The most interesting part of the red card saga isn't the ruling. It's how differently Americans and Europeans process the idea that they might have been wronged.
Europeans are fundamentally different from Americans in one particular way: they expect life to be aggravating and at times unfair. It's just a fact of moving through the world. I joke that in Europe, the customer is always wrong. You didn't read the fine print. The only pharmacy in town is closed every other Tuesday for three hours, and even if the times weren't posted, that's still your problem. Too bad if you want the bill, because the waiter's on his union-mandated half-hour smoke break, and you're just going to have to wait.
To quote the great Mark Knopfler: sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug. There's something freeing in that. Things are less in your control, so there's less angst in managing your expectations.
In America, things couldn't be more different. We simply can't accept a wrong left unrighted.
The flight attendant sneezed handing you a drink on your one-hour flight? 15,000 frequent flyer miles. Didn't like your appetizer? A replacement is on the way, and the whole course comes off the bill. There's a reason our interstates are lined with trial lawyer billboards.
Europeans have turned complaining into a continental pastime with no expectation that the universe owes them a remedy for their grief. You gripe about the train being late, your friends nod solemnly and everyone goes back to their apéro. In America, we launch a full-blown investigation of the train system, sue the government (and its contractors) that allowed for the tardiness and hold a Congressional hearing on the state of national infrastructure.
So to an objective observer, the red card shouldn't have happened, and VAR was a travesty. To Americans, our star player shouldn't be unfairly banned from a match we couldn't afford to lose for a card he so obviously didn't deserve.
Who cares that FIFA used a little-used reversal to fix it. Who cares that other people are mad about it. We. Were. Wronged. It was unjust. It must be corrected. We would accept nothing less.
Europeans waxing poetic about the sanctity of the game are, of course, talking about a governing body whose last tournament host was decided via confirmed cash bribes — one that imposed dress codes on women, shrugged off widespread allegations of modern slavery and reconfigured the entire tournament calendar to suit the host country. Which is exactly the point. If you've made peace with all of that, at least enough to watch the tournament four years later, a probationary suspension isn't actually a scandal.
Maybe that's the real divide. Over millennia, Europeans have made peace with being the bug. Americans have never once considered it, and apparently, we're not about to start now.
@JonathanTurley@kkearney322 Classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
They spend all their time hurling the most vicious insults against the Right never even thinking to protect their flank as they get eaten by their own on the Left.
I think possibly the best thing about Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire is how angry it makes a bunch of losers who've never built a thing in their lives.
37 years ago today, the Chinese government brutally crushed peaceful protesters in and around Tiananmen Square who were demanding an end to corruption, freedom of speech, and democratic reform. The massacre revealed a truth the world should never forget: the Chinese Communist Party will do whatever it takes to preserve its grip on power. If it did not value the lives of its own citizens, why would it value the lives of others?
Today is Fracture Day - the fifth anniversary of the final fracture.
On June 5th 2020, over a thousand public health experts published an open letter giving sanction for Black Lives Matter, a Marxist terrorist organization, to ignore COVID lockdown restrictions and riot in the streets, looting and burning down our cities, because "racism is a public-health issue".
And nobody in the rest of the establishment pushed back.
This was the original Fracture Day. The day that the confidence of the American people in technocrats and experts irreparably broke. It was the day we realized that even the most supposedly disinterested of our institutions had been captured by overt enemies of our liberty and our civilization.
There was no going back from that moment. Afterwards, the words "trust the experts" became a grim joke.
Every year on Fracture Day, remember the truth. When "experts" and institutions seek to control and censor you, allegedly for your safety, you dare not assume that this is being done for your benefit.
For the sake of your civilization and your posterity, you must reject them. You must not obey. Resist them - if necessary, with the considered violence of our ancestors who fought the first American Revolution against tyranny.
In 2021, I publicly criticized my school for putting ideological indoctrination ahead of education. What followed was intimidation, harassment, and retaliation: a principal who sought a “mental wellness check,” physical threats from a fellow teacher, doxxing, the release of private medical records, and a level of hostility that left me afraid to go to work.
Now, five years later, mainstream organizations like the Chicago Jewish Alliance are finally saying what I was saying all along and giving this issue the attention it deserves.
But it should never have gotten this far.
It should not have taken Jewish students becoming targets in our schools for journalists, media outlets, and public officials to begin treating this problem seriously.
What happened to Jewish students did not emerge from nowhere. It was the predictable result of an educational culture that spent years teaching students to view society through the lens of collective guilt, power hierarchies, and identity politics. When students are taught to sort people into oppressors and oppressed based on race, ancestry, or perceived privilege, it is only a matter of time before new groups are cast as villains.
A republic cannot survive indefinitely when its schools teach young people to see one another as oppressors and oppressed rather than as fellow citizens. That path does not lead to unity, tolerance, or social cohesion. It leads to division, resentment, and eventually political instability.
The purpose of education is not to train activists for competing factions. It is to prepare citizens for self-government. We have forgotten that at our peril.
Democrats in 2024 be like "we totally don't want to ban all guns, Kamala Harris has a Glock!"
18 months later, several blue states passing bills to ban the sale of Glocks.