Things Fall Apart

Take a minute to look at the opener here. We all know this is pretty much how things are nowadays. Everything chaotic, backwards and upside down, as if some law of nature had been violated. Which it has. 

Early in this this century, wishful thinkers believed in a mirage called Hope and Change that turned out to be shallow, insincere, and small-minded. We survived that, sort of, but the ones who felt most betrayed, about 30 percent of the nation, believed they deserved more than the eight years of delusion which had been their sacrifice given in exchange for the real prize. In compensation, they wanted to elect a very bad woman to the Presidency of the United States. They were denied that wrongheaded but deeply felt desire.

Since that bitter disappointment they have become obsessed with becoming as mean and hateful and ruthless as it took to wreak their revenge on the man who defeated them and the people who helped him do it. The bad woman led the legions of those smashing everything in sight, including the most basic American values, to bring down the ogre that had made up in their fury. 

The result? Sometimes only a great poet can put the biggest things into a large enough frame.

W. B.Yeats, excerpt from ‘The Second Coming’

Yes, that 30 percent has been working and waiting for a Second Coming, but the price they’ve been willing to pay is everything, including the entire nation that gave birth to them, as well as its history, culture, and institutions. Wrong aims are perverting. They turn fine-sounding ideals into their opposites, and insist that what is wrong must be good, and vice versa. It’s a kind of hysteria that leads to a kind of suicide lust.

Where we are. Sometimes, only some seemingly small thing can make us see the extent to which a shared vision has become poisoned and absurd on its face. Here’s a useful example.

Replacing real hope and faith with its direct opposites.

Two self-righteous voices who cannot perceive that their own rage is the reason “the center cannot hold.” As it happens the voices represent the keenest disappointments of two shoulda-been champions who turned out to have feet of clay. To see their error, we have to take a closer look at who the speakers are and what they think they know.

Melanie Stansbury (D, NM) is an idealist of sorts, but her definitions are narrow, her criteria bent by a narrow political perspective. 

Indicators here? No, not a secret agent trained by the KGB and smuggled into a position of influence in the academic wing of the federal bureaucracy. An earnest American Congresswoman from a blue state, college trained in the social science selected as a strategic arena by by the New Left of the Radical Sixties as they were looking for a unifying global cause after the Reagan-engineered collapse of the Soviet Union. Her undergraduate majors of human ecology and natural science, acquired in ultra-blue California, probably involved indoctrination in the emerging grant machine called climate change and perhaps even student activism on conservation of the snail darter and the end of small-scale burning campaigns in the state’s forests. Idealistic policy causes that created the Golden State’s stubborn curse of chronic water shortages and runaway wildfires. 

After college, the big time immersion in leftist-dominated disciplines and institutions at prestigious Cornell University. She took her Masters degree in developmental sociology (liberal social engineering) with a minor in American Indian Studies. (Bury her heart at Wounded Knee… yada yada.)

I know something of the cultural environment of Cornell University. I was there before she was, and the university was already riven by racial divisions and occasional armed confrontations between activists and fainthearted administrators. What Columbia was to urban New York, Cornell was to rural upstate New York, a quieter pasture in which next generation leftist academics could be bred and trained without much real world intervention. I wrote about it back in November of 2005, when conservative columnist Michelle Malkin wondered why Cornell was so leftist despite its bucolic setting. She wondered specifically if there was something in the waters of Lake Cayuga… The following was part of my response to her:

I was in the graduate business school, but my personal experience of the place goes far beyond my 20-some months there. It was a family thing until it wasn’t anymore. My Dad and a first cousin of mine went to the Engineering School, and my sister started in the architecture program but finished with a PhD in Education, specializing in Women’s Studies. I am not mistaken in my assessments of the school or its contemporary political biases. 

All of which presents us with a woman educated in a particular way, endowed with a penchant for detailed critiques of the United States as some of its less fortunate constituencies might regard it. Whether these are appropriate as the bases for informing general audiences of the social history of the entire nation in any subject area is at least open to question. She does not seem to think so. I’ll leave her at that grumpy end point.

Who is Jonathan Jackson? And what in his own less fortunate life has induced him to believe that beautification projects in the nation’s capital are incontrovertible evidence of a violently vandalistic mentality that can only be compared to bombing campaigns against nations which have routinely killed thousands of American young people?

We were wondering about Jackson’s unfortunate life? Just kidding. Neither one of our advocates for a Smithsonian presentation of the United States as a world-class doer of epically unaddressed wrongs is entitled to play the victim. They are both part of the huge bureaucratic machine that has grown fat and destructive and immune from accountability by pretending to care about the less fortunate among us. Stanfield is no native American descendant. She’s a middle class white girl with a PhD. In ethnic resentment. Jackson is no child of the inner city. He is the son of Jesse Jackson, Jr., a man who has known no poverty or want of advancement opportunity. In fact, he was held out of the family business of hard-dealing urban politics to live the peaceable life of a wealthy businessman until his politician brother, Jesse Jackson III, fell victim to the temptations experienced by many beneficiaries of nepotism and frittered away his electability with venal sins. Now Jonathan is a recently elected member of Congress, occupying his brother’s seat, and speaks with all the self-righteous preacher hyperbole he’s absorbed osmotically from his father. Except not quite so felicitously. Imitation is rarely mistakable for talent.

[PERSONAL NOTE. Time out taken here for foot-tapping, thinking, deciding whether or not to deal with the rest of Yeats’s poem and some of its most famous lines. This is where he begins his famous concluding lamentation. 

This is also the point at which it becomes possible to recognize that Yeats himself is one of the two kinds of guilty contributing voices to the great civilizational apocalypse he is deploring. Why I will leave this poem to a future post of its own. It was written in 1919, during the year after the Great War, and it was first published in 1921, the year Woodrow Wilson, the father of modern Progressivism, left office in a state near death. Neither date is a coincidence…]

Where were we? Oh yes, the great Smithsonian debate.

Yeah. Upside down, backwards, and off the wall. Two emblematic opponents of all things Trump. The girl child so smitten with her own slanted education that she believes the President is unpredictable and probably senile. Beside her, the fortunate beneficiary of evident nepotism who sees things so starkly in black and white that everything he objects to is automatically violently destructive and evil.

These are classic demonstrations of the phenomenon called Psychological Projection. 

No, you don’t have to wade through the psychobabble jargon. I have a simpler way for you to visualize it:

Now just run that again in reverse…

We’ve had two scathing indictments of the President from self-professed Progressives who are determined to correct past wrongs in the American experience and prevent the odious occupant of the White House from adding to those wrongs. Each of them has a boulder to hurl into the media for the purpose of exposing what is wrong with the President. But what are the boulders they’re throwing? The boulders are their own deficiencies, subconsciously imputed to the President as a way of offloading the mental illnesses that afflict them.

Melanie Stansbury objects vehemently to the administration’s criticisms of the Smithsonian’s approach to the history of Native Americans in the 250 year history of the United States. Her anger in the video is inspired by a report issued on July 4, 2026:

FTA: <<The report, Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage, was issued as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to reshape how American history is presented in federally supported institutions.

The report stems from Trump’s March 27, 2025 executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which directed a review of Smithsonian exhibits, educational programs, and policies. The executive order named Vice President JD Vance to serve on the Smithsonian Board of Regents and charged administration officials with examining what the White House described as “divisive” and “ideological” historical narratives.

While the report focuses primarily on the National Museum of American History, it also takes aim at interpretations of Native American history presented across Smithsonian museums, including themes long associated with the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of the American Indian.

The report criticizes the National Museum of the American Indian’s Nation to Nation exhibition. “For example, the exhibit’s introductory video begins by stating that the story of the U.S. and Native American Indian nations is a story about ‘the rise of a new great nation at the sacrifice of hundreds of others,’” the report states.

The report also takes issue with Suzan Shown Harjo’s video, The ‘Indian Problem’. In the video, Harjo—Cheyenne and Muscogee (Creek), one of the exhibit’s curators and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama—states:

“When you wrench people from their homelands, wasn’t that genocide? We don’t make the case that there was genocide. We know there was.”

Another of the report’s central criticisms is the use of “land acknowledgements” and exhibits that describe the United States as having been built on land taken from Indigenous peoples. A chapter titled “NMAH’s Repeated Claim that America Rests on Stolen Land” argues that such interpretations frame American history primarily as a story of oppression rather than achievement.>>

This is where Stanbury’s indoctrination in academic talking points about U.S. history regarding Native Americans becomes a boulder of accusations against Trump. The confusions are all on her side. The charge of genocide is ridiculous. Real genocide leaves a long-term scar in the form of reduced populations. The total worldwide population of Jews in 1933 was 15 million. In 2023, it was 15.5 million, a figure representing recovery from the millions of murders committed in German death camps. For purposes of comparison, the population of the United States was 125 million in 1933 and 336 million in 2023, a near tripling in 100 years. Without the Holocaust the current population of Jews might be over 40 million. That’s about 25 million invisible people eliminated from history by genocide.

What do we know about Native American populations? In 1776, there were approximately 250,000 “Indians” divided into numerous tribes who fought frequent wars with one another. In the same year, the population of the 13 original American states was approximately 2.5 million people. 250 years later, the total population of Native Americans in the U.S. is 7.4 million, including 40,000 Alaskan Inuits. The population of the original 13 states in 2023 was 78 million. Both populations have increased by a factor of 30 times in 250 years, approximately the same amount. Were there wars, unfairnesses, massacres even? Yes. But the federal government recognizes 574 Native American tribes who have the choice of living in their own territories or in any of the states as American citizens. Genocide? Stolen lands? Those are both pretty controversial subjects these days. How did the Palestinians acquire birthright to the land they occupied after the Jews had inhabited it as Israel? The current Progressive positions on both are a study in opposites. Where the boulder shows its ugly face. 

Who do Progressives blame most obnoxiously as perpetrators of genocide these days? Jews. Oh, the upside down irony of it… They also tend to be fervently pro-Palestinian in their politics and supportive of Islamist/jihadist politicians in their own party, two constituencies who openly advocate extermination of the Jews to the last man, woman, and child. How does Melanie Stansbury reconcile this gross contradiction? She simply lobs her boulder of absurdly opposite articles of faith into the anti-Trump media and calls him “unpredictable” because he has consistently maintained an 80-year American policy of supporting and defending Israel’s right to exist in defiance of Islamic hatred and terrorism. Splash, ripples, chaos.

What is Jonathan Jackson’s boulder? Similar but differently shaped. His obsession is not Trump’s unpredictability but his ruthless penchant for violence and destruction and death. His unlikely rock is so huge and all-encompassing that it turns everything he sees into its opposite. Urban beautification projects like the White House Ballroom, the rehab of the Lincoln Center, the 250th Anniversary Arch, and the restoration of the capital’s reflecting pools are themselves depicted as acts of vandalism and violence. Never mind that it is members of his own diseased party who fantasize about physically blowing up these privately financed structures because they were sponsored by Donald Trump; Jackson’s own father regarded Trump as a longtime friend and ally.

He doesn’t stop there. He goes on to brand all the domestic and international policies of the Trump administration undertaken to improve the safety and security of the United States against hostile foreign powers as if they were as evil as the ballroom and the arch. He sees death in everything Trump does. Here’s what he can’t see that’s right in front of his face:

These are more lives saved than anything the Biden administration could claim. Murder rate down 20 percent nationally, violent crime 9.3 percent. 5.000 child predators arrested. 3,258  kilograms of fentanyl — poured into the borderless United States by an administration that valued adding tend of millions of dependent voters over safeguarding hundreds of millions of citizens — represents 1.6 billion potentially lethal 2-milligram doses of a drug that’s killed more young Americans than the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. Yet somehow the war in Iran is proof of a presidential death wish on his own people when it has in seven months cost about the same number of American lives as were lost in a single day during Biden’s Afghan withdrawal.

Likely, there is no foreign war in the nation’s history that has cost fewer 

American KIAs than the current war in Iran. But politicos on both sides 

of the aisle are happy to campaign in the delusion that itmis a disaster.

How do people like Stansbury and Jackson get away with such nonsensical misrepresentations of available facts?  Because the mass media on both sides of the aisle are complicit in confusing the issue. It isn’t Trump who lacks conviction. “The best” of us who are failing in that way are the myopic conservative outlets who would rather report on the clickbait public squabbles than the real news. Kash Patel’s report (see above) was turned into a few lurid posts about lefty members of a Congressional hearing slandering Patel rather than an assessment of what the FBI accomplished in its first year under Trump.

They’d rather show off the fireworks than present the facts like journalists.

When you don’t really understand what’s going on, 

it’s easier to play both ends against the middle.

As for “the worst who are full of passionate intensity” (Yeah, I figured Yeats would elbow his way back in…), the poet would probably be siding with the lefties here, given his Victorian reduction of Christianity to “some rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born.” 

That’s the real boulder the haters of all things American are really hurling into the river. The most unbearable feeling of all is the loss of faith experienced by the selfish, resentful, and vindictive. It has to be propelled outward and away, hopefully at enemies who can be distracted from their goals and ideals by fugly assassins.

The haters and the cowards can’t hear this. They really can’t.