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Ruth King

The Howard Zinn Industry He may be dead, but his followers are legion. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-howard-zinn-industry/

His parents were peasants from Russia and the Ukraine. Had they stayed in that part of the world, any children they had would’ve grown up under Stalin – and, if they’d dared to say anything critical of Uncle Joe in public, they wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. In fact, both mom and dad emigrated to America, where their son, like so many other offspring of destitute immigrants, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. He became rich and famous, in fact. And how did he become rich and famous? By celebrating Communism and savaging America.

That Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a card-carrying Communist, a daily fixture at Party meetings in New York, an inveterate Soviet apologist, a member of a range of Kremlin front groups, a cheerleader for Mao’s “people’s government,” a supporter of Castro and Ho Chi Minh, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and an associate of such groups as ACORN, the Democratic Socialists of America, and International ANSWER, is routinely dropped down the memory hole by the countless teachers and professors who enthusiastically use his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States as a classroom text. Those instructors don’t tell their students that they’re being taught to think like Marxists; rather, they tell them that they’re finally learning the real truth about America, not patriotic propaganda.

For example, Zinn maintains that America was founded as – and has always been – a totalitarian state. Yes, Americans today are richer and freer than pretty much everybody else who’s ever lived on this planet; but Zinn’s readers are presented with a picture of an America whose economic inequality and political oppression are virtually without parallel. American heroism? American accomplishment? American ingenuity? Your kids won’t learn about these things from Zinn’s jeremiad. In his hands, even the most admirable chapters of American history become evidence of the depths of American perfidy.

Today, Zinn’s diatribe is used at schools and colleges all over America, at virtually every level, and in a wide range of disciplines.

Should Christians Declare A State Of Emergency, Too?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/08/should-christians-declare-a-state-of-emergency-too/

“Just to be clear, we’re not advocating that Christians declare a state of emergency. Declaring something a “state of emergency” is little more than an attempt to cut off debate and characterize the other side of an issue as an enemy.”

Less than six months after President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified gay marriages, the Human Rights Campaign declared its first-ever “state of emergency” for “LGBTQ+ people.”

Why? Because of a supposed spike in “legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.”

“More than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law this year alone, more than doubling last year’s number, which was previously the worst year on record,” the HRC says.

But look closely. Almost every single bill on the “assault” list is legislation designed to protect children from the omnipresent and increasingly aggressive “transgender” community.

The list includes things such as bans on doctors performing sterilization procedures or prescribing dangerous puberty-blocking drugs to minors. It includes Florida’s ban on public schools teaching children under age 9 about gay sex, and removing books from elementary school libraries that are too pornographic to show on local news programs. It includes protections for girls who don’t want to share lockers with boys (who claim to be girls) or be forced to unfairly compete in sports with physically dominant males. The list includes laws that prevent schools from “transitioning” children behind their parents’ backs.

It’s our guess that most people would view these sorts of measures as reasonable safeguards, not worthy of a “state of emergency” declaration.

The Truth About ‘Puberty Blockers’ The FDA hasn’t approved them for gender dysphoria, and their effects are serious and permanent. By Gerald Posner

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-truth-about-puberty-blockers-overdiagnosis-gender-dysphoria-children-933cd8fb?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The fashion for transgenderism has brought with it a new euphemism: “gender-affirming care,” which means surgical and pharmacological interventions designed to make the body look and feel more like that of the opposite sex. Gender-affirming care for children involves the use of “puberty blockers”: one of five powerful synthetic drugs that block the natural production of sex hormones.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved those medications to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis, certain types of infertility and a rare childhood disease caused by a genetic mutation. But it has never approved them for gender dysphoria, the clinical term for the belief that one’s body is the wrong sex.

Thus the drugs, led by AbbVie’s Lupron, are prescribed to minors “off label.” (They are also used off-label for chemical castration of repeat sex offenders.) Off-label dispensing is legal; some half of all prescriptions in the U.S. are for off-label uses. But off-label use circumvents the FDA’s authority to examine drug safety and efficacy, especially when the patients are children. Some U.S. states have eliminated the need for parental consent for teens as young as 15 to start puberty blockers.

Proponents of puberty blockers contend there is little downside. The Department of Health and Human Services claims puberty blockers are “reversible.” It omits the evidence that “by impeding the usual process of sexual orientation and gender identity development,” these drugs “effectively ‘lock in’ children and young people to a treatment pathway,” according to a report by Britain’s National Health Service, which cites studies finding that 96% to 98% of minors prescribed puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones.

The Long Reach of Hong Kong Tyranny A single Facebook post from abroad or even singing a song can put you in prison.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-china-communist-party-glory-to-hong-kong-student-facebook-post-arrest-4ca2e6f3?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

How far will China’s Communist Party go to stifle and punish dissent in Hong Kong? As far as authorities can reach, new developments show.

The first involves “Glory to Hong Kong,” an anthem that arose from the 2019 pro-democracy protests. On Monday the Hong Kong Department of Justiceasked the city’s High Court to issue an injunction on national-security grounds to prohibit anyone from “broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing” the song “in any way.”

The government added that it’s seeking to restrict sharing of the song “on the internet and/or any media accessible online and/or any internet-based platform or medium.”

Beijing claims its national-security law applies even to speech abroad and to foreigners. Article 43 asserts that authorities can order a “relevant service provider” to hand over communication or delete information. Regulations say Hong Kong can require social-media companies to take down posts deemed a national-security threat, and failing to comply can mean fines or imprisonment.

There is also the recent case involving a 23-year-old Hong Konger studying at a Japanese university. Some two years ago the young woman (whose name hasn’t been released) posted a brief statement on Facebook about independence for Hong Kong, according to the Tokyo-based JiJi Press. Hong Kong authorities arrested her in March when she returned home to renew her ID card.

Eric Kaufmann :Don’t Take This Personally How the fallacy of composition produces policy failure

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-wests-culture-of-therapeutic-individualism

Recent years have been marked by policy failures on crime, homelessness, border control, family support, education, and health care. A major cause is progressives’ ability to transform questions about the best way to reform structures into emotional referendums on individuals. In a therapeutic, interconnected, and individualistic age that prizes feelings and “emotional safety,” making policy debates personal is a winning tactic. Progressives consistently resort to the fallacy of composition to shut down competing arguments.

The fallacy of composition arises when we mistakenly generalize from the part to the whole, or vice-versa. A phone book is hard to tear, but that doesn’t mean that an individual page is. Venezuela is an authoritarian nation, but that doesn’t mean that Venezuelans are. Brazilians tend to be good at soccer, but that doesn’t mean a particular Brazilian necessarily is.

Consider the examples below:

Apart from the first example, all the rest implicate progressive sensibilities, in that a progressive might engage in the fallacy and misconstrue the collective policy proposal as offensive to individuals. We often see this in our public debates, where a normative proposal (as are those in the left-hand column) is regarded, by progressives, as an attack on certain people (the right-hand column). Progressives thus collapse a complex discussion about collective entities into a debate about the treatment of individuals. This stems in part from the moral foundations of cultural progressives, who value equal outcomes and the minimization of harm. Those committing the fallacy of composition prioritize the therapeutic, privileging the psychological feelings of sensitive individuals at the margins above the collective dimensions of social problems to impede rational, democratic solutions. The political becomes the personal.

Public morality has evolved since the mid-1960s to the point where most taboos revolve around racism, sexism, homophobia, and other identitarian versions of the care/harm moral foundation. In short, our moral landscape has tilted in favor of the Left. This permits what the scholar Cass Sunstein terms “opprobrium entrepreneurs” to institutionalize the fallacy of composition on their cardinal issues.

ONE WORD AT A TIME by Tom McCaffrey,

https://www.thepostemail.com/2023/06/05/one-word-at-a-time/

“The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.” So said President Biden at Howard University’s commencement recently. Was he telling a bald-faced lie? At the very least, he was corrupting the language. Herein, a primer on some of the more egregious crimes against clear thought that are currently bedeviling well-meaning Americans. But first a word on precisely what the culture vandals are out to destroy.

The American Way of Life

Despite the best efforts of the neo-Marxists and their collaborators in both parties, America still possesses a distinctive way of life. Those who subscribe to it believe that “governments are instituted among men” to secure the rights of individuals, and that individuals do not exist to serve governments. They believe in the rule of law, equality before the law (as the only sort of equality government should concern itself with), and basic law and order. They believe in freedom of religion, speech, and press and in the right to bear arms. They believe in a person’s right to run his own life and in his obligation to take full responsibility for it. They believe in private property, in earning one’s keep, and in the economic freedom and opportunity afforded by capitalism. They put great stock in science and technology, and they see industrialism as an overwhelmingly beneficial human achievement. They see the family as a fundamental and essential institution, and if they are religious, they are likely Judeo-Christian. Their language is English, and they do not believe that all cultures are created equal.

Diversity

If every American subscribed to the American way of life, it would be a very bad thing, we are told. That’s because diversity is good, they say. Race, ethnicity, culture, religion, sexual identity–the more ways in which the members of any group of Americans differ from each other, the better. No valid rationale for this conception of diversity has ever been offered. Usually, it is simply asserted, as in this statement from the website of the Boston Foundation, “Diversity is core to what makes cities great.” Diversity thus conceived is always treated as intrinsically and self-evidently beneficial. In truth it is an Orwellian pseudo-concept conjured out of thin air to serve a subversive political agenda. Only a confused, compliant, or deeply cynical mind would accept it at face value.

COVID The Curious Tale of Hydroxychloroquine Robert Clancy

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/covid/2023/05/the-curious-tale-of-hydroxychloroquine/

The discipline of medicine has changed. Its traditional cohesion and leadership have fractured into multiple disconnected specialty groups, allowing powerful commercial and political forces to increase control over both structure and function of medical practice. The COVID era burst through boundaries long taken for granted.

A major driver of opinion about COVID has been the World Health Organisation (WHO). Its Health Emergencies Programme in its proposed form, designed to strengthen disease-specific systems and capacities, including for vaccines, pharmaceuticals and other public health interventions, may be a serious threat to independent local health systems. Given it is an unelected body responsive to powerful lobbies, and a with a performance short of wide approval in its overarching role in the recent pandemic, there is reason to tread carefully.

I have practised as a physician in Australia for half a century. I recall when we knew (and revered) the name of the President of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, while living in fear of their Chief Examiner as we sought qualification! They were great men and women and were the exemplars for ethical practice. Today they only occasionally question imperfect narratives or challenge the ethics of prevailing medical practice, risking being part of the problem rather than a solution.

Recently I was invited to speak at a symposium “Medicine at the Crossroads in the COVID Era”. I sought a topic that illustrates contemporary challenges to Western medicine. Few topics could be more relevant than threats to the doctor-patient relationship, and to science-based medicine seen in the COVID-19 pandemic. So I chose “The curious tale of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)” as a metaphor for the distortion COVID imposed on clinical practise, driven by misinformation aimed at supporting a flawed narrative originating from the highest sources of medical influence.

I am a clinical immunologist. I have a special interest in chronic inflammatory disease and the immunology of the airway. Among the valuable drugs in my clinical practice was HCQ, for which I wrote approximately 20,000 prescriptions without any observed major side effect.  It proved to be a safe and effective medication that blocked antigen-promoting pathogenic immune responses in patients with autoimmune or hypersensitivity diseases.

COVID made HCQ a household name. No medication attracted more brutal and remorseless assault. It was subjected to derision and negativity by medical professionals and the public alike. HCQ presents the dilemma that embodies the extremes of the narrative and science of COVID. In this context and over the last three years, popular narrative and science have gone down quite different paths.

Trump team says Christie ‘will waste no time eating DeSantis’ lunch’ Former NJ Gov. Chris Christie filed Tuesday to run his second presidential campaign: Andrew Mark Miller

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-team-responds-christies-imminent-presidential-run-will-waste-no-time-eating-desantis-lunch

The Trump team responded to the presidential candidacy of former New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie, announced today, with a message warning that it will mean bad news for his current top challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

“Ron DeSantis’ campaign is spiraling, and President Trump’s dominance over the Republican primary field has opened a mad rush to seize the mantle for runner-up,” Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for the PAC Make America Great Again Inc. said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Ron DeSantis is not ready for this moment, and Chris Christie will waste no time eating DeSantis’ lunch.” 

The DeSantis campaign pointed Fox News Digital to a statement DeSantis made in an interview with KCCI-TV in Iowa last week where he said, “Regardless of who decides to run or not run, for us, it’s really just background noise.”

“We believe we have a message that will win. We believe we have the plan to be able to get that done and it’s basically just about execution for us.”

Christie, who served as governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018, previously ran for president in 2016 and lost the GOP primary to Trump.

Is Genocide Too Powerful a Word? By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/is_genocide_too_powerful_a_word.html

Genocide is a potent word.  It refers to the decimation of an entire group.  It results in destruction on a massive scale.  It defies the imagination even though we have often witnessed it in the 20th century.

To most people, it is the concerted evisceration of a particular group, whether they be Jews annihilated by the Nazis, Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the Ukrainians by Stalin.  Of the latter, the term Holodomor comes to mind.  It was a man-made famine that affected the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, causing mass starvation in grain-growing regions.  In acknowledgment of its scale, the famine is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).”

These events need to be understood as the prelude to global actions that are now convulsing the world and whose ultimate goal is the destruction of human life.

Often begun as a bid for the welfare of humanity, these decisions must be regarded as the “alibis of tyrants” with resultant deadly consequences.

Consider the dictates that have caused and will continue to cause food shortages and starvation.

‘Feminist’ mini-golf course debuts, courtesy of Middlebury College By Eric Utter

The feminist golf course consists of 11 holes, each of which focuses on a “reproductive justice” topic such as “foster care, incarceration, abortion, contraception, sex education [and] crisis pregnancy centers.”

The first-ever “feminist” mini-golf course debuted recently at Middlebury College’s Kenyon Arena, courtesy of professors and students from a class called “Feminist Building.”

Middlebury College is famous—or infamous– for its unparalleled wokeness. For example, the school’s counseling director purports to believe that all psychological suffering is due to “whiteness, heteronormativity, [and] patriarchal systems.” Alrighty then. Its administrators have promised students that they would do everything in their power to prevent conservative speakers from coming to campus. (Middlebury students rioted when Charles Murray attempted to give a talk there.)

According to the Addison County Independent, the feminist golf course consists of 11 holes, each of which focuses on a “reproductive justice” topic such as “foster care, incarceration, abortion, contraception, sex education [and] crisis pregnancy centers.” Fun for the whole family! Course design director Rayn Bumstead stated, “The places where reproductive injustices occur are all around us, which means that possibilities for resistance are also all around us.” (Especially on hole number 3!)

Valley News dutifully reported: “[A]s players traversed the hand-built greens, putting balls through landscapes built to replicate sites where reproductive issues play out — a hospital, a kitchen, a courthouse, a classroom, a bar — they were confronted with manifestations of feminist ideas that were grounded in physicality.” A kitchen?

Yes. At the hole dubbed “Care Work,” participants must hold a baby doll “while putting their golf ball through a makeshift kitchen.” Because?

But there are other notable holes, of course. To wit, hole 6 offers players two entrances — one to an abortion clinic and the other to a crisis pregnancy center. The latter has “an infinitely more difficult putting trajectory” because it “articulate[s] the impact of crisis pregnancy centers, which aim to discourage people from getting abortions.” Which, of course, is bad.