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2021-


2021-06-24 g
BARBARIAN BALLOT BALONEY EXPOSED

From what I’m hearing the information coming out is that the amount of ballots missing continues to be overwhelming. Let’s put it that way. We’re not going into numbers. That’s not our role. That’s going to come out at the right time… And when the information does come out, if it stays the way it is now, it’s going to be a nuclear explosion against this narrative against Democrats, against the mainstream media… This is absolutely major. Arizona is on fire. What they are uncovering is what we logically have known ever since the late night of November 3rd, early November 4th. We’ve known from the TIME magazine article. The Democrat Machine did everything they could to steal this election.

Boris Epshteyn


2021-06-24 f
BARBARIAN BETA MALE CHECKLIST FOR OLYMPICS
1. Wear bras and panties.
2. Wear dresses and skirts.
3. Take estrogen.
4. Take mincing steps.
5. Speak in a falsetto.
6. Don't bother using makeup.
7. Keep your penis; wear tight outfits and make sure it shows.
8. Take home the GOLD.


This is unfair and just wrong. A female competitor from Belgium said,
“Life-changing opportunities are missed for some athletes—medals and
Olympic qualifications—and we are powerless.” This is sad and a major
 step back for women’s athletics.


— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) June 21, 2021

*

Dinesh D’Souza wrote, “Laurel Hubbard competed as a man until 2013, with
undistinguished results. Then he had an idea! Team New Zealand sparks outrage
after picking transgender woman weightlifter to compete at Olympics.”


Laurel Hubbard competed as a man until 2013, with undistinguished results.
Then he had an idea!


Team New Zealand sparks outrage after picking transgender woman weightlifter
to compete at Olympics https://t.co/Oj9D4buGyS


— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 22, 2021


2021
-06-24 e
BARBARIANS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN, "DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES"


Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: “We’re coming for
you McAfee! We’re going to kill yourself”. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide
myself, I didn’t. I was whackd. Check my right arm. $WHACKD available only on
https://t.co/HdSEYi9krq 🙂  pic.twitter.com/rJ0Vi2Hpjj


— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 30, 2019


*

I am content in here. I have friends.

The food is good. All is well.

Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) October 15, 2020


*

The US believes I have hidden crypto. I wish I did but it has dissolved through the
many hands of Team McAfee (your belief is not required), and my remaining assets
are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association.


I have nothing.

Yet, I regret nothing.

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 16, 2021


*

The Department of Justice has confirmed that the American tycoon John McAfee
has been found dead in the cell he occupied in the Brians 2 Penitentiary Center.
He was seventy-five years old.


— Nathan Michaud (@InvestorsLive) June 23, 2021



2021
-06-24 d
BARBARIANS DEFENDED THEMSELVES WITH AK 47s, beating Uncle Sam from Vietnam to Afghanistan (& beyond)

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov

(No, Senile Joe, fighter jets and A-bombs aren't necessary.)



President Biden on 2nd Amendment: “If you think you need to have weapons to
take on the government? You need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons. The
point is, it’s always been…to rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned.”


Full video here: https://t.co/oJxPULyHtM  pic.twitter.com/trPidVFQtv

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 23, 2021



2021-06-24 c
BARBARIANS AT AUDITS


Drop the word FULL from FORENSIC AUDIT and say “fractional audit” all you get is the same old rigged systems and games. #FractionsDontFindFraud FULL FORENSIC AUDITS DO! #ScanTheBallots #KinematicArtifacts #NoBallotLeftBehind #JovanHuttonPulitzer WORDS MATTER! #Michigan Lost Again

— JovanHuttonPulitzer™ #JovanHuttonPulitzer (@JovanHPulitzer) June 22, 2021



2021-06-24 b
BARBARIANS AT STANFORD

My road to cancellation

The road to cancellation for Stanford business school educator, successful CEO and entrepreneur Joel Peterson began in 1987. Now it’s time to say enough!

“Wokeism,” America’s new civil religion, draws on elements of neo-Marxism, critical race theory, social justice and identity politics. Its adherents believe it will lead to a more just society. Its detractors, on the other hand, believe its “cancel culture” will push civil society to the brink. And, for the “woke,” either will do.

The roots of my own unlikely cancellation go as far back as 1987, when Jesse Jackson marched Stanford students up Palm Drive to a rhythmic chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Western Civ has got to go!” The next year, I joined the advisory council of its Graduate School of Business where I was soon invited to fill a one-year faculty vacancy. To everyone’s surprise (including my own), I returned every fall for the next three decades to teach four courses to a generation of exceptional MBA candidates.

Then, last year, before a student-politician boldly posted that “White people need to be eradicated,” I was summoned to respond to an equally disturbing complaint over having “triggered” woke students. Because I didn’t think I’d done anything worthy of the summons and because I had received the distinguished teaching award from students, a “Silver Apple Award” from alumni and been appointed to a faculty chair, I wasn’t worried. Alas, I’d misjudged my peril.

Years after Jackson’s campaign to eliminate Stanford’s requirement to study Western civilization, an Iowa-born, New York Times reporter, Nikole Hannah-Jones, developed what she titled “The 1619 Project.” In it, she presented America as founded on slavery and stained by perpetual bigotry.

With boosts from the Pulitzer Foundation and from George Floyd’s tragic death, her social justice message struck a nerve. However, when a number of historians debunked the pseudo-history, Hannah-Jones repositioned her essay as “a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative.” She followed up with a New York Times Magazine article headlined “What is Owed” making a case for reparations, consistent with her 1995 letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s “The Observer,” in which she likened Christopher Columbus to Hitler.

With police departments defunded, monuments vandalized and cities torched, Dr. Seuss was soon condemned as racist, Mr. Potato Head scheduled for gender reassignment and free speech restricted by social media oligarchs. So, it wasn’t a surprise to see social justice warriors on the previously welcoming Graduate School of Business campus.

Content of character vs. color of skin

In a class I teach, students objected when guest CEOs claimed to have been “color blind.” When I volunteered that I, too, had resisted hiring based on skin color, gender or quotas, and had relied, instead, on character, competence and commitment, some students were offended. To understand why those “triggered” would object to standards of character and competence being added to the emergent holy grail of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), I turned to one of my own daughters.

Sensing my bafflement at the outrage, she immediately wrote back:

“I have known you my entire life, and I know by your words and deeds that you value all people of all races, ethnicities, and genders. I know you are constantly impressed and inspired by immigrants and their amazing stories of courage and perseverance. I’m proud of the work you’ve done. If this younger, “triggered” generation pushes out of their lives all who seek to improve their understanding, teach them, and open their minds to broader ways of thinking, it will be to their detriment.”

I’d taught my kids – and, until now, my students — that talent, character and competence are evenly distributed across every demographic. In response to my determination to be on the lookout for leaders without regard to identity, an offended gender-studies major wrote that she’d not known “whether to scream or throw up.” After all, it had been nearly 60 years since Martin Luther King had dreamt of the day when the content of one’s character mattered more than the color of one’s skin. But, by the time that day happily arrived, “wokeism” had hijacked his dream, re-elevating skin color over character.

As demands for skin-color diversity were broadened to include gender and sexual orientation, a student notified me that I’d called on more men than women in two (of four) classes. Knowing that I was no respecter of persons — whether by gender, race, sexual orientation or anything else — I moved ahead with the course, suddenly aware that my interactions with students were being catalogued by identity.

Soon, a Black Lives Matter advocate asked, of all things, whether I would stand for the American flag. To provide context for my decision, I shared a story. As a toddler, I’d seen my mother take a call from the Department of Defense announcing that her fighter-pilot brother had been killed. Honoring her grief, I’d chosen to stand for the flag under which my only uncle had offered the ultimate sacrifice. The student’s response was presented as an irrefutable argument; my choice was “racist.”

Furthermore, in this woke new world, my professional experience was no longer relevant because of the race and gender I’d been assigned at birth. Despite having created tens of thousands of jobs, promoted women and minorities, and coached scores of entrepreneurs, I was deemed an “oppressor” in the catechism of “wokeism.” Furthermore, the penance for being raised in a “systemically racist” society — founded on millennia of Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian antecedents, no less — was submission, and, if resisted, cancellation.

The reason behind such tyranny came into focus for me when Condolezza Rice, former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, told me she’d shared with her students that the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (9/11’s architect) had felt like “having Erwin Rommel under lock and key.” The blank looks on the faces of her very bright students revealed that they had never heard of WWII’s famous Desert Fox.

Until then, I’d traced the enmity to activists like Jackson and Hannah-Jones. Now, I could see that it also stemmed from students having swapped an education for indoctrination. Those enlisted as social justice warriors had avoided the lessons of history, missed out on refining skills that might have allowed them to judge assertions and denied themselves the insights required to make wise trade-offs.

Because such uninformed activism brought with it a minefield of woke hostility, I kept to myself any reservations I harbored about critical race theory, gender fluidity and climate alarm. And, when Stanford’s math department proposed achieving “racial equity” by eliminating AP math (as racist, no less), I also kept quiet. Instead, I hoped my hardscrabble climb to CEO might inspire those who saw themselves as victims of inequity. Ironically, those who strained to label my uphill journey a product of “white supremacy” were often the very beneficiaries of woke preferences.

Oppressor-victim

To understand this recipe for canceling predecessor generations, I spoke next with Stanford military historian Victor Davis Hanson. Because Hanson had written the following, I wanted his help in gracefully handling the oppressor-victim theme:

“We should not… allow a current affluent, leisured and pampered generation to hijack the past, and damn it to perdition. (They have) not earned the right to… cancel… those of the past who won Gettysburg, or built the Hoover dam, or produced a Liberty ship every week.”

While Stanford had long nurtured a remarkably diverse and admirably inclusive community, it nonetheless rejected Hanson’s counsel in favor of a now fashionable “institutional racism.”

When Graduate School of Business faculty were further instructed to avoid “racist and xenophoic (sic) rhetoric and actions against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community,” I found myself wondering if the addendum were a virtue-signaling accusation, or if it were based on something I’d simply never encountered in all my years at Stanford. And, when the facts behind subsequent murders (of a Capitol police officer and 10 Colorado shoppers) contradicted de rigueur narratives, I wondered if the time had come to move beyond racial memes.

Apparently not. With free markets also labeled “racist,” those of us with responsibilities outside the ivory tower began to feel our “diversity of optic” (based on long experience) had been dismissed in favor of a “diversity of identity” (rooted in ideology). So, while I care deeply about Stanford University, and like and admire its president, provost and business school dean, I was beginning to feel isolated.

Their deference to selective diversity led me to reflect upon a meeting I’d conducted in Berlin as chairman of JetBlue Airways. After the meeting, I’d taken a stroll down Unter den Linden to the Bebelplatz, 500 yards to the east of Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. It was at that plaza, on May 10, 1933, that newly empowered Nazi officials had orchestrated the burning of “objectionable” books. Later dubbed “The Night of Shame,” the conflagration eventually contributed to Germany’s liberal democracy turning a blind eye to Kristallnacht, the Holocaust and an appalling rationale for war.

While loath to compare such a long-ago shame with how I was currently feeling in Palo Alto, of all places, I remembered being impressed that, in Berlin, the survivors of that era’s cancellation had later inserted “stumbling stones” between pavers to ensure that all who followed neither forget, nor repeat, that calamity.

As I traversed the once-riven capital city, the ground-level reminders had provoked in me a surge of optimism. Surely, the world would avoid the sort of conflict for which my own father had gone to war. Surely, everyone realized by now that banning books, restricting free speech and stoking fear would lead to tragedy. And, just as surely, America would eventually reject totalitarianism, even in its “wokest” form.

Yet, here I was, only three years later, 6,000 miles to the west of Berlin, sensing I was perilously connected to a prior generation’s intolerance. Adding to my anxiety was a discovery that my grandchildren’s generation were being scheduled to view an honorable heritage through a lens cleverly manufactured to provoke shame.

Forced to consider moving to a less hostile teaching environment, I heard from former students. One female “of color” offered that, of all her professors, I’d been the most supportive of women and minorities. Another confirmed that the majority of his classmates felt silenced by the threats of a racist label. One student even scolded me for having allowed “the slings and arrows” of the woke to achieve their hoped-for effect.

I smiled wanly to see that Prince Hamlet had somehow survived Jesse Jackson. I, on the other hand, had failed utterly to anticipate the distorting polemics of identity politics. The script advanced during America’s annus horribilis had pitted race against race, gender against gender, and generation against generation, all risking a degradation of spirit worse than any virus.

As a former CEO, it seemed to me that the narrative had gone well beyond gaining political or market advantage. It had even exceeded antifa’s hope for French-Revolution-style anarchy. In fact, by 2021, it looked like a bold attempt at a hostile takeover of mankind’s best hope for peace and prosperity.

This conclusion led me to contrast two Americans best known for their connections to societal breakdown — a mid-19th-century Abraham Lincoln and a mid-20th-century Saul Alinsky. I selected Lincoln because he’d guided America through a civil war, and Alinsky because his dream had been to provoke civil unrest by inciting those he called the “have-nots” against those whom he called the “haves.”

President Lincoln’s observation of America’s vulnerability mirrored community organizer Alinsky’s precondition for a successful revolution. Thus, the warning attributed to Lincoln that “America will never be destroyed from the outside; if we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves” was the basis for the race and class warfare Alinsky welcomed by rewriting history, inciting envy and “canceling” a large portion of the population.

Whereas Martin Luther King had called upon our “better angels” to subordinate our differences to shared values and, thus, to overcome what Condi Rice called our nation’s “birth defect,” Alinsky chose to repudiate King’s redemptive dream. If he could get people to ignore e pluribus unum (America’s motto since 1782), he might be able to overcome the spirit under which the nation had thrived.

By 2020, the pandemic had offered activists a unique opportunity to cleave the nation along identity and tribal lines, skirting the 238-year-old aspiration that had been Alinsky’s steepest obstacle. Using a fear of cancellation to silence half the population, SJWs dismissed the steady social progress that was the trademark of the world’s most successful multicultural society. Instead of celebrating the progress flowing from our commonalities, they fomented division by pointing to historical injustices.

Between a pandemic, racial tensions and the absence of a Lincolnesque figure to bind up our wounds and bring us together, America was, indeed, vulnerable. As its citizens awakened to the soft tyranny promoted during the pandemic, many felt betrayed by institutions they’d once admired and leaders they’d once trusted. And, for my part, I discovered that the experience I’d had with cancellation in the academy was being repeated all across the nation.

While I may well survive, America will not survive the rewriting of its history, the violation of its Constitution and the abandonment of the freedoms it has promised to citizens of all political persuasions, ethnicities, genders and orientations. No matter our differences, unless we preserve free speech, secure our Constitution and re-enthrone individual responsibility over victimhood, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will be unable to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

And Alinsky’s vision will have canceled Lincoln’s.

Joel Peterson is the Robert L. Joss Professor of Management at Stanford University, the former managing partner of the Trammell Crow Company, the former chairman of the board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution, the former chairman of JetBlue Airways and the founder and chairman of Peterson Partners, a sponsor for a quarter century of more than a dozen funds covering private equity, venture and real estate investments in hundreds of companies and real estate projects across the nation and throughout the world. (read more)

2021-06-24 a

America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy. Our representative democracy only works if we protect the “marketplace of ideas.” This free exchange facilitates an informed public opinion, which, when transmitted to lawmakers, helps produce laws that reflect the People’s will. That protection must include the protection of unpopular ideas, for popular ideas have less need for protection. Thus, schools have a strong interest in ensuring that future generations understand the workings in practice of the well-known aphorism, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

— Justice Stephen Breyer


2021
-06-23 h
INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE VII

Bill Barr: Public Schools Are Becoming Unconstitutional ‘Secular-Progressive Madrassas’
 
'It may no longer be fair, practical, or even constitutional to provide publicly-funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools,' the two-time U.S. attorney general contends.

“The greatest threat to religious liberty in America today,” said former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr in a recent speech, is “the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run education system.”

Barr, whose high-profile career has demonstrated a deep commitment to the U.S. Constitution [Deep State], spoke to the religious liberty legal defense organization Alliance Defending Freedom. The legal lion put together a strong argument that a half-century of Supreme Court decisions combined with the left’s long march through American institutions have pushed U.S. public schools so far from religious neutrality that many now comprise a government-established preference for the atheist religion. Government preferences for some religious views over others are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“The heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country. In light of this development, we must confront the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical, or even constitutional to provide publicly-funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools,” he said.

Government Schools the No. 1 Anti-Religious Force

While many American adults believe U.S. public schools keep religion out of the classroom, that era ended with their childhoods, Barr says. Too many Americans are dangerously unaware that today’s public schools forcefully instruct children in specific religious and political beliefs that openly undermine Christianity and, therefore, the private self-government necessary to preserve the United States’ foundational natural rights regime.

The evidence for this is strong, both in data and personal testimony. “[Ex]pansions in government service provision and especially increasingly secularized government control of education… can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world,” writes sociologist Lyman Stone in a 2020 review of research on this topic.

A few weeks ago, conservative pundit Dennis Prager cited constantly encountering some of the “millions — yes, millions — of Americans whose children have contempt for America, for free speech and for their parents as a result of attending an American college or even high school. I meet such people at every speech I give, and I speak to them regularly on my radio show. Ask these parents, if they could redo their lives, whether they would keep their child in school.”

I’ve seen and heard this myself countless times, both politically and religiously, usually when it is too late to do anything. One mother active in conservative politics recently described to me the trend of her friends’ young adult children losing their faith and conservatism in high school as “like an invasion of the body snatchers.”

Her fellow conservative parents are scared for their college-age kids, she told me, and with good reason. Much data and human experience back up parents’ worries that secular-progressive schooling converts conservative Americans’ kids away from their deepest religious and political beliefs.

How U.S. Government Schools Became Anti-Religion

Barr explains how U.S. public schooling, which used to be explicitly Christian, became the strongest antagonist to religion in American life. He detailed a brief history of American education to make his case, in three historical phases. In the first phase, “the advocates of public schools agreed that religion was integral to such an education. You could not separate moral education from religion,” he said. Thus, in America’s founding era, taxpayer-supported schools were explicitly religious.

In the second phase of American education’s history, Barr said, “the Left embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public square. Public schools quickly became the central battleground.” This was the era when the Supreme Court cooperated with the political left to eradicate Christianity from publicly supported education, for example by banning prayer in schools.

Since it is impossible to educate someone without passing on religious beliefs — Is there a God? Does he care about what we learn, or is he irrelevant to learning? What is right and wrong, and how do we know? — this myth of a religiously neutral education quietly cleared American education of Christianity. This prepared the way for complete secular progressive dominance of U.S. education institutions. That’s Barr’s “third phase” of American education history, occurring today.

“It is hard to teach that someone ought to behave in a certain way unless you can explain why,” Barr explained. “…[P]urging schools of any trace of religion created a vacuum by eliminating the explanatory belief system undergirding moral values. Now, we are seeing the attempt to push into the schools an alternative explanatory belief system that is inconsistent with, and subversive of, the religious worldview.”

The New Government-Sponsored Religion: Cultural Marxism

While many parents want to believe that secularist propaganda in their kids’ schooling is an infrequent occurrence, the truth is that anti-religious materialism saturates most government and many private schools, right down to content and teaching methods. For example, the neutral-seeming act of keeping Christianity off-limits in schooling teaches children that their faith is a private, side matter, instead of the most important thing in human existence and without which no one can learn anything. Barr gave other examples.

“What is taking shape is a full-blown—may I say ‘systemic’—subversion of the religious worldview,” Barr said. “While the secularist may view each lesson, such as transsexualism—as dealing with a discrete subject, those lessons embody broader ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the religious viewpoint. Telling school children that they get to choose their gender—not just male or female, but anything else—and that no one else has anything to say about it—does not just contradict particular religious teachings on gender and the authority of parents; it is a broadside attack on the very idea of natural law, which is integral to the moral doctrines of a number of religious denominations.”

Barr noted that one-fifth of Americans live in states that require public schools to teach LGBT ideology, all the way down to kindergarten. Many more Americans live in localities that do the same, all often with no opt-out allowed and with LGBT ideology often marbled into all curricula, so that this anti-Christian ideology is as inseparable from public education as Christianity ought to be from a Christian education. This, he said, appears to be an unconstitutional infringement on the free exercise of religion.

“As the Supreme Court has recognized, nothing is more fundamental than the right of parents to pass religious faith to their children. It is monstrous for the state to interfere in that by indoctrinating children into alternative belief systems that are antithetical to those religious beliefs,” Barr said.

This dynamic doesn’t only involve violating Americans’ constitutional right to freely exercise their faith, but also appears to include unconstitutional government establishment of a preferred religion, Barr said.

“When we are no longer talking about simply stripping religion out of school curriculum, but now talking about indoctrination into an affirmative belief and value system—a new credo—resting on materialist metaphysics and taking the place of religion, then the question is whether this involves establishment of a religion. I am not the first to observe that the tenets of progressive orthodoxy have become a form of religion with all the trapping and hallmarks of a religion. It has its notion of original sin, salvation, penance, its clergy, its dogmas, its sensitivity to any whiff of heresy, even its burning at the stake,” he said.

No More Leftist Monopoly on Education Funds

Barr said the courts have subjected taxpayer funding for schools to a religious double standard, whereby “secularism has been afforded the protection of the Religion Clauses, [but] it has generally not been subject to the prohibitions of the Establishment Clause…If secular-progressivism indeed occupies the same space as a religion–as by all appearances it does—then how is it Constitutional to have a state-run school system fervently devoted to teaching little else? And how on earth can these same institutions be allowed to use the state to punish traditional religious doctrines as hate speech?”

The only way to resolve these major difficulties, he said, was for states to resort to full school choice so anti-religious government K-12 education does not maintain an unconstitutional monopoly on the religious formation of American children.

“If the state-operated schools are now waging war on the nation’s moral, historical, philosophical, and religious foundations,” Barr argued, “then they would seem to have forfeited their legitimacy as the proper vehicle to carry out the mission with which the American People have charged them.” (read more)

2021-06-23 g
INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE VI

Amazon Bought Critical Race Theory Books For Affluent Virginia Schools

Tech giant Amazon rolled out the red carpet for a Virginia school district, donating thousands to support critical race theory initiatives.

Emails obtained by Parents Defending Education indicate Amazon was asked by the director of diversity and inclusion at Arlington Public Schools to send copies of critical race theory activist Ibram X. Kendi’s [his birth name is Henry Rodgers] book “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You.” Amazon provided 500-600 copies to the school worth $5,000 and spent $10,000 to get the co-author of Kendi’s book, Jason Reynolds, to speak with students, as first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

Amazon was initially going to send the district $100,000 worth of Kindle reading devices, and other items through the “NeighborGood” program, but Arlington did not bite. The company has had a number of Black History Month projects. This includes an affirmative action scholarship program and curated movie and song playlists of just black people.

While pedaling in equity dogma — which is equality of outcome — Amazon has not been as kind to conservative black people. The company removed a Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas documentary, which ranked number one in the documentary category at the time during Black History Month.

Justin Grayson, the public relations manager for Amazon, led the charge for the book donations. Likewise, a study guide was provided for students to look over. It claimed Kendi’s book “debunks the myths of several master narrative themes,” as well as the idea that “America is a meritocracy” and “truth and justice (or law and order) should be valued.”

This is nothing new for Arlington Public Schools. Last fall, the district forced students to participate in an “equity training program” on Columbus Day. After officer Derek Chauvin was [wrongfully] convicted for the murder of George Floyd, the district’s superintendent pushed to have students learn from educational materials provided by the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center.

Arlington Public Schools did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment. (read more)

2021-06-23 f
INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE V

New Video Shows University Of Oklahoma Faculty Teaching How To Silence And Punish ‘Problematic’ Conservatives
 
'In the classroom, free speech does not apply,' a workshop spokeswoman said. 'As instructors, we can tell our students no, you do not have the right to say that, stop talking right now.'

According to newly released video footage, University of Oklahoma instructors want to punish students who defy campus orthodoxy. Their plan is to “avoid ‘a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence’ that closes ears to marginalized voices,” by — you guessed it — silencing marginalized voices.

On Tuesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit focused on protecting campus free speech, publicized video footage of an April 14 workshop on “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The workshop’s leaders presented slides about “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “subverting white institutional defensiveness.” In an attempt to teach so-called antiracism, the workshop’s leaders also promoted censorship and indoctrination.

The event was “one of nine professional development workshops for instructors and grad students” at OU. During the workshop, three faculty members taught their colleagues “how to foster an anti-racist environment in their classrooms,” brainstorming tactics for dissuading, censoring, and penalizing “problematic” speech.


BREAKING:

A recording of an “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” workshop acquired by
FIRE raises alarm bells about the state of free expression and conscience at
@UofOklahoma. https://t.co/8DXLXnaqbf pic.twitter.com/JkU5JMEOel


— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) June 22, 2021


One of the workshop’s spokeswomen, Kelli Pyron Alvarez, said she prohibits “white supremacist ideas or sources” as well as “derogatory remarks, critiques, and hate speech” from her classroom — unless, of course, students use them to be “antiracist” crusaders against racism. Pyron Alvarez failed to explicitly define the ideas and sources she forbids, but she plans to reprimand those who deviate from her script.

“If [students] use any of those things, if any of those come through in their writing or in their comments, I will call them out on it,” she explained. And if a student errs in front of her a second time, she wants him to be formally reported. “In the classroom, free speech does not apply,” she said.

Unsurprisingly, Pyron Alvarez noted that her students didn’t challenge her method of teaching last semester. She successfully chilled all dissenting speech.

“Imagine being an OU student who is ‘reported,’ presumably to the administration, simply for your choice of text to analyze or what sources you include in a bibliography,” FIRE wrote in response, highlighting the absurdity of promoting such an intolerant snitch culture. According to FIRE, OU’s workshop “raises alarm bells about the state of free expression and freedom of conscience at Oklahoma’s flagship university.”

“The workshop in question trains instructors on how to eliminate disfavored but constitutionally protected expression from the classroom and guide assignments and discussion into preferred areas — all for unambiguously ideological and viewpoint-based reasons,” FIRE emphasized.

For example, students in Principles of English Composition must choose independent research projects, but FIRE explained that “the faculty conducting the training show the participants how they might lead students not only to topics the instructors find appropriate, but also to the side of the argument that the instructors prefer.”

OU instructors exist in an academic climate that seemingly emboldens them to continue dictating student speech. Pyron Alvarez confidently celebrated the power she thinks she and her colleagues exert over those they teach. “One of the fears is that we’re going to get in trouble for this, right? Like we can’t tell students that they can’t say something in class. But we can! And let me tell you how,” she bragged.

Her colleague and fellow workshop spokeswoman Kasey Woody, who is confident she and her colleagues won’t suffer consequences for promoting student censorship, elaborated: “I, in this case, usually look for my students who might be, like, entertaining the idea of listening to a problematic argument. Then I say, ‘We don’t have to listen to that.’”

“That’s right,” FIRE wrote, “even thinking about listening to a disfavored argument is apparently to be discouraged.” Students can’t write about “unacceptable” topics, such as “whether refusing to use preferred pronouns is hate speech” or whether Black Lives Matter should “engage in property destruction.”

Meanwhile, Pyron Alvarez wrongly thinks the Supreme Court emboldens her to silence disfavored speech. “The Supreme Court has actually upheld that hate speech, derogatory speech, any of the -isms do not apply in the classroom because they do not foster a productive learning environment,” she claimed. “And so, as instructors, we can tell our students: ‘No, you do not have the right to say that. Stop talking right now,’ right?”

FIRE disagrees. “Professors cannot abuse their power to require students to personally adhere to a particular viewpoint or ideology,” the organization said.

Of course, FIRE spends a significant amount of its own time and resources defending the academic freedoms of university faculty. Such individuals possess “wide latitude to manage the atmosphere and tone of the classroom,” something FIRE often describes in great detail.

FIRE, however, makes a distinction. “As the AAUP has written, instructors have academic freedom of ‘instruction, not indoctrination.’” Furthermore, “there’s no question that a significant amount of this workshop teaches participants how to indoctrinate instead of how to instruct.” The workshop leaders mistakenly “conflate disagreement with disruption to such an extent that they call it a valid reason for reporting students for discipline.”

This isn’t the first time FIRE has criticized OU for — to use the workshop leaders’ own terminology — “problematic” initiatives, and the organization says the university’s “[s]tudents deserve better.” To demand change, FIRE is collecting submission forms to “let leaders in Oklahoma know that this type of indoctrination is not acceptable.”

Readers can view the full video of the workshop here.

Watch the full video and take action: Demand that @UofOklahoma stop infringing
on students’ rights to free speech and conscience.


Full video: https://t.co/p0XOAxKoLt

Take action:https://t.co/A0C9PLQPqW

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) June 22, 2021

2021
-06-23 e
INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE IV

What Is Progressivism?

The dream of a utopia administered by technocrats

Twenty years ago, few Americans identified as “progressive.” Ralph Nader’s first Green Party presidential campaign changed that. Naderites needed a way of distinguishing themselves from the followers of the establishment Democrat Al Gore. In searching for a way to explain their politics to others they reached back to a term whose roots went back to the early 20th century.

In current American leftist discourse, “progressive,” its sister term “liberal,” and their distant cousin “socialist” all tend to overlap in general use. So it shouldn’t be surprising that all three terms are poorly understood by their opponents and adherents alike. Even admirable populist critics of America’s establishment left like Thomas Frank and Glenn Greenwald miss what progressivism truly represents and the key, degrading, historical role it has served in the development of American political culture.

Progressivism originated as an Anglo-American alternative to socialism and populism in the late 19th century. More specifically, progressive political culture was a way for the Gilded Age’s new self-styled “cosmopolitan” wealthy elite class to feel good about fighting for reforms of America’s laissez faire economic structures—but, in a manner that didn’t threaten the larger Anglo-liberal tradition, or the Protestant moral norms it relied upon.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, as railway workers, brutal Pinkerton “security” forces, and even battalions of the Army battled it out in violent clashes, the reform tradition in the United States took shape in two distinctly American modes: populism and progressivism. Populism was a bottom-up movement of Middle American struggling farmers, poor working folk, and tradesmen frustrated with a late-19th-century banking and monetary system they saw as “rigged” against them. Progressivism took off as a movement of the guilt-laden offspring of coastal industrialists who looked down their noses upon the Middle American populists and the “Jays” of their “hay seed” “bumpkin” culture.

Where populism was a rural revolt against the overweening power exercised by big cities over the rest of the country, progressivism was an urban movement led by a well-educated, urban, coastal elite, which was top-down in conceptions and mannerisms. While the radical element of this new progressive class identified with what they thought of as the “other half of society” (what we would today probably call the “marginalized” or “underprivileged”), it’s important to note that progressives did not necessarily wish to give voice to the poor or the suffering. Instead, progressive intellectuals sought to elevate themselves as spokespeople for the downtrodden, on terms that cemented the grip of their own class on power.

Rather than a break or interruption in the WASP chauvinism that characterizes most of the country’s political culture, progressivism is little more than a peculiar variation of it —and wokeism is merely a new version of progressivism, updated for the secular mode of the “anti-racist” age.

Woodrow Wilson—the former professor and president of Princeton— [and vicious racist] endures as America’s quintessential progressive politician. His antipathy for the class politics of populism was so great that despite a (highly beneficial) alliance with William Jennings Bryan during the 1912 election, he continued to loathe populists because, in his mind, their organizations (and ideas) were tinged with “socialist” elements. Populists were “resisters of modernity” and enemies of “progress” who refused to properly understand the inevitability of the new order of globalized trade and mass market consumption. 

Few better illustrate the latent Protestant utopianism of progressivism’s “Social Gospel” philosophy than the influential reformer Richard Ely, founder of the Christian Social Union. On some level, Ely’s thought was as economically radical as any American progressive. However, his radicalism took the form of advancing the need for a new “collective Christian ethic” to “heal the breach between capital and labor”—as if this divide in interests were a small familial wound that could be salved with a few intense Bible study sessions. Ely called for economic reforms in child labor, recognition of unions, but also focused his rhetoric on ushering reforms that began with the social sphere and then moving to the economic—the exact reverse of the populist, Marxist, and European social democratic outlook.

While churches had their place in the progressive effort to transform society, Ely believed that the enormity of state power was required to promote the correct “collective Christian ethic.” Scholar Eldon Eisenach sums up: The progressives regarded “the state as an educational and ethical agency.” For the progressive, utilizing the state’s power, was indispensable in promoting “human progress.”

It is no accident that contemporary progressives understand universities as the central outlet to spread—and enforce—their new pseudo-secularized woke religion. The original progressives, as Eisenach notes, “saw the university as something like a ‘national church’—the main repository and protector of common American values, common American meanings, and common American identities.”

Unlike populists, who wanted state intervention in the economic sphere to help supply them with the means for personal and social autonomy, progressives wanted aggressive state intervention into the social sphere that would deprive working people of individual choices—for “their own good.” Progressives—then as now—understand “social justice” as occurring through moral reform within the self, but believe this personal transformation must be directed by morally enlightened elites wielding state power to prohibit the masses from engaging in “bad behaviors.”

Progressive temperance advocates therefore happily joined forces with the early-20th-century American religious right to tell Germans, Italians, and the “new” immigrants of Eastern Europe they needed to move away from their “festive” and “drinking” cultures toward the Puritan discipline of Anglo asceticism. Progressives thoroughly believed if “drink” was outlawed these new immigrants would no longer struggle to keep the lights on, domestic violence would disappear, and their adorable little children wouldn’t have to work in wretched conditions where Jacob Riis could take lamentable photos of them that made elites sad.

In our secular, post-Protestant age, contemporary progressives likewise seek to morally shame the working classes and working poor into thinking their behavioral choices and retrograde beliefs are responsible for the country’s hardships. However, in a blindness inherent to the movement, today’s progressives patently refuse to acknowledge that most working class and working poor “people of color” are mostly socially conservative. The disjuncture between the avant-garde social values of today’s progressives and the targets of their empathy is exemplified in the new refashioned spelling of Latinos and Latinas as “Latinx”—a boutique academic term that is rejected by or else unknown to the vast majority of people to whom it is supposed to apply. Woke identitarian progressivism offers non-BIPOC or LGBTQ+ persons (the far majority of the population) a nightmarish denial of their individual experiences and hardships. Progressives are then shocked when the targets of their derision become angered, and further pathologize them.

Class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes lives at the core of progressivism, both in its early 1900s origins and its 2020s “woke” offshoot. This moralistic bias informs the confident declarations from educated professionals clustered in hub cities that the only reasons Middle American “Trump supporters” have for opposing mass immigration is xenophobia and racism. Progressives at The New York Times point to graphs created by neoliberal economists that show low-skill illegal immigrants do not in fact replace, or compete with, established American citizens for jobs. They offer these graphs never acknowledging that the field of economics, like most in the so-called “social sciences,” is one where nearly any thesis can be “proven” by pairing a skewed data set with the “right” assumptions. Why would anyone, except of course a bigot or an ignoramus, question the knowing class?

Progressivism is a mindset driven, if not ruled, by the technocratic impulse. The foundation of the progressive critique of laissez-faire liberalism arose largely due to late-19th-century American intellectuals’ envy of Kaiserreich-era theories of the German state; the American system of elite, research-centered higher education originated as an imitation of the German model. During the Gilded Age, jaunting off to Germany for a stint of graduate work was a key rite of passage for many American intellectuals, and most of the key figures of the progressive movement received at least part of their education in Germany. During an era when very few Americans attended higher education, more than 9,000 Americans studied at German universities—nearly 2,000 in 1880 alone.

From their experiences in German classrooms, many progressive intellectuals gained exposure to the country’s mandarin model of civil service scholars—professors and university-trained experts to whom the Prussian government looked for advice when crafting social, economic, and political policy.

Young, impressionable progressives looked enviously upon these technocrats and believed that they could recreate the Prussian mandarin model at home.

Yet when brought stateside by American intellectual upstarts, the economic interventionism (and direction) of their German counterparts took a backseat to social interventionism. Lacking a full understanding of their own Anglo-liberal tradition—and its uniqueness—they also had a tenuous relationship to both individualism and constitutional rights. As Eldon Eisenach notes, “in all cases, a rights-based language of constitutional law, economic freedom, and political democracy is firmly rejected” in the progressive mindset.

Eisenach’s insight into the progressive fondness for state-backed technocracy helps explain the easy transition Barack Obama made in 2010. First, he argued for the so-called “public option,” which would have brought the still (mostly) laissez faire private health care market closer to that of most other industrialized countries. However, when confronted with health care providers’ resistance and some resistance from tea party voters to “death panels,” the president quickly removed the statist portion of the plan and instead pushed the burden of a new, entirely market-driven program onto consumers in the form of an individual mandate to purchase slightly more regulated private coverage. Here lies the progressive reform mindset in a nutshell: envy of the economic statism of European social democracy paired with a mentality there’s nothing truly wrong with the American liberal tradition that can’t be solved with a bit of expert tinkering, plus behavioral controls.

Unlike populists and socialists, progressives did not embrace the language of class conflict when protesting large proprietorship capitalism. They did, though, concur with Marxists’ love affair with expansive state power. Progressives had no complaints about working people answering to elite-controlled institutions and organizations as long as those institutions agreed with their preferred sensibilities—just like contemporary progressives like Obama and Kamala Harris have never had any qualms taking millions from Silicon Valley lobbyists and “entrepreneurs,” who, like the politicians themselves, boast the requisite elite credentials.

The real problem with America, contemporary progressives believe, doesn’t lie in the system that makes their families and friends rich. It lies within the uncouth behaviors and general immorality of the under-educated Americans whose lives they must rationalize. The “racist” police, the “sexist” and “homophobic” rubes saying nasty things to their coworkers or on Twitter may not have much wealth or capital, but their class standing is much less important, according to the progressive mindset, than the power conferred by their white or male “privilege.”

In the progressive model, counteracting the thought crimes and behavioral failings of American heartlanders provides the mandate for their coastal superiors to monopolize power while pushing economic inequality to the periphery of legitimate social concern. Clinton- and Obama-style progressives would gladly usher in a world where everyone is employed at the woke Amazon-ExxonMobil-Kraft-Apple-Disney megacorporation complex. Even if most workers are systematically disempowered by this setup, there’s still justice in such a future as long as the corporate executive committee is allotted equitable “representation” to “marginalized” identities and the full range of gender expressions.

Walter Benn Michaels, the accomplished literary scholar and author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality argues that affirmative action serves one central purpose: allowing wealthy white liberals to feel good about their privileges. What’s the fun in winning the supposedly meritocratic game if you know it’s rigged in your favor? Every “Black” and “brown” face wealthy and well-connected white elites see next to them in an Ivy League classroom, corporate boardroom, or academic committee meeting lets them know that the system is just—and that they earned their own places based on their merits. As for the poor, the vast majority of whom are white, if they wanted a better future they could have “studied harder in school” or, as Rahm Emmanuel recently put it, “learned to code.”

The recent emergence of a fashionable American socialist movement only made this point even clearer in 2020 as much of the energy behind Bernie Sanders was diverted from populist economic concerns into culture war theater for upper-middle-class radicals. American schools might be incorporating pop versions of “radical” critical race theory into their curriculum, but they sure as hell aren’t educating kids on the history of the labor movement (or, for that matter comparative political thought). As Michaels asks, what wealthy corporation—or university (these days it’s easy to confuse the two)—wouldn’t rather respect their employees cultural and identity “differences” rather than pay them a living wage accompanied by substantial benefits or job security?

The Civil Rights era changed how Americans dealt with class, but only slightly, and in ways that have arguably done more to obscure the economic realities of American life than illuminate them. Fifty years hence, race and class have become blurred in the progressive mind. All “whites” have privilege. All “POC” are marginalized. These assumptions take the consideration of race and class outside the realm of the individual and therefore outside the normal orientation of Anglo liberalism. Because of this deviation, it’s tempting to think of today’s “anti-racism” as a substantial shift that takes progressivism far afield from its origins. In fact, the enforcement of a racialist hierarchy has been a key component of the progressive ideology since its birth.

Progressive leaders and intellectuals like Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Richard Ely on some level held to the so-called “germ theory” made popular in 18th-century America. Germ theory advanced the idea that democratic thought was less an individual or even cultural choice but more a biological trait originating with the late Roman-era German tribal communities. As Reginald Horsman writes, in this understanding, the concepts of self-governance that the American revolutionaries fought for could be traced to mythical German forests that had served as “collective destination for Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other tribes that invaded the Roman Empire.”

Germ legend, for that’s a more appropriate label than “theory,” traced the origins of democratic thought not to Athens, the Protestant Reformation, or even the Enlightenment (all of which might be more logical as points of origin) but, instead, to the ancient Goths of Germany, who brought the idea with them to post-Roman Britain—thus making the Anglo-Saxons of America the true inheritors of democracy’s “germs.”

Herbert Baxter Adams, the influential purveyor of Anglo-Saxon superiority in the late 19th century, served as Woodrow Wilson’s supervisor at Johns Hopkins. There, he oversaw Wilson’s scholarly investigation of the origins of the democratic governmental form, eventually published in 1889 as The State (Adams supervised Richard Ely’s doctoral work as well). Wilson’s investigations included only “Aryan races” because they were the only ones presumed to contain the appropriate racial inheritance needed to construct a “free” system of government.

While the progressive generation saw a racial kinship with the Germans they still saw their own “Anglo Saxon race” as a full two steps more racially advanced. This presumption is littered through much of the literature of the time, but scholars and historians have missed it because they impose contemporary “whites” versus “POCs” concepts on a historical period that operated outside that binary.

If we recognize this racialist origin point of progressive thought, the inverted KKK ideology of the new woke hierarchy can be understood as the overzealous expression of a core identitarian precept of progressive thought. In an attempt to repent for the country’s past sins, today’s woke progressives have taken the KKK’s notions of Saxon superiority that Woodrow Wilson and most of the 1910s progressives upheld and turned them upside down. No longer is the “Saxon” race thought of as on top. Instead, today’s woke progressives insist upon intersectional QTPOC supremacy and a bizarre, anti-intellectual—and thoroughly racist—notion that all Americans without European ancestry have inevitably been marginalized and therefore are entitled to governmental recompense. BIPOC and LGBTQ “traits” now fill the same role as the mythical blond-haired, blue-eyed Saxon forest dwellers did in the germ theory of the original progressives.

In the Gilded Age, progressives were enamored with tales of how the Germanic tribes fought off the Romans and provided humanity with its greatest stage of political development: democracy. Like those mythical Saxons tribes of old, today’s anointed racial and gender identity groups—especially when found in their exoticized intersectional form —are heralded for their unique ability to lead civilization to its supposedly inevitable future. Here, democracy takes a backseat as ideals of representational correctness are made paramount.

In the woke version of the state of nature, all ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and genders would, if not for systemic racism and bias, be found equally in all job categories, educational admissions, and government offices. Aggressive diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are carried out in the name of anti-racism and similar ideologies with the aim of restoring society’s supposedly natural, uncorrupted state.

Today’s woke progressives demand Americans recognize cultural differences but never accept any differences in outcome. Representational correctness has become the greatest unifying orthodoxy among elites—so much so that even right-wing institutions and think tanks today refrain from confronting the utopianism that lies beneath it. No one wants to be called a “racist”—and woke progressives use the threat of this charge to bully opponents into submission.

Between 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump improved his electoral performance with every major ethnic and gender voter category except white men. Why? As evidenced by California’s recent rejection of affirmative action Proposition 16, many poor and working-class Americans of “color” are not fooled by race-based preferences supposedly carried out on their behalf. They know their kids are not getting into Berkeley or Stanford, much less on the path to becoming the next Barack Obama or Kamala Harris. To most poor and working-class Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, progressive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs come across the same way that “prohibition” did in the early 20th century—a gigantic, paternalistic social experiment waged by elites and invoiced to those of meager means, whose consequences the American bourgeoisie will itself avoid.

The increasingly aggressive—and probably often illegal—race- and gender-based hiring and admissions programs now common across college campuses are sold as the answer to everything that’s wrong in today’s monopoly heavy oligarchic America: police brutality, wage stagnation, rapidly declining enrollment in the humanities fields, you name it.

Of course, none of these failures will be remotely improved by such an approach. Rather, these programs will only serve to further alienate America’s poor and working classes from the nation’s so-called progressive left. Who knows how to effectively fill out an application for a grant, fellowship, or merit scholarship using critical race theory panache—the working poor? New immigrants learning to speak English? Uh, no.

The supposedly valiant character of “allyship” provides a means for wealthy European American elites to claim to speak for everyone else while maintaining their role as master of ceremonies. When the working poor protest that they too face hardships and structural disadvantages, they can be conveniently condemned as racist enemies of progress.

Now well into its second act, progressive racialism serves the same function it did in the Gilded Age: Hiding class and regionalist prejudice beneath cultural battles. Smiling darkly in the shadows lurks America’s unspeakable injustice—an economic system that is generous to the rich and cruel to the poor. (read more)

2021-06-23 d
INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE III

Campus Reform’ and Higher Education

It’s possible to both criticize the outlet’s penchant for hyperbole and recognize its point about the dire state of campus speech

Conservative media have had a long tense relationship with institutions of higher education. Right-leaning outlets depict higher education as a landscape of unrelenting indoctrination spearheaded by ultra-progressive professors and social justice warrior students. At the same time, the stalwarts of those colleges wave away any negative portrayals of their campuses by conservative media as groundless, hyperbolic hysteria. The former can lead to a counterproductive level of hostility and demonization. The latter can lead to a separate set of problems. Specifically, defenders of higher education who focus only on condemning these outlets ignore the possibility that some of the criticism found in the conservative media may be of legitimate concern, even to them. What if some of what they say turns out to be true? In many ways, this is precisely what happened when mainstream outlets dismissed the Wuhan lab-leak theory as conservative fearmongering and conspiracism.

Let’s look at what is considered one of the most unabashedly hyperpartisan outlets in the conservative media ecosystem, at least when it comes to higher education: the online publication Campus Reform. The organization, a self-described “conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education system,” has been labeled an “outrage machine” and has been rightly called out for the fact that many of the subjects of its stories become targets of online harassment campaigns. If any outlet is drumming up needless hysteria, Campus Reform would almost certainly be it.

A quick glance at the Campus Reform website is informative. It says its mission is to expose “liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.” Some pieces address concerns about the way higher education leans into identity-based theories (along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). Examples include titles such as “Academics claim that ‘whiteness’ is a hindrance to education reform” and “Prof claims that violence against Asians from non-white people is still caused by ‘white supremacy.’” Such pieces raise questions that should be open to debate, including: Is it possible to lean too much into separating people into identity categories? Who decides what is “too much”? What are the potential consequences in terms of the resulting divisions?

Some campus Reform articles reference activity that people across the political spectrum may find concerning. For instance, in “Macalester College offers ‘weightlifting for women of color,’” “‘Sex Week’ at Tulane University features ‘Black Sex’ talk for ‘Black students only,’” and “Cornell charges students $1,800 for racially-segregated rock climbing class, frantically scrubs website when confronted,” the authors highlight campus programming that promotes segregation in a way that may be unlawful. Sometimes, the precipitating event that leads to an article occurs on social media. For instance, one article was about an instructor who tweeted that she is trying to minimize contact with white people. I’ve written here about whether comments on social media should be viewed as indicative of classroom teaching, but whatever the answer is, it should be applied consistently with regard to political orientation.

Rather than engage with conservative criticism, some campus defenders have argued that the real truth is that conservatives themselves are the ones who actually control higher education, as one author wrote recently. That piece was published after the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees tried to block New York Times journalist and 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones from a tenured appointment at UNC-Chapel Hill. (The appointment is going through, but her tenure will be postponed and reconsidered in five years.) To be clear, using political bias as a basis to prevent Hannah-Jones from receiving a tenured appointment is wrong. However, to go from this instance, or the relatively small number of similar instances, to the conclusion that conservatives run academia is a serious reverse ecological fallacy.

The fact that it is improper and concerning for a conservative-influenced board of trustees to deny tenure based on politics simply underscores the separate and equally improper and concerning fact that steady streams of students at institutions around the country are only exposed to a narrow—and overtly left-leaning—ideological perspective. Placing overt ideological bias at the center of the academic enterprise is a problem whether it comes from the right or the left, or from a board of trustees or an instructor in the classroom.

For each of the past three years, I have taught a course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called “Bigots and Snowflakes.” The course, which engages with a set of complex social questions from multiple ideological perspectives, has been a pleasure to teach, with an engaged group of students each time. In teaching that class, I have learned that in other classes at my college, and I’m sure at many others, too, students are rarely exposed to ways of understanding the world that don’t align with a politically progressive worldview.

This is why they often start the semester without understanding that someone could have a principled objection to campus discourse elevating identity above all other attributes, to segregating people into racial groups for housing and other activities, to discussions of inequality that only focus on structural causes, and so on.

Often, they tell stories about conversations that unfold in other classes. There was the student with the instructor who asked the class whether they supported “building a wall” on the border with Mexico, making it very clear exactly what she thought of people who held such an opinion. There’s the student who admitted to the class that he doesn’t do the reading for his other sociology classes yet does well on the exams. Why? Because he simply supplies the instructor with whatever answer is furthest to the political left—a strategy he has found to be effective and reliable in securing high scores. And there are the endless students who can’t answer the question of why someone who isn’t racist may adopt a “conservative” position, such as opposing race-based college admissions.

It’s possible that these are the types of concerns that drive the work of outlets such as Campus Reform. And dismissing them as nothing more than conservative hysteria, even if the outlet is an “outrage machine,” is evasion, not engagement.

We should condemn hyperbole and the harassment that often follows Campus Reform articles. We should also be open to recognizing that some of the events those articles describe raise legitimate concerns. We can actually do both. (read more)

2021-06-23 c
INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE II

Freddie deBoer Wants to Make College Even Dumber

Fredrik deBoer's new book on the failures of American education takes aim at the role of the educated elite and misses the mark

At a recent soiree in Florida, where we have been allowed to have parties for some time now, an unemployed millennial in her late twenties asked me through a dimpled smile what I thought she should read next. “Tolstoy!” I suggested.

“Who?” she replied cheerfully and without a hint of self-consciousness.

“He wrote War and Peace,” I told her, with an astonishment that only extreme self-control could conceal.

“Ohhhhh,” she cooed, pretending to recognize the title.

By the current standards of our educational establishment, my poorly read acquaintance—who graduated from my prestigious alma mater and attended a New England prep school similar to mine—should be perched at the very pinnacle of achievement, a high priestess consecrated for life in what Fredrik deBoer, a self-described Marxist journalist who also works as an unspecified “administrator” at an unidentified public university, calls “The Cult of Smart.”

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice is deBoer’s searing book, which militantly seeks to undermine our society’s near-uniform valorization of intellectual achievement as the primary signifier of individual worth. DeBoer, who has gathered fans from across the political spectrum by presenting himself as a dissident voice from within the progressive orthodoxy, argues that our Academic-Industrial Complex (my term, not his) misses a fundamental point: that innate intelligence, largely determined by genetics and early childhood acculturation, plays a much greater role in the outcomes of people’s lives than does any of the schooling and testing and enrichment activities that the otherwise unemployable Ed.D.s, virtue-signaling politicians, and worried parents who listen to them can conjure.

As a result, he suggests, we are propping up an outdated and deeply flawed system of “sorting” in which “merit” is so subjective as to be largely meaningless. To its shame, the system claims to be fair and objective but in fact boosts children already born into “privilege” while cruelly stigmatizing and oppressing those who are too disadvantaged to compete. In an ironic twist, he argues, it often fails even as an unfair sorting mechanism because predetermined intellectual ability tends to assert itself over whatever temporary advantages higher education bestows on the innately less gifted.

If you ask deBoer, then, high-end education fails because our prospects in life can only be slightly altered by what we do and how we study. What he fails to grasp is that even the nominal “winners” in his zero-sum game will likely not rise to unqualified success either. Before grandly prescribing the public distribution of these so-called “elite” privileges, he might consider whether they too are part of the American affliction—and, if they are, whether what he is prescribing for those less fortunate may, in fact, be as bad for them as it is turning out to be for everyone else.

Admittedly, deBoer takes a risky stand in our current cultural climate. For the past few centuries, liberal thought has held that human beings are “blank slates,” each equally capable of reaching unlimited potential if they would just try hard enough in an environment free of obstacles. “You can be whatever you want to be,” millennials were told by helicopter parents who monitored their every move, and by “snowplow parents” who push all barriers out of their way, even to the point of the criminality uncovered in last year’s college admissions scandal, which is where deBoer starts his book. Rather recently, however, every discipline of behavioral and cognitive science, with the ironic exception of education, has reached the contradictory conclusion that about 40% to 50% of a person’s intelligence is determined by heredity, with much of the rest decided by early childhood environments that precede formal schooling. Put simply, the school you attend and the teachers who instruct you cannot really make you more intelligent than you were by about the age of seven.

This flies in the face of just about everything we have been told to believe since the Enlightenment: that all people are created equal and deserve equality of opportunity; that apparently less-intelligent individuals can improve and be improved; that there are no group-based variations in intelligence; that identities are determined socially rather than biologically, and that even suggesting otherwise opens the ugly path to racism and eugenics. The recent fates of Charles Murray, Amy Wax, James Flynn, and other scholars who have invoked solid empirical data about the prescholastic determinants of academic performance have massively chilled policy discussion that could lead to any meaningful change in how we measure outcomes or conceive of education. “Following the science” on this unique topic can literally cause one to be violently attacked, as Murray was, or face “cancellation,” as Wax and Flynn certainly did. What politician could hope for reelection if he dared speak the likely truth that most people are not suited for college, an idea that radical egalitarians have only tried to put over on us in the past 30 years or so? It is much easier and more appealing to say the opposite, that everyone should go to college, particularly if the politicians already know that most of us either will not go or will fail to complete a degree if we do. DeBoer diagnoses this gnarly problem and does it well—with a combination of rigor and sensitivity that is uncommon and exemplary.

Unfortunately, when it comes to offering solutions, his white-knuckled attachment to classical Marxism—seemingly the one idea the otherwise curious thinker refuses to question—clouds his judgment. And so, to borrow a Marxist phrase, his arguments end up collapsing on their own internal contradictions.

In a relentlessly accusatory tone, he demands to know why we tolerate a system that excludes untalented “losers” from the happy and fulfilling lives so enviably enjoyed by talented “winners.” But like many a revolutionary before him, he prefers postulating a universal utopia to truly learning whether the non-elite population really is unhappy and unfulfilled. Describing his own lower-middle-class Midwestern childhood, he makes the mistaken assumption that since he found life on the wrong side of the “elite” divide unhappy and unfulfilling, all others must, and do. In this way, he has inadvertently embraced the self-serving assumptions put forth by the very elite he so righteously and correctly skewers elsewhere.

This reductive analysis buys heavily into debunked economic determinism, which erroneously indexes happiness to income and other purely material factors. We know, however, that happiness is largely a function of positive interpersonal relationships and quality leisure, neither of which, fortunately, is controlled by our failing educational establishment. Income makes some difference up to a relatively low comfort threshold (i.e., about $75,000 per year), yet family, faith, culture, nature, entertainment, purpose, community, and other less quantifiable but readily available variables play enormous roles in one’s satisfaction with life. We should take bracing note that Marxist regimes uniformly try to take total control of all of these forces.

Indeed, one should ask if the educated “elite” to which deBoer repeatedly alludes truly is happy and fulfilled. They certainly seem to want everyone else to believe they are. But signs point to no. Levels of depression, anxiety, personality disorders, suicidal ideation, and other psychological complaints stand at record-high levels—and are expanding rapidly among young people who otherwise did very well in the Cult of Smart, only to find that the intense competition never ends and often fails to confer the expected rewards. In 2017, 70% of Yale Law School students self-reported some form of mental health problem before graduating in large numbers to grueling Big Firm associateships that likely have done little to improve their psyches since then. Some two-thirds of academic women never become mothers, in significant part because the average length of time to complete doctorates and become comfortably established has stretched to the age at which childbearing ends. Employment in media, finance, consulting, public relations, and other ostensibly high-prestige fields is stressful, uncertain, time-consuming and, in relative terms, often far less well-paid than it was a generation ago. Just holding these positions usually requires residence in environments with high taxes, exorbitant living costs, rising crime, and other undesirable factors. Romantic love is widely seen as a distracting obstacle to professional fulfillment. Gen Z slang refers to the feelings involved as something one “catches,” like a disease. Sex, of which they have less than previous generations do, is often perfunctory and detached from emotion. Living with parents is considered normal.

Nor are deBoer and his fellow “elites” in the media even particularly free. In the midst of the Great Awokening, urban professional speech and behavior, in and outside of work and even at remote pastimes, are subject to pervasive surveillance and extrajudicial policing by standards that frequently shift and are arbitrarily applied. Egged on by activist faculty members whose approval they must court, an alarming percentage of young people oppose First Amendment rights, if they can even correctly list them. Regardless of how many Cult of Smart hoops a “winner” jumps through, an injudicious tweet, a tasteless joke, a misspoken word, and even pure hearsay can cause the purported transgressor to be swiftly “canceled” with major consequences. Indeed, deBoer need look no further than his dozens of proletarianized co-generationalists featured on the “Shitty Media Men” list, a briefly published database of largely anonymous sexual harassment allegations against male media professionals. His irritatingly repeated insistence that he is not a racist when discussing the possibility of group variations in intelligence painfully reveals how vulnerable he knows he is and what would probably happen to him if activists at his unnamed university quoted his book out of context. I can’t imagine he wants or would accept sympathy from a reviewer, but that’s what I feel witnessing how thoroughly he and his peers are in many ways victims rather than beneficiaries of this system. That he wants to open this putrid system to still more people, people with even fewer resources to defend themselves from its toxicity, seems at best misguided. At worst, it is perverse.

But deBoer badly wants to remain a committed man of the left and to make sure people know that he has more substance than the downbeat provocateur persona he has cultivated for much of his career. He concludes with what he claims are “revolutionary” solutions to realize a more just society in which all people know happiness and comfort, at least as he would define it. Ending the Cult of Smart, he argues, will require far-reaching social reforms to distribute society’s resources in a way that may obviate participation in a relentlessly competitive educational environment. He hopes that a universally strong socioeconomic foundation will make the categories of “winners” and “losers” so unimportant that they are no longer relevant and that everyone, regardless of intellectual ability, could occupy an equally valued and dignified place. He ignores that human societies, and even the societies of our primate relatives and ancestors, almost uniformly form hierarchies, but his solution is nothing new. John Kenneth Galbraith made substantively the same argument in The Affluent Society, published in 1958. Even earlier, most of the American labor movement conceded that the best way forward was to negotiate for a slice of the growing economy big enough that blue-collar workers could sit as comfortably in the middle class as white-collar workers. DeBoer merely dresses it up with the talking points of today’s progressive left, which wants single-payer health care, student debt forgiveness, government guarantees of employment or minimal income, and other ambitious policies that the Democratic Party inevitably abandons as soon as it cycles back into power and realizes that they are impractical, unsustainable, and even unpopular on any significant scale.

Reading deBoer’s obvious frustration felt like being cornered at a dull party by an aging Bernie Bro whose girlfriend just dumped him and left him angrier at the world than usual. As for the process of education itself, he advances palliatives that others have suggested, such as replacing competitive college admissions with a lottery system, moving away from standardized tests, and lowering academic standards so that more students are graduated. The trouble is that we are already doing this on a mass scale, with the most discernible result that even more students get to leave college feeling let down, when there is so much in life that could lift them up.

American society may one day reach a point where it does away with inequality, or at least manages it better. Lucky for today’s young people, there are multiple right answers—many more than they have been told—and exploring any one of them could be a more productive use of time than looking to this book, or the educational galaxy it seeks to uphold, for a solution. (read more)

2021-06-23 b
INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE I

Dalton parents enraged over ‘masturbation’ videos for first-graders

Last fall, parents at the posh, $55,000-per-year Dalton School got wind of their first-graders being taught sex education lessons that included masturbation.

They complained to school administrators, but were told they had simply “misinterpreted” what Dalton’s now-notorious “health and wellness” educator Justine Ang Fonte — who last month led a controversial and explicit “porn literacy” workshop at another elite prep school — was teaching.

But after The Post’s exposé last week on the porn class, Dalton parents “bombarded” the school with more complaints about Fonte’s curriculum, sources told The Post.

The Post viewed video of a cartoon Fonte used in one of her sex ed classes for 6-year-olds showing little kids talking about “touching themselves” for pleasure.

“Hey, how come sometimes my penis gets big sometimes and points in the air?” asks the little boy in the cartoon, leading to an explanation of what an “erection” is.

The boy nods and says, “Sometimes I touch my penis because it feels good.”

Then the little girl character chimes in: “Sometimes, when I’m in my bath or when Mom puts me to bed, I like to touch my vulva too.”

Fonte has reassured parents that she does not use the word “masturbation” in class, and that her lessons teach kids not to touch themselves in public.

They are also taught lessons about “consent.” While one mother conceded that teaching the concept of consent can be valuable in protecting children from abuse, another said telling kids that that their own parents or grandparents should not touch them without first asking for permission is extreme.

“Literally parents are supposed to say to their kids, May I hug you?” one parent said.

One mother said another parent told her, “I’m paying $50,000 to these a–holes to tell my kid not to let her grandfather hug her when he sees her?”

Fonte’s lessons for first-graders also include subjects such as gender assigned at birth, gender identity and gender expression.

“Kids have no less than five classes on gender identity — this is pure indoctrination,” a Dalton mother said. “This person should absolutely not be teaching children. Ironically, she teaches kids about ‘consent’ yet she has never gotten consent from parents about the sexually explicit, and age-inappropriate material about transgender to first-graders.”

“We are furious,” a third Dalton mother told The Post. “We were horrified to learn this was shown to our first-grade 6- and 7-year-old kids without our knowledge or consent. But it’s so hard to fight back because you’ll get canceled and your child will suffer.”

The second Dalton mother said, “I’m not against all sex education but it’s not cool to keep parents in the dark about it.”

The parents spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are afraid of retaliation.

The second mom hit back at Dalton administrators who she said are playing mind games with parents and not fessing up to what’s really going on in classrooms. The school has said that only a “small group” of parents complained about Fonte’s class last fall and that they “misinterpreted” the content. At the same time, however, the school quietly removed the video about kids touching themselves from the curriculum.

“We are not ‘confused.’ We are in fact just seeing very clearly for the first time what a ‘progressive’ education really means at Dalton,” the mother said. “The fact that the school then gaslit parents into thinking we are confused is abysmal.”

Fonte’s work at the school is reportedly funded by a $450,000 grant given to Dalton in 2012 by hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation. Ackman’s ex-wife Karen is on the Dalton board of trustees.

“What we are seeing across the country is that many schools have lost sight of the purpose of education, and are hiding curriculum and teaching materials from parents,” a spokesman for FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, told The Post.

Last month The Post reported on Fonte’s workshop, “Porn Literacy:  An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture to the 120 co-ed juniors included how porn takes care of “three big male vulnerabilities”; statistics on the “orgasm gap” showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially nude women, some in bondage, to analyze “what is porn and what is art.”

Fonte’s presentation included a list of the most-searched pornographic terms of 2019, including “creampie,” “anal,” “gangbang,” “stepmom” and more.

Shortly after The Post published the Columbia Prep story, its head of school, Dr. William M. Donohue, sent a conciliatory email to school parents saying that the “content and tone of the presentation did not represent our philosophy, which is to educate our students in ways that promote their personal development and overall health, as well as to express respect for them as individuals. … It was unfortunate that we did not better inform ourselves of the speaker’s specific content in advance. I apologize … Going forward we will certainly learn from this experience.”

Fonte has not responded to repeated requests from The Post for comment.

A Dalton spokesman said, “As part of Dalton’s comprehensive Health curriculum for students, a lesson on Gender & Bodies included two evidence-based and age-appropriate videos approved for students 4 years and older. These videos align with nationally recognized methodologies and standards. We consistently review our Health curriculum, making sure that the content is developmentally appropriate and, if necessary, we adapt our curriculum accordingly. We will continue to listen carefully to parent feedback, respond thoughtfully to community concerns, and develop lessons that are in the best interest of our students, respect our community’s values, and correspond with best practices.” (read more)

See also: Sex-ed teacher out at elite NYC school after ‘masturbation’ lesson for first graders

2021-06-23 a

“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.”

— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling


2021
-06-22 h
PRO OR CON?


Adviser Epshteyn says Constitution does not prohibit Trump reinstatement,
matter has never been ruled upon | Just The News https://t.co/7Yoikeovst


— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) June 22, 2021



2021
-06-22 g
TOLKIEN SOCIETY CONNED

In An Affront To Its Namesake, The Tolkien Society Goes Woke

The Tolkien Society, a literary organization founded in 1969 and dedicated to promoting the works of J.R.R Tolkien, has held an annual academic conference for decades. This year’s conference, to be held virtually via Zoom on July 3 and 4, is on the theme of “Tolkien and Diversity.”

Before we go on, understand that the Tolkien Society’s president was, and formally remains, the great J.R.R. Tolkien himself. His daughter, Priscilla, currently serves as the vice president. At its annual seminar, scholars present academic papers, archival materials are sometimes displayed and discussed, and a serious effort is generally made to understand and appreciate Tolkien’s unique genius. In other words, it’s not some ramshackle fan club for Middle Earth LARPers.

But this year, seminar attendees will be subjected to something different. Papers to be presented include, “Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings,” “The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism,” and “‘Something Mighty Queer’: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien.” Pretty much the entire program is like this.

The best thing we can say about a Tolkien conference that presents papers on, say, “Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” or “The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack,’” is that the scholars in question do not know the first thing about Tolkien or the meaning of his work.

The worst we can say is that they hate Tolkien and his work, and would like very much to destroy it.

Indeed, how else can we account for such a conference? “The Lord of the Rings,” like “The Hobbit” and “The Silmarillion” and Tolkien’s entire corpus of writings on Middle Earth, has almost nothing to say about the concerns expressed in these papers or the worldview from which they spring. There are no “transgender realities” in the Lord of the Rings. There is nothing to say about the Lossoth — a remnant of the ancient people of Forodwaith, a race of hardy men who dwelt in the icy far north of Middle Earth — that even remotely relates to contemporary leftist ideas like antiracism. There is no place in a serious discussion of Tolkien’s writings for phrases like “cishetero amatonormativity.”

The only reason to torture Tolkien’s work like this is not to understand it more deeply but to tear it down. And why would modern scholars want to do that? Because everything that Tolkien was, and everything he wrote, is an affront to the modern secular scholar’s understanding of the world, reality, and the meaning and purpose of life.

Put bluntly, the worlds Tolkien created sprang from an imagination shaped and suffused by his deep Roman Catholic faith. “The Silmarillion” in particular is in some ways a poetic and literary reflection on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In considering Tolkien’s Middle Earth, there is no way to escape this reality.

His creation, as he himself said, was a kind of sub-creation under the inspiration and aegis of almighty God. His grand themes — good and evil, truth and falsehood, power and glory and honor and sacrifice — all flow forth from his Christian faith and his decidedly sacramental view of the world. For Tolkien, all the world is shot through with meaning by a Creator who loves mankind and is manifest in His works.

That men and women now come to slander and distort and ultimately destroy these sub-creations of Tolkien is also, in a strange way, a testament to his legacy. Like Melkor, they are possessed by dark thoughts of their own imaginings, unlike those of the great Tolkien, and seek not so much to increase their own power and glory, but to bring Tolkien’s down to their grubby station, where everything can be reduced to race and sex and politics.

These people are taken today to be Tolkien scholars. What can we, who love Tolkien and his profoundly Christian art, do but repeat in sorrow a line from “Lament for the Rohirrim”—

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
(read more)

2021-06-22 f
THE EVERYTHING CON

“Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.”

– Matt Taibbi


2021-06-22 e
THE COVID-CON IV

We Are About to Run Out of Some Stuff

You’ve probably never heard of Yantian International Container Terminal, the busiest port of Shenzhen. Overall, Shenzhen is the third largest container port in the world, roughly three times as big as the largest US port, Los Angeles. Not that far away sits another place you’ve never heard of, Guangzhou Harbor, the world’s fifth largest container port. Together, these two ports handled nearly 50 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of cargo in 2018.

In about a week, these ports will be all you hear about.

The Chinese province of Guangzhou is dealing with an outbreak of the Delta variant of COVID-19, a highly contagious form of the virus originally discovered in India. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a history of aggressively dealing with localized COVID-19 outbreaks, and this time is no different, global supply chains be damned. And damned they will be. In late May, the CCP effectively shut down these two ports, leading to an unprecedented shipping logjam that will make the March 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal by the Ever Given seem downright trivial.

Global container shipping was already a mess before this incident. Below is a chart of the cost to ship a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Los Angeles as far back as my Bloomberg machine has been keeping score. We were cast away in uncharted waters well before this latest shipwreck.

Reports from China indicate a spike in estimated wait time to dock at these two ports from half a day to 16 days or more. The ports are beginning to partially reopen, although this is doing little to alleviate the growing backlog.

Brian Glick, founder and CEO at supply chain integration platform Chain.io, was quoted in a CNBC article this morning. Here’s his key message:

“Many small- and mid-sized shippers are throwing up their hands as the cost of shipping is surpassing the margins on the products they’re trying to move. Shipping costs are at all-time highs with anecdotal quotes coming in at 5 to 10 times historical norms. We’ve broken through so many price ceilings that nobody can say where this will peak.”

What do I think is going to happen? I think we are about to see random shortages of critical intermediates and finished goods alike. I think prices for all manner of products are going to continue their upward trajectory, building on the recent inflation momentum. Supply chains weren’t built for this level of disruption. We long ago decided to trade robustness for efficiency, and this chicken thinks those chickens are about to come home to roost. Trust me, I know my chickens. (read more)

2021-06-22 d
THE COVID-CON III

Follow the Science

Children should not be vaccinated for the moment

(from the W.H.O. website - today)

2021
-06-22 c
THE COVID-CON II

Denying the Demonic

In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine.  My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants. Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus [Editor's Note: it was originally called: variolation.].  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?  Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.  Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.”  It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after.  Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.  I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.  As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

Nine-year-old Kim Phuc, known as Napalm Girl,
                      1972 Nick Ut
Nine-year-old Kim Phuc, known as Napalm Girl, 1972 Nick Ut

So let me begin with a few reminders.

The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

This list could extend down the page endlessly.  Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.  Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.  Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.  As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

Resist. (read more)

2021-06-22 b
THE COVID-CON I

What I Know (And Don’t Know) About SARS-CoV-2

After fifteen months of assiduous reading, study, observation, and research, I have come to some conclusions about what is called COVID-19.

I would like to emphasize that I have done this work obsessively since it seemed so important.

I have consulted information and arguments across all media, corporate and alternative, academic, medical, books, etc. I have consulted with researchers around the world. I have read the websites of the CDC, the World Health Organization, and government and non-government health organizations.

In other words, I have left no stone unturned, despite the overt or covert political leanings of the sources. I have done this as a sociologist and writer, not as a medical doctor, although many of my sources have been medical doctors and medical studies.

My succinct conclusions follow without links to sources since I am not trying to persuade anyone of anything but just stating for the public record what I have concluded.

Life is short. I am going to say it now…

I know that vast numbers of people have been hypnotized by fear, threats, and bribes to accept the corporate mainstream media’s version of COVID-19. I have concluded that many millions are moving in a trance state and do not know this. They have been induced into this state by a well-organized, very sophisticated propaganda campaign that has drawn on the human fear of death and disease.

Those behind this have no doubt studied the high incidence of hypochondriasis in the general population and the fear of an invisible “virus” in societies where belief in God and the spiritual invisible has been replaced by faith in science. Knowing their audience well, they have concocted a campaign of fear and confusion to induce obedience.

I do not know, but suspect, that those who have been so hypnotized tend to be mainly members of the middle to the upper classes, those who have invested so much belief in the system. This includes the highly schooled.

I know that to lockdown hundreds of millions of healthy people, to insist they wear useless masks, to tell them to avoid human contacts, to destroy the economic lives of regular people have created vast suffering that was meant to teach people a lesson about who was in control and that they better revise their understanding of human relations to adjust to the new digital unreality that the producers of this masquerade are trying to put in place of flesh and blood, face to face human reality.

I know that the PCR test invented by Kary Mullis cannot test for the alleged virus or any virus and therefore all the numbers of cases and deaths are based on nothing. They are conjured out of thin air in a massive act of magic.

I know that the belief that it can so test began with the unscientific PCR Corona protocol created by Christian Drosten in Germany in January 2020 that became the standard method for testing for SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. I am sure this was preplanned and part of a high-level conspiracy. This protocol set the cycle threshold (amplification) at 45 which could only result in false positive results. These were then called cases: An act of fraud on a massive scale.

I do not know if the alleged virus has ever been isolated in the sense of being purified or detached from everything else aside from being cultured in a lab. Therefore I do not know if the virus exists.

I know that the experimental mRNA “vaccines” that are being pushed on everyone are not traditional vaccines but dangerous experiments whose long-term consequences are unknown. And I know that Moderna says its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” functions “like an operating system on a computer” and that Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, says that the lipid nanoparticles from the injections travel throughout the body and settle in large quantities in multiple organs where the spike protein, being biologically active, can cause massive damage and that the FDA has known this.

Additionally, I know that tens of thousands of people have suffered adverse effects from these injections and many thousands have died from them and that these figures are greatly underestimated due to the reporting systems. I know that with this number of casualties in the past these experimental shots would have been stopped long ago or never started. That they have not, therefore, convinces me that a radically evil agenda is under way whose goal is harm not health because those in charge know what I know and much more.

I do not know where this alleged virus originated, if it exists.

I know that from the start of this crisis, there was a concerted effort across the world to deny access to proven effective treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, steroids, ivermectin in a planned effort to vaccinate as many people as possible. This alone reveals an agenda centered, not on health, but on getting as many people as possible to submit to being vaccinated and controlled. Social control is the name of this deadly game.

I know that those pushing these vaccines – The World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, etc. – have a long history of wanting to drastically reduce the world’s population and that their promotion of eugenics under various names is very well known. I am convinced that the totally untested mRNA-type “gene therapy” is the key to their plan for population reduction.

I do not know if they will succeed.

I know they must be resisted.

I do not know why so many good people cannot see through this evil. I can only attribute it to having been seduced by a massive hypnotic propaganda campaign that has appealed to their deepest fears and will result in those fears being realized because they thought they were free. It is a great tragedy.

I know that all the statistics about cases and deaths “from” COVID-19 have been manipulated to create a fake pandemic. One of the most obvious proofs of this is the alleged disappearance of the flu and deaths from influenza. Only someone in a trance could fail to understand the absurd logic in the argument that this was the result of mask-wearing when at the same time the air-born COVID-19 spread like wildfire until that stopped precipitously in January 2021 when a tiny number of people had been vaccinated.

I know there has been barely any excess mortality throughout all this.

I do not know where it will all end but hope against hope the growing opposition to this fraud will grow and defeat it despite the organized censorship that is underway against dissenting opinions. I know that when organized censorship on this scale takes place those behind it are afraid of the revelation of the truth. A simple understanding of history confirms this.

I know that the temporary reprieve the authorities have granted to their subjects will be followed by further restrictions on fundamental freedoms, the corona virus lockdowns will likely return, “vaccine” boosters will be promoted, and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Great Reset with a Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology with the USA and other countries continuing to slip into a new form of fascist control unless people across the world stand up and resist in great numbers. I am heartened by signs that this resistance is growing.

Finally, I know if the authoritarian forces win the immediate battle, someone will write a book with a title like that of Milton Mayer’s classic, They Thought They Were Free. It will be censored. Perhaps it will first be shared via samizdat. But in the end, after much suffering and death, the truth about this evil agenda will prevail and there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

We are in a spiritual war for the soul of the world. (read more)

2021-06-22 a

“What is the difference between leftists and cannibals? Cannibals don’t eat their friends.”

— attributed to Lyndon B. Johnson


2021
-06-21 i
TAKE FROM THE POOR TO GIVE TO THE RICH

New Harvard Data (Accidentally) Reveal How Lockdowns Crushed the Working Class While Leaving Elites Unscathed

The picture painted is one of working-class destruction.

Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later.

We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.

The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.

The picture painted by this comparison is one of working-class destruction.

Employment for lower-wage workers, defined as earning less than $27,000 annually, declined by a whopping 23.6 percent over the time period. Employment for middle-wage workers, defined as earning from $27,000 to $60,000, declined by a modest 4.5 percent. However, employment for high-wage workers, defined as earning more than $60,000, actually increased 2.4 percent over the measured time period despite the country’s economic turmoil.

The data are damning. They offer yet another reminder that government lockdowns hurt most those who could least afford it.

Some critics argue that the pandemic, not government lockdowns, are the true source of this economic duress. While there’s no doubt the virus itself played some role, government lockdowns were undoubtedly the single biggest factor. It’s pretty intuitive that ordering people not to patronize businesses and criminalizing peoples’ livelihoods would hurt the economy. This intuition is
confirmed by data and studies showing as much. And don’t forget the fact that heavy lockdown states have consistently had much higher unemployment rates than states that took a more laissez-faire approach.

Others might insist that the mitigation of the spread of COVID-19 accomplished by lockdowns justifies this economic fallout. But this argument fails to account for the many peer-reviewed studies showing lockdown orders did not effectively slow the pandemic’s spread, or the painfully inconvenient fact that most COVID-19 spread occurred not in workplaces, restaurants, or gyms but at home. (Making “stay-at-home orders” seem like an astonishing mistake in hindsight.)  

So, all lockdowns really seem to have accomplished is at best a mild delay in the pandemic’s trajectory in exchange for a host of lethal unintended consequences such as a mental health crisis and skyrocketing drug overdoses. And, as we now know, a highly regressive economic fallout for the working class.

Of course, Ivy League researchers almost certainly did not intend to expose the failings of big government pandemic policies when they set out to catalog employment data. But, as Adams said, facts are stubborn things. (read more)

2021-06-21 h
GOOGLE THIS

REVEALED: Google & USAID Funded Wuhan Collaborator Peter Daszak’s Virus Experiments For Over A Decade.

Google funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – a controversial group which has openly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on “killer” bat coronavirus research – for over a decade, The National Pulse can today reveal.

The unearthed financial ties between EcoHealth Alliance and Google follow months of big tech censorship of stories and individuals in support of the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory.

The Google-backed EcoHealth Alliance played a critical role in the cover-up of COVID-19’s origins through its president, Peter Daszak.

Daszak served on the wildly compromised World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 investigation team. He championed the efforts to “debunk” the lab origin theory of the virus, despite mounting support for the claim first made by experts on Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic podcast in early January 2020.

Left-wing websites masquerading as “fact checkers” still call the lab theory “false,” despite the shift in tone from the [illegitimate] Biden regime, leading world scientists, and intelligence officials.

EcoHealth Alliance also funneled hundreds of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to its research partner, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to conduct studies on “killer” bat coronaviruses.

And Google.org, the charity arm of the tech behemoth, has also been funding studies carried out by EcoHealth alliance researchers including Peter Daszak since at least 2010. (read more)

2021
-06-21 g
YANKEE INGENUITY; DISINGENUOUS YANKEES II

The Can of Worms

Do not “pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19 because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued”. This was the instruction given by the US State Department to its investigators over a year ago, as reported by Vanity Fair in a long piece on Lab Leak. State Department investigators were warned against “digging in sensitive places” and repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box”.

What were they afraid of? They were afraid that someone might reveal that the deadly virus was cooked up by Chinese cooks under American guidance. The hands were Chinese, but the voice was that of Uncle Sam (Gen 27:22). In plain words, if the Chinese altered (Gain-of-Function’ed) the natural coronavirus, they did so on the orders of their American partners and according to their instructions. It is even more probable that the Chinese contribution was secondary, for they do not possess the know-how necessary to alter a virus. Whether it was an accidental leak of a bioweapon or the intentional deployment of bioterror (as Ron Unz expounded), in either case the US is the leading actor in the story.

President Trump threatened to sue Beijing for ten trillion dollars for the Wuhan lab leak. Good idea! But this princely sum should be charged to Washington (or rather New York with its Wall Street) as well as to Beijing. Actually, we didn’t have to wait until the end of May 2021 for this revelation. The basic facts were covered in the viral videos Plandemic and Plandemic II, released almost a year ago and promptly banned. Here you can watch a condensed (7 minutes), yet very convincing version of these two long videos, published last August. The creators conclude their story with ‘a plague on both your houses’ statement: “The US could say China did it, China could say the US did it. And both were right.”

The video (narrated by Dr David E. Martin and released by London real, the company owned by Brian Rose, a Jewish businessman from San Diego, CA, who is closely connected to the City of London) shows that work on Coronavirus began in 1999; the CDC filed a patent application on SARS-CoV in 2004; it was granted in 2007. They kept tampering with the virus for a few years, trying to make it more infectious and more deadly. After gain-of-function research was forbidden by the US government in 2014, it was promptly offshored to Wuhan lab. The research was quietly continued with US grants coming (partly) from the notorious Dr Fauci via the equally notorious Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance, the beneficiary of a $39 million grant from the Pentagon. The Pentagon is a great humanitarian organization known for its love of mankind, right? If they forwarded so much money to Wuhan, they surely had our good in mind. Probably it was out of sheer modesty that they hid the grants, via a web of multiple transactions, passing money from one NGO to another until reaching its final destination in Wuhan. In 2017, the work on weaponising the virus was resumed in the US, while President Trump stopped the grants to Wuhan.

The united media and social networks unleashed their ferocious fact-checkers against the video and its conclusion that the Chinese did it on US orders. And for a long time the story disappeared. But now that the Lab Leak story has been unbanned (thanks to Nicholas Wade’s impactful story) we can check the fact-checkers and find them sorely missing actual arguments. Their main reasoning, beside labelling different opinions “debunked” or “discredited”, was based on an article in Lancet that was commissioned and produced under the guidance of the very same Peter Daszak who admitted (in 2016) that he commissioned and funded Chinese scientists to create a ‘Killer Coronavirus’. Thus the debunkers were debunked and the discrediters were discredited.

The conclusion that the virus was made by Chinese under US instructions was also reached over a year ago, in April 2020, by Tsarfat, a French-Jewish blogger, who claimed that Ralph S. Baric was the man who weaponised the virus in 2015, “and described without any inhibition how he took what appears to be a natural strain of a bat virus and altered its properties by adding HIV strains (the Spike Protein in question). The original virus that Baric manipulated in his team’s 2015 work was provided by a team of Chinese scientists which claimed its discovery in a 2013 Nature article.” What about suing Dr Baric and Gilead Sciences for some of the billions? Or Facebook for blocking this important information? Or, indeed, Dr Fauci, who covered up for Baric and for Daszak?

[...] The Russians agree with Ron Unz. They think the virus was crafted by US scientists. While Putin avoided answering this question directly, Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to Putin and a minister of the Eurasian Commission, provided the whole script. In his view,

…The virus was synthesized in a well-known US laboratory by order of a scientific foundation closely associated with certain structures of the American financial oligarchy, then moved by ethnic Chinese to a Wuhan laboratory and released into the environment there. The purpose of this operation was to destabilize the socio-political situation in the PRC in order to create the prerequisites for a revolutionary situation. It fully fits into the logic of the global hybrid war, unleashed by the American financial oligarchy in order to maintain world domination in the confrontation with the rapidly growing China.

The Wuhan institute, says Glazyev, worked closely with a more advanced American laboratory. The Chinese scientists who worked in Wuhan had previously trained and conducted research in the United States. The United States is the only country in the world that has the necessary competencies to create such a virus. The United States is the only major country that has not signed the international convention on bioweapons. The Chinese specialists who worked at the time in the Wuhan laboratory came from the United States, where they conducted experiments on the synthesis of coronavirus using quasi-secret American funds.

Glazyev, a leading economist by trade, explained why the people behind creating a novel Coronavirus didn’t mind that it might spread all over the world. They needed to deflate the global financial bubble that had been inflated by the US Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Banks of England and Japan through a decade of quantitative easing. Throughout the decade the volume of the dollar money supply increased five fold, and the euro increased fourfold. Financial collapse was inevitable. Thanks to the global pandemic, the bubble deflated peacefully and manageably, without any unpleasant excesses. A million or two million dead is reasonable collateral damage in the eyes of the American super-rich.

If the 2020 pandemic did not exist, it would have to be invented. And it was invented: back in 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation published the Lock Step report, a scenario for the deployment of a pandemic; all measures of social isolation and violation of the citizens’ civil rights were predicted and actually implemented last year, says Glazyev.

I looked up the “fact checkers”. Like Wikipedia, it can be a useful source as long as you are aware that it is a hostile source. It’s like reading a well-sourced Nazi apology for their own atrocities. Not a stupid essay claiming there never were any atrocities, but a clever report full of half-truths. The fact checkers say this report (technically speaking, The Rockefeller Foundation, Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development included a section called Lock Step) has been removed from the Rockefeller Foundation site, but they did find it somehow. And indeed they declared it was

…a scenario of authoritarian control in the wake of a hypothetical novel influenza pandemic similar to COVID-19. Lock Step envisions “a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback,” according to the report. Another excerpt on the “mandatory wearing of face masks” and “body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” parallels ongoing practices to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The Lock Step scenario describes a continuation of authoritarian policies after the pandemic “fades”…

Despite the eerie similarity to reality ten years later, the Fact Checkers pronounced it fake news, because “The report makes no reference to COVID-19, a vaccine against the disease or plans to introduce a police state during a pandemic.” Well, they are hard to please! (read more)

2021-06-21 f
YANKEE INGENUITY; DISINGENUOUS YANKEES I

The Covid BioWeapon: Made in the USA, Aimed at China

Question 1–
What makes your theory about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so controversial, is not that it suggests that the pathogen was created in a lab, but that it is, in fact, a bioweapon that was deliberately released by US agents prosecuting a secret war on presumed enemies of the United States. Here’s the “money quote” from your article titled, “American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak”:

“…..we are left with the strong likelihood that Covid came from a laboratory along with a good possibility that it was designed as a bioweapon, yet we lack serious indications that any lab-leak occurred. So if the original Wuhan outbreak was due to the deployment of a powerful bioweapon but not one that had accidentally leaked from any lab, then surely China was the intended target, the victim rather than the perpetrator….

Given our ongoing military and geopolitical confrontation with China, America seems the likely source of the attack… The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment, probably some of the Deep State Neocons whom Trump had placed near the top of his administration.

This small handful of high-level plotters would have then drawn upon the resources of the American national security apparatus to actually carry out the operation. The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives or members of special forces would have been sent to Wuhan to release it…. In effect, what happened was a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario, but brought to real life.” (“American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak”, Ron Unz, The Unz Review)

So, here’s the question: Do you think recent developments lend credibility to your explosive theory or do you now believe that Covid-19 was merely “accidentally” leaked through human error?

Ron Unz– As everyone knows, over the last month the entire “mainstream narrative” of the Covid outbreak has been completely overturned. Just a few weeks ago, anyone suggesting the virus was artificial was denounced and ridiculed as a “conspiracy theorist” and any such statements were automatically banned by Facebook.

But exactly these same prohibited ideas are now widely accepted and promoted by leading figures in the media and political establishments. The 45-year veteran of the New York Times who spearheaded its Covid coverage has now admitted that he was completely mistaken, and that the virus probably came from a lab. The three billion Facebook users can now openly discuss this possibility.

The total collapse of this “natural virus” propaganda-bubble was produced by a self-published 11,000 word article by longtime science journalist Nicholas Wade. Yet the astonishing thing is that almost none of the crucial facts he cited in his article were new. Nearly all of Wade’s important evidence had been publicly available for a full year, but was simply ignored by our entire political and media establishment, partly because Trump took that position and they all hated Trump.

So the virus probably came from a lab. But the question now becomes “which lab?” Just as the MSM had promoted the totally unsubstantiated belief that Covid was natural, the MSM has now begun promoting the equally unsubstantiated belief that Covid accidentally leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, the evidence of any such Wuhan lab-leak is so thin as to be almost invisible.

It’s true that Chinese researchers at that lab were experimenting with related bat viruses, but many American researchers were doing very similar experiments, and for decades bat viruses have also been the central focus of America’s huge biowarfare program.

Wuhan is an enormously large metropolis of 11 million, much larger than New York City, and the Wuhan lab is located 20 miles(!) from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which was the earliest epicenter of the Wuhan outbreak. A distance of 20 miles seems pretty far for an accidental lab-leak.

Immediately after the initial Wuhan outbreak, the virus began infecting Iran’s top political elites, and killing a number of them. Isn’t it implausible that a random lab-leak in Wuhan would so quickly jump to the Holy City of Qom on the other side of the world?

There are many other aspects of the timing of the outbreak that seem very inconsistent with a random, accidental lab-leak.

Until a few weeks ago, the MSM and Facebook shut down anyone who disagreed with the “natural virus” theory, even though the evidence for an artificial virus had always been much stronger. They’ve now said “Oops! We were wrong. The virus probably came from a lab.” So I think they’ll now have a much harder time shutting down any debate about which lab.

Once people became aware of the basic facts of the virus, belief that it was artificial natural quickly collapsed. And once people become aware of the basic facts of the initial Covid outbreak, I think that belief in an accidental lab-leak will also begin to collapse.

Question 2–You seem to have anticipated my next question, but I’ll go ahead and ask it anyway. In another one of your articles, you say this:

“As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?”

My question is this: Is this the smoking gun? In other words, do these two “attacks” on enemies of the United States strongly suggest Washington’s involvement?

Ron Unz– Well, it’s certainly an *extremely* odd coincidence for those who claim the global Covid outbreak was caused by an accidental, random lab-leak of a virus in Wuhan, China.

Iran is on the other side of the world from China, and very few Chinese visit the Holy City of Qom. So it’s extremely strange that the Covid virus would have jumped so extremely quickly from a Wuhan lab-leak to Iran’s top political leadership, which suffered the next major outbreak.

A few weeks afterward, the third major world outbreak began in Northern Italy, but 200,000 Chinese live and work in that region, and many had just returned from their Lunar New Year holiday in China. The Chinese population in Qom is absolutely negligible by comparison. The Italian outbreak makes perfectly logical sense while the one in Qom does not.

None of this constitutes proof, but it raises huge doubts about the likelihood of the random lab-leak hypothesis. By contrast, the deliberate release of a viral bioweapon seems a much more plausible explanation of both these outbreaks.

America has the world’s largest and most comprehensive biowarfare program, and America’s two leading international adversaries—China and Iran—were almost simultaneously hit by a mysterious, deadly virus. Suspicion seems to point in a pretty obvious direction.

If the Colombo crime family of NYC is locked in a bitter feud with the Genoveses, and two capos of the latter are found shot to death in a 24-hour period, maybe they both suddenly decided to commit suicide. But most sensible observers would also tend to consider other possibilities.

Question 3– Shortly after you published your explosive piece suggesting US Intel agents may have been involved in releasing Covid-19 among the Chinese and Iranian people, your website was deplatformed by Google and banned on Facebook? Would you briefly explain what happened and will you also tell us whether you think that your alleged offense was:

1– Suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab?
2– Or, suggesting that Washington might have used SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon directed at its geopolitical rivals?

In my opinion, ruling elites don’t really care if people think Covid was man-made. What they’re concerned about, is that people will think it was intentionally released. That is the thought they don’t want us to think.

Ron Unz– Obviously, all this is entirely speculative. But for six years our website had been publishing a wide variety of extremely controversial articles on all sorts of different subjects, and we had never had any problems with either Facebook or Google.

Then in late April 2020, I published my first long article laying out the substantial evidence that the global Covid outbreak might have been due to an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and that article got very strong early traffic, with more Facebook Likes in the first few days than anything I had previously published.

But about ten days after it ran, our website was suddenly banned by Facebook. A few days later, our entire website was deranked by Google, so that all our web pages would appear near the very bottom of Google searches and almost no one would see them. The coincidental timing of these actions seems very suspicious.

At that point, I think we were one of the most popular websites to have ever been banned by Facebook. For example, our traffic far exceeded that of the venerable New Republic, a century old publication that had spent decades as America’s most influential opinion magazine. Although Facebook did publish an official report explaining that month’s bans, our name was barely mentioned, with almost all the pages of discussion devoted to obscure foreign websites in Georgia, Mauritania, or Myanmar, or those located in America’s major geopolitical adversaries such as Russia or Iran. The report explained the reasons for banning VDARE, “a website known for posting anti-immigration content” and then banned our own website for being “similar.”

This explanation seemed very strange. We do regularly republish VDARE articles, but since the beginning of 2020, these had only amounted to 41 of our 1,751 total articles and posts, representing just 0.2% of our content, and few of these VDARE pieces had anything to do with immigration. Meanwhile, Google provided no explanation at all for our sudden purge from their search results.

It seems likely that the sudden purges by Facebook and Google were due to our very extensive Covid coverage over the previous couple of months, culminating in my major article. Among English-language websites, the vast majority of mainstream outlets had been reporting that the virus was obviously natural and denouncing anyone who suggested it came from a lab as “crazy conspiracy theorists.”

Meanwhile, large numbers of right-wing, anti-China, or pro-Trump websites regularly claimed that the Covid outbreak was due to a lab-leak in Wuhan, and sometimes suggested that the virus was a Chinese bioweapon. I think we almost alone in focusing upon America’s huge and well-documented biowarfare program, sometimes publishing important articles that had been rejected elsewhere, and pointing suspicion in that direction.

Because we were banned by Facebook and Google, what should have became a debate over three origin Covid possibilities—a natural virus, a Chinese virus, or an American virus—became a year-long debate between only the first two.

Given enormous negative impact the Covid epidemic has had on America and the rest of the world, it’s easy to understand why our political leadership would be extremely concerned if people merely began to even consider the possibility that the virus may have been produced by an American government lab, let alone deliberately released. And persuading Facebook and Google to block such theories would make perfect sense.

Question 4– There’s a part of your theory I have a problem with. You say: “CIA operatives or members of special forces (may) have been sent to Wuhan to release “(the virus) This could be true, but why do you exclude the possibility that Chinese scientists may have been working either secretly with their US counterparts (Baric, Fauci?) or that the Chinese leadership is cooperating with foreign elites and Intelligence agencies to help them implement authoritarian policies in their own countries? Is that too far-fetched for you to even consider?

Ron Unz– Well, anything’s possible, but there’s simply no evidence of that.

Given the extreme recent hostility between the American and Chinese governments, I think it’s very unlikely that any senior officials of the two countries would be secretly cooperating behind the scenes in releasing the Covid virus.

Since the Trump Administration spent much of the Spring claiming that the Chinese had “covered up” the outbreak, large teams of investigative journalists from our top media outlets devoted many weeks of effort to tracking down the facts. Based upon all available evidence the Chinese government only discovered the existence of this mysterious, unsuspected new virus near the end of December, and almost immediately informed the World Health Organization.

Once the Chinese realized that Covid was highly contagious and spreading around Wuhan, they reacted very quickly. Some local officials tried to ignore or minimize the problem, costing them about a week, but once the national government discovered the danger, it quickly ordered massive public health measures, locking down the entire city of 11 million, and soon expanding the lockdowns to the region and then the entire country, confining 700 million Chinese to their homes for several weeks. This allowed them to completely stamp out the virus, and within a few months, the country was almost back to normal.

Meanwhile, the American government mostly ignored the entire potential problem and the possibility that the virus would back into the U.S. Our CDC botched the production of testing-kits, so for many weeks we had no way of knowing if the virus was starting to spread here. Trump and his supporters engaged in wishful thinking, claiming that the virus wasn’t dangerous and might disappear “like magic.” The American government only started to take the problem seriously after the horrific outbreak in Northern Italy.

Since the American government was harshly denouncing China during this entire period and reacting so differently to their Covid outbreaks, I think it’s very unlikely that American and Chinese leaders had planned the Covid outbreak together or were secretly cooperating in any way.

On the other hand, it’s certainly true that for many years Chinese scientists and American scientists had worked together on viral research, and jointly published papers. But that’s true of scientists all around the world, and until the last few years, China and America had generally been on pretty friendly terms. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that the American NIH provided some funding to the viral research of the Wuhan lab, and until the Covid outbreak, nobody would have cared about that. As far as I know, America provides research grants to scientists all around the world, and other countries, including China, do the same thing with American research.

And despite all the media hype, I also didn’t see anything particularly surprising in those Fauci emails that were recently released. American financial support for the virus research of the Wuhan lab had never been a secret, and I’ve been reading about it for over a year. However, once Trump and Pompeo began claiming that devastating Covid epidemic had been caused by a Wuhan lab-leak, the situation obviously changed. If they were correct, then everyone in America even somewhat associated with the Wuhan lab could share some of the gigantic blame, including Fauci. So it’s hardly surprising that Fauci and all the others began hiding their connection and also using their influence to try to (dishonestly) persuade the media that the virus was natural, thereby protecting the Wuhan lab and also themselves.

That worked for about a year, and nobody paid attention to the issue. But now that the media has come around to the virus being artificial, the Wuhan lab has become a prime suspect, putting Fauci and the others back in the hot-seat. Fauci seems a dishonest federal bureaucrat, but our entire government is filled with such people, and the focus on Fauci seems ridiculous. I think it’s quite unlikely that Covid was produced in Wuhan or leaked out, so Fauci’s dishonesty was totally unimportant.

Finally, while it’s remotely possible that America intelligence agencies had some spies in Wuhan or even the Wuhan lab, there seems no evidence of this. In fact, the only secret intelligence we allegedly received about events in Wuhan came from a third-country source, which demonstrates our own total lack of information and agents. If we did release the Covid bioweapon in Wuhan, it’s pretty unlikely that we were able to recruit local Chinese agents to carry out the operation.

For about a year, most experts had agreed that the Covid outbreak in Wuhan probably began in late October or early November of 2019. By a remarkable coincidence, there were 300 American military servicemen visiting Wuhan for the World Military Games, which ended in late October. That visit would have provided perfect cover for America to slip a couple of operatives into the group, and have them release the virus in the city. With thousands of foreign military personnel traveling around and doing sightseeing, any risk of detection would have been minimal. That seems much more plausible than the risk of finding and using local Chinese operatives.

What would Americans think if 300 Chinese military officers paid an extended visit to Chicago, and immediately afterwards a mysterious, deadly viral epidemic suddenly broke out in that city?

Question 5— Alot of people who read this interview are going to think, “The United States is not capable of crime like this.” But, over the years, US-funded laboratories have created, modified and stockpiled all manner of toxic agents including “six mass-produced, battle-ready biological weapons”, namely, anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q-fever, VEE, botulism and God knows what else. The United States has also authorized highly controversial human research programs that involved people and groups who were never informed that they were being used as guinea pigs in a government lab experiment. As Jeanne Guillemin said more than three decades ago:

“The entire experimental legacy is dismaying, from the hundreds of dead monkeys at Fort Detrick to … the vaccinated volunteers in Project Whitecoat, strapped to chairs amid cages of animals in the Utah sunlight as Q fever aerosols are blown over them. Most chilling are the mock scenarios played out in urban areas: light bulbs filled with simulated BW agents being dropped in New York subways, men in Washington National Airport spraying pseudo-BW from briefcases, and similar tests in California and Texas and over the Florida Keys.”

US biological weapons were allegedly used in Korea, Vietnam and Cuba although the evidence is not conclusive. The history of these weapons does increase the probability that rogue elements in the national security state, could put them to use if they thought there was some advantage in doing so.

So what do you say to those people who think that the United States would never use a bioweapon, like SARS-CoV-2 , against an enemy?

Ron Unz– Sure, many Americans might regard it as “unthinkable” that their country could have used a biological weapon against China. But it is very widely recognized that for decades America has had the world’s leading biological warfare program, and in fact during the 1950s, it received government resources comparable to our nuclear weapons development efforts.

There seems quite a lot of evidence that those American bioweapons were used during the Korean War, though the claims have been disputed and they anyway turned out to be rather ineffective compared to conventional weapons. There are also claims bioweapons were used against Cuba and perhaps Vietnam.

In any event, our biological warfare capability certainly does exist, with the Ft. Detrick facility being our leading lab. Trump’s lackadaisical response once Covid began leaking back into the U.S. hardly suggests that he initially realized it might be a dangerous bioweapon, so he seems to have been entirely ignorant of the facts. Therefore, the attack against China (and Iran) would have been a rogue operation, probably carried out by elements of the national security apparatus associated with the Deep State Neocons at the top of his administration.

If someone sufficiently senior had been behind the plot, I think it would have been easy for the conspirators to have drawn upon America’s military resources to carry out the operation, with all those lower-level participants believing that they were part of a fully-authorized strike against America’s leading geopolitical adversaries, just as our government soon afterward assassinated Iran’s top military commander. Probably someone such as such as Secretary of State (and former CIA Director) Mike Pompeo or National Security Advisor John Bolton would have had been able to orchestrate the attack.

Such individuals had the means, motive, and opportunity, so it seems absurd for the media to so totally ignore this possibility.

Here’s something to consider. The worst biowarfare attacks in American history occurred just after 9/11, with Anthrax mailings to important political and media figures stampeding Congress into the passing the Patriot Act. The Anthrax attacker attempted to implicate Islamic terrorists in his attacks, but the FBI soon determined that the Anthrax came from our own Ft. Detrick facility, and eventually declared that a government biowarfare researcher named Bruce Ivins was responsible and closed the case, just after he supposedly committed suicide. Whether or not Ivins was actually guilty may be disputed, but the attack was almost certainly carried out by rogue elements of our national security apparatus. So it hardly seems impossible that the Covid outbreak had somewhat similar origins.

As a rogue operation, the Covid attacks could have been organized by a very small handful of individuals, with virtually none of the exhaustive bureaucratic planning that would normally take place. Under such circumstances, the plotters might have casually minimized the possible risk that the disease would leak back into America or our NATO allies, resulting in the disaster which eventually occurred. After all, the previous SARS and MERS coronavirus epidemics had left both America and Europe almost totally unscathed.

There’s one particularly telling clue that has been almost entirely ignored by both the mainstream and alternative media. Most experts believe that the Covid outbreak in Wuhan probably began in late October or early November, but since infections took some time to spread and the virus was initially undetectable, no one in the Chinese government was aware of the outbreak until the end of December. However, several American government sources later revealed to ABC News that as early as November 2019, our Defense Intelligence Agency had distributed a secret report to government officials warning that a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak was taking place in Wuhan. The Pentagon afterwards denied the story, but Israeli TV independently confirmed that the report indeed existed and had been distributed to our NATO allies and Israel. The secret DIA report was prepared in “the second week of November,” at a time when probably only a couple of dozen people were starting to feel a little sick in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, and more than a month before anyone in the Chinese government discovered the outbreak. These facts seem almost impossible to explain if the virus was either natural or was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab.

I think that the combination of all this evidence, together with additional material, strongly supports the hypothesis that the Covid outbreak resulted from an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), probably a rogue operation orchestrated by the Deep State Neocons in the Trump Administration.

Whether or not others agree with me, it seems absurd and ridiculous for this very serious possibility to be so completely excluded from virtually the entire mainstream and alternative media. I suspect that the reason for this total silence is that the evidence supporting this theory is sufficiently compelling that merely presenting it would quickly convince much of the Western public that a biowarfare attack was the most likely scenario. Therefore, the reaction has been a total blackout of these facts, which have remained unmentionable.

The Biden Neocons have now replaced the Trump Neocons at the helm of our government, but very little has changed in our dangerously anti-China foreign policy. And with the mainstream media wholeheartedly in the Biden camp, their attacks against China on all sort of dubious grounds have intensified. Indeed, the huge outpouring of current media support for the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis—which argues that Covid was secretly developed by the Chinese, possibly as a bioweapon—only became possible after their hated enemy Trump had left office.

America has the world’s largest biowarfare program, the Trump Administration focused on China as our greatest geopolitical threat, and the Deep State Neocons whom Trump hired were notoriously reckless individuals. It would hardly take a great deal of thought for the media to connect these dots and begin at least considering the obvious possibility they suggest.

Addendum by Ron Unz:

And here’s a link to a freely downloadable eBook, containing my four main articles on the subject:
https://www.unz.com/ebook/covid-catastrophe-ebook/

(read more)

2021-06-21 e
JUST SAY NO IV

“We made a big mistake; we didn’t realize it until right now, we thought the spike protein was a great target antigen, we never knew that the spike protein itself was a toxin…and was a pathogenic protein. So by vaccinating people, we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin, and [for] some people, this gets in the circulation and when that happens in some people, it can cause damage, especially to the cardiovascular system. I have many other legitimate questions about the long-term safety therefore of this vaccine. for example, with it accumulating within the ovaries, one of my questions is, will we be rendering young people infertile?”

Dr. Byram Bridle, Associate Professor of Viral Immunology, University of Guelph

2021-06-21 d
JUST SAY NO III

Death rate from variant COVID virus six times higher for vaccinated than unvaccinated, UK health data show

Hospitalizations are also higher among thousands of fully vaccinated individuals who test positive for the Delta COVID ‘variant of concern.’

The death rate from the Delta COVID variant is six times higher among those who were fully vaccinated for two weeks or longer than among those who never received a shot, according to data published by Public Health England on Friday.

Twenty-six people died among 4,087 who were fully vaccinated 14 days or more before testing positive for the Delta COVID variant. This equates to a death rate of 0.00636 percent, which is 6.6 times higher than the rate of 0.000957 deaths – or 34 deaths among 35,521 positive Delta cases among the unvaccinated, according to data published in a June 18 report titled, SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England, Technical briefing 16. (read more)

2021-06-21 c
JUST SAY NO II


It's astonishing that the host thinks that the problem with doctors not being willing
to stake their credibility on the vaccine is the reduced access to vaccines, rather
than, you know, the problems with the vaccine that make doctors hesitant to stake
their credibility on them. https://t.co/WX2Va1n8ft


— Gell-Mann Corvaier (@Corvaier) June 21, 2021



2021-06-21 b
JUST SAY NO I

REVEALING: 58% Of Doctors In The Association Of American Physicians And Surgeons DIDN’T Take The Jab!

Looks like there is ZERO consensus.

We keep hearing “trust the science”, but most doctors and surgeons seem to be mistrustful of “the science”. Personally, I think a lot of these folks talking about “trusting the science” really just trust the television.

According to a new survey conducted by The AAPS, most of the doctors and surgeons who responded aren’t even vaccinated.

Just how many you ask?

58% according to their survey.

This isn’t medical advice, and I am not a doctor, but how telling is it that doctors and surgeons themselves are hesitant about this vaccine? (read more)

2021
-06-21 a
Editor's Note:

Contra Christopher Langan

The post immediately below was published to entertain, not so much to inform.

Christopher Langan claims an IQ of 200 yet is ignorant of economics, the division of labor, production and the lifestyles of our "Overlords."

He is also blind to verities strewn about in plain sight.

While it is true that the gene therapy injections marketed as vaccines for the made in the U.S.A. (not China) synthetic corona cold virus are themselves a bioweapon, his assertion that the control group (the abstainers) will be killed, defies logic.

The elite are Malthusians and eugenics is their wettest of wet dreams, but they do not want to live in a worldwide Kinshasa or Lagos.

At the very least, the billionaire technocrats will want the trains to run on time. They will continue to want the finer things in life as well as their exotic foods and drinks available without having to be delivered by armed convoys throughout the supply chain.
 
The technocrats will also want to maintain, even increase, their income streams. Their businesses need sophisticated consumers with disposable income. The dregs and gang members of Central America being imported by the illegitimate Biden regime, for example, will be mired in poverty in criminality for several generations. How lucrative will it be to sell them disposable diapers and .22 caliber ammo?

The billionaire technocrats are also stern taskmasters who hire ambitious, articulate and highly capable managers. Persons with such skills are relatively common in high IQ populations. They are very uncommon in the low IQ populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America.

It is more likely the vaccine control group (abstainers) will populate and manage the brave new world. They already have the culture, intelligence and skills to succeed.

The vaccinated hordes: credulous, fearful and cowering before a phantom menace will succumb to Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Blood clots and organ failure by spike protein over-production will kill many. The survivors will have fertility "issues."

Am I a terrible person for noting that the vaccinated hordes include so many Leftist-Progressive-Wokesters and melanin minorities?

With my knowledge of biochemistry and immunology, I expect the first waves of mass vaccine deaths to occur this fall and winter with the coming Northern Hemisphere cold and flu season. Of course, the media will blame the unvaccinated. But then again, the media is mostly Leftist and well-vaccinated...

It's going to get ugly; very ugly.

I'll be spending much time at the gun club this summer. My aim is good, but it must be perfect.

2021
-06-20 l
CHRISTOPHER LANGAN, IQ 200, OPINES ON COVID VAXX

Christopher Langan on Facebook

(from a Facebook post)

2021-06-20 k
THE UK IS SIMILARLY PLAGUED

Blacks Bless the Benighted West: The Sacred Central Principle of Modern Western Politics and Culture

[...] Like all other Western nations, Britain is a Land of Lies where liars rule, minority-worship is mandatory throughout public life, and non-Whites impose huge and growing costs on the White majority. And what should we do in the face of the lies, ugliness and evil currently rampant in the West? I think Vox Day’s advice is good. We should devote ourselves ever more firmly to what the great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc called the “indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.” (read more)

2021
-06-20 j
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION X

Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren channeling Wu Wang Washington Waldstein

crackpot melting pot

Intersectionality is the American Nightmare

2021-06-20 i
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION IX
"I do not expect that Murray or the rest of mainstream conservatism to learn anything from their decades of abysmal failure. They will continue to shout of the virtues of colorblindness and the dangers of identity politics for as long as anyone will listen. But that also means that there will remain a vacuum on the Right, and it is our job to fill it."

Happy Juneteenth Charles Murray

[...] But at the end of the day, liberal individualism can never be an identity. It creates a void, and now that void is filled by anti-White identity. You could say that liberal individualism, as an end in itself, morphed into anti-White identity, but in practice, it’s the same difference. Behind the equity rhetoric, and the diversity-is-our-greatest-strength slogans, opposition to Whiteness is the legitimizing myth of the American state and its intelligentsia. And while a large share of the general public objects to the anti-White language of some of the more strident “antiracists,” anti-Whiteness has long established itself as the implicit normie consensus. This is why mainstream conservatives accept that it is perfectly fair for other races to defend themselves as races, but even when countering anti-White racism, they never dare defend themselves as Whites.

Conservatives might say I am missing the larger picture, that what we are really facing is an assault on the entire American and Western heritage, or it’s all about socialist big business taking away our freedoms. But no, anti-Whiteness is the larger picture. That is the regime’s reason-for-being. After all, conservatives are very willing to defend America and the West, they are quite comfortable defending Christianity, and they are equally at ease attacking socialism or woke business or woke socialist business. But they are absolutely terrified to defend Whites by name. Indeed, one of their primary modes of defending America or Western culture’s honor is to insist that those things [have] nothing to do with Whites!

For sure, it is true that leftist pathologies extend beyond anti-White resentment. And obviously our politics is broader than demonization of Whitey. But that is sort of the point, the idea of defending, let alone celebrating, Whites as Whites is understood to be off-the-table. And that reflects the fact that the implicit consensus is anti-Whiteness. If the national story we tell ourselves is of the gradual extension of tolerance and equal opportunity to all, the bold-print subtext of that story is the overcoming of Whiteness. And in practical effect, White identity is made the negative moral center of that American story.

I am not arguing that the vast majority of Americans are actively anti-White. To use the Kendian language, most are non-White identitarians, not anti-White identitarians. Anti-Whiteness has not bewitched 95% of Americans, body and soul, by any means. Of course not. In fact, I have no doubt that a large share of conservative Whites, maybe a majority, would prefer America to be a predominantly White country, or a Christian country, or a White Christian country. But they have been trained that it is wrong to speak, or even consciously think, in those terms. Which says it all. Anti-Whiteness may not be an especially stable national identity—it is an inherently divisive project—but for the time being, that is its role.

It’s possible I am overstating the anti-Whiteness thing, maybe it is only the most prominent component of a more expansive left-wing project of resentment. But that is ultimately beside the point. The larger picture, remember, is that Murray’s beloved liberal individualism is not suited to be an end in itself. Something will fill the vacuum, whether it’s anti-Whiteness or whatever else, but liberal individualism does not make a nation. And whatever it is you think is filling that vacuum at the moment, at the very least we can agree that it is hostile to White identity. (read more)

2021-06-20 h
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VIII

Police: Fatal Austin mass shooting arose from a [black] teenage feud

AUSTIN, Tex. – A deadly weekend mass shooting in Austin’s famed entertainment district arose from a feud between two groups of [black] Central Texas teenagers, according to a police affidavit filed Wednesday.

Harker Heights High School student Jeremiah Tabb, 17, was arrested at school Monday and remained in Travis County Jail on Wednesday. He is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison.

Bond is set at $500,000, but a police spokesman said it was unclear if [the black teen] had an attorney to speak on his behalf.

In the arrest affidavit filed by Austin police filed in a Travis County district court Wednesday, a wounded male juvenile is quoted as telling detectives at an Austin hospital that he was with friends on East Sixth Street, a famous entertainment strip, when they began exchanging stares with a youth he identified as JT and JT’s friends.

The [black] male juvenile, who was not identified by name, said he had attended the same Killeen middle school as JT, who said to the juvenile’s group, “What y’all wanna do? Y’all wanna fight?” The juvenile said he answered, “It’s whatever,” at which point JT pulled a handgun from his waistband and opened fire. A [black] companion of the juvenile, also a juvenile, drew his own gun and returned fire. One person was killed and more than a dozen others were wounded.

Police showed a yearbook photo of Tabb to the hospitalized juvenile, who identified him as the one who shot him. He told police that Tabb had already shot him in the leg in Killeen a few days earlier. Police in Killeen, 70 miles (113 kilometers) north of Austin, have a complaint on file from that shooting, according to the affidavit.

Police found eight spent shell casings on the sidewalk where Tabb and his group were standing, all of which were determined to have likely come from the same gun, the affidavit states. There was no word on whether shell casings were found in the street, where the juvenile’s group was walking.

The juvenile gunman also remained under detention. Police have released no information on that suspect, nor on whether they have determined who fired the shot that killed Douglas John Kantor, 25. (read more)

2021
-06-20 g
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VII


It doesn’t lack empathy or understanding he’s 100% right and anyone with a brain
knows it but these days that’s not PC/Woke so rather than solve the problem they’ll
elect someone who will perpetuate it and likely make it much worse while crime
skyrockets and taxpayers flee.


— Donald Trump Jr. @DonaldJTrumpJr June 19, 2021


Watch: Andrew Yang’s response to a question about how he would handle mental
health during Wednesday's NYC mayoral debate drew fire on social media from
people who said it lacked empathy or understanding. https://t.co/frKMJ3naJf pic.twitter.com/g9VKD1CoX5

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 17, 2021


This is what Andrew Yang said:
Yang: “The fact is, mentally ill homeless men are changing the character of our neighborhoods. A woman my wife, Ellen, is friends with — and her mom grew up in Hell’s Kitchen — was punched in the face by a mentally ill man, sent a picture of her bruised face around the mom group, spread like wildfire. This is happening in New York City. And we’re not talking enough about it. Families are leaving as a result, in East Harlem, the neighborhood has been changed. Upper West Side, the neighborhood has been changed. We owe our people and our families better than this. And I’m frustrated by the political nature of these responses. I mean, we’re not talking about housing affordability. We’re talking about the hundreds of mentally ill people we all see around us every day on the streets and the subways. We need to get them off of our streets and our subways, into a better environment. And when you ask what I’m going to do differently, I’m going to rebuild the stock of psych beds in our city because the number has gone down 14 percent — it should be going up 100 percent until there are resources necessary for anyone who’s mentally ill to not be on our streets. It’s not right for them. It’s not right for a city. There will be no recovery until we resolve this. I will fix this.”

Moderator: “Thank you.”

Yang: “Yes, mentally ill people have rights. But you know who else have rights? We do. The people and families of the city. We have the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out at us.”

2021-06-20 f
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VI


Fort Lauderdale Mayor ⁦@DeanTrantalis ⁩ said the deadly car incident at the
gay pride event was a “terrorist attack,” sparking left-wing conspiracies & panic.
But the driver of the vehicle was a gay participant in the event who says it was an accident


— Andy Ngô @MrAndyNgo June 20, 2021


*

CBS Miami: “The driver of the truck is telling police that his foot was stuck between
the gas pedal and the brake causing him to lose control of the truck”
https://twitter.com/maebe_a_girl/s


— Andy Ngô @MrAndyNgo June 19, 2021



2021-06-20 e
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION V


In our exclusive interview, Dr. Aruna Khilanani explains why she said there were
“no good apples” among White people. She also explains her claim that White
people are “psychopathic.” pic.twitter.com/CMfrz5vO3K


— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) June 17, 2021



See more about this racist psychiatrist here.

2021
-06-20 d
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION IV


invasion

As I’ve been saying, the root cause of the border crisis is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

— Lauren Boebert @laurenboebert June 19, 2021



2021-06-20 c
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION III


At our current rate of examining over 100k ballots per day, we will complete the
paper examination phase of the audit by Saturday, June 26.


— Maricopa Arizona Audit @ArizonaAudit June 16, 2021



2021-06-20 b
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION II

"In life, Floyd was at war with Truth, Beauty and Goodness; in death, he became a leftist icon not despite his ugliness and criminality, but because of them. Leftism is powered by its contradictions, not weakened. It insists that “Black is White” in all senses, portraying violent Black criminals as saintly victims and civilized law-abiding Whites as murderous oppressors. This inversion of reality has sent the murder-rate soaring among young Black men in America, as leftists perform their usual trick of most harming those they claim to be most helping. But in reality leftists don’t want to help Blacks: they want to harm Whites. George Floyd is best seen not as an icon of Blackness, but as an icon of anti-Whiteness. From his dark skin and thick lips to his low intelligence and immorality, the destructive and criminal Floyd is the antithesis of a creative and law-abiding White. He represents Black savagery against White civilization.

"And that is why he is now an icon of leftism. But even for leftists Floyd isn’t entirely perfect. If only he’d been Muslim too! Then he would have represented an even stronger antithesis to White Western Christian civilization. That’s why Black Muslims like Somalis are probably the leftist ideal as immigrants into Western nations."

Tobias Langdon


2021-06-20 a
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION I

“What we are witnessing here, right out in the open, is a build up to a mass killing of White people. That is why they are trying to remove the police – they want nothing standing in the way of these Blacks and you.”

Andrew Anglin


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Ocober 24 - 31
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