ESG’s power grows as banker is canceled for talking sense on climate change By Rupert Darwall

https://nypost.com/2022/05/24/hsbc-banker-stuart-kirk-suspended-for-climate-change-remarks/

Last Thursday, something extraordinary happened: A senior HSBC banker, Stuart Kirk, told the world that climate change, though real, is not something financial markets need worry about. “Unsubstantiated, shrill, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” one of Kirk’s presentation slides read.

The reaction was instantaneous. Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations climate secretariat, denounced Kirk’s remarks as “abhorrently outrageous,” words that might well describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but a banker’s presentation analyzing climate financial risk for what it is?

Four hundred years ago, people were burnt at the stake for believing the wrong things about religion. Today, they get fired for questioning the climate-change catechism.

Figueres demanded HSBC immediately cleanse itself of Kirk’s remarks and fire the climate heretic. “I do not agree — at all — with the remarks made at last week’s FT Moral Money Summit,” bank chief executive Noel Quinn duly declared, avoiding any mention of Kirk by name. “I am determined that our team won’t be distracted by last week’s comments.” On Monday, it emerged HSBC had suspended Kirk

Race-Based Illness at the Best of the Best At elite universities one must never, ever criticize students of color, especially the black students. Those individuals are sacred. By Mark Bauerlein

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/24/race-based-illness-at-the-best-of-the-best/

It looks like the long persecution of Professor Joshua Katz by his employer Princeton University has come to an end. The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that the school president “passed his recommendation that Katz be stripped of his tenure and fired to the university board of trustees,” and the board rubber-stamped it Monday. The whole episode nicely exemplifies the cowardice and incompetence of the liberals who run elite institutions in the United States today. 

The ostensible cause of the termination is a relationship Katz had with a student many years ago, an impropriety that was handled and closed long before the current controversy began. In truth, this current situation has nothing to do with Katz’s private history. The older matter is a false pretext for his termination. Katz’s current sin originates far from the Princeton campus, on the website Quillette, where on July 8, 2020, he published a piece called “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” 

That word independence should clue you in immediately to the danger Katz risked when he wrote the essay, for few personality traits are more ruinous in the academic habitat than that of one’s willingness to dissent, to go one’s own way, to gainsay conventional wisdom. For all of the humanities professoriate’s praise of “speaking truth to power,” it is a profession populated by timid conformists with fearful sensibilities. Few fields in the world exert and police their dogmas more vigilantly than does that of our tenured wordsmiths. Katz was doing what all of them pretend to do but don’t—and so he had to pay. 

Does leftist ideology create tangible psychiatric issues? By Olivia Murray

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/does_leftist_ideology_create_tangible_psychiatric_issues.html
Even outspoken Democrat Bill Maher is asking questions of the delusional narrative propagated through transgender activism. In a comedic segment posted to Twitter, Maher touched on compelling evidence, suggesting the possibility that “California is creating” trans children. Well, California is notorious for their radical trans agenda like ‘drag queen story hour’ and schools promoting transgenderism unbeknownst to parents – so in light of additional scientific evidence, it seems like Maher could be right.

A study published on PubMed compared two sets of mothers. The first set was mothers of boys with gender identity disorder, and the second set – the control group – was mothers of normal boys. Researchers found:

….mothers of boys with GID had more symptoms of depression and more often met the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder than the controls. Fifty-three percent of the mothers of boys with GID compared with only 6% of controls met the diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder….

The data showed that boys struggling with their biological sex are almost nine times more likely to have a mother who suffers from a severe personality disorder. So are they really born into the wrong body, as the transgender lobby and their activists would tell us? Or are they casualties of external factors, like a parent’s mental illness, perhaps caused by leftist ideology? The study mentioned above makes no connections between mental illness and “progessive” ideology, but other studies do.

Trump shouldn’t run By M.B. Mathews

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

“By contrast, Ron DeSantis has everything Trump has without the nastiness, the coarseness, the Everest-sized ego.  DeSantis understands restraint; he never shoots from the lip. He is pleasant, substantive, and at least as politically astute as Trump. DeSantis is far more of a traditional family man with the added benefit of having served his country in the Navy. He is also as tough as Trump, perhaps more. He is proactive not reactive, possessing admirable foresight.”

Donald J. Trump was the best POTUS in my very long lifetime. His policies were effective, making America prosperous, energy independent, and lowering minority unemployment to record low levels. Everything he did, with the possible exception of the COVID lockdown, was quintessentially Trump; competent, encouraging, and salutary for America and her people. We were blessed to have him in the White House.

Although many Americans cringed, we nonetheless put up with Trump’s coarseness and his inflated ego because he gave America back to the people. He relit the candle that lit the city on a hill. He was awesome. He took his business acumen and applied it to government very effectively, making America great again. We loved him. We still do. But sometimes the greatest love is to let go.

When 2020 happened, Trump was unceremoniously removed from office because of some highly questionable voting anomalies and practices. It was understandable that he was infuriated. We were equally so. But the prospect of more upheaval is too much for many Americans. We love a maverick but Trump became a burr under our saddle. Trump, instead of America, became the focus as he was attacked from all sides. We became beaten down, frustrated that we had no weapons to fight back with except the ballot box and even that has now become unpredictable. The election has been over for well over a year. It is time to stop talking about it; it keeps the electorate roiled. We need some tranquility, at least to regroup before the next battle.

Ohio School District’s ‘Transgender Guidelines’ Instruct Teachers to Socially Transition Students without Parental Consent- By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ohio-school-districts-transgender-guidelines-instruct-teachers-to-socially-transition-students-without-parental-consent/

In recently developed K-12 “transgender guidelines” circulated among principals and school counselors, the Olentangy Local School District in Ohio instructs teachers to begin the social transitioning of non-gender conforming students without parental consent.

The guidelines, obtained by non-profit Parents Defending Education, would advise teachers and staff on how to treat students who identify as a member of the opposite sex, though it’s not clear whether they’ve yet been issued to teachers. The guidelines have implications for record-keeping, addressing students, and communicating with parents, and touch on bathrooms/locker room access and overnight school trips.

“A student’s transgender status or gender assigned at birth is not considered directory information and therefore cannot be released without prior consent,” the document reads. It demands that school staff “not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status to others, including parents and other staff, unless legally required to do so,” according to a copy of the document released

Superintendent Mark Raiff writes in an email, obtained by PDE, that “the guidelines were shared following the issuance of new guidance from the US Department of Education and US Department of Justice so that our principals and school counselors were apprised of the most recent developments.”

“As far as board policy, the guidelines support and do not supersede the board policies referenced within the document that prohibit harassment or discrimination based on gender identity,”  he adds.

Staff and faculty are to refer to students by the “name and pronoun requested by the student or parent that matches their gender identity,” according to the guidelines. While district administration, staff and faculty are “required to maintain legal name and gender assigned at birth on all legal documents and permanent records” until “provided with a legal name change,”  anything “not considered an official school document should feature the student’s preferred name,” it says.

Georgia Governor Kemp Defeats Perdue in GOP Primary, Setting Up Rematch against Stacey Abrams-By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/georgia-governor-kemp-defeats-perdue-in-gop-primary-setting-up-rematch-against-stacey-abrams/

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has successfully fended off a challenge from former Senator David Perdue in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, the Associated Press has projected. The victory sets up a rematch between the governor and Democrat Stacey Abrams, whom he defeated in the 2018 general election.

Kemp bested Abrams by 55,000 votes in November 2018, though Abrams contested the race and has made repeated claims that the election was stolen from her.

She has, to this day, never conceded to Kemp and said as recently as October, “Just because you win, doesn’t mean you won.”

Abrams peddled disinformation about Georgia’s new election law, becoming one of many Democrats to claim the law would suppress voter turnout. Even when Tuesday’s primary races saw record early voter turnout —more than 850,000 ballots were cast in person or returned via absentee ballot in three weeks of early voting— Abrams claimed that the voter turnout is not proof that the law has not caused voter suppression.

An Open Letter to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Her Fellow Travelers Instead of memorializing the Nakba, perhaps you should have learned from it. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/open-letter-congresswoman-rashida-tlaib-and-her-richard-l-cravatts/

“But do not ask the American people to enshrine in law the self-delusion and Jew-hatred that has long impeded your own self-determination and made you victims of your own corrosive and hateful ideology.”

On May 16th, you and some other members of The Squad, including Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, McCollum, and others, introduced a loathsome resolution, H. RES. 1123, which had as its purpose “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights” and to “commemorate the Nakba,” the catastrophe you assign to Israel’s creation, “through official recognition and remembrance.” According to your baleful resolution, the Nakba not only took place at Israel’s founding “but [refers] to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day.”

This resolution is yet another manifestation of your narcissistic victimology, a corrosive point of view in which the very creation and continued existence of Israel, according to you, is an ongoing tragedy because, in your contorted view, Israel’s “violence and war crimes are an ongoing and ever-present assault on the existence and humanity of the Palestinian people. The Israeli apartheid government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing seeks to degrade Palestinian humanity and break the will of the people to be free.”

The Baneful Politics of the Therapeutic Sensibility The most important casualty of our obsession with feelings. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/baneful-politics-therapeutic-sensibility-bruce-thornton/

The heart of “woke” politics is the therapeutic sensibility: the primacy we put on the role of individual feelings in self-identity and self-worth. Thus our psychic comfort, self-esteem, and the acknowledgement of both by others should be the most important concern of society, its institutions, and government policy. And they should confirm and validate our subjective emotions and identities, even if doing so infringes on both the unalienable rights of others, and on the foundational principles of our political order, particularly free speech and truth, the most important bulwark of our political freedom.

These therapeutic attitudes have contributed to the moral and intellectual incoherence of the “woke” Left, and its threat to our political freedom, one enabled by the long transformation of our federal government into a nanny Leviathan-state that empowers itself by pandering to this juvenile narcissism.

“Cancel culture,” for example, and the eagerness to create mechanisms of censorship like the proposed Disinformation Governance Board, on pause for now, are manifestations of this obsession with the impact of politically proscribed ideas and speech on manufactured victim-group identities. Public monuments or names of schools must be “cancelled” because members of certain groups will be traumatized by fleeting reminders of injuries and injustices, like slavery, they have never personally experienced.

The Economic Doom Loop Has Begun No communist was ever as dedicated to economic suicide as the current class of idiots who rule us. By Adam Mill

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/the-economic-doom-loop-has-begun/

High inflation, overregulation, and a general sense that things are going in the wrong direction remind us of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But today the underlying problems that were responsible for our woes in that time are vastly worse. The coming reckoning for Washington’s insanely irresponsible monetary policy may dwarf the troubles from all recent recessions and periods of inflation. 

The Federal Reserve has created a doom loop between the housing market and inflation. For years it has printed tens of billions of dollars each month to buy sketchy securities meant to subsidize the housing market and favor bond traders. This continues even now, in spite of inflation and a red-hot housing market. But the housing market has become dependent on unearned, newly printed money, and stopping the flow might cause a catastrophic correction. If it doesn’t stop, however, inflation will explode. 

Let me walk you through some of the math.

Inflation closes the gap between money earned and money spent. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve expanded M2 money supply from just under $8 trillion to around $22 trillion today. During that time GDP has increased from around $14.6 trillion to around $24.5 trillion today. We’ve gone from a ratio of one dollar chasing $2.20 in goods in services to an almost 1 to 1 ratio today. Inflation during the same period, according to the government, has eroded the dollar by a mere 33 percent. 

You think 8 percent inflation is high? Prices need to double to restore any semblance of balance between currency and the things you can buy with currency. We have a long way to go.

The Real Reason Why The Disinformation Governance Board Got Cancelled: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/25/the-real-reason-why-the-disinformation-governance-board-got-cancelled-ii-tipp-poll/

Why did the Joe Biden administration abruptly shut down its Disinformation Governance Board a mere three weeks after creating it? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll has the answer.

As the administration’s plan for creating the Orwellian-sounding speech regulator was being rolled out, the I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,320 Americans from May 4 to May 6 a simple question: “How much do you trust the Disinformation Governance Board to decide what is disinformation fairly and accurately?”

Among the 550 who said they were following the Disinformation Board “closely,” the reaction was strong: 55% said they had “little trust” (22%) or “no trust at all” (32%). That compares with 42% who said they had “a lot of trust” (19%) and “quite a bit of trust” (22%).

In short, it was a highly unpopular idea. Indeed, it was more unpopular than even the overall numbers suggest.

The only major political grouping that trusted the Disinformation board was the Democratic Party. They gave it a big thumbs up in the poll, with 73% giving it “a lot” or “quite a bit” of trust, versus just 23% granting the new agency “little” or “no” trust.