Ghettotainment

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything.  The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.  P.J. O’Rourke 

Obama's open borders policies at ICE have Los Angeles looking just like what he and his progressive cohorts want it to resemble.  Violent gang amorality and lawlessness are not merely revered and glorified, they have been legitimized.  They call it Ghettotainment.  Little wonder that civilized people are abandoning California in droves.

In "The Day I Left the Left," LA expat Jim Goad reveals some of the epiphanies that helped to transform him into a rational, enlightened cynic from an idealistic, indoctrinated crusader.  Journalism degree in tow, [he] set about to right historical wrongs.  Working for a now defunct alternate news weekly magazine, he wrote an article about the Hicks Boys, a group of drug dealing, longhaired Mexican metalheads from East Los Angeles.  They rejected local gang customs in favor of muerte obsessions, Satan worship, and generally aimless nihilism, and Goad identified with them at the time.

He found that he had to defend the significance of his article about them to his boss, a sniffy, retentive type, by pointing out that they had grown up in East LA housing projects where police-chopper lights glared into their windows every night and shirtless, machete-wielding cholos terrorized the barrio.  Armed with the certainty that he would be safe there because they recognized his empathy for them, Goad returned to their neighborhood to buy some pot.  What he encountered took him aback.

Rather than thinking of him as a kindred spirit, the Boys wanted to beat him to death for accurately depicting them, their lives, and their neighborhood.

His personal philosophy then was a half-digested buzzing meme-hive of left-leaning pop culture and far-left academic indoctrination.  Although taught to question authority, he had never questioned the authority of the major media or academic consensus [believing they were] objective scientists rather than evangelical ideologues.  Conditioned to this thought process by the Democrat controlled and operated national education collective, he believed that there was something noble in losing rather than winning.

This collective publishes endless treatises on deconstruction without making a peep about how to reconstruct everything after destroying it.  Theirs is a Gospel of innate cognitive and physical equality among all social groups [not] an equality of character.  White people generally [are] depicted as morally defective.  Goad writes that he appointed himself as an advocacy journalist who would defend the poor against the rich and the weak against the strong, without realizing that often he would be defending the stupid against the smart.

His disillusionment followed the realization that he lacked the inexhaustible capacity for cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias that most leftists seem to possess, a capacity that drives them to defend the amoral against the moral, the cunning against the courageous, and predators against their prey.  He considered his research into Orange County’s Vietnamese gangs and how he was continually impressed with how war-shattered Asians had come here penniless but owned businesses and mansions within a decade.  The author could not reconcile this reality with his belief that blacks, Mexicans, and Vietnamese were all equals.  Goad realized that the idea of equality had substituted for religion as a modern opiate of the masses.

Taught that capitalism oppresses minorities, he also reflected upon his countless interviews with dumb-as-dirt rappers whom he remembered posing for album covers fanning themselves with $100 bills and heavily laden with gold chains.  He thought about the claims of some minorities that they had absolutely nothing to do with the mess that they made of their own lives, and he pondered those who have succeeded handsomely despite language, cultural, and economic barriers.  He concluded that there are good reasons that the third world came in third.

May your gods be with you.