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A Perfect Storm

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I’m speechless. What can be added to such disheartening piece, except to place the responsibility for the creation of  such a generation to where it belongs — to the parents of these maladjusted misfits who will someday be lead our nation. OMG!

The Smartphone Generation vs. Free Speech

Controversial speakers are being shut down on campus because today’s college students are obsessed with psychological safety and have little experience with negotiating conflicts

Jean M. Twenge

A student group set up a ‘safe space’ on the University of Missouri campus, Columbia, Mo., Nov. 8, 2015. PHOTO: JAIME KEDROWSKI/MISSOURIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

In the past few years, many U.S. college campuses have become embroiled in controversies over free speech. Students have insisted on “safe spaces” to protect themselves from ideas with which they disagree and have demanded the dismissal of faculty members who offend their sensibilities. Campus speakers have been “disinvited” when students object to their point of view. Such events were rare just five years ago but now seem to occur constantly during the school year. Why has this happened? What is so different about today’s students that many of them denounce faculty and administrators who suggest that a basic expectation of university life is for people with differing perspectives to talk to each other?

Meet iGen, the generation of young Americans born after 1995 and the first to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones in their hands. Puzzling as the recent campus controversies might seem, they are rooted in the unique psychology and life experiences of this cohort.

First, iGen’ers grew up in an era of smaller families and protective parenting. They rode in car seats until they were in middle school, bounced on soft-surface playgrounds and rarely walked home from school. For them, unsurprisingly, safety remains a priority, even into early adulthood.

As I found in analyzing several large national surveys of teens from all backgrounds, fewer of them in the 2010s (as compared with the 2000s) say that they like to take risks, and fewer say they get a thrill out of doing something dangerous. That has real benefits. Fewer get into car accidents or physical fights. In the annual Monitoring the Future survey of more than a half million 12th-graders, the number who binge-drank was cut in half between the late 1990s and 2016. In previous eras, teens were willing to live on the edge by doing things they knew weren’t safe—that was the nature of being a teen. Not anymore.

Teenagers using cellphones. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Nor are they just concerned about physical safety. The iGen teens I have interviewed also speak of their need for “emotional safety”—which, they say, can be more difficult to protect. “I believe nobody can guarantee emotional safety,” one 19-year-old told me. “You can always take precautions for someone hurting you physically, but you cannot really help but listen when someone is talking to you.” This is a distinctively iGen idea: that the world is an inherently dangerous place because every social interaction carries the risk of being hurt. You never know what someone is going to say, and there’s no way to protect yourself from it.

The result is a generation whose members are often afraid to talk to one another, especially about anything that might be upsetting or offensive. If everyone must be emotionally safe at all times, a free discussion of ideas is inherently dangerous. Opposing viewpoints can’t just be argued against; they have to be shut down, because merely hearing them can cause harm.

‘This frame of mind lies behind recent student agitation to keep controversial speakers off campus.’

This frame of mind lies behind recent student agitation to keep controversial speakers off campus. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit watchdog group, campus disinvitations have risen steadily, reaching an all-time high of 42 in 2016, up from just six in 2000. In the American Freshman survey of more than 140,000 college students conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute in 2015, 43% agreed that campuses should be able to ban extreme speakers, up from just 20% in 1984.

The reasons for disinvitations frequently refer to the safety of students. When Williams College disinvited a speaker with provocative views on race, the campus newspaper wrote that his presence on campus would have caused students “emotional injury.” When controversial speakers do come, it is now fashionable to create a “safe space” where students can go if they feel upset.

Members of iGen are also taking longer to grow up. As I found in analyzing seven large national surveys of teens, today’s adolescents are less likely to drive, drink, work, date, go out and have sex than were teens just 10 years ago. Today’s 18-year-olds look like 15-year-olds used to. They don’t reach adulthood too early, but they also lack experience with independence and decision-making.

The result is a generation that looks to college administrators to settle disputes, like squabbling siblings appealing to their parents. Unaccustomed to independence, they want an authority figure to step in. At San Diego State University in 2016, students wanted the university president to apologize for fliers posted by an off-campus group. At Yale University in 2015, a faculty member suggested that students use their own judgment about potentially offensive Halloween costumes rather than let the administration dictate the rules. The students demanded that she resign.

Campus as a “home,” evoking the protected cocoon of childhood, is a theme in many of these incidents. During the controversy at Yale, a student yelled, “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students…It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! It is about creating a home here!”

Members of iGen have spent more time with screens and less time interacting with each other in person than any previous generation. Because they communicate primarily online, most of the threats they experience come through social media or texts, not in person. For iGen, danger tends to take the form of words, not physical altercations. At the extreme, this has led to the belief that words can be violence—the belief at the core of disinvitations, “trigger warnings” to alert students to potentially offensive material, and campus speech restrictions. In the American Freshman survey, iGen college students were more likely than Gen X students in the 1990s to agree that “colleges should prohibit racist or sexist speech.”

Finally, in a time of growing income inequality, iGen believes that you either make it or you don’t—so you’d better make it. Compared with previous generations, they are more likely to say that they are going to college to get a good job and less likely to say that they hope the experience will broaden their education and point of view.

To faculty and administrators who grew up in previous eras, college is a place for being challenged by new ideas. Members of iGen disagree: They see college as a place to prepare for a career in a safe environment. They don’t necessarily see a connection between participating in big social and political debates and getting a job that pays well.

All of these iGen factors have combined to create a perfect storm at U.S. colleges. It isn’t hard to see why these young people, looking for safety and practicality, now clash so regularly with their elders when controversial ideas arrive on campus.

—Dr. Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood” (Atria).

Appeared in the September 2, 2017, print edition as ‘The Smartphone Generation Vs. Free Speech.’

Originally posted 2017-09-13 09:06:50.

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Madam Clinton – Really?

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I always like reading Nolte’s commentary, always nails it with a touch of humor. He certainly nailed this one.

During his Sunday night interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon finally said out loud what many of us already knew: that Hillary Clinton is “not very bright.”

by JOHN NOLTE  11 Sep 2017

This was actually my favorite part of the interview because nothing is healthier for our culture than the truth, most especially a truth no one dares to speak out loud.

For 25 years, Madam Clinton has been in the public eye, and for 25 years we have been told time and again and again and again two whoppers: 1) Hillary is brilliant. 2) When you get to know her, Hillary is a warm, funny, vibrant real person.

We expect Democrats and leftwing activists to tell us this. What else are they going to say? My problem is that it has been the national media, those who pose as objective truth-tellers, who have been spreading and cementing this fable. It is those who wear the uniform of journalists who keep telling us that this bumbling, fumbling, tone deaf, two-time failure is, when you really get to know her, a dazzling personality wrapped around a super-smart brain.

Granted, I do not know Hillary Clinton. I’ve never met her, nor have I even seen her in person. Nevertheless…

COME. ON.

We are talking about 25 years in the public eye here, twenty-five freakin’ years of gaffes, whiffed opportunities, serial-humiliations, absurdly transparent lies, needless scandals, and epic fails.

The Hillary Clinton who clown-shoe’d her way on to the national stage 25 years ago with, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” (even though time has proved that is exactly who she is), is the exact same stunted-woman who, 25 years later, thought it was smart politics to attack half the country as a “basket of deplorables.”

Hillary Clinton’s public career has been one defined only by stepping on rakes.

From Whitewater to Benghazi.

From cattle futures to uranium.

From Travelgate to Emailgate.

From the “missing” Rose Law Firm billing records to 33,000 deleted emails.

From the speaking fees to the secret server.

From rape-denier to looting the White House.

From the Clinton Foundation to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

From “sniper fire” to “vast rightwing conspiracy” to “stayed at home and baked cookies” to “with a cloth” to Gandhi “ran a gas station” to “I ain’t no ways tired” to “dead broke” to, well, this.

This is not partisanship on my part. I’ve seen Bill Clinton’s brilliance. There is no question Chuck Schumer has plenty going on. Barack Obama is not the genius everyone says he is, but Barry’s still plenty smart. Even Nancy Pelosi has shown some true savvy.

Hillary Clinton is just dumb. Plain dumb. Not once during the quarter century that I have suffered under the oppression of her voice, her condescension, her awkward fumbles at being real, have I witnessed her porch lights come on. Not once have I said, There it is!

And all it would take is once.

I know what the rebuttal is: that dumb people don’t almost become president of these here United States. Let me respond to that in three ways…

1) No intellectually honest person will tell you Hillary Clinton would be where she is had she not married Bill. That is not a slam on women, plenty of whom have emerged from their husband’s shadow to distinguish themselves: Katharine Graham, Arianna Huffington, Eleanor Roosevelt, Abigail Adams, etc. Given a change of fate, we can see each one of these women succeeding in some way all on their own.

Hillary? No.

Senator Hillary Clinton? No way. New York has way too much political talent to waste on a stiff, awkward, brittle politician with zero people skills.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? All she did was log miles. Five years later no one, and I mean no one, not even her biggest supporters, can name a single accomplishment.

Democrat Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton?  Don’t make me laugh.

2) If you trust me on nothing else, trust me on this. Having now served time in the worlds of entertainment and media, the dirty little secret of both is that naked ambition, driving persistence; unbridled, unscrupulous, shameless scraping and grasping allows many, many, many, too many marginal people to fail upwards.

Hillary Clinton might be a few clowns short of a circus, but she is pantsuited ambition personified. There is nothing she will not do to get what she wants, no person she will not destroy, no humiliation she will not suffer, no indignity she will not dignify. And going back to ancient Rome, the quality of naked ambition has always made up for so many others, including smarts.

3) The media. Hillary is a left wing Democrat loathed by the media’s numero uno enemies: Republicans and everyday Americans. So of course the Sisterhood of the Andrea Mitchells and all those media metrosexuals who bow to feminist politics have propped her up over the years.

To be clear, I am in no way saying that Hillary is a stupe. There is no question that in the same way Rain Man can count toothpicks, Hillary can booklearn. But native intelligence? Common sense? Being able to grasp a room, a situation, a people, a country? Yeah, no. She’s an idiot.

Without Bill, without the media, I think we all know where Hillary Clinton would be right at this very moment… Forever-tenured Professor Rodham sitting in a cluttered, smelly,  Womyn’s Study office deep within the bowels of some Ivy League university; a bitter feminist still clinging to her one claim to fame, her time with the Watergate committee (before she was fired). In other words, she would be no one and nowhere , and even among like-minded colleagues, she’d be something of a joke…

Just like she is today.

 

Originally posted 2017-09-12 10:01:17.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Letter to VA Governor

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An Open Letter to Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

From Sherwan W. Dillar

Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe speaks during a debate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in Ohio. I have taught Political Science at the collegiate level in Cincinnati, been published in The Wall Street Journal and am in my 12th year of research for a forthcoming book on Columbine.  For the past seven years I have made Rockbridge County, Virginia, my home.  The one and only reason I live in Lexington, Virginia is, because it is the final resting place of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson. Their lives, character, faith, integrity, honor and testimony shone so brightly a century and a half after their decease, that there is no other place on the Earth I want to be, but where they lived and served.

There is something deeply and morally wrong with anyone, who objects to these two great Virginians—great Americans being honored by the native State, for which they gave their lives, limbs and blood in selfless patriotic service.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept Lee’s portrait in his executive office, while president. Churchill extolled him as the greatest American. Ulysses S. Grant threatened to resign from the U.S. Army, if Lee were tried for treason. The statue that marks the grave of “Stonewall” Jackson was paid for not only by the veterans, who served under him, but by financial contributions from former slaves, whom he had taught to read in violation of Virginia law.

When a Lexington local assailed Jackson for breaking the law to “teach those people”, Jackson uncharacteristically lost his temper and shouted, “If you were a Christian you would not say so!”After the war, it was Lee who broke social convention at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, by kneeling beside a former slave, who had mortified the White congregation by kneeling at the altar. Asked afterward by a bigot why a man like himself would kneel beside a former slave, Lee simply chastised him, “The ground is always level at the foot of the cross.”

The anniversary of the deaths of Lee and of Jackson were long commemorated in this Commonwealth by veterans of the North, who were often the honored keynote speakers invited to praise the virtues of their once-foes.  Every monument to a Confederate Virginian is a war memorial to an American veteran.  It has been the mark of manhood and civility and longstanding American tradition to leave politics out of the way we honor our veterans. They fought the battles; we did not. They shed the blood; we did not. They reconciled with their enemies; we did not. End of subject. It is not for children born a hundred and fifty years later to re-adjudicate the past and expose to double jeopardy men their own contemporaries exonerated.

It is the height of arrogance to suppose that you know more about these men and their times than their even contemporaries. The command of God remains, “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” It is to God you will assuredly answer for its violation. If you find it impossible to respect your elders, attempt at least to revere your betters.  The destruction of Virginia’s monuments to her war dead is sacrilege and those, who urge and execute it, are nothing more than cemetery vandals. There is no honor in this course of wanton destruction and, morally, you equate yourself with ISIS, which shares your contempt for actual culture, something you both so manifestly lack. It is more than history, more than art. 

No matter. No one will remember you in any 150 years. Nothing you do can make anything like the mark these great Virginians made on history’s ledger. Just being you another day is your own punishment and yet you still face God for what you propose to do as well. Something is deeply, horribly wrong with your soul, Sir. And you know it. So does all Virginia. I have strived to be civil, but you do not make it easy. Smearing reputations, slandering saints and tearing down what better men raised has zero to do with love, unity, tolerance, acceptance, diversity and coexistence. It’s just the usual political spoils game, playing one race/class/group against another to score a win at any cost. The mean, petty loathing of Virginia’s first string heroes outs you as a raging hypocrite just as you were trying to pass for intelligent. What a piece of work.  Just leave the statues, graves, monuments and memorials right where the grown-ups put them, Terry. Just fool around doing nothing, you know, like back at Georgetown. Easy.

That’s all I ask. And about the most anybody expects of you. Aren’t you tired yet of just being the same old failure and lurching from bungled debacle to bungled debacle? Why not shock the world: open a book, educate yourself and do something less horrible than usual. Resign, even, and leave Virginians to govern Virginia. What a concept.

With all due respect,
Sherwin W. Dillar

Originally posted 2017-09-07 17:01:59.

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Amnesty

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As always, Ann nails it. We are not being listened to by our elected officials who do nothing but pander to us. We want a wall, but yet we don’t want a wall. Which is America? Speak up or go sit down, listen to the MSM, and shut up!

Congress has tried to sneak through amnesties three times in a little more than a decade. Every time, the American people somehow found out — despite the best efforts of the press — rose up in a rage and killed the proposed bills.

By Ann Coulter

In 2006, President Bush got the brilliant idea to push amnesty on the country. His party was wiped out the very next time voters could get to the polls.

Liberals like to claim that their brave opposition to the Iraq War led to the midterm slaughter, but, as I recall, they were against that war in the 2004 presidential election, too, and Bush won. An April 2006 Washington Post–ABC News poll — taken about a month after Bush launched his amnesty crusade — showed that more Americans approved of Bush’s handling of the Iraq War than approved of his handling of immigration. In nearly every poll on Bush’s handling of immigration that year, a huge majority of the public disapproved.

Three years ago, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his seat to an unknown economics professor, Dave Brat, by a whopping 55 percent to 45 percent, despite outspending Brat 40-to-1. It was the first time in history a member of leadership had lost a primary. (This despite Cantor being one of the “Young Guns”!) Brat had explicitly attacked Cantor for supporting amnesty.

Most spectacularly, last year, an utterly implausible presidential candidate crushed all his opponents — including the media — and won the White House by promising to deport illegals and build a wall.

The media imagine that President Trump’s deficiencies are an argument for not taking his positions seriously. Oh no — it’s just the reverse. The fact that Trump’s supporters implacably stick by him, through every horror, proves they are willing to put up with any lunacy if it means getting that agenda.

How many different ways can Americans express that they want a whole lot less immigration and absolutely no amnesties?

We already tried amnesty once. The 1986 amnesty under Reagan was supposed to be a one-time fix. We’d forgive the estimated 1 million illegal aliens living here and, in exchange, draconian measures would be imposed on any employer ever caught hiring an illegal again — up to a $10,000 fine per illegal and jail time for repeat offenders.

It wasn’t a one-time fix. In another real-world example of “incentives,” the first amnesty led to a never-ending stream of illegals across our border, confident of getting in on the next amnesty. Today, there are at least 40 million illegals living in the U.S. (Eleven million is nonsense — they’ve been claiming that since 1986. See Adios, America)

And now, once again, politicians are lobbying for the exact same policy that was a complete failure last time. When it comes to immigration, it’s always Groundhog Day!

We’re told the DACA amnesty will apply only to a very small, discrete group of unbelievably fantastic illegals — who melt Ivanka’s heart by refilling her water glass at Cipriani with such alacrity!

Not only that, but there will be strict requirements on who qualifies for a DACA amnesty.

None of which will ever be enforced.

Congress has passed laws requiring that immigrants pay back taxes, learn English, not collect welfare and have good moral character. That’s not too onerous, right? It’s not like we’re requiring them to have any skills or talents that would be valuable to America.

Every single one of these requirements has been scuttled by immigration bureaucrats, federal judges and Democratic presidents. All of ’em. Our immigration bureaucracy is so dedicated to destroying America that it’s made citizens of thousands of convicted felons.

If you don’t understand how that could happen, you have no idea how much our cultural elites hate this country. Their governing philosophy is: Anyone we bring in is at least better than an American!

This nation is mind-bogglingly generous. But decades of lies make it impossible for even the most tender-hearted American to fall for this bait-and-switch one more time.

Every politician swears up and down that he wants a “secure border.” But then these same politicians go absolutely berserk when Trump says he wants to build a wall.

They say we’ll get enforcement right after the amnesty. That’s obviously absurd. When the tub is overflowing, water pouring out of the faucet, across the carpets, down the stairs, up the dining room walls, we don’t debate whether we’re going to dry clean the curtains or throw them out. We don’t argue about whether to use a mop or towels. FIRST: Turn off the water. This is what we always do, we discuss the wrong things, pass laws we have no intention of enforcing, and allow the media to decide what’s important in our lives. We are simply sheep and the herd dogs take us where they want to. It’s sad, so sad.

As long as both political parties stoutly refuse to build the wall, we know they are not serious about ever stopping illegal immigration. (Luckily, the Constitution gives the commander-in-chief full authority to protect our borders, with or without congressional approval.)

We know what happened after the Reagan amnesty. We know politicians and the media are lying to us. Why, some of the politicians who lied to us then are lying to us today, for example, Chuck Schumer.

No matter how innocent and lamblike a “Dreamer” they produce to tear at our heartstrings, it won’t work anymore. Decades of their perfidy has made sympathy impossible.

It’s as if, night after night, Paul Ryan knocked on our door and asked us to take in one helpless orphan and, night after night, we crack open our door, only to be set upon by 30 armed felons with tire chains and brass knuckles.

At a certain point, Ryan might actually produce a sad orphan. Who knows? It’s theoretically possible. But we could not be faulted for not opening the door.

Politicians and the press are themselves responsible for thoroughly killing any human sympathy Americans may have had for illegal immigrants — even the “Dreamers” (whom Ivanka adores, but would die before sending her kids to a school jam-packed with them).

The only question is: Will anyone in Washington ever listen?

Originally posted 2017-09-07 09:55:41.

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Rednecks Respond

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Wikipedia says: The term redneck is a derogatory term chiefly used for a rural poor white person of the Southern United States.] It’s usage is similar in meaning to cracker (especially regarding Georgia, Texas, and Florida), hillbilly (especially regarding Appalachia and the Ozarks), and white trash (but without the last term’s suggestions of immorality)

I did not write this—but it’s worth reading. They may be Rednecks, but they know what has to be done, and they are doing it in droves. God bless them!

Hundreds and hundreds of small boats pulled by countless pickups and SUVs from across the South are headed for Houston. Almost all of them driven by men. They’re using their own property, sacrificing their own time, spending their own money, and risking their own lives for one reason: to help total strangers in desperate need.

Most of them are by themselves. Most are dressed like the redneck duck hunters and bass fisherman they are. Many are veterans. Most are wearing well-used gimme-hats, t-shirts, and jeans; and there’s a preponderance of camo. Most are probably gun owners, and most probably voted for Trump.

These are the people the Left loves to hate, the ones Maddow mocks. The ones Maher and Olbermann just *know* they’re so much better than.

These are The Quiet Ones. They don’t wear masks and tear down statues. They don’t, as a rule, march and demonstrate. And most have probably never been in a Whole Foods.

But they’ll spend the next several days wading in cold, dirty water; dodging gators and water moccasins and fire ants; eating whatever meager rations are available; and sleeping wherever they can in dirty, damp clothes. Their reward is the tears and the hugs and the smiles from the terrified people they help. They’ll deliver one boatload, and then go back for more.

When disaster strikes, it’s what men do. Real men. Heroic men. American men. And then they’ll knock back a few shots, or a few beers with like-minded men they’ve never met before, and talk about fish, or ten-point bucks, or the benefits of hollow-point ammo, or their F-150 pickup’s.

And the next time they hear someone talk about “the patriarchy”, or “male privilege”, they’ll snort, turn off the TV and go to bed.

In the meantime, they’ll likely be up again before dawn. To do it again. Until the helpless are rescued. And the work’s done.

They’re unlikely to be reimbursed. There won’t be any medals. They won’t care. They’re heroes. And that’s what heroes do.

https://www.toddstarnes.com/column/redneck-army-saves-national-guard-in-houston

 

Originally posted 2017-09-04 17:20:20.

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