What a week!
Until a minute ago, I had no idea what day this is, as is usual on Thanksgiving week, though it’s possible that fainting during Thanksgiving dinner and landing on my head has something to do with it. [Incidentally, before I get accused of an anti-Left bias (again), if the Right behaved half as bonkers this week as their ideological foes, I would have written about it.]
1. What does it say about our media that two websites and a TV network feature a guy that writes things like this? What does it say about our society that he has an audience?
We stand on the precipice of losing our American character to the forces of authoritarianism and bigotry. For many people, this holiday season will be the last face-to-face encounter with family members before the most consequential election of our lifetimes. And yet, many people are desperate to pass the potatoes without starting any uncomfortable conversations.
The holidays are when your resistance is needed. Some of you have the opportunity to talk to Trump voters and assorted conservatives this weekend. Some of you will have the opportunity to talk to people who live in an echo chamber of Fox News commentary and Russian troll farms. To waste that opportunity because of your own hang-ups and Mommy or Daddy issues is criminal….You might not like conflict, but if you choose to break bread with Trump supporters and climate change deniers because you happen to be related to them, then conflict is required. Anything less is appeasement, and we’ve had far too much of that these past few years. So stiffen your spine, rehearse your talking points, and get ready to fry some turkeys in your family with your righteousness…
Take a traditional Thanksgiving Day football game. This may seem like safe, nonpolitical ground—so long as everybody agrees to not talk about Colin Kaepernick. But it won’t take long for Trump supporters in your family to say something racist, sexist, or plain nutty while watching the game. They’ll say a white athlete is just a “hard worker” while praising a black athlete’s “natural gifts.” They’ll champion a slur against Native Americans, masquerading as a nickname, on a holiday that commemorates the prelude to a continental genocide. They’ll make fun of the “egghead statisticians,” which will sound like they’re making a comment on football strategy, but actually they’re making an attack on science and math that will later fuel their climate change denier sensibilities. Or maybe they’ll just sit like lumps on the couch while women: prepare dinner, set the table, take care of the kids, clean up after dinner, serve dessert, and fetch them a beer.
In those moments, I think of the children. I think of the behavior that is being modeled for them. I think of the cultural messages they are learning as they’re being exposed to these “traditional” structures….
Who IS this lunatic? Why, it’s Elie Mystal, the race-obsessed, U.S. hating crazy who made “Above the Law” so unbearable to read that I have to go elsewhere for my big law firm gossip. Because he detests whites and the U,S, and of course the President, Ellie is now turning up on MSNBC and, of course, on “The Nation’s” site, where America-bashing thrives.He really, really thinks that white Americans, men and supporters of President Trump (Ellie is a man, but he calls himself Elie, so he has an out) are as he portrays, racist, sexist morons who must be vanquished. An equivalent stereotype for blacks would have them eating watermelon and fried chicken while they listen to the Mills Brothers sing “De Camptown Races.” The man just oozes with hate; almost as much hate as disinformation and progressive propaganda.
2. Then there’s Colin Kaepernick. The self-aggrandizing Nike martyr tweeted out an “Unthanksgiving Day” message:
“Spent the morning at the Indigenous People’s Sunrise Ceremony on the 50 year anniversary of the Occupation of Alcatraz. The US government has “stolen over 1.5 billion acres of land from Indigenous people.” Thank you to my Indigenous family, I’m with you today and always.”
Oh, bite me. “Stolen over 1.5 billion acres of land from Indigenous people”—what simple-minded, historically, legally, sociologically ignorant crap. It’s unethical enough for celebrities to use social media to make the public dumber, but making them as dumb as Colin Kaepernick is unforgivable.
3. Of course, there are also professors who also spreading the anti-America, anti-white, anti-Thanksgiving propaganda. David J. Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University, the author of the Howard Zinn-ish“This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving” provided an op-ed to the New York Times that they eagerly published. (De-bunking Thanksgiving is the obvious next step after marginalizing Christmas, and it is done for exactly the same reasons.)
The Bookworm Room does an excellent job rebutting the professor’s propaganda (as does Ann Coulter, in a relatively restrained mood, here…
For now, I want to focus on Kaepernick’s familiar trope, that the U.S. stole all that land from the Indians. The Bookworm Room piece neatly points out what anthropologists, sociologists, historians and scientists from Henrik Van Loon to Stephen Hawking have made clear for decades, and what should be obvious anyway:
First, American Indians’ limited run as wholly independent tribes was written by circumstance the moment they came into contact with Europeans. A stone age culture will simply not survive in daily contact with a far more technologically advanced culture. They will adopt technology and seek out goods that will make their life easier and that will inevitably change their societies. They will, over time, blend in with the more advanced culture, hopefully adding good things to what then becomes a shared culture.
Second, if they go to war with the more advanced society (a decision that may seem eminently reasonable at the time, for they are fighting for their survival), they will ultimately lose and pay the price for it, just as they would in their own inter-tribal wars. And that is a major part of the story of Indian and European relations in the 17th and 18th century.
I think this was well understood by me when I was about, oh, 10. And it’s still true, but the schools want children to believe the worst, and so they do.
4. “Hello. This is Martin. He suffers from uncontrollable Trump Derangement. Will you give to help Martin and and others like him? For pennies a day…” Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley—you may remember him as the wan, pathetically vague challenger of Hillary Clinton in the early Democratic candidate debates in 2015—saw former Virginia attorney general, now Acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary, Ken Cuccinelli in a Capitol Hill bar called The Dubliner (I know it well!) and accosted him, screaming and cursing about the President and “whatever else he could think of.”
It’s bad enough when members of the public take cues from Angry Left crazies and feel they are entitled to harass Trump officials and anyone wearing a MAGA cap. Now actual leaders of the Democratic party are doing it. Wow.
Ethics Alarms 
Speech
I just read it and thought, “My dear penguins, we stand on a great threshold! It’s okay to be scared; many of you won’t be coming back. Thanks to Batman, the time has come to punish all of God’s children!” Same vibe.
1–Didn’t the Use Thanksgiving theme begin in 2009 or 2010 with Obama imploring his adoring throngs pitch the ACA to the great unwashed?
4–Coulter? She’s (as my Dear 94 1/2 year-old Father would say) as mean as a snake; I can’t disagree. But she’ll always have a special place in my heart for penning something I’ll never tire of rereading: Olbermann’s Plastic Ivy.
She OWNS Olbermann’s fat @$$; she knows it & he knows it.
I am not a big fan of Coulter, but anyone who can write an article like that about Keith Doberman can’t be all bad.
She’s a very smart, very articulate, very erudite thinker and writer who decided to carve out a niche as conservative feminist asshole. Different strokes. Who knows what she really believes? I lost respect for her when I learned she used to date Bill Maher…
I thought the image below was a very funny counter to this. When asked to bring something for Thanksgiving when you know you are going to be bombarded with TDS, bring this.
Every one of these leftists can stuff it without any tasty leftovers.
If I read one more screed extolling the pastoral virtues of native life prior to whitey arriving, I’m gonna puke. They were killing and enslaving each other for centuries (maybe longer) before we got here. Many tribes were completely and happily wiped out by opposing tribes. Still others were forced to be annexed geographically, socially, and culturally. Who knew humans, regardless how advanced, can act less than graciously toward one another?
These people hate America and all are aiming to do one thing: undo the US Constitution and capitalism. End of story.
The colonization of what is now the United States by people of European descent was enabled by two factors.
One was the collapse and fragmentation of the Mississippian civilization one and a half centuries before Christopher Columbus landed at Hispaniola.
the second was the wave of diseases brought by the first generation of explorers.
This was what made ethnic replacement possible.
But it would have happened regardless. Maybe a century later, maybe two, but it would have happened.
It wouldn’t have anything to do with superior technology like ships and guns? The former certainly seems to have been required.
What caused the fragmentation of Mississippian society?
“Ellie is a man, but he calls himself Ellie, so he has an out.
He spells it Elie. It is a nickname for, or a shortened version of, Elijah (Eliahu, Elias or any version thereof). Elie Tahari and Elie Wiesel are others examples of men with the name.
Full disclosure: my youngest son is Elias. I’m partial.
How do you pronounce it? EElie?
From now on, I’m going to misspell his last name too.
Haha!! It’s pronounced the way you misspelled it.
Please take care of yourself, Jack. You’ve been so busy.
If Elie (Ellie, Eli, Eelieeeeee), had stopped at the first sentence, he would have been correct. The radical left (can’t call them the far left since they seem to be in the vouge now) fits that description perfectly. Replace conservative with progressive and you’d be pretty close to the money. It’s like the pot calling the kettle black, except the kettle is aluminum. I don’t understand how so many people can be so delusional about their own hypocrisy. It reminds me of this story I read about how memetic diseases were capable of infecting people and causing them to carry out story tropes. But it seems like memetic diseases may be real after all.
Bingo.
My 9 year old came home from school on Wednesday and informed me that the first Thanksgiving was a party that the Pilgrims held for the Indians. He said that the Pilgrims were Europeans, and that Europeans always kill people and steal their land and make them slaves, and that the reason the Europeans held the party was to trick the Indians into thinking that they were friends.
I asked where he had heard this, and he said his teachers had explained it to the class that day. I told him that was completely wrong and showed him an excellent Charlie Brown / Peanuts video about the Mayflower voyage. I tiptoed around any criticism of his teachers. What would have been the ethical thing to do?
Invited all his friends, classmates and neighborhood kids over to see it too.
Then report the teacher for creating a nasty lie – as opposed to the wishful “story” that is Thanksgiving in the first place – and trying to ruin a family holiday about bringing your enemies, including those family members who behave thus, as we say, “to the table” to make peace.
That includes what to do about a teacher I heard about who shows her pre-Thanksgiving elementary school class a video about how turkeys are killed,
The problem is that his teachers are lovely, caring people who are truly excellent at imparting reading, writing and arithmetic to the children. Unfortunately, they have been taught this grossly distorted version of history which they are dutifully passing on.
Boy, I don’t know. We had fights with four different schools and multiple teachers, and ended up home schooling our son, who had developed a true hatred of formal education. I’m pretty sure I would have raised holy hell with the school principal, then the school board, then the local news, then perhaps contacted the school’s parents. The problem is, once you tell a kid a teacher is wrong, that trust is broken, and you can’t effectively teach without it.
My son grew into a complex, virtually self-educated, articulate young man who is progressing in the career he always seemed to want (he is an auto tech), without the class biases that infect my peers, defiant and suspicious of power and authority, and always his own man, for which he keeps telling his mother and I that he is grateful, and it is our doing. He professes to be grateful that his mother and I are still married, unlike virtually all of his friends, and that he enters adult life with a nest egg, thanks to his grandparents.
Of course, I was indoctrinated too, in a different era. I think kids should begin life with an idealized vision of their country and history, and the intellectual curiosity and critical thinking skills to pick up the nuances and complexities of it all as they get older. Kids should be proud and happy to be Americans—never a problem for my son, who learned early that his adoptive parents had rescued him as an infant from a foreign hellhole where his life would have been nasty, brutish, and probably short. The most important part of school (and, I believe, college), social skills, he mastered independently: he has many friends of diverse backgrounds and interests, and is an instinctual networker.
And it’s quite possible that I had nothing to do with any of this.
Comment of the day.
Even with all the typos! (Which I have fixed.) Thanks.
I thought this image did a good job of putting the Kaepernick clown show in perspective:
Extra credit for the Al 4 TDs Bundy reference!
Love it. If you really can judge character buy one’s heroes, the Kaepernich fawners are a real burden on the rest of us.
Oh, and for the record, our family had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner without any squabbles about politics (and we collectively span the far left to the medium to libertarian right). We also (some of us) watched a football game without any racist or otherwise offensive remarks (at least none that I would recognize as offensive — but I’m unwoke).
Speaking of the disrespect toward Thanksgiving and Christmas…should there be a Raunchy Santa Claus Principle?
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mall-santa-claus-fired-racy-photos-151954522.html