Posts Tagged ‘progressive culture’

Posted by Susan Swift Feb 21st 2011 at 1:10 pm in Abortion, Mainstream Media, New Media, citizen journalism

A few weeks ago I attended the Walk-for-Life in San Francisco, having volunteered to drive a large group of high school students to the event.  On arrival, I dropped them off near the rally kick-off point.  Having no prior experience, I assumed it would be easy enough to go park my car and rejoin my students (wearing bright red sweatshirts) later.  After all, I figured, there wouldn’t be that many people.  How wrong I was.  The crowd was enormous.

To find my group, I stood at a lamppost along the route, watching hundreds of people passing by.  After about 30 minutes I began to count.  The marchers – confined to the boundaries of a two lane street – walked at least twenty abreast with each line of marchers passing by my spot every two seconds.  I waited in that same spot for over 90 minutes after I began counting.  When I finally found my little band of students and joined in the walk, the crowd stretched out far behind me, still thick with humanity.  By my personal estimate, I believe there were 60,000 to 70,000 people there that day, quietly marching, holding signs, signing songs and saying prayers to protect human life.  But you wouldn’t have known it from the news coverage that day.

The Make-Believe Media grudgingly reported this annual event but in a manipulative and distorted manner.  The coverage focused its cameras tightly on one pro-life speaker at the rally before the walk began, showing only his face, never panning back to show the throngs around him.  Not even a five second clip of the endless waves of marchers walking the route that day.  And they absurdly underreported the number of marchers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLwEOIDu-7s&feature=player_embedded

But what the MBM did allow you to see, the focus of their story that day, was the freak show – a small band of perhaps 15 malcontents running up and down the length of the route with a bull horn shouting “keep your rosaries off our ovaries.”  These abortion fanatics dressed in drag and some carried obscene signs urging explicit homosexual acts – and understand that thousands of the marchers were children.  But the media carefully avoided publishing any images of those X-rated signs or the fact that the freaks waved them in front of children.  These pathetic caricatures — these ambassadors of homoculturalism and feminism – got disproportionate air time on the networks to howl their anti-life clichés.

Cut to Valentine’s Day – a day celebrated by Hallmark, florists and Planned Parenthood passing out free condoms – but originally a religious feast celebrating a man who was killed by government officials for the crime of marrying Catholic men and women in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony.  One wonders when new blood from martyrs defending traditional marriage will once again refresh the Church Militant.

Well, this year, something good and decent happened.

On February 1^st, Lila Rose and her group LiveAction.org began releasing a series of damning videos of Planned Parenthood. The videos and stories behind them went viral.   The Make-Believe Media responded feebly, incoherently, and even tried the unprecedented act of meeting and collaborating to concoct a lockstep narrative.  But the more the MBM reacted in varying forms of rage, condescension or silence, the greater impact they gave the videos.

By Thursday, February 10^th, efforts were made to organize grassroots lunchtime rallies at over 200 Planned Parenthood sites protesting Federal funding.  I helped organize one in my area.

In less than three days’ time, on Monday, Valentine’s Day, thousands of protestors held peaceful protests in front of Planned Parenthoods across the nation.   At my location, 30 pro-life individuals came to hold signs and banners for an hour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTHZhXpxOg4&feature=player_embedded

It struck me that more people protested at that one clinic, on three days’ notice, than the total number of pro-aborts attending the San Francisco rally, a widely publicized annual event in the heart of the liberal homocultural mecca.  Yet, no mainstream media reported the pro-life gatherings.  The sleeping media monster probably didn’t even know it was happening.

Juxtapose this Make-Believe Media obsessing on a handful of abortion supporters at the Walk-for-Life against the MBM silence about pro-life support across this nation.  Or, put another way, consider that far more pro-lifers appeared at the San Francisco event than pro-union protestors appeared in Wisconsin this week.  Yet contrast the utter media blackout of the one versus the hysterical media frenzy with the other.

This is why the generation of Lila Rose, the 20-somethings, together with other groups such as the Tea Party Generation, ignore and bypass traditional media.  Instead they prefer the internet, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks to connect, to report and rally, to transmit and share news.  And the result was stunning – four days after these Valentine’s Day protests and in slightly more  than two weeks after the video releases, the House of Representatives voted to withhold federal taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.

Friday’s House vote to defund Planned Parenthood represents much more than a temporary victory for certain pro-life forces.  It is evidence that one of Progressivism’s hydra heads, called the mainstream media, has been severely defanged and will no longer imperiously dictate the political debate among the next generation of Americans.  The liberal monster once known as the mainstream media will increasingly become irrelevant and sequestered to the realm of myth and legend.  Hats off to Lila Rose, citizen journalists and the new media.

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WHAT THE AGE OF DRAFT DODGING/POT SMOKING AQUARIUS HAS DONE FOR YOU~!!!

August 11, 2010

A Rather Angry America

by Victor Davis Hanson

Pajamas Media

Unemployment is still high, growth low, deficits huge.  States are cutting out everything from streetlights to paving. Public pensions  are exploding everywhere.

A class war looms between retirees who want their  sweet-heart obligations honored, and strapped, poorer taxpayers who feel about  those bloated payouts as they do their underwater mortgages.

What Did You Expect?

In a progressive (liberal) culture, where ads blare hourly  about skipping out on credit card debt, shorting the IRS, and walking away  from mortgages, did the public employee unions really think they were exempt  from a Chrysler-like renegotiation?

In the age of Obama, there is no real contractual  obligation: everything from paying back bondholders to fixing a BP penalty is,  well, “negotiable.” When the money runs out, the law will too. Law? There is  no law other than a mandated equality of result.

The Talkative Crowd

On the Internet recently appeared the pictures of the  JournoList [1] bunch, who at least between themselves gave up their usual  pretense that the media was unbiased. With all due respect (confession: I was  briefly mentioned by the list as someone that the racist card might work on in  connection with the illegal immigration debate), they appear to the eye as a  sort of nerdish group.

They remind me of what we used to call the “wimp table” at a  pretty tough Selma High around 1970. It was there that the high school’s  handful of geeks, toadies, and picked-upon used to eat, under the protective  eye of yard-duty teachers. The assumption was that with a few steps further  onto the grounds, the entire sorry bunch was fair game for every bully on  campus. And that sad outfit filters, disseminates, and arbitrates our news?  Most from their writing and appearance seemed either neurotic overachievers or  twenty-something bloggers who confuse calling someone something with  erudition.

Up Is Down

No wonder aristocratic golf became needed presidential  relaxation, the old first lady hysteria over things like Nancy’s china cooled  when Michelle hit the Costa del Sol, and Guantanamo became A-Okay. The news  now for these guys is sort of like writing boilerplate race/class/gender  oppression papers for a Yale undergrad gut class.

Populism Is Now Bad?

In contrast, the proverbial people seem angry. A book will  have to be written explaining how in 19 months Obama blew a 70% approval  rating and is headed for under 40% — something that took Bush six years. A  handful of judges nullified what millions voted for in Arizona and California,  apparently on the premise that wanting federal immigration law enforced, and  seeing marriage as a traditional bond between a man and woman as it has been  for 2,500 years in the West, was bigoted, analogous to the racism of the Jim  Crow South, and thus in need of judicial intervention.

A guy in Bakersfield might think it prejudicial that a gay  judge struck down an amendment to the Constitution passed by a majority of  voters and opposed by the gay lobby; a guy in DC would think the guy in  Bakersfield prejudicial for coming up with that preposterous  conclusion.

Meanwhile, in our postracial age, race is everywhere:  Charles Rangel, who won’t follow the tax laws he writes, whines about an  “old-English, Anglo-Saxon procedure.” [2] Maxine Waters (under the cloud of  insider bank influence peddling) and the Black Caucus (recipient of  federalized GM donations) cite racism as the source of their ethical dilemmas  (at least Larry Craig did not cite gay-bashing and Duke Cunningham reverse  discrimination and Chris Dodd ageism and the late John Murtha  girthism).

A mass murderer at a beer distribution center (so much for  Van Jones’s assurances that such mayhem was a white thing) is portrayed on the  airwaves as an aggrieved victim of racism lashing out. Not a word about the  shattered lives of those gunned down and their families. Welcome to the  post-racial Obama age — with much more to follow. (Nemesis gives no quarter:  once Barack Obama years ago went down the patronize-and-use-Rev.-Wright path,  the payback was only a matter of when, not if.)

History Is Negotiable

We sent our first delegation to the services marking the  bombing of Hiroshima. Fine, but will we do the same with the Philippines,  Manchuria, South Korea, and all the other places where the Imperial Japanese  Army by early 1945 was killing on average well over 5,000 a day in its  occupied co-prosperity sphere? To understand why Hiroshima, understand 50,000  American casualties, 100,000 Japanese dead, and 100,000 Okinawan dead at the  conclusion of Okinawa ten weeks earlier, and then multiply it by a factor of  10 for the upcoming Japanese homeland invasion.

The Rising

At home, a huge mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan will  rise up before the new World Trade Center (maybe Bruce Springsteen can do a  sequel to “The Rising”?). To suggest this is bad taste is bigoted. To suggest  that we don’t know the where, how, and why about the funding, or why a  self-proclaimed ecumenical group of Muslims wants to build ties by picking  this provocative spot, or who exactly is behind the idea (or where exactly the  promoter now is [3]) is the worst sort of Neanderthal right  prejudice.

No problem. We can assure the 3,000 dead that their passing  was marked by the enlightened harmony of a mosque preempting a new tower. What  we do know is that in about a year, all over the Middle East, al-Qaeda videos  will have photo-shopped “strong horse” posters and CDs of the ruins of 9/11 in  the shadow of a towering mosque, with the accustomed boilerplate about how  Atta et al. knocked down the looming towers in order to have Islam’s shrine  rise up in their place. It all sort of reminds one of the nasty reception the  president’s envoy on Islamic outreach just got from a Muslim audience in  India. He was “shocked” at his reception — or translated into Valley Girl  parlance: “Like, I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

I don’t think the polls quite capture the present public  anger, which in not abating. Everything seems to channel into a general furor:  Michelle’s movable feast from Costa del Sol to Martha’s Vineyard; the  president suing Arizona and counting on a judge to nullify the public will, as  part of a larger effort either by judicial nod or administrative fiat to get  amnesty for 15 million future voters who will reciprocate at the polls;  politicians bragging about handing out another $100 billion of someone else’s  money here, another $200 billion there; the constant assumption that popular  expression is retarded, and those who go to a tea party rally, vote to enforce  immigration law, want to see marriage as it has been for millennia, want to  cut federal spending, or are tired of identity politics are Palinesque  clingers.

The Best and the Brightest

The common denominator? If one were to  survey the elite campuses around 1975 and talk to those in law school,  political science, or the humanities, then imagine them 35 years later as our  elite leaders in government, the media, the universities, the foundations, and  the arts, one could pretty much expect what we now  have.

The present symptoms that characterize both our  popular culture and current governance —  shrill self-righteousness; abstract communalism juxtaposed with concrete  pursuit of the aristocratic good life; race/class/gender cosmic sermonizing  with private school and Ivy League for the kids; crass and tasteless public  expression; a serial inability to take responsibility for one’s actions; the  bipartisan mega-deficits; the inability to cut pensions and social security  for the baby boomers — from the trivial to the fundamental, all  derive from a bankrupt cohort that came of age in the sixties and  seventies.

We see the arrested adolescence and hypocrisy that  come from that sermonizing generation, whether in  Al Franken’s puerile face-making, the ideologically driven suicide at  Newsweek, the steady destruction of the New York Times, John Kerry’s  tax-avoiding yacht, the Great Gatsby Clinton wedding, Michelle on the Costa  del Sol, Nancy Pelosi’s jet, Tim Geithner’s tax skipping, or the constant  race-card playing of a Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters. Yes, one walk across  the Yale or Stanford campus circa 1975, and one could see pretty clearly what  sort of culture that bunch would create when it came of age and was handed  power. If that is reductionism, so be it.

©2010 Victor Davis Hanson