is embarrassed by its own base,” Limbaugh said.

I assume that some Republicans think there is a new group of people that would become their base. If they just got rid of these pro-lifers, if they just got rid of this religious crowd, if they just got rid of the Christians, if they just got rid of these gun nuts.

Turncoat Marco Rubio is certainly playing from this game book.  Thankfully, Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are now beginning to mobilize people against this legislation.

For the past two years, I have travelled around Florida speaking to citizen patriot groups.  I’ve come to believe that pressure from people on our own side is the main reason that Beck listeners and Tea Party and 912 groups (and many registered Republican) have been hesitant to enter the fight against an amnesty bill that they personally oppose and recognize as an existential threat to America.

Making this problem worse is a troubling dynamic in Tea Party/912 organizing.  While the majority of people I’ve met in this movement identify themselves as social conservatives first, the minority of libertarians involved — who are often pro-open borders, pro-gay marriage, pro-pot legalization, and even pro-abortion rights — have an outsized influence over the far larger numbers of traditional values conservatives.

This outsized influence is magnified by the presence of national libertarian groups that siphon power off the grassroots while claiming to speak for them.

I don’t say any of this as a blanket condemnation of all people who identify themselves as libertarians.  Some of the people I admire the most in politics are diehard, capital “L” Libertarians (myself, I was writing fan letters to Ayn Rand and stumbling through Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology way back in high school).  And some national libertarian groups like Campaign for Liberty are airing the view of members who oppose the Gang of Eight’s amnesty bill.  They may even be doing more to fight this legislation (I would appreciate confirmation of this).

But I’ve also witnessed aggressive attempts within the movement to dominate and silence people who want to talk about subjects like illegal immigration and abortion.  And when libertarians define everything that they don’t want to talk about as a “social issue” and then demand silence on social issues, they’re just being liberals who don’t want to pay taxes.

A big source of this problem is the outsized influence of national organizations like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.  Although they provide training resources and leadership in campaigns, they also pressure the grassroots to abide by their agendas, and on amnesty they both curiously claim to be “sitting the fight out,” which is no different from supporting the bill.

In fact, deep-pocketed players all over the Right are currently pressuring Tea Partiers to sit down and shut up about immigration.  Grover Norquist has been flogging ugly racial charges against the Tea Party, as Ann Corcoran details in this excellent blog.  Jeb Bush is flouting bizarre anti-facts about needing illegal immigrants to teach Americans about family values at his (very vaguely named) American Action Forum.  Daniel Greenfield has a wonderful takedown of Bush’s immigrant fertility derangement.

FreedomWorks once at least talked about a no-amnesty plan, but now they are vigilantly avoiding the entire subject of  illegal immigration.  The grassroots needs to realize that, by whispering to Beltway insiders about how they’re “sitting out” the immigration bill, FreedomWorks is for all practical purposes actually supporting amnesty.  And if they claim you as a member, they’re essentially saying that you do, too.

Americans for Prosperity in Florida [disclosure: I did freelance and volunteer work for them] is arguably more coercive with the grassroots.  They have a habit of culling names from grassroots organizations and claiming these people as their membership.  If you ever attended an AFP event or volunteered on their phone lines or went to hear one of their speakers, AFP lobbyists in Tallahassee and Washington D.C. are probably claiming that you are a member of AFP and that they are speaking for you.

And what they’re saying is that you’re “sitting out” the immigration bill along with them, which really means supporting amnesty.

Don’t let AFP, or anyone else, do this in your name.  Tea Party and 912 activists need to take a hard look at the people and groups claiming to be speaking for them.  Don’t give away your power to anyone.  And if you are a member, let them know how you feel.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

I believe the majority of people involved in citizen patriot movements oppose the Gang of Eight’s amnesty bill.  But if we don’t make ourselves heard now, we might as well give up the fight.

When amnesty supporter and presidential hopeful Jeb Bush claimed at the recent Faith and Freedom conference that “immigrants are more fertile . . . and they have more intact families,” CNN reported that his “arguments . . . were met with near silence from the conservative crowd.”  In contrast, the crowd loudly applauded Michelle Bachmann’s fiery denunciation of “amnesty.”

But it’s time to do more than applaud.  Following is a toolkit for lobbying against the Gang of Eight’s bill, countering the lies being told, and educating your friends and fellow Tea Party/912 members about the facts on amnesty and illegal immigration.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ten Things To Do to Oppose the Gang of Eight’s Amnesty Bill

#1: Educate Yourself About the Facts

Before we talk about amnesty for illegal immigrants, we need to understand who is here and the many ways they’re already accessing government benefits.  When I worked in social services, I came to know a lot of low-income immigrants, legal and illegal, and those who weren’t living with someone with legal status and taking advantage of their public benefits still had multiple ways to access funding on their own.  Anybody, for example, who tells you that the Gang of Eight’s bill will deny subsidized healthcare to illegal immigrants during a waiting period is lying.  They already receive publicly funded healthcare through multiple sources: emergency services, Medicaid, FQCHSs (look it up), Disproportionate Share Hospitals, state programs that enroll illegal immigrants, federal and state programs that support pregnancy and deliveries, and special grants funneled through universities and research hospitals.

None of this is going away.  Instead, expect doors to medical programs to open very quickly for 30 million mostly low-income beneficiaries of amnesty.  When people in residence here start on the path to citizenship, who will argue against including them fully in Obamacare long before the 10 or 13 year delay has ended?

And there are other forms of welfare that promise to explode as well.

• Read this report by Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, beginning to end: Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children, A Look at Cash, Medicaid, Housing, and Food Programs.  It’s a great primer on use of public assistance, broken down by native-born/immigrant status and legal/illegal immigrant status.
• Center for Immigration Studies has the most up-to-date analyses on the Gang of Eight’s legislation and amendments.
• This Heritage Foundation’s Report is absolutely essential as well: The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer
• Heritage has more excellent information on immigration.
• Numbers USA has many fact-sheets and toolkits for action.
• The Eagle Forum has a good summary of the costs of amnesty, here.
• Background on the immigrant rights movement’s ties to communism from Trevor Loudon.

#2: Educate Yourself About the Lies

• Frontpage Magazine has some of the best exposés on the Gang of Eight’s media disinformation campaign, from David Greenfield on Jeb Bush’s fertility comments, Lindsey Graham’s ugly pandering, and Rubio’s cozying up to Obama, to information on border control.  Frontpage also published a timely exposé on the organization behind those dishonest Americans for a Conservative Direction ads airing on talk radio and television.
• John T. Bennett has published many excellent articles about immigration.  Visit his archives at American Thinker, one of the few conservative publications consistently opposing amnesty.
• Victor Davis Hanson’s columns about the impact of illegal immigration in the Southern California town where his family farms are indispensable.
• Judicial Watch is a reliable source for information about the way immigration law is and will be enforced, or not.
• Jeffrey Lord has an important new article about Ryan, Rubio, and immigrant child credit tax scams at American Spectator.
• Mark Krikorian provides background and insights at National Review.
• Former INS Senior Special Agent Michael Cutler offers important information about border security at Accuracy in Media.
• And this guy, who goes only by DrewM., offers a very funny imaginary debate with Paul Ryan, who has disappointed many people with his dishonest defense of amnesty.

#3: Understand the Earned Income Tax Credit

Around January 1, tax preparation offices pop up all over the small Florida tomato town that is my sometimes-home.  No, they’re not for thrifty taxpayers seeking to get an early start on April 15: they’re storefronts for processing Earned Income Tax Credit checks.  For a fee, these storefronts fill out the paperwork for “refund checks” of up to $5,666 that go to pretty much anyone with children who can claim a limited income.  The word “refund” does not mean refund for taxes paid: the EITC is a “cash assistance” welfare program built into the IRS to dispense money to people who pay no federal taxes.  It’s like Christmas — after Christmas: in poor neighborhoods, car dealerships and electronics and furniture stores hold “tax” sales where non-taxpayers use taxpayer’s money to buy themselves consumer products.  It isn’t uncommon to see store windows with giant “EITC” signs, or slogans like “Mo Money, Mo Money” around EITC season.  Police even pick up patrolling in some places to prevent EITC-cash related robberies and burglaries.

It is also, of course, a program subject to massive fraud –  $11 – $13 billion a year in recent years.  So even though illegal immigrants aren’t supposed to qualify for EITC largesse, many apply for and get the money anyway by lying about social security numbers, other identity fraud, or lying about children who don’t exist or don’t live here.  There are even loopholes built into the system to allow some illegal immigrants to legally receive EITC — $4.2 billion was distributed to illegal immigrants in 2010.

Of course, EITC give-aways will skyrocket as soon as 30 million of Jeb Bush’s “extremely fertile” illegal immigrants and their families gain legal status . . . and nobody is even sure whether illegal immigrants will qualify for back-payments of EITC for previous years.  Such details, you see, aren’t something the taxpayers need to worry their little heads over.

I doubt the Gang of Eight would tell us the truth about it anyway, even if they knew what the truth was.

 #4: Get Your Hands on This One Amazing Book

Actually, whether you support or oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants, you should read Darrell Ankarlo, a former talk radio host in Arizona.

In Illegals: The Unacceptable Cost of America’s Failure to Control its Borders, Ankarlo travels between Mexico and America to discover why and how people enter this country illegally.  He opens a window, showing us who is coming here, how they get here, and what this all means for both Mexico and America.  Ankarlo seems a little crazy, in a good way.  He is empathetic towards everyone — a rare achievement.

If the Gang of Eight had started with this book and encouraged other people to read it, the nation would be having a real conversation about illegal immigration right now.

#5: Know Your Enemies

Illegal immigrants aren’t the enemy.

But the racially divisive, leftist activists who are using illegal immigration to challenge America’s sovereignty are enemies.  You need to learn about their real intentions — and where the country is heading if the Gang of Eight succeeds.

Jim Simpson has published absolutely essential reports on the radical groups running the illegal immigration lobby: CASA de Maryland: The Illegals’ ACORN is a must-read, as is this follow-up report.

Radical Hispanic separationist groups such as MEChA and Nation of Aztlan have strongholds in some cities and on college and university campuses, especially in Arizona and California.  Here is a primer introducing these groups.  Here is the website for the National Brown Berets: their radical mission statement should be read and understood.

La Raza is seemingly more mainstream, but they share much of the mission and attitudes towards America expressed by more radical groups.  In contrast to those groups, however, La Raza is entirely mainstreamed in the political Left.  It receives significant taxpayer funding to underwrite its race-based activities (nearly 10 million dollars in 2010), and can call upon scores of high-ranking elected officials to do its bidding.  A former high-ranking La Raza official serves in the Obama administration.  Here is an exposé on La Raza.

La Raza claims to be nonpartisan, but in reality they operate like any other aggressive race lobby, making demands on both parties but inevitably siding with the Democrats.  Look at the La Raza site to find a pdf of a disturbing 2012 speech by La Raza president and CEO, Janet Murguîa.

#6: Bring the Discussion to Your Tea and 912 Groups — NOW!

IRS, NSA, Benghazi, the economy, Syria . . . it’s overwhelming.  But as Michelle Bachmann, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Steve King, Louis Gomert, and . . . oh yeah, Obama are telling us (see this great John Hawkins piece), the amnesty bill needs to take precedence over all these other issues because it is speeding through Congress and will create irreversible political changes . . . changes that will give rise to even more uncontrollable Washington scandals.

Too many Tea Party groups are looking elsewhere.  Of course, holding the IRS accountable is important; Common Core needs attention.  But it’s time, now, to talk about illegal immigration.

Next month will be too late.  Heritage Action has resources for your state.

#7: Thank Our Allies

Those fraudulent Americans for a Conservative Direction ads airing on talk radio and television shows, including Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and the Rush Limbaugh Show, have been confusing audiences, but the ads do not reflect the shows’ hosts’ views.  In fact, Rush and Beck have been calling for immediate action against the Gang of Eight’s amnesty plan.  Be sure to thank them.

The Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, Numbers USA, Center for Immigration Studies, the Eagle Forum and others are standing strong against amnesty.  Thank them too.

#8: Encourage Our Friends, Cautiously

I don’t always see eye to eye with the national libertarian organizations partnering with Tea Parties, especially when they issue top-down directives to grassroots groups.  I believe that the Tea Party/912 movements need to get back to their local roots and work with nationals only when the relationship is really a two-way street.

Part of this involves donating more of your money locally, instead of sending it to wealthy national organizations.  Also, ALWAYS check a group’s tax forms before donating anything to them, and ask for detailed information about staff salaries and how your money will be spent.  Go to Guidestar to view the 990s of all nonprofit organizations.  The site is very easy to use: just register, and you can view any organization’s 990 for free.  I’m happy to answer individual questions about researching 990s.

Local membership groups also need to make sure nobody is claiming to speaking for them on contentious issues such as immigration, or saying one thing to Tea Party groups and another to the RNC bigwigs in Washington.  It’s great to partner with national organizations when you agree, but don’t give away your power or voice to them.  When you work together, maintain your identity and name, and get proper credit for your contribution to any activity.

NEVER hand over your membership list to anyone, and share your membership list only when you are working in an equitable coalition where all parties agree to keep primary ownership of their lists.

One more word on money: when you work with any individual or group, demand that they be transparent about money and other resources they are receiving from any source.  You might be very surprised to learn how much money the Tea Party leader sitting next to you at a conference is getting for their participation, especially if they are pushing a view that you don’t agree with.

Doing these things can help create healthier and stronger alliances between national groups and your local organization.  And in that spirit, I encourage activists who have worked with FreedomWorks, AFP, and other national entities to reach out to them and let them know how you feel about the Gang of Eight’s Amnesty legislation, and ask them to discuss their position with you.  If you have volunteered for their organization in the past, they owe you that.

We may find more common ground on this legislation if we agree to look for it together.

#9: Don’t Let Anyone Call You A Racist . . . And Don’t Let Them Lie to You

I don’t mean the Democrats: they just don’t care what we think.  But Republican and conservative organizations that are smearing amnesty opponents with slurs and crude misrepresentations of our positions deserve to hear from us.  Here’s a short list of the people who merit a critical phone call, e-mail, or tweet:

• Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform
• Jeb Bush, American Action Forum
• Marco Rubio, Offices in Florida and Washington
• Jeff Flake, Offices in Arizona and Washington
• John McCain, Offices in Arizona and Washington
• Lindsey Graham, Offices in South Carolina and Washington
• GOP - 202-863-8500

#10: Call Your Legislators . . . today

and tomorrow and the day after that.  As Michelle Bachmann says, it’s time to burn up the phones.

We are especially interested in hearing from police officers who were attacked by the Weathermen during the Chicago Days of Rage or who were targeted by their fire bombings and other attacks on police.  These stories are being suppressed by the academic establishment and especially PBS, which is trying to make the Weathermen out to be self-sacrificing cultural heroes fighting only for “peace.”  We need to tell the truth about them, their ties to foreign terrorist groups, their violence, and their real plans to imprison and “re-educate” ordinary Americans using Maoist brainwashing they used on their own cult followers.  It is a disgrace that schoolchildren are being taught to look up to these murderous lunatics.

Here are links to some of my previous blogging on the Weather Underground, Susan Sarandon (who plays the Kathy Boudin figure — as heroine — in Robert Redford’s vile and dull paean to the Weathermen, The Company You Keep)  and other sickening cop-killing radicals:

(Weathermen) Marilyn Buck, Cop Killer: Five Less Than Six Degrees of Separation From Barack Obama 

(Sarandon) Aesthetic Tragedy, New York Times Style: Mime Panic Buttons Defunded in California

(Sarandon) Rwanda and Columbine: The Politics of Forced Reconciliation

(Sarandon) Tina Fey Defiles Memory of Murdered Actor and Mocks Male Victims of Child Molestation While Denouncing “Hate Speech”

(Sarandon) The “Benjy Brigade”, Part 1: Boston’s Finest Mount an Attack on an Elderly Victim of Rape

(Weathermen) Something Else Barack Obama and Bernadine Dohrn Share, Besides Secrets with Terrorist Bill Ayers . . .

. . . they find vicious murders of women pretty funny.

Bernadine Dohrn in December 1969, joking about the Manson family murder of Sharon Tate:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!  Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson!

Barack Obama in October 2012, joking about O.J. Simpson’s attempt to flee justice after murdering his wife Nicole:

“You didn’t know this, but for all you moms and kids out there, you should have confidence that finally somebody is cracking down on Big Bird,” Obama said, alluding to the famous O.J. Simpson chase scene. “Elmo has been seen in a white Suburban. He’s driving for the border.”

Sharon Tate’s blood on her living room wall

Nicole Simpson’s blood on her backyard walkway

Who jokes about things like this?

Sharon Tate was nearly nine months pregnant at the time she was killed.  She had been stripped and tortured before death, a rope strung around her neck and hung from a beam.  She begged the killers to temporarily spare her life, kidnap her, and let her deliver her baby before they killed her.  They laughed and killed her anyway.  She was buried with the body of her deceased son cradled in her arms.

After Tex Watson stabbed Tate to death, Susan Atkins stuck her finger in Tate’s wounds and wrote the word “pig” on a wall with her blood, an act that delighted Bernadine Dohrn when she heard about it.  Dohrn and other Weathermen adopted a four-fingered “fork” salute to signify the act of stabbing Tate in her pregnant stomach.

Still not funny: Dohrn, now a “Children’s Rights Law Professor,” smiling with her FBI Most Wanted poster

Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City

by Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis 

And so we have this, a 51-page “study” by the esteemed sociologist of SEIU apologetics, Ruth Milkman, and her peers: Stephanie Luce (living wage academician and activist) and Penny Lewis (ACORN shill/labor prof).  These three ladies practice their activism and their academics on your dime, taxpayers, at the portentous-sounding Joseph P. Murphy Institute for Worker Education of the CUNY School of Professional Studies, which is not to be confused with the CUNY School of Unprofessional Studies, which is not to be confused with a dead parrot.

The JPMIWWE openly claims to be building the union movement and serving “the educational, policy, and research needs of unions and their members,” also all on your dime.

I bet you didn’t know you were paying for that.

Frances Fox Pivens is an associated scholar at the program, which explains a lot, though it doesn’t quite explain what someone whose contribution to society consists of encouraging people not to work actually does in a Labor Studies department.

Just one more drop in the ironic abyss of the intelligentsia.

A Dead Parrot

 Frances Fox Pivens

The Occupy study, which is delighting journalists and Media Studies Professionals everywhere by reinforcing their belief systems, asserts that Occupy Protesters are actually well-educated and employed, with a full third earning more than $100K per year.

Gee, how do you do that while living in a tent and banging on drums all day?

Well, it’s done with magic.  The magic is called sociology, an obscure religion practiced, according to Iris Murdoch, by people “who had got into an intellectual muddle early in life and never got out.”  Because sociologists don’t have to do things like build bridges or solve math problems or cure cancer, their definitions of science can be a bit loosey-goosey.

How loosey-goosey?  Well, this much: the Occupy study, which is 51 pages long and paid for with your tax dollars, arrived at the conclusion that all those Occupiers who slept, raped, pooped, and drummed in the streets for months on end were actually educated, employed, and well-off.  The researchers arrived at this conclusion by surveying an entirely different group of people who showed up for a different event months after the Occupy camps were disbanded.

In fact, only 10.3% of the people they surveyed said they had stayed in an Occupy camp.  The other 89.7% did not.

In case you’re wondering what the labor professors actually do when they aren’t doing this type of thing, it looks a heck of a lot like this.

Watcher’s Council Nominations – Post New Year’s Eve Edition

JoshuaPundit on Jan 02 2013 at 4:49 am | Filed under: Nominations

A few days ago, the glossy-haired fourth estate of the Occupy Movement, Naomi Wolf, joined other activist/journalists in accusing police, federal law enforcement, and “big banks” of committing “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent” over Occupy protesters last year.  According to Wolf, Occupy was totally subjected to torturous police crackdowns of their peaceful, non-violent, property-respecting protests, for no reason whatsoever.

Wolf’s description of this “corporate-state repression” is, to be kind, histrionic.  She sees herself and other protesters as deeply and dramatically victimized freedom fighters and visualizes Occupy’s many enemies as some sort of highly coordinated giant squid, or maybe a huge fascist octopus.  I thought it was more like code enforcement, myself.  The main concern of most taxpayers, after all, was the scabies and the defecating in the streets.

Though, I would happily draft the biggest fascist octopus available to silence the round-the-clock drumming circles.

In an editorial in The Guardian, Wolf vividly describes:

a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council [try not to scream as punctuation gets tortured].  And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

Elsewhere, just yesterday, police busted yet another peace-loving armed-to-the-teeth political activist.  Aaron Greene, reportedly of Harvard University and Kennedy School of Government, had ironically stuffed the Greenwich Village apartment he shares with his very pregnant socialite girlfriend with enough grenade launchers, shotguns, and unstable explosive powder to totally recreate the famous 1970 Weather Underground Greenwich Village Townhouse explosion that killed socialite Diana Oughton and two other Weather Underground terrorists.  The three accidentally blew themselves up as they assembled nail bombs that were to be used to kill scores of servicemen and their girlfriends at a dance at Fort Dix later that night (see here and here for other recent bomb-related arrests of “peaceful” Occupy protesters).

The cynical way of describing this confluence of events would go something like this:

Naomi Wolf/Occupy Movement Peaceful: 0   —   Police: 1 

But, why be cynical?  It’s the most magical time of the year.  And thanks to a “totally integrated” police response to Aaron Greene and Morgan Gliedman’s little home-made lab, Ms. Gliedman is safe and sound and reportedly giving birth in a hospital as I write this, rather than possibly having what’s left of her fingertips peeled off the remains of a smoldering pile of rubble, which was the fate Diana Oughton met in 1970.  Contrary to what Naomi Wolf seems to believe, police possibly saved these two, and a newborn, and who knows who else, today.  The explosives they were messing with were not for amateurs: more than one building reportedly had to be evacuated to deal with their venal stupidity.

1970 Greenwich Bomb Factory Explosion

Morgan Gliedman, 2013: New Mommy

Diana Oughton, 1970: Dead

Yeah, I know.  The resemblance between these two women is downright creepy.  You would think that Ms. Gliedman was trying to look like Diana Oughton.  She certainly appears to have been working on turning out like her.  Hopefully, she will someday have the decency to thank the cops who risked their lives and their own families’ future holiday memories in order to save her from the stupidity of trying to hatch a baby in a retro hippy bomb factory.

  Just Doing My Job, Ma’am

But if I were the police, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for an apology.  Gratitude for being rescued from their own stupidity has never been a virtue of the radical Left.

Naomi Wolf, for example, is shown at the top of this post being arrested at an Occupy protest last year.  By her own description, she apparently believes that the arrest arose merely from her vigorous efforts to educate ignorant police about protesters’ rights by citing a chapter about sidewalk permits from some book she once wrote.  I’m just going to say it: no matter how much we all wish we lived in a world where it was illegal for Naomi Wolf to write book chapters, that’s not what really happened.  Yet, here is just one portion of the breathless, hair-tousled, cop-loathing Patrick Henry-inspired facebook entry she penned to memorialize her arrest:

The [Occupy] protesters were being told that they needed to leave the sidewalk outside of the Huffington Post event because “Huffington Post had a permit” to control the use of the sidewalk. I have a chapter in Give Me Liberty on NYC permits so I knew that could not be accurate. Sidewalks are public spaces and can’t be leased by private entities. I asked for a copy of the permit . . . Some press reports say that I was arrested because I ignored police warnings to get off the sidewalk or that I was arrested for using a megaphone without a permit. Both of these are untrue. I told the protesters that the NYC permit requirement that states that using a megaphone is illegal. . .

And so on.  And so on.

Is anybody else itching to gnaw off their arm to escape this?  Remember, the cops have to be there.

In her recent Guardian editorial, Wolf breathlessly tells the whole world that’s watching (or at least the part of it that reads The Guardian) about a nefarious plot by police, the FBI, and “big banks” located in different cities to use actual cellphones to communicate with each other about completely non-violent Occupy protesters who pacifistically announced in writing in advance their intentions to invade banks, destroy property, and physically attack police officers.

Here’s how Wolf describes this mysterious law enforcement plot to talk with each other on the telephone:

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

Mystifying group disruptions?  Canister missiles to the skulls?  Faceless banks wanting protesters to wet their pants?  Bondage?

Now I’m just going to say this: would it be at all possible for modern feminists to at least try get through an essay about ANYTHING WHATSOEVER without mentioning “bondage”?  Please.

Also, having spent a very stinky week in August tramping around after Occupy protesters who were trying to shut down the Republican Convention in Tampa by creating pure physical revulsion through the wearing of giant sweaty pink vulva costumes, I think I speak with a frisson of authority when I say that there was absolutely no need for anyone to “coordinate” with “big banks” in order to get that crew to soil themselves.

Anyone who has ever failed to properly clean their pet gerbil’s cage knows exactly what the Occupy encampments in downtown Tampa smelled like, all on their own, with no pressure from Wachovia.

Really, do we have to do this Occupy/Sixties nostalgia thing all over again?  Because somebody’s going to get hurt.  It was the cops in Tampa who were being pummeled with abuse as they handed out bottled water to masked “anarchists” wandering around looking for trouble while being trailed by their own personal ACLU attorneys and gaggles of argumentative middle-aged women dressed like vaginas.

Yet, Naomi Wolf apparently still feels that when lit.crit. majors with nary a mouse-pelt of common sense between them announce portentously in AdBusters that they are going to arrive by the tens of thousands to smash bank windows and meaningfully blockade Staples stores in order to transform reality itself with their ideas, police and federal agents should just stick their fingers in their ears and let them do it.

Let me try to explain this is language that can be understood: the police have the right to pick up the phone and trade hippy-punch notes with Sgt. Friday out there on the Left Coast.  OK?

~~~

Speaking of radical chic, it was sort of a Weather Underground thing to mix babies with bomb making, from Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers to Eleanor Raskin and Jeff Jones.  Make that Judge Raskin.  The future judge and her future labor lobbyist spouse were busted in yet another apartment/bomb factory with baby in tow in 1981.

Robert Redford is about to release a film that actually romanticizes all those toddlers-n-TNT moments.  You know, the terrorists will be the good guys.

Remember 1981?  Here are just a few of the police officers who didn’t get to go home to their own children around that time because of the murder campaigns against cops waged by the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, and others.  Always remember that cop-killers are revered by the peace-loving Occupy Movement:

Murdered in Brinks Robbery: Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown

Murdered in Brinks Robbery: Sgt. Edward O’Grady

Murdered in Brinks Robbery: Brinks Security Guard Peter Paige

Murdered in the San Francisco Police Station Bombing: Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell

Murdered during the Assata Shakur escape: Trooper Werner Foerster

It’s only a matter of time — and the sort of self-indulgent cop-hating rhetoric Wolf and many others are spewing — before something ends in tears.

You shouldn’t serve less time for stabbing someone just because she is your wife or was once your wife.  Or your husband.

The law shouldn’t make exceptions for people based on their identities.  Criminal acts should be the only factor determining punishment.  Of course, there is manslaughter and there is murder; crimes of passion and random violence; there are many factors to be considered when two people live together and the relationship is a violent one.  But the goal of making the criminal act, not the relationship, the deciding factor for the punishment is and always has been a good goal.

Those early domestic violence advocates were dealing with a judicial system that did, until surprisingly recently, make it exceedingly difficult to put violent offenders behind bars if the targets of their violence were their own family members.  Things are better now.  They aren’t perfect.  They’re more equal.  The overall path has been towards equality.  And as I write this, I know I will hear from people who feel they were given a raw deal because they are men and the feminists have taken over the courts, so let me say this up front: I happen to advocate for radical equality, not special treatment of anyone, unless they are children, for obvious reasons.  I’m also very suspicious of feminist legal ventures that attempt to excuse murders by women who claim they were suffering from battered woman syndrome and are therefore not responsible for their actions.  If self defense is the defense, so be it.  But there are plenty of women who belong in prison, or deserve to stay there, as much as any other murderer, despite the fact that their victim once battered them.

Having worked with the domestic violence movement, I know enough about the dynamics of the crime to know that men are not infrequently victims too.  That’s actually more reason for us to pursue every domestic violence case objectively and with little consideration for the voluntary relationship involved, except insomuch as the technical elements of that relationship can be considered evidence of a crime.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between the legal reforms of the 1970′s that demanded equal treatment for blacks, or women, or gays, versus the special rights movements that subsumed these earlier efforts.  For a brief window of time, equality was the ambition, and a lot of good came of that.  Those healthy legal efforts led to new sex crime laws, for example, that punished the offender based on his behavior, not on the victim’s identity.  They opened the door for prosecutions of men who raped men and the prosecution of female rapists — virtually all of whom target children.  They enabled battered women to see their violent husbands serve time for beating them, and visa versa.

But then the emphasis shifted to special rights, special protections, affirmative action justice and identity-based law enforcement.  The politicization of crime is spinning wildly out of control these days — illegal immigrants are given special leniency when they can’t produce a driver’s license in Los Angeles, for example; the hate crimes industry is a bottomless pit of prejudicial law enforcement; affirmative action poisons every aspect of employment law and equal rights; federal meddling casually threatens police with career-destroying racial charges for simply trying to do their jobs.   The sheer notion of equality before the law is deemed risible by the “best” legal minds.

Equality isn’t the goal anymore.

We need to get back to that moment when it was the goal.  Because in addition to being the right thing to do, equality worked a hell of a lot better than the alternative.  Inequality of any type, I’ve come to believe, is the handmaiden of leniency.  When any crime is politicized, the courts lose the moral authority they need to maintain every law.

I thought of this when I saw the following headline in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today:

Slain woman predicted her own death

Donna Kristofak was terrified and letting the court know it. John S. Kristofak, who was her husband for 19 years, had been arrested six months earlier as he chased her in a Wal-Mart parking lot. In his car were a butcher’s knife and what police called “a suicide note.”

During a court hearing Oct. 12, Mrs. Kristofak begged a Cobb County judge not to release him from jail. “I fear for my life,” she told Superior Court Judge Adele Grubbs, telling the judge that a court-issued order of protection would not stop her crazed ex-spouse.

Early Thursday, fugitive squads arrested Kristofak, 58, after a short struggle at a Motel 6 in Union City, ending a publicized five-day manhunt. He was charged with doing exactly what he’d promised earlier this year: murder.

I have a lot of questions about this case.  What the hell was this man doing out of prison for time served, seven months after trying to kidnap and plotting (with evidence) to murder his ex-wife last March?  Why wasn’t he prosecuted for attempted kidnapping and given a real sentence?  Why wasn’t he given a sentence enhancement for repeatedly violating the restraining order in place against him before the March incident?  What happened to the mandatory minimum of 10 years without parole for kidnapping in Georgia?  Was a protective order used in lieu of prosecuting him for kidnapping?

Why does anybody get time served and probation for attempting to kidnap, with the written intent to kill, anyone?  Ex-wife or no ex-wife?

The judge in this case has more explaining to do, as does the prosecutor and the defense attorney and everyone else involved in what may be an illegal plea deal that left an unsurprised woman unsurprisingly dead.  I’m not saying that any of them treated John Kristofak with special leniency because his target was his ex-wife, but why was he released from prison with such a paltry sentence when he had just set out to kill someone, threatened her repeatedly, stalked her, and then tried to kidnap her from a public place?

Kristofak remained in jail until October, when he cut a plea deal with the court that would sentence him to seven months in jail and have him serve the rest of the 5-year term on probation.

According to the transcript of the guilty plea Oct. 12, Donna Kristofak told the judge: “I definitely want a permanent order of no contact. May I also say that a protective order existed the night of the arrest and I do not feel that will necessarily bring safety.”

Judge Grubbs: “I understand that. It’s a little different with a TPO and filing a protective order. … If he violates the order in this case he gets picked up by the probation violation and put in jail immediately.”

Mrs. Kristofak: “Yes, your honor, I respect that and thank you for that. My fear is that I may not survive that …”

“I understand,” the judge said, cutting in.

“… I fear for my life,” Mrs. Kristofak continued.

“I can’t tell you with 100 percent, I’d be lying to you and I am sorry you are in that position,” said the judge, sounding sympathetic. “But whatever I do, you can go out and, you’ve got that risk but you will have that … copy of the protective order so the minute you get nervous about anything you call the police. … It’s as close as we can get to 100 percent.”

“Thank you, your honor,” Mrs. Kristofak said. “May I ask, your honor, that it is on the record that I fear for my life?”

“It is on the record,” said Judge Grubbs . . .

On December 22, John Kristofak killed Donna Kristofak in the garage of her home.

Keeping Kristofak in prison would have been 100%.  Apparently, the restraining order was a giant zero.

If Kristofak was treated with special leniency in the March crime because his victim was his wife, something needs to be done about that.

If Kristofak was treated with run-or-the-mill leniency for no special reason, something needs to be done about that, too.

 read the article here

Great Leader chatter about Obama healing the nation is engulfing every network news station — including Fox — following the mass killing in Connecticut.  Was it always this way?  I’m thinking back on Columbine, David Koresh, Oklahoma City — is anyone else getting nostalgic for mere partisan political jabs in the wake of grim and senseless violence?  There is something profoundly creepy about the bureaucratic/therapeutic/paternalistic vibe emanating from Washington.  Of course, this is part of the Department of Justice’s ongoing efforts to expand their mission beyond crime control . . . to social control.  Flying under the flag of “anti-bullying,” “hate hurts,” “restorative justice,” and “prisoner re-entry,” the Department of Justice continues its Great March behind the Great Leader into people’s lives, this time using the excuse of a nut with a gun.

The goal isn’t merely gun control.  Gun control is a speed bump on the way to social control.

In order to align law enforcement’s activities with the agenda of collectivism, it is necessary to either therapeuticize or politicize every crime.  One or the other: a school shooter is generally therapeuticized.  He falls into the category of “victim,” probably of bullying, so long as he didn’t express any of the select group of “hatreds” that are deemed atrocities and thus politicized.  Luckily for school shooters who target females, that particular preference has been slotted back into the inconsequential category, and as it is the only category of shooter choice that has manifested in recent school shootings, school shooters generally just get counted as victims of social suffering — the therapeutic slot.  The Department of Justice is making noises about social bullying today, for example — it’s the stuff on which they can build expensive and intrusive bureaucracies without violating Eric Holder’s allergy to incarceration and law enforcement itself.

So, expect a lot of talk about bullying from the nation’s federal law enforcement agency — and everyone else — in coming weeks.  Ironically, early reports suggest that the killer in this case may have been systematically encouraged to see himself as a victim of “bullying” and social maladjustment.  There’s something to contemplate as the experts descend on schools throughout the nation to cash in on the actions of one unstable individual: might we produce fewer school shooters if we had fewer school professionals encouraging children to see themselves as victims — of garden-variety bullying, social slights, and social exclusion?

For if there’s one common thread that ties together otherwise diverse killers, bank robbers, terrorists, street thugs, and assorted psychopaths, it’s self-pity.  So as the armies of school psychologists and grief counselors and other soft-soap contract-remunerated social engineers fan out across the land, think about both intended and unintended consequences.  It’s bad enough that the federal government is using a tragedy to grow the bureaucratic-therapeutic federal government machinery, but is it even worse than that?  Are we growing future criminals in the process of therapeuticizing violence?

I was driving through South Georgia when the news reports of the Connecticut shootings broke.  It may be Terrific in Tifton but it’s darn hard to get A.M. radio reception from the highway there, so we had to listen to public radio.  ”Obama Will Save Us” positive visualizations popped up immediately, with NPR devoting its earliest hours to Dear Leader chatter and gushing praise for the FBI.  Why the FBI?  Because the federal government was on the way to save the day.  Not that they actually did anything.  But the purpose of NPR is to justify federal powers and federal funding — for themselves and for actual government officials.  So they talked obsessively about how wonderful it was that the FBI was doing this and that for local law enforcement, even though local law enforcement was doing the actual work.

The therapeuticization of justice dictates two responses to crime.  Offenders are transformed into victims of society, and victims are transformed into suspects, at least until they demonstrate that they are also willing to blame society and not the individual offender for victimizing them.  Once everyone agrees that society is at fault, the experts can step in to dictate the cure, which involves creating more therapeutic non-incarcertive responses to crime.  Response is an artful term: it expresses the bureaucratic view that we are one enormous sensate organism reacting with animal reflexes to pain or shock.  If criminals are simply part of the sensate whole, how can we blame them for their actions?  It’s like blaming us . . . well, we are blaming us.  We are all responsible: nobody is responsible.

The alternative view is to accept the existence of moral choice and individual responsibility for crime, followed by judgment and consequences.  As readers of this blog have learned from the anonymous Professor Dunderpants of CUNY’s Media Studies Department, merely believing in such things is considered terribly primitive these days, and not the sort of good primitive that stimulates the anthropology department.  It is bad primitive to  harbor a secret belief in free will these days, let alone express it publicly.

The power to transform criminals into victims and victims into suspects — to dictate not just the administration of justice to the guilty but the emotional responses of everyone to crime — is a tremendous, intrusive power cupped in the hands of the bureaucrats calling the shots.  Fascist power, one might say.  Soft fascism.  The creepy kind.

Therapeuticizing criminals is the end-game of the social roots-theory of crime.  Roots theory was invented by sociologists in the 1960′s who wished to displace responsibility for criminal actions away from the criminal himself and onto society — onto injustice arising from poverty and prejudice in particular.  Poor and minority offenders, the story goes, are not responsible for their actions: they are merely reacting to injustice directed at them when they steal your car or mug your husband or rape your sister.  And social engineering is, of course, the only known cure.  Forty years later, the roots-theory movement has expanded to the point that it may even be applied to a young white male from an upper-class suburb who just slaughtered 20 innocent schoolchildren.  In coming days, even the most rational expressions of anger at the shooter will be quickly smothered by ministrations of therapeuticized justice in the government and the media.

Let the intensive policing of the innocents begin.

          ~~~~~

Related:  Lester Jackson has a compelling article about Justice Sotomayor and judicial sympathy for repeat killers in American Thinker today.  It’s a timely read:

 As detailed elsewhere, pro-murderer media suppression of the truth has played a major role in enabling a wholesale evisceration of capital punishment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently provided a graphic example, one that would be excruciatingly painful to survivors of murder victims if they knew about it. Many people unfamiliar with the practices and philosophy of the current Supreme Court would very likely be shocked to learn just what values some justices hold. . .

When pro-murderer justices seek — often successfully — to focus upon criminals rather than crimes, the result is to grant certain perpetrators greater protection against punishment for their brutality than others who commit identical or less serious acts without Supreme Court succor. The reductio ad absurdum, of course, is the Court’s fiat proclaiming a Constitutional right, nowhere to be found in the real document, for the most depraved and vicious barbarians . . .

Read the rest here.

And see also:   Rwanda and Columbine: The Politics of Forced Reconciliation

Watcher’s Council Nominations – It’s Beginning To Look A lot Like Christmas Edition

JoshuaPundit on Dec 12 2012 at 3:38 am |

Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.

There is currently a conversation on the internet about whether “girls” are excluded unfairly from “geek” culture. I came across this fascinating post from a young woman named Serenity Caldwell, who took up the conversation as an opportunity to talk about her constant fear that members of the “geek” community might mistake her for Sarah Palin. By which she means “stupid” and not worthy to be a “geek.” She calls these gatekeepers the “fraud police,” and they apparently have a tendency to make “girls” unwelcome in “geek” society.

Her name is Serenity, she’s 24 years old, went to Hampshire and lives in Boston, so I guess the confusion with Sarah Palin is natural.

Anyway, I feel compelled to comment, and she posted this on Tumblr, where you are only permitted to “like,” and then only if you’re a member of the club. I don’t think they allow monkeys, and my feelings are a little more nuanced. So here, for whatever it’s worth, a few things:

1. I was at a wretched party recently. Lawyers and doctors trying to force their business cards on each other. Food was good. Anyway, I was talking to someone in the corner and said, “Maybe in the next life I’ll be good at this.” He said, “The secret is not to care.”

I could write a book about the wisdom hidden in this, but instead I will just point out that any social group is composed of a large number of actual people with diverse and complicated motives for wanting to interact with other people in the group. Making newcomers feel welcome is usually surprisingly high on the list of things that people in these room (any rooms) want, sometimes even too high. Humans are like that. But they want other things, too — food, shelter, procreation, good verdicts. This is also human nature. I am not saying this to imply that people should put up with jerks. I just mean you have to learn to route around people who aren’t paying the kind of attention to you that you’d like. That’s what the internet is for, after all. Networking.

2. It’s possible that the members of what Caldwell calls the “fraud police” know more about fear than she credits them for, and that insight might suggest to her some strategies for dealing with them. Just putting that out there. Maybe I am saying you should (sometimes) put up with jerks. People have hidden depths.

3. Okay, Sarah Palin. I’m not going to belabor the obvious point that some people consider Sarah Palin to be a victim of the same dynamic that Caldwell is talking about. That would look too much like literary criticism. But I would ask Caldwell to think about the fact that there might be a statistically significant fraction of the population who (a) are geeks and (b) actually, honestly like Sarah Palin. Is an unfunny joke and the approbation that might come from broadcasting tedious and shopworn political opinions in a forum where those tedious and shopworn political opinions aren’t exactly novel worth alienating that person?

Answer? Sure, maybe. Am I telling her to like Sarah Palin, or at least shut up about it? No. Seriously. This is the internet, she can say what she likes. My advice is for the young conservative geek who might otherwise have found what she has to say compelling or at least interesting. Or just might want to talk to people like this at parties.

“The secret is not to care.”

4. I think there should be a law that requires the word “geek” to be set off in ironic quotation marks and hyperlinked to the Urban Dictionary definition of “humble brag”.   See also the “Status” chapter in Keith Johnstone’s Impro.

5. Okay, literary criticism. Can’t help myself. The author is a graduate of one of the most expensive colleges in the country, lives in one of the most expensive cities in the country, and has a real job as a writer in a world where that is not a small accomplishment. She clearly is being brought along and mentored by a variety of successful people in her chosen field. And yet she’s trying to associate herself with this discussion about women who are afraid to be heard in the public sphere.

Note that I’m not saying I doubt that she, like all women, experiences sexism. I just find it interesting that she begins the discussion of sexism in her life by denigrating Sarah Palin and ends it with a denunciation of “boisterous braggarts who come into a situation ignorant to the facts and who want to be the center of the discussion—even if they have no idea what the discussion is.”

Her conclusion about the “braggarts” is: “there’s a certain sort of smug satisfaction that comes with taking them down—it’s clear they don’t respect your subject, so why should you respect them?” Kinda ugly when you take it out of context.

Anyway — maybe her status anxiety has more to do with class then gender?

But then something shows up in the post to cheer you up.  I received a delightful piece of hate mail yesterday.  It’s nice to see people making an effort.

The letter is from “Steven,” who claims to be a professor of English and Media Studies but wishes to conceal his real identity.  This raises an obvious question: wouldn’t a professor of media studies know that his e-mail can be traced to the CUNY (CCNY) server from which he sent it?  I’m no Steve Jobs, but even I get that.

I actually sympathize with Steven’s technological pratfalls.  The internet remains mysterious to me, too.  It feels like a sentient yet alien creature living in my house, even inside of me.  We sometimes forget the uncanny nature of modern electronic communication.

Gregor Samsa, having a bad morning

One of the unpleasant uncannyness-es of the internet is its ability to blow past all the social barriers that once defended against unwanted intimacy.  The last thing we need today is more intimacy: we are already practically living in each other’s tonsils.  A dear friend of mine who went a little unhinged while writing her dissertation (an entirely ordinary thing, and she did it charmingly) took to calling language “a virus.”  For a long time, I politely nodded at this, while secretly wondering what the heck she was talking about.  But I think I finally get it.

I am a quotidian thinker: un-theoretical, literal, plodding, and slow — a soil person, not a fire or light person.  In my earth-clumped mind,  Language is a virus means that the antibiotics we currently have won’t work against it.  This is all the more reason to long for the days when one could live like the characters in I Know Where I’m Going!, a movie I recommend to “Steven” to cheer him up, because the very fact of my existence appears to have gotten him very, very, very down.

It’s a nice movie to watch when you are tired of words, because, throughout the entire film, the characters can hardly hear each other, for the wind is howling so loudly.

Among its many virtues, I Know Where I’m Going! introduces the uninitiated to the existence of the Corryvreckan Whirlpool.  Once you know that the Corryvreckan Whirlpool exists, the earth feels like a different place.  Here is some interesting trivia I did not know until I consulted Wikipedia.  If language is a virus, Wikipedia is the herpes of the internet.  But, a good herpes:

In mid-August 1947, the author George Orwell nearly drowned in the Corryvreckan whirlpool.  Seeking to focus his main energies on completing a novel destined to become the dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell had fled the distractions of London in April 1947 and taken up temporary residence on the isolated island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides.

On the return leg of an August boating daytrip to nearby Glengarrisdale, Orwell seems to have misread the local tide tables and steered into rough seas that drove his boat near to the whirlpool. When the boat’s small engine suddenly sheared off from its mounts and dropped into the sea, Orwell’s party resorted to oars and was saved from drowning only when the whirlpool began to recede and the group managed to paddle the distressed craft to a rocky outcrop about a mile distant from the Jura coastline. The boat capsized as the group tried to disembark, leaving Orwell, his two companions, and his three-year-old son stranded on the uninhabited outcrop with no supplies or means of escape. They were rescued only when passing lobstermen noticed a fire the party had lit in an effort to keep warm.Orwell completed a first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four about three months after the Corryvreckan incident, with the final manuscript not finished until late 1948.

And here is an excellent story by Robert McCrumb that goes into more detail about Orwell’s encounter with the Corryvreckan Whirlpool.  Every detail of this event grows more interesting as you examine it: the great author misreads a text and nearly drowns for it; Homeric oars must be resorted to when the engine falls off.  Don’t you feel better about the world knowing that passing lobstermen are responsible for the existence of a great literary classic denouncing totalitarian intellectual oppression?  Lobstermen plucked Orwell from the sea!

Somewhere inside, a tremendous unifying metaphor lurks.

Anyway.  Onto Steven.  I think I finally understand why reading his letter made me think of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  It’s the tone.  One of the difficult things about reading Kafka is the unpleasantness of his main characters.  Even as you witness them suffering horribly, you find yourself inching to the door to escape their elemental whininess:

I’m wondering, Dr. Trent, whether this is blog is a template or if you penned the directions for comments: “Please be nice and tolerant, don’t offend. Thanks!”

I ask because the level of vitriol in your writing seriously undermines your arguments. The problem with allowing emotion, especially anger and contempt, to drive your arguments is that it conveys your fanaticism and leaves your readers convinced your mind was made up before you even began your research.

Now, I have to thank Steven for bringing this information to my attention.  I am obviously deeply opposed to niceness and tolerance, and I had no idea that my readers were being subjected to such a demand when they deigned to weigh in.  Yes, Steven, this blog is a template.  And I intend to obliterate those comment directives as soon as I figure out how to use the internet .

I also like the use of the word “vitriol” here, but I wonder if the sentence wouldn’t have been stronger if Steven had left off the word “seriously.”  Merely undermining my arguments seems work enough, and I don’t think there is such a thing as unserious undermining.

Or is there?

I do not, however, intend to abandon fanaticism, anger, or contempt.  I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with them.

Here, that strange and creepy thing about the internet rears its head: Steven assumes a troubling intimacy with me.  It would be easy just to make fun of his hapless efforts to sound rational and objective — allowing emotion, especially anger and contempt, to drive your arguments – but there is something darker underneath all the academic foppery.  There is an ugly need to control people, to get into their heads and classify thoughts as appropriate and inappropriate, politically correct and incorrect.  Orwell would have quite a bit to say about Steven, if he stooped to bother, but my immediate thought upon reading his letter is of the quotidian, earth-clot sort:

Do not date this man.  He is an asshole.

Or maybe he’s just a tenured professor of media studies.  Some jobs, my clever husband said to me, warp all but the strongest personalities.  Steven continues:            

It’s quite possible that your opinions about the people and events you discuss have serious validity, but the value I attach to your blog is not one you will likely appreciate: I’m going to use it to teach my college media and English students the perils of attacking your readers with furious opinions and political agendas while you call them “facts.” Over the years, I’ve learned how easily they see through hysteria and propaganda, so I expect they’ll have no trouble deconstructing and discrediting a significant portion of your postings.

Again: would anyone want to date this man?

I am worried about the literacy of university professors.  Steven says he teaches media studies and English.  I certainly wouldn’t sign my name to something this inflated and vapidly aggressive and sanctimonious; then again, I wouldn’t write it either.  But stepping back from — oh, content and intent — shouldn’t university professors be a bit better than this at expressing themselves?

In the third brief paragraph of a tiny letter, Steven commits the “serious” redundancy again.  Doubling a redundancy does not minimize it, for good diction does not operate like the Federal Reserve.  What is “serious validity”?  Something is valid, or it is not.  I should note here that the post Steven criticizes is about terrorist Judith Clark and her apologists at the New York Times.  In the imaginary universe of the Times, and apparently Steven’s CCNY classroom, murderers like Clark are actually love-muffins spreading sunshine from their prison cells because the people they killed were pigs who aren’t really human, just cops.

You have to trot a bit to keep up here.  Shedding your moral consistency helps.

the value I attach to your blog is not one you will likely appreciate

Oh no.

I’m going to use it to teach my college media and English students the perils of attacking your readers with furious opinions and political agendas while you call them “facts.”

Steven is going to teach his students about journalistic ethics by anonymously attacking a stranger with inappropriately personal comments.  Do you want to know more?  I know I do:

I’ll leave an additional observation here as well. How many times have you addressed poverty and molestation as a cause of crime? How many articles have you written on police deceit, abuse and corruption? How often have you criticized corrections policies designed to exact revenge and ignore abuse instead of combat recidivism? Until your perspectives prove a more balanced approach to these issues, I will assume you argue for a rigid and unforgiving and, incidentally, deeply anti-Christian approach to crime.

Apparently, I have not criticized policies the appropriate number of times, nor have I scribbled enough on deceit.  I have failed to balance my voice in ways that satisfy our Steven.  He will punish me for being rigid and awaits my rehabilitation.

Sounds like someone needs to spend a little less time pawing over Fifty Shades of Grey.

But, seriously.

It is sad to imagine anyone spending classroom time performing coarse and hysterical deconstructions of blog posts.  And I say that as the author of blogposts.  So, on the off chance that Professor Dunderpants’ students are reading this, let me offer a gentle suggestion: Your school is not giving you a quality education for the money.

If you want to get really depressed about how much money and time you are wasting, I suggest you read an actually unnerving (borderline uncanny) blog — The Last Psychiatrist, specifically his two-part posting, Hipsters on Food Stamps, ought to bring the sensation of malaise barreling down on even the cheeriest sort.

I realize that it’s getting late in the post, and I haven’t said anything yet directly in response to Steven’s criticisms of me.  In keeping with his tone, I suppose I could just argue that I’m being a very disobedient little girl today, but I’m going to offer a bit more.

It doesn’t seem as if Steven actually disagrees with the serious validity of the people and events I discuss.  What he seems to want to do is to ignore my arguments about people and events and deconstruct my writerly identity instead.  This is what far too many people in the academy do all day long.  Rather than teach their students valid things about people and events, all of which takes work, they engage in the masturbatory rituals of deconstruction, which — despite the magic vocabulary involved — generally boils down to one very simple chant:

I am better at social justice than you are.

This is all Steven was writing to me to say.  He felt entitled to say it anonymously because he was speaking for a mob.  I am better at social justice than you are is the only intellectual contribution some tenured faculty make throughout their entire careers these days.

Here’s something else Steven’s students should know: education should be about things that exist somewhere other than your phone, or your professor’s warped and outsized ego.

Beware the Corryvreckan Whirlpool.