Representative Markwayne Mullin Confronts FBI Director Christopher Wray About Difference Between Prosecuting Capitol Hill Protestors vs BLM/ANTIFA Violence – Thus Almost Hitting a Point Many Miss, BLM Funded Joe Biden
Rep. Markwayne Mullin took his opportunity to question FBI Director Cristopher Wray by asking the FBI Director about the double standard in investigating/prosecuting Capitol rioters vs the Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in DC and Portland.
Rep Mullin smartly uses the example of federal officers who have been attacked, assaulted and injured by Antifa and BLM, yet the FBI does nothing to investigate or prosecute these violent extremists. Mullin even quoted Wray back to himself when the FBI Director said: “Antifa is not a national organization”, a quote Director Wray now stunningly denies. First, WATCH:
Unfortunately Mullin missed one key aspect and it would be nice if any GOP member would ask the DOJ and FBI this question:
‘Is the reason the federal agencies refuse to investigate and prosecute Black Lives Matter and Antifa due to the fact both organizations were the funding mechanism for Joe Biden’s election effort’?
Ask that question and Republicans will be getting closer to the target.
Many people have forgotten, and the media intentionally refused to take notice, that Joe Biden’s campaign was funded by donations to BLM. After reaching the BLM homepage on their website, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chose to donate, the were rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”…. Well, Joe Biden was the top beneficiary of these coordinated ActBlue’s fundraising efforts. (link)
Black Lives Matter donations ultimately became the primary funding mechanism for Joe Biden 2020; and that explains why national democrats (Pelosi) and the DNC changed their position on BLM as an activist organization and embraced them openly. Keep in mind there were also hundreds of multi-million donations to Black Lives Matter from big corporations. Any corporation that paid into this BLM scheme paid to fund Joe Biden 2020 and the Democrats.
With that in mind, do all of those corporate “donations” to BLM make sense? It was a great workaround to subvert campaign election laws.
Does the renewed and enlarged corporate advancement of leftism also make sense? The corporations have a significant financial investment.
The BLM/DNC financial arrangement also further solidified the purpose for BLM (Obama/Holder) to align with the AME Church network (James Clyburn and his Biden endorsement etc) which facilitated the DNC agenda (Biden, Tom Perez, Obama, et al).
The early 2020 financial problem that was being faced by the Democrat National Committee was solved through the use of Black Lives Matter as a funding mechanism for the 2020 election. The more money the resistance movement pushed into their BLM advocacy, the more money that actually flowed to the DNC for their 2020 operations.
Do you really think the Biden administration (DOJ or FBI) are going to investigate the political groups who funded their usurpation? That’s the part of the issue Representative Markwayne Mullin should have asked Director Wray…
Ida
B. Wells, born into slavery in 1862 and orphaned at 16, rose to fame as
a journalist by shining light on things we didn't want to see — in
particular, the horror of lynching. Five thousand Americans were
lynched over 90 years, three quarters of them black. The numbers don't
account for the notoriety of the practice; rather, the demonic zeal of
its practitioners does. Even reading about it will turn your
stomach. Do not look at the photos they displayed with pride of charred
bodies. Lynch mobs spread terror among non-white people and those who
would defend the rule of law.
Ida
B. Wells proposed a solution. "A Winchester rifle should have a place
of honor in every black home," she wrote, "... for that protection which
the law refuses to give." "The only times an Afro-American who was
assaulted got away," Ida noted, "[were] when he had a gun and used it in
self-defense."
Translated
for today, Wells's proposal will sound radical to some. The Civil War
began with muzzle-loading muskets but ended with breech-loading rifles
firing modern cartridges. The Winchester lever-action debuted in
1873. The “gun that won the West" was a repeating rifle that stored as
many as a dozen cartridges in a tubular magazine fitted under the
barrel. Someone armed with a Winchester could fire as fast as he could
work the cocking lever and pull the trigger. Fans of old westerns like
The Rifleman recognize the gun. It allowed an individual a new level of
self-defense against multiple attackers. Atticus Finch used it to face
down the mob in To Kill a Mockingbird. No one improved on it until
1905, when the self-loading, or semi-automatic, rifle made the lever
unnecessary — its more advanced action loads a fresh cartridge from a
magazine each time the trigger is pulled.
When
Wells was writing, the Winchester, battle rifle of the U.S. military,
was state-of-the-art. Wells wanted one in the hands of every black
family. Its modern civilian counterpart is the AR-15.
Wells
was a Republican. The lynch mobs were Democrats; the KKK, the
paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party. A friend once asked me
whether a black female journalist like Wells would be Republican
today. If she wanted civilians to have access to that sort of
firepower, she sure as hell would be. That's heresy now among
Democrats.
Wells
understood that all guns are designed to kill. Aside from hunting and
shooting sports, they have one legitimate purpose: to defend the
innocent from harm. They also have a non-legitimate purpose: harming
the innocent. For which are they most used? Exactly as Ida intended:
many, many times more often to prevent crimes than to commit
them. Democrats want to stop that by ending private ownership and use
of firearms as quickly as they can. Their intent is to enforce
unacceptable law through lawless mob rule, just as they did when Ida was
alive.
Like
it or not, America can be a violent place — not El Salvador or
Venezuela, but not Japan or Switzerland, either: 20,000 homicides a
year. Fifteen thousand involve guns, 97% of them handguns. Insane
killers bent on mass destruction typically use semi-automatic rifles,
but more people are beaten to death each year than murdered with rifles
of all kinds. Thugs, gangs, and career criminals don't need
rifles. Cheap black-market pistols are their weapons of choice. Any
cop can tell you which brands. Rifles are overwhelmingly used by the
law-abiding, in defense of life and property.
It's
important to understand that firearms employed in self-defense are
seldom actually fired. It isn't necessary to kill, or even shoot, to
deter criminals. They're looking for a victim, not a challenge. Merely
showing the gun often is often enough. The more intimidating the
weapon, the greater its deterrent power. Those on guard during riots,
whether the 1986 Rodney King version or today's, carry AR15s. Their
deterrent power is high.
The
left wants to take our AR15s. Legislation is already proposed to ban
sales of them, as was done 1994–2004 with no effect on crime, or
confiscate them. Australia confiscated all semi-automatic rifles in
1996. That also had no effect on crime, which was falling already, and
continued to, as in neighboring New Zealand, which enacted no ban. For
now, Democrats don't have the 19th-century Winchester in their
sights. They will. It's already illegal to own, let alone carry, any
defensive weapon in our most dangerous cities. All are
Democrat-run. The left won't rest until everyone, everywhere, is
defenseless.
Ida
B. Wells's American South didn't benefit from effective local
policing. We do, but we won't for much longer. Leftist city councils
are quickly defunding and depleting the ranks of police
departments. Soros-sponsored prosecutors negate the efforts of law
enforcement with catch-and-release criminal justice. When politicians
order police to stand down, someone fills the authority vacuum. The
process is well underway.
For
the brief time CHAZ and CHOP ruled part of Seattle last summer, that
six-block nation was the most murderous in the world. In a small
Virginia city last summer, a mother trapped in her car with a terrified
three-year-old during a BLM takeover of downtown pleaded in vain with
911 for help. "The event was approved by the city. We can do
nothing." In April, a Black Panther honcho intimidated a Milwaukee
business into shutting down over some perceived slight. Police took his
side — with great deference. The Washington BLM contingent routinely
harasses curbside diners; in Dallas, a mob invaded a restaurant, kicking
over patrons' tables while chanting, "Who burns s--- down? We burn
s--- down." Last week, an illegally masked Antifa mob again attempted
to burn ICE officers alive by barricading them inside a building they
torched. They didn't have the success the KKK once had, but they
channeled its methods. The mask laws now ignored by Democrat mayors
were, ironically, enacted long ago to limit the terror of the Klan.
We've
seen the tactic many times. Post–Civil War Democrats used
Klansmen. Nineteen-thirties European fascists used brownshirts and
blackshirts. Venezuelan communists use motorcycle-mounted
colectivos. When police are hamstrung by leftist politicians and the
people are made helpless by the criminalizing of self-defense, rule by
mob and gang is inevitable. If Derek Chauvin, or any officer they
condemn, is sentenced to one day less than the mob decrees, its wrath
will be poured out. For now, the mob's weapons are largely improvised,
but these people will soon take up the firearms denied law-abiding
people.
This
is not a side-effect of the actions of Democrat legislators. It is the
intent. Democrats in boots will enforce the tyranny of Democrats in
suits.
Ida
B. Wells went to her reward in 1931, the most famous black woman in
America. If she were still with us today, she'd be warning us about the
mob mayhem to come — again. I'll do that on the great woman's behalf.
Article by Bruce Deitrick Price in The American Thinker
K-12: The Comintern Gave Us a Century of Ruthless Meddling
The
Communist International started its worldwide campaign of subversion
and sabotage circa 1920. The goal was always the same: wage a
disciplined, low-budget attack on soft targets such as foundations,
unions, universities, education, and media. The M.O. was the Fabian
three-step: take a job, work up to higher management, overthrow the
country.
Globalsecurity.org, a think-tank concerned with international security, concludes:
The
Communist International was a tool or weapon such as no other country
possessed, and the Soviet Union never hesitated to use it when the
occasion demanded. Masquerading as a political party in a country
permitting it to operate openly, a communist party was in fact a fifth
column as much as any Bund group, except that the latter were crude and
ineffective in comparison with Communists.
People
who joined the Comintern were expected to be subservient to Moscow and
fiercely committed to communism's first principle: the ends justify the
means. The name "Comintern" is no longer in use, but this aggressive,
amoral mentality lives on. The same sort of militants continue their
warfare against the world. They are the reason for many of the
intractable problems in the U.S.
Their
particular brand of fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon
traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any
permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of
which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the
possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexistence of rival
forces. Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the submission or destruction of all competing power.
So
these are the fanatics who descended on our society in 1920. John
Dewey and his Progressives softened up the battlefield in the preceding
decades. But the heavy hitters, the ideological demolition teams,
fought under the banner of the Comintern.
The
Bolshevik triumph in Russia was really a powerful stimulant to the
'"world revolution," because it proved the ability of a determined,
ruthless minority to impose its will upon a disorganized society devoid
of capable leaders, and thus encouraged revolutionary minorities
everywhere to hope that they might do the same thing[.]
Point is, the Comintern brought an unprecedented sort of aggression to civil society in the United States. Is there anything, no matter how vicious, these extremists would not do? Not that I can see.
For
example, if you wanted to make American citizens weak and unpatriotic,
who gets this assignment? If you want children to be illiterate and
without ambition, whom are you going to call? If you hope to make
children ignorant, almost devoid of cultural knowledge, who is just
right for that project?
Clearly,
all these things come back to education. And wherever you look in
K–12, you will find strange artifacts and an agenda put in play by a
cunning opponent.
"A Nation at Risk,"
a report published in 1983, honored this heritage when it proclaimed:
"The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded
by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a
Nation and a people[.] ... If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted
to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists
today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
It was a foreign power, and it was an act of war.
The
paradigm for a wide array of educational sabotage was the relentless
plot to eliminate phonics and instead make children memorize
sight-words. Soon American literacy was in free fall.
The professors of education knew that sight-words do not work. Dr.
Samuel Orton conducted elaborate research and concluded in 1927 that
this method was counterproductive and would permanently damage
children. But the communists were on a roll, around the world. When
the stock market crashed in 1929, these anti-capitalists felt
vindicated. They eliminated phonics from one public school after
another, starting in 1930. This project continues unabated. As fast as
a school dares to prefer phonics, the cult fights back.
The
war against phonics was just one of many hostile projects. The pattern
is always the same. Discredit and dismiss any methods known to
work. Replace them with shoddy contrivances. But the reading saga is
particularly illustrative because the victims suffer so
greatly. Imagine that you are a ten-year-old boy who still cannot read,
and you have no idea why. They give you drugs to keep you quiet,
and you watch the other children advance into a smarter world. Now
imagine the cold hearts needed to impose this torture on children. Year
after year, you have to withhold from students any knowledge of what
works and force them to learn what does not work. Only someone who
believes that the ends justifies the means could perform such sadism.
Everything runs parallel in math, where the professors came up with New Math, Reform Math,
and now Common Core Math, all much the same designed-to-fail
curricula. Content courses such as history, geography, and science are taught in ways that guarantee that children learn little history,
geography, and science. You have to be a vicious Pavlovian to concoct
this dreck. But the true Comintern spirit is shown in the perennial
infliction of psychopathic nonsense on defenseless children.
The
media should be telling parents how to defend themselves. But as
noted, the media were also infected by the Comintern. How can parents
find out what to do when schools and newspapers are aligned against
them?
The
key insight to understanding the last hundred years is that the
communists were always on offense. Anything that might be a threat
needed to be neutralized. The Nazis had their concentration camps and
their ovens. The communists had something perhaps more powerful:
thousands of lifelong fanatics, toiling every day on tiny assignments in
order to bring about the downfall of America.
This
elaborate obsessiveness became the marching orders for our Education
Establishment. Even the tiniest success must be expunged. The stupidest ideas in the history of education were brought into the schools and made to seem normal.
Images of a modified Land Rover designed by the Duke of Edinburgh to carry his coffin have been revealed.
The duke, who died at the age of 99 last week, worked on creating the bespoke hearse for 16 years, starting in 2003.
His modifications include the open top rear section, where his coffin will rest, and the military green colour.
On the day of the funeral, the Land Rover Defender will be used to carry his coffin to St George's Chapel.
Prince Philip's funeral will take place in the chapel at Windsor Castle at 15:00 BST on Saturday.
The Land Rover hearse was among the details of the ceremonial royal funeral released by Buckingham Palace on Thursday.
The
duke's four children - the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal, the
Duke of York and the Earl of Wessex - as well as grandsons the Duke of
Cambridge and Duke of Sussex, will follow the vehicle in a procession.
The Duke of Edinburgh began creating his own hearse in collaboration with Land Rover in 2003, the year he turned 82.
The
duke, who served in the Royal Navy in World War Two, requested that the
original Belize Green bodywork be switched to Dark Bronze Green, a
colour used for many military Land Rovers.
He
also designed the open top rear section where his coffin will rest,
made to his exact specifications, including the rubber grips on silver
metal pins known as the "stops" or "stoppers" which prevent the coffin
from moving.
The vehicle also has matching green wheel hubs, a black front grille, a single cab and no registration plates.
The
Defender was made at Land Rover's factory in Solihull and the duke
oversaw the modifications for several years, making the final
adjustments in 2019, the year he turned 98.
The
vehicle's original role would have been to transport the duke from
Wellington Arch in central London to Windsor, 22 miles away, but the
coronavirus pandemic curtailed those long-held plans.
The duke used Land Rovers throughout his adult life and granted his Royal Warrant to Land Rover more than 40 years ago.
Men Are Getting Tired of the Hyper-Sexualized Woman
As a man, I can tell you that men are pretty simple. We like good
food, good alcohol, a good dog, and a good woman, but somehow “good
woman” became out-of-date.
Today, it’s all about the hypersexualized woman who doesn’t cook or
clean but will tell you how they got this ring. Their primary concern is
how sexy or hot they look to the world. Instagram photos with a girl
posing in sexy ways and in provocative clothing are about a dime a
dozen. Two-dozen on the weekends.
It all kind of jumped a shark when Cardi B performed “WAP” during the Grammys.
It was one of the most try-hard, look-at-me performances the world had
ever seen, and despite all the “shocking” sexualization they put on
screen, people just didn’t seem to care. It was tired and overdone.
Society is bored with it.
Especially men.
Men have become so desensitized to hyper-sexualization that we’re
actually bored with all the booty being thrown in our faces at all
times. There used to be a higher value to women for us. Seeing a naked
woman, or even a woman wearing teasing clothing, was once something that
got us excited in more ways than one.
Now we’re so saturated with it that the value of a woman’s body is
about equal to a cup of instant ramen. It costs almost nothing to get
and seems cool for the short time we’re imbibing it, but afterward, we
just feel unsatisfied.
I was cruising the web when I came across a video that really summed up how men feel nowadays. I can’t agree with it more.
The sad fact is that mainstream society has women so focused on their
sexuality that they’ve become next to worthless in every other way. The
path to it is easy to see, too.
Society doesn’t encourage women to be good partners, they’re
encouraged to be consumers of what their partner produces. Sadly, these
same women are being encouraged to go out and get high-paying positions
and are very likely to succeed thanks to the current culture, and very
often make more money than their male partners. Yet still, the male is
still expected to make more for the family.
It doesn’t just stop at the societal level either. Even in modern
families, men are taught how to treat a woman, provide for her, and work
hard to keep her happy. Women aren’t taught how to treat a man or how
to make him happy; they’re strictly taught what to expect from a man.
This, combined with modern feminist philosophy that encourages women
to do away with traditional ideas, has produced an entire swath of
useless women who value shallow sexuality over familial contribution and
homemaking skills. They enter into marriages where they contribute very
little and expect quite a lot, and these marriages eventually end.
This has men thirsty in a way they haven’t been in some time.
Men are becoming increasingly excited about a woman who not only has
homemaking skills but interests that actually have more of an innocent
and domesticated nature. Is she a reader? Does she like to knit or will
she game with us? Does she know how to take care of us if we get sick?
Will she be a supportive partner when we’re down and help pick us back
up when we fail?
These are infinitely more valuable to us than how good your ass looks
in tight pants. Sure, it’s fun to look at, but like anything on this
planet, the more we’re introduced to it, the less effective it is.
Things that make a woman three-dimensional will always add value. Like
it or not, good looks and sexual desirability fade over time. When that
goes, what’s left?
“Modernized” women can be angry about this truth all they want, but
the reality is what it is. It’s okay for a man to desire homemaking
skills in a woman. They’re important to a stable home and healthy
children. It’s okay for men to see a woman as more valuable if she has
strengths that fall in line with traditional gender roles. Women
certainly haven’t changed their views about men in that regard.
Men shouldn’t be made to feel bad about wanting valuable women in a
traditional sense. We’re told that we should want the over-sexualized
Lust-Inducer 5000 with twerking action, or we’re sexist and don’t
respect the emancipation and freedom of women and their individual
choices, but that’s just not true. We as men will eventually do as
biology instructs us and settle down with one of these women. It’s our
lives that will either be uplifted or miserable/ruined by the woman we
pair with. We absolutely should be concerned with her character, skills,
and value as a wife and partner.
Mainstream culture will tell you that what I’m saying is horrific and
sexist, but the truth is that mainstream culture needs to value men and
the family more than it does. It definitely needs to value women more,
and not in the shallow way it currently does.
So apparently we were mistaken back in March when Joe Biden announced he was putting Kamala Harris in charge of the border crisis. He wasn’t putting her in charge. Nope. Not at all. According to Kamala, her assignment is to noodle out the root causes of this mad dash to our border.
And if you believe that, you probably believed my ‘shop image of Jill dressed like Madonna was authentic.
You don’t send arson investigators into a building until the fire is out. And you sure as hell don’t look for root causes of a border crisis while the crisis is roiling out of control.
“Chief, the building is completely engulfed in flames! There are over a hundred people inside. What do we do?”
“Well, first and foremost, we need to get to the root causes of the fire. Is it Climate Change? An economic problem? Systemic racism? These are the things we need to figure out and figure out this minute!”
“But what about the people trapped inside?!”
“Hey, that’s not my job.”
Yeah, no.
This “Look everybody, I’m working really hard to find the root causes” dog and pony show is just another Kamala resume-packing diversion. It’s a textbook example of “the boss is coming, try and look busy!”
We the people are the boss and Kamala is hoping her “root causes” busy work will fool us.
And, sad to say, it will fool some.
I’ve said before, I have no doubt that Kamala’s “find the root causes” dog and pony show is less about solving the crisis at the border and more about keeping Kamala’s cardboard cutout reputation from being sullied by an association with the mayhem the Biden Administration unleashed on the border.
Fact is, if Kamala wants to know the root causes of mass illegal immigration, she need look no further than the building in which she works.
It’s not hard.
If your campaign runs on ending Trump’s “xenophobic” border policies, guess what? Not only are human traffickers and their cargo listening, but all the Open Border non-profit groups are listening too.
If you announce that you are stopping the construction of the border wall, what do you think will happen?
To borrow from Field of Dreams, if you stop building it, they will come.
You know, for someone who bangs on endlessly about “believing in science,” you’d think Kamala would have a grasp of Newton’s Third Law.
But it doesn’t matter. Now isn’t the time to figure out the root causes of the chaos Biden and Harris unleashed.
Now is the time to stop the chaos.
And that’s the last thing Harris or Biden want.
Kamala doesn’t give a rip what the root causes are.
Not at all.
Both she and the addle-brained coot she plans to replace rolled out the red carpet and brought this chaos down on our heads. And they did it on purpose.
Even if Kamala’s root causes dog and pony show arrives at any answers, neither she nor Biden plan to do anything to stop the unending flow of foreign nationals pouring into our country. They want them here. Hell, they invited them here.
If anything, this dog and pony show has a foregone conclusion already. Whatever Kamala decides are the root causes of the border crisis, the solution will be the same: Amnesty, Open Borders, throwing taxpayer money at it, and putting Americans last.
Legacy media doesn’t like to be joked with. The New York Times recently accused satirical website The Babylon Bee of having “sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.” Last year, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan made a similar allegation about the website:
Having a disclaimer buried somewhere on your site that says it’s ‘satire’ seems like a good way to get around a lot of the changes Facebook has made to reduce the spread of clickbait and misinformation.
Of course, those like me, who believe the NYT, CNN, and other similar ideological and partisan outlets have abandoned any pretense at objectivity, might respond to the Bee’s teasing headlines in thewords of Homer Simpson: “It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.”
Many Americans have gotten good at caustic ridicule. We know how to level the most searing barbs at our opponents on social media or the website combox, a weapon made all the more effective by our ability to carefully refine our language on our smartphone or laptop before clicking “send.”
Cancel culture takes many forms, but certainly one of them is the ease with which people can be labeled racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, Karens, you name it, often with social or professional costs. At the same time, however, we’re increasingly disconnected from the art of teasing.
Of course, The Babylon Bee engages in satire — defined as the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize others’ hypocrisy or stupidity — but it is a satire that is intended as playful and good-hearted rather than vicious. In this sense, much of what it engages in — contrary to the more predictable and haughty satire one sees from, say, “Saturday Night Live” or the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri — can be characterized as teasing.
Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and a prominent researcher on teasing, defines it as “an intentional provocation accompanied by playful off-record markers that together comment on something relevant to the target.” Teasing can be verbal or non-verbal, is intentionally light-hearted, and comments on or draws attention to something regarding the person being teased. Psychologists acknowledge that teasing can serve valuable functions in society.
Of course, humans knew this long before professional scientists and academics began labeling and studying it. If you’ve seen a war movie or read a book on the subject, you know that soldiers are constantly poking at each other, giving each other unflattering nicknames, and insulting their female relatives.
As an officer and friend of mine in the Air Force explained to me, teasing, whether on the practice field or during training, is an important social ritual. For one, players (or soldiers) are part of a team. Whatever their abilities, they must recognize that those talents are to support something larger than themselves. Teasing helps temper egos that can ruin a play or get someone killed.
Alternatively, teasing fosters humility and equalizes the group. If everyone possesses some trait or personality quirk that is worthy of mockery, then we are all in at least one sense equal. Nobody is allowed to remain aloof and detached.
As an extension of that, teasing also helps build unit cohesion by building trust among its members. You make fun of me, I make fun of you, and we develop a rapport in the process. Teasing, done properly, is a form of acceptance, notes psychologist Peter Gray, because it shows the recipient that he or she is considered part of the group.
Teasing also reinforces natural hierarchies based on competency and experience. Even if you’re the brilliant new kid who is more intelligent or skilled than the aged veteran, there are lessons — and traditions — that are learned only through “time on target.” This reinforces humility, but it also keeps the pecking order explicit.
If teasing is stifled or prohibited, those hierarchies don’t go away. Rather, those hierarchies will go underground, or people will act out in problematic ways that undermine the group and amplify tensions.
Unfortunately, our hyper-sensitive culture is aggravating this problem in our institutions. Human Resources departments and woke activists warn of “patriarchal norms,” “toxic masculinity,” and “mansplaining” that encourage people to aggressively police each other’s (and especially men’s) behavior. They promote “safe spaces” and deride “micro-aggressions” so no one gets hurt or offended. Ironically (and sadly), this can result in punishing those who question such pseudo-science, likeUniversity of Virginia medical student Kieran Bhattacharya.
Yet it is precisely in pain and suffering that virtues like trust, sacrifice, and camaraderie are fashioned. Ending nuanced behaviors like these eradicates social rites that mature us in favor of those that coddle and infantilize. The consequence is a generation of emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped (and malformed) whiners.
Of course, teasing can be taken to extremes, manifested in bullying that is aggressive, mean-spirited, and dehumanizing. We all know about cases of hazing where abuse crossed lines and led people into depression, self-hatred, and even sometimes death. The goal of such behavior isn’t to foster cohesion and build virtue, but to exclude and weaken. There were, and unfortunately remain, toxic “good old boys” clubs. I have no interest in defending any of that.
I was bullied a fair share as a kid. I had a funny last name, was short, and had bad acne. I was also smarter than most of my classmates, which made me an easy target. Sure, some of the teasing hurt. But a lot of it was formative, toughening me up for greater challenges and obstacles in my adult life. It’s hard to mature if everything you experience is warm, affectionate affirmation.
Ultimately, I’m grateful for learning to absorb teasing during my first tour in Afghanistan, when I spent a lot of time with the same people in close quarters. I was ribbed for being more introverted, bookish, and innocent than my peers (I was at the time a young, devout evangelical who mostly stayed on the straight and narrow). I knew barely anyone meant any real harm by it. In time, I learned to give as good as I got.
But more deeply, I knew that we were part of the same team, with the same mission, and could count on one another. That means a lot when you’re periodically experiencing incoming rockets and small-arms fire.
Even in less dramatic life scenarios, the give-and-take of teasing means a lot when you’re just trying to live in the world with people who are different from you. If you can’t suffer a little good-natured ribbing, how will you manage the real crises and losses of life?
Perhaps that’s a question our vain, dangerously fragile culture — who kvetcheven over an older man harmlessly and good-humoredly calling a younger woman “kiddo“ — should consider.
Many people have forgotten, and the media intentionally refused to take notice, that Joe Biden’s campaign was funded by donations to BLM. After reaching the BLM homepage on their website, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chose to donate, the were rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”…. Well, Joe Biden was the top beneficiary of these coordinated ActBlue’s fundraising efforts. (link)
