September 05, 2013

Paula Deen

Paula Deen

Here is David Gelernter’s classic take on Virginia Military Institute being forced by the US Supreme Court in 1996 to admit women:

The elite hated VMI, and no doubt VMI hated the elite”€”another even match-up, except that, when it occurred to the elite one afternoon on the way to the water cooler that VMI’s way of life ought to be wiped out (just a casual notion, inasmuch as the likes of VMI hardly matter to the elite one way or the other), it was duly wiped out. The old VMI was crushed like a beer can under a tank tread and the Institute is now, needless to say, co-ed.

(From How the Intellectuals Took Over, 1997.)

Gelernter was not the first to notice the casual, ruthless arrogance with which the elites impose their will on the rest of us, but the process has rarely been described so well.

“€œLiberalism is not just wrongheaded; it is malicious.”€

With the passing of sixteen years, the arrogance has only become more gross, shameless, and cruel. I thought I had the measure of our overclass, but I was shocked at the heartlessness with which Paula Deen was treated. As I opined on Radio Derb:

The nastiest thing of all, I thought, was her publisher’s canceling Ms. Deen’s forthcoming book, which was already selling well by pre-order, and would surely have made them a bundle of money. Making a profit by doing mean things to people is all too common in the world, God knows, and nothing to be surprised about; but FORGOING a profit so that you can be mean to a silly but harmless old woman is something close to pathological.

Liberalism is not just wrongheaded; it is malicious. And it never quits until its target has surrendered unconditionally to overclass norms. You thought they’d finished tossing and goring the Boy Scouts of America? Think again:

SB 323 is designed to target nonprofit groups, particularly the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), who “have a long history of out-of-line discriminatory practices against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth here in our community.”

Europe is of course the overclass ideal. In Germany, a swarm of state agents converged on a home last Thursday and abducted four children to prevent their being homeschooled. Coming soon to an American household near you.

It is liberals’ fondest belief that they have replaced a heartless, brutalizing old order with a gentle, compassionate new one, free of all the evils inherent in such outdated institutions as single-sex military academies, scouting clubs that exclude pederasts, and the nuclear family.

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