Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Tag: Justice

For Encounter Books’s “Close Encounters” video series, I interviewed Rep. Devin Nunes in connection with his new broadside Countdown to Socialism.

During the interview we discussed a variety of topics, including:

  • The weaponization and politicization of the intelligence and national security apparatus
  • Rep. Nunes’ expectations regarding the U.S. Attorney John Durham probe
  • The corruption of the media, Big Tech, and Rep. Nunes’ theory of the “disinformation funnel”
  • The costs of the Russiagate hoax to American national security
  • Rep. Nunes’ chilling observations regarding the coronavirus shutdowns
  • The truth about Democrat vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ political ascent
  • The criticality of the 2020 election
  • And much more

Heather Mac Donald on Corrosive Identity Politics, Multiculturalism and Unjust Criminal Justice

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My Guest

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal and author most recently of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Mac Donald, the archetype of an unassuming academic, makes for an unlikely counter-cultural figure. She draws protests and outrage on college campuses across the country because she has the gall to challenge the prevailing progressive orthodoxy about subjects like identity politics, multiculturalism and criminal justice.

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Obama Bends the Arc of History Towards Justice by Renaming Mt. McKinley to ‘Denali’

Because the West is simply the worst:

President Obama announced on Sunday that Mount McKinley was being renamed Denali, using his executive power to restore an Alaska Native name with deep cultural significance to the tallest mountain in North America.

The move came on the eve of Mr. Obama’s trip to Alaska, where he will spend three days promoting aggressive action to combat climate change, and is part of a series of steps he will make there meant to address the concerns of Alaska Native tribes.

It is the latest bid by the president to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise to improve relations between the federal government and the nation’s Native American tribes, an important political constituency that has a long history of grievances against the government.

Denali’s name has long been seen as one such slight, regarded as an example of cultural imperialism in which a Native American name with historical roots was replaced by an American one having little to do with the place. [Emphasis mine]

Changing the name of a mountain from the surname of a U.S. president to ‘Denali’ is an apt symbol for the Obama presidency, which views the West as the world’s foremost oppressor.

Whether in rewarding our enemies, punishing our allies or elevating Native Americans over Americans, for our morally relativistic Dear Leader this is moral. This is how President Obama corrects for what he perceives as our sins of the past. This is how he makes the arc of history bend towards justice.

It’s a safe bet that

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Does the Arc of History Bend Towards Tyranny? An Excerpt from Michael Walsh’s ‘The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.’

Michael Walsh’s new book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is pivotal in its explication of how poor and purely evil ideas have subverted America, and eaten away at the pillars of Western civilization.

While we often hear the refrain “ideas have consequences,” too frequently we attribute the decline of the American system to politics or particular political figures, while giving the power of ideas short thrift.

The Devil's Pleasure Palace

But as Walsh’s important work illustrates, ideas are everything, and if you lose the war of them you lose all of the other battles too.

One such idea that has trumped to date deals with “History” — which you would not dare be on the wrong side of — as if some metaphysical Berlin Wall.

Here is what Walsh has to say on the matter:

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

Isn’t it interesting that there can be some form of moral judgment in a morally relativistic, largely if not entirely amoral secular progressive system?

Walsh has some questions for the arc-ists too:

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