NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Decolonisation and the Closing of the Western Mind: Sean Kelly

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/decolonisation-and-the-closing-of-the-western-mind/

EXCERPT:

It is nearly forty years since the University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom warned us about the stealthy takeover of US universities since the 1960s by intellectual relativism. In a prescient observation, he detected that it was leading to the “closing of the American mind”. There had been an increasing rejection of the foundations of a liberal education, namely the vigorous pursuit of objective truth through free and rational inquiry and the fundamental importance of great books and ideas for the understanding and defence of Western civilisation. It was being replaced by a new culture which fixated on group identity and historical grievances which saw the United States as the prime enemy. As Bruce Bawer pointed out in 2012, in an updated version of Bloom, this new ideology was destroying not only US universities but “the America of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the melting pot”. “Grievance studies”, namely women’s studies, black studies and queer studies, metastasised quickly in universities in America and abroad. They have produced several generations now of indoctrinated students, or “pod people”, who have gone on to spread in their places of work the seed of the ideology of white “oppression” of ethnic and other minorities. Regarded by its adherents as a great awakening (hence the term “woke”) of US society to the need for social justice, it has led to the denigration of US culture, the polarisation of its politics and the coarsening of public debate. It has torn the very fabric of American society.

The woke takeover of US universities and other institutions received a boost during the outbreak of mass hysteria and rioting which followed the death at police hands of a black petty criminal and drug addict, George Floyd, in Minneapolis in 2020 and its exploitation by the race hustlers of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is in the wake of this seemingly catalytic event that Doug Stokes takes up the story. He notes how President Biden on his first day in office in January 2021 signed the “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities” act. It is intended to tackle “the enormous human costs of systemic racism, persistent poverty and other disparities”. It was, in reality (and Stokes could have pointed this out) a reward to those notables who had got out the black vote for Biden in the recent election. The aim now was to transform American society in such a way as to benefit the 12.4 per cent of the US population who are black.

Federal law was to be used to force US institutions, including the universities, to change their allegedly “white supremacist” culture. In effect, this comes down to hiring more blacks for high positions in the US government, the universities and corporate America.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s New Enemy: Americans Who Accept Biology A new SPLC propaganda document claims to ‘expose’ a vast ‘Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network’ that’s supposedly targeting trans people.

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/12/27/the-splcs-new-enemy/

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 with a mission to fight poverty and racial discrimination. Its early litigation campaigns, which targeted the Ku Klux Klan and other overtly racist organizations, met with success, and the group soon came to be seen as an authoritative source in regard to right-wing extremism more generally. 

Another form of expertise the organization developed was in the area of marketing—especially when the market in question consisted of deep-pocketed urban liberals. As former SPLC staffer Bob Moser reported in a 2019 New Yorker article, the group has consistently taken on attention-grabbing urgent-seeming causes that its leaders knew could be leveraged as a means to gain publicity and—more importantly—donations. It’s no coincidence that the SPLC’s co-founder and long-time fundraising guru, Morris Dees, had previously operated a direct-mail business that sold cookbooks and tchotchkes. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees told a journalist in 1988.

The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center
The work at the S.P.L.C. could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us there, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.

Dees’ big fundraising break at the SPLC came when he got access to the direct-mail list from the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. The SPLC co-founder went on to maximize the SPLC’s revenues through what would now be known as targeted methods. According to one former legal colleague, for instance, Dees rarely used his middle name—Seligman—in SPLC mailings, except when it came to “Jewish zip codes.”

Thanks to Dees’ slick marketing expertise, the SPLC was eventually taking in more money than it paid out in operational expenses. (As of October 2022, its endowment fund was valued at almost US$640 million.) But over time, his hard-sell tactics began to alienate co-workers, as there was an obvious disconnect between the real class-based problems they observed in society and the fixations of the naïve northern donors whose wallets Dees was seeking to pry open.

“I felt that [Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on,” former SPLC attorney Deborah Ellis told Progressive writer John Egerton. “The Klan is no longer one of the South’s biggest problems—not because racism has gone away, but because the racists simply can’t get away with terrorism any more.”

On March 14, 2019, Dees—by now 82 years old, but still listed as the SPLC’s chief trial lawyer—was fired amid widespread rumors that he’d been the subject of internal sexual-harassment accusations. His affiliation was scrubbed from the group’s web site; and the organization’s president, Richard Cohen, cryptically (but damningly) declared that, “when one of our own fails to meet [SPLC] standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” (Less than two weeks later, Cohen himself left the organization, casting his resignation as part of a transition “to a new generation of leaders.”)

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Funding for Failure Even as its black students lag disastrously behind, the Los Angeles Unified School District pours more taxpayer dollars into racial and ideological indoctrination.

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/los-angeles-schools-are-funding-for-failure

For decades, progressives have attributed black students’ low academic skills to school underfunding. Attend any graduate education program or sit in on any legislative hearing, and you will hear that stingy white taxpayers deny majority-black schools the financial resources necessary to close the academic achievement gap. Americans are to imagine cash-starved inner-city classrooms that would make a prairie schoolhouse look luxurious—teachers forced to ration textbooks, students lacking pencils and paper, harried principals drowning in administrative duties due to the lack of staff.

A recently announced initiative from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the public school system in Los Angeles County, is a good place to test the underfunding theory. February 5, 2024, will mark the start of a district-wide “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” (Previous LAUSD “weeks of action” have included a week in October 2023 organized around “National Coming Out Day.”) The district has distributed a teacher “toolkit” of suggestions for conducting the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, compiled, as the toolkit notes, by the district’s “SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE.”

Here is our first clue for assessing the underfunding theory: any bureaucracy that slaps acronyms on its component parts is not a bare-bones organization. The names of its innumerable departmental byways must be abbreviated, lest they take up too much space in print or in speech.

“SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE” stand for the district’s School Mental Health bureaucracy, its Black Student Achievement Plan bureaucracy, and its Human Rights, Diversity and Equity bureaucracy. The HRDE bureaucracy is itself part of the Student Health and Human Services bureaucracy. Possessors of these sinecures are hidden from sight, far from the classroom. Funding such offices requires princely sums; the BSAP just received an additional $26 million in 2023, on top of its existing budget. The BSAP bankrolls counselors, climate advocates, and psychiatric social workers to work with black students in “high priority” schools. It doles out “Innovation Capacity-Building” grants of up to $100,000 to entities that promise to improve black achievement.

Any school system that can afford climate advocates (as part of a black uplift plan, no less) is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Any school system that runs a massive system of subcontracting for “psychiatric social workers” and “counselors” is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Such a system has more money than it knows what to do with. Indeed, the LAUSD budget for the 2022–23 school year was $20 billion—more than that of some nations. Divide that pot among the district’s 397,623 K-12 students, and taxpayers are paying the equivalent of an Ivy League tuition—over $50,000—for every student, every year. Add “clients” in other functions that the LAUSD has embraced— early education centers, infant centers, and adult education—and the district spends a still-lavish $35,341 per student.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Frontpage Magazine’s Man of the Year: The IDF Soldier In a year of defeatism and surrender, he is fighting back. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/frontpage-magazines-man-of-the-year-the-idf-soldier/

In a year when the civilized world is stuck in a state of retreat, he is fighting back.

Under Biden’s leadership, America has been invaded by hordes of millions of migrants, and Europe continues to stagger under an endless wave of migration from the Muslim world. That’s why American and European cities are being torn apart by rioting mobs supporting Hamas.

But after Israel was invaded on Oct 7, it fought back. The men on the front lines are not the politicians or the generals, they’re among the 360,000 reservists activated in a nation with a Jewish population of 7 million who left behind their homes, families and jobs to go and fight.

The Israeli military was unprepared for both Oct 7 and a call-up of this size. The soldiers were fed, clothed, and equipped by the people. While the media reports on the fighting, the truly incredible unreported story is how civilian volunteers have become the supply and support (the ‘tooth-to-tail’) of the Israel Defense Forces or the IDF.

In a small country, volunteers have been bringing food every day, they have provided clothes, shipped in body armor and even showed up with washing machines on pickup trucks to do the laundry. Some civilian volunteers have been wounded and even killed while delivering food. Israeli housewives have formed the Baking Battalion to make cookies, a cooking school produces meals for the troops and restaurants operate free food trucks. Others have stepped in to harvest crops and run the shops of the reservists who have been called up to serve in Gaza.

When the government and the leaders failed, the ordinary Israeli stepped up.

Some armies call themselves the “people’s army”: IDF soldiers really are. They’ve gone into Gaza knowing that the country stands behind them, not as an ideal, but as an everyday reality. Israel is a small country and everyone knows someone who died, came under attack, is among the 200,000 who left their homes to be out of range of the terrorist attacks, or in the ranks of those who are fighting or who have already fallen in defense of their nation.

Israel today reminds me of New York City after September 11 where for a brief shining moment everyone except the worst leftists pulled together against a common enemy. That spirit may well pass in Israel as it did in America, but while it lasts, it is something to admire and emulate.

Islamist mobs rampage around Manhattan and our elites celebrate Hamas, but the Israelis woke up after one terrible day and decided that they wouldn’t take it anymore. They rejected the dogma that fighting doesn’t work and they went to war. And far more than their own country is riding on the outcome. Nation after nation has surrendered to the Jihad, appeased it, and accepted the lie that Islamic terrorists can’t be defeated and fighting back only radicalizes them.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pakistan Deporting Afghans Who Seek Asylum from Taliban by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20263/pakistan-deporting-afghans

“Those at particular risk are civil society activists, journalists, human rights defenders, former government officials and security force members, and of course women and girls as a whole, who, as a result of the abhorrent policies currently in place in Afghanistan, are banned from secondary and tertiary education, working in many sectors and other aspects of daily and public life.” — UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 27, 2023.

“Asad and his family fled Afghanistan in 2021 when his friends and colleagues were murdered after the Taliban came to power. ‘I am on several lists maintained by the Taliban and I am certain I will be killed if I go back…'” — Amnesty International, November 10, 2023.

The terrorism that Pakistan complains about comes from the Taliban in Afghanistan — that Pakistan supported for decades — not from the Afghan asylum seekers in Pakistan.

What Pakistan has done… is to counter terrorists that challenge its own authority while actively supporting other terrorists who challenge other governments — particularly in India and the West.

There are no “good jihadist terrorists.”

What has caused an increase in terrorism in Pakistan is not Afghan refugees trying to survive there, but Pakistan’s own policies that, for decades, have empowered jihadist terrorists both domestically and abroad.

Pakistan has started the mass deportation of “unregistered” Afghans in the country. The move sends back hundreds of thousands of people who fled the Taliban when they took over in 2021 after American troops withdrew, and violates principles of refugee non-refoulement. If forcibly returned, these refugees are at risk of persecution.

Pakistan claims its mass deportations of these Afghans is due to “increased terrorism” in the country — but it was the government of Pakistan that for decades supported the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ever since they took over the country in 2021, Afghanistan has just become a safe haven for terrorist groups.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academic Bias and Censorship Are Huge Problems, and We Can Prove It Wilfred Reilly

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/academic-bias-and-censorship-are-huge-problems-and-we-can-prove-it/

A team of researchers measured contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth.

Academic censorship just got accurately measured.

For the prestigious professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of top academics — which, in the interest of full disclosure, included Yours Truly as a bit player — recently attempted both to examine contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy and understand the motivations behind it. The results obtained by our team, led by UPenn’s Cory Clark, were interesting and to some extent not very surprising — but deeply unsettling.

Censorship is extraordinarily prevalent across modern academia. Per one large data set reviewed for the project, 34 percent of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members report open “peer pressure” to “avoid controversial research.” Interestingly, the motives of today’s bluenoses seem to be, at some level, positive ones (Clark uses the term “pro-social”). Censors genuinely want to interfere with the spread of ideas that they see as racist or sexist, rather than to simply exercise power. However, the in-practice effects are the same: Since contemporary leftists see almost everything as racist and sexist, the effects of the theoretically moral motivations that dominate on today’s campuses are frequently absurd — i.e., the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers after he noted that men and women are different.

First, let’s look at the data. Drawing on both high-quality, preexisting databases and our own analyses, the Clark Team documented an extraordinarily high level of hard censorship (i.e., journal blacklisting of certain research categories), soft censorship (“cancellation”), and self-censorship (self-explanatory, one hopes) in the modern academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth. Overall, “hundreds of scholars have been sanctioned for expressing controversial ideas,” and the rate of sanctioning has increased substantially over the past decade.

This trend can be outlined empirically, using hard numbers. In sum, 4 to 11 percent of current university or collegiate faculty have been threatened with dismissal or other discipline related to some aspect of their teaching or research work, 34 percent have been “peer pressure[d] to avoid controversial research,” and fully 25 percent describe themselves as being very or “extremely” likely to self-censor during the professional research process. Hell, it may be no coincidence that we named the paper “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” rather than simply “Censorship Is Everywhere in Academia!”

Disturbingly, the Inquisitional atmosphere of the contemporary campus seems to be supported by a sizable minority of its denizens. Per the data, “9-25% of academics and 43% of PhD students . . . support dismissal campaigns for controversial academics.” Many of these individuals report willingness to behave in a biased fashion against right-wingers and other controversial scholars in the context of “hiring, promotions, grants, and publications.”

IMMIGRATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Leprosy, Polio, Malaria, TB, Measles … and Massive Unscreened Illegal Immigration James Varney

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/27/leprosy_polio_malaria_tb_measles__and_massive_unscreened_illegal_immigration_1000817.html

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Vaccination in Pakistan, one of two countries where polio is still endemic. The other is Afghanistan, source of an estimated 90,000 taken into the U.S. since America’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal. 

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

THE TRUMP AGENDA IF HE RETURNS TO OFFICE-

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/newsmaker-interview-trump-puts-iran-europeans-and-antisemites

Newsmaker Interview: Trump puts Iran, Europeans and antisemites on notice, dispels Nikki rumors: John Solomon

In an extensive interview, the former president lays out an expansive vision to Just the News if he is elected to a second White House term ranging from Ukraine War to the southern border crisis.

Former President Donald Trump is sending some pointed messages to friends and foes alike: No, Nikki Haley is not on his vice presidential list because there isn’t one right now. Yes, if he returns to the White House European countries had better get ready to pay more for the Ukraine war. And both federal agencies and nonprofits that espouse antisemitic views and threaten Jews should prepare to lose federal funding or even their tax-exempt status.

In a wide-ranging interview with Just the News, the 45th president surveyed the sort of policies he’ll pursue if voters return him to office next November as the nation’s 47th president. He made clear securing the U.S. southern border is a top priority as is cutting off the sources of income from oil sales and reclaiming the unfrozen funds that he says has revived Iran’s terrorism activities across the globe on Joe Biden’s watch. Those activities include recent rocket and drone attacks from proxy groups targeting U.S. troops. The United States said Tuesday that it had shot down 12 attack drones and five missiles launched by the Iran-backed Houthis.

“Iran was allowed to get rich because Joe Biden allowed them to,” Trump told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show on Real America’s Voice. “So he could say whatever he wants. But he’s the reason for this. He’s an incompetent president. He’s a compromised president, totally compromised. But he allowed them to get rich.”

“But worse than being rich, because of the money, because of what they have, they will have within a short period of time nuclear weapons,” Trump added. “And that is never something that can be allowed to happen.”

Trump made clear he plans to return U.S.-Iran policy to a strict regimen of sanctions to choke off any funding for Tehran to use on weapons or terrorism support.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Chinese Communists are organizing political thuggery in America By Jimmy Quinn

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/02/xi-jinpings-goon-squads/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

At a ritzy gala at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco on November 15, a crowd that included America’s top business leaders twice gave Xi Jinping a standing ovation as he delivered a speech full of reassurances about his fine intentions and the state of the ailing Sino–U.S. relationship.

Next door, from the fourth floor of a parking garage, a group of masked thugs came close to killing five Tibetan activists. “Before the secret entities and the clearly pro-CCP — and what looked like a bunch of trained — men, before they came in and ambushed us and stole our banner from the fifth floor, they actually started from the fourth floor and started pulling on the banner,” said Chemi Lhamo, an activist with the group Students for a Free Tibet. She told me that she and others lost their balance and almost fell off the side of the garage. Fifteen masked men who “really marched like a unit” then came up to the fifth floor and attacked them.

That was not an isolated incident. Outside the hotel that night, and throughout the week, pro-Beijing gangs stalked and assaulted opponents of Xi, most of them pro-democracy Chinese, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and Tibetans, who had flocked to the city to protest his attendance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Estimates vary, but it appears that at least 1,000 pro-CCP demonstrators from across America were involved. The anti-Xi crowd was around 100 people, if that.

The harassment started upon Xi’s arrival at the airport on November 14 and didn’t let up until after his departure on November 17, Allen Chen, a lawyer and leader in the pro-democracy Chinese community, told me.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Peace Processors Return Elliott Abrams

Posted By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/the-peace-processors-return/

The true believers in a ‘peace-minded Palestinian state’ are clapping their hands, but no one in Israel believes in this Tinker Bell.

Middle East peace processing is a great career, or has been for a small but resolute group. Never successful but never daunted, immune to reality, unaffected by wars or elections, they never flag. That means they never stop going to nice conferences and writing articles about “the two-state solution.” Not even now.

The slaughter of Israelis by Hamas on October 7 has greatly affected Israeli opinion. Israelis on the left, including some of those living in the kibbutzim that were attacked, have understood the meaning of the event: A Palestinian state today is simply too dangerous. A couple of weeks ago, President Isaac Herzog of Israel, a former head of the Labor Party, called upon the United States to stop talking about this:

What I want to urge is against just saying ‘two-state solution’. Why? Because there is an emotional chapter here that must be dealt with. My nation is bereaving. My nation is in trauma. In order to get back to the idea of dividing the land, of negotiating peace or talking to the Palestinians, etc., one has to deal first and foremost with the emotional trauma that we are going through and the need and demand for a full sense of security for all people.

Dismissing Herzog’s appeal, two of the longest-serving peace processors, former State Department officials Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller, are at it again. In an article in Foreign Affairs dated December 22, Kurtzer and Miller want to “create an independent Palestinian state” as the only solution to conflict in the Middle East.

Here’s how: Their plan “would require the PA to run fair and free elections in the West Bank and Gaza and to convince voters that it really will aim to end Israel’s occupation and create an independent Palestinian state. Should it succeed, Israel would also need to demonstrate its commitment — in words and actions on the ground — to advancing a two-state outcome.”