Prize lies 140
Obama claims that the eight years of his presidency were free of scandal. In fact, the scandals were many and appalling.
Obama claims to have stopped Iran becoming a nuclear power. In fact, he entered into a deal that permitted Iran to become a nuclear power.
Obama claims to have improved race relations. In fact, he worsened them.
Obama claims to have launched an economic boom. In fact, he never achieved even 3% GDP growth.
In sum, he was a weak and destructive president. The harm he did would not be easy to repair, and America is lucky to have found the man to succeed him who could not only mend what he had broken, and is doing so, but is going much further, turning the failure round and achieving success. Even some unprecedented successes. And all in record time.
Obama sees the repair as an undoing of the changes he wrought. As he puts it, “The status quo pushes back.”
The complaint comes from a speech he made at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill., on Sept. 7, 2018, when the university honored him with the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.
The speech he gave on the occasion of receiving the prize included these claims:
Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. …
To which political party does that last sentence most aptly apply? We say the Democratic Party? But then, the Left has a habit of accusing its opponents of the faults, failings, bad emotions, plots, conspiracies, evil intentions, underhand actions, and failures of which itself is guilty.
Most of you don’t remember a time before 9/11, when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at an airport.
Did he mention who was responsible for 9/11 and for us having to take off our shoes at an airport? No. Because he never did and never will blame Islam for its acts of terrorism.
Most of you don’t remember a time when America wasn’t at war, or when money and images and information could travel instantly around the globe, or when the climate wasn’t changing faster than our efforts to address it.
A strange combination of references. No one living remembers a time when America wasn’t at war, if the Cold War is counted. About the money and images he probably meant “remember a time when they could not …” And then he throws in as a certainty that there was a time when climate was not changing fast, but it is now.
And this was all before a change. What change? Have the wars stopped?
The only change he almost got right was a change to faster communications than ever before.
He claims that all three factors together brought about this consequence:
This change has happened fast, faster than any time in human history. And it created a new economy that has unleashed incredible prosperity.
Only, of the three phenomena he mentioned, could the faster communications be said to have promoted prosperity.
Actually, he just gabbled nonsense. And all to get in a claim to an “unleashed incredible prosperity” – the prosperity he claims as his own achievement.
He goes on to say how he rescued the economy from wicked men.
[T]he reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, ten years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren’t old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes. Many were worried we were entering into a second Great Depression. So we worked hard to end that crisis, but also to break some of these longer term trends. And the actions we took during that crisis returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record. And we covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance and we cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.
While it is true that employment rose before he left office, his claim that higher taxes (on “people like me”) were a formula for prosperity is false. President Trump’s tax cuts (for all tax payers) prove it. Furthermore, Obama heavily regulated business, and President Trump’s lifting of many Obama regulations has been a factor in creating the very real present economic boom.
And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all-time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. I mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. …
He came on then to his foreign policy.
Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder. …
And even though your generation is the most diverse in history …
Nonsense! No generation is more “diverse” than any other.
… with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. …
[O]ver the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.
Remember when a Republican Attorney General refused to prosecute a bunch of white people although they were breaking the law, on the grounds that he would not act against “his people”? No. Neither do we. But we do recall Eric Holder- Obama’s black AG – saying something like that in a case of the Black Panthers …
This Congress has … embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.
The trick: he throws out, in passing, that the (factually accurate) report of his failure to send help to a US ambassador and three servicemen who were killed by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi was a “wild conspiracy theory’, and associates it with an unproved, unlikely, and petty story that he was not born in the United States. But the horrible events in Benghazi were proved and profoundly important.
He comes to his own party’s wild conspiracy theory:
[The Repulicans in power are] undermining our alliances, cozying up to Russia. What happened to the Republican Party? Its central organizing principle in foreign policy was the fight against Communism, and now they’re cozying up to the former head of the KGB, actively blocking legislation that would defend our elections from Russian attack.
And he calls the partial repeal of his unworkable health legislation “sabotage”:
Their sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than three million Americans their health insurance. And if they’re still in power next fall, you’d better believe they’re coming at it again. …
He defends the media who gave him uncritical support in all he did, and never stp attacking President Trump. What is indefnsible in his eyes, is Trump hitting back at his media enemies. To do this, he lies again:
I complained plenty about Fox News – but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people.
We did hear that his administration “spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’ after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources”. (See our quotations from Matt Margolis below.)
Next, he endorses the lie that President Trump sympathizes with Nazis:
We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.
How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.
How hard can it be to say that Islamic terrorism is bad? That Communism is bad? Too hard for him, it appeared.
Then comes the most blatantly impudent accusation of them all:
And we won’t win people over by calling them names, or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic.
Who, every minute of every day, calls whom “racist, or sexist, or homophobic”? Or all three?
Matt Margolis comments at PJ Media:
Today we saw just how far academia is going to perpetuate the myth of Obama’s “scandal-free” administration when he was awarded the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government by the University of Illinois. Not since the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has Obama been so undeserving of an award. But, I submit that this award is even worse than the Nobel Peace Prize he didn’t deserve. In 2009, the Nobel committee was at least ignorant of what Obama’s record would turn out to be. There is simply no excuse in 2018 for Obama to be receiving an Ethics in Government award. … The Paul H. Douglas Award is now forever tainted.
What, exactly, did the committee at the University of Illinois think Obama did to earn an Ethics in Government award? The Obama years were plagued by scandal and defined by a hyper-partisan government.
Last month I cited six Obama scandals where a special counsel should have been appointed to investigate but was not. Unlike Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were partisan lackeys who did everything they could to protect Obama from being held accountable. Obama, Holder, and Lynch knew that if they left the investigating to Republicans in Congress they could write them off as partisan witch hunts and use any and all tactics possible to obstruct and stonewall those investigations, or in some cases, run their own sham investigation that cleared them of any wrongdoing.
I document thirty different scandals in my book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. Each scandal on its own makes the idea of Obama receiving an ethics award laughable. All of them together make this award blasphemous. From the moment Obama took office he was under a dark cloud of scandal, having been involved in illegal negotiations with [the condemned criminal] Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to give him a cabinet position in exchange for Blagojevich nominating an Obama-preferred candidate to his vacated Senate seat … yet Obama just received an Ethics in Government award? What a joke!…
There are plenty of well-known scandals that the committee that decided to award Obama had to have been aware of but chose to ignore. There was the Fast and Furious scandal, which involved sending guns to Mexico in the hopes of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. Not only did they lose track of a large number of guns, but one gun was found to have been used in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Obama administration tried to cover it up, and they stonewalled a congressional investigation, resulting in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois?
The Obama administration also abused the Espionage Act to target reporters and their sources. They even spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois? …
There were also –
The Solyndra scandal [see here], the Benghazi cover-up, Uranium One, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the covering up of thousands of deaths of veterans waiting for care at VA hospitals, manipulating intelligence, paying ransom money to Iran, Project Cassandra [see here], spying on Donald Trump, the Hillary email scandal, which I should add, also implicated Obama, who communicated with Hillary via her private email address and used a pseudonym himself.
It’s bad enough when Obama claims he was scandal-free. But, when he receives an ethics in government award, it diminishes the meaning of ethics. It’s time to stop pretending Obama was scandal-free or ethical. … I’ve only scratched the surface of Obama’s scandalous and unethical presidency.
The only reason why Barack Obama was elected president was that he was black. He had nothing else to offer. A sufficient number of white Americans voted for him to get him into the White House for no better reason than that they needed to feel good, to prove to themselves, and the country and the world, that they were not “racist“.
Barack Obama, for all his expensive education, was ill-informed and strangely ignorant – and he embraced ideologies inimical to America. He seemed not to know how many states there were in the country he governed. He thought Austrians spoke a language called Austrian. He did not know how to pronounce “corpsman”. And he was a follower of the Communist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, and a lackey of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He lied and commanded others to lie. Under his leadership, his party worked an elaborate plot, which it still pursues, to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump with false and slanderous allegations of treason.
If prizes were awarded for lying, Obama would deserve them all.
Only joking that they want a race war? 131
Or “only joking” lest they get a race war?
An extreme racist and sexist by the name of Sarah Jeong has been hired by the New York Times to flavor its opinion columns with disgust and loathing for white people and men – so above all of course for white men. And old white men are the worst of the worst, deserving only cruelty. (See examples of her tweets here.)
But all in a good humored way, you see?
She says she was “only joking”. So she is excused by the Left because the Left thinks what she says is really funny, and if the Right can’t share the joke and laugh it off, it’s because the Right just doesn’t have a sophisticated nuanced sense of humor.
Sultan Knish writes:
What part of the “social justice left” or “left” is really producing Sarah Jeongs?
To answer that question we have to talk about what no one really talks about, the alt-left. Unlike the alt-right, a subject of numerous essays, news reports and investigative pieces, the internet culture of racism, misandry and heterophobia that is the millennial alt-left is mostly undocumented.
The alt-left’s norms of discourse are defined by the same harsh contempt and winking racism that appear in Sarah Jeong’s tweets. It’s an internet culture where “white people” is an inherently derogatory term and new slurs, such as “caucasity”, are coined. Ironic racism is defined as “resistance” to whiteness. And what better way to resist whiteness than with racial slurs aimed at white people?
Sarah Jeong’s hateful tweets … [are] variations on the typical memes and jokes on the alt-left. When we talk about Jeong’s racism, we’re really talking about the bigotry of an intersectional movement that is obsessed with punitively destroying the “privilege” of white people and other majority groups with racist memes, taunts and harassment.
The alt-left preceded the alt-right. The features of the alt-right that the media has attacked are mirror images of its origins counter-trolling the alt-left. When Sarah Jeong’s critics and defenders claim that she was “counter-trolling”, they hilariously get the origin of the internet culture species completely wrong.
Long before the alt-right (at least in internet years), the alt-left was weaponizing racist memes (“white tears” was a popular one) and harassing targets with online mobs (today’s social justice mobs are alt-left online harassment coordinated with alt-lefties in the media). The current trend of media stories that dox targets on the right almost all tend to come from media millennials aligned with the alt-left.
This isn’t the first time that the alt-left’s ironic racism has gotten its members in trouble. There was plenty of outrage when Drexel University’s George Ciccariello-Maher had tweeted, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide”. Just like Jeong, the defense was that Maher was just kidding.
The claims by Vox lefties that Sarah Jeong and the “social justice left” are being ironic in their racist remarks about white people, is not a defense, it’s an indictment. Ironic racism was prevalent on the alt-left before it was mirrored by the alt-right. It’s also a misuse of the term. Non-ironic irony is typical of millennial internet culture that uses humor as a distancing mechanism to normalize repellent views.
That’s not ironic. It’s cowardly and disingenuous.
The “ironic” alt-left humor of Sarah Jeong uses absurdity and winks to convey actual hatred for white people. …
When we talk about the alt-left, it’s often in terms of antifa … [But] most of the alt-left, like the rest of the left, is white. Its racism isn’t the outcry of an oppressed minority, as the pro-Jeong pieces have contended, but of an ideological bigotry.
So the New York Times whose publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, is white and male, and whose executive editor, Dean Baquet, is male, employs a racist and sexist to attack Whites and men.
It’s still the same old story. Middle class Utopians pouring scorn on the middle class. That is the nature of the Left since the days of Karl Marx. White “anti-racists” pouring scorn on Whites. That has been the nature of the New Left since 1968.
The only idea the self-haters on the Left now embrace that does not come from their own class and race, is Islam.
And there are no jokes in Islam.
And it has nothing to do with class or race.
And it subjugates women.
The unfunny war is less likely to be over race than ideology.
It will be – it is – jihad.
The false claims of leftist humanism 110
We seldom argue with atheists of the Left. We seldom argue with the Left. We find the attempt to be, almost always, a nugatory exercise. Leftism is a religion, and religions are not to be argued with. Faith and Reason exclude each other.
A religion need not have a god in it. Atheists on the Left can and do reason against the existence of a deity, but not against the doctrines of collectivist ideology such as: the community must be organized; the economy must be planned; the purpose of government is to control and direct the lives of the people to serve the general interest.
This time we make an exception. We raise arguments with certain statements that seem reasonable, but are not, because – we want to demonstrate – they are premised on dogma.
We quote an article from Patheos Friendly Atheist, a Humanist website. As far as we can discover, all self-named humanists and all Humanist organizations are on the Left (although there is nothing about Humanism as such that makes Leftism logically necessary to it). Patheos is no exception.
Patheos Friendly Atheist’s most frequent columnist, Hemant Mehta, writes:
Here’s a really important development in the world of organized atheist activism.
On Thursday [July 19, 2018], the American Humanist Association launched what they’re calling the Humanist Legal Society.
I’d call it the atheist equivalent of the conservative Federalist Society: A way to identify, bring together, and support those in the legal professional who are dedicated to maintaining church/state separation, science-based evidence, civil rights (especially for marginalized people), and ethics in government.
You know… all the things conservatives no longer give a damn about.
The statements we have stressed in bold provide us with an opportunity to make clear how the issues we are concerned about, the values we hold, and the judgments we make according to the information we acquire, are opposed to the issues, values, and judgment of Hermant Mehta, the Humanist Legal Society, and the Left in general.
1.”The atheist equivalent of the conservative Federalist Society”
To start with, he does not, or they do not, really mean “the atheist equivalent”. The Federalist Society is not a god-concerned institution. What is meant is a “leftist-humanist equivalent”.
So what is the Federalist Society?
This is what the members of the Federalist Society say about themselves under the heading,
Our Purpose
Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.
This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors. In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community.
The first paragraph makes it perfectly clear that the Federalist Society opposes “a centralized and uniform society”.
The second and third paragraphs provide a summary of certain core conservative principles: “that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be”; that individual liberty is a prime value, along with “traditional values, and the rule of law”. The Federalist Society works to restore “the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors.” To this end it has “created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network” in the world of the legal profession.
Plainly, this new association is intent on reinforcing the very “orthodox liberal ideology” that the Federal Society exists to overcome.
The Humanist Legal Society’s purpose is to defend “a centralized and uniform society” that does not believe in the state’s prime duty to preserve individual freedom, traditional values and the rule of law. It would hold that the duty of the judiciary is to say what the law should be, not what it is. It would exist to preserve all that the Federalist Society finds wrong with “the current state of the legal order”. There is no equivalence between the cause of individual freedom protected by the rule of law and the cause of collectivist state-dictatorship. The Humanist Legal Society might be called the “counterpart” of the Federalist Society, but not its “equivalent”.
2. “All the things conservatives no longer give a damn about”
2.1″Church-state separation”
Conservatives want the Constitution to be preserved intact. They want no variation of the First Amendment, the separation of church and state clause. So to say that “conservatives no longer give a damn about church-state separation” is a lie.
2.2 “Science-based evidence”
Mehta may be referring here to the belief among Christians, many of whom are also conservatives, in Bible literalism, and their rejection of evolution. But Bible literalism, or any variety of Creationism, is not a core principle of conservatism.
What is also probably being referred to here is the widespread skepticism among conservatives that climate change is caused – dangerously – in our time by human activity. We are unwilling to go over the arguments as to why we conservatives are skeptical about it, but they can be found easily. One of our own posts revealing the vicious motivation behind the Anthropological Global Warming (AGW) movement, The real enemy is humanity itself, may be found here.
The Left maintains that the science of AGW is “settled”. That in itself is an unscientific statement. It is a dogmatic statement.
All real science is ardently encouraged by most conservatives. American conservatives are delighted that NASA is returning to the exploration of space under President Trump’s leadership, after Obama had told the space agency to concentrate on outreach to Muslims!
Furthermore, as gathered by the Heritage Foundation …
Conventional wisdom holds that it’s conservatives who are anti-scientific morons, and liberals who are devotees of reason, science, and evidence. But as the The Chapman University Survey on American Fears reveals, that accusation is based on nothing but prejudice.
As The Washington Post summarizes it, “Democrats were slightly, and in some cases significantly more likely than Republicans to believe in paranormal phenomena.” From fortune telling to astrology, liberals live in a world of spirits. At least belief in Bigfoot is bipartisan.
The Chapman study shouldn’t surprise anyone. A 2011 Pew Research Center study similarly found that liberals were more likely than conservatives to believe in the evil eye, spiritual energy, reincarnation, communication with the dead, and of course fortune tellers and ghosts.
2.3 “Civil rights”
Since President Trump was elected, the civil rights of his supporters have been violently interfered with by militant organizations of the Left. Instance are numerous, but one of the most egregious was the violent action of masked ANTIFA thugs at Berkeley on February 1, 2017. There are no such violent militant organizations on the conservative Right interfering with anyone’s civil rights.
Towards the end of the article “letting the government dictate what a woman can do with her body” – meaning her “right” to abort a child she has conceived – is raised, probably to be understood as a civil rights issue. The Left consistently refuses to allow that when there is another body inside a woman, the law has to extend its protection to that other, helpless, human being.
2.4″Marginalized people”
The Left is obsessed with race and sex. What matters about you, according to Leftist ideology – propounded continually by ever-more-lefty Democrats – is your race, your descent, your ethnicity, your sex and sexual proclivity. Not your individual worth, your talents, your achievements. And they like to pretend that women, non-whites, and those classed as “LGBT”, are “marginalized” in the United States.
American women are the most privileged class of person that has ever existed in the history of humankind.
And in fact, far from it being “LGBT” persons, it is white men and the sexually normal who are marginalized wherever the Politically Correct and the Social Justice Warriors have power – notably in the academies.
As for blacks – it is ironic and outrageous that Democrats should virtue-signal themselves as the champions of blacks. Democrats whose party defended slavery and segregation; Democrats who launched and exclusively manned the KKK; who passed the Jim Crow laws; who consistently opposed every effort the Republicans made to give equal rights to blacks! A black woman professor, Carol Swain, explains in this video how that was really the case. And now it is the Democratic Party that insists on the humiliating policy of affirmative action, based on the notion that blacks cannot compete unless whites (and Asians) are handicapped!
2.5 “Ethics in government”
The Left makes wild unsubstantiated accusations against President Trump of every kind of moral offense from his being given two scoops of ice-cream when everyone else was only given one, to his being a “racist” and a “sexist”, and even a “traitor” for meeting with Vladimir Putin and not throwing the Russian leader’s crimes in his face. Meanwhile, in a manifestation of deliberate amnesia, the Left ignores the indisputable fact that the Obama administration was deeply morally disgraceful, guilty over and over again of scandalous turpitude. Its inaction over the appalling events in Benghazi on 9/11/12, to recall just one of the scandals, marks Obama’s terms in office as a period of ethical baseness hard to outmatch in the history of the United States. And how ethical was it to give permission to the hostile regime of Iran to build a nuclear arsenal in a few years’ time?
Mehta quotes:
“Many lawyers approach the world and the law from a humanist standpoint, but there is a need for them to have a way of organizing professionally as a group,” said the Society’s president, David Codell, a nationally recognized constitutional litigator who has served as counsel in many major cases involving LGBT rights. “The Humanist Legal Society will give humanist lawyers solidarity and resources that will make a difference.”
No. It is against the iniquitous Left, with its religious intolerance, its betrayal of science, its denial of civil rights to everyone it disagrees with, its marginalization of whites, and its lack of moral responsibility, that lawyers, judges, law students and professors need to band together. And fortunately they have done so, in the Federalist Society.
No races, no racism 17
Let RACE be officially ignored in the United States. No forms asking you what race you are. The melting-pot idea fully realized.
(Only medical forms have to be excepted. Some diseases are ethnic-specific.)
No affirmative action.
One nation under the Constitution.
Mike Gonzalez and Hans von Spakovsky write at the Daily Signal:
The Trump administration announced it is rescinding Obama administration policies that directed universities to use racial preferences in the admissions process. Because this type of discrimination is the gateway drug of the identity politics balkanizing America, Tuesday’s decision is a boost for unity and a setback for those who want to divide Americans.
To be sure, this week’s action is just the beginning, and the left will fight it tooth and nail. But the administration should go even further. Just last Friday, the two of us published a Heritage Foundation paper calling on the administration to stop giving preferential treatment on the basis of “race, color, national origin or ethnicity in any of its programs and activities.”
Indeed, we think that the administration should stop collecting data, including in the census, on artificially created ethnic groups, such as “Hispanics” or “Asians,” which bring together under large umbrellas disparate cultures and races. That would really cut identity politics off life support.
The Constitution is quite clear: The survey is conducted to enumerate the population for purposes of apportionment and direct taxation. Yes, since the first one in our history in 1790, the U.S. Census has asked a question about race — but that has always been something quite incidental to apportionment and taxation.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution.
The question on citizenship, which the administration now wants to bring back, has been asked for much of America’s history, and until recently was uncontroversial.
Reinstating a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census is a small but salubrious step. And it would also help weaken the grip of identity politics, a destructive force that is now racializing all of society.
By emphasizing citizenship (but not ethnic ties), the government gives all people, but especially immigrants and their children, the important and inclusive message that it is concerned with their relationship not with the land of their ancestors but with the land to which they now belong. …
The executive branch should stop collecting data on artificially created ethnic groups and recognize that we are increasingly a mixed-race society. Calling someone “Hispanic” because they have a Spanish surname, for example, makes no sense when his family has been in the United States since the Spanish settlement of southern California three centuries ago.
Neither does classifying someone as black when he is born of mixed-race parents, who may themselves have come from mixed-race parents or may have a “black” ancestor somewhere back in their family’s past. Classifying someone as “Asian,” given the wide array of countries, cultures, societies, and tribal and ethnic groups throughout the Asian continent, also makes no sense.
In addition to eliminating racial or ethnic qualifications, the government should also state that no data on countries of descent of Americans’ ancestry should be used to favor any particular groups in funding, employment, or contracting. The president should issue an executive order ending all race-based and ethnicity-based decision making in the federal government. …
As U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
If the state becomes blind to race, and the law forbids discrimination on the grounds of race (as it already does), and the universities are directed not to use racial preferences in the admissions process (as they do at present), the odious idea of “diversity” will be discredited.
Which will stoke Leftist resentment to explosive heat.
Two wins!
“It’s okay, walk away” – from the Democratic Party (2) 75
Following on from yesterday’s post about minorities deserting the Democratic Party, here’s a short video in the Walk Away series in which C. J. Pearson, remarkable for his political acumen at the age of 15, explains why. (The wonder remains why any blacks ever supported the party that has always been their enemy.)
“It’s okay, walk away” – from the Democratic Party 106
Is this the start of a big enough trend to wreck the Democratic Party, or at least to force a total revision of its policies, values, methods, and aims?
A former Democrat, Brandon Straka, is leading a movement of which he says:
Today I’m kicking off the #WalkAway campaign by releasing my video about why I am walking away from liberalism and the Democratic Party.
It is my sincere hope that you will join me in this campaign and that we may start a movement in this country – which not only encourages others to walk away from the divisive left, but also takes back the narrative from the liberal media about what it means to be a conservative in America. It is up to all of us to make our voices heard and reclaim the truth.
The Democratic Party has taken for granted that it owns racial, sexual, and religious minorities in America. It has encouraged groupthink, hypocrisy, division, stereotyping, resentment, and the acceptance of victimhood mentality. And all the while, they have discouraged minorities from having independent thought, open dialogue, measured and informed opinion, and a motivation to succeed.
Please like and share my video, and please post your own #WalkAway video!! If you are a former liberal who has walked away from the left, please share your story, or your message, or your thoughts in a video on the WalkAway Campaign Facebook Page.
If you are a lifelong conservative or non-Democrat, please share your story, message, or thoughts on what it truly means to be a conservative. Right now, the liberal media continues to perpetuate a false narrative about the “hateful” and “bigoted” right. Use your voice to let people know who conservatives really are. Be sure to use the hashtag #WalkAway.
Please like and follow me on Facebook and Twitter:
@usminority
The Unsilent Minority
and subscribe to my YouTube channel: The Unsilent Minority
https://youtu.be/4Pjs7uoOkag
Celia Farber writes at the Epoch Times:
Some 5 million people on Facebook and YouTube have seen the video by now. A very handsome gay man, who you just assume is about to scold you on progressive talking points, instead says this:
They gather at his two Facebook groups, “The Unsilent Minority” and “WalkAway Campaign.” Those who have the courage post their own video testimonials about the moment when the abuse, rage, and ugliness of the Democrats caused them to finally leave the party and “walk away”.
“This is so much more than a hashtag on Twitter,” he said. “This is a testimonial campaign, a grassroots movement that is going to change the political landscape of this country.”
And that’s the astonishing twist here: If these people have been driven into the arms of Donald Trump, who’s left on the left? …
Those who are walking away are not Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”, but rather, in many cases, lifelong Democrats who simply could not take it any longer and have longed for this very moment, when somebody like them would make it safe for them to come out of the closet and speak their minds. …
A man adjusts his video camera and sits back. The walls behind him are a tasteful grey-blue. He’s a gay, affluent, native New Yorker, and he’s coming out of the second closet of his life. For Ricky Roberts, the moment came after the Orlando nightclub shootings.
“Trump said he was going to protect gay men, and he did, [with] the travel ban. Hillary was telling Americans not to ‘pick on all Muslims because of this’,” and that did not feel like protection, Roberts says. … “I can’t do it anymore. I really can’t. You know, listen, I’m a gay guy from New York City, but before that, I’m an American, I’m a patriot. …”
His assessment of the Democrats: “From immigration to everything, they are just a disaster. They’re anti-American, anti-common sense, [anti-]rational — anything good, they’re against it.”
It took Brandon Straka himself a little longer than that to see the light:
Straka, who grew up in a small town in Nebraska, was on board with the fear and loathing campaign around Trump until he began asking people back home why they had voted for him. To his astonishment, they told him about Obama-era regulations that had crippled their small businesses.
He started to research media canards like the one about Trump supposedly mocking a disabled reporter. When he found that it was a total distortion, he kept going, his anger rising.
He eventually became “completely “red-pilled”. And isolated. He told himself that he would have to give up his lifelong dream of becoming an actor if he hit the “publish” button on his video, but, encouraged by one conservative gay friend, he decided to go ahead.
“This was a matter of the media specifically using and manipulating people’s deepest fears, based on legitimate traumas,” he explained.
Many gay people have experienced very serious homophobia and even physical violence. Can you imagine manipulating a domestic violence survivor’s fears just for political purposes? It’s insane. I was afraid of losing all my friends. As I began posting about these things on social media, people started attacking me and unfriending me. But I thought, “You know what, this is too important.” Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a gay man and I’ve already been through this — people making up lies about what it means to be gay and trying to shame me. … [But] the more resentment I received, the stronger I got. Finally, I thought, “To hell with it. I’m just going to blow the lid off this whole thing and make this video.”
The video has garnered 1.3 million views on his Facebook page and has been shared on many other popular pages. It is estimated to have reached some 5 million viewers so far.
There are some 27,000 followers of the Facebook group, with new people posting both video and text testimonials every day. Straka calls them “the patriots”.
Initially, my focus was on the gay community because I was so angry at how they were [being terrorized]. Then I thought, why should I limit it to just us? They’re doing the same thing to black people. And Hispanic people. And frankly, they’re doing the same thing to everybody in one way or another. But it’s really the minorities in America who don’t feel like we have a choice. That’s what they keep telling us over and over: “You’re not safe on the right. They don’t want you on the right. They hate you on the right. You’re only safe with us. We are here to protect you.” Meanwhile, are you kidding me? You’re here to “protect” me? All you are doing is use my fears to scare the [expletive] out of me — to terrify me and to try to manipulate the way that I vote.
Libby Albert, one of the WalkAway Facebook group members, said “This is taking off,” citing the snowstorm of thousands of hashtags on Twitter. “It’s kind of incredible.”
Said another: “It’s kind of incredible. It’s OK. Walk away.”
Women’s hour 158
… comes round at last.
Dark women taking preference over pale women.
For every plum job, every position of power, including in government and at the top of government.
Pale men – OUT!
We pursue thoughts arising from yesterday’s post, The woman who knows she can save the United States …
From the Washington Post, by Michael Scherer and David Weigel:
The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.
The newest star of the Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, launched her New York congressional campaign by declaring “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office” — a jarring embrace of her distinction as a 28-year-old Latina less than a year removed from a job tending bar.
Her campaign slogan: “It’s time for one of us.”
That appeal to the tribal identities of class, age, gender and ethnicity turned out to be a good gamble, steering her to the nomination in a year when Democratic voters are increasingly embracing diversity as a way to realize the change they seek in the country.
“Diversity” meaning, as usual when used by Leftists: women, blacks, Hispanics, and (preferably black and female) persons who declare “non-normative” sexual preferences. Which is to say, anyone except a white male. Even a gay white male being not very welcome.
Given an option, Democratic voters have been picking women, racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians in races around the country at historic rates, often at the expense of the white male candidates who in past years typified the party’s offerings. …
The divide is more stark than any other so far in the primary season, and it reflects the party’s growing dependence on female and minority voters. …
The tribal trend has implications for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, where an historic number of nonwhite and female candidates are considering launching campaigns, including Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Cory Booker (N.J.). …
At a rally in Nevada over the weekend, [the blonde blue-eyed Cherokee] Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), another potential 2020 Democratic contender who never fails to mention her own hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma, got cheers when she let slip that she wanted to see a woman occupy “that really nice, oval-shaped room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”. …
This proved the case again in New York on Tuesday, when Ocasio-Cortez toppled [Joe] Crowley, one of the most powerful Democrats in the nation and one widely seen as heir apparent to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. …
Through the end of June, 151 women have won House Democratic primaries, nearly doubling the 81 female nominees at the same point in the 2016 cycle, according to data collected by the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. Republican nominations of women rose much more slowly, to 32 in 2018 from 27 in 2016.
On this difference, Neil Munro comments at Breitbart:
Unlike tribal Democrats who organize themselves into semi-fixed identity groups, the conservative GOP conserves the classical intellectual ideals built into the U.S. Constitution, and which aspires to help all people compromise on their voluntary political differences, regardless of color, sex, creed or tribe. According to the libertarian Mises Institute:
“Classical liberalism” is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism …
[Recent US-style] social liberalism deviates fundamentally … it denies the self-regulatory capacity of society: the state is called on to redress social imbalance in increasingly ramified ways. …
The progressive, elite-socialist ideology of “diversity” uses government to impose variety on settled, coherent communities with the goal of fragmenting political resistance to progressives’ centralized power. …
U.S. conservatives oppose the centralized variety of “diversity” and the grass-roots variety of semi-fixed tribalism.
Conservatives instead favor a small-government ideal which allows a shifting mix of personal freedoms and voluntary affiliations. They expect people — regardless of race, class, sex or birthplace — to organize themselves and their ideas to meet their own needs …
What the Democrats’ policy of “diversity” has come to mean in practice is choosing women “of color” as candidates.
In Europe, where there are fewer women “of color” to choose, white women seem to be preferred to white men. Whether such a policy has been articulated or not, women occupy a great many seats of government, and feminists almost all of them. The Swedish cabinet – fully half of it female – calls itself a “feminist government”. As Western Europe under such governance declines – the female Chancellor of Germany having insisted on swamping the continent with immigrants from the Muslim countries of the Levant, North Africa, and the Middle and Far East – popular nationalist movements are arising and strengthening, and Italy recently elected a nationalist government (a coalition of two popular nationalist parties led by white males) which is taking active steps to stem the tide of the Muslim invasion. And Austria now has a white male Chancellor who in principle opposes more Muslim immigration into his country.
In fairness, and against our prejudice, we must admit that some of the popular nationalist movements (dubbed “far-right” and “neo-Nazi” by the globalist progressives) are also led, and ably, by women – notably Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party in France, Frauke Petry of Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Anne Marie Waters of the new For Britain party. But they rose on their merits, not because they are women. And that applies also to the excellent women in President Trump’s cabinet.
The thing is, if people are not chosen for a job because of their proven ability to do it well, but for irrelevant and ridiculous reasons such as their color, sex, or sexual behavior, the results will not be good. It’s obvious, but the Left studiously overlooks it. Of course the best person for a job might be female, black, Hispanic, homosexual, transgender, but any such state of being is incidental and cannot in itself be a qualification.
The supreme qualification for power in the US, and ideally everywhere, is the understanding that only the nation-state can protect the freedom of all, equally under the rule of law; that the nation-state must have well-guarded borders to survive; that small unobtrusive government is the only good government; and that only free market capitalism can produce general prosperity.
And those ideas, well proved to be good, were taught to us by – cry! Democrats, social democrats, socialists, communists, feminists – white men.
The New York idiocracy’s anti-education plan 7
They’ve been the jewel in the crown of New York City’s public school system: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech (here’s a longer list). They provided a chance for any of New York’s students, regardless of finances or race or creed or religion, to pass the qualifying test and get a fabulous education among their peers.
So Neo-Neocon reports and comments.
But that opportunity has met the diversity police in the form of Mayor De Blasio, who has proposed an end to all that …
Mayor de Blasio of New York has a plan to “do away with the single entrance test, instead offering admission to the top 7 percent of graduates from all middle schools. That would make up 90 to 95 percent of admissions, with the remainder coming from a lottery”.
If this plan is implemented, either the failure rate will go up or the curriculum will be dumbed down, or both.
Michael Goodwin writes at the New York Post:
Under Mayor de Blasio, New Yorkers watch as their City Hall becomes a font of bad ideas. Day in, day out, the dumb and the dumber tumble forth with a common flaw: little bang for big bucks.
But de Blasio tops himself with his plan to impose a virtual racial quota on the city’s top high schools. In a single move, he surrenders the effort to improve hundreds of failing schools while simultaneously aiming to undermine the truly excellent ones.
Without doubt, this is his Worst Idea Ever. …
The plan would throw objective, proven test standards out the window, and thus qualifies as educational malpractice. The mayor inadvertently admits as much by saying his new chancellor, Richard Carranza, “is focused on social justice”.
The mission of the Social Justice movement is to ensure that the stupid, the mad, and the criminal (of all races, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, and “genders”, except “cis-heteronormative” white males, and Asian scholars because they are not stupid, mad, or criminal anyway) inherit the earth. (No matter that the criminals will then despatch the stupid and the insane.)
Not so long ago, chancellors were hired to run schools and promote educational excellence for all students. Now they’re hired to engineer outcomes based on race, ethnicity and family income.
The lower the family income the more virtuous and worthy the appointee.
This is justice only if you believe identity trumps all other human attributes, including effort, character and achievement. Sadly, de Blasio and Carranza worship that false god.
It follows that they aim to make the student body at the top high schools more closely reflect the citywide student population, which is 70 percent black and Latino. As it stands, black and Latino students make up about 10 percent of the 15,000 enrolled at the most selective public schools.
That is a serious and longstanding concern, but a fundamental problem with the argument that the schools are not diverse is that Asian students are the single-largest group at most of the schools. They constitute 73.5 percent at Stuyvesant, 65.6 percent at Bronx Science and 61.3 percent at Brooklyn Tech. Overall, Asians of all backgrounds comprise less than 20 percent of students.
Their extraordinary presence in the top schools belies de Blasio’s claim that the schools are exclusionary because many Asian students belong to poor immigrant families where English is not spoken in the home.
If the mayor wanted an honest answer to the imbalance, he would order educrats to study why so many Asian students excel and try to duplicate their work habits among all students. Instead, Asian success is now being treated as a problem that must be overcome, just as several generations ago, high-achieving Jewish students were restricted by quotas at Harvard and other Ivy League institutions.
De Blasio’s plan would be phased in over three years and do away with the single entrance test, instead offering admission to the top 7 percent of graduates from all middle schools. That would make up 90 to 95 percent of admissions, with the remainder coming from a lottery.
The change would be a case of fixing what isn’t broken. For generations, the vast bulk of the students admitted under the current system succeeded, making those high schools prime feeders for the best colleges in America.
But those facts are ignored by de Blasio because they reveal the real problem — too many elementary and middle schools in black and Latino neighborhoods are perennial failure factories. He talks a good game about fixing them and is throwing a ton of taxpayer money at them, but has little to show for it.
He, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg before him, is making it easier to take the selective school test and offer free prep courses. None of it has made much of a difference in part because de Blasio has turned the schools over to the teachers union and has given up trying to get rid of the teachers who can’t teach.
The mayor is also a big fan of dumbed-down tests and graduation requirements, always with an eye toward engineering a phony racial and ethnic balance in results.
But if those results were real, he wouldn’t need a quota to gain more balance in the top schools.
He even made it next to impossible to suspend unruly and violent students because of a racial tilt, with principals complaining that many classrooms are now chaotic.
The only silver lining is that eliminating the test for some of the schools requires state legislation, and there is little chance of that happening now. Gov. Cuomo, thankfully, doesn’t appear interested, so opponents, including Asian parents’ groups, have an opportunity to organize and stop the quota travesty in its tracks.
They shouldn’t assume common sense will prevail. Not in Albany, and certainly not with de Blasio at City Hall.
(Hat-tip Robert Kantor)
Candace Owens speaks 13
“Racism is being used to turn blacks into single-issue voters.”
Candace Owens speaks for conservatism, capitalism and the free market:
Londonistan 122
London has a Muslim mayor. Its murder rate has outstripped that of New York. It has become one of Europe’s main centers of festering ant-Semitism, encouraged by the Labour Party.
An American describes London as she finds it now.
Phyllis Chesler writes at Front Page:
Now, all London only dares whisper about the Arab and Muslim takeover of their city. Nearly every single luxury hotel is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia as is the historic department store Harrods. (Dodi Al-Fayed’s father, an Egyptian, bought it long ago when he envisioned his son marrying Princess Diana, the mother of the future King of England).
The best townhouses on Park Lane, in Hyde Park, Belgravia, Mayfair, and Knightsbridge now belong to Arab Embassies, oil-rich sheiks, and the occasional Russian oligarch. I know several exceptionally gallant, truth-telling thinkers and writers in London who are now blacklisted, censored, their powers curtailed. They dared tell the truth about how biased against America and Israel the British media and professoriate are–and how irrationally they favor both Islam and Islamism.
However, as one life-long Londoner pointed out to me: “Harrods, which is also owned by Arabs, (al-Fayed sold it to Qatar), loses business nine months of the year and only survives because Arabs come on shopping expeditions in the summer to escape the desert heat.” London’s Fortum and Mason’s, the most luxurious store in the world, now has its first stand-alone satellite store in Dubai.
A limousine driver tells me that he routinely picks up exceedingly short fur coats that cost $65,000.00 for Arab women and that “once, a Saudi Prince left 3 million pounds in the boot (trunk) of my car. He completely forgot about it.”
A professor from Oxford comes down to visit me. She tells me about the “Asian (Pakistani) grooming gangs” in Oxford and about how 378 very young Caucasian infidel girls were pimped out by these gangs in Oxford alone.
“Finally, after many years, the pimps were arrested and sentenced and the failure of the police to stop them was excoriated in open court. The English Defense League mounted a brave, civil rights protest right in front of the police station. The police cordoned them off, surrounded them with barking dogs and a line of police officers who let no one near enough to hear what they had to say. And then they loosed the Anti-Fascist League against them who came rushing down the street, hollering “Nazi, fascist scum.”
As Orwell understood, not all speech is equal.
The streets are filled with women in heavy hijab, in Niqab, (face masks), and in black, burqa-like body bags. As I have written many times before: I have no quarrel with head coverings but suggest that the West must draw the line at face masks and sensory deprivation isolation chambers which burqas truly are. These “covered” women are flying the flag of Jihad, of a barbaric version of patriarchy – which is now increasingly ensconced within Britain’s gates.
The West’s dependence on Big Oil together with its own blind commitment to cultural sensitivity, an allegedly anti-racist tolerance for the barbarian “other,” and fearfulness about the consequences of speaking out, have together brought this about.
Some say that just as England once colonized the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, Central Asia, and the Far East that now, the favor is being returned; the Islamic world is giving the colonizing Mother Country a taste of its own well deserved medicine.
The British took great gifts to the backward Third World as they spread their empire. To all their colonies, individual freedom (for all, after Wilberforce), tolerance, a free press, an impartial judiciary, roads and railways. To some who lacked it, literacy.
The Muslims now colonizing Britain – many of them NOT from former British colonies – have no equal gifts to bring. Instead they offer the subjugation of women, intolerance, honor killings, female genital mutilation, suppression of free speech, indoctrination of their primitive and cruel ideology, the horrors of Sharia law wherever and whenever they can, and hatred of the people and culture of their host country.
Tragically, this means that infidel women are sexual prey; that their rape, sexual harassment, and sexual slavery is being done quite openly, publicly – just as it is done in the Muslim world.
It means that the luxury hotels all offer a “halal” option; that certain British government offices are run as Sharia enterprises.
All British government offices have Muslims in positions of authority. For – you know – “diversity and inclusion”.
The British nationalists and the Islamists agree on one thing and one thing only: That the Jews are the greatest oppressors and conspirators in the world; that “Palestine” is the most oppressed (non-) country in the whole wide world; and that this must be screamed out loud in the mosques, on the streets, in the media, and in the universities. …
Recently, I wrote about a British documentary made possible by the hard work of a Turkish-born nun, Sister Hatune Dogan. She opened every door for the British filmmakers, gentled the sex slaves whom she and her networks had rescued from ISIS and translated their words for the filmmaker.
Despite all promises to the contrary, Sister Hatune and her foundation were completely dropped from the film. When I finally got the producer on the phone, she admitted to me that “the film could not afford to be associated with such a racist Islamophobe, that it would ruin their chances for recognition and prizes” – and when I questioned her further, she quickly began yelling, then screaming after which she hung up on me in breathtaking fashion.
Yes, there is some “fight back”. Britain has the power to return Muslim girls whose families have kidnapped them to Pakistan for forced marriages – that’s if they can find them. Just as I was leaving, I read that a couple were arrested at Heathrow Airport for having taken their eight year old girl back to Somalia to have her genitals mutilated; doing so is against the law.
Will Britain, will all Europe, fight to remain Western countries? Or, hoisted on their own petard of political correctness, will they simply become vassal states of Islam?
To be or not to be – that is the question.
The Islamic Republic of Great Britain looms ahead. For the most part, the living generations are too feeble and cowardly to do anything to stop it.
*
In preparation for the transformation of the United Kingdom into the Islamic Republic of Great Britain, the Conservative government is turning it into a thorough-going police state.
Freedom of speech is abolished.
Blasphemy laws are re-introduced.
Breitbart reports:
People promoting “hostility” towards a religion or the transgendered online could get sentences of up to six years in jail, especially if they have a large online audience, according to new proposals.
The Sentencing Council for England and Wales has drafted changes to public order offenses, including anyone perceived as targeting online “protected characteristics”, including “race; sex; disability; age; sexual orientation; religion or belief; pregnancy and maternity; and gender reassignment”.
Whoever drafted this nonsense is retarded, insane, or Muslim. Or all three. (Muslim intermarriage in Britain produces many future citizens who are physically and/or mentally impaired.)
It is commonly known and generally accepted that the only religion actually protected by law from criticism is Islam.
All ideologies, all ideas, must be critically examined.
And as we have said before, and will say again:
Any idea that needs a special law to protect it is ipso facto a bad idea.