In the Words of Katey Kontent

Just finished a lovely book. Here's the story's protagonist, Katey Kontent (pronounced kon-TENT), summing things up at the end of her reminiscences. I don't give anything away by sharing these paragraphs.  

A compliment to the author, Amor Towles, who happens to be a man. I marvel at writers who somehow are able to write from the point of view of the opposite gender. I never once felt Katey's voice to be inauthentic. This was Towles' first novel.

Remembering a Rabble-Rouser

Before Breitbart News Network became what it is today, there was Andrew Breitbart, rebel, rabble-rouser, visionary. I was organizing my bookmarks and came across this video. I had forgotten how much I liked him. 

The date on this interview is June 2011. He died unexpectedly of heart failure about a year later. I had only recently discovered him and had become a fan (here's a tribute I wrote a couple of years ago).

Something I learned as I was putting this post together: Earlier that same year (April 2011), Andrew apparently predicted the rise of Donald Trump. "Celebrity is everything in this country," he said on The O'Reilly Factor. "And if these guys [conservatives] don't learn how to play the media the way that Barack Obama played the media last election cycle and the way that Donald Trump is playing the election cycle, we're going to probably get a celebrity candidate."

Andrew Breitbart wasn't highly educated (he says he drank his way through college). But he was gutsy and cocky and funny and charming. All this, combined with his instinctive media savvy, made him a consequential adversary and an invaluable ally. Conservatives lost a good one six years ago.

My left-leaning friends (and their kids) should give this a listen.



Andrew Breitbart: Media War (interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution). I'm including the original source as well as the YouTube link.

The Ugly Side of Illegal Immigration (The Classicist Podcast)

Victor Davis Hanson has that rare blend of academic gravitas and down-to-earth pragmatism, being the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a classics and military historian, and a farmer who resides in Fresno, California, a town in Central California midway between Bakersfield and Sacramento, which...well, enough said. 

I particularly appreciate Professor Hanson's perspective on immigration since he speaks as one who is impacted personally by the policies and politics of the open borders segment of the political left. He is literally looking out his window and describing what he sees as he talks about illegal immigration, and it's not a pretty picture.

The Classicist: The Ideology of Illegal Immigration (Victor Davis Hanson) 

The Real Losers

A word to the readers of The Atlantic, whose editor Jeffrey Goldberg kowtowed to the mob and fired Mr. Williamson before the ink was even dry on his contract: you're the real losers. Hope you're enjoying life in your little bubble.

When the Twitter Mob Came for Me, by Kevin Williamson

The Train Leaves the Station

 

Methinks these schools may rue the day they encouraged this event. 

What kind of letters will these administrators be sending to their teachers next January, for example, if millions of students across the nation stage a National School Walkout for the murdered unborn, or a National School Walkout for gun rights?

“It’s a teachable moment,” say the wise and judicious administrators. “We want to support what they want to do. It’s not ours to plan, it’s not ours to encourage, it‘s not ours to discourage.”

A teachable moment? Well, then. Let the teaching begin…with them. Because now that the floodgates have been opened (and they have), the real lesson will come when these administrators are confronted with a flurry of causes that students insist on demonstrating for during school hours, causes that may (or may not) represent these administrators’ views.

I taught today (community college) but not until late afternoon. Part of me was glad I didn’t have to even deal with this (we got our letters). The other part of me, the part that has me pacing the floors in anger at how this country is so manipulated by the far left, wishes I had taught at 10 a.m. Because I would have lectured to an empty room for 13 minutes and tested for 4. Fine, miss my class for your cause (good cause, bad cause, whatever), but I won’t be held hostage by your cause. The train leaves the station at 10, class carries on, be here or don’t be here.

But I’m tired of being manipulated.