Americans have a very strong sense of fair play. What we have seen over the past few years is that there are two Americas, one for those who get a pass and another for the rest.
A friend recently returned from Yale where he attended graduation ceremonies. He mentioned seeing lots of students and faculty cosplaying as Hamas terrorists with keffiyehs on campus. After a few minutes, I was hit with “deja vu, all over again.” It was none other than Yale that had quite a kerfuffle about “cultural appropriation” only a few years ago. In 2015, a university official sent out a campus-wide email asking people not to wear Halloween costumes of other cultures, as this might be considered some new thing called cultural appropriation. When I was growing up in the 1970’s and later when I was in Madison in the 1990’s, it was customary for people to dress up with sombreros, lederhosen or kimonos and everybody thought it was wonderful. Not at Yale. Erika Christakis, a co-Master of Silliman House along with her husband Nicholas, sent out an email to house members suggesting that they ignore this silly email and use their own good sense of taste. A volcano went off immediately thereafter. The Christakis family was harassed and threatened; I remember seeing video of Yale students sobbing, saying how unsafe they felt at one of the most expensive and pampered schools in the country. In the end, the Christakis pair resigned not only their Silliman sinecure but Mrs. Christakis quit her lectureship at the school.
My friend who went to graduation last week asked why the professors and students today get to wear keffiyehs and are not accused of cultural appropriation while some woman who went to a Halloween party wearing an Indian sari would run afoul of the culture police? And his question is the basis of the loathing that has overtaken Western society. There are simply different rules for different peoples and groups. And if there is one thing that Americans hate it is an uneven playing field. Just a couple of examples from the past few years:
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*Whatever Donald Trump is accused of is small potatoes compared to Joe Biden taking classified material for decades and running a pay-to-play scheme out of the vice president’s office. Trump is legally hounded while the Biden family—who all seemed to get rich from overseas contracts related to Joe being vice-president—skate.
– The J6 protesters are treated like traitors while the George Floyd protesters mostly went free. The J6 protesters who violated the law should be prosecuted for their actions—parading in the Capitol, damage to public property, and the like. They were not insurrectionists; not one of them entered the Capitol with a weapon! The George Floyd summer of 2020 protesters caused several deaths, injury to dozens of police officers and destruction of property in excess of a $1 billion. They were mostly let go if arrested at all.
– Guys can compete in women’s sports with minimal physiological requirements. Girls and women who have trained all of their lives find themselves limited to silver at best in championship competitions.
– Illegal aliens are given their own fast lane at the airport as they lack documentation, while the rest stand in line with their belts and shoes in their hands.
– Illegal aliens are given better treatment than America’s own veterans.
– Those on the right who question some aspects of the 2020 election are called “election deniers” while Hilary Clinton can drone on endlessly about who caused her loss in 2016 and is considered a courageous woman.
Americans do not ask for favors or special treatment. All they want is that everybody plays by the same rules. So when they see universities accept far less talented candidates over their more accomplished peers solely due to skin color, they are not happy. The same when companies announce job searches for anybody who is not white. New bigotry does not somehow cancel out the horrible bigotry of old. The goal was to get to a common good where race and color were an afterthought; instead we have descended into separate graduations at Harvard—the opposite of the goals set by the Great Society and other social programs designed to make society more cohesive.
Americans will vote this Fall. The lousy Biden poll numbers half a year out are reflective of many factors: Joe Biden’s degrading mental and physical capabilities, his administration’s terrible national and international policies, Donald Trump sounding normal compared to the Biden open border/let’s shaft Israel rhetoric and the bipolar society growing more pronounced in the US. People want a fair shot and they want everyone playing by the same rules. The more illegal aliens and minorities are favored by official policies--"equity"--over other Americans, the more people will look at Donald Trump as the least bad option.
Israelis take a perverse pride in having sent to jail a former president and a former prime minister. The current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has four criminal cases pending. While there are still cases of uneven treatment by the judiciary, there is an overall sense that no one is safe from prosecution. Biden being a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and thus not subject to prosecution for taking classified material home with him over decades would not cut it here.
The United States is an extraordinary country. One should live a bit outside of her borders to appreciate how amazing the people are, how beautiful the land is, and how plentiful and still relatively cheap are its goods. The US is not perfect, but the Obama and Biden administrations with the support of the media, universities, and other institutions have played favorites at the expense of regular Americans. We have seen the tractor protests in various European countries in response to “elites” trying to shaft the farmers to please the angry climate gods. Their American equivalent will make itself felt at the ballot box this Fall.
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