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Hurricane West: Cornel West and American Radicalism
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE ^ | May 10, 2010 | David Horowitz

Posted on 05/10/2010 11:08:25 PM PDT by neverdem

Rarely has our country faced a more uncertain future under more troubling circumstances. We have been attacked by an enemy who is inspired by religious hatreds and is able to strike our homeland, something no adversary has been able to accomplish in modern times. Domestically, we are facing the greatest economic collapse in a generation, and our federal government is on its way to bankruptcy. Confronting these crises, we are led by the most inexperienced, radical, and divisive president in our nation’s history, a man who has appeased our enemies and attacked our allies abroad and has authorized a government expansion at home that will create more debt in the next four years than previous presidents have since our nation began.

Barack Obama’s radical measures have prompted others to focus on the political breakdowns that characterize his administration — the disdain for bipartisanship and traditional compromise, the disregard for constitutional process, and the blunt contempt for the will of the voters who elected him. But politics is a reflection of forces that are ultimately rooted in a society’s culture, the values and attitudes that shape its consciousness. These are the crucible of a nation’s achievements and its armor against adversarial threats. A people proud of its heritage will fight for its survival; a people guilty before history will not. Hence a nation’s fate is ultimately tied to the health of its culture. Underlying the present crisis is a breakdown of our culture that has been 50 years in the making and cannot be altered by an election or two.

To measure the dimensions of our current predicament, there are few better indicators than the improbable career of a cultural icon and political radical named Cornel West, friend (and former colleague) of Pres...

(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: americanradicalism; corn; cornelwest; davidhorowitz
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1 posted on 05/10/2010 11:08:25 PM PDT by neverdem
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To: neverdem
Confronting these crises, we are led by the most inexperienced, radical, and divisive president in our nation’s history, a man who has appeased our enemies and attacked our allies abroad and has authorized a government expansion at home that will create more debt in the next four years than previous presidents have since our nation began.

Other than that, I'd give him a solid B+.

2 posted on 05/10/2010 11:27:11 PM PDT by beaversmom
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To: neverdem; Ernest_at_the_Beach
"Underlying the present crisis is a breakdown of our culture that has been 50 years in the making and cannot be altered by an election or two."
I must seek sleep. But. We just may be at the turning road. Where we cannot recover. We may not be able to find enough electable local, state, and US Senate and House to somehow stem the tide.
I now work with so many totally ill informed people, both young middle and old. They are all totally clueless as how the premises of socialism are the worst and hideous concepts the world has known. They are clueless at what for so many years had occured in Russia, China just to name two countries.
We are in deep trouble. Damn my own mom at ninety three plus is clueless. If you hear her whine... you would think she was a socialist.
With that. I must seek sleep. Do try to have a great upcoming day. I have to work till Tuesday 11PM.
3 posted on 05/10/2010 11:33:49 PM PDT by Marine_Uncle (Honor must be earned....)
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To: neverdem

Like all pseudo-intellectual liberals, he is a tap dancer in the realm of issues. The only time he actually lets you know what he is thinking is immediately after you have gotten his goat.

That’s how all communistas are. They try their damnedest to throw you off their track; but in the end, it always comes out. Thank God they are angry most of the time.


4 posted on 05/10/2010 11:48:42 PM PDT by Migraine (Diversity is great... ...until it happens to YOU.)
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To: neverdem

Horowitz hits the nail on it’s depressing head. West reminds me of Al Jolsen-if he didn’t exist someone would have to invent him.


5 posted on 05/10/2010 11:51:44 PM PDT by Amberdawn (As you go through life Brother, whatever your goal, keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.)
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To: Marine_Uncle

Just as one example of what you say, consider illegal immigration, tipping points and look up the battle of Adrianople.


6 posted on 05/11/2010 12:41:44 AM PDT by UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide (NEW TAG ====> **REPEAL OR REBEL!** -- Islam Delenda Est! -- Rumble thee forth)
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To: beaversmom

A B+ For What ??????? Being a COMMIE?


7 posted on 05/11/2010 12:43:53 AM PDT by Paige ("All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," Edmund Burke)
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To: neverdem

Bump for later.....I’m low on antacids.


8 posted on 05/11/2010 2:49:20 AM PDT by BIGLOOK (Keelhaul Congress!)
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To: beaversmom; Grampa Dave; AuntB; Tennessee Nana; Condor51; stephenjohnbanker; maggief; onyx; ...
......we are led by the most inexperienced, radical, and divisive president in our nation’s history, a man who has authorized a government expansion that will create more debt in the next four years than previous presidents have created since our nation began.........

Rush read an essay by a U of Illinois professor emeritus stating that the Obama administration is viewed as an "occupying force from outside the US" ........whose cultural and political values are entirely foreign to most Americans.

Our laws, and the rights we thought were inviolate, have no meaning or consequence to Obama and his Demolition Squad. The rights of American citizens have taken a back seat to the advancement of their crass political ambitions, goals and careers.

Americans are reduced to second-class status.......seen merely as workhorses to be beaten into submission, to come up with the taxes these insatiable occupiers require to advance their alien goals.

Notice that Obama and his Demolition Squad spend most of their workday perfecting their "act"....... trying to make Americans think they're "harmless."

9 posted on 05/11/2010 3:19:22 AM PDT by Liz (If teens can procreate in a Volkswagen, why does a spotted owl need 2000 acres? JD Hayworth)
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To: Migraine
Like all pseudo-intellectual liberals, he is a tap dancer in the realm of issues. ....That’s how all communistas are. They try their damnedest to throw you off their track....

Good point. Leon Wieseltier agreed with you years ago in the pages of The New Republic, in an article usefully titled "The Decline of the Black Intellectual" (quoted in this article):

“Since there is no crisis in America more urgent than the crisis of race, and since there is no intellectual in America more celebrated for his consideration of the crisis of race, I turned to West, and read his books. They are almost completely worthless. . . . West’s work is noisy, tedious, slippery, . . . sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared."

Does that sound like a frank enough review for you? It about gets it for me.

10 posted on 05/11/2010 3:22:54 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: neverdem
The article is about 2,000 words more than Cornel West deserves, but Horowitz has certainly done his research. The thing about West and all his ilk is that they are intellectual fly-weights and also very poorly educated, something that doesn't impeded their ability to be rabble rousers, unfortunately. However, Horowitz made an interesting point:

Because West is a sentimentalist, his amalgam of religion and politics reveals in stark form the malign method of the progressive attack.

When I read this statement, it caught my attention and I realized that sentimentalism is a big part of "progressivism," among either blacks or whites. Think of any "progressive" speech and you'll hear sentimental sob stories, sentimental reflections by the speaker on his own life, sentimental justifications of horrors...and you'll hear absolutely no rational thought. I think one of the things that black racists consider "white" is reason.

That's why the canon has been changed so that there are no longer writers (of any color, but mostly white) whose work is based on reason, structure, and a knowledge of history and the writings of other people whose work was based on reason. And that includes people like Shakespeare; I'm not referring only to essayists.

Saul Bellow, in The Dean's December, described the people in the black communities around the university and, in fact, people in the university who had emulated them, such as white liberals, as "insides without outsides." Everything was about them, everything was emotional, everything was a matter of their immediate desires. But they had rejected rationality, rejected structure and control, and rejected the past. They lived entirely in their stew of emotions of the moment. And because this is an unworkable way to live, they had paradoxically passed every responsibility in their lives to an outside structure: the government, whose responsibility it now was to support their precious churning "insides."

11 posted on 05/11/2010 3:34:30 AM PDT by livius
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To: neverdem

[the rest of the article is very long....but it concludes:]

Viewed as a historic force that has conducted a 50-year assault on America’s institutional values and standards and that has driven America’s cultural decline, the progressive Left is a movement that masks malice towards its own country as a love for the world’s powerless and oppressed. In quest of a mythic “social justice,” progressives are the willful adversaries of America’s actually existing civilization, which, by any real-world standard, is both tolerant and free. The career of Cornel West shows with alarming clarity that the progressive presence is now pervasive in our institutional midst and its destructive enterprise is well advanced.” [end of quote of article - rah]

My mother was an FBI typist in WWII. She then saw the communist/Marxist plan for the destruction of the USA that they wrote in the 1940’s - which is totally on track, now into its 2nd generation. Destruction of the REAL foundation of our country - a belief in the Lord Jesus Christ and a scriptural view of man and the world - and replacing it with an atheistic/marxist view — has been insidiously progressing for a long time and is now in it’s 2nd generation. They control government, media, and education - all as planned. Thank God for the Glenn Beck’s, Rush Limbaugh’s, et al who are fighting the raging torrent.

But ultimately it is God’s people - us - who have allowed this to happen with multiple generations of our outward religion replacing a living relationship with God and our failure to live the truth - let alone to declare it.

My thought is this: I wonder if the overtaking of our nation’s culture and world-view in all things by this atheistic/marxist beast is not the spiritual equivalent of Babylon’s outward conquest of Jerusalem/Israel? The conquest by Babylon was God’s judgment for Israel’s spiritual immorality and idolatry.

Could it be that what we see happening is also God’s judgment for our spiritual immorality and idolatry?

If so, it emphasizes even more that our only hope is the clear declaration of II Chronicles 7:14, “If MY PEOPLE, WHO ARE CALLED BY MY NAME, humble themselves (note this is the first requirement, without which I believe the rest cannot happen)......”

I think of both Daniel’s and Nehemiah’s prayers, where they included themselves when they confessed the sins of the nation.....two of the most powerful prayers in scripture.

May God give us such hearts as Daniel and Nehemiah.

arlis


12 posted on 05/11/2010 4:25:10 AM PDT by Arlis (- Virginia loghome/woodsdweller/"gun-clinger")
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To: neverdem

West fits the biblical description of a ‘fool.’


13 posted on 05/11/2010 5:47:13 AM PDT by Neever
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To: Liz

“Americans are reduced to second-class status.......seen merely as workhorses to be beaten into submission, to come up with the taxes these insatiable occupiers require to advance their alien goals. “

EXACTLY.


14 posted on 05/11/2010 6:02:48 AM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (Support our troops....and vote out the RINOS!)
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To: Liz

Have you ever tried to read on of West’s book? Don’t bother, they are unreadable.


15 posted on 05/11/2010 6:05:58 AM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (Support our troops....and vote out the RINOS!)
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To: stephenjohnbanker

Saw him being interviewed-—he seemed totally out of his element.


16 posted on 05/11/2010 6:07:11 AM PDT by Liz (If teens can procreate in a Volkswagen, why does a spotted owl need 2000 acres? JD Hayworth)
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To: Liz

You mean he wasn’t interviewed at the “ College of Sociology Jargon “ ?


17 posted on 05/11/2010 6:23:03 AM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (Support our troops....and vote out the RINOS!)
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To: BIGLOOK

Antacids or bourbon?


18 posted on 05/11/2010 6:40:30 AM PDT by AFreeBird
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To: neverdem

Anyone who has had the misfortune of hearing West drone on in his pseudo-intellectual Marxist style must have truly wondered where they got this clown. His speaking “method” is totally bizarre. I’ll bet even most of delirious people lapping up his idiocies probably think to themselves “what the h... is this buffoon jabbering about?”


19 posted on 05/11/2010 7:07:28 AM PDT by driftless2 (for long term happiness, learn how to play the accordion)
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To: Liz
"totally out his element"

I think happily demented is the best term for West.

20 posted on 05/11/2010 7:10:09 AM PDT by driftless2 (for long term happiness, learn how to play the accordion)
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