CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s current straits represent the victory of 1960s radicals Roger Kimball

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/06/29/americas-current-straits-represent-the-victory-of-1960s-radicals/

Many people think the chance to say “I told you so” is a source of pleasure. This isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes one’s insight is more mournful than gratifying.

A case in point: Back in September 1982, in a note on the inaugural issue of The New Criterion, the late Hilton Kramer, the founding ­editor of the magazine I lead, wrote: “We are still living in the aftermath of the insidious assault on the mind that was one of the most repulsive features of the radical movement of the 1960s. The cultural consequences of this leftward turn in our political life have been far graver than is commonly supposed.”

Indeed. A good index of the success of a cultural revolution is the ­extent to which it manages to render the ideas and values it set out to subvert not merely “problematic” but inert. A counterculture has really triumphed when it ceases to ­encounter significant resistance, when its values seem not merely victorious but inevitable.

That is where we are today.

America’s cultural revolution, launched in the late 1960s and never quite stopped, has always been a Janus-faced phenomenon. One face was the Boomers’ euphoric hedonism and disregard for the moral guardrails of tradition and authority — the “revolution” of easy sex and relentlessly bad taste that now defines our aesthetics and cultural arrangements.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Silent Majority, Ignored by Biden, Readies Backlash

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/national/silent-majority-ignored-by-biden-readies-backlash/91175/

The current speculation about a likely Joe Biden victory in the November presidential election ignores a number of extraordinary factors. Since the speculation is in the press and the press is overwhelmingly hostile to President Trump, there is a spontaneous urge to consider his declining fortunes in the polls as a vindication of both their professionalism and their prophetic talents. Their self-confidence is misplaced.

In the last four months the United States has endured the greatest public health crisis in a century, requiring a substantial economic shutdown that has induced the swiftest and most profound economic recession since the 1930s, followed by the worst rioting and public disorder, and the greatest racial strife in more than 50 years. It is not surprising that the president has lost some ground in the polls.

Four months ago, in the midst of perhaps the most flourishing economy in American history, Mr. Trump’s innumerable enemies were sinking into an almost resigned state of gloom about his reelection. Since the pandemic and its consequences seemed to produce a benign deliverance for the president’s enemies — a political miracle — it has temporarily deprived most of the anti-Trump media of any perspective.

It has transported them to pinnacles of righteous overconfidence, and it has emboldened the furtive anti-Trump and NeverTrump Republicans to come snorting out of the undergrowth, bellowing their long-muted hostility to the incumbent. Now they openly cavort with the Biden Democrats.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Ruthie Blum The ‘right’ kind of gay pride Israeli Public Security Minister Amir Ohana is seen as a traitor by the LGBTQ community for being on the wrong side of the left.

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-right-kind-of-gay-pride/

Israeli Public Security Minister Amir Ohana—a proud member of the LGBTQ community and equally proud member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party—has said that “being attracted to men doesn’t mean you have to believe in creating a Palestinian state.”

Ohana made that statement during an interview with The New York Times a year ago in June, when Netanyahu appointed him interim justice minister.

Ohana—a lawyer, a major in the reserves and a veteran of the Shin Bet—is hated by the left for the policies that he promotes and the bills that he has drafted. Among the latter is the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

But it is Ohana’s view of judiciary overreach that has earned him the greatest wrath among his detractors. When he was first appointed justice minister, he made a statement to the effect that not all Supreme Court decisions should be honored.

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In the wake of the ensuing uproar from the disingenuous “defenders of democracy”—those who don’t believe in the separation of powers as long as the judges that they deem politically correct are occupying the bench—Channel 12’s Amit Segal asked Ohana if he really meant what he had said.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Strategies of Dementia Politics By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/joe-biden-campaign-strategy-hide-biden-stoke-chaos-obstruct-recovery/

Stoke chaos, obstruct economic recovery, and hide Biden in the basement till Election Day.

Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.

I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.

Often Biden cannot finish a sentence. Names are vague eddies in his mind’s river of forgetfulness. He is in a far more dire mental state than a physically failing FDR was in his 1944 campaign for a fourth term.

The earlier career of a healthy Biden illustrates that he was not especially sharp even when in control of most of his faculties. We recall the former sane/nutty Biden of Neal Kinnock plagiarism, his “put y’all in chains” demagoguery, the studied racism of Biden’s riffs about a “clean” and well-spoken Obama, and the sane/insane Corn Pop stories. All are the trademark of a once fool Joe Biden, who was at least alert when compared with his current catalepsy. If Donald Trump can be ungrammatical, Biden is agrammatical — he simply streams together half-thoughts without syntax and then abandons the sentence entirely.

If Trump repeats vocabulary, Biden increasingly searches for words, any noun, whatever its irrelevance to the point he is making. Biden seems to suffer dyscognitive seizures, in which for moments he has no idea what he is doing or saying or where he is — a tragic, nearly epileptic condition. In scary episodes, the pale, scaly, and frozen visage of Biden appears almost reptilian, like a lizard freezing and remaining stationary as it struggles to process signals of perceived danger.

Inserting memorized answers into rehearsed questions, as if the entire con was spontaneous, only reveals how his once episodic dementia has become chronic as he loses his prompt and place. It was understandable that his handlers saw opportunity in secluding Biden during Trump’s tweeting, alongside the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the rioting that in voters’ minds had equated fear of chaos with the culpability of the current commander in chief.

BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America By virtue of the unsettling, bracing originality of his ideas, Mencken is rendered as inaccessible to the American reader today as an alien from deep space. By Ilana Mercer

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/29/h-l-mencken-misfit-in-21st-century-america/

H.L. Mencken, a contrarian polemicist and the consummate critic, who wrote prolifically and prodigiously from 1899 until 1948, may no longer seem relevant, but the fault would not be his.

Mencken was a well-read bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to immutable truth. He was also a brilliant satirist and a writer whose facility with the English idiom and grasp of intellectual history remain unsurpassed.  

How can a phenom like Mencken appeal in our age, The Age of the Idiot? 

He can’t. He should, but he can’t.

Henry Louis Mencken cannot appeal to the bumper crops of humorless, dour “dunderheads” America is now siring. He cannot resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase.

How could Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America in which the rules of syntax are passé, pronouns are politicized and neutered, torrential prolixity is in, concision and precision are out, and “editors” excise nothing, preferring to let mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like gravy over a tablecloth?   

Not for nothing did one wag say that the history of ideas is the history of words. And since Mencken was, first and foremost, a man of ideas (and hence, words)—no discussion of Mencken and his ideas is complete without a reference to English, the language he deployed with such verve and vim. 

Thus, when “a few newspaper smarties protested” Mencken’s verbal virtuosity, Mencken tartly noted, in his Preface to A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949): “Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives . . . are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses. Let them . . . leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.” 

Written at a considerable level of abstraction, for a prosaic people that, by Mencken’s estimation, “cannot grasp an abstraction,” a Mencken essay is certain to furrow the brow of the above-average American reader, writer, and editor these days. Unlike the tracts disgorged by Conservatism, Inc., the least complicated of Mencken’s editorial writings would place excessive demands on the unsupple minds of young activists, who are busy striking a selfie on social media or running to CPUKE conferences.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Andy Ngo: Do Politicians Really Want Police to ‘Let the Rioters Destroy and Kill’ With Impunity? By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/06/29/andy-ngo-eviscerates-nadlers-claim-that-antifas-role-in-riots-is-imaginary-n586315

On Monday, Andy Ngo, editor-at-large at The Post Millennial, testified before the House Oversight Committee, powerfully rebutting Rep. Jerry Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) insistence that when it comes to the protests and riots spreading across America after the horrific police killing of George Floyd, the presence of antifa instigators is “imaginary.” Ngo, who has suffered serious injury from antifa attacks, is a living rebuke to such claims.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted that Ngo’s name did not appear on the Democrats’ web page for the hearing. “Mr. Ngo, why do Democrats try to ignore you?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t know if it’s intentional,” Ngo responded. “I’ve written for very major publications about this very violent threat.” He noted that Portland has experienced “thirty-straight days of violent rioting downtown” following protests over the death of George Floyd.

Jordan asked Ngo to respond to the claim that antifa is “imaginary.”

“Yes, it’s real,” the journalist responded. “When I heard that, I was quite surprised.” He held up police affidavits in criminal cases against self-described members of antifa.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will Governors Make The Same Mistake Twice With Lockdowns?

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/29/will-governors-make-the-same-mistake-twice-with-lockdowns/

With a recent spike in coronavirus infections, no doubt due to the nationwide riots and demonstrations whipped up by the Democrats since late May, some governors are reversing their earlier easing of economic restrictions. It’s a huge and costly mistake.

At least 10 states and cities are either putting their reopenings on hold or actually imposing new lockdown rules.

Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington have hit the “pause” button, according to recent press reports. Meanwhile, the U.S.’ three most populous states, California, Florida and Texas, have reversed their reopenings, in essence reimposing a lockdown.

Supposedly it’s a response to 27 states reporting big rises in new coronavirus cases.

But those spikes have two main causes: One, more testing finds more infections. So cases are naturally “spiking”. Two, recent demonstrations, riots and other non-socially distanced activities led to an increase — with nary a peep from the Democratic “progressive” left, which cynically hopes to ride the wave of coronavirus cases into the White House and a congressional majority.

In fact, the data are clear. The lockdowns had no real impact on the virus’ spread. But they did have a devastating impact on the economies where they were introduced.

“Residents and business owners in states under a COVID shutdown mandate from their governors are suffering far more job loss,” according to data crunched by the Kansas Policy Institute. “May private-sector employment in those 43 states was 13.1% lower than a year ago, but the states not shut down by their governors only lost 7.7% of their private job base.”

So, if politicians do their citizens the non-favor of re-closing parts of their economies in the mistaken belief that doing so will halt the spread of coronavirus, they will be making a major error, one that will cost us dearly as a nation.

“Even if lockdowns were the best strategy, the authorities, espousing and imposing them repeatedly, undermined their legitimacy,” wrote former U.S. Treasury official (and Issues & Insights contributor) J.T. Young on The Hill web site. “Authorities have so discredited the lockdowns that there is little chance lockdowns can be reimposed at their prior level — even if they are needed.” 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Corporate Thought Police by Judith Bergman

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16128/corporate-thought-police

Sweden has been steeped in political correctness for decades; its failed immigration policies, which have had multiple negative consequences, as reported by Gatestone Institute, have long been taboo.

The idea that free speech is not a fundamental liberty that must be defended at all costs runs deep in Sweden.

Radio personality and NBA announcer Grant Napear was fired from his radio show at KHTK radio and resigned as the Sacramento Kings play-by-play TV announcer after tweeting on June 1, “All Lives Matter… every single one!”, in reference to protests by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

A young Democrat data scientist, David Shor, was fired by the research firm for which he was working, Civis Analytics, after tweeting about the electoral effectiveness of peaceful protest as opposed to violent protest.

Our corporate thought police have been working overtime, and from the look of it, they are only beginning.

Mats Skogkär, a journalist and editorial writer at one of Sweden’s largest regional newspapers, Sydsvenskan, was recently demoted from editorial writer to a non-writing position for tweeting the following:

“When you see the Left’s almost sexual excitement over the riots in the United States, over the looting, fires and violence, it also becomes easier to understand its desire to create similar conditions here with a large… segregated underclass of migrants”.

“A tweet way over the line,” wrote Jonas Kanje, editor in chief at Sydsvenskan, after receiving backlash on Twitter. “A way to express yourself that Sydsvenskan can never support. I dissociate myself from it.”

According to the Swedish publishing house Bonnier, which owns Sydsvenskan, “Bonnier defends freedom of expression… a diversity of voices and perspectives should be heard in our media”.

Less than a week later, Sören Åkeby, who had an advisory role on the board of the Swedish football team, ÖFK, was let go by the board for sharing a Facebook post that “directly violate[s] ÖFK’s values”. The post that Åkeby shared contained the following:

“Another Swede murdered by a racial stranger!… [The boy] was stabbed when he helped a Swedish girl who was being raped by a Somali… Don’t stand by and watch your own people get murdered, raped and humiliated. Organize and resist this alien invasion. We are at war!”

“I read it too quickly and just [shared it],” Åkeby apologized.

“I certainly don’t have those (thoughts)… I have trained foreign players for more or less all my life… For me, this became so surreal… I’m definitely not a racist. I’ll take it back. I will delete the posts immediately if it is interpreted this way. I didn’t mean to.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Future of Israel’s Borders: International Law and Islamic Law. Part I by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16172/israel-borders-law

Today’s Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews and glorify — and handsomely profit from — violence against them.

It is common today to find references to Palestine as a mainly Muslim Arab state that has supposedly been “stolen” by Jews, or promised but not given to those people who describe themselves as Palestinians. That is an immense misconception, albeit one that seems to influence political and legal thinking internationally, especially among people who would like to believe it.

In a clearer understanding [of international law], Israel’s planned move appears to be legal.

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism…. [T]he moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.” — PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 31, 1977.

In general, taking territory from another country is treated under international law as illegal. Much of our sense that such illegality is as much morally wrong as it is legally prohibited comes from historical realities in modern history. The Nazi German takeovers of numerous countries across Europe between 1938 and 1945, together with the brutality with which they were carried out, stand even today as notorious examples of unacceptable behaviour in an attempt to dominate other peoples without the least pretence of legality of purpose or practice. More recently, the Russian Federation’s 2014 invasion of Crimea has caused unnecessary conflict with Ukraine and damaged Russia’s own international reputation.

Article 2 of the first chapter of the United Nations Charter declares:

“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

This was formulated in 1945, in a very understandable response to the aggressions by Nazi Germany. It remains a valid ruling on the dangers posed by powerful nations should they too choose to use force to take over neighbouring territories. Even so, Article 2 was contravened by China in 1959 when it overran Tibet; by Turkey in 1974 when it invaded northern Cyprus, and is constantly contravened by Iran — with the evident complicity of most of the members of the UN — in its expansions into Iraq, Syria, Yemen ad Lebanon, as well as its 41-year-long threats to obliterate a fellow UN member state, Israel.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

315 College Deans Tell Applicants, Academics Unimportant, Protesting for Racial Justice Is Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/06/315-college-deans-tell-applicants-academics-daniel-greenfield/

If you thought that the modern campus was a warren of safe spaces, radical politics, and neutered learning, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Here’s a statement by 315 college deans hot and fresh off the Harvard site about their priorities for incoming students.

This statement was developed in collaboration with admissions leaders and has been endorsed by leaders at more than 315 institutions across the United States. It describes what college admissions offices value and expect—and don’t expect—from students during the pandemic.

I’ll just give you the bullet points to show off the new normal.