RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/22/trans-activists-silence-science-can-claim-side/

It’s telling that, in order to claim that science is on their side, trans activists need to bully actual scientists into silence about what the data and human experience actually suggests.

According to legend, Galileo defiantly muttered “and yet it moves” after the Inquisition forced him to abjure his Copernican views. Although unverified, this story became a popular anecdote in the history of science, giving voice to the passionate love for inquiry and truth, even in the face of dogmatic threats of violence.

If the transgender movement has its way, we shall soon see many more like Galileo, forced by today’s ideologues and inquisitions to deny the plain truth of science and reason. For example, Ray Blanchard, a leading researcher on human sexuality, was recently suspended from Twitter for the clinically correct statement that “Transsexualism and milder forms of gender dysphoria are types of mental disorder.” After an outcry, his account was restored, but the message had already been sent—thoughtcrime will be punished, even, perhaps especially, if it is true.

This might be dismissed as another Twitter tempest in a teapot, were it not part of a trend of trans activists targeting scientists and researchers who reach politically inconvenient conclusions. Another respected researcher, Kenneth Zucker, was defamed and wrongly fired when trans activists smeared him. Lisa Littman, whose qualitative research identified the phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, was vilified and lost a consulting position.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-new-socialism/

When I told a friend who works in academia about NR’s renewed attacks on socialism, he shook his head and said: “You’re tearing down a 30-year-old straw man. All the literature on socialism that matters today is post-1989.” And when I asked what makes this New Socialism new, he replied: “It’s all about the internet and social media and people from different places and backgrounds collaborating to erode and bypass existing power structures.”

Sounds great — but by Leftsplaining in this way, he was only showing how far behind the times he is (and no wonder; due to the tenure system, academia is the slowest to change of any major American institution). Internet socialism is old hat; this year’s New Socialism is an Uncle Sam–as–Santa Claus nostalgia act, seen most prominently in the Democratic presidential candidates’ Loud, Proud, Refusing to Be Cowed, At Least Until the Primaries Are Over program of free college, punitive taxation, and DMV-style health care, along with factory workers advocating seizure of the means of production.

Of course, socialism has always been subject to sudden changes, from Lenin’s New Economic Policy nearly a century ago to glasnost and perestroika and “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to the 1990s “stakeholder society” (and I’m sure Jonah could give us a few dozen more). There are as many varieties of socialism as there are of Doritos, most of them just as crunchy.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/confessions_of_a_recovering_white_supremacist.html

My name is David Solway and I am a recovering white supremacist. For many years I had no doubt that my supremacy and attendant privileges were morally and historically deserved. But of late I have begun to doubt these assumptions, owing to the tornado of contempt and animadversion that has come my way via the media, establishment politicians on the left, various identity groups, assorted intellectuals, and even former friends.

This has led me to reconsider my principles and beliefs, to subject them to relentless scrutiny in order to discover if there is any justice to the criticism and vilification I have endured, and whether I should modify my convictions and mend my ways. Obviously, I first needed to review these convictions and see precisely what they consisted of before I could arrive at a just conclusion.

It seemed to me that my “white supremacism” comprised some of the following items and elements.

I am white.
I believed that Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization, for all its flaws and missteps, was on balance an undeniable boon for mankind, raising vast populations from abject poverty, tyrannical compulsion, and low horizons of expectation and achievement.
I was convinced that Western civilization engendered enormous advances in religious thought, art, philosophical speculation, science, medicine, technology and infrastructure, giving us the presumed blessings and inventions we all take for granted: longer life spans and increased leisure; readily available transportation; electricity; interior heating; viable buildings; a wide range of comestibles; sanitation facilities; clean water; revolutionary surgical techniques; communication devices; labor-saving implements and tools; great painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature; and indeed, almost everything we touch, experience, eat and drink, look at, wear and enjoy, down to the tiniest domestic objects. The list of such supposed goods is endless and is with few exceptions associated with the energy and resourcefulness of white males of chiefly European descent.
I believed that a free-market economy was infinitely superior to a command economy and that the proof was everywhere to be seen by those who still had eyes to see. What this had to do with white supremacy was never entirely clear to me, but then, the principal economists of merit were chiefly Scottish and English and tended to be men — same for those who pioneered the Industrial Revolution of which we are all the ostensible beneficiaries.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/20/president-trump-can-win-on-race/

The good news for President Trump is that most Americans agree with Republicans about race: that we are all created equal and deserve equal treatment and opportunity. The problem is that far too many Americans believe the lie that Republicans, instead of adhering to these basic truths, are racist. President Trump has the courage to express our views on race. We can win on this issue.

Democrats don’t want all citizens to be treated equally. Democrats want people treated differently and according to their skin color. They want group justice. They call it social justice because it sounds better. In their idea of a just America, whites, Asians, and Jews must give up opportunities as a group, and blacks and other people of color must be privileged with extra opportunities and reparations.

By their definition, Democrats claim half the country is racist. Understand this: the Democratic Party’s idea of racism is defined by group identity, not by an individual’s behavior or beliefs. You’re not biased? Doesn’t matter. Utterly reject discrimination? Doesn’t matter. White? You’re racist.

Democrats believe being colorblind is itself racist. Republicans, who believe laws should be colorblind, are by definition racist.

https://quadrant.org.au/

“In order to achieve that “healing” for which Ms Wilkinson has been yearning since Saturday night, all the Morrison government need do is implement the very same slate of Left policies which the electorate rejected. Funny how that works.”

There are many misconceptions about the Left, whose louder advocates can strike those not of their tribe as being possessed by a hectoring absolutism. Don’t agree with what they say? You’re worse than wrong, you’re evil! That’s apt to be the take-home impression of any conservative who has survived a Northcote barbecue or Newtown soiree, but the fact of the matter is that it isn’t always true. Sometimes our Left-inclined fellow citizens can be the very essence of conciliation, good manners and empathy, extending much love and respect to those on the other side of politics.

This happens whenever they lose an election, as TV personality Lisa Wilkinson has just demonstrated. No sooner had it become apparent Labor couldn’t win on May 18 than she was pouring her broken, gentle heart into an open letter to once and future PM Scott Morrison.

“It might be good to start with some healing,” she begins, observing that “we” are all feeling “just a little broken right now”. We? According to the Australian Electoral Commission, some 52 per cent of the voting population has been pretty chipper for the past two days or so.

As I was taught, commonly used  pronouns include I, me, mine, she, he, it, we, they, us, his, hers, theirs.

Yesterday at a delightful lunch in bucolic Connecticut one of the guests announced that he was a “pronoun warrior”-determined to wipe out gender in pronouns.

I asked what injustices, challenges, hurts, offenses, prejudices would be ameliorated by altering pronouns. His response was that I am old and not “woke” enough.

I gently accused him of ageism but he won the argument by denying that he was an ageist….after all, he explained, he voted for Bernie Sanders and would do so again.

We ended lunch on very good terms when I gave him my creme brulee, proving that food is the way to a “they’s” heart.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/09/as-dems-embrace-

If Democrats are going to run in 2020 on a platform of driving the U.S. into socialism, they are likely to get thumped hard at the ballot box. Results of a Monmouth University Poll released this week show that 57 percent of the country says socialism is not compatible with American values. Only 29 percent say it is.

It’s alarming that socialism has penetrated as deeply as it has into our politics. For decades, Americans clearly understood what socialism is, and widely rejected it. And, despite the media’s grade-school infatuation with socialist politicians and policies, maybe they still do. The Monmouth poll found that only 10 percent of Americans hold a positive view of socialism.

Yet every Democratic candidate has to identify as a comrade in the struggle if he or she is to pick up any traction. When Noah Wall from FreedomWorks wrote in the Washington Examiner three months ago that the Democratic Party was in a socialist spiral, he was exactly right.

We need to be clear — and fully honest — about what socialism is. It’s coercion. It’s compulsion. It’s the threat and use of force. It robs its free people of choice and enslaves them. Socialism is anti-liberty, pro-servility, and soul-crushing. Its servants live in misery while those in power live in luxury.

Of course America’s Democrats say that their version of socialism is democratic socialism — not that nasty stuff that’s killed and maimed in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. They want to emulate the systems of Scandinavia.

But Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are not socialist countries. They are welfare states paid for by the market economies of those nations — and the defense budget of the United States.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/16/democrats-rally-round-their-anti-semites/

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Democratic Party leadership defending her indefensible comments on the Holocaust are now promoting the Big Lie about Arabs as innocent victims of World War II. Nazism was widely popular among Palestinians, who played a key role in the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann himself went to Cairo to train the Muslim Brotherhood in anti-Semitic propaganda, military sabotage, and terrorism—launching the modern jihadi movement in the process. Without Arab Nazism, 6 million Jews would not have been murdered.

This is a history Americans should know, since it is a war we are still fighting today.

Tlaib and her colleague, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), are not on America’s side in this battle. Nor, it seems, is the Democratic Party.

Before Hitler adopted the Muslim Brotherhood, its Islamist message focused on the sexual decadence of the West, the evil of treating women as equals, and calls to reject modernity. This got them exactly nowhere, languishing with a membership of 800 cranks. With Nazi funding and training, the Brotherhood adopted the Third Reich’s obsession with anti-Semitism. Hitler’s message was fused with the Koran’s anti-Semitic teachings into a toxic mix. The Muslim Brothers grew a thousand-fold during the war, emerging triumphant with 1 million members. Thus the jihadi movement was born. The history of the Middle East was changed forever.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273767/and-little-child-shall-lead-them-mark-tapson

In this recent video clip from a news channel’s interview with 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, it is clear that the young girl has no special insight to offer, only canned platitudes (“If everyone does something, huge changes can happen”). And yet the older male interviewer fawns over his teenage subject as if she is a credible, informed expert and a wise Cassandra whose dire warning we ignore at our peril. He does so not in spite of her youth, but precisely because of it. Why? Because the leftist media, and the left generally, love propping up gullible, politically indoctrinated children as authoritative mouthpieces to promote their agendas.

Swedish schoolgirl Thunberg attracted worldwide media attention at age 15 for her activism against weather, and is now the deadly serious face of the left’s climate change hysteria. Recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, Thunberg is following in the carbon footprints of environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez who, at the age of 15, entreated the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to take action against purportedly human-caused climate change.

After the Parkland school shooting in Florida on Valentine’s Day, 2018, student activists David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez (pictured above), 17 and 18 respectively at the time, were ubiquitous in the media coverage about the atrocity – not because their thoughts on the incident were any more insightful than those of any of their fellow students, but because of their forceful calls for stricter gun control and their eagerness to demonize the hated National Rifle Association.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/author/abe-greenwald/

Disease is reversible—rot isn’t. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib brought the disease of anti-Semitism into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party when they were elected in November. The party could have fought the disease. It chose instead to nurture it. And that’s when the irreversible rot set in.

The rot explains why Democrats, from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on down, are vigorously defending Tlaib’s recent lies about Arabs welcoming Jews after the Holocaust. It doesn’t matter what Tlaib or Omar say, how blunt their Jew-hatred is, or how often it’s aired. A defense pact is already in place that covers all calumnies against the Jews. Both the Democratic leadership and the liberal media establishment will back these bigots against any and all charges of anti-Semitism in return for smooth relations with the social-justice left. It’s a monstrous deal made by people too weak to defend their party and speak the truth.

During a Yahoo podcast over the weekend, Tlaib said that she gets a “calming feeling” when she thinks about the Holocaust because “it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity . . . in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-Holocaust, post-tragedy. . . And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right?”

Wrong. At the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was a supporter and ally of Hitler. When the two met, al-Husseini told Hitler that they shared the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” The two went on to scheme about how best to set upon and destroy the Jews of the Middle East. What’s more, the Arabs regularly massacred Jews in Mandatory Palestine.