America is beginning to look like Germany in th early 1930s

In his novel, titled 1984, George Orwell described a world in which an all-powerful government manipulated reality to deceive the citizenry. For example, when the government cut the chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20 grams, it announced that it was raising it to 20 grams--a bald-faced lie.

When Orwell's novel was released in 1958, it was considered a utopian novel about a world that didn't really exist. Today, we are living in 1984.

President Joe Biden, our demented Big Brother, recently made this pronouncement about the American economy. “Today, we saw more progress bringing down inflation while maintaining one of the strongest job markets in history.” That's just bullshit.

Everyone I know expresses shock at the price of groceries. I went to the grocery store not long ago and discovered that the cost of Kraft mayonnaise was almost $10 a jar!

People who are retired and living on fixed incomes find their dollars’ buying power shrinking month by month. Yet the Biden administration claims that Bidenomics has made us all more prosperous.

The government’s official employment rate is more bullshit. Federal bureaucrats claim unemployment is below 4 percent, but that number hides the fact that millions of people are not working and not even looking for work. 

The United States is beginning to look like Germany in the early 1930s. Like the United States today, Germany was governed by a man suffering from dementia. Paul Von Hindenburg, president of Germany from 1925 until he died in 1934, drifted in and out of senescence.

Like Hindenburg (who appointed an Austrian corporal with a funny mustache as chancellor of Germany), Biden has made some terrible personnel decisions. Who believes Kamala Harris is qualified to be Vice President?

Germany, in the years leading up to World War II, was wracked by political violence from the left and the right. America, too, is plagued by a rising tide of political violence.

Then, there was inflation, which wiped out the German middle class and drove the German mark down to a million marks to the U.S. dollar.

Evil days are ahead of us. The time may come when we will fondly reminisce about the days when mayonnaise only cost $10 a jar.

 

 

Is Anti-Semitism the New Orthodoxy? Reflections on George Orwell's 1984 and the Attack on DNC Headquarters

Yesterday, a mob of anti-Israel protesters stormed the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. CNN might describe this altercation as “mostly peaceful,” but the video images I watched showed protesters battling with police.

Who are these anti-Israel agitators? Why this explosion of anti-Semitism? Do these fools know anything about the history of Israel? Have they forgotten about the Holocaust? Have they no sympathy for the Israelis who were murdered and raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7^th?

Yesterday’s attack on the DNC headquarters reminded me of a passage from 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel. Orwell described a daily “Two Minutes of Hate” exercise, which the bureaucrats of fictional Oceana were required to attend.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. . . . A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Curiously, Orwell continued, the hatred that the bureaucrats expressed was impersonal. “[T]he rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blow lamp.”

Likewise, there is an abstract quality to the recent outbursts of anti-Semitism; the racial hatred is not directed at any particular person. And yet, there is an element of cunning in these explosive, racist rants against Israel. The rioters seem to know that it is now acceptable to hate Jews. Anti-Semitism has suddenly become the new orthodoxy—almost overnight. Even the universities have signaled that they will tolerate their students’ open hostility toward Jews and Israel.

“Orthodoxy,” Orwell reminds us, “means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” Indeed, there is a thoughtlessness that permeates the new orthodoxy—much like the thoughtlessness of the German people as the Nazis came to power. Non-Jewish Germans tolerated the persecution of  Jews because they believed the Nazis would direct their bestiality only toward Jews.

Later, Germans learned that Nazi brutality knew no bounds. Anyone who opposed Hitler's murderous agenda would be liquidated.

I say again that anti-Semitism is intolerable in the United States.  The District of Columbia should prosecute the rioters who attacked the DNC headquarters as vigorously as they prosecuted the January 6th rioters. The universities should expel students who publicly espouse anti-Semitism, and they should fire the professors who spout racist propaganda in their classrooms.

 

"Mostly peaceful"
Photo credit: The Mirror

 

American colleges are producing racists and it's a damned expensive process

American colleges are spending millions of dollars a year to fight racism. Virtually every school has a vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and DEI officers don’t come cheap. Ohio State University, for example, spends $20 million a year to promote diversity and employs 189 people to get the job done.

Curiously, the more the colleges obsess about race, the more racist their students become. After Hamas massacred more than a thousand Jews last month, college students all over the United States staged mass protests in support of the butchers. Some protesters have even called for the liquidation of the Jewish state. In other words, they have come out in favor of genocide.

A college education is expensive. It can cost a quarter of a million dollars to get an undergraduate degree from an elite university. Supposedly, college students are learning how to reason. Seemingly, they are gaining a deeper appreciation of diverse cultures, races, and ethnicities. Purportedly, they are acquiring the skills and dispositions they need to participate in a democratic society.

And now we are discovering that a college education is about none of that. Instead, American universities are teaching students to celebrate murder, rape, and infanticide and to hate Israelis.

The pro-Hamas college students think they have heightened moral scruples. In fact, they have the moral sensibilities of Nazis, and they are so stupid that they don’t even realize it. 

Graduation day at Columbia University