The LEFT’s Conspiracy

The Left can work together, and does so naturally, to get its message widely disseminated.  This is how big lies get told and come to be widely accepted as incontrovertible truth. Typically, the lie originates in academia, where one left-wing academic concocts it and other left-wing academics whoop it up.  Then the media adopts it, invoking the academic theory for validity and then drumming it into the popular mind as a proven truth. Periodically Hollywood then converts the story into a sitcom or feature film and builds emotional support for the cause while also making it seem fashionable and cool. Finally, all three institutions gang up on anyone who questions the big lie, seeking to discredit them, ruin them, and ideally drive them out of public life altogether.

Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, pg.197-198

Building on Sand

Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world.  There are lots of nice things you can do with sand: but do not try building a house on it.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 7

The Verbal Dexterity of the LEFT

Verbal dexterity plays a key role in insulating the vision of the anointed from the vicissitudes of mere facts.  Through the magic of definitions, no one can ever catch AIDS by “casual contact” and no one will ever be murdered by a “homeless” person.  Any newly discovered way by which someone catches AIDS will then be removed from the category of “casual contact” and any homeless person who commits murder will thereafter be referred to in the media as a “transient” or a “drifter”—but not “homeless.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," pg.243

The Anointed Don’t Believe In Personal Responsibility

The vision of the anointed is one in which such ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from “society,” rather than from individual choices and behavior.  To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society.”  Since no society has ever treated everyone fairly, there will always be real examples of what the anointed envision.  The fatal step is to make those examples universal explanations of social ills—and to remain oblivious to evidence to the contrary.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," pg.203

Beliefs Are Not Time-Bound

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another.  Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.  You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable for half-past four.  What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.

G.K. Chesterton, cited by George Grant, "Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood," pg.227

The Tyranny of Ideas

One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is -- beware of intellectuals . . . For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behavior.  Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value . . . [enabling] them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.  Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first.  The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.

Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, pg. 342.  Cited by Ravi Zacharias in "The Real Face of Atheism," pg.67

Liberal Compulsory Propaganda

To those with the vision of the anointed, the public serves not only as a general object of disdain, but as a baseline from which to measure their own lofty heights, whether in art, politics, or other fields.  Systemic processes which offer channels of expression of the public's views and values are to be circumscribed and circumvented.  Art, music, and ballet are to be financed by compulsory exactions from the public, while ignoring or disdaining what the public itself wants or does not want.  Similarly, so-called "public television"--taxpayer-subsidized television--is in fact the least responsive to the public's desires and most reflective of the vision of the anointed.  Shamelessly one-sided propaganda for the environmentalist movement, for example, has become a staple of so-called "nature" programs on "public television" for years.

Failure to use tax money  to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called "censorship."  If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples rather than oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds.  But of course no such consistency is intended.  This strained usage of the word "censorship" appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed.  If a  public library declines to buy some avant-garde book approved by the anointed, because either the librarian or the taxpaying public does not like it, that is called "censorship"--even though the book remains freely available to all who wish to buy it and no library can possibly purchase even a tenth of all the books published, so that discretionary preferences are inevitable and the First Amendment does not guarantee either an audience or money.


Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," p.20

Vision of the Anointed

It is widely taken as axiomatic that ordinary people's lives lack meaning, which must be brought to them by the anointed via various political crusades or social activism. . . . 
In other words, the purpose of a tax-payer-supported institution is to express the ideologies of those who run it and to brainwash the visiting public with the vision of the anointed.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," p.20

Darwinists Suppress Dissent

Defenders of evolution used to style themselves the champions of free speech and academic freedom against unthinking dogmatism.  But they have become the new dogmatists, demanding judicially imposed censorship and discrimination against the teachers, scientists, and students who dissent from Darwin.  These are tactics of intellectual suppression, not free inquiry, and they betray the Darwinists' insecurity about the defensibility of their own theory.


John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.267

The Handicap of Victimhood

Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.  They have encouraged the poor to believe that their poverty is caused by the rich — a message which may be a passing annoyance to the rich but a lasting handicap to the poor, who may see less need to make fundamental changes in their own lives that could lift themselves up, instead of focusing their efforts on dragging others down.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.544

Multicultural Nonsense

Intellectuals have romanticized cultures that have left people mired in poverty, ignorance, violence, disease and chaos, while trashing cultures that have led the world in prosperity, education, medical advances and law and order.  In doing so, the intelligentsia have often degraded, or even filtered out, the fact that masses of people were fleeing the societies intellectuals romanticized to go to the societies they condemned.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.543

The Education System Is For Indoctrination

In the schools and colleges, the intelligentsia have changed the role of education from equipping students with the knowledge and intellectual skills to weigh issues and make up their own minds into a process of indoctrination with the conclusions already reached by the anointed.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.543

Normally I don't comment on these posts, but I thought the following (brought to my attention in the comment below) was worth posting with this particular quote.

Public Education Danger to Family

The new education’s danger to the family comes in two stages.  The first stage weakens the family by “atomizing” its members — an effect that is reinforced by popular culture.  As the family flounders, the second stage capitalizes on its failures.  Because the family has been undermined, individual families become disabled — there are some functions they can no longer perform at all, and others they can’t perform fully or well.  At the personal level, families struggle, and often fail, against the forces that weaken and divide them.  Problems increase in number and severity.  At some point, state bureaucracies, typically led by education and social welfare, step in — first to oversee, then to take over, the functions that families are unable to exercise, or are willing to abandon.

When this process runs its course, the influence of the family will be mostly displaced by the influence of the collective, in the form of the bureaucracy, the schools, and the media.  The natural, biological family in general, and parents in particular, will become appendages of the “omnicompetent state,” watchfully regulated by state agencies.  The family will be redefined to prevent it from becoming a focus for loyalties apart from the collective.  If a form of the “family” survives at all, it will be as a convenient device for bureaucratic book-keeping, and will be redefined in mostly economic terms.

Brooks Alexander, “Abolished Man: From Instruction to Indoctrination in the New Education,”  SCP Journal, Vol 16:4, p.7

The Liberal Intelligentsia Have No Use for Merit

The intelligentsia have changed the high achievements and rewards of some members of society from an inspiration to others into a source of resentment and grievance for others.  The intelligentsia encourage people who are contributing nothing to the world to complain, and even organize protests, because others are not doing enough for them.  They have rationalized the breaking of laws by those who choose to picture themselves as underdogs fighting an oppressive “system,” even when these are college students from affluent homes, being subsidized by their parents and/or the taxpayers.  Intellectuals have, both in America and in France, verbally turned military heroes who put their lives on the line for their country into victims of war, people whom one might pity but never want to emulate.

They have put the people whose work creates the goods and services that sustain a rising standard of living on the same plane as people who refuse to work, but who are depicted as nevertheless entitled to their “fair share” of what others have created — this entitlement being regardless of whether the recipients observe even common decency, much less the laws.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.541-542

Social Justice?

Calling unrealistic standards “social justice” enables intellectuals to engage in endless complaints about the particular ways in which a particular society fails to meet their criteria, along with a parade of groups entitled to a sense of grievance, exemplified in the “race, class, and gender” formula today, though the same kind of thinking behind that particular formula has also been used to depict children as victims of their parents and illegal immigrants as victims of a calloused or xenophobic society in the country they enter, in violation of its laws.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.540

All Cultures Are NOT Equal

Most women’s studies, racial and ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies are intellectual hoaxes, programs of propaganda an mutual support. It is hardly surprising that denials of the possibility of rationality should come from groups whose excuse for existence is threatened by rational inquiry.  The knowledge that science produces, moreover, often results in a picture of the world that is anathema to the more rabid egalitarians, for that knowledge may demonstrate there there is a hard, concrete reality blocking the egalitarians’ path forward.  Radical feminism is put in peril by scientific proof that some sex-role differences are inherent and cannot be dismissed as mere social constructs.  To multiculturalists, empirical investigation is dangerous because it will demonstrate that not all cultures are equal in their capacity to equip their members for success in the modern world.  Contrary to the claims of the multiculturalists, there are not different ways of knowing.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.267

Student Indoctrination

As early as elementary school, students have been encouraged or recruited to take stands on complex policy issues ranging up to and including policies concerning nuclear weapons, on which whole classes have been assigned to write members of Congress or to the President of the United States.  College admissions committees can give weight to various forms of environmentalism or other activism in considering which applicants to admit, and it is common for colleges to require “community service” as a prerequisite for applicants to be considered at all — with the admissions committee arbitrarily defining what is to be considered a “community service,” as if, for example, it is unambiguously clear that aiding and abetting vagrancy (“the homeless”) is a service rather than a disservice to a community.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.516

It All Began With Woodrow Wilson

During the presidential election campaign of 1912, Wilson explicitly invoked Darwin to justify an evolutionary understanding of the U.S. Constitution that would allow the federal government to dramatically expand its powers over the economy.

According to Wilson, the Constitution betrayed the Founders’ “Newtonian” view that government was built on unchanging laws like “the law of gravitation.”  In truth, however, government “falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life.  It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”  Hence, “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.  Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life … [I]t must develop.”  Wilson averred that “all that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”

The doctrine of the evolving Constitution articulated by Wilson and other Progressives opened the door to much greater regulation of business and the economy, eventually paving the way for the New Deal.  But once the door was opened to regulate the rich, there was no reason increased government powers should not also be used to regulate the poor.  The stage was thus set for a different kind of Social Darwinism, one based not on laissez faire but on the idea that government should scientifically plan and regulate even the most intimate questions of family life.

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.122

Beware of "Experts"

In an age of technology and expertise, we have been convinced that we should listen to the “experts” rather than common sense in determining the norms, values and attitudes of our families, our churches and other trusted institutions.  Cultural relativists urge us to adapt to the changes of our times, which they define as “progress” rather than mere change whose inevitability is not assured.

Anne Hendershott, The Politics of Deviance, p.154

Indoctrination in Education

Among those with a sense of mission are those who teach the young, whether teachers in the schools or professors in colleges and universities.  Those among the academics or school teachers who lack either the inclination or the talent to become public intellectuals can instead vent their opinions in the classroom to a captive audience of students, operating in a smaller arena but in a setting with little chance of serious challenge.  In such settings, their aggregate influence on the mindset of a generation may be out of all proportion to their competence — not simply in what they directly impart, but more fundamentally in habituating their students to reaching sweeping conclusions after hearing only one side of an issue and then either venting their emotions or springing into action, whether by writing letters to public officials as part of classroom assignments or taking part in other, more direct activism.  In these cases as well, there are few, if any, constraints beforehand and no accountability for the consequences afterwards.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.515