"Whenever I go into a restaurant, I order both a chicken and an egg to see which comes first"

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Cancelled Again - The Perils Of A Conservative In La-La Land

A lot is happening in Los Angeles these days.  Rioters have taken over downtown and are running amok.  Progressives call it 'peaceful demonstration' in the kind of Hollywood transformation of reality that Americans are used to; and as another truth of received wisdom goes, If you repeat a fantasy enough times, it will be believed', an ironic twist of another American nostrum, You can fool most of the people most of the time'. 

 

So, irony piled on irony, one confabulation tossed upon another, and the riots become demonstrations of love, harmony, inclusion, and civil rights. Amazing how belief-driven perspective changes reality. 

Studies have been done on this.  Four eyewitnesses who have observed a drive-by shooting do not agree on the perp, the vehicle, or the venue.  Those who believed that most shootings are committed by black males saw two of them in the car, one driving, the other firing his Uzi into the crowd.  The liberal, convinced that the black man had been tarred and feathered, and was actually a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, said that the shooter was white.  The two other witnesses, again persuaded by their preconceptions either thought the car was a tricked out, ghetto pimpmobile, or a good ol' boy pickup. 

Lawrence Durrell, Robert Browning, and the Japanese film maker Kurosawa all described this very human trait of a priori judgment.  It's not what you see, but what you think you see. 

This particular human characteristic comes to political conclusions.  Belief tends to shut out logical inquiry, analysis, exegesis, and decision.  No matter what argument is presented, it can only be looked at through a pre-adjusted lens with appropriate filters.  What a progressive hears when listening to the most cogent, relevant, and appropriate thesis about social justice, wealth, the environment, or polity, can only be vile, humorless, inconscient screed, 

For the true, progressive believer whose principles, ethos, and social balance have been set in stone years earlier, a conservative argument cannot possibly be reviewed objectively.  As a matter of fact, giving ground to a conservative by paying attention to what he says is, ipso facto, a dereliction of duty if not apostasy. 

And so it was that MacArthur Bolding, a conservative writer with an intellectual and popular following, came under the gun - yet again - when he published a series of posts on the events in Los Angeles.

Identity politics and DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusiveness) are at the very core of the current unrest.  Under this supposition everyone but white Americans, no matter who they are or how they came to America, take precedence.  To vet, scrutinize, sort, and triage is tantamount to racism.  Brown and black people, because of their history of oppression, poverty, and discrimination have, ipso facto, the right to special protection and reserved status.  

They do not have to hew to the same rules and regulations as whites because it is whites who are the perpetrators of racism and who have created a country of 'systemic racism' from which black and brown people cannot escape.  

 

'Racist', wrote one former operative in the Equal Opportunity cabal of the Clinton Administration, predecessor to Biden's DEI Office of Civil Justice.  The very mention of 'black and brown people' was itself tantamount to racist invective, and to challenge the notion of 'white supremacy or systemic (white) racism was an expression of deep-seated hostility and discrimination.  

Progressive critics claimed Bolding could not be excused for his reliance on history (the divisive, destructive, inchoate race riots of the Sixties which put to rest any notion of legitimate racial concern), his statistics (the black man is still mired in a miasma of crime, civic irresponsibility, misogyny, and antisocial hatred), or his conclusions (DEI 'black coddling' was perhaps the worst of all civilly divisive elements).  No matter what the front, he was racist at heart. 

A lambasting critic who happened to be a close acquaintance of MacArthur Bolding and a former classmate of his immediately cancelled him. 'I am a proud person of color', he wrote in a personal email, 'and I take umbrage at your unbridled, racist references.  Heretofore, contact and communication between us will be polite but desultory'. 

This was not the first time Bolding had been cancelled nor certainly not the last.  The overwhelming closure of the liberal mind, as academic Phillip Holmes observed in his book The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left or the same conclusion drawn in an earlier book by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind was alive and well in 2025 - as pernicious, as insidious, and as damaging to thought and free speech as it had always been; and Bolding was living proof. 

 

There was Bob Muzelle, another college classmate who had, thanks to the missionary zeal of Chaplain Reverend Blanton P Phelps become a Freedom Rider, long time activist for women, gays, and the environment and was, because of the moral, spiritual nature of his belief, felt it necessary to clear his address book of any and all disclaimers and disbelievers. Bob who had been a college friend and post-graduation coffee mate of Blanton, had had enough of the latter's conservatism - what Bob saw as political indifference, an amoral lassitude, and at worst a deeply-buried but deeply rooted racism.

Nothing of the sort, of course. Blanton's disquisitions on the errors of identity politics, the tyranny of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusiveness), the lionization of the black man, and the uniform, universal theological condemnation of the gender spectrum were jumped on by Bob.  'Racist, misogynist, proto-colonialist bigot', wrote his former friend who indicated that despite beers and pussy at Smith, their friendship had to end. 

Then there was Ellicott Moore, scion of the historical Moore family which had ridden with Davenport and Potter out of Massachusetts to found New Haven and Yale, Class of 19-- who scarcely before his tenth reunion, had been converted into an unshakeable progressive; and when after years of congenial sparring with his classmate McArthur Bolding, informed him that his views were unconscionable and unacceptable.  

He - Blanton - preferred a nation that rode on the backs of the poor, sucked them dry, and left them desperate and inconsolable on the curb.  Racist, misogynist, homophobic and greedy capitalist minded, Blanton had to go, expunged, cleansed, and removed from all Moore correspondence 

There was William the son of New Orleans high octoroon culture who, when he got wind of Blanton's elegy to European empire and civilization at the expense of fabulist illusionary black historians who championed Black Athena and the influence of Africa on Greek culture when there was scant evidence for this claim, he cancelled him outright.  It didn't matter that the two men were peas in a pod, both sophisticated womanizers (only the best would do).  Only political philosophy mattered. 

So when Blanton weighed in on the Los Angeles riots, every one his former nemeses felt the need to speak up.  This imposter, this faux intellectual, this bottom-feeding, rancid Trump acolyte must be shut up and shut down. 

'Of all places', Blanton mused. 'La-la land where nothing is as it seems'; but the irony was totally lost on his fevered friends who could see nothing but Gestapo SS troops, pogroms, Kristallnacht, and the forced  removal of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.  

 

Blanton was proposing nothing of the kind.  The images of the forces of law and order in the streets were surprising because they for so long had been absent. Under the progressive Biden Administration, the police were demonized, defunded, and withdrawn.  Now under the new Trump regime, unruly, antisocial, riotous and destructive acts would be met in kind.  The swing of the pendulum, a reversal of fortune, a new deck of cards. 

All in a day's work, said Blanton, used to and expecting the untoward, illogical, and febrile attacks from the Left.  When all was said and done what better place to air fictitious grievances, fabulist impressions, and marvelous soap opera renditions of reality?  The facts were clear - illegal aliens rioting to protest their lawful arrest and deportation and the ensuing mayhem and destruction.  Nada mas.  Confabulated into a Che Guevara struggle for freedom was what Hollywood was all about, so Blanton gave free rein to the consummate criticism he received - good material for the next afternoon edge-of-your-seat thriller. 

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