You want to become a scientist, an engineer, a mathematician, a doctor? Okay, but you have first to become a racist, and if you’re white, a penitent, and if you’re black, a victim.

The re-education camps of America, aka the universities, have a name for their introductory course of indoctrination for newcomers: the First-Year Experience, commonly referred to as FYE.

John Tierney reports and comments at City Journal:

The programs often start with a “common read”, a book sent to everyone the summer before school starts, and proceed with lectures, discussion groups, seminars, courses, exercises, field trips, art projects, local activism, and whatever else the schools will fund. The programs are typically run not by professors but by “cocurricular professionals”—administrators lacking scholarly credentials who operate outside the regular curriculum. They don’t need to master an academic discipline or impart an established body of knowledge. They create a cocurriculum of what they want students to learn, which usually involves a great deal of talk about “diversity” and “inclusion”.

These professionals seem to lean even further left than the faculty, and in some ways they have more influence. They get to the students early, before classes begin, and they’re inescapable. By choosing your courses carefully, you can avoid the progressive sermonizing that passes for scholarship in some departments, but everyone has to undergo the orientation and first-year programs. You may have come to study computer science or literature or biochemistry, but first you’ll have to learn about social justice, environmental sustainability, gender pronouns, and microaggressions. You may have been planning to succeed by hard work, but first you’ll have to acknowledge your privilege or discover your victimhood. If you arrived at college hoping to broaden your intellectual horizons, you’ll quickly be instructed which ideas are off-limits. …

When administrators of these first-year programs convened this year, they chose to be addressed by author Julie Lythcott-Haims.

As an undergraduate at Stanford, she had been required to take a course called “Western Culture”, but she and other students succeeded in eliminating the requirement by joining with Jesse Jackson in protests where they chanted, “Hey-hey, ho-ho. Western Culture’s got to go!”

In Africa the doctrine is known as Boko Haram.

She went on to Harvard Law School and a brief career in corporate law before returning to Stanford as the dean of freshmen, which enabled her to put her cultural philosophy into practice.

As dean of freshmen, she insisted on choosing books that “fostered a sense of community and belonging”. And now, after leaving academia, she has written just such a book herself, Real American, which she calls “a post-poetry memoir”.

She said in her address:

Mine is a memoir of being black and biracial in a country where black lives weren’t meant to matter. … I am privileged. I have privilege that I’m aware of and more privilege that I don’t even know.

The daughter of a white British immigrant and black American doctor who was once assistant surgeon general of the United States, she grew up in good neighborhoods and thrived at school academically and socially. In high school, she was a cheerleader and president of her class as well as the student council. But despite those successes, despite the degrees from Stanford and Harvard, despite the well-paying jobs and a bestseller she published on how to raise children, her memoir is a saga of oppression.

She has discovered the awful cloud behind all those silver linings by dredging up an incident from her high school days. The great pivot point of the book, the moment that would haunt her for decades, was her discovery of graffiti on a birthday card that a friend had taped to her locker. Someone, presumably a classmate jealous of her achievements, had defaced the card by scrawling the N-word, misspelled as “Niger”. 

This is the story of how despite all that privilege and opportunity, America made me loathe my black self, my brown skin …

… she tells the audience. It’s not clear why one semiliterate teenage bigot should represent America, but Lythcott-Haims quickly segues into denunciations of the police, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and whites in general, to repeated applause from the (mostly white) audience. She explains why she has left a wide margin on each page of the book (“As a black woman I do not have access to the full page”) and reads a passage: “You think your whiteness makes you better than the rest of us. You make us your scapegoat. Your excuse for your violent rage.”

What violent rage, we ask rhetorically, would that be?

In her memoir, the well-meaning liberal whites are continually guilty of unintentional slights. Don’t try suggesting that she overlook them, because she classifies “Get over it” as yet another microaggression. The nonliberals in the book are simply evil. When Peter Thiel and other classmates of hers launched the conservative Stanford Review, she is “scared to death of these unhooded whites printing their disdain for our existence”. When she sees Clint Eastwood speak to an empty chair representing President Obama at the Republican National Convention, she believes that it “symbolizes the chair underneath the Black man about to be hanged from a Southern tree”. 

Yes, it’s all part of her mission to “foster a sense of community and belonging”, as long as the community doesn’t include any Republicans.

The writing is dreadful, but you have to give her credit for knowing her audience. The first-year administrators give her a standing ovation, and afterward they wonder to one another what she charges for a campus speech. The intercollegiate competition for black authors has driven up their speaking fees …

Last year, when the University of Oregon assigned Between the World and Me for the common read, it paid Ta-Nehisi Coates $41,500 for a campus appearance (while also meeting his contractual requirement to be supplied with Nature Valley Oats and Dark Chocolate granola bars), and afterward students complained that the university hadn’t gotten its money’s worth. Coates was scheduled for a speech and question-and-answer session lasting 75 minutes, but he left the stage after 40 minutes without taking questions. Somehow, it didn’t feel very inclusive.

For colleges that can’t afford Coates, the first-year conference is a chance to scout for cheaper alternatives. Besides Lythcott-Haims, there’s another autobiographer, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who gets a warm reception for her book When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.

The administrators pack another ballroom to hear about All American Boys, a novel written to protest the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. The protagonist is an amalgam of the two martyrs, with a few details changed. Instead of pounding a white man’s head against the sidewalk, as Martin did, or shoplifting and then assaulting a police officer, as Brown did, this young African-American man is a peaceful, law-abiding customer at a convenience store, wrongly accused of shoplifting by a white police officer who slams his head against the pavement. The novel’s coauthors, one white and one black, extol their collaboration as a model for how the races can learn to communicate with each other—or at least communicate in one direction, as the white author, Brendan Kiely, tells the audience. “The most important thing I can do as a white man is listen, listen, listen to the truth coming from communities of color across the country,” he says. “I especially want to reckon with whiteness. Because as a white person I can’t talk about racism or dismantle the system that supports it or eradicate racism itself without first grappling with whiteness. It is whiteness that perpetuates racism.”

How does a white person “reckon with whiteness”? What must he do to “grapple with whiteness”? Presumably, that’s what FYE teaches you.

Clearly, since “whiteness” is what “perpetuates racism”, and since white people cannot be anything but white, the only way to bring about the elimination of racism is by extinguishing the white race.

The disadvantage of the social surgery would be the loss of the most important academic subject, the laying off of thousands of “diversity” officers, the obsolescence of hundreds of books, and – well, what do you do when your enemy vanishes? Whom shall you hate for all your frustrations? Whom blame for your failures?

While the days of hate last, while accusation, shame, guilt, obsequiousness can still be freely indulged, enjoy the presence of whiteness while ye may! Carpe diem.

The crowd applauds and listens raptly as Kiely sketches the possibilities for using this book on campus. “We should be talking about race consciousness in all our disciplines of higher learning,” he tells the administrators. “You can talk about it in your math classes. You can talk about in your education classes. You can talk about it in your humanities classes.”

He doesn’t explain the connection between calculus and Trayvon Martin, but then, he doesn’t have to. This audience knows that racism is the all-consuming topic in higher education. It has been the most popular theme for common-read books for the last three years, according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which has tracked these programs across the country for the past decade. The latest report by the NAS, a group dedicated to reviving traditional liberal arts education (and a haven for non-progressives in academia), analyzes some 350 schools’ common-read books and finds a “continuing obsession with race” as well as an “infantilization of students”.

The obsession depends on the infantilization.

Can real education ever be resurrected? Will a deeply humiliating defeat of the race-obsessed Left in the forthcoming elections restore common sense to the institutions of learning – and save the white race?

Late in the fourth night of their burning and looting spree in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the mob of “peaceful protestors” invaded the orderly streets of residential areas where families slept – safely, they believed – in their houses. For the greatest of all causes, the ending of the appalling racism that starkly characterizes America, they honked car horns, beat on buckets, and yelled “Wake up! Wake up!” How dared people sleep, indifferent to the cause and its righteous protestors? How dared they not come out and join in the yelling? Had not the mob and their political aiders and abettors – stalwart anti-racist Democrats in Congress and governors’ mansions, and town halls in Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Kenosha – told them that “silence is violence“? And violence, they want to impress upon you, is an appalling thing that must be stopped.

What we must all wake up to realize is that they – the victims, the black race martyrs and their legions of white empathizers – have succeeded in making American politics all about race.

They have won.

Do you think you can go out to dine with a friend, sit there enjoying a meal and and a chat while black people are being martyred by police officers, white men, Republicans, and President Trump?

Just try it and see what can befall you –

This dramatic description of a scene on video is by Dominic Sandbrook, writing at the Daily Mail on August 27, 2020:

The footage could hardly be more chilling …

A woman sits at a table, recoiling in fear. She is penned in, surrounded by a mob of masked men and women, their clenched fists raised menacingly in the air.

Again and again the rhythmic chants go up: “White silence is violence! No justice, no peace!” The woman shrinks further back in her chair. The mob moves in. Some of them lean into her face. They stand over her, fists raised, shrieking and shouting, demanding that she too raises her arm in salute.

On and on it goes. Nobody comes to her defense. It’s an awful scene, reminiscent of the street scenes in Germany in the spring of 1933, when Nazi thugs demanded that ordinary people raise their arms in homage to Hitler.

This was Washington, D.C., one of the great capitals of the democratic West, just two days ago.

The woman’s name is Lauren Victor, and her crime was to be having dinner at a Washington restaurant. The mob were, inevitably, Black Lives Matter protesters, roaming the streets of the US capital during their latest demonstrations about alleged police brutality towards black Americans.

The predominantly white activists were trying to force diners to raise their fists and join in with their chants. Miss Victor … said no.

All the other diners, including the friend Miss Victor is sitting with, are shown to have obeyed the command of the mob and are meekly holding up their fists.

Ironically, it turns out she had previously been on Black Lives Matter marches herself, but now she just wanted to have her dinner in peace. “It didn’t feel right” she said afterwards, adding that she felt “under attack”.

That seems a remarkably understated way of putting it. I wonder how many of us, in Miss Victor’s shoes, would show the same grace and guts under such horrendous pressure. In almost every detail, it’s a scene that turns your stomach. …

The facemasks give the episode a deeply sinister feel. …

A glimpse of the scene is shown here, after another sequence of an angry black woman berating a diner, screaming invective at him and ordering him to put his mask on. Dammit, he does!

Fox News reported the episode with the brave (even if otherwise politically misguided) Lauren Victor, and added this:

Another video that went viral Monday showed a man and a woman sitting outside a restaurant when a crowd of protesters confronted them. Other diners nearby all complied with the protesters’ demands to raise their fists, but the man and woman kept their hands on the table. The protesters screamed expletives at the couple as they demanded they raise their fists. One protester appeared to yell at the man, “Pasty piece of sh–.”

Because, you see, he is passionately anti-racist.

At a congressional hearing on reparations in June, 2019, passionate Ta-Nehisi Coates argued with brilliant thinker Coleman Hughes:

 

We declare Hughes the winner of the debate.

What are our readers’ opinions?

Is the human species choosing extinction?

Mark Steyn writes about P. D. James’s novel The Children of Men:

The Children of Men endures as a meditation on the west at sunset. It is a quick read – a short book on a bigger question than anything roiling the news cycle …

Baroness James’s tale is set in Britain in the near future, in a world that is infertile: the last newborn babe emerged from the womb in 1995, and since then nothing.

Pets are doted on as child-substitutes, and churches hold christening ceremonies for cats.

The unneeded toys are burned, except for the dolls, which childless women seize on as the nearest thing to a baby and wheel through the streets. …

Sex itself becomes a bit of a chore. The authorities frantically sponsor state porn emporia promoting ever more recherché forms of erotic activity in an effort to reverse the populace’s flagging sexual desire just in case man’s seed should recover its potency. Alas, to no avail. … A bold conceit, at least to those who believe that shorn of all those boring procreation hang-ups we can finally be free to indulge our sexual appetites to the full.

[The] novel is set in the near future – very near in fact, next year, 2021 – in a world that is impotent, literally. The human race can no longer breed. The last children, the “Omega” generation born in 1995, are now adult. Schoolhouses are abandoned and villages are dying as an ever more elderly citizenry prefers for security reasons to cluster in urban centers. As the narrator writes:

The children’s playgrounds in our parks have been dismantled. For the first twelve years after Omega the swings were looped up and secured, the slides and climbing frames left unpainted. Now they have finally gone and the asphalt playgrounds have been grassed over or sown with flowers like small mass graves. The toys have been burnt, except for the dolls, which have become for some half-demented women a substitute for children… The children’s books have been systematically removed from our libraries. Only on tapes and records do we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programs do we see the bright, moving images of the young …

In one of the most striking scenes in the book, a fawn is seen happily loping round the altar in the chapel of Magdalen [pronounced Maudlin – ed] College in Oxford. … “Bloody animals,” rages the Magdalen chaplain. “They’ll have it all soon enough. Why can’t they wait?” It is an image of utter civilizational ruin … all lost to the beasts and the jungle:

In the [James] book, the “Warden of England” … knows an aging population wants “security, comfort, pleasure”, not untrammeled liberties. One discerns something similar in the west’s acceptance of Covid impositions: elderly societies will tend to be risk-averse, even if it means obeying orders to stay inside for six months.

P. D. James’s short novel is about loss of societal purpose in society: the symptoms are already well advanced in ours – convenience euthanasia, collapsed birth rates, [routine abortion, legal infanticide, sterilization by transgendering – ed], wild animals reclaiming empty villages on the East German plain, the rejection of the past that necessarily accompanies the abandonment of a future… It is a world of the middle-aged and old, a society on its last waltz.

So is the human species choosing extinction?

Unlikely? Impossible? Mark Steyn describes how Japan is already very like the society P. D. James visualizes. And it is not even a socialist country.

Socialism is the fast lane to despair and death.

If America chooses socialism this coming November, then certainly there is a Death Wish epidemic that will wreck our marvelous civilization.

Will it also put an end to the Human Age?

A great many Americans do not want their country to become an entirely different country, a socialist polity.

They do not want a government that is master and provider; they want a government that is hired guard.

How many are they? What proportion of the population? The forthcoming election will tell.

(Information for those who have not learnt American History or Civics, such as Americans under fifty-five who attended public schools and courses in “Studies” at university: if the ones who do want America to change into a United Socialist States of America vote for it in a majority by voting for the Socialist Democrats, they will not necessarily win the election. That depends on where they are. If they are mainly in two states, for instance, the free Republic will still be safe. The Electoral College gives power to the smaller states and protects the federal Republic from simple majoritarian democracy.)

Malcolm Pollack writes at American Greatness:

Looking at the yawning rift in American politics—the fundamentally incompatible visions of society and government that the two factions hold, the dehumanizing mutual antipathy that finds freer expression every day, the unforgettable damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power—can any of us imagine some way forward in which Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?  …

“Red” and “blue” have profoundly different visions of the scope and structure of the federal government, and of the role of government in American life generally. …

Red believes that the American founding was a work of astonishing insight and inspiration and that it represents the best compromise yet struck by the minds of men to enable the possibility of ordered liberty and the individual citizen’s pursuit of happiness and prosperity.

Blue seems to believe increasingly that the whole thing was a sinister power-grab by a cadre of rich white males, designed to preserve and consolidate their immoral supremacy, and that the whole thing is so rotten that it should be torn up by its roots and replaced with something fairer and nobler. [No: something that somehow gives you everything you want free – ed] Blue has already revealed that it wishes to see the Second Amendment, the Senate, the Electoral College, and our nation’s borders abolished—and its grievances hardly end there.

We are fighting, then, not over who shall rule over the existing system, nor about whether the United States should be broken up into two distinct nations, but about whether the United States as currently constituted should continue to exist, or should be wholly replaced with an entirely new regime. … [Italicized emphasis in the original]

A characteristic of revolutions is that they rupture the fabric of history. In periods of high civilization, however, that fabric is strong: healthy societies exist not only in the present, but extend both backward and forward in time. The citizens of a robust and prosperous polity are taught from childhood to have a reverent appreciation for what their ancestors have bequeathed them, and a sense of duty to preserve, cherish, and build upon it for generations yet unborn. …

To rupture that fabric is far easier when it is already weakened—and this is precisely what has happened in America, and in the West more generally, over the past half-century. Insofar as the American past is taught or remembered at all today, it is as a litany of sins, deserving not propagation, but denunciation. …

Civil war is nothing to wish for. But under the name of “revolution,” it can be a powerful attractor, especially in an era of pathological presentism. Have we already crossed the event horizon? …

These are dangerous times. …

He foresees the possibility of civil war. He makes no prediction as to its likely outcome.

Right now we can only hope that those who want to keep the United Sates of America as a free Republic will vote in vast numbers in every state for Donald Trump.

We need to be afraid. And armed.

A spruce passenger and cargo ship, named Western Civilization, was cruising the oceans. A million leaking vessels with constantly stalling engines, crowded with emigrants – whole populations from every Third World country – surrounded it. All the passengers from the leaking ships set out in rowboats and tried to board Western Civilization. Those that got aboard her, the terrorist leaders, slit the throats of her captain and officers just to teach them that they weren’t superior. They locked all the passengers, whom they called “the Whites” although they were of many races and colors, in the hold. Then they bombed the engine room. Western Civilization sank. The leaky tubs sank. The overloaded rowboats capsized. This is the way the human species ended, with a bang and billions of gurgles.

Ilana Mercer writes at American Greatness:

Racism is a lot of things. But there is one kind of thing we are not permitted to believe it is.  When a 5-year-old white child is executed [murdered – ed] by a black man with a bullet to the head, as the tyke rode his bike, that can’t be racism. Ask the cultural cognoscenti. They’ll tell you: That’s never racism.

Otherwise, almost anything involving the perpetually aggrieved black community counts as racism.

Students hoist a “thin blue line” flag in solidarity with police: racism.

A black male is asked for his driver’s license: racism. Of course it’s systemic. Are you stupid, or something?

A white politician proclaims that “all lives matter”: Come again? Are you kidding me?!

A museum curator fails to commit to the exclusion of the art of white men, including, presumably, the Old Masters: not racism; white supremacism. Be gone with you, Rembrandt and Vermeer!

A black student struggles with English grammar. English grammar is deemed racist. Take that, Dr. Johnson!

As you can see, accusations of racism are seldom grounded in reason or reality.

Racism, then, is just about anything other than the point-blank execution [murder – ed] of little Cannon Hinnant (white) on August 9 by Darius Sessoms (black), and the rape the other day by Dejon Dejor Lynn, 25, of his 96-year-old neighbor.

From the media industry’s modus operandi, we may comfortably deduce that the raped lady is almost certainly white.

How so?

Fully 73 percent of the residents of Ann Arbor, Michigan, are white. If the race of an unnamed victim of a crime is withheld, she’s most likely white. Were the victim Hispanic, the media industry would say so, and would forthwith withhold the picture and race of the “suspect”, so that the crime became an attack against a “minority”.

Similar black-on-white atrocities are a daily occurrence, documented, in moving images by the fearless and indefatigable journalist Colin Flaherty. They are either ignored by the media industry or described as racially neutral. …

Jack Kerwick, a Frontpage.com columnist and occasional American Greatness contributor, commands us to “say their names”:

David Dorn was a 77-year-old retired African-American police captain and family man. Say his name.

Paul and Lidia Marino, a couple in their mid-80s. Say their names!

Wendy Martinez: Say her name.

Jourdan Bobbish and Jacob Kudla: Teenagers tortured and murdered. Say their names.

Karina Vetrano: Attacked, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death while jogging. Say her name.

Phil Trenary: Treasury of the Chamber of Commerce in Memphis who was trying to rejuvenate the city’s economic life. Say his name.

Scott Brooks; Sebastian Dvorak; Serge Fournier; Tessa Majors; Dorothy Dow; Lorne Ahrens; Brent Thompson; Michael Krol; Patrick Zamarripa.

Say their names.

The prototypical American victims of racial hatred were 21-year-old Channon Christian and 23-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom, of Knoxville, Tennessee. Their slaughter, in 2007, was dismissed as a garden-variety murder and rape. But there is no finessing the white-hot racial hatred seared into their mangled, white bodies. …

Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused “by the tearing,” or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash. White trash.

It’s easy to kill Whites (including their black collaborators) now because they have been softened up by accusation. They are fragile according to Robin DiAngelo, who explains how that is the case in her book, White Fragility.When “racially challenged”, she instructs, Whites react either with “argumentation” or with “silence”, either or both of which condemns them.

Whiteness is wrong. Whiteness is an original sin.

Barbara Kay wrote – with horror, in disgust – at the National Post about Whiteness Studies (WS):

WS teaches that if you are white, you are branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin. You can try to mitigate your evilness, but you can’t eradicate it. The goal of WS is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone — eternal victimhood for nonwhites, eternal guilt for whites — and was most famously framed by WS chief guru, Noel Ignatiev … : “The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race …”

Noel Ignatiev (who is white) also wrote bluntly in a Harvard Magazine article titled Abolish the White Race:

Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as “the white race” is destroyed—not “deconstructed” but destroyed.

Barbara Kay is in no doubt that such declarations, though they use weasel words like “social construct” to soften genocidal intention, do result in the actual killing of people in the real world. She wrote:

One could say with justice that the 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who obliterated almost 3,000 individuals in the trade towers were only acting out the anti-Western hatred their ivory tower “colleagues” have been incubating amongst their flocks for nigh on 40 years.

Since to be White is to be racist, since racism is a sin of Whites only, and since the sin of Whiteness cannot be eradicated, the only way to get rid of racism is to obliterate all Whites.

It’s perfectly logical. It stands to reason.

The muzzle policy is all about power and fear. The muzzle is a badge of subservience and submission. What is happening to us is the final closing down of centuries of human liberty and the transformation of one of the freest countries on Earth into a regimented, conformist society, under perpetual surveillance, in which a subservient people scurries about beneath the stern gaze of authority.

So Peter Hitchens writes at the Daily Mail.

We strongly agree with him.

Here’s more of his article:

England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, … said that wearing face masks would do little to combat the outbreak [of the Coronavirus]. While noting that if someone was infected, they might reduce the danger of spreading the disease by covering their faces, Prof. Whitty said wearing a face mask had almost no effect on reducing the risk of contracting the illness.

He stated: “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.”

Also in March, the Advertising Standards Authority banned two firms’ advertisements for masks, saying that the adverts were “misleading, irresponsible and likely to cause fear without justifiable reason”.

At about the same time, Dr Jenny Harries, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer, warned that people could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting Covid by wearing muzzles. She said masks could “actually trap the virus”, and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in. She explained: “For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.”

On April 3, the other Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, said he did not believe healthy people wearing them would reduce the spread of the disease in the UK.

The British Government has also zig-zagged. As recently as June 24, in a series of official pamphlets for reopening shops and services, the Department for Business and Enterprise said repeatedly: “The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.”

This was true at the time and it is still true. The evidence is indeed weak. There is plenty of research showing that the case for muzzles is poor, especially a survey done for the dental profession four years ago, which quietly vanished from the internet after mask opponents began to cite it.

The scientific papers in favor of muzzling are full of weak, hesitant words such as “probably”, “could” and “may” – which can equally well be expressed as “probably not”, “could not” or “may not”.

There has not been any great discovery in the past few days.

Generally, the main way of discovering if something works is the Randomised Control Trial (RCT), in which the proposed treatment or method is tested directly and thoroughly.

This hasn’t been done with muzzles, probably because it would be a bit difficult and possibly because muzzle zealots fear the results would not help their case.

Amazingly, the chief spokesman for science in this country, who should surely support proper rigor, has dismissed such RCTs. Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society, sneered at “inappropriate” RCTs as “methodological fetishism”. He did this while advocating more compulsory muzzle-wearing when he appeared on Radio 4’s Today program on July 7 – as the political lobbying for muzzles intensified.

All that has changed is the politics. Why are they changing? Interestingly, Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s muzzle edict was the first action by the London Government which actually copied a move made by Nicola Sturgeon’s extremely Left-wing Edinburgh administration.

There are many signs that it has not been thought through, at least by scientists.

Why are we more likely to spread Covid in a shop than we are to do so in a pub or restaurant? The question cannot be answered.

What evidence there is certainly suggests that the risk of transmission is greater if we linger longer, but the Government does not dare close down the catering trade again, because it would be wildly unpopular and because these businesses are on the point of bankruptcy – and such an action would shut them.

The truth is that the muzzle policy is all about power and fear.

The Government began its wild, disproportionate shutdown of the country by spreading fear of a devastating plague that would destroy the NHS and kill untold thousands.
Now, as many people find that Covid-19 is, in fact, nothing of the kind, new ways have to be found to keep up the alarm levels.

One was exposed on Friday by the superb scientists of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. Puzzled by the way that Covid death figures in England continued to pour in, while they had all but ceased in Scotland, they looked at the figures from Public Health England (PHE). And they found, in their own devastating words:

It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community. Anyone who has tested Covid positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE Covid death figures. By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but been successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.

This problem would be avoided by having a simple cut-off, where those who tested positive more than 28 days ago were no longer counted as Covid deaths. Scotland does this. That is why its figures are lower.

Findings are now also pouring in which suggest that a horribly high number of the excess deaths during the last few months were not caused by Covid, but by people failing to seek treatment for heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

Despite the propagandists of the BBC, which has tried as hard as it can never to mention the legions of dissenting scientists who dispute the Government’s policy, people are beginning to wonder, in increasing numbers, if they might have been taken for a ride.

This Government has no great authority. It is a Cabinet of undistinguished, inexperienced unknowns, headed by an exhausted and empty Prime Minister whose sparkle, such as it was, is fast fading.

In a few weeks’ time, the Government faces the onset of what may be the worst economic crisis since 1929. It needs to keep the fear levels up to maintain its authority.

One way of doing this is the ceaseless promotion of an alleged “second wave” of Covid, for which there is no evidence.

Another is to undertake a ferocious testing policy. This is now happening in Leicester where testers go from door to door to discover people who are “infected” with Covid, even if they have no symptoms (which is usually the case) and are perfectly healthy. Then they can raise the alarm and close down the city.

But muzzling the populace is even better. People such as me, who think Ministers’ response to the virus is wildly out of proportion, have until now been able to live amid the propaganda, trying to stay sane.

But the muzzle is a badge of subservience and submission. Anyone who dons it publicly is agreeing to the Government’s crazy assessment of the level of danger.

Societies in which citizens are discouraged from speaking out against the regime, as this has become, are pretty disgraceful. But countries where the citizens are compelled to endorse the opinion of the state are a serious step further down the path to totalitarianism.

It is even worse than that.

Look at the muzzled multitudes, their wide eyes peering out anxiously from above the hideous gag which obscures half their faces and turns them from normal human beings into mouthless, obedient submissives.

The psychological effect of these garments, on those who wear them, is huge.

And it also has another nasty result for society as a whole.

Dissenters, who prefer not to muzzle themselves, are made to stand out from the surrendered majority, who then become quite keen on pressuring the non-conformists to do as they are told, and on informing against them.

I predicted the same outcome during the House Arrest period in April, and was mocked for it, but it came true.

When all this began, I felt fear. But it was not fear of the disease, which was clearly overstated from the start.

It was fear of exactly what is happening to us, the final closing down of centuries of human liberty and the transformation of one of the freest countries on Earth into a regimented, conformist society, under perpetual surveillance, in which a subservient people scurries about beneath the stern gaze of authority.

It is my view that, if you don that muzzle, you are giving your assent to that change.

Why does Joe Biden, the senile Democrat nominee for the US presidency, insist that masking should be compulsory?

Rush Limbaugh has an answer:

Rush Limbaugh believes that Biden’s support for forced masking is really all about the candidate’s basement strategy. The Biden team has mostly confined Joe to the basement of his Delaware home in an effort to preserve his poll numbers. It’s a good strategy for a 77-year-old gaffe-prone candidate who a majority of likely voters believe has dementia …

According to Limbaugh, Biden’s calls for mandatory masking represents Biden’s doubling down on his basement strategy. …

“This is how Plugs intends to keep himself unavailable,” Limbaugh told [his radio] listeners on Friday. “Plugs” is Limbaugh’s nickname for Joe Biden, due to the obvious hair plugs on Biden’s head. “It’s just too dangerous, folks, to go out there. Everybody must wear the mask for three months because they can’t afford for Joe Biden to leave the basement.”

For the Left in general, anywhere and everywhere, the pandemic is a gift of an excuse to compel obedience. They tried it on with global warming, but that didn’t work. This time it’s different. People everywhere, all over the globe, are covering their faces on the orders of their masters.

This forced masking is grooming for totalitarianism.

We are being groomed for totalitarianism. 

“The complete extinction of mankind is not a chance external consequence of the socialist ideal but a fundamental and organic part of socialist ideology.”

“The death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of extinction – it constitutes the goal of socialism.” 

The Russian writer – and great mathematician – Igor Shafarevich makes and proves these assertions in his very interesting book The Socialist Phenomenon*.

Socialism goes nine-tenths of the way to destroying the human race by suppressing individuality, anathematizing the primacy of the self. (The notion that doing this is morally good descends from Christianity, which teaches you to serve the needs of others before your own, but Shafarevich is a Christian and does not say this.)

Whatever gratifies individual needs or characterizes and exalts the unique person, socialism takes away. The aim is to have human society as an anthill, all inhabitants looking the same, each serving all to gain common purpose.

“In the contemporary leftist movement, the theme of the struggle against individuality is particularly strong.”

He shows how the steps being taken now were taken by socialist movements since ancient times.

Now, as then, the ideologists work to bring about a “series of revolutions” – social and racial, sexual and artistic.

Attempts are made “to overcome sex distinction“, because “the [capitalist] cult of making distinctions, which serves only for oppression, is now being swept away by awareness of resemblance and ‘identity’. … Both sexes are moving towards general Humanity”.

“Socialism is equally hostile … to those aspects of life in which man can participate only as an individuality and cannot be replaced by anyone else. Cultural creativity, particularly artistic creativity, is an example. … In periods when socialist movements are on the increase, the call for the destruction of culture is heard ever more distinctly.”

In the contemporary left radical socialist movements –

“Culture is understood by them to be ‘bourgeois’ and ‘repressive’; the goal of art is understood as an ‘explosion’ or the destruction of culture.”

Not only literature, but also literacy itself, are criticized as “typically bourgeois elements of culture.”

He writes of “the naïve adventurism, the arrogant boastfulness, the disposition to petty dishonesty and disruptive behavior, a certain inanity” that flavors such movements, and that we are seeing much in evidence now in 2020 America.

“These features are inherent in a majority of socialist movements in the initial period of their development.”

Everything the Left touches it ruins: art, architecture, literature, music, human relations, happiness, life.

And beauty.

This comes from an article by Guido Mina di Sospiro at New English Review, August 2020:

Theodor W. Adorno, the philosopher as well as trained musician who belonged to the Marxist Frankfurt School, wrote the influential The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949). In it, he essentially polemicized against beauty itself, having beauty become a component in the ideology of advanced capitalist societies. Art, and music, contributed to the sustainability of capitalism by making it ‘aesthetically pleasing’ and ‘agreeable’. Only avant-garde music would tell the truth by representing human suffering. ‘What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man … The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks … Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.’ Ugliness, in other words, was to be reproduced in the new language of avant-garde music, and art in general.”

Socialism will deprive you of freedom, family, property, beauty, books, privacy, achievement …

Once it has captured your country, you might positively look forward to extinction.

 

*The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich, Gideon House Books, 2019. Foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Students at the Claremont McKenna Colleges argued that objective truth is a social construct devised by “white supremacists” to “attempt to silence oppressed peoples” in a letter to the Pomona College president. …

So Tom Ciccotta reports at Breitbart.

These atavists say in their letter:

Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of “subjectivity vs. objectivity” as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth – “the Truth” – is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment …

Yes, the idea is “rooted in the Enlightenment” (and ancient Greece). And it is True.

Contrary to these silly claims now prevalent in almost all Western academies – lost as they are to the earthly powers of darkness – there are objective facts. Though science owes everything to Socratean doubt, and though we ourselves favor the motto “Scio nescio”, we acknowledge that there is objective truth, and it is worth seeking, however elusive it may be philosophically.

As we once heard a real scientist say: “The blood does circulate.”

Who dares believe it when the Leftist bullies want it denied?

We do.

Another report at Breitbart, by the same writer, tells us more about this nonsense going on in the great intellectual power-houses of the nation:

Brooklyn College Professor of Math Education Laurie Rubel argued this week on Twitter that the mathematical equation 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy”. Rubel’s tweet was retweeted and promoted by several academics at universities and colleges around the nation. …

The tweets are part of a larger trend in recent scholarship by American academics, many of which have argued that “objective truth” is a social construct. …

Harvard Ph.D. candidate Kareem Carr suggested that math should be reevaluated because it was primarily developed by white men. …

A few academics have pushed back. James Lindsay, one of the academics behind a series of hoax papers that were published in “social justice” journals, reminded Rubel and her peers that mathematical truths are objective.

“It’s certainly the case, and the Woke need to be held firmly to the point, that feats of engineering like space travel and rocketry utterly depend upon accepting stable meanings of mathematical statements like 2+2=4 as objectively true, not mere accidents of culture,” Lindsay tweeted.

Okay, call it White Math (although it owes much to eastern cultures, particularly to India). Thing is, it works.

White Math works, and any other math (if it exists) not in agreement with White Math can’t work, won’t work.

So White Math is supreme. Like it, Professors Rubel and PH.D candidate Carr, or lump it.

A book titled White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo is a best seller written to make Whites ashamed and Blacks sad.

It is a bad, nasty, destructive book.

How do we know?

Shamelessly shirking even a glance into it ourselves, we quote reviews by two critics whose judgment we trust:

Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:

At a time when violent radicals are attacking America and its institutions as fundamentally and irredeemably racist, Robin DiAngelo may well be the woman of the hour. A 63-year-old professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, she’s a big name in multicultural education and in the burgeoning field of Whiteness Studies, which, unlike other identity-group “studies”, exists not to exalt the group in question but to demonize it. In the words of National Post columnist Barbara Kay, Whiteness Studies teaches that to be white is to be “branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin. You can try to mitigate your evilness, but you can’t eradicate it. The goal…is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone – eternal victimhood for non-whites, eternal guilt for whites.”

DiAngelo, just so you know, is white. …

Two years ago she published a book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, that has been on the bestseller list ever since …

Her message: all whites are indeed eternally guilty, for they’re all racists, and all “people of color” are their eternal victims. Don’t think you can escape the racist label by saying “I judge people by what they do, not who they are” or “I don’t see color; I see people.” DiAngelo doesn’t buy into the idea of colorblindness. Nor does she have any patience for Martin Luther King’s sentiments about the content of one’s character. “Individual whites,” DiAngelo explains, “may be ‘against’ racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group,” and are consequently racists.

The flip side of this tenet is that blacks can’t ever be racists. “While a white person may have been picked on – even mercilessly – by being in the numerical minority in a specific context,” DiAngelo contends, “the individual was experiencing race prejudice and discrimination, not racism.” Hence, even though Barack Obama was president of the United States for two terms, he’s still structurally subordinate to some white guy in a shack in the Appalachians.

Don’t dare tell DiAngelo that “focusing on race is what divides us”. According to her, race in America is a constant existential crisis that we can only fairly address by focusing on it constantly. DiAngelo admits that race is continuously on her mind and that it’s ever been thus. … As far as DiAngelo is concerned, her obsession with racial identity isn’t weird but admirable, and her goal is to make her white readers, students, and diversity trainees as obsessed as she is with their place in “a system of racial inequality that benefits whites at the expense of people of color”.

But what, you ask, if you can’t think of circumstances under which you’ve actually benefited from your whiteness? When I was in high school in Queens, N.Y., the student body of about 5000 was roughly 20% white gentile, 20% black, 20% Asian, 20% Hispanic, and 20% Jewish. I don’t remember those labels mattering in the slightest; kids weren’t picked on because of their ethnic identities but because they were fat or short, nerds or sissies. Later, being black would’ve been a boon to me; as somebody who attended a state university for financial reasons, I know that if I’d been black, my SAT scores would’ve given me a free ride through the Ivy League college and grad school of my choice and swept me into any one of a number of lucrative career paths. No, I’m not saying I’ve been seriously stung by affirmative action; on the contrary, I’m glad to know I never got special treatment, and I wouldn’t have wanted to go to Harvard or Yale anyway. But there are plenty of whites – and Asians too – who’ve been royally screwed over by racial preferences. …

DiAngelo … is  a woman who’s monetized her own pathological obsession with race. Instead of seeking help for this sickness, she plays healer to the healthy. She might celebrate the fact that America is the world’s least racist country, that e pluribus unum is a remarkable, unprecedented reality; instead, the effect of her mischief is to help preserve and deepen whatever racial divisions do exist. Her grim ideology of race is crude, dehumanizing, insulting to black and white; it places us all, without regard to individual qualities or actions or accomplishments, into fixed categories of oppressor and oppressed; it condemns every last one of us to life sentences, alongside DiAngelo herself, in an exceedingly dreary prison of the mind.

John McWhorter writes at The Atlantic:

In 2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me. Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings. I see no connection between DiAngelo’s brand of reeducation and vigorous, constructive activism in the real world on issues of import to the Black community. And I cannot imagine that any Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome. …

Her answer to white fragility … entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.