RUTHFULLY YOURS

This summer President Obama visited Alaska, where he stood in front of a shrinking glacier and said, “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now.” At a conference in Anchorage, he made the apocalyptic prediction that “submerged countries, abandoned cities . . . entire industries of people who can’t practice their livelihoods, desperate refugees seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own, and political disruptions that could trigger multiple conflicts around the globe” would be the wages of failing to act now to stop global warming.

Most environmentalists cheered the President’s statements, while some have been critical of him for betraying the cause by allowing Shell Oil to drill off Alaska’s Arctic coast. But all assume that their opinions are based on hard science. While science does play a huge role in modern environmentalism, old cultural myths influence much of what many people believe about humanity’s relationship to nature. For some, their belief system approaches a nature worship that has little value for solving the environmental problems troubling the world today.

Dr. Carol Swain was born in segregated Virginia. The second of twelve children, she grew up sharing a bed with her sisters in a shack that had no running water. Her family was so poor that she had no shoes and had to stay home from school when the weather was bad. She never did make it to high school.

And now 1,400 leftist fascists have signed a petition to Vanderbilt University demanding that one of the most respected African-American scholars in this country take diversity training or be “terminated.”

The petition to force a conservative black woman to undergo diversity training comes from Nick Goldbach, a white hipster student and self-described “urban enthusiast” who claims that working as a waiter at a “sustainable” luxury urban resort in Connecticut taught him about “common humanity.”

Nick cares about “civil rights and social action,” “chic and unassuming” dining experiences and getting a black woman whose writings about race and racism were cited by Supreme Court justices fired.

And once that’s done, Nick and a few of his closest social justice warrior pals can celebrate with another “chic and unassuming” dining experience. Dr. Swain had worked her way up from a GED to a PhD by taking a job at McDonald’s where the dining experiences are unassuming, if not especially chic.

A federal judge has refused to stop Texas from withholding the birth certificates of children born in the U.S. to mothers who are illegal immigrants. But he has also called for a full court hearing to determine if the civil rights of these newest U.S. citizens are being violated by the policy.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman’s ruling that the Texas Department of State Health Services can continue denying birth certificates to “undocumented” immigrant families’ U.S.-born babies if their identification doesn’t meet Texas standards “an important first step in ensuring the integrity of birth certificates and personal identity information.”

“Before issuing any official documents, it’s important for the state to have a way to accurately verify people are who they say they are through reliable identification mechanisms,” Paxton said in a statement his office released following Judge Pitman’s ruling.

The Texas Department of State Health Services refuses to recognize some forms of identification offered by illegal-immigrant families including the identification cards known as “matriculas consulares” that are issued by Mexican consulates.

Today’s undergraduates probably know little, if anything, about the cataclysmic movement in China known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It began in 1966 before all of them (and even a great number of their professors) were born. This massive national crusade, instigated by Chairman Mao Zedong, was intended to create a pure communist man and woman, devoid of the constraints of materialism and personal ambition.

It started with the closing of the schools and the re-education of intellectuals and the bourgeoisie and ended up with years of incredible violence, taking millions of lives. The actual statistics are still a state secret, but a recent biography of Mao states “at least 3 million people died violent deaths and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100 million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or another.”

Boris Johnson got himself disinvited from several events in the West Bank this week. More’s the pity in a region that needs the sort of truth-telling with which the London mayor caused such a stir.

On a visit meant to boost trade ties with Britain, Mr. Johnson sought to reassure Israelis that the long-running boycott, divest and sanction movement against Israel in the West is not a majority position:

“I cannot think of anything more foolish than to say that you want to have any kind of divestment, sanctions or boycott against a country that, when all is said or done, is the only democracy in the region, is the only place that has in my view a pluralist, open society. Why boycott Israel?”

“And by the way,” he continued, “I think there’s some misunderstanding over here [in Israel] about it. The supporters of this so-called boycott are really just a bunch of corduroy-jacketed . . . lefty academics who have no real standing in the matter and I think are highly unlikely to be influential on Britain.”

This was too much for the Palestinian charities that pulled the plug on meetings with him later in the week. The Sharek Youth Forum canceled Mr. Johnson’s visit, describing his remarks as an “inaccurate, misinformed, and disrespectful statement” that “fails to acknowledge our very existence as Palestinians,” according to the Independent newspaper. Several other sessions were dropped as well.