A rare case where Victor Davis Hanson is wrong!

Did you read the latest from Victor Davis Hanson the superb commentator?  He states that "The NFL is on the Brink."

"Racial issues are often virtue-signaled in the NFL — but almost never in an honest way. New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees recently objected to players not honoring the flag. But he quickly caved when a media mob damned him. In contrast, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson posted a series of anti-Semitic tweets last week, even falsely attributing a quote to Adolf Hitler. That disconnect posed a bizarre question for the NFL: Is it worse for a player to be pro–American flag or anti-Semitic?

NFL owners and head coaches are almost all white. But nearly three-quarters of the players are black. Those who play the game obviously want to see more diversity in coaching and ownership.

In a culture so obsessed with identity politics, is it the players or the owners and coaches (or both) who do not “look like America”?

Given that about 13 percent of the U.S. population is black, and given that the Black Lives Matter movement embraces concepts such as proportional representation, today’s NFL teams hardly qualify as diverse. Social activists might argue that the league should mentor and recruit more Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans to better reflect their percentages of our diverse national population.

Perhaps an NFL compromise could ensure that 30 percent of coaches and owners are nonwhite, thus reflecting current U.S. demography. But then, in reciprocity, the players would match such mandatory demographic diversity — leading to Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, whites, and those of mixed ancestry accounting for 87 percent of the player population. The NBA might also take note.'

I think that the estimable Dr. Hanson is incorrect. The NFL has Thelma and Lousied it over the cliff. They are long past the point of no return. They are not just Anti-American they are Anti-white. They have spit in the face of the majority of their fans. The league is full of felons and criminals who are indulged because of their animal athletic ability. The top New York Giant player was just arrested for armed robbery. Domestic violence is on the rap sheets of half of the league. Instead of weeding out the criminals the leauge endorses and encoruages them. 

I have given up on them long ago when the kneeling started. More and more Americans are waking up to their bias and hatred of us the majority of their fans. The momentum of what had gone before might carry on for a while still. But many of their former fans will no longer bring their kids into the realm of fandom.

This has happened before. At one time boxing, baseball and horse racing were the three biggest sports in America. When boxing became a black sport followed by a white fandom it declined a great deal and only certain spectacular champions brought a modicum of popularity. Now it is as dead as Murphy's dick. They make some money here and there but nothing like it used to be. This is footballs future.

Victor Davis Hanson is wrong. Football has already fallen into the abyss.

Woof, woof, woof! Two

Victor Davis Hanson also spoke about another subject dear to my heart. The failure of academia and the fact that we should stop pouring money down the rathole that is public education. Especially the university system that has become a cesspool.

Hanson speaks about it as follows:

College.

"The university will either change soon or simply implode; its present course is unsustainable and rests on the premise that schizophrenic deans and presidents can still manage to write and say things to student cry bullies that they hope their donors and alumni never read or hear.

Colleges overcharge insolvent students through tuition increases far beyond the annual rate of inflation—the Ponzi scheme predicated on guaranteed federal loans that cannot be repaid by poorly educated graduates and drop-outs, many with little skills or demonstrable education. Obama has already promised relief to the disabled student debtor: expect that more amnesties will follow, probably predicated on the basis of race, class, and gender. In the meantime, the number of disabled indebted students will mysteriously soar.

In response, the university freely imposes speech codes, allows racial segregation, and winks at censorship of texts. It has suspended due process in cases of allegations of sexual assault, and allows 1930s-like violence (reminiscent of the Brownshirts) to disrupt public lectures and assemblies—if the agendas of the protestors profess social awareness. Only the hard sciences and professional schools in engineering, mathematics, and medicine have for the moment partially escaped the ruin.

Online colleges are far cheaper and more concerned with offering skill sets for cash. Their spread has so far been checked by the lack of general education enrichment, by the mythical college experience of physically living in or walking about a beautiful campus, and by the lack of prestige accorded a for-profit, online diploma. But if the traditional American college has largely given up on liberal education (due to its deductive and politicized mandatory –studies courses), if being on a campus can equate to an unpleasant ordeal of thought policing and mob rule, and if a diploma from a major university does not suggest that one knows anything about history, literature, science, or basic facts concerning our civilization, why would the university need to continue? Cui bono?

It runs now partly on past momentum, and partly because taxpayers and alumni donors still subsidize it. If a majority were to feel that their money only empowers fascism among faculty and administration, and if they were to conclude that students are not sympathetic in their indebtedness, but rather increasingly arrogant and ignorant in their passive aggressions, then they might well simply pull the plug on what is becoming their Frankenstein monster."

Well put. Online degrees will replace the bogus university experience and many hack professors will lose their rice bowl. It couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of scumbags. 

Woof, woof, woof!

Sleeping Dogs are Waking.

So says Victor  Davis Hanson the noted writer David on military and foreign affair on Instapundit.

He notes how the cumulative effect of the Obama administration and the deterioration of our cultural norms has lead very dangerous ground. Something I have thought for some time. He talks about the effect on Colleges, Race and the Economy. But I find his most interesting thoughts are about tribalism.

"A multiracial, single-cultural U.S. was an historical fluke. No other society has ever quite pulled that feat off—not Austria-Hungary, not Rwanda, not Iraq, not Yugoslavia. To ensure multiracial harmony, cultural unity (or what is now dismissively written off as the "melting pot") was essential.

Yet the Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?

Coupled with years of open borders, a failure to enforce immigration laws, hostility to integration and assimilation, and racial preferences in hiring and admissions, the Obama administration in just over seven years has nearly achieved its aims of racializing the American experience to such a degree that everyone must now belong to his particular tribe first, and begrudgingly remain an American a distant second.

An example of our future is found in Rome around the early 5th century AD onward, when parochialism and localism reasserted themselves, as Civis Romanus sum was rendered irrelevant. I fear that self-segregation is already institutionalized, as people migrate to live with like kind in red and blue states. And states such as California have divided into two antithetical societies, in which an interior Fresno is about as akin to coastal Newport or Palo Alto as Somalia is to Switzerland.

This is not going to end well, largely because the remedy—melting-pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage—simply would threaten far too many lucrative careers ranging from those of an Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter to La Raza and Jorge Ramos. When a person pledges his career and future to the color of his skin or tribe, he will fight tooth and nail for that crutch, given that his greatest fear is to be judged on the content of his character. Tribal identification is historically the last refuge for scoundrels."

I think he is exactly right. In fact he explains the essential appeal and continuing popularity of Donald Trump. That is what the pajama boys at NRO don't get and never will. 

Liberalism in Ruins

Vicror Davis Hanson lays the smackdown and hard. 

Survey the wreckage. 

The hope-and change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from "leading from behind" to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of war against ISIS.

Wow. Excellent survey but a bit short. That is all international while Obama's focus is on domestic policies. His aim to fundamentally transform America. How has he done?

Hanson continues, there are two saving graces to his misadventures abroad. 1) Each ensuing disaster diverted attention from the prior calamity, also true of domestic scandals. 2) Unable to stop oil and gas energy exploration on private land as he has stopped it on public lands Obama can take unearned credit for gas and oil renaissance that turns out a boon for American global leverage despite his efforts to thwart it. If Obama is lucky he will be able to avoid minor confrontations while ensuring catastrophic confrontations for his successors.

Although immigration is praised by those who benefit from it directly. The vast majority of Americans know when federal law is ignored then chaos follows. The burden of granting federal exemption to millions of foreign nationals who never followed U.S. law for entry falls to the middle class taxpayer and entry level workers.

The planet did not heat up, the ice caps did not melt away, global warming morphed to climate change, this after insisting weather is not climate, so now that climate change caused everything, it caused nothing. So what was it? A late 20th century critique of global-market capitalism by elites who have done so well by it, a secular religion filling a deep psychological yearning for a secular religion held by western big shots with no effect on the lifestyles of its priests.

Ferguson is the result of identity politics, salad bowl instead of melting pot, trillions of dollars spent over last fifty years into Great Society dependencies. We are left with the movement's slogans, "Hands up, don't shoot" now added to "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," and "If I had a son, he'd look like Travon."  Ferguson shows the problems of present day liberalism: the anti-empirical insistence that facts of the shooting do not matter, critical legal theory ignoring time-honored role of disinterested grand jury, tolerance of illegality as acceptable protest against a system, and media's hyping while understanding the violence is remote from their own neighborhoods, schools and businesses.

Hanson avers the truth is Obama has always trafficked in racial divisiveness. From his candid memoir admissions, dutiful discipleship of racist Reverand Wright, to "typical white person," the clingers speech, "punish your enemies, Skip Gates, Travon Martin, and Michael Brown cases. Hanson describes his contortions as brilliant, the current canard that losing 6% of the black vote is proof of diversity while wining 40% of the white vote is sign of new racism.

Obamacare was, in the end, little more than a clumsy effort to take over the health-care system by redistributing resources from the supposedly too-well-off to the more noble less-well-off, with billions of dollars siphoned off to expand government bureaucracies and enrich crony capitalists  

The point of the program was not to provide coverage to millions of uninsured Americans — that could have been done far more cheaply through existing programs — but to create a vast new federal bureaucracy to redistribute health-care resources. 

My own healthcare is socialized and I have benefitted from it tremendously. It saved my life repeatedly. I am not exaggerating. I still value it. But that is socialized at the district level, not the federal level. And it is not even all citizens within a district, rather, all people working for an organization within the district. Important because closer, it is far more responsive. Example: our prescription drug provider was sold to a new outfit. They treated us as if we all landed from Mars, and they were all just born yesterday. Cost savings by the new company reduced customer service dramatically. I called and I wrote our head office. My voice was added to other voices and within the next year the provider was changed. That will not be possible under a federal system.

Hansen believes most importantly Obama has failed to deliver on his most extravagant promises to end crony capitalism, the revolving door, lobbyists in government, and corruption. Instead, Obama will be remembered as presiding over the most corrupt administration in the last half century.

How conservative.

Historians will aggregate the scandals of IRS, VA, GSA, Secret Service, erosion of constitutional fidelity, serial falsehoods about Benghazi, amnesty, and Obamacare, harassment of journalists, Wall Street shakedown in 2008 and 2012, flood of lobbyists in and out of Obama's administration. And then there is Eric Holder spouting inflammatory racist rhetoric, politicizing Justice Department, selectively enforcing the law and being held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents.

The damage, as summarized by military historian, classics professor, scholar of ancient warfare, Victor Davis Hanson, is that six years after the summer of hope and change nobody in the Democratic party is bragging about American foreign policy, nor pushing for cap-and-trade, nor praising Obamacare, nor the way amnesty is handled, nor pointing to a cleaner more transparent bureaucracy. What started out hopefully ends with a president who habitually misleads, leaves an array of scandals and a discredited media, and policies that do not work, and by all historic models never could have worked.

Proof: Observe Democrats regroup for 2016. They will ignore or deny most of what Obama has done.

This is summary. Victor Hanson says all this and more so much more eloquently on National Review Online.