Covington Catholic

Monday

Geoff Shullenberger

Meme warfare on the convention stage

Who’s on the roster of speakers for the Republican National Convention is just as revealing as who’s not. Nowhere in sight are former GOP standard-bearers like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Included, on the other hand, are several anonymous civilians turned into internet celebrities by viral videos. Among them is Nick Sandmann, the teenager at the center of the Covington Catholic confrontation captured on film at the National Mall last year. Also featured will be Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the couple whose armed confrontation with protesters outside their St Louis home in June also circulated widely online. Their inclusion clearly signals that the party is leaning into the meme warfare strategy that helped propel Trump to victory in 2016.

meme warfare

Friday

Roger Kimball

Jussie Smollett, and the strange alchemy of egalitarian despotism

One of my favorite observations made by F. A. Hayek concerns the semantic detonations of the word ‘social.’ Especially pernicious, he noted, was the conjunction of the word ‘social’ with the word ‘justice.’ ‘Much the worst use of the word “social,”’ he wrote, and ‘one that wholly destroys the meaning of the word it qualifies, is in the almost universally used phrase “social justice.”’ There are, Hayek continued, other instances of this sort of ‘semantic fraud.’ Consider the phrase ‘People’s Democracy.’ The one thing you can be sure of about states describing themselves thus is that they are totalitarian, not democratic.

jussie smollett

Monday

Freddy Gray

Abortion and the new covert culture war

What connects the Ralph Northam story, the Covington story, and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation story? Is it the dark side of social media? The perils of high-school? Catholicism in America today? It is all that. More than anything, however, it is abortion. Abortion is and arguably always has been the nuclear core of the culture war, yet these days it hides itself. The pitched media scraps between progressives and conservatives are often still about Roe v. Wade, we just pretend that they are not. We act as if the Ralph Northam story is about racism. It isn’t. It’s about what he said about fetuses, and the tasteless whooping for late-term abortions.

abortion