Submitted by: P McMillan
If There’s Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit?
If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and “concerned” NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.
An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona’s Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights.
Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount “ludicrous” because “the election is over.” And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only “dangerous,” but also the “end of democracy.”
Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented transparency and live video feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process, reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers.
If there is a reason for inserting spies into an already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the auditing process itself, I don’t know of it. And if there is a reason to expose workers’ identities to the public other than to make them targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt to provide it. - J.B. Shurk
Biden admin to award millions in science grants for ‘racial equity’ in STEM education. National Science Foundation "seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM" with $30 million program.
The Biden administration is spending millions in grants through the National Science Foundation to address what the federal agency calls "systemic racism" in the country and to advance "racial equity" in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education."
Persistent racial injustices and inequalities in the United States have led to renewed concern and interest in addressing systemic racism," reads a synopsis of the Racial Equity in STEM Education Program on the NSF website. "The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM." - Mary Lou Lang
Was John Stuart Mill right that conservatives are members of “the stupid party”? I used to scoff at that charge. Lately, alas, I have begun to harbor doubts. Maybe “stupid” is a bit of an overstatement. But how about “supine”? Can it be said the conservatives are “the supine party”? The evidence, I submit, is formidable.
You have probably noticed that the computers furnished to journalists these days come with the phrase “the Big Lie” programmed into them. It is impossible to write about the 2020 election, Donald Trump, the political environment, or your Aunt Mabel’s recipe for fudge brownies without encountering it.
A couple of days ago, CNN speculated about “Why Republicans won’t walk away from the ‘Big Lie’.” Ditto Politico, which assured its readers that “The ‘big lie’ lives on.” MSNBC weighed in with a story that the GOP was the “Party of the Big Lie.” Then there is the Washington Post which told its readers that Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” was about more than the “baseless and overwhelmingly debunked effort to call the results of the 2020 election into question.”
These examples easily could be multiplied a hundred-, a thousand-fold. There seems to be an unwritten rule (or, who knows, maybe it is written down in the stylebook by now) that you cannot write a column without declaring that any suggestion that the 2020 election was fraught with “irregularities”—which is a polysyllabic word for “fraud”—be described as “baseless,” “debunked” (“overwhelmingly debunked”), etc.
This tic is not confined to acknowledged leftists. It has also infected the prose and pronunciamentos of the entire anti-Trump fraternity. Thus we see soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) deriding Donald Trump and his repetition of “the Big Lie” in columns, speeches, and tweets. “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” she wrote. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their [sic] back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
The great thing about the phrase “The Big Lie,” of course, is its origins in the philosophy of Adolf Hitler. That gives the phrase, free and for nothing, an extra dollop of nastiness making it easier, for example, to describe supporters of Donald Trump as potential (or maybe actual) “domestic extremists,” “terrorists,” etc., because, after all, they support die große Lüge, recommended beforehand by Nazis, ergo what do you expect?
In my view, however, it is not CNN or MSNBC or even Liz Cheney who has demonstrated a true understanding of the nature of the Big Lie that is affecting our society. It is writers like Julie Kelly. Just a couple of days ago in American Greatness, Kelly hit the proverbial nail on the head (Jeeves would have said rem acu tetigit). “The ‘Big Lie,’” she wrote, “isn’t that the 2020 election was stolen; the ‘Big Lie’ is that it was fair and lawful.”
Bingo, as anyone who can pronounce mail-in ballots, unconstitutional changes to voting laws immediately before the election, or ballot harvesting knows full well. Stalin got it in one. Voting is fine, he said. We all want voting. What matters is who counts the votes. Thus, just as things are getting interesting in the Arizona vote audit, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is making noises about shutting it down.
2.If There’s Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit? By J.B. Shurk
If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and “concerned” NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear. An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona’s Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights. Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount “ludicrous” because “the election is over.” And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only “dangerous,” but also the “end of democracy.”
Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented transparency and live video feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process, reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers. If there is a reason for inserting spies into an already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the auditing process itself, I don’t know of it. And if there is a reason to expose workers’ identities to the public other than to make them targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt to provide it.
Admissions officers around the country can hardly contain themselves. With their schools seeing record numbers of applications and acceptances for minority students, they are taking a victory lap in the media.
“It is safe to say this is the most broadly diverse accepted class in the long history of Dartmouth,” Lee Coffin, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at the school, told the Wall Street Journal. At Dartmouth, 48 percent of accepted students identify as black, indigenous, or other people of color, and 17 percent are the first in their families to attend college.
At New York University, this year’s class is about 29 percent black or Hispanic, up from 27 percent last year; it also includes 20 percent first-generation students, up from 15 percent. MJ Knoll-Finn, NYU’s senior vice president for enrollment management, sees the situation as historic. She told the New York Times: “You could tell the story of America through the eyes of all these young people, and how they dealt with the times, Black Lives Matter, the wave of unemployment and the uncertainties of the political moment, wanting to make a difference.”
Applications at Harvard were up 43 percent over last year, and the percentage of black students admitted went from 14.3 percent to 18 percent. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, enthused: “We have the most diverse class in the history of Harvard this year, economically and ethnically. . . . This is an incoming group of students who’ve had experiences unlike any experiences first-year students have had in the history of Harvard or history of higher education.”
The celebrations may have come too early. Many of these admissions decisions, administrators say, happened because their schools went “test-optional.” Dropping the requirement that students submit SAT or ACT scores meant that admissions officers could rely only on grades, essays, and recommendations. Thus, students with lower scores may have been more willing to apply to schools they otherwise would have considered a reach.
Despite the shift of public opinion against them, SAT scores remain fairly good predictors of not only how well students will perform in college but also the difficulty of the classes they’ll take. “Students with high test scores are more likely to take the challenging route through college,” University of Minnesota psychologists Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett maintain.
National Science Foundation "seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM" with $30 million program.
The Biden administration is spending millions in grants through the National Science Foundation to address what the federal agency calls "systemic racism" in the country and to advance "racial equity" in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.
"Persistent racial injustices and inequalities in the United States have led to renewed concern and interest in addressing systemic racism," reads a synopsis of the Racial Equity in STEM Education Program on the NSF website. "The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM."
Although the grants are funded by the federal government's primary source of support for basic science research, the agency emphasizes that proposals are to be developed by and reflect the perspective of aggrieved groups and individuals who perceive themselves as victims of undefined "inequities" assumed in advance to be caused by "systemic racism."
"Core to this funding opportunity is that proposals are led by, or developed and led in authentic partnership with, individuals and communities most impacted by the inequities caused by systemic racism," specifies the agency. "The voices, knowledge, and experiences of those who have been impacted by enduring racial inequities should be at the center of these proposals, including
in, for example: project leadership and research positions, conceptualization of the proposal, decision-making processes, and the interpretation and dissemination of evidence and research results." The NSF stipulates that research funded by these grants should be designed to produce predetermined outcomes that benefit those engaged to conduct the research.
"The proposed work should provide positive outcomes for the individuals and communities engaged and should recognize people's humanity, experiences, and resilience," according to the program description.
A synopsis on the government's grants.gov website shows $30 million will be awarded to an expected 45 grantees beginning in July.
Since President Biden took office, the NSF has awarded millions in grants related to equity, diversity and inclusion, a review of government spending by Just the News showed.
Closing Your Social Media Accounts David Solway
I closed my Facebook account two years ago and I was never on Twitter, regarding it as COVID on steroids. I saw Twitter as a broad thoroughfare for the most vulgar and contemptible people we are ever likely to meet, a digital forum for the SJW mob, and of course, the offspring of a censoring autocrat with no sense of managerial decorum or moral decency. This is not to say that one does not—or did not—meet good and interesting folks on Twitter, but that the palaver is pervasively tainted by obscenities, scurrilous vilification, intellectual stagnation, scandal, and malice. It is a home for everything tawdry, boorish and sordid while whatever is noble or discreet or truthful is in danger of imminent deplatforming.
My wife abandoned Facebook at the same time as I did, but maintained her Twitter account for another year, given her large follower base with whom she wished to remain in contact. Finally, despite a rich correspondence, she could no longer justify helping to maintain a platform that, in its essence, represented everything she detested. It was a sacrifice, but one she felt that had to be made. For it was clear that every tweet by a responsible citizen or freedom-loving patriot only served to reinforce a despotic enterprise in the business of creating a cultural gulag for dissenters.
Writing in the NYT-Singapore, Ligaya Mishan points out that “Twitter, cancel culture’s main arena, is not the digital equivalent of the public square, however touted as such. We think of it as an open space because we pay no admission, forgetting that it’s a commercial enterprise, committed to herding us in. We are customers but also uncredited workers, doing the free labor of making the platform more valuable.” Why, then, help to keep it going? Why support an influential arbiter of cancel culture, a vast atrium where online mobs form to carry out vindictive and irrational vendettas, and where, as Mishan writes, “any of us can be cancelled at any time, living in our glass Instagrams, leaving a spoor of digitized gaffes behind us?” Why contribute to an anti-democratic organ intent on policing popular discussion and debate?
Generally speaking, whether we are thinking of Twitter, or any of its congeners—Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram—“social media” are really not “social” in the sense of civil, sociable, genuinely communal, but “political media” chiefly committed to shameless profiteering and the ideology of the nation-destroying Left cancelling anyone who opposes its agenda. Mishan argues, here mistakenly I think, that unlike the dictates of State regimes, “cancel culture is rudderless, a series of spontaneous disruptions with no sequential logic, lacking any official apparatus to enact or enforce a policy or creed.” Given the consolidation of public power in the hands of Big Tech, to the point where it can influence and subvert State authority and even cancel a president of the United States, her argument lacks credibility in this respect. Rather, we are witnessing not merely “the evolution of a digital form of carnival and misrule,” but the crushing hegemony of inquisitorial authority. As Edward Ring writes at American Greatness, “It is fire and brimstone and furious vengeance. It is religious zealotry of the worst kind, clothed in piety.”
There is less dividing Paul Gottfried and me than I would have expected, which is good. For when the orc hordes—at Sauron’s urging—come for both of us, they aren’t going to discern, much less care about, any academic differences over this or that statement from the American founding era. They are going to see us identically as enemies to be exterminated.
I also welcome this chance to reiterate some points that bear repeating. To those bored with the repetition, I can only say that what I learned in politics apparently applies to intellectual debates as well: if you want your message to break through, you can’t repeat it often enough. This exchange also gives me the opportunity to take a few more whacks at Cracker Jack Claremontism, which can’t be beaten often enough.
The Claremont-Hillsdale School does indeed hold that all human beings “have inalienable rights to life and liberty.” Gottfried continues from here that this “did not mean that for the founders ‘all men’ were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right.” And he’s absolutely right. Only Cracker Jack Claremontism holds to that silly view. Anyone who’s actually studied the founders (and if we’ve done nothing else, we’ve certainly done that) knows that it’s false.
A Separate and Equal Station
Among the Powers of the EarthLet’s take these two issues separately. The first is membership in the political community. We may say that, for the American founders, their government’s exclusivity as a political community internationally mirrors the principle of freedom of association at the domestic level. Just government originates in the social compact—that is, a compact in which men freely choose to form a government for their mutual protection and benefit. At the founding of such a government, agreement on membership must be unanimous, and in both directions. That is, no one who doesn’t want to be in the compact can be forced to join, but also no one whom others don’t want to take in can be allowed to join either. The social compact is invitation only.
It remains so in perpetuity for newcomers. Children born to members of the existing compact are automatically made members but may, if they later choose, renounce that membership via emigration. No one from outside the compact, however, may join it without the consent of its existing members. As Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the U.S. Constitution, put it: “every society, from a great nation down to a club, has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members shall be admitted.”
The DOJ’s Abusive Indictment of the Police Who Killed George Floyd By Andrew C. McCarthy
Federal prosecution of these defendants makes no sense — except as a political matter.
A t best, the Justice Department’s indictment of Derek Chauvin and the three other former Minneapolis cops involved in George Floyd’s killing nearly a year ago is overkill. At worst, it is an exercise in political zeal that could undermine the accountability being achieved by state prosecutions. In the meantime, it is abusive — ironically so given that the charges are brought under the guise of upholding civil rights, though it obviously has not dawned on the Civil Rights Division’s social-justice warriors that police have civil rights, too.
Chauvin, of course, has just been convicted by a Minnesota jury on two murder counts, as well as a manslaughter charge. He faces up to 40 years’ imprisonment — the maximum sentence on the most serious charge, second-degree felony murder — when he is sentenced, which is scheduled to happen on June 16. State prosecutors have asked Judge Peter Cahill to apply penal-law enhancements that would push Chauvin’s term close to the maximum. Even if the court does not apply all of them, Chauvin’s sentence is bound to be severe — probably 20 years or more, maybe a lot more.
And make no mistake: That will be a very tough stretch, assuming the 45-year-old survives it. Chauvin is a notorious ex-cop convicted in a case that is racially charged, notwithstanding the absence of racial-bias evidence. He will be a target for gangs and other violent inmates. Holding him in the general prison population would not be responsible in the short term, if ever. There is no harder time than time in isolation. That is not a defense of the excessive force that resulted in the jury’s verdict; it is simply a realistic observation of what lies ahead.
The other three former cops charged by the Justice Department are Chauvin’s partner, Tou Thao, a 35-year-old veteran of the force, and a pair of rookies, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, 38 and 27 respectively, who were brand new to the job when they encountered Floyd last Memorial Day. The three are scheduled to be tried jointly in state court, starting August 23, on charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter. Furthermore, prosecutors are pushing to add a third-degree “depraved indifference” murder charge, just as they controversially did in Chauvin’s case. In less than two weeks (May 20), a state appellate court will hear arguments on whether that should be permitted.
Terrorist incidents in the West peaked in 2017, and have fallen dramatically since, mainly due to the defeat of the Islamic State. Yet the politics of fear demands a substitute: right-wing terrorism. “Right-wing” is stretched so broadly today that it conflates ethnic and religious identities, i.e., whites and Christians. Identity politics is fashionable but makes for terrible analysis.
In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with a rarefied left-wing news site (Quartz, then under the same ownership as The Atlantic magazine) to claim that two-thirds of American terrorism in 2017 was right-wing. Their “right-wing” categories were slippery, including “alt-light,” as a gateway to “alt-right.” Worse, they categorized both anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism as right-wing. Extremist Muslims and Jews hate each other. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center put them together as right-wing allies. Such an equation prevents admission of the fact that anti-Semitism is the bigger problem, and largely jihadi.
United States official data for 2019 shows that more than 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed against Jews, while 13 percent are directed against Muslims (about the same as all Christians).
The Anti-Defamation League jumped on the bandwagon of fearmongering over “right-wing” terrorism, by launching its own study of American “extremist violence.” In January 2019, the ADL reported right-wing extremists as the “biggest threat” by the “numbers.” The report uses the term “white supremacist” interchangeably with “right-wing.” Here, critical race theory meets left-wing partisanship.
But the ADL does not fully reveal its data or methods. By contrast, official statistics show that whites (72 percent of Americans) are underrepresented in hate crimes (52.5 percent of perpetrators of hate crimes in 2019 were white). And there is no upward trend in white perps.
Trends tend to get pushed behind unrepresentative events. In the deadliest attack of 2018, a white male shot 11 people to death at synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was officially categorized as white supremacist (although all the victims were white). The ADL effectively treated that single event as evidence for a multi-year trend.
New England Journal of Medicine Pushes Open Borders By Wesley J. Smith
I always say that if you want to see what will go terribly wrong in the country, read the professional journals. Radicalism. Woke perspectives. Transgender ideology. Critical Race Theory in health care. Socialized medicine. “Nature rights” advocacy. It’s all there in the world’s foremost professional publications, along with advocacy for policies reflecting those views.
That matters because the people who write for and publish these journals are part of the ruling elite who exert tremendous influence on legislation, executive decision making at federal and state levels, court rulings, business practices, etc..
The radicalization of the intellegentsia is a major factor in the hard-left shift we see in political advocacy and policy. In the latest example, the New England Journal of Medicine offers an article advocating for open borders for illegal alien children and their families. Literally. From, “When Undoing is Not Enough,” (the “undoing” refers to Trump border polices–which the authors claim was legal “torture,” and the goal is to reduce “trauma.”):
First, under the Biden administration’s leadership, the United States could minimize the amount of time that migrants spend in Mexico and in detention. We believe that unaccompanied children, pregnant women, and families should never have to wait to cross the border.
That would sure slow the flow, wouldn’t it? But not just “children:”
Second, the Biden administration could carefully consider the unintended consequences of allowing children, but not entire families, to enter the United States. This policy forces parents to choose between prolonging their children’s exposure to life-threatening trauma in Mexico and sending them into the United States unaccompanied.
And to sweeten the pot, free health care for all!
Thomas Sowell :The Great Elucidator By Kyle Smith
An inspiring one-hour documentary about the conservative public intellectual Thomas Sowell serves as a superb intro to his thinking.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.” Thomas Sowell, who combines a Mark Twain-level gift for apothegms with the rigor of a data scientist, said that back in 1998, but like many of his sparkling one-liners, it’s more strikingly true now than ever.
At 90, Sowell remains “one of the great minds of the past half century,” as host Jason L. Riley puts it in the one-hour PBS documentary Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, which can be viewed here, but fair warning: This film is a gateway drug. You are bound to get hooked on Sowell, just like many others interviewed in the film. These include podcaster Dave Rubin, a Silicon Valley executive with Overstock.com; a Dallas rapper named Eric July from the band Backwordz; and Sowell’s friend Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and linguist. Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author, makes a perfect guide because he is the Sowell whisperer: His new book Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, is about to hit shelves.
In a film written and produced by Tom Jennings, Riley takes us through how Sowell, who lost his dad before he was born and his mother when he was a small child, rose from poverty. His early years he spent in a house with no electricity in North Carolina, then an apartment in Harlem, where a family friend guided him to a love of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library when he was eight years old. At the University of Chicago, one of his professors was Milton Friedman, who proved unable to talk him out of being a Marxist. What did the trick was a government job. In the Department of Labor, Sowell found that increased minimum wages reduce employment, but this fact interested no one. “People in the government didn’t give a rip whether it worked or not. They were simply implementing the policy,” notes another black intellectual, columnist Larry Elder.
If There’s Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit?
If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and “concerned” NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.
An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona’s Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights.
Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount “ludicrous” because “the election is over.” And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only “dangerous,” but also the “end of democracy.”
Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented transparency and live video feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process, reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers.
If there is a reason for inserting spies into an already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the auditing process itself, I don’t know of it. And if there is a reason to expose workers’ identities to the public other than to make them targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt to provide it. - J.B. Shurk
Biden admin to award millions in science grants for ‘racial equity’ in STEM education. National Science Foundation "seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM" with $30 million program.
The Biden administration is spending millions in grants through the National Science Foundation to address what the federal agency calls "systemic racism" in the country and to advance "racial equity" in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education."
Persistent racial injustices and inequalities in the United States have led to renewed concern and interest in addressing systemic racism," reads a synopsis of the Racial Equity in STEM Education Program on the NSF website. "The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM." - Mary Lou Lang
Was John Stuart Mill right that conservatives are members of “the stupid party”? I used to scoff at that charge. Lately, alas, I have begun to harbor doubts. Maybe “stupid” is a bit of an overstatement. But how about “supine”? Can it be said the conservatives are “the supine party”? The evidence, I submit, is formidable.
You have probably noticed that the computers furnished to journalists these days come with the phrase “the Big Lie” programmed into them. It is impossible to write about the 2020 election, Donald Trump, the political environment, or your Aunt Mabel’s recipe for fudge brownies without encountering it.
A couple of days ago, CNN speculated about “Why Republicans won’t walk away from the ‘Big Lie’.” Ditto Politico, which assured its readers that “The ‘big lie’ lives on.” MSNBC weighed in with a story that the GOP was the “Party of the Big Lie.” Then there is the Washington Post which told its readers that Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” was about more than the “baseless and overwhelmingly debunked effort to call the results of the 2020 election into question.”
These examples easily could be multiplied a hundred-, a thousand-fold. There seems to be an unwritten rule (or, who knows, maybe it is written down in the stylebook by now) that you cannot write a column without declaring that any suggestion that the 2020 election was fraught with “irregularities”—which is a polysyllabic word for “fraud”—be described as “baseless,” “debunked” (“overwhelmingly debunked”), etc.
This tic is not confined to acknowledged leftists. It has also infected the prose and pronunciamentos of the entire anti-Trump fraternity. Thus we see soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) deriding Donald Trump and his repetition of “the Big Lie” in columns, speeches, and tweets. “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” she wrote. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their [sic] back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
The great thing about the phrase “The Big Lie,” of course, is its origins in the philosophy of Adolf Hitler. That gives the phrase, free and for nothing, an extra dollop of nastiness making it easier, for example, to describe supporters of Donald Trump as potential (or maybe actual) “domestic extremists,” “terrorists,” etc., because, after all, they support die große Lüge, recommended beforehand by Nazis, ergo what do you expect?
In my view, however, it is not CNN or MSNBC or even Liz Cheney who has demonstrated a true understanding of the nature of the Big Lie that is affecting our society. It is writers like Julie Kelly. Just a couple of days ago in American Greatness, Kelly hit the proverbial nail on the head (Jeeves would have said rem acu tetigit). “The ‘Big Lie,’” she wrote, “isn’t that the 2020 election was stolen; the ‘Big Lie’ is that it was fair and lawful.”
Bingo, as anyone who can pronounce mail-in ballots, unconstitutional changes to voting laws immediately before the election, or ballot harvesting knows full well. Stalin got it in one. Voting is fine, he said. We all want voting. What matters is who counts the votes. Thus, just as things are getting interesting in the Arizona vote audit, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is making noises about shutting it down.
2.If There’s Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit? By J.B. Shurk
If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and “concerned” NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear. An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona’s Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights. Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount “ludicrous” because “the election is over.” And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only “dangerous,” but also the “end of democracy.”
Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented transparency and live video feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process, reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers. If there is a reason for inserting spies into an already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the auditing process itself, I don’t know of it. And if there is a reason to expose workers’ identities to the public other than to make them targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt to provide it.
Admissions officers around the country can hardly contain themselves. With their schools seeing record numbers of applications and acceptances for minority students, they are taking a victory lap in the media.
“It is safe to say this is the most broadly diverse accepted class in the long history of Dartmouth,” Lee Coffin, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at the school, told the Wall Street Journal. At Dartmouth, 48 percent of accepted students identify as black, indigenous, or other people of color, and 17 percent are the first in their families to attend college.
At New York University, this year’s class is about 29 percent black or Hispanic, up from 27 percent last year; it also includes 20 percent first-generation students, up from 15 percent. MJ Knoll-Finn, NYU’s senior vice president for enrollment management, sees the situation as historic. She told the New York Times: “You could tell the story of America through the eyes of all these young people, and how they dealt with the times, Black Lives Matter, the wave of unemployment and the uncertainties of the political moment, wanting to make a difference.”
Applications at Harvard were up 43 percent over last year, and the percentage of black students admitted went from 14.3 percent to 18 percent. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, enthused: “We have the most diverse class in the history of Harvard this year, economically and ethnically. . . . This is an incoming group of students who’ve had experiences unlike any experiences first-year students have had in the history of Harvard or history of higher education.”
The celebrations may have come too early. Many of these admissions decisions, administrators say, happened because their schools went “test-optional.” Dropping the requirement that students submit SAT or ACT scores meant that admissions officers could rely only on grades, essays, and recommendations. Thus, students with lower scores may have been more willing to apply to schools they otherwise would have considered a reach.
Despite the shift of public opinion against them, SAT scores remain fairly good predictors of not only how well students will perform in college but also the difficulty of the classes they’ll take. “Students with high test scores are more likely to take the challenging route through college,” University of Minnesota psychologists Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett maintain.
National Science Foundation "seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM" with $30 million program.
The Biden administration is spending millions in grants through the National Science Foundation to address what the federal agency calls "systemic racism" in the country and to advance "racial equity" in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.
"Persistent racial injustices and inequalities in the United States have led to renewed concern and interest in addressing systemic racism," reads a synopsis of the Racial Equity in STEM Education Program on the NSF website. "The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM."
Although the grants are funded by the federal government's primary source of support for basic science research, the agency emphasizes that proposals are to be developed by and reflect the perspective of aggrieved groups and individuals who perceive themselves as victims of undefined "inequities" assumed in advance to be caused by "systemic racism."
"Core to this funding opportunity is that proposals are led by, or developed and led in authentic partnership with, individuals and communities most impacted by the inequities caused by systemic racism," specifies the agency. "The voices, knowledge, and experiences of those who have been impacted by enduring racial inequities should be at the center of these proposals, including
in, for example: project leadership and research positions, conceptualization of the proposal, decision-making processes, and the interpretation and dissemination of evidence and research results." The NSF stipulates that research funded by these grants should be designed to produce predetermined outcomes that benefit those engaged to conduct the research.
"The proposed work should provide positive outcomes for the individuals and communities engaged and should recognize people's humanity, experiences, and resilience," according to the program description.
A synopsis on the government's grants.gov website shows $30 million will be awarded to an expected 45 grantees beginning in July.
Since President Biden took office, the NSF has awarded millions in grants related to equity, diversity and inclusion, a review of government spending by Just the News showed.
Closing Your Social Media Accounts David Solway
I closed my Facebook account two years ago and I was never on Twitter, regarding it as COVID on steroids. I saw Twitter as a broad thoroughfare for the most vulgar and contemptible people we are ever likely to meet, a digital forum for the SJW mob, and of course, the offspring of a censoring autocrat with no sense of managerial decorum or moral decency. This is not to say that one does not—or did not—meet good and interesting folks on Twitter, but that the palaver is pervasively tainted by obscenities, scurrilous vilification, intellectual stagnation, scandal, and malice. It is a home for everything tawdry, boorish and sordid while whatever is noble or discreet or truthful is in danger of imminent deplatforming.
My wife abandoned Facebook at the same time as I did, but maintained her Twitter account for another year, given her large follower base with whom she wished to remain in contact. Finally, despite a rich correspondence, she could no longer justify helping to maintain a platform that, in its essence, represented everything she detested. It was a sacrifice, but one she felt that had to be made. For it was clear that every tweet by a responsible citizen or freedom-loving patriot only served to reinforce a despotic enterprise in the business of creating a cultural gulag for dissenters.
Writing in the NYT-Singapore, Ligaya Mishan points out that “Twitter, cancel culture’s main arena, is not the digital equivalent of the public square, however touted as such. We think of it as an open space because we pay no admission, forgetting that it’s a commercial enterprise, committed to herding us in. We are customers but also uncredited workers, doing the free labor of making the platform more valuable.” Why, then, help to keep it going? Why support an influential arbiter of cancel culture, a vast atrium where online mobs form to carry out vindictive and irrational vendettas, and where, as Mishan writes, “any of us can be cancelled at any time, living in our glass Instagrams, leaving a spoor of digitized gaffes behind us?” Why contribute to an anti-democratic organ intent on policing popular discussion and debate?
Generally speaking, whether we are thinking of Twitter, or any of its congeners—Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram—“social media” are really not “social” in the sense of civil, sociable, genuinely communal, but “political media” chiefly committed to shameless profiteering and the ideology of the nation-destroying Left cancelling anyone who opposes its agenda. Mishan argues, here mistakenly I think, that unlike the dictates of State regimes, “cancel culture is rudderless, a series of spontaneous disruptions with no sequential logic, lacking any official apparatus to enact or enforce a policy or creed.” Given the consolidation of public power in the hands of Big Tech, to the point where it can influence and subvert State authority and even cancel a president of the United States, her argument lacks credibility in this respect. Rather, we are witnessing not merely “the evolution of a digital form of carnival and misrule,” but the crushing hegemony of inquisitorial authority. As Edward Ring writes at American Greatness, “It is fire and brimstone and furious vengeance. It is religious zealotry of the worst kind, clothed in piety.”
There is less dividing Paul Gottfried and me than I would have expected, which is good. For when the orc hordes—at Sauron’s urging—come for both of us, they aren’t going to discern, much less care about, any academic differences over this or that statement from the American founding era. They are going to see us identically as enemies to be exterminated.
I also welcome this chance to reiterate some points that bear repeating. To those bored with the repetition, I can only say that what I learned in politics apparently applies to intellectual debates as well: if you want your message to break through, you can’t repeat it often enough. This exchange also gives me the opportunity to take a few more whacks at Cracker Jack Claremontism, which can’t be beaten often enough.
The Claremont-Hillsdale School does indeed hold that all human beings “have inalienable rights to life and liberty.” Gottfried continues from here that this “did not mean that for the founders ‘all men’ were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right.” And he’s absolutely right. Only Cracker Jack Claremontism holds to that silly view. Anyone who’s actually studied the founders (and if we’ve done nothing else, we’ve certainly done that) knows that it’s false.
A Separate and Equal Station
Among the Powers of the EarthLet’s take these two issues separately. The first is membership in the political community. We may say that, for the American founders, their government’s exclusivity as a political community internationally mirrors the principle of freedom of association at the domestic level. Just government originates in the social compact—that is, a compact in which men freely choose to form a government for their mutual protection and benefit. At the founding of such a government, agreement on membership must be unanimous, and in both directions. That is, no one who doesn’t want to be in the compact can be forced to join, but also no one whom others don’t want to take in can be allowed to join either. The social compact is invitation only.
It remains so in perpetuity for newcomers. Children born to members of the existing compact are automatically made members but may, if they later choose, renounce that membership via emigration. No one from outside the compact, however, may join it without the consent of its existing members. As Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the U.S. Constitution, put it: “every society, from a great nation down to a club, has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members shall be admitted.”
The DOJ’s Abusive Indictment of the Police Who Killed George Floyd By Andrew C. McCarthy
Federal prosecution of these defendants makes no sense — except as a political matter.
A t best, the Justice Department’s indictment of Derek Chauvin and the three other former Minneapolis cops involved in George Floyd’s killing nearly a year ago is overkill. At worst, it is an exercise in political zeal that could undermine the accountability being achieved by state prosecutions. In the meantime, it is abusive — ironically so given that the charges are brought under the guise of upholding civil rights, though it obviously has not dawned on the Civil Rights Division’s social-justice warriors that police have civil rights, too.
Chauvin, of course, has just been convicted by a Minnesota jury on two murder counts, as well as a manslaughter charge. He faces up to 40 years’ imprisonment — the maximum sentence on the most serious charge, second-degree felony murder — when he is sentenced, which is scheduled to happen on June 16. State prosecutors have asked Judge Peter Cahill to apply penal-law enhancements that would push Chauvin’s term close to the maximum. Even if the court does not apply all of them, Chauvin’s sentence is bound to be severe — probably 20 years or more, maybe a lot more.
And make no mistake: That will be a very tough stretch, assuming the 45-year-old survives it. Chauvin is a notorious ex-cop convicted in a case that is racially charged, notwithstanding the absence of racial-bias evidence. He will be a target for gangs and other violent inmates. Holding him in the general prison population would not be responsible in the short term, if ever. There is no harder time than time in isolation. That is not a defense of the excessive force that resulted in the jury’s verdict; it is simply a realistic observation of what lies ahead.
The other three former cops charged by the Justice Department are Chauvin’s partner, Tou Thao, a 35-year-old veteran of the force, and a pair of rookies, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, 38 and 27 respectively, who were brand new to the job when they encountered Floyd last Memorial Day. The three are scheduled to be tried jointly in state court, starting August 23, on charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter. Furthermore, prosecutors are pushing to add a third-degree “depraved indifference” murder charge, just as they controversially did in Chauvin’s case. In less than two weeks (May 20), a state appellate court will hear arguments on whether that should be permitted.
Terrorist incidents in the West peaked in 2017, and have fallen dramatically since, mainly due to the defeat of the Islamic State. Yet the politics of fear demands a substitute: right-wing terrorism. “Right-wing” is stretched so broadly today that it conflates ethnic and religious identities, i.e., whites and Christians. Identity politics is fashionable but makes for terrible analysis.
In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with a rarefied left-wing news site (Quartz, then under the same ownership as The Atlantic magazine) to claim that two-thirds of American terrorism in 2017 was right-wing. Their “right-wing” categories were slippery, including “alt-light,” as a gateway to “alt-right.” Worse, they categorized both anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism as right-wing. Extremist Muslims and Jews hate each other. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center put them together as right-wing allies. Such an equation prevents admission of the fact that anti-Semitism is the bigger problem, and largely jihadi.
United States official data for 2019 shows that more than 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed against Jews, while 13 percent are directed against Muslims (about the same as all Christians).
The Anti-Defamation League jumped on the bandwagon of fearmongering over “right-wing” terrorism, by launching its own study of American “extremist violence.” In January 2019, the ADL reported right-wing extremists as the “biggest threat” by the “numbers.” The report uses the term “white supremacist” interchangeably with “right-wing.” Here, critical race theory meets left-wing partisanship.
But the ADL does not fully reveal its data or methods. By contrast, official statistics show that whites (72 percent of Americans) are underrepresented in hate crimes (52.5 percent of perpetrators of hate crimes in 2019 were white). And there is no upward trend in white perps.
Trends tend to get pushed behind unrepresentative events. In the deadliest attack of 2018, a white male shot 11 people to death at synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was officially categorized as white supremacist (although all the victims were white). The ADL effectively treated that single event as evidence for a multi-year trend.
New England Journal of Medicine Pushes Open Borders By Wesley J. Smith
I always say that if you want to see what will go terribly wrong in the country, read the professional journals. Radicalism. Woke perspectives. Transgender ideology. Critical Race Theory in health care. Socialized medicine. “Nature rights” advocacy. It’s all there in the world’s foremost professional publications, along with advocacy for policies reflecting those views.
That matters because the people who write for and publish these journals are part of the ruling elite who exert tremendous influence on legislation, executive decision making at federal and state levels, court rulings, business practices, etc..
The radicalization of the intellegentsia is a major factor in the hard-left shift we see in political advocacy and policy. In the latest example, the New England Journal of Medicine offers an article advocating for open borders for illegal alien children and their families. Literally. From, “When Undoing is Not Enough,” (the “undoing” refers to Trump border polices–which the authors claim was legal “torture,” and the goal is to reduce “trauma.”):
First, under the Biden administration’s leadership, the United States could minimize the amount of time that migrants spend in Mexico and in detention. We believe that unaccompanied children, pregnant women, and families should never have to wait to cross the border.
That would sure slow the flow, wouldn’t it? But not just “children:”
Second, the Biden administration could carefully consider the unintended consequences of allowing children, but not entire families, to enter the United States. This policy forces parents to choose between prolonging their children’s exposure to life-threatening trauma in Mexico and sending them into the United States unaccompanied.
And to sweeten the pot, free health care for all!
Thomas Sowell :The Great Elucidator By Kyle Smith
An inspiring one-hour documentary about the conservative public intellectual Thomas Sowell serves as a superb intro to his thinking.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.” Thomas Sowell, who combines a Mark Twain-level gift for apothegms with the rigor of a data scientist, said that back in 1998, but like many of his sparkling one-liners, it’s more strikingly true now than ever.
At 90, Sowell remains “one of the great minds of the past half century,” as host Jason L. Riley puts it in the one-hour PBS documentary Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, which can be viewed here, but fair warning: This film is a gateway drug. You are bound to get hooked on Sowell, just like many others interviewed in the film. These include podcaster Dave Rubin, a Silicon Valley executive with Overstock.com; a Dallas rapper named Eric July from the band Backwordz; and Sowell’s friend Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and linguist. Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author, makes a perfect guide because he is the Sowell whisperer: His new book Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, is about to hit shelves.
In a film written and produced by Tom Jennings, Riley takes us through how Sowell, who lost his dad before he was born and his mother when he was a small child, rose from poverty. His early years he spent in a house with no electricity in North Carolina, then an apartment in Harlem, where a family friend guided him to a love of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library when he was eight years old. At the University of Chicago, one of his professors was Milton Friedman, who proved unable to talk him out of being a Marxist. What did the trick was a government job. In the Department of Labor, Sowell found that increased minimum wages reduce employment, but this fact interested no one. “People in the government didn’t give a rip whether it worked or not. They were simply implementing the policy,” notes another black intellectual, columnist Larry Elder.
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