Dark Days

As the madness of the antiliberal, quasi-religious, proto-totalitarian left sweeps across the nation, its doddering frontman surges to an alarming lead:

It's still early, but these numbers are, well, bad. After a wave of race riots, mob violence, and a group of anarcho-communist Blackshirts toppling statues and setting up a zone of control in the middle of a major U.S. city, you'd think that even someone as off-putting as Trump could build a lead... But guess what?

   I suppose the good news is: Trump sucks too... So his losing to the proto-totalitarian faction is...possibly less bad, comparatively speaking, than it has any right to be. Maybe? Maybe you can call that comforting.

   We just had some hysteria at my institution over a few bits of the place with naughty, unPC monikers. Every department issued its own anguished, fantastical, falsehood-laden profession of faith in the BLM gospel of race. Apparently in a university filled with Ph.D.s, nobody bothered to take thirty seconds to check the numbers at the BJS... I've yet to find a single person who had any idea what those numbers actually look like. 

   Eventually, people in my own department issued their own statement (sans the names of a handful of departmental Neanderthals such as yours truly), to at least some extent so that they wouldn't be seen as not being onboard with "antiracism." Like all the others, it was about how the U.S. is saturated in "systemic racism," and we're all guilty, and we've made no progress on race...it didn't quite say that the entire university had to be given over to "social justice" bullshit...but it didn't quite not say that, either. 

   Before the ink was dry, we got an email on a massive white guilt workshop to which all faculty are "invited"--for now these things are at least nominally voluntary. Right up front we are informed that documents will be available that can be handed over to ones department chair in order to certify participation so that this can count towards one's annual evaluation... 

   It's very difficult to watch the voluntary destruction-from-within of the only human institution allegedly given over entirely to the life of the mind and the pursuit of truth. But here we are. The social justice cult and the power of white guilt has--at least it now seems--turned out to be too strong. 

   Well, scratch that. It's impermissible to fall into despair. Resist the black pill! Despair virtually guarantees failure. A new dark age does threaten...but, on some ways of dividing things up, it's the dark ages that produced universities in the first place... Things have been worse. Just keep fighting. There's no alternative.