Premises Based On Truth

Having noticed that not everyone thinks as she does, a disconsolate Mary Grabar goes in search of an explanation, and finds it in the very first place she looks:

Were it not for the “Destructive Generation” instantiating themselves in our schools, the election of Barack Obama would not have been possible. Had we had a generation who understood history, we would have had voters who understood the vacuity of his rhetoric and the implications of “spreading the wealth"....

We would have seen how his teaching a course on “critical race theory” would naturally lead to a nomination of a Supreme Court justice who sees herself as a “wise Latina woman” who can “empathize.”

We also would've realized that Obama's...uh...background makes him more likely to show favoritism to his own kind (politically speaking, of course), and had the good sense to elect someone objective, like for instance a white man.

This isn't a racial issue, you understand. It's just that certain cultures aren't quite as far along the road to civilization as they ought to be, objectively speaking, and therefore can't be trusted to play fair.

For her next trick, Grabar tries her hand at the Goldberg Method, by weaving loose threads of historical data into a web of weak analogical inference: Russian peasants received little or no education, and overthrew their democratically elected Tsar. American college students received the wrong kind of education, and installed Barry Obama as dictator for life, in an orgy of mob violence.

What's the missing link? Communism, natch.

With help from the Soviet Union, they fomented hatred of the United States and then successfully groomed a generation to colonize the schools....Employing the old Soviet strategy of “boring from within,” they focused on “an overlooked seat of influence”: the university. Divested of their history, literacy, and ability to reason, their students became the mob that elected Barack Obama.

One of this mob's most frightening weapons is critical pedagogy, which dares to look the gift horse of "Western culture" in the mouth.

The “dominant culture”...is the Western one. It relies on standards of truth, objectivity, and fairness. It uses the syllogism, where a premise based on truth leads logically to a conclusion. Our “dominant culture” also emphasizes fairness, such as notions that people of a certain race are not inherently wiser or that those who demonstrate merit should be rewarded.

Syllogism is a pretty weak foundation for pretensions of this sort, as Grabar might realize if she were a bit more familiar with the Western culture she claims to worship. If you do seriously propose to base a civilization on it, you can't really be surprised when the definition of "premises based on truth" becomes a matter for debate. Nor can you be surprised when people wonder whether a culture that hails itself as uniquely fair, objective, and truthful might be mired in a certain amount of self-contradiction.

What makes matters worse is that the premises here are actually Graber's own prejudices, which she's universalized so that she can portray anyone who challenges her self-satisfied assessment of her own tribal entitlements as an Enemy of Cosmic Order and the Illustrious Dead. Just as Fred Phelps conveniently worships a God whose every waking moment is consumed with thoughts of throbbing, pounding, triple-X buttsecks, Grabar seems to have invented a version of Western culture in which skepticism toward authoritarian claims is a betrayal of reason and logic. Which makes me wonder how she thinks the United States got here in the first place.

For someone who loves truth, revels in fairness, and counsels logical thought, Grabar is unusually prone to mythomania, sour grapes, and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy:

Conservatives who have seen through these techniques but simply dismiss these kooky professors do so at their peril. They may be protecting their own children through homeschooling and private education, but they are reaping the products in the voting mobs that elected Barack Obama.

"Voting mobs," you betcha. Behold the wisdom and judiciousness of Western culture, as it articulates its eternal truths through the organs of its humble servant Mary Grabar. It's really too bad that when you reduce her argument to its essentials, it doesn't carry much more epistemic weight than screaming "shut up!" until your face goes purple.

It occurs to me that maybe's there's some commonality between Grabar's displeasure at the overthrow of the Tsar, and her outrage at the mere concept of questioning her paint-by-numbers idea of cultural authority, and her indignation at being challenged by her students, and her description of American voters who refuse to do her bidding as "zombies" and "mobs." Perhaps what we're hearing here is the banshee wail of a frustrated authoritarian, whose idea of noblesse oblige is to reward submission by calling it "individual choice" and "independent thinking."

Even when she shuts off the lights, holds a flashlight under her chin, and starts moaning about "death panels," one feels pretty certain that it's not the idea of imperious death-dealing power that troubles her, so much as the fact that this shiny bauble might wind up in someone else's playpen.

In conclusion:

The visions of modern-day brown-shirted civilian troops have predictably been dismissed as evidence of overworked imaginations of right-wing extremists.

Visions have "predictably" been dismissed as imaginary, eh? Shocking. Ought not to be allowed.

But what do you expect, in a country where a communist like Bill Ayers can divest students of their history, literacy, and ability to reason, until they're just as ignorant as the Russian peasants who deposed the Tsar, and then compel them to form voting mobs in order to elect a communist president who promises us free cars so that we'll submit to death panels staffed by white-coated communist Nazis who'll pursue "social justice" by means of a new Holocaust that we can't possibly afford without raising taxes, instead of leaving healthcare decisions to the wisdom of a market comprising millions of illogical zombies whose brains have been ruined by four decades of critical pedagogy?

It's a wonder things aren't worse, considering.