This was all light talk and mock heroics

Were I to assess the three greatest threats to our Constitution, our tradition of freedom and our form of government, I might propose these three.  

Universities

It seems compelling that Universities are a deep tap root for much of the intellectual rot of the past thirty of forty years.  Ideologies of racial bigotry (Critical Race Theory); reformulated Marxism (Equality of Outcome over Equality of Opportunity); and Mob Rule (Social Justice) are originated and sustained in Universities.  Their influence is felt through the mass production of apostles who go into News Media and Advocacy Foundations to influence public culture (so far unsuccessfully) and government policy (with some success). 

NewNeo has a piece up this morning, Why didn’t more professors oppose the Gramscian march or at least stick up for free speech? in which she quotes extensively from Allan Bloom in his Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987.

The [Cornell] provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance…there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association. He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.

The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger. At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so. No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later – immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected – the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.

It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university. These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them. To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were – that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger. There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible. 

 My wife and I have frequently thanked our lucky stars to have received our educations in the late seventies and early eighties under an education system still functionally focused on producing and transmitting knowledge.  That was the tail-end of that era of freedom, problem solving, and exploration of facts and ideas.  The focus shifted later to exacting fundamental national change and advancing a foreign and evil ideology of Social Justice and Critical Race Theory as exemplified by deplatforming, abolition of diversity of opinion, rejection of knowledge, rejection of natural rights, and, most startlingly, rejection of freedom of speech.  

 

Delegation to Agencies

The political parties are so polarized right now (in contrast to a much more united majority of the nation) to a large degree because they have delegated governance to unsupervised and significantly autonomous federal agencies.  Congress no longer speaks on behalf of the people, Congress no longer budgets in any meaningful fashion, Congress no longer negotiates across political divides and Congress no longer legislates.  They are suffering the vanity of small differences as articulated in Sayre's Law:

Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."

 The President governs via Executive Order.  Congress legislates via unsupervised federal agencies.  Consequently, the American citizen no longer controls its own government.  

 

Discretionary Prosecutions

Perhaps among the least reported or discussed threats.  A bedrock of our system of freedom is the Rule of Law.   Law which is applied consistently to all in the nation.  

Over thirty years we have drifted away from that.  More and more often, legislation is written only to be selectively applied, the selectiveness based on political expedience, ideological conviction, and contra the constitution.

Time and again you see instances of members of the Mandarin Class committing crimes for which they are never brought to justice despite the law being applied relentlessly to ordinary citizens.

Something similar happens if the court of public outrage.  Plutocrats like Bill Gates and John Kerry jet around the world to receive climate change awards in private jets while ordinary citizens are mocked and ostracized when they complain about being forced to pay more taxes, when they object to an anti-car national policy trend, when they are forced to live more circumscribed lives in service to the religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming.  

You see this when prosecutors choose selectively when to apply hate crime charges, not based on the similarity of actions but based on race. 

In 2020, we lived an entire year of prosecutorial discretion.   Or, in another sense, indiscretion.  Over hundreds of riots by BLM and Antifa with billions of dollars in property destruction, many thousands of crimes committed, many hundreds of thousands of physical threats, hundreds of assaults and a couple of dozens murders.  Virtually no prosecutions or convictions.  

In contrast, the FBI, Capitol Police and other agencies have invested tens of thousands of hours and millions of dollars to identify and bring prosecutions against as many January 6th protestors as possible despite zero protest deaths and very little property damage. 

There is an ironical equilibrium yet to be reached on the Capitol Hill Riot.  The more investigation which occurs, the more the MSM narrative has eroded.  The more Antifa and BLM participants are being identified.   The more obvious is the asymmetric prosecutions based on political allegiance.  My suspicion is we will see a steady decline in coverage of investigations.  

The issue is not the riots per se.   Those are illegal no matter who is involved in them.  The issue is that the law is being administered on a selective ideological basis.  

If the law is not equally applied to all, it is a milestone on the road to despotic rule.  As noted in Predatory Prosecutors.