RUSH: We’re not quite through with the gun control aspect of this, because that’s the big area, number one, where the left has finally decided they don’t have to lie anymore and they don’t have to pretend. They’ve been saying for years: We don’t want to confiscate every gun. We just want life to be safer in America. We want get rid of the assault rifles. We wanted to get rid of the semiautomatics. We want to get rid of the killing machines. We love our children.
Well, that’s never been the case. Not that they don’t love their children. What’s never been the case is that they only have a few things they want to do. They want total confiscation of every weapon in this country. And if it takes them 20 years, fine and dandy. They don’t put four-year time limits, something the Soviets and communists taught them very well. The Soviet Union never had a time limit on things like we do.
We have four-year administrations. If the president doesn’t get something done in four years or a second term, eight years, that’s considered, “It’s over. Somebody else has to start again.” In totalitarian countries, dictatorships, there’s no such thing as a time limit. You just get it done when you got it done. You have an objective and you work towards it, period. You don’t get derailed, and you don’t get stopped, and you don’t stop yourself. And people on our side just don’t believe anybody could have that kind of commitment and intensity. But these people have had it trained and educated, burned into them.
But I ran across a piece today that I want to share some excerpts with you from. This is Bruce Thornton, Shillman Journalism Fellow, David Horowitz Freedom Center. This is from FrontPageMag.com. “Teenagers Make Great Progressive Shock Troops.”
I just want to read a few excerpted paragraphs here, because you know what this piece is? This piece is one of those I wish I would have written. It contains elements, details, explanations for why things have been happening by certain people on the left for all these years, what the objective is, how they’ve gone about it and so forth. It’s really enlightening. And it deals with, how did we go off the rails?
It wasn’t that long ago that there were virtues and that there were tenets, there were time-honored traditions, institutions, and philosophies that everybody followed because they were time-honored and believed in, and they worked. And they were all oriented around virtue and morality, doing the right thing, overcoming obstacles, learning how to deal with adversity, not whining, not moaning, not complaining, not becoming a victim. When did all this change? Bruce Thornton here tackles it. So I JIPped this. I join it in progress.
“Once upon a time, experience in a hard, indifferent world, the virtues like self-reliance and impulse-control nourished by faith and tradition, and an education based on mental skills and the lessons of history taught the young that their feelings and ‘self-esteem’ don’t amount to a hill of beans in this flawed world.”
Once upon a time experience mattered, virtue, self-reliance, impulse control nourished by faith and tradition and an education system that taught people how to think, taught the lessons of history, taught young people that feelings were no substitute for knowledge and experience.
“Once upon a time people learned that good deeds are more important than fine words, that acting on their impulses and seeking instant gratification carry a high price, and that duty and obligation and responsibility to others in the end are the foundations of our political and social order.
“Starting in the postwar fifties, increasing wealth, more time spent in school rather than factories and fields, consumer capitalism’s promotion of impulse-buying, and a culture of materialism that defines the self through fashion, consumption, and popular culture rather than through education, challenges, and character — all exacerbated the flaws of youth that the larger culture once tried to correct, but now indulged.”
So he’s saying that the descent into current pop culture can be traced back to the economic boom of the postwar fifties. He’s not blaming economic booms. He’s not blaming a good economy. What he says is that with the increased wealth per capita, family income, more time spent in school rather than in factories and fields, so more professional training rather than vocational, consumer advertising promoting impulse buying and a culture of materialism as a definition of yourself. And of course yourself is defined by fashion, consumption, pop culture. That’s when it all began.
“Movies, music, and soon the therapeutic curricula of schools reinforced and glorified these flaws rather than disciplining and correcting them. The ‘human sciences’ replaced the doctrines of faith and wisdom of tradition in explaining human nature and its proper aims. The last three generations have been marinated in these social and cultural dysfunctions –” So he’s talking about anywhere from 60 to 75 years. So the last 60 to 75 years people have marinated, kids have “marinated in these social and cultural dysfunctions that have resulted in a sense of entitlement and outlandish expectations. Adolescence has been extended far beyond the traditional beginning of adulthood.”
That means parents are perfectly fine with their kids not growing up. Parents are perfectly fine with their kids remaining kids. I have a story in the Stack today, 75% of Millennials, mom and dad are still paying most of the bills, even after they’ve left the house. Because their parents say, “It’s so hard out there.” Good Lord. But, anyway, Mr. Thornton here is exactly right. Adolescence has been extended far beyond the traditional beginning of adulthood. What would you say that is, 21? Graduating from college, you’re an adult, you strike out on your own.
Anyway, it’s a great point here that parents have willingly accepted that their adult kids are still their kids, they’re still adolescents. This has been “increasingly shaped by a leftist political ideology that rationalizes and exculpates bad character and destructive choices as the fault of a corrupt political, economic, and social system. But the old-left call for the violent overthrow of such an evil establishment is now merely a rhetorical flourish. Symbolic politics like marches and demonstrations that occasionally stray into vandalism and petty thuggery are preferred, for they are relatively risk-free, and draw the attention of sympathetic media and like-minded adults who praise the youngsters’ ‘passion’ and ‘commitment’ to ‘change’ and a ‘better world.'”
“Take David [‘Camera’] Hogg, who was present during the attack last month on the high school in Parkland. The 17-year-old appears with four other Stoneman Douglas students on the cover of Time [magazine], and has become a darling of the anti-gun crowd for his profanity-laced tantrums that demonstrate perfectly the portrait sketched above…” Adolescents not being reined in. Profane language and behavior being applauded.
Isn’t he cute? Don’t we want to reward his passion and commitment? You know, I ask people who have kids, “Would you let your kid be doin’ this? Would you let your kid go on national TV at a march and make YouTube videos, and every other word be the F-bomb?” “No way! No way!” See, every parent that I ask… Where are this kid’s parents? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know if they’re applauding. I don’t know if they’re troubled by it.
He’s out there calling the people that he’s upset with “‘The pathetic f—ers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs,’ [Hogg] said of the NRA and” people like Marco Rubio. “Notice how this…” I’m reading now Mr. Thornton. “Notice how this callow youth simply regurgitates the stale clichés of the gun-control fundamentalists. [This kid] obviously has no clue that the NRA has political clout not because of the pittance it gives politicians compared to, say, public-employee unions…”
No! “[T]he NRA has political clout … because millions” and millions and millions of Americans support it to defend a constitutional right they cherish. “Nor does [this kid] realize that a young person dying in a mass school shooting by a psychopath with a rifle is a rare occurrence, compared to dying in a car accident, or being beaten to death, or being killed by a motorist while walking or biking to school. He has no clue that the demonized, perfectly legal AR-15 was already banned from 1994-2004, without lowering gun-deaths…
“Like his equally addled elders, he can’t fathom that more regulations of guns do nothing to keep them out of the hands of” bad guys. In other words, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about — and it was that long ago where people that didn’t know what they were talking about were not given pedestals, and were not proclaimed experts, and the rest of the country was not required to agree and shut up. The rest of the country was not required to applaud and say, “Isn’t that cute!”
And the rest of the country was not prohibited from calling out that whoever didn’t know what they were talking about. But all of that’s changed. We can’t criticize it! We have to respect it. We have to applaud it for reasons that have nothing to do with fact, reasons that have nothing to do with truth. “This same juvenile thinking characterizes another high-school teen, this one interviewed by The Wall Street Journal:
“‘I make it a point to tell my mother I love her every day, because I want that to be the last thing I say to her in case anything happens to me at school,’ [the student] said, adding that gun violence ‘is something I don’t want to have to think about on a daily basis.’ While the young [student] is obsessing over the rare deaths from school shootings, 11 teens die every day from texting while driving. But we see no mass-movement to hold cell-phone manufacturers, and their billions spent in lobbying po[itician]s, responsible for the carnage their products cause.”
And likewise my old standby: We don’t see anybody protesting the automobile companies because the number of people killed every year by the wheel dwarfs the number of students shot in school. “Throw in drug overdoses and drunk-drivers, and kids and their parents have much more likely risks to worry about when a child leaves for school.” He’s the thing: “But we can’t blame the young. The progressive transformation of our culture has been directed at creating just such students, whose natural inclinations to self-drama and emotion rather than thinking make them perfect constituents for an ideology that flourishes among those who obsess over their feelings, and who demand the elimination of the sad constants of risk and suffering.
“The tragic wisdom that flawed humans are free to choose wickedness, and that the utopia of a world without risk or suffering is impossible, contradicts the pipe dreams of the left,” and all they are teaching. “So those who believe traditional wisdom must be trained from an early age to [give up] their freedom and autonomy to the technocratic elite that needs them to remain children.” So his point is that those kids are who they are because somebody has a design that it stay that way, that they become useful, that they become trained not to think but rather as sponges.
And they grow up to be exactly who they are as 17-year-olds, and they never change.
And they end up being incapable of self-reliance, incapable of thinking for themselves, incapable of being moved by facts.
They remain intolerant. So his point is: You can’t blame the kids. This is how they’re being raised. It’s how they’re being educated. It’s how they’re being taught. But at the same time, there are millions and millions of kids who somehow have managed to avoid this progressive inculcation. They join the military. They work for charities. They march for the right to life of the unborn. You just don’t know hear nearly as much about them, but they’re there, and they’re in much greater numbers than the students on Saturday. And that crowd, again, is estimated to be 10% kids.