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Ruth King

Why Colorful View of American Politics Is Wrong by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16590/colorful-american-politics

White supremacists forget that in most cases what they present as lawbreaking by blacks is primarily caused by socio-economic factors, not skin color. Even then, lawbreakers form a small minority of black Americans, who account for 12 percent of the population.

While racists, both white and black, do exist in the United States, it is wrong to talk of across the board institutional racism. A majority of Americans of all colors understand that slavery was an evil and harmed every American regardless of color. They have also seen in real life that advancing equality benefits all, not only those of any particular color.

The way world media cover the current US election campaigns may foster the impression that the nation is gripped by a crisis due to institutional racism with black Americans as victims. Professional anti-Americans even claim that the US perpetuates a version of apartheid.

How accurate are such claims?

There is no doubt that race, or skin color, remains a cause of friction with small radical groups, both white and black, seeking to legitimize their agendas by fomenting fear and loathing with racial themes.

On the right, white supremacists try to portray black fellow citizens as genetic criminals whose presence is a cause of anxiety. They cite figures showing that a disproportionate number of blacks are in prison for breaking the law.

On the left, some radical anti-capitalists try to cast blacks as victims of institutional racism and use the concept of victimhood to justify violence.

White supremacists forget that in most cases, what they present as lawbreaking by blacks is primarily caused by socio-economic factors, not skin color. Even then, lawbreakers form a small minority of black Americans, who account for 12 percent of the population.

Anti-Americanism, Then and Now Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/03/anti-americanism-then-and-now/

The habit of liberal accommodation has precipitated a crisis in what one used to be able to call, without apology, manly self-confidence.

As members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter continue their nightly exercise of kinetic economic redistribution, and protestors assemble outside Walter Reed Hospital, where President Trump is receiving treatment for the Wuhan Flu, to shout anti-Trump slogans, I thought it might be useful to step back and consider this current wave of anti-American sentiment in historical context. 

Anti-Americanism is not new, of course. It was, as many writers have noted, a staple of 1960s’ radicalism. What seems novel today, however, is the extent to which radical anti-American sentiment has installed itself into the heart of many institutions that, until about 15 minutes ago, were pillars of the American establishment. How odd that (Democratic) members of Congress should lament that America is guilty, and has always been guilty, of “systemic racism,” etc., etc. Somehow, the fact that Boston Mayor Martin Walsh hoisted the Chinese Communist flag in front of City Hall there epitomizes the rot.

Anti-Americanism is hard to argue with. I don’t mean that there are good arguments in favor of the phenomenon. Quite the contrary: insofar as arguments enter the arena at all, they usually lean heavily on assertion backed up by belligerence and cliché. 

But it is seldom that argument does enter. Anti-Americanism has always been more a matter of attitude than argument. It depends on, it draws its strength from, the wells of passion, not reason. The composition of that passion is complex and shifting. Envy generally enters into it, as does a congeries of political attitudes that the literary critic Frederick Crews aptly dubbed “Left Eclecticism”: a bit of cut-rate Marxism to start with, leavened with a dollop of some trendy academic theory, a dash of utopian fantasy and snobbery, seasoned to taste with resentment and paranoia. 

The late Paul Hollander provided a connoisseur’s overview of the favored configurations in his classic compendium Anti-Americanism: Irrational & Rational, first published in 1995. Reading through Hollander’s inventory, one is again and again struck by the combination of virulence and absolutism that fuels expressions of anti-Americanism. Hollander quotes the Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov, who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in the late 1970s: 

Even now, after living in America for more than five years, I keep wondering what provokes so many people in Latin America, Russia, and Europe to anti-American sentiments of such intensity that it can only be called hatred. There is something oddly hysterical about it all.

Chris Wallace caps a bad week with a strange attack against Scott Atlas By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/chris_wallace_caps_a_bad_week_with_a_strange_attack_against_scott_atlas.html

On Tuesday night, during the first presidential debate, Chris Wallace was weak and ineffectual.  He was also a partisan without the decency to admit it.  On Wednesday, Wallace blamed Trump for his own failings, a coward’s way out.  And Friday, he announced that Scott Atlas, M.D. is not qualified to talk about Wuhan virus policy because he is not an epidemiologist.  This almost random collateral attack has nothing to do with the important skill sets Atlas brings to Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force.

The real reason why Scott Atlas is in the left’s crosshairs is that he’s a new voice on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and he’s saying things the left dislikes.  His usefulness lies in the fact that he’s a brilliant man who is a counterweight to Fauci, who is all in for locking America down indefinitely.

Although Fauci is primarily responsible for Trump’s initial approach to the virus — an approach the left now claims leaves Trump with blood on his hands — the left loves Fauci.  Leftists resent that Trump has added an opposing voice to the Task Force.

The left’s hostility to Atlas reflects a general problem with socialists: they value only their opinions (think “cancel culture”) and invariably embrace groupthink.  Groupthink creates conditions for Lysenkoism in scientific endeavors.  This can be incredibly dangerous because there’s no one to point out their factual errors or fallacious reasoning and conclusions.

Atlas’s ideas are especially repugnant for a party invested in the shutdown.

The media’s mad obsession with white supremacy It isn’t the Proud Boys who have been rioting for the past two months. by Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/01/the-medias-mad-obsession-with-white-supremacy/

EXCERPT

Trump and white supremacy have become the main talking points in the post-debate fallout. From CNN to the BBC, and of course across the Trump-loathing Twittersphere, all the talk is of why Trump won’t condemn the white-supremacist groups that are apparently tearing apart the soul of America. During the debate, Trump was asked if he would condemn the Proud Boys, the stupid right-wing gang founded by Gavin McInnes to defend Western values (if these chinless wonders are the last line of defence for Western civilisation, then we’re even more screwed than I thought). Trump said he doesn’t know who the Proud Boys are but he would be happy to condemn them if they are indeed white supremacists. They should ‘stand down’, he said, and ‘stand by’.

It is those last two words – ‘stand by’ – that have whipped up global fury and rejuvenated the chattering classes’ beloved pastime of Trump-bashing. See, Trump is a white supremacist, they’re saying. He is now openly calling on groups like the Proud Boys to ‘stand by’ (we’ll leave it to the time-rich, sunlight-deprived users of 4Chan and other sites to pore over the question of whether the Proud Boys really are white supremacists). No one allowed for the possibility that Trump misspoke or messed up his words, something he is quite famous for doing. And even his clarification of his comments – he has now said that the Proud Boys, whoever they are, should definitely ‘stand down and let law enforcement do their work’ – has not damped down the drama. Trump refused to condemn white supremacists because he is one, the tweeting classes claim.

Biden, who at this point will clamber upon any soapbox that comes his way, says America now has a president who is ‘refus[ing] to disavow white supremacists’. Big talk from a man who just a few weeks ago announced that any black person who is even thinking of voting for Trump is not really black. These are the double standards on racism in the woke era: Trump is a vile white supremacist for saying ‘stand by’ in relation to the Proud Boys, yet Biden is the great hope for civil rights in America despite his belief that all black people must think and vote in the exact same way or else forfeit their blackness. The broader point about that crazy, awful debate – the fact that Trump said ‘Sure, I’m willing to do that’ when directly asked if he is willing to condemn white supremacists – has been lost in all of this. Trump saying he is willing to condemn white supremacists has somehow morphed into proof that he supports white supremacists.

There is a bigger issue at play in the media elite’s obsession with white supremacist groups. It speaks to their alarming inability, or unwillingness, to face up to the real source of disarray and conflict in the US today. It isn’t white-supremacist groups who have taken part in the worst, most nihilistic riots to rock America for five decades – it is people who, right or wrongly, identify as ‘left’ or as ‘progressive’. It isn’t the Proud Boys who have laid waste to entire blocks in often quite deprived areas in Kenosha, Minneapolis and Portland – it is supporters of so-called ‘Antifa’ and of Black Lives Matter. It isn’t the Proud Boys who have harassed diners and stormed into suburbia calling people ‘motherfuckers’ and insisting that they bow down to the supposedly correct political worldview – it is the upper middle-class, often white supporters of BLM who have done that, most of whom will shortly be voting Biden for president.

Willing dupes are funding a toxic new racial grift industry

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/willing-dupes-are-funding-a-toxic-new-racial-grift-industry

Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, recently gave a presentation to teachers and administrators in Fairfax County, Virginia. For his one hour of work, he was paid an astounding $20,000 in taxpayer money. That’s $333 per minute of his presentation.

On top of that, the school district splurged $24,000 to buy his books about critical race theory and to make them required reading for K-12 students.

This utter waste of money on ideological claptrap is, however, chump change compared to the lucre that sluices into Kendi’s pockets for his corporate work. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to Kendi’s anti-racism center. Bank of America partnered with the law firm McGuireWoods to host a discussion with Kendi as part of its “diversity and inclusion” initiative.

So, yeah, anti-racism is great work, if you can get it. It would be a relief if it were only “money for nothing,” but actually, it is money for poison.

This summer, amid evidence of police brutality against black people in the United States, it has become trendy to react in ways that do nothing to advance the cause of reform. Reform is hard, and it is much easier for corporations, school boards, and other institutions to whitewash themselves by deliberately getting themselves scammed. So, they unaccountably pay outrageous sums (usually of other people’s money) to hucksters such as Kendi.

One Nation, Under Woke . By Richard M. Reinsch II

ttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/02/one_nation_under_woke_144356.html

Through the sweeping and indiscriminate indictment of oppression that it makes against the American republic, wokeism poses the first serious challenge to our constitutional democracy since communism. Wokeism aims to remake American constitutionalism root and branch, to transform economics, politics, education, and other institutions and practices. The free and equal individual under the rule of law will be replaced with monolithic voices, united by perceived oppression, who demand a mutating law and politics that reward their grievances with punishments against alleged oppressors and redistributed resources for supposed “victims.”

The first thesis of wokeism is that persons are reducible to their affiliated identity: above all, race or gender. In this view, we understand ourselves solely through these prisms and we apply that understanding to others and to institutions. The second thesis is that no person, no idea, and no historical account can be understood by independent human reason unfiltered by race, gender, and stories of interlocking oppression, or, as the case may be, by the acts of oppression one has shared in as a member of the dominant group. Everything comes to us and is either understood or projected by us through our racial or gender identity. The third thesis is that those who have identities that can be grouped under “persons of color” or LGBTQ possess greater authority to speak — owing to the various oppressions they have experienced and the cosmic redress required for justice and liberation —  than oppressor groups in almost every sphere.

America’s national DNA, according to the New York Times’ 1619 Project — wokeism’s anti-American document par excellence — has been encoded with slavery and anti-black racism. Indeed, America left the British Empire for the purposes of retaining the slavery regime, the project’s lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones proclaims (against historical evidence). White males stand as the grand artificer of this oppression, which has been transmitted throughout American history, informing our constitutional documents, politics, and social structures.

FINAL JOBS REPORT BEFORE ELECTION DAY SHOWS US EMPLOYERS ADDED 661,000 WORKERS IN SEPTEMBER BY ANDY PUZDER

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/september-jobs-numbers-andy-puzder

“There is simply no historical parallel for the magnitude and speed of the current economic recovery.”

Following the four best months for job growth since the government began tracking the data in 1939 — 4.8 million jobs in June, 2.7 million in May, 1.7 million in July, 1.4 million in August — the economy added an additional 661,000 jobs in September.

But for the four record-setting months that preceded it, September’s jobs numbers were the best since September of 1983 during the Reagan presidency. While this was a slowdown from four record-setting highs, keep in mind that the numbers slowed to a 37-year high.

There is simply no historical parallel for the magnitude and speed of the current economic recovery.

By comparison, the monthly high mark for job growth during the Obama-Biden recovery was 540,000 jobs in May of 2010.

In total, the U.S. economy has regained 11.4 million jobs or 55 percent of the 20.8 million jobs lost in April to the coronavirus – and that’s with many major states still at least partially shut down.

RACE IN AMERICA: SYDNEY WILLIAMS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Bigotry in any form is ugly. Certainly, racism exists in individuals, but does institutionalized racism exist in the United States? This essay owes its origin to an interview with Kay Coles James, conducted by Nicole Ault in last weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. The title was “On Being Black and Conservative.” Ms. Coles was in the second class to integrate her junior high school in Richmond, Virginia in 1961. Today, she is president of the Heritage Foundation. Could that have happened in a systemically racist country?

The concept of systemic racism stems from Critical Race Theory (CRT), which states that race, “instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of color.”[1]  Systemic racism is defined by Wikipedia as “the formalization of a set of institutional, historical, cultural and interpersonal practices within a society that more often than not puts one social or ethnic group in a better position to succeed, and at the same time disadvantages other groups in a consistent and constant manner, that disparities develop between the groups over a period of time.”

But does systemic racism exist in the U.S.? Certainly, there are individual racists, as well as anti-Semites, misogynists, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-Catholics and those infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome. To define the United States as systemically racist, however, connotes a conspiracy that does not appear to exist. In 1948 President Tuman signed an executive order committing the government to integrate its segregated military. The term “affirmative action,” affecting the hiring practices of government contractors, was first used in Executive Order No. 10925, issued by President Kennedy on March 6, 1961. Jim Crow laws (state and local laws enacted to maintain racial segregation) were abolished with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation in public places and prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices, which had been in effect in many southern states since the end of the Civil War.

Chris Wray is Right: Antifa Is an Ideological Threat to the United States By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/antifa-ideological-threat-to-united-states/

His assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on the very real and present threat of ideologically driven violence.

On Thursday, Jim Geraghty had a characteristically insightful Corner post discussing FBI director Christopher Wray’s recent characterization of Antifa on Capitol Hill. Jim observes that the director’s testimony will be (indeed, is being) distorted in the debate halls, congressional chambers, and media commentary because, well, that’s what we do.

The rap on Wray is that he resists framing Antifa as an “organization,” thinking it more accurate to depict it as a “movement” or an “ideology.” The problem is not just that he is being maligned for what was a more nuanced and accurate description than the commentary indicates. Beyond that, the commentary is missing entirely that his assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on ideologically driven violence, which has been the most immediate threat faced by the United States for a generation. If the government is applying to international terrorism — i.e., jihadist terrorism — the same thinking that Wray described as the bureau’s approach to Antifa’s domestic terrorism, that is a significant security enhancement.

Wray is not denying that Antifa is infecting and driving violent anti-American anarchists. Those anarchists, he indicated, include collections that range from ad hoc groups of individuals who self-identify as Antifa to more regimented “nodes” that are “coalescing regionally.”

Does that sound familiar? It should. On a global stage, it mirrors in many ways the Muslim Brotherhood. Not a precise reflection, but it is similar (and bear in mind that these movements are in very different stages of their historical development).

American Jews should reject Joe Biden   By Judah Waxelbaum

Joe Biden has spent nearly 50 years on the political stage. In that time, he has repeatedly proven that he is no ally to Israel. The Biden platform is a delicate balance of establishment Democratic talk points when it comes to Israel. It is rare you get a candidate with this extensive of a political record; it would be criminal to ignore it. American voters must look past the campaign and focus on Biden’s time in the Senate and as vice president.

 In 1982, prime minister Menachem Begin testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Then-senator Biden told Begin that US aid to Israel could be cut off if actions in the West Bank did not cease.
 

Begin responded,

 “Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
 

Biden slammed on the dais, clearly angry with what Begin was saying. Begin continued,

 “This desk is designed for writing, not for fists. Don’t threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the US lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do? We are grateful for the assistance we have received, but we are not to be threatened. I am a proud Jew. Three-thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats. Take note: we do not want a single soldier of yours to die for us.”