The Left now is taking into mainstream everyday society the totalitarianism, public shaming, and repression that it has been imposing on your kids in college these past ten years since the Age of Obama dawned.
By Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer, INN
My first paid job came in my late teens when I was hired to be a counselor at Yeshiva Rambam Day Camp in Brooklyn. I was put in charge of a group of nine-year-olds. One of them was named Jacky.
Jacky had a vocabulary consisting mostly of two words. He was not on the Asperger spectrum, just difficult and it just seemed that those two words sufficed to get him through nine-year-old life. Whenever anything or anyone disagreed with him — and everything did — Jacky would respond with his expansive vocabulary.
“Jacky, c’mon, get ready. We’re off to softball right now. You’re holding us all up.”
Jacky: “Your mother.”
“Jacky, shouldn’t you eat something at lunch besides cookies?”
“Your mother.”
“OK, Jacky, time to get out of the pool now.”
“Your mother.”
I had forgotten about Jacky until the past few days’ news of Democrat liberals now departing from even the semblance of quasi-rational debate as they extend their descent into social cavemanism. Now they are throwing Republicans out of restaurants, yelling at them at the movies, and — when all else in Mr. Webster’s dictionary leaves them at a loss for the right term — resorting to calling all Republicans and conservatives “Nazis.”
In other words, descent to the level of once-nine-year-old Jacky:
“Hi, Mr. Scarborough. I believe that America should be permitted to protect and enforce her borders. Can you explain why you might disagree?”
Morning Joe: Your mother.
“Hi, Ms. Brzezinski. It was under Obama that they built cages for children, and it is by order of the super-liberal United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that children must be separated from their detained parents after twenty days. Would you agree that the Flores Settlement needs to be revisited?”
Mika: Your mother.
The Tony Awards. Robert De Niro on stage. In the audience, the cream and elite of Broadway. The quintessential Hollywood wiseguy who has made a career of stereotyping Italians in the mob looks at his erudite, literate, bejeweled, gold-chained, tuxedoed, ballroom-gowned audience — all having graduated high school, unlike him — and addresses the President of the United States.
Taxidriver/Young Vito/: Your mother.
Here is what is happening: The Left now is taking into mainstream everyday society the totalitarianism, public shaming, and repression that it has been imposing on your kids in college these past ten years since the Age of Obama dawned. This is what they have been doing to the kids for whom you have been taking out six-figure PLUS loans, the campuses to which all-too-many fools among America’s conservative elite actually have been donating significant endowment funds.
Understand that, for a decade and more, the social sciences faculties of America’s elite and even not-so-elite campuses have been closed off to conservative faculty. Under the guise of tenure and academic freedom, liberals who dominate and control social sciences departments — languages, sociology, political science, education, philosophy, history, religion, ethnic and gender studies — have been methodically reproducing themselves by hiring liberals with proven leftist track records for tenure-track positions that assure permanency, while denying conservatives access. They look at applicants’ records, the subjects of their doctoral theses, what they have published in academia. And they will not hire proven conservatives to tenure-track faculty positions.
When today’s teen enters college, he or she encounters four years of non-stop anti-conservative public shaming: in the classroom, in the cafeteria, on the college walk. Their professors teach one ideology. The assigned reading lists point in one direction. Students who buy into the professor’s liberalism, the tyranny of social shaming and social ostracism, are rewarded with better grades and awards. Those who remain true to conscience face shunning.
Most college-age kids cannot withstand the social pressures and sooner or later break. They become brainwashed into liberalism and will remain that way until their 50s and 60s when, having experienced a few series of economic and political cycles, they will grasp life’s lessons.
If there is no substitute for experience, they will come to see that the Bernie Sanderses of their lives, the socialists who railed against the top one percent, never forgot themselves to land in the top one percent with three or four vacation homes. That the Clintons and their philanthropic foundations somehow turned out to be fronts for the Hillaries and Raping Bills to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars for themslves and for their cronies — spending charitable millions on charitable first-class airliner seats to charitable exotic destinations for charitable speeches and charitable 5-star catered meals to do charitable fact-finding while raking in more charitable hundreds of millions as honoraria for charitable speeches about the need for others to do charity.
Baby Boomers do grow up, albeit kicking and screaming. At some point they graduate from drinking beer all night and partying hard to starting the day with a cholesterol-lowering statin and perhaps a proton pump inhibitor for gastroenterological reflux disease. By their 50s and 60s, many of the brainwashed campus liberals of yore have paid enough federal, state, and municipal taxes to have seen poverty and homelessness vanish many times over. Yet they see it all was a lie, with even more on welfare, food stamps, and bogging down the hospital emergency room with emegencies ranging from sniffles to compacted ear wax.
None of the ills that would be solved under Johnson’s Great Society taxing-and-spending ever were solved, only exacerbated. Forty years after Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and a decade after Obama, racial progress has regressed to Black Lives Matter and Caucasian students assigned by radical-left professors to apologize for “White Privilege.”
Over decades, people see that when you pay someone enough so that he need not work, he often does not subsequently work. When you put him into a new dwelling for which he has not contributed even sweat equity, he lets it fall into disrepair. When you welcome him into your warm and temperate climate and assure him courtesy and government-undisturbed outdoor living in the parks and on the streets, safe from being arrested for vagrancy or loitering, you encourage a few tragically economically homeless to be accompanied by thousands more mentally challenged homeless.
In the end, San Francisco and Santa Monica become homelessness dumps where the sharpest societal divisions unfold between the richest and the poorest, and where the daily journey is deemed blessed if one can make it to work without being panhandled aggressively or worse.
When you tell two parents that, because the father’s job does not pay well, the government will send the check, the father loses his sense of dignity, replaced by an envelope. In time, he shies away and disappears. His sons grow up without a father to role-model waking up every morning and trudging off to work, so they opt for the excitement of the streets instead. They end up, all too often, amid the wrong element, whether in a gang or just hanging around with the neighborhood delinquents and they eventually get locked in a cell more suited for Hillary, Huma, and former Representative Weiner. Their lives now soiled with a rap sheet of convictions for violent crime at age 16 or 17, they now unknowingly have lost their lives — they never will overcome the stigma, the abandoned education opportunity — terminated just at inception: societal abortion courtesy of liberalism.
By their 50s and 60s, most of the campus liberals of another day have figured it out. The groups they meant to help did not gain and are even more resentful, demanding even more. And counter-intuitively the only times that the underprivileged and oppressed and the truly victimized ever gained employment and reduced dependency on public assistance always seemed to come under Republican conservatism.
For some reason, perhaps indecipherable, all the warm and fuzzy liberal pacifist governments that offered peace and unconditional surrender were met with more war and bloodshed, while — ever so curiously — it was the war-mongering cycles of rabid-sounding conservative Republicans who threatened Star Wars, joked off camera (unaware that the mike was “hot”) about nuking the Commies off the face of the earth, and who taunted that “my nuke button is bigger than your nuke button” who somehow, incomprehensibly, got the terrorists to the table, got them to give up their weapons, and got them to make peace. Or eradicated them and their ISIS fiefdoms.
Hence, the Baby Boomers of 1968 — the era of the SDS riots at Columbia, activism for janitors and maids, anti-war rallies, and the birth-control pill and free love of Woodstock — now comprise a solid Republican constitutency in every poll. They have figured it out. They no longer care about the E.R.A. but about their I.R.A., and rather than focusing now on the birth control and condoms of the Age of Free Love, they now are far more concerned about controlling ample berths in their condos.
They lived through Carter — rampant inflation, Iranian hostages, Soviet expansion, misery index through the roof — and they lived through Reagan and a new morning in America. They lived through Obama and now are seeing the economy, trade imbalance, and international chaos get stabilized under President Trump. It’s morning again in America.
But if the sexagenarians, septuagenarians, octogenarians, and nonagenarians have it figured out, safe from campus intimidation, the kids on today’s campuses still have a lifetime of life experience awaiting them, and they now are being shamed and threatened and bombarded by the tunnel-visioned one-dimensional education that is starkly devoid intellectually of the “diversity” that the Left loves to extol.
And now the intimidation and threats that one sees at Berkeley and at other such campuses across the land moves into the Red Hen restaurants of America.
As the college student is shamed out of the campus cafeteria, so is the elegant and dignified woman ousted from the Red Hen after being mercilessly mocked and shamed at the journalists’ laugh-fest for not being sufficiently thin, ever a source of laughter in Hollywood liberal circles.
That is the new language of the Left, the new vocabulary of those whose failed Obama policies are being rectified, one by one, either by being overhauled, overturned, or superseded.
Suddenly, the deceased and paralyzed economy rolls again. ISIS is on the run. North Korea is returning bodies and talking. The border is being protected. Angel Fanilies are being heard. The embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, America is out of the United Nations “Human Rights Council,” and we have cut out $300 million and more of our past years’ ridiculous money-wasting donations to the UNRWA boondoggle. Businesses are beginning to thrive. Religious liberties are being protected. Corruption in the deepest bowels of the FBI and Department of Justice is being ferreted out. The benefits of dramatic tax cuts are weighing in at all segments of the economy. Suddenly, the false narrative of Obama, perpetuated by those who led the lying for the Emperor with No Clothes, is exposed.
And all they can retort is: Nazi.
So Scarborough and his ilk now compare America to Nazi Germany. They tell the television audiences that, if I voted for Trump — which I did, and darn straight that I will again — then I am a Nazi. That, because I am conservative, I am responsible for concentration camps.
That is how a ten-year-old’s vocabulary translates when a person is fifty years older but still has the same inability to counter an idea with a compelling antithesis: “Your mother” becomes “Rabbi, you are a Nazi who constructs concentration camps.”
When someone uses the term “Nazi,” he better have a sly and wry smile on his face, in the way of Jackie Mason ridiculously and hilariously using the term hyperbolically to describe everyone from the meter maid who hands out parking tickets for overstaying at the curb by five minutes to the sanitation worker who forgets to pick up your container on Wednesday to the person at the grocery who tells you that he just sold the last pint of your favorite ice cream.
And this rabbi, who faced the shaming and insults and four years of Leftist intimidation at Columbia University en route to earning his bachelor’s in Poli Sci, who was assigned to read every book, paragraph, and postcard ever written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Stokely Carmichael and Franz Fanon, but never even heard of Ayn Rand until he was done with his formal college schooling, and who twenty years later would face three more years of shaming and insults of Leftist intimidation at UCLA Law School, learned often-enough to stay as much in the closet as he could while he was getting graded on exams and having his future GPA assigned by professors with liberal agendas. But he remembers every deprecation and imprecation that he was called instead of being intelligently countered with a challenging counter-argument.
Those of us who survived that world without being brainwashed, dutifully feigning to be the liberals our professors demanded we be, actually emerged more the conservative for it. We helped elect Reagan in 1980 and 1984, voted for Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, and we helped elect Trump.
And there is a new generation today coming up, even more subjected to the shaming and insults and Leftist intimidations, a social derangement that now has spilled over from the campuses and into the streets. Conservatives being thrown out of restaurants. Cops being denied a burger or a donut. People being heckled at movie theaters, harassed and threatened on social media, or lectured on race relations by baristas who, for all their insight and reeducational inculcation, are — well, baristas.
So we learn to play the game. We hide the totality of our conservatism. We mumble the right things. We stay out of trouble because we want our frappuccinos made the way we order them. But we quietly read articles like these in our closets, and we exit the closets just long enough to vote behind closed opaque curtains.
Every time they call us “Nazi” or accuse our great free land of building concentration camps in America, we smile. We nod. And, under our breaths, picturing Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren in our minds, we know the two words that will lead us down each Republican box that we will check on the November ballot:
Fed up.
The writer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com
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