RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/04/trump-was-right-the-mob-is-coming-for-the-washington-monument/

Remember a few years ago, when the left scoffed at President Donald Trump for suggesting that mobs tearing down Confederate statues wouldn’t stop there?

“This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself: ‘Where does it stop?’”

NPR even did a “fact check” to prove Trump was nuts for saying that. Others blasted the president for comparing the nation’s founders to slave-loving traitors, suggesting that it was another example of Trump’s racism.

Well, a working group appointed by Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser released a report this week that called for removing or relocating (or “contextualizing”) the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial because Washington and Jefferson have been deemed “persons of concern.”

The DC FACES report says the two founders fall into a broader group of historical figures who’ve now been found guilty of “participation in slavery, systemic racism, mistreatment of, or actions that suppressed equality for, persons of color, women and LGBTQ communities.”

The report also calls for toppling statues and scrubbing the names of Ben Franklin, George Mason, Andrew Jackson, Alexander Graham Bell, Francis Scott Key, and many others from D.C. buildings and parks. (The complete list of undesirables is below.)

In their place, the report says, should be names that “include more women, people of color and LGBTQ Washingtonians.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/gop-senator-questions-white-privilege-trainings-at-fed-funded-nuclear-lab_3468911.html

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is seeking an explanation as to why the United States’ leading nuclear safety laboratory spent taxpayer dollars to lecture its staff about “white privilege.”

In an Aug. 13 letter (pdf) to the Department of Energy (DOE), the largest funder of the lab, Hawley called for “a comprehensive review of its procedures and practices to ensure that taxpayers are no longer required to fund such divisive and ineffective trainings.”

Hawley was referring to a series of training sessions that Sandia National Laboratories paid for at a Santa Fe, New Mexico, resort, where Sandia’s white male executives were sent last year to learn about their “white privilege” and the supposed harmfulness of their “white male culture.”

Leaked materials from the sessions were published earlier this month by Christopher Rufo, head of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

“Employees must expose the ‘roots of white male culture,’ which consists of ‘rugged individualism,’ ‘a can-do attitude,’ ‘hard work,’ and ‘striving towards success’—which sound good, but are in fact ‘devastating’ to women and POCs [people of color],” he said, citing the materials in an Aug. 12 tweet.

“Taxpayers funded this? At a resort?” Hawley responded on Twitter on the day of sending his letter.

Sandia, which is responsible for the safety of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, is run by Honeywell, but is wholly government-funded. It has received more than $3.7 billion in federal dollars this year, Hawley said.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/08/was-booker-t-washington-too-white/

According to the Washington Post, on May 31, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s “Talking about Race” portal published a graphic of “Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States.” As reported by Thomas DiLorenzo, it characterized “most U.S. white people most of the time” as including “self-reliance, independence, merit, competitiveness, belief in equality under the law, protection of property rights, ability to speak and write plain English, avoidance of conflict, politeness, Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the work ethic, associating ‘pay’ with work, the scientific method, respect for authority, planning for the future (i.e., savings, delayed gratification), and belief in the traditional nuclear family.”

As people started noticing the claims that such characteristics represented whiteness, rather than what Frederic Hess and R.J. Martin termed “intellectual and personal traits that promote personal and civic success – in the U.S. or anywhere else,” it created enough controversy that the graphic was taken down last month, leaving many unanswered questions in its wake.

However, that graphic helped me understand something that has puzzled me for a long time. That something is that every Black History Month, which annually promotes many role models for imitation, gives such short shrift to Booker T. Washington. While my research has led me to conclude that he was an exemplar of the moral means to success – self-improvement that benefits others as well through voluntary arrangements – apparently that makes him “too white” to emulate today. But that is a hard conclusion to defend.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/high_cultures_iminent_surrender_to_the_woke_.html

Not at all surprisingly, the classical music world is now squarely in the sights of the woke mob.  So now the gang of callow American Maoists is going to teach us that excellence in classical music — composers and performers — is also a white male plot.  I suppose that soon great American symphonies will be hiring violinists who might just barely be able to cut it in a small-town community orchestra.  And the Metropolitan Opera? As an opera lover I can attest: Few sounds are more grating to the ear than opera badly sung, and to sing it well takes extraordinary talent and a lifetime of devotion.

For lovers of classical instrumental music and opera, prepare yourselves for mediocrity and worse.  Can the legitimate stage and museums be far behind?

Of course, in the current revolutionary environment, the culmination of 50 years, this had to come.

It’s important to see this ongoing cultural revolution in some kind of historical context.

America’s rapid cultural collapse, as distinct from its gradual decline, started with an attack on a key cultural — not political or economic — institution, the university.  It began in earnest in the fall of 1964 at UC, Berkeley.  This writer was present, a 19-year-old junior, participated as a dissenter, and followed events closely in amazed disgust, as President Clark Kerr surrendered the university to the radical left and handed them a tactical roadmap for the next 60 years.

The events at Berkeley in 1964 and Kerr’s handling of them provided the template for the left’s destruction of the American university: Take over the Dean’s office, employ a mob to bring normal university functions to a halt, make “non- negotiable” demands, and then, as a reward, get anything you want from administrators and faculty prepared to sell out the functions of the university – imparting knowledge and pursuing truth – for (temporary) peace.

The depth of UC President Clark Kerr’s confusion, weakness and cowardice in October of 1964 — an important story for another time — shocked even the left.  But leftists quickly drew the correct lesson from Kerr’s fecklessness: Universities are easy to mug.  And, employing the Berkeley model, mug them the left did over the next two decades.  By 1985, perhaps earlier, American universities were unrecognizable as the institutions they had been.  The worst consequence of that period was the creation of an entire array of politicized and intellectually vacuous new departments and majors focusing on grievance and specializing in victimology, all born at the gunpoint of the Berkeley tactics that had been validated by Clark Kerr in 1964.  For at least 30 years those new departments have been spreading the lie of American and western civilizational evil, tarted up as academic theory and gradually oozing outward to infect all aspects of campus life with the new university ethic: Ideology over rigorous analysis, mandatory beliefs over rational inquiry, and — above all — feelings over facts.

https://operawire.com/black-opera-alliance-calls-for-removal-of-david-n-tucker-from-richard-tucker-foundation-position-for-racist-comments/

COMMENT FROM A FRIEND

…….”It appears that David Tucker, a son of the famed opera singer, the late Richard Tucker, spoke out on social media referring to rioters as « thugs ».  To be sure, some of the rioters were Black, but also included members of other races, most if not all Americans.  No use of racial epithets has been reported, however, on the complaint of an organization calling itself the «  Black Opera Alliance », Mr. Tucker was removed from the Tucker Foundation board due to the statement of his opinion.

I do not question the right of the Black Opera Organization to speak out on a matter that concerns it’s members.  Such organizations are protected by the Constitution.  It is the action by the Foundation that is deplorable as a violation of Mr. Tucker’s right of free speech even as narrowed by state laws which criminalize “ hate speech”.

Were Mr. Tucker to challenge removal as a violation of rights guaranteed in the First Amendment of our Constitution, his suit would stand a reasonable likelihood of success if fairly adjudged on a non political basis and if properly brought would present the Supreme Court with an excellent opportunity to define the meaning of free speech in a time when this right, central to freedom, is under attack by the political left.

Freedom House, a non political civil liberties organization, publishes annually ratings based on how free a country is deemed to be (Freedom House.org).  Criteria include free speech, free press, freedom of religion, among other rights deemed essential in a free society.  The United States has always received the highest rating, a One.  Countries that are rated lowest (their grade is Seven) include China, Iran, North Korea and Cuba. “