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Ruth King

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Gender Studies Faculty Sides With Hamas Facts and history are not the concern of the morally-elevated professoriate. Richard L. Cravatts

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/gender-studies-faculty-side-hamas-richard-l-cravatts/

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another group of academics—this time faculty in some 120 Gender Studies departments—has, after the latest conflict in Gaza, followed the lead of various student governments, faculty, and other academic organizations by launching yet another attack in the cognitive war against Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, a “solidarity statement” issued by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) pretentiously announced that “as gender studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline.” 

“We center global social justice in our intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing.,” these moral termagants continued.  “From Angela Davis we understand that justice is indivisible; we learn this lesson time and again from Black, Indigenous, Arab, and most crucially, Palestinian feminists, who know that ‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue.’”

Palestine may be a feminist issue in the addled minds of these academics, but, tellingly, they conveniently make no mention in their statement of the terrorist group Hamas which is singularly responsible for initiating this latest clash with Israel and which commits a war crime each time its militants launch a rocket toward civilian neighborhoods with the intention of murdering Jews. And while these gender studies activists seem so concerned for the emotional and physical welfare of Palestinian women, they do not mention any Israeli women in their statement or commiserate with the reality of living with a genocidal enemy at one’s border. They do not mention mothers of children in southern Israeli towns like Sderot, a frequent Hamas target, where bedrooms have been converted to bomb shelters, residents sometimes have only 15 seconds to seek cover from incoming rockets, and over 40 percent of the town’s children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of living with the specter of terrorism and possible death clouding daily life.

And, apparently, their virtue-signaling mission to realize “global social justice in [their] intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing” has not enabled these gender studies faculty to notice the injustice and violence currently being meted out against Israelis, either as a result of the shower of some 4300 Hamas rockets launched from Gaza in the latest assault with the intention of murdering Jewish civilians, or as part of an ongoing intifada which has claimed the lives of  Israelis who have been injured and murdered by psychopathic Palestinians wielding knives, guns, rocks, incendiary kites, and even automobiles used as weapons.

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Critical Race Theory’s Marxist Roots And its existential danger to our political freedom and unalienable rights. Bruce Thornton

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/critical-race-theorys-marxist-roots-bruce-thornton/

The expanding influence of Critical Race Theory and its Black Live Matter “praxis,” as Marxists call applied theory, has raised concerns about its incoherent pronouncements and illiberal aims. The origins of this ideology is an important question, for CRT has nothing to do with civil rights, or improving black lives or making them “matter.” It’s about increasing its practitioners’ power in our institutions in order to “fundamentally transform” the United States from a country of ordered liberty and limited government, to a “soft” despotic, intrusively regulated technocracy at best, or an illiberal socialist tyranny at worst.

CRT has its roots in Marxism, as one of the founders of BLM has bragged. And, like the Soviet version of Marxism, BLM’s growing influence over our social, educational, political, and corporate institutions––already compromised by a century of progressive ideology, itself a kissing-cousin of Marxism––is an existential danger to the Constitutional safeguards of our political freedom and unalienable rights.

The first Marxist feature is the dubious habit of thought often called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This intellectual grift also defines postmodernism in general, and ideological movements like poststructuralism, radical feminism, and postcolonialism, all of which are fellow travelers of Marxism.

This method of analysis assumes that the reality of all social, political, artistic, and other cultural phenomena cannot be known from the public words and actions of social and political institutions, but rather must be found in the deeper, subterranean ideologies of the power elite that runs them.  This “ruling class” shapes political and institutional “discourses” and “knowledge regimes”––the “epiphenomena,” as Marxists call them–– in order to benefit their tyrannical, selfish interests by oppressing others, whom they keep imprisoned in a “false consciousness” that hides from them the true agents and causes of their oppression.

Hence for CRT, all the progress in race relations––the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Brown vs. Board of Education, the growth of the black middle class, the elimination of legal segregation, and the increase in black office-holders including the presidency––are mere “epiphenomena” that have not eliminated the underlying “systemic racism.” According to CRT, this occult “racism” keeps racism alive and accounts for all the “disparate impacts”  that deny “equity” (i.e. the equality of result) to blacks and other minorities, but benefit and reward “white privilege” and “white supremacy” at the expense of black well-being.

Correcting that “false consciousness,” especially “white fragility,” the denial of white “privilege” and “racism,” explains the efforts to include CRT in school curricula from pre-school to university, and in training programs for employees of corporations and the federal and state government agencies so that they interpret their functions from the CRT perspective. The goal is to expose and reform these institutions’ true oppressive nature that is obscured by their duplicitous, self-serving public claims and motives. Hence the “1619 Project,” which has revolutionized and deformed the discipline of American history from grade school to university.

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Making Book on Trump What can we learn from the library of volumes by Trump haters? Bruce Bawer

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/making-book-trump-bruce-bawer/

The presidency of Donald Trump was not just a boon for CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. It was also a gift to the book business. There was, publishers found, an apparently insatiable hunger for anti-Trump screeds.

One after another of these tomes hit the bestseller lists. While there were the inevitable differences among them in style and perspective, virtually all shared a single theme: Trump was not just a president whose politics the authors disliked; he was the worst person ever to hold the office, unique in his bigotry, corruption, ignorance, stupidity, egomania – indeed, in the estimation of many, comparable to Hitler. In general, the author paid very little if any attention to Trump’s actual political ideas, programs, or accomplishments; instead, their focus was on his personality and personal views, real or imagined – and, by extension, on the supposed attitudes of Trump’s supporters, whose very enthusiasm for him was treated as a character flaw and, indeed, an existential threat to American democracy, tolerance, and social cohesion. Some, if not all, of the writers did not trouble to hide the fact that their disdain for Trump and his voters was rooted in snobbery, regional prejudice, and ideological rancor.

These books fell into a number of general categories. Some were works of reportage by journalists who covered Trump. Some, such as former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020, 384 pages), former FBI director James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (Flatiron, 2018, 312 pages), Comey’s Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust (Flatiron, 2021, 240 pages), and former FBI deputy director Andrew G. McCabe’s The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (St. Martin’s, 2019, 288 pages) were by members of the intelligence community and former government officials. Some, such as Michael Cohen’s Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (Skyhorse, 2020, 432 pages) and Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Creates the World’s Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster, 2020, 240 pages), were by former associates and family members. Some were by psychologists who professed to diagnose Trump’s mental conditions; some were by NeverTrump conservatives; some pushed the Russian collusion narrative; some spun conspiracy theories. And some, such as How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018, 240 pages) by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, Twilight of Democracy by Russian author Masha Gessen (Riverhead, 2020, 288 pages), and Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Autocracy (Doubleday, 2020, 224 pages), by longtime Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, linked Trump to historical fascism. We cannot examine each of these categories in detail but let’s take a quick spin through some of the more important ones, highlighting their distinctive qualities, after which we will consider what they have in common and above all what they reveal—not about Donald Trump himself, but about their authors. For Trump is a unique figure in American life who stands as a kind of Rorschach on which people project their deepest fears and prejudices.

First, a look at the works of reportage (to use the term loosely). It’s important to note at the outset that political reporting, as traditionally understood, went out the window when Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower and, in the view of mainstream journalists, began a years-long national emergency Some even declared openly that this crisis required them to dispense with even an attempt at objectivity. They were now champions of the people against Trump’s tyranny and lies, whose job was not to report the news but to stand as the last bulwark of democracy. This self-dramatizing posture led to a great deal of narcissistic preening. And on this front, no one was more objectionable, and more ridiculous, than Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta-

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The More Alarmists Talk, The More We Know Global Warming Is A Scam

By on June 10th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/08/the-more-alarmists-talk-the-more-we-know-global-warming-is-a-scam/

It’s said that conspiracies can’t remain secret forever because someone eventually talks. This is certainly true of the global warming swindle. The climate fanatics have a habit of regularly revealing that they’re running a racket.

The most recent example occurred last month during a “Critical Climate Moment?” segment on CBS that featured its global warming “expert.” When asked why an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius in global temperature has been determined to be a tipping point, the network’s “climate specialist” admitted it’s a “symbolic” figure. 

“Because, I mean, humans chose it, we chose 1.5, we chose 2 degrees,” said meteorologist Jeff Berardelli, whose entire on-camera spiel was an exercise in fearmongering based on speculation.

So there it is. A number pulled out of the ether. No (real) science behind it. A benchmark used to do nothing more than frighten the public – a Menckenian hobgoblin.

It’s almost routine for the alarmists to give up the game. We’ve seen them inadvertently admit that the objective of the global warming scare is an opportunity to:

Abolish capitalism, “change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” and install a command-and-control economy. 
Change our political system.
Redistribute wealth.
“Build a better world” that will surely be based on economic and social central planning.
“Bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development.”
Pursue personal and religious ambitions – at the expense of others.

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Fauci Is Starting To Look Guilty, Guilty, Guilty On ‘Gain Of Function’

By on June 10th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/10/fauci-is-starting-to-look-guilty-guilty-guilty-on-gain-of-function/

As the “lab-leak” theory for COVID-19 gains increasing credibility, Dr. Anthony Fauci must answer for whether he had any role in supporting Chinese researchers who created this monster. So far, his answers aren’t exactly helping his case.

For those not following this story closely, it now appears likely that COVID-19 didn’t just happen in nature, but was the result of so-called “gain of function” research in a Wuhan lab, where scientists “spiked” a virus found in animals so it could infect humans. If true, the Chinese are directly responsible for the resulting pandemic’s massive economic and human cost.

Until just recently, the press and the “experts” – including Fauci – dismissed the lab-leak theory as a Trump-concocted conspiracy. Not anymore, and now there’s the question of Fauci’s involvement. What have we learned since? Nothing that exonerates him, that’s for sure. Here are the highlights:

Fauci’s Ever-Changing Story

Over the course of three weeks, Fauci has changed his tune three times when it comes to the question of whether he helped funnel taxpayer money to gain-of-function research.

When Sen. Rand Paul pressed Fauci on the question on May 11, he categorically denied it.

“The NIH has not ever, and does not now, fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci said.

Two weeks later, he told Sen. John Kennedy that he had no way of knowing whether the Chinese used grant money from the NIH for such studies.

Then last week Fauci dismissed the grant – which he said totaled $600,000 over five years – as insignificant.

“The Wuhan lab is a very large lab to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The grant that we’re talking about was … an average of about $125,000 to $140,000 a year.”

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Sydney Williams: “Defying Hitler” by Sebastian Haffner

By on June 10th, 2021

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense catastrophe of civilization, such as the rule of the Nazis in Germany.”   Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       China in 2021 is not Germany in 1933, nor is the United States. History never repeats itself exactly. The past, despite Antonio’s remark to Sebastian in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is not necessarily prologue. But knowledge of the past provides warning signs. The book is a cautionary tale to those who believe in the goodness of big government. They forget what evil people, in the name of the common good, can do.

In this personal, Orwellian-like memoir, Sebastian Haffner attempts to answer the question of why “no individuals ever spontaneously opposed some particular injustice or iniquity they experienced…”, an accusation, he wrote, that applied to himself. “What,” he asked, “became of the Germans?” Haffner was born in 1907, so his earliest memories are of the Great War, a war that was not fought on German soil. “It took place somewhere in distant France.” To a generation of German school boys, war was seen as a “great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations,” which became “the underlying vision of Nazism.” By the spring of 1919 the Nazi revolution was already fully formed and potent: “It lacked only Hitler.” He quotes Bismarck who once said that moral courage is a rare German virtue but “it deserts a German completely the moment he puts on a uniform.”

We read of the hyperinflation of 1923, the year Haffner turned sixteen: “The old and unworldly had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well.” The decade of 1914-1923 was a time when a sense of balance, tradition and continuity were abandoned, and many youths turned nihilistic. How, for example, were elders to explain to the young why Germany lost the Great War. As the 1920s wore on, those like Haffner wanted to see the world they loved preserved, but they were becoming a minority: “We knew we could not talk with many of our contemporaries because we spoke a different language.” Hitler was master of promising “everything to everybody.” He evoked the glorious memories of pre-war 1914, as well as the triumphal, anarchic looting of 1923. In doing so, Haffner experienced the loss of “fun, understanding, goodwill, generosity and a sense of humor.”

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The Deadly Results of Defunding the Police Makhi Buckly, 19, my colleague’s grandson, became a casualty on Memorial Day. By Robert L. Woodson Sr.

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deadly-results-of-defunding-the-police-11623259226?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Woodson Center family lost one of our own on Memorial Day. Makhi Buckly, the 19-year-old grandson of Carl Hardrick, one of our most faithful leaders in youth violence prevention, was fatally shot in Hartford, Conn. Makhi was a student athlete in his freshman year at American International College in Springfield, Mass. When Carl called to tell me the terrible news, his words broke my heart: “It’s my job to keep kids safe, but I can’t even protect my own grandson.”

Our grief is shared by hundreds of minority families that have lost children to senseless violence over the past year. In June 2020, 3-year-old Mekhi James was killed on his way home from a haircut, riding in the back seat of a car in Chicago. A week later, 10-year-old Lena Marie Nunez-Anaya was killed after a stray bullet came through the window of her Chicago apartment. In July 2020, 7-year-old Natalia Wallace was shot in the forehead as she played outside, also in Chicago. Eleven-year-old Davon McNeal was struck by a stray bullet shortly after a Fourth of July peace cookout organized by his mother in Washington. In April, 11-month-old Dior Harris was shot and killed in the back seat of a car in Syracuse, N.Y. Two other children who were riding in the same car were also wounded.

Over the past few years, the deaths of unarmed black people at police hands—including the murder of George Floyd —have rightly generated national outrage. But the number of unarmed blacks killed by police represents a fraction of those who are killed each day in our neighborhoods. Many of these victims are children. In 2020 nearly four children and teens were shot and killed each day in America on average. Yet the national press habitually ignores any victim who isn’t killed by the police, distorting our understanding of what is really going on.

The movement to “defund the police,” which rose to prominence after Floyd’s death, has actually gotten innocent black people killed. As police have pulled back, our neighborhoods have been left unprotected. Crime has skyrocketed. Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country. Preliminary Federal Bureau of Investigation data show that the U.S. murder rate increased by 25% in 2020. Between Dec. 11, 2020, and March 28, 2021 (after the Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a budget that shifted $8 million from the police department to other programs), murders in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, rose 46% compared with the same period the year before.

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Refugee Camp for Families of Islamic State Fighters Nourishes Insurgency Violent ideology and money-making schemes flourish at Al-Hol in Syria, which houses women and children; punishment for dancing is death By Isabel Coles and Benoit Faucon

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/refugee-camp-for-families-of-islamic-state-fighters-nourishes-insurgency-11623254778?mod=hp_lead_pos5

The United Nations warned last year that Islamic State is trying to use al-Hol escapees to develop cells in Europe.

AL-HOL, Syria—A refugee camp set up to shelter women and children after the defeat of Islamic State has instead turned into a mini-caliphate itself, where female leaders nurture the group’s violent ideology and run money-making schemes that help keep the insurgency alive outside the razor wire.

Authorities have recorded more than 40 murders, at least 10 of them beheadings, in the 736-acre camp since the start of the year. Most of the victims were accused by Islamic State of collaborating with camp authorities, according to the Rojava Information Center, an independent volunteer-staffed research organization based in northeast Syria.

Late last year, an Iraqi woman was strangled in front of her children with an electric wire after she posted a video on Instagram of herself dancing in her tent, an activity forbidden under the strict Islamist doctrine imposed by the group, say people in contact with al-Hol prisoners. On March 20, another 18-year-old woman, also Iraqi, was shot dead after being accused of being an informant, these people said.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia responsible for guarding al-Hol, say they lack the resources to properly secure the camp, which has grown into a small city of more than 62,000. Most Western nations have refused to systematically repatriate citizens who moved to Syria during Islamic State’s rise and were trapped there after its collapse.

What remains of Islamic State is making the best of the international stalemate. In this slum-like camp dubbed “Europe’s Guantanamo,” the group enforces its hard-line version of Islam, exfiltrates some detainees to its strongholds in Syria and takes a cut on the millions of dollars raised by sympathizers to free them, according to a recent United Nations report.

“Everyone in the camp wants to get out,” said Amal Bilifad, a Moroccan mother who says she unwittingly followed her husband to Syria and tried in vain to flee the self-declared caliphate after he was killed in an airstrike.

In recent months, fugitives from al-Hol have made it back to Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Belgium, according to judicial records and counterterrorism officials.

Part of the difficulty in controlling the camp lies in its complex structure. It is both a detention facility and a haven for people who were displaced by the conflict and cannot return home. Its biggest section is made up of Iraqi families including men, almost half of the residents, closely followed by a separate area made up of Syrians.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Biden OMB Doubles Down on Redefining Mothers as ‘Birthing People’ in Budget Proposal By Caroline Downey ???!!!???

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-omb-doubles-down-on-redefining-mothers-as-birthing-people-in-budget-proposal/

During a congressional hearing Wednesday, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Shalanda Young defended the 2021 Biden budget proposal’s redefinition of mothers as “birthing people.”

Republican Representative Jason Smith, a top-ranking member on the House Budget Committee, noted that the replacement of the word “mother” for the gender-ambiguous phrase, in reference to funding maternal health care, was unprecedented for a budget plan.

“The budget requests $26 million to reduce maternal mortality and eliminate race-based disparities in outcomes among ‘birthing people.’” Smith said. “This is a shift from recent budgets that referred to maternal health issues as women’s issues. I’ve never heard the term before, can you explain what it means?”

“There are certain people who do not have gender identities that apply to female and male, so we think our language needs to be more inclusive on how we deal with complex issues,” Young responded.

Incorporating jargon of both gender and racial inclusivity, Biden’s budget stipulates that over $200 million in funding will be allocated to reduce the high rate of maternal mortality and “race-based disparities in outcomes among birthing people.” The latter term is instead of “mothers,” which encompasses the strictly female capabilities of both child delivery and child-rearing.

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Woke Inquisitors in the Medical World By Joel Zinberg

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/woke-inquisitors-in-the-medical-world/

A recent ‘controversy’ reveals how politically correct ideology is harming health care.

Four hundred years ago, Italian astronomer Galileo was persecuted for advancing Copernicus’s theory that the earth and other planets rotate around the sun. This heliocentric theory violated the prevailing belief dating back to Aristotle and engrained in Christian theology that the sun and planets rotate around a stationary earth. Galileo was tried for heresy and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Science would eventually vindicate Galileo.

Today’s scientists and physicians face a different orthodoxy that explains all disparate health outcomes as the result of structural or systemic racism. Doubters and those who investigate genetic and scientific alternative explanations face their own latter-day inquisition. Just ask Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of JAMA — the Journal of the American Medical Association — who was recently forced to resign. While the remaining JAMA editors offered fulsome praise in a farewell editorial citing his accomplishments, including a commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, make no mistake: He was purged for a thoughtcrime.

Dr. Bauchner’s offense was that he presided over JAMA when it aired a podcast titled “Structural Racism for Doctors — What Is It?” in late February. The podcast featured two white physicians — JAMA deputy editor Ed Livingston and Mitchell Katz, an editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, president and CEO of New York City’s public-hospital system NYC Health + Hospitals, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Katz described structural racism as societal policies or practices that perpetuate racial inequality, as opposed to individuals’ racist beliefs. Dr. Livingston wondered if “structural racism is an unfortunate term to describe a very real problem.” (emphasis added) He worried that people offended by being labeled racist would not address the societal barriers to equal opportunity. JAMA’s tweet promoting the podcast stated, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors. . . .”

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