RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274039/smithsonian-disgrace-matthew-vadum

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in the nation’s capital is planning to use taxpayer dollars to honor unrepentant America-hating Communist Angela Davis.

Of course, this is the same museum that had to be shamed into properly recognizing the contributions of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a brilliant jurist and political conservative, to American society. Initially, the museum praised his undistinguished nemesis, Anita Hill, a former aide whose politically motivated lies about his office behavior nearly felled his nomination to the court in 1991, before being pressured into giving Thomas the attention and respect he richly deserves.

Unless a political backlash arises, on Sept. 10 the museum will screen and host a discussion on a piece of agitprop called Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners, directed by Shola Lynch. Lynch and Davis will headline the talk that will be moderated by Rhea Combs, NMAAHC film and photography curator.

According to the museum, “[t]he documentary explores the life of Angela Y. Davis, Ph.D. a brilliant young scholar and how, because of her activism in support of social justice, she was criminalized and named on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list.”

This piece of revisionist anti-American cinematic propaganda is, of course, how the Left prefers to view Davis: as a Social Justice Warrior extraordinaire cruelly and systematically oppressed by a nation that hates her because she is a black agent of desperately needed change.

https://quillette.com/2019/06/14/its-time-for-progressives-to-protect-women-instead-of-pronouns/

“A century ago, suffragists were beaten and imprisoned for asserting their rights as women. Their attackers were conservative reactionaries who hated the idea of women being treated as equals. It is shocking to see this same spirit of misogyny re-enter the marketplace of ideas through the back door of faux-progressive trans orthodoxy.”

On my way out of Edinburgh University last week, where I’d just delivered a speech on how feminists should resist male violence, I was attacked by a shrieking “transgender person” (to cite the term used in a Scotsman headline). Had it not been for the three burly security guards surrounding me, I would have been punched.

I usually use female pronouns to refer to trans women, as a courtesy. But this is a courtesy I won’t extend to someone seeking to hurt me physically. This was a man—specifically, a misogynist who’d become notorious under the (since deleted) Twitter handle TownTattle. He was deeply offended that I’d been allowed to speak. That’s why he wanted to hurt me: for being a woman who opened her mouth.

The event at which I’d appeared was called Women’s Sex-Based Rights. It focussed on the threat to women-only spaces and organizations posed by gender activists who seek to erase any legal distinction in regard to the treatment of male- and female-bodied individuals. In the run-up to the event, trans activists and their allies (mostly men who are highly woke, as popular slang would have it) had been claiming that the meeting would cause harm to trans students, and that I would be promoting hate.

Before we took the stage, speakers were given an hour-long briefing by the university’s security team. We were told what would happen if the stage were stormed by protesters, or if it became necessary to vacate the venue. This is what it now means to advocate publicly for women’s rights.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/seattle-yoga-teacher-offers-undoing-whiteness-class/

Good morning, white people. Have you apologized yet today for the color of your skin? Have you begged forgiveness for the immutable physical characteristic that renders your opinions meaningless and your very presence intolerable? Have you expressed regret for the white supremacy you carry around with you everywhere? If so, it still doesn’t matter. Guilt is not enough. You must actively undo your whiteness. Repent, sinner!

And now a strong, brave, fierce white lady in Seattle has finally figured out how to do that: yoga.

Marcus Harrison Green, Seattle Times:

Laura Humpf braced herself for fresh salvos of death threats, rage-soaked slurs and indictments of “reverse racism” from media provocateurs…
This spring, Humpf publicized an “Undoing Whiteness” yoga class at Rainier Beach Yoga, geared toward white people wishing to “unpack the harmful ways white supremacy is embedded” in their “body, mind and heart.” Along with providing a contemplative space, the class would dissect the “pathology of whiteness” — an obliviousness to the batch of privileges society grants white skin — and how it operates in daily life…
“I do stand behind white people needing to talk to other white people on how to undo whiteness. Can I keep refining it and doing it differently and better? Yeah, and I will forever and ever. But I believe in this space as one tool,” she says of her class of about a dozen that incorporates meditation, yoga postures, and readings from “Witnessing Whiteness,” a book meant to help white people deal with discomfort around race-based conversations.

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.