The 15th Amendment actually states: "The right of citizens of the United States..."
And:
Today is 9/11. America's second Pearl Harbour Day
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As Florence nears: Wife and hurricane
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++"Thinking back a few years, while living in Florida, I remember Hurricane Andrew. I was ready for it, but my first wife was not. When the wind reached a screaming freight-train pitch with the trees thrashing and snapping, the horizontal streaming rain, the flying roof shingles and tiles, the destroyed fences, my wife was rooted to the one same spot. She stared and stared through the glass of the window. Immovable, with her nose pressed to the window, the stark fear in her eyes will stay with me forever.
Fortunately, as the eye of the storm arrived and the winds temporarily lessened, I was able to grab a beer, open the door and let her in."
President Peacock speaks. (See 1 below.)
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Two views on anonymous NYT's secret op ed.
You decide. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Wrecking college curriculum using the excuse of diversity in order to impose progressive thinking on education. Why? Because progressives want to shake the foundations on which our republic rests and there is no better way than through controlling education - read free thinking. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
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Matters I recently wrote about. (See 4, 4a, 4b, 4c, and 4d below.)
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History's value to humankind is priceless! B29
And:
Should we monkey around with Congress? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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Transference is a psychiatric term for the ability to take your faults and ascribe them to others. In the dictionary next to the definition should be a photo of former President Barack Obama, particularly the section in his September 7 University of Illinois speech where he attacked President Trump for fomenting paranoia and division:
In a moment reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's outrageous characterization of Trump voters as "deplorable" and "irredeemable," President Obama said: "I have to say this... Over the past few decades, the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party."
Labeling the 63 million Trump voters as "deplorable" and "irredeemable" didn't work out for Hillary Clinton when she ran a failed presidential campaign against Trump in 2016. Labeling the same voters as divisive, resentful and paranoid will not work for Democrats in the November midterm elections.
No, it will not, and the remarks by this poster child for self-serving hypocrisy and delusion go a long way toward explaining how Obama shrank the Democratic Party by a thousand state, local, and federal legislative seats during his eight years in office. Once again, to use President Obama's own phrase, he "acted stupidly."
That was the remark President Obama would fire towards the Cambridge, Massachusetts police who arrested black Harvard professor Harry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home for disorderly conduct:
President Obama knocked back some cold beer in the Rose Garden with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley of Cambridge, Mass., the two men at the heart last week of a heated debate over race in America[.] ...
The dispute began July 16 when Crowley, while investigating a report of a potential burglary at Gates' house, arrested the agitated professor on a charge of disorderly conduct. Gates, who is black, accused the white sergeant of racial profiling. The disorderly conduct charge was dropped – but the dispute exploded into a national debate, particularly after Obama said the police had "acted stupidly" in arresting Gates.
Remember Obama's beer summit, held to talk about how the Cambridge Police acted against the offended black professor Gates? And then, afterward, who helped Gates down the steps? The "racist cop," of course. Obama couldn't be bothered to make sure his friend got down the steps.
From Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond, President Obama's words aiding and abetting the war on cops and inciting racial division have been the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. He has encouraged a false narrative of racist cops and racist police departments whose officers are guilty until proven innocent, or buried, whichever comes first. Never mind that in both Baltimore and Ferguson, the cops accused of racism and murder were found guilty of neither.
It was Ferguson, Missouri, where President Obama's Justice Department sent forty FBI agents to prove that Officer Darren Wilson was a racist murder of an innocent black teen. He made the race-baiting Al Sharpton, who helped create the myth of "hands up, don't shoot," a key adviser on race matters and Ferguson.
In December 2014, President Obama stoked the fires of animus against cops when he said on BET that police were judging blacks, not on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin:
President Barack Obama made an appearance on Black Entertainment Television (BET) Monday to reach out to black Americans and discuss calls for criminal justice reform after two grand jury decisions cleared white police officers in the deaths of two black men. The president has to carefully express his concern for the safety of African-Americans while not undermining the law enforcement community. President Obama suggested that the issue of police vs. minorities is deeply rooted in American culture and is the result of police having a "subconscious fear of folks who look different."
That is a common theme for the divisive Obama, one he now applies to illegal immigration and border reform, saying those who don't like illegal aliens entering the U.S. to murder our children, like Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts, or oppose sanctuary cities that harbor illegal alien criminals or believe that the rape, torture, and murder gang known as MS-13 aren't here seeking a better life, are racists.
The alleged fear by conservatives of others not like them was a key part of the famous "bitter clingers" remark made during the 2008 campaign:
Barack Obama had not yet locked up the nomination for his party when he revealed his true feelings about gun owners to attendees of a private fund raiser in San Francisco last April:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
In Obama's world, Islam is a religion of tolerance – not so much of Christians, also maligned as "bitter clingers." He took a shot at Christians when he said at an Easter prayer breakfast that "I have to say that, sometimes when I listen to other less-than-loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned." Not so concerned was he by the mass beheading of Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach by the Islamic State.
Obama once lectured Christians to "get off their high horse" as they pronounced their teachings to the faithful:
During remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama said that all religions had grappled with radical elements attempting to co-opt its spiritual messages, a rebuke to those who want him to more forcefully condemn what they consider a violent extremism inherent in Islam[.] ...
"Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout history," Obama continued, "and lest we get up on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ."
Obama also named slavery and Jim Crow as examples in America, along with religious intolerance "that would have shocked Gandhi" in India.
Religious intolerance? Physician, heal thyself. Jesus preached peace long before the prophet Muhammad mounted a horse, grabbed his sword, and began beheading infidels on his way to Mecca. As for the Crusades, they came after and in response to centuries of Islamic conquest and aggressive war against the infidels of the Christian West. As Princeton scholar and Islamic expert Bernard Lewis explains, "The Crusade was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war – to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage." According to St. Louis University and Crusade scholar Thomas Madden, "[a]ll the Crusades met the criteria of just wars."
Slavery was an institution supported by Democrats in the South. Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats. Evils may have been committed in the name of Christ, but not at the urging of Christ, who preached peace and love and mercy to one's enemies.
It is Barack Hussein Obama who divided America and incited paranoia, attacking, cops, Christians, and clingers, just to name a few.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications
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2) New York Times op-ed betrays Trump, voters. Staffers don't get to steer US: Ari Fleischer
Ari Fleischer, Opinion contributor
Ari Fleischer, Opinion contributor
The anonymous New York Times op-ed betrayed Donald Trump and his White House. Voters get to decide America's direction. Staffers get to advise or resign.
During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, I was asked on a TV show what advice I would give then-candidate Donald Trump or if I would ever work for him if he became president. I said he wouldn’t want to hire me, and I wouldn’t want to work for him.
That’s because if you’re going to work for the president, you need to believe in the president. Not just his policies, but the man (or one day the woman).
Which is why the anonymous op-ed published by the New York Times is a shocking betrayal of how a White House staffer should conduct him or herself. It’s also a piece whose importance is impossible to gauge given that no reader knows how “senior” the author truly is.
But whoever the author is, he or she is out of line.
Deceitful and selfish betrayal
It doesn’t matter what White House you work in, if the president gave you your job, you need to support the president or stop working for him. White House staffers are privileged to hold their positions. Their jobs come with responsibility, to the president and to the nation. Staffers should feel free to challenge the president. They should advise the president. And they should do so privately, knowing that’s part of their job. It’s one of the joys of the job. The staff gets to give the President of the United States their opinion. The president gets to decide if he wants to follow it.
But if staffers can no longer support the president, or as the case with the anonymous author, they doubt the president’s ability to do his job, they need to do the honorable thing and resign. At that point, they can go public and say what they want. There’s a tradition of Americans doing that and it can be a noble one.
But to do so while in the employ of the president is deceitful and selfish. In the case of the Times op-ed and President Trump, I suspect the source is playing both sides — he or she wants to keep his or her job while hedging how little they support the president in case things get worse for him.
Let’s say the author really means it when he says he seeks to “preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office…So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.”
Forgive me, but who the hell are you to decide what the “right” direction is?
The American people settled that question when, like it or not, Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Under the Constitution, the president gets to decide what the “right” direction is. The staff should give advice, but they don’t get to decide.
I hope this anonymous author realizes there are other staffers who think the president’s direction is the right one. Who is this anonymous staffer to believe that his or her views are superior to their colleague’s views?
Voters choose America's direction like it or not
In our system, the remedy to a president who is not liked or trusted is overt politics, not covert op-eds.
If the American people don’t like what Donald Trump is doing, they can elect a Democratic House and-or Senate this fall. If they do like the president, the Republicans might keep the House or Senate. And the same healthy, political choice will again be before the voters in 2020.
That’s how our system was meant to work and be responsive to the will of the people.
No White House staffer is above the will of the people, especially one whose name none of us know.
Ari Fleischer was White House press secretary in the George W. Bush administration. Follow him on Twitter: @AriFleischer
2a) Commentary: Anonymous anti-
Trump op-ed boosts democracy
By John Lloyd
The good news was well disguised in the anonymous cry of warning against the “amorality” of Donald Trump. A senior administration official, writing as an unnamed columnist in the New York Times, described how he and like-minded colleagues “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of (the U.S. president’s) agenda and his worst inclinations.” The message is that democratic habits – and, crucially, civic decency and responsibility – can, in step with free journalism, win out over degraded administrations.
Democracy worldwide is in need of a fillip – and this column, if properly understood, delivers it. A shelf full of fluent, convincing and pessimistic books lamenting the decline, even the end, of democracy has been published in recent months. This includes Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die,” Jonah Goldberg’s “Suicide of the West,” and Edward Luce’s “The Retreat of Western Liberalism.” American liberals, writes Luce, believe that the march towards freer societies will resume “after a brief interruption. How I wish they were right. I fear they are not.”
I hope they are. And the as-yet-unidentified Washington official gives me a basis for that cock-eyed optimism, for he or she illuminates the existence of a powerful countertrend. It shows that when there is a great challenge from such as Trump, there is great pushback. Democracy does not simply reside in governments, and the behavior and policies of their leaders. It has taken root, and still takes root, in the actions and aspirations of citizens.
These citizens, crucially, include civil servants. These are servants of governments, but are also civil, belonging to the civis, to the citizen, the Latin root given early democratic power by the status of a Roman citizen in its republican incarnation. Thus there is a tension in the phrase “civil servant,” which expresses the tension inherent in being part of a state bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats serve presidents, or prime ministers – but not at their whim. Civil service is not servitude; it implies reciprocity. In return, there must be observation, by those in power, of the democratic limits. It is one of the many features which distinguish democracies from authoritarian states – where service is servitude.
Essential to these states which are not authoritarian – especially those with an authoritarian past – is that politicians are able to fulfil at least the minimal responsibilities of their calling. These are to protect the democratic mechanisms and civilities which brought them to and sustain them in power. They also serve: they have the huge privilege of serving the citizens.
As populist politics continues to thrive, the tensions inherent in the position of civil servants will continue to grow. Some of this will be conservatism on their part. The new politicians are deliberately crude in their pronouncements, since they want to burst open the settled policies and habits of mainstream politics, both right and left, and replace it with what they interpret as the will of the people. And that can, indeed, be what the people want.
But populists also tend to act like Trump. Populist leaders tend to see themselves as the sole embodiments of popular power, and as thus empowered to trample checks and balances – the division of competing powers, which mature democracies have erected over many decades (in some cases, over centuries).
This is evident in the world’s second-most prominent case of populist government, in Italy. The two parties – the 5-Star Movement and the Lega (League) – which uneasily coalesce to form the country’s administration now face the exacting and tedious duty all successful politicians must undergo in the months after an election victory: squaring their promises with the country’s reality. In Italy’s case, this is a public debt of just under 132 per cent of GDP, and very low growth. Matteo Salvini, deputy prime minister and leader of the Lega, huddled with economic advisers earlier this week, and came out to announce that the annual budget, now being prepared, will not break the limit of a three percent deficit agreed with the European Union, arguing that “we can make this country grow and make Italians feel better without irritating those who look at us from above.” This reverses the trend of statements from the administration since the March election.
We’ll see. Salvini has bought time. Whether or not the tug between rules freely agreed and pledges over-freely dispensed results in a win for the former depends on how the budget will be framed. Salvini can claim a greater democratic mandate from Italian citizens than the European Union can, and may yet break the EU’s limit. For the moment, the bureaucratic economists have prevailed. So did school principals in Italy this summer, defying a measure which rendered vaccinations administered at schools voluntary rather than compulsory and forcing a reversal of the measure, in spite of its approval by parliament.
Politicians can also oppose a leader seen to be un-civil. Earlier this week, in yet another debate within the British Labour Party’s ruling executive committee on anti-Semitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition was finally fully accepted, but not before the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, sought approval for a statement affirming that it should not “be regarded as anti-Semitic to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist.”
Corbyn’s politics align him with the Hamas terrorist movement, whose charter describes Israel as a “racist, anti-human and colonial” endeavor. So much does it mean to him to be able to say this, that he was prepared to be, at least temporarily, a pariah to his own people. So much did it mean to them that they at least be seen to care about not siding with anti-Semites that they, at last, squashed him. (He may, however, have a little last laugh. On Thursday, signs declaring “Israel is a racist endeavour” went up at several London bus stops.)
There is still, when tested, vigorous life in democracy and civil society. Populists do express popular frustrations, which have strong foundations. They are right to seek power to address them. But democracy demands responsibility: to explain the down- as well as the upsides of policies, to work through the institutions which maintain necessary checks on supreme power, to separate legitimate remedial action from mere (even if popular) prejudice. Civility, civil servants – and powerful administration officials – can save us from an eventual abyss, and give us hope that a decline is not irreversible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is senior research fellow. Lloyd has written several books, including “What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics” and “Journalism in an Age of Terror.” He is also a contributing editor at the Financial Times and the founder of FT Magazine.
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3) Duped by diversity:
Colleges corrupt their
curriculum to satisfy modern
progressive sensibilities
Another new college year, another opportunity to teach students that “America was never that great,” to quote Gov. Cuomo. From the moment that college students set foot on campus, they will be inundated with the message that the United States in particular and Western civilization in general are the world’s primary sources of oppression and injustice.
That idea is rapidly infusing the world outside academia, as Cuomo’s recent comment suggests.
Here is what to expect over the next nine months.
The anti-meritocratic assault on science will accelerate. The lack of proportional representation of females, blacks and Hispanics in computer science, engineering, and other math-based fields will be attributed to a racist and sexist commitment to the “male-socialized traits” of “objectivity and rationality,” as a recent article in The Physics Teacher put it.
Teaching will be slowed down, and standards loosened (a process officially known as “culturally responsive pedagogy”), in an effort to “diversify” the STEM classroom. A professor at the University of Akron announced in May 2018 that he was boosting females’ grades in his Systems Integration class as part of a “national movement to encourage female students to go into information sciences.” He withdrew the policy after criticism from conservative media, but such efforts will continue in other forms.
The big tech companies will mimic this commitment to “diversity,” ordering recruiters and managers to prefer females and so-called applicants “of color” over white and Asian males. Medical schools will admit, hire and promote in part on the basis of race, rather than solely on academic qualifications.
The metastasizing campus diversity bureaucracy, costing taxpayers and parents millions of dollars a year, will drum into students that they are either victims or oppressors. Lavishly paid diversity deanlets and vice chancellors of equity and inclusion will propound a patently delusional idea: that to be a female or minority college student today is to be the target of life-threatening racism and sexism. (Never mind that these allegedly racist colleges employ large racial preferences to order to admit as many as “underrepresented minorities” as possible.)
Bias response teams, discrimination reporting hotlines, coursework on white privilege, workshops on toxic masculinity, faculty training in implicit bias — all will pour forth from university coffers in wild abandon. Universities will be held harmless for the resulting increases in tuition, which will be treated as a naturally occurring phenomenon, solvable only by more federal aid.
Self-engrossed students will jockey for position on the ruthlessly competitive totem pole of victimhood. While today the “trans” student reigns supreme, his/her/their/zhe position is not secure.
Let some creative students come up with a new category of oppression that is preventing them from studying for exams or attending class, and their college president will penitently promise to make amends by hiring more diversity bureaucrats and setting up academic programs in this newly discovered form of bias.
Students who have been primed to see oppression where none exists will carry that chip on the shoulder into the “real world.” It will prevent them from seizing the many opportunities available to them and will further engulf society in the culture of complaint.
The foundational belief in victimology will be leveraged to further suppress speech that challenges campus orthodoxies, all in the name of preventing existential harm to members of favored victim groups. The “real world” will follow suit and punish anyone who violates diversity taboos, as we saw this summer with the torpedoing of a qualified judicial nominee who had mocked racial identity politics as a college student and the firing of a Hollywood executive who had referred to black male-female dynamics as part of a script discussion.
If the Republicans hold the House in the mid-term elections, college administrators will probably deploy an army of petting dogs and cartloads of stress-reducing chocolates to protect student Resisters from trauma.
As for actual learning, our intellectual patrimony will be further eroded. Culturally illiterate students who could not name a single artist or philosopher from Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment will announce that Western civilization is racist and patriarchal. Being forced to study the West’s monumental accomplishments of imagination and reason, whether by Plato, Aeschylus, Mozart or Hume, jeopardizes their very survival, they will whine.
And their professors will kowtow to such ignorance and create more alternative courses based on an author’s gonads, melanin and sexual preference.
At Reed College, students calling themselves Reedies Against Racism occupied class sessions of the college’s signature humanities course during the 2016-17 academic year, surrounding the lecturers with denunciatory signs. Humanities 110, which had been taught since 1943, was a headlong plunge into the explosion of artistic creativity in the ancient Mediterranean world, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with the Bible and Apuleius.
Too white, male and Eurocentric, whined the Reedies — even though early Mediterranean societies were neither exclusively white nor European. Naturally, the faculty caved, with the chair of Humanities 110 even praising the protesters for their fortitude in getting up at “9 in the morning, three days a week,” to occupy the class.
The new “decentered” course bumps an as-yet-unspecified number of texts to make room for two new modules on Mexico City in the 15th through 20th centuries and Harlem from 1919 to 1952.
While these substituted periods contain works worthy of studying, they fail to expose students to the building blocks of Western literature and philosophy; they were chosen simply to meet an identity-based political agenda.
Reedies Against Racism, of course, were not placated. The new Humanities 110 should focus on cities outside Europe, “as reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people,” they complained in a post.
A class called Major English Poets has been the gateway into Yale’s English major for decades, exposing students systematically to the most influential poets of English literature: Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Milton and Wordsworth.
Such foundational significance is irrelevant, according to the nearly 160 students who circulated a petition in 2016 against the class. “A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity,” the petition declared. “The Major English Poets sequences creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.”
In response, Yale’s English faculty remained resolutely mum about why these poets are so central and why students are privileged to immerse themselves in their works. Instead, they meekly removed the requirement that English majors take the course and created an alternative sequence that has “inclusion as its goal,” Yale’s director of undergraduate studies told the Yale Daily News. No period will “simply and exclusively focus on the writing representations of aristocratic white men,” another English professor explained — even if the greatest writers in any given period happen to be, irrelevantly, “aristocratic white men.”
Education in the monuments of the human imagination must now take the back seat to identity politics.
At the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, students removed a large print of Shakespeare from the English department and replaced it with a photograph of Audre Lord, a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” In response, the department chair blandly invited “everyone to join us in the task of critical thinking about the changing nature of authorship, the history of language, and the political life of symbols.”
Here’s what he should have said instead when students first complained about the unsafe space created by the Bard’s picture: “Please provide your analysis of ‘Hamlet,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Twelfth Night.’ Until you read Shakespeare, there is no negotiating over him.”
To see the local effects of academic diversity ideology, look no further than Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza’s war on school standards. Their plans to scrap objective entrance tests to the city’s selective high schools and middle schools parrot the specious rhetoric of “privilege” and “bias” that college victimologists have perfected. In fact, there is no better guard against bias and inequality than color-blind, high standards and the expectation that all students will work hard to meet them.
De Blasio and Carranza’s grotesquely wasteful $23 million anti-bias training for the city’s teachers is also a direct import from the university. Education schools marinate already left-leaning students in social justice theory to produce the most “progressive” profession on earth. Yet we are to believe that these immaculately “anti-racist” teachers are discriminating against students of color in their grading and disciplinary practices and are in need of another taxpayer-funded boondoggle in order to overcome their racism.
The solution to corrosive identity politics lies in a return to universities’ core mission: joyfully passing on the precious inheritance of Western civilization, which happens to have been disproportionately shaped by white males.
If a work by an allegedly “marginalized” author is unknown and great, by all means include it in the canon, not because of social justice but in order to discover new sources of pleasure and enlightenment.
But to pretend that Western civilization is not worth studying and respecting because it does not happen to reflect the gender and racial diversity of American cities, or the uber-liberal values of students who attend universities today, is pure bunk.
Until universities return to their core mission, the diversity delusion will continue poisoning and dividing the country.
Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the just-released “The Diversity Delusion.”
Here is what to expect over the next nine months.
The anti-meritocratic assault on science will accelerate. The lack of proportional representation of females, blacks and Hispanics in computer science, engineering, and other math-based fields will be attributed to a racist and sexist commitment to the “male-socialized traits” of “objectivity and rationality,” as a recent article in The Physics Teacher put it.
Teaching will be slowed down, and standards loosened (a process officially known as “culturally responsive pedagogy”), in an effort to “diversify” the STEM classroom. A professor at the University of Akron announced in May 2018 that he was boosting females’ grades in his Systems Integration class as part of a “national movement to encourage female students to go into information sciences.” He withdrew the policy after criticism from conservative media, but such efforts will continue in other forms.
The big tech companies will mimic this commitment to “diversity,” ordering recruiters and managers to prefer females and so-called applicants “of color” over white and Asian males. Medical schools will admit, hire and promote in part on the basis of race, rather than solely on academic qualifications.
The metastasizing campus diversity bureaucracy, costing taxpayers and parents millions of dollars a year, will drum into students that they are either victims or oppressors. Lavishly paid diversity deanlets and vice chancellors of equity and inclusion will propound a patently delusional idea: that to be a female or minority college student today is to be the target of life-threatening racism and sexism. (Never mind that these allegedly racist colleges employ large racial preferences to order to admit as many as “underrepresented minorities” as possible.)
Bias response teams, discrimination reporting hotlines, coursework on white privilege, workshops on toxic masculinity, faculty training in implicit bias — all will pour forth from university coffers in wild abandon. Universities will be held harmless for the resulting increases in tuition, which will be treated as a naturally occurring phenomenon, solvable only by more federal aid.
Self-engrossed students will jockey for position on the ruthlessly competitive totem pole of victimhood. While today the “trans” student reigns supreme, his/her/their/zhe position is not secure.
Let some creative students come up with a new category of oppression that is preventing them from studying for exams or attending class, and their college president will penitently promise to make amends by hiring more diversity bureaucrats and setting up academic programs in this newly discovered form of bias.
Students who have been primed to see oppression where none exists will carry that chip on the shoulder into the “real world.” It will prevent them from seizing the many opportunities available to them and will further engulf society in the culture of complaint.
The foundational belief in victimology will be leveraged to further suppress speech that challenges campus orthodoxies, all in the name of preventing existential harm to members of favored victim groups. The “real world” will follow suit and punish anyone who violates diversity taboos, as we saw this summer with the torpedoing of a qualified judicial nominee who had mocked racial identity politics as a college student and the firing of a Hollywood executive who had referred to black male-female dynamics as part of a script discussion.
If the Republicans hold the House in the mid-term elections, college administrators will probably deploy an army of petting dogs and cartloads of stress-reducing chocolates to protect student Resisters from trauma.
As for actual learning, our intellectual patrimony will be further eroded. Culturally illiterate students who could not name a single artist or philosopher from Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment will announce that Western civilization is racist and patriarchal. Being forced to study the West’s monumental accomplishments of imagination and reason, whether by Plato, Aeschylus, Mozart or Hume, jeopardizes their very survival, they will whine.
And their professors will kowtow to such ignorance and create more alternative courses based on an author’s gonads, melanin and sexual preference.
At Reed College, students calling themselves Reedies Against Racism occupied class sessions of the college’s signature humanities course during the 2016-17 academic year, surrounding the lecturers with denunciatory signs. Humanities 110, which had been taught since 1943, was a headlong plunge into the explosion of artistic creativity in the ancient Mediterranean world, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with the Bible and Apuleius.
Too white, male and Eurocentric, whined the Reedies — even though early Mediterranean societies were neither exclusively white nor European. Naturally, the faculty caved, with the chair of Humanities 110 even praising the protesters for their fortitude in getting up at “9 in the morning, three days a week,” to occupy the class.
The new “decentered” course bumps an as-yet-unspecified number of texts to make room for two new modules on Mexico City in the 15th through 20th centuries and Harlem from 1919 to 1952.
While these substituted periods contain works worthy of studying, they fail to expose students to the building blocks of Western literature and philosophy; they were chosen simply to meet an identity-based political agenda.
Reedies Against Racism, of course, were not placated. The new Humanities 110 should focus on cities outside Europe, “as reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people,” they complained in a post.
A class called Major English Poets has been the gateway into Yale’s English major for decades, exposing students systematically to the most influential poets of English literature: Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Milton and Wordsworth.
Such foundational significance is irrelevant, according to the nearly 160 students who circulated a petition in 2016 against the class. “A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity,” the petition declared. “The Major English Poets sequences creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.”
In response, Yale’s English faculty remained resolutely mum about why these poets are so central and why students are privileged to immerse themselves in their works. Instead, they meekly removed the requirement that English majors take the course and created an alternative sequence that has “inclusion as its goal,” Yale’s director of undergraduate studies told the Yale Daily News. No period will “simply and exclusively focus on the writing representations of aristocratic white men,” another English professor explained — even if the greatest writers in any given period happen to be, irrelevantly, “aristocratic white men.”
Education in the monuments of the human imagination must now take the back seat to identity politics.
At the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, students removed a large print of Shakespeare from the English department and replaced it with a photograph of Audre Lord, a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” In response, the department chair blandly invited “everyone to join us in the task of critical thinking about the changing nature of authorship, the history of language, and the political life of symbols.”
Here’s what he should have said instead when students first complained about the unsafe space created by the Bard’s picture: “Please provide your analysis of ‘Hamlet,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Twelfth Night.’ Until you read Shakespeare, there is no negotiating over him.”
To see the local effects of academic diversity ideology, look no further than Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza’s war on school standards. Their plans to scrap objective entrance tests to the city’s selective high schools and middle schools parrot the specious rhetoric of “privilege” and “bias” that college victimologists have perfected. In fact, there is no better guard against bias and inequality than color-blind, high standards and the expectation that all students will work hard to meet them.
De Blasio and Carranza’s grotesquely wasteful $23 million anti-bias training for the city’s teachers is also a direct import from the university. Education schools marinate already left-leaning students in social justice theory to produce the most “progressive” profession on earth. Yet we are to believe that these immaculately “anti-racist” teachers are discriminating against students of color in their grading and disciplinary practices and are in need of another taxpayer-funded boondoggle in order to overcome their racism.
The solution to corrosive identity politics lies in a return to universities’ core mission: joyfully passing on the precious inheritance of Western civilization, which happens to have been disproportionately shaped by white males.
If a work by an allegedly “marginalized” author is unknown and great, by all means include it in the canon, not because of social justice but in order to discover new sources of pleasure and enlightenment.
But to pretend that Western civilization is not worth studying and respecting because it does not happen to reflect the gender and racial diversity of American cities, or the uber-liberal values of students who attend universities today, is pure bunk.
Until universities return to their core mission, the diversity delusion will continue poisoning and dividing the country.
Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the just-released “The Diversity Delusion.”
3a) ‘The Coddling of the
American Mind’ Review:
Fragile, Fearful, Feeling
Aggrieved
By Laura Vanderkam
Thanks to well-meaning, if misguided, parents and educators, students can’t see nuance, and they don’t feel tough enough to handle debate.
For most of the past few decades, college students have been proponents of free speech, despite occasional bouts of protest and indignation. But something changed about five years ago. Students began demanding “trigger warnings” for certain material in their classes. Some demanded that anything “triggering” be removed entirely from the curriculum so that no one might feel traumatized. They lobbied for “safe spaces” where they could avoid being exposed to uncomfortable ideas. Members of what psychologist Jean Twenge calls “iGen” (born after 1995) moved from challenging controversial speakers to hounding even very liberal members of their own communities who wrote or said something that was deemed offensive.
“What is new today is the premise that students are fragile,” write Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” “Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.” The debate narrows as everyone censors others as well as themselves.
Mr. Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Mr. Haidt (a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business) argue that this new vulnerability is a result of the ways in which the first social-media generation has been raised. Well-meaning parents and educators have inculcated in young people three bad ideas, what the authors call “the Great Untruths”: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that you should always trust your feelings; and that life is a battle between good and evil people. Students can’t see nuance, and they don’t feel tough enough to handle debate.
Tales of political correctness run amok—indeed, many of the incidents recounted in “The Coddling of the American Mind”—are nothing new to anyone who has been paying even fitful attention to college trends. Messrs. Lukianoff and Haidt differ from many other critics of campus excess in that they do not think of themselves as conservative or even right of center. “Neither of us has ever voted for a Republican for Congress or the presidency,” they write.
Despite the “coddling” angle of the title, Messrs. Lukianoff and Haidt try not to fall into the trap of claiming that modern young people are uniquely lazy or whiny. In any case, they write, “by the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled.” What is more, members of iGen have been better at avoiding arrest or pregnancy during their teenage years, and better at graduating from high school, than recent generations born before 1995. They are, in short, not without inner resources.
Still, there is a problem. The authors write with concern about the rise of anxiety and depression among young people, whose teenage foibles can be broadcast widely in the era of social media and who have not—at least among the privileged sorts who show up at elite colleges—experienced the unsupervised, risk-taking play that teaches emotional regulation and social problem solving. Messrs. Lukianoff and Haidt understand why young people want to feel mentally safe on college campuses. “If members of iGen have been risk-deprived and are therefore more risk averse,” they write, “then it is likely that they have a lower bar for what they see as daunting or threatening.”
That said, the authors also think it’s a terrible idea for the adults who run colleges to cater to this need. They believe that such coddling especially hurts young people already prone to anxiety. They note that one of the most effective treatments for anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches people to overrule their immediate emotions and see themselves as tough enough to survive life’s slings and arrows. They also believe that coddling hurts the cause of social justice that is so dear to students themselves. Few arguments are sharpened through groupthink; most are improved by facing skepticism or different points of view. “A community in which members hold one another accountable for using evidence to substantiate their assertions is a community that can, collectively, pursue truth in the age of outrage.”
Given such a clear diagnosis, it is unfortunate that many of the proposed solutions in “The Coddling of the American Mind” are less than satisfying. The authors pinpoint, as one cause of hollow debate, the changing ratio of conservative to liberal faculty over the decades (from 1-in-3 or so in the mid-20th century to much lower in some fields now). But colleges are unlikely to start a conservative-hiring program, even if they add “viewpoint diversity” to the normal diversity statements, as the authors suggest. Nor will anyone champion a campaign to “discourage the creep of the word ‘unsafe’ to encompass ‘uncomfortable.’ ” Students paying upwards of $50,000 per year for college probably feel entitled to seek comfort even if it isn’t especially good for them. The admonition to parents of future college students to “encourage your children to walk or ride bicycles to and from school” (to gain a sense of independence) is nice but probably insufficient on its own. No doubt there are walkers and bike riders among irate students demanding trigger warnings.
Until then, unfortunately, the emphasis on safety will continue, and people on all sides will be poorer for missing the great debates that make higher education worthwhile.
Ms. Vanderkam is the author, most recently, of “Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.”
3b)Harley Davidson is closing many of its plants due to declining sales. Apparently, the Baby-Boomers all have motorcycles, and Generation X is buying only very few, and the next generation, the Millennials, aren’t buying any at all.
3b)Harley Davidson is closing many of its plants due to declining sales. Apparently, the Baby-Boomers all have motorcycles, and Generation X is buying only very few, and the next generation, the Millennials, aren’t buying any at all.
A recent study was conducted to find out why.
Here are the reasons why Millennials
don't ride motorcycles, and why sales are down:
1. Their Pampers won't pull up far enough for them to straddle the seat.
2. Can't get their phone to their ear with a helmet on.
3. Can't use 2 hands to eat while driving.
4. They don't get a trophy and a recognition plaque just for buying one.
5. Don't have enough muscle to hold the bike up when stopped.
6 Might have a bug hit them in the face and then they would need emergency care.
7. Motorcycles don't have air conditioning.
8. They can't afford one because they spent 12 years in college trying to get a degree in Humanities, Social Studies or Gender Studies for which no jobs are available.
9. They are allergic to fresh air.
10. Their pajamas get caught on the exhaust pipes.
11. They might get their hands dirty checking the oil.
12. The handle bars have buttons and levers and cannot be controlled by touch-screen.
13. You have to shift manually and use something called a clutch.
14. It's too hard to take selfies while riding.
15. They don't come with training wheels as their bicycles did.
16. Motorcycles don't have power steering or power brakes.
17. Their nose ring interferes with the face shield.
18. They would have to use leg muscle to back up.
19. When they stop, a light breeze might blow exhaust in their face.
20 It could rain on them and expose them to non-soft water.
21. It might scare their therapy dog, and then the dog would need therapy.
California’s Corporate Quotas
A bill in Sacramento would dictate the gender of company directors.
By The Editorial Board
The right-thinking progressives who rule Sacramento aren’t satisfied with punishing business with high taxes and costly regulation. Now they want to dictate to shareholders the gender of whom they can elect as corporate directors.
This imposition on business management passed the state Senate last month 23-9 and the Assembly 41-26. The law requires a company to appoint one woman to its board of directors by the end of 2019. By the end of 2021 a five-member board would need to have two women, while boards with six or more directors would need three. The Legislature, always alert to possible micro-aggressions, defines female as “an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.”
“Countless highly-qualified women are ready and waiting to serve on the boards of our publicly traded corporations,” declared Senate President Toni Atkins. “SB 826 will open the door to these talented women.”
Except no one is blocking the doorway now, as board trends clearly show. Investment funds like BlackRock and Vanguard already push for board diversity on companies in their portfolios. And it’s a rare board these days that isn’t hunting for more women as directors.
More than a third of new directors appointed in the second quarter this year were women, according to corporate-data firm Equilar. Only 17.1% of Russell 3000 companies had all-male boards in the same period, down from 19.5% the previous quarter. Deloitte found earlier this year that the number of white men on Fortune 500 boards decreased 6.4% between 2012 and 2016.
Quotas could speed up these trends—but to what end? The point of a corporate board is to represent the interest of shareholders who own the company. That requires experience, expertise and judgment. After the corporate frauds of the early 2000s, corporations were told they needed directors who are more independent of management and have more technical knowledge of the business.
Many companies would merely create a new board seat and appoint a woman to check this government box. Male minorities could also lose seats to white women as other companies comply without growing the board. If minorities lose ground, will there be new quotas based on race?The California law will now have nominating committees looking to fill some seats based on gender first, which invariably means a smaller pool of candidates. Companies will have to file reports detailing compliance or face a $100,000 fine. Failure to fill one board seat with a woman leads to another $100,000 fine. The penalty is $300,000 for subsequent violations—and the negative publicity of being cited would arguably be worse.
Europe provides examples of what’s to come. Since 2008 Norwegian firms have faced dissolution if their boards aren’t at least 40% female. Belgium, France and Italy impose sanctions if quotas aren’t met. Germany, Spain and the Netherlands set quotas without real penalties.
A 2012 study from USC professor Kenneth Ahern and University of Michigan professor Amy Dittmar found Norway’s “quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards.”
There’s also the question of whether these quotas are legal. The California Civil Code, the California Constitution and the U.S. Constitution proscribe sex-based discrimination, and the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that explicit quotas are illegal.
California is also seeking to intrude, as it so often does these days, on the laws of other states. Corporate governance is determined by the state of incorporation, and many companies choose Delaware for the simplicity of its rules and its long corporate legal history. Yet the California bill imposes quotas on companies with “principal executive offices” in California, regardless of where they’re incorporated. What does a tech company based in Palo Alto but incorporated in Delaware do?
Companies have a difficult time finding board members with sufficient knowledge and authority without gender quotas. The bill is now on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk, and he hasn’t said if he’ll sign it. He can be a voice of reason in Sacramento and veto a bill that will damage U.S. corporate governance
4a) Shutting Down the PLO
The U.S. stops indulging Palestinian hostility to Israel.
The Editorial Board
The Trump Administration is blowing the whistle on the Palestine Liberation Organization, and it would be hard to identify a more overdue reality check in U.S. foreign policy.
The Administration announced Monday that it is closing the PLO’s Washington office, citing lack of progress on peace negotiations. The PLO began as a terrorist organization but was allowed to open an office in Washington in 1994 after the Oslo accords produced hope for a new era of reconciliation between the PLO and Israel.
That hope has never been fulfilled, notably since the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat began the second intifada after walking away from the historic and generous Israeli peace offer brokered by Bill Clinton in 2000. Long-term indulgence of the PLO’s recalcitrance has had the effect of allowing a toxic and reflexive anti-Israel sentiment to build in international institutions, not least among academics and students on U.S. campuses.
The Trump Administration has tried to revive the Israeli-Palestinian talks, but it has also shown less tolerance for Palestinian resistance. Last November Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas used his speech at the United Nations to call for the investigation and prosecution of Israeli officials by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Trump Administration said then that the PLO’s Washington office was at risk of closure.
Mr. Abbas’s call for an investigation of Israel by the ICC was consciously provocative, and the PLO’s Washington office would have known that. The U.S. Congress said in 2015—beforeDonald Trump became President—that the Secretary of State was required to certify that the PLO wasn’t trying to use the ICC against Israel.
In a speech Monday to the Federalist Society, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton made clear the U.S. will push back hard against any ICC investigation involving members of the U.S. military or the country’s allies.
“The United States,” Mr. Bolton said, “will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court. We will not cooperate with the ICC.”
Meanwhile, late last month the U.S. announced it is permanently cutting funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa, a primary source of Palestinian financial support for decades. The numbers are significant. The U.S. decision will cut off more than $300 million from Unrwa’s $1.24 billion budget. By now the U.N. agency is essentially a shadow government in the Palestinian-held territories. In Gaza alone, there are 274 Unrwa schools with a student population of 280,000.
The point of all this isn’t to be vindictive but to show Mr. Abbas and the PLO that they can't continue to underwrite anti-Semitic textbooks and anti-Israel terrorism without consequences. If the Palestinians want to be treated with the respect of a peace partner, they have to first show a desire for peace.
4b) Playing the Civility Card
By William McGurn
The upending of basic decency and norms began long before Donald Trump.
“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings—unintentionally.”
The quip is attributed to Oscar Wilde, and the sentiment is capacious enough to include Donald Trump. For even the most ardent Never Trumper would concede that when this president offends, it’s intentional.
During the 2016 campaign, for example, Mr. Trump claimed a judge’s Mexican heritage meant he couldn’t be impartial. He belittled a Muslim mom and dad whose U.S. Army officer son had given his life in Iraq. And he declared John McCain was “not a war hero” because he had been a prisoner of war. The insults continued in the Oval Office, from regular jabs at “Crooked Hillary” to “low IQ” tweets variously directed at MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, actor Robert De Niro and Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.).
As America heads toward the November midterms, one fruit of Mr. Trump’s insults is a national lecture about the need to restore civility and norms to our politics. The latest campaign was launched Friday when Barack Obama, in what he conceded was his own departure from a long-established norm of “ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage,” scored the Republican Congress for its “phony” civility and savaged his successor as an existential threat to democracy.
Yet the civility offensive is not without contradiction. How is it that those who presume they posses the moral standing to preach on Mr. Trump’s incivility are so conspicuously blind to the equally glaring outrages of his critics?
Was it civil, for example, for Hillary Clinton to dismiss half of Trump voters as “deplorables” who were also “irredeemable”? Is it civil that showing up with a “Make America Great Again” cap can invite a beating?
Perhaps this explains why the civility conversation is mostly confined to those who already agree. In the past few months alone, after all, Americans have watched press secretary Sarah Sanders and her family hounded out of a Virginia restaurant while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife were harassed by young men. More recently, John McCain’s memorial services became a weeklong taunt to the president—all by the same people applauding each other for their exquisite decency.
The denouement was telling as well. Two days after McCain was laid to rest at his beloved U.S. Naval Academy, the Senate Judiciary Committee began confirmation hearings for Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Talk about incivility and norm-breaking. Leave aside the disruptive audience members. When Democratic senators weren’t interrupting Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, they were attempting to smear a decent and respected husband, father and jurist. Surely the proposition that Mr. Trump has a monopoly on rudeness and incivility took a beating from the antics of Sen. Cory Booker.
Of course, the New Jersey Democrat’s conscious defiance of Senate decorum is but the latest in a long line of progressive norm-shattering. Anyone remember when the New York Times announced on its front page that the journalistic norm of objectivity shouldn’t apply to Mr. Trump?
Or the reporter who used the F-word in a tweet accusing the president of incest with his daughter, and yet has not been rendered morally unfit by the world of journalism?
Or, less salaciously, those who illegally unmasked national security adviser Mike Flynn? Those who have leaked the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders? What about Sally Yates, the acting attorney general who refused a lawful presidential order?
This is civility? These are people concerned with norms? Forgive those Americans who concur with blogger Ann Althouse that today’s pious demands for civility are often less about good manners than shutting down folks with an opposing view. Certainly the anti-Trump side has indulged in plenty of the latter, whether it be the Obama Internal Revenue Service targeting tea party, pro-Israel and pro-life nonprofits for harassment or rioters who would rather set university buildings on fire than allow a conservative point to be uttered on a woke campus.
On top of this, anyone even vaguely familiar with how respectable Washington defamed Judge Robert Bork and grossly distorted his record during his Supreme Court hearings further appreciates that incivility didn’t start when Mr. Trump came to town. It wasn’t all that long ago when Republicans were—falsely—blamed for a nutjob’s shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011.
During our last national outburst of disquisitions on political comity, columnist Froma Harrop, as head of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, was running something called “the Civility Project.” In 2012, John Oliver of “The Daily Show” had great sport with Ms. Harrop for seeing no contradiction between her leading the charge for civility even as she defended likening tea partiers to al Qaeda terrorists.
None of this justifies Mr. Trump’s own excesses. But it may help explain why so many on the receiving end of today’s civility sermons aren’t buying.
4c) Jeremy Corbyn and the
Socialism of Fools
At the root of his bigotry is a Marxist hatred of capitalist U.S. ‘imperialism.’
By Walter Russel Mead
That Jeremy Corbyn, who hopes someday to occupy the office previously held by Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli and William Pitt, is an anti-Semite seems no longer in question. No anti-Israeli terrorist entity is too drenched in Jewish blood for him to cheer on. Hamas, Hezbollah, the mullahs of Iran—their sins against freedom of speech, against freedom of assembly, and against women and gays may be crimson, but if they hate the Jewish state enough, Labour has a leader who will wash them as white as snow.
But not all anti-Semites are alike. Different forms of anti-Semitism can have very different consequences. What kind does Jeremy Corbyn profess, and how does it relate to the rest of his worldview?
Mr. Corbyn and his colleagues in the hard-left Labour elite are, above all, modern. They don’t hate the Jews for killing Christ as medieval Christians did. They don’t think the Jews use the blood of gentile children to make matzoh. Whatever some of the less enlightened members of Mr. Corbyn’s base among the British Muslim community may think, the secular Labour elite doesn’t blame the Jews for rejecting Muhammed.
Nor is their hatred racial. Mr. Corbyn’s worldview is blinkered and sadly skewed, but he is neither wicked nor delusional enough to imagine that the Jewish “race” is competing with the “Aryan” Anglo-Saxons to dominate the world.
It is Zionism that drives Mr. Corbyn’s anti-Jewish passion. He is not anti-Israel because some or even many of Israel’s policies are wrong. He is existentially anti-Zionist. He does not believe that the Jewish people are a nation. From this point of view, the notorious U.N. Resolution 3379 of 1975 got it exactly right: Zionism is racism, and the Jewish state is racist to the core.
What elevates the Jewish state from an irritation to an obsession in the Corbynite world is Israel’s relationship with the U.S. The U.S. is the center of international capitalism. Destroying American capitalism and the imperialist system it imposes on the world is the overarching goal of the Marxist zealotry that drives Mr. Corbyn’s worldview and justifies his sympathy for otherwise dubious regimes. The Iranian mullahs may hang homosexuals and stone the occasional adulteress, but in the all-important struggle against American imperialism and its Zionist sidekick, they are a natural and necessary part of the Resistance.
It’s a short step for hard-left Labour from hating Israel to finding “Zionist” conspiracies on every side. Marxism typically rejects liberal democracy as a sham. Rich and powerful capitalists make all the big decisions: They control the political parties, they control the press, and they use the facade of democratic politics to amuse, befuddle and ultimately control the masses. From this standpoint, conspiracy thinking isn’t a sign of ignorance or emotionalism; to the contrary, perceiving the hidden plots of our true rulers is a necessary and vital step in seeing through the myth of liberal democracy.
The hard-line Marxist and the classic anti-Semite agree that the world is really run by a cabal of greedy men behind closed doors. But where the Marxist sees capitalist string-pullers, some of whom may happen to be Jewish, the anti-Semite sees only Jews. This is the meaning behind the famous statement, once popular on the European left, that anti-Semitism is the “socialism of fools”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are too narrow and miss the real point.
But for Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour colleagues, the perceived special relationship between American imperialism and Zionism collapses the distinction between the socialism of fools and the “real” thing. The urban legend that “the Jews” control America’s Middle Eastern policy and that Jewish power forces the U.S. to march in lockstep with right-wing Israeli governments is also an organizing principle of the Corbynite worldview. The supposed control exerted by Zionist Jewish billionaires over American politics makes the fight against imperialism also a fight against a powerful Jewish conspiracy.
Those ideas, as any serious student of American politics or of the American Jewish community knows, are nonsensical. In every presidential election of the 21st century, American Jews have given significantly more money and votes to Democratic than to Republican candidates. If the American Jewish community controlled American politics, President Trump would still be hosting a television show and there would be no U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.
Yet myths are no less powerful because they are false. Mr. Corbyn’s outlook will lead any government he forms into deep trouble and frustration, but that in itself won’t keep him out of Downing Street. Liberalism today may face its deepest crisis in the country that gave the liberal tradition to the world.
4d) Why the ‘Obama Recovery’
Took So Long
The economy should have roared back. Instead it crawled.
By Peter J. Farrara
Barack Obama is back, and he wants credit for the booming economy. “When you hear how great the economy is doing right now,” he said in a speech last week, “let’s just remember when this recovery started.” That would be in the summer of 2009, but the story is more complicated.
Milton Friedman was the first economist to notice a pattern in American economic history: The deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. The economy has to grow even faster than normal for a while to catch up to where it would have been without the recession. The fundamentals of America’s world-leading economy are so strong that the pattern held throughout the country’s history.
Until the past decade. The 2008-09 recession was so bad, the economy should have come roaring back with a booming recovery—even stronger than Reagan’s boom in the 1980s. But Mr. Obama carefully, studiously pursued the opposite of every pro-growth policy Reagan had followed. What he got was the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.
Before Mr. Obama, in the 11 previous recessions since the Depression, the economy recovered all jobs lost during the recession an average of 27 months after the recession began. In Mr. Obama’s recovery, dating from the summer of 2009, the recession’s job losses were not recovered until after 76 months—more than six years.
America also suffered a severe recession during Reagan’s early years, because of the tight monetary policy that broke the back of 1970s inflation. All the job losses from that recession were recovered after 35 months. Seventy-six months after that recession started, the number of jobs was up 12.8 million from the previous peak.
Before Mr. Obama, in the 11 previous post-Depression recessions, the economy recovered the gross domestic product lost during the recession within an average of 4.6 quarters, or a little over a year. It took Mr. Obama’s recovery 14 quarters, or 3½ years, to reach that point. The Reagan recovery took half that time.
Obama apologists argued America could no longer grow any faster than Mr. Obama’s 2% real growth averaged over eight years. Slow growth was the “new normal.” The American Dream was over. Get used to it. Hillary Clinton promised to continue Mr. Obama’s economic policies. America’s blue-collar voters rose up.
The recovery took off on Election Day 2016, as the stock market communicated. Mr. Trump’s tax cuts and sweeping deregulation—especially regarding energy—fundamentally changed course from Mr. Obama. These policies have driven today’s boom, increasing annual growth to more than 3% within six months and now to over 4%.
Will Democrats ever figure out what policies create jobs, economic growth and rising wages? If not, they’ll wake up some Wednesday morning to find they have been routed in a fundamental realignment election, in which they have permanently lost the blue-collar vote—once the backbone of their party.
Mr. Ferrara teaches economics at the King’s College.
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5) Monkeys
5) Monkeys
You start with a cage containing four monkeys and inside the cage you hang a banana on a string, and then you place a set of stairs under the banana. Before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana. You then spray ALL the monkeys with cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt. As soon as he touches the stairs, you, again, spray ALL the monkeys with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new monkey. The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, ALL of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him after another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original four monkeys, replacing it with a new monkey. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment - with enthusiasm - because he is now part of the "team."
Then, replace a third original monkey with a new monkey, followed by the fourth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked. Now, the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. Having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, not one of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the Banana.
Why, you ask? Because in their minds, that is the way it has always been!
This is how today's House and Senate operates, and this Is why from time to time, ALL of the monkeys need to be REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME!
DISCLAIMER: This is meant as no disrespect to monkeys.
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