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Jedediah Bila: "Elitism is what's eating away at our country"

Like many of her admirers, we first came upon leg-chair lovely Jedediah Bila early one morning in the "take-no-prisoners" parry and thrust of Greg Gutfeld's "Red Eye" on Fox.

"I always have thought that elitism — on the left and the right — is what's eating away at our country," writes "Hot Conservative American" columnist and commentator Jedediah Bila in her new book, Outnumbered: Chronicles of a Manhattan Conservative, an album of anecdotal moments in the making of a "conservative girl with a twist." 

"I followed my heart — as always — and have held dear the wise words of my former college professor to "sit down, trust it, and write” when I feel lost. It never disappoints me," Jedediah explains the eureka moment in March of 2009 when "my focus on writing political commentary was born."

It's a fun and easy read — sweet and savory — and sticks to the ribs. We downloaded Outnumbered onto our desktop Kindle app yesterday morning and finished before cocktail hour, devouring tasty morsels amongst the usual multitaskings of a busy day. Arranged as a series of vignettes based upon everyday encounters with the politically correct multiculturalists of the upperclass milieu she moved in as a Spanish teacher at a Manhattan private school, Jedediah's story is full of aphoristic quotable quotes suitable for promulgating on Twitter. A sampling:

Kids are supposed to go to school to learn HOW to think, not WHAT to think.

I learned that what people say about you has a lot more to do with them than with you.

It's incredible how a mind prone to collectivism will quickly try to impose that same branding on you.

I treasure people who come to this country with big goals, loads of ambition and an inspiring work ethic.

"They felt the need to 'remind' me that Obama is a 'genius,' Palin is an 'idiot,' and anything and everything is George W. Bush’s fault," Jedediah recalled sitting through lockstep faculty-lounge chatter in the aftermath of President Obama's election.

Back to that quote in the title to our post:

I always have thought that elitism — on the left and the right — is what's eating away at our country.

Jedediah's insight resonates in a series of eureka moments of our own dating back, perhaps, to early spring of 2009 when we found our voice as an anti-statist Tea Party activist. As we wrote last year in "Gramsci's long march through the institutions ends at the water's edge":

Then came Angelo Codevilla's palate-cleansing revelation that neither statist democrats nor nominally limited-government republicans gave a darn about the electorate. It was the Ruling Class vs the Country Class. Enter stage right the Tea Party and Barbara Bush's unmasking when she revealed her contempt for you and me. And now the cascade of outrageous intrusions on our Bill of Rights.

"I thought the academic elite were supposed to represent the pinnacle of sophistication?" notes Jedediah in mock surprise:

Oh, wait. That's only when they agree with you.

William Staneski observed the phenomenon — a case of "epistemic closure' in the trendy parlance of the day — as it applies to another of our cultural institutions, the media, in an American Thinker piece awhile back:

It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can't escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don't realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth …

Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

“Perhaps Mark Levin said it best when speaking of his dog Sprite in his touching book, Rescuing Sprite: 'But the truth is, Sprite did more for us than we ever could have done for him.' I feel exactly the same way about Emma," Jedediah wrote at her blog a few months back about her precious Maltese Emma, featured in a portfolio of images in the final pages of Outnumbered. "She has taught me more about trust, loyalty, commitment, and honesty than I could ever have dreamt of teaching her."

Update: Maggie's Farm links! Thanks, Bird Dog.

Update: Jedediah links!

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

Message to Peggy Noonan: Girls just wanna have fun

“Today we completed one pledge and we began another," says Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee: "Many months ago House Republicans committed and pledged to listen to Americans all across this country… We kept that pledge, and it allows us to make another. The Pledge to America starts with the preamble that reminds us that every American citizen is endowed with certain rights from their creator. When our government charts a course that endangers those rights, the people have the right to demand a new agenda from their government."

"This election is more and more shaping up into a contest between the Exhausted and the Enraged," writes Northeast Corridor Conservative Peggy Noonan, once again almost grasping the spirit that animates this Army of Davids. As we wrote last summer, "Tea Party to Peggy Noonan: It's not rage, but disgust!" This time, the former Reagan speechwriter and author of the transcendent "thousand points of light" decided to listen instead of pontificate. Her telephone conversation with Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is a revelation:

But Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee suggests I have the wrong word for the Republican base. The word, she says, is not enraged but "livid" …

There are two major developments, she says, that are new this year and insufficiently noted, but they're going to shape election outcomes in 2010 and beyond.

"The question is which is to be master," as we blogged the other day, and Blackburn is taking no prisoners:

First, Washington is being revealed in a new way.

The American people now know, "with real sophistication," everything that happens in the capital. "I find a much more knowledgeable electorate, and it is a real-time response," Ms. Blackburn says. "We hear about it even as the vote is taking place" …

The Internet isn't just a tool for organization and fund-raising. It has given citizens access to information they never had before. "The more they know," Ms. Blackburn observes, "the less they like Washington."

It's that effervescent disintermediation of the powers that be via the internet that we are forever flogging here. Blackburn closes in for the kill:

Second is the rise of women as a force. They "are the drivers in this election cycle," Ms. Blackburn says. "Something is going on." At tea party events the past 18 months, she started to notice "60% of the crowd is women."

She tells of a political rally that drew thousands in Nashville, at the State Capitol plaza. She had brought her year-old grandson. When the mic was handed to her, she was holding him. "I said, 'How many of you are grandmothers?' The hands! That was the moment I realized that the majority of the people at the political events now are women. I saw this in town halls in '09 — it was women showing up at my listening events, it was women talking about health care."

Blackburn casts the "rise of women as a force" in terms of "the Rage of the Bill-Paying Moms," and she's right as far as what Noonan calls "a change in national thinking regarding the role of the individual and the government." But don't discount what may be an even more fundamental dynamic at play: "Girls just wanna have fun."

Update: Instalanche! Thanks for the spelling correction, Professor. :D

Message To Peggy Noonan: Girls Just Want To Have Fun.

Want to, want to …

Update II: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link! They just want to, that's all!

Update III: Cubachi links:

SISU: Must read.

Update IV: James Nicholas of What the …?! links:

Boy, do they ever. And few of 'em have more fun than Sissy Willis, whose blog SISU is about as fun as it gets here in blog land. Her latest post is a "once more into the breach" attempt to communicate with Ms. Peggy Noonan, and by my stars, she and candidate Marsha Blackburn of Tenessee seem to have succeeded.

Crossposted at Cloven Not Crested, Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

A growing chorus of "minority" Republicans are finding their voice

 

New Jersey Sistah Grizzly Cubachi (left) takes no prisoners. Watch out, Harry Reid. "Minority" Republicans are mad as hell, and they're not going to take this anymore.

"Harry Reid can't believe I'm a Hispanic Republican" writes our fiery Latina blog/twitterfriend Cubachi in an important post that's part of a growing chorus of "minority" Republicans who are finding their voice. They're pushing back against Michelle Malkin's "ethnic plantation owners," the demagoging Democrats who would project their own racism onto the tea partiers of all races among us who don't toe the politically correct, identity-politics party line. And they're disintermediating the legacy media via the internet. Cubachi's opening salvo is a challenge to the obscenely arrogant Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's assertion that he "doesn't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican":

Well Harry, let me introduce myself. I am the daughter of Cuban exiles who have seen first hand the failures of liberal and socialist policies in their native country. My father in fact, was a political prisoner in Cuba for five years because the government deemed his speech against repression and dictatorship “hateful and dangerous.” Sort of like what you democrats say about the tea parties, although you have not thrown their members in jail … yet …

My father looked at the platform of the republican party that endorsed small government, lower taxes, and strong defense, while the democrat party embraced Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, murderers and tyrants, as some sort of folk heroes, and endorsed larger governments taking power away from the people.

Although I wasn’t born in Cuba, I witnessed for myself liberals governing the state of New Jersey. I saw the failed policies of former Governors Jim McGreevy and Jon Corzine. Unions ran the show, uncontrolled and limitless spending, massive corruption, and the highest property taxes in the nation. I, as a thinking, tax-paying citizen, can not fathom why I would support democrats that have ran this state to near bankruptcy. Heck, I see it in a larger scale in Washington, DC. Yes Harry Reid, I do think and watch the news.

As a red stater behind enemy lines here in Deepest Blue Taxachusetts, we feel a profound kinship with fellow Americans like Cubachi and other "minorities," including small-government, free-market women of Northern European descent like ourselves, demonized by our "betters" on the left side of the aisle for embracing the Founding Fathers' vision and rejecting the smothering embrace of identity politics and the nanny state. A sampling from recent archives of that rising chorus of "my people" finding their voices:

Cedra Crenshaw, who's fighting the Chicago machine

Herman Cain, whose words "Stay inspired. The people are still in charge" are an inspiration

Black Republicans National Press Club event

Other signs of unconventional Republicans finding their authentic American voices:

Pajamas Media's weekly The Minority Report

Juliette Akinyi, aka Baldilocks, "The Herding Series"

GOProud Announces Ann Coulter to Headline Homocon 2010 in New York City

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: Juliette Akinyi links at KelseyLive.com.

Update III: "SISU has it almost right with the title of her first rate post," writes our friend Da TechGuy:

The truth is they have always had their voices, it is just the MSM has ignored them in the past and continues to do so. The point is they are unable to prevent the general public from finding them due to social media and the internet. The correct title is "A growing chorus of “minority” Republican voices are found by the public."

Crossposted at Cloven Not Crested, Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Cedra Crenshaw vs King Samir Shabazz: The hand that rocks the cradle?

"I am up against the same machine that put Barack Obama in office. The machine came in, they wiped all of his competitors off the ballot, just like they're trying to do to me," grassroots Illinois state senate candidate Cedra Crenshaw told an Independence Day audience Saturday," drawing her secret weapon: "They can't call me a  racist, white, evil man." You can donate to her legal defense fund here.

"You hear so much about conservative women leading this conservative movement in this country, and I really believe that conservative women are the most persecuted figures in politics right now," says Dana Loesch in a refreshingly candid Dana Show radio interview — crossposted at BreitbartTV — with "mama grizzly" Cedra Crenshaw. Does the hand that rocks the cradle still rule the world? More about that in a moment, but first a few excerpts from the interview:

She's a wife, she's a stay-at-home mom, she's an education reformer, she's an accountant, and she was fed up, and so she threw her hat in the ring.

She has enormous support from the grassroots movement, and she has terrified the Chicago Machine, who is trying to move heaven and earth to get her off the ticket.

The Tea Partiers love her. Listen to the Dana Show interview and her Independence Day speech, and you will understand the smart, common-sense appeal of this authentic American voice. Fellow Illinois Republican Adam Andrzejewski at Big Government has more:

Why is the machine afraid? Because a new class of leadership is starting to develop. These new leaders threaten to end the shell game of taxes, politics, and patronage. Cedra Crenshaw is one of those new leaders, and she’s is running for state senate against one of the Chicago Machine’s rubber-stamp apparatchiks.

She’s an accountant who wants to spearhead a forensic audit of Illinois state government. A former auditor at Deloitte and Touche, Cedra supports an audit of the half a trillion dollars of Democrat-controlled state spending during the blow-off historic corruption of Blagojevich/Quinn. The Democrat Machine — contractors, politicians, and patronage army — stand in naked fear of the result that such an audit would bring.

"The mainstream media is completely ignoring you," Loesch notes, "because you defy their narrative of what conservatism is." Crenshaw agrees, but with new-media avenues like the Dana Show itself, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, fire-breathing bloggers and twitterers and Tea Party energizers, she's been able to disintermediate the media powers-that-be to get her narrative across loud and clear:

People in this state, they want jobs. They want economic growth. They're not interested in more handouts and more promises … My opponent, he's got no solutions except more tax increases.

While uniters like Cedra Crenshaw are pursuing the American Dream, dividers like New Black Panther Party Philadelphia chapter leader "King Samir Shabazz" (at 2009 street festival above) pursue the nightmare part of Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: "I hate white people. All of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate him! You want freedom? You're going to have to kill some crackers! You're going to have to kill some of their babies." Whatever gets you on the evening news. Shabazz was caught on tape intimidating voters at the polls in November of 2008, but in his infinite and inscrutable wisdom, Attorney General Eric Holder is dropping charges.

Contrasting the public faces of Cedra Crenshaw and King Samir Shabazz, the words of William Blake's The Tyger" come to mind: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? We found a timely interpretation of the riddle in Juliette Akinye's provocative and insightful blogpost "Scarred Souls: More About Abortion" (h/t twitter buddy King Shamus of Blog de KingShamus), where the blogger AKA Baldilocks casts the old-fashioned notion of women as civilizers of men in a contemporary light:

There might be a little preaching. That's an essential part of me. He's a part of me…

All women should stop creating the exterior and — more importantly — the interior conditions under which abortion is an option. And by that I mean that all women should stop giving themselves to men who they are not sure will love, cherish and protect them and any prospective offspring they may create by having sex with each other …

You see, there’s this thing about women, a thing that makes us different from men, aside from the physical aspects. When we lie down with a man, we are giving him more than physical pleasure and doing more than gaining physical pleasure for ourselves.

When a woman has sex with a man, she joins her soul with him [For those of a more scientific bent, it's a matter of chemistry — oxytocin, the "cuddle hormone"] …

Think about all the illegitimate black children there are in America and think about the fact that black women have the highest rate of abortion of any women in America. That statistic says that there are very many black women who are giving themselves to men who don’t care about them.

Here's the kicker that illuminates the disjunct between Cedra Crenshaw's and King Samir Shabazz's American dreams:

And, on top of that, we can take these effects and mirror them onto black men, too many of whom are angry at the world, angry at black women, and angry at themselves (black-on-black crime). That anger almost always stems from observing or experiencing the spiritual, moral and worldly failure of their mothers.

It's the nanny state, stupid! The unintended consequences of the debilitating dependency fostered by those handouts Cedra Crenshaw's supporters want no more of.

Update: Related thoughts and video from Ed Morrissey:

“Mama grizzlies” actually fits better in the Tea Party movement, which I’ve argued is driven in the main by activist women. These are women with families who aren’t focused on what government can do for them, but what government should be doing, period. They’re defending their turf rather than looking for handouts, and defending their children from expansionist government and the massive spending that their children’s children will have to repay. It’s a good brand to stake out for Palin, but she’s been doing that all along with the Tea Party movement (as has Michele Bachmann). This just puts a label on it, and one that sounds much more assertive than “soccer moms” did.

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.