Stopping science being a form of white-supremacist racist oppression 61

The “Biden” administration is compelled by the Holy Writ of Wokeism to appoint black women to top government posts.

It’s not easy to find black women to head some of the posts, such as the Office of Science.

But they have found one. She has the skill to adapt Science to fit the dogma of Wokeism.

She will stop Science being a form of white-supremacist racist oppression which is all it has been hitherto.

Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports.The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science”, as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion.

As head of the Office of Science, Berhe would be asked to choose strategic directions for DOE-funded science. Should the agency try to expand understanding of fundamental particle physics or of the physics of the universe? How much attention should be given to solid-state lighting, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence? With regard to energy conservation and clean energy, should DOE pursue geothermal or biomass, tackle storage issues, or seek greater energy efficiency through insulation and refrigeration? Each day, the Office of Science turns out dozens of “one-pager” descriptions of projects and proposals. It is unlikely that a soil geologist (with an M.S. in political ecology) will have the knowledge to evaluate proposals for, say, advanced scientific computing research or nuclear physics, or make the policy judgments that those “one-pagers” require.

But she is not expected or asked by the “Biden” administration to do anything of the sort. She is asked to be black, which she is; to be female by nature or choice, and she qualifies in that by nature; and to get non-white people recognized as scientists. Getting non-white people recognized as scientists is the future of Science. It is called “Diversity” and is far more important than nuclear physics.

It is fitting that Berhe teaches at the University of California, Merced. UC Merced was created as a diversity campus, in the hope of minting more Hispanic graduates with a UC degree. No one advocating for this new institution, located in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, made the case that California needed more university research capacity. Berhe herself benefited from UC’s obsessive diversity push, having received a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program for promoting “underrepresented minority” graduate students.

A physicist wonders if Berhe “can know merit when she sees it”. Preference beneficiaries “think that merit is a myth and hierarchies of achievement are arbitrary and based on power and oppression“, this professor observes, based on years of watching academic admissions and hiring. Berhe argues that the lack of race and sex diversity in STEM is due to exclusion, rather than to the absence of a proportional number of competitively qualified “diverse” candidates in the hiring pipeline. Her co-authored articles include: Leaky Pipeline vs. Vicious Obstacle Course: metaphors for the persistent exclusion of minoritized scholars from STEM; A critical feminist approach to transforming workplace climate in the geosciences through community engagement and partnerships with societies; Hostile climates are barriers to diversifying the geosciences. She will undoubtedly further elevate the importance of race and sex as criteria for federal research awards.

Berhe’s Soil Biogeochemistry Lab at UC Merced strives, according to its website, to “create a dynamic, diverse, and equitable STEM community that represents the public”.  Scientists do not mirror the public’s demographics, however, thanks to yawning academic skills gaps. Nor is it the mission of science to be representative of population groups; its sole mission is to advance knowledge. Berhe’s lab, however, is developing and testing “sexual harassment bystander intervention training programs that incorporate experiences of diverse women” as part of a National Science Foundation consortium. Her lab recommends readings on racism and offers tips on writing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” statements that are increasingly required of academic science hires. Expect such statements, thinly disguised euphemisms for announcing oneself as “diverse”, to become mandatory for a DOE science job or grant.

The Biden administration’s war on merit is being waged at an unprecedented rate.

The subjection of scientific research to the requirement of race and sex parity threatens future human progress. Such parity can be achieved only by sacrificing intellectual standards. An electrical engineer at a prestigious California university compares Berhe’s nomination to “putting a newspaper delivery boy in charge of Google”. Theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia warns that by choosing scientific leadership according to a political agenda, “science itself risks becoming another form of covert political activism”.

It is that. Has been for decades. What is global warming science but a form of political activism – and not covertly but openly?

The national science agencies have already wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on identity politics. The Biden administration will multiply that waste at a time when China is relentlessly racing to surpass the United States at the frontiers of science.

China is winning. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe will help it win.

And the new great goals of Woke America – the abasement of the white race, the humbling of men, the bringing down of the barriers those villains put up by making Science, Engineering and Mathematics difficult – will be achieved.

Posted under education, Leftism, Race, Science, United States by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, May 11, 2021

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America’s state religion 570

Wokeism is fast becoming the American state religion.

Ben Weingarten identifies it as such, writing – surprisingly – at (woke) Newsweek:

Should it overtake our government, in making identity politics paramount it will unmake any semblance of a unifying American identity.

In so doing, it will serve as the ultimate tool of cynical, radically leftist power-grabbers, who will be dividing and conquering under the guise of a fraudulent virtue, justice and morality.

It is the religion of the party that is now in power. The government is woke. It is making identity politics paramount.

The Woke’s core views have been bubbling up from elite classrooms to the commanding heights of society for decades.

What is different is that now such views have been legitimated by the authorities and mainstreamed in our culture. If you dare to challenge them, you are liable to end up excommunicated from American life—canceled. After all, dissenting from the Woke orthodoxy makes you a racist.

Consider some of the signs that indicate the fast-accelerating ascent of Wokeism.

In New York City, at the same time Mayor Bill de Blasio was preventing Jews and Christians from freely exercising their religions—including peaceably assembling—he permitted adherents of Wokeism to assemble en masse in protesting, rioting and looting with impunity. The Woke enjoyed First Amendment rights foreclosed to the [other] faithful.

Mayor de Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the relevant health authorities had argued the coronavirus-driven draconian shutdown of New York City, and the rest of the state, was necessary to save lives. If so, by permitting the Woke to flood the streets, were not New York officials conceding that public health was not really the number one priority? Were they not suggesting that they were willing to let people get sick and die because the right to practice Wokeism was absolute, sacrosanct and preeminent—this, incidentally, after instructing citizens to take to the streets in celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year in February, coronavirus be damned, in context of a broader campaign against purported coronavirus-related anti-Chinese discrimination? Were they not affirming that Wokeism mattered more than the lives of the Woke—and everyone else?

Certainly, this view would seem to have been reinforced, as, in the face of the Woke, New York reduced police funding, and policing itself, which coincided with a dramatic rise in violent crime.

In St. Louis, menacing protesters by the dozens were able to threaten a couple, the McCloskeys, at their home, without consequence. The police did not rush to the McCloskeys’ aid. In fact, after the husband and wife were recorded brandishing firearms to deter those descending on their home, authorities left them not only defenseless, but threatened to disarm them and throw them in jail.

Did it not appear again as if privileging the Woke was now the highest responsibility of government, over and above protecting our natural rights, including those to life, liberty and property—all of which the Woke threatened?

The religion of Wokeism is the most extreme racist ideology since segregation.

While the “summer of love” may be over in Seattle, with CHOP/CHAZ—the ultimate symbol of government acquiescence to Wokeism—no more, its ideals persist. Seattle recently held a training session for white municipal employees—to be clear, a government training session for those of a specific race—called “Interrupted Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” Meanwhile, Washington’s state phase-in plan for public schools calls for giving priority to “students furthest from educational justice first,” specifically including “students of color”—that is, on the basis of race.

Tal Bachmann deplores it at Steynonline:

Wokism is now the official state religion of the United States of America.

By constitutional standards, this means something has gone wrong. The United States isn’t supposed to have a state religion. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Yet it now has one, and its name is Wokism.

Wokism is now celebrated or taught as Absolute Truth in every elementary school class, every middle and high school class, every university class, every corporate training session, every Capitol Hill political chamber, every Hollywood movie or cable show, every civic ceremony, every law, every political speech, every novel, every awards show, every sports league, every everything.

Government, its corporate allies, and cultural institutions all fund Wokism. They, along with their street troops, all demand Wokist belief and perfect compliance with Wokist commandments and rituals. They all punish those who question Wokist orthodoxy, often by completely ruining their lives. They fire dissenters, ban them from social media forever, initiate global social media pile-ons, and even threaten to kill them. Sometimes our officially Wokist government sends in goon squads to scare, or even arrest, those who dare criticize Wokism.

Wokism, the writer rightly says, is a “bellicose, uncompromising, ruthless, unself-critical, totalitarian movement“.

Does that remind you of anything else? If you say Islam, you win. The fact is that Wokism is now well on its way to becoming to American government and society what Islam is to Iranian government and society.

That this has happened means—can only mean—that something has gone terribly wrong in America (and the rest of the West). America’s original plan was to avoid funding and pushing any particular religious ideology or practice. It was to have full religious freedom. It was to keep government limited to solely protecting a few basic liberties. It was for Americans and their government to live and let live.

But things have changed. Why?

Maybe luxury spoiled us and made us fat and lazy and stupid. Maybe the Frankfurt School communists really did inject a lethal dose of philosophical poison into American thought. Maybe misguided government policies, and socially corrosive movements like sexual libertinism or feminism, really did start the implosion of the family unit.

Somehow or other, we’ve wound up in a total mess. And somehow or other, we need to find a way out of it. This is no way to live. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to live in a society run by frothing ideologues who have declared war on human biology, logic, and mathematics; on unborn children, confused adolescents, and the traditional familial arrangements which raise them; on Shakespeare and Homer; on fairness and decency; on reality itself—on survival itself. These people are all manic, obsessive-compulsive nation-destroyers, community-destroyers, culture-destroyers, family-destroyers, individual-destroyers, love-destroyers, beauty-destroyers, everything-destroyers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win”, by now we all know where it will end up.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America.

The public is now increasingly bombarded by 360-degree, 24/7 wokeness in the fashion of the Maoist Red Guard gangs. There appears little refuge from it. Not in television commercials. Not from CEOs. Not from professional sports. Not from movies or television shows. Not from Wall Street, the internet, and social media. Not from the administrative state, and not from the military. Not from the K-12 teachers, much less the professors.

It is largely the well-off professionals, the “privileged” and the rich—CEOs, news anchors, actors, star athletes, college presidents, foundation heads, corporate board retired military brass, Wall Street grandees—who usually do the woke remonstrating (or fund it) to the supposedly non-privileged but guilty un-woke.

The most law-abiding of Americans now seem terrified of the law—the FBI of James Comey vintage, John Brennan’s legacy at the CIA, the same old IRS of Lois Lerner, the Justice Department once branded by Eric Holder, and the predictable court order of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Enlisted men fear their inquisitional officers.

Conservatives especially fear that the once-revered FBI can become analogous to the Stasi, the once indomitable CIA after 2015 began emulating the KGB, and the federal prosecutor has become a vindictive Inspector Javert. And just when you think they are crazier for such fears, another couple is rousted out of bed by agents for supposedly being at a riot they were not at.

The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold. 

Roger L. Simon writes at the Epoch Times:

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

All key aspects, most parts of them anyway, of our society “get it” … the media, the corporations, the government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the military (yikes!), entertainment, the university system, the K-through-12 system, the medical community, the scientific community (incredibly), the religious, and on and on.

All, to one extent or another, believe in “woke” except—the people.

What the extremist ideology of “woke” actually provokes is talk of—and not just talk—secession and even civil war.

Few of us have heard anything like that in our lifetimes. But now it’s real. We have been driven apart as never before. We have been awakened indeed.

Anything can happen and some of us, who would never have considered anything like secession and civil war, suddenly do—highly disturbing to us as those thoughts may be.

How long will it be before “considering” comes to decision and “some of us”  – ideally most of us – act?

Black mamas 132

A Note on America this Mother’s Day, May 9, 2021

The patriarchy is gone.

We are all now as fatherless as most black families have been for generations.

We are ruled by women.

Black women.

If you are against them, if you are against a black matriarchy, you are a racist sexist, or a sexist racist, and a worse thing than that you cannot be.

If you are for them, if you want America and the world to be ruled by black women, you are woke.

If you are male but woke, you can live, but humbly.

If you are white but woke, you can live, but humbly.

If you are male and white, and not woke, your days are numbered.

Posted under Race, Slavery, United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, May 9, 2021

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Review: Nova Roma: De Itinere in Occasum 189

We usually only review books about religion and contemporary politics, but we made an exception for NOVA ROMA* for three reasons: first, we happen to know that the author, Anderson Gentry, is an atheist conservative; second, we admire the Roman Republic and appreciate how much our own civilization owes to it; third, we found that the story makes a strong contribution to an important debate pursued with ever greater intensity here and now in the West.

Don’t be put off by the Latin title. The book is written in English. And nothing it tells us about the Romans can seem strange to us in our time. The author rightly reminds us in his Introduction:

“Once all roads led to Rome. Now, Rome stands as the source of all roads that lead to modern Western civilization. In fiction and in fact, Rome excites the imagination as few other nations ever have.”

The story – which moves at a fast pace, making it a real page-turner – begins in Rome in 44 B.C.E. Caesar has crossed the Rubicon and is advancing with his army towards Rome. Some of the Senators, suspecting that he wants to be crowned king and so put an end to the Roman Republic, form a plan, not to stab him to death as happened historically, but to bring a powerful military force of their own to oppose him.

Among the would-be defenders of the Republic are Pompey, Cato, Cicero, and Brutus. They set sail with two legions, livestock, arms and horses, and the treasury gold, in forty ships bound for Spain, where Pompey has reserves of money and can recruit soldiers. But they never reach their intended destination. A tremendous storm blows them way beyond the Iberian peninsula, right across the ocean. Thirty-four ships survive to land them on the coast of an unknown continent which fifteen hundred years later would be called America.

Reconciled to the certainty that they will never be able to return home, they found a new Rome, starting with the construction of a Senate, a forum, and a protective wall, all built with wood and stone. They name their rudimentary city Nova Roma.

And they encounter the native peoples. The Romans call them Novans, regard them as primitive savages. But, needing to trade with them, they soon find that there are wise men among them, worthy of all respect. Friendly relations are established early with two tribes, but there is also a tribe of fierce warriors, and war between the Romans and Novans becomes unavoidable.

Most of the rest of the story is about the war. It is excitingly narrated and demonstrates an expertise in military tactics on the part of the author which will add to the appeal of the novel for readers who share his fascination with the subject.

We will not give away the ending, which we found not just satisfying but moving. Suffice it to say that that the resolution of the problem of how an advanced civilization can come to terms with a less developed nation to the satisfaction of both is typically Roman – and a model for our time.

 

* NOVA ROMA: DE ITINERE IN OCCASUM by Anderson Gentry, Crimson Dragon Publishing, Aurora, Colorado, 2020. 383 pages. Available from June 1, 2021, at $16.99 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other bookstores, or direct from CrimsonDragonPublishing.com. Pre-order here. The  e-book at $8.99 will be available through the same, as well as Nook, iBooks, and OverDrive (Library System).

Posted under Reviews by Jillian Becker on Saturday, May 8, 2021

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Left fascism, Right feebleness 137

What is the Republican Party FOR?

Where are its protests, its howls of rage,  its demands, its questions, its investigations, its objections, its actions?

As a national party in opposition to the dictatorship of the Oligarchy it is useless! Feeble! Positively collaborative with the destroyers of the Republic.

What is a conservative party needed for, what is it up against? Extreme bigotry that declares itself to be against bigotry; extreme racism that declares itself to be against racism; fascism that justifies its violence in the name of anti-fascism; terrorists that pretend they are acting against terrorists; relentless outpourings of bitter hatred against what is falsely called hate; oppressive dictatorship claiming to be against dictatorship; the spreading of fake news and misinformation to label true reporting as lies; a junta’s coup d’état to undo what it wrongly called a coup d’état; a continual committing of crimes of perjury to get honorable men punished for perjuries they did not commit; Americans destroying America. 

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Why are Republicans so reluctant to confront Democrat racism? Why are they reluctant to use the word “traitors” for a party that funds Palestinian terrorists and favors Iranian Nazis, blows up America’s borders in the midst of a global pandemic and privileges illegal aliens and criminals over law abiding American citizens? Why isn’t it treason to systematically attack America’s constitutional order, and its revolutionary founding, aid and abet America’s enemies, and attack the integrity of America’s electoral system?

The Democrats are busily creating a one-party state by destroying the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, eliminating  voter I.D.s, flooding the polls with unsolicited mail-in ballots, demonizing opponents as “insurrectionists” and traitors, de-platforming presidents and prominent conservatives, banning books they find “offensive”, conducting witch-hunts of conservatives in the military, in the Capitol police, in the Department of Homeland Security, and turning our schools into indoctrination centers for anti-American racist ideologies. Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are now the curricula in thousands of K-12 schools. The crackpot racism of these theories  turns our national heritage upside down, caricaturing Americans as slaveocrats and racists rather than as the leading defenders of freedom and equality in the world.

Democrats control every major inner city in America, and have for fifty to a hundred years; every killing field – Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Minneapolis. Every injustice real or imagined in the inner cities, Democrats are 100% responsible for. The oppressor of inner city minorities is not “white supremacy”; it’s the flesh and blood racist, pro-criminal officials of the Democrat Party.

And nothing, no one, actively opposing it!

Please, Donald Trump, get a firm grip on the Republican Party and make it work for you, against them, and so for America.

What does the wider world think of President Biden? 25

 

Posted under Australia, United States, Videos by Jillian Becker on Thursday, May 6, 2021

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What is an oligarchy? 89

…  asks Angelo Codevilla at American Greatness, and answers that it is –

The exercise of coercive powers by and for self-selected elites. 

Which describes the present government of the United States.

America is no longer a constitutional republic.

The writer states firmly –

It is an oligarchy. 

He asks more rhetorical questions:

What are hundreds of America’s biggest corporations doing as they browbeat the public to abolish the requirement of identification for voting? What are Twitter, Facebook, et al. doing when they prohibit people from sharing facts that are inconvenient to government policy or (and) the Democratic Party? What did banks do when they turned over to the FBI the records of persons who happened to have traveled to D.C. near January 6? And what about all those big retail stores—you know, the ones that the government designated “essential,” the ones that thrived under the lockdowns—what are they doing when they continue to demand that you wear masks on their property regardless of vaccination? What are colleges and universities, even K-12 schools doing when they deprive of opportunities young people who do not fit woke profiles? And what do all of them do when they dismiss complaints that they are violating your Constitutional rights by telling you that they are exercising their own private rights?

Are they simply fronting for the government or, specifically, for the Democratic Party?

Is the government—in practice, the political party that controls the government—fronting for corporations, or do the corporations front for the Party? Do the drug companies influence what the Centers for Disease Control “recommends” regarding pandemic restrictions? Do they influence the Democratic Party, or is it the other way around? Who runs whom?

He does not answer those questions. He dismisses them.

Understanding what is happening in America begins with dismissing such silly questions. Focus, instead, on the fact that those who rule us in all these matters are essentially the same people. They are interchangeable, with near-identical interests, loves, hates, and tastes. Often, they are friends and colleagues, and are united about coercing whomever is not on their own sociopolitical side. Whether the institutions they control are public or private under our Constitutional system has ceased to matter.

The American republic was founded in 1776-89 by the people at large, to serve the general interest by mixing the power of sheer numbers with that of states, and with that of a unitary presidency. But over the last century, the increasingly homogeneous set of people who run the republic’s institutions took power out of the hands of the people’s elected representatives pretty much at all levels, and have governed in their own interest rather than in the general population’s. Nobody voted for this, on any level.

In 21st century America, this oligarchy erased the distinction between public and private powers, and replaced it with the distinction between those who are and are not part of the ruling class. The privatization of public power is oligarchy’s essence. Because government is by the ruling class few, and is for that class’s interest, the oligarchs can wield the coercive powers of government without legal limits, as if they were dealing with their own private affairs.

Those who live under oligarchies are not citizens—because oligarchy validates itself, decides for itself, within itself, and because it is committed above all to negating the people’s capacity to rule itself.

Americans struggle to understand what is happening because we still regard ourselves as citizens, and imagine that those who run our republican institutions still respect them to some extent.

But we aren’t, and they don’t.

We see persons whom the ruling class favors committing crimes with impunity, and complain of a two-tiered justice system. But this is not mere corruption.

We see corporations wielding government powers and complain that power is being franchised to favorites. But these are not mere favorites of the regime. This is the new regime being itself. Such things are not deviations from republican legality. They are the assertion of oligarchic reality. This is oligarchic justice, oligarchic normality.

The republic was yesterday. The oligarchy is today.

Conservatives’ mistake is to try conserving something that no longer exists by supporting institutions that now belong to a regime so alien to republican life that it treats attempts at citizenship as crimes against the regime. And so they are. They call today’s American regime “our democracy”. It is “theirs” all right, but not ours.

It is a classic oligarchy.

Can it be defeated? The writer thinks it can be.

Rejection of oligarchy is possible, even easy, if and when large numbers of persons do it together. This goes for ostensibly private corporations as well as for formerly republican institutions now in the oligarchs’ hands. The moment that millions of Americans, whether led by actual state governors in league with one another or by prospective presidents, recognize that Twitter and Facebook are enemy institutions, their power ends. The moment that millions are led to boycott Costco, or Pfizer, their officers are fired. The moment that these millions, so led, refuse the legitimacy of anything coming from Washington, its power ends.

Our oligarchs, having seen how easy it was to cower the majority of Americans to agree to the stupid, self-destructive practices of mask-wearing and lockdowns, having rejoiced in ruining the lives of small numbers of individual dissenters, believing that, under the media’s cover, their threats to crush opponents as white supremacists will forestall serious resistance, fantasize about applying the tools of the war on terror to America’s population.

But no. Their success was due to what remained of the American people’s confidence in them. That is now gone. The oligarchs have the FBI and CIA, and the Pentagon’s generals. But who will risk his pension, never mind his life, for them? Who will risk anything for Kamala Harris, never mind Joseph Biden?

Nor, in 2021, can anybody stop the governors and legislatures of any number of states from leading their peoples in settling what is and is not acceptable to them, how they shall and shall not live—that is, nobody can stop them as they decide to govern themselves.

The American people, divided as they are, cannot purge the oligarchs from what had been republican institutions. But those so minded have full power to defend themselves from them and to leave them to their own devices.

Will some – perhaps most – states simply disobey the federal government? Is that the way back to a free republic?

Posted under Fascism, government, United States by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, May 4, 2021

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Biden’s America 176

It is the policy of the “Biden” government to house and feed illegal aliens free in hotel luxury while US military veterans live and die on the streets under their windows.

“Biden” is the label the American Oligarchy has stuck on itself.

Radio host James T. Harris shows a typical picture of city life in Biden’s America:

Posted under United States, Videos by Jillian Becker on Monday, May 3, 2021

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A cure for riches 12

We do not generally trust polls, but these figures endorse something we are pretty sure of anyway, so we trust them more than most.

Ameer Benno reports at the Western Journal:

The Democratic Party is now undeniably the party of the wealthy.

IRS data from 2020 show that Democrats represent 65 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000.

Most taxpayers in Republican districts – 74% – have household incomes of less than $100,000.

Census Bureau data that show the typical congressional district represented by a Republican in 2020 was 13 percent poorer than its Democratic counterpart.

A somewhat less scientific analysis from 2020 reinforced that the GOP is the party of working Americans. According to The Cook Political Report, 85 percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, while only 32 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country store did so — a “culture gap” of 53 points.

This demographic shift is part of a long-term trend that began well before the arrival of Trump and his MAGA policies on the political scene.

A 2015 study revealed that families registered as Democrats have higher annual salaries than Republicans.

And, according to a Vox report from 2016, top-end wealth in America over the past several decades has increasingly concentrated in a handful of metropolises. Most of these very prosperous cities (especially New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles) have become very solidly Democratic.

Despite these metrics, many cultural elitists on the left continue to perpetuate the canard that Republicans are country club snobs and that the Democrats are the party of the little guy, the underdog and the downtrodden. A Pew Research Center survey conducted during the Obama years revealed that more than 60 percent of Americans believed that Republicans were the party of the wealthy, but only 20 percent felt that way about Democrats. Conversely, 67 percent of Americans believed that the Democratic Party favors the poor and middle-class, and only 26 percent felt that way about Republicans.

The writer then speculates:

But if the Democratic Party is home to so many high-earners, why does it support so many wealth-killing measures, such as Biden’s 43.4 percent capital gains tax and the steep hike in the corporate tax rate?

The answer is that, generally speaking, its members view affluence — even their own — with scorn. Financial success does not inspire pride but shame. It is not something to be celebrated but punished.

Who can be so hard of heart as not to pity rich Democrats?

Luckily, there’s an easy cure for their suffering. Each has only to unload his/her/xir personal wealth onto any Republicans they happen to know or know of. Away with the dollars, away with the shame. Let Republicans endure the affliction of wealth.  

Posted under Commentary, United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, May 2, 2021

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Holy murder 149

“Kill those who are not Muslim.” – Koran, Sura 9:5

Paul Joseph Watson tells how this order, sent by Allah through his Prophet (mm-hmm-hmmm), was carried out today in France – where the motive behind the killings remains a mystery.

Posted under France, Islam, jihad, Videos by Jillian Becker on Friday, April 30, 2021

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