Category: Culture

are fleeing the Lefty hell-hole that is NYC and moving to Texas.

Burdened by high taxes, stifling regulations, rampant crime and homelessness, failing schools and an atmosphere that hampers the entrepreneurial American spirit, New Yorkers are flocking south for a friendlier and more vibrant alternative. 

Yes, there IS a natural sorting that takes place–birds of a feather tend to flock together and all that. When groups hit a certain point, they just can no longer live together. The bible scholar/historian Hugh Nibley called it “The Rechabite Principle.”

Nibley characterized the sons of Rechab as “typical of the back-to-the-wilderness movements among the Jews in every age…” 

Nibley argued that Jonadab ben Rekhab and his followers had gone out into the desert “to recapture the spirit of [the ideal Israelite] time,” recalling the years when Israel, having been delivered out of Egypt, was led through the wilderness by God’s hovering cloud by day and by his pillar of fire at night

(See: Jeremiah 35) The point is that historically there have been groups to separate themselves from others who have antithetical belief sets. Mild disagreements are pretty easily dealt with, but those “gaps” in beliefs tend to widen and widen (and it only takes one side to move), until the two groups can no longer tolerate living together.

And we also see this exact same thing on a personal level–people who were once friends find that their beliefs become more and more disparate until the point comes where at least one party simply refuses to be friends any longer.

It is predictable. Sad, but predictable.

never been less proud of having done a post-doc at Harvard. I mean, it was always a bit of a cesspool, though I had some truly outstanding (and deservedly famous) mentors there. And my situation was far different than an undergrad or even graduate student there. It was a very good thing for me. Still…

hope.

But this aircraft carrier of institutional bigotry is not going to turn on a dime. The bigots in academia are NOT suddenly going to lose their jobs and they WILL hire fellow bigots–who will stay there 30 years or more.

So yes, change is possible. But it will be incremental and FAR slower than we’d like. Conservatives, as a group, have long since left academia, and it will take a good deal of time to get them back.

young people so frightened?

In a word, Leftism.

Hear me out: American cultural Leftism is ALL about litigation-inspired nanny state-ism. Don’t put this bread sack over your head–it is not a toy. Gee, it’s a good thing there is this warning–I thought it was a toy and putting it over my head might be a really fun thing…

See, a consequence of focusing with such hyper-vigilance on safety is that it renders ALL life dangerous. Don’t build a ramp and jump your bike on it.

And when I feel that ALL life is extremely dangerous, I might well feel chronically anxious. And that anxiety has grown explosively among our kids over the last 30 years or so. No surprise, there.

So you never play “Red Rover” (when we played it one time a friend’s little sister got her arm broken). You never play Smear The Queer (for obvious reasons). You certainly never build ramps and jump bikes over them.

And you never (speaking from experience) steal gunpowder from your dad’s reloading setup and make pipe bombs (yeah, that is just dangerous and MY parents would have had a freakin’ fit had they known).

As a teen, you never see if you can hit the railroad elevation fast enough that you get “air.” You never throw an old mannequin off a very tall bridge where all the traffic can see a “body” falling off the bridge!

I’m NOT endorsing doing stupid and dangerous things. Please, don’t misunderstand. I’m saying that if I had never “spun cookies” in snowy parking lots as a teen, slick roads would now panic me a lot more.

We need to understand that there is a trade-off here. We want our loved ones to be safe and sound. But going hard the other direction also poses some risks–which often fly “under the radar.”