Barry Rubin US US politics

BARRY RUBIN: AMERICA IS ONE BIG RADICAL CHIC PARTY………

 

Scarry thing is, most Americans are totally ignorant about what’s been launched upon their society. They know to rebel against high gas prices and Obama-care, but most are still clueless about the nature of the beast set upon them intent on subverting their society and stealing the rest of their liberty.

From Satire to Horror Reality Show: Radical Chic Conquers America

In a recent article, Bruce Bawer reminds us of Tom Wolfe’s famous 1970 article ridiculing the Park Avenue penthouse party of Leonard Bernstein, where various stars from stage, screen, and television came together to celebrate the Black Panther Party.

Bawer compares that party to a recent meeting at the Jewish Community Center in New York to combat “Islamophobia” in a way that whitewashed the real threat posed by revolutionary Islamism. In each case, well-to-do people thinking of themselves as highly virtuous and showing their “love” for freedom and tolerance are being manipulated by a political movement that would destroy them, as well as the United States more generally.

Bawer’s piece is excellent. But on reading it I realized that he was thinking too small. The true contemporary parallel to the Bernstein party is not to some event of a few hundred people on Manhattan’s West Side. It is to all of America.

At the 1970 party, the Panthers’ representatives complained that they were being stigmatized as criminals when, as Bawer summarized it, they were really ”a peaceable group whose real concerns were indicated by the clinics and children’s breakfast programs.”

You know, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Panthers’ speaker continued:

“We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world. The pigs have the weapons and they are ready to use them on the people…ready to commit genocide against those who stand up against them…..All we want is the good life, the same as you. To live in peace and lead the good life, that’s all we want.”

The individuals present then gave big contributions to a racist, antisemitic, violent, anti-democratic revolutionary movement.

Fast-forward to today. Bawer describes, basing himself on an eyewitness account by Phyllis Chesler, the Islamophobia event chaired by instant network television personality Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the current secretary of state and the previous president. The audience is, like their Bernstein predecessors, made up of “upper class” New Yorkers engaged in “narcissism and self-congratulation, shameless social climbing…and a truly repellant condescension toward the purported prejudices (read: legitimate concerns) of the lower orders.”

He concludes by pointing out that the Bernstein party was ridiculed by the media of the time while no major newspaper would dare do the same to its contemporary successors.

All of this is valid. And yet there is something far bigger, far more important. It cannot be called the elephant in the room but rather the brontosaurus in the room:

Contemporary America is one big radical chic party.

More here.

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