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Our House Divided: Multiculturalism vs. America Thomas D. Klingenstein

By on November 4th, 2018

https://americanmind.org/essays/our-house-divided-multiculturalism-vs-america/
Following Trump’s lead—and Lincoln’s.

Many conservatives did not see that Trump had framed the 2016 election as a choice between two mutually exclusive regimes: multiculturalism and America. What I call “multiculturalism” includes “identity politics” and “political correctness.” If multiculturalism continues to worm its way into the public mind, it will ultimately destroy America. Consequently, the election should have been seen as a contest between a woman who, perhaps without quite intending it, was leading a movement to destroy America and a man who wanted to save America. The same contest is being played out in the upcoming midterm elections.

I realize the term “multiculturalism” is somewhat dated, but I mean to freshen it up by using it in its most comprehensive sense: a political philosophy. Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling a unifying, self-affirming narrative without which no nation can long survive.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump exposed multiculturalism as the revolutionary movement it is. He showed us that multiculturalism, like slavery in the 1850’s, is an existential threat. Trump exposed this threat by standing up to it and its enforcement arm, political correctness. Indeed, he made it his business to kick political correctness in the groin on a regular basis. In countless variations of crassness, he said over and over exactly what political correctness prohibits one from saying: “America does not want cultural diversity; we have our culture, it’s exceptional, and we want to keep it that way.” He also said, implicitly but distinctly: the plight of various “oppressed groups” is not the fault of white males. This too violates a sacred tenet of multiculturalism. Trump said these things at a time when they were the most needful things to say, and he said them as only he could, with enough New York “attitude” to jolt the entire country. Then, to add spicy mustard to the pretzel, he identified the media as not just anti-truth, but anti-American.

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Teenage Mutant Fashion Marxists By Heather Wilhelm

By on November 1st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/fashion-magazines-embrace-woke-politics/

Fashion magazines have gone woke.

O ne Saturday morning years ago, back when certain sectors of our culture were at least a teensy bit less preachy and tiresome and insufferable than they are now, I sat at my kitchen table, idling through a fashion magazine. As a salty veteran of years of fashion-magazine consumption, I knew exactly what to expect: pages upon pages of uber-thin women towering on impossibly reedy legs, imperiously clutching things like massive diamonds and random cheetahs while posing in weird giant moon boots against carefully composed, super-serious artistic backdrops.

Behold, fashion-magazine readers, and do not turn away: There’s a busy New York street corner, complete with a bodega and a hot-dog stand and maybe even a pizza rat, paired with an ostrich purse that costs more than your car! There’s a repressed suburban grocery store, its blank-eyed and chiseled patrons pushing around puzzlingly empty carts, accessorized by hair curlers and Tom Ford and despair! There’s the zombie-strewn aftermath of a nuclear war, with the lone androgynous stilettoed survivor brought to you by someone like Helmut Lang!

On that morning, however, fresher, less jaded eyes could perceive a deeper truth. “Ooh, look, Mommy,” my then-three-year-old hollered in delight, peering over my shoulder at the scary-eyed women looking strangely disappointed in their eight-thousand-dollar coats. “Witches! Ooh! Witches!”

I laughed back then, but those were more innocent times. In hindsight, this was a mistake. This is not just because we live in an increasingly humorless age; it is also because my son was eerily prophetic. As I write, the front page of the website of W magazine — which I used to consider the “serious” fashion magazine, the one that did not mess around with a lot of non-fashion-y things — has an actual story instructing readers on how to become a witch.

“Witchcraft and covens have also proven to be a source of solace and solidarity for some in the #MeToo era,” W informs us, “following an increasing association between witches and feminism.” Along with its helpful guide on how to climb on board with “paganism” and “all things occult,” W also offers instructions on “How to Throw a Séance at Home.” In case you decide you want to dabble with the dead in your living room, here’s one particularly helpful tip: “In a lot of cultures, you never do anything without covering your head, which prevents you from getting possessed or getting messed up.”

Wow. Possessed! That would be messed up. It’s kind of like the state of fashion magazines today! Not so long ago, readers like me could hope that the year would bring just a few stray and annoying puff pieces profiling random Planned Parenthood executives or Hillary “I Shall Never Leave” Clinton. In 2018, however — like so much else in American culture — fashion magazines have morphed into a relentless and insufferable leftist acquaintance you’d quite frankly rather avoid.

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Trans Activists’ Campaign Against ‘TERFs’ has Become an Attack on Science written by Julian Vigo

By on October 22nd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists
In a recent article for Forbes, “The Vaccination Debacle,” I discussed the frightening rise in the number of European measles cases. The reason for the spike is simple: Fed a daily online diet of nonsense and ideologically motivated activism, many people have come to reject mainstream medical science—including the science behind vaccinations. You’d think that “get vaccinated” would be a relatively straightforward message. But in the days following the article’s publication, I received a good dozen emails from doctors thanking me for writing the piece, and describing how difficult it has become to convince some patients that their local paediatrician isn’t part of an international conspiracy.

But at least the effort to push back against anti-vaccination conspiracy theories is seen as a respectable form of discourse. In other spheres, it’s not so easy to speak common sense.

Consider, for instance, last year’s saga involving Rebecca Tuvel—who was hounded by trans activists and scholars after applying a theoretical application of transgender ideology to the idea of “trans-racialism.” Scandalously, the article in question was edited post facto so as to remove the name “Bruce Jenner”—in response to the claim that these two words served to “dead-name” the person now known as Caitlyn Jenner (despite the fact that Caitlyn Jenner herself repeatedly refers to “Bruce” in interviews). To cite the historically verifiable fact that someone named Bruce Jenner once existed is now seen as a sort of religious heresy. And like all heresies, it must be ritualistically expunged—not because it is factually wrong, but because it is seen as morally wrong.

In August, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island was criticized for removing a news release about a peer-reviewed study published in PLoS One by one of its academics—Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher at Brown’s School of Public Health. Littman’s article, titled “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,“ discusses the phenomenon by which social media and peer pressure seem to have fuelled the recently observed trend by which young teenagers (typically girls) suddenly declare themselves transgender. The paper infuriated transgender activists, who claim that the entire notion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a transphobic invention. Both Brown and PLoS One also were attacked as Brown’s enablers.

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Stick To Fashion Teen Vogue, And Shut Up About Politics By aggressively politicizing fashion, Teen Vogue is furthering one of the most destructive trends in our culture.By Inez Feltscher Stepman

By on October 20th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/19/stick-to-fashion-teen-vogue-and-shut-up-about-politics/

Teen Vogue, publisher of groundbreaking, age-appropriate material like anal sex manuals for both “prostate owners” and “non-prostate owners” alike, has stepped into the political arena once again with an article about the alleged failures of capitalism.

“Can’t #endpoverty without ending capitalism,” the magazine tweeted on Wednesday, with a link to a poorly-written diatribe that reads like a B student’s Marxism 101 paper and gets key historical facts wrong. Absent from writer Kim Kelly’s excoriation of the system that has brought the world out of grinding poverty is the fact that her screed was published in a fashion magazine, which is supposed to fill its pages chronicling the trends of an industry of excess that owes its existence to the tremendous wealth capitalism has created.

Meanwhile, socialist paradise Venezuela is succumbing to what increasingly seems to be an ironclad rule of left-wing economics: they’ve run out of toilet paper. Of course, the leader of the workers’ paradise isn’t going on the same crash diet that caused the people of Venezuela to lose an average of 24 pounds last year (“10 ways to lose 20 lbs: 1. Communism”). President Nicolas Maduro was recently spotted living the Michelin star-studded capitalist life with a Miami celebrity chef known as “Salt Bae.”

While it’s easy (and let’s face it, kind of fun) to tear Teen Vogue’s pop Communism apart on the merits, the relentless politicization of all spaces in public and private life is exhausting and dangerous. When top Democrats refuse to condemn — and sometimes encourage — mob violence against Republicans, calls for civility are falling on deaf ears in a political environment where left and right seem polarized even on the most foundational principles.

With the threat of political violence and civil unrest bubbling in the background, it’s even more critical that people of different political tribes connect with each other as friends, family and fellow citizens. When politics are front and center in every interaction, Americans are deprived of the ability to connect as everyday human beings — as sports fans, Netflix bingers, and yes, fashionistas.

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Move Over Vagina Costumes: Fendi Debuts $990 Designer ‘Vulva Scarf’ By Megan Fox (!!!!????)

By on October 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/move-over-vagina-costumes-fendi-debuts-1300-designer-vulva-scarf/

Move over vagina costumes and pu**y hats! There’s a new ridiculously offensive genitalia-themed apparel on the loose thanks to designer Fendi.

Yes, just imagine! The Women’s Marchers have really got to be jumping on this one, although $990 for a hairy muff seems a little steep. But when you’re woke, no amount of money is too much to spend on protest gear.

The photoshop opportunities for this monstrosity cannot be underestimated, though.I don’t know what this says, but whatever it is, it’s super hilarious when you turn this scarf upside down. This tweet is proof that Fendi is reaching a worldwide audience with this horror of a fall “must-not-have.”

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Lionel Trilling’s Jewish Problem A leading light of the famous New York Intellectuals harbored deeply conflicted feelings about his own Jewishness, and exceptionally harsh views on Jews and Judaism. Edward Alexander

By on October 16th, 2018

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2018/10/lionel-trillings-jewish-problem/

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was the grand master of America’s “Age of Criticism.” A renowned literary authority who taught for many years at Columbia University, Trilling was an influential member of the grouping that came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, a highly respected voice in public arguments concerning matters social, cultural, and political—and a Jew with (to put it mildly) conflicted views on Jews and Judaism.

While a full biography of Trilling remains to be written, he makes a central appearance in numerous studies of intellectual and political culture in mid-20th-century America as well as in memoirs by his wife Diana Trilling and by many friends, colleagues, students, and sparring partners. There is also a collection of his major essays, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (edited by Leon Wieseltier, 2000). And now, most recently, both the man and his work speak for themselves in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. The volume is edited by Adam Kirsch, an accomplished critic and poet and himself the author of an earlier brief study, Why Trilling Matters (2011).

Life in Culture, a kind of epistolary biography, consists of 270 letters culled from the thousands available. All of them but one were written by Trilling himself; there is none by his interlocutors, though Trilling does frequently quote passages from their letters in the course of grappling with their thoughts. Kirsch helpfully identifies these interlocutors, but the book lacks a glossary, and Kirsch’s own annotations are minimal—a possible obstacle for readers unacquainted with the persons, the issues, or the circumstances being addressed.

Trilling was a prodigious correspondent, who once estimated that he wrote about 600 letters a year. That he was also a generous correspondent I can testify as a former student whose letters he never failed to answer (and for whom he also performed two remarkable acts of personal kindness). Nor did he fastidiously decline to respond to non-literary people asking for advice about “writing” from a famous English professor; to the contrary, as Life in Culture demonstrates, they would get wise and feeling replies.

Many of the letters in Kirsch’s book are copious, and some are of enormous length, especially when Trilling is engaged in argument and quoting his adversary in full or near-full. From Kirsch’s selections, three major themes emerge: Trilling’s politics; his ambivalence about his own literary vocation (is he a critic, or a novelist?); and his permanently uneasy relation to Jews and Judaism. For our purposes here, I’ll focus only on the last.

In his magisterialintellectual biography (1939) of the great Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, begun as a Columbia doctoral dissertation, Trilling gave a detailed account of the strident opposition mounted by Arnold’s father, a prominent educator and liberal church leader, to the admission of Jews to London University. Thomas Arnold could not countenance a scheme that would mark “the first time that education in England was avowedly unchristianized for the sake of accommodating Jews.”

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Lionel Trilling: America’s Matthew Arnold Edward Alexander

By on October 16th, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7269/full

The recent publication of a selection of letters by Lionel Trilling — 270 chosen out of thousands available to an editor in the archives — affords an opportunity to reflect on the importance of this grand master of the Age of Criticism in the middle of the last century. Trilling rose to prominence in 1950 with the publication of his third book, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. It sold in numbers unprecedented for a book of criticism — 70,000 copies in hard cover, and 100,000 in paperback — and made Trilling the most influential mind in the culture of the Fifties.

But Trilling’s importance in the development of American literary culture and the place of Jews in that culture goes back to the time when he was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in New York and to a now unremembered predecessor there named Ludwig Lewisohn. Lewisohn, a Berlin-born Jew who made himself into a southern Christian gentleman in Charleston, had to leave Columbia in 1903 without his doctorate because he was, in the eyes of Columbia’s English Department faculty, irredeemably Jewish. Like many a Jewish student of English after him, Lewisohn was told that he should not (or could not) proceed in his studies because the prejudice against hiring Jews in English departments was insuperable. Two decades later, reflecting on the appointment of a number of Jewish scholars in American colleges, he noted that in one discipline alone the old resistance remained firm: “Prejudice has not . . . relented in a single instance in regard to the teaching of English.” Perhaps this was because the study of English, unlike that of science or philosophy, was intimately bound up with the particularities of culture, for it was precisely the study of the mind of Western Christianity. What Bernard Berenson called the “Angry Saxons” who ran English departments were determined to protect Tennyson’s “treasure of the wisdom of the West” from barbarous Eastern (European) invaders. (I heard the very same story of rejection decades later from Irvin Ehrenpreis, who recovered sufficiently to become the consummate biographer of Jonathan Swift, but never got a PhD in English.)

Almost nothing of this part of Trilling’s story appears in this volume of letters (Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35, edited by Adam Kirsch). But Trilling did tell it, and very sardonically, in his notebooks of April and May of 1936, when Columbia’s English faculty tried to discontinue his appointment. “The reason for dismissal is that as a Jew, a Marxist, a Freudian, I am uneasy. This hampers my work and makes me unhappy.” His colleagues would undertake to cure his unhappiness by dismissing him before he could complete his degree and thereby strengthen his claim on a tenured position.

Trilling, never one to avoid a fight, confronted his professorial “accusers,” indeed “made date to annihilate [them],” and particularly his dissertation supervisor Emery Neff, who reportedly complained that Trilling had “involved himself with Ideas,” that he was overly “sensitive,” and didn’t really “fit [in] because he was a Jew.” This was not the last time that Trilling’s mentor would abandon him. Twenty-three years later, after Trilling had given a famously “heretical” lecture about Robert Frost’s poetry that aroused a storm of controversy, he wrote to me as follows: “Since we speak of teachers and scholarship, you will readily understand that the startling — and grotesque — part of the incident was that my old teacher Emery Neff, who taught me most of what I know about scholarship, denounced me with no knowledge of the text of what I had said.”

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PC Culture The Word ‘Problematic’ Declared Problematic By Katherine Timpf

By on September 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/the-word-problematic-declared-problematic/

‘Problematic’ is problematic because it’s not specific enough.

According to an essay written by a Dartmouth student, the word “problematic” is actually in itself kind of problematic or something.

“The word problematic . . . gives people a way out, easing the burden of identifying exactly what about the state of the word gives people unease,” Steven Chun writes in an essay titled, “The Problem with ‘Problematic’” for the school’s newspaper, The Dartmouth.

Chun explains that although he does not think that people who use the word “problematic” are necessarily “in the wrong,” and although the word “captures so many of the ills that plague us: racism, ableism, twisted power dynamics, ignorance, discrimination, injustice, and the intersection of every one of those evils,” it is still “vague and incomplete.”

“It doesn’t tell us which injustice has taken place,” Chun writes. “In fact, it allows us to ignore the details completely.”

“Problematic means you know it’s wrong and that’s enough,” he continues.

According to Chun, however, simply knowing that something is wrong is not enough. Rather, you still need to know the answers to questions such as “Where does the injustice lie and what societal values has it violated?” and “Is it disrespectful to a culture or peoples? If so, are historical power dynamics at play?”

“These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we are to know how and where to respond to injustice,” he writes.

Chun advises that, instead of using the word “problematic,” people should stay silent until they have more specific words to describe what’s wrong before speaking.

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Paul Collits: Sanity Banished, Standards Cast Down

By on September 14th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/sanity-banished-standards-cast/

Western societies no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded the genuine article for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter. They no longer yearn for excellence. They do not seek truth. What we have witnessed is a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions.

That great culture warrior and conservative, Douglas Murray, recently observed, following a visit to Australia:

I cannot think of a time when more people have lost their minds — opponents and erstwhile allies alike. I am a minimalist in my expectations for this era. I think our main job is not to be driven mad. Or at least not to behave in ways that will make us feel shame in the future.

Well might we feel broad and deep shame for our era. Conservatives, many of us, have all but given up on the party of Menzies, as it lurches from crisis to crisis, unseats elected leaders at will, sidelines just about everybody to the right of Clive Hamilton, and engages in systemic fixing, branch-stacking, the career-destruction of enemies and lining the pockets of mates.

The once great Labor Party, the party of Curtin and Chifley, has upended its old, honest, defensible, socially conservative policies and embraced holus-bolus the core ideas of the post-1968 generation of post-modernist ratbaggery.

Those once trusted organisations, the banks, have their criminal acts and corporate idiocies paraded before us on a daily basis.

Sporting codes embrace cloying political correctness, especially as it relates to race and sex, and enforce it with sanctions.

Corporations bully employees who dare to challenge the party line of big (social liberal) brother.

Fake news abounds. The very term, newly coined to describe old, old practices, is itself used as a weapon. The media, once able to differentiate news from opinion, no longer does or can. The ABC is no longer the network of James Dibble, having adopted activism and partisan advocacy as its virtuous mission.

Institutions of higher learning stop (certain) people from speaking on their campuses, lest someone be offended. The universities accept money from all comers — save those who simply wish to teach literature, philosophy and history as they have been taught for a millennium. Police forces now charge (monetarily) the innocent while failing to charge (legally) the patently guilty.

Scientists, those supposed exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, have in large measure opted for groupthink and venal grant-troughing even when this means the abandonment of scientific method.

That foundational institution, the source of all others, the family, now cannot even be defined without bastardising its core characteristics. The family is now, to borrow from Paul Keating, two gays and a cocker spaniel. Or whatever we want it to be.

Institutions across the whole of Western society no longer have standards. They no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded that for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter. They no longer yearn for excellence. They do not seek truth. What we have witnessed is, in effect, a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions.

Melanie Phillips, in one of her excellent books, describes a world “upside down”. Murray talks of the “shame” of our era. The traditionalist Catholic rag The Remnant – no fan of the current pope, of course – featured a recent, “Vatican going bonkers”.

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The Diversity Delusion How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture Heather Mac Donald

By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/diversity-delusion

By the national bestselling author of The War on Cops: a provocative account of the erosion of humanities and the rise of intolerance

America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.

The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk.

But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.

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