Our Western civilization is roiled by conflict; political struggles of the utmost importance.

Some call them “wars”. They are being fought mostly without weapons and violence, though one side (the wrong side of course) often resorts to physical attack, convinced that its righteousness justifies and demands it.

We quote from an article by Paul Collits at the Australian magazine Quadrant. (Our cuts include most of the specifically Australian references.)

By my reckoning there are six key wars, all of which must be identified, understood and, most of all, fought.

First, there is the war that must be won against political correctness in all its forms.  This is a fight between the elites and the punters.  It is a battle for the heart and soul of our society.  On one side are the careerists and ideologues of the fevered swamps of Washington, Canberra and so on; on the other, the deplorables, the Reagan Democrats, the Howard Battlers, the Struggle Street listeners tuned in to talkback radio, the small businessmen and women, the two-income families who want what is right for their kids. …

Second, there is the war against environmentalism in all its guises.  The god of “sustainability”, born in the 1980s … is now so embedded in schools, universities and media it is not remotely clear how one might fight back.  The god of sustainability has delivered to us the scourges and nonsenses that are “peak oil”, “climate change” and “renewable” energy.

Third, there is the war between Islam and the West.  This takes many forms – from global migration of economic refugees, to sharia law, welfare fraud, gangs and terrorism.  Its fronts are the banlieu of Paris, the bookshops of Lakemba and the streets of Melbourne.  Taking the side of Islam in this war is politics 101 for today’s “leaders”.

Fourth, there is the war against the Administrative State.  The State’s overreach is now all but complete.  The nanny state rules our lives.  It is the tool by which political correctness is enforced, by which freedom of speech and freedom of belief are purged and personal conduct regulated. Paranoia, you say? … The State’s nannyism combines with political correctness to haul the innocent before the faux courts of our time … Their crime? Saying that which others do not want heard. …

Fifth, there is the war between globalism and nationalism. The Davos brigade, the Soros network of lavishly funded activists, and their many lackeys in politics, Silicon Valley and elsewhere, lead the charge. Their weapons are globalisation and technology.  Their institutions are global, not national. Their aim is global governance and the end of the nation state, with its old fashioned values of patriotism flag and family.

Finally, there is the war on truth. This is the biggest of them all. …  [We must fight for truth against] the victory of Derrida, Foucault and their fellow-travelling Marxists and neo-Marxists who occupy the commanding cultural heights of our society and have succeeded in embedding and seizing our key institutions – the media, political parties, schools, universities, Hollywood and now even the corporations. The whole phenomenon of fake news bespeaks their success. …

[Their] biggest victory … was over our poor dumb millennials, now two generations removed from any proper understanding of Western values and virtues, and the core value of the West is truth. Earlier, when I spoke of schools, I did not say “our” schools, for they no longer are. They, too, have been colonised. Their graduates will list the ills and crimes of the West and rattle them off by Pavlovian rote, and thus do we hear of a past populated by the likes of Simon Legree [the cruel slave-owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – ed] but seldom if ever of Wilberforce [who launched the successful campaign to free all the slaves in the British Empire – ed]. The ease with which, for example, the young are convinced of something patently untrue can be seen in the numbers of our young who lazily embrace the ersatz version of marriage now de rigueur. …

There are other battles outside the six wars, of course, but it would be hard to find a front or even a minor skirmish that is not a theatre of these six conflicts. …

In [the] “darkest hours” [of World War II] Churchill certainly did not believe that checking and defeating an existential threat to the very being of the British Isles would be easy, nor that it could be avoided. Everything was on the line. His own War Cabinet was divided.  A serious argument was made … that Britain should seek an accommodation with Hitler.  Much of the British army was stranded and exposed in a foreign land, albeit only 22 miles away at its closest. … Victory would be deemed by any reasonable appraisal as most unlikely. …

The two wars since – Vietnam and the second Iraq War – featured murky enemies, often hard to find and certainly hard to destroy, and new technologies. But far more telling was the lack of consensus at home about whether those wars should be fought at all — whether the enemy was, indeed, “the enemy”. What Churchill could count on was a united and angry populace … committed to the fight with heart and soul — “blood, sweat and tears”, as he put it. …

Who do we have manning the barricades today? 

The barricades of the wrong side, that is to say.

Justin Trudeau.  Macron.  Merkel. Theresa May. Jean-Claude Juncker.  Turnbull.  The Davos set.  The UN.  Pope Francis. Mark Zuckerberg. Oprah. Prince Charles. These are the figures that flit across the world’s TV screens and its collective frontal lobe, mouth their platitudes and move on to the next sound byte, their pronouncement’s on Islam’s amity or the wickedness of cheap power seldom questioned by a media imbued with the same views, the same agendas, the same presumption that projected virtue can trump the precedent of history. Just how they never explain. These leaders, so called, are almost to a man or woman, batting for the enemy by word and deed and silence.  The worst of them actively collaborate and work against the interests of their own people. …

If, on the off-chance, our young people might be cajoled to see [the film] Darkest Hour, they just might begin to see with a clarity not previously available to them how we are, indeed, involved in a number of lethal wars. To lose them will destroy their futures in ways even more insidious than Hitler or even Stalin could have imagined. And they might consider voting for folks who might be minded to fight the battles that matter now.  An outsider?  One hated by his own party?  Someone who sees enemies and understands how to fight them.  Someone willing to spare the niceties?  Someone willing to make his country great again?  Err, wait a minute …

Although at present we have on our side – the side of truth, freedom, civilized values, and the nation state – a great Commander-in-Chief in the person of President Trump, it is not at all clear at this time which side will be victorious.

In all the wars, the enemy is the Left. With its “political correctness”, environmentalism, alliance with Islam, deep-state socialism, globalism, and hatred of our civilization which it is determined to destroy, the Left has conquered the institutions of education, most of the media, the entertainment industry, and the pinnacles of power in many Western states. It held the pinnacle of power in the US for eight years and did much harm to America, making the people poorer and the country weaker; and to the world by upheaving populations, sending millions pouring out of shithole countries and flooding into our world. The tide is against us.

Will President Trump, standing alone among leaders as Churchill did, succeed as he did in turning the tide?

We had a commenter recently on our Facebook page who said that President Trump should “get off his ass” and do something. When we replied that he had achieved more in his first year than any other president in living memory, and against more deliberate hampering, blocking and resistance than any other president – and that he, the commenter,  only did not know this because he read the mainstream media which refused to report President Trump’s accomplishments – his further comment was a long string of hahahas.

As there must be millions who would also laugh at our assertion, it is time to list those accomplishments. And it is also time to name the conservatives who joined the hamperers, blockers and resisters in making it as hard for the president to achieve anything as they possibly could – out of sheer prejudice.

John Nolte has made such a list and named some of the most prominent guilty conservatives.

He writes at Breitbart:

Remember these names: Jonah Goldberg, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, Max Boot, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Joe Scarborough, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Jennifer Rubin, George Will, Josh Jordan, Tom Nichols, Charles Cooke, Stephen Hayes, Tim Miller, John Podhoretz, Nicole Wallace, Steven Schmidt, Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, Leon Wolf, David Brooks, Rick Wilson, Evan McMullin, Stuart Stevens, Red State, National Review, the Weekly Standard …

These are the so-called conservative men, women, and institutions who (among others) fought the hardest to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, all in the unforgivable hope that Hillary Clinton would become president.

These are so-called conservatives who have, for nearly two years now, been promoting themselves and fundraising by smearing Trump as incompetent and “not a real conservative,” as a “Democrat in sheep’s clothing” — when, in fact, all of that best describes #NeverTrump.

These are the so-called conservatives who — after Trump’s first year in office — have now been proven as wrong as wrong can be. If their conservative credentials lost all credibility during a 2016 campaign during which they used whatever residual influence they had to hand the Oval Office to Clinton, the proven results of the past year should mean that they are written off forever as idiots, quacks, mercenaries, and con men.

Trump has had, in my opinion, the most successful first year of any president since Ronald Reagan. And not just a consequential first year that has already built a legacy, but a conservative first year. Below, I do my best to list these accomplishments, but there are so many, forgive me if a few are missed:

• Real, honest-to-goodness tax reform and cuts — the most consequential in 30 years.
• Opening ANWR for oil exploration, an accomplishment few can appreciate who do not remember the 90s and what a sacred cow this is for the left.
• Killing the Obamacare mandate that brutalized those making less than $50,000 a year.
• The Islamic State (ISIS) has been decimated. [We would say obliterated– ed]
• After a 2016 of just 1.9 percent GDP growth, we have now had two quarters in a row of growth over three percent; predictions for the final quarter of 2017 are as high as four percent.
• [The appointment of] Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has already proven himself the perfect replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia.
• The Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines are a go — which means tens of thousands of jobs.
• A record number of judicial appointments on the appeals courts.
• The end of the War on Coal.
• A surge in coal mining after 2016’s decline.
• The end of the federal government’s violating the religious conscience through indefensible Obamacare mandates involving birth control and abortion pills.
• The civil rights movement for school choice is getting the green light throughout the country.
• Illegal immigration is way down.
• The stock market hit record highs 70 times in 2017, rising 5,000 points for the first time ever.
• The long-overdue recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
• We are free of the awful Paris climate treaty.
• Regulatory reform that is just getting started, but it has already had a hugely positive effect on our economy.
• Withdrawal from the Global Compact on Migration, which undercut American sovereignty.
• Return of nearly two million acres to the state Utah that the federal government had stolen.
• A $250 billion trade deal with China.
• Many of our NATO allies are finally paying their dues.
• Consumer confidence is the best we have seen in more than a decade.
• Pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in favor of the American worker and sovereignty.
• Trump has managed to get China to help rein in North Korea. [To some extent – ed]
• Black unemployment is at a 17-year low.
• Hispanic unemployment is at an all-time low.
• Overall unemployment is at [four point] one percent.
• Manufacturing jobs boom.
• Standing up for persecuted Christian minorities in the Middle East. [More needs to be done, but it’s a start – ed]
• Promoting Christmas.
• Banning [immigration] or demanding stronger vetting [of immigrants] from [predominantly Muslim] countries most likely to [export] terrorists.
• Housing sales are at an 11-year high.
• Ban on transgender military recruits.

Now, you need to close your eyes and imagine what the list above would look like had #NeverTrump won the day and made Hillary Clinton president.

Now, try to imagine any one of the 16 Republicans who competed [with Trump] for the 2016 nomination accomplishing all of this, or even having the courage to stand up to a media onslaught to accomplish all of this, or even being, yes, conservative enough to do things like pull us out of the Paris climate agreement (something the Republican establishment’s failed 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, opposes).

Trump’s conservatism, his competence, his willingness to stand up to gale force media hate to keep his promises, is unlike anything we have seen since 1981.

In the pursuit of only their own grift, personal fame, the gratification of bottomless egos, and a soft place to land among the Beautiful People, #NeverTrump lied to us, took our money, and fought tooth and nail to extend the disastrous Obama presidency into a third term.

And now, just one year into Trump’s presidency, #NeverTrump has once again been exposed for who they truly are — bitter, dishonest saboteurs more interested in their lofty place at the trough than the future of their own country.

All these bitter clingers have left now is to further degrade outlets such as the once-necessary National Review, a once-cherished laboratory of vibrant conservative ideas and thought, which is now a hangout for sore losers to keep rewriting the same column over and over and over again about how pure and virtuous they are, as they scold the rest of us for fighting for and sticking with a president who has delivered in ways they told us was not even within the realm of possibility.

So now the real conservatives can laugh – the longest string of triumphant hahahas they can manage while their breath lasts.

*

Later: WND provides an even longer list: 168 accomplishments.

The brilliant researcher – and self-declared atheist and conservative – Heather Mac Donald writes:

Another academic year, another fattening of campus diversity bureaucracies. Most worrisomely, the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields are now prime targets for administrative diversity encroachment, with the commercial tech sector rapidly following suit.

The pursuit of discovery and understanding in the Infinite Realm of the mind is a venture in liberation. It does not matter there whether your body is strong or weak, what color your skin is, or what you feel. You hunger for nothing but knowledge. No other appetites – alimentary, sexual, hubristic – vex you there.

To enter it, you turn to the study of science, technology, engineering, mathematics. The study of the humanities will not get you through the door.

There are people – most perhaps – who do not want to leave bodily hungers, emotion, the self and its desires behind. If they visit the Infinite Realm at all, it is to view it from the deck of a cruise ship of the Studies Line, named Women Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies, Diversity Studies, Gender Studies, Protest Studies, Oppression Studies, Peace Studies, Studies Without Borders.

And the glimpse they have of the Infinite Realm disturbs them. They see who goes in. For whom the door opens. The privileged.

And look – they are almost all men, too many of them white. You can tell they are unfeeling. They do not cast a compassionate glance at the tourist crowds leaning on the rails of the Studies ships, victims of exclusion oppression, yearning to be let in.

Oh, that unassailable citadel! Oh, that locked door! However many voyagers on the Studies ships were to batter it, it would not yield.

But the will of so many people, documented and undocumented, must not be frustrated.  If more women and “people of color” are not admitted in equal numbers to the white men, then the Infinite Realm must be changed. It can still be called the realm of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, but it must become a place where your body, your color, your sex, and above all your feelings matter. It must be feminized, diversified, gendered. It must become a temple where the new gods Diversity, Inclusion, Compassion preside.

The most significant new diversity sinecure has been established at the University of California, Los Angeles, where the engineering school just minted its first associate dean of diversity and inclusion. The purpose of this new position is to encourage engineering faculty to hire more females and underrepresented minorities, reports the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper. “One of my jobs,” the new dean, Scott Brandenberg, told the paper, is “to avoid implicit bias in the hiring process.”

The new engineering-diversity deanship supplements the work of UCLA’s lavishly paid, campus-wide Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Jerry Kang, whose 2016 salary was $444,000. Kang, one of the most influential proponents of the “implicit-bias” concept, already exerts enormous pressure throughout the university to hire for “diversity”. Even before his vice chancellorship was created, any UCLA professor hoping for the top rank of tenure had to write a “contributions to diversity” essay detailing his efforts to rectify any racial and gender imbalances in his department.

The addition of a localized diversity bureaucrat within the engineering school can only increase the focus on gender and race in hiring and admissions decisions. (Brandenberg, of course, expresses fealty to California’s beleaguered ban on racial and gender preferences in government. But it would be naive to think that the ubiquitous mandate to increase “diversity” does not inevitably tip the scale in favor of alleged victim groups.)

No evidence exists that implicit bias is a factor in the engineering school’s gender and racial composition. Its percentage of female undergraduate and graduate students – about one quarter – matches the national percentage reported by the American Society for Engineering Education. I asked the school’s spokesman, Amy Akmal, if UCLA Engineering was aware of any examples of the most qualified candidate being overlooked or rejected in a hiring search because of implicit bias; she ignored this fundamental question. (She also ignored a question about the new dean’s salary.)

Every science department in the country relentlessly strives to improve its national ranking through hiring the most prestigious researchers. It would be deeply contrary to their interests to reject a superior candidate because of gender or race. And given the pools of federal and private science funding available on the basis of gender and race, hiring managers have added incentive to favor “diverse” applicants. Contrary to the idea that females are being discriminated against in hiring, Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci found that female applicants for STEM tenure-track positions enjoyed a two-to-one advantage over similarly qualified males in paired resume experiments.

The director of UCLA’s Women in Engineering program trotted out the usual role model argument for gender-and race-conscious decision-making. Audrey Pool O’Neal told the Daily Bruin that she never saw anyone who looked like her (black and female) when she was an undergraduate and graduate student. “When I do teach classes, the female students let me know how much they appreciate seeing a woman in front of their classroom,” O’Neal said.

Why not appreciate seeing the best-trained scholar in front of your classroom? Any female who thinks that she needs a female in front of her in order to learn as much as she can, or to envision a career in a particular field, has declared herself a follower rather than a pioneer – and a follower based on a characteristic irrelevant to intellectual achievement. If it were really the case that a role model of the same gender is important to moving ahead, it would be impossible to alter the gender balance of a field, assuming such a mission to be worthwhile, which – absent a finding of actual discrimination – it is not. Marie Curie did not need female role models to investigate radioactivity; she was motivated by a passion to understand the world. That should be reason enough to plunge headlong into the search for knowledge.

The Columbia University Medical Center has just pledged $50 million to diversify its faculty and student body, reports the Wall Street Journal, part of a new $100 million diversity drive across the entire university. Never mind that Columbia University has already fruitlessly spent $85 million since 2005 toward the same end. Never mind that there is a huge gap between the MCAT scores of blacks and whites, which will affect the quality of subsequent hiring pools. Columbia’s vice provost for faculty diversity and inclusion regurgitates another classic of diversity boilerplate to justify this enormous waste of funds. “The reality is that you can’t really achieve excellence without diversity. It requires diverse thought to solve complex problems,” says vice provost Dennis Mitchell.

Mitchell’s statement is ludicrous on multiple fronts.Aside from the fact that the one thing never sought in the academic diversity hustle is “diverse thought”,  do Mitchell and his compatriots in the diversity industry believe that females and underrepresented minorities solve analytical problems differently from males, whites, and Asians? A core plank of left-wing academic thought is that gender and race are “socially constructed”. Why then would females and underrepresented minorities think differently if their alleged differences are simply a result of oppressive social categories?

Columbia’s science departments do not have 50/50 parity between males and females, which, according to Mitchell, keeps them from achieving “excellence”. Since 1903, Columbia faculty members have won 78 Nobel Prizes in the sciences and economics. The recipients were overwhelmingly male (and white and Asian); somehow, they managed to do groundbreaking work in science despite the relatively non-diverse composition of their departments.

The only thing that the academic diversity racket achieves is to bid up the salaries of plausibly qualified candidates, and redistribute those candidates to universities that can muster the most resources for diversity poaching. The dean of UCLA Engineering, Jayathi Murthy, laments that of the 900 females admitted to the undergraduate engineering program in 2016, only about 240 accepted the offer. “There are (about) 660 women there that are going somewhere else and the question is . . . is there an opportunity for us to do something differently,” she told the Daily Bruin.

Presumably, those 660 non-matriculants are getting engineering degrees at other institutions. If the goal (a dubious one) is to increase the number of female engineers overall, then it doesn’t matter where they graduate from. But every college wants its own set of “diverse” students and faculty, though one institution’s gain is another’s presumed loss.

The pressure to take irrelevant characteristics like race and sex into account in academic science is dangerous enough. But Silicon Valley continues to remake itself in the image of the campus diversity bureaucracy. Dell Technologies announced in September a new “chief diversity and inclusion officer” position. Per the usual administrator shuffle, the occupant of this new position, Brian Reaves, previously served as head of diversity and inclusion for software company SAP. Reaves will engage the company’s “leaders” in “candid conversations about the role of gender and diversity in the workplace,” said Dell chief customer officer Karen Quintos in a press statement. “Candid” means: you are free to confess your white cis-male privilege. “Candid” does not mean questioning Dell’s diversity assumptions, as this summer’s firing of computer engineer James Damore from Google made terrifyingly clear to any other potential heretics. …

Official scientific organizations have all turned obsessively to the diversity agenda. Any academic scientist who wants to move up in administration – or apply for grants, leave, or access to the conference circuit – must be on a crusade against his fellow scientists’ microaggressions and implicit bias. This is good news for the diversity industry, but bad news for America’s scientific competitiveness.

So why are scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians laughing?

Because, fortunately, university faculties of the STEM fields are not the Infinite Realm itself. Nor are the campuses of the Silicon Valley technology giants.

Funny that. The army of diversity administrators grows and grows. More and more STEM faculties in more and more universities appoint more and more diversity officers. But the frustration remains. Because that castle, which the people on the Studies cruises were told was the Infinite Realm, and which has been commandeered by the diversity police, and now has a day care annex, a free clinic, a gym, a safe place with coloring-in books and stuffed animal toys, a diner, unisex bathrooms, and 50 offices for diversity administrators (none for scientists, technologists, engineers or mathematicians), was not the real thing.

Truth is, the Infinite Realm is abstract. No matter who you are, of what tribe or caste or clan or breed or birth, if you can think you can enter. For the Infinite Realm is in your own head or else it does not exist for you at all. And no diversity officer, or law, or politically correct opinion, or Antifa riot, or grant from George Soros, can make any difference to that immutable fact.

Ezra Levant talks about the huge contribution one man made to our culture, to the English language, to the whole human race. He is a dead white man – and the greatest writer who has ever lived.

There are plotters on the Left who would exclude him from school curricula in America now, cut him out, have nothing more to do with him. He is irrelevant, they say, to the lives of this and that group of people. But the plotters will not be able to do it. He has provided them with the language in which they think, and to a large extent what they think about. They can ignore his works. They can refuse to utter his name. But though they don’t know it, he lives inside their heads. As long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, or English is spoken, or people have thoughts and passions, so long lives he.

Everything Dr. Jordan Peterson says in this video clip we heartily agree with:

… will guarantee you more of it.

James Kirchick writes at Tablet – a generally “liberal” magazine:

Yale’s Nakanishi Prize is awarded every spring to “two graduating seniors who, while maintaining high academic achievement, have provided exemplary leadership in enhancing race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College”. Normally, the bestowal of an undergraduate award, even at an august institution like Yale, is of interest to no one beyond the recipients, their classmates, and their families. This year’s prize, however, should trouble anyone concerned with the imperiled fate of free inquiry and rational dialogue at our nation’s institutions of higher learning: on May 21, Yale recognized — out of a graduating class of some 1,300 —two individuals who did more than most of their peers to worsen race relations on campus.

Our story begins in the fall of 2015, when a mob of students surrounded professor Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard of Silliman, the residential college of which he used to be Master, a term used to describe head faculty members who oversee undergraduate life (more on this later). Christakis, a world-renowned sociologist and scientist, was there to answer complaints about an email sent by his wife, Erika, in response to a campus-wide message distributed by a Yale College dean of “student engagement”, Burgwell Howard, warning students away from wearing Halloween costumes that “threaten our sense of community.” For her mere suggestion that Yale undergraduates — adults who can legally vote and fight and die in the nation’s wars be entrusted with the responsibility to choose their own Halloween costumes (and, furthermore, be entrusted to share whatever discomfort they may have about potentially “offensive” costumes with their peers, rather than encouraged to whine to overpaid, utterly superfluous, administrative busybodies), Erika Christakis was denounced by hundreds of Yale students, faculty, alumni, and countless off-campus agitators as an incorrigible bigot and “white supremacist” whose job should be taken from her.

But Nicholas Christakis was doing more than just defending the honor of his wife that afternoon in the Silliman courtyard. As video of the several hours-long ordeal revealed, Christakis was defending the most fundamental principle of higher education: that the university should serve as a place of free inquiry where individuals can respectfully engage with one another in the pursuit of knowledge.

At least, that’s what places like Yale claim to stand for. Not anymore.

Of the 100 or so students who confronted Christakis that day, a young woman who called him “disgusting” and shouted “who the fuck hired you?” before storming off in tears became the most infamous, thanks to an 81-second YouTube clip that went viral. (The video also —thanks to its promotion by various right-wing websites — brought this student a torrent of anonymous harassment). The videos that Tablet exclusively posted last year, which showed a further 25 minutes of what was ultimately an hours-long confrontation, depicted a procession of students berating Christakis. In one clip, a male student strides up to Christakis and, standing mere inches from his face, orders the professor to “look at me”. Assuming this position of physical intimidation, the student then proceeds to declare that Christakis is incapable of understanding what he and his classmates are feeling because Christakis is white, and, ipso facto, cannot be a victim of racism. In another clip, a female student accuses Christakis of “strip[ping] people of their humanity” and “creat[ing] a space for violence to happen”,  a line later mocked in an episode of The Simpsons. [See below -ed.] In the videos, Howard, the dean who wrote the costume provisions, can be seen lurking along the periphery of the mob.

Of Yale’s graduating class, it was these two students whom the Nakanishi Prize selection committee deemed most deserving of a prize for “enhancing race and/or ethnic relations” on campus. Hectoring bullies quick to throw baseless accusations of racism or worse; cosseted brats unscrupulous in their determination to smear the reputations of good people, these individuals in actuality represent the antithesis of everything this award is intended to honor. Yet, in the citation that was read to all the graduating seniors and their families on Class Day, Yale praised the latter student as “a fierce truthteller.”

This, for an hysterical liar who accused one of the university’s most distinguished academic minds of inciting “violence” upon his own students. And the chair of the selection committee? Burgwell Howard.

The Orwellian veneration of racial agitators as racial conciliators is the logical conclusion of Yale’s craven capitulation to the hard left forces of identitarian groupthink. From the very beginning of this ordeal, the Yale administration refused to state some simple but necessary truths: that the missive Erika Christakis wrote was entirely appropriate; that the “demands” issued by protesting students (such as an “ethnic studies distributional requirement”) were ridiculous; and, most important of all, that the rude and insubordinate treatment to which Nicholas Christakis was subjected rose to the level of a disciplinary offense. (It was not so long ago that mobbing a professor, physically threatening him, and screaming in his face, for hours, would result in expulsion).

But Yale’s spineless leaders were never willing to say these things. The reason is not just due to the fact that they have themselves imbibed so many of the shibboleths about “intersectionality” and “structural racism” spouted like dogma by their students. It’s also because the relationship between the university and its charges is no longer that of a Master-student one (and not only because the title of “Master” has been eliminated on the spurious grounds that it is offensive to African Americans). Instead, as revealed in a devastating documentary about the Christakis imbroglio produced by Rob Montz, the relationship is better defined as employee-client, with the main function of a place like Yale no longer being the provision of a liberal education but rather a comfortable, indeed, luxurious four-year “experience” that prepares paying customers for admission into the professional upper-middle-class managerial elite. Indeed, the real root of the Halloween costume controversy can be traced back to before the Christakises even entered the picture, with the original, entirely unnecessary, prophylactic email sent by Howard, which, in its patronizing admonition to students against donning racist Halloween costumes — something that had never caused any sort of controversy at Yale — treated the entire student body as if it were the freshman pledge class of an historically racist fraternity at some deep south state university.

Burgwell Howard

What Yale ought to have done, as I wrote back when the original conflagration surfaced in November 2015, was instruct its students to “grow up”. Because the university failed to do this, thereby offering its implicit endorsement of the scurrilous charges hurled against two well-regarded members of its faculty, Nicholas Christakis eventually resigned as Master of Silliman College and his wife quit teaching at Yale altogether. And now, to add insult to injury, Yale has decided to award their tormentors as paragons of communal healing. It is a fittingly disgraceful coda to one of the most disgusting chapters in Yale’s recent history.

Who were these two exemplary students?

From The Blaze:

At Class Day ceremonies Sunday, Yale bestowed its Nakanishi Prize upon Alexandra Zina Barlowe and Abdul-Razak Mohammed Zachariah. The prize is given “to two graduating seniors who, while maintaining high academic achievement, have provided exemplary leadership in enhancing race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College.”

Barlowe’s citation calls her “a fierce truthteller who illuminates the challenges affecting her communities, rooting them in history and context in order to promote a deeper understanding of them. Her peers say of her ‘Lex never fights for just one issue. Her moral imagination operates with the knowledge that issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. are all interconnected’.”

Her subject? You guessed it: African American Studies.

His? He speaks of his “Sociology and Education studies”.

Zachariah’s citation says he has “explored the topic of ‘respectability politics’ in mentorship organizations for Black male teenagers in New Haven in the first of his two senior essays; in his second, he examines multiculturalism and racial representations in children’s literature“.

So, they are both exemplary racists.

If only:

Yale university would change its name to Patrice Lumumba University (after the Soviet institution of that name where Communist terrorists were trained to undermine the West during the Cold War) as a final declaration of what it has become, and then close permanently.

But long live The Simpsons!

James Delingpole tells this delicious story at Breitbart:

Gender studies is a fake academic industry populated by charlatans, deranged activists and gullible idiots.

Now, a pair of enterprising hoaxers has proved it scientifically by persuading an academic journal to peer-review and publish their paper claiming that the penis is not really a male genital organ but a social construct.

The paper, published by Cogent Social Sciences – “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences” – also claims that penises are responsible for causing climate change.

The two hoaxers are Peter Boghossian, a full-time faculty member in the Philosophy department at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, who has a doctorate in math and a background in physics.

They were hoping to emulate probably the most famous academic hoax in recent years: the Sokal Hoax – named after NYU and UCL physics professor Alan Sokal – who in 1996 persuaded an academic journal called Social Text to accept a paper titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.

Sokal’s paper – comprising pages of impressive-sounding but meaningless pseudo-academic jargon – was written in part to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish pretty much anything so long as it sounds like “proper leftist thought;” and partly in order to send up the absurdity of so much post-modernist social science.

So, for this new spoof, Boghossian and Lindsay were careful to throw in lots of signifier phrases to indicate fashionable anti-male bias:

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

They also took care to make it completely incomprehensible.

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading”, a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

Some of it was written with the help of the Postmodern Generator – “a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern ‘paper’ every time the page is reloaded.”

This paragraph, for example, looks impressive but is literally meaningless:

Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative, so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the words of Judith Butler, “can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility” (Butler, 1993). The penis should not be understood as an honest expression of the performer’s intent should it be presented in a performance of masculinity or hypermasculinity. Thus, the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity”, is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action. The result of this trichotomy of roles is to place hypermasculine men both within and outside of competing discourses whose dynamics, as seen via post-structuralist discourse analysis, enact a systematic interplay of power in which hypermasculine men use the conceptual penis to move themselves from powerless subject positions to powerful ones (confer: Foucault, 1972).

None of it should have survived more than a moment’s scrutiny by serious academics. But it was peer-reviewed by two experts in the field who, after suggesting only a few changes, passed it for publication:

Cogent Social Sciences eventually accepted The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct. The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our thesis statement “sound” and praised it thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process” (which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and nonsense).The other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the entire paper, “outstanding” in every applicable category.

They didn’t accept the paper outright, however. Cogent Social Sciences’ Reviewer #2 offered us a few relatively easy fixes to make our paper “better.” We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, putting in a little more nonsense about “manspreading” (which we alleged to be a cause of climate change) and “dick-measuring contests”.

No claim made in the paper was considered too ludicrous by the peer-reviewers: not even the one claiming that the penis is “the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change”. 

You read that right. We argued that climate change is “conceptually” caused by penises. How do we defend that assertion? Like this:

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of [sic] the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear.

The fact that such complete drivel was published in a social science journal, the hoaxers argue, raises serious questions about the value of fields like gender studies and the state of academic publishing generally:

The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct should not have been published on its merits because it was actively written to avoid having any merits whatsoever. The paper is academically worthless nonsense.

But they do not hold out much hope for it having any more effect on the bullshit in the social sciences industry than Sokal’s hoax did – because leftist stupidity in academe is so heavily entrenched.

As a matter of deeper concern, there is unfortunately some reason to believe that our hoax will not break the relevant spell. First, Alan Sokal’s hoax, now more than 20 years old, did not prevent the continuation of bizarre postmodernist “scholarship.” In particular, it did not lead to a general tightening of standards that would have blocked our own hoax. Second, people rarely give up on their moral attachments and ideological commitments just because they’re shown to be out of alignment with reality.

What self-respecting scholar will attend a university these days – unless maybe to study math, engineering, medicine, or real (not climate) science? The Left with its ludicrous “Studies” departments has battered the institution of the University into terminal decline.

Zach Wood quietly and persuasively defends freedom of speech.

He even catches a moment when Barack Obama said something in favor of it!

Wanna see Democrats and media hacks weep? Hand them this list!

So writes Joan Swirsky at Canada Free press. We want to see Democrats and media hacks weep, and we also want to see conservatives and libertarians, nationists and populists, Republicans and all our friends and allies smile.

Here is the list:

If these accomplishments are not familiar, that’s because 99 percent of the media – the jerks – are a de facto arm of the Democratic National Committee and the far-left fringe, and are so terminally distressed by the fact that Mr. Trump won the presidency that they obstinately refuse to report what by any objective standards is the news. This is because:

• They’ve been pushing leftist values for well over a half century and are unable to admit that their anti-Trump, pro-Hillary message was an utter and complete failure.
• They are part and parcel of the vast, contaminated, rancid, crooked, pay-for-play, corrupt swamp that candidate Trump promised to drain, and President Trump is now draining.
• The man they mock – for his syntax and phrasing, style of governing, unpredictability, and so-called contradictions – has both confounded and trumped them at every turn.

This is why they remain fixated on the fairy tale of a Trump-Russian connection. They have nothing else – as in nothing!

LIGHTNING

After Pres. Trump’s first month in office,

• 235,000 jobs were added to our economy in February, 100,000 more than expected;
• 40 percent fewer illegal immigrants crossed our border;
• $3 trillion was added to the stock market;
• Judge Gorsuch, a constitutionalist worthy of Justice Scalia’s seat, was nominated to the Supreme Court.

In his first 100 days:

• appointments of Vice President Mike Pence, pro-life conservative;
• Justice Neil Gorsuch, an originalist committed to the Constitution;
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions, staunch conservative committed to the rule of law;
• Defense Secretary James Mattis, a warrior committed to restoring America’s military;
• Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, a former general committed to border security;
• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a former CEO who understands how the real world works;
• Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon from a humble background;
• Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a doctor who understands health care;
• Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, an advocate of school choice and educational reform;
• Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former governor of Texas and expert on the energy industry;
• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, former CEO who understands the business world;
• EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a conservative committed to reining in big government;
• U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, a fearless advocate for American values;
• U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, a true friend of Israel;
• White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, a conservative warrior against crony capitalism and the left;
• National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, an accomplished military commander;
• and White House Counterterrorism Adviser Sebastian Gorka, committed to defeating radical Islam.

President Trump;

• restored the U.S. alliance with Israel and welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House;
• restored U.S. leadership in the world;
• enforced red lines against the use of chemical weapons in Syria;
• dropped the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB) on ISIS, sending a clear message to Iran and North Korea;
• secured the Chinese cooperation in pressuring North Korea and the release of Aya Hijazi, American charity worker held in Egypt since 2014;
• imposed a five-year ban on lobbying the government by former White House officials and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments by former White House officials;
• repeatedly called out the liberal media for “fake news”;
• repealed Obama mandate that forced states to fund Planned Parenthood;
• signed executive order reinstating Reagan policy against taxpayer funding of overseas abortions;
• stopped U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes abortions;
• signed the following Executive Orders
  1. to mandate a comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS,
  2. to begin construction of the border wall and hire additional 5,000 border agents,
  3. to order the Justice Department to cut funding to sanctuary cities,
  4. to institute a temporary federal hiring freeze,
  5. to institute a travel ban on individuals from a select number of countries embroiled in terrorist atrocities;
  6. to withdraw from the Transpacific Partnership trade deal,
  7. to mandate that two regulations will be repealed for every new one issued,
  8. to institute a comprehensive approach to illegal immigration and crime; et al.

THUNDER

Further,

• Pres. Trump issued orders to seek increased penalties for crimes against police;
• to promote energy independence; to put American companies and workers first;
• to review federal regulations in education; to investigate national security impact of foreign steel imports;
• to require an audit of executive branch agencies;
• to order every agency to create a regulatory reform task force;
• to roll back Obama environmental infringements on private property.

In addition,

• Pres. Trump issued orders to prevent future taxpayer-funded bailouts; to reverse Obama restrictions on offshore energy development;
• for a major review of national monument designations on federal lands;
• to establish a new office to reform the Veterans Administration bureaucracy;
• to address concerns of Rural America;
• to establish a White House Initiative on historically Black Colleges and Universities;
• to create a commission on drug addiction and the opioid crisis;
• to combat transnational criminal organizations and international trafficking; to repeal the following:

1. Obama’s transgender public school bathroom mandate,
2. Obama’s “Stream Protection Rule” that has hurt the coal industry,
3. Obama’s Social Security Administration’s gun ban,
4. Obama’s Labor “blacklisting” rule with $500 million in regulatory costs,
5. Obama’s Interior rule that restricted state and local authority in land use decisions,
6. Obama’s unfunded education mandate that created new standards for teachers,
7. Obama’s education rule that undermined state and local control,
8. Obama’s regulation that prevented drug testing for unemployment compensation,
9. Obama’s rule that banned some hunting in Alaska,
10. Obama’s regulation that created vastly more paperwork and reporting of worker injuries,
11. Obama’s regulations on Internet Service Providers,
12. Obama’s rule that allowed states to force workers into government-run savings plans, and the Dodd-Frank regulations that disadvantaged domestic companies.

Going further,

• Pres. Trump Imposed sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile violations and human rights violations;
• Ordered review of the Iranian nuclear deal;
• Produced a budget that cut $54 billion from bloated federal bureaucracies, that would eliminate 50 programs and more than 3,000 federal jobs, and that boosted spending for defense, homeland security and veterans; produced a tax-reform plan that simplifies the tax code and reduces taxes for businesses and families;
• Approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline; shut down illegal immigrant advocacy program at Department of Justice;
• Established Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office;
• Reduced illegal immigration at the border by 61 percent;
• Called for “major investigation” of voter fraud led by Vice President Mike Pence;
• Called for repeal of the Johnson Amendment, which limits free speech of pastors and churches;
• Called for 50 percent cut in funding to the United Nations; supported English as official language by dropping Spanish version of the White House website;
• Purged “climate change” alarmism from White House website;
• Returned bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office;
• Succeeded in getting NATO nations to boost defense spending by $10 billion;
• Halted $180 billion in Obama regulations;
• Signed legislation expanding private healthcare options for veterans;
• Relaxed Rules of Engagement in the fight against ISIS;
• Imposed sanctions on Venezuelan vice president for international drug trafficking.

UP, UP & AWAY

At this early point,

• Consumer confidence is the highest in 17 years;
• Small business confidence highest in 11 years;
• Stock market is up 10 percent since inauguration, up 15 percent since election;
• Exxon Mobil announced $20 billion-45,000 job expansion in U.S.;
• Charter Communications announced $25 billion expansion, creating 20,000 jobs in U.S.;
• Accenture announced $1.4 billion expansion, creating 15,000 jobs in U.S.;
• Intel announced $7 billion expansion, creating 10,000 jobs in the U.S.
• Pres. Trump ordered renegotiation of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico;
• Named former Congressman Scott Garrett, an outspoken critic of the Export-Import Bank to the bank’s Board of Directors
• Today, U.S. unemployment is at its lowest level since 1988!

The U.S. debt decreased by $100 billion during Pres. Trump’s first hundred days; the U.S. Manufacturing Index soared to a 33-year high! In the first month alone, he added 298,000 jobs; housing sales are off the charts right now … in 2011, the average time a house was on the market was 84 days, now, it’s just 45 days; illegal immigration is down 67% since the Inauguration; NATO announced Allied spending is up $10 billion.

This Mt. Everest of accomplishments belongs to a man who is straight out of central casting. Every day, he looks like a million dollars and is stunningly successful in his dealings with everyone from heads of state to manual laborers to ardent fans to entrenched skeptics. Every day, he brings both ebullience and laser-like focus to a job he clearly relishes, displays admirable courage in making hard choices, and is zooming along at warp speed to Make America Great Again!

All this while never hesitating to take on the sacred cows of the leftist jerks among us – political correctness and global warming rank high – and to illuminate the public about the widespread scourge of the fake news and fake polls that those same leftist jerks tried but failed to foist upon us in the November election.

It was easy for the media when all they had to do was pretend that 94-million unemployed citizens, a weakened military, alienated allies, a genocidal Iran deal, and unprecedented escalation of Muslim Brotherhood operatives implanted in the highest reaches of our government, and an increase in the national debt by $9 trillion to almost $20 trillion, were nothing to worry about – all while they asked the guy in the Oval Office what his favorite ice-cream flavor was!

Now there’s a grown-up in charge and the children among us (Democrats, leftists, progressives, whatever they’re calling themselves these days) are as ineffectual – indeed, impotent – as they were when Donald J. Trump announced for the presidency in June of 2015.

Important omissions:

President Trump also fired dangerous James Comey from his directorship of the FBI.

He gained the co-operation of China – at least to some extent, though how far remains to be seen – in dealing with hostile North Korea.

His tax proposals will reduce the burden of taxation – and at the same time increase revenue.

His proposed health legislation, while not ideal, at least hastens the end of Obamacare.

While we fully appreciate the quantity and quality of these achievements, and the speed with which they have been executed, there are others we are hoping to see in due course (perhaps in some cases over-optimistically). Chief among them are (in no special order):

The disarming of  North Korea.

The cancellation of the Obama “deal” with Iran and the destruction of Iran’s  nuclear facilities.

The permanent crushing of ISIS.

An effective restraint on Muslim immigration.

Effective resistance to the Islamic jihad, putting a stop to both its stealthy and its terrorist tactics.

The completed Wall on the southern border of the United States.

The US embassy in Israel moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The defunding of the UN – ideally to the end that it withers and dies.

The defunding of sanctuary cities.

The defunding of so-called universities that have become madrassas to indoctrinate leftist ideology.

A refusal to sign any international agreement demanding action to “change the climate” of the earth, since it is impossible as well as unnecessary, and the pointless effort is a colossal waste of money.

*

Update:

Two more needed achievements we hope to be able to celebrate:

The investigation, conviction, and incarceration of both Obama and Hillary (among others) for their various crimes including treason.

The Muslim Brotherhood declared a terrorist group.

.

[Hat tip for these additions to our highly valuable commenter liz)

In the West, since the Enlightenment, the university is an institution for the exploration of the infinite realm of ideas. It is a convention of many members all dedicated to the perpetual quest for truth. They will  learn, imagine, search, examine, invent, experiment, discover, reflect, reason, conjecture, theorize, test, propound, doubt, criticize, argue, challenge, revise, triumph and fail. There can be no dissent that is unwelcome, no novelty barred out, no mystery preserved from exploration. It is an open field for thinkers.

If a university adopts any set of ideas as an orthodoxy, if it refuses to allow an idea to be expressed, it ceases to be a university. It has become a church.

A church is an institution for the protection of unproven belief, the propounding of dogma, the performance of mystical rites and rituals, the enforcement of strict ideological conformity, the exclusion of doubt, the punishment of dissent, the scorn of reason. It insists that it owns the truth. Its doctrine is apodictic. To challenge it is heresy, and heretics are shamed and silenced. It is a stuffy home for the gullible.

The university and the church are as opposed to each other as are fire and water.

Here is a video about a university becoming a church.