Sherman McCoy, the Yale-educated lead character of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities–and an old money WASP–saw himself as a “Master of the Universe.”
But as the Book of Proverbs says, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”
At America’s elite universities, such as Yale and the rest of the Ivy League, as well as NYU, Stanford, and some others, there are thousands of students who see themselves as Masters of the Universe. In reality, they have the right family connections, and they are very good at taking standardized tests, such as the SAT. Or, instead of being old money types like McCoy, they check the right woke boxes.
Ryna Workman, who is non-binary (box one), Black (box two), and a leftist (box three), in her (Workman prefers they/them pronouns) role as president of the NYU Student Bar Association president, wrote a hateful anti-Israeli statement about the October 7 attacks that, among other things, said that the Jewish state “bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” Among those murdered were babies. The Nazi’s Einsatzgruppen also indiscriminately killed babies–and many others–during the Holocaust.
People calling their political enemies Nazis is as old as the Nazi movement and almost always it’s an overstated charge–but calling Hamas members Nazis is accurate.
Fortunately, there has been some pushback. Winston and Strawn, an elite Chicago law firm where Jim Thompson, Illinois’ longest-serving governor–and a Republican–once served as CEO, repealed its job offer to Workman.
Good.
After former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who had previously served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, decried the dozens of Harvard student groups siding with Hamas over Israel in a statement, some of those organizations retracted their support.
Summers, on X, said, “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.”
In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.
These so-called Masters of the Universe are playing with half a deck of cards, one filled with jokers, not the harmless harlequin types, but evil clowns of the Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix ilk.
In the words that Dan Bongino uses so often, “They are stupid smart people.” These young elitists don’t know the difference between good and evil.
So many of them are the evil Jokers of the Universe.
I was in conversation with my priest this morning after mass and confession and I noted how today’s 1st reading from Joel was almost a blueprint for what is happening and going to happen in Gaza.
As we continued to talk we discussed confession. To get the forgiveness of God paid for by Christ one must be willing to look at oneself in the light of truth. The knowledge that you have sinned and contrition for them is what drives a good Catholic to confession. This is why before absolution one recites an act of contrition like this one.
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Amen.
There are those who are unwilling and incapable of looking at once self in the light of truth. Who are in denial of their sins. This is why Hell is in fact a mercy of God. Demons under compulsion during exorcisms have bluntly admitted they understand the love of God and the decisions they have made but when asked if they would change their choices they’ve replied emphatically NO! Their pride will not allow it.
Thus do people put themselves into hell as the merciful alternative to admitting a reality that they can’t bear to admit. Pride the ultimate sin.
And that brings us to the pains that parts of the left, particularly the Jewish left is now feeling.
You see many of on the right, particularly folks like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer have been talking about the antisemitism of the left in General and the Muslim left in particular for many many years. For their troubles they were called bigots and hate mongers by all the “right” people of the elite left. How DARE they suggest that any people of the left might think this way! Any such statement was “hate” speech and “violence”.
And then came the Hamas attacks and the slaughter and worse of not only of men but of women and children.
That was painful and awful, particularly to those who had argued for the Palestinians (although a lot more painful for some and even fatal for others) but the pain increased when in colleges around the nation and the world groups (particularly groups heavy in the DEI defended hamas and the slaughter of woman and children. As Victor Davis Hanson put it:
The overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education. https://t.co/eI0acO7Pbw via @VDHanson
In Australia you actually had the spectacle of people publicly shouting “Gas the Jews” while the only person taken into custody was a single Jewish counter protester with an Israeli flag. In America the highest bastions of Education openly supported these murderous bastards.
To some on the left, particularly the Jewish left it was an eye opening moment. A moment of clarity that shows their “allies” for what they actually are and have always been. Ready to decry “microaggressions” of any of opposed them but declaring that loud public support for the mass murder of woman and children is “free speech’ to be protected and/or excused.
To these people comes the great decision. Do they divorce themselves from this barbarians, do they admit that those of us on the right have been telling the truth all along or do they hate us on the right so much that allying with folks who support their own murder is better?
But for all the angst that this decision will bring their situation at least they now see beyond the bubble and are in a position to make a choice.
There are others on the left who still maintain denial, both of the acts of Hamas or that they bear any responsibility for them.
You see for those folks acknowledging any of these things means they must face the possibility of being wrong. They mustn’t see things in the light of truth it is more then they can handle. Much better to live the lie and remain in the bubble.
How these groups will respond to the reality will define them for the rest of their lives. The question: How many will rather suffer the hell of denial than the pain of reality?
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? "
But it's " Thin red line of 'eroes " when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's " Thin red line of 'eroes, " when the drums begin to roll.
Kipling: Tommy 1892
One of the side effects of the Hamas attack on Israel is you aren’t hearing a lot of talk about “toxic masculinity” or microaggressions or even the horror of “misgendering” from our friends on the left.
This is as predicted by CS Lewis who wrote about pains and pleasures:
The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method…you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.
If you’re a man insisting your a woman, or if your a person who declares themselves “nonbinary” or declares that their “pronouns” are “ye” or a BLM activist decrying white supremacy it’s very hard to declare yourself a victim of “violence” when a person refuses to call by your desired gender or pronoun or orientation or enforces the law when during the same week when men, women, children and infants are slaughtered and abused and the images of this slaughter is on every TV channel and video platform as it exposes you for the shallow self loathing narcissist that you are.
You see only in a country that is rich and comfortable and safe can you get away with and even become rich declaring yourself a victim of violence that is either in your own head or due to enforcing of laws that you are breaking.
But there is another thing that has been noticed lately, in fact I’ve noticed it myself while watching the baseball playoff. Suddenly the armed forces seem to be changing their ads, it seems that white heterosexuals males with the masculine desire to protect are in.
This is likely due to failures to meet recruiting goals in the services.
The US Army and US Marines are running ads featuring white males again all of a sudden.
I think this means we are definitely going to war.
The whole DEI scam and the left agenda is all well and good if all you need is a force for virtue signaling, but now that there is a real prospect of fighting well you need people who can FIGHT.
The only problem is, are potential recruits going to forget the Army’s war on it’s own men?
Frank Perconte:Hey this guy says he’s not a Nazi. All of Germany and I haven’t met one Nazi yet
Band of Brothers 2001
For a long time after World War Two there was an enduring myth that the French Resistance to the German occupation of their country was larger than it was. This myth was advanced for political reasons but the reality that nobody wanted to admit that the vast majority didn’t want to get involved as:
Finding basic necessities like food was a priority
It was a great way to get yourself killed
Until late in the war it seemed unlikely that the Nazi’s were going anywhere
In fact there was a great one line joke in France concerning the “resistance” that I first heard in the 1970’s I recall it went like this:
If everyone who claimed to be part of the [French] Resistance [to the Nazis] had been a member there would have been nobody left to collaborate [with the Germans].
This was similar to a phenom in Germany where you were hard pressed to find either:
A Nazi
or
Anyone who knew what the Nazi’s had done.
It brings to mind a scene in the movie Judgement at Nurenburg, not the famous one between Spencer Tracy & Marlene Dietrich but one where Spencer Tracy’s Character asks the servents at his house Mr. & Mrs. Halbestadt what it was like to live under National Socialism. After making a point of saying how apolitical they are he continues…
Judge Haywood:For instance, there was a place called Dachau… which was not too many miles from here. Did you ever know what was going on there?
Mrs. HalbestadtWe knew nothing about it. How can you ask if we knew anything about that?
Judge Haywood:I’m sorry.
Mr Halbestadt:Your Honor, we are only little people. We lost a son in the army… and our daughter in the bombing. During the war we almost starved. It was terrible for us.
Judge Haywood: I’m sure it was.
Mrs. Halbestadt:Hitler did some good things. I won’t say he didn’t do some good things. He built the Autobahn. He gave more people work. We won’t say he didn’t do some good things. But the other things… the things they say he did to the Jews and the rest… we knew nothing about that. Very few Germans did.
Mr. Halbestadt:And if we did know… what could we do?
Judge Haywood:But Mrs. Halbestadt said you didn’t know.
Judgement at Nurenburg 1961
Apparently it was almost impossible to find anyone in Germany who knew anything that was happening at all.
And that brings us to the present day and US universities:
It’s been an ironic week in these expensive bastions of learning. These are places where identifying someone by the wrong pronoun can get you blacklisted but supporting Hamas as they rape women and behead children, that’s was fine:
I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their… https://t.co/7kzGOAGwp9
Fallout from a controversial statement published and initially signed by about 30 student groups at Harvard University continued Wednesday as two trucks circled Harvard Square for much of the day, featuring the names and photos of students linked to the statement.
The billboard trucks, funded by the conservative news group Accuracy in Media, featured LED screens that changed throughout the day to feature at least a half dozen Harvard students under the words, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” The trucks also linked to a website, HarvardHatesJews.com, which directs users to send messages to Harvard’s board of trustees.
“Tell them to take action against these despicable, hateful students,” the website reads. “Each and every one of these students should be expelled and their student organizations should be kicked off campus.”
And suddenly you have all kinds of Harvard students who where going to be lawyers are suddenly resigning from the student groups and/or claiming they never read the statements before they went out. To wit:
Simple question: If these groups had signed onto a statement condoning the murder of blacks, or gays, or trans people would you still call this "harassment" or would you demand CEO's not hire any member of such a group, even if they left said group after the fact?
As a commentator at Instapundit descried this sudden Volte faca
“The lesson is that luxury beliefs vanish the instant the luxury is threatened. How much of our fake politics would turn in an instant if we didn’t have institutional enforcement and narrative policing, and everyone just had to stand on their own behind their own thoughts? What if radical chic consistently cost something? What if tenured communists had risk?”
I predict that by the end of this week students at all of these schools will be saying this.
And by April or May of next year when students get ready to graduate or apply for internships all of these students at these universities will like Germans after 1946 insist they were not political, that they did not know about these student organization or their statements. By the time we get to 2025 there will be so many students and graduates who claim to have been opposed to the statements supporting Hamas there will scarcely have been enough students left to have drafted them.
But whatever happens make no mistake. It was the prospect of future lucrative careers being beheaded over those statements not the reality of Jewish babies being beheaded by Hamas that will be the sudden cause of these denials
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