The Anime Riots

When I was in high school, a few centuries before the signing of the Magna Carta, I came across one of those nature magazines in the library. The cover said something about animals facing extinction because two legs bad. The articles inside featured pictures of cute animals with anime-character eyes, eyes that were pleading with you to vote for Democrats.

"If you were here, I'd snuggle and cuddle with you. Without your help, Republicans will come and beat me to death!"

I fell hard for it. I was convinced that harp seals and tarsiers and bunnies were all about to be wiped from the face of the earth. I had a heartless, analytical bent even then, but those pictures overwhelmed my ability to reason. The irrationality stayed with me for years. If you weren't willing to sacrifice this or that to save these doomed cuties, you were a monster.

Some of it was true, of course, and it would have been valuable to incorporate that into a more sophisticated world view, but I was young and driven by emotions. My thoughts had that imbalanced quality that comes from youth.

Fast forward to today's blue civil war. On Andrew Klavan's show yesterday, he discussed the open letter that many progressives wrote, pleading for a reduction in the cancel culture. They begged for a partial return to free speech. Andrew pointed out the generation gap between the authors and the social justice mob. The young left is not in favor of free speech.

The older progs thought they were having a discussion. They weren't because the mob is beyond reason. Discussion itself is a problem. The mob is consumed with visions of anime-eyed baby harp seals in the form of oppressed people of color. You, with your "discussion." Bah! You want to club them to death!

Andrew correctly points out that the older progs think they can apologize their way out of the social justice mob's rage, but they can't. They don't understand that they're dealing with unreasoning, hysterical children.

As he talked, I thought of my daughter's public high school, which I have written about before.

At my daughter's public high school, her history teacher preaches racialism morning, noon and night. Almost every time we've asked for extra credit assignments, they've been suggestions to watch racialist movies like 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Cesar Chavez and so on. In order to gain some extra credit points, my daughter had to go to the MLK Day Parade here in San Diego. The textbook is no better. The chapter on WW II is a wonder to see.

The first 8 photographs in the chapter are of minorities and women. The chapter deals exclusively with WW II, not the lead-up to it nor the aftermath. It's straight-up wartime history twisted into racialism. The white guy with the biggest photo in the chapter is ... President Clinton apologizing to a Japanese internment victim. Eisenhower's photo is 1/6 the size.

My daughter's English class isn't much different. Every novel they're reading this year is racialist. There's one about blacks being oppressed, one about women, one about Hispanics and one about American Indians.

As far as the students can tell, the American past is filled mostly with evil. While the intent of the progressives in the education industry is to indoctrinate the kids in critical race theory, their tools are not nearly as focused as they think. Instead of racialism, the kids learn to mistrust their ancestors. The progressives being ancestors as well, they end up caught in their own nets.

This is exactly what we're facing now. It's the harvest of the raging lunatics who run our education industry. They themselves are driven by incoherent emotions, so they banished all dissenting voices. Without any balance, the children who make up the social justice mob never experienced a counter point to the baby harp seals' eye-pleas. There is no reasoning with them because they don't reason.

The Democrat civil war is as much a generational war as anything else. The mayors and governors think they can have a conversation with the mob. They think that if they just pull down enough statues and have enough difficult conversations, they can regain control of the situation.

They can't and they're about to find out just how bad things can get when they allow themselves to be driven by the mob. Reality is starting to have it's say.