Displaying posts published in

October 2021

Revolution without the Middle Class Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/eeyores-cabinet-revolution-without-the-middle-class/

The beleaguered middle class, especially those of the suburbs, for the most part did not join rioting radicalized youths and inner-city minorities in the violence, looting, and destruction, even as their businesses were often targeted, and jobs lost.

Some small stores that had somehow endured the two months of shutdowns, did not survive the flames and break-ins that devoured entire city blocks from Santa Monica to Minneapolis. It was also no accident that many of the nation’s wealthiest, from enclaves in Malibu, Silicon Valley, and Manhattan, played the Jacobin role among the French aristocracy, and so cheered on the violent protests, assured that they were exempt from the violent ramifications of their own ideology.

Certainly, while there was expressed outrage about reports of the use of riot gas in dispersing violent protestors in the nation’s capital, few even noticed that the Beverly Hills police department stopped all would-be Black Lives Matter protestors aimed at Beverly Hills, through the generous use of tear gas.

In reductionist terms, the violence was medieval. The underclass attacked the sustenance of the middle class, while the progressive upper class virtue signaled the protests from their secure keeps. Disenchanted and mostly white youth found a new relevance for their education as megaphones for violence, in a loud and visible fashion that working at Starbucks or Target had never offered. Their foot soldiers who looted on television were all too often the urban and minority underclass.

So, in bitter irony, an entrenched feudalism was apparent even in the new resistance society—as the more educated middle class condescendingly directed the noncredentialled poorer to new looting grounds.

Terry McAuliffe’s faith in the experts

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/terry-mcauliffe-faith-experts/

Parents shouldn’t control schools, he says, but what about when expertise is wrong?

Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former governor and Democratic power broker, is seeking to return to his old job in 2021. Polls show him narrowly ahead of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, by a one- to four-point margin.

That is by no means a safe distance for McAuliffe in a state that is widely understood to reflect national sentiment. Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, one year ahead of the congressional midterms, will be the first major contest held in the blazing light of Biden’s constitutional bonfire.

Many Americans believe that the government is absconding with their rights and liberties, and high on the list of stolen articles is their right to have some say in the education of their children. School boards in almost every state have been visited by throngs of citizens outraged over the imposition of curricula infused with the 1619 Project, critical race theory, the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda and other approaches that characterize the country as systemically racist. Many of those parents are also unhappy over their schools’ embrace of transgenderism and aggressive mask mandates.

Virginia has been no exception. Fairfax and Loudoun county school districts are frontline battlegrounds in the fight over curricula. Videos of parent rebellions and the heavy-handed responses of school boards have racked up millions of hits. Fairfax and Loudoun are adjacent in the metropolitan DC area. They are part of must-win Northern Virginia if McAuliffe is to prevail over Youngkin.

The false accusation of “Israel apartheid” South Africa’s uniquely evil regime has been maliciously twisted into a uniquely evil lie Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com

The campaign to demonise and delegitimise Israel has recently moved into a higher gear with the increased use of one particularly vicious falsehood.

This is the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.

The claim is as fatuous as it is pernicious. Apartheid was the name given to South Africa’s systematic oppression of its black inhabitants who were denied political, civic and human rights.

By contrast, Arab Israeli citizens have fully equal rights. They study in Israel’s universities; enjoy Israel’s beaches and parks; receive equal treatment as patients in Israel’s hospitals and work there as doctors and other medical staff; serve as members of the armed forces and as judges; and are represented by members of Knesset who are currently lynch-pins in Israel’s governing coalition.

Those Arabs who live in the disputed territories don’t have Israeli rights — for the very good reason that they aren’t Israeli citizens. They have no civic entitlements purely because the status of those territories remains unsettled as a result of Palestinian Arab rejectionism and violence — and because Arab states regard them as a nuisance preferably to be ignored.

The “Israel apartheid” smear, however ludicrous, isn’t new. It has its roots in the infamous 1975 “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution. Although that was revoked in 1991, it was resurrected at the scarcely-less infamous UN conference in Durban in 2001.

At that anti-Jewish hate-fest, the NGO forum referred to “Israel’s brand of apartheid and ethnic cleansing methods” to justify advocating “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel”. This spawned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and launched a propaganda campaign against “apartheid Israel,” resulting in grotesque campus “Israel apartheid” weeks.