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Ruth King

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‘The elites are hoarding the American Dream’ Batya Ungar-Sargon on the establishment’s betrayal of the working classes.

By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/the-elites-are-hoarding-the-american-dream/

Whatever happened to the American Dream? Only a generation ago, millions of Americans still held to this vision of meritocracy. The US prided itself on being the land of opportunity, where the rigid class system of the old world could be overcome. But as Batya Ungar-Sargon lays out in her new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, the dream has collided with a new reality. An oligarchy has emerged, propping itself up by keeping the working classes down. The laptop class thrives, while hardworking Americans are increasingly struggling to get by.

Batya discussed all these issues and more on the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What has happened to meritocracy in America?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: What’s happened in the US is tragic. Americans still like to see ourselves as a classless society. We want to believe that we’re a nation that has abandoned the burdens of aristocracy. Part of how we left those burdens behind was by believing that the US should adopt a meritocratic drive. We pushed the idea that a person’s talents should raise them up as high as possible. But this drive for meritocracy has effectively calcified into an oligarchy of credentialism.

What I mean by this is that certain kinds of talents, such as being able to sit and study for a very long time, can pretty much guarantee you a successful life in America. But the talents that we need much more, like being able to drive a truck for 12 hours straight or care for the elderly, are treated as though they are worthless. The people who do these tasks – the working classes – are treated like they’re nothing.

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Russia, China and Iran Must Not Seize Control of Sudan by Con Coughlin

By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20640/sudan-control-russia-china-iran

Moscow has undertaken a radical change in its involvement in the Sudanese conflict, with the Kremlin now providing al-Burhan’s Islamist-aligned SAF its “uncapped” military support.

In return, Moscow is hoping the Sudanese leader will honour a deal struck in 2020 to allow Russia to establish a naval base in Port Sudan, a move that would enable the Russian navy to threaten directly Western trade routes passing through the Red Sea.

If, as now seems likely, both Russia and Iran, together with China, succeed in deepening their foothold in Sudan, as well as gaining access to key maritime bases such as Port Sudan, they will be in a strong position to challenge the West’s ability to protect key shipping routes in the Red Sea.

Iran’s presence in Sudan, moreover, will present a major challenge to Israel: it will complete Tehran’s strategic encirclement of the Israelis.

The Western powers must act urgently to protect this pivotal African state from falling into the hands of hostile autocratic regimes, such as Iran, Russia and China, which seek to use Sudan as a base from which to maintain their assault of the West and its key allies in the region.

A modern-day “Scramble for Africa” is taking place in war-torn Sudan, where an unholy collection of hostile autocratic states, namely Iran, Russia and China, are competing for a stake in the country’s key resources, especially the all-important maritime base of Port Sudan in the Red Sea.

Back in the late nineteenth century, the original “Scramble for Africa” was the term coined to describe the efforts of European colonial powers such as Britain, France and Germany to expand their influence throughout the African continent. Their campaign of expansion proved so successful that by the outbreak of the First World War, only Liberia and Ethiopia remained free from the shackles of European colonisation.

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Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier reviewed by Kay Hymowitz

By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-bad-therapy-why-the-kids-arent-growing-up

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier (Sentinel, 320 pp., $30)

Abigail Shrier’s first book, 2020’s Irreversible Damage, launched the mother of all cancel campaigns. Because the book attributed the sudden and inexplicable rise in juvenile gender anxiety to social contagion rather than the activist-approved explanation of social progress, Shrier, an occasional contributor to City Journal, was branded a “transphobe.” Amazon employees demanded the company remove the book from its virtual shelves. Unlike the suits at Target, who briefly did exactly that, Amazon stopped short of cancelling the book and settled for banning any paid advertising. Despite growing questions about juvenile transgender treatment, including among practitioners, many libraries continue to treat Irreversible Damage as radioactive. Only last month, a Japanese publisher reneged on plans to publish the book, proving that, whether or not transgenderism is contagious, the urge to cancel those out of line with approved ideas unquestionably is.  

Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy, an astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis now afflicting adolescents, may cause a similar emotional meltdown in some corners of American culture. Shrier’s target is more expansive than it was in Irreversible Damage; she aims her fire at the therapeutic mindset that pervades not just the offices of psychologists and counsellors, but elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, best-seller lists, middle-class homes, and government agencies. It’s a pernicious development because a therapeutic mindset easily paralyzes kids’ natural defenses and resilience, hence the crisis we confront today. Assuming a Bad Therapy backlash comes, it is unlikely to be as heated as it was in the case of Irreversible Damage—therapists, who have the most to lose if Shrier’s analysis were to win out, are a more sedate crowd than trans activists—but one hopes that for the sake of the rising generation, any pushback won’t prevent people from heeding the warnings of this important book. 

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Motherhood is the most important job in the world And it’s one fewer and fewer want Don Feder

By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

When President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a federal holiday in 1914, the average American woman had six children. During the baby boom, the number was 3.62. Today, it’s an anemic 1.6, which should set off alarm bells.

Motherhood is the most important job in world. But it’s a job fewer and fewer want to do.

In 2023, 3.6 million babies were born in the United States, compared with 4.16 million in 1990.

The total fertility rate is the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime. We haven’t had replacement-level fertility (2.1) since 1973.

Still, the United States is experiencing another baby boom compared to most of the industrialized world.

In Italy, the fertility rate is 1.21. The average Italian child has no brothers, sisters or cousins.

In South Korea, it’s 0.72. The nation will lose more than half of its population in each generation. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un can disband his army. In a few years, he’ll be able to just walk in and take over.

Last year, Japan lost 595,000 people. This is the 13th consecutive year of population decline. More than 20 million Japanese are 75 and older, a record high. The number of vacant homes also hit an all-time high of more than 9 million, or 13.8% of the housing supply.

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FBI: Assaults Against Law Enforcement at Highest Level in Ten Years By Eric Lendrum

By on May 16th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/15/fbi-assaults-against-law-enforcement-at-highest-level-in-ten-years/

The latest data from the FBI reveals that the number of assaults committed against law enforcement officers is at the highest level in at least 10 years.

According to the Daily Caller, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program recorded 79,091 different cases of assault against officers in the year 2023. The most common occurrences were during police responses to assaults against non-officers, with 6,783 such cases. The second-highest occurrence was during responses to drug violations, with 4,879 assaults taking place under such circumstances.

At least 466 officers were assaulted and injured by assailants with firearms, which is also the highest rate of such assaults in the last 10 years. The report also reveals that 194 officers were feloniously killed between 2021 and 2023, thus marking the highest rate of such murders in any three-year period in the last 20 years. The year 2023 saw 60 officers killed, while 61 were killed in 2022, and 73 were killed in 2021.

In 2023, there were 57 offenders who committed felony murder of law enforcement officers. Of those 57 culprits, 32 had previous violent arrests; 54 of the 57 culprits were men, while 8 allegedly suffered some form of mental illness.

Regionally, the South saw the highest number of officers killed in the line of duty in 2023, with 20; this marked a decrease of about 38% from 32 line-of-duty deaths in 2022.

The persistently high rate of violence against police officers is a continuation of the widespread anti-police sentiment that started in 2020, after an African-American named George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His accidental death, falsely believed to be a murder, sparked nationwide race riots and led to numerous far-left politicians calling for a “defunding” of the police. Although political attempts to do so have either failed or been repealed in recent years, anti-police rhetoric remains high, and has also led to a wave of early retirements as well as recruitment struggles for many police departments.

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The Biden Reelection Strategy Bidenites believe they can reelect an unhealthy, unpopular, and unsuccessful president by any means necessary. And they may be right. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 16th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/16/the-biden-reelection-strategy/

Joe Biden polls at or below 40 percent approval. Historically, such unpopularity has made it almost impossible for a president to be reelected.

His age advances by the hour. His voice falters, his memory fades, and his gait is reduced to short steps, with his arms, winglike and in tandem, offering balance.

Biden is not so much an octogenarian as an unhealthy and prematurely aging 80-year-old. It is America’s irony that he is fit for almost no other job in the country other than President, which apparently allows for a 3-day-a-week ceremonial role while others in the shadows run the country.

So how does Biden become renominated and reelected, as polls show he is behind in almost every critical swing state on nearly every issue?

Answer: not by campaigning, not by championing his record, and especially not by doubling down on his neo-socialist and now unpopular agendas.

Instead, his campaign is focused on four other strategies to beat Donald Trump.

First, left-wing local, state, and federal prosecutors are tying Trump up in court on crimes that have never been seen before and will never be again after the election. All the cases are politically motivated, with many coordinated with the White House.

Even if Trump is not convicted by blue-state prosecutors, in blue-state courtrooms, in front of blue-state juries, he will lose critical campaigning time.

Trump may end up paying out $1 billion in legal fees and fines. At 76, the monotonous days in court are designed to destroy him financially, physically, and mentally.

Biden and his operatives know that, in the long term, they may have fatally damaged the American legal system with such judicial sabotage. But short-term, they hope to destroy Trump before the ballots are cast.

Second, in his fourth year, Biden is suddenly selling government favors to special-interest voting blocs, or hoping to bring short-term relief to voters at the expense of long-term damage to the nation.

For elite college students and graduates, there are now billions of dollars in student-loan cancellations, despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring such targeted contractual amnesties illegal.

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The Woke Gobbledygook That Passes for Erudition in Medical Journals Wesley Smith

By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-woke-gobbledygook-that-passes-for-erudition-in-medical-journals/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Our most august medical journals are in danger of becoming more woke ideological-advocacy publications than disseminators of learned scientific studies. This is particularly true of the New England Journal of Medicine, which regularly publishes progressive gibberish pushing “equity” that is often nearly impossible to understand.

Here’s the latest example. From “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize — Focusing on Health Care Equity”:

We believe that health care–centric goals — equity in patient experience and clinical outcomes — should be the primary equity-related targets for clinicians, health care administrators, health plans, and payers. The health care sector is best positioned to improve the effectiveness and equity of the care it delivers and has the most control over these factors. To be clear, providing equitable health care includes addressing HRSNs [individual health related social needs] as part of treating illnesses shaped by structural SDOHs [structural social drivers of health]. But provision of acute and chronic care is often inequitable, with suboptimal quality, even for patients without unmet HRSNs.

The key word is “equity,” but can anyone explain what the heck that means? Speak plainly, for goodness’ sake! Oh, here it is:

Screening patients for HRSNs and referring those with such needs to indicated services can be helpful but doesn’t address underlying structural SDOHs, such as income inequality, structural racism, and a lack of robust social services; structural drivers create much of the downstream need captured in HRSN screening.

My brain is itching!

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Illegals accused of beating cops in New York’s Times Square offered slap-on-the-wrist plea deals By Monica Showalter

By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/illegals_accused_of_beating_cops_in_new_york_s_times_square_offered_slap_on_the_wrist_plea_deals.html

On what planet does assaulting a police officer merit a mere six months in the slammer?

Only Planet New York.

According to the Daily Mail:

Six of the migrants accused of assaulting two New York City Police Department officers in Times Square have been offered plea deals – including one who was re-arrested while out on $15,000 bail. 

Ulises Bohorquez, Yohenry Brito, Edgarlis Vegas, Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel, Wilson Juarez, Yorman Reveron and Kelvin Servita Arocha appeared in New York Supreme Criminal Court on Tuesday in front of Judge Laura Wood.

The Venezuelan migrants were charged with second-degree assault and the obstruction of a government admin following the attack on January 27 which was caught on video and all have pleaded not guilty.

They were offered this:

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has offered plea deals to Bohorquez, Brito and Gomez-Izquiel for them to serve a year in prison in return to pleading guilty to second-degree assault.

Arocha and Juarez have been presented a deal where they serve six months in prison for pleading guilty to obstructing a government admin.

Yorman Reveron was also offered a deal of two years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty to second degree assault.

The rest of us would go to prison for ten years if we assaulted a police officer, but these illegals are special.

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The Xi-Macron Romance – and Big Nukes Dreaming of the end of American preeminence. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-xi-macron-romance-and-big-nukes/

China’s president Xi wound up his five-day European tour just as an emperor should, with a red carpet welcome and full military honors in Budapest.

The Hungarians, known Euro-contrarians, welcomed Xi’s pledge to invest billions to build an EV plant in Hungary, and didn’t bat an eye when told it meant they now belonged to China’s imperialist Belt and Road Initiative.

Xi’s trip went better than expected. France’s president Emmanuel Macron, whom I call “Little Cookie” for reasons you will find fully explained in my new book on France, Raising Olives in Provence, backed away from his aggressive statements about China’s unacceptable economic takeover of Europe.

Instead of berating Xi, he took the Chinese dictator to a childhood haunt in the Pyrenees, thinking perhaps he was Donald Trump, who gave Xi the Mar-a-Lago treatment when the two first met in May 2017. He was left to beg Xi to reduce the huge trade imbalance between China and the EU ($314.72 billion in 2023), or else – or else, nothing.

Macron could make no credible threat of tariffs, because he doesn’t yet speak for the EU, although on most days he thinks he does.

Little Cookie and Xi could agree on one thing, however: Both would like to end American “hegemony,” and see both the EU and China play larger roles on the world stage.

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“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” Sydney Williams

By on May 16th, 2024

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The title of this essay comes from Stanley Kramer’s 1963 mad-cap comedy. With his dying words Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) mentions a stash of loot buried under the “Big W.” The movie is about a bunch of crazies’ search for the money, reminding one of today’s political scene and the race for the Presidency.

We are not living a Hollywood film; but an alien from another planet would be excused for laughing. The ridiculousness of what is being said and done justifies a belly laugh. Writing recently in City Journal, Heather MacDonald noted: “Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatic, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. ‘The university would rather see us dead than divest,’ said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X.” Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a recent issue of The Spectator of some “absurdist moments” at Columbia. Student protesters demanded the university deliver food and drink to them: “When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid.’”

Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, quoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” Really? Do the citizens of Ireland, Puerto Rico and Hawaii know they are colonized? Who besides Haitians and Koreans have colonized Haiti and Korea in recent years? And Mr. Boot asks: “What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was the name used by some indigenous groups for Central and North America.” Do wizards at Columbia expect descendants of settlers to abandon the farms, towns and cities they and their ancestors have now lived on and in – in some cases for 400 years – so progeny of those long dead can occupy them?

More than seven million illegal (sorry, undocumented) migrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, roughly triple the number under President Trump. But this is not a crisis, according to the Biden White House. It is a “challenge,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

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