Monday, November 11, 2019
Prof who fled communism quits 'communist' university in America
Gave up tenured Ivy League
post amid 'social justice' demands
post amid 'social justice' demands
A professor who grew up in communist Romania has revealed that he quit his tenured position at Columbia University in New York City because the Ivy League school is "on its way toward full blown communism."
Prof. Andrei Serban, an award-winning director who taught in the theater department, recalled the "social justice" demands that prompted his move in a Romanian TV interview translated by a Romanian-American immigrant, the College Fix reported.
In one instance, he was told as the chairman of a faculty hiring committee that he could not chose a heterosexual married man like himself, even if that person was the most qualified for the job.
In one instance, he was told as the chairman of a faculty hiring committee that he could not chose a heterosexual married man like himself, even if that person was the most qualified for the job.
"I felt like I was living under communism again," he said in the interview on Romania's TVR1 on Oct. 26.
The TV host expressed incredulity several times in the interview at the state of the American higher education system.
In another instance, he was said he was pressured to admit a male-to-female transgender applicant who auditioned as Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet."
Serban said his colleagues expressed displeasure with him stating that this person could not become Juliet.
It was the last straw, for me, he said, and he resigned, explaining he could not violate his principles.
The TV host expressed incredulity several times in the interview at the state of the American higher education system.
In another instance, he was said he was pressured to admit a male-to-female transgender applicant who auditioned as Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet."
Serban said his colleagues expressed displeasure with him stating that this person could not become Juliet.
It was the last straw, for me, he said, and he resigned, explaining he could not violate his principles.
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‘He’s not a king!’
I recently spoke with an old acquaintance, just out of government, who had worked in the Intelligence Community in Washington. The venue was a neighborhood party in a deep-blue area of the U.S., in one of the highest of high-income ZIP codes.
As the lone conservative I tend to tread carefully in these discussions. However, I thought she might have a conservative bent, as she seemed to share my mistrust of government. When she first started working for the I.C., she told me she was waiting to meet "the adult in the room," as everyone she interacted with seemed clueless. After a few years, she eventually realized "there was no adult in the room!"
So I was interested in her take on the Trump impeachment process, then just getting under way. When I brought it up, she immediately got excited. "It's worse than you think; it's worse than anyone knows!" I wondered what might be worse than what I've read. I also wondered which side she felt was acting worse — Trump or the swamp?
I soon learned she was upset with Trump for supposedly talking to Ukraine about Joe Biden. I asked, quite innocently, wouldn't you expect him to look into it? After all, Trump is the head of the law enforcement community, and Biden's son was getting over $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company for a position that he was clearly unqualified to hold. Wasn't that suspicious? She airily waived off my concerns. "Oh, everyone in Washington does that kind of thing."
What particularly galled her was that Trump had changed the procedures, placing his calls to other heads of state under high classification status, so they could not be seen by others in government. She considered this an outrageous breach of protocol. How could Trump do such a thing?
I pointed out that he had a good reason; Trump was the victim of two major leaks in his first month, where the full texts of his calls were given to the press. Wasn't that also outrageous and unprecedented? And given the strong possibility of further leaks, wouldn't classifying his calls be the prudent thing to do?
At this point, her eyes flashed in anger. "He can't just change things like that! He's not a king!"
It was a nice party, and I didn't want things to escalate. I took an opportunity to break off our conversation, leaving her still unsure of my political proclivities.
But to me, her statement — "He's not a king!" — perfectly encapsulates the attitude and entitlement of the swamp.
To them, the unelected bureaucrats are the real stewards of the government, not some outsider who just happened to win a presidential election. How dare Trump parachute in and disrupt the status quo? Never mind that he ran specifically on a platform to "Drain the Swamp" and make government more accountable. To her, Trump was just a gauche usurper, an outsider who had no business making changes to the almighty bureaucratic monolith.
So if President Trump isn't the king, then who is? The answer is obvious: the swamp.
The king is dead; long live the swamp!
As the lone conservative I tend to tread carefully in these discussions. However, I thought she might have a conservative bent, as she seemed to share my mistrust of government. When she first started working for the I.C., she told me she was waiting to meet "the adult in the room," as everyone she interacted with seemed clueless. After a few years, she eventually realized "there was no adult in the room!"
So I was interested in her take on the Trump impeachment process, then just getting under way. When I brought it up, she immediately got excited. "It's worse than you think; it's worse than anyone knows!" I wondered what might be worse than what I've read. I also wondered which side she felt was acting worse — Trump or the swamp?
I soon learned she was upset with Trump for supposedly talking to Ukraine about Joe Biden. I asked, quite innocently, wouldn't you expect him to look into it? After all, Trump is the head of the law enforcement community, and Biden's son was getting over $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company for a position that he was clearly unqualified to hold. Wasn't that suspicious? She airily waived off my concerns. "Oh, everyone in Washington does that kind of thing."
What particularly galled her was that Trump had changed the procedures, placing his calls to other heads of state under high classification status, so they could not be seen by others in government. She considered this an outrageous breach of protocol. How could Trump do such a thing?
I pointed out that he had a good reason; Trump was the victim of two major leaks in his first month, where the full texts of his calls were given to the press. Wasn't that also outrageous and unprecedented? And given the strong possibility of further leaks, wouldn't classifying his calls be the prudent thing to do?
At this point, her eyes flashed in anger. "He can't just change things like that! He's not a king!"
It was a nice party, and I didn't want things to escalate. I took an opportunity to break off our conversation, leaving her still unsure of my political proclivities.
But to me, her statement — "He's not a king!" — perfectly encapsulates the attitude and entitlement of the swamp.
To them, the unelected bureaucrats are the real stewards of the government, not some outsider who just happened to win a presidential election. How dare Trump parachute in and disrupt the status quo? Never mind that he ran specifically on a platform to "Drain the Swamp" and make government more accountable. To her, Trump was just a gauche usurper, an outsider who had no business making changes to the almighty bureaucratic monolith.
So if President Trump isn't the king, then who is? The answer is obvious: the swamp.
The king is dead; long live the swamp!
Jay Latimer is an international businessman, writer and investor who has worked in investment banking for several multinational banks in New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing.
Yes, the English Language is
Source: National Review
Yes, the English Language Is Important
There’s no substitute as a source of social cohesion
Yes, the English Language Is Important
 |
| Participants carry the American flag during a Fourth of July parade in Los Angeles in 2013. (Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters) |
There’s no substitute as a source of social cohesion
I wouldn’t have thought the importance of the English language in America would be controversial, but our era is full of surprises.
When I was on Morning Joe the other day talking about my book, The Case for Nationalism, the Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked, in a skeptical tone, if we should be protecting the status of the English language in our culture.
My emphasis on English was also a bee in the bonnet of Charles King, the book’s reviewer at Foreign Affairs, who said I make “the strangest arguments, which collapse upon the slightest interrogation.” He includes in this category my statement that English is a “pillar of our national identity.”
He further says, accusingly, that one of the things I can’t imagine America without is a dominant role for the English language. In his view, a genuinely inclusive nationalism has to jettison “the idea that liberty is somehow less American if you call it la libertad.”
I never suggested, as you might expect, that saying the word “liberty” in a foreign language somehow negates the value of liberty or makes liberty less American, which would be absurd (I’ll return to all the other preposterous things in the King review at another time). I do, though, spend a lot of time discussing the importance of a common language as a source of social cohesion. Why?
Because our sense of community obviously depends heavily on it. Where a common language is present, it creates a cultural glue; where it isn’t, there are usually deep-seated divisions.
Nice, pleasant Canada has been nearly torn apart in recent decades by the presence of a French-speaking province, Quebec, in an English-speaking country. Equally nice, pleasant Belgium is perennially riven between its French-speaking and Dutch-speaking regions. Spain has been buffeted by an independence movement in Catalonia, where, despite the best efforts of the Spanish central government over the centuries, Catalan is still spoken by much of the population.
On the other hand, the cleavage of Charlemagne’s empire in the 843 Treaty of Verdun between German- and Romance-speaking parts, corresponding roughly to Germany (in all its various forms over the centuries) and France, has endured for more than a millennium.
People have long cared about the status of their language. As early as the fifteenth century, proto-Protestant Hussite rebels agitated in the Holy Roman Empire for more Czech officeholders and greater recognition of their own tongue. The revolt was both religious and national, against an emperor deemed “a great and brutal enemy of the Czech kingdom and language.” Years after the Hussite rebellion had ended, dissidents still accused the pope of seeking “to destroy, wipe out, and utterly suppress the Czech language.”
Language runs very deep. Benedict Anderson writes of how each language “looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past.” This is why languages “appear rooted beyond almost anything else in contemporary societies. At the same time, nothing connects us affectively to the dead more than language.” The weight of the words “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” for instance, “derives only in part from their solemn meaning; it comes also from an as-it-were ancestral ‘Englishness.’”
Indeed, the spark for nationalist movements has often been historians, writers, lexicographers, and folklorists who celebrated and promoted vernacular languages and excavated a glorious literary past. The German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, who famously collected folk-tales, nodded to the primacy of language with its logo “In the beginning was the word.” Poets came to exemplify the national traditions and aspirations of their countries: The Irish had W. B. Yeats, the Poles had Adam Mickiewicz, the Zionists had Haim Bialik, and so on.
This was true as well of composers (Franz Liszt for the Hungarians, Frédéric Chopin for the Poles, Antonin Dvorak for the Czechs), painters (Jacques-Louis David for the French, Henry Fuseli for the Swiss, Viktor Vasnetsov for the Russians), and novelists of great historical epics such as Walter Scott and Leo Tolstoy. The spectacle of opera provided a particularly powerful tableau for national themes.
In short, language occupies an outsized space in the cultural life of nations, and the role of English here in the United States is no different.
When I was on Morning Joe the other day talking about my book, The Case for Nationalism, the Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked, in a skeptical tone, if we should be protecting the status of the English language in our culture.
My emphasis on English was also a bee in the bonnet of Charles King, the book’s reviewer at Foreign Affairs, who said I make “the strangest arguments, which collapse upon the slightest interrogation.” He includes in this category my statement that English is a “pillar of our national identity.”
He further says, accusingly, that one of the things I can’t imagine America without is a dominant role for the English language. In his view, a genuinely inclusive nationalism has to jettison “the idea that liberty is somehow less American if you call it la libertad.”
I never suggested, as you might expect, that saying the word “liberty” in a foreign language somehow negates the value of liberty or makes liberty less American, which would be absurd (I’ll return to all the other preposterous things in the King review at another time). I do, though, spend a lot of time discussing the importance of a common language as a source of social cohesion. Why?
Because our sense of community obviously depends heavily on it. Where a common language is present, it creates a cultural glue; where it isn’t, there are usually deep-seated divisions.
Nice, pleasant Canada has been nearly torn apart in recent decades by the presence of a French-speaking province, Quebec, in an English-speaking country. Equally nice, pleasant Belgium is perennially riven between its French-speaking and Dutch-speaking regions. Spain has been buffeted by an independence movement in Catalonia, where, despite the best efforts of the Spanish central government over the centuries, Catalan is still spoken by much of the population.
On the other hand, the cleavage of Charlemagne’s empire in the 843 Treaty of Verdun between German- and Romance-speaking parts, corresponding roughly to Germany (in all its various forms over the centuries) and France, has endured for more than a millennium.
People have long cared about the status of their language. As early as the fifteenth century, proto-Protestant Hussite rebels agitated in the Holy Roman Empire for more Czech officeholders and greater recognition of their own tongue. The revolt was both religious and national, against an emperor deemed “a great and brutal enemy of the Czech kingdom and language.” Years after the Hussite rebellion had ended, dissidents still accused the pope of seeking “to destroy, wipe out, and utterly suppress the Czech language.”
Language runs very deep. Benedict Anderson writes of how each language “looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past.” This is why languages “appear rooted beyond almost anything else in contemporary societies. At the same time, nothing connects us affectively to the dead more than language.” The weight of the words “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” for instance, “derives only in part from their solemn meaning; it comes also from an as-it-were ancestral ‘Englishness.’”
Indeed, the spark for nationalist movements has often been historians, writers, lexicographers, and folklorists who celebrated and promoted vernacular languages and excavated a glorious literary past. The German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, who famously collected folk-tales, nodded to the primacy of language with its logo “In the beginning was the word.” Poets came to exemplify the national traditions and aspirations of their countries: The Irish had W. B. Yeats, the Poles had Adam Mickiewicz, the Zionists had Haim Bialik, and so on.
This was true as well of composers (Franz Liszt for the Hungarians, Frédéric Chopin for the Poles, Antonin Dvorak for the Czechs), painters (Jacques-Louis David for the French, Henry Fuseli for the Swiss, Viktor Vasnetsov for the Russians), and novelists of great historical epics such as Walter Scott and Leo Tolstoy. The spectacle of opera provided a particularly powerful tableau for national themes.
In short, language occupies an outsized space in the cultural life of nations, and the role of English here in the United States is no different.
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via email: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. @richlowry Turkey starts sending Islamic State fighters back to home countries
Turkey says it has sent back to the
US an American belonging to the Islamic State (IS) group, as part of a
drive to repatriate captured jihadist fighters.
The interior ministry said 20 IS fighters from Germany, France, Ireland and Denmark were also being expelled.Turkey wants to repatriate some 2,500 militants - most to EU countries - state broadcaster TRT Haber said.
Turkey's president said 7,600 people from 102 countries held in the fight against IS had already been deported.
What happens to foreign IS fighters has been a key question since the defeat of the group in territory it controlled in Syria and Iraq.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has indicated that some 2,500 foreign IS fighters are in prison in Turkey.
European countries have been reluctant to allow back nationals who went to fight for IS.
Where were the IS suspects captured?
It was not confirmed if those being repatriated were seized in Syria, or in Turkish territory.Some IS members and their relatives were captured in north-eastern Syria in October, when Turkey launched a cross-border operation against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) there.
At the time, the SDF said it was holding more than 12,000 suspected IS members in seven prisons in the area, at least 4,000 of them foreign nationals.
Relatives of suspected IS militants were also being held at a number of camps for displaced people - the largest of which, al-Hol, housed almost 70,000 people.
When Turkey's allies warned its invasion could compromise the security of those camps and aid the revival of IS, Ankara said it would take responsibility for IS prisoners found during the offensive.
How will the repatriations work?
The UN has said countries should take responsibility for their own citizens unless they are to be prosecuted locally, in accordance with international standards.A French foreign ministry source told AFP news agency last week that suspected jihadists were often sent back to France from Turkey under a 2014 agreement.
"Jihadists and their families are regularly sent back to France and arrested as they leave the airplane. Most of the time it is done secretly. The news is not published, or released much later," the source said.
It is unclear whether Turkey will be able to repatriate IS suspects who have had their home citizenships revoked.
The UK has stripped more than 100 people of citizenship for allegedly joining jihadist groups abroad, AFP reports - for example in the case of teenage IS recruit Shamima Begum.
Denmark and Germany have taken the same step to block the return of suspected IS members.
Turkey's Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu warned last week that jihadists would be returned to their home countries regardless of revoked citizenships.
"There is no need to try to escape from it, we will send them back to you. Deal with them how you want," he said on Friday.
What is the risk from these fighters?
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says European intelligence agencies have warned that many of those who survived the final days of IS's last stand will remain highly dangerous radicals, brutalised by the atrocities they have witnessed, and in some cases, committed.German magazine Der Spiegel said German officials believed a third of its nationals in the Kurdish-run camps - a total of 27 men and women - were "capable of carrying out violent acts including terrorist attacks".
Our correspondent says there is a fear that if and when these jihadists are eventually brought to trial in their home countries there could well be insufficient evidence - given the fluid circumstances in which they were captured - to convict them.
Governments may then find themselves accused of allowing back in dangerous men and women who pose a risk to national security.
The Looming ‘1984’ Election
Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an
American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
For a variety of reasons, the 2020 election is going to be a referendum beyond Donald Trump’s record and his Democratic opposition.
The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election. It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.
The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse. Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!
In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it.
Targeting Traditional America
We are also well beyond even the stark choices of 1972 and 1984 that remained within the parameters of the two parties. In contrast, the Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a number of Democratic presidential candidates sympathize with the New York subway jumpers who openly threaten the police, then what or who exactly is the alternative to such chaos?
When the media proves 90 percent partisan according to its own liberal watchdog institutions, or reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?
When the violence of Antifa is quietly—or sometimes loudly—condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?
If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?
If the leading Democratic presidential candidates openly embrace the Green New Deal, reparations, abolishing the Electoral College, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, amnesties, wealth taxes, a 70-90 percent income tax code, Medicare for all, and legal infanticide—what is the alternative vision and who stands between all that and a targeted traditional America?
Californication Ahead!
In California, the nation’s largest utility preemptively shuts off power to multibillion-dollar industries and two-million customers, given its ossified grid and over-regulated operations, and the deliberate policy of the state not to clean up drought-stricken dead forests and underbrush that are ignited by wind and antiquated transmission cables. So, who or what then in 2020 would oppose all that?
In a state where half the nation’s homeless use the streets as open sewers and receptacles for refuse, incubating medieval diseases and public hazards, who exactly says that is unacceptable? The California attorney general openly boasts that he believes the state is the home for 10 million illegal aliens; is there any pushback to that agenda? If not, would 20 or 30 million illegal aliens be acceptable for Californians? Why not 50 to 60 million additional illegally residing foreign nationals?
Can even a leftwing Facebook, Google, or Apple operate within a landscape that cannot ensure reliable power to run its businesses? Do the progressive masters of the Silicon Valley want to hand over millions per year in wealth taxes on money that has already been taxed—but which is considered by the Warrenites and Sandersites as veritable public property given their own past use of state roads and infrastructure to build their businesses? Do these billionaires really think conservative state policies encouraged tens of thousands of homeless people to sleep in cars and streets near their businesses?
On the social front, we are bombarded with celebrities dreaming of various methods of assassinating the current president. Who speaks out against such incendiary smears? Did Hollywood stars do the same to then-President Barack Obama?
In professional sports, Colin Kaepernick’s circus of not standing up during the national anthem has transmogrified into something far more serious—the National Basketball Association’s wholesale appeasement of the dictatorial communist Chinese government, and the leveraging of U.S. free speech in return for access to the lucrative Chinese market. Who is more likely to speak out against that?
Will Campus Culture Replace Our National Character?
Our universities effectively have eroded the First Amendment and the due process protections of the Fifth in matters of sexual assault allegations. Higher education is now controlled by a revolutionary clique. It institutionalizes racially segregated dorms and safe spaces, matter of factly promotes censorship, and either cannot or will not prevent students from disrupting lecturers with whom they disagree. What or who exactly say not to all that? Who would dare say that America in its third century is not going to change its use of English pronouns or decide that there are not three and more biological genders?
When a progressive mom takes her kids to walk and play in a California municipal park and, instead of relaxing comfortably with her fellow mom friends, finds blood-tainted needles sticking up out of the grass, what sort of policies does she imagine allowed that? When a small business owner in San Francisco finds vagrants defecating near his breezeway or mobs of shoplifters swarming his store, what sort of politics and ideologies will he consider led to that?
Who Is Sovereign Here?
On the national level, what or who created a landscape in which the highest echelons of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department sought to surveil American citizens, undermine a presidential campaign, and abort a presidential transition and then a presidency? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, would anyone have objected? Do any object today that she hired a foreign national to work with foreign sources to discredit and smear her political opponent?
Who or what is behind the constant remonstrations that the American people are racist, sexist, homophobic, nativist, xenophobic, and oppressing the transgendered? Who lodges such charges? Who believes them to be true?
Why is gasoline reaching $5 a gallon in coastal cities, when states like California have huge untapped sources of oil and natural gas? Why is lumber sky-high in stores while the state mandates that millions of harvestable drought-stricken dead trees instead slowly rot to serve as kindle for deadly wildfires?
What is wrong with 3.5 percent unemployment? Is there a Democratic plan to lower it to 2.5 percent?
Who exactly wishes to pack the court, to repeal the Electoral College, to nix the difference between residency and citizenship, to promote identity-politics tribalism over collective affinities, to nullify federal immigration law, to hunt down and disrupt political opponents as they eat and sleep—and who not?
Whose ideologies logically lead to promoting iconoclasm and statue-toppling, the Orwellian renaming of streets and buildings, the defacing of public murals?
The Orwellian Jacobins or America First
The new progressive party is Jacobin. It sees politics in all-inclusive French revolutionary terms—encompassing every aspect of American life from entertainment, sports, academia, religion, and family matters to politics, foreign policy, and individual rights.
In his own way, Trump also fights back in 360-degree fashion, from the existential to the trivial, railing against Colin Kaepernick, tit for tatting Hollywood stars, weighing in on radical abortion, open borders, power outages, the homeless and subway jumping. The result is not just that there looms a choice between two different agendas, but two quite different American lifestyles and experiences—and histories.
Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.
The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.
One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple.
The ‘Global Citizen’ Fraud
The ‘Global Citizen’ Fraud
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On September 24, Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that “the future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to the patriots.” Four days later, as if in a rebuke to his assertion, the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park was the site of the “Global Citizen Festival.” This event brought together “top artists, world leaders, and everyday activists to take action” (in the words of its website) and offered free tickets to “Global Citizens who take a series of actions to create lasting change around the world.” Those “actions” included writing tweets and signing petitions affirming their dedication to “changing the world.”
Featuring such entertainers as Alicia Keys and Hugh Jackman, the Global Citizen Festival was organized by a group called Global Citizen in partnership with firms such as Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, and Cisco Technologies. Rarely have so many heavyweight corporations described their activities in such benign language: Verizon stated on the event’s website that “we focus our business and resources to uplift people and protect the planet.” Who knew?
Covering the festival live, MSNBC hosts kept insisting—between interviews with Democratic politicians and recitation of DNC talking points—that it was “not about politics.” Hurricane Sandy, Central American drought, and the fall of Venezuela, we were informed, were all caused by climate change. A Mexican official announced her country’s new “feminist foreign policy.” The head of some activist group took credit for the decline in U.S. poverty. Politicians from Norway, Barbados, and elsewhere waved their globalist credentials, while America’s withdrawal from the Paris accords was cited as a sin against globalism and thus against humanity itself.
At the heart of the whole event were the repeated reassurances by those onstage that everybody present was a “global citizen”—and that this was something for which they deserved endless congratulation. Gesturing at the folks lolling around on the sunny Great Lawn, one reporter enthused over the magnificent “commitment” they were making. Representative Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), calling the audience members a “powerful” image of “global citizenship,” was asked what, exactly, they could do to change the world. Glancing back at them lying on the grass, he enthused: “They’re doing it now!” To quote one MSNBC talking head: “Tonight is about community, connection—the world coming together!”
Welcome to the vapid but dangerous new world of global citizenship. I was introduced to it a decade ago while walking in Amsterdam. A rally was taking place on the Dam, the large cobbled square in front of the Dutch Royal Palace. As I approached, some signs and banners came into view. A person cannot be illegal! read one. There is no such thing as an illegal person!read another. (They were in Dutch, with misspellings.) There were many other signs, communicating the message that the term “illegal alien” should be replaced by “undocumented aliens” and that people should be allowed to live wherever they wished.
I knew some basic statistics. I knew how wonderful the Netherlands was, how small it was, and how crowded it was already with its population of 15 or so million. I also knew how many people were out there, in the not-so-wonderful world beyond the West. India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and the Philippines: Each of these countries had a population (a fast-growing one, at that) in excess of 100 million, a large percentage of whom would doubtless be thrilled to relocate to this tiny kingdom.
The pronouncement that “a person cannot be illegal” made no sense. What else could be said of a citizen from one country living unlawfully in another? Little did I realize that within a few years, such thinking would be mainstream. Little did I realize that in the view of many Americans, “undocumented persons” would not only deserve all the rights of American citizens but would actually deserve special treatment in matters as significant as health care, schooling, and housing—to which they would be considered entitled without being subject to any of the obligations actual citizens of the United States are required to perform.
In the past decade, the very concept of citizenship has become not only passé but déclassé. We should all be global citizens.
It’s not a new concept. The first person to call himself a “citizen of the world” was Diogenes, the founder of cynicism. He lived in the fourth century B.C.E. and has been cited in support of the idea. He made this pronouncement, however, only after being stripped of his citizenship in his native city of Sinope and moving, in disgrace, to Athens. In ancient Greece, citizenship was deeply prized. It was inextricable from the idea of civilization. Never before had individuals been afforded the protection of an identity beyond that of family or tribe. The Romans borrowed it from the Greeks and made it something of absolute value. To be a Roman citizen conferred protection and prestige throughout the ancient world. Citizenship meant order. It meant, at a bare minimum, a degree of respect and rights and security that was without parallel in the world of the day.
Ironically enough, the contemporary enthusiasm for global citizenship has its roots in the historical moment that marked the triumph of modern national identity and pride—namely, the World War II victory of free countries (plus the Soviet Union) over their unfree enemies. Citizens of small, conquered nations resisted oppression and, in many cases, gave their lives out of sheer patriotism and love of liberty. As Allied tanks rolled into one liberated town after another, people waved flags that had been hidden away during the occupation. Germany and Japan had sought to create empires that erased national borders and turned free citizens into subjects of tyranny; brave patriots destroyed that dream and restored their homelands’ sovereignty and freedom. And yet a major consequence of this victory was the establishment of an organization, the United Nations. Its founding rhetoric, like that of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, was all about the erasure of borders, even as it hoisted its own baby-blue flag alongside those of its members.
On December 10, 1948, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights it enumerates emanate from the DNA of modern Western nation-states; they can be traced to Magna Carta and were articulated in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. But the UN Declaration departs from its British and American antecedents in significant ways. While affirming freedom of speech and due process, noted E. Jeffrey Ludwig in an article posted at the American Thinker, it “point[ed] the way towards intervention by the UN in the daily lives of people” by, for example, “assert[ing] the right to food, clothing, medical care, social services, unemployment and disability benefits, child care, and free education,” plus more abstract rights, such as the “right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community…and to enjoy the arts.”
The chief force behind the Declaration was Eleanor Roosevelt, the chair of the UN’s Human Rights Commission. In a 1945 newspaper column, she had had some interesting things to say about patriotism and what we would now call globalism. “Willy-nilly,” she wrote, “everyone [sic] of us cares more for his own country than for any other. That is human nature. We love the bit of land where we have grown to maturity and known the joys and sorrows of life. The time has come however when we must recognize that our mutual [sic] devotion to our own land must never blind us to the good of all lands and of all peoples.”
“Willy-nilly”? “Bit of land”? Didn’t America deserve better than that from its longtime first lady? Didn’t America’s armed forces, who had fought valiantly for their own “bit of land”? One part of Mrs. Roosevelt’s testimony was ambiguous. When she referred to “the good of all lands and of all peoples,” did she mean that Americans should care about what’s best for other peoples? Or was she saying that all lands and peoples are good? She couldn’t possibly be saying that, could she? Hadn’t the Holocaust just proven otherwise? It’s striking to recognize that Mrs. Roosevelt wrote this only months after the bloody end of the crusade to restore freedom to Western Europe—and at a time when our erstwhile ally Joseph Stalin’s actions in Eastern Europe were underscoring precisely how evil our fellow man could be, and just how precious a gift to the world the United States was.
Although the Universal Declaration passed in the General Assembly, 48–0, eight nations—the USSR, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia—abstained. This rendered the document essentially pointless, a statement of Western values that much of the Soviet bloc and one of the most powerful countries in the Arab world rejected. Other Muslim nations signed on, and their insincerity in doing so was later reflected in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which defines human rights in a way that is founded entirely on sharia law and is utterly at odds with Western values.
Another would-be global citizen was Wendell Willkie, who had challenged FDR for the presidency in 1940. In 1943, Willkie published One World, an account of a round-the-world trip he had made and a plea for the nations of that world to accept a single international order. Willkie wanted more than just a UN: He wanted world government, based on the Atlantic Charter. It is said that his book was the biggest non-fiction bestseller in history up to that time, inspiring an international One World movement to which both Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi belonged. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Willkie was determined to build a new world founded on specifically American notions of rights and freedoms. Like Mrs. Roosevelt, too, he was convinced that postwar feelings of goodwill toward the U.S. by other governments would lead them to embrace those notions. On his world trip, wrote Willkie, he had discovered that foreigners knew that America had no desire for conquest, and that the U.S. therefore enjoyed their respect and trust—a respect and trust, he argued, that America must use “to unify the peoples of the earth in the human quest for freedom and justice.”
Needless to say, the world didn’t end up with Willkie’s One World. But it got the UN—where, from the outset, there was more talk of peace than of freedom and where the differences between the West and the Soviet bloc were routinely glossed over in order to present a façade of international comity. Behind the Iron Curtain, captive peoples weren’t citizens, global or otherwise, but prisoners. Yet in the West, the UN’s language of what we now call global citizenship started to take hold, and the UN began to be an object of widespread, although hardly universal, veneration. In reality, the UN may be a massive and inert bureaucratic kleptocracy yoked to a debating society, most of whose member states are unfree or partly free; but people in the free world who grow starry-eyed at the thought of global citizenship view it as somehow magically exceeding, in moral terms, the sum of its parts.
You can’t discuss the UN and global citizenship without mentioning Maurice Strong. “A very odd thing happened last weekend,” wrote Christopher Booker in the Telegraph in December 2015. “The death was announced of the man who, in the past 40 years, has arguably been more influential on global politics than any other single individual. Yet the world scarcely noticed.” What Strong, an extremely rich Canadian businessman, did—almost single-handedly—was to create, out of the blue, the global-warming panic that is now a cornerstone of left-wing ideology. Although he never was secretary-general of the UN, Strong wielded massive power within that organization and innumerable other international bodies, serving, for instance, as a director of the World Economic Forum and as a senior adviser to the president of the World Bank. He also played pivotal roles in a long list of programs and commissions that were nominally dedicated to the environment—among them the UN Environmental Programme and World Resources Institute, the Earth Charter Commission, and the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development.
But although he was nicknamed “Godfather of Global Warming,” Strong didn’t really care about climate. His real objective was to transform the UN into a world government—a permanent, unelected politburo composed of elders such as himself. At first, indeed, climate played no role in his plans. To fund the all-powerful UN of his dreams, in 1995 he proposed a 0.5 percent tax on every financial transaction on earth—a scheme that would have netted $1.5 trillion annually, approximately the entire annual gross income of the United States at the time. When the Security Council vetoed this move, Strong tried to eliminate the Security Council. The failure of such stratagems led Strong to focus increasingly on climate. By promoting the idea that the planet was in existential peril, he was able to argue that a looming disaster on the scale he predicted could be solved only by vesting in the UN an unprecedented degree of authority over the lives of absolutely everyone on earth.
To this end, Strong concocted Agenda 21. Formulated at the 1992 UN Earth Summit (or Rio Conference), of which he served as secretary-general, Agenda 21 proposed a transfer of power from nation-states to the UN. “It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states,” Strong explained. “The global community must be assured of global environmental security.” What kind of regime did Strong wish to establish? Suffice it to say that he disdained the U.S. but admired Communist China, where he maintained a flat—to which, incidentally, he relocated after being implicated in the UN “oil for food” scandal in 2005. Another one of the many financial scandals in which he was implicated (but for which he repeatedly managed to get himself off the hook) involved funneling massive sums to North Korea, of whose regime he was also fond.
Strong was the spiritual father of all those global citizens who today fly thousands of miles in private jets to swanky conferences at which they give speeches chiding their inferiors for not recycling. One such personage is Al Gore, whose house is known to have one of the largest carbon footprints in Tennessee. Another is Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist who promotes an initiative, Global Citizen Year, which seeks to “engag[e] young Americans in global issues.” With his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, Kristof wrote the 2014 book A Path Appears, described by its publisher as “a roadmap to becoming a conscientious global citizen.” Kristof has argued that Americans should contribute to foreign rather than domestic causes, because “an aid group abroad can save more lives more cheaply than an organization in the United States, and generally can do more good with less money.” Never mind the ample proof that foreign aid more often than not does more harm than good—encouraging dependency, fostering resentment, crushing initiative, lining the pockets of dictators and their cronies, and preventing poor countries from developing healthy economies.
After the UN came the European Union. As a free-trade zone gradually morphed into a would-be superstate, the EU’s supposed raison d’être was that nationalism had almost destroyed Europe in World War II. But this was wrong. Europe had been torn apart because of two totalitarian ideologies, one based on racial identity and the other on a utopian universalist vision. Communism’s end goal was, indeed, nothing more or less than a kind of global citizenship under which everyone except for a handful of elites would be equally controlled, spied on, and oppressed.
The global-citizenship mentality ramped up with the 1960s. No one expressed it more memorably than John Lennon in “Imagine,” a 1971 song whose influence has been immeasurable.
“Imagine there’s no countries,” Lennon wrote, going on to imply that without countries there would be “nothing to kill or die for,” so that “all the people” on earth would be “living life in peace” and, indeed, the world would “be as one.” The song, which to this day remains a ubiquitous protest anthem, has led millions of starry-eyed idealists to equate nationhood with war and patriotism with killing and to believe that a borderless planet would be a peaceful one. The song has also helped spread the view that simply imagining a perfect world is equivalent to, or even better than, doing the hard work of creating a better, if still imperfect, world—hence the inane comments at this year’s Global Citizen Festival to the effect that the attendees, just by being there, were actually accomplishing something.
The concept of global citizenship now pervades our politics. During her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton envisioned a Western hemisphere, and ultimately a world, without borders. Barack Obama, in reply to a question about American exceptionalism, said that, yes, he saw America as exceptional, but that people in other countries, too, saw their countries as exceptional. The last sentence of his Nobel Peace Prize citation contained the word “global” not once but twice: “The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that ‘Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.’” What U.S. president had ever been more global? A Kenyan father, an Indonesian boyhood: his bestselling autobiography conveyed his affection for both of those countries; it was the U.S. for which his feelings were ambivalent.
The concept of global citizenship also dominates our popular culture. In a 2018 book, Hollywood Heyday, David Fantle and Tom Johnson write about attending a 1981 church service with film director Frank Capra, then 93. To honor the recently released Tehran hostages, the recessional hymn was “America (My Country ’Tis of Thee).” All four verses, three of them obscure, were sung. Congregants were handed lyric sheets. Capra didn’t give his sheet so much as a glance. He knew every word of every verse by heart, and sang with emotion. What member of today’s Hollywood elite could do that? More typical of the attitude of movie people nowadays was a remark made during an onstage interview at the 2016 PEN World Voices Festival by screenwriter Richard Price. Asked about American identity, he replied: “I always feel like I live in the country of New York.” The interviewer replied: “Whenever I’m traveling and people ask if I’m American, I say I’m a New Yorker.” Price replied: “I always say I’m Canadian because I don’t know who I’m talking to.”
One of the conceits of America popular culture is the idea that the human race would come together in a trice—the ultimate pipe dream of global citizens—if confronted by a common enemy. In Independence Day (1996), the world responds as one to an attack by space aliens and the U.S. president gives a pep talk to American participants in the common defense:
In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind.Mankind. That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences any more….Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July….Should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night!”
In Independence Day, as is almost invariably the case in such films, international cooperation is premised on American values—just like the founding of the UN. Routinely, people call themselves global citizens without recognizing in the slightest the extent to which their sense of the global is rooted in uniquely American ways of thinking.
Global citizenship is also big at America’s most prestigious colleges. “Global engagement” is a featured category on the main page of the Brown University website. Type in dartmouth.edu and you’ll find the category “Global” alongside “Admissions,” “Schools,” “Centers,” “Arts,” and “Athletics.” On the main page of Columbia University’s site, “Global” is right up there with “Libraries,” “Arts,” and “Athletics.” On Duke’s main page, the categories are “Admissions,” “Academics,” “Research,” “Arts,” “Schools & Institutes,” and—yes—“Global.” The same is true of the websites of any number of other major U.S. colleges.
What do you get when you click on “Global” on these sites? Well, at Columbia’s site you’ll encounter a comment by its president, Lee C. Bollinger: “We all need to be explorers again, rediscovering what the world is like and what it means to think globally.” (Recall that Bollinger’s own most prominent contributions to “thinking globally” were his speaking invitations, in 2007, to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, earlier this year, to Mathatir Muhammed of Malaysia—both virulent Jew-haters.) Bollinger’s bemusing rhetoric typifies the way in which these institutions discuss global citizenship. When I checked the Yale website recently, front and center on its main page was the statement that Yale “engages with people and institutions across the globe in the quest to promote cultural understanding, improve the human condition, delve deeper into the secrets of the universe, and train the next generation of world leaders.” Oh, is that all? The site quotes Yale “partner” Vincent Biruta, Rwanda’s minister for the environment: “Partnerships like the ones we have forged today are especially critical when addressing complex global challenges.”
The words complex and challenges get a real workout on these sites. The pitch for Columbia’s M.A in Global Thought calls it “an interdisciplinary academic course of study that challenges students to explore new concepts and categories intended to encompass and explain the complexities of our interconnected and changing world.” M.A. students will come to understand “global thinking as a process rather than a product” and be supported “in their development of insights about the changing world.” One course, “Global Governance Regimes,” “explores the challenges of thinking about and effectuating governance in a global era.” Globalization, you see, “poses new challenges for thinking about the concept of governance.” Meanwhile, on Dartmouth’s site, you can read an item entitled “How Can Students Be Good Global Citizens?” The Dartmouth campus, we learn, features the “Global Village,” a “residential community” that “holistically equips students to thrive as ethical, engaged, and responsible world citizens and scholars” and enables them “to explore complex international issues” and engage in “focused reflection.”
Decades ago, American curricula included a subject called “civics.” Students learned about responsible citizenship—understanding how government worked, knowing one’s constitutional rights, following current affairs, and voting intelligently in elections. Describing these courses was not problematic; students weren’t “invited” or “challenged” to “figure out” what citizenship means. They were told. They were given specifics. They experienced something known as education. Alas, those civics courses have long since disappeared. The contemplation of global citizenship has filled that vacuum. Its apparent purpose is to undo any sense of responsible citizenship that a young person might have acquired and to replace it with a higher loyalty.
I began this article by mentioning the Global Citizen Festival. One of its two co-founders is Hugh Evans, described on his Wikipedia page as “an Australian humanitarian.” He gave a TED talk in 2016 titled “What does it mean to be a citizen of the world?” Evans praised this “growing movement” of “global citizens” who identify “first and foremost not as a member of a state, a tribe, or a nation, but as a member of the human race.” Saying that “the world’s future depends on global citizens,” Evans maintained that if we were all global citizens, we “could solve every major problem in the world,” because those problems are all “global issues” and can therefore “only be solved by global citizens.”
How did Evans become a global citizen? It happened, he recounts, during a brief stay in a Philippines slum whose residents wore rags and slept on garbage heaps. Why, he wondered, was his life so much better than theirs? The answer he came up with was this: Their poverty was the result of colonialism. International economics, he concluded, is a zero-sum game: If some countries are rich, it’s because they’ve exploited countries that are poor. Granted, this belief hasn’t led Evans to give up his wealth. But he’s certainly made a great show of guilt about it. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that he makes a career out of traveling from place to place, standing at lecterns and expressing solidarity with people who sleep on rubbish heaps. Note, however, that you’re not likely to hear those slum dwellers describing themselves as global citizens. They’re tied by poverty to the places where they were born.
One wonders: Would any Brit who went through the Blitz ever have called himself a “global citizen”? Would any American whose father died in a Nazi POW camp ever have called himself a “global citizen”? I doubt it. Global citizenship is a luxury of those who’ve reaped rewards earned by the blood of patriots. Global citizens pretend to possess, or sincerely think they possess, a loyalty that transcends borders. It sounds pretty. But it’s not. By the same token, to some ears a straightforward declaration of patriotism can sound exclusionary, bigoted, racist. It isn’t. To assert a national identity is to make a moral statement and to take on a responsibility. To call yourself a global citizen is to do the equivalent of wearing a peace button—you’re making a meaningless statement because you think it makes you look virtuous.
Think of love. To say that you care first and foremost about your own family doesn’t mean that you hate other families; it’s merely a question of being honest about something that, in the real world, entails commitment and sacrifice. In matters of loyalty, as in matters of love, there are hierarchies. To love everyone is to love no one. To say that you love all humanity is a pretty lie. As former British Prime Minister Theresa May said in 2016, in one of her rare deviations into sense, “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
To be American is to partake in the benefits that flow from American freedom, power, wealth, and world leadership. Very few Americans who call themselves global citizens ever actually back up their proclamation by relinquishing any of these benefits—that might be worthy of respect. No, they gladly embrace the benefits of being an American; they’re just too virtuous, in their minds, to embrace the label itself. They’re like young people living off a generous trust fund while sporting an “Eat the Rich” button.
One way of looking at the aftermath of 9/11 is to recognize that many Americans who were simply unable (for very long, anyhow) to dedicate themselves to country were thrust by that jihadist assault into the arms of the only alternative they could imagine—namely, global citizenship. Instead of being usefully dedicated to the liberty and security of their own country in a time of grave threat, they have bailed on America and have found, in global citizenship, a noble-sounding illusion of freedom from patriotic obligation. And in fact they are floating free, hovering above the earthly struggle between good and evil and refusing to take sides—and, moreover, presenting this hands-off attitude as a mark not of cowardice but of cultural sophistication and moral superiority.
To a large extent, the project of global citizenship is about trying to replace the concrete with the abstract, about exchanging the real for the idealistic. It’s a matter of trying to talk Americans into rejecting the pragmatic and industrious patriotism that, yes, made America great, and pushing on them, instead, yet another pernicious utopian ideology of the sort that almost destroyed Europe in the 20th century. It’s a matter of endlessly talking up ideas for radical change on every level of society—from ecological measures that would bring down the world economy to a neurotic obsessiveness with hierarchies of group identity that threatens to destroy America’s social fabric—instead of implementing practical reforms that enjoy popular support and would improve everyone’s life. It’s a matter of trying to persuade ordinary citizens, in the name of some higher good—whether world peace or world health or protection of the planet’s environment—to relinquish their freedom and obey a small technocratic elite. In the final analysis, global citizenship is a dangerous dream, a threat to individual liberty, and an assault on American sovereignty—a menace not only to Americans but to all humanity, and one that should therefore be rejected unambiguously by all men and women of goodwill and at least a modicum of common sense.
Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is the author of several books, including The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.
Has the Coup Already Happened?
We have an elite that does not accept the American idea of government—
government by, for, and of the people.
Democrats in Congress, Democratic operatives in the deep state, and co-conspirators in the corporate leftist propaganda conglomerate are attempting to drive Trump from office. This hyperpartisan process rightly has been called an attempted coup. It is also a brazen fraud. In the immortal words of Woody Allen’s Fielding Melish, “it is a travesty . . . a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”
But in a deeper sense, isn’t it clear that the coup has already happened? By trying to overthrow the results of a presidential election, the political elite is merely showing its hand; America has an elite that believes it now rules in America. We have an elite that does not accept the American idea of government—government by, for, and of the people.
According to our self-selected rulers, the election of Hillary Clinton was the whole point of 2016. They had designated Hillary to succeed Obama. She was to continue the project of fundamentally transforming America that was the focus of the Obama Administration. The voters were supposed to ratify the elite’s selection of Clinton.
But voters failed to do what they were supposed to do. From their point of view, if you voted for Trump, you let them down. By voting for Trump, you enraged the people who have designated themselves to rule you.
They are far beyond merely disappointed in you. You are a deplorable if you voted for Trump or if you have come around to supporting him. The people who are asserting that they rule America intend to teach you a lesson: “You have disappointed us, and we are going all out—with this fraudulent attempt to impeach Trump, with hyperpartisan ‘journalism,’ and by means of open borders, ballot harvesting, armies of dead people voting, whatever it takes—to make certain that this never happens again. Let this be a lesson to you about what voting means and what voting does not mean in the new, fundamentally transformed America.”
The truth about those who intend to rule us with or without our consent is that, instead of putting America first, they have been using the power of government to advance an anti-American agenda—open borders, hollowing out our economy to the benefit of the Chinese, drowning the American voter in a flood of Muslims and people from the Third World; the list goes on and on.
Trump, of course, represents a threat to the elite’s project of selling America down the river. He has to be stopped, and those Americans who have not gotten with the program for America the elite has chosen for us must be taught a hard lesson about who now rules in America.
Don’t Laugh Too Hard At..
Townhall
Don’t Laugh Too Hard At Bloomberg
Or
He Might Not Run
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Cheryl Senter, File
Name the Democrat who is super-excited to have Michael Bloomberg barge into the Dem primaries like some nutty ex-girlfriend who gave you crabs popping in at your wedding. Where is the groundswell of support behind this pint-sized presidential aspirant? Perhaps the Democratic consultants who didn’t sign up with one of the other goofy candidates are happy. The micro-zillionaire may not have charisma or a vision or actual human support, but he’s got endless bucks to squander on electoral parasites.
So, those jerks will love him getting in. And so will us Republicans – Trump already has a nickname laid upon the numismatic gnome, “Little Michael.”
Real talk: the guy is delusional. Can you hear the excitement about the Verne Troyer of American politics bubbling over in the Midwest where this election’s going to be won?”
“Hey Lou, good news. That Bloomberg guy is in the race. I’ve been lookin’ for a miniature Manhattan finance snob who wants to ban Cokes, take our deer rifles, and who makes the New York Times happy.”
“Yeah Phil, I’m sure getting tired of all this great economic good news and my kids not coming home in boxes from Whocaresistan.”
“We need a guy who’s thinks he’s smarter and better than us and isn’t afraid to tell us how to live our lives!”
Now, we’re already hearing lots of superficial and staggeringly dumb comparisons to Donald Trump. Yeah, they are both New York billionaires, but Trump is from Queens, and that matters. Trump is not trying to win over the swells who think their caste’s role is to stop all those lesser beings out there – by which they mean you and me – from consuming sugar and being able to defend ourselves. Trump is the voice of the people shouting, “Hey jackass, ban this straw right here!”
Trump is also not a hobbit.
Bloomberg is the kind of pursed-lipped, uptight scold the Normals are saluting with a single digit. You get the distinct impression that he spends a lot of his time being very, very upset that we are choosing to live our lives without his approval, and that it grates on him. Electing him president would be like electing your kindergarten teacher POTUS, if your kindergarten teacher was tiny, 77, and jetted away for every weekend to Bermuda in her Gulfstream after lecturing you on how you can’t have chocolate because of global warming.
This futile fiasco is not driven by anything but the malignant midget’s vanity, and not a little jealousy that Donald Trump, the unpolished Al Cervik, is dominating the Bushwood Country Club of American politics while Little Michael Smails is looking like a buffoon trying on awful hats in its pro shop.
He’s a crusty, twisted Bilbo seeking his precious.
Can you imagine the soul-smashing agony Little Michael feels every day seeing Trump get played “Hail to The Chief” while all he gets is a couple of hobos whistlin’ “Short People?”
But that’s okay, because his ego trip is going to cause amazing, glorious disruption within the Democratic race and help Donald Trump immeasurably. Blue on blue is the best kind of conflict, and this uncivil war is going to send popcorn sales through the roof. I know I’ll be gobbling it down, while sipping a Big Gulp just to tick him off.
Do you think Joe Biden, who now occupies the “fake moderate” lane Bloomberg wants to run in, will just go quietly? It was Gropey’s age-fueled decline, magnified by his snortunate son Hoover’s coke-fueled Slavic shenanigans, that made the creepy veep vulnerable. But Joe won’t stagger away quietly. He’ll stagger away loudly, incoherently, and bloodily. Joe may be utterly confused – “Whaddya mean the Blue Man Group is running against me?” – but those around him, those investing in his success, those planning to actually control things should the American people be dumb enough to elect the empty figurehead, are not going to just throw in the towel.
It’s not like Bloomberg has a lot of love out there in Dem land, or in Republican land, or in any land. He wants to claim the centrist slot, but the Dems are in no mood for puny moderation. And we Republicans are not fooled by Lil’ Duce. He’s a liberal schoolmarm just like the rest, except his business acumen won’t let him support the trillions in giveaways Chief Sitting Bolshevik and the rest are touting. He knows their numbers are literally insane, and he’ll say so, but just because you can count doesn’t make you moderate.
Bloomberg’s platform of “I have a lot of ideas about how you should live your life” may play in the Upper Whatever Side where the peeps we used to call Yuppies live in Manhattan and in similar elite enclaves, but the last four years of populist revolt in the rest of the country have been against just that sort of micro-management of our lives. This is a populist moment, not one for a tiny totalitarian with a list of decrees designed to make us better people.
His money will mess things up for the Dems, which is good. And in the unlikely event he gets coronated at the convention – his plan appears to be to skip all the early primaries in an innovative strategy of getting the nomination without actually having anyone vote for him – there’s a whole massive swathe of Democrats on the left who will stay in their mothers’s basements and dorm rooms in protest instead of going out to vote for Mr. Center Left Establishment. Everything about Bloomberg’s potential candidacy is bad for the Democrats, and the beauty is that you know that no one in the petite tycoon’s bubble will dare tell him that the emperor has no clothes and no chance. He’s a loser, and that’s why we should totally hope he runs.
More than 750kg of cocaine washes up on French Atlantic beaches.
More than 750kg (1,654lb) of cocaine
- most of it 83% pure - has washed up in plastic packages along
France's Atlantic coast this month.
The drugs have been found on beaches from the Landes, in the far south, to the Loire estuary west of Nantes.Prosecutors in Brittany are collecting the seized bundles. They do not yet know where the drugs came from.
In Gironde, near Bordeaux, several beaches have been closed. People have been told not to move any of the drugs.
The haul's street value so far is estimated to be as much as €60m (£51.5m; $66m).
"Any discovery must be reported immediately to the police or gendarmes [paramilitary police] without touching [the drugs]," the prosecutors' office in Rennes, Brittany's capital, said.
Transporting drugs such as cocaine can land an individual with a 10-year jail term
in France.
Rennes prosecutor Philippe Astruc said the 763kg of cocaine found on beaches "probably comes from South America, and it is worth very large sums of money".
Police also warned that the purity of the cocaine made it a health risk to anyone coming into contact with it.
The prosecutors are liaising with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and European anti-narcotics police in their investigation.
