via thefederalist:
It is not that there is no home to go to, either. Western history is rich with sustenance for mind and soul. Its longevity, richness, and vibrance are proof enough of that. It is that the people who consider themselves our leaders now deliberately strip America’s young of their roots.
Peterson and many others note rightly that most of our universities, and the other cultural institutions they gatekeep such as media and public schools, are anti-education, anti-culture, and anti-American. They gain power by separating people, by not only refusing to cultivate the capacity for self-government, but also actively cultivating intellectual, economic, and spiritual dependency.
This is why, as Flanagan has noticed, a worthy curriculum, an apprenticeship in the deepest wisdom of our heritage, is typically no longer delivered through the West’s “leading” institutions. To gain any real competence, most people must self-educate through a growing “parallel culture of ideas.” Where have we heard this parallelism language before? Among the anti-Communists of Eastern Europe, for one.
Read the whole thing.
EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH, THEY CORRUPT: Using the Truth to Lie.
Picture in your mind a political debate between acquaintances, perhaps on social media, or in meatspace. You make your point, your opponent makes his. Demands for evidence are made. Your opponent cites a media piece. Perhaps an article on CNN, or a reference to a study on The Atlantic. The onus is on you to prove that the item is now incorrect. Yet you cannot do so, for the citations within it are true, even though the spin has rendered it into something it really is not. How do you articulate that?
Consider this CNN headline: Children found in New Mexico compound were training for school shootings, prosecutors say.
What is wrong with it? The headline is true. The children were indeed in a compound in New Mexico, and were indeed training to commit school shootings. Ah, but it omits that this was linked to Islamic terror. Now the article itself sort-of admits this in the last section of the article.
Hogrefe said FBI analysts told him the suspects appeared to be “extremist of the Muslim belief.”
Compare this to how the same event is reported on Fox News: Investigators raided New Mexico compound on tip from terror-tied New York City imam, cleric claims.
Note the difference in spin. One emphasizes ‘school shootings’ and the other ‘terror-tied’ and ‘imam’. This is how the tone of a thing is subtly changed, depending on the journalist’s preferred viewpoint. Of course, aside from Fox News, most media outlets are Left-leaning. So the spin is much more weighted toward the Left, and furthermore Fox News is usually casually dismissed by any Leftist. It is, in essence, banned from the court of polite opinion. And yet, both articles are fundamentally true.
I’ve been on a Tolkien kick of late, for which I blame my friend Francis. And so I caught the connection quite readily when I read the above headlines:
The Stones of Seeing do not lie, and not even the Lord of Barad-dûr can make them do so. He can, maybe, by his will choose what things shall be seen by weaker minds, or cause them to mistake the meaning of what they see. Nonetheless it cannot be doubted that when Denethor saw great forces arrayed against him in Mordor, and more still being gathered, he saw that which truly is.
Denethor was shown nothing but truth by the palantir. It could not be made to lie to him. But Sauron could spin what was shown, and cause Denethor to mistake the meaning of the things he saw. This tactic is readily employed by the media, and in the past it has been extremely effective. The journalist, if confronted on his spin, could escape with the excuse “but everything I have said is true!” We know there is a wrong here, we can sense it, but to prove it unequivocally is difficult, and essentially impossible if the instances are few enough.
Over time, with many such incidences, we can begin to notice the pattern. The old saying “if every bank error is in the bank’s favor, get a new bank” applies here. If every coin toss is in Hillary’s favor, get a new coin tosser. If every media article from your chosen outlet slants Left, get a new outlet. Note, too, that whenever an election is close and we have to start digging for uncounted ballots, the count always favors the Democrat. This is happening right now in Ohio. But it likewise happened in my home state of Florida in 2000. Every time a pile of uncounted votes was discovered, it invariably favored the Democrat.
And they have the temerity to accuse us of election fraud.
We are told to ignore the evidence of our eyes and ears, that we are being paranoid, perhaps. Or conspiracy-minded. Yet, every bank error is favoring the bank. Why is that? Has Sauron hijacked the palantir? I should think the answer is obvious to my readers by now. The question is what to do about it? Denethor made the mistake of thinking he could control it, that he could bend it to his will. The effort drove him insane.
h/t ED