On the occasion of the Tenth Anniversary of Legal Insurrection, William Jacobson reflects on how American Society has ‘evolved’ during the past decade*:
…While many of [the Left on campuses] are merely misguided, far too many of them are bad people who simply must be defeated. They don’t share our core values of liberty and freedom. In the insane world of the modern campus, defending free speech for those who are unpopular is denigrated as an act of white supremacy. Insisting on due process for the accused is deemed an act in service of the “patriarchy.” And now those campus orthodoxies have taken over the Democratic Party and progressive movement, and are projected by the media.
A meaningful segment of the “progressive” movement has had their minds captured by anti-capitalist, anti-American and anti-Western educational indoctrination. There is no reasoning with such people not because I don’t want to reason with them, but because they have what amounts to a religious zealotry. “Intersectionality” has weaponized these zealots against Israel and Jews, as a proxy for capitalism, America and the West. It’s a singular enemy we face.
If Vassar was an eye-opener for me. Kavanaugh was a game-changer. I don’t know what will be in a few years, but for now there is pre-Kavanaugh and post-Kavanaugh.
Others have made the point, but it’s worth repeating: The malicious campaign against Kavanaugh proves that none of us are safe. No matter how well you live your life, you are exposed to serious damage if you get in their way politically.
The failure to confirm Kavanaugh would have been a disaster, emboldening further abuses. When defeat for Kavanaugh seemed possible, I also was reminded of how Natan Sharansky read Psalm 30 as he was released from Soviet imprisonment:
“I will exalt You, O Lord, for You have raised me up, and You have not allowed my enemies to rejoice over me.”
Thankfully we prevailed this time, just one battle in a long war which, as least superficially, we are losing.
Academia is gone. High tech is gone. Mass media is gone. The entertainment industry is gone. And along with those losses has come the loss of control over our vocabulary, which now is subservient to political needs of the institutions we have lost.
This situation is clearly Intolerable.
The Left has taken over all of our institutions, except for the very personal ones — and those ones are under constant bombardment.
Let us face the facts: the Left has invaded every, single institution we hold dear; it has stuck it’s poisonous claws into those we hold sacred; it has corrupted everything it touches and there is not one aspect of our Society that it has not touched.
The only reason I keep going is to explain and to warn about the coming Calamity.
We have to be asking ourselves what is it we want.
For me, it’s damn easy:
I will not be a slave;
I will either Live Free or Die
I think most of you agree with this, so let us ask ourselves next: How can we live Free?
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*The Prof and I started in the same year.