I have always been amazed at the sub-intellectual process by which liberals all know at almost the same time and in the same form what they are supposed to think. It is amazing. Of course, it has nothing to do with ideas or learning—it has to do entirely with attitude, fashion, and presenting oneself as belonging to the rare company of those who are truly wise and good.
Fashions in dress move fast but never as fast as liberal attitudes, which seem to be communicated globally almost iunstantaneously. I will swear that almost the same day, certainly within the same week, my one-time professorial colleagues stopped saying “African-American” and began saying “People of Color.” How do they do it? I suppose if one is an elite person surrounded by stupid peasants, one has to be up-to-date on the signs of one’s superiority.
Once I was present at a talk by a venerable and quite celebrated historian, who made a few remarks about the undesirable changes being made in our country by the flood of immigrants. It was not two minutes into the talk before the assembled professors, including those on the platform behind the speaker, began to murmur disapproval, which grew until the speaker had to stop. This was a not particularly radical group. Of course, few of them knew enough about their supposed field of study to recognise the scholarly stature of the speaker since it was not recent and fashionable.
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I frequently get phone calls, sometimes live and sometimes canned, tempting me into a dialogue that leads to buying some candidate or other dubious product. Why do these people who want South Carolinians to vote for them hire phone solicitors who speak in a rapid, almost unintelligible Valley speak, sometimes prissy sounding males? Or even worse, Hindoo singsong? I am surely not the only person who is immediately repulsed.
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How do politicians, judges, corporate moguls, media talking heads, generals, and college presidents manage to be completely free of any sense of shame? Surely some of them had mothers who taught them that lying, stealing, perversion, and dirty tricks on other people were not good.
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It was recently stated in my favourite journal that official Catholic charities receive three-fourths of their funds, a billion dollars per year, from the U.S. government. When and where did this kind of thing become routine? (Probably under that great statesman Bush Minor.) In a regime in which a little prayer in a schoolroom or at a ballgame is a violation of church/state separation? I venture that the very same people support both the government’s absorption of the church and the government’s suppression of Christianity.
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Every time an election nears, the Republicans begin to blast “Democratic policies” like big spending, affirmative action, abortion, open borders, needless wars, bad judges, etc—all policies fostered in some way or other by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the two Bushes. Bush’s wars and Bush’s budgetary disaster are already being treated as if Obama caused them. Why does the Republican ploy always seem to work? It is a mystery. The answer, centering on the intellectual inferiority and moral immaturity of the Republican voter, is almost too horrible to contemplate.
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Why have Americans of the last several generations lost all ability to recognise age-old truths? Like the richer the government, the poorer the people? In this case, I think it has something to do with the fact that people of hereditary wealth now make the decisions about government spending, and they like to be generous—with other people’s money. They have no idea that acting an unwilling Lord Bountiful to the taxpayer may actually be a sacrifice for most people.
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Why was a presidential wannabe recently attacked for saying that the black family is less sound today than it was under slavery, a demonstrably true statement, and praised for saying that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, a demonstrably false statement? What does this tell us about the state of public discourse in the U.S.?
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Why do European elites seem to be just as enthusiastic for limitless immigration, affirmative action, and multiculturalism as American elites? When the Europeans, unlike the American rulers, actually have a civilisation to keep?
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Why do the very same people who get in a moral dudgeon over Thomas Jefferson’s presumed sex life wink indulgently at Jack Kennedy’s and Bill Clinton’s satyriasis?
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How many books has George W. Bush read since leaving the White House? OK, let’s be fair. How many pages has George W. Bush read since he left the White House?
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If Obama had been at the Constitutional Convention, what State would he have represented?
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