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September 2021

Ripping Off the Veil A British classical music organization exposes the sordid business behind all racial-preference regimes. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/ripping-off-the-veil-on-diversity-regimes?wallit_nosession=1

Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.

Now a British classical music organization has inadvertently ripped the veil off the diversity arithmetic, and the consequences may be far-reaching. Earlier this month, the English Touring Opera told nearly half its orchestral musicians that it would not be renewing their contracts for the 2022 season because it has “prioritised increased diversity in the orchestra.” In other words, as a bunch of white guys you must be cleared out so that we can boost the collective melanin levels among our musicians. Your talent does not matter; your skin color does.

Here, at last, were concrete, publicly identified victims of a preference regime. The reaction was swift. Since the Sunday Times broke the story, the English Touring Opera has been thrown on the defensive. Arts Council England, a government arts funder and the opera company’s main patron, is backpedaling on its aggressive promotion of diversity after the company claimed that it was only following the Council’s mandates in terminating the white musicians. It turns out that the public has little stomach for watching the diversity sausage be made.

Everybody Hates the Jews A disturbing new study confirms what many Jewish Americans are feeling. Bari Weiss

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-the-jews

Everybody hates the Jews. That’s the refrain from the brilliant satirist Tom Lehrer in “National Brotherhood Week,” a song that I had memorized by the time I was ten.

The very fact of the song’s existence, of course, is evidence of abundant American tolerance and pluralism.

But these days, the idea that “everybody hates the Jews” feels like less of a punchline and more like an accurate report of public sentiment. It seems every other day a new study or survey confirms what so many American Jews are feeling, as the old joke had it, that they are hating us more than is necessary. 

Today, came the latest study from the Brandeis Center, which released a poll of “openly Jewish” college students. Seventy percent of the students surveyed reported that they experienced antisemitism. Half of the students said they have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity at school, explaining that they felt doing so would protect them from harassment, bullying or social exclusion. This is the kind of thing we would expect to hear about the Jews of Europe. But not here.

“What is so ​​alarming about these results is that the survey focused on more than a thousand AEPi brothers and AEPhi sisters. These are kids who generally enter college with strong Jewish identities and an eagerness to be active in Jewish organizations. Instead, they are learning to hide their Judaism. And the longer they are in college, we found, the more they closet themselves,” Kenneth L. Marcus, the head of the Brandeis Center, told me. “Anyone who has been paying attention can see that what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. This should be an alarm for the entire American Jewish community.”

Woe Canada: Justin Trudeau wins….

Justin Trudeau will remain as Canada’s prime minister, Canadian TV projected, but it is unclear if his Liberal Party will regain a majority.  Mr. Trudeau called the vote two years earlier than scheduled, in a bid to regain the legislative majority his party lost in 2019. But preliminary results suggested that the Liberals would probably not achieve that.

DAVID SOLWAY: CONTRADICTIONS GONE VIRAL

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/17/contradictions-gone-viral-n1479646

The controversy over the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines and boosters, and the validity of vaccine passports, seems only to have grown more pronounced and, indeed, more vehement with every passing week. The apologists for the vaccines—political leaders, medical “experts” (usually government-affiliated), the media and the punditocracy—have deposed that everyone must be vaccinated, unleashing an army of “fact-checkers” to torpedo any dissident argument and call the credentials and bona fides of highly accredited objectors into question, that is, when they are not being summarily censored.

The legacy press, as to be expected, is busy advancing the staple narrative of the official echelons. There are very few exceptions. I have just come across a particularly egregious and representative sample of such sanctimonious special pleading by Jonathan Kay in Canada’s National Post, worth attending to as an example of hack opportunism to be met with almost everywhere in the mainstream media. The moving finger writes, but in the case of the majority of journalists, only after it has gauged the direction of the wind.

As for our politicians and public health bureaucracies, they have put all their eggs in the mRNA vaccine basket and are now incapable of responding honestly to the bankruptcy of their policies. Their only strategy is to double down on their failure and persist in terrifying a gullible citizenry. Maintaining authority, the perks of office and reputation are powerful incentives. Notwithstanding, contradictions continue to poke holes in the consensus of what passes for official—and much public—unanimity. 

We are told that booster shots, which are coming thick and fast, are fail-safe supplements to counter the proliferation of variants. That these variants seem to have no trouble escaping the orbit of the recommended antidotes does not trouble the equanimity of our so-called “experts.” A recent report states that “An international group of vaccine experts, including officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and World Health Organization (WHO), said that there is no evidence to suggest that the general population needs COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.” Yet they keep coming and the variants keep humming along.

The Mayo Clinic and the CDC expediently changed their definition of vaccination from “produce immunity” to “produce protection,” essentially, from controlling the disease to reducing its symptoms. Apparently, the vaccine train and its caboose of booster shots looked as if it were beginning to run off the rails, requiring the gambit of shunting to another track. In any event, the destination is likely unattainable.

Kristi Noem Must Fix South Dakota Standards Fiasco By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/noem-must-fix-south-dakota-standards-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=4

Hard-left activists have taken over the writing of K-12 history and civics standards in ruby-red South Dakota. Governor Kristi Noem’s administration has belatedly attempted to set things right, but the troubled standards are nowhere near fixed. While public attention has been drawn to the controversy, the press has done little to explain what is actually in the new social-studies standards or how the process ran off the rails. The resignation of two “workgroup” members from the committee drafting the new standards shortly before the release of the final report has also spurred public interest. The picture that emerges from an examination of public documents, as well as conversations with committee members, is disturbing.

While Noem deserves credit for an important move to curb politicization of South Dakota classrooms (more on that below), she bears significant responsibility for the current mess. Noem has positioned herself nationally as a tough-minded conservative, yet she’s handed control of South Dakota’s Department of Education to squishy establishment types only too happy to allow leftist professors, bureaucrats, and their hand-selected teachers to run the show. That said, the real bad actors in this story are at the South Dakota Department of Education, which has blatantly defied the governor’s wishes.

Here’s the bottom line. Unless Noem throws out the current, hopelessly compromised draft social-studies standards, replaces the state education bureaucrats responsible for this fiasco, and puts thoughtful conservatives in charge of the standards revision process, South Dakota’s schools are poised to become playthings of the Left.

The FBI’s Incurable Rot The bureau is an institution with no shame, no remorse, and no accountability. There’s no fix for that. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/20/the-fbis-incurable-rot/

The incurable incompetence, corruption, and moral rot of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was on full display last week.

Within a 24-hour period, some of America’s toughest female athletes recounted to a Senate committee their painful tales of how the FBI ignored evidence that team doctor Larry Nassar was a sexual predator, and a powerful attorney who colluded with the FBI to concoct one of the most animating chapters of the Trump-Russia collusion fiction was indicted for lying to federal officials.

Overlap in the two cases is more than ironic, it’s illustrative: Michael Sussman, a lawyer for Perkins Coie, the law firm that was working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, met with the FBI’s general counsel in September 2016 to plant a false story about Donald Trump’s financial ties to a Russian bank. That same month, the Indianapolis Star broke the story of how Nassar, the longtime physician for the USA Gymnastics team, had sexually abused several female gymnasts. One victim filed a lawsuit after the FBI refused to investigate complaints made to at least two FBI field offices in 2015 and 2016.

But the FBI at that time was too preoccupied with protecting Hillary Clinton to deal with a monster who had systematically raped nearly 300 female American athletes. (As Lee Smith recently noted, the FBI “has been used for a quarter of a century as the place to clean up the Clintons’ dirt.”)

Months before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI, led by James Comey, used its unchecked authority to sabotage Donald Trump. Meanwhile, elite American athletes, including Olympic gold medalists, could not get the bureau’s attention while a sexual abuser continued his rampage. Local FBI agents passed the buck and allegedly falsified reports; one agent reportedly tried to shake down a USA Gymnastics official for a job with the organization.

The FBI’s political game-playing came with irreversible human cost. According to an analysis by the New York Times, at least 40 women and girls, including some of the youngest victims, were assaulted by Nassar between July 2015, the first contact with the FBI, and September 2016. Had the Star not published its exposé of Nassar that month, which finally prompted some action by the FBI, who knows how long his depraved predation would have continued?

“If they’re not going to protect me, I want to know, who are they trying to protect?” McKayla Maroney, a two-time Olympic medalist and one of Nassar’s most frequent victims, asked the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 15.

Maroney may or may not be surprised to learn the agency assigned with protecting the most vulnerable is actually in the business of protecting the most powerful.

Nasser Was Not an Outlier

FBI Director Christopher Wray, hired by President Trump in 2017, publicly apologized. The “fundamental errors” made in the Nassar case, Wray told the judiciary committee, would not happen again as long as he’s head of the agency. “I want to make sure the American people know that the reprehensible conduct . . . is not representative of the work that I see from our 37,000 folks every day.” The rank-and-file, Wray insisted, perform their jobs with “uncompromising integrity.”

The Great Reset of Beef Consumption By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_great_reset_of_beef_consumption.html

“You are not going to eat beef in the future — I one hundred percent guarantee it.”

Political commentator and rancher Glenn Beck stresses each of those words at the beginning of his recent video.  He explains that in the not too distant future, public land will not be used for cattle grazing, resulting in government-imposed meat shortages.  Beck worries that our food supply will be crippled by the globalists, and Americans will no longer have control over what they eat, how it is processed, and what it costs.

Globalist advocates of the New World Order are promoting so-called “sustainability” programs that will raise beef prices so high that only the super-rich will be able to afford it.  This is designed to be achieved by outlawing grazing on public land, allowing an oligopoly of meat-packers to squeeze ranchers out of business, and popularizing plant-based meat.  It’s the big meat-packers who will make this fake meat, so their profits will continue to skyrocket, sustained under the cover of “climate virtue.”

Veganism is being advanced as the most ethical way to sustain the planet, and to promote human health and animal welfare.  But along with that, ranchers and small- and medium-scale beef-packers are being marginalized.  The very consumption of meat is being damned.  Deploying outright lies, a misguided agenda threatens individual liberty and our freedom to farm, own livestock, control our land, and choose our diet.

The socialist roster of lies about meat-eating must be countered.  One of the biggest lies is that veganism protects the environment.  But according to Dr. Frank Mitloehner, professor and air quality extension specialist at the University of California, Davis, if the entire population of the U.S. became vegan for a year, emissions would be reduced by a mere 2.6%.  He also says advocates of the Green New Deal have been dishonest about the water input assigned to beef.  Cattle mostly ingest green water or rain water.  What’s more, they soon release much of that back to earth by urination — which cannot be said of trees.

The Iran Nuclear Deal – and the Lessons of Munich Reflections on the price of appeasing evil. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/iran-nuclear-deal-shouldnt-be-munich-deal-joseph-puder/

The Biden administration, along with our western allies Britain, France, and Germany, are handling the Iran nuclear deal in an appeasement mode that reminds me a bit of Britain’s Neville Chamberlains dealings with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Eager to have a deal, Chamberlain sold out to Czechoslovakia, and ultimately the free world in his 1938 Munich deal. Let us hope that the Biden administration is not seeking a paper deal rather than a genuine lasting and effective nuclear deal that would protect America and its allies.

Frankly, whatever paper agreement would be signed eventually in Vienna or elsewhere, it will not stand. The Iranians have proven time and again that they will cheat, and deceive the western powers, who are more than willing to be deceived for the sake of “non-escalation” politics with Iran. In the end, the US and its western allies might end up selling out the security of its allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia in a Czechoslovakia-like deal.

Iran has already escalated matters by upgrading the centrifuges far beyond the level allowed by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). They are developing ballistic missiles that are aimed at reaching Europe and ultimately the US. They already possess missiles that might be able to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia. Frankly, they have positioned a huge arsenal of rockets in Lebanon, at the disposal of Hezbollah, to be used by the Hezbollah terrorist group when Tehran gives the green light. Similarly, the Ayatollahs have provided the Yemeni (Shiite) Houtis with enough missiles to paralyze the Saudi oil production and more…

The terror and instability Iran is causing in the region is not an issue the cowed western representatives in Vienna much care to bring up. They want to get along with the radical Iranian regime, and are fearful that the Iranians might bolt and walk away. The Iranians, sensing the weakness of the western representatives, and their eagerness to reach a deal at all costs, have hardened their bargaining position. They know that it is the US, and its western allies who will ultimately give in.

The Biden administration already handed down a victory to Iran’s Ayatollahs in the form of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The US administrations admission to its total exhaustion with wars in the Middle East, and its intent to leave the region altogether will grant Iran the ultimate prize: expelling the US from the region. In fact, that is the dream of every jihadist and the Iranian mullahs in particular.

China Uses ‘Disinformation’ Pretext to Ban More Online Content How China’s censorship virus is spreading in the U.S. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/china-uses-disinformation-pretext-ban-more-online-joseph-klein/

The Communist Chinese regime is moving aggressively to solidify what it calls a “civilized” Internet for its citizens. The regime’s definition of a “civilized” Internet is one that adheres to “the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological cyberspace sphere, foster a common ideology among the whole Party and the Chinese people, and interiorize core socialist values.”

China’s rulers want the Internet to serve as their tool to disseminate their propaganda about “the great achievements of [China’s Communist] party in each historical period of revolution, construction, and reform.” The regime intends to crack down on what it characterizes as “misinformation” and to refute so-called online “rumors” with the government’s official party line.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on an online summary posted by China’s State Council of upcoming proposed regulations. “The country plans to better regulate the production, publication and distribution of online content, classify the management of online accounts and build a national mechanism to stop and prevent disinformation,” according to the Xinhua News Agency.

President Joe Biden has frequently sought to contrast “autocratic governments” like China’s with “democracies.” But at least in the area of freedom of expression on the Internet, Biden’s declared line of demarcation is rapidly disappearing.

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith co-authored an article with Andrew Keane Woods, a law professor at the University of Arizona College of Law, entitled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal.” The article claimed that “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” during the last two decades when it came to the debate over whether Internet freedom or control of the network deserved greater priority.

“Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” the law professors wrote.

The giant social media companies in the United States are already doing much the same thing as the Chinese regime in terms of censoring online speech they don’t like. The difference is that China’s government is imposing censorship directly on what is posted on social media platforms in China. In the United States, left-wing Silicon Valley plutocrats are doing the dirty work themselves, under pressure by the Biden administration and progressives in Congress to clamp down even further on what they consider to be undesirable speech.

Americans Need A New Media

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/21/americans-need-a-new-media/
“Today’s journalists are a collection of liberty-loathing progressives, Neo-Marxists, aspiring tyrants, busybodies, and angry juvenile activists”

The news media can be anything they want to be. There are no laws that demand them to be objective, fair, truthful, or accurate. Consequently, we have an army of journalists who are nakedly biased, vainly divisive, childishly spiteful, and purposely destructive. We can only hope our free market economy responds to the great business opportunity at hand before the press and its Democrat allies make doing so impossible as they work to shut down free enterprise.

At one time, long before radio, television, and the Internet, the newspapers in this country were party organs. Wikipedia, citing the work of university researchers, explains that “prior to the 1830s, a majority of U.S. newspapers were aligned with a political party or platform. … This was called partisan press and was not unbiased in opinion.”

The newspapers of the day didn’t pretend to be objective reporters of fact. Their bias was known and accepted. Not a problem.

Today, however, the media, with a few exceptions, try to cover themselves in a veneer of objectivity when in reality they are the modern newsletter of the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda. Those who aren’t part of their tribe are lied to, sneered at, and marginalized by journalists who not only want to establish a political society while killing our civil society, but want to ensure they’re part of the elite that enjoys the privilege and status of power.

From the TV networks to the major daily newspapers to sophomoric gab shows, the media are in the business of lying, covering up and/or ignoring truth that hurts Democrats, instilling fear, creating an environment in which government can more easily control people who already had been freed through revolution, and “othering” and gaslighting dissenters.

As an institution, the press has been almost wholly taken over by a collection of liberty-loathing progressives, resentful leftists, neo-Marxists, aspiring tyrants, busybodies, bitter scolds, elitists, anti-Americans, and angry, juvenile activists – a composition identical to that of the Democratic Party. For those who doubt this, consider the Democrats’ recent proposal to subsidize left-leaning newspapers with taxpayer money.

Enough.