George Mason Professor Bethany Letiecq is at the center of a firestorm of controversy over his article in the Journal of Marriage and Family declaring that the institution of marriage plays a key role in white supremacy. In considering what she labels “marriage fundamentalism,” Letiecq lashes out at the “two-parent married family” model. It is the latest example of what I have called the “radical chic” of academia, faculty who find publication and promotional opportunities in advancing highly racialized and radical theories challenging institutions, values, and even common expressions.
In today’s academic environment, there often seems a rush to racialize common practices or terminology. Publications clamor for such articles and discovering another hidden racist element in society can bring academic accolades. However, others have already staked out many areas such as mathematics, astrophysics, statistics, meritocracy, climate change, dieting, tipping, skiing, chess, and organized pantries. Most recently, the American Psychological Association declared that merit-based hiring may be racist. Even robots are now declared to be part of the supremacist menace because they are often made of white plastic.
Letiecq has spoken up to say that we should not forget marriage as we address “elements of White heteropatriarchal supremacy, such as structural racism, sexism, heterosexism, anti-immigrant nativism, and settler colonialism, operate and interlock to condition and constrain diverse family formation and functioning.” She notes that “there is abundant critical scholarship to unsettle the self.” That unsettling journey should include dismantling the institution of marriage.
As a threshold matter, Letiecq defines marriage as “the belief that a family composed of a cisgender heterosexual married couple (i.e., a man and a woman as husband and wife) is the ideal family form for rearing children, is the foundation of civilization, and is necessary for ensuring White, heteropatriarchal supremacy in America.”
As one might expect, that definition leads to fairly predictable conclusions on combating white heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs). She details how the institution was used for white domination:
“These efforts to coercively eradicate, delegitimize, and transform sex, gender, and reproduction via systems of racist heteropatriarchy were forms of assimilative violence understood as necessary for the production of marriage fundamentalism. … In colonized America, this new gendered and racialized social contract was institutionalized in the context of a White heteropatriarchal supremacist social order where the White heterosexual married-parent family served a particular purpose: to channel the flow of resources between generations of White male property owners to maintain their domination, power, and control over others.”
She notes that this will not be easy since “building new theories and models to understand and explain White heteropatriarchal family supremacy in a field heretofore dominated by White people, many of whom have benefited from Whiteness as property and WHNF advantaging, will require deep reflexivity and self-interrogation to unsettle the self.”
The fact is that many of us have long supported the right of adults to marry and foster families according to their own values and morals. I supported same-sex marriage for decades and have challenged “morality laws” that seek to impose such rules on others. As someone with long-standing libertarian values, I oppose orthodoxy in the law and efforts to coerce others into living their lives according the values of others.
However, this research, in my view, is emblematic of the scholarship that is now in vogue in academia. I encourage you to read the paper. It is a collection of jingoistic catch phrases and conclusory observations. The fact that marriage as an institution has existed throughout periods of colonialism and oppression creates a false cause-and-effect relationship. It may also be true that marriage was found early in human development to be socially, economically, or religiously beneficial institution — entirely separate from the racial or cultural conditions of any given country or time. The fact that the conventional family unit is fairly common throughout the world indicates that it may have other more universal benefits. This historical record does not inherently support the view of the institution in fostering “assimilative violence understood as necessary for the production of marriage fundamentalism.” It is also possible that such problems exist in society but correlation does not mean causation.
Letiecq works to show how marriage as an institution is “cisgender” and heterosexual even though most countries now have a broader definition. The core of the institution remains the union of individuals in establishing a family unit or relationship.
My disagreement with the paper of Professor Letiecq does not mean that I do not believe that it should have been published. It is provocative and challenging. My concern is the dominance of such scholarship in academia with the declining number of conservative or libertarian voices on faculties. These publications are far less likely to publish a work by an academic espousing the value of a traditional family unit. The result is a new type of orthodoxy and intolerance in higher education.
A summary of the George Mason professor’s ‘scholarship’ for those who do not have the time to read through the ‘academic’ jargon: Bla, bla , bla.
Oh, and what about them sneaky Orientals! Those boogers are trying to topple white supremacy, because even more of them get married than white people!
“There is substantial variation in marriage rates by race and ethnicity. While 57% of white adults and 63% of Asian adults are married, fewer than half of Hispanic (48%) and black adults (33%) are.”
Oh, and look at this! I think President Xi is behind this! Only about 12% of Asian American kids are born out of wedlock!
“Late last year, the final data for 2018 were published here (the key is Table 9 on page 25), and here’s what we learn: For all racial and ethnic groups combined, 39.6 percent of births in the United States were out-of-wedlock (incidentally, isn’t that appalling?). And there was as always a tremendous range among groups. For blacks, the number is 69.4 percent; for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 68.2 percent (Native Hawaiians/Other Pacific Islanders were at 50.4 percent); for Hispanics, 51.8 percent; for whites, 28.2 percent; and for Asian Americans, a paltry 11.7 percent.
So, we go from seven out of ten for African Americans, to one out of ten for Asian Americans; from a little less than three out of ten for whites, to a little more than five out of ten for Hispanics. As I say, a huge range, and one that more than anything else seems to fit quite precisely with how well the different groups are doing on whatever success metric you want to use.
But rather than encourage people to wait until they are married before having children — which is perceived by the Left as too religious and patriarchal — it’s much easier to talk about “institutionalized racism” and “white privilege” and “mass incarceration” and “implicit bias” and 1619, isn’t it?”
https://ceousa.org/2020/02/26/percentage-of-births-to-unmarried-women/
And amazingly the rates of single parent families matches near perfectly with the rates of poverty.
Maybe there is a connection ?
Bottom line, Floyd: It’s easier to make up simplistic things that don’t exist, and criticize them, than it is to deal with reality which is far more complex (and interesting, I might add), and seek solutions that could actually work. Academics then get tenure without having to do any mental heavy lifting or contribute anything useful to the world. Nice gig for them, sucks for everyone else. It could be cured by an actual free market for higher education, which would mean the government leaves the market completely …. but we all know that ain’t gonna happen.
My wife and I want to renovate our kitchen, and we decided we would prefer white cabinets. However, we were afraid that would be interpreted as displaying a symbol of our presumed supremacy. Societal condemnation would be our punishment, so we feared, and the likelihood of a FBI SWAT team ransacking our home and discovering additional proof in the form of a white-tiled master bathroom (in our defense, the guest bathroom has brown tiles) of our MAGA-leaning, right-wing, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal supremacy philosophy, and throwing us in pre-trial jail for the next 3 years became an obsession. We went to our neighbors (a Black family) to seek their advice in the matter, and they showed us their kitchen, which has white cabinets.
DoubleDutch said: “we decided we would prefer white cabinets. However, we were afraid that would be interpreted as displaying a symbol of our presumed supremacy.’
I’m waiting for it to dawn on these morons that the “White House” is the most obvious symbol of white supremacy and oppression that exists today, and to generate a mob 10,000 or more to storm it, and try to demolish it. Oh, wait, they’ll probably wait for Trump’s inaugaration. Unless Biden decides to paint it with rainbows and rename it “The House of Color”.
Black families in the US lived in traditional family units during slavery and beyond. In fact, breaking up families by slaveholders selling away the children from the parents, or one oif the parents, is generally recognized as one of the detrimental consequences of the salve system here. After the Civil War, Black families did comparatively well economically (lower unemployment rates among young Black males compared to young White males) until the end of the 1950-1960ies. Then, the party of the slaveho;der, Jim Crow, and the KKK decided that they could win there votes by announcing to help them. Financial support for poor families was introduced but limited to single parent families. Hence, the result was an enormous increase in single parent families especially (but not exclusively) among Black families. The problem is government intervention; we all do better without it.
So misguided…would miss these messages from you, they are so enlightening and essential!
Marriage IS is key role in “white supremacy”. Countless research articles have shown the detrimental effects of fatherless homes. Why is it “white supremacy?” Because the single mother birthrate of blacks (70%) is nearly three times that of whites. White culture in this ONE case is superior to what is apparently black culture. But the good professor DEFINITELY doesn’t want THAT to come up in political arguments……….
While it is true that assimilative as well as unassimilated violence is an inevitable consequence of both gendered, degendered and retendered heteropatriarchy, cisgendered racism can and does exist apart from such practice categories and can enforce its own intersectional destruction of norms, where . . . uh . . . beliefs that . . . uh . . . wait . . . where am I? I think I need more oil and vinegar.
Occasionally Razor at work? Maybe she’s against marriage because no one would want to be with a person like this, and is unconsciously projecting her own failures as an unsuitable biological breeding animal and blaming it on the white, racist hiarchy?
That was autocorrected. Should have been Occams razor
Anonymous said: “…Should have been Occams razor.”
Oh, I dunno. Considering the frequency with which logical thinking is evident in our society “Occasional Razor” has a certain feeling of accuracy.
I looked her up, and apparently she is a normal woman, who is living with a guy, with whom she has children. She calls him her partner, not her husband. So, her kids have two parents in the home.
There is a female law professor, I think in Pennsylvania, who says a lot of these white liberal women talk the 60s but live the 50s. Can’t remember her name.
@Floyd
If course they do. Sycophants and lunatics seldom follow their own rhetoric; I don’t know how or why they would when their bogeymen(people 😂?) are largely puerile, hypothetical figments of their imaginations, often gestated from their *own* privilege that literally can’t be addressed in a real world featuring real human beings; the confines of a mind are ultimately experienced alone. As an aside, extreme pedantry makes a good case for the autism hypothesis, too. It is the perfect system for people incapable of coping with cognitive dissonance.
She is a ridiculous person, they all are. It would be bizarrely hysterical were the consequences not so dire. At times, like this one, it’s hysterical regardless. Clowning, it turns out, is not a dead profession.
Floyd said: “apparently she is a normal woman”
If she is truly a “normal woman”, it’s possible that a horrid mistake was made in 1918…
I’ve decided wokeness is a modern system of excuses for weak people to justify their own human discouragement or personal failings. Clearly no one wants to date these people. 😂😂
Well Prof, libertarianism gone libertine has given us a culture of anything goes, as long as it’s perverse. Maybe it’s just not possible to keep a home standing when termites are seen as a positive good. Debunking reality leads to collapse. I believe in free speech, notice that these ugly forces believe in the opposite.
Core to libertarianism is that constrained only by causing harm to others. you can do as you please AND reap the benefits as well as consequences for those choices.
Libertarianism allows you to chose to protect your home from termites – or not. If you matke choices that result in your home being destroyed so be it. You then serve as an example to others.
It is a meta paper, a paper the looks at the overall scholarship and acts as a guide to other papers. That being said, it is a awful academic paper that is very weak in the ways that Turley described. I believe that careful analysis and good scholarly practices could show that the obsession with the cis married couple is a detriment to society as a whole, and minorities and LGBT in particular. This paper mentions some of this, but fails.
For example when they wrote ” Researchers have found geographic and racialized differences in TANF administration. For example, southern states with the largest percentages of Black families—and where the legacy of slavery is entrenched (Baker & O’Connell, 2022)—tend to spend a significantly higher share of TANF funds on marriage promotion programming (e.g., counseling about marriage, healthy relationships) than providing direct cash assistance to families” they do present evidence of their theory, but the paper is very light on this.
As usual. ignoring reality
While there are tax incentives for marriage and children, welfare money has decimated the nuclear family. The highest welfare is paid out to single head of household. Driving males out of the home and the creation of terms like babydaddy
Before The Great Society programs of LBJ, Black Culture centered around Family and Church. But when free money showed up for single mothers, SURPRISE the number of single mothers exploded. Do that for 4 generations, and you get exactly what we have today. feral children finding the attention they desire in gangs.
The structure of all human groups has always been male female led families. For 10’s of thousands of years
You nail the problem when you introduce “the great society”.
The freedom to try new things is absolutely essential to the rise of standard of living.
But most new things fail – and that failure is a critical part of learning for all of us.
When we institutionalize failure through government – we thwart learning and fossilize failure.
You are demonstrating the point of the paper. You start out by assuming that a cis lead family is the best at the exclusion of all others. There are extended families, and LGTB couples, and single parents where it is better for the parent to be single. Social polices should help all parents, not just cis.
Sammy, I assumed nothing.
I am pointing our the statistics.
Government cash, under the guise of “help” has decimated the nuclear family.
All I did, was notice rising poverty tracks rising govt welfare. I also notice that maybe govt programs that have crossed 4 generations of the same family. That is not a successful govt program, no matter how much you try to spin the facts.
If you know anything about history, you know that this anarchism, chaos and rebellion of the status quo is inevitable when governments grow too large and small communities become non-functioning. Eventually a new form of order regains control… the problem facing us is which new order will gain control – the one envisioned by our founding fathers or some radical whole world global elite controlling the entire planet for ever? Are we large enough in mass and committed enough in spirit to reverse the current insanity and regain control or will we just lazily roll over and let globalists have their way. Oh, by the way, we are aware that all this chaos is well planned – aren’t we?
Bethany LeFriecq is correct! The institution of marriage plays a key role in white supremacy. But how dare she give our secrets away!
That is exactly how come us white people are superior to the inferior American black people. That, and we actually do our homework and stay in school. We mostly get married before having kids, and most of our kids grow up in a home with two parents for a good portion of their lives. Meanwhile, over in the hood, black women are copulating with whoever, and popping out out-of-wedlock kids to the point where it is about 80% of them born that way. It is not unusual for black kids to not even know who their father is, or even what prison he is currently residing in. It is why there is less “generational wealth” passed down to black kids. And why those kids are so violent, and uneducated. That is why black women are so broke, and so stressed out, and angry. They are in a situation where they have all of the responsibility and little of love or support.
As a proud white person, I think that we should continue to prohibit black Americans from getting married or from finishing schools. We should continue to baffle them with bullsh!t, and encourage them to make excuses for their sorry state, and blame white people for their poverty and crappy lives. That way, us white folks can stay on top! Because if black people start getting married and forming families, and God Forbid! – making their kids stay in at night, do their homework and not roam around at 2:30 AM jacking cars, why if black Americans did that, and they did not have to run off to Jamaica to get married, like about 27% already do, then Oh My God! – black Americans might join the middle class, and make something of themselves. Then, who will fry our chickens for us? Who will tend our lawns? Who will buy all those over-priced tennis shoes? Who will tear down our cities, so that they can one day be re-gentrified? And what will happen to all those poor, insane white people who make it their life’s goal to uplift black Americans, and worship at the feet of their chaos and destruction? What will happen to those fragile white people, still living, in their minds, back in the days of Jim Crow and separate water fountains!
Stop giving our secrets away, Prof. LeFriecq!
[UPDATE] I have just been informed that black Americans were legally permitted to get married thru the auspices of the 1965 Civil Rights Bill. Thank goodness, that provision is buried somewhere deep in the bill. Whew! Hey, DeMarquarius, bring me another mint julip, and this time, go easy on the ice!
Floyd said: “As a proud white person, I think that we should continue to prohibit black Americans from getting married or from finishing schools. We should continue to baffle them with bullsh!t, and encourage them to make excuses for their sorry state, and blame white people for their poverty and crappy lives.”
Are you perchance the reincarnation of Lyndon Baines Johnson?
LOL! I always wondered if LBJ was secretly a member of the Invisible Empire (the Klan)? It may have just been stupid vote buying, but I do not think anyone could have done a worse thing to blacks than paying them to not get married. He had to have known better than that.
The most bigoted and ignorant people in our country now teach at our universities. No wonder they turn out more idiots each day.
I consider myself a fairly well-educated person with a doctoral degree in my field of expertise. Despite this, I am absolutely gobsmacked by how society continues to cede the redefinition of words to the Left. I understand the words they use but their redefining of words in the English language I also find dangerous. A few examples should suffice:
* The use of politically correct words to avoid potentially offending people is ubiquitous. For instance, words such as “Christmas” and “manpower” have been replaced with more “inclusive” alternatives. You can’t even refer to a position in baseball as a “fielder” if the player is Black without the easily offended saying that you are using racist terminology.
* Professor Turley has often written about how Democrats have creatively tried to equate “infrastructure” to include “cognitive infrastructure” to justify attempts by government and social media to “police” language on social media platforms.
* “Court-packing” is now being used to advance political agendas related to the judiciary.
* “Crisis” now means “political urgency”. A good example of this is the climate change “crisis”.
* The use of “Jim Crow” has been expanded to describe any perceived racial inequality or discrimination; by doing so, the Left aims to highlight ongoing racial disparities and advocate for social justice reforms.
* Despite the fact that the term “illegal alien” is codified into law, the Left finds it “dehumanizing” and that its use (as well as the word “illegals”) can promote violence and discrimination. They prefer words like “undocumented”.
* “Domestic terrorist” is now the label that is used to describe anyone holding a traditional view of any number of conventional social constructs. You don’t even have to have committed a crime to be a “domestic terrorist”. If you are a traditional Catholic (or Protestant), protest abortion, or advocate for children not being exposed to sexual content in schools at a school board meeting, you can be labeled a “domestic terrorist”.
* The definition of “marriage” has been expanded to include not just a union between a “cisgender” man and woman, but also to same-sex marriages. Opposing this redefinition makes you a bigot or homophobe.
* The political Left apparently cannot define what a “woman” is, but it is now understood to include transgender women.
There are so many other examples that to list them would unnecessarily lengthen this post. Suffice it to say that we must reclaim our language lest we find ourselves living in a world we no longer recognize.
Thank you for demonstrating the “Gish Gallop”.
The hallowed halls of West Point are even affected. Duty, Honor, Country has been removed and replaced by a mealy-mouth white bread mission statement that makes you wonder what they are for and what they do. The mission statement now would make people like Eisenhower, MacArthur, Bradley, Pershing, Grant, Sherman, Winfield Scott, and others turn away in embarrassment.
Somehow I can’t see this faculty standing there like at Wake Island (some Marines attend West Point and not Annapolis), Bataan, Corregidor, The Chosin Reservoir (marines and army), The Bloody Angle, The Wheat field, Little Round Top, Point Du Hoc, leading B17’s over Germany or B29’s over Japan (USAAF). The students, hopefully will rise above their teachers but we need to give them a change back to Duty, Honor, Country and the reasons why they should believe it.
To start off with, the American Psychological Association lost their collective minds a few decades ago . It is soft science with an emphasis on soft. There are still many good psychologists out there but they have to walk through the morass of the APA and the problems they have caused especially with transgenderism. They have used the weight of their society, I emphasize weight here and not scholarship, to further the transgender movement, to the detriment of us all. This particular professor just once again reinforces the dearth of scholarship in many American universities and although it seems nationwide it still seems to be mainly entrenched in the slowly dying northeast and west coast, from which many people are fleeing, and strangely enough, almost all ethnicities and races are part of the migration. And they seem to be fleeing to those states where the heteropatriarchal nuclear families seem to be strongest. Strange.
That particular term should be banned or we are going to have an overwhelming number of dental injuries trying to say it.
I propose that these “woke” and learned universities institute a quick course change requiring all new faculty to have at least 5 years of study (work) in the private sector where they have to find and apply for jobs, keep a schedule requiring them to be up at 5:30 am or working nite shifts from 11pm-7am, producing a product or service that the common folk use or buy (that’s mainly us), and returning to said private sector every 3 years after that so they must descend from the heights of academia and keep touch with the earth and all it’s morass of people and real life.
The heights to which modern scholarship has ascended is so high that I fear they are hypoxic and suffering the effects of oxygen deprivation. How else to explains these nonsensical ravings.
Thumbs up!
The tipping over of the table is far more prominent in academia than mere attempts to discredit marriage. Please take the time to look at the attached and alarming link, –sent to the Biden admin,– but carefully look along the left border of the document, showing all the COLLEGES that were included/sent copies.
The crux of the letter is promoting the idea of “popular constitutionalism,” (previously brought up by Professor Turley)
From the letter:
“Aaron Belkin and I have written the following open letter to the Biden administration urging that it endorse and take steps to implement popular constitutionalism as a response to what the President [Biden] has described as ‘not a normal’ Supreme Court…
“We urge President Biden to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretation…
“The central tenet of the solution that we recommend—Popular Constitutionalism—is that courts don’t exercise exclusive authority over constitutional meaning.”
(PLEASE READ THAT LAST SENTENCE AGAIN ^^^^)
The advisory letter continues:
“In practice, a President who disagrees with a court’s interpretation of the Constitution should offer and then follow an alternative interpretation…We urge readers to let the administration know in their own ways that reinvigorating the long and honored tradition of popular constitutionalism is both viable and urgently needed in today’s circumstances.”
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2023/07/an-open-letter-to-biden-administration.html
This is truly alarming. No wonder parents wonder what their kids are being taught at today’s colleges…..
No wonder we feel the ground underneath us trembling as the slow, insidious, unraveling of our Nation surreptitiously, but determinedly, creeps along…..
“popular constitutionalism”
Aka: Mob rule. With the Left as the Voice of the mob.
Agreed Sam. Ruling by simple majority is just mob rule dressed in fine linen. That’s why we have the electoral college.
Lin, I first heard Tushnet’s name when I took con law in the early 90s. He was one of the authors of our case book, and was at that time respected and mainstream. Coincidentally at that Time Ed Meese’s version of popular constitutionalism was being subjected to sharp criticism by con law academics. It was proposed by a conservative as a way of blunting the effects of a liberal Supreme Court. My how times have changed 😥
Not.so.old: I did not know this, so thank you. And I have no memory of any discussion of him in class(es). But you are definitely correct, I just found this, file:///C:/Users/stone/Downloads/edwinmeese.pdf. The times they are a changin’ indeed.
Lin, my browser couldn’t open that, saying it’s a local file.
BTW if me going to law school in the 90s makes me seem “not so old,” consider that I went mid-career (I was in the computer software industry through my late 30’s). Not that I mind the not-so-old designation, I hasten to add 😉
oldmanfromkansas said: “consider that I went mid-career ”
You and I may be about the same age. I got a late start in IT (called “Data Processing” at the time, for any youngsters reading this) at age 28. I also did a stint doing programming, mostly in RPG and OCL on IBM midrange machines. Eventually moved to Information Security for the last 20-some years of my career. I did give some consideration to law, but I had kids to support.
lin said: “‘The central tenet of the solution that we recommend—Popular Constitutionalism—is that courts don’t exercise exclusive authority over constitutional meaning’.”
Article III; Section 1-
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court…
Section 2-
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution…
IANAL, but I don’t think I need to be to understand those perfectly clear declarations. Should Biden choose to act on the suggestion of those lunatics, I would consider him guilty of obvious treason, and subject to the prescribed penalty for same.
Number 6: I didn’t say that. I was quoting the blog link letter sent to the Biden administration and colleges around the country. That’s why it alarmed me so.
lin said: “Number 6: I didn’t say that.”
I know, that’s why the single quotes are nested within the double quotes. I should probably have included more of what you posted to make that more obvious, but I was in a hurry. Sorry.
No need to apologize! but thanks (the single quotes within the double quotes were not in your original version of your comment). I was only concerned that anyone reading would think I said that. I do appreciate your good substantive comments though.
(–at least I THINK there was not both single and double quotation marks, I may have missed, as I only cursorily reviewed it before my response, –so ditto, I also apologize if original comment contained both! All is well!)
lin said: “I may have missed”
No worries, they are hard to see, even for the person who wrote them 🙂
There are a growing group of people in academia, corporate media, and the coastal leftist elite who will say or do anything to bring down all elements of western civilization. They want to destroy everything normal people think to be normal. They introduce and force us to use words that lead us down the slippery slop to a society that defies science, biology, culture, history, judgment and common sense to placate the narcissistic cravings of the lunatic fringe.
The term Cisgender, for just one example, forces us into the idea that there are an unlimited number of genders. This then leads to the idea that a man can become a woman by just declaring it to be so. Next, we are expected to allow these dysphoric and delusional people into women’s spaces and make believe that this is normal.
The concept of equality suddenly becomes equity, and the idea that anything that interferes with equal outcomes is white supremacy and racist. We are expected to deny the reality that inequality is the very foundation of evolution.
I, for one, have decided to stop playing the games of gender lunacy, forced equity, and anti westernism. I will no longer let the tail wag the dog. I will not enable, support or celebrate someone’s gender dysphoria, delusion or sexual fetish. I will speak out against allowing delusional men into women’s spaces. I will not be silent as a wave of people from failed cultures, societies and governments flood into our country and then demand we accept the ideas they fled from as normal or acceptable.
We may have already past the tipping point, but standing by and letting the leftist lunatic fringe destroy everything that made this country what it is – or at least was – is not the answer.
I agree with you that we should both allow and encourage open communications. However, we should also be willing to stand up and say you’re and idiot, and you ideas are ridiculous.
“[T]he “radical chic” of academia [destroying Western] institutions, values, and even common expressions.”
Topple statutes — check
Topple objectivity — check
Topple individualism — check
Topple marriage — in progress
Topple the Supreme Court — in progress
Topple the Founding Fathers and American history — check
Topple merit and talent — check
Topple free speech — ongoing
Topple free and fair elections — ongoing
Topple Lady Justice — check
Topple energy production and economic progress — check
Topple common sense — double check
Topple journalistic *reporting* — check
Topple the police and protection of the innocent — check
All spurred by academia’s decades-long chant: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
From sociology to political science to philosophy, in academia it’s nihilism across the board.
Once completely toppled, what will replace Western civilization? Who knows. The nihilists don’t. But we have a preview: In the streets of San Francisco, the subways of NYC, Downtown DC . . .
Sam, odd that they never topple the university system.
“. . . they never topple the university system.”
I should have included that one. They toppled the university a long time ago — if by “university” one means an institution, not for the spread of propaganda, but for the teaching of an important body of knowledge.
But by “system,” I gather you mean the trough they feed at.
Sam and hullbobby: Mornin’ Excellent post from you. Please see my post above and add: Topple the Constitution. You won’t believe it if you take the time to read my enclosed link.
And none of this is an accident… our first mistake was allowing the federal government to attain such power as it now has; that laid the path for a greater ability of those on a certain mission, to control and sow the seeds of cultural demise. Tail Gunner Joe was right to the extent that there were communists infiltrating our government but we did not want to see that so we punished the messenger. Now the sewn seeds have flourished and are now the tools of those who wish a world hegemony without the bothersome moral fibre set out by our founding fathers asserting itself around the globe with our enormous military. The solution is to destroy the culture supporting such power and they (the nihilist fellow travelers) are well within their goal of achieving cultural “fundamental transformation” because we, on the right, are lazy and self-indulgent to a degree that would have lost our war of independence from the British. I fear for what cannot be undone finally over-running this country.
The idea that family and marriage is a white evil is balderdash. The family unit in China is the bedrock of their civilization and their sense of the Mandate of Heaven. It has sustained them in spite of all the centuries of good and bad emperors and the CCP. What are they now? Over a billion people? Further to the balderdash, there is what Lilly Tomlin said on Laugh In. “What are the people who gave us the leisure suit going to do with our leisure time”?
They need it to be balderdash to ease their destruction of our culture… same as all the gender confusion and racial animosities…all to deconstruct cultures to allow for the “fundamental transformation” of our once great nation.
Sam, as we all should realize, how people act and react is based on small changes in civilization over the millennia, where a lot of the change was by trial and error. Your list shows how an entrenched bureaucracy can suddenly turn the world upside down, leaving us worse off.
Why do these crazies in academia feel that an idea they constructed in twenty minutes is more valid than millennia of trial and error?
the academics are filled with constantly re-enforced hubris – they bounce their approval of each other’s insane ranting off of one another until the entire community is convinced they are correct and righteous – sort of how the islamists whip up fanatics to blow up building and fly planes into towers – it is the same religious fanaticism – just different religions.
Sadly, their own failures reinforce their belief system. When black people end up worse off, after having blown off the nuclear family concept, the LeFriecqs of the world do not ask themselves, “Gee, were we wrong?” Instead, the continued downward spiral is taken as more proof that the system is rigged against blacks.
The DeMacs, Anonymi, and LeFriecqs of the world – if you could ever get them to see the light- it would be horrible for them. Not only would they have to admit that they were wrong about all the black oppression silliness, they would have to confront the reality that they have done more harm to blacks than the Klan and Jim Crow and slavery ever did. A thousand times over. I am not sure that many of them would not end their own lives over it, simply unable to continue to live with the guilt. Like Peter Lawford somebody here was talking about.
the academics are filled with constantly re-enforced hubris – they bounce their approval of each other’s insane ranting off of one another until the entire community is convinced they are correct and righteous – sort of how the islamists whip up fanatics to blow up building and fly planes into towers – it is the same religious fanaticism – just different religions.
But interestingly, never want to apply those standards to themselves.
– Tech giants don’t allow their kids to have gadgets.
– Elites demand monogamy of their spouses.
– TV stars don’t allow tvs in their homes (Chip & Joanna Gaines, for example.)
– Pelosi demands two freezers to store gourmet ice cream.
– Pols dine at posh restaurants while demanding the rest of us are stay home.
– Black politicians hold giant funeral services while everyone else’s relatives die and get buried alone.
And on it goes…
Great comment.
This is from a great intellect
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.