Displaying posts published in

May 2019

EU Elections Usher In New Era But Tommy Robinson won’t be a part of it. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273873/eu-elections-usher-new-era-bruce-bawer

Not only was the turnout in last week’s European Parliament elections the highest in at least 20 years; the results themselves were nothing less than spectacular. In Italy, Matteo Salvini pronounced: “A new Europe is born.” Writing in De Volkskrant, Dutch journalist Marc Peeperkorn declared that the vote tallies marked the end of the “omnipotence” in Brussels of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, a significant step forward for Green parties, and a “modest” advance for “Euroskeptic populists.”

“Modest” strikes me as a classic example of calculated mass-media understatement. In fact, to judge by the results, the main reason that millions of Europeans flocked to the polls was to tell Brussels that they’re sick of being ruled by Brussels. Almost everywhere on the continent, results for Euroskeptic parties were, at the very least, encouraging, and at most downright stunning: in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally came in first; ditto Salvini’s Northern League in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria (whose leader, chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has just been ousted as a result of a scandal); in Germany, Alternative for Germany finished a strong fourth place; in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats almost tied for third with the Moderates; in the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet’s fledgling Forum for Democracy secured a promising fourth. (Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party came in eighth.)  

But the biggest news of all was in Britain, where the ruling Tories dropped to fifth place and Nigel Farage’s just-founded Brexit Party topped them all, securing 28 MEPs to the Liberal Democrats’ 15, Labour’s 10, the Greens’ 7, and the Conservatives’ 3. It was the first time in British history that so new a party had won such a sensational victory. Brexit will now have the largest delegation of any party in the European Parliament. It triumphed even in cities that had voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, suggesting that former Remainers, perhaps in reaction to Brussels’ arrogant response to Brexit, have changed their mind about the EU – and/or that Remainers, despite their views on EU membership, resent their Tory-led Parliament’s failure to carry out the electorate’s clearly stated will.

My Say :What an Honest Commencement Speech Would Sound Like By Ruth S. King

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/what_an_honest_commencement_speech_would_sound_like.html

…..”Good morning and congratulations!  I sincerely believe that most of you came to college with a desire to learn and be prepared for your future. But many of your teachers have skills and ideas that are proscribed by coercive politically correct bureaucrats.

However, you are all victims of a colossal scam for which your parents have anted up colossal sums of money.

You have been ensconced in an academic gulag where you have been programmed and robbed of the intellectual dexterity it takes to listen to, consider and debate opinions that are contrary to those into which you are being indoctrinated.

You abjure capitalism without understanding that everything you own, buy, wear, ride and text on — and that includes your Che Guevara t-shirts — are available to you because capitalism provides the funds for research, development and production.

Even the organic vegetables you consume so virtuously, not to mention those windmills and solar panels, depend on capital investment.

 You mock religious Creationists, but many of you are worshippers in the cult of global warming without even being aware of the vast scientific research that debunks it.

Many of you call yourselves “woke” and “alert to injustice in society, especially racism” but sanction the racist hypocrisy of organizations that promote libel, boycott and divestment from a freewheeling democracy like Israel, while giving Ilhan Omar and Tlaib a ” freedom of speech” pass.

You raise your fists in solidarity with “Black Lives Matter” but have no interest in the genocides and famines that are perpetrated on hapless millions of black people in Africa.

There is no calamity, no atrocity, no failure of a system, no tyranny that you have not been taught to trace to a “root cause” in American greed or complicity. Patriotism and nationalism are evil, but you give socialism a wide berth ignoring its documented failures.

Almost everything you learn to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree is indexed to gender and race. Oh, and by the way, “Bachelor” is a male noun. Will that word also be scrubbed from your diplomas?

You wish to make simple pronouns “gender fluid” while ignoring the barbarism inflicted on millions of women by Shariah laws. Will it really ameliorate their suffering if you call them “hirs?”

You have lost the fun of flirting without p.c. opprobrium and ridiculous accusations that trivialize real abuse. And, you reduce all expressions of gratitude, admiration or even condolence to illiterate texts.

 You are coddled and babied in the most cynical and self-indulgent way with “safe spaces” to avoid any words, images, or persons that “trigger” your vapors.

In conclusion, my advice to you is simple.  The word commencement means a start. Go forth and free your mind from the cant to which it has been hostage for four years. And grow up!

The Death of Merit and the Race to Mediocrity in Our Increasingly Marxist Universities By Philip Carl Salzman

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-death-of-merit-and-the-race-to-mediocrity-in-our-increasingly-marxist-universities/

“Our school teachers and university professors have been doing their best to discredit and destroy liberal individualism, freedom, merit, the search for objective truth, Western civilization, American and Canadian culture, and capitalism, all contrary to the views of the American and Canadian public. This is an ambitious agenda, but through the magic of “social justice,” they have made great progress in shaping the minds of pupils and students, and our future doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, and legislators, if at the expense of objectivity, science, and truth. In a competitive and dangerous world, they lead us to ever increasing mediocrity and vulnerability.”

The television series “The Enemy Within” begins by informing the viewer that there are 100,000 foreign spies in the United States working to undermine and destabilize America. China has sent hundreds of thousands of students to America to gain maximum access to the West’s advanced knowledge and technology, some through education alone, some through espionage.

While the foreign threat is real and serious, it pales beside the internal threat represented by the North American education complex. There are 756,900 teachers and professors in Canada, and 5.2 million in the U.S. Almost all of these professors and teachers are daily resolutely and relentlessly attacking Western culture, rejecting American culture, and advocating cultural Marxism.

America Has Become a Place Where Spoiled Children Paying $60,000 Tuition Consider Themselves ‘Victims’ By John Stossel

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/america-has-become-a-place-where-spoiled-children-paying-60000-tuition-consider-themselves-victims/

“I don’t feel safe,” says a Harvard student in a video.

What threatens her? The dean of her Harvard dormitory, law professor Ronald Sullivan, agreed to be part of accused sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team.

Sullivan and his wife were deans of the dormitory for years, but no matter. Now the professor is apparently an evil threat.

A group calling itself “Our Harvard Can Do Better” demanded Sullivan be removed from his dean job.

Sullivan is black, but black activists joined the protest, too. On the videotape, one says, “Dean Sullivan told me to my face that I should view his representation of Harvey Weinstein as a good thing because that representation will trickle down to black men like me who constantly face an unjust justice system.”

Seems reasonable to me. But the privileged Harvard students laugh and clap when the protester goes on to say, “F— that!”

Colleges don’t show much courage when pushed by student activists. Harvard administrators removed Sullivan and his wife from the residence hall.

Understanding the Results of the European Parliamentary Elections By John O’Sullivan

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/understanding-the-results-of-the-european-parliamentary-elections/

The legacy parties continued to decline and the populist right advanced only so far. Now, the pro-EU left, which gained ground, may grow more assertive.

Sunday’s results in the European Parliament elections are like a clever modernist painting, apparently formal, abstract, and meaningless, which as you move back from it, looks increasingly like a busy city street with cars, taxis, buses, and people going quite clearly in their different directions. You can even guess where some of the drivers will end up. Similarly, if you step back and glance at the election returns with, as yet, not a great deal of exit-polling data on which to base deeper judgments, you will probably reach these preliminary conclusions:

1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.