One reason conservatives never saw a culture war they couldn’t lose is that they insist on using Queensberry rules, even as the Left fights no-holds-barred. Consider, for example, two scenarios.
When leftists discover someone “committing conservatism” — such as when former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was found to have donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 — they accept nothing less than the person’s termination. In fact, they never want him to work again. Ergo “cancel culture.”
When leftists effect something truly outrageous, such as the anti-white “Deep Equity” school curriculum being implemented nationwide, the reaction is different. Conservatives may fight back against it as they did with Deep Equity in Chandler, Arizona, but they’re generally satisfied if the social engineering is abandoned. They don’t go for blood. In fact, so often have I heard prominent conservative figures say in such a situation, “Look, I don’t want anyone fired.”
Well, I do.
I say this not with just a vindictive spirit. Liberals make sure to administer a coup de grâce generally driven by anger and hatred, emotions epitomizing them. Yet slightly more thoughtful leftists may have an additional reason and understand something: Culture wars are zero-sum games. And winning a battle but leaving your adversary in place to fight another day is no recipe for victory.
With respect to school indoctrination, consider: If you caught a teacher trying to molest your child, would you be satisfied with an apology and continue leaving your kid in his care?
Why should it be any different when a teacher visits upon your child the rape of mind, heart, and soul?
The point apparently missed is that in such a situation, the problem is not that the educator tried to effect a given type of toxic indoctrination.
It’s that he’s the kind of person who would effect toxic indoctrination.
This won’t change just because you successfully mitigate an obvious symptom of his moral disease. He’s still infected; he still is what he is. And while I’m no fan of Maya Angelou, some of her words should be heeded here: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
“I remember first hearing these words in my early twenties. I heard them,” she continued. “I just didn’t follow them. Hence, I brought myself a whole lot of painful lessons and needless suffering because I always wanted to give people a second chance, and a third, and a fourth….”
Implementing a planned program of leftist insanity isn’t just a momentary lapse in judgment such as an angry outburst, regretted soon afterwards, that resulted in calling a child a derogatory name. It bespeaks of a twisted world view, of a lack of virtue. And when you identify a cancerous tumor, you excise it; you don’t leave it in place so it can metastasize further and affect the healthy tissue around it.
A teacher imbued with leftism will corrupt everything he touches, whether he wants to or not. For he cannot help being what he is. As with virtues, vices are caught more than they’re taught. It’s what’s assumed that’s learned best, and an educator’s basic assumptions will always come through to his students one way or another.
This said, a left-wing teacher will usually seek to intentionally indoctrinate his charges even after being caught with his ideological pants down. He’ll just be more subtle about it.
If my prescription still sounds harsh, know that there’s a difference between being virtuous and being a “nice” guy — and that nice guys finish last. I’d also implore conservatives to stop being conservative, as in being defensive, as in conserving our now leftism-forged status quo.
I’d further say, look around you. Do you not realize that our culture is being undone root and branch? Have you not noticed the statues coming down, the traditions torn up, the names of Founders and other historical heroes being stripped from buildings, the history being rewritten, and the morality being turned on its head? Do you not see that we’re facing our own Year Zero?
This is happening, too, partially because of the educational indoctrination of the past many decades, which conservatives didn’t effectively combat because, in part (though there were other reasons), they “didn’t want to see anyone lose his job.”
But conservatives, one might hope, would understand the importance of accountability. In fact, we find it maddening, and complain, when we see conservatives crucified for saying “boo” (e.g., Roger Stone) while left-wing criminals such as John Brennan and Jim Comey are allowed to skate. Yet are we doing any better?
A threat of merely having to stop your social engineering (perhaps only temporarily) if it’s discovered is no threat at all. Loss of employment, however, sends a message. And don’t confuse a soft head with a soft heart. It matters little here that a propagandizing ex-teacher may have trouble paying the rent; it matters much that our culture is being rent stem to stern.
The accountability being prescribed here should, of course, be applied beyond education and to all our institutions, from government bureaucracies to film studios. But education matters because as the apocryphal saying warns, “The teaching in the schools today will become the politics of tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow” is now because yesterday too many of us were distracted, lukewarm, inattentive, and complacent — and too busy being “nice guys.”
Really, we need to become as “intolerant” as leftists accuse us of being and 10 percent as intolerant they are.
As the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen put it in 1931, “America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”
Tolerance of evil is evil itself. Go Roman, conservative brethren, or go home.
Selwyn Duke
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