IS THE WEST SALVAGEABLE ?

 

The fight for civilisation is only just beginning

The West failed the moral test of 7 October. We must never fail like this again.

Oct 07/24

So, it is here: the anniversary of fascism’s return. It is one year since Hamas’s pogrom. One year since that army of anti-Semites invaded the Jewish State and visited unspeakable terror on its people. One year since the atavistic hatreds of the last century leapt from the pages of the history books and violently imprinted themselves on our complacent world. One year since the pact humankind made in the aftermath of the last Great War – ‘Never Again’ – was turned to dust in the Negev desert and the kibbutzim of southern Israel.

Today is first and foremost a day of remembrance for the slain. Jews and their allies will light candles for the more than 1,100 souls extinguished by Hamas’s fascists. People will say ‘Never Again’ again. Yet alongside recalling the inhumanity Hamas wrought in Israel on 7 October, let us spare a thought for what that darkest of days revealed about our own societies, too. What it told us not only about Hamas, the Jew-killing machine that masquerades as a national-liberation movement, but also about us. About how far we have strayed from the path of reason. About our betrayal of civilisation.

To my mind, there were two horrors on 7 October last year. There was the horror of what Hamas did. Its rape, kidnap and murder of more than a thousand Jews. Its execution of the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazis. Its gleeful, boastful sadism – let us never forget that this racist militia relished in its atrocities, filming them for posterity and even phoning home to gloat to loved ones about how many Jews had been slaughtered. Then there was the horror of the West’s response. The horror of our failure – our unforgivable failure – to stand with the Jews against their persecutors.

I knew the response of the West’s opinion-shapers and self-styled ‘progressive’ elites was going to be bad. Indeed, on 7 October itself, when the confirmed death toll was just 20, I warned right here on spiked that talking heads in the West would falsely laud this pogrom as a ‘rebellion’, as an ‘act of resistance’. And in doing so, I argued, they will expose to the world ‘the true extent’ of the West’s ‘moral decomposition’. Yet even I could not have imagined how bad things would get.

Even I did not foresee shit being smeared on a ‘Kidnapped’ poster in New York City featuring an image of the 12-year-old Jew who was kidnapped by Hamas. Even I did not imagine that Hitler moustaches would be daubed on the faces of the three-year-old twins Hamas kidnapped. Even I did not think ‘pro-Palestine’ activists would glorify the paragliding pogromists who descended on the Negev desert to butcher young Jews. Even I did not foresee our highest seats of learning being overrun by gangs of privileged Hamas sympathisers who would brand the Jewish State as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and tell Jews to fuck off ‘back to Poland’.

Even I could not have imagined that left-wingers in my own country would describe Hamas’s Jew-slaying spree as a ‘day of celebration’. Even I did not foresee mobs of upper-middle-class youths on our streets cheering the Houthis, a violently racist movement whose flag grotesquely issues ‘A Curse Upon the Jews’. Even I could not have foretold mobs of Israel-haters assembling outside the Sydney Opera House to chant ‘Fuck the Jews!’, and, worse, the left saying nothing about it. A left that spent the past decade damning everything it dislikes as ‘fascism’ – Trump, Brexit, gender-critical feminism – staying shamefully silent in the face of actual fascism. In the face of the slaughter of Jews, and the rank apologism for it in our own cities. Reprehensible doesn’t cover it.

The West’s moral failures in the aftermath of 7 October were of an entirely new order. They exceeded even my grim fears. They shone a harsh, inescapable light on the retreat from reason and abandonment of Enlightenment many of us have warned of for years. In the hours and days after the pogrom, a dawning, chilling realisation came: the West’s activist class and its educated elites were sympathising more with the pogromists than with the pogrom’s victims. They went from saying ‘Never Again’ to saying ‘All Right Then, One More Time’. The delirium of our post-civilisational era emerged into broad daylight. It was undeniable now: the West is in the stranglehold of a profound moral crisis.

And it continues to this day, the first-year anniversary of that wicked intrusion into Israel. Think about this: today is the anniversary of the worst act of racist violence of modern times, and yet so-called anti-racists will not be marking it. They won’t be putting a black square on their Instagram pages. They won’t hold any vigils. Not one tear will touch their cheeks for the thousand human beings murdered by racists a year ago today. No ‘anti-fascist’ will decry this fascism. On the contrary, they will spend today doing what they always do: feverishly hating on Israel, puking yet more wordy bile on to the Jewish State. They will hijack this day of Jewish remembrance to further their defamatory hatreds of the Jewish nation.

What we have seen over the past year is that when the young in particular are invited to reject Western civilisation, they might very well be tempted into the arms of its opposite: barbarism. When you educate a new generation to be wary of the West, to view our claim to be enlightened as just so much white man’s arrogance and bluster, you might just push them towards the West’s enemies. When you depict Western society as fallen, racist, phobic, shit – as so much fashionable thought does right now – you make anti-Westernism, even violent anti-Westernism, seem exotic, enticing. The sympathy for Hamas on our campuses and streets is fundamentally an extension of the West’s own crisis of meaning, of our denial of our own insights, of our betrayal of our history.

A war for the soul of humanity must now be fought. On two fronts. On the physical front of Israel’s borders, where some of the most regressive movements on Earth, sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran, openly lust and agitate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish nation. And on the intellectual front here at home. In the academy, in politics, in hearts and minds. Only a full-throated defence of the virtues and wonders of Western civilisation might see off the moral derangement of our times and the Jew hatred it has nurtured. We owe it to the dead of 7 October to stand by Israel and repair our own broken societies.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer

COVID: NEVER FORGET

 

No, We Will Never Forget What You Did to Us in Covid

BY THOMAS BUCKLEY

 

10 OCTOBER 2024 11:00 AM

In a recent piece in the New York Times, Dr. Rachel Bedard – who specialises in “medicine and criminal justice” – said the world needs to move on from the whole Covid catastrophe, the pandemic response, the wholesale destruction of liberties.

In complaining about the possibility that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be appointed by a – horrors! – potential Donald Trump administration, she had this to say:

The COVID-19 pandemic was a divisive crisis for Americans. I worry that appointing Mr. Kennedy to a top health job would entrench the maddening, counterproductive, personality-driven dynamics that have dominated the politics of health and medicine for the first half of this decade, especially post-Covid. …

The future will surely bring both predictable and unforeseen public health crises that will require cool, experienced, nonpartisan leadership. Should Mr. Kennedy be appointed to the federal Government, he is unlikely to use his power to turn down the temperature. We should learn from what the pandemic revealed about our culture’s deep divisions. If Mr. Kennedy is in the administration, I fear we never will.

Arrogance aside, Bedard’s opinion piece screams enforced forgetfulness. While she may claim her position is about being able to “learn” from the pandemic, her statements belie that.

Her version of learning is about learning how to trust the public health complex that lied to the world for four – and counting – years about the dangers, origins and potential treatments for Covid.

Bedard does admit that much politics was played and that maybe kinda sorta the pronouncements from the likes of Anthony Fauci were too “prescriptive” rather than “persuasive”, which is the best way to handle discussions in the midst of any public health crisis.

She says RFK Jr.’s pronouncements are about power rather the necessary “nuance” needed and he is therefore unfit for office.

One assumes one can replace “nuance” with “I was just following orders”, but, either way, Bedard whitewashes fault and then – for purely pejorative reasons – goes into a tangent about raw milk.

Pejorative because it seems that people who go beyond the socially acceptable “farm to table” and “non-GMO” and “certified organic” to demanding purer foods are weird stupid people who are endangering the rest of the population, even though the rest of the population will most likely stick with things like pasteurised moo juice.

It’s a red non sequitur herring, intentionally included to try to lump various types of officially designated-crazy people together.

Kennedy’s appointment, Bedard frets, would lead to people remembering what happened during the pandemic and may even lead to investigations into exactly why it happened.

And that would be bad because it would not allow for the enforced amnesia, the demand for the Great Forgetting.

Prior to this, the folks that did very, very well during the pandemic asked for “Covid amnesty” for the public health experts who led the effort and their terrifying minions who did things like yell at people who were not wearing a mask and refused to allow family members to attend Thanksgiving if they were not vaccinated. 

The argument – made by Brown University economist Emily Oster, whom no one had ever heard of before the pandemic – for amnesty was that “everyone tried their best, no one did anything intentionally bad, we now know better, we’re not bad people, we didn’t really know”.

In other words, we did the best we could, be nice, can’t we all get along?

The hubris of Oster’s argument is shown up by a very simple observation about what the pandemic response did. Massive educational degradation. Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal over-reaction. The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering. The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic. The massive erosion of civil liberties. The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbour. The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street. The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended. The demonisation of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus or the absurdity of the useless public theatre that made up much of the programme. The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends. The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration) and just plain reasonable people like Jennifer Sey for daring to offer different approaches, approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable – that had been tested and succeeded before.

What Oster forgot – and what Bedard wants everyone to forget forever – is the fact that, despite the heroic efforts of the public health establishment, a million people still died.

Note as to the use of the one million figure, it is absolutely true that the number of people who died “from Covid” alone or primarily is, of course, nowhere near one million – pretty sure even the CDC is side-of-the-mouth admitting that now.

Co-morbidities and advanced age played a huge role in the toll of the virus, and then there were the people who died in a car accident and tested positive at the hospital and were listed as dying of Covid, etc.

That issue is another massive scandal that we will not know the actual truth for years.

But I chose the one million number because that is what they – the experts, the scientists, the public health officials, the pandemicists, the media, etc. and all the people who lied to the public and caused massive societal disruption – use as a figure. 

And since they – Oster is not the only one thinks as she does – claim they did the best they could, they had good intentions, they tried really hard so please don’t be mean to us, it demands a question be asked: if one million people died while you were doing your best, exactly how awful are you at your job, why should anyone trust you about anything ever again, and why should anyone forgive your gross incompetence, negligence and systemic dissembling? And that’s not even considering the fact that you now admit you knew the damage you were causing while you were causing it?

In other words, if they are going to claim the pandemic was so serious it cost a million lives, it makes the request for “amnesty” even more unconscionable.

And never forget that the people who asked for amnesty and, when that was laughed out of the building, are now demanding amnesia, again, did well during the pandemic.

Oster kept her job. Oster got famous. The pandemic was good for Oster.

The pandemic was also good for bureaucrats, multi-national companies, putative experts, the mindless media and internet scolds. It was good for woke adults who want to remain children, it was good for the national security-industrial complex, it was good for hiding behind, it was good for expanding societal power.

It was not good for people.

Dr. Bedard – we will never forget that.  And don’t ever ask again.

DISGUSTING PIG?

 

Howard Stern’s TDS-Fueled Worship-Fest With Kamala

When “edgy” goes establishment.

October 10, 2024 by Mark Tapson 

I have never been a Howard Stern fan, to put it mildly. The pioneering “shock jock” is a disgusting pig who has built a depressingly lucrative career out of exploiting the basest human behavior and dragging our culture into the gutter. But his Tuesday interview with epically incompetent presidential wannabe Kamala Harris shows just how fully “edgy,” envelope-pushing influencers become shameless sycophants for the establishment when the reigning regime is Left-wing.

It’s no surprise that Kamala chose to appear on Stern’s Sirius XM radio show. Her campaign strategy has been to avoid, as much as humanly possible, interviews with news outlets where she might be treated with anything less than boot-licking adoration. Hence, for example, her recent appearance on the ABC daytime gabfest The View, where she was introduced by ranting progressive idiot Whoopi Goldberg as “our next President.”

Stern is avowedly anti-Trump, although he claims not to hate the former President. “I don’t hate Trump. I hate the people who vote for him. I think they are stupid. I do. I have no respect for them.” He added that if half of his viewers disagree with his opinion about Trump voters, they should stop listening to his radio show: “I’m at the end of my career, so fuck you and listen to another station if you don’t like my views [on Trump].”

After all, as Stern explained last November, he takes being called “woke” as a compliment: “To me, the opposite of woke is being asleep. And if woke means I can’t get behind Trump, which is what I think it means, or that I support people who want to be transgender, or I’m for the vaccine, dude, call me woke as you fucking want. I am a woke motherfucker, and I love it.”

As definitive evidence he suffers from the rampant Trump Derangement Syndrome that has afflicted so many of his fellow progressives, Stern has fully bought into the progressive hysteria that Trump is Hitler 2.0, as in this very scholarly assessment: “Hitler was perceived as a clown in Germany [like Trump in the US]. He was one of these buffoonish characters. Then he won an election. And that was the end of Germany.”

This is the media host Kamala Harris chose to let the American people learn more about her as she seeks our vote for the Leader of the Free World. And this, as New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle neatly summed up, is what we found out from the hour-long interview:

That the V.P. isn’t a napper; that she digs Doritos and jigsaw puzzles; that her favorite F1 driver is Lewis Hamilton; that she went to see U2 at the Sphere; and that a rare area of musical agreement between her and Doug, her husband, is their love of Prince.

Exactly what inquiring American minds want to know.

Stern launched hard-hitting questions right out of the gate, beginning by marveling at Harris’ schedule and asking if she ever naps. He moved on to complain about a recent Saturday Night Live episode in which Kamala was imitated by comedienne Maya Rudolph, because when it comes to mockery, Democrat totalitarians can dish it out but they can’t take it. “I hate it. I don’t want you being made fun of,” Stern told the VP. “There’s too much at stake. I believe the entire future of this country right now… it’s literally on the line.”

In all fairness, Stern is right about the stakes involved, although not for the reason he thinks. The threat to the future of this country is the Party represented by the woman sitting right across from him.

But TDS sufferer Stern fretted that the real totalitarian is Trump. When Kamala fear-mongered about Trump’s joke that he would be a dictator on day one of his presidency, and suggested that Trump would start jailing journalists critical of him, Stern added that comedians are at risk too.

“He said he thinks he wants to go after Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian,” Stern panicked. “You want to go after Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers? What?” Apparently neither Kamala nor Stern are aware that Trump has already been POTUS for a full term and never “went after” journalists, comedians, or even moronic shock jocks.

Later in the conversation, Stern claimed Trump would ban “gay rights next,” and Harris agreed, of course. Again: Trump was already president and made no effort to ban gay rights. If anything, Trump has been one of the friendliest Republican politicians to the LGBT community. Perhaps Stern was referring to Trump’s promise that he would put a stop to sex change surgeries for minors without parental consent. Perhaps he meant Trump’s support for keeping men out of women’s sports. Are those the “gay rights” Stern is worried about losing?

Stern then went full TDS-unhinged, asking Kamala if she would feel safe in this country in the event of a Trump victory. “Would you stay in this country?” he asked, ludicrously. At one point, Stern sank to a Keith Olbermann-level of unhinged, declaring that “the sun’s literally going to go out” if Trump is re-elected. He told Harris, rather unnecessarily, “And yes, I’m voting for you.”

The interview, if you can call it that, was so fawning that even the New York Times called Stern out for it. Aforementioned columnist Michelle Cottle wrote that the Democrat nominee spent an “hour in the warm embrace” of a gushing fan who was “a little too openly butt-smoochy for my taste, but I like a little more spice in my political interviews.”

Well, Americans would like a little more substance, if not spice, in their political interviews, and that was completely lacking in the full hour everyone wasted listening to Howard Stern’s obsequious love-fest – just as it’s lacking in candidate Kamala Harris herself.

WHAT DO PALESTINIANS SAY ABOUT OCT. 7?

 

Polls: It’s not just Hamas – it’s all Palestinians. 98% said Oct. 7 events “made them proud”

Itamar Marcus  | Oct 7, 2024

• Don't say "Hamas' massacre." Say "the Palestinian massacre." That's the way Palestinians see Oct. 7.

Every poll of Palestinians since October 7, 2023, by both AWRAD – Arab World for Research and Development, and PSR - Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, shows that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians supported and continue to support the rapes, torture, beheadings, and murder of more than 1,100 people in southern Israel led by Hamas, and their kidnapping of 250 hostages.

Significantly, the polls found that the support in the West Bank was higher than the that the Gaza Strip. Asked if they supported the attack on Oct 7, the first poll in November 2023 found West Bank support at 83%. Half a year later, in June 2024, after the destruction in Gaza, 73% still said that the decision to attack Israel was correct. In the Gaza Strip, two months into the war support had already dropped to 63% and continued to fall to only 31% in March 2024, saying it was correct to attack. Astonishingly, the joy over the rape, torture, beheadings, and murder of Israelis was so great that even after much of Gaza was in rubble following Israel's counter attack, for West Bank Arabs that one day of horror inflicted on Israelis, made the destruction of Gaza an acceptable price to pay.

Possibly the ongoing belief that the decision to attack was the right decision can be explained by the results of a question that was asked only in the November 2023 poll by AWRAD:

"Considering the ongoing events do you feel a sense of pride as a Palestinian?"

Incredibly, 98% of Palestinians felt "pride as Palestinians."

The importance of this question is that it removed the destruction of Gaza out of the equation. Even those 27% of Palestinians who didn't think attacking Israel was the "correct decision," attacking Israelis and murdering them freely for 24 hours still created "pride as Palestinians." Both in the West Bank and Gaza 94% answered that the events made them "proud to a great extent," while another 3% - 4% were "proud to some extent."

Another very significant question asked which political parties Palestinians supported. In the West Bank in the poll prior to the October 7 massacre, Fatah was more than twice as popular as Hamas in the West Bank. Since the massacre, all three polls show Hamas 2 ½ to 3 times more popular than Fatah.

Israelis must accept the reality that the murder of Israelis and atrocities committed against Israelis is what creates popularity among Palestinians.

Another astonishing finding is that even though most of Hamas' terror army is destroyed, and most of the infrastructures in the Gaza Strip either destroyed or damaged, still 79% of West Bank Palestinians believe that Hamas will win the war. Even 48% of Gazans believe that Hamas will be victorious. To understand this, we must recognize what victory means both for Israel and Palestinians. For Israel, victory means destroying Hamas both militarily and politically so that it can never rebuild and launch missiles into Israel or be a threat to commit another October 7. For Palestinians, if Hamas avoids destruction and the members who survive continue to impose their military and political rule on the Gazan population that will be a complete victory for Hamas. Between March and June 2024, the belief that Hamas will win the war went up from 69% to 79%, and this corresponds to the period of intense international pressure on Israel to agree to an immediate cease-fire. Even within Israel there were demonstrations calling for cease-fire exchange for release of just a small number of the hostages. A cease-fire without the destruction of Hamas, is all that Palestinians need to declare Hamas victorious. Palestinians are following these pressures around the world and in Israel and are convinced that cease-fire and Hamas victory is forthcoming.

​Based on captured Hamas documents, the Israeli Army exposed that Hamas as rulers in Gaza was able to falsify the March 2024 poll. The chart above showed Gaza Strip support for Hamas' attack at 71% whereas in fact after six months of war support was only 30.7%. No one is questioning the accuracy of the support for Hamas in the West Bank where Fatah rules. Were Fatah able to tamper with the results in the West Bank it certainly would not have shown Hamas to be the far more popular.

The most important conclusion from these polls is that it's time Israelis and the world stop referring to the massacre on October 7 as "Hamas' massacre." Hamas perpetrated the massacre with the support of and in the name of the majority of Palestinians. The atrocities made 98% of Palestinians proud. Don't say "Hamas' massacre." Say "the Palestinian massacre." That's the way Palestinians see it.

THE NEXT CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER IS UNEQUIVOCAL ABOUT IRAN

 

Pierre Poilievre is unequivocal about these Hamas supporting Palestinian radicals and especially their main sponsor Iran:

“The idea of allowing a genocidal theocratic unstable dictatorship that is desperate to avoid being overthrown by its own people to develop nuclear weapons is about the most dangerous and irresponsible thing that the world could ever allow and if Israel were to stop that genocidal theocratic unstable government from acquiring nuclear weapons it would be a gift by the Jewish state to humanity.”

Advance to the 45:45 mark

IS AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE EVEN POSSIBLE?

 Note: After seven weeks off, Oct 7 seems like an auspicious date to resume posting

We Are in Need of Renaissance People

Modern society's focus on credentials has created a two-tiered system, where multi-talented individuals are criticized, and elites oversee a dependent underclass.

The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.

Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with then-spouse and singer Rita Coolidge, and the country group super-quartet he formed with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

In other words, Kristofferson was a rare Renaissance man who could do it all in an age of increasingly narrow specialization and expertise.

At certain times throughout history at particular locales, we have seen such singular people from all walks of life.

Classical Athens produced polymaths like Aristotle—tutor to Alexander the Great, logician, student of music, art, and literature, educator, think-tank founder, biologist, philosopher, and scientist. Later Greeks like Archimedes and Ptolemy, as men of action, mastered six or seven disciplines and applied their abstract knowledge in ways that made life easier for those around them.

The late Roman Republic was another cauldron of multitalented geniuses. It produced the brilliant stylist, historian, politician, and consummate general Julius Caesar, as well as his republican archrival Cicero—politician, philosopher, orator, master stylist, lawyer, and provincial governor.

Turn-of-the-century Victorian Great Britain produced giants like Winston Churchill—prime minister, statesman, essayist, historian, orator, strategist, and wartime veteran. As Britain’s war leader, between May 10, 1940, and June 22, 1941, he, almost alone, resisted the Axis powers and prevented Adolf Hitler from winning the war.

But we associate the idea of a “Renaissance man” mostly with Florence, Italy, between the 15th and 16th centuries. In that brief 100 years, the Florentine Republic hosted multi-talented geniuses like Leonardo De Vinci—master painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, and inventor—best known for the Mona Lisa and Last Supper.

The multifaceted talents of his younger contemporary Michelangelo were as astounding, whether defined by his iconic sculptures David and Pietà, his stunning painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or as the master architect of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

The American Revolution was a similar embryo of Renaissance men. Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most famous example of unchecked abstract and pragmatic genius displayed in almost every facet of late 18th– and early 19th-century life—main author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia, inventor, agronomist, architect, and diplomat.

But Benjamin Franklin may best approximate the model of the Florentine Renaissance holistic brilliance—journalist, publisher, printer, author, politician, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and philosopher.

Franklin’s life was one of perpetual motion and achievement. In one lifetime, he helped to draft the Constitution, invented everything from the lightning rod to bifocals, founded the American postal service, and successfully won over European countries to the nascent American cause. Theodore Roosevelt—president, historian, essayist, conservationist, naturalist combat veteran, battle leader, explorer, and cowboy—exemplified the idea of an American president as the master at almost everything else.

The history of our own contemporary Renaissance people often suggests that they are not fully appreciated until after their deaths—especially in the post-World War II era.

Why?

We have created a sophisticated modern society that is so compartmentalized by “professionals” and the credentialed that those who excel simultaneously in several disciplines are often castigated for “amateurism,” “spreading themselves too thinly,” “not staying in their lanes,” or not being degreed with the proper prerequisite letters—BA, BS, MA, PhD, MD, JD, or MBA—in the various fields that they master.

But specialization is the enemy of genius, as is the tyranny of credentialism.

Because the Renaissance figure is not perfect in every discipline he masters, we damn him for too much breadth and not enough depth—a dabbler rather than an expert—failing to realize that his successes in most genres he masters and redefines is precisely because he brings a vast corpus of unique insights and experience to his work that narrower specialists lack. The Greek poet Archilochus first delineated the contrast between the fox who “knows many things” and the hedgehog who “knows one—one big thing.” We have become a nation of elite hedgehogs, whose narrow expertise is not enriched by awareness of or interest in the wider human experience.

Renaissance people often live controversial lives and receive 360-degree incoming criticism, not surprising given the many fields in which they upstage specialists and question experts—and the sometimes overweening nature of their personalities that feel no reason to place boundaries and lanes on their geniuses and behavior or to temper their exuberances.

The best American example of the current age is the controversial Elon Musk, a truly Renaissance figure who has revolutionized at least half a dozen entire fields.

No one prior had broken the Big Three auto monopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

Musk did just that. He exploded all three companies’ dominance with his successful creation of the first viable electric vehicle, Tesla, whose comfort, drivability, reliability, safety, and power rivaled or exceeded the models of all his competitors.

His spin-off battery storage and solar panel companies allowed thousands of families to go off the grid and stay self-sufficient in power usage.

Musk’s revolutionary Starlink internet system—a mere five years old—provides global online service to over 100 countries. Through its some 7,000 satellites, Starlink brings internet service to remote residents far more effectively and cheaply than do their own governments. When natural disasters overwhelm utilities or war disrupts the normality of peace, all look to Musk to restore online reconnections to the outside world.

Musk, almost singlehandedly, transformed the U.S. space program from a NASA 60-year-old government monopoly to an arena of fervent private-public competition. His Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) created a rocket and spacecraft program that has kept the U.S. preeminent in space exploration and reliable satellite launches. When NASA and old aerospace companies falter, the government looks to Musk to bail them out.

Musk, at great personal cost, radically transformed the old Twitter—poorly managed, censorious of ideas and expressions not deemed progressive, and mired in scandal for partnering with the FBI to silence news deemed possibly injurious to Democratic candidates and left-wing campaigns.

His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X.

Musk’s newest companies have now entered the convoluted, little-understood, radically competitive, and dangerous field of artificial intelligence (OpenAI) and the emerging discipline of bonding the natural brain to the electronic online world (Neuralink). To the degree Musk is successful, America will lead these areas of intense international rivalry that involve the gravest issues of national security and survival.

Overspecialization has helped make vulnerable and sometimes doomed complex top-down societies from the Mycenaeans to the Aztecs to the Soviets. A tiny credentialed and often incestuous elite manages the lives of a vast underclass whose daily lives are scripted by top-down master planners—as an autonomous and skeptical middle class disappears.

America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.

The overclass cult lacks sufficient common sense and pragmatic expertise outside their narrow areas of specialization to direct society, and the masses are often without the education, money, and power to challenge them or the esoteric complexity of their modern society. And the result is often disastrous, as we see everywhere, from the trivial to the existential—from our currently paralyzed state space station program and inability to build a floating pier in Gaza, to ineffectual and insensitive state responses to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and an increasingly dangerously incompetent Secret Service.

Renaissance people provide a link to the proverbial people, as they master almost anything they attempt while keeping themselves attuned to the practical effect of their achievement among the people.

The Renaissance physicist Richard Feynman once explained to the entire nation why the Space Shuttle 1986 Challenger catastrophically imploded shortly after launch. A polymath Albert Einstein explained to America why it had to begin the Manhattan Project and beat Nazi Germany to the acquisition of an atomic bomb. Theodore Roosevelt used his expertise as a politician, conservationist, outdoorsman, explorer, and writer to help establish and preserve 230 million acres of public lands.

So, we should occasionally pause and reflect on the Kristoffersons and Musks in our midst. They play a vital role in enriching culture and civilization for the many without becoming part of the narrow few. And we owe these people, who belong to a rare and hallowed caste of the ages, for making our lives richer, more enjoyable, easier, and safer.