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September 2017

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Missing Monuments Remembrance and an encounter with the Nazi past Howard Husock

By on September 22nd, 2017

As Jews observe the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we enter a period not of celebration—notwithstanding the former being known as the “Jewish New Year”—but of profound reflection. Best known as a period of prayer and repentance, it is also, and explicitly, a period of remembrance: Yom Kippur is one of only four times each year when Jews recite the Yizkor prayer, primarily for deceased parents. It concludes, more broadly, with “Av Harachamim,” the eleventh-century prayer first written after crusaders destroyed German-Jewish communities.

We will recite it this year at a time when remembrance has become complicated—especially as it involves public memorials. It is in that context that a personal story of remembrance comes to mind, for suggesting what may currently seem counterintuitive: that there is much that we miss when a historic site has no monument.

My own encounter with such a site came on a trip to Germany that my wife and I took three years ago. It was a trip inspired by a long-ago conversation with my wife’s elderly cousin Roselle Weitzenkorn, who fled Northern Saxony in 1937. When we spoke with her in the mid-1970s in her Philadelphia apartment, she was still thoroughly German in many ways—and not just in her Kissingerian accent. She was a fan of the Bismarckian social-welfare state and looked down on what she viewed as the benighted United States. Her family, composed of small shopkeepers and cattle traders not far from Hamlin, was well assimilated to German life. Indeed, a member of her own family was named on the village Great War monument for his service to the Kaiser. But once the Nazis took power, Jewish children, such as Roselle’s niece Ilsa, were separated from Christians on the school playground. Soon after, the Hitler youth massed outside Ilsa’s father’s business one evening, threatening him for having traded with Gentiles. If that was not enough to convince them to flee Germany, there was, as Roselle put it, the night “I saw Hitler speak.”

She’d provided a clue as to where she heard him by noting that she’d lived in “Emmerthal on der Weser”—the river in northern Germany. We began to look into events in that rural, agricultural part of the country with the help of German friends whom we had met in graduate school. They arranged for us to meet a Hamlin-based author and guide, Bernhardt Gelderblom, the son of a Nazi soldier who has taken it as his mission to restore desecrated Jewish cemeteries, such as those in which my wife’s family members were buried.

Gelderblom told us that, yes, just outside the municipal limits of Emmerthal—within a short walking distance—was Bückeberg Mountain. This was not just somewhere Hitler spoke; it was a place of chilling Nazi spectacle. There, in the autumns from 1934 to 1937, it was the site of Das Reichserntedankfest, the so-called Nazi harvest festival. In October, 1937, more than 1 million Germans gathered on the mountainside overlooking the river to witness military maneuvers and much more. They massed there in the countryside for a show culminating with Hitler himself striding up the Führerweg (Führer’s way) to a harvest monument. Women were said to have begged for Hitler to touch their children and to serve as their godfather. At a festival altar, he addressed the throng. “The starting point for National Socialism’s views, positions, and decisions lies neither in the individual nor in humanity,” Hitler said. “It consciously places the Volk at the center of its entire way of thinking. For it, this Volk is a phenomenon conditioned by blood in which it perceives the God-given building block of human society.”

Yet when we visited, there was not only no monument to Hitler—of course—but also no historic marker of any kind. No plaque, no explanation—nothing to indicate what had once happened there. Without our guide, we would never have noticed that there remained but one telling remnant: a still-visible path, the Führerweg, where a parade of troops and notables—and Hitler himself—had marched. Otherwise, this was a rural hillside with nothing to distinguish it.

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Gotham Crime Story The long history of policing in New York City has many surprises and lessons for today. Clark Whelton

By on September 22nd, 2017

Bruce Chadwick begins his fascinating, data-packed history of “law and disorder” in mid-nineteenth century New York City with a gripping account of the anti-abolitionist riot of 1834. A mix-up over the use of a chapel on Chatham Street for a gathering of black leaders and abolitionists led to an all-out attack by several hundred anti-abolitionists. Slavery was legal in New York State until 1827, and thousands of city residents had been sorry to see it go. The abolitionists, however, gave no ground.

For four days, rioters swept back and forth across the city, which at that time stretched from the Battery to 14th Street. Seven churches and a school for black children were burned. The Bowery Theater was heavily damaged. Businesses and houses went up in flames, and the homes of prominent abolitionist leaders were sacked and looted.

In the midst of the furious mob, vainly attempting to bring the rampage under control, was the city’s feeble company of constables. Untrained, unarmed, and unpaid, these political appointees in plainclothes worked for rewards and bonuses, and for the bribes they received from the city’s underworld; some constables even served as procurers in the city’s flesh trade. These amateur officers were good at making money and many lived in style, but they were not good at enforcing the law. Mayor Cornelius Lawrence summoned the state militia, which arrived on horseback. The militiamen warned the mob to disperse, then opened fire: several people were killed and dozens wounded, ending the riot.

For the City of New York, however, an unprecedented wave of crime and chaos had just begun. In 1835, a close mayoral election sent political gangs storming down Broadway. In 1837, a mob protesting reports of profiteering threw 500 barrels of flour into the street. Almost any rabble-rousing tale of injustice could bring hordes of irate “rogues and rascals” streaming through Manhattan. Rumors that an English actor had insulted America filled the streets with incensed New Yorkers, for whom rioting had become a patriotic duty.

In the 1820s, New York’s newspapers turned up their noses at graphic stories of crime, sin, and degradation. All that changed with the arrival of Scottish immigrant James Gordon Bennett and his penny newspaper, the New York Herald. Bennett seized on the gruesome ax murder of a prostitute to introduce a new form of crusading journalism. Instead of brief news items, Bennett published lengthy interviews with hookers and madams, scandalizing respectable New Yorkers—and tripling the Herald’s circulation. Following Bennet’s lead, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and nine other dailies joined the battle for newsstand dominance. Not unlike their modern tabloid descendants, they all claimed to be shocked by the lurid crime stories of rape and robbery that were making them rich, and they all called for a larger, better-trained police force.

But the need for cops outpaced the supply. About 70 percent of immigrants to America landed in New York. Some 30,000 a year were arriving from Ireland alone, causing a dramatic shift in religious and cultural demographics that soon raised Catholic-Protestant tensions to a boiling point. Churches were burned, and the home of Bishop John Hughes was partly destroyed by an anti-Catholic mob. Ethnic and religious firebrands egged the rioters on.

The new immigrants crowded into squalid and dangerous wards like Five Points, a notorious intersection of five streets where Columbus Park stands in Chinatown today. So infamous was this warren of alleys and passageways that, in 1842, a darkly curious Charles Dickens insisted on seeing the wicked slum for himself.

More police, better training, better weapons (such as Samuel Colt’s new revolver), and putting the cops into uniform had little effect on the crime rate. Rioters continued to rule the streets and murders went unsolved. Hotheads and agitators still found it easy to manipulate volatile crowds, and the state militia still replied in kind. When a longstanding feud between two actors brought 10,000 demonstrators to the area around the old Astor Opera House at Lafayette and East 8th Streets, the police lost control. The militia was called. Warning shots were fired. Rocks and bottles flew. A volley was then aimed directly into the crowd. At least 25 people were killed, and a hundred injured. When the anti-draft riots swept the city 14 years later, President Lincoln had to order federal troops to quell the violence.

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Statue of Limitations by Mark Steyn

By on September 22nd, 2017

A week ago, I suggested that, sixteen years into “the war on terror”, we were making the same mistake as the British at Singapore and pointing our guns in the wrong direction. The only difference is that we’ve been doing it for a decade and a half and don’t seem to notice that, while we’ve been firing straight ahead, our buttocks have been entirely blown off. So we continue to run around the Hindu Kush in order that, in the President’s words, terrorists will “never again have a safe haven” in Kandahar or Jalalabad, while simultaneously allowing them ever safer havens in Manchester and Brussels and Paris and Stockholm, Ottawa, Orlando, Sydney…

I’ve tried to ease up on the “As I wrote some years ago…” shtick, not only because it irritates some readers but because it sows the fatal seed in my own self-doubting breast that I’ve said it all before and it made no difference. But there is a section in America Alone about the need for countries at war to use all elements of national power. And my concluding chapter begins by saying:

This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will.

Or for more “cultural confidence”, as I call it in the ensuing paragraphs. That was eleven years ago. But the void on the culture front was obvious even earlier. My 2002 book The Face of the Tiger (yes, yes: “as I wrote even more years ago”) includes the following:

President Bush has won the first battle (Afghanistan) but he’s in danger of losing the war.

Well, we are losing. I think that’s undeniable. But why is that? Well, we have the best trained and most technologically advanced military – and nothing else:

Against that are all the people who shape our culture, who teach our children, who run our colleges and churches, who make the TV shows we watch — and they haven’t got a clue. Bruce Springsteen’s inert, equivalist wallow of a 9/11 album, The Rising, is a classic example of how even a supposed ‘bluecollar’ icon can’t bring himself to want America to win. Oprah’s post-9/11 message is that it’s all about who you love and how you love’. On my car radio, John McCain pops up on behalf of the Office of Civil Rights every ten minutes sternly reminding me not to beat up Muslims…

The Islamists are militarily weak but culturally secure. A year on, the West is just the opposite. There’s more than one way to lose a war.

I wrote that in August 2002. Obviously, the idea of a “war” subcontracted to an elite professional soldiery while consciously forswearing all other levers of national power (including immigration policy) would have struck any strategist from 50, 100, 200, 400 years ago as entirely absurd. Yet it has persisted for a decade and a half, to the point where the remnants of the hot war – the behind-the-scenes special-forces action in the Islamic State; the periodic shootouts between Nato forces and our Afghan “allies” – actively obstruct clearheaded thinking on the far more vital cold war.

William Kilpatrick expands that point in a sharp essay on the big picture. He begins with a blunt statement of where we’re headed:

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam, and America also seems destined to eventually submit. If you have young children or grandchildren, it’s likely that they will have to adapt at some point to living in a Muslim-dominated society. It won’t necessarily be a Muslim-majority society because, as history testifies, Muslims don’t need a majority in order to successfully take control of non-Muslim societies.

If and when Islam persuades America to submit, it most probably won’t be through force of arms. The civilizational struggle in which we are now engaged is primarily a culture war. America used to be good at cultural warfare because America once had cultural confidence. The Cold War was in large part a cultural war, and America won it because it didn’t have qualms about demonstrating the superiority of the American way to the Soviet way.

But times change. These days, may Americans would rather shred their culture than spread it. Cultural shame rather than cultural pride rules the day. And, not surprisingly, people who are ashamed of their culture can’t be counted on to defend it.

That’s true. The Dallas School Board has smoothly progressed from chiseling the names of Confederate generals off its schools to “studying” whether also to remove the names of Jefferson, Madison and Franklin. Without whom there would be no such thing as America. Indeed, without whom there would, in a certain sense, be no you. The erasure of your total civilizational inheritance turns everyone into “Dreamers” – blank slates who find themselves in America through mere quirk of fate, and for whom the great Republic is no more than a geographical location. Or if you prefer, Un-Anchored Babies: You can be born here, but, if the entirety of your culture has been wiped clean, what’s the diff? Once Jefferson and Madison and all the rest are gone, a kid whose great-great-great-whatever got off the Mayflower is no different from the child of Mexican drug smugglers: we are all children of Year Zero.

This psychosis isn’t confined to America: In London Lord Nelson is feeling the heat, and in Canada Sir John A Macdonald. The Guardian wants to topple a statue of H G Wells. Wells’ political views are not mine – but, in the fullness of his life, he got some things wrong and some things spectacularly right. That’s not good enough for the thought police: 19th century men, and 18th century men, and 16th and 13th and back through the millennia, have to get everything right by 2017 standards – or their statues must be guillotined:

Robert E Lee must be toppled because he was racist. Thomas Jefferson must come down because he owned slaves. Christopher Columbus has to go because he had no transgender-bathroom policy on the Niña, Pinta and Santa María. The mobs in the street have no idea who these guys are – except that they are not like them, and so cannot be permitted to stand.

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Anthony Dillon Black Lives Matter? Only Sometimes

By on September 22nd, 2017

If you take the word of blacktivists bent on blaming any and all ills on white oppression and the ever-handy ‘institutional racism’, no member of an Indigenous community has a chance to getting ahead. That stock standard response pointedly ignores the home-bred ills the BLM mob refuse to see.

We’ve all heard of the US movement ‘Black Lives Matter.’ But do all black lives really matter to the BLM crowd? I don’t think so, and I will explain why shortly. Preventable deaths of Aboriginal people involving non-Aboriginal people through homicide or neglect is an emotionally charged topic which has to be discussed. In writing this article, there are several high profile cases I could mention, but won’t, as that would only attract slanderous attacks. And those opponents are members of the victim brigade and the Australian incarnation of the BLM mob.

The Australian chapter of the BLM movement is very similar to the American chapter: it seems the only time black lives matter is when the white man can be implicated in their death or injury. Is that not a racist attitude? Aboriginal deaths in custody is the classic example. When an Aboriginal person dies in jail, protesters go into a frenzy. Of course it’s convenient for them to forget that Aboriginal people in custody are less likely to die than non-Aboriginal people in custody. More generally when an Aboriginal person dies and a non-Aboriginal person can be implicated, either through negligence or mishandling, there are shouts of racism. For some deaths, I don’t doubt that there may be an element of racism, but to automatically assume that racism is the motivation is, once again, a racist attitude. The other similarity between us and America is that there is little interest when blacks die at the hands of other blacks. The BLM movement in Australia is just another opportunity for the victim brigade to shout racism — and a perfect distraction for avoiding problems like violence, child abuse, homelessness, and suicide in Aboriginal communities.

Motives of the BLM Movement

If the Australian BLM movement members were sincere in their claims to care for Aboriginal people, they would be concerned for all Aboriginal people who die from homicide or neglect, not just those where white men is involved. Most of those jumping on the BLM bandwagon are currently more concerned about statues of Captain Cook or Australia Day than about the lives of Aboriginal people.

Deaths of Aboriginal people where the white man can be implicated provide the opportunity for BLMers to address their unquenchable thirst to see racism everywhere. This then gives the opportunity to play moral crusader and oppose all of the alleged “racism”. They don’t seem to understand that there can be other causes for harm or death besides racism. They don’t realise that service providers make mistakes or can be less diligent in their duties than they should, for reasons other than racism – non-Aboriginal people also die preventable deaths. In the past week, since writing this article, there have been news stories of two boys on separate occasions who died after medical authorities failed to see the seriousness of each boy’s illness. It is very unlikely that racism played a part, but had each of the boys have been Aboriginal, I’m sure the protesters would be out in full force.

What is the Appropriate Level of Care for Aboriginal People?

Whenever there is the death of an Aboriginal person it sends the BLM crowd into outrage mode, with calls for better care and treatment for Aboriginal people. Aboriginal Australians accessing a health service or being detained in police custody are entitled to receive the same level of care as other Australians, and most times they do. But while the victim brigade and BLM members might take pleasure in cherry-picking cases to support their agenda and contention that racism is rampant, perhaps they should consider their own back yards first? Consider that the rate of both victimisation and offending by Indigenous people has been reported as being approximately five times higher than that of non-Indigenous people. Or if any other evidence is needed to show that Aboriginal people are far too often the victims of other Aboriginal people, then consider the images highlighted in a video from Western Australia in August 2017. Why does this not manifest the same level of outrage generated when an Aboriginal person dies in a White institution? Could the claims of racism be a convenient distraction from the appalling acts of black-on-black violence?

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Mark Steyn: ‘I’m a Non-DREAMer, I Did The Boring Thing and Filled Out Paperwork’ Video

By on September 22nd, 2017

Commentator and legal immigrant Mark Steyn said he “did the boring thing” by following American immigration law, and therefore gets none of the sympathy that DACA recipients receive.

“I’m a non-DREAMer. Nobody sentimentalizes me,” he said of Democrats who use tales of illegal immigrants’ hardship to defend the rights of the undocumented.

Steyn said many of the DACA supporters talk about “brave journeys” through the desert.

“Nobody ever says that about me and my kids,” the Canadian immigrant to New Hampshire said. “We did the boring thing and filled out the paperwork.”
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On the topic of the supporters of illegal immigration speaking broadly about their fear or disdain for Trump, Steyn said it reminded him of Democrats during the Bush years.

He said that many on the left had bumper stickers during the Iraq War that said “Bush scares me.”

“Nobody in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was driving around saying ‘Saddam scares me’,” he said.

“John Kasich would scare them,” Steyn said, referring to the Ohio governor’s centrist stance on many issues compared to President Trump.

Watch more above.

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Top Swiss Islamic Officials Indicted for Making al-Qaeda Propaganda Videos By Patrick Poole

By on September 22nd, 2017

Three senior leaders of one of Switzerland’s most visible Islamic organizations were indicted Thursday after a nearly two-year investigation into videos that one of the leaders made in Syria, including interviews with senior al-Qaeda leaders.

The charges were announced by the Office of the Attorney General, which will be heard by the Federal Criminal Court.

The Local reported:

Swiss federal prosecutors have brought charges against leading members of the country’s largest Islamic organization in a criminal probe into jihadist propaganda.

Swiss media reported on Thursday that the president and two members of the governing board of the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (ICCS) had been charged with violating the ban on groups including Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS).

Blick named the three as Nicolas Blancho, ICCS president, Naim Cherni, and Qaasim Illi.

With respect to the charges, prosecutors believe the videos made inside Syria were more than just documentaries.

According to Swissinfo:

The specific allegation against the head of the “culture production department” at the ICCS is that between the end of September 2015 and mid-October 2015 he made films in Syria with a leading member of the banned terrorist organisation al-Qaeda in Syria, the OAG said in a statement on Thursday.

The films were subsequently used as propaganda for the al-Qaeda member concerned. Two videos were published on YouTube, both of which were endorsed by the head of the “public relations and information department” at the ICCS and actively promoted via social media and at a public event by all three accused: by the committee members mentioned and by the ICCS president.

The OAG alleges that the accused offered the leading al-Qaeda member in question “a prominent multilingual multimedia platform from which to advantageously portray and promote both himself and the ideology of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation he represents”.

The OAG claims to have proof that this increased the appeal of al-Qaeda to existing and potential members around the world, thus promoting the organisation’s criminal activities.

The investigation was opened by Swiss authorities in December 2015 when Naim Cherni published a lengthy interview with Jabhat al-Nusra leader Abdullah al-Muhaysini.

At the time, prosecutors alleged:

The German citizen is accused of having presented his journey to embattled regions of Syria in a video for propaganda purposes, without having explicitly distanced himself from Al-Qaïda activities in Syria. In particular, the accused party is accused of having interviewed a senior member of the jihad umbrella organisation Jaysh al-Fath (“Army of Conquest”), of which the Syrian Al-Qaïda branch Jabhat al-Nusra (“Support Front”) is also a member.

Prosecutors asked YouTube to remove the videos, though a copy of the interview with al-Muhaysini (with English closed-captions) is still available on their site:

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To Secure the Blessings of Liberty, Rein in the ‘Permanent State’ By Sebastian Gorka

By on September 22nd, 2017

It really is a high honor for me to address this august audience. My wife and I have been huge fans of Hillsdale for many, many years, and it’s always a race when Imprimus hits the door mat; who’s going to read it first. But I have a caveat to begin with. For the next 30 minutes, please don’t expect a discourse on de Tocqueville and Epistemology of the New Age. My first degree was philosophy and theology many moons ago, but I cannot match the erudition of the panels that we heard this morning. I’m going to bring it all down to earth and share with you my experiences inside the belly of the beast as a deputy assistant and strategist to the president, how we should move forward, and what we can expect in the years to come.

But first things first, I must make a plea to all those people who came up to me last night, and have done so since I left three weeks ago. Relax. Take a deep breath and count to 10. The fat lady isn’t singing, OK? I know that’s not politically correct, but who cares? We are in this for the long game. I’m going to be using Washington jargon, but this is about the long game. It’s not about the first eight months. It’s about eight years, and then another eight years, under President Pence. That’s the plan.

Lots of people got suicidal when my boss, Steve Bannon resigned. And then they really got suicidal when I left the building. But it’s OK. Bringing us back to the principles of the founding is not a function of where Steve sits, or whether I have a window in my office in the Eisenhower building. It’s a function of the ideas that brought a man (as we were reminded last night) brought a man who has never held public office before, or been a general flag officer, into the position of being the most powerful man in the world. There’s a reason for that, and it is much bigger than the few people who work in that wonderful peoples’ house just across the city. So, hold the line.

Common Sense, Truth, Sovereignty
The only philosophical things I’ll say is, words matter. Words matter. And the words for my address today are simple ones. The first one is a phrase. “Common sense.” The second one, which is allied to common sense, is the word “truth.” And the last one, which is the most important philosophical undergirding of everything that brought Donald Trump into the White House, and it formed his politics, is the word “sovereignty.” This is missed by the people inside the beltway. These aren’t random speeches. The war, defeating ISIS, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, these are informed by the same philosophical idea: the importance of sovereignty and the nation-state. So that’s all the philosophizing I will do.

So, let me talk to you about my experience for the last few months inside the White House. I’ll talk about three things: Who is the president? I’ll talk about what happened inside the building, and I’ll address this question that has become so popular today, of the ‘deep state’ and how it affects foreign policy going forward.

Who is the president? The president, behind closed doors, is exactly the same as he is in public. He’s not your average politician; when he sees a camera, flicks a little switch in the back of his head, and then switches on that “Washington grimace.” He is who he is. When I first met him in the summer 2015, I was asked to come brief him in New York on matters to do with national security. The man, in private, was exactly the man I’d come to know on the television screens. And that is, in itself, refreshing. There is no Janus-faced, bi-polarity with this individual.

Secondly, he is a preternatural, instinctual actor. It is not an exaggeration. Monica Crowley described him most accurately. The weekend of the election, we were with David Horowitz and his colleagues at his Restoration Weekend (which was either going to be a wake or a celebration.) But, the right candidate won. And two days after the election, Monica stated, “The people who misunderstand Donald J. Trump look at him through an ideological lens. And that is completely the wrong way to look at him. Because, Donald J. Trump wasn’t an ideological candidate; he was an attitudinal candidate.” And that is very, very much so. You cannot slap easy, lazy labels onto this man. Yes, the chattering classes would have you do so. The mainstream media would have you do so. But remember, this is a Republican candidate who strode along the campaign platform waving a “gay pride” flag. That’s not exactly a classic Republican candidate. He breaks the conventional taxonomy, and that’s important to remember.

What he is, is a man who cares about making this nation great again. That slogan is not pablum; it’s not empty rhetoric. He truly wishes to translate what he has done in the private sector, in terms of making a great brand, and translating that back to America’s position in the world and its founding principles.

A Hostile Takeover
What happened in the last seven months, until I left the White House? Well, what happened on January the 20th needs to be understood. Who likes the movie “Red Dawn,” the original one? Great movie, OK? Those of you who have not seen it, watch it. Not the remake; the original.

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Fla. Teacher Tells 11-Year-Olds to Call ‘Them’ the Gender-Neutral Pronoun ‘Mx’ By Megan Fox

By on September 22nd, 2017

In the “Are you kidding me?” file, a 5th grade math and science (ha!) teacher is coming out as a biology denier and has sent a letter home to his or her (we’re still not sure) class asking to be called by the pronoun “Mx.” pronounced “mix.” Parents in Tallahassee, Florida, were understandably alarmed when they received this letter from their children’s’ teacher:

One thing that you should know about me is that I use gender neutral terms. My prefix is Mx. (pronounced Mix). Additionally, my pronouns are “they, them, their” instead of “him, her, his.”

Frankly, if I got a letter like this I would be down at that school asking them to remove the mentally ill person they hired who has power over my child. What kind of fresh hell is this? The school is standing behind this mixed-up person, of course, and spitting in the faces of parents who feel that this type of political grandstanding is a distraction to learning. How are the parents supposed to be assured that their child will not be punished for failing to deny reality should they slip up and use the proper pronouns? And will there be any recourse for the English language, which they are being taught to abuse in such a heinous way? Have we no respect left for basic grammar?

Third person, singular pronouns are not interchangeable with third person, plural pronouns. They are not now and will not ever be unless the LGBTQWTF crowd is going to dismantle the rules of grammar and rewrite them and then force us all to learn them again. This task would be so difficult I doubt they could pull themselves away from the latest vagina march to actually try it. No one should refer to a singular person as “they or them” and should be slapped by a stern nun for even thinking about it.

The sex-confused have ruined public education, locker rooms, public bathrooms, Target, and sanity, but by God, they will not ruin English. That’s a bridge too far. Those of us immersed in its structure and thousands of tiny rules and exceptions, who live daily by the written fundamentals of the hardest language on earth, who have sweated and slaved over dangling participles and subjunctive moods will refuse, with rigid defiance, to take part in this destruction of our language. You don’t want to tangle with the grammar Nazis! We will not be moved.

Anyone who is sending a child to a school that does not repudiate this grammatical horror show should realize immediately that it is not a place of learning but one of political indoctrination and idiocy. A school that supports this heinous pronoun person-swapping is no school at all but a place where someone goes to become irreversibly incoherent and unable to function in reality.

Is anyone keeping an active list of all the reasons why homeschooling is the only way to go? The wanton destruction of our mother tongue should clearly be moved to the top.

UPDATE: The principal, Paul Lambert, supported his teacher by misgendering her to the press: “We support her preference in how she’s addressed, we certainly do,” Lambert said. “I think a lot of times it might be decided that there is an agenda there, because of her preference — I can tell you her only agenda is teaching math and science at the greatest level she can.”

It just doesn’t get funnier than this.

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Oops! Climate Cultist Destroys Own Position By Daren Jonescu

By on September 22nd, 2017

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been doing the leftist media interview circuit recently, pressing his peculiar thesis that professional (i.e., paid) scientists are a superior class of humans whose conclusions are intrinsically beyond reproach and must therefore be accepted blindly by unscientific lunks like you.

In each of these interviews, a non-climate scientist asks a series of predetermined questions designed to elicit rehearsed responses from the non-climate scientist Tyson, the upshot of which is that (a) people who question man-made global warming are anti-scientific fools driven by irrational agendas; (b) scientific consensus is not the product of the social and political pressures of academic life working on the minds of the career-motivated, publication-obsessed majority of scholarly mediocrities, but rather consensus is the very definition of Objective Truth; and (c) anyone who questions a scientific consensus poses a threat to the survival of democracy.

For an example of (a), here is Tyson’s explanation of why some people continue to question the alleged scientific consensus on global warming:

What’s happening here is that there are people who have cultural, political, religious, economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another.

In other words, non-scientists who have the audacity to cite scientific results falling outside the consensus as grounds for questioning global warming are just people with agendas who are refusing to accept the settled science, for anti-scientific reasons. This doesn’t account for the actual scientists who produced those dissenting results or hypotheses. Are they also to be dismissed as mere “deniers,” since their views do not match the consensus?

Tyson’s answer appears to be yes, as he offers this interesting definition of “objective truth,” answering to talking point (b), above:

For an emergent scientific truth to become an objective truth – a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it – it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That’s what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence. If you want to find the three percent of the papers or the one percent of the papers that conflicted with this, and build policy on that – that is simply irresponsible.

So according to Tyson, science is ultimately defined not by superior individual minds defying accepted views – i.e., standing against a consensus. No, science is rather defined by consensus itself, for consensus alone establishes objective truth, which “is true whether or not you believe in it.” (Funny – I always thought Nature or God established objective truth, but apparently, in our nihilistic progressive age, that task has devolved to the collective of university professors.)

And what is a scholarly consensus? It is “a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences.” Tyson conveniently leaves out the most important factor: “all beginning from the same underlying premises.”

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Inside the Madness at Evergreen State The school denies it is a racially hostile work environment, but internal emails belie that assertion. By Jillian Kay Melchior

By on September 22nd, 2017

Biology professor Bret Weinstein has settled his lawsuit against Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Mr. Weinstein became a pariah last spring when he criticized an officially sanctioned “Day of Absence” during which white people were asked to stay away from campus. He and his wife, anthropology professor Heather Heying, alleged that Evergreen “has permitted, cultivated, and perpetuated a racially hostile and retaliatory work environment.” They claimed administrators failed to protect them from “repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.”

Last week the university announced it would pay $500,000 to settle the couple’s complaint. Evergreen said in a statement that the college “strongly rejects” the lawsuit’s allegations, denies the Day of Absence was discriminatory, and asserts: “The college took reasonable and appropriate steps to engage with protesters, de-escalate conflict, and keep the campus safe.”

A different story emerges from hundreds of pages of Evergreen correspondence, which I obtained through Washington state’s Public Records Act. The emails show that some students and faculty were quick to levy accusations of racism with neither evidence nor consideration of the reputational harm they could cause. The emails also reveal Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying were not the only ones concerned about a hostile and dangerous campus.

Consider a February exchange, in which Mr. Weinstein—a progressive who is skeptical of identity politics—faulted what he called Evergreen administrators’ “reckless, top-down reorganization around new structures and principles.”

Within minutes, a student named Mike Penhallegon fired back an email denouncing Mr. Weinstein and his “racist colleagues.”

Another student, Steve Coffman, responded by asking for proof of racism within the science faculty. Mr. Coffman cited Christopher Hitchens’s variation of Occam’s razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

Jacqueline McClenny, an office assistant for the First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services—a campus office that helped organize the Day of Absence—observed that because Hitchens’s razor is an “Englishman’s popularization of a Latin proverb,” it “would seem to itself be the product of at least two traditionally hierarchical, imperialist societies with an interest in disposing of inconvenient questions.”

Media professor Naima Lowe urged one of Mr. Weinstein’s defenders to read about how calls for civility are “often used to silence and/or dismiss concerns about racism.” She also said that the “white people making changes in their white supremacist attitudes and behaviors” were those “who do not immediately balk and become defensive,” instead acknowledging that “white supremacy is literally ingrained in everything.” In other words, merely defending oneself against the accusation of “white supremacy” is evidence of guilt. CONTINUE AT SITE

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