Wrongthink on Race with Glenn C. Loury A conversation with one of our sharpest cultural critics. Bari Weiss

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/wrongthink-on-race-with-glenn-c-loury

Four decades ago, Glenn C. Loury became the first tenured black professor of economics in Harvard’s history. Ever since then, he has made waves for his willingness to buck the elite intellectual establishment; for his iconoclastic ideas about race and inequality; and for his incisive cultural criticism. 

He is a man of many apparent contradictions: he rails against the divisiveness of woke politics from his post as the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics Brown University, one of America’s most left wing campuses. He worries about what the death of God means for the country — though he calls his own past religious beliefs a “benevolent self-delusion,” even as he admits they saved his life. In the ‘80s, Glenn challenged his fellow black Americans to combat the “enemy from within,” while he himself battled personal demons like addiction. 

For my part, I think Glenn embodies what the philosophers call a man in full. Glenn is a man who, in a time of lies told for the sake of political convenience, strives to tell the truth even when the truth is hard. Or complicated. Or an affront to our feelings. Or contradicts what we wish were true.  

On today’s episode of Honestly we discuss: race, racism, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Tony Timpa, school choice, standardized tests, crack, sexual infidelity, Christianity, the Nation of Islam, neoconservatism, and pretty much every other hot-button subject you can imagine.

Plus, Glenn’s own remarkable life story and what it says about America.

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Going Batty Over Climate Change Michael Kile

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/09/going-batty-over-climate-change/

We live in an age where Climate Change™ has replaced God as the explanation for everything. The list of phenomena it allegedly causes grows ever longer. More and more young people seem to be coming down with climate anxiety and ecological distress. In a recent survey led by Bath University, UK, over half of ten thousand respondents between 16 and 25 believe they are doomed and have no future.

The twenty-sixth United Nations annual climate Conference of the Parties (COP) is only weeks away.  After a quarter of a century of concern and another two billion people on the planet, is it too late to save us from a french-fry fate? Given the sombre mood, an attempt to link climate change with the COVID pandemic was inevitable. As if on cue, a “short communication” appeared in May this year in Science of The Total Environment, Volume 767:

“Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2”.

The three authors: Robert M Beyer and Andrea Manica (Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) and Camilo Mora (Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’I, Manoa). Beyer has since taken up a European research fellowship at the alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Hysteria Impact Research. They argue that bats are the likely zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. The local number of coronaviruses is said to correlate with “bat species richness”, with climate change shifting the global distribution of bats. This “bat richness” has strongly increased the likelihood of SARS-CoV-1 and 2 outbreaks; hence climate change may have been an important factor in these outbreaks.

The Real Palestinian ‘Heroes’: Terrorists by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17764/palestinian-heroes-terrorists

As far as [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas and the PA leadership are concerned, any Palestinian who joins the jihad (holy war) against Israel and Jews and gets killed, wounded or imprisoned is a “hero” and a “freedom fighter.” This is the same PA that the Biden administration is now working to strengthen.

This approach by the PA leadership has sent a message to generation after generation among the Palestinians that the murder or injuring of a Jew is a noble deed that earns the perpetrator boundless respect – even adoration.

This is the theater of the absurd, where a senior Palestinian official condemns Israel for making an effort to recapture convicted terrorists who murdered and injured several Jews and are serving lengthy sentences. Israel, according to this official, should stand aside while terrorists escape from prison and return to murdering Jews.

What Abbas, the PLO and Fatah have been saying – in Arabic – about the terrorists over the past few days reveals the Biden administration’s talk about reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process for what it really is: a fatal phantasm.

Under such circumstances, how could Abbas – or any Palestinian leader – ever return to the negotiating table with Israel, regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars the Biden administration decides to waste on the Palestinians’ worthless words.

While many international media outlets focused their attention on the escape of six Palestinian inmates from an Israeli prison on September 6, as well as the ensuing dramatic manhunt launched by thousands of Israeli police officers and soldiers, only a few – if any – reported on the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership’s ongoing glorification of terrorists.

Biden’s Immigration Treachery Threatens the Nation, Not Just National Security By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/bidens-immigration-treachery-threatens-the-nation-not-just-national-security/

The president is telling Texas and other border states that the federal government will neither protect them nor allow them to protect themselves.

T he photographs that should be seared in your memory from the Del Rio debacle are not those of Border Patrol agents on horseback, defamed by their federal superiors — and in particular, by President Biden himself — for daring to do their job.

Focus instead on the photos of police vehicles arrayed in long, imposing rows on the American side of the river — state police vehicles, ordered to secure the border by the governor of Texas.

Does Governor Abbott have the authority to deploy a “steel wall” of Lone Star State troopers?  Well, he has the raw power to do it, and in crisis conditions, that is what tends to matter. And — capped by White House oracle Jen Psaki’s astonishing assertion that the “migrants” Democrats are inviting into our country don’t need the COVID vaccines Biden is mandating for Americans because “they are not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time” — the administration’s ineptitude was sufficiently humiliating that Biden hasn’t challenged Abbott’s démarche . . . yet, anyway.

As it happens, I believe the state of Texas does have the authority to exclude illegal aliens. But it is a debatable question thanks to a century of federal jurisprudence, culminating in Obama-era Supreme Court decisions that sided with the federal government’s willful refusal to perform its basic constitutional duties, and against the basic constitutional principle of state sovereignty — of which self-defense is an ineliminable element.

Another leftist gets red-pilled by the truth By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/another_leftist_gets_redpilled_by_the_truth.html

Several honest leftists have been red-pilled—that is, their eyes have been opened politically—because of the Democrats’ tyrannical moves in 2020/2021, That list includes Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolf, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Maher. They’re not Republicans, by any means, but their disgust with their party is growing. The most recent addition to this cavalcade of honest leftists may be British comedian Russell Brand, who just discovered the truth about Russiagate.

Brand started as a stand-up comedian and then moved into TV and movie stints in both Britain and America. Many Americans came to know about him because of his two-year-long marriage to Katy Perry, which ended when his self-admitted drug, pornography, and sex addictions came to the fore. (If you read about his early life, you can see how he ended up with those problems.) He’s a relatively bright guy and can be very funny.

Politically, Brand is a man of the left. In 2009, along with every other leftist, he attacked Israel for the Gaza incursion. By 2013, Brand had pretty much given up comedy in favor of political activism and commentary…always from the left. He’s all about climate change, sought a socialist revolution in England, advocates for decriminalizing drugs, opposed Brexit, and supports just about any other leftist cause de jour.

For seven years now, Brand has done a one-man video podcast that looks at news and social issues from his self-admitted leftist viewpoint. He’s got almost 4 million subscribers, so he has a bully pulpit for his ideas. The problem for Brand of late is that, while he may be a leftist, in his own way he’s intellectually honest. In the crazy world of 2021, that’s making it difficult for him to maintain a pure leftist attitude. He’s discovering that the people he admired and supported don’t just have feet of clay but are also truly terrible people.

Six days ago, Brand had his mind-blown (call it swallowing a red pill) when he discovered that the entire Russiagate scandal that ran for most of Trump’s presidency and seriously damaged his ability to govern, was a Clinton hoax. The video is only 15 minutes long but Brand leads with his conclusion: He’s a leftist and no fan of Trump but he just had his mind blown. He is “in awe, gobsmacked, flabbergasted, and startled” by which he learned. Continue to listen to him and you’ll see a man in the beginning stages of disillusionment, long may it continue:

(Incidentally, have you noticed that the leftists’ problem isn’t that Russia is totalitarian because it’s always been totalitarian? Their real problem is that Putin is a garden-variety oligarch, rather than a communist. They liked the Soviet Union.”)

It’s Time To End Government-Run Schooling We need to bulldoze the education establishment and privatize schools. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/29/its-time-to-end-government-run-schooling/

The National Center for Education Statistics recently published K-12 enrollment data for the 2020–21 school year, and it showed a 3 percent drop—about 1.5 million kids from the previous year. With a total k–12 enrollment of about 51 million students in the United States, that equates to a loss of 1.5 million children. The largest segment of the leavers and no-shows were kindergarteners and pre-k kids, whose enrollment dropped by 13 percent last year. As American Enterprise Institute policy maven Rick Hess points out, “Such figures are unprecedented; public school enrollment has grown almost every year during the 21st century, with any declines coming in well under 1%.” 

While the main reason for the exit is COVID-related, there are other reasons to bail. The latest NAEP—also known as the nation’s report card—reveals that just 37 percent of U.S. 12th-grade students are proficient in reading and a pitiful 24 percent are proficient in math. It’s important to note that these results are from 2019, before the teacher union orchestrated COVID hysteria forced schools across the country to shut down.

So where are the escapees going? Some parents are availing themselves of the new private school options throughout the country. According to the latest available data, 18 states have created seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones this year.

Charter schools also have experienced more growth in 2020-21 than they have in the past six years, according to data released last week from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. While traditional public schools were losing students, independently-run charter schools in 39 states saw an influx of 240,000 new students, a 7 percent increase over last year, more than double the rate of growth from the prior year.

Additionally, homeschooling has been booming. The Census Bureau reports that between 2012 and 2020, the number of homeschooling families remained steady at around 3.3 percent. But by May 2020, about 5.4 percent of U.S. households with school-aged children reported they were homeschooling. And by October 2020, the number jumped to 11.1 percent.

With so many government-run schools not meeting their customers’ expectations, perhaps it’s time to think about doing away with them. Entirely. I know I will be charged with heresy—being a right-wing shill for corporations, anti-union, a crackpot, and worse, in some quarters, but let’s get real. As a country we did quite well before the government stuck its large bureaucratic nose into our lives, and we can do so again.

Our Porcine Two-Legged Wokeists Orwell would say of the woke Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders, LeBron James, or Ibram Kendi—and their supposed unwoke, but similarly rich enemies, “It was impossible to say which was which.” By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/29/our-porcine-two-legged-wokists/

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

—George Orwell, Animal Farm

What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?
Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000 a ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well attended to by masked Morlock servants.

Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?

For answers about these hypocritical wokeists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, Animal Farm, an array of animal characters—led by the thinking pigs of the farm—staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers. 

The antihuman animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).

Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged piggish revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life. 

The Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise—the rewards for revolutionary service.

The Murderous Anti-Semitism of the Effort to Kill Iron Dome Why the Left thinks it’s perfectly acceptable for Jews to die in the name of Palestinian “self-determination”. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/murderous-anti-semitism-effort-kill-iron-dome-richard-l-cravatts/

Even for Congressional Democrats who, in recent years, have shown a growing animosity and even cruelty toward Israel, last week’s effort to remove $1 billion of funding to maintain Israel’s Iron Dome defense system was particularly grotesque. Congressional “Squad” members, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and including Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), pressured the Democratic House leadership to strip funding to Israel for this key military technology that tracks and intercepts incoming rockets and has a success rate of doing so of over 90 percent. 

It is one thing to seek to deprive a country of offensive weapons out of a wish to minimize further conflict, reduce casualties of that country’s enemies, or based on a record of abusive or disproportionate use of weaponry in previous military engagements. But Iron Dome is a defensive weapon, which, in neutralizing incoming and potentially lethal rockets, saves Israeli lives by ensuring that Hamas rockets never reach their intended targets. It also, of course, saves Arab lives, as well, since the inevitable political and military Israeli response to high numbers of its citizens’ casualties that might well occur in Iron Dome’s absence would be more aggressive and prolonged retaliation against Hamas, along with unfortunate, but inevitable, civilian casualties—especially since Hamas regularly (and in violation of international law) embeds itself and fires its rockets from Gazan neighborhoods, mosques, hospitals, and other non-military locations.

Any sentient being understands that Iron Dome reduces deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians, and therefore its use ought to be continued and supported, but not, apparently, the radical Leftist Squad, whose decision to push for these funding cuts cannot be explained away by any other interpretation than that these members of Congress do not care at all about Jewish lives and are willing to sacrifice them in a hollow, though long professed, desire to promote Palestinian self-determination. In seeking social justice for the Arabs, these policymakers, and their fellow Israel-hating travelers, wish to level the playing field of military engagement, favoring the weak in the name of equity and justice.

The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law Hollywood veteran Greg Ellis delivers a gripping, first-person account of family breakdown – and the forces fueling it. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/respondent-exposing-cartel-family-law-jason-d-hill/

Family breakdown is the single greatest threat to American society. Every day, more than 4,000 children lose a parent because of our archaic and inhumane family-court system. Every day, ten divorced men commit suicide. And now, one in three children in our country is without a father.

The Respondent is Ellis’s personal story about a Hollywood dream razed by internal and external forces. Part memoir, part meditation, and part manifesto, it’s a timely and heartrending portrait of perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of the American legal system. Through its candor and moral strength, The Respondent offers guidance and hope. As such, it’s an indispensable read for not only parents enduring the grief of child separation, but all interested in learning about the gross overreach and unrelenting brutality of family law.

This book is a masterpiece and a gem on many levels. To begin with, Ellis is a brilliant writer and stylist. The prose is of another world—elegiac and full of pathos without becoming mawkishly sentimental. The writing is cinematic and evocative. The words create a lush visual image of the harrowing experiences Ellis experienced by losing custody of his children. If you want to learn how deeply family law is antipodal to the interests of the father—then read this book. If you want to learn how one innocent man survived the single-minded goal of his spouse to destroy his life and career, but who emerged with his dignity intact, his love of life burning incandescently, and the way his profound love for his sons have kept him living with sustained purpose and meaning—read this book.

I was struck by Greg Ellis’ graciousness throughout the book. In describing the toxic manner by which his ex-wife and ex-mother-in-law tried to set him up and destroy his life, Ellis does not resort to demonization of those vocationally called to destroy him. Rather, in a dignified and restrained manner he unfolds the chain of events that led to the crisis, orchestrated by his ex-wife, that found him being forced into a psychiatric unit.

The book is suspenseful and a real page-turner. Fathers matter. They love their children deeply and want to protect them. This is the story of a devoted father viewed as almost sub-human by the guardians and enforcers of family law. If your marriage is on the rocks and you honestly think divorce is a possibility—then read this book. It is chock full of profound insights about the nature of family law, and the hidden anti-male attitudes embedded in our culture that influence that law. Thousands of fathers like Greg Ellis have suffered unspeakable injustice by a legal system that regards men—by nature—as disposable, toxic and incapable of efficacious parenting.

How’s the Anti-Trump Doing? Not so good. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/hows-anti-trump-doing-not-so-good-bruce-thornton/

Joe Biden was touted by his supporters as the anti-Trump, the seasoned politician and “centrist” who had the experience, gravitas, and governing skills that the radical “demagogue” Donald Trump lacked. Supposedly, Biden also possessed the respect for “democratic norms” and the “empathy” lacking in the abrasive tweetster and crude-talking ex-reality show host. Elect Biden, the pitch went, and the “adults” will be back in charge, the sacred “norms” and “decorum” once again respected, and our status in the world restored.

This appeal, of course, depended on hyping Trump’s “mean” tweets and rhetoric, while ignoring his successful first term achievements both at home and abroad. It also required burnishing Biden’s decades of mediocrity and trimming, his gaffes and plagiarism, his unseemly attention to women and girls, and the stench of corruption wafting from his career. Indeed, the odor was so strong that his media and social media courtiers had to discredit, censor, and embargo the blockbuster New York Post story about son Hunter’s laptop and emails, which we now know is authentic and contains strong, corroborated evidence of Biden’s complicity in his son’s influence-peddling grift. And as the campaign progressed, the Dems’ media flaks were compelled to ignore as well the obvious signs of Biden’s cognitive decline.

But last November the Dems and the media pulled Biden across the finish line, leaving another bad odor of electoral anomalies the bipartisan establishment keeps declaring is actually the stink of conspiracy theories that––without a thorough investigation conducted to settle the issue–– they somehow know are in fact MAGA fantasies. Biden took office, and immediately began undoing Trump’s successes, as if to show that his policies, like his confected “presidential” persona, will be the antitheses of Trump’s.

In just eight months, we have now a record with which we can judge that governing principle.