Christopher Buckley (writing on Facebook, in reference to the picture): Happy New Year, America. We deserve much better.

Me: Actually, politics and government are downstream from culture. (I believe Andrew Breitbart said that.) Nobody as evil AND insane as AOC would have acquired such power and influence unless our culture had gone off the rails. And millions have succumbed. Millions have not succumbed; but millions have. And the evidence points to a majority of younger people wanting this. Well, they’re going to get it.

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The only way Republicans can lose Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024? If the media declares medical Armageddon over the flu, most states shut down, Democratic Party officials require mail-in voting, unverifiable voting methods and early morning data dumps.
But, no … that could never happen.

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“There is no federal solution.” But the government will enslave you anyway, said the demented dictator.

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1940s Americans are known as “the greatest generation.” What will 2020s Americans be called?

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For generations, Americans have worried about censorship. The assumption was always: Censorship in America will be imposed by the government. Yet that was always at odds with the First Amendment, which forbids government censorship. But who could know that media and the press would willingly, and voluntarily, hand over objective truth in favor of self-censorship to advance green, socialist and other irrational narratives? And who could know that the self-censorship would become so massive, and so profitable, that gigantic corporations could do what no Soviets, no Mussolini, no Castro, and no Hitler could ever have pulled off so decisively? Mass, willful ignorance disguised as enlightenment; Medieval group insanity disguised as science; open evasion disguised as progressive; and brazen one-party rule disguised as “democracy.”

Wow. They did it. How? Because most of us WANT to be self-deluded. Government has barely had to fire a shot. We did it to ourselves–most of us, at least. We embraced our ignorance and labeled it cool and “woke.” We pay government-run schools billions of dollars to promote self-evident, crude, cheap brainwashing. We put the approval of our equally deluded peers above the most basic, sensory-level objective truths. But evading reality is, by definition, irrational. It will come at a very, very heavy cost.

Various Contributors

The White House on Wednesday endorsed further regulations on social media tech platforms, in response to testimony from far-left Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen on Capitol Hill.

“The President has long said, as you referenced, that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms that they cause,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during the daily press briefing in response to a question about the hearings on Capitol Hill.

Here’s the beginning of the end of social media, especially Facebook, as we have known it. If you think it has been bad for conservatives and libertarians up to now, just wait. The White House, through its threats, makes it easier for Facebook to be the totalitarian monolithic entity its owners so want it to be. The Biden regime will threaten to use force against Facebook until it bans ALL nonleftist speech, across the board. Further, the Biden regime will reward Facebook for turning over dissidents so the government may harass and ultimately jail them under one-sided and subjectively defined “anti-domestic terrorism” policies. Will Facebook buckle under? Of course. This leftist, one party totalitarian dictatorship is what they always wanted.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Censorship FEEDS irrationality and conspiracy theories. When selective facts are not permitted to be considered, and certain conclusions may not be drawn, or certain hypotheses may not be uttered … you shut down the capacity of the mind to do its job: to THINK. Many correct and brilliant conclusions are littered with half-baked or contradictory ideas along the way. This is how the process of thinking operates. The efforts of Facebook, Twitter, Google, the Bidenistas and others to outright shut down and even legally prosecute human thinking (as with the Arizona recount) are not only grotesquely unjust. They are stupid. And they are policies that will make us stupid. What else could be their intention?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Dr. Seuss book-burning gave a guest on Tucker Carlson’s eponymous show the giggles: “It’s total distraction from the real issues,” claimed one Chadwick Moore. So wrong.

Come to think of it, our much-loved TV host’s defense of the purged Dr. Seuss books fell short of freedom’s standards: “Dr. Seuss was not a racist” was the gist of it.

But before deconstructing Tucker’s defeatist and defensive argument—here is the latest in the saga of Dr. Seuss and the wussification of the West, for lack of a better word.

The New York Times reports that, “Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of their use of offensive imagery.”

None other than Dr. Seuss Enterprises, “the business that oversees the estate of the children’s author and illustrator,” “had decided last year to end publication and licensing of” the following titles:

• “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” (1937)
• “If I Ran the Zoo” (1950)
• “McElligot’s Pool”
• “On Beyond Zebra!”
• “Scrambled Eggs Super!”
• “The Cat’s Quizzer”

These custodians of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s work simply rolled over. They conceded to cancelling their own books after consulting with the educational idiocrasy.

It took panels of ponderous oafs to conclude that the “whimsical stories [that] have entertained millions of children and adults worldwide” “revealed strong racial undertones.”

Some parents were aflutter, too.

The following headline perfectly captures the “wussification“—that fretful melding of “wimps” and “p-ssies,” en masse—that makes for a Wussy Nation:

“Parents grapple with racist images in Dr. Seuss books.”

Grown-ups “grapple” with things like, let’s see, food and medicine shortages; with the fact that the educational idiocracy that is depriving kids of the literary canon has failed to teach them to read, write and speak English properly.

Or, picture this: Video footage of Kamala Harris being swallowed whole by a python has surfaced. She is being subjected to the crushing peristaltic movements of the giant reptile, as he digests her. You “grapple” with that:

To pull or to publish these ostensibly upsetting images, that is the question. (Adult-humor alert for Wussy Nation.)

But grownups do not “grapple” with Dr. Seuss content!

Tucker’s mistake was his contents-driven defense of these kiddie books:

“Dr. Seuss was not a racist. He was an evangelist against bigotry,” pleaded Tucker. “He wrote an entire shelf of books against racism, and not in a subtle way. They were clearly, explicitly against racism. That was the whole point of writing them, to teach children not to be racist.”

Yawn.

Even if Dr. Seuss was the pedagogic, sanctimonious bore Tucker makes him out to be—actual racism in the targeted literature should be a peripheral issue, or no issue at all.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing process, not content.

Whether he intended it or not, the premise of Tucker’s defense of Dr. Seuss is that if we do detect “legitimate” racism in literature—there is a case for banning it. (Now, Tucker might not have meant it that way, but, this is what the structure of his argument portends.)

By contrast, freedom makes the case for an unfettered free market in ideas, good and bad. Freedom argues for politically impolite books to be published and read freely.

Banning books, moreover, assumes a lack of choice and agency among individual human beings. It’s also predicated on a higher authority that decides for the rest of us which cultural products are fit for our consumption.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing not over the contents of Mein Kampf or McElligot’s Pool, but for their publication irrespective of their content.

Which is why I say freedom’s argument is an argument from process, and not content.

Alas, in the face of the cancellation of people and publications, cancelled conservatives just keep these logically weak and, frankly, loser mea culpas coming. Like the Argument from Hitler, which is a kind of “WhatAboutism”:

“Amazon and eBay sell Mein Kampf, why not Dr. Seuss? I want what Hitler got, Amazon and eBay. Me too. Boo-hoo.”

Tweeted “Musil Protégé”: “Conservatives [inadvertently] condone presentism. As Audrey says in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that our world judged by the standards of Jane Austen’s time would (look ridiculous)?’”

Most great literature doesn’t meet the sub-intelligent standards of the woke illiterati, who control the intellectual means of production—the schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), the press, publishing houses, think tanks, Deep Tech and the Deep State.

In some of the axed Dr. Seuss books, the typically cartoonish illustrations exaggerate the physical characteristics of a “Chinaman” and one or two African islanders. You know, just the kind of characteristics that, once-upon-a-time, made books about faraway places and people so exciting to kids.

Much of the Western literary canon—indisputably the greatest works of literature ever—is guaranteed to violate woke racial dogma.

Yet, even by Wokepedia’s telling, “Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist.”

What next? Shall we ban Shakespeare due to Othello and Shylock?

Ilana Mercer, UNZ review

Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.

There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.

He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.

But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.

The Left Is Carrying Out a Cultural Revolution

To grasp how a man known as much for his messages of tolerance as for his artistic genius could be canceled for racism, you have to understand what’s actually happening here. The left’s war on the past, on long-dead authors like Geisel, isn’t really about the past, it’s about the future. It’s about who gets to rule, and under what terms.

There’s a predictable pattern to what we’re seeing now. It’s predictable because it has happened before in much the same way it’s happening now. During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Chinese Communist Party, at the direction of Mao Zedong, called for the destruction of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. All of these stood in the way of Mao’s socialist ideology, so they had to be destroyed.

Children and students were encouraged by the communist government to inform on their parents and elders, to shame and condemn them in public. The guilty were forced to recant in “struggle sessions,” during which they were mocked and humiliated, sometimes tortured, sometimes murdered. Before it was over, millions were dead.

We’re obviously not there yet, but the woke revolutionaries who now run our elite institutions and exert outsized influence in the corridors of power are following this same pattern.

First, they come for the monuments, destroying the icons of the past and re-writing history to turn even our national heroes and Founding Fathers into enemies. The animating ethos of the mobs pulling down Confederate statues is the same as The New York Times editors who gave us the 1619 Project. And because there is no limiting principle to iconoclasm, they have moved on from Confederates.

The City of Charlottesville, for example, having removed or tried to remove every last Confederate monument, is now pleading for someone, anyone, to haul away a giant statue of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The 18-foot-tall bronze statue, which was erected in 1919 and depicts Lewis and Clark with Sacajawea crouched behind them, is free for anyone who can prove he knows how to move it safely—although at this point it’s a wonder the city doesn’t just dynamite the thing to rubble, Taliban-style.

Then they come for the books, destroying any ideas or literature that challenges their ideology—like Ryan Anderson’s 2018 book on the dangers of transgenderism, which Amazon summarily canceled last month. Even seemingly unobjectionable books can be targeted, if not for their content then for the race of their author. Just ask Jeanine Cummins, whose novel “American Dirt” drew the ire of the left last year simply because Cummins, who is white, wrote a book about Mexican drug cartels. The list goes on and on.

So much for statues and books. At some point, the left will come for actual people, because the ideology of revolution demands that dissent—and therefore dissidents—be silenced, by force if necessary.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, recall what happened all across the country last summer when Black Lives Matter “protesters” took to the streets. They didn’t just march and chant, they rioted. They attacked businesses, destroyed entire city blocks, and carried out a campaign of intimidation, harassing, and in some cases attacking random people if they didn’t kneel and repeat the slogans of the revolution. Dozens of people lost their lives in the chaos and violence that ensued.

The people behind the statue-toppling, the digital book burnings, and the street violence won’t stop until all three of these things—history, ideas, and dissidents—have been destroyed. These are all impediments to their cultural revolution, and they mean to eliminate them.

So forget about Dr. Seuss. Forget about the statues and the books. Those things are just the beginning. It could easily get much worse. The woke revolutionaries of the left can’t be bargained with or appeased. They believe this is a zero-sum game, that one side will win and one side will lose. And they’re right.

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

Censorship isn’t funny. But censors ARE. Think about the mentality of a person who wants censorship. It’s absurd.

“Let’s get Donald Trump off Twitter. When he’s gone, he can’t incite violence and hatred anymore.”

Donald Trump doesn’t incite hatred or violence, of course. He celebrates freedom and decries socialism. But that’s not the point. The point is: Censors think people’s minds will change when they no longer have the ability to speak.

Censors ignore that Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh and anyone with a strong point-of-view exists because THEY SAY THINGS THAT MANY PEOPLE AGREE WITH, AND LIKE TO HEAR.

Censors reverse cause-and-effect. They think Donald Trump supporters exist because Donald Trump exists. It’s the other way around. Donald Trump exists because there are people who agree with him, and they’re constantly looking for a voice.

Censors tend to only talk to one another. It makes them gullible and naive. It leads them to think that if you can just obliterate something from their minds, it will go away. Kind of like a three-year-old, when you play “peek-a-boo.” The censor, like the three-year-old, thinks you disappear when you stop talking, and when the censor covers his eyes.

If censorship worked, there never would have been an Age of Reason and Enlightment, which followed the repressed Middle Ages. Without an Age of Reason and Enlightment, there would have been no resurgence of Aristotle, no John Locke and therefore no Thomas Jefferson or James Madison to create a civilization and a republic based on rights, for a time.

Censorship fails as badly as socialism fails. The fools who think ideas can be WISHED into or out of existence are the same fools who think that prosperity, wealth and technology can be WISHED into existence.

Shutting up Donald Trump will not change the minds of people who like what he says. Neither would impeaching him 50 times, jailing him or killing him. All of these things just make 75 million people like him more.

Donald Trump was saying things that for years, millions of Americans wished a presidential candidate or President would say — and mean. That desire — whatever you think of it — cannot disappear merely because you stifle their leader. If anything, the desire will grow stronger.

Look how intense the feelings of Donald Trump opponents grew during the Trump years. Those feelings culminated in months-long rioting by people, like Black Lives Matter, who shared their views, and whom the police were not permitted to arrest when they burned down businesses, homes and police stations. Donald Trump did not censor them, but they felt censored merely by his existence. And look how angry they became. What makes them think it won’t happen in reverse?

When you repress the ideas, views and feelings of people, those ideas, views and feelings do not go away. They intensify.

Censors are playing with fire. It’s not funny. But the way they smugly congratulate themselves and each other for what they’re doing … well, that’s quite hilarious.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason