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October 2021

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Victor Davis Hanson: Why I Left National Review

By on October 6th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/05/victor_davis_hanson_why_i_left_national_review.html

Victor Davis Hanson, author of “The Dying Citizen,” speaks with FNC’s Tucker Carlson about why he no longer writes for the National Review.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I didn’t know much about Donald Trump, I wasn’t a supporter of his in the primaries, but I knew he was going to win. I just knew it, because he was saying things I could not believe. And, you know, we’re going to redo Youngstown, Ohio.

And then he came to California, I talked to a bunch of farmers and asked if he had come here, and did he have the straw in the mouth and the Caterpillar cap.

No, he had this black suit, it was 105 degrees, he had a Queens accent. So I said, in other words, he wasn’t Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, “put you all in chains.” He didn’t change his act. I said he is authentic and he’s representing the middle class, so I thought he had a very good chance.

As far as your other question, yeah, I lost all those friends.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I left the National Review this year after 20 years and I think they were happy to see me leave too.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did you leave National Review?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Because there were certain issues that would pop up occasionally, and I could predict what the answer was going to be. The Covington kids. I just sensed that before we knew anything, people would come and condemn them. Or the Access Hollywood tape–

TUCKER CARLSON: People at National Review condemned the Covington kids?

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Is this the beginning of the end of the Biden administration? Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools Roger Kimball

By on October 6th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/beginning-democrats-biden-defeat-merrick-garland-critical-race-theory/

When future historians congregate to conduct their postmortem of the short-lived Biden administration, what date will they pick to mark the crisis that signaled the beginning of the end? I’d like to offer October 4, 2021 for consideration.

In the weeks before, it is true, Biden’s approval rating had been in free fall. (Fun pastime if you’re bored: enter ‘Biden’ and ‘free fall’ into your favorite search engine). There was the world historical disaster of our evacuation of Afghanistan, the nearest parallel to which was not America’s ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 but William Elphinstone’s disastrous evacuation from Kabul in 1842. There was the unfolding crisis at our southern border. The President insisted that the border was ‘closed’ (in the same way that he said that the cost of his doomed, $3.5 trillion spending plan was ‘zero’), but his own officials are prepping for a surge of 400,000 illegals in the month of October. Inflation is at a 30-year high, with no end in sight. Gas, food, housing, clothes: the prices of all are skyrocketing. The President came to office promising to ‘shut down’ COVID, not the country, but since he took office some 250,000 people have died and ineffectual mask mandates, vaccine mandates, St-Anthony-Fauci-certified mandate mandates have proliferated like pussy hats at an anti-Trump rally.

Several weeks ago, writing about the incineration of 10 innocent Afghans (including seven children) in an errant drone strike that the lying US military first said had killed an Isis-K operative, I pondered the proverbial expression ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. Some trace that expression back to Thomas Hobbes, but I suspect the germ of the idea is much older. The basic idea, of course, is that an accumulation of evils is bearable up to a certain point, beyond which even a tiny addition, apparently insignificant, brings sudden disaster.

I wonder if Attorney General Merrick Garland has just supplied the proverbial straw that will send the camel that is the Biden administration crashing to the ground.

Garland was supposed to be a moderate. The Washington Compost assured its readers that there was a ‘98 percent probability that Merrick Garland is “in between” Ginsburg and Scalia. In other words, that he is comparatively moderate’. One of my friends even wrote that he was a ‘superb’ choice to be attorney general.

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MIT Abandons Its Mission. And Me. Let’s make sure my cancellation is the last. That begins by standing up and saying no to the mob. by Dorian Abbot

By on October 6th, 2021

I am a professor who just had a prestigious public science lecture at MIT cancelled because of an outrage mob on Twitter. My crime? Arguing for academic evaluations based on academic merit. This is the story of how a cancellation is carried out, why it should worry all of us, and what we can do to stop this dangerous trend.
I have been a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago for the past 10 years. I work on topics ranging from climate change to the possibility of life on extrasolar planets using mathematics, physics, and computer simulation.
I have never considered myself a political person. For example, a few days before an election I go to ISideWith.com and answer the policy questions, then I assign my vote using a weighted draw based on my overlap with the candidates. It’s an efficient algorithm that works perfectly for a nerd like me.
But I started to get alarmed about five years ago as I noticed an increasing number of issues and viewpoints become impossible to discuss on campus. I mostly just wanted to do my science and not have anyone yell at me, and I thought that if I kept my mouth shut the problem would eventually go away. I knew that speaking out would likely bring serious reputational and professional consequences. And for a number of years I just didn’t think it was worth it. 
But the street violence of the summer of 2020, some of which I witnessed personally in Chicago, and the justifications and dishonesty that accompanied it, convinced me that I could no longer remain silent in good conscience.
In the fall of 2020 I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I recorded some short YouTube videos in which I argued for the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as allowing them to express their opinions openly, even if you disagree with them. 
As a result, I was immediately targeted for cancellation, primarily by a group of graduate students in my department. Whistleblowers later revealed that the attack was partially planned and coordinated on the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program listserv by a graduate student in my department. (Please do not attack this person or any of the people who attacked me.)

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Biden’s bank robber Lloyd Billingsley

By on October 6th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/bidens_bank_robber.html

Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. Treasury Department is Saule Omarova, a native of Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and graduate of Moscow State University, which she attended on a “Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.” 

In a May 9, 2020 interview with Chris Hayes of NBC, Omarova revealed she was in an exchange program with the University of Wisconsin in 1991 when the USSR collapsed. The Lenin scholar remained stateside to pursue a PhD in political science. Some of her views on economics emerged in 2019, nearly 30 years after the USSR collapsed. “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there,” Omarova wrote, “Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’” 

Contrary to the Lenin scholar, individuals know what’s best for themselves and a free market empowers them to make choices that reflect those interests. In the old USSR, by contrast, an all-male Marxist-Leninist dictatorship planned the economy. This ran up against the knowledge problem F.A. Hayek outlined in The Road to Serfdom way back in 1944 during the Stalin era. 

Economic knowledge is fragmented and dispersed, so no group of people is able to plan an economy that will thrive for the benefit of all. That’s why Omarova’s beloved “old USSR” was an economic basket case. 

Countries barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. The biggest country in the world, with abundant energy and natural resources, could not even feed itself. This was a matter of record, but Hayes failed to press the issue. Omarova knew that in the old USSR consumers waited in line to select, pay, and pick up the goods. That is how an economy planned by Communist Party bosses functions in practice, but there’s more to it.

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