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Matthew Shepard, Trayvon Martin and the Power of Leftist Myth

By Ben Shapiro

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Next week, "The Book of Matt" by famed investigative journalist Stephen Jiminez, is slotted for release. The book tells the true story behind the murder of Matthew Shepard, who has become the angelic face of victimhood in the gay rights movement. Shepard's murder in 1998 launched a national effort, spearheaded by President Clinton, to push for a hate crimes law including sexual orientation. It became the basis for Hollywood's addiction to storylines involving the killing of gay men (see, for example, "Brokeback Mountain"). Shepard, the mythology went, died for America's homophobic sins.

There's only one problem. Shepard, according to Jiminez, was not killed because he was gay. His murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, attempted the "gay panic" defense in court -- suggesting that Shepard had come onto them and provoked them into murderous rage. But that wasn't true. Jiminez, who is gay, reports that Shepard dealt methamphetamine, and that one of his murderers was a sex partner. Even gay-journalistic icon Andrew Sullivan has endorsed Jiminez's work.

But the left cannot let its mythology go. And so The Matthew Shepard Foundation released a statement decrying Jiminez's book: "Attempts now to rewrite the story of this hate crime appear to be based on untrustworthy sources, factual errors, rumors and innuendo rather than the actual evidence gathered by law enforcement and presented in a court of law. We do not respond to innuendo, rumor or conspiracy theories. Instead, we recommit ourselves to honoring Matthew's memory, and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it."

If the facts tarnish Shepard's memory, perhaps that's because the facts are inconvenient.

The same, of course, was true with regard to the killing of Trayvon Martin. The left insisted on a similar racial crucifixion story, in which a thuggish white racist, George Zimmerman, tracked down and shot an innocent black boy in cold blood. The facts of the case simply didn't bear that story: Zimmerman had no racist background; Martin had a history of criminal activity; witness testimony placed Martin on top of Zimmerman, banging his head against the pavement. But the narrative of the left was set: Trayvon was killed for wearing a hoodie and carrying Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea.

Radio host Dennis Prager has wisely observed that to the left, truth is not a value. Ideology is a value. And so the myths of Shepard and Trayvon must live on. That's because the left understands that narrative drives hearts and minds, rather than argument. Were the left to openly contend that gay men and women around America are in danger every day from the vastly homophobic majority of the American populace, most Americans would rightly be insulted and skeptical. Were the left to suggest that most Americans are vicious racists a hairsbreadth away from murdering black teenagers, most Americans would scoff. Instead, the left trots out cases like Shepard and cases like Trayvon -- and manufactures those cases to fit their needs.

Racism and anti-gay hatred must be wiped from the map. But there is no need to fudge the facts in order to combat them. The left's need to seize on individual cases as impetus for broad societal change demonstrates just how desperate the left is to paint exceptional cases as the rule to justify a broader agenda.

The Decline of College

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, September 19, 2013

For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience.

Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically.

The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings.

Yet most elsewhere, something went terribly wrong with that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or antithetical to their original mission.

Tenure -- virtual lifelong job security for full-time faculty after six years -- was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How, then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant of politically unpopular views than open-minded?

Universities have so little job flexibility that campuses cannot fire the incompetent tenured or hire full-time competent newcomers.

The university is often a critic of private enterprise for its supposed absence of fairness and equality. The contemporary campus, however, is far more exploitative. It pays part-time faculty with the same degrees far less for the same work than it pays an aristocratic class of fully tenured professors.

The four-year campus experience is simply vanishing. At the California State University system, the largest university complex in the world, well under 20 percent of students graduate in four years despite massive student aid. Fewer than half graduate in six years.

Administrators used to come from among top faculty, who rotated a few years from teaching and scholarship to do the unenviable nuts-and-bolts work of running the university. Now, administrators rarely, if ever, teach. Instead, they became part of a high-paid, careerist professional caste -- one that has grown exponentially. In the CSU system, their numbers have exploded in recent years -- a 221 percent increase from 1975 to 2008. There are now more administrators in that system than full-time faculty.

College acceptance was supposed to be a reward for hard work and proven excellence in high school, not a guaranteed entitlement of open admission. Yet more than half of incoming first-year students require remediation in math and English during, rather than before attending, college. That may explain why six years and hundreds of million dollars later, about the same number never graduate.

The idea of deeply indebted college students in their 20s without degrees or even traditional reading and writing skills is something relatively new in America. Yet aggregate student debt has reached a staggering $1 trillion. More than half of recent college graduates -- who ultimately support the huge college industry -- are either unemployed or working in jobs that don't require bachelor's degrees. About a quarter of those under 25 are jobless and still seeking employment.

Apart from our elite private schools, the picture of our postmodern campus that emerges is one of increasing failure --a perception hotly denied on campus but matter-of-factly accepted off campus, where most of the reforms will have to originate.

What might we expect in the future?

Even more online courses will entice students away from campuses through taped lectures from top teachers, together with interactive follow-ups from teaching assistants -- all at a fraction of current tuition costs.

Technical schools that dispense with therapeutic, hyphenated "studies" courses will offer students marketable skills far more cheaply and efficiently. Periodic teaching contracts, predicated on meeting teaching and research obligations, will probably replace lifelong tenure.

Public attitudes will also probably change. The indebted social science major in his mid-20s with or without a diploma will not enjoy the old cachet accorded a college-educated elite -- at least in comparison with the debt-free, fully employed and higher-paid electrician, plumber or skilled computer programmer without a college degree.

Real skills will matter more than mere college attendance or a brand. New competency in national tests in math, science and English will be considered by employers to be a far better barometer of past achievement and future potential than the mere possession of a now-suspect university transcript.

As in any revolution, much good will be lost along with the bad. The traditional university used to offer a holistic four-year experience for motivated and qualified students in a landscape of shared inquiry and tolerance. The Internet and for-profit trade schools can never replace that unique intellectual and social landscape.

Yet because professors of the traditional arts and sciences could or would not effectively defend their disciplines or the classical university system, agenda-driven politicians, partisan ideologues and careerist technocrats absorbed them.

The college experience morphed into a costly sort of prolonged adolescence, a political arena and a social laboratory -- something quite different from a serious place to acquire both practical and humanistic knowledge.

No wonder that it is now financially unsustainable and going the way of the dinosaurs.

Crazier Than Liberals

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

There's been another mass shooting by a crazy person, and liberals still refuse to consider institutionalizing the dangerous mentally ill.

The man who shot up the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, Aaron Alexis, heard voices speaking to him through the walls. He thought people were following him. He believed microwave ovens were sending vibrations through his body. There are also reports that Alexis believed the Obamacare exchanges were ready to go.

Anyone see any bright red flags of paranoid schizophrenia? (Either that, or Obama's NSA is way better than we thought!)

But Alexis couldn't be institutionalized because the left has officially certified the mentally ill as "victims," and once you're a victim, all that matters is that you not be "stigmatized."

But here's the problem: Coddling the mentally ill isn't even helping the mentally ill. Ask the sisters of crazy homeless woman "Billie Boggs" how grateful they were to the ACLU for keeping Boggs living on the streets of New York City. Ask the parents of Aaron Alexis, James Holmes (Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooter), Jared Loughner (Tucson, Ariz., mall shooter) or Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter) how happy they are that their sons weren't institutionalized.

Tellingly, throughout the last three decades, the overall homicide rate has been in free fall, thanks to Republican crime policies, from 10 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4 per 100,00 today. (You might even call them "common sense" crime policies.) But the number of mass shootings has skyrocketed from 4 per year, between 1900 and 1970, to 29 per year since then.

Something seems to have gone horribly wrong right around 1970. What could it be? Was it the introduction of bell-bottoms?

That date happens to correlate precisely with when the country began throwing the mentally ill out of institutions in 1969. Your memory of there not being as many mass murders a few decades ago is correct. Your memory of there not being as many homeless people a few decades ago is also correct.

But liberals won't allow the dangerous mentally ill to be committed to institutions against their will. (The threat of commitment is very persuasive in getting disturbed individuals to take their medicine.) Something in liberals' genetic makeup compels them to attack civilization, for example, by defending the right of dangerous psychotics to refuse treatment and then representing them in court after they commit murder.

Liberals won't even agree to take the most basic steps to prevent psychotics from purchasing guns -- yes, GUNS! -- because to allow the release of mental health information would be "stigmatizing." We're not talking about anorexic girls here. We just need shrinks to tell us if potential gun purchasers are paranoid schizophrenics.

The disastrous consequences of the deinstitutionalization movement is described in E. Fuller Torrey's book, The Insanity Offense: How America's Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens. Torrey's book reads like a compendium of America's most heinous murders since the early '70s -- all of which could have been stopped with involuntary commitment laws, and none of which could have been stopped even with a complete gun ban.

Here are a few:

-- "Mary Maloney had decapitated her infant daughter and year-old son. Her husband had tried to have her psychiatrically hospitalized prior to the crime, but she had not met the (legal) criteria for dangerousness."

-- "Charles Soper had killed his wife, three children, and himself two weeks after being discharged from Camarillo State Hospital because he failed to qualify as 'imminently dangerous.'"

-- "In April 1973 ... Edmund Kemper (who had been released from a mental hospital a few years earlier when the deinstitutionalization act became law) had been arrested after he bludgeoned his mother to death, then strangled her friend who came to visit. Kemper was also charged with the murders of six female hitchhikers."

Kemper had originally been institutionalized after murdering his grandparents at age 15 because "he tired of their company."

In 1972 and 1973, paranoid schizophrenic Herb Mullin went on a killing spree in California that left 13 dead, including a 72-year-old World War I veteran, a college coed, four teenaged campers and a mother with her two little boys, murdered as they played with marbles.

Mullin killed his victims with a baseball bat, knives, his fists, as well as with guns. How's your "high-capacity" magazine ban going to stop that, Democrats? How would piling on yet more gun control laws have helped the priest whom Herb Mullin beat, kicked and stabbed to death?

What about the elderly boarders that Dorothea Puente -- diagnosed with schizophrenia -- poisoned and buried in her backyard?

What additional gun restrictions would have helped the group of bicyclists Linda Scates intentionally drove her car into because voices were telling her to "kill the demons"?

In the decades since the deinstitutionalization movement began, more and more people kept being killed as a result of that movement -- including the deinstitutionalized themselves. According to Torrey, between 1970 and 2004, the mentally ill were responsible for at least 4,700 murders in California.

Increasing government spending on mental health programs is not going to stop the mentally ill from committing murder. Like liberals, these are people too sick even to know they need help. As Herschel Hardin, whose son was schizophrenic, wrote in the Vancouver Sun: "If you think you are Jesus Christ or an avenging angel, you are not likely to agree that you need to go to the hospital."

Liberals will pretend to have missed the news that the Washington Navy Yard shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic. They refuse to acknowledge that the mass murder problem -- as well as the homeless problem -- only began after crazy people were thrown out of institutions in the 1970s. They tell us crapping in your pants on a New York City sidewalk is a "civil right." They say that haranguing passersby on the street about your persecution by various movie stars is a form of "free speech."

Only after a mass murder committed by a psychotic with a firearm do liberals spring to life and suggest a solution: Take away everyone's guns.

Taking guns away from the mentally stable only makes us less safe: Even psychotics know enough to keep choosing "Gun-Free Zones" for their mass murders. If Americans are serious about preventing massacres like the ones at the Washington Navy Yard, Newtown, Tucson, Aurora and Virginia Tech, it's time to review our civil commitment laws.

After this latest shooting, will the left finally let us do something about the dangerously mentally ill?

Climate Change Ice-Capped

By Cal Thomas

Thursday, September 19, 2013

There is a tradition in politics that is similar to one in the legal profession: When evidence supports your position, make your argument based on the evidence, but when it argues against your position, ignore the evidence and appeal to emotion.

The evidence is piling up that "climate change," formerly known as "global warming," is losing evidentiary support, despite recent "preliminary findings" by a group of "experts" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that a Washington Post editorial suggests may prove, "warming has boosted the chances, in some cases significantly, that certain unwelcome weather or weather-related disasters will occur." The Post and other "true believers" ignore or ridicule a growing body of evidence rebutting their beliefs.

Most bad weather -- from hurricanes, which have been few this season, to tornadoes -- are unwelcome by those in their paths, but these weather phenomena have existed for centuries. Both sides seem to agree that CO2 levels are elevated, but they don't agree on whether that will cause dangerous climate change, including rising temperatures and turbulent weather. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) argues, "The human effect is likely to be small relative to natural variability, and whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs."

Yet the climate change cultists continue to focus on melting polar ice caps and "displaced" polar bears as part of their emotional appeal for government to "fix" the problem. Now comes a report in the UK Daily Mail that "eminent scientists" have observed a record return of the Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60 percent in a year, covering with ice almost 1 million more square miles of ocean than in 2012.

In 2007, the BBC reported that by 2013, global warming would leave the Arctic "ice free." Oops!

Just how silly this is getting is an assertion by some activists that the current tensions in Syria might be linked to climate change. That's not as harebrained as a newspaper report in January 1933, which said, "Yo-Yo Banned in Syria, Blamed for Drought by Moslems." The Syrians of 1933 actually believed the up and down of a toy yo-yo affected the weather. If it went down and sprang right back up, rain. If it went down and didn't spring up, drought. Police reportedly patrolled the streets, confiscating the toy. Ridiculous? Not as ridiculous as some of the junk science coming out of climate research circles today.

Last March, the Daily Mail reported that global temperatures are about to drop "below the level that the (computer) models forecast with '90 percent certainty.'"

Marc Morano, a former staff member of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (whose web page climatedepot.com offers numerous scientific articles debunking climate change), emails me: "As a long observer of the global weather movement, I can say that the events of 2013 (have) been one of the most devastating to the movement. Both poles have record expanding ice. Global temperatures have failed to rise for 15 plus years, sea level rise is failing to accelerate, tornadoes are at record lows, hurricanes are near record low activity ... 2013 may be the year in which man-made global warming fears enter the dustbin of history."

I doubt it. Too many people have too much invested in perpetuating this fiction. Billions of dollars and other currencies have been diverted into "green" projects in a Chicken Little attempt to stop the sky from falling. The BBC reports it as fact in virtually every story it does on the environment. Ditto the American media. Most media ignore evidence that counters climate change proponents.

Former Vice President Al Gore has made a personal fortune promoting the cult of global warming, a cult being partially defined as a belief system that ignores proof contrary to its beliefs.

Perhaps the climate change counter-revolutionaries should adopt the yo-yo as their symbol and send Gore and his apostles a box of them.

Obama's Bait-and-Switch on Syria

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Chemical weapons are evil, but you could also say they're a curse. They have a talismanic power to bend and distort U.S. foreign policy. You can ask George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

In 2003, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz gave a lengthy interview to Vanity Fair that caused a huge uproar, largely because the magazine shamefully distorted what he was trying to say. Wolfowitz explained that within the Bush administration there were a lot of arguments for why we should invade Iraq. Some had to do with the fact that Saddam Hussein was a state supporter of terrorism. Some had to do with how Hussein treated his own people. Others emphasized alleged links between the regime and 9/11. And so on.

Each of these arguments had proponents and opponents, Wolfowitz explained. The result was that "we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on": weapons of mass destruction.

The problem with focusing solely on a single issue turned out to be disastrous for the administration, given that the WMD never materialized. It should have been clear to everyone that few important decisions in life boil down to a single issue.

Something similar has happened to the Obama administration.

"I'm less concerned about style points; I'm much more concerned about getting the policy right," President Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, in response to the widespread criticism that his foreign policy has been a hot mess of late.

It's a fair point, even if a bit hypocritical for a president who goes by the moniker "No Drama Obama."

The last few weeks have had more drama than a "Desperate Housewives" franchise during sweeps week. Still, if in some Mr. Magoo-like way the administration has blindly blundered into a policy victory, that's preferable to smoothly sticking the landing on a policy failure.

The question, however, is: What policy?

In his ABC interview, the president repeatedly said that his goal is to do something about chemical weapons: "And what I've said consistently throughout is that the chemical weapons issue is a problem. I want that problem dealt with.

"That's my goal," he declared. "And if that goal is achieved, then it sounds to me like we did something right."

That is a huge bait-and-switch.

Until the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs, the administration was not primarily concerned with chemical weapons. It was concerned with doing whatever it could -- short of intervening militarily -- to see to it that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad either step down or be forced out. In 2011, Obama said: "For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside." And, a year later: "I have indicated repeatedly that President al-Assad has lost legitimacy, that he needs to step down." And in May at a news conference with the Turkish prime minister: "We both agree that Assad needs to go. ... That is the only way we're going to resolve this crisis. And we're going to keep working for a Syria that is free from Assad's tyranny."

That goal is now dead. The new Putin-Obama compact is a boon to Assad in that it brings him into the so-called international community America has spent the last two years trying to kick him out of. This "represents an astonishing victory for the Assad regime," writes Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg (no relation). So long as Assad only massacres his own people -- including children -- with old-fashioned weapons, he's immune to international force. Worse, Assad is now our partner because getting his WMD is now more important than getting rid of him. We've gone from siding with the rebels to acting like a boxing ref with no investment in who wins so long as neither side strikes any low blows.

Obviously, in reality, the Obama's short-term goal was to avoid getting into an unpopular war precipitated by his own ill-considered statements or being humiliated by a congressional no vote precipitated by his decision to punt the issue to Capitol Hill. But what made that goal achievable was the curse of chemical weapons.