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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Woke is truly going broke. Netflix is just the latest casualty Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/woke-is-truly-going-broke/

It looks like Susan Sontag was ahead of her time. Back in 1966, she (in)famously wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (After her own bout with cancer a few years later she emended that statement, noting that, on reflection, she thought it was unfair — to cancer.)

Back then, such statements were “provocative,” a euphemism for outrageously mendacious. But it wasn’t long before lots of white liberals, abetted by sundry black race-hustlers, got in on the game. To accompany its 1993 biennial exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art passed out little pins that said, “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.” It was fun to watch all the white females in black boots, bad hairdos and ill-fitting clothes trudge scowling through the galleries sporting that declaration of ideological submission.

Nowadays, of course, anti-white animus is all the rage wherever tribal wokeness accumulates and pools. “Critical Race Theory,” which began life in the academy, has metastasized down into primary school, throughout the corporate world and even into various agencies of the federal government where “workshops” (that’s English for what Maoists called “struggle sessions”) are convened to provide cathartic opportunities to declare and abominate one’s “whiteness” and the fifty shades of one’s “privilege.”

Racial aphrodisiacs like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (in a nutshell, practice anti-white racism) and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism fill the marketplace of stale ideas while Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, skirls about “white rage” and frantic exercises in malicious historical fantasy like the New York Times’s 1619 Project poison the hearts and minds of students across the country.

The Chinese have come up with one of the most penetrating epithets to describe this sickness. In 2010, some clever Chinese coined the term baizuo, which literally means “white left” but really means “sanctimonious liberal dysphoria.” It’s a menu-driven pathology in which, in the words of the political scientist Chenchen Zhang, “hypocritical humanitarians… advocate political correctness just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority.” A rancid pity is the motor of this enterprise — pity, and an unearned sense of forever unexpiated guilt. “Culpability suits us,” the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner observes, “it provides an alibi for our abdication.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: – – SUFFERING THE WORTHLESSNESS OF WOKEISM

https://www.tothepointnews.com/2022/05/suffering-the-worthlessness-of-wokeism/

We are witnessing a number of radical military, social, and political revolutions that are changing the United States—and the world—in fundamental ways that we still have not appreciated.

The taboo about never mentioning the first-strike use of nuclear weapons in a major conventional war is now apparently over. Vladimir Putin routinely threatens their use. Communist China hints at its growing nuclear capability and is hell-bent on rushing into production a huge new nuclear missile force. The world is defining nuclear incineration down.

The more China and North Korea talk about nukes, the more necessary it is that uneasy democracies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will make adjustments. And the more the United States bows out of its prior role of extending its nuclear umbrella over Western democracies, the more likely these societies will consider going nuclear themselves.

Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons—and its patrons Russia and China seem to be ensuring that it will—then the long feared but heretofore never reified nuclear Middle East arms race will finally break out, as the petro-rich Arab world tries to deter Iran’s unhinged theocrats.

There is also a revolutionary vacuum occurring abroad. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are trying to figure out whether there is still any old-style American deterrence, or whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the customs and traditions of the United States even more than they do.

Lots of disasters have contributed to the current perilous state of affairs, including the precipitous American retreat from and humiliation in Afghanistan. Add in voluntary cutbacks in oil and gas production by the West, and the subsequent embarrassment of a superpower beseeching thuggish regimes such as Venezuela to send us their energy.

The politicized transformation of the U.S. military from a meritocratic force focused on wartime lethality into an extension of the social welfare state driven by diversity, equity and inclusion has encouraged our enemies to take risks they otherwise might not have taken.

Clarence Thomas Reveals When He Plans to Leave the Supreme Court By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/17/clarence-thomas-reveals-when-he-plans-to-leave-the-supreme-court-n1598613

In recent weeks, left-wing activists have been calling for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the bench or resign because of his wife’s activism in conservative politics.

Over the weekend, Justice Thomas revealed when he actually plans to leave the Supreme Court, and a lot of people aren’t going to be happy about it.

“One of the things I say in response to the media, when they talk about, especially early on … about the way I do my job, I said, ‘I will absolutely leave the Court when I do my job as poorly as you do yours.’ And that was meant as a compliment, really,” Thomas said during an interview at a conference in Dallas.

“It really is good to be me. It really is,” he added.

How Dare He Pick on Communism? Once again, Florida’s Ron DeSantis proves he has all the right enemies. By Bruce Bawer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/17/how-dare-he-pick-on-communism/

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, you just might be named Ron DeSantis.

Let’s recap. On April 22, the Florida governor signed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which, in the words of USA Today, “prohibits any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex or national origin.”

The law was necessary because, as you can see in any number of YouTube videos of school-board meetings around the country, young children have indeed been taught, in accordance with critical race theory and other poisonous postmodern pap, that if they’re white or male they’re oppressors, bearing guilt for the actions of long-dead people who looked like them, and if they’re black or female, by the same logic, they’re victims. 

Six days later, DeSantis signed the “Parental Rights in Education Act,” which forbids kindergarten teachers in Florida from talking to their pupils about such topics as masturbation, ejaculation, and oral sex—an act his enemies dishonestly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

This law was necessary too, because, as you can see in other videos (many of which have been curated on the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account) young schoolchildren are indeed being taught all kinds of things about sex that nobody, until the day before yesterday, would have considered remotely appropriate. 

Then, on May 9, DeSantis signed a third bill. It designates November 7 of each year as “Victims of Communism Day” and mandates that schoolchildren in Florida be taught about Communism for at least 45 minutes a year.

Like the two laws before it, this one, too, was necessary. All American schools teach about Nazism, and make it clear to students that Hitler was evil.

But Communism? Stalin? Not so much.

Critical Race Theory has infected 80% of the top US medical schools By Peter Barry Chowka

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/critical_race_theory_has_infected_80_of_the_top_us_medical_schools.html

The U.S. medical establishment is in the process of absurdly identifying “racism” as the major determinant in health care outcomes.

Last January, I wrote about how the Biden administration was “institutionalizing medical racism nationwide.”  In a previous article in April 2021, I reported how “Medical Racism — Preferential Treatments for Blacks over Whites — Is Here.”  Yesterday, Fox News’s Brian Flood advanced this underreported story by noting how 39 of the nation’s 50 top medical schools have mandated Critical Race Theory training for their medical students.

At least 39 of America’s 50 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training or coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org, which monitors CRT curricula and training in higher education. 

Earlier this year, CriticalRace.org found that CRT was prevelant in medical schools across the country. The project from Legal Insurrection Foundation, a non-profit devoted to campus free speech and academic freedom, has since expanded its database and found even more elite medical schools are focusing on “racialization” of medicine. 

“The national alarm should be sounding over the racialization of medical school education. The swiftness and depth to which race-focused social justice education has penetrated medical schools reflects the broader disturbing trends in higher education,” Legal Insurrection founder William A. Jacobson told Fox News Digital.

“Follow the science” in medical academia has now taken a backseat to “follow the CRT woke,” as medical schools around the country have fallen sway to the Marxist theory of radical Critical Race propagandists.

The Mass Shooting Blame Game The despicable rush to blame a deranged killer on Republicans

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-massacre-blame-game-buffalo-shooting-payton-gendron-democrats-media-race-11652825519?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

American politics these days never fails to meet the public’s low expectations. The latest example is the transparently political attempt by Democrats and their media allies to blame political opponents for the murderous rampage of Payton Gendron in Buffalo.

As so often these days with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looking over his shoulder, the exploiter in chief is New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. He used the moment to blame the Democratic Party’s recently unveiled, and focus-group tested, election campaign theme: “MAGA Republicans.”

“Every time MAGA Republicans or pundits vilify wrongly immigrants and call them invaders, every time they falsely claim that millions of undocumented people cast ballots in our elections, and every time loud bigoted voices bemoan the disintegration of an imagined ‘classic’ America, the subtext is clear: these hard-right MAGA Republicans argue that people of color and minority communities are somehow posing a threat—a threat—to the American way of life.”

He added: “This is replacement theory in a nutshell. It is a dangerous and a deeply anti-American worldview. It’s poisoning people’s minds who spend hours wandering the darkest wastelands of the internet.”

We’ve supported immigration longer than Mr. Schumer has been in Congress, and politicians should be careful in their rhetoric. But note his logic of massacre causation: Political opposition to unchecked immigration, or support for ballot integrity and American values, drove Payton Gendron to kill 10 African-Americans at a Buffalo supermarket. Oh, and Mr. Schumer also threw in Fox News (where we have a TV show) as fellow travelers in domestic terrorism.

Judge Jackson Won’t Say Dobbs Leak Is Wrong and Won’t Object to Protests at Her Soon-to-Be Colleagues’ Homes Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/judge-jackson-wont-say-dobbs-leak-is-wrong-and-wont-object-to-protests-at-her-soon-to-be-colleagues-homes/?

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court after the current term ends in a few weeks, sat for an interview by the Washington Post. She was asked about the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, and the consequent demonstrations at the homes of several justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as conservative justices identified in media reporting as having voted with Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the interview:

Q: What was your response when you when you saw the draft leak [of a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade]?

A: Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.

Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?

A: I can’t answer that.

Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?

A: I don’t have any comment.

This ranges from somewhere between cowardly and sinister, much like the failure of the justices to issue a joint statement that echoes the chief justice’s condemnation of the leak and statement of determination to identify the leaker, and that condemns the protests, which violate federal law.

Lawyers for Radical Change The legal profession, once a guardian of republican government, is now a force for social upheaval. John O. McGinnis

https://www.city-journal.org/lawyers-for-radical-change

The transformation of the legal profession marks a fundamental change in American democracy. In the republic’s early days, lawyers provided ballast for stability and served as an anchor against excessive populism. The judiciary’s sober attachment to formal order was a primary reason for giving it the power to review the constitutionality of legislation. Law was the profession most likely to preserve the enduring framework of republican government against the mutable passions of the hour.

Nowadays, lawyers are a force for often-radical progressive change. Nothing symbolizes that shift better than the American Bar Association. Once an embodiment of conservatism, it has been captured by the Left. Its resolutions at its annual meeting constitute a wish list of Democratic Party proposals. It also deploys its influence in the accreditation process of law schools to make them even more monolithically left-wing than they already are.

The reasons for the shift lie, at least in part, in the reorientation of lawyers’ interests. Since the birth of the modern regulatory state, lawyers are no longer primarily the allies of commercial classes, as they were in the early republic, but instead the technocrats and enablers of regulation and redistribution. The more the nation intervenes in economic affairs to regulate and redistribute, the greater slice of compliance costs and transfer payments lawyers can expect to receive. Thus, they cannot be counted on as supporters of property rights or even of a stable rule of law. Their interest lies frequently in dynamic forms of legal transformation and the uncertainty they bring. Far from supporting a sound, established social order, they are likely to seek to undermine it. Only an ideological attachment to older forms of legal orders, like that which Federalist Society members manifest, can call lawyers back to the essential role they play in the civic life of our republic.

Today’s American Bar Association uses its accreditation power to make law schools monolithically left-wing.

Ultra-MAGA? More Like Ultra-Incompetent. Scott McKay

https://spectator.org/ultra-maga-more-like-ultra-incompetent/

Remember Anita Dunn? You might have heard the name once or twice.

The legacy corporate media, particularly on the East Coast, has here and there delivered puff pieces touting Dunn as an expert message-maker and political brain. She, in her role as a publicity generator, probably planted those. Her firm SKD Knickerbocker is known as one of the more expensive PR and publicity firms in New York.

That would indicate Anita Dunn is good at her job. But don’t be quite so sure about that.

If you remember all the way back to the beginning of when anybody had heard of Anita Dunn you’ll likely remember this… HERE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2FVEe7wCzs

When that video surfaced at the beginning of the Obama administration, Dunn was quietly packed off from her government job and she set out on her private-sector course. It turns out that you can go quite far as a Maoist in today’s Democrat Party, but not if the general public is made aware of it.

It scares the fish away.

So Anita Dunn’s greatest failing as a message-maker came from telling too much truth.

Perhaps she’s learned from that, but either way, the smoking ruins of Team Obama, which now exists as Team Biden, have brought Anita Dunn back for another colossal PR gaffe. It turns out that Dunn was the architect of the classic blunder in which Joe Biden was trotted out to assail Donald Trump, and the new wave of confrontational conservative (or revivalist, as I continue to put it) political candidates plying their trade in races across the country as Republicans prepare to retake majorities on Capitol Hill, as “Ultra-MAGA” extremists.

President Joe Biden’s “ultra-MAGA” label was the result of a six-month research investigation led by top Democratic operatives searching for an edge in the November elections, according to a new report.

The performative outrage over Tucker Carlson He’s being blamed for the Buffalo shooting despite never being mentioned by the killer: Stephen L. Miller

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-performative-outrage-over-tucker-carlson/

On February 12, 2013, Christopher Dorner, a former police officer, committed a string of murders around Los Angeles. The multiple killings spurred a days-long manhunt that ended with his suicide in a cabin. Previously Dorner had sent a manifesto to Anderson Cooper of CNN, whom he praised, along with several other CNN and MSNBC personalities. “Willie Geist, you’re a talented and charismatic journalist,” he proclaimed.

“Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Pat Harvey, Brian Williams, Soledad O’Brien, Wolf Blitzer, Meredith Viera, Tavis Smiley, and Anderson Cooper, keep up the great work and follow Cronkite’s lead. I hold many of you in the same regard as Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings.” he wrote.

He even went on to praise then-Vice President Joe Biden: “Mr. Vice President, do your due diligence when formulating a concise and permanent national AWB plan. Future generations of Americans depend on your plan and advisement to the president. I’ve always been a fan of yours and consider you one of the few genuine and charismatic politicians. Damn, sounds like an oxymoron calling you an honest politician. It’s the truth.”