Category Archives: Political Correctness

Part 7 of 7 of a Series on Reconstruction 1865-1877

Mike Scruggs- The study of the causes and conduct of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed from 1865 to 1877 is still governed by the partisan myths of the Union victors and modern political correctness. But Truth crushed to the earth (William Cullen Bryant) is still the truth and shall rise again.

In his second inauguration speech, President Lincoln had presented a generous vision for bringing the South back into the Union fold. His often quoted words, with malice toward none; with charity for allto bind up the nations wounds, were to set a new attitude and theme in the restoration of the South to the Union. Lincoln had instructed Grant in accepting Lees surrender at Appomattox to let him up easy.

Union General J. L. Chamberlain ordered his battle seasoned troops at Appomattox to give a salute of honor to Confederate troops as they passed in final review at that surrender. Robert E. Lee had advised his men to go home and be good American citizens.

Following the assassination of Lincoln, however, goaded by the press and Radical Republicans in Congress, the flames of regional mistrust, hatred, and a desire for vengeance on the South erupted with vehement passion.

Lincolns Vice President, now President Andrew Johnson, a relatively conservative Union military governor of Tennessee and former Democratic Congressman from East Tennessee, had planned to follow the Lincoln plan for restoring the South to the Union. In this he would be vigorously opposed by the Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania in the House, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate, and Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War.

Their objective was permanent Republican Party dominance of the nation. A humiliating and vengeful subjugation of Southern States was to be an important instrument of the Radical Republican plan for continued national dominance. Southern States would be remade into Republican States fashioned and tightly controlled by Radical Republicans. Although civil rights idealism played a part in Radical Republican thinking and a very great part in their talk, the main role of former slaves would be insuring Republican political dominance in the South and suppressing any rising political opposition. This would have the effect of opening the South to economic exploitation and dominance by enterprising Northern fortune and office seekers for twelve years.

There are two warring schools on Reconstruction today. Up until about 1960 the Dunning school prevailed. Dunning and his students viewed Reconstruction as the most corrupt, tyrannical, and disgraceful period in American history. After looking at the facts presented, most conservatives and moderates are appalled at the scandalous injustices inflicted on both white and black at the hands of Federal Military Government and its Freedmans Bureau and Union League agencies and swarms of corrupt opportunists.

However, it is now the Foner school that dominates. Eric Foner is a Neo-Marxist, Columbia University professor, who believes Reconstruction did not go far enough. Harsher methods should have been used to remake the South into a more liberal society. Many of the facts Foner presents are correct, but other important facts and context are missing. His analysis generally favors big government despotism with a liberal flavor. Yet many media conservatives have only read leftist revisionist Foners book, Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution, 1883-1877, published in 1988 and 2005.

One difficulty in writing about Reconstruction is the role of the Klan. The Dunning school was willing to look at the Klan in the context of Radical Republican and Union League violence against and suppression of white Southerners after the war, while the modern Foner school is unforgiving. It is also extremely important to realize that the KKK of 1865 to 1877 was originally a regulator organization completely different in principles and motives from the imitation KKK that was founded in 1915. The original early KKK was primarily organized to protect both white and black Southerners from the Radical Republican sponsored violence of the Union League.

In my book, The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths, pages 352-3, I have recommended 16 books and several tape series and other articles covering or partially covering Reconstruction Here in my opinion are the best seven for most readers. :Charles Adams; When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, 2000John Chodes; The Union League: Washingtons Klan, 1999. Essential reading.Merton Coulter; The South During Reconstruction 1865-1877, 1947. In my opinion the best book on Reconstruction.Thomas J. DiLorenzo; The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, 2002.William A. Dunning; Reconstruction, Political and Economic 1865-1877, 1907.Ludwell H. Johnson; North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877, 1978, 1993, 2002 printing.Alfred B. Williams; Hampton & His Redshirts: South Carolinas Deliverance in 1876, 1935.

Unfortunately, once the Northern carpetbaggers and Radical Republicans had abandoned their black political constituency in 1877, Southern Democrats indiscriminately made second class citizens of all blacks, friend and foe, regardless of qualifications. The Southern experience with the widespread corruption, demagoguery, and oppression of Reconstruction caused in most whites a fear and revulsion of black participation in government that would take many decades to subside.

It took Alabama and South Carolina nearly one hundred years to pay off the wild and corrupt state spending of the Reconstruction era. Blacks were placed under the same type black laws that still relegated blacks to second class citizenship in most Northern states. Several Northern states, such as Indiana, Illinois, and Oregon had laws that prevented blacks or mulattos from even entering their states. Because of the Reconstruction experience and the larger black population in the South, the residual of these Jim Crowe laws lasted longer in Southern states.

The Union League and Freedmans Bureau had failed in their purpose, but succeeded in doing tremendous damage to race relations in the South. Thus they were a strong contributory cause in retarding rather than advancing black political and economic progress.

Union League militias in the South are estimated to have numbered nearly 280,000, far outnumbering regular Union Army troops. Except for mostly white Northern leadership, the Union League rank and file were former slaves and 100,000 blacks who had served in the Union Army. Numerous Union Army communications indicate that many of these were recruited into the Union Army at the point of bayonet. Yet at the wars end they were not welcome in the North and even excluded by law from entering many Northern states.

They had to return to the South where they were strongly resented by the white Confederate veterans, who they had fought against during the war. Most Union League militiamen, both Union veterans and ex-slaves, wore the Union Army uniform. They were essentially federal agency units of the War Department assigned to the military or carpetbagger governments for their political bidding and defense. Often the more resentful or vengeful Union League militiamen used their new and elevated status to insult and menace the now humiliated Confederate veterans and their families. The Union League militias were also notorious for their lack of discipline.

In addition to their assigned political violence and bullying, there was often wanton violence, destruction, confiscation, and thievery. They outnumbered regular Federal troops in most states. Despite their numbers, reputation for brutality, and connections to Federal power, the Union League was first intimidated and then defeated by the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan. The severely damaged racial relations that were the work of the Union League and Reconstruction policies still lingers, but modern political correctness generally assigns the South as the sole scapegoat.

However, an enormous portion of the violence blamed on the KKK during Reconstruction was actually the work of the Union League. The League had found a way to disguise its violence and blame it on the KKK. The first two convictions under a Mississippi anti-Klan law in 1870 turned out to be two black Union League men who had been harassing a black Democrat. A U.S. Marshall in North Carolina also commented on the high number of Union League incidents using imitations of KKK disguise. In collusion with Radical Republican Congressmen in Washington, Radical Republican state governments in the South made a concentrated effort to report as many incidents of white violence against blacks and white Republicans as possible.

They went much further than honest reporting to keep Congress and Republican voters in the North stirred up against reputed Southern misdeeds. Much distortion and fabrication was involved and was readily passed on as fact by a biased and obedient Northern press. For example, in April 1866 in Memphis, there were more than forty blacks killed in a three day race riot. This turned out to be a conflict between a garrison of black federal soldiers and Irish police of recent Northern importation.

The bottom line is that Reconstruction further devastated the South and retarded its economic recovery by many decades. The primary economic beneficiary was the Northeast. The primary political effect of the War and Reconstruction was that we evolved from a philosophy of limited government to big, powerful, highly centralized unlimited government. The degree of corruption and despotism during Reconstruction may seem incredible, but they were the natural result of a collusion of big government and politically connected businesses unchecked by the consent of the governed.

Dr. Henry Bellows, a Unitarian minister and the founder of both the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Union League, wrote a summary of Union League consequences in 1879. He was appalled that an organization of such good original intentions [exalting the power of consolidated Federal government over the Constitution] had such staggeringly negative consequences even in the North. The philosophies of vengeance, violence, and corruption that had been inflicted on the South came home to roost in the North.

There was something more hopeless and desperate in the political, social, and commercial demoralization that followed the war than the war itself. The old and pestilent doctrine of the spoils of war had changed from an acknowledged heresy into a dogma.Nothing less than a moral typhoid , the consequence of a general malaria in the public air, can account for the sinking tone of public sentiment during the decade following the close of the war; partly a reaction to the exalted patriotism that had sustained the war into victory, partly the dreadful result of the unsettling influence on values, standards, habits, by the creation of an artificial currency that did not carry its measure in itself, partly by the coming to the top of powerful men who had suddenly become rich without the aid of any moral habit or any refined or gentlemanly standards.

This decline in the public tone was not confined to the vulgar and ignorant. It affected all ranks and professions, perhaps most marked where it would naturally be least looked for, and most abhorrent, in the clerical calling. No doubt it affected injuriously many of the leaders of all parties and every school of politics, the Senate, the Bench, and the Bar.

Roberta F. Cason, writing in The Georgia Historical Quarterly, volume 20, in 1936 summarized with this:The Union League of Georgia did more to breed suspicion between the races, to create misunderstanding, to ignite often justifiably but none the less dangerous explosions of feeling and conduct, to estrange the black man from the people with whom he must live, to fan alive and kindle in new places fires of prejudice, than any other single influence.

There can be no doubt that if the races had not been set against each other, these situations pregnant with fearful implications for the future, would never have come aboutThe Union League distorted the blacks reaction to freedom, enslaved him politically for a time, and was a vital factor in creating the situations that have resulted in his economic slavery.

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The Battle for Truth on the Reconstruction Era The Tribune Papers- Breaking News & Top Local Stories - Thetribunepapers

If Jordan Wolfson is an edgelord, our culture doesnt have much of an edge. Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson?, a new documentary directed by James Crump, nods at its start to the artists offensiveness and his lack of deference to political correctness and virtue signaling. But since the putatively offended parties are mostly absent from the 55-minute film, one can only imagine what sensitivities might be triggered by Wolfsons vulgarity, scatology, violence, lust, and direct or sideways invocations of ethnicity, race, and racism. Maybe tweakings of these taboos count as offensive today, but not too long ago they were common currency.

So outside a certain bubble, Wolfson comes across less as a provocateur than as a sophisticated and entertaining nostalgia act, repackaging familiar transgressions in novel trappings like animatronics and virtual-reality headsets. Plenty of precursors beyond the two that Wolfson names (David Lynch and Jeff Koons) are obvious: Norman Mailer, R. Crumb, Al Goldstein, the Beastie Boys, Howard Stern. His 2014 breakout work (Female figure), an animatronic blonde who dances while looking in a mirror, channels 50s-era pinups through pre-2001 robotics and the perverted masquerade of Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut. His VR installation from the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Real Violence, replays the street beatdown scene from A Clockwork Orange in black goggles with an anti-Semitic twist. As for the animated aging Jewish man in a yarmulke and beard talking dirty in in the artists voice in Animation, masks (2011), Woody Allen made the same joke in Annie Hall. Call Wolfson a transgressive traditionalistand watch him drag such manchild signifiers as Pinocchio and Looney Toons into the piss and shit of a muddled 21st-century adulthood to a familiar pop score of Lady Gaga and Percy Sledge.

One function of virtue signaling is money laundering, since money has no virtue on its own and more often than not is born of vice (or worse). But if virtuous art pays out these days in return for the cover it provides to capital, it stands to reason that some money will flow to its opposite, especially if it comes in an ironic wrapping. If Wolfson were truly offensive, hed be kicked out of polite society. But his irony affirms the status quo even as it points up its hypocrisies and general flimsiness. And so Spit Earth takes us to Wolfsons farm house in upstate New York, where he enjoys the company of a couple of large dogs and keeps a pair of rescue horses in a big red barn. Wolfson cops that hes always been fortunate, and we see childhood photos of his upper-middle-class family. But as usual, his checking of privilege comes across as a form of autofellatio thinly disguised as self-deprecation.

The best scenes of the film transpire in the living room: Wolfson putting his phone on the mantel and FaceTiming with an animator, acting out the scene he wants her to put on the screen for his next piece. Hes laughing, hes dancing, hes appreciative of his collaboratorall with the sense of childlike fun that enchants many of his works. Such scenes are more illuminating than anything the talking heads in the film say about himthough theyre all entranced by his charismaor any of the vague things Wolfson says about his boyhood. It was hard, he tells us of growing up. Jordan had a learning disability, his mother explains. Theres a whiff of therapy to the proceedings, the couch no doubt being the source of a good deal of Wolfsons inspiration. No artist is comfortable in his own skin, adds Wolfsons aunt, the novelist Erica Jong. Am I allowed to say that?

Asking permission to utter a bromide nicely captures the tone of Spit Earth, but the supposed scandalousness of the art doesnt quite eclipse the art itself. The drama at play is mostly of the messy-breakup variety. Wolfsons ex-girlfriend Emma Fernberger, who is pictured nude in his embrace in one of his paintings, recalls how the picture hurt another ex-boyfriends feelings. She and Wolfson have since patched things up, and when Fernberger wonders aloud whether all of Wolfsons work amounts to an elaborate psychic self-portrait, shes stating the obvious.

Wolfsons most striking transgression was a series of posters in which he called out the Venice Biennale for not selecting him for competition (nothing is more offensive than a careerism that dares to speak its own name) while also criticizing other artists for not making work you love. The image behind the text on them is something Wolfson surely loves: himself.

Its hard to blame him. Wolfson has wit and energy. He does a funny impression of Jeff Koons. Hes clever and shrewdmaybe even too shrewd within an art world thats allowed him to thrive more as jester than gadfly. The glibbest of Wolfsons works is the new Artists, Friends, Racists (2020) in which the three words flicker alternately in neon read signage. To hear him explain the logic behind the piecethat any white person born in America might not be personally racist but is complicit in structural racismonly makes it drearier, since its conventional wisdom.

Wolfson could clearly use some competition as a satirist. But turning 40 this fall, his days as an enfant terrible are behind him. Spit Earth serves as a capstone to that phase. The table is set for a long midlife crisis.

Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson? is now available online on Vimeo.

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Is Artist Jordan Wolfson Really So Offensive? A New Documentary Considers the Artists Persona - ARTnews

The British government's computer security gurus have announced they will stop using the terms whitelisting and blacklisting in their online documentation.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, said on Friday it would, following a request from a customer, eliminate the terms when describing including and excluding specific applications, websites, weak or leaked passwords, and so on.

Instead, it will use the terms "allow list" and "deny list" in material published on its website.

The aim, said NCSC head of advice and guidance Emma W, is to avoid linking "black" with bad and "white" with good, and the racial connotations they carry.

"From now on, the NCSC will use 'allow list' and 'deny list' in place of 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' on our website. Which, in fact, is clearer and less ambiguous," said Emma.

"So as well as being more inclusive of all, this is a net benefit to our web content. We are editing our guidance across the website to update the terms, but if you do spot any in the meantime then please do contact us."

The NCSC noted the policy change was only a small gesture in a much larger effort to drive prejudice from technology and cyber-security industries, but noted that every small step helps.

"You may not see why this matters. If you're not adversely affected by racial stereotyping yourself, then please count yourself lucky," Emma said. "For some of your colleagues (and potential future colleagues), this really is a change worth making."

The centre also shared an additional statement from technical director Ian Levy and the board of directors in anticipation of a knee-jerk internet backlash:

"If youre thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, dont bother."

These aren't the first problematic terms to be deprecated in technical vocabularies. For instance, "master" and "slave" to describe storage drives, databases, and similar stuff have been dropped by organizations and companies in favor of "primary" and "secondary."

In response to the NCSC announcement, some asked if this will mean an end to "white hat" and "black hat" to describe those in defensive and offensive security roles, respectively.

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As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If youre thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness...

Sholten Singer Justin Rohrwasser was hand-picked by Bill Belichick to follow in the footsteps of Stephen Gostkowski and Adam Vinatieri.

Justin Rohrwasser was driving across New York state last Sunday, from Buffalo to his home outside of Albany, when his emotions overwhelmed him.

He just broke down crying in the car, said John Barber, Rohrwassers high school football coach. My first reaction was, Where are you? Ill come get you. He said, No, Im fine, Im driving home.

They were supposed to be tears of joy for Rohrwasser, who last Saturday realized his dream of getting drafted into the NFL. After a college career that took him from the University of Rhode Island to Erie (N.Y.) Community College to Marshall University, Rohrwasser was the first kicker drafted into the NFL this year, taken in the fifth round by the Patriots. Coach Bill Belichick handpicked Rohrwasser to be the possible successor to Stephen Gostkowski and Adam Vinatieri.

Instead, Rohrwasser was crying tears of pain. And fear. And disappointment.

Not long after Rohrwasser was drafted, one of his tattoos caught the attention of social media.

On his left forearm is the Roman numeral III encircled by 13 stars a logo of a group called the Three Percenters.

The organization is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-government group." Anti-government groups, according to the center, advocate or adhere to extreme anti-government doctrines, but do not necessarily advocate for violence or racism.

Members of the Three Percenters have made news in recent years for harassing Muslims and Mexicans; for planning to detonate a car bomb in Oklahoma City; for occupying an Oregon wildlife refuge for five weeks in 2016; and for having a presence at the Charlottesville, Va., white supremacy rally in 2017.

The group says on its website that it is very pro-government, so long as the government abides by the Constitution." Its members view themselves as defenders of the Constitution, who fight for small government, free speech, and gun ownership rights, according to previous reporting on the subject.

The Three Percenters got national notice when some of their members traveled to Charlottesville in 2017 intending to help keep the peace and defend both the white supremacists and their counter-protesters right to free speech. After the bloody clash, the Three Percenters national council ordered a stand-down order, saying, We will not align ourselves with any type of racist group.

Rohrwasser got the tattoo when he was in college. A review of photographs on his social-media profiles suggests that he had it as early as December 2015, when he was a freshman at Rhode Island.

He said after being drafted last week that he didnt fully understand what the group represented to the public.

I have a lot of family in the military," he said. "I thought it stood for a military support symbol at the time. Obviously, its evolved into something that I do not want to represent.

"When I look back on it, I should have done way more research before I put any mark or symbol like that on my body, and its not something I ever want to represent. It will be covered.

Rohrwasser told WBZ the next day that he will completely remove the tattoo instead of covering it up.

Exactly when and why Rohrwasser got the tattoo could not be determined. The Patriots did not let Rohrwasser and his family be interviewed for this story. Belichick was not asked about the tattoo during his post-draft media availability and was not made available for this story.

Rohrwassers world came crashing down last Saturday. His Twitter and Instagram feeds were scoured, turning up tweets and likes of Rohrwasser supporting President Donald Trump, controversial right-wing figures such as author Ayn Rand, and anti-political correctness psychologist Jordan Peterson.

For him to be called a racist thug and a Nazi and Hitler, it just turns my stomach, because thats not who he is, said Barber. What shouldve been the best day of his life people that Im trying to be polite they dont understand the full story of who he is, just want to take something out of context and destroy a kid, which wasnt called for.

Kicking his ticket

Rohrwasser, 23, grew up in Clifton Park, N.Y., about 20 miles north of Albany. Listed now at 6 feet 3 inches and 230 pounds, he was a standout soccer and football player who attended Catholic Central in Troy, and played for a co-op team called Holy Trinity. He was the starting quarterback, kicker, and punter during his senior season, and led the Crusaders to a 5-3 record. In one game, he quarterbacked his team down the field in the closing seconds, then kicked the winning 37-yard field goal.

Rohrwasser knew that kicking was his ticket. In the winter, he kicked in the schools indoor batting cage. In the summer, his father and coach shagged balls for him.

Every kickoff was through the end zone, Barber said. His extra points and field goals were just automatic. He had that pop on the ball.

It all led to a partial scholarship at Rhode Island, where he kicked in the 2015 and 2016 seasons.

He was tremendous, a great kid in the program, Rhode Island head coach Jim Fleming said. I thought he was an intelligent, well-spoken, good dude. Kids liked him. He wasnt a normal introverted kicker. He had some personality to him.

Fleming said he never noticed the III tattoo, but said he would often engage in political discussions with Rohrwasser, who wasnt shy about his conservative beliefs. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Rohrwasser often wore a red Make America Great Again hat, according to Fleming.

He was an interesting cat to talk to, Fleming said. We dont let the hats in meetings, but hed wear it in the hallway, on campus. Id joke, You take that freakin hat off, and then wed have conversations about it.

And he was a very mature kid. We had some interesting conversations about what he thought and why he liked Trump and those kinds of things. As I remember it, he always came back to the economic component; that made him jump on the Trump bandwagon more than anything else.

"I was not concerned whatsoever about him dividing the team. So I feel bad for the kid right now. Hell weather the storm, hopefully.

Rohrwasser connected on 15 of 20 field goal attempts in his two seasons, with a long of 42, but the Rams won just three games and Rohrwasser wasnt getting many opportunities.

He transferred to a community college near Buffalo, then received a scholarship offer at Marshall for the 2018 and 2019 seasons.

Rohrwasser thrived at Marshall. He hit on 15 of 21 field goal attempts as a junior, then 18 of 21 his senior year, earning first-team All-Conference USA honors and drawing buzz as an NFL prospect. Rohrwassers finest moment came at the end of a win over Western Kentucky last season when he lined up for a winning 53-yard kick. He wound up attempting the kick three times because WKU iced him twice with timeouts, and he nailed all three.

I was probably more nervous than he was, holder Jackson White said. I remember I looked back at him on the third kick, he gave me the nod and he just smiled at me. I was like, Oh, hes going to crush this kick. It was amazing.

Several of Rohrwassers Marshall teammates said they never heard him speak about his tattoo or make uncomfortable political statements.

We have lockers next to each other," long snapper Matt Beardall said. "Ive seen the tattoo a thousand times and had no idea what it stood for or what it meant.

"Justin did love to talk politics and stuff, but it was never to this extent or what the tattoo stands for. If something happened in D.C., you could go to Justin and he would tell you what happened because he would follow the politics from both sides of things. It was never left or right, he was always in the middle and he just wanted to understand everyones point of view.

Hes not an extremist like everyone is calling him to be, and its really sad that some people who dont know him are calling him names and making judgments.

Among Rohrwassers other tattoos are an American flag, one stating Liberty or death, and another that states, Dont tread on me. He also has tattoos of the all-seeing eye, the Dave Matthews Band, and one with a black spade that reads, Born to lose, Live to win, a symbol and motto often attributed to heavy metal singer Lemmy of Motorhead. Rohrwasser previously told the Marshall website that the tattoos are all random.

Marshall running back Brenden Knox, who is Black, said he and Rohrwasser became close friends while attending community events together, like speaking at local elementary schools and visiting the hospital before the Gasparilla Bowl. Knox said he never felt threatened by Rohrwassers political views.

We sat together a lot on buses, and when I first saw [the tattoo] I honestly did not think twice about it. I thought it was Illuminati stuff or something like that, Knox said. A lot of times were around our teammates more than our friends and family back home and you really get to know a guy. And I never got any type of vibe that set me off on edge. A guy like that, you want to stand up for him when everybody else is saying things that arent true.

Best foot forward

Rohrwasser was fortunate that Marshall held its Pro Day on March 11, before the NFL shut down all travel because of COVID-19. Performing in front of about 16 NFL teams, Rohrwasser nailed 12 of 13 kicks, with a long of 58. The only kick he missed was from 66 yards, but it had the distance and barely missed.

Patriots special teams coordinator Cameron Achord was in attendance, intently taking notes and speaking with Rohrwasser after the event.

Only the people that were at Pro Day knew the interest the Patriots had in Justin, Beardall said. I was like, This guy really, really wants him. He was their sleeper, and they knew he wasnt a sleeper.

Rohrwasser wasnt ranked highly by most scouting analysts, and ESPN didnt have any footage of him for its broadcast. But Beardall had a hunch the Patriots would draft him on Day 3.

Hes like, Ill probably just sign an undrafted rookie contract with the Patriots, Beardall said. Then when the fifth round came around, I was sitting on the couch talking to my brother. I was like, What if they pull the trigger on Justin right here? And the next thing you know, they did.

But Rohrwassers celebration quickly turned to a nightmare as his social media accounts (since locked) were scoured and his name became associated with the alt-right and white nationalism.

It was very hard, just to see that and things that are being said about him and some of the backlash came at me also, said Barber, the high school coach. His senior year, he dated my niece for five to six months. Hes a good kid. When we talked on Sunday, he broke right down crying. So it was difficult.

Some of Rohrwassers ex-teammates and coaches came to his defense this past week. Marshall junior defensive end Koby Cumberlander, who is Black, said on Twitter, Im going to keep defending my dawg, crazy how people are quick to judge someone they dont even know.

White, the holder, said he believes Rohrwasser that he didnt fully understand the associations made with the Three Percenters.

I believe in him. I dont think hes part of anything, White said. I know for a fact that hes very passionate about supporting the military. Hes a conservative guy, hell tell you that. But I was looking on Twitter and people were ragging on him about the tweets that he liked about Trump. I think its crazy theyre trying to destroy his career.

His friends believe that the controversy will eventually subside, and Rohrwasser will be a benefit to the Patriots.

All of the Patriots fans have only heard the untrue stories about Justin, said Beardall. Theres so many true, great stories about him that theyre going to see once he starts. Hes going to interact in the community, hes going to read to elementary schools thats what we did on Wednesdays. Hes a stand up dude.

I totally know hell be fine once he puts his pads on. Hell go out there and kick and make the Patriots fans super happy.

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For Justin Rohrwasser, the controversy about his tattoo started soon after being drafted by Patriots - msnNOW

In his recent New York Times review of Andrew Bacevichs new anthology of conservative writings, columnist George Will tosses out a dig at self-described national conservatives, convinced that the thinking persons Trumpism is not an oxymoron. These poor souls, he adds, are struggling to infuse intellectual content into the simmering stew of economic nationalism, resentment of globalizations disruptions and nostalgia for the economy and communities of the 1950s.

Though Will issued his characterization merely in passing, part of a broader point about conservatisms ambiguous attitude toward modernity, it was meant to sting. In terms of intellectual content, he seems to be saying, Trump and Trumpism are the same thing.

But are they? Trumpism got Donald Trump elected in 2016. If he loses in 2020, as seems increasingly likely, it wont be because of Trumpism but because of his own severe limitations as a leader. As president, Trump has been a haphazard and largely hapless exponent of Trumpism.

Leaving aside Trump, what is Trumpism? And why is it inherently contradictory to the thoughts of thinking people? Of course, Trump himself is not a thinking person. He operates by instinct and viscera. But those attributes provided him with enough insight in 2016 to understand that a host of issues were agitating a substantial constituency that had been forgotten or dismissed by the political establishment. So he ran against the establishment and won. That doesnt reflect particularly well on the establishmenta habitat, of course, of thinking people.

If we confine ourselves to the general policy positions that Trump ran on in 2016 and leave aside his empty governance and his incapacity to build a governing coalition, we can distill the essence of Trumpism. And then we can assess whether it is worthy of thinking people. The component parts:

The World We Live In: One of Trumps sharpest insights was that we no longer live in the world that brought us Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan. Their conservatism was right for their time, and Reagan was the right man to carry it to national prominence. But the country and the world have changed since then. In 2016, Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders were the only politicians who pressed the view that the status quo was crumbling. And Trump, in capturing the Republican Party in the primaries, made clear he had little regard for the issue clusters and sensibilities that had guided the party since Goldwater.

Immigration: Nothing illustrates this more starkly than immigration, which likely was the single most powerful issue that propelled Trump into the White House. When Reagan ran for president in 1980, the proportion of foreign born persons in the country was 6.2 percent. In 2016, it was 13.5 percent. Today, it is approaching 15 percent. History tells us that, when this important metric approaches or exceeds 14 percent, as it did around the turn of the last century, political concerns emerge about the ability of the country to assimilate such immigration numbers smoothly. Smart politicians pay attention, but the establishment politicians of 2016 ignored it.

This no doubt was part of what George Will was talking about when he referred to those seeking to infuse intellectual content into the simmering stew ofglobalizations disruptions. But why is it smart to disdain those concerned about the disruptions wrought by immigration flows exceeding anything ever seen before in the country? Particularly when the last time they approached todays level, a century ago, the country became agitated and moved decisively to curb that inflow? To understand this political reality is an element of Trumpism, and to have a finger on the pulse of political sentiment would seem to be an example of a thinking persons Trumpism. Further, those who either missed it or ignored it dont look much like thinking people, and their ignorance or ideological zeal helped give us Donald Trump.

Trade: The Republican Party of Goldwater, Buckley, and Reagan was a free-trade party (though Reagan was willing to stray from that doctrine in deft and often camouflaged ways when political pressures impinged upon him). Trump ripped away the free-trade label. Does this represent another of those disassociations of Trumpism from thinking people? Well, the Republican Party was consistently protectionist from its beginning in the 1850s right up until the end of World War II. One president during that time, William McKinley, sought to craft a new doctrine, called reciprocity, dedicated to multiple bilateral agreements in which two countries mutually reduced trade barriers. He didnt have a chance to demonstrate how well it could work before he was killed in 1901. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, promptly abandoned the concept.

The Trump trade policy bears a serious resemblance to McKinleys reciprocity concept. Whatever one thinks of it, no one can deny that the free trade regimen wasnt working as advertised. Indeed, it helped hollow out Americas industrial base and devastated the blue-collar working class long considered the countrys brawn and backbone. Further, it became an invitation for other nations, particularly China, to game the system and undermine Americas ability to compete in the global marketplace. And where were our establishment politicians? Clinging to the status quo and refusing to see or address the devastation. Who were the thinking people in this tale?

Financialization of the Economy: Trump went after the big banks of Wall Street during his campaign but hasnt taken them on as president. He was right the first time. Today, $1 out of every $12 of GDP goes to the financial sector; in the 1950s, it was only $1 for every $40 of GDP. This represents a huge additional cut for people who dont make anything, dont create many jobs, and generally just move money around. The financial system we have now, wrote Matthew Stewart in The Atlantic a couple years ago, has been engineered, over decades, by powerful bankers for their own benefit and for that of their posterity. The federal government favors these elements of society further with lavish tax preferences and other juicy perks of crony capitalism. If Trumpism is what Trump campaigned on in 2016, then the big financial institutions would be under political pressure today, as they should be.

Foreign Policy: Before Trump, the Republican Party was thoroughly under the sway of internationalists bent on remaking the world in the American image, including through regime change wars and threats of war, and dedicated to preventing the emergence of regional powers allowed to pursue their own interests in their own neighborhoods. Trump ran against all this. As president, severely beleaguered by allegations of Russian collusion that turned out to be bogus, he has had to abandon his desire to forge better relations with Russia. He has avoided any new Mideast wars, though his bellicosity toward Iran could yield that result and he has been unable to get the country out of ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. And his foreign policy rhetoric during the campaign clearly was popular with many voters and set new terms of debate both within the party and in the broader political environment.

Political Correctness: After the 2016 presidential campaign, mathematician Spencer Greenberg conducted a study indicating that anger over political correctness was the second most reliable predictor of Trump support, behind party affiliation and ahead of social conservatism, protectionism, and anti-immigration sentiments. This provided a remarkable window on the frustrations and anger on the part of those who felt they were being dismissed and marginalized by the nations liberal elites. No serious presidential candidate had ever taken on the PC forces with Trumps brand of pugilism, often accompanied by his unsavory mode of expression. It was a brutal pushback against those seeking to silence conservatives by declaring their views to be outside the bounds of proper discourse. It turned out, based on Trumps forcing the issue onto the national stage, that many Americans were fed up with that political ploy.

These Trumpian positions of 2016 represent a repository of political sentiment in the country and constitute Trumps tightly formed political base, which has been and remains about 43 percent of the electorate. Could these positions also serve as bedrock for a broader political movement undergirding a governing coalition for the future? We dont know because Trump has proved himself incapable of building any such governing coalition. Besides, as he has proved recently, its tough to disguise buffoonery in a crisis. But not all of Trumpism is divorced from intelligent thinking, and some of it will still be out there, beckoning a politician, even perhaps a thinking politician, interested in building that coalition.

Robert W. Merry, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and Congressional Quarterly CEO, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster).

The rest is here:

In Defense of Intellectual Trumpism - The American Conservative

Do you speak Bug? Do you know its diction and syntax? Do you recognize its cant, the clicks and stridulations?

If you are reading this, you almost certainly do. You are, more likely than not, well-versed in its rhetoric. Bug is a second language for you. The superstratum of the hyper-educated class to which you belong. It is a language you need to survive here, to effectuate your role in the knowledge economy. Bug is the lingua franca of globohomo.

Globohomo? Can I say such a word? Not in the boardroom or in the faculty lounge, that is for sure. Not at my TedTalk or the panel I will sit on at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Globohomo is not a Davos word. It is not a Bug word. Its connotations are much too vulgar. It does not, in fact, even matter that you understand precisely what it means. One can intuit its pejorative capacity, its intent to offend. It is a word with verve and weighta pulse. It is one of many such neologisms arising out of the anarchic ferment of the too-online subterranean world anons like me inhabit.

Here we do not speak Bug.

OK, so what is this Bug language exactly? What follows is a recent, prominent example via negativa. Just about any of Donald Trumps utterances would qualify as the opposite of Bug, but his letter to Recep Erdogan in October encouraging the Turkish leader to cooperate on the issue of the Kurds is especially instructive. This is what Bug is not.

You might remember the furor over this letter, these final lines in particular:

History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things dont happen. Dont be a tough guy. Dont be a fool!

A conspicuously Trumpian ultimatum. The style is inimitable, Trumps alone. Brusque, temperamental, masterfully trollish, eschewing the usual niceties and mealy-mouthed platitudes of diplomacy which, to the ears of a swaggering, ersatz sultan would be rejected anyway.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, another man who does not speak Bug nor think within its constraints, praised the virtue of Trumps epistolary flair. He compared Trumps missive to the famous Zaphorian Cossacks Letter to Sultan Mehmed IV. Below, a sampling:

Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!

O sultan, Turkish devil . . . Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother.

Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria . . .

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife . . . Now well conclude, for we dont know the date and dont own a calendar; the moons in the sky, the year with the Lord, the days the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!

Goat-fucker of Alexandria . . . Imagine!

Trumps own letter is so mild in comparison; and yet, what did our Bug-speaking class have to say about it?

It is hard when adjudicating anything Trump-related to disaggregate their reflexive contempt from a more substantive critique, but here we see their old point-and-sputter routine to dismiss what they cannot (or refuse to) comprehend. Bizarre, they say. Is this, like, even real? they wonder. Do a Twitter search for Erdogan on October 16th, 2019, the day the letter became news and you will see for yourself. The Bug class screeching in unison, performing ironic dramatic readings. The cringe is unbearable.

Forget the utility of the letter; they do not even bother to take aim at the question of whether or not Trump succeeded in deterring Erdogans aggression. Erdogan threw the letter in the trash, dont you know? As if that is the end of it, or tells us anything at all about the foreign policy matter at hand. No. What they most resist are the aesthetics of the letter. They resist its style.

Trump writes like a man wielding overwhelming power, held back only by generous restraint, says a Bug-speaking columnist at the Guardian. As if that is a bad thing! What matters is not that Trump did or did not persuade Erdogan. Trumps great sin, as one presidential historian and CNN contributor put it, was that he failed to look professional.

Much is revealed by this concern over professionalism. Much more than Trumps accuser intends, and it is not about Trump but about the function of the Bug language as perceived by the people who wield it and enforce its use. The appearance of professionalism is the overriding ethic. This is what the Bug language affords, a thin veneer of legitimacy. It is cosmetic, purely, a layering over of a much more sinister, much more repugnant creature underneath.

Let us go back to beginnings. Christopher Caldwells much-discussed Age of Entitlement makes the provocative claim that the origins of the modern American nation (and the death of the old one) can be traced to the Constitutional cataclysm of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He observes in this episode the hardening of a certain progressive legal and political impulse seeded in the suite of new laws, including Hart-Celler, that would come to dominate American life, and by proxy the Western world at large, in the decades to come.

Caldwell notes this wasnt merely a legalistic revolution, even if the courts supplied the arms, but also activated through social and cultural practice a much broader reorientation of the commonweal toward a coalition of minority interest groups and administrative state commissars, at the expense of a white working-class who under this new dispensation were obliged to take their ration of gruel with a smile.

One of the mechanisms Caldwell identifies for this social and political conquest is the old conservative bogeyman of political correctness. The dopey, ham-handed manner in which the term is so often criticized by the Right notwithstanding, an examination of P.C. provides an illustrative example of how languagethe Bug language, of which political correctness is a major idiomis used to enforce ideology on otherwise unwilling subjects.

Take the case of the nauseating term Latinx. Go ahead. Say it out loud to yourself. Latinx. Do you feel properly debased? You should. You are meant to. Your indignity is the point.

Bug language cannot be allowed to persist. And we must stomp it out with the heel of our boot.

Nevermind for a moment that the vast majority of people the term is ostensibly meant to assuage do not like it and would never use it themselves. Like so much else that might fall under the umbrella of P.C., the goal is not to empower the weak but to weaken the strong. And a term like Latinx does this firstly by extorting consent through moral blackmailyou are a bad and discourteous person for not using itand secondly by smuggling in with its adoption a whole matrix of ideological commitments from which the term is constructed, including commitments related not just to Latino ethnicity, but to gender, sexuality, immigration, and even American foreign policy. The Bugmen who invent this stuff say so themselves.

Reader, you might resist using the term. I suspect you do. Just as you might resist declaring your pronouns, or saying the equally nauseating term person of color, or examining your privilege, white or otherwise, or renouncing your toxic masculinity. At least for now. But where these terms fail to take root, others of their type will spread and claim the soil, and inexorably the ground from which we derive our understanding of the world and our place in it, becomes choked with these verbal weeds and the poisonous fruits they bear.

But this is not all that is going on. Lamenting the scourge of P.C. is by now prosaic culture-war sport and not really even the most interesting aspect of Bug speak. The civil rights revolution at the center of Caldwells thesis dovetails with another era-defining revolution of a subtler kind that perhaps better elucidates this subject.

For our purposes, it will suffice to give a potted history of the class divisions and alliances that emerge alongside Caldwells civil rights revolution. The trends are related and feed on one another but should be understood as separate phenomena. The story of the managerial class, the progenitors of Globohomo and the language he instantiates, opens with the financialization of the American economy in the 1970s.

In the cauldron of burgeoning American global economic hegemony, the witch doctor(ate)s in the academy and on Wall Street cooked up a new, more potent scheme to extract resources from firms and their labor. The finer details are better explained elsewhere.

Whats important to understand is the creation of new wealth under this scheme, if not the result of a casino economy exactly, depended less and less on the production, sale, and consumption of goods and more and more, as David Graeber puts it, [on] various forms of rent taking, that is, direct extraction, through semifeudal relations of extraction where financial interests work closely with state power (policy, as its euphemistically termed) to create conditions of mass indebtedness.

This is the neoliberal economy at the End of History: a shell game that coerces Peter, if not to steal, then to borrow beyond his earning capacity to pay Paul, where owner and worker, no longer adjoined by lifetime employment, a pension, a shared community where their respective children attend the same schools and might even (gasp!) marry, are instead cut off from one another, the owner having made common cause with financial interests and the public bureaucracies that dole out his gibs, while the worker is left to fend for himself against mass imported labor, in decaying, alienating cities and towns, his union busted, his pension depleted, and his sons subjected to the haradins and gremlins in the media and in the lecture halls who blame him for societys ills.

Melodramatic? Maybe. But only a little.

Into this milieu, a new antagonist emerges. The managerial class.

Broadly speaking, the upper quintile or so of highly educated, relatively well-paid paper pushers and desk jockeys whose primary duty is to keep the corporate-bureacratic machinery well-greased. Much, perhaps most, of it is not real work. Not in the traditional sense of value-added inputs. Instead, it is inflationary makeshift drudgery to justify the continuation of its own existence. Mandarins puttering about with a pair of meddling eyes over every shoulder. Needlessly convoluted procedures, rules, redundancies, instructions, prohibitions, and laws are the grist for the new corporate mill, serving, again, per Graeber, the flunkies, goons, box tickers, and task masters who populate the modern office.

Here, then, we get another condition out of which the Bug language is born. It is a do-nothing language for do-nothing people. Its flimsy abstractions and moralizing sentiments serve both to explain away the dispossession of the working class over whom the managers preside, and to substantiate their status that is increasingly decoupled from any actual merit. Hence, officespeak. HR drivel.

MBA Harvard. Forward Optimization Analyst. Delivering strategies to achieve excellence across domains. Advancing underrepresented managers within an Inclusion and Diversity capital and technological ecosystem.

You have seen this on Linkedin. I have. What does this Bugman do? What purpose could he possibly serve? It is a language to describe the clothes of a naked emperor. A profoundly deceptive, ever-permutating glossary of buzzwords and junk phrases to sustain the illusion that the professional degrees mean something, the six-figure salary is deserved, and their complicity in undercutting your grubby-handed countrymen nil, if such a thought might ever surface at all.

This verbal (self) deception, a discharge of pustulating insecurity, and the dim awareness of the hours, days, years wasted on endless busywork, relates to a third and final condition of Bug speak, elite overproduction. As more and more Harvard MBAs are minted, as well as college degrees across the board, especially graduate degreescollege loans being a necessary pillar of the financialized economys mass debt superstructurethe relative status value of the degree is proportionally deflated.

But the petty status games go on, and where the intrinsic value of the Bugmans credentials are debased, a Bug vernacular is constructed to prop it back up.

In its Platonic form:

One sees this more and more. The besieged, officious Bugman, demanding with increasing desperation her due respect and acknowledgment of her expertise. If this is not status anxiety, I dont know what is.

These self-proclaimed experts and their water carriers are perhaps the worst offenders. Every pronouncement begins with a declaration of their assumed authority. It goes something like this: Doctor here. I spent years training how to put on an N95 mask. It is impossible unless you have a degree like me. So dont even try, plebe.

They say this. In so many words.

The purpose, again, is always to weaken you, to subjugate you, to patronize and condescend. Without their help, or their degrees, you are not even fit to wipe your own ass. Do not better yourself, do not defend yourself. Submit.

That is the telos of the Bug language, to lead you into submission. Bound and gagged.

In writing this essay, I do not mean to suggest that Trumps too-often caricature-like bluster, for example, is what serious people ought to adopt to displace Bug language. Nor should we all begin speaking in memes and other obscure online jokes. Though we must maintain a sense of humor and a sense of play. Our sense of humor is one of our great advantages over the Bugmen. And our memes, and Trumps, certainly have a place, and at least provide a striking contrast to Bug language that can, and has, shaken many a soul out of their Bug-induced slumber.

But this is not merely a call for a coarsening of the discourse exactly, though some coarsening is in order. Rather, I want to insist that language is the vehicle through which its speakers material and spiritual needs are both defined and met, and to the extent Bug language has been adopted by our public and private elites, in the United States and around the world, we have been accordingly reduced to stuttering, impotent, homunculi of the mind and soul, estranged from our own humanity and that of our fellow man.

One must refuse their terms. One must not enter into their status games. One must not be held hostage by threat of moral extortion and declare of himself or of others what he does not believe to be true. One must not be debased. One must not get bogged down in legalistic hair-splitting or pedantic empiricism.

Well, akshually . . . Fuck off, akshually.

Richard Weaver (read him!), the mid-century conservative rhetorician, had much good to say on the topic of how we might communicate our ideas. Perhaps foreseeing the rise of the Bug language, Weaver warned of basing our claims too much on authority or the crude accounting of consequentialism. This was the way of the technocrat.

Instead, Weaver asserted, we must concern ourselves with principles, with essences. Rhetoric in its truest sense seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the idea.

Heady stuff, no doubt. But a language that allows us to think bigly, allows us to do bigly.

On the day I began writing this, Marc Andreesen wrote an impassioned plea that our nation start building again. It is a powerful statement, spoken from a place of deep longing, and I believe he means every word. I will leave it to Andreesen to sort out the financing, the tech, the coordination required to fulfill such a promise.

But I will suggest that none of this can be donenot the flying cars, or the space travel; there will be no fourtth Industrial Revolutionuntil and unless there is a common language with the capacity to inspire it. His declaration is a start. But Bug language will not allow it. It cannot support its vision. It can only pervert, and inevitably thwart all that dare to be heroic. Bug language cannot be allowed to persist. And we must stomp it out with the heel of our boot.

See the rest here:

Bound and Gagged by the Bugmen - American Greatness

Kerri-Anne Kennerley is perhaps one of the most controversial Australian TV personalities, yet in a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph, she blames it on the fact Aussies have lost their sense of humour.

Shes been dubbed racist by Yumi Stynes for her views on abuse in indigenous communities, accused of slut-shaming colleague Antoinette Lattouf, and once suggested environmental protestors lying on the streets should be used as speed bumps. This was all just in one year.

And, every time KAK makes a contentious remark, it more often than not ends in cries for her dismissal.

However, in her most recent interview, Kennerley says shes just trying to have a laugh and that Aussies have lost their sense of humour.

I am who I am and I am not going to change for other people, she told The Tele.

I care about people that I admire or trust, she said. And if a mate or family says you know what that was a bit across the line, I will consider it. But anybody else, people I dont know or dont have the same thought process, like most of those on Twitter, I dont give a toss.

In the interview, KAK said having an outspoken opinion is part of her job.

Political correctness to me means that you are too afraid to say what you really mean because one tenth or one per cent of the population might be hugely offended and cant laugh at themselves. Whats wrong with us these days? You have to have a laugh, she said.

She continued to add that Australians have gone so woke that people are frightened to say what they think or have a joke.

She added: Not everybody is evil or cruel or homophobic or sexist. I think people just occasionally like a sense of humour. We in Australia and you ask any other country in the world are the greatest larrikins of all time because we can laugh at ourselves.

Check out some of KAKs most controversial comments below.

Read more from the original source:

KAK Blames Controversial Personality On The Fact Aussies Have Gone "So Woke" And Lost Our Sense Of Humour - B&T

In the late 1970s, countless students and young professionals lived in German communes. A new, progressive lifestyle was followed there, which the neighbors did not agree with.

On a windy Saturday in the fall of 1977, the commune at Kritenbarg, a street in Hamburgs northern Poppenbttel quarter, welcomed lots of guests. They mostly came from other communes all over the city. Members of a Rock band which sounded a bit like Black Sabbath had just set up their instruments and PA on a make-shift stage in the garden.

Applied Flower Power

This party was about celebrating this commune of 13 people, including four children. It was about celebrating their progressive, modern lifestyle. They rejected the bourgeois approach many others were following in West Germany at the time. Nine years after the start of the student revolution, love and flower power were still very much alive.

Some seven minutes into the first song the band played, the police showed up. The officers did not have to drive too far since the police station was only a quarter mile away. As it turned out, residents of an apartment block built on top of the Alstertal Einkaufszentrum mall had complained about the noise.

Police Expects Trouble

Even though deescalation was something the German police did not really care or know about during those times, the cops on site wanted to find a compromise. They knew the party had to go on. But they also expected more trouble from residents in that high-rise across the street. So they stood there and made sure nobody would turn up the volume on the PA anymore. Also the bands performance was cut short.

The Kritenbarg commune was made up of working adults with and without kids, students and hedonists. In this case, judging from the outside, things seemed to work out quite well, without constant conflicts. The members lived in a 9-room house tolerant owners had rented out to them.

Smiling Sun

A few kilometers further north, at Haubenlerchenweg, a small street with single-family homes and mostly neatly trimmed gardens, one house was different. The garden looked partially ragged. An old Volkswagen Beetle was parked under the two big firs in front of the house. Also there was a big sticker on the front door with a smiling sun, saying Nuclear power? No thanks.

Yes, members of this commune did take part in protests against nuclear power plants, including the one in Brokdorf, a 1,480 megawatt reactor the construction of which had started in 1975, two years before. But that sticker mainly had another purpose. It was supposed to show the neighborhood this place was different, and convey the message that like-minded people were welcome. It did serve its purpose.

Tolerant Landlord

In the neighborhood, some residents looked at the commune with disgust in their eyes. Its members seemed suspicious to them and they rejected this lifestyle. Most male commune members wore long beards like Marx or Castro. Some of the women loved red Henna hair color. And the kids hair was far too long. Yes, those were the days when long hair was indecent and reserved for revolutionists, good-for-nothings, freaks.

The owner of that house in Haubenlerchenweg, a headmaster, was very tolerant indeed. He did not see why young people who found their own lifestyle should not be allowed to try new forms of living together. This kind, elderly man just did not want the neighbors to be disturbed. Anything else was fine.

Weed and Zappa

So he signed the lease with a teacher who would now be the main tenant, meaning she would be responsible and pay those 900 Deutschmarks per month. But would everyone else act in a responsible way too? That was the big question. And the answer was no.

Some of the inhabitants of this big white house were students. They wanted to becomenatural health professionals and were into homeopathy. At times, they went to homeopathy congresses. Some of them also liked smoking weed while listening to Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Frank Zappas Apostrophe album all night long.

Incompatible Lifestyles

As it turned out, that kind of activity was not compatible with the lifestyle of the main tenant and others who had to get up early in order to work. There were lots of conflicts. But this was only the beginning of trouble.

Some of the students increasingly got into yoga. They frequently visited Lorien, some kind of an alternative business in Hamburgs city center which offered yoga classes and sessions, meditation and vegetarian food. So, visitors could come along, consume half a carrot and a salad leaf, and get enlightened afterwards.

Trouble in Paradise

One art form those yoga enthusiasts imported to the Haubenlerchenweg commune was something called dynamic meditation. It involved sitting there cross-legged and shouting ones heart out. This kind of meditation was supposed to release all of the bad energy the person had. Sure.

On a nice spring day in 1977, a few inhabitants decided to move their daily meditation activities to the garden. First they played Indian meditation music. Then they did that dynamic meditation thing. The neighbors were not exactly enthusiastic about what was going on. There was trouble in paradise.

Angry Landlord

The guy who lived in the next house on the right started playing military marches at full volume, while the other neighbor stood there at the fence. His shouting sounded very different from that dynamic meditation, but both ways may have had the same effect. When the tolerant landlord was informed about the incident, even he was angry. This was one of the occasions when he threatened to cancel the lease.

A year later, that incident had long been forgotten. Rdiger (all names changed), a new member of the commune, saw an excellent opportunity to try his new Bose loudspeakers in an outdoor environment, namely the big commune party. So he carried them downstairs, one by one, and set them up in the garden. He also brought his nice Akai amplifier. Several other residents contributed parts of their enormous record collections.

Show Put On for Cops

Once the first guests showed up, the party commenced. Creedence Clearwarer Revival came out of those speakers, the Average White Band, parts of Santanas excellent Borboletta album and other great sounds. But not for long. The cops showed up at the door. Melanie knew how to welcome them. She took off her blouse, in order to open the door topless.

More Articles (This one continues below.)

The cops may have liked that show, but insisted on more quietude anyway. After they came along a second time, the party had to be moved inside the house. And even there it was too loud.

Free Love

Melanie and Pete were a couple, or they wanted to be, but somehow they could not have sex together, which is why she had an extra boyfriend. With him it worked a lot better, but she would never get rid of Pete. Lothar and Gesine had a lot of sex in his basement room, in between meditations. They were not really together, but who cares?

Yet another commune member, Viola, a single mother, fell in love with Greg, an alcoholic and ex-con who had been looked after by Jens, another resident who was about to become a Lutheran pastor and who had worked with challenged individuals in one of Hamburgs jails.

Sympathy for Red Army Faction

One day, Christine came to live in that commune. As some of the other members would find out soon, Christine was actually not her real name. It was unclear whether she was part of the radical left-wing terrorist organization Red Army Faction (R.A.F.) or what other reason she might have had to conceal her name.

Since the R.A.F. around Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhoff was murdering people and taking them hostage, especially in 1977, the police checked almost all communes. They believed there was a lot of sympathy for the R.A.F. in these circles, and unfortunately they were generally right. But they did not find anything suspicious in Hamburgs Poppenbttel district. The investigators did not even show up at this particular commune.

Back in Black

Everyone had to contribute. Even the children cooked once a week, or at least they were supposed to. Because of those yoga-loving vegetarians, dinner would usually consist of carrots, rice and all kinds of dips and sauces, along with the smoke coming out of Pall Mall cigarettes. And everyone was supposed to clean part of the house. The cleaning plan was carefully orchestrated, like everything else on these premises.

The living room everyone shared was painted in dark red, including the ceiling. One member painted his room in black. It took about eight layers of white paint to get rid of it when he moved out.

Temptation in Poona

One day, Melanie and Pete flew to the Indian town of Poona. They just needed to meetBhagwan Shree Rajneesh and the rest of his cult. It was about meditation and love. But Rajneesh also loved Rolls Royce vehicles. He had quite a few of them, financed by his cult members. When Melanie and Pete returned to Hamburg, they suddenly had new names: Vihaan and Fagun (even these names were changed in this feature).

These Hamburg communes, and similar places all over Germany, were mostly peaceful. Some political movements developed in communes, including the Alternative Liste which became part of the Greens a bit later. They even made it into the Berlin Bundestag.

Children growing up in communes, like the one in Haubenlerchenweg, may have gotten an overdose of what was considered political correctness during those times. Some of them are far more conservative today.

By the way:The publication you are reading,The Berlin Spectator, was established in January of 2019. We have worked a whole lot, as you can see. But there has hardly been any income. This is something we urgently need to change. Would you consider contributing? We would be very thankful. Ourdonations pagecan be foundhere.

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Santana, Meditation and Carrots: Hamburg's Communes of the 1970-s - The Berlin Spectator

WHAT might British churches do if the Covid-19 lockdown banning them from meeting physically together continues into June?Would some of them start meeting again in their buildings?

Unlike some churchesin the United States, British churches are co-operating fully with the lockdown regime. The leadership of the Church of Englandhas even exceeded the rules, demanding that clergy do not enter their church buildings to conduct live-streamed services or even for private prayer.

The Roman Catholic Church in Britain has not gone that far. It has closed its buildings but it allows its clergy to live-stream services from their churches.

In which British churches might a conscience-driven protest movement start? The older Protestant denominations such as the Church of England, the Methodists and the United Reformed Church do not seem minded to question the lockdown regime or to call on the government to come up with an exit strategy. The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church is at least talking to the government about when it might be allowed to reopen church buildings, but has said it will not do so until the restrictions are lifted.

It would seem that the most likely candidates for principled defiance of the lockdown would be the newer churches in the Pentecostal and independent evangelical scene. These churches are more counter-cultural, more inclined to dissent from the prevailing culture of political correctness in the British governing class.

The churches inclined to start meeting again in their buildings would, one imagines, be led by people who were sceptical about the proportionalityof the lockdown, but they would be mainly driven by the New Testament vision of the church as the body of Christ.

The Apostle Paul used the metaphor of the human body to teach a congregation inclined to disunity about their spiritual interdependence as Christs people: If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him (1 Corinthians 12v17-18 Authorised Version).

This metaphor for the church then turns into a synonym: Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular (v27).

This New Testament description of the church as the body of Christ rules out putting online meetings on an equal theological footing with the physical gathering of Gods people. Christ had a physical body in his incarnate state on earth. Now in his exalted heavenly state he continues to have a physical body on earth the human members of his church gathered together in a shared physical space for corporate worship.

According to the Holy Scriptures, virtual Christianity will not do. The body of Christ should never be turned into an avatar.

So, with supermarkets being allowed to open during the lockdown and the feared overwhelming of hospitals not materialising, might some churches consider that they ought not to deny their God-given calling to be the body of Christ here on British soil? At what point under a long lockdown is of course the tricky question. But the point might come for some churches when they think the choice between obeying God or man is staring them in the face.

How might the police react if theological principle moved some churches to start meeting again? Would they arrest Christian worshippers or issue them with on-the-spot fines? If there were prosecutions, how might the courts react? Would they support the police or would they uphold the ancient British right to peaceable Christian assembly?

The Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, has orderedan investigationinto state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens.

He said: As the Department of Justice explained recently in guidance to states and localities taking steps to battle the pandemic, even in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers.

Is the British government capable of producing such a champion of the rights of Christian worshippers under a long lockdown preventing their churches from meeting as the body of Christ?

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When will churches fight for their God-given right to meet? - The Conservative Woman

Though Trump has previously raged against political correctness explicitly, and indeed, campaigned on it in 2016, when it comes to this recent COVID-19 labeling campaign, other far-Right thought-leaders have been doing this for him. For example, in a March 14th interview on Fox News, Arkansas Republican SenatorTom Cottonstated, Anyone who complains that its racist or xenophobic to call this virus the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan virus is a politically correct fool, and they ought not to be listened to about anything.

And March 20th, Former Fox News hostBill OReillytold Glenn Beck: The worst thing in this pandemic virus outside of the actual illness itself of course is the political [sic] correct media still, still peddling garbage that hurts the American people. Quoting an ABC News reporter, OReilly said in a whiny, mocking voice, A lot of people think its racist if you call it the Chinese Virus.Its sickening.

But survey data confirm that white Americanslike President Trump, Senator Tom Cotton, Bill OReilly, or their followerswho attack politically correct language as the enemy are in fact the most likely to hold racist or xenophobic views.In a nationally representative survey fielded in February 2020, we asked Americans to indicate how much they agreed with statements about using politically correct language. We also asked Americans for their views on refugees from the Middle East and Americas control over its Southern border.

In the first figure [left], we see that, as Americans agreement with the statement Too many people are easily offended these days over language increases, the more likely they are to believe that the federal government should do more to secure the Southern border and that Middle Eastern refugees pose a terrorist threat.

In the second figure [below, right], we see a similar trend, but in the opposite direction. The more strongly Americansdisagreewith the statement People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people, the more likely they are to hold xenophobic views about refugees from the Middle East and to want stricter border control.

In sum: both figures show that white Americans who voice the strongest opinions against politically correct language also hold the strongest anti-immigrant attitudes.

Just as important, they are also the group most likely to plan on voting Trump in 2020.

The last figure [left] shows the percentage of white Americans who indicate they plan on voting Trump in 2020 by their level of agreement with our two statements regarding politically correct language. Nearly 80% of white Americans who strongly disagree that People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people, or who strongly agree that Too many people are easily offended these days over language, intend to vote for Trump in November.

Seen in light of these data, Trumps dual strategy is clear. By unapologetically referring to COVID-19 as the Chinese Virus, Trump is first able to signal to his white base that he too is disdainful of scheming, disease-ridden outsiders. But he can also intentionally provoke a backlash against his hurtful and xenophobic language, which he and his followers can dismiss as leftist political correctness. Trump shores up support against both a perceived external threat (immigrants) and an internal threat (liberals) with a single dangerous and offensive swipe.

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Heres the data that shows Americans who rage against political correctness are the most xenophobic and most likely to vote Trump - AlterNet