Tag Archive for: racists

Nancy Pelosi, High Priestess of the Left’s Cult, Gives Thanks to Floyd Her Savior

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Smirnoff) has been getting a lot of heat, as Matt Margolis detailed, for thanking George Floyd for being good enough to die “for justice.” But amid all the scorn and ridicule Pelosi is justly receiving, a key point is being overlooked: While her words may have sounded mawkish, maudlin, and incomparably tone-deaf to outsiders, to true believers in the left’s new secular religion, everything she said was entirely appropriate. In her capacity as high priestess of this religion, Pelosi was performing a hieratic role and giving thanks to the new savior.

The priestess began by giving thanks to the deity for his salvific sacrifice: “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.” Then she recounted a bit of sacred history for the edification of the believers: “For being there to call out to your mom — how heartbreaking was that — to call out for your mom, ‘I can’t breathe.’” She concluded by explaining to the faithful how much they owed to the savior: “Because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice.”

Pelosi is ostensibly a Catholic, and this statement closely follows the pattern of the Catholic Mass, which contains texts giving thanks to the Lord, recounting the institution of the Holy Eucharist, and explaining how Jesus gave his life for the salvation of the world.

In the left’s new religion, racism, or whiteness, is the original sin. This sin manifests itself in all sorts of “systemic” ways, most notably in the alleged police double standard for blacks and whites. George Floyd, in Pelosi’s clouded vision, sacrificed himself just as Jesus did. In Christian thought, Jesus submitted to death in order to destroy it and enable human beings to enjoy eternal life; now George Floyd submitted to racism and police brutality in order to destroy them and enable Americans to enjoy racial justice.

Pelosi’s statement thanking Floyd is thus not only a religious one, but it’s a Christian heresy, a twisting of Christian doctrine for nefarious ends, in this case substituting Floyd for Christ in an effort to sanctify the left’s race-baiting and dangerously irresponsible ratcheting-up of societal tensions by means of hysterical false charges.

While Pelosi is a high priestess of the Floyd cult, she is not its founding prophet. That honor goes to some anonymous spiritual seer in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where last June, according to Dr. Reza Parchizadeh, a political theorist and analyst, “the Iranian regime has turned the late #George_Floyd into Saint George, Shiite-style!” Parchizadeh posted a painting of Floyd depicting him in the way Shi’ite Muslims often depict their holy figures: in a green robe and surrounded by an aura of holy light. As incongruous as the image was, it was perfectly fitting: Floyd, whose murder touched off the rage for destruction that is still afflicting America today despite the conviction of Derek Chauvin, is the perfect symbol for the Iranian Islamic regime’s oft-repeated aspiration: “Death to America.”

Now that Pelosi has endorsed this cult, expect it to grow further, even exponentially. The inconvenient details of Floyd’s life have already been glossed over for months. Never mind the fentanyl, never mind the convictions for robbery, theft, and drug dealing, never mind the pistol he held to a woman’s stomach while robbing her – none of that matters or besmirches Floyd’s salvific mission in any way. Basketball great Magic Johnson tweeted Tuesday: “Great speech by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison describing George Floyd as a father, family man, and beloved member of his community. It was beautiful and sent chills down my body! If you didn’t see it, I encourage you all to watch it.”

That’s a big miss for me, Earvin, but you’ll have to pardon me, you see, I am not an adherent of your religious faith. Don’t be concerned, however; many people are, and their numbers are growing every day. Now that Derek Chauvin (aka Satan) has been driven out, a new messianic era of racial justice will dawn, in which the faithful will gather together joyfully to sing their praises to the savior, the one who died to give them life. In this glorious year of Our Floyd, our racial redemption is finally at hand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

If Critical Race Theory turns everything into race, isn’t it racist?

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An unpleasant incident at an elite US women’s college shows the danger of trusting feelings over facts.

Last week the New York Times resurfaced a notorious racial profiling incident that took place in 2018 at Smith College, in Northhampton, Massachusetts. The story has struck a chord globally because of the light it sheds on the race struggle underway in the United States—a struggle now rippling across the Western world.

Smith College is the largest of the “Seven Sisters”, elite colleges for women in northeastern US; tuition, room and board for its students are about US$78,000 a year. Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Gloria Steinem are amongst its distinguished alumnae.

In the summer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a black student, was eating lunch alone in a dorm lounge. She was approached by a janitor and a campus police officer who inquired as to what she was doing there.

The encounter was distressing for Kanoute, who felt it to be part of a year-long pattern of harassment. “All I did was be Black,” she later wrote on Facebook. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of colour.” She was especially upset that the officer was likely carrying a firearm.

The president of the college apologised to Kanoute, put the janitor on paid leave, and hired a law firm to investigate the incident. Apologising for the affair, the president wrote,

This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias in which people of colour are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.

In the months following, officials at the college emphasised “reconciliation and healing” and announced anti-bias staff training and the creation of separate dormitories for students of colour.

The problem, of course, is that the investigation eventually found no “persuasive evidence of bias”. As a Times opinion columnist highlights, “the narrative of racist harassment of a minority student at an elitist white institution turned out to be comprehensively false.”

Michael Powell, the Times reporter covering the story, summarised the findings of the law firm’s investigation:

Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorised people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

Unwittingly, Powell exposes the postmodern dilemma underlying the events at Smith College. He writes of “the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.”

Truth be told, Kanoute’s “deeply felt sense of personal truth” did a lot of damage. She named and doxxed a janitor and a cafeteria worker who weren’t even involved in calling campus security that day. The stress of this caused a flare-up of lupus in one and anxiety attacks for the other—not to mention death threats.

And there was of course the national impact: the amplification of claims that the United States is “systemically racist”—a narrative that was never tempered by the ultimate findings of the law firm, since the news cycle had long moved on.

Owing to their breed, bogeymen aren’t easily put back in cages.

We know this, not just from the Smith College incident, but a string of apparently racist incidents that have turned out to be short on facts and long on a “deeply felt sense of personal truth”. Jussie Smollett, Bubba Wallace and the Covington Affair are just a few that spring to mind.

To the credit of the New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens was permitted to dissect the incident in an insightful piece called “Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain”. (This was a somewhat surprising compromise from an outlet that suffered multiple newsroom revolts over comparable stories in 2020).

Stephens asks, “Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?”

Indeed.

Stephens rightly discerns that the Smith College affair is further evidence, not merely of a racial struggle in the West, but a brewing cultural revolution. “Liberal ideals themselves are up for renegotiation,” he warns.

That much is clear to anyone who has examined Critical Race Theory in some depth, the ideology shaping this revolution. Despite assertions to the contrary, Critical Race Theory is not simply about racial sensitivity. As I have documented elsewhere,

The West has long prized evidence, logic and reason as the way to discern truth from falsehood. Critical Race Theory rejects this, claiming that every part of the Western liberal order—including ideas like merit, rational inquiry, the rule of law, and individual liberty—are the very tools being used to perpetuate white supremacy and oppress people of colour.

When Stephens writes that “liberal ideals themselves are up for renegotiation,” he really means it. And he has the receipts. As Stephens points out, this is not mainly a “left versus right” battle: it’s an all-out war between the liberal left and the Woke left. “Well-meaning liberals,” he writes, “don’t seem to understand the illiberal nature of what they are facing.”

By every measure, Critical Race Theory is racism by another name. Writes Stephens,

In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of “restorative justice” for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings.

What we are witnessing is postmodernism in full flower. And given its penchant for raw power, it won’t go away until the morally courageous stand up and name it for what it is.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

COLUMN BY

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg.

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

 

‘Nice White Parents’ Responsible for Failing Public Schools, New York Times Says

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Why does the public education system continue to fail America’s children? Policy experts have pondered this question for decades.

Most say the answer is complicated, requiring a nuanced, collaborative approach.

But not The New York Times. It found the problem, and it’s simple: white parents.

The solution? “Try, whenever possible, to suppress the power of white parents.”

How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>

That quote comes from the Times’ podcast “Nice White Parents,” which chronicles the history of a single public school in New York. Specifically, the host, Chana Joffe-Walt, decides to look into the racial history of this school.

Her first finding: Many parents who advocated for the integration of public schools, specifically this public school, did not end up enrolling their children. Instead, they chose to send their children to established schools with a history of success. This choice—made predominantly by white families—is why the school has struggled, Joffe-Walt says.

She contacts several of these parents to scold them for not sending their children to a worse school to serve the larger cause of public education. Some parents note that although they believed in advancing school integration, they perceived this particular school to struggle academically, noting that many students could not read at grade level.

Joffe-Walt chalks up these criticisms to racism, rather than a genuine observation that the school would be a step backward academically for a student functioning at grade level.

Does she offer concrete policy solutions to fix the underlying academic issues plaguing the school? Of course not. Instead, she perpetuates the myth that parents choosing to exit the public school system leads to underfunded schools.

In reality, schools are not underfunded. Not even close. In fact, since the creation of the Department of Education in 1979, education spending has gone only in one direction: up. Test scores, by contrast, have remained entirely stagnant.

New York spends almost $23,000 per student per year in the public school system—a close second to Washington, D.C., for the highest per-pupil expenditure in the country. That figure also is significantly higher than most private school tuitions. So why are so many schools still failing?

One reason: The public school system is drowning in bureaucracy. And bureaucrats get paid before teachers—and before students get new textbooks.

Ben Scafidi at Kennesaw State University has studied the concept of administrative bloat in the K-12 public education system extensively. He found that between 1950 and 2015, the student population at public schools had grown roughly 100%. During that same time period, teaching staff had grown 243%.

Although that disproportionate growth in the number of teachers compared to the growth in student population is shocking enough, that is hardly his biggest finding. During that same time period, “administrators and other staff” in the public school system grew 709%.

An increase in administrative staff exceeding 700% compared to just a 100% increase in students seems to be a far more likely answer to why heavily funded public schools appear to lack resources than the choices of some parents to seek out the best education options available for their children.

Throughout “Nice White Parents,” Joffe-Walt details examples of parents’ getting involved in the day-to-day operation of the school, and paints this involvement as affront to public schooling.

In Episode 1, for example, she describes how when “white parents” came into the school, many wanted their children to learn French, yet no French classes were offered. The parents formed a committee, held fundraisers, collaborated with administrators, and got their French program.

This is problematic, according to “Nice White Parents,” because a French program strays from the cultural needs of the majority-minority population of the school.

This scenario is exactly why every family needs school choice. There never will be a one-size-fits-all public school system that will offer the foreign language needs and wants of every family, nor other such demands.

The New York Times and the makers of “Nice White Parents” argue that the solution to the different wants and needs of families is to ignore the wishes of parents altogether and let education bureaucrats decide what is best for their children.

School choice proponents, by contrast, believe that every family in America should be empowered to choose an education option that is custom fit for their child’s needs. Through programs such as vouchers or education savings accounts, every family would be financially empowered to make that decision. Students do better when their parents are actively engaged in their education.

A podcast attacking parental autonomy is bad enough. But the fact that The New York Times attacks parents of a particular race for executing their autonomy is worse. “Nice White Parents” isn’t just troubling, it’s wrong, and an affront to American ideals.

Ultimately, this hurts all children because “Nice White Parents” racializes the failure of the public schools, hurting the students who are trapped there and don’t have the resources to flee the public system.

There has got to be some accountability for the failure of the public system. The New York Times’ use of a racist canard to avoid systemic culpability for failing these kids isn’t going to cut it.

COMMENTARY BY

Mary Clare Amselem

Mary Clare Amselem is a policy analyst in education policy at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: .

A Note for our Readers:

Democratic Socialists say, “America should be more like socialist countries such as Sweden and Denmark.” And millions of young people believe them…

For years, “Democratic Socialists” have been growing a crop of followers that include students and young professionals. America’s future will be in their hands.

How are socialists deluding a whole generation? One of their most effective arguments is that “democratic socialism” is working in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway. They claim these countries are “proof” that socialism will work for America. But they’re wrong. And it’s easy to explain why.

Our friends at The Heritage Foundation just published a new guide that provides three irrefutable facts that debunks these myths. For a limited time, they’re offering it to readers of The Daily Signal for free.

Get your free copy of “Why Democratic Socialists Can’t Legitimately Claim Sweden and Denmark as Success Stories” today and equip yourself with the facts you need to debunk these myths once and for all.

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

‘Do Something About It’: BLM Protesters In Seattle Call On White People To Give Up Their Homes

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Black Lives Matter protesters appeared to march through a suburban Seattle neighborhood demanding white residents give up their homes, claiming white residents gentrified the area, according to a video shared on Twitter.

Dozens of protesters chanting “Black Lives Matter” took to the streets before an unidentified man appeared to say white residents are living in a historically black section of the city and should give up their homes to black people.

“Do you know that before your white a** came here this was all black people? Do you know people like you came here and basically bought all the land from the black people for less than what it was worth, kicked them out so you could live here?” the man said in the video. “Do you know that? Cause if you don’t, now you f–king do, now do something about it!”

A woman on a megaphone then appears to demand white residents “open” their wallets before telling the unidentified residents to leave the area.

“Give black people back their homes! You’re sitting there comfortable-comfortable as f–k as if they didn’t help gentrify this neighborhood!” the woman shouted.

Seattle is the third most gentrified city in the United States, according to The Seattle Times.

The Central District of Seattle, which has historically been black, has seen a dramatic decrease in the number of black residents, with estimates showing the area could be less than 10% black in the next decade despite having been 73% black in 1970, according to a report from The Seattle Times.

While gentrification can displace low-income families, for original residents who don’t move away, gentrification reduces their exposure to poverty and increases the value of their homes, according to The Seattle Times.

Seattle is working to rectify issues of gentrification, creating a policy that encourages developers to combat gentrification by choosing residents with community connections.

COLUMN BY

BRIANNA LYMAN

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‘He Don’t Speak For Me’: Herschel Walker Criticizes ‘Black Lives Matter’

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Former NFL running back and Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker ripped the “Black Lives Matter” movement in a video posted to his Twitter feed Friday.

“I was watching some kids, African American and Caucasian kids, play the other day,” Walker said. “I started thinking about their future, and then I was listening to a BLM protester, who’s speaking for the black people, and I said ‘Wait a minute, he don’t speak for me, he don’t speak for a lot of other people that I know.’”

Walker then went on to criticize companies that give money to organizations such as Black Lives Matter.

“Why is these companies giving money to these groups? For what?” Walker said. “Where is my freedom? Where is my freedom that I don’t want to tear down statues. I don’t want to defund the police. I don’t want to riot and tear people’s stores up.”

The former Georgia running back recently said he would “love” to send activists calling to defund the police to countries that don’t have police.

“For all these people who don’t want any police, I’d love to meet with American Airlines, Delta, and Southwest and make a deal to fly them to countries that don’t have police. I want them to be happy!” Walker said at the time.

COLUMN BY

WILLIAM DAVIS

Reporter. Follow William Davis on Twitter

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

Black Privilege

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Is white privilege really the problem? I explore another possibility.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Ebony magazine.