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May 2021

EDUCATION Comments turned off

University Hires Founder of Discredited ‘1619 Project,’ Calling Her a ‘Most Respected’ ‘Leader’ By Tyler O’Neil

By on May 1st, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/04/29/founder-of-nyts-discredited-1619-project-honored-with-prestigious-unc-job-n1443684

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The New York Times‘s discredited “1619 Project,” will join the faculty at the University of North Carolina (UNC), where she earned her master’s degree.

“This is the story of a leader returning to a place that transformed her life and career trajectory,” Susan King, dean of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism, said in a statement on Hannah-Jones’ new gig. “Giving back is part of Nikole’s DNA, and now one of the most respected investigative journalists in America will be working with our students on projects that will move their careers forward and ignite critically important conversations.”

Hannah-Jones will join UNC Hussman as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Knight Chair professorships, endowed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, bring top professionals to classrooms to teach and mentor students.

“The Knight Chairs are highly-respected news leaders who bring insights about journalism and support elevating it in the academy. Their work contributes to keeping communities informed and democracy robust,” Karen Rundlet, journalism director at the Knight Foundation, said in the statement. “Nikole Hannah-Jones is an outstanding addition to this group of leaders.”

Yet Nikole Hannah-Jones’s brainchild has an ugly track record. “The 1619 Project” tried to flip American history on its head by arguing that America’s “true founding” came with the arrival of the first slaves in Virginia, not with the Declaration of Independence. Scholars immediately raised objections and the Times has issued a series of stealth corrections tacitly admitting that its project was based on a lie.

The 1619 Project twists American history along the lines of Marxist critical race theory, reframing many aspects of American life as rooted in race-based slavery and oppression, including capitalism, the consumption of sugar, and America’s rejection of 100 percent government-funded health care. The project goes right to the heart of America, featuring graphics crossing out “July 4, 1776” and replacing the founding date with “August 20, 1619.”

Until September 2020, the 1619 Project website had announced that the project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” In September, the Times stealth-edited the website to remove the claim about 1619 being America’s “true founding” and the project’s founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, told CNN that the project “does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country.” Psyche!

Historians have criticized the project for twisting the truth. For instance, there were black slaves, and black freedmen, in America for about a century before 1619. Whoops!

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Man They Couldn’t Cancel Mobs have targeted Jordan Peterson, but he hasn’t lost his university job and his publishers have stuck by him. What’s his secret? By Barton Swaim

By on May 1st, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-they-couldnt-cancel-11619806528?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness” before it, is a comical expression for an ugly cultural pathology. To be canceled—an older, closely related term is “blacklisted”—is to have your public persona or influence assailed, typically by a sizable mob, for some real or perceived offense against progressive orthodoxy, whatever that orthodoxy may hold at the moment. For that to happen, you must possess some form of authority in the first place: an academic post, a political office, a role in the entertainment industry, employment with a “mainstream” media organization, a voice as an intellectual or imaginative writer.

But the targets of cancellation, having derived their legitimacy from consensus left-liberal culture, are typically not very good at defending themselves, or even understanding what happened to them. Often they apologize, despite having said or done nothing wrong, which only emboldens the cancelers. Or they fall back on pieties about free speech and the marketplace of ideas, as if their tormentors still believed in those principles.

One target of cancellation who is able to speak intelligently about it is Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto clinical psychologist, YouTube lecturer, and author of “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” (2018) and “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” published in March.

If you’re an ordinary curious person, Mr. Peterson won’t strike you as a likely target for moral outrage. He brings together a dizzying array of texts and traditions—Jungian psychoanalysis, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Frederick Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and much else—to formulate basic lessons, or “rules,” about how humans might overcome their natural tendency to lassitude and savagery. His books, podcasts and lectures are impressively argued, frequently insightful and occasionally abrasive presentations of various principles of wise living.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Backlash Against Bad History GOP Senators warn Cardona about pushing the ‘1619 Project.’

By on May 1st, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-backlash-against-bad-history-11619822062?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Education in America is still mainly a state and local enterprise, and thank heaven for that. Look no further than the Biden Administration’s plan to use federal grants to urge states and local schools to teach bad American history like the New York Times “1619 Project” in classrooms.

Thirty-nine GOP Senators led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday expressing “grave concern” with his “effort to reorient the bipartisan American History and Civics Education programs” from “their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda.”

This includes the destructive 1619 Project, which seeks to replace 1776 with the year slaves first arrived in North America as the country’s true founding. Prominent historians, including many on the political left, have criticized the 1619 Project’s many mistakes, not least its claim that preserving slavery was the driving force behind the American revolution.

The Cardona effort is bound to roil the culture wars and is the opposite of President Biden’s pledge to unify the country. Mr. Cardona should take the McConnell letter as good advice to cashier his history project. The backlash he’s courting will do no one any good.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Con against America By Charles C. W. Cooke

By on May 1st, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-con-against-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

One hundred days in, Biden’s radical presidency makes clear that his campaign was, in fact, a fraud.

‘ It’s the unspoken Biden formula,” reports Axios. “Talk like a rosy bipartisan; act like a ruthless partisan.”

Indeed, it is. And to this maxim we might add a few others. Talk like a moderate; act like a radical. Talk about normality; act like a revolutionary. And, at all stages, aggressively hide the ball. Progressive pundits have taken to saying that Biden poses a problem for conservatives because he is so “boring.” That’s one way of looking at it, certainly. Another is that he is a fraud. The man who ran on a return to normalcy — and whose party avoided unified Republican government by only 90,000 votes — now says he wants to be FDR. Heaven help us all.

If anyone truly thinks that Biden is “boring,” it is because, having been intoxicated by the Trump Show, they are looking only at this president’s style. One hundred days into Biden’s presidency, and there is scarcely a single part of American life that the man isn’t trying to change. At the latest count, he wants to spend 6 trillion new dollars; to raise taxes to their highest level in three decades; to raise the minimum wage to $15 nationally; to turn the Senate into the House and turn the Supreme Court into the Senate; to oversee a federal takeover of elections and the police; to force as many workers as possible into unions, while banning right-to-work; to prohibit the most commonly owned rifle in the United States; and much more besides. Some of this, Biden is now open about. Much of it, however, he is still not. That $2 trillion “COVID relief” bill you’ve heard about? It wasn’t really about COVID relief. The “Infrastructure” bill? It’s not really about infrastructure. The “Families” bill? You get the picture. Nor are the contents described accurately. Two hundred billion dollars in new spending on Obamacare. That’s a “tax cut,” apparently. “No increase” in the estate tax? Well, unless you count the step-up basis, which is really the whole game. It’s as if, having finally been elected president after 50 years in politics, Joe Biden has decided to push every priority his party ever failed to get through.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Big Chalk and the Shrinking of Young Minds Andrew Gutmann

By on May 1st, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2021/05/big-chalk-and-the-shrinking-of-young-minds/

The headline on the front page of today’s Australian (May 1,  paywalled) doesn’t mince words, ‘A nation of cretins: class revamp fail’, the report beneath it detailing what the pedagogic poobahs of the post-modern education Establishment wish to do to the national curriculum and, mercifully, that state and federal education ministers aren’t keen on the proposed emphasis on what might be termed the Three As — Aborigines, Alarmism, Activism.

The Australian quotes University of Queensland emeritus professor Kenneth Wiltshire as calling for the abolition of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, whose proposed ‘reforms’ were released this week for public comment. According to Wiltshire, “We will create a nation of cretins awash in a world where they have no understanding of the history of civilisation, human thought, human philosophy, values or principles.”

Misery, they say, loves company, but there is scant comfort in knowing that Australia’s schools are not alone in promoting the fashionable and politically correct memes of the day at the expense of genuine learning. In New York, the rot became too much for one father, Andrew Gutmann, to tolerate. Reproduced below, his open letter to the board of Manhattan’s Brearley School, where tuition runs to around $50,000 a year. Switch the proper nouns and he might well be writing of Australia’s educational malaise and the long-marchers of Big Chalk who are perpetrating it. — rf

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is “Murderapolis” Again Michael Tracey

By on May 1st, 2021

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/one-year-after-george-floyd-minneapolis

“There will never be cries to “say their names,” nor will enormous crowds of protesters ever demand “justice” on their behalf. Again, the unique political resonance of cop-on-civilian killing makes the outsized focus on those events understandable. But when you spend some time in the crime-surging Twin Cities looking into other victims of unjust violence, the disproportionality of the focus does make you think. ”

It would be foolish to deny that there’s a specific significance when citizens are unjustly killed by the police, as a jury in Minneapolis determined last week happened to George Floyd. Armed agents of the state funded by taxpayer money have special obligations, and that includes avoiding the unjust killing of citizens. When the killing is captured on video, an intense emotional reaction is doubly understandable.

But with the gigantic outpouring of global attention that the Floyd case received — and with virtually every major elite US institution united in both their condemnation of the death-inducing act, and their claimed resolve to continue doing unspecified reparative “work” — it would be foolish to not also notice the comparatively miniscule attention that other instances of unjust killings receive. If one unjust killing (Floyd) generates sustained, historic, society-altering attention, and hundreds or thousands of others generate virtually no attention, the reasons for that disproportionality have to reflect something about a society’s cultural and political priorities.

This is especially true in Minneapolis, where the tumult of the Floyd episode and its fallout has now lasted for nearly a full year. Because it simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.

“We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)

The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree, as I can personally attest. See below.)

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Has Climate Change Become a Tool of Social Control? By Rupert Darwall

By on May 1st, 2021

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/04/27/has_climate_change_become_a_tool_of_social_control_774643.html

A puzzle of contemporary society is the broad acceptance by young people – Millennials and Generation Z – of their lot. True, they haven’t been conscripted to fight an inglorious war as the early Baby Boomers were in Vietnam. But in many other respects, they have strong grounds for feeling shortchanged. Economies in the developed world haven’t boomed, as they did in the decades immediately after the Second World War. The expansion that started in the 1980s sputtered after the dotcom bust at the turn of the century. The economy glowed only thanks to a central bank-stoked housing boom that led to the economic equivalent of a cardiac arrest in the 2007-08 financial crisis.

 “The one experience Millennial Americans all share is that our early adult years have been dominated by an economy that has failed us over and over again,” writes Joseph Sternberg in The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future. The jobs market has been hollowed out as routine jobs are automated. Research shows that it pays to be old – the earnings gap between older and younger male workers widened from 11% in 1970 to an astonishing 41% in 2011. Declining rates of homeownership put the primary vehicle of wealth accumulation increasingly beyond reach of Generation Rent, burdened with $1.4 trillion of student debt. Earlier generations experienced recessions, but none since the Great Depression matches the Great Recession, notes Sternberg. “The economic recoveries weren’t as slow. The underlying transformation in the labor market wasn’t as dramatic. And the previous generations weren’t so indebted, so house-poor, so haunted by the prospect of substantial tax bills to come.”

Add the pandemic to that list. For Gen Z, it is even more of a disaster. Most Millennials – the youngest now in their mid-twenties – had some chance to get onto what remains of the jobs ladder. Students are finding their college years turned into a virtual experience of remote learning and social isolation, their introduction to adulthood suspended indefinitely. Has any generation been treated so shabbily by its elders? Covid-19’s steep age gradient means that young people are least at risk from serious illness but are punished most by lockdowns and social distancing. There is low-level, covert non-compliance, but signs of a youth rebellion are few. Mask mandates are broadly obeyed. The justification for lockdowns is unchallenged except by a handful of crotchety old Boomers. Street protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd had the imprimatur of public-health officials and the approval of cultural and political elites, which perhaps offers a clue.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Tony Blinken’s Mideast Blind Spot Martin Peretz

By on May 1st, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/tony-blinken-mideas

The U.S. secretary of state and his regional envoy Robert Malley played in the sandbox together as children in Paris but speak different languages when it comes to American foreign policy. The results may be the same.

Antony Blinken has been secretary of state for less than 100 days. On the most important strategic issue facing the United States, China, and on the most important moral issue, human rights, he has marked those days with a brand of muscular internationalism that has been absent from Foggy Bottom for too long. He has labeled China’s treatment of its Muslim Uyghur minority as genocide and taken a tough stance on trade imbalances, while committing to work with China on issues like the environment—using exact but firm language backed by coherent policy.

For the most part, Blinken’s stated policies have been strong yet moderate. On the one hand, for example, he will probably not press for international sanctions or reparations from China when it comes to its responsibility for the COVID outbreak. He will probably not use a boycott of the Beijing Olympics to respond to China’s crimes against the Uyghurs. On the other hand, he will push to sanction Chinese officials for their clear, documented, ongoing violations of human rights in Hong Kong. The Biden administration has warned Wall Street not to expect government support for corporate expansion in China—a stand with real substance, since it affects both daily investments and America’s ethical position in the world. For its part, the Treasury Department is pushing for a global minimum tax rate to constrain corporate outsourcing.

But Blinken does have blind spots when it comes to both rhetoric and policy, and these could have large consequences for him and the Biden administration in its larger project of promoting human rights abroad while confronting China. The twinned issues where Blinken has remained conspicuously reticent and indistinct are the Middle East and the elephant in the Middle East, Iran. In lieu of asserting himself, the secretary of state has approved the reopening of nuclear talks with Iran and outsourced them to Robert Malley, whom he appointed or allowed to be appointed U.S. special envoy to that country. Blinken’s reliance on Malley, and Malley’s own history of finding any opportunity to engage with groups and countries that demonstrably align themselves against American interests, point to a large lacuna, so far, in the otherwise sober vision Blinken has laid out.

It is worth noting here that Malley, besides being an architect of President Barack Obama’s Iran deal and a longtime proponent of outreach to Iran and Hamas, is a childhood friend of Blinken’s: The two grew up together in Paris, Malley as the son of a European-style Jewish communist with anti-imperialist politics and links to Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro, and Blinken as the stepson of an active and influential Zionist businessman and philanthropist who was also a public supporter of détente between the West and the Soviet Union. The divergences and convergences of their fathers’ politics are not irrelevant to understanding the sons.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Sentimental Antisemite The CIA’s case for Palestinian statehood was based on analysis. Then the analysts turned out to be wrong. By Lee Smith

By on May 1st, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/sentimental-antisemi

It’s not hard to see the dilemma facing John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Decades of U.S. intelligence assessments of the Middle East, including many he composed and greenlit himself, were trashed during the past four years, as Donald Trump crossed virtually every red line previously drawn by the CIA and other U.S. spy services. Even pro-Israel organizations had assumed that it doesn’t matter what presidential candidates say on the stump—like Bill Clinton, like George W. Bush, and like Barack Obama, they all inevitably walk back their campaign promises. Sure, all presidents would like to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But after seeing the top-secret intelligence and consulting with their well-connected spy chiefs, what president would risk the war that such a move would start?

But the so-called Arab street didn’t erupt when Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Islamists didn’t topple the regimes in Cairo and Amman when the U.S. recognized Israel’s sovereignty in the Golan Heights. Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the two holy shrines in Mecca and Medina, gave all but explicit approval when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel.

That left Brennan with egg on his face. Now out of government, Brennan believes that despite “dealing with a dizzying array of domestic and international problems,” the Biden administration should prioritize “the Palestinian quest for statehood.” Why? To put an end to Israel’s “oppressive security practices,” Brennan wrote on Tuesday for The New York Times. But the case he makes for bumping Palestinian nationalism to the top of the White House’s to-do list is not strategic or rational. It’s sentimental, with a dollop of antisemitism on top—just like his decades of poor intelligence assessments.

“I always found it difficult to fathom how a nation of people deeply scarred by a history replete with prejudice, religious persecution, & unspeakable violence perpetrated against them would not be the empathetic champions of those whose rights & freedoms are still abridged,” Brennan tweeted Tuesday, promoting his Times op-ed.

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KRD NEWS Comments turned off

THE DEATH OF THE POST-RACIAL SOCIETY THANE ROSENBAUM

By on May 1st, 2021

WHEN a youthful but electric Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, there was much talk about what it would mean to America to elect its first black president. The very prospect of it was exhilarating. It tapped into our truest democratic ideals, a major national milestone and giant leap in rectifying our racist past. Both black and white Americans shared the symbolism of the moment.

Obama’s political opponent, John McCain, was an old white male, a war hero who had been brutalized as a prisoner in Vietnam, and a longtime serving United States Senator. Immensely qualified and deserving, but he never stood a chance.

Color blindness has disappeared, replaced by full floodlight x-ray vision—deep into the soul of the nation.

What Obama represented was too intoxicating and exotic to ignore. Even the rest of the world wanted to vote for him. Before there would ever be an Italian, Jewish, Asian, Puerto Rican, Indian, or Greek president, America would first elect a black man. How appropriate; how morally vindicating. Not even a woman would reach the White House first, since Obama handedly dispatched Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. It was a historic and touchingly romantic moment in American history. Obama won Iowa, with a 95 percent white population. More white people voted for Obama in 2008 than they did for John Kerry in 2004.

Obama’s victory carried with it the implicit possibility that a vote for Obama could lift the disgrace of racism that has strangled this nation since its inception. An Obama presidency would signify that white Americans once and forever will regard their darker-skinned fellow citizens as equals. The message to African Americans would be that feelings of inferiority and damaged dignity now and forever shall come to an end. And, hopefully, in time, all lingering resentment toward white Americans would dissipate in this newly “post-racial society.”

True colorblindness. Race-free judgments. Pigmentation a vague sidenote, scarcely visible in all interactions between blacks and whites. 

Obama’s campaign slogan was, “Yes, we can.” He made it easy, spending little time discussing race. It wasn’t a campaign issue, and the press did everything it could to deliberately leave race out of this presidential race. Anyone who wanted to racialize this presidential contest would be breaking the new ground rules, trespassing on the free lane that had opened up for Obama, and Obama alone. 

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