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Ruth King

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THOMAS SOWELL ON MULTICULTURE

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.tsowell.com/spmultic.html

Most of the arguments for so-called “multicultural” education are so flimsy, inconsistent, and downright silly that it is hard to imagine that they would have been taken seriously if they were not backed up by shrill rhetoric, character assassination, and the implied or open threat of organized disruption and violence on campus.
    Let us examine the multiculturalists’ questions, one by one:

  Why do we study Western civilization, to the neglect of other civilizations?
    Why is that question asked in English, rather than in some non-Western language?  Because English is what we speak.  Why do we concern ourselves with the Earth, which is an infinitesimal part of the known universe?  Because that is where we live.  If we want to understand the cultural and institutional world in which we carry on our daily lives, we need to understand the underlying rationale and the historical evolution of the way of life we have been born into.
    None of this has anything to do with whether English is a better language than some other languages.  English is in fact more inconsistent and less melodic than French, for example.  But we speak English for the same practical reasons that cause people in China to speak Chinese.  Attempts to turn this into an invidious comparisons issue miss the fundamental point that (1) languages exist to serve practical purposes and (2) they serve those purposes better, the more people in the same society speak the same language.
    Why don’t we study other civilizations equally?  The most obvious answer is the 24-hour day and the limited number of days we spend in college.  It is stretching things very thin to try to cover Western civilization in two semesters.  Throw in a couple of other civilizations and you are just kidding yourself that you are educating anybody, when all that you are really doing is teaching them to accept superficiality.  Those whose real agenda is propaganda are of course untroubled by such considerations.

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Modelers Were ‘Astronomically Wrong’ in COVID-19 Predictions, Says Leading Epidemiologist—and the World Is Paying the Price Jon Miltimore*****

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://fee.org/articles/modelers-were-astronomically-wrong-in-covid-19-predictions-says-leading-epidemiologist-and-the-world-is-paying-the-price/

In a recent interview, Dr. John Ioannidis had a harsh assessment of modelers who predicted as many as 40 million people would die and the US healthcare system would be overrun because of COVID-19.

Dr. John Ioannidis became a world-leading scientist by exposing bad science. But the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be his biggest challenge yet.

Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, has come under fire in recent months for his opposition to state-ordered lockdowns, which he says could cause social harms well beyond their presumed benefits. But he doesn’t appear to be backing down.

In a wide-ranging interview with Greek Reporter published over the weekend, Ioannidis said emerging data support his prediction that lockdowns would have wide-ranging social consequences and that the mathematical models on which the lockdowns were based were horribly flawed.

Ioannidis also said a comprehensive review of the medical literature suggests that COVID-19 is far more widespread than most people realize.

“There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus,” Ioannidis, a Greek-American physician, told Greek Reporter. “Of course none of these studies are perfect, but cumulatively they provide useful composite evidence. A very crude estimate might suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases.”

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Happy July 4: Tyranny Of The Woke Mob Might Be Worse Than Suffering Under British Rule

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/02/happy-july-4-tyranny-of-the-woke-mob-might-be-worse-than-abusive-british-rule/

When we celebrate Independence Day, we rejoice over the freedom won from the English crown. But there’s a new master gaining power in America. We need to shrug it off before it takes over.

Because we’re marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, it would be instructive to see where we are today by comparing a few passages from our founding document with current events.

1776: King George III has “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

2020: The cancel culture has cost people jobs, income, and social status.

1776: The king “has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

2020: Rioters, looters, statue-topplers, and the criminals holed up in “autonomous zones” have killed and injured, stolen, burned, and destroyed.

1776: The crown imposed “taxes on us without our consent.”

2020: Black Lives Matter is at its core a marxist organization, while its “partner organization,” the Movement for Black Lives, “calls for a ‘progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.’”

1776: The king abolished “our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.”

2020: Defund the police.

1776: Our Creator endowed us “with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

2020: Conform or else.

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The Believer The ideology behind the lust to tear America down. Jamie Glazov

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/believer-jamie-glazov/

Editors’ note: As we witness the Marxist revolution currently transpiring right before our eyes in America, a vital question confronts us: what yearnings lie inside the members of groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa — and why do members of the Democrat Party and of the Establishment Media cheer them on? What inspires this violent hatred of America and the ferocious craving to tear it down? These are, without doubt, some of the most pertinent questions of our time. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it vital to run, below, an excerpt from Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. The excerpt is the second chapter, titled ‘The Believer’s Diagnosis’; it explores the progressive believer’s secular faith – and unveils his heart of darkness. Don’t miss this essay. 

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The Believer’s Diagnosis
“Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
—Karl Marx, invoking a dictum of Goethe’s devil in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon

In the eyes of Joseph E. Davies, who served for several years as American ambassador to the Soviet Union before the Second World War, no human being merited greater respect than Joseph Stalin. The ambassador spent much time reflecting on why he believed the Soviet dictator deserved the world’s—and his own people’s—heartfelt veneration. He finally realized that the answer had always been staring him square in the face: it was that Stalin’s “brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”[i] Leading French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre discovered a similar truth about his own secular deity, Fidel Castro. “Castro,” he noted, “is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle, and the earth. He is the whole island.”[2] Father Daniel Berrigan, meanwhile,  contended that Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong was an individual “in whom complexity dwells, in whom daily issues of life and death resound; a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion . . . he had dared to be a humanist in an inhuman time.”[3]

The objects of all this adoration, of course, were despotic mass murderers. One crucial question, therefore, surfaces: what exactly inspires a person, and an entire mass movement, to deify a monstrous tyrant as a father-god who transcends the singular and encompasses, as Sartre put it, all the people and their land? The answer to this question helps illuminate the contemporary Left’s romance with Islamist jihadists, just as it helps crystallize the Left’s alliance with the most vicious totalitarians of the twentieth century.

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Red China Moves on Hong Kong The snuffing out of freedom – and what it portends.Michael Finch

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/red-china-moves-hong-kong-michael-finch/

I was fortunate enough to be in Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, traveling with a group headed by the estimable Bruce Herschensohn.  It was an extraordinary, if bittersweet trip, seeing the British ships sail out of Hong Kong harbor on the evening of July 1st.  The lowering of the Union Jack across the city allowed a moment of great sadness, a passing of an era, given way to a future of trepidation and worry.

On the trip, we were honored to meet the politician and freedom fighter, Martin Lee.  Lee was just recently arrested and freed, but will now, almost certainly, be under threat of harassment and further arrests.  William McGurn, then senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, also spoke to us, offering some hope, but tinged with warning.  That week marked a pivotal moment in history, one that anyone present in Hong Kong at the time will never forget.

Promises and guarantees were made; Hong Kong was given 50 years of freedom, under the now-infamous “one country, two systems” policy of administration.  And, indeed, it did work.  For just over 20 years, Hong Kong was the gateway and engine that helped propel China to a remarkable economic take off, lifting millions out of poverty.  Hong Kong was the portal for the rest of the world into China, and the city continued to thrive.  Rule of law, security of contracts, an independent judiciary and a free press were all legacies of British rule. 

All of this, however, was snuffed out in recent days with the new national-security law imposed on Hong Kong by mainland China.  Simply put, Hong Kong has lost its freedom. 

It certainly didn’t go down without a fight; the past months have seen countless protests and demonstrations from the freedom-loving people of Hong Kong.  It has been a sight to behold, watching thousands of demonstrators in the streets of Hong Kong carrying American flags, speaking the words of freedom and liberty.  It is awe-inspiring to see that America is still the beacon that all look to, a light of freedom that casts its radiance to every corner of the globe. 

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Independence Day and the ‘Woke’ Revolution Not since the Civil War has Independence Day been celebrated amidst such threats to our country’s political heritage. Bruce Thornton

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/independence-day-and-woke-revolution-bruce-thornton/

Not since the Civil War has Independence Day been celebrated amidst such threats to our country’s political heritage. The riots and bombings of the Sixties and Seventies were more lethal and destructive, but the political consensus from the center-left to the center-right––that the democratic process rather than violence should be the agent of change––hence rejected the revolutionary narrative of the New Left.

Today, however, the recent shift of the Democrats to their progressives and Marxist wing has put the authority and power of Congressmen, Democrat Party leaders, governors, mayors, city councils, media, corporations, sports teams, and entertainment industries on the side of rioters, vandals, and looters. The outfits behind this disorder, whether the self-proclaimed Marxists of Black Lives Matter, or the juvenile anarchists of Antifa, have with near impunity added widespread violence to illiberal tactics like “cancel culture”: the vandalism of public monuments and proscription of cultural artifacts; and the shaming, silencing, and ostracizing of dissenting voices.

The alleged “crisis” of racist police targeting black males for slaughter is in fact a specious pretext for this disorder, a Reichstag Fire for justifying a revolutionary political agenda to “burn down this system and replace it,” as a BLM honcho put it recently. This legitimizing of an illiberal political ideology and violent tactics by civic, business, and cultural leaders now threatens to dismantle the Constitutional order and American civic identity of which American exceptionalism and political freedom are the fruit.

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Stalin, Famine, and the New York Times By Kyle Smith

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/movie-review-mr-jones-tells-truth-about-new-york-times-communism/#slide-1

Mr. Jones tells the truth about Moscow’s man at the Paper of Record.

 ‘T he world is being invaded by monsters, but I suppose you don’t want to hear about that,” Both clauses of that sentence are devastatingly true: The reference is equally to the horrors of the Soviet Union’s mass murders — and to the West’s determination to turn its back to the monstrosity. The speaker is George Orwell; the subject is Stalinism. Orwell is preparing to write a book called Animal Farm in which the farmer is named Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones, it turns out, is also the name of an Orwell acquaintance who might have been an inspiration in his writing: Jones is a Welsh reporter, first name Gareth, who is our vantage point for the Stalin-engineered Ukraine famine of the 1930s that amounted to the state-ordered murder of more than three million people by seizing the region’s grain. At the outset of the film Mr. Jones (which is just out via VOD services) is seen pleading to a team of politicos led by David Lloyd George, a former British prime minister in 1933. Jones (played with a combination of determination and disbelief by James Norton) advises the Brits that Herr Hitler, whom he has recently interviewed, has already started a war on western civilization and that a similar threat is building in the Soviet Union. Guffaws greet everything Jones says, and he gets the sack from Lloyd George. “It is me you need, I’m the only one who tells you the truth,” Jones tells the grand old man, but the ex-premier isn’t interested. So Jones goes to Moscow anyway, pretending he has Lloyd George’s blessing.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Universities Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Obsolescence By Victor Davis Hanson *****

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence/

The media blitz during these last several weeks revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African-American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud, and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots, and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.

How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing?

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Is Hamilton Next? The hit musical, now a movie, celebrates the American Founding so unabashedly that it seems ripe for cancellation. Kay S. Hymowitz

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/future-of-hamilton-musical

This Independence Day, Disney is giving America a big-ticket birthday gift: the musical Hamilton. After handing over a head-turning $75 million, the company will stream a filmed version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda Broadway megahit on its Disney+ channel. It could be just what the doctor ordered as an antidote to the nation’s gloomy mood, or it could be the opposite—another cultural touchstone swept up and spit out by the vortex of the Great Awokening.

That second scenario may sound absurd. After all, Hamilton is the beloved masterpiece of the diversity revolution, an ode to the country’s multiracial future and to “immigrants [who] get the job done!” Its cast was almost entirely nonwhite, with one notable exception: a campy, mincing King George III. Miranda himself, son of Puerto Rican parents, played the musical’s namesake hero, Alexander Hamilton. Audiences were swept up in the mischievous chutzpah of casting black actors as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the clever rap couplets evoking the thrill of youthful revolution. “Rap is the voice of the people of our generation, and of people of color,” Miranda, winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has proclaimed. Hamilton won a Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy, and 16 Tony Awards. The show has grossed well over $500 million. Beyoncé, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Sondheim, Jay Z, and a long list of other luminaries number among his fans. On social media, followers are counting the days and minutes until the television event. What could go wrong?

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Kayleigh McEnany, media critic By Bill Grueskin……See note please

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/kayleigh-mcenany-trump-white-house.php

This column was clearly meant to trash McEnany but actually highlights her welcome ripostes to the ” calumnists”….rsk

White House press secretaries make a good salary—around $183,000 a year, almost half the president’s pay. But taxpayers are getting a bargain in Kayleigh McEnany, who has taken on two roles: first, as the president’s spokesperson, and second, as a media critic, offering unsolicited but carefully researched and rehearsed critiques of news coverage writ large.

McEnany, a Harvard Law graduate who got her start as a combative Trump supporter on CNN, has been press secretary for less than three months. It’s dicey to make a lot of predictions about her future, given that she is the fourth person to hold this job in three-and-a-half years, succeeding Sean Spicer (182 days), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (705 days), and Stephanie Grisham (281 days). (All of them lasted longer than 11-day White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci.)

McEnany got off to a promising start with her first briefing on May 1: “I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,” she told reporters in the White House briefing room. And then, at the same briefing, McEnany made clear that she, like Trump, sees herself as an assignment editor. She was asked about Michael Flynn’s efforts to pull back on his guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI. She responded by telling the press corps that they were, in essence, asking the wrong question, and should instead focus its attention on an FBI agent’s notes (“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie?”) written before the Flynn interview.

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