All posts by Mike Slater

It’s The Dads

February 26, 2018
by Mike Slater


Why are there more school shootings now than ever before?

We’ve talked about many reasons. I think one of the biggest reasons: Dads. Or lack of dads.

When Moynihan wrote “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action” in 1965, 25% of black kids were born without a dad. And it was a call to action! Today 72%. How sad is that!

Of all races, 72% of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers. 60% of all rapists. 70% of juveniles in state institutions grew up in single- or no-parent situations. And these are kids with NO dads. There are also many dads who may be “present” but are absent or violent or alcoholic or whatever.

POVERTY is not a predicte of crime. It’s lack of dads

Let me say here, if you’re a single mom, this does not mean that your kid is destind to be awful or a murderer or a delinquint or a dropout or a terible person, goodnss NO!

But it means you have to intentional.

Intentional about finding male role models in your kids life. And being aware of wounds that will exist from not having a present dad. But I want to stress it’s not a guarantee by any means that your kids will be ruined or worhtless to society! I mean this as awareness and a call to be inteientonal about finding positive male role models, which can come fom a million diffent direction. I had a dad. And I had many male role models that each added something to my life.
Bruce Filer was dying of cancer and he organized a “Council of Dads”; a group of men who each brought something to the table to mentor his kids. HE ended up not dying, but the Council of Dads remain. My kids have a Council of Dads. Everyone should.

Anyway, we focus on guns and depression and isolation and dropping out of school and all the rest, but what comes LONG before that? The home. A broken home. A chaotic home. An unstable home. An unloving home.

This is Dr. Farrell, author fo The Boy Crisis:

Without dads as role models, boys’ testosterone is not well channeled. The boy experiences a sense of purposelessness, a lack of boundary enforcement, rudderlessness, and often withdraws into video games and video porn. At worst, when boys’ testosterone is not well-channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world’s most destructive forces. When boys’ testosterone is well channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world’s most constructive forces.

We’v talked before about the Ancient Greek Polis. There’s no good translation in our language. We call it a city-state, but it’s so much more than that. Victor Davis Hanson:

The Greeks thought of the Polis as an active, formative thing, training the minds and characters of it’s citizens…The training of virtue, which the medieval state left to the church, and the Polis made it’s own concern, the modern state leaves to God knows what.

Maybe you’ve heard the line from Aristotle, “Man is a political animal.” That’s very poorly translated. The real line is, “Man is a creature who lives in a Polis.” Meaning, the Polis, the community, his family and culture is the only framework that man can fully realize his spiritual, moral and intellectual potential. Not in isolation.

And the root of that is the home.

James Wilson, one of our Founding Fathers, he wrote a pamphlet in 1790, “Of the Natural Rights of Individuals” and it’s all about marriage and the history of marriage in ancient times. In the middle of it he not only quoted Cicero, but he quotes it in Latin. He didn’t’ translate it because everyone reading it knew what he was talking about, “Prima societas in ipso conjugio est” Translation: The first bond of society is marriage, the next, our children, then the whole family and all things in common.”

So, marriage, family, community.

Break down on the first point – marriage – and society won’t survive.

An anthropologist in 1934 studied 86 civilizations and concluded, “In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on nuptial continence”

Strong marriage.

Marriage is hard. It’s a lot of work. But there’s nothing more important.

My wife is 38 weeks pregnant. We been asking people advice on how to raise a girl. The number one piece of advice: Spend Time. Just be there. Be present.
!
I would argue that this is the least talked about/most important issue in our country. It’s the root of so many other issues. Dads.

It’s Not The Guns

February 20, 2018
by Mike Slater


It’s not the guns.

The best article on this comes from Leah Libresco. She writes about her transformation from an anti-RA, anti-2nd Amendment person who thinks we should ban guns to someone who realizes guns aren’t the problem. She used to get upset that the NRA was blocking Congress from passing “common-sense gun control measure”

Quick aside: The NRA gives very little money to politicians. Vox wrote that in 2014, the NRA gave John Cornyn, the Texas Senator, $9,900 — more than it gave to any other Republican senator that election cycle.

That’s nothing. In 2014 he raised $14 million.

And he’s one of the biggest recipients of NRA donations in Congress.

Vox concluded, “NRA funding reflects a tiny fraction of the Republican fundraising apparatus”

There’s this perception that the NRA pays off members of Congress. You hear this rhetoric, “Stop taking money from the NRA because children are dying” and “Congress is funded by the NRA.”

Zero basis in reality.

Anyway, Leah Libresco spent 3 months analyzing 33k deaths from guns each year, “and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way… the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence”

The very short conclusion from her research: 2/3 of gun deaths are suicide. The next largest group of people killed by guns, 20% are young men 15-34 killed by other young men (gang violence). And the next notable group is women murdered by a domestic partner.

So her conclusion is, instead of banning guns, let’s tailor our intervention to best help the potential victims. Specifically, better suicide prevention for older men (who commit most suicides), we need more mentoring and identifying of kids in gangs and we need more protections for women in abusive relationships.

Read her entire article here.

And play around with the data yourself with this website.

I’ll end with this: We can’t have a conversation about gun laws in America until the Left first admit that conservatives want to stop mass shootings, too.

I wrote about in my book “How To Change Someone’s Mind”. You can’t ever change someone’s mind if they have contempt for you or if you have contempt for them. It can’t happen. Many people on the Left, after a school shooting they scurry to the top of the moral superiority mountain and point their finger down at you because THEY want school shootings to stop and you don’t. “Blood on your hands!”

Nothing productive will ever happen if we keep operating like this.

Let’s all agree that we want to stop school shootings! And all shootings! And suicides and gang murders and domestic violence! We want all violence to stop. So let’s get to the root of each of these.

It’s not the guns. If only it was that easy.

About Those Obama Portraits…

February 19, 2018
by Mike Slater


Let’s talk about these awful Obama portraits for a minute.

First let me say, I don’t really care.

But it’s a good example of our progressive society today.

These portraits represent three aspects of our modern society:

1) Everything is rooted in identity politics.
2) There’s no such thing as truth.
3) Progressives think the only way to fight oppression is to oppress.

Three days before these portraits were unveiled Andrew Sullivan wrote in New York Magazine, about campus culture infecting the rest of America, “Objective truth? Ha! The culture is now saturated with the concept of “your own truth” — based usually on your experience of race and gender. In the culture, it is now highly controversial for individuals in one racial/gender group to write about or portray anyone outside it — because there is no art that isn’t rooted in identity…”

Enter Erin Biba, science writer for BBC. She wrote on Twitter, “Dear white people, it is beautiful that the Obama portraits are bringing so much joy to the black community. That is the only opinion you need to have about them.”

There it is. Perfect example of what Sullivan was talking about. There is no art that is not rooted in identity. The Obama portraits were unveiled, they’re objectively terrible and inappropriate for this project, but it has to be seen through the lens of race: black people have to love it, white people have to be happy that black people love it, and if you have any other opinion other than that you’re racist.

You can’t look at this art as a person. You have to look at it based on your racial identity. So say progressives.

Second, there’s no such thing as truth.

The Michelle Obama portrait doesn’t look like her.


Kate Bennett from CNN, “It’s not supposed to “look like her” in the traditional sense of portraiture.”

That makes no sense. “It’s not supposed to look like her?” Yes it is. It is supposed to look like her. Exactly in the traditional sense of portraiture, it’s supposed to look like her.

We’re at such a point in “there’s no such thing as truth” where portraits aren’t even supposed to look like the people who are being painted.

Third, progressives think the only way to fight oppression is to oppress.

The artist who painted the Obama portrait has two other paintings where a black woman is cutting off the head of a white woman.


Barack Obama said he chose the artist because “What I was always struck by when I saw his portraits was the degree to which they challenged our ideas of power and privilege”

So these paintings are a take on Judith of Holofernes:

The story of Judith, she was a beautiful woman, the general of an invading army was about to invade her hometown. She seduces him, He gets drunk, passes out, and then she beheads him.”

You may have heard that this Obama artist “likes to place black people in historical scenes”. I read that and thought, “Oh, so he takes the battle of Lexington and Concord and paints black people in it.” He’ll “Hamiltonize” historical scenes!

Well, not really. What he did was take this one story involving two white people, he made Judith black and the he made the general a white woman.

This isn’t heroic. To use Barack Obama’s words, I guess he’s challenging the idea of power and privilege. But, he’s doing it with different power and privilege.

This is Neo-Marxism. Marxism is seeing the world as a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors. If you view the world this way, then the only solution is to switch roles and for you to become the oppressor.

If your heads were once cut off, the only solution is to now cut off heads.

Which is what we’re supposed to celebrate with this artist’s paintings.

So, in conclusion, again, I don’t really care, but garbage in, garbage out. Our modern culture says 1) You are your identity group 2) There’s no such thing as truth and 3) If you’re oppressed, you need to get power so you can oppress.

These paintings are a nice example of all of this.

Garbage in, garbage out.