This is why Trump--if he can keep it between the ditches--may well go down in history as the most consequential President since Reagan. Reagan, who I did almost nothing but ridicule in my dopey youth, was instrumental in ending the USSR, then the world's foremost force for leftist totalitarianism. (To be fair to myself, I was never a defender of communism, the USSR, nor the CCP, and I did eventually give Reagan the credit he deserved for ending Soviet communism.)
Trump is now facing down what is plausibly the greatest threat to America and the West since that time--the woke leftist insanity that has taken over our institutions from within.
Continetti references this piece from The Washington Examiner, which is also worth a read:
Way back in 1989, John O’Sullivan, the former Thatcher aide and National Review editor, coined what’s known as O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” (This is sometimes confused with an overlapping law formulated by the late Robert Conquest: “The behavior of any organization can best be predicted on the assumption that it is headed by a secret cabal of its enemies.”) Alas, there’s a great deal of truth to this observation about ideological entropy. So much so, that we would like to add a corollary we’ll call The Scrapbook’s First Law of Media: “All publications that are not actually right-wing will over time become Salon.”
Remember Salon? It emerged in the 1990s as one of the first big cultural and political outlets on the Internet. It was by no means a conservative publication, but it was aimed at the general-interest reader, and it published a fair number of interesting pieces that weren’t wholly off-putting to half the country. Then sometime over the course of the next decade it became a wasteland for the left’s unrestrained id, featuring headlines such as “White Men Must Be Stopped” and stories on which video games are the most appropriate for vegans.
However, Salon was novel enough that it never had much of an established identity from which to deviate. What’s more horrifying is to see Internet publishing imperatives drag down more venerable publications. A case in point is the Atlantic, which in its storied heydays published everyone from Mark Twain to Martin Luther King Jr.
Those days are long gone, and worse ones are at hand to judge by the Atlantic‘s recent bit of analysis of a new Defense Department honor, which was a quantum leap more depressing than the usual milquetoast liberal political analysis and hipster trend pieces. “The New Anti-ISIS Medal: A Bit Too Crusadery?” asks the magazine. In a nutshell: The military has announced it’s handing out a new medal for soldiers involved in ongoing efforts to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The medal depicts a hand holding a sword—fairly standard military imagery.
Coupla things there: I've confused this O'Sullivan point with Conquest's point...like everybody else.
More importantly: this wild, half-assed, ridiculous "reading" (as they like to say) of the anti-ISIS medal could almost be a paradigm of the Continental-philosophy/PoMo/lefty method: loosey-goosey interpretive yarn-spinning that aims from the get-go at promoting leftist bullshit. The method of inverse criticism: the conclusion is fixed from the beginning, and the free-associative/"interpretive" method is so amorphous and protean that a dedicated leftist can get from virtually any evidence to virtually any conclusion. It's not merely that they've abandoned rigor, but that they've explicitly adopted, encouraged, and enforced bullshit methods of pseudo-reasoning. This is the intellectual core of the postpostmodern progressive left.
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