Culture war

FrontPage Magazine | Dennis Prager | Nov. 13, 2007

The current issue of Rolling Stone magazine, its special 40th anniversary issue, reveals almost all one needs to know about the current state of the cultural left. The issue features interviews with people Rolling Stone considers to be America’s leading cultural and political figures — such as Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Cornel West, Paul Krugman, Kanye West, Bill Maher, and George Clooney, among many others.

It brings me no pleasure to say that, with few exceptions, the interviews reveal a superficiality and contempt for cultural norms (as evidenced by the ubiquity of curse words) that should scare anyone who believes that these people have influence on American life.

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Free Congress Foundation | Paul M. Weyrich | October 25, 2007

There is terrible news from California. On October 12, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law three bills which, the opposition argues, introduce the radical homosexual agenda into educational institutions. Unquestionably the traditional purpose of public education is to teach reading, writing, mathematics and other fundamentals necessary for well-rounded intellectual development. Instead, these institutions apparently will become miniature laboratories for redefining nature, implementing “gender theory” and experimenting with the effects of sexual lifestyles.

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TownHall | Dennis Prager | October 9, 2007

On Sept. 21, 2007, the editorial board of the Colorado State University student newspaper decided to publish a four-word editorial. Apparently finding the traditional mode of expressing ideas — arguing a case in a few hundred words — too demanding, they instead wrote four words: “Taser this … F— Bush.” Needless to say, they spelled out the F word.

The “Taser” referred to the police using a stun gun on a student at the University of Florida who refused to relinquish the microphone to other students at a speech at the university given by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. (How George Bush is connected to the use of a Taser on a left-wing student interrupting a speech by a left-wing anti-Bush senator was never explained by the editor.)

When universities were governed by people — either liberals or conservatives — who valued civilization i.e., before the contemporary left took over the universities, such an “editorial” was inconceivable. It would have been regarded as the work of moral and intellectual idiots whose political philosophy, to the extent that they had any, was anarchism.

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Boston Globe | Michael Jonas | August 5, 2007

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger. But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

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