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December 2020

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

What in the Fresh Hell Is This? Wishing Someone a ‘Merry Christmas’ Is White Supremacy Matt VespaMatt Vespa

By on December 26th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/12/25/of-course-wishing-people-a-merry-christmas-is-white-supremacy-n2582127

I mean, we shouldn’t be shocked that people like this exist. Ever since ‘wokeness’ latched onto the political Left like a barnacle, the hot takes have grown more insane. Whatever you thought was ‘too extreme’ quickly was turned on its head with these people. Since Obama, the ‘woke’ Left has thrust scores of pseudo-intellectual talking points into the social media universe in the hopes of making it mainstream. Yet, the most common is making everything into a vehicle for white supremacy and then bashing it. Ladies and gentlemen, these people think that a man who holds the door for a woman is a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. Are we shocked that they decided to put Christmas on the white supremacy list? 

Even now, we can’t say Merry Christmas on certain platforms, who have opted for the more politically correct ‘happy holidays’ send off. But as Jen Bokoff of the Disability Rights Fund reminded all of us today, a lot of people don’t celebrate Christmas, so please be cognizant of that because “the default Merry Christmas as a normal greeting is also white supremacy culture at work.” Yeah, we’re not all mentally defective, Jenny. If I see someone with a yarmulke on, I’m not going to say, “Merry Christmas.” Also, this isn’t some random holiday. It’s not something where only half the nation celebrates. The vast majority celebrate Christmas. In fact, billions do. And not all Christians are white people. I guess it would shock Jen that a lot of people of color are—gasp—Christian. 

The added idiocy with this ‘wishing merry Christmas is white supremacy culture’ take is that it carries this connotation that all holidays are relatively equal with regards to participation. Sorry, given the numbers, no one really celebrates Kwanzaa. I think more people attend ComicCon than those who celebrate Kwanzaa. We’re also the most religious industrialized nation. It’s not even close. The United States has a population of 331 million; 205 million are Christians.

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EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

1619 and All That Salvatore Babones

By on December 26th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/1619-and-all-that/

The New York Times is right: the United States was born in slavery in 1619. At least, its America was. Of course, the genteel America of mannered New York society that has formed the core readership of the New York Times since its inception never owned slaves themselves. They merely lived off the proceeds of slavery while disparaging the Deplorables who did the dirty work of cruelty and oppression on the cotton plantations of the deep South. The New Yorkers were the bankers, the brokers, the jobbers, the lawyers, the accountants, the insurers—in short, the money-men of the slave economy. They opposed slavery while appropriating its profits.

The 1619 Project, placing “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [America’s] national narrative”, is the signature initiative of today’s New York Times. Launched with the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine, the 1619 Project commemorates 400 years of slavery in America, dating from the transport of the first African slaves to the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The conceit of the project is that “out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional”. At least they left it at “nearly”.

Faithful to its subscribers (and its advertisers), the 100-page special issue of the magazine manages to mention various forms of the word “bank” fifty-six times without naming any banks that happen to be based in New York. Well, that’s not quite true. It does mention an African-American “former financial adviser at Morgan Stanley [who] chose to leave a successful career in finance to take his rightful place as a fifth-generation farmer”. How inspiring! Never mind the Pulitzer Prizes; Hollywood is on the line.

Of course, the 1619 Project did win a Pulitzer Prize for its director, Nikole Hannah-Jones. And truth be told, the individual essays that make up the special issue are pretty good. The National Association of Scholars has harped on a half-dozen or so mostly minor historical inaccuracies, but the sins of the 1619 Project are much more sins of omission than commission. There really is a straight line from the birth of the Southern slavocracy at Jamestown to the United States Constitution, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and Black Lives Matter. An America without African-Americans wouldn’t be the United States we know today. In fact, it might look a lot more like … Australia.

But the aristocratic Jamestown colony of the Virginia Company, founded in 1607 and focused on cash crops, was only one of three early settlements of what would become the United States. The second was New Amsterdam, founded as a trading colony in 1614, with the first permanent settlement on Manhattan island established in 1624. While the Virginia planters populated their baronial manors with African slaves, the Dutch patroons of the Hudson valley left their massive estates largely untilled, since they were unable to attract free farmers from the Old World to become feudal tenants in the New.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Mushrooming of the 2020 US Election

By on December 26th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/tony-thomas/2020/12/the-mushrooming-of-the-2020-us-election/

On December 23 President Trump made a powerful speech summing up facts behind the purported win by Joe Biden of the US election. As is normal, the mainstream US media and the Australian media en bloc have ignored or ridiculed this speech. Their narrative is that Trump is a spiteful and buffoonish loser.

In the real world, a Rasmussen survey showed that only 47 per cent of American voters believe that Joe Biden won. Only 10 per cent of Republicans think Biden won fairly.

And these American voters have good grounds for so believing. Quadrant Online now goes where the rest of the media refuses, and publishes our own and full transcript of Trump’s 14-minute address.

It exposes the disgraceful alliance of the media (including The Australian’s US correspondent, let alone the ABC), the media-technology giants and the Democrat Party to suppress pro-Trump news, up to and including censoring the President himself. Here is just one handy fact: Twitter has censored Trump and his campaign 543 times since May 2018. Its censoring of Biden: zero.

—Tony Thomas

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: From Europe With Love by Burak Bekdil

By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16861/turkey-europe-tensions-sanctions

Erdoğan also said that he sees Turkey’s future in Europe — the same Europe he just had accused of being “Nazi remnants and fascists.”

The heart of the matter was how tough the EU would go in sanctions at a time when Turkey’s national economy was in free-fall. What Brussels decided, it turned out, was: Not so tough

Legally speaking, the man Erdoğan referred to as a “terrorist” is only a suspect without a court verdict. This, however, is Erdoğan’s sick understanding of constitutional rights: He is the elected leader, so he believes he can take the liberty to declare suspects guilty or not guilty while their court cases are in progress.

If Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, spent more sleepless nights the first week of December than he had over his concerns for U.S. sanctions, it was because of the more imminent and potentially punishing European Union sanctions that would take shape at a summit on December 10-11. He must have had a relatively peaceful sleep when the summit was over. He might have thought that he had managed to get away from a huge European sanctions bomb, at least until March. It may, however, be a bit premature for him to sigh with relief.

After the EU leaders gave Turkey an unambiguous warning in October, Erdoğan chose to escalate tensions, bringing what otherwise would have been mere diplomatic issues to the level of a mini-clash of civilizations. Erdoğan calculated that he could play the tough Ottoman sultan until the last moment and that the EU would never dare burn their bridges with Turkey. He was right and wrong. He bought time, the EU did not burn their bridges, the sanctions at the December summit were not powerful enough to change Turkey’s course. Nevertheless, Erdoğan now has another deadline by which he must choose between a further clash of civilizations and sustainable de-escalation.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Rudy Giuliani is again promising good news is on the way By Andrea Widburg

By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/rudy_giuliani_is_again_promising_good_news_is_on_the_way.html

When it comes to the election, the facts are clear: Joe Biden, an incompetent, corrupt, possibly senile politician who campaigned from his basement, allegedly received more votes than any president in American history. The engines for that victory were media and tech propaganda and censorship, and paper and computer ballot fraud. Nevertheless, a craven judicial class that refuses to look at the evidence, corrupt political officials, and more media and tech propaganda and censorship seem to have fixed the dial on a Biden presidency. On Christmas Day, though, President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, promised that things are “going to blow up” going forward.

Let me say that I’m a little bit worried that Giuliani is over-promising. I know how lawyers think. They get incredibly excited about a specific fact, legal argument, or procedural point, and optimistically assume that whatever excites them is going to break the whole case wide open. Sadly, lawyers are almost always wrong about that. What ends cases isn’t some Hollywood, Perry Mason moment, with a witness suddenly admitting to a lie or a fingerprint magically appearing. Instead, it’s a long slog of aggregating facts and legal arguments.

The problem with the 2020 election is that we don’t have a long slog. Instead, we have a judicial class (reaching all the way up to the Supreme Court) that has settled for a very peculiar and deeply immoral position: In an election rife with manifest fraud, America’s judiciary would prefer to see Trump’s real votes voided through fraud, than see Biden’s fake votes properly invalidated through having that fraud exposed. Put another way, they’re voting for a dishonest Biden win than an honest Trump victory.

Given this situation, we Trump supporters keep hoping that a black swan explodes onto the scene, or even better, a fiery phoenix that blasts to ashes the arguments propping up the dissolute, demented, doddering Democrat darling, Joe Biden. (I love alliteration.)

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Why Sidney Powell gets the Galileo treatment By Eric Georgatos

By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/why_sidney_powell_gets_the_galileo_treatment.html

“Common sense says election integrity is fundamental to the survival of democracy in any form, so if there are reasonable grounds for suspicion, why wouldn’t serious adults want to turn over every rock to determine the truth?  If the ruling class is so eager to pronounce Sidney Powell a lunatic fringe conspiracy theorist, why wouldn’t they want the Dominion voting machines fully audited so they can prove once and for all that Powell is crazy and deserves to be mocked and ignored?”

Observers of human history might have to go back all the way to Galileo to find a ruling class as determined to cancel someone as much as today’s is to cancel Sidney Powell in response to her single-minded devotion to bringing the truth of the full scale of the 2020 election fraud to light. 

Galileo broke the news/discovery that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, and in fact revolved around the sun, and that just didn’t comport with what the ruling class, including church authorities, were prepared or willing to accept.  Galileo rocked their world — probably deeply threatening their hold of authority over the masses if they were exposed as so fundamentally wrong — so their solution wasn’t to deal with the truth but to put Galileo under house arrest and demand that he renounce his discovery.

The American ruling class of 2020 is bizarrely opposed to allocating any oxygen to what Sidney Powell has discovered and is alleging about Dominion Voting Systems (and others), about vote-shifting algorithms and partial decimal vote counts, and about vote manipulation showing up throughout the country.  Even Rudy Giuliani, the President’s attorney, and Mark Meadows, the President’s Chief of Staff, seem hellbent on publicly keeping their distance from Powell — and on keeping President Trump from getting too close to or aligned with Powell.

Other elements of the ruling class — such as SCOTUS and much of the rest of the federal judiciary — won’t even look at the evidence Powell has assembled.  They just ‘don’t want to go there’, and so they make up legal excuses — e.g., lack of standing — and wave off the substance of the allegations.

What gives?  Why are they behaving this way?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nashville: A bomb blast unlike any other on American soil By Andrea Widburg

By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/nashville_a_bomb_blast_unlike_any_other_on_american_soil.html

The facts about the Christmas morning bomb in Nashville are not complicated. What is complicated is understanding who set off the bomb and why. That’s because this bombing does not match any other bombs that have exploded in the Western world.

As I said, the facts about the bomb are not complicated:

Early Christmas morning, someone parked an RV in front of the AT&T building near Second Avenue and Commerce Street in downtown Nashville.

Shortly before it exploded, the RV began playing a recording telling people to leave the area:

Note the precision of that announcement: If you can hear this recording, you are in the blast range. The person who prepared that bomb knew precisely how far the blast would carry – and how far the announcement would carry.

Nashville police, upon hearing that announcement, went door to door telling people to evacuate:

Doing so was extremely brave because there was no reason to believe that the announcement was honest. That bomb could have gone off at any minute.

At least three people ended up in the hospital. The police also announced that they’d found human remains, although they have not stated whether they were from a victim or the bomber.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Woke See No Evil—and Nothing but Evil Behind the paradox lies a superstition about history that may explain their viciousness and violence. By Chilton Williamson Jr.

By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-see-no-eviland-nothing-but-evil-11608925768?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

It is impossible to read Mark Twain in the 21st century without being aware, each time one encounters it, of the single most unspeakable word in the English language today; a word that in Twain’s time was as common as mud and therefore completely unremarkable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The issue concerning the appropriateness of designating “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in their original and unexpurgated state as assigned reading in English classes in the public schools has troubled teachers and administrators since at least the 1990s.

I am not concerned here with the question of whether the bowdlerization of these texts is defensible, a moral imperative, or an offense against literature—New South published a sanitized edition of the two books in 2011—but rather with the paradoxical character of postmodern political correctness. That character was exposed, also in 2011, when the Virginia Department of Education adopted a textbook, “Our Virginia: Past and Present” by Joy Masoff, which contained the claim that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” That prompted anger and indignation on the left and an advisory to teachers from the department to ignore the passage.

Yet it is a historically confirmed fact that many Southern blacks, freemen as well as slaves, fought on the side of the Confederacy, as attested to by the historian William Freehling and documented by Harvard’s Prof. John Stauffer in an essay for TheRoot.com. Even so, many Civil War historians continue to deny it for ideological reasons.

The dispute over the existence of black Confederate soldiers is a clear instance of how radical progressives, in their war on America, have been pursuing two contradictory aims at once. First, they have worked tirelessly to expose what they view as the fundamentally and indelibly racist character of America from its inception. Thus the central purpose of the “1619 Project,” conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones and subsequently developed by the New York Times magazine: to rewrite, edit and otherwise “correct” the history of the American Republic. Second, they have sought to sanitize America’s cultural achievements and thereby satisfy the moral demands of the present time, all for the good of future generations.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Lone Star Speech Victory The University of Texas at Austin will dissolve its bias-response team.

By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-lone-star-speech-victory-11608852943?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Political speech is under attack these days from Beijing to Berkeley, so we’ll take victories where we can get them. One arrived Tuesday when the University of Texas at Austin agreed to disband its PC police and end policies that suppress speech on campus.

Credit the nonprofit Speech First, which sued on behalf of student members in 2018. The group claimed UT and its officials had “created an elaborate investigatory and disciplinary apparatus to suppress, punish, and deter speech that other students deem ‘offensive,’ ‘biased,’ ‘uncivil,’ or ‘rude.’”

Students could anonymously report their professors and peers for “bias incidents” to the Campus Climate Response Team, which would investigate and threaten disciplinary referrals and “restorative justice” meetings with administrators. The university gave several examples of what constitutes an act of bias, including “faculty commentary in the classroom perceived as derogatory and insensitive,” and other behavior open to highly subjective judgments about what is offensive.

A federal judge dismissed the case in 2019. Citing that decision, university spokesman J.B. Bird said Wednesday that there was “no evidence students were disciplined, sanctioned or investigated for their speech” and that, “to the contrary,” there was “strong evidence of the university protecting the speech rights of conservative students and guests on campus.”

But Speech First appealed, and in October the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the ruling and remanded the case back to the district court. Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones blasted the bias-response team as “the clenched fist in the velvet glove of student speech regulation.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obamas spending Christmas in Hawaii and generate the best picture ever of the former first couple By Thomas Lifson

By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/obamas_spending_christmas_in_hawaii_and_generate_the_embest_picture_everem_of_the_former_first_couple.html

It’s no surprise anymore when our ruling class travels for Christmas or any other reason that strikes their fancy, while the rest of us are told to give up family reunions, and even church services. So seeing Barack and Michelle Obama in Hawaii, able to jet around wherever their fancy takes them, enjoying their scores of millions of dollars earned from Netflix, books and other post-presidential activities is no surprise. Obviously, Barack has not reached the point he mentioned in 2010, when he said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

I am actually grateful they took the opportunity to go kayaking and generate the picture in the tweet below, which is to my eyes the best, most revealing view of the couple ever taken.

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