Saturday Miscellany

First, I hear tell, from a very reliable source, that the Showtime series, Couples Therapy has, in its first episode of the new season, showcases a book by yours truly. I am humbled and I thank Orna Guralnik for her excellent taste in reading material. I have not yet seen the episode, so I do not know which of my works she showed but I am grateful.

Second, a commentary on lawfare, from someone who fashions himself the Physics Geek. It stands as a response to the Trump administration effort to crack down on certain law firms for their efforts to destroy him:

One year ago, a leftist DA, judge and jury used lawfare to manufacture felonies out of thin air against a former president. The conviction was rightly seen as nonsense by the vast majority of people able to get oxygen to their brains because their heads weren't shoved up their own asses and this energized both his base and wavering independents who were outraged at this judicial chicanery.

Third, how did anyone get the idea that great universities had become cesspools of anti-Semitism. Consider these remarks from the president of MIT’s class of 2025, during the school’s commencement. 

Newsmax reports:

Clad in a red keffiyeh, Megha Vemuri, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's class of 2025, addressed graduates at the school's commencement on Thursday.

"You showed the world that MIT wants a free Palestine," she said.

"It is no secret that at this time, academic institutions across the country are shrouded in a dark cloud of uncertainty," she said. "The question of what will happen next echoes in our minds, and there is a lot of fear in many of our hearts."

In a better world, she would have been sanctioned for promoting anti-Semitism. Alas, when it comes to major American universities, we do not live in a better world.

Of course, she risked devaluing the degrees that were being handed out on the occasion. Would you recruit from a school that identified itself with a terrorist supporter?

Fourth, as though to affirm that this woman is not an exception, we have this from emeritus Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, a strong supporter of Trump administration efforts to stifle academic anti-Semitism.

Newsmax has the story:

Dershowitz told "American Agenda" that Harvard's Divinity School and Public Health School are "sewers of antisemitism."

“It has actually encouraged, fomented, and incited antisemitism by some of the courses," he said. "If they dared ever to allow courses of the kind they allow against Jews to be taught against Blacks or gay people, there would be hell to pay.”

"We have too many foreign students today who are unvetted and who are creating real problems on campus," he said, referencing the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington. “Look, the two people who were killed in Washington, D.C., there is blood on the hands of universities for those two deaths, because universities not only tolerated antisemitism, not only tolerated shouts of 'Globalize the intifada,' which is an incitement to kill.”

He said the concerns go even further. “But also we're encouraging antisemitism by teaching courses on intersectionality and DEI and critical race theory and you name it.”

Dershowitz said there should be no debate that “the government has the right to restrict foreign students" as the United States is "long past the point in time where people should be allowed to light a fire and get away with it."

Fifth, in the bad news department, David Brooks took to his New York Times column to prove definitively that he does not know how to think. 

Brooks opens his column by informing us that he communes with his phone. It is so embarrassing that it is probably true. Brooks gives special meaning to-- pathetic.

Anyway, he explains that conservative thinkers believe that soldiers do not fight wars to defend a bunch of gauzy ideals, but do so  in order to defend hearth and home, family and country. To which he is going to take serious offense.

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

It sets him off. I am sure you are glad to know what sets him off. He has a problem with Deneen and Vance because they do not think that soldiers are not fighting for an ideal.

Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

You might not have guessed it, but Brooks is going to denounce Trump for promoting national pride, which he considers to be atavistic and rejecting what he calls the best aspirations of the human spirit.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

And, also:

Deneen’s and Vance’s comments about men in combat are part of a larger project at the core of Trumpism. It is to rebut the notion that America is not only a homeland, though it is that, but it is also an idea and a moral cause — that America stands for a set of universal principles: the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with inalienable rights, that democracy is the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and best honors beings who are made in the image of God.

Brooks takes offense at the notion that America is not the embodiment of universal ideals. 

Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it.

If America is an ideal, then thinking it, and believing it makes it so. Dare we say that Brooks is encouraging us to think less of people who do not live as we do.

What Deneen and Vance said about men in combat is a manifestation of tribal morality. They take a sentiment that is noble in time of war — we take care of our own — and apply it in general to mean that we don’t have to take care of the starving children in Africa; we can be cruel to those we don’t like. Trumpism is a giant effort to narrow the circle of concern to people just like us.

The problem is, we engage with the world as we find it. If we assume that all nations on the planet will end up believing the same beliefs then we are totalitarian zealots who aspire to control minds.

It will come as news to David Brooks, but human beings are not merely minds. We do not unite the nation on the basis of shared belief. Human beings are social beings. They identify as members of groups, whether of families, or communities or nations. To deprive them of this defining characteristic, the foundation for their moral behavior, is to render them eunuchs. 

What happens to the virtue of loyalty, if we are all just true believers in ideals that Brooks accepts?

Besides, it has not crossed Brooks’ pea brain, but you never really know what anyone really believes. Unless, of course, you can read minds. People are judged by their actions, not their beliefs in gauzy ideals.

Today’s history lesson says that America was founded on a contract, a constitution, that laid down rules that we all respect and follow. Whether you follow the rules is not the same as believing in some Platonic ideal.

The Brooks approach gave us witch hunts and inquisitions looking for heretics. It is well past time that he retires.

Sixth, in a world that Brooks would find congenial you would be investigated and even jailed by the thought police. See, for example, the Great Britain now under Labour Party control.

Danial Greenfield explains the tyranny of Labour in Front Page:

The British economy continues to struggle under PM Keir Starmer, the military is depleted and a pension crisis is on the horizon, but there is one area where the UK is exceeding expectations.

Starmer’s UK has achieved levels of political prisoners not only resembling but occasionally even outdoing those of Communist dictatorships like Cuba, Venezuela and even China.

Freedom House estimated that Cuba has 2,768 political prisoners, Venezuela has 1,953 political prisoners, and thousands more in China. Starmer’s regime and an enthusiastic police force have easily outdone these backward Communist regimes by arresting over 1,000 people a month for social media posts. The full number of political prisoners in the UK remains unknown, but the high number of arrests suggests that Britain may be able to compete with Cuba.

The 12,000 arrests by 37 forces a year are a record high. Speech arrests more than doubled from 5,502 in 2017 to over 12,000 since 2022. increasing by 1,000 or more every year. The internet did not fundamentally change since 2017. The UK authorities however have.

The London Times recently reported that “British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts”. London’s Met Police, who have been at the center of some of the worst speech abuses, maintain a secretive operation monitoring social media leading to almost immediate arrests.  The Met Police arrested a staggering 5,332 people in 9 years for speech and 1,700 speech arrests in 2023 alone making London into its own speech gulag.

Finally, I currently have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Returning to the Blue Book

We have scrupulously reported the evidence: Johnny and Janey cannot read. They cannot write and they cannot count. They do not read books and do not write their papers, in high school or college. Apparently, something called Chat GPT does it for them.

You may believe that it does not much matter. Surely, college students do not want to be wasting their precious time reading and writing, honing their intelligence and their ability to think and to articulate. 

And yet, however, do you imagine that these serial cheaters will be able to do the jobs of tomorrow. It’s nice to think that public policy is going to bring industry home, but what if we do not have the human capital to run that industry effectively.

And we will not even bother with the simple fact that if you cannot articulate a thought coherently and cogently you will be at a loss when it comes to communicating with other people.

Reading is one of the best ways to absorb the most information in the shortest period of time. And writing is the best way to learn how to state clearly what you think, not to mention persuade someone else to take you seriously.

We are all aware of the fact that the young generation, Gen Z, has a bad attitude toward work. It is lazy and inefficient, lacking in the most elementary skills.  Could it be that these young people are simply overwhelmed by the requirement to do more reading and writing on the job, and that they believe that they can get away with not doing it, because they have learned mostly how to cheat.

Now, the professorial empire is striking back. The Wall Street Journal reports that professors have resorted to the good old blue book, that is, to in class exams, written by hand, without the aid of books or phones. 

The Wall Street Journal explains:

Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.

It’s called a blue book.

The mere thought of that exam booklet with a blue cover and blank pages is enough to make generations of college kids clam up—and make their hands cramp up.

But inexpensive pamphlets of stapled paper have become a surprisingly valuable tool for teachers at a time when they need all the help they can get.

Apparently, one company manufactures most of the blue books. Lately, business has been booming:

All of which explains how a paper company in Pennsylvania has unexpectedly found itself on the front lines of the classroom AI wars. 

Most blue books for sale in campus bookstores and on Amazon for 23 cents apiece are made by Roaring Spring Paper Products. The family-owned business was founded more than a century ago in Roaring Spring, a small borough outside Altoona that has become the blue-book capital of America. The company now sells a few million of these classic exam books every year and all of them are manufactured in the U.S., said Kristen Allen, its vice president of sales and marketing.

And yes, I asked her if everybody makes jokes about Dunder Mifflin when they find out she works for a paper company in Pennsylvania.

“Nobody,” she said. “It’s weird—and it’s sad. I love ‘The Office.’ ” ...

This new golden age of blue books is not something that anyone would have predicted a few years ago, when remote school put them on the verge of extinction. But after sales tanked in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, they have picked up in recent years because of AI cheating.

And then there is the problem of communication, or lack of same. If young people do not know how to communicate thoughts and feelings, not to mention, information, their relationships will necessarily suffer--

The ability to connect with other people, to develop and sustain relationships requires advanced verbal and cognitive skills. Lacking same, the nation will quickly descend into social chaos. And besides if you are invited to a dinner party and demonstrate that you have no table manners, or that you do not know how to speak intelligibly within a conversation, you will most likely not be invited back.

Do You Want to Live Forever?

If you had the option of living forever, would you take it? The tech bros in Silicon Valley are hard at work trying to figure out how to extend human life, presumably to the point where you will just think that enough is enough.

Given the unfortunate infirmities that befall the elderly, it makes sense that people might be looking for an off ramp. Unless they are in Silicon Valley. As it happens, none of the discussions posit an afterlife.

Now, Francis Fukuyama, of “end of history” fame, has suggested that it is not a good thing to worry about living forever. Or better, living substantially longer than our current lifespan.

Of course, the argument against living forever involves bodily deterioration. The older  you get the more enfeebled you get. And if you are barely functional you will need someone to care for you.

It is not exactly an enticing prospect.

Of course, longevity will be touted as a great medical advance. And yet, how much of the good health will be accompanied by debility. If you live forever in a vegetative state or in full dependance on others, will you might soon tire of it.

Mere survival is one thing. Functioning in the world is quite another, especially when your sense of reality has been skewed by the simple fact that you are so much older than everyone else.

The older you get the more your participation in the culture becomes compromised. How well are you, as old as you are, capable of communicating with young people. Surely, their cultural references will be Greek, on both sides of the communicating. And besides, at different life stages you will have different priorities. A young person might be looking to mate and reproduce. An older person is not in the dating and mating game.

As a centenarian you might have difficulty communicating with a teenager or even a twenty-something. You will feel like you are speaking different languages.

Fukuyama explains it thusly:

Among the cognitive debilities that occur over time is rigidity in one’s fundamental outlook and assumptions about life. One’s outlook is usually set relatively early in life; usually by early adulthood you are either a liberal or a conservative; a nationalist or an internationalist; a risk-taker or someone habitually fearful and cautious. There is a lot of happy talk among gerontologists about how people can remain open to new ideas and able to reinvent their lives late in life, and that certainly happens with some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that fundamental change in mental outlooks becomes much less likely with age.

He is not optimistic:

But what will happen if people routinely live into their 100s? You will have an overlapping of generations and increasing social conflict as younger people begin to think differently and demand change, while older ones resist. The problem will not be conflict per se, but a gradual slowing of the rate of social change. Meanwhile, technological change will continue to happen at ever faster rates, requiring ever-faster rates of adaptation.

If the Silicon Valley bros get their way, we will find ourselves in social stagnation:

… life extension will leave us with a world that is more economically and socially stagnant, and in which large proportions of older populations are suffering from some form of debility. 

Meanwhile, we still do not know whether there is an afterlife.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, obviously, people on the political left, who have spent their careers railing against right-wing anti-Semitism, are hard at work making it appear that anti-Semitism is coming from both the left and the right.

Unfortunately, the numbers do not bear it out. Avi Bitterman reports:

Since Oct 7th, 2023 antisemitic incidents, including those rising to the level of violence or threat of violence, overwhelmingly all come from the Far-left, not the Far-right. This held true for all categorizations of incidence types. Violence or threat of violence from far left: 132 Violence or threat of violence from far right: 21 Vandalism from the far left: 514 Vandalism from the far right: 126

Second, in the matter of Harvard University’s anti-Semitism problem, it turns out that the university has just rewarded students who assaulted a Jewish classmate. It’s one thing to offer a slap on the wrist in place of punishment. It’s quite another to reward the perpetrators of ant-Semitic violence:

The Jerusalem Post reported:

Two Harvard students, Ibrahim Bharmal and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, assaulted Jewish classmate Yoav Segev during an anti-Israel protest. Despite criminal charges, a judge dismissed the case in April, ordering community service and anger management. Bharmal later received a $65,000 Harvard Law Review fellowship at CAIR, and Tettey-Tamaklo was named a class marshal. 

Third, speaking of Harvard, Alan Dershowitz, who taught for five decades in the Harvard Law School, has not been invited back since he retired several years ago. Maybe this remark is one of the reasons:

"Harvard is not only tolerating antisemitism in several of its schools… It's actually teaching, encouraging, and fomenting antisemitism."

Fourth, the Biden scandal proceeds apace. Authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have declared that it was worse than Watergate.

Now James Carville weighs in, while defending Biden:

“I cannot begin to express how tragic this is,” Carville said on Thursday’s episode of his podcast, “Politics War Room.”

“He’s one of the most accomplished Americans” since World War II, Carville said, praising Biden’s legacy in politics. “If you just look at what he did as chairman of the Judiciary, Foreign Relations, Vice President, President, and you look at the tragedies of his life and distress that he’s exhibited, and he’s a well-liked, very admirable person, and he made one colossal mistake, and the Democrats made a colossal mistake by going along with it.”

Of course, Carville is capable of rationalizing anything. And, if the worst that Biden did was not dropping out of the race sooner, this conveniently invites us to ignore his dereliction of duty during his presidency.

Carville called Biden a titan, conveniently forgetting Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran and Gaza. Not to mention the open borders policy.

Fifth, as for the Abraham Accords, we are all awaiting the Saudi decision to join them. But, now, certain Palestinian officials have declared that they want to join also.

It began with a sentence that sounded less like the opening of a diplomatic talk and more like the opening pitch at an accelerator demo-day. Economy Minister Nir Barkat – whose résumé lists two tech exits before it lists “mayor of Jerusalem” – stepped onto the Jerusalem Post Conference stage in New York and said he was tired of hearing that the West Bank was unsolvable.

If a product fails, he told the room, you either ship a better one or the market walks. His “product” was the Palestinian Authority; his better version was a Palestinian chapter of the Abraham Accords. 

“One day – hopefully soon – Arabs in Judea and Samaria will decide they’ve had enough of the PA and ask to join the accords,” he said.

“If they work with Israel, we’ll help them build Dubai. If they fight Israel, they’ll end up looking like Gaza.”

And,

In his model, clusters of West Bank towns would bypass Ramallah, plug directly into Israeli security and Gulf capital, and trade under commercial annexes adapted from the UAE-Israel playbook. No midnight shuttle diplomacy, no flags raised over Rose Garden lawns – just container IDs, escrow instructions and profit-and-loss sheets.

Sixth, how bad is it for the Democratic Party? The New York Times thinks that it’s worse than we think. Matt Margolis reports on the latest from the Gray Lady:

While Democrats continue their tired routine of Trump-bashing and pretending to care about working Americans, the numbers tell a completely different story. The Times' analysis reveals a political earthquake that's reshaping the electoral landscape, and it's not in the Democrats' favor.

“It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020. By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.”

In the 2024 election, six times as many counties shifted toward the GOP as toward the Democrats. 

While 435 counties trended more Democratic compared to 2012, 2,678 moved more Republican—by an even larger average margin of 13.3 points versus 8.8 for Democrats.

That's not just a loss; that's a political bloodbath.

The Democrats' problem? 

They're increasingly becoming the party of coastal elites and college-educated snobs. 

Meanwhile, Trump has built an unstoppable coalition that includes working-class voters across all racial and ethnic backgrounds. 

The New York Times didn’t sugarcoat the situation for the Democrats.

Counties that have become steadily more Republican exist in some of the country’s bluest strongholds, including New York City, Philadelphia and Honolulu. Mr. Trump’s party is still losing in those places, but by significantly less. At the same time, Mr. Trump has driven Republican margins to dizzying new heights in the nation’s reddest bastions.

Seventh, the president of France is, as the expression goes, whipped. We all saw the pictures of Emmanuel Macron being slapped by his wife Brigitte.

It brought to mind the fact that the couple met when she was his teacher in high school. She was nearly forty and he was fifteen. As it happens, fifteen is the age of consent in France. 

What does it mean? The word in certain Parisian circles is that he is simply gay.

Finally, I have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, write me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

 

The Countercultural Revolution

Heather Mac Donald asks whether the counterrevolution has arrived. Has the country finally turned the corner on the cultural revolution that has infested the nation for so many years now?

Have we, in other words, reached peak scold? Can we go back, for example to enjoying high culture-- Mac Donald’s bailiwick-- without drowning our sensibility in guilt.

For those who do not recall, I suggested in a prior work, my book about Saving Face, that we were suffering through a cultural revolution whereby we are implored to feel guilt about the sins of the past, both real and imagined. 

The cure for guilt is, of course, pride. And the Trump administration is now hellbent on restoring national pride, and erasing the fabricated guilt that infects so many minds, both young and old.

Mac Donald takes us to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to an exhibition of Dutch masters. The Met curators could not restrain themselves. They abused spectators by exposing what they considered to be the deeper meaning behind the paintings, which involved colonialism and imperialism.

Consider a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show featured the Met’s extraordinary collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, that explosion of creativity that produced Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Gerard ter Borch, and other masters. Were we to see beauty in those cloud-laden horizons, those serene compositions of domestic order, those haunting portraits of age and vulnerability? No, we were to see what was not there: “colonialism, slavery, and war,” which, the Met curators reminded us, were major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history, but which were “barely visible” in the Met’s Dutch collections. Or take the still lifes, a new genre that marked Northern Europe’s epoch-changing attention to empirical detail. What was a viewer to make of the dragonfly iridescence of ripe grapes, the delicate play of light on cut glass, the puckered skin of a lemon peel? Do not be taken in! the Met advised us. Dutch still-life paintings omitted the “human cost of colonial warfare and slavery” that underlay the bounty these canvases documented, the wall labels warned. Of course, by definition, a still life features inanimate objects, not human subjects, so any still life would be hard-pressed to portray colonial warfare and slavery. But never mind. The artists should have anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about racial justice and revised their subject matter accordingly.

Do you feel sufficient guilt for enjoying these artworks? If not, take a walk over to the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Verdi’s Aida:

Here is another manifestation of that prior worldview: the Metropolitan Opera’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, currently running at the Met (see the May 2025 issue of The New Criterion). Aida tells the story of a doomed love between an ancient Egyptian warrior and an Ethiopian princess. The opera’s director has added a frame around the work: a group of archaeologists who troop across the stage at random moments taking stock of the pharaonic tombs. During the famous triumphal march, that glorious brass-filled explosion of military hubris, the archaeologists cart away Egyptian sculptures and other trophies for their European collections. The inspiration for these gratuitous images of plunder is Edward Said, the father of postcolonial theory and a key source of the anti-Western hate that animates today’s universities. Said viewed Egyptology as an act of theft and Aida itself as an act of imperial domination. Never mind that it was the Khedive of Egypt who commissioned Verdi in 1870 to compose an opera for the opening of Cairo’s opera house. Never mind that the construction of that opera house was itself an Egyptian, not a European, initiative. The magazine Opera (the successor to the Met’s house organ, Opera News) gushed over Edward Said’s interpretation of Aida in anticipation of the new staging, lest anyone miss the subtext. Said, by the way, taught at Columbia University for four decades before his death in 2003, which tells us much about the anti-Israel animus among some university members.

In some considerable part we owe it to the Biden presidency.

To live under the prior regime was to live under a set of fictions: The West ushered into world history colonialism, slavery, and xenophobia. Non-Western civilizations were peace-loving and egalitarian, before being invaded by Western interlopers. 

Mainstream institutions in the United States discriminate against underrepresented minorities in admissions, hiring, and promotions. The biological difference between males and females is a petty convention that can be wished away as a matter of personal choice. To argue that solar and wind energy cannot at present replace fossil fuels is to wish for the annihilation of the planet.

So, we were functioning within a fiction, of America as an evil empire, a civilization whose successes were really failures, signs of oppression:

American elites preserved the hegemony of these fictions and paradoxes through stigma, casting into the wilderness anyone who dared to deviate from the official line. Anyone who believed in the traditional American narrative of vitality and progress, who thought our history was not entirely disfigured by slavery, was a racist in need of bias training. Careers have been ruined for failure to toe the pro-diversity line, even in private conversation. Self-censorship reigned on college campuses, even as those institutions held themselves out to the public as the font of free inquiry. Members of the University of Pennsylvania female swim team had to hide behind anonymity to protest the unfair advantage enjoyed by a male teammate.

Now, with the new regime, we want to know whether it is over yet. Surely, corporate America has seen the light and is ridding itself of diversity, equity and inclusion. 

And yet, the academic intelligentsia is willing to fight to the death to preserve their power and influence as keepers of ideological orthodoxy.

Mac Donald sheds an optimistic light on the current situation:

The scandal of the present moment is that someone with outsize visibility has said: No more. The race hustle is over; the gender hustle is over. The denigration of traditional values and American history is over. The demonization of law enforcement: over. Being black or female will no longer be treated as an accomplishment. The only thing that matters in employment is excellence. And to realize that principle, the White House on April 23 banned the greatest enemy of meritocracy: disparate-impact analysis.

She notes that the university system will be the last to renounce the madness of DEI:

Besides this bureaucratic retrenchment, the curriculum remains steeped in the hermeneutics of suspicion. The faculty will continue churning out graduates who see America and the West as the world’s main problems. Turning off the geyser of federal tax dollars to recalcitrant institutions should be an enormous lever, whether against K–12 schools that indoctrinate students in victimology, or against research universities that have rerouted science funding to diversity sinecures. But that strategy, too, is being shut down via preliminary injunctions and outright defiance.

Making Children Crazy

There’s something special about Hollywood. There’s something very special about being the child of a Hollywood celebrity. Apparently, these children of privilege have lost their minds. They went or are going to the best schools, but they have bought all of the basic tenets and precepts of the woke mind virus.

Take the case of Ramona Sarsgaard, recently arrested for protesting in favor of Palestine at Columbia University.

Bethany Mandel explains:

Case in point: Ramona Sarsgaard, the 18-year-old daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, who was arrested this month for criminal trespass during a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University’s Butler Library.

If you have nothing better to do with your time, why not spend your family capital by making a blithering fool of yourself?

Sarsgaard is also a climate activist, working to save the planet from global warming. A junior Greta Thunberg, if you wish.

Mandel writes:

Sarsgaard marched in the Youth Climate Strike in New York and, according to her mother, is among the many children who “aren’t able to push out of their minds the dire situation that we’re in.”

An army of overgrown children has mobilized to promote mindless leftist causes. 

And then there is Violet Affleck:

Just this week Violet Affleck, 19, daughter of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, published an essay in Yale University’s “Global Health Review” describing a heated conflict with her mother earlier this year.

“I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,” she wrote — in fights triggered by Garner’s shock at the devastation.

“As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of Generation Z,” Violet explained, “my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when.”

She went on to call climate change an “existential and accelerating” crisis.

In short, these gullible young people have drunk the climate change Kool-Aid

Mandel explains:

Affleck’s worldview was deliberately drilled into her by climate activists, who have groomed an entire generation to join their crusade.

At institutions like Yale, climate anxiety is treated as a developmental inevitability.

An advice column in a Yale newsletter a few years ago instructed parents and caregivers to lead even the youngest children through therapeutic climate exercises, like imagining their favorite animal being impacted by climate change and speaking from its perspective.

Activists have set out to traumatize the younger generation, with some success:

Just imagine launching that conversation with your 4-year-old: “Think of Peter Rabbit. Now imagine Peter has run out of food and dies because he’s too thirsty, has no grass to eat, and no shade to take refuge in as temperatures soar.”

You couldn’t come up with a more traumatic lesson for a young child to engage in if you tried —yet the “experts” at Yale recommend it as a therapeutic template to explain to children that the world is ending.

At the least, this effort to traumatize the young has produced a mental illness:

A global 2021 study on climate anxiety found that in 31 of 32 countries, distress about climate change was linked to poorer mental health.

In another survey of 10,000 young people across 10 nations, three-quarters said “the future is frightening,” and more than half believed that “humanity is doomed.”

And yet the same activists, media outlets and global institutions that amplify climate alarmism are now wringing their hands over the youth mental-health crisis.

And Mandel continues:

A pair of Stanford University psychiatrists, discussing the 2021 anxiety study on the World Economic Forum website, sought to normalize what they called “climate distress” — defining it as a troubling blend of dread, sadness, powerlessness and anger.

It’s “a normal and appropriate thing to feel,” they claimed, in the face of “hurricanes, droughts and floods, and clear evidence that our planetary boundaries are being overshot.”

They’re fighting an existential battle to save the planet — one they’ve been convinced is rapidly coming to an end.

And as Sarsgaard demonstrates, they’re easy prey for those pushing the next leftist cause du jour.

They represent an entire generation driven off the deep end by their own manufactured anxiety.

Irony of ironies--   a generation of adults has given up on the notion of curing mental illness and emotional distress. They have gone into the business of producing it.