Tag Archive for: Progressives

Why Progressives Can’t Simply Condemn Anti-Semitism

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Democrats demand the suppression of speech they disagree with, but they cannot seem to unify against crass antisemitism. 

When Hamas attacked Israel in a genocidal pogrom targeting men, women, and children, it was not the start of a war with the traditional goals of strategic victory or conquest, but a war to annihilate the Jewish People.

Let’s tell it like it is: The Arab/Israeli conflict has never been about self-determination for Palestinian-Arabs, who have no historical footprint or ancient pedigree in the land, but about the destruction of Israel and extermination of the Jews, whose ancestral connection to their homeland is, unlike Palestinian Arab claims, incontrovertible.

The root of the conflict – the true basis that nobody wants to acknowledge – is the doctrinal hatred of Jews.

Though there was an unprecedented show of support for Israel after the initial attack in which Hamas terrorists slaughtered families, raped women and girls, burned people alive and murdered children, it didn’t take long for the UN Secretary-General to contextualize Hamas’s savagery by saying it “didn’t happen in a vacuum.” Or for progressives in the US and elsewhere to accuse Israel of concocting accounts of atrocities, or to admit they occurred but justify them as natural consequences of an “occupation” that does not exist.

Soon after came calls from the global community for Israel to temper her response or agree to a ceasefire, followed by specious allegations of Israeli war crimes. True to form, the mainstream media showed its bias by publishing Hamas propaganda as news without seeking verification from Israeli sources or employing the kind of rigorous fact checking that set the standard when I was a young journalist starting out in the 1980s. The abdication of objectivity was clear when most news outlets falsely reported that Israeli rockets had blown up a Gaza hospital killing hundreds, when in fact the missile was fired by Islamic Jihad. The stories were later retracted, but not before such reporting had inflamed tensions and instigated worldwide condemnations of Israel.

And now, a month into the war and in the midst of Israel’s intense campaign to destroy Hamas, progressives have become the terror organization’s most prominent boosters by stepping up their pathological demonization of the Jewish state. Violent anti-Israel demonstrations are sweeping liberal college campuses and cities across North America and Europe, where rioters can be seen chanting Nazi-like slogans, assaulting Jews, and openly calling for genocide.

Despite reports that extremist elements of the Jewish left are sympathizing with the demonstrators, moderate liberals are finally starting to acknowledge the anti-Jewish hatred permeating the progressive movements and identity communities they have traditionally championed. This realization was slow in coming because liberals always considered other progressives their natural allies and thus rarely acknowledged left-wing or minority Jew-hatred, no matter how blatant. Their immediate reflex, rather, was to blame white supremacists or right-wing extremists for all acts of antisemitism – even when committed by leftists or members of minorities (like the Jersey City massacre perpetrated by two antisemitic Black Hebrews in 2019).

Despite their tendency to ignore or excuse left-wing bigotry, many liberals were roused from their moral torpor by Hamas’s atrocities and spurious allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Whereas in the past they might have responded by lecturing Israel about the incorrectly understood “disproportional” use of force or blaming “the occupation” for provoking terrorism, many are now conceding that: (a) there is no occupation; (b) Israel has the sovereign right to defend herself; (c) only Hamas is committing war crimes – including rape, murder and torture of Jewish civilians and using noncombatants as human shields, and (d) Palestinian-Arabs generally reject the two-state paradigm.

Though this newfound awareness is encouraging, it does not reflect a sea change within the wider progressive establishment, which thus far has failed to take a clear moral stand against leftist, Islamic, or minority antisemitism. The internet is full to bursting with images of demonstrators praising Hitler, calling for death to Israel, and chanting “Jews back to the ovens,” but there has been no unified, plenary condemnation of antisemitism from progressive or Democratic Party leadership.

The problem is that protests in which Jews are threatened, harassed, and assaulted are being perpetrated by many of the same identity groups that are courted by Democrats and comprise the core constituency of their party’s progressive wing.

Nothing epitomizes this more than the “Squad,” a group of Congressional Democrats including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and other radicals, who have expressed anti-Israel or antisemitic rhetoric, have refused to condemn Hamas terror, and who nonetheless have avoided unequivocal reprimand by their party (the majority of which voted against a recent House Republican resolution censuring Tlaib).

Though White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre finally denounced offensive comments from the Squad (without mentioning any members by name), Joe Biden has remained silent, perhaps for fear of alienating the Squad’s radical base. And despite the press secretary’s somewhat generic denunciation, she waffled when asked about increasing antisemitism in the US, choosing instead to rail against Islamophobia – which pales in statistical significance to hatred and violence against Jews.

Such equivocation begs the question; are there any voices of principled decency on the progressive left?

Political conservatives had their moment thirty years ago and rose to the occasion, when the late William F. Buckley confronted accusations of antisemitism against certain contributing writers to the National Review (the political journal he published and edited) in a feature-length essay entitled, “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” Whereas defenders of those authors tried to distinguish criticism of Israel from hatred of Jews, Buckley identified antisemitic themes where he found them on both the right and left. He thereafter republished the essay in a book that incorporated other writers’ responses to his thesis. It was not the most definitive work on antisemitism to be sure, but it was a high-watermark of conservative moral self-evaluation.

The problem today is that there has been no similar ideological soul searching on the left. What we have seen instead is denial, blame shifting, false equivalence likening Islamic terrorism to Israeli self-defense, and pervasive disparagement of Jews and Israel. We’ve also seen how ignorant (or revisionist) progressives are when it comes to Jewish history and modern Israel’s ancient underpinnings.

It seems the left cannot bring itself to unconditionally condemn all those who demonize Israel, deny Jewish history, legitimize terrorism, or justify atrocities against Jews. Buckley clearly was not overreacting when he undertook to expose antisemitism and illustrate its ubiquity in society and banalization by intellectual elites. And the impact of his book on conservative America was culturally seismic, as reflected by a Republican Party that for decades now has generally shown stronger support for Israel and a greater commitment to eradicating antisemitism than the Democrats.

In contrast to Congressional Republicans, the Democrats cannot even all agree on the need to condemn party caucus members who side with terrorists or engage in anti-Israel or antisemitic hate-speech. Barack Obama got it very wrong when he implicated the role of “the occupation” leading up to the war, although “occupation” is a dissimulative term meaning the entire Jewish State and Gaza was not occupied. He also drew incongruous moral comparisons between Israel and Hamas by stating “nobody’s hands are clean” in the conflict. No surprise there. He simply stopped hiding his antisemitism.

Democrats are quick to demand the suppression of speech they disagree with, particularly when it questions climate change, condemns genital mutilation of children, or decries the excesses of identity politics. But they cannot seem to unify against the crass antisemitism that infects their constituency and the progressive wing of their party. Though individual Democrats are finally coming around, they have failed to take unequivocal, collective action against Jew-hatred, whether directed at Israel or individual Jews, who are routinely harassed and assaulted by mobs in progressive cities and universities across the country.

Progressives often assert that antisemitic hate-speech must be evaluated “in context” and cannot be judged without considering Arab-Muslim grievances; and when their logic fails, they invoke the First Amendment, which admittedly protects even odious speech. Their usual contempt for the Constitution does not seem to prevent them from using it as a shield to avoid intellectual engagement. And though free speech is indeed a fundamental American right, so is the right to criticize the words of others. The First Amendment only prohibits government from stifling expression; it does not preclude citizens individually or collectively from condemning hate-speech or incitement.

Suppressing the right to disagree only chills dissent and the free exchange of ideas.

The real reason many progressives will not condemn antisemitism unconditionally is that doing so would require them to criticize ideologies and identity groups they support; and because Jew-hatred is omnipresent on the left and therefore often deemed morally acceptable.

More disappointingly, no moderate liberal icons have spoken out against antisemitism the way Buckley did so eloquently in 1992. It seems the liberal mainstream is more concerned about alienating radical haters than in doing what is correct and decent in civilized society.

And that should scare everyone.

©2023. Matthew Hausman, J.D. All rights reserved.

The Power of Woke: How Leftist Ideology is Undermining our Society and Economy

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Neo-Marxism is a cultural cancer spreading through America and beyond.

“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement.

Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of economic ordering and exchange that propelled the United States of America to prosperity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s infecting Gen Z and millennials, who, suffering high depression rates and prone to “quiet quitting,” are not as well off as their parents and grandparents, and who feel isolated and alone even as they enjoy a technological connectivity that’s unprecedented in human history.

What, exactly, is wokeness, and how does it impact business and the wider society?

Subversion

The term as it’s widely used today differs from earlier significations. “Woke”, which plays on African American vernacular, once meant “awake to” or “aware of” social and racial injustices. The term expanded to encompass a wider array of causes from climate change, gun control, and LGTBQ rights to domestic violence, sexual harassment, and abortion.

Now, wielded by its opponents, it’s chiefly a pejorative dismissing the person or party it modifies. It’s the successor to “political correctness,” a catchall idiom that ridicules a broad range of leftist hobbyhorses. Carl Rhodes submits, in Woke Capitalism, that “woke transmuted from being a political call for self-awareness through solidarity in the face of massive racial injustice, to being an identity marker for self-righteousness.”

John McWhorter’s Woke Racism argues that wokeness is religious in character, unintentionally and intrinsically racist, and deleterious to black people. McWhorter, a black linguist, asserts that “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species.”

Books like Stephen R. Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. highlight the nefarious side of the wokeism adopted by large companies, in particular in the field of asset management, investment, and financial services.

Hypocritical neo-Marxism

Wokeism, in both the affirming and derogatory sense, is predicated on a belief in systemic or structural forces that condition culture and behavior. The phrases “structural racism” or “systemic racism” suggest that rational agents are nevertheless embedded in a network of interacting and interconnected rules, norms, and values that perpetuate white supremacy or marginalise people of color and groups without privilege.

Breaking entirely free from these inherited constraints is not possible, according to the woke, because we cannot operate outside the discursive frames established by long use and entrenched power. Nevertheless, the argument runs, we can decentre the power relations bolstering this system and subvert the techniques employed, wittingly or unwittingly, to preserve extant hierarchies. That requires, however, new structures and power relations.

Corporate executives and boards of directors are unsuspectingly and inadvertently — though sometimes deliberately — caught up in these ideas. They’re immersed in an ideological paradigm arising principally from Western universities. It’s difficult to identify the causative origin of this complex, disparate movement to undo the self-extending power structures that supposedly enable hegemony. Yet businesses, which, of course, are made up of people, including disaffected Gen Zs and millennials, develop alongside this sustained effort to dismantle structures and introduce novel organising principles for society.

The problem is, rather than neutralising power, the “woke” pursue and claim power for their own ends. Criticising systems and structures, they erect systems and structures in which they occupy the center, seeking to dominate and subjugate the people or groups they allege to have subjugated or dominated throughout history. They replace one hegemony with another.

The old systems had problems, of course. They were imperfect. But they retained elements of classical liberalism that protected hard-won principles like private property, due process of law, rule of law, free speech, and equality under the law. Wokeism dispenses with these. It’s about strength and control. And it has produced a corporate-government nexus that rigidifies power in the hands of an elite few.

Consider the extravagant spectacle in Davos, the beautiful resort town that combined luxury and activism at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, perhaps the largest gathering of self-selected, influential lobbyists and “c suiters” across countries and cultures. This annual event occasions cartoonish portrayals of evil, conspiratorial overlords — the soi-disant saviours paternalistically preaching about planetary improvement, glorifying their chosen burden to shape global affairs. The World Economic Forum has become a symbol of sanctimony and lavish inauthenticity, silly in its ostentation.

The near-ubiquitous celebration of lofty Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies at the World Economic Forum reveals a seemingly uniform commitment among prominent leaders to harness government to pull companies — and, alas, everyone else — to the left.

ESG is, of course, an acronym for the non-financial standards and metrics that asset managers, bankers, and investors factor while allocating capital or assessing risk. A growing consortium of governments, central banks, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), asset management firms, finance ministries, financial institutions, and institutional investors advocates ESG as the top-down, long-term solution to purported social and climate risks. Even if these risks are real, is ESG the proper remedy?

Attendees of the World Economic Forum would not champion ESG if they did not benefit from doing so. That plain fact doesn’t alone discredit ESG, but it raises questions about ulterior motives: What’s really going on? How will these titans of finance and government benefit from ESG?

Follow the money

One obvious answer involves the institutional investors that prioritise activism over purely financial objectives or returns on investment (for legal reasons, activist investors would not characterise their priorities as such). It has only been a century since buying and selling shares in publicly traded companies became commonplace among workers and households. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), created in response to the Great Depression, isn’t even 100 years old.

Until recently, most investors divested if they owned stock in a company that behaved contrary to their beliefs. They rarely voted their shares or voted only on major issues like mergers and acquisitions. In 2023, however, institutional investors such as hedge funds and asset management firms engage boards of directors, exercise proxy voting, and issue shareholder reports with the primary goal of politicising companies. As intermediaries, they invest pension funds, mutual funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, 401(k)s and more on behalf of beneficiaries who may or may not know what political causes their invested assets support.

If a publicly traded company “goes woke,” consider which entities hold how much of its shares and whether unwanted shareholder pressure is to blame. Consider, too, the role of third-party proxy advisors in the company’s policies and practices.

Big companies go woke to eliminate competition. After all, they can afford the costs to comply with woke regulations whereas small companies cannot. Institutional investors warn of prospective risks of government regulation while lobbying for such regulation. In the United States, under the Biden Administration, woke federal regulations are, unsurprisingly, emerging. Perhaps publicly traded companies will privatise to avoid proposed SEC mandates regarding ESG disclosures, but regulation in other forms and through other agencies will come for private companies too.

The woke should question why they’re collaborating with their erstwhile corporate enemies. Have they abandoned concerns about poverty for the more lucrative industry of identity politics and environmentalism? Have they sold out, happily exploiting the uncouth masses, oppressing the already oppressed, and trading socioeconomic class struggle for the proliferating dogma of race, sexuality, and climate change? As wokeness becomes inextricably tied to ESG, we can no longer say, “Go woke, go broke.” Presently, wokeness is a vehicle to affluence, a status marker, the ticket to the center of the superstructure.

ESG helps the wealthiest to feel better about themselves while widening the gap between the rich and poor and disproportionately burdening economies in developing countries. It’s supplanting the classical liberal rules and institutions that leveled playing fields, engendered equality of opportunity, expanded the franchise, reduced undue discrimination, eliminated barriers to entry, facilitated entrepreneurship and innovation, and empowered individuals to realise their dreams and rise above their station at birth.

When politics is ubiquitous, wokeness breeds antiwokeness. The right caught on to institutional investing; counteroffensives are underway. The totalising politicisation of corporations is a zero-sum arms race in which the right captures some companies while the left captures others.

Soon there’ll be no escaping politics, no tranquil zones, and little space for emotional detachment, contemplative privacy, or principled neutrality; parallel economies will emerge for different political affiliations; noise, fighting, anger, distraction, and division will multiply; every quotidian act will signal a grand ideology. For the woke, “silence is violence”; there’s no middle ground; you must speak up; and increasingly for their opponents as well, you must choose sides.

Which will you choose in this corporatised dystopia? If the factions continue to concentrate and centralise power, classical liberals will have no good options. Coercion and compulsion will prevail over freedom and cooperation. And commerce and command will go hand in hand.

This article has been republished with permission from Mises Wire.

AUTHOR

Allen Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall is an associate dean at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, executive director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty, and Managing Editor of Southern… More by Allen Mendenhall

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Recovering a more perfect union: A rebuke of the 1619 Project

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A new book describes the importance of memory, history, and national identity in saving America from desolation.

One of the worst sins of the present — not just ours but any present — is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.
— Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

Jay Leno used to do a regular schtick, Jaywalking, in which he would interview random persons on the street, often young ones, and ask them questions about American history, such as: “Who did America fight in the Revolutionary War?” “How many branches of the U.S. government are there?” “What year was the War of 1812?” Invariably, they could not answer the question, standing mute with Leno’s impertinent microphone pointed at their gaping mouths, or they gave a ridiculous answer.

As deflating as these performances were, it turns out that the state of American education is even worse than Leno documented. Not only does ignorance characterise so much of the citizenry, but Americans are now also imbibing, i.e., being taught, pernicious lies or partial truths about the founding and history of the United States from a tendentious, ideological, and solidly left-wing perspective.

Twisted narrative

This sorry state of affairs is documented in excruciating detail in Timothy S. Goeglein’s enlightening, depressing, and, ultimately, hopeful new book, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story.

The distortion of history now routinely fed to elementary and high school students, as well as those attending hopelessly “woke” universities and colleges, has produced many young people who are “cynical, entitled, and aggrieved.” Continues Goeglein:

Rather than being thankful, they are indignant. Rather than proud, they feel ashamed. Rather than feeling free, they feel oppressed. Rather than wanting to fix America’s faults, they want to burn America down. Rather than asking what they can do for their country, they demand to know what their country can do for them — and the answer is increasingly to “cease to exist.”

We have created “a citizenry divorced both intellectually and emotionally from its heritage.” Further, “[w]hen we disassociate history — and memory — from facts, we are lost,” writes Goeglein, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, a former Senate staffer, and, presently, vice-president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family.

Our predicament is exemplified by the absurd, anti-historical 1619 Project of the New York Times, an initiative repudiated by many respected, liberal historians. It is being taught in roughly 4,500 schools nationwide.

In a feat of historical and moral inversion, it maintains that the American Revolution was designed primarily to protect the institution of slavery from being destroyed by the British Empire.

Such a one-sided view of history will alienate Americans from one another, given the dissolution of a common identity and love of country, and disregards those who struggled to make the Declaration of Independence a reality in spite of its obvious flaws, such as slavery.

On the matter of slavery, always a leading complaint against America’s founding, the Washington Post’s George Will has rightly observed that the founders’ Constitution “gave slavery no national validation. It left slavery solely a creature of state laws and therefore susceptible to the process that, in fact, occurred — the process of being regionally confined and put on a path to ultimate extinction. Secession was the South’s desperate response when it recognized this impending outcome that the Constitution had facilitated.”

So, it comes as no surprise that, as “a 2020 Pew Research study found a month before the presidential election, roughly eight in ten registered voters in both camps said their political disagreements with others were about core American values, with roughly nine in ten — liberal and conservative — worried [that] a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States” [emphasis added]. We are now in a situation in which tribe is pitted against tribe, race against race, rich against poor, red against blue states.

We have succumbed to the “termites of self-loathing,” to use a term coined by Ben Stein. There is hardly a historic personage — Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, St Junípero Serra — who is not vilified, “cancelled,” and banished into outer darkness by woke activists and educators. One should be grateful that at least Frederick Douglass and Dr Martin Luther King Jr are spared such treatment, given their devotion to American ideals in the Declaration of Independence, classical literature, and Scripture. They are just ignored.

Dearth of patriotism

Recently, a friend whose daughter attended one of the tonier prep schools in Washington, DC, related that his conversations with her on US and Western history were disappointing. She, and her friends, showed no “piety” toward her country or heritage.

It was an interesting word choice and recalled my own school days studying Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem written between 29 and 19 BC. It tells the story of the Trojan Aeneas, who fled the destruction of his city, travelled to Italy, and would later become the ancestor of the Romans.

I remember my Jesuit instructor lauding “pius Aeneas,” “pious” being the most used adjective throughout the poem. In following the will of the gods — he even left the captivating Dido in Carthage — Aeneas demonstrated pietas, a virtue in the eyes of Virgil and my teacher, in his devotion to family, country, and mission. Such piety is no longer encouraged in our educational institutions, or so it would seem.

Major culprit

What brought America to this sorry state? In the beginning there was the “Original Zinn” — Howard Zinn, that is, a Boston University professor of political science and “the godfather of the radical attack on America’s history”, as Goeglein outlines in a pivotal chapter of Toward a More Perfect Union.

Zinn’s “epic screed,” A People’s History of the United States (1980), and his supplemental book for high schoolers, A Young People’s History of the United States (2007), have had an unparalleled impact on social studies teachers. The historian “refram[ed]” and “reimagin[ed]” facts to fit a Marxist critique of the US and a Western civilisation marred, claimed Zinn, “by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money.” For Zinn, “standards of historical analysis are merely ‘technical problems’ to be dismissed.”

“You wanna read a real history book?” Matt Damon’s titular character, Will, asks Robin Williams’ Dr Sean Maguire in the movie Good Will Hunting (1997). “Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f***ing knock you on your ass.” Indeed, it does. It also boggles the mind.

Zinn claims that the nation “has been taken over by men [the founders] who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.” Again, in service to ideology, Zinn does not believe in objective history as documented by Mary Grabar, PhD, a refugee of communist Yugoslavia, on whom Goeglein draws heavily.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main author of the 1619 Project, backtracked after respected historians critiqued her work. She claimed that the project was not about history but about “memory.” This is not historically grounded memory, but memory saturated with ideology and politics. This is pure Zinn in methodology. Hence, noted historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Eugene Genovese, and Michael Kammen — hardly a crowd of right-wingers — criticised Zinn as a “polemicist, not a historian.”

“His ultimate goal is not a historical one but a political one,” writes Goeglein. “[H]e wanted to depict the United States as an illegitimate enterprise, one demanding a revolution.”

Pushback

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, today, only 18 percent of colleges require that students take a US history or government class to graduate. Maybe that is a blessing, given what passes for “history” in today’s woke environment. Ultimately, however, this is devastating to national unity.

Goeglein describes survey after survey that all indicate Americans’ ignorance of their rights under law and history. When the Constitution is taught, it is derided as being not radical enough in terms of the outcomes desired by left-of-centre teachers and advocates.

Toward A More Perfect Union does not specify a political agenda for reform, although it does note efforts made by some governors to reign in educational bureaucracies on, say, critical race theory. It does make a plea for parents to make a concerted effort to teach and counsel their children on the history of the nation and to pay close attention to what their schools are teaching.

It points to excellent resources available with which parents can educate themselves and their children on the complete story of American exceptionalism, not excluding the darker chapters. Parents who can afford the cost should look for alternatives to public schools that sacrifice true learning for the sake of ideology. “Classical” schools, home schooling, and parochial schools — all of which boomed during the COVID lockdowns — are possible options.

Parents who cannot afford private schools or who have special-needs children “must be extra vigilant and expect to receive the full wrath of Leftist activists if they stand up and demand that civics be taught while also standing against the indoctrination their children are receiving.” Specifically, they need to insist on the rights to inspect curricula, to opt out of the teaching of certain subjects, and to insist that controversial issues be discussed impartially. No easy tasks these.

Goeglein concludes:

[W]e must rededicate ourselves to the teaching of history — true, verifiable, factual history, with all its glories and tragedies. We need not fear to teach the ugly truths about America alongside the beautiful ones, because America’s founding vision is pure and her ideals are noble. Our failures do not change that.

Toward a More Perfect Union makes a compelling case that the country’s future, as one nation, demands a reclamation of our educational system and a recovery of the authentic teaching of history and constitutional government rightly understood.

This article has been republished from The American Spectator with permission.

AUTHOR

G. Tracy Mehan III

G. Tracy Mehan, III, was Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Administration of President George W. Bush. He is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School,… More by G. Tracy Mehan III

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Why Do The Woke Hate Clarence Thomas So Much?

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Justice Clarence Thomas, being African American, is seen as a traitor to the woke cause.

After the overturning of Roe v Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas has been a particular target of venomous attack from the woke mob. Why do they hate him so much? One might be forgiven for thinking that it is due to his staunch anti-abortion views. But that explanation does not work.

Pope Francis has long expressed that opposing abortion is “closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right”, and yet, the Left is not obsessed with him (in fact, many even take a liking). At some point, even Joe Biden supported letting States overturn Roe v Wade, and again, the Left did not go ballistic on him.

Not behaving as expected

So, why the animus against Thomas? There can only be one explanation: race. In 1991, as he was accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill, Thomas countered that he was the victim of “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.”

This was loose talk, as it trivialised the suffering of real lynching victims in America’s troubled history of race relations. But Thomas did have a point in arguing that in the United States, any black person who dares to deviate from the official narrative of how blacks are supposed to act, will face severe harassment.

In 1991, he anticipated a trend that would become mainstream in our times: if you are born with a particular skin colour, you are supposed to behave in a certain way, and uphold a specific ideology. If not, you are a race traitor. As Biden so neatly phrased it:

“[I]f you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Any competent scholar of the history of racism would immediately recognise this as race essentialism. As Angelo Corlett explains in his book Race, Racism and Reparations,
“proponents of race essentialism define human races by a set of genetic or cultural traits shared by all members of a ‘racial’ group.”

Who are the neo-Nazis now?

In the first half of the 20th Century, this view was popular amongst proponents of so-called “racial science”. They believed that racial biological traits determine how people behave. Hitler believed that no matter how much a person with Jewish ancestry tried to assimilate to German society (even converting to another religion), he or she would still be a dangerous Jew, because it was in his or her essence.

Race essentialism is abhorrent, and one might think that after 1945, the world learned a lesson. And yet, race essentialism is alive and kicking, but this time, under the guise of woke progressivism. As per today’s woke rules, if you are black, you must embrace the whole woke mindset.

White people (such as Pope Francis) may occasionally be forgiven for having anti-abortion views, but if you are black and you deviate from the woke line (such as Clarence Thomas), you are a race traitor, an Uncle Tom. Unsurprisingly, Thomas has been called “Uncle Clarence” multiple times.

If you are black, not only do you have to act a certain way, but you must also have a special sexual preference. The woke pay lip service to interracial relationships, but amongst them there is a sense of unease when they contemplate a successful black man marrying a white woman.

For example, when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States, USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds wrote: “Here’s a man who’s going to decide crucial issues for the country and he has already said no to blacks; he has already said if he can’t paint himself white he’ll think white and marry a white woman.” Russell Adams, chairman of African American studies at Howard University, said that Thomas “marrying a white woman is a sign of his rejection of the black community.”

Truly racist

Frantz Fanon is a figure beloved by the Left. In 1952, he published Black Skin, White Masks, a canonical text of wokeness. In that book, he also scorns black men who fall in love with white women. Fanon castigates himself for, at some point, having had these thoughts: “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.” The implication of this passage is that loving a white woman is an act of racial treason.

Fanon felt disdain for black people who embraced Western values. He claimed they were wearing white masks, as if somehow, they were deviating from their real essence, and were therefore living an inauthentic life. Therefore — so Fanon believed — Western civilisation must be rejected entirely. As he explained in The Wretched of the Earth, “When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture, they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand.” He who admires Western values is a sellout.

Ever since Fanon, racial essentialism in the name of progress has only grown worse. People of color are now encouraged not to honour punctuality, because being on time is part of whiteness. Black kids who are academically talented run the risk of being told they are “acting white”. Analysing things objectively is an act of white supremacy. And so on.

Consequently, Clarence Thomas is not allowed to have anti-abortion views. Nobody cares about his anti-abortion arguments, because he is not supposed to make them in the first place. Other jurists, philosophers or theologians will be allowed to oppose abortion, but only if they are white. Thomas is hated not because of his views, but because of his skin colour. He upsets the arbitrary racial classifications that the woke are so eager to embrace.

As per woke taxonomy, black people cannot be conservative, and if they are, they are only wearing a “white mask”. To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, “identity politics poisons everything”. We can no longer have a meaningful discussion about anything as vital as the ontological status of a fetus, because the race of the discussants will determine who is allowed to uphold a particular view. It’s time to push back against this madness.

AUTHOR

Gabriel Andrade

Gabriel Andrade is a university professor originally from Venezuela. He writes about politics, philosophy, history, religion and psychology. More by Gabriel Andrade

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Leftist Jews Ally with Suit-Wearing Jihadists in New Group [Part One] by Andrew Harrod

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Anwar Khan “has been doing outreach to the Jewish community on behalf of the Muslim community for decades,” stated former American Jewish Committee (AJC) official Robert Silverman at Washington, DC’s Newseum on December 3. His praise for Khan, the director of the Hamas ally Islamic Relief USA (IRUSA), typified the unsettling leftist Jewish ignorance of jihadist threats at this launch event for the Inter Jewish Muslim Alliance (IJMA).

Silverman addressed an audience that ultimately grew during the daylong conference to about 50. This included his fellow IJMA organizer, Microsoft External Affairs Director Suhail Khan, a “conservative” political operative with deep, longstanding personal Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ties. Other faces familiar to this author included the Gülenist Rumi Forum’s public relations director, Jena Luedtke, and the Iraqi-American co-founder of the American Islamic Congress, Zainab al-Suwaij.

Silverman’s association with the dubious Khan replicated Silverman’s experience as the first director of the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, previously rightly mocked as the “Wolf-Sheep Advisory Council.” Therein the left-leaning American Jewish Committee (AJC) had joined with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a nefarious MB-legacy organization, supposedly to combat hate crimes and other manifestations of bigotry. An IJMA statement distributed among the conference handouts and now available at IJMA’s new website proclaimed that IJMA members wanted, “as a Muslim-Jewish alliance, to counter voices of hatred and bigotry within our own communities.”

Yet the day’s proceedings demonstrated a decidedly one-sided view of prejudice among Jews and Muslims, as indicated by the seminar’s first presentation by Elana Hain from the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI) of North America. “Antisemitism is converging on Jews from both the right and the left,” she correctly noted, but while “everybody in this room knows about antisemitism on the right,” leftist antisemitism “is much harder to talk about.” Today “what we are seeing on the progressive left is a type of conversionist antisemitism that says, ‘Jew, we will accept you if you disavow your commitment to the state of Israel.’” She noted particularly that “my spouse works on a college campus, and I have seen how Jewish students are increasingly unwelcome in progressive spaces.”

However true, Hain’s remarks surprisingly contained not a single reference to antisemitism involving Muslims or Islam. Excerpts from three publications (see here, here, and here) in her handout included several dubious allegations of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and administration inciting antisemitism. By contrast, “Muslims” appeared only once in a Tablet article’s reference to hate crimes, even though the American Interest article she quoted briefly discussed “Islamic antisemitism” in an uncited paragraph. Meanwhile, internet searches of the Tablet for “Islamic antisemitism” find numerous articles (e.g. here).

Hain’s blind spot seemed particularly disturbing given the annual conference in Chicago of the viciously anti-Semitic American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) just days before (November 28-30). The conference featured inflammatory condemnations of Israel’s right to exist from prominent American Muslims. This included former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Executive Director Nihad Awad, and CAIR San Francisco chapter leader Zahra Billoo.

This author accordingly presented to Hain an audience question noting the AMP conference and that AJC CEO David Harris has previously called for “trifocal lenses” to confront antisemitism from the “far left, the far right, and the jihadists.” She responded that she was “including in progressive antisemitism” the “antisemitism that comes from the Muslim community around Israel.” She added that she had not devoted particular study to Islamic antisemitism and suggested that Muslim conference attendees might be better qualified to discuss this topic.

Just as Hain only circuitously referenced Islamic antisemitism, she similarly indulged questionable tropes commonplace among many Muslims. For example, without any indication of whether Jews or others had any valid objections to Islamic beliefs and/or behaviors she used the Orwellian phrase “Islamophobia.” Conflicts between Israel and Palestinians should not “lead to antisemitism or ‘Islamophobia,’” she said, as if irrational Jew-hatred were the same as critical inquiry into Islam.

Audience member Imam Abdullah Antepli, a leader of SHI’s Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), reflected Hain’s remarks with questions about “Islamophobic elements within the Jewish community.” “Within this organized anti-Muslim campaign in the United States, there are so many visible Jews,” he stated. Jews have a “fear of losing the state of Israel” and “when many Jews meet Muslims, that fear is all that they see,” she responded while again not explaining why such perceptions are meritless (consider Israel, Muslims, and Britain’s Labour Party).

Hain also equated Jewish national liberation in Israel with baseless claims that “Palestinians” represent a unique, historical nation and not merely a local collection of Levantine Arab communities. The statement “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” is equally false as “Jews don’t have a history in that region” of Israel, she said. This is “mutual denial of peoples’ actual historical experiences,” notwithstanding numerous modern “Palestinian” fictions.

A veiled female Muslim audience member from the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, a group obsessed with all real and imagined “white supremacy,” prompted more historical revisionism from Hain. The Muslim claimed that historically the term “antisemitism” encompassed prejudice against both Jews and Muslims, and Hain suggested that antisemitism could include both “Judeophobia” and “Islamophobia.” In reality, the German publicist Wilhelm Marr invented the word “antisemitism” in 1879 in order to impart a scientific veneer to his rabid Jew-hatred.

The appeasing Hain, who called the leftist American rabbi Jill Jacobs a “colleague and a friend,” paralleled the reaction to Islamic antisemitism of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an IJMA sponsor. As Islamic antisemitism scholar Andrew Bostom has documented, ADL global surveys of antisemitism in recent years have identified Muslims as world leaders in prejudice against Jews. Yet the ADL has minimized such facts.

While Hain acted conciliatory towards Muslims, they often show little reciprocity, as a following article will analyze. Conference speakers after her like the radical “Islamophobia” expert Wajahat Ali were far more direct in their accusations of bigotry against various Jews while exhibiting little interest in the anti-Semitic milieus of conference participants like ISNA members.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. The views are those solely of the author.

VIDEO: Excuse Me, Professor! Correcting the slant on campus

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excuse me professor book coverToo often, the message students get in college is that government is the answer to all social and economic problems. This happens in classes on history, sociology, politics, literature, and even in economics. You can graduate having heard only one narrative: the market has failed, so it must be replaced by all-controlling government bureaucracies.

FEE president Lawrence Reed is the editor of a wonderful collection of essays that address myth after myth. The book is Excuse Me, Professor (buy it from FEE). The essays deal with a huge range of issues that confront students every day. Unless young thinkers have an alternative paradigm in mind, the cause of human liberty will continue to lose the intellectual battle.

In this presentation at the Acton Institute, Reed discusses his new book and why it is an important contribution to setting the record straight. (Talk begins around 4:30 mark.)

Jeffrey A. TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins slam Left for giving Islam “free pass” despite Muslim terrorism

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What is noteworthy about this is how selective and one-sided Maher and Dawkins are. They’re all upset about the Marxist anti-Semite Maryam Namazie being banned from speaking at a university because of her views on Islam, but have never said a word while for years Pamela Geller and I and others who tell the same truths about Islam that Namazie tells (and more consistently than she does because we do not support the “Palestinian” jihad as she does) have received the same treatment from universities and other venues. Maher and Dawkins would never think of speaking out on our behalf because they would likely think of us as “right-wing bigots” — as Sam Harris last year dismissed critics of jihad terror besides himself and his friends as “fascists.”

What Maher, Dawkins and Harris don’t seem to realize is that they only think of us as “fascists” because the same Leftist/Islamic supremacist smear machine (including their pal Namazie) that is now going after them for their “bigotry” has for years defamed us in exactly the same way, for saying essentially the same things they do about Islam. We are “right-wing” because the smear machine has called us “right-wing” for years — when I have never taken a public position on anyissue other than those involving jihad and Sharia, and the claim that defending free societies against jihad terror and Islamic supremacism is a right-wing issue, or constitutes “fascism,” is a media fiction.

I expect that Maher, Dawkins, and Harris wouldn’t be caught dead in the company of Pamela Geller or me, even though we note the same truths they do and defend the same freedoms they’re defending. That is testimony only to the effectiveness of the defamation campaign that has now turned against them, for the same reason its organizers targeted us. And as long as their indignation about the threat to the freedom of speech and the hollow truncheon of the “Islamophobia” charge remains restricted only to those on the Left, it remains inconsistent and hypocritical.

“Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins Slam Liberals for Giving Islam ‘Free Pass’ Despite Link to Terrorism,” by Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post, October 5, 2015:

Two of the most famous atheists in the world, HBO host Bill Maher and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, slammed liberals who they say are giving Islam a “free pass,” despite the human rights abuses being committed in Muslim countries and by Islamic extremist groups around the world today.

Dawkins was a guest on Maher’s “Real Time” on Friday, where Maher said it is “ridiculous” that some make out Muslims to be a “protected species.”

Dawkins added that people sometimes believe that those criticizing Muslims are racists.

Maher and Dawkins both took aim at liberals they said would shoot down free speech in order to protect Muslim sensitivities. Dawkins pointed out the case of Warwick University’s students’ union declining atheist and critic of extremist Islam Maryam Namazie the opportunity to speak at the school in October, out of fear of offending the religion.

Maher has himself faced push-back for his own university appearances, with University of California at Berkeley students starting a petition last year seeking to bar the HBO host from speaking at 2014’s fall commencement ceremony, due to his “racist” views on Muslims.

“If you can’t speak your mind at a university campus, where can you? I mean that’s what universities are about. It’s about free speech,” Dawkins said.

“So they think that if you you criticize Islam you’re being racist and you’re absolutely right that the regressive [liberals] give a free pass to Islam,” the atheist author continued. “They’re kind of right about everything else, I mean, they’re right about misogyny and all of the other good things. But in the case of Islam, it just gets a free pass and I think it is because of the terror of being thought racist.”

Maher added that those who criticize Islam are also called “Islamophobes,” which he said was a “silly word that means nothing.”

Maher, Dawkins, and other atheist authors, such as Sam Harris, have been criticized by religious commentators, such as Reza Aslan, for blaming Islam for the rise of terrorism….

Aslan added that such anti-theists get their ideas “from the most simplistic, the most unsophisticated and the most knee-jerk reaction to the very real problem of religious violence around the world,” and argued that it is “nothing less than idiotic to blame religion for religious violence without recognizing the multiple factors that are involved in violence of any sort.”

“Multiple factors” are “involved in violence of any sort.” This from a man who accused Pamela Geller and me of complicity in a murder that was initially blamed on “Islamophobia” but that turned out to be an Islamic honor killing. Aslan, of course, refused to retract.

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VIDEO: The Left Wing Liars Club

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We hit back at the tired old lies of the left on the Iraq War, George W. Bush, the economy, the Islamic State and Obamacare.

Is there life on Mars? … And other tough, progressive questions

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A recent post on the People’s Blog made me think of the following:

Is there life on Mars? If so, there are too many questions we must answer before we contemplate going there. Tough, progressive questions.

  • Is there social justice on Mars?
  • Is there an economy on Mars and if so, does it need regulating?
  • Is there a community on Mars and if so, does it need community organizers?
  • Are there genders on Mars and if so, is there gender equality for all 58 of them?
  • Is there private property on Mars and if so, is there redistributive justice?
  • Is there illegal immigration on Mars and if so, are there sanctuary cities?
  • Are there elections on Mars and if so, is voter ID required?
  • Is there Al Sharpton on Mars?
  • Is there homosexuality on Mars and if so, is there homophobia?
  • Is there parenthood on Mars and if so, does it need to be planned?
  • Are there corporations on Mars and if so, are they considered people?
  • Is there an environment on Mars and if so, does it require environmentalists?
  • Is there climate change on Mars and if so, is the Martian science settled?
  • Is there a nuclear bomb on Mars and if so, do they need negotiators?
  • Are there Muslims on Mars and if so, is there Islamophobia?

Actually, the last question has already been answered: there no Muslims on Mars.

Muslims ‘warned in Fatwa not to live on Mars’

Fatwa reportedly issued warning Muslims not to make ‘hazardous trip’ to live on Mars

Muslims have been warned in a Fatwa not to go and live on Mars because it would pose “a real risk to life”, according to a Dubai news organisation. The General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) in the United Arab Emirates said that anyone making such a “hazardous trip” is likely to die for “no righteous reason”.

Indeed, there appears to be plenty of “righteous reasons” for Muslims to die here even without Mars.

Come to think of it, progressives still have plenty of righteous causes to fight on Earth as well. Besides, if none of the above exists on Mars, there would be nothing for us to do there but to sustain ourselves by hard work.

Maybe we should join our Muslim brothers and not go to Mars after all. No matter how tempting it is to spend billions of other people’s money on such a trip.

IN OTHER NEWS…

The Sword of Revolution and the Communist Apocalypse

The Sword of RevolutionI was hired as a graphic designer and I did my job well, recycling the original revolutionary poster by Dmitry Moor, one of the founding fathers of Soviet agitprop. Now that the book is out, here’s my two kopecks.

This book has a lot of valid, factual information. At the same time, I remain skeptical about the theory that the breakup of the USSR was only a show so that the communists could take over the world by other means. Not that there aren’t powerful forces bending the civilized world towards what they call “progress” (and what I call collectivist barbarism), but those are different people and different movements with different goals. I generally don’t believe in conspiracies that require the presence of an undying, eternal, all-knowing, and superhuman brain – or in this case, community organizer.

I follow the developments in Russia very closely and one thing today’s Russians couldn’t care less about is Communism. To be sure, the Communist Party still has a strong presence there, but that’s mostly because Putin is feeding the communists in order to appease the nuts and the old-timers. That is also part of Putin’s strategy to shape and maintain his own opposition…

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Study: ‘Crazed gunman’ stigma increases risk of suicide

'Crazed gunman' stigma may cause suicideA new study published by the country’s #1 rank school of clinical psychology, UCLA’s Dept. of Psychology, suggests a link between the high rate of suicide among alleged rampaging mass murderers and the stigma of being labeled, by mass media outlets, as a “crazed gunman.”

The study shows that close to 100% of those who are labeled as a “crazed gunman” commit suicide within the first 24 hours after their alleged rampage and, very often, within the first 60 seconds. Some, it is suggested, commit “suicide by cop” in inexplicable and “out-of-character” gun battles with law enforcement.

The study suggests that fear of being stigmatized leads many of these alleged felons to end their own lives before…

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Stock market crash foretells third coming of Bush

third coming of BushSix days of stock market losses that have erased trillions of dollars of global wealth are being taken as a sign that the Third Coming of Bush is nigh. Those gifted in the dark art of political prognostication have reportedly been awaiting this omen for many months.

Well-known oracle Karl Rove was the first to recognize the significance of the financial portent, tweeting “As it was in 1987, as it was in 2000, so will it be in 2016. Let the Third Bush come forth and the world tremble at his glory!”

David Brooks, Chief Conservative Augur for the New York Times, elaborated…

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FBI hires Ashley Madison hackers to retrieve Clinton emails

Ashley Madison HillaryTHE HACKERS BEHIND the Ashley Madison breach have been contracted by the FBI to retrieve Madam Hillary’s 35, 000 yoga emails that were scrubbed from her personal server.

On the heels of being stonewalled and lied to by the former Sec. of State, the bureau has determined that a bigger batch of deletions were unretrievable unless true experts, such as the Ashley Madison hackers, were contracted to retrieve the wiped correspondences.

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Recovered images from Hillary emails prove it was only yoga

Hillary yogaWhile the FBI is still at a loss regarding the content of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail cache from her days as secretary of state, one thing they have determined beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the Democratic presidential frontrunner is a diligent distance-education yoga student.

Emailing yoga routines are standard practice in distance education, said Mrs. Clinton’s online yoga instructor Maha Bharata through an interpreter. He claims that over the years he has sent her over two hundred thousand Hindu-language emails with pictures of yoga poses, which constitutes 90% of the data that had been wiped clean from Clinton’s personal server.

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MURDAH: a stunning advancement in the right to choose

External UterusA child has grown up not how you envisioned? An elderly parent becoming a burden? Have you considered a post-birth abortion? Scientists at the Barack Obama Women’s Health Research Center have made an epic advancement in women’s health, and the right to choose.

Scientists have developed a method to allow abortions past the third trimester, as explained by the project’s lead scientist, Dr. Hillary Sanders: “Until now, women were limited to aborting only their own fetus, and only during the first three trimesters before birth. Our laboratory has pioneered…

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The People’s Cube wasn’t always red: the story of Erno Rubik

People's CubeEverybody knows that the People’s Cube is gloriously red, which is politically correct and compliant with the Current Truth. It’s impossible to imagine today what it would look like with all the confusing unequal colors. Imagining such a thing is inadvisable. All you need to know is that it’s equally red.

All squares are equal, and all players are equal. Nobody is too smart, nobody is too slow. Guaranteed equality of results. A symbol of fairness and painless existence. Nobody’s a boob with the People’s Cube!

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CNN to grill Democrat candidates using Fox News debate style

Fox News debate inquisitionFollowing the ratings success of Fox News in its presentation of the first Republican presidential primary debate, CNN has decided to mirror the GOP debate’s formula and tone when it hosts the first of six Democrat Presidential debates in October.

Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, tipped his hat to Fox: “I have to admit that they did a fantastic job and really held the candidates’ feet to the fire. I saw the numbers like everyone else did, and I want those ratings for CNN.”

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EDITORS NOTE: The political satire originally appeared on the Peoples Cube.

The Importance of Right Thinking

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For fifty years liberals, progressives, socialists, those of the left or whatever they call themselves have been chipping away at every vestige of morality, right thinking, correct actions they could target.  So it is pretty darn pathetic and humorous when one of the opponents of personal responsibility suddenly decry destructive behavior.

Unless you have been in a coma, are deaf, blind or just dead, odds are you are acutely aware of the Ferguson disaster.  You are also familiar with how legions of thugs went to nutsville and tried to burn Baltimore to a crisp after their fallen thug brother Michael Brown assumed atmospheric temperature because he forgot that it is not nice to try and grab a police officer’s gun, after whacking him a few times.

I will probably never forget how Baltimore Mayor, Rawlings-Blake was at first OK with allowing the criminal rioters to wreak havoc, to let off a little steam.  Since that gruesome time of riotous woe followed by Baltimore government policies which have enormously inhibited the ability of Baltimore’s finest to effectively fight crime, things have gone more awry than usual.

So it was almost humorous to read in a CNS News report that Baltimore Mayor Rawlings-Blake stated that “the level of violence in Baltimore is unacceptable.”  Here we are a little over a year after the lunacy in Ferguson and Baltimore.  In recent months, Baltimore and other cities like Chicago have experienced record numbers of black on black murders.  One of the major reasons, amongst others is a refusal to teach individuals about right and wrong as well as personal responsibility.

Even the Mayor herself was obviously not taught about personal responsibility and property rights.  Remember her famous “they need to give the protesters room to destroy statement?  That verbiage alone opened the floodgates of destruction upon that historic city.  Unfortunately, Baltimore and increasingly throughout America society is reaping the intellectual garbage that has been sewn for decades.  When hate and blacks are victims are both taught and endorsed through the racism of low expectations what we have witnessed in Baltimore has become the fashion of the day in certain circles.

The racism of low expectations and victimization has not only damaged those who have been brainwashed by such hoopla, but the republic as a whole is negatively affected.  The burdensome cost of mad-uncivilized and enraged so-called victims is costing billions of dollars in property damage and medical costs.  More importantly, the needless loss of life at the hands of dummied downed so-called victims is costing fa

milies throughout the republic, the needless heartache of losing family members who became the real victims of so-called victims.

The black lives matter crowd is often a collection of either criminals or losers who should be considered criminals when conducting criminal acts.  If they die in the process of being criminals, then sovereign citizens should be smart enough to recognize it.  You cannot raise generations of American hating “victims” and then expect them to behave like rational human beings. It’s just not going to happen. Sorry!

If black lives matter activists and anyone else for that matter want a better life for people, they must first be willing to learn what entails a better life.

One cannot build a business, get a job or properly educate themselves if they are not first correctly instructed on the reality and importance of striving to be morally good.  Without the concept of common decency, Americans will continue to degenerate into vicious balkanized society of disunited countrymen out to hurt their fellow citizens and their property, just because they believe they can get away with it, like they did in Baltimore and Ferguson.

The time has come or some real concrete decisions to be made.  One of them is not to allow the continuation of the racist low expectation directives to poison the minds of young black Americans.  In addition, the evil choice of countless liberal educators and others to convince black Americans that they are nothing more than victims must be stopped NOW!

America was and can be great again, if “We the People” first choose to be great, victorious and through God’s grace, morally good.

Liberals HATE the History of The United States and Want to Create Their Own Utopia

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In July, there are two nations that celebrate their Independence from one nation. Canada celebrated their independence from Great Britain on July 1 and the United States of America celebrated its independence from Great Britain on July 4. How interesting that the summer month of July produced such nations, birthed by an empire. Now some would argue that the empire that was Great Britain birthed another empire that was even more powerful, the United States.

Surely that was not the intent of our Founders, for us to be an empire and it is our true intent this day. We do not seek to conquer lands far and wide. We do not seek to occupy and hold territory in every corner of the world. But if you listen to Liberals, they would have you believe that the United States is nothing more than a colonial power that takes from other nations and gives nothing back. I have always found that to be strange since every time we defeated a major power or nation, we always gave it back to the people of that nation. Germany, Japan, South Korea, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and the list goes on.

Surely a nation that is bent on world domination does not allow for conquered nations to live their own lives and have their own government. Remember the old Soviet Union? They surrounded themselves with nations that they controlled completely. There was no independence for the likes of the Baltic’s, Poland, East Germany and the list goes on. They had no choice but to do as their masters dictated. They had no choice but to stand and be the shield for Russia.

But Liberals in the United States, those who actually hate the United States, try to paint the picture that the United States is no better than the Soviet Union. They are so brazen with their hatred now that they even write articles that redefine history. They redefine the history of the United States of America by stating that the Revolutionary War was a bad idea. They claim that if the Monarchy of Great Britain ruled over the United States for a little while longer, there would not have been slavery and there would not have been a Civil War. These folks obviously do not know or understand their own history.

These Liberals tell us that the military Veterans of the United States should pay for their own health care. That if we didn’t spend so much on the military and if we didn’t pay our soldiers so much in salary that we could eliminate hunger in the United States and that everyone could go to public college for free. These Liberals preach that the basic foundations that made this country great and prosperous were illegal and immoral. You know, the institution of marriage between one man and one woman, Liberty and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The idea that each man is responsible for his own life.

You know the other ideals such as law and order is good for society. The military deserves our respect and admiration and that we should spend our money providing our soldiers with the best and latest equipment available to help insure their safe return home. Liberals detest the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance, the playing and singing of our National Anthem, the military jet fly overs at major sporting events, prayer before government meetings.

Liberals can’t stand the fact that you should have the freedom to choose your doctor, your health insurance, your child’s school, what kind of car you drive, and what words you can and cannot say in public. In the end, if Liberals had their way, we would not have a flag. We would not have a pledge. We would not have a military capable of defending this nation. We would not have the ability and the right to choose to live as we see fit. We would not have the right to choose what we buy, who we elect, where we speak, what we say.

In the end, what Liberals really want, what would really truly make them happy, is the death and destruction of freedom. The end of the United States of America. What Liberals would have is what that great utopian novel most of us read in high school clearly announced. In the world of the novel Animal Farm, clearly the Liberals believe that some people are more equal than others. They are more equal than you or I. And there is nothing more they would love than to be able to march you down to the nearest government building and force you to pledge your allegiance to them and their utopian, Socialistic ways.

But if they did that, would they still celebrate July 4th? Of course not, they don’t like the fact that we eat a lot of meat on that holiday.

Why Liberals Make Me Want To Hit Myself With a Sledgehammer

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I often ask myself, when are the American people going to wake up? Seriously. It’s getting very frustrating dealing with people who not understand the basic concept of Freedom.

Of course there is the school of thought that you have the freedom to give up your freedom. But why would you do such a thing? Sure, you can blame former President George W. Bush for the Patriot Act but then why would you not only vote for but give undying support for others who tell you to your face they will take away your freedom and limit your choice? Does anyone stop and actually think any more? Do you really understand the meaning of hypocrisy?

I run into people all the time who are aghast that I do not support Barack Obama. When I ask them to tell me why they support him so blindly, they cannot give me a non-soundbite reason. When I ask why they would support with unwavering admiration and love the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, again I get the deer in the headlights look. What I get all too often is he will change or she will change things in Washington. Well let me ask you if Obama was the change you sought, then how is it Hillary needs to bring even more change?

Now we see many folks that once supported the notion of mandatory, government health care, not support it and indeed, want it repealed. Yet, Hillary would double down on government health care. In fact the state she once represented as a Senator recently passed a bill in one of their houses, about single payer government health care. I ask these same supporters if they like being taxed. The answer is always no they do not. I ask if they think they pay too much in taxes. Most reply with a resounding yes. But they claim it’s only because the rich do not pay their fair share. So I point out how much the rich do pay and they don’t believe it. So I tell them to look up the government numbers themselves. They often tell me they don’t have to do so because they know for a fact that the rich don’t pay enough. So then of course I ask what exactly is rich. How much do you have to earn to be rich? Who decides who is rich and who is not? I never get the same answer. How can you tax the rich, I ask, if you cannot even define who the rich are? I had one person tell me “oh the rich know who they are.” My goodness, I think I need to smash it with a hammer.

I hear the left talk about how the war in Iraq was illegal and we needed to get out. Now that we got out we are leaving them in the hands of terrorists who are winning the battle and killing innocent women and children. We are told by the left that people deserve to live in peace and harmony. But I tell them that the people of Iraq are not living in peace and harmony and in fact are being slaughtered daily by those who just don’t like their kind of religion. Should we not step in and bring balance and order to a country that wants only to live in peace? No, they respond. It is none of our business what they do over there. But the people of Iraq want peace, do they not? Of course but its our fault they don’t have peace the left tells me. So its our fault if we invade and its our fault if we do not invade? Yes they respond. I need a large hammer.

So I try to wrap this up succinctly. You wanted change that Obama promised but didn’t get. You wanted lower taxes but didn’t get them. You wanted government to allow you to do things you want to your body but you want government to tell others what they can and cannot do with their body. You didn’t want the Patriot Act under G.W. Bush but it was increased and expanded under Obama. You think that Republicans lie and cheat yet Hillary has admitted to breaking the law. And yet you still support Obama and Hillary?Yes, they say. Why? I ask. Because they are so smart. Because they are so open and transparent. Because they want to bring change. I even had one liberal tell me that the problem with Republicans is that they want to protect the Constitution too much and what we need is modern, smart government.

Oh like what we have now? Well, yes sort of, was the reply. Because we need more smart people like Obama and Clinton in office who are open and honest and let us see everything they are doing.

I blink. I need a sledge hammer. Are we really this stupid on a collective, national basis? I think a well-placed whack with an 8lb sledge hammer will put me out of my misery.

Who Ignores the Principle of Scarcity? Progressives and Politicians by Sandy Ikeda

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Everyone has a theory of the way the world works, a way of connecting cause and effect. Without it, we wouldn’t know how to start the day: “If I wake up at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow, I should make it to work on time. And then…”

Our theories, the rules and principles by which we interpret the world, help us to think and plan, but they also constrain our thinking and planning to some degree. That can be a good thing, as long as our theories conform reasonably well to the real world. We understand, for example, that the best way to exit the 10th floor of a building is not necessarily to step out of the nearest window.

For economists who study human action in the real world, one of the principles we cannot ignore is that scarcity exists — to get more of one valuable thing, you will have to give up some of another valuable thing. In fact, you could say that not understanding the nature and significance of scarcity is the hallmark of someone who isn’t an economist, or is a very bad one.

In everyday life, it’s usually impossible to ignore the existence of scarcity. For most of us, it’s pretty obvious that time and money aren’t unlimited, and that if we want a bigger house we’ll probably need to earn more by giving up some leisure time and working more. In a free market, one without arbitrary political power and aggression, the economic reality of scarcity is a “hard constraint” that’s always good to keep firmly in mind when making plans.

Economics versus politics

But tracing out the more subtle and far-reaching implications of scarcity in a given set of circumstances is a skill that takes a lot of training and practice, which of course not everyone has done or, really, needs to do.

As Murray Rothbard puts it,

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.” But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in the state of ignorance.

Unfortunately, politics sorely tempts us to act irresponsibly. Politics is essentially about acquiring and using political power  — the initiation of physical violence. If the first principle of economics is that “scarcity exists,” then far too often the first principle of politics is, “ignore the first principle of economics!”

In the absence of legal privilege or persecution, people in a free market have to deal with scarcity’s hard budget constraint. But in the world of politics, people can try to immunize themselves against scarcity by making others pay for the things they want for themselves or for their cronies. Politics is the realm of the “soft budget constraint,” which may have prompted Margaret Thatcher to say, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Unfortunately, the same could easily be said for garden-variety politics almost everywhere today.

Principles versus consequences

This suggests perhaps another way of differentiating libertarians from the progressives of the left. For libertarians, economic principles constrain ourthinking. For progressives, economic reality constrains their outcomes.

What I mean is that when progressives, for instance, demand that people pay ever-higher minimum wages to those who work for them, they ignore the hard reality that someone, often unseen, must bear the cost of their “compassion,” and that those others are mostly young and unskilled workers that employers will now find too costly to employ. Or, an employer may cut back on nonwage payments they previously used to compensate their employees, making the employees worse off.

But because libertarians from the outset tend to be more mindful of economic principles, they are better able to shape their proposals, at a minimum, so as not to harm the very people that progressives aim to help. Libertarians are less likely to be disappointed when their policies confront economic reality. As someone once said, “Economics is the art of putting parameters on our utopias.” Scarcity is one of those parameters.

(Some may be reminded of Thomas Sowell’s distinction between “constrained vision” and “unconstrained vision,” which, however, I believe focuses more on one’s view of human nature: whether it is perfectible or not perfectible.)

Innovating within constraints

Faced with poverty, unhealthy working conditions, criminal violence, and a host of other persistent socioeconomic problems, we’re often admonished by the left to think beyond capitalism, to think creatively “outside the box.” Why not try to change those parameters or remove some of them altogether?

Well, even musical geniuses from traditions as different as classical, jazz, and rock must learn the rules of their genre before they can break through and go beyond them. Before he pioneered bebop, Charlie Parker had first to master the saxophone and the musical conventions of his day. Only then could he push outside mainstream jazz. To color outside the lines, you need to know where the lines are.

Moreover, scarcity is not a man-made thing that can be unmade purely by human willpower or by wishing it away. We have to account for it when we confront the real world. Otherwise, we risk personal failure or perhaps much worse. None of this means, though, that we can’t dramatically reduce scarcity and address those problems.

Sometimes there are free lunches. It’s possible to push that constraint outward and reduce scarcity through efficiency (getting more out of less) or, more importantly, through innovation (creating something of value that didn’t exist before). Henry Ford, Estee Lauder, and Norman Borlag significantly reduced the scarcity of cars, cosmetics, and food — to a world of ordinary people within the constraints of physics, chemistry, and economics.

We can get to where we want to go faster when we can see the road.


Sandy Ikeda

Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.

Using a Bill Gates Grant to Sidestep Standardized Testing in University Admissions?

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Billionaire Bill Gates believes in testing. However, it appears that he believes in “the market” even more. Consider Gates’ words to legislators in 2009:

When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better. [Emphasis added.]

Bill Gates has no background in K-12 classroom teaching. He has no background in assessment. He does have money, lots of money. It must be his money that allows him to even write a guest editorial in the April 2013 Washington Post to share his views on the *appropriate* role of student test scores in teacher evaluation. He assumes that student standardized test scores will work as a component of teacher evaluation. He also assumes that merit pay can and will work, if only “we” would be careful as “we” “drive the long-term improvement our schools need.”

We?

Bill Gates has no background in teaching. Instead, he views education through the lens of business. And if the tests are interfering with business, perhaps it is time to pull back on the testing in order to save Gates’ extensive CCSS investment. To this end, in June 2014, the Gates Foundation declared the need for a “moratorium”– not the end of testing, mind you, and not the end of CCSS– just a break from theconsequences of testing in order to take the heat off of CCSS:

The Gates Foundation is an ardent supporter of fair teacher feedback and evaluation systems that include measures of student gains. We don’t believe student assessments should ever be the sole measure of teaching performance, but evidence of a teacher’s impact on student learning should be part of a balanced evaluation that helps all teachers learn and improve.

At the same time, no evaluation system will work unless teachers believe it is fair and reliable, and it’s very hard to be fair in a time of transition. The standards need time to work. …

Including the assessment results in teacher evaluations even though they won’t count for two years also has benefits: First, the teachers can begin to use the assessments to inform their practice, and second, teachers can see how their performance looks using these measures and make sure it lines up with other measures of teaching practice. This is crucial in building teacher trust in the assessments.

In our view, allowing two years in which assessments will be administered and scored but not yet taken into account strikes the best balance between a commitment to teacher evaluations that measure student learning and a commitment to ensure that teachers will not be harmed as they complete the transition to the Common Core.

Protecting the Gates investment. Cutting mass education a deal.

The Gates Foundation published this position only five days after Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed legislation to immediately replace CCSS with Oklahoma’s former state standards until new standards and assessments could be developed.

This is not good for Gates’ CCSS investment, which Gates hopes will bring American education “to scale” in order to benefit “the market.”

Gates does not restrict his business applications to K-12 education. He is willing to spend his billions on better business models for higher education, as well. Consider this January 2014 grant to the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU):

Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities:

Date: January 2014 
Purpose: to support a cohort of public urban research universities to develop new business models that can increase access, improve success rates and find greater cost efficiencies and then use national association networks to scale promising practices 
Amount: $2,507,628

Much of this funding has been divided among seven universities in a seeming “innovations contest” to “improve success rates.” The seven recipients have one year to develop its “innovations”– with the intent that “successful” innovations will be “scaled” (efficiently reproduced).

Temple University was one of the recipients:

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU) announced today that Temple University is one of only seven universities nationwide selected to participate in an innovative, one-year project that seeks to transform the way higher education is delivered.

Temple will receive $225,000 as part of the Transformational Planning Grant project—an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—to research, develop and test new university business models that can increase access, improve student success rates and find greater cost efficiencies. …

APLU intends to use its national network to work to scale the most promising findings and practices of Temple and the six other grantees—California State University, Fresno; Florida International University; Georgia State University; Portland State University; the University of Akron; and the University of Illinois at Chicago—to help its more than 200 public university members across the country better meet the needs of their evolving student populations.

In an interesting turn of events, Temple University plans to use its Gates “better business of education” money to admit students without use of standardized test scores and instead incorporating “noncognitive approaches” to student success:

Temple’s Transformational Planning Grant will be used to develop new approaches for recruiting and evaluating prospective Temple students. The project will be piloted among students in Philadelphia area high schools whose potential may be overlooked by traditional measures of achievement, such as standardized testing. Temple also will analyze how these “non-cognitive” approaches—strategies that take into account factors such as a student’s grit, determination, self-assurance and self-advocacy—can be incorporated into the university’s academic policies, financial aid strategy, and advising and support services.

So, it seems that Gates might experience some “business model clashing” given the Gates preference for standardized testing as assumed “good for education business” and now a Gates grantee assuming that standardized testing could “overlook potential” in some students– which implies that standardized testing has limitations that make it suspect a component for any high-stakes decisions.

No seasoned teacher needs to be told that some students just don’t test well.

But Bill Gates is certainly no seasoned teacher. He is just a man with lots of money who gets to purchase his viewpoint. He believes that standardized tests should be “part” of “measuring” teacher effectiveness.

I wonder what Gates will do if via Temple University’s “innovation” he is faced with the news that forsaking standardized testing “promotes greater cost efficiencies” in the business of higher education.

Would he be willing to promote such a finding “to scale”?

RELATED ARTICLE: What National Group Is Funding the Pro-Common Core Lawsuit in Louisiana?

France’s united front of Jew hatred

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Parts of the French left have no problems participating in anti-Semitic demonstrations demanding that Jews be kicked out of France. The Socialist government is less than pleased.

PARIS. What happened in the streets of Paris on the 26th of January? On the eve of Shoah Remembrance Day, a significant contingent of demonstrators marching in the Jour de Colère [Day of Rage] howled “Jews, get out of France” and other vicious anti-Semitic slogans.

The best coverage of the march I have seen begins with a display of Islamic Jew hatred on the Champs Elysées in October 2012. Then, scenes of wild Dieudonné fans mocking the Shoah alternate with choice excerpts from the Day of Rage, illustrating converging branches of Jew hatred packed into a cocktail of contemptuous destructive rage.

One week later, on February 2nd, a far larger crowd marched peacefully for five hours with absolutely no violence, anti-Semitism, or disrespect for the République. The Manif’ pour tous [Everyone’s protest march] is a movement created last year in an attempt to block the passage of the mariage pour tous [marriage for everyone] Bill. Though the Hollande government tried desperately to link the two movements, the difference is visible to the naked eye and confirmed by closer examination of the people, the discourse, and the outcome.

The Left, which is never more than a heartbeat away from the barricades, adores street protests… when it is in the Opposition. Today, an embattled government with nothing to show for its first 18 months in office but a tawdry politico-sexual scandal at the summit is tut-tutting about “baseless” demonstrations. The JDC [Jour de Colère] is, apparently, the brainchild of Béatrice Bourges, a dissident of the MPT [Manif’ pour Tous]. Exasperated with the failure to prevent passage of the same-sex marriage law, Bourges created an aggressive Printemps Français [French Spring] faction that engaged in battles with the police, easily used by the government to discredit the squeaky clean MPT movement that had mobilized at least half a million. Having failed to take over leadership of the MPT, Bourges sought new allies and new forms of action.

Ten days before the Day of Rage, in a debate with Pierre Cassen of the anti-Islamization site Riposte Laïque, Béatrice Bourges presented her analysis of same-sex marriage and parenthood, by adoption and eventually artificial insemination and womb rental, as part of a global project of “transhumanism.” The plan is to create a New Man hors sol [without national identity] and hors sexe [without sexual identity], a slave of an oligarchy determined to rule the world by turning people into featureless units of production and consumption. Her choice of villains and vocabulary ring with the familiar string of adjectives often associated, in times of trouble, with Jews: “stateless cosmopolitan unscrupulous money-grubbing demons of finance …”

Cassen announced he would not participate in the Day of Rage after Dieudonné encouraged his followers to join the troops. Bourges countered, helter skelter, that Dieudonné himself wouldn’t attend, the best way to discourage his acolytes was to ignore them, but it doesn’t matter if they do come because this is the Day for all the rhymes and reasons of Rage, no one should be excluded. Expressed rage, she said, is less prone to violence than repressed rage. These and other predictions about attendance—“it will be a tsunami”– and results—“the government has feet of clay, a few good blows and it will topple”– turned out to be equally inaccurate. I have not found on the Jour de Colère or Printemps Français any statement sites of disapproval of the anti-Semitic slogans, chants, and signs.

Though Béatrice Bourges is believed to be a central figure in the JDC organization, the movement adopted the anonymous Facebook-twitter image ascribed to the “Arab Spring.” Another “Arab Spring” prop, the “Hollande dégage” [Hollande, bug off] slogan, picked up from one of the participating groups, goes back to Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” and subsequent uprisings in Libya, Egypt, etc. “Day of rage” is associated with a Palestinian practice of periodic organized violence against Israel. Aside from the strange Middle East echoes, these borrowings perpetuate the idea that we are living under a dictatorship that must be overthrown. (Similar echoes were found in the Occupy Wall Street movement.)

This justified accusations that the protest movement is aimed at destroying the République. But nothing can hide the Left’s paternity of a movement that coalesces dark forces from all extremes of the political spectrum. It would be impossible within the limits of this article to give an idea of the pot pourri of participating groups listed on the Jour de Colère site. Splinters, split-offs, offshoots of multiple varieties–anti-Islamization, Muslims against gender theory, anti-globalization, anti-population replacement, Catholic fundamentalists, old fashioned neo-Nazis, small businessmen, freelancers, nationalists, royalists, farmers… An undercurrent of the Jew hatred that emerged on the Day of Rage can be discerned here and there: the campaign to keep children home from school to protest gender theory indoctrination in kindergartens was organized by Farida Belghoul, one of the pioneers of the “beur” [second generation Maghrebi] movement spawned on the Left. She is now allied with arch anti-Semite Alain Soral. Media Press, a JDC-friendly site links to articles such as “Is Manuel Valls the Interior Minister of France or Israel?”

Will the coalition of united rage, fired by the weakness of the French government, find Jew hatred as its common denominator? The danger is real. Socialist deputy Julien Dray declared that an important faction of the Day of Rage demonstration intended to march into the rue des Rosiers in the heart of the Jewish Marais. Sammy Ghozlan, president of the BNVCA [Bureau national de vigilance contre l’antisémitisme] warns that when the law catches up with Dieudonné and puts him in handcuffs, it could trigger a “Crystal Day.”

Is there room for the hope that many French people, disgusted with overt Jew hatred, will withdraw from the hastily concocted coalition? It only took fourteen years for the guttural shouts of “Kill the Jews” that have been ringing out in pro-Palestinian, anti-war, pro-Hamas and go-jihad marches to reach the ears of French media. And for the government to recognize that anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism is a danger to the République.

Epilogue

The Manif’ pour Tous is another story and the government didn’t know what to do about it. Spokespersons and friendly media pumped out the talking points as tens of thousands marched in bright winter sunshine: This protest is based on wild rumors. Reproductive boosters—PMA [artificial insemination] for lesbian couples and GPA [womb rental] for males—do not figure in the Family Affairs Bill slated for March. The “ABC of Equality,” experimented in hundreds of kindergartens, is not “gender theory,” it’s just about abolishing stereotypes. Mariage pour tous is the law of the land; it is undemocratic to demonstrate against it.

It didn’t work.

Monday morning the Interior Minister, followed quickly by the Prime Minister, promised they would not allow deputies from the majority to attach PMA and GPA amendments to the Bill.

By late afternoon the government announced that the controversial Bill is postponed … indefinitely.