“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.… ‘Never Again’ means something.”
— AO-C
“Concentration camps were places where Nazis inflicted slave labor, torture and death upon innocent Jews removed from their homes at gunpoint and transported there in cattle cars. To use Holocaust terminology regarding the refugee situation at the border is deeply offensive, and for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to first use the term ‘Never Again’ and then deny making the comparison is compellingly dishonest.”
— Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer, Chairman of the 1,000-member Rabbinic Circle of Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV)
“Trivializing the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. Jews were not sneaking into countries illegally, nor did they anticipate incarceration like these illegals do. Neither are illegal immigrants forced into labor or tortured, much less being systematically murdered. It is doubly shameful that she is trying to excuse or justify her statement, rather than apologizing.”
— Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, CJV Senior Rabbinic Fellow
Among my roles as law professor, I teach a course in California Civil Procedure. Although that course entails teaching lots of fascinating chess-like theory and strategy, it also includes conveying mundane rules. One must serve a complaint within 60 days of filing. One must answer, object, or otherwise respond to that action within 30 days of being served. An opening brief should not exceed 15 pages and must be received by the opposing party at least 16 court days before the hearing. Stuff like that. Lots of stuff like that.
I have to teach the right law. I cannot just throw in my own law, like “Hey, serve whenever you like. Don’t sweat deadlines. And if you feel you need 19 pages to tellYourTruth, then take the damned extra four pages. Big deal! And, geesh, serve that opening brief eight days before the hearing because, what the heck!”
I cannot get away with that, and I never would contemplate doing so. I have to teach the right law, the correct law.
Now let us shift to a tenured college professor in political science. He/She /It /Ze basically can say whatever the moment feels like. Tenured college professors cannot get fired, no matter how incompetent, deathly boring, and intellectually stale, as long as they (i) do not say the “N word,” and (ii) do not sexually violate a student. So a tenured college professor can tell a class that the Soviet Union was a model of freedom, that Stalin is completely misunderstood because he really was as kind as Mother Teresa, that AmeriKKKa is the center of fascism and Nazism, that up is down, in is out, and Trump is a Nazi.
We all have seen the street interviews: Jay Leno “Jaywalking” at Universal Studios, Jesse Watters, all the others. The first reaction we have when we see those is to say: “Oh my L-rd! Are these morons ever so stupid! Where do they find such idiots?” But we are missing a point when we react that way.
Many of those people, particularly those under 30, are not as stupid as they seem. That is, their abstract intelligence is not lacking. Give them squares and circles, and many of them will be able to figure out which shapes fit into which cut-out segments on the board that accompanies the pieces. There is something deeper going on than “Stupid.” The problem is that they are being taught ignorance.
If you take a smart mind and teach it nonsense, it will spout forth nonsense for many years until the sheer experience of life itself ultimately teaches otherwise. There is a reason that all polls find that voters become more conservative as they mature. If you go through four years of Columbia University without ever learning American history, after not having it learned it through the prior twelve years, you will not know it. If — even worse — you do not learn from objective books but instead from the jaundiced lectures of life-tenured Marxist professors of “soft sciences” like political science, sociology, philosophy, and Identity Studies — tenured professors who call themselves “Socialists” but actually are “Marxists” or “Communists” — then you come out learning what they teach you to memorize and to spout back to them on final exams and in term papers.
Less than she is a person, Ocasio-Cortez is a Specimen. (AOC, if you are reading this, a “Specimen” is not someone who flies to the moon.) The Left Media and their Democrat patrons make a grave error when they present O-Cortez as a person of thought. She is not an original thinker. Rather, she is a metaphorical Laboratory Rat who demonstrates repeatedly what happens when someone born with a mind that seems capable of operating properly emerges from the present-day American university system. Thus, she is not an “idiot” or “moron” in the objective sense — not unless she truly has come up with all her “ideas” on her own, a highly doubtful proposition. Having observed O-Cortez’s public communications for a year, I am more convinced than ever that she simply is the product of a broken education system that deconstructs facts and reality, teaching instead that there are no facts at all. Rather, I have “My Truth,” and you have “Your Truth.”
Remember: She attended Boston University on a John F. Lopez Fellowship. She interned in Ted Kennedy’s office and was smart enough never to ride in a car alone with him. She graduated cum laude from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2011, majoring in international relations and economics. Because she got good grades, she clearly reflects the “education” she received. If you are served the most wonderful steak imaginable, and then they pour a gallon of kimchi on it and grind that kimchi into it, you better like kimchi because that is what it will taste like. Her grades mean that she absorbed the pabulum she was spoonfed.
Thus, in one apparent self-parody, her revealing PBS interview with Margaret Hoover, O-Cortez condemned Israel — one of the Five Basic Food Groups of American College Education (alongwith condemning Trump as Nazi, berating America as World Persecutor, praising Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib as Misunderstood, and recognizing that Gender Is Fluid). Ms. Hoover probed gently beyond the college slogans, asking O-Cortez to explain her “thoughts.” Dead silence. Crickets. Deer in the headlights. And then The Hyphen found the words that a college professor had pre-programmed in her years earlier: Y’know, uh, the Settlements, whatever. Watch her here for the minute and a half that she demonstrated the point.
She did it again recently when she told a packed room of clapping seals at an MSNBC Forum that the 22nd Amendment had been passed by right-wingers trying to prevent Franklin Roosevelt from seeking reelection: “They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure that Roosevelt did not get reelected.” Go ahead — treat yourself here to these 22 seconds. FDR already had won four terms, and O-Cortez saw a right-wing conspiracy to stop him from more. She was not stating an opinion but a fact. An opinion entails thought; a fact is teachable. Rather than see her at that forum as “stupid,” she really was more the Laboratory Rat with Makeup and Lipstick proving what happens when a higher education aims at deconstructing facts, obfuscating reality, and granting unbridled authority to spout “Your Truth” no matter how absurd. As older Americans who went to school in prior decades know, FDR died April 12, 1945 while in office. The 22nd Amendment was proposed March 21, 1947. It was ratified February 27, 1951.
Thus, another John F. Lopez Fellow, majoring in international relations and economics, now replicating itself by the dozens as a room of nodding, assentingclapping seals drink in her ragweed.
Thus, there is something going on with O-Cortez that transcends “stupid.” Rather, she is so very much like so many tens of thousands of your and your friends’ sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, who now receive an education that costs $40,000-$60,000 per year and fails to teach:
If college professors can spout any foolish, false narrative they wish, safe in the knowledge that their life tenure grants them a safe harbor to mislead, to lie, and to brainwash their defenseless minions who must get good grades in their courses, it is not surprising that O-Cortez emerged as she did. She can string sentences together coherently when she speaks. She can communicate in 140 characters. Her problem is not that she is “stupid” per se but, rather, that she is emblematic of too many peers among a generation that spouts nonsense as “My Truth,” peers who do not know what they are talking about, and — much worse — lack the humility to recognize that they do not know that they do not know what they are talking about.
Her latest trick in the Rat Laboratory came this week when The Hyphen commented on the humane and lawful facilities in which we temporarily detain people who brazenly defy our laws and break into our country illegally, overwhelming our available resources. We provide the Illegals with food, shelter, and health care at our expense. We hold them only a few days before releasing them. But The Hyphen compared those facilities to “concentration camps.” Earlier above I invited you to view The Hyphen for ninety seconds as she demonstrated her ignorance of Israel and then for twenty-three seconds as she spouted ignorantly on FDR and the 22nd Amendment. I am not going to invite you now to watch Claude Lanzmann’s ten-hour movie, Shoah, nor even to visit a Holocaust museum.
I have warned for thirty years that, when you build Holocaust museums, you end up teaching ignorant people just enough so that now they can place their issues alongside the martyrs of Dachau and Auschwitz. Thus, Climate Extremists screech that advocates of American energy independence are bringing a Holocaust because the whole world will end in twelve years. Suddenly, temporary shelters for Illegals become denominated as “concentration camps.” I wonder what The Hyphen will say when she learns they have showers in them. Donald Trump gets called a Nazi. ICE becomes the Storm Troopers. And in such an insanely deconstructed reality, I guess Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez becomes Anne Frank.
Is O-Cortez an idiot? Maybe. An imbecile? Maybe. A moron? Maybe. Those who have an IQ between 0 and 25 are idiots; IQs between 26 and 50 are considered imbeciles; and those who have an IQ between 51 and 70 are considered morons. So, maybe.
But more reasonably, when she starts invoking a term like “Never Again” to characterize “concentration camps” that are nothing of the sort, The Hyphen demonstrates what American university education now is producing: Young people who are utterly ignorant beyond tears, have no concept of historical reality, are unable to compare and contrast reasonably, and yet who are all-too-willing to pontificate “Their Truth” on any bullhorn or into any cable camera that will provide the makeup, the lipstick, the wardrobe, and the hair-arranging needed.
The added irony, of course, is that the O-Cortezes who populate the Left Media and their Democrat Patrons always protest against “Cultural Appropriation” any time a Caucasian makes the mistake of wearing a kimono or eating Mexican food or attending a culture-themed Halloween party. Well, honey, the term “Never Again” is not yours. This book may not have been on the John F. Lopez Fellows Reading List, but it will educate you as to the term’s origins.
