RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/06/museum-james-madisons-home-slants-truth-interactions-slavery/

It seems the Montpelier Foundation has adopted a version of the ‘blame America first’ mantra: Blame the Founders first, instead.

Along with a group of other young professionals, I journeyed to James Madison’s Montpelier last year for a weekend summit “to connect with the source of American democracy.” I was disappointed. It seems the Montpelier Foundation has adopted a version of the “blame America first” mantra: Blame the Founders first, instead.

In June 2017, “The Mere Distinction of Colour” exhibit, composed of three separate exhibits on slavery, opened at Montpelier. An 11-minute video on “slavery’s lasting legacies in modern society” occupies its own room in the cellars.

Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries, chair of the Teaching Hard History Advisory Board, an initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is featured. There are some notable similarities between the video and the preface of SPLC’s report (authored by Jeffries).

The SPLC is now infamous as an ideologically biased organization. They brand conservative nonprofits such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, an institution that has won Supreme Court cases, “hate groups.”  Even Twitter is not comfortable relying on the advice of the SPLC, having removed them from their “Trust and Safety Council” recently. Yet their arguments are welcome at Montpelier.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/05/an-outbreak-

A book for young adult readers (fourteen-plus) includes a letter to the writer’s amputated breasts:

And I know this is probably hard for you to hear, but I believe I’ll be happier without you. I also think this will be better for you. You need to be free and I’m just going to keep holding you back and pushing you down. It’s time to separate.

Nevo Zisin’s surgery costs were paid for, like earlier testosterone treatments, by internet appeals for cash. Finding Nevo is an autobiography commissioned by Walker Books, “the leading children’s publisher in Australia and New Zealand”. By age twenty, when it was published, the gender celebrity author had been a girl, a lesbian, a man, and non-binary. Presently, the transgender activist is a public speaker who runs “programs and workshops” for schools and workplaces, and advises children and parents in the Jewish community on gender and sexuality.

In December 2016, about the time Finding Nevo was being written and edited, Dr John Whitehall, Professor of Paediatrics at Western Sydney University, published the first in a series of Quadrant articles on childhood gender dysphoria—the conflict experienced by those children who believe they have been born in the wrong gender. The psychological condition has become a politicised media celebration, and a cause in the culture wars. YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram are guides for escaping youthful boredom, bullying and parents by selling the excitement and obsessiveness of gender swapping. For the isolated and friendless, Google will find you gender advice and medical solutions to put things right. It’s a fast-track route that leaves some young twenty-somethings mutilated and drug dependent, alone, and in another body, worrying about adult things like working, passing and how to tell new acquaintances, and remind old ones, of their pronouns. And after the glamour and grooming that led them on their journey, everyone around them now seems to be talking of suicide.

Whitehall is on the side of the kids, urging caution and pleading for the saving of young bodies from surgical castration, body disfigurement and lifetimes of prescribed drugs with unknown long-term effects:

While proponents argue for massive intervention, scientific studies prove the vast majority of transgender children will grow out of it through puberty if parents do little more than gently watch and wait.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/6/restoring-the-lost-consensus

Editors’ note: The following is adapted from Roger Kimball’s acceptance remarks at the Bradley Prize ceremony in Washington, D.C., on May 7, 2019.

Looking around the cultural landscape today, I conclude that we are in the midst of a sort of negative religious revival: let’s call it America’s First Great Awokening.

Evidence of our society’s wokeness—a false awakening sparked by political grievance—is all around. I’d like to begin with what the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa called the “coincidence of opposites.” Unpacking exactly what Cusa meant by that arresting phrase would take us into the thickets of metaphysical speculation. But we see pedestrian examples of that strange coincidence everywhere. Indeed, one of the great tests of our wokeness is the extent to which many things have mutated into their opposites—not awake but awoke. Inversion is a dominant principle of our social life.

Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time, and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization. Today, most are dedicated to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short, they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness. This is especially true, with only a handful of exceptions, of the most prestigious institutions. The tonier and more expensive the college, the more woke it is likely to be.

There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/47257/walsh-simple-matt-walsh

For the last few weeks I have been trying with increasing desperation to get a leftist — any leftist — to answer one simple question: what is a woman?

You’ll notice that folks on the Left use the word “woman” quite a bit. They make many claims about women. They say that these creatures known as women have something called “women’s rights.” They say that these rights are under attack. They say that women are persecuted and disadvantaged by something called male privilege. They say that women are the victims of a wage gap. They say things like, “We need a woman President.”

They also say that biological males can be women. They say transwomen are women. They say that someone can start out life as a male and transition into a woman. They make many other claims in this vein.

But how can I understand any of these claims and declarations if I do not know what they mean by the word woman? And how can they make any meaningful statements about women if they themselves do not know what they mean by it? So I ask again very simply: what is a woman?

I feel in fairness I should provide my own definition. I tend to agree with Merriam-Webster that woman means “an adult female person.” I agree not only with the dictionary but with the whole history of human civilization, which, collectively, has always understood woman in this way.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/why-is-fat-a-feminist-issue/

In a speech on the topic of “radical fat liberation” jointly sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Department and the Center for Equity and Inclusion (what else?) at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, the prodigiously overweight Sonalee Rashatwar, a self-proclaimed Fat Sex Therapist, compared fitness trainers to Nazis, defined child dieting as sexual assault, attributed the Christchurch shooting to ‘thin” white supremacism, and condemned science as “fataphobic” for “promoting the idea that certain bodies are fit, able and desirable.”

She wonders, rhetorically, “is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?” She goes on to blame the Reagan administration for having refused to provide “social supports that also help me to subsidize my food costs.” Believe it! We have entirely transcended the realm of reason, sanity and common sense, and tossed the concept of personal responsibility into the cultural dumpster.

Rashatwar, of course, is not alone in pursuing her redemptive mission. Fat is big in the feminist Weltanschauung. Virgie Tovar’s influential You Have the Right to Remain Fat is a case in point, resting on a subtle distinction between fat positivity and fat activism. Lindy West, whose book Shrill is a feature on Hulu, tells us she had “always been a great big person,” but uses her natural condition as a kind of license for voluntary accumulation. If we are to be honest, we would have to say that we are witnessing a grotesquerie in progress—which is, again to be honest, what feminism has become.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vermont-replaces-columbus-day-with-indigenous-peoples-day/

Vermont on Friday became the sixth state to eliminate Columbus Day, replacing it with Indigenous People’s Day.

Governor Phil Scott, a Republican, signed a bill designating the second Monday in October a day honoring Native Americans rather than the 15th-century Italian explorer.

“Vermont was founded and built upon lands whose original inhabitants were Abenaki people and honors them and their ancestors,” the state’s new law reads.

“I know it’s controversial from many standpoints, from many people, but you know, it’s just a day, and we’ll get through it,” Scott said last month after the state legislature passed the measure.

Vermont’s move comes on the heels of similar bills in Maine and New Mexico, whose Democratic governors signed the holiday change into law last month. Hawaii, Oregon, and South Dakota had already chosen to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day instead of Columbus Day.

Some modern Native American tribes object to the celebration of Christopher Columbus, who led several expeditions to Central and South America and spearheaded the European colonization of the New World.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/actor-stephen-fry-accused-of-white-supremacy-for-making-ok-gesture/

Last week the Chicago Cubs banned a fan for playing the Circle Game, claiming he was actually being a white supremacist. They fell for the hoax that the OK gesture is actually something bad. And NBC News even blurred out the guy’s hand so the infection wouldn’t spread, or maybe so the audience couldn’t see that it was just an OK sign.

“Chicago Cubs fan, who appeared to flash a hand gesture that has become associated with white supremacy behind a black sports reporter while he was on air, has been banned from Wrigley Field. https://nbcnews.to/2HcgNeJ ”

Emma Kelly, Metro (UK):…While Stephen was just trying to raise awareness and drum up support by sharing the universally recognisable OK symbol, others piped up to claim it was a sign of the alt-right.One person wrote: ‘Stephen and friends – You might want to be super careful using this symbol if you don’t want to be confused with white supremacist creeps. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that even the kindest of intentions can be taken out of context.’ Another replied: ‘Are you aware that this hand symbol can be misinterpreted as support for white supremacy?’, while one reply said:‘Didn’t have you down as part of the alt-right.’

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/13/the-modern-bonfire-of-the-vanities/

Five centuries ago, in Renaissance Florence, the Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola, in his quest to purge Florence of all “immoral” works of art, started what came to be known as the “bonfire of the vanities.” Thousands of objects and works of art were burned in the fire; paintings by Sandro Botticelli, works by the poet Boccaccio, and countless other books, paintings, and objects were forever lost to history.

Looking back on this event today, we might be tempted to feel smug. We’re better than that, aren’t we? Surely today, in our enlightened, modern society, we’d never be stupid enough to destroy works of art or irretrievable relics of our history.

Yet it seems like, every day, leftists are more and more eager to prove that yes, they are that stupid. Because of the Left today, we are stuck in a slow-moving, modern version of the bonfire of the vanities. Unlike Savonarola’s bonfire, this isn’t a one-day affair; it’s an ongoing, subtle, never-ending eradication of our Western history and culture.

A story out of George Washington High School in San Francisco is the latest case in point. Earlier this month, the high school convened a “reflection and action working group” to determine the fate of a pair of 83-year-old murals depicting George Washington. The group determined the artwork is “highly problematic” and “traumatic” for students, since one of the murals presents George Washington next to several laboring slaves, and the other represents a dead Native American. The working group’s choice follows an earlier decision in February by a school-board committee that the art “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-5-8-modern-architecture-theres-no-accounting-for-taste

This past Sunday I joined the good people from Maggie’s Farm on their annual “Urban Hike” in New York City. This year they rounded up a group of about 13. The hike started at the Museum of Natural History (80th Street and Central Park West — near the geographical center of Manhattan Island) and proceeded uptown on a meandering path of about 9 miles, stopping at sites that included things like Pomander Walk, Straus Park (Leo Straus was the founder of Macy’s who died on the Titanic), and Columbia University. The weather was chilly with persistent rain. Toward the end of the hike, at about 155th Street, we had just stood on Edgecomb Avenue at the top of the bluff overlooking the spot where once had stood the Polo Grounds (actually a baseball stadium that was the original home of the Mets, and before them the New York Giants baseball team), and we turned the corner, and suddenly this:

Several gasps and “Oh my God”s erupted spontaneously. I heard the words “Darth Vader building” uttered behind me. Whatever this black block might be, there had been no mention of it in the hike itinerary that had been provided to us; and yet this building was clearly the dominant presence in the neighborhood. Viewing it from the street, its function was not obvious. Had this thing been dropped in by space aliens? What could it possibly be, and why was it here?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273718/new-york-orders-museums-hire-people-race-daniel-greenfield

Another great idea from New York City’s white mayor and white city council speaker.

They’ve destroyed so much of New York City. But even in the city’s darkest days, the Met, Carnegie Hall, and other classical cultural institutions had survived. Now the cultural revolution is coming for them.

The heads of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are among dozens of cultural institution leaders quaking in their boots as Mayor Bill de Blasio considers slashing their funds if they fail to meet his staff diversity criteria, The Post has learned.

De Blasio’s decree targets the nonprofit organizations that run the 33 museums, theaters, concert halls, botanical gardens and zoos that comprise the city’s “Cultural Institutions Group.”

But in 2017, de Blasio reversed course and warned that diversity “will be a factor in funding decisions,” claiming, “We do this because we believe in fairness.”

And nothing says fairness like giving people jobs because of their race.

The move is intended to help boost people with African, Latin, Asian, Arab and Native American heritage, “LGBTIQ populations,” people with disabilities, non-English speakers and the poor.

The next great Met conductor can be one or all of the above.