RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/white-privilege-debate-elizabeth-warren/

It’s not a coincidence that many of the loudest critics decrying white privilege are . . . privileged whites.

“I’m a white woman. . . . And my job is to shut other white people down when they want to interrupt. My job is to shut other white people down when they want to say, ‘Oh no I’m not prejudiced, I’m a Democrat, I’m accepting.’”
— Sally Boynton Brown, erstwhile candidate to head the Democratic National Committee

“These white men, old by the way, are not protecting women. They’re protecting a man who is probably guilty.”
— Joy Behar, cohost, The View

“Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins? . . . Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”
— Sarah Jeong, newly appointed editorial board member, the New York Times

Why are current monotonous slogans like “white privilege” and “old white men” finally losing their currency?

Who exactly is “white” in a multiracial, intermarried, and integrated society? How do we determine who is a purported victim of racial bias — relative degrees of nonwhite skin color, DNA badges, an ethnicized last name, or nomenclature with two or three accent marks?

The reason that Arab-, Greek-, or Italian-Americans are more likely to be branded or to self-identify as “white” than Brazilian-, Argentinian, Spanish-, or Mexican-Americans doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with appearance or their DNA or their ancestors’ or their own historical experience in America. It has everything to do with the perversities of the devolving diversity industry in which claims to victimization bring greater careerist advantage or at least psychological satisfaction.

The recent farce involving Elizabeth Warren’s “ancestry” has not only probably aborted her presidential aspirations, but — along with the Asian-American lawsuit against Harvard’s admission practices — also reminded us of the growing corruption of race-based set-asides. Warren’s desperate gambit was simply a response to the new reality that minority status often has little relation with appearance. (Many Latinos — a term never adequately defined — look “whiter” than Italian Americans or Greek Americans who have been absorbed as “white” long ago.)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/10/23/political-correctness-college-campuses-democrats-voters-midterms-progressive-activists-column/1726496002/
Democrats push for political correctness, Republicans mock them for it, and most Americans are uncomfortable with it. No one wins with PC culture.

Democrats are hoping to administer a tough midterm-election blow to the Republicans — akin to the “shellacking” President Barack Obama got from the Tea Party in 2010 — as a means of shutting down President Donald Trump. But it’s looking iffy now, post-Kavanaugh, and if they fail, they’ll have the politically correct culture that has moved from college campuses into the Democratic Party to blame.

As I wrote in these pages back before the 2016 election, opposition to PC culture was a major source of Trump’s appeal to voters. While most politicians, even Republican politicians, were afraid to challenge it head-on, Trump was unafraid, mocking the PC social justice warriors even on their own ground.

Since Trump’s election, the response among Democrats has been to double down. After all, if Trump’s against politically correct culture, then they have to be for it. But that puts them right where Trump wants them to be, because PC culture is highly unpopular.
Most Americans don’t want to be ‘woke’

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what a recent article in The Atlantic, with the title “Americans strongly dislike PC culture” says:

“Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that ‘political correctness is a problem in our country.’ Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages. Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness — and it turns out race isn’t, either. Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent) and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/trump-administration-isnt-dehumanizing-transgender-americans/

The administration is proposing to conform the law to the truth.

Today I learned something truly new. I’d lived my life on this earth almost 49 years before I understood that federal anti-discrimination law defines human existence. Changing that law can thus literally “negate the humanity of people.”

At least that’s what I’m learning in response to the news that the Trump administration is considering rolling back the Obama administration’s lawless expansion of Title IX, the federal civil-rights statute banning sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. At issue is the definition of the word “sex.”

In April 2014, the Obama administration quietly expanded the definition — without an act of Congress or even a regulatory rulemaking process. In a document called “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence” it stated that “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”

Empowered by this new definition, the Obama administration issued extraordinarily aggressive mandates to schools across the nation, requiring that schools use a transgender student’s chosen pronouns and that they open bathrooms, locker rooms, overnight accommodations, and even some sports teams to students based not on their biological sex but their chosen gender identity.

The Trump administration is moving forward with efforts to define gender on the basis of biological sex, reversing decisions under the Obama administration that essentially allowed individuals to choose their own sex for federal government purposes. A new memo from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services argues federal agencies need a definition of sex and gender that is defined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

The changes are to take place under Title IX section of a 1972 law that bars sex-based discrimination in federally funded education institutions, but could have far broader implications, in areas such as single sex settings and set aside programs.

Progressives are predictably outraged by the fact that the Trump administration will no longer allow pseudoscience to define the words “man” and “woman,” but this is a common-sense move that will help the government better protect women’s rights and avoid the confusion of trying to regulate the myriad genders that have been invented in the past several years.

It is important to understand that this change will in no way affect how trans people or anybody else choose to label themselves. Rather, it will allow the government to have an objective standard when implementing federal programs. Without such a standard, a haphazard set of rules exists as to who qualifies for legal protections under Title IX.

Frankly, this move has been a long time coming and is very obviously needed. Our government and governments around the world have been struggling to keep up with new definitions of gender that seem to pop up every day. In recent years many advocates of the idea that people can choose, or self identify, their gender have argued that its nobody’s business but the person making the choice. But this is patently false.

Questions were always bound to arise that would require the state to make a determination about a person’s sex. College athletics, where men who identify as women have unfair advantages, is one example; another is set-aside or quota programs. If government contracts require that a certain number of subcontractors on a project have to be women-run businesses, for example, then there needs to be a definition of “woman.”

Both of the above examples show how this move really does protect women. The set-aside programs are a particularly good example, as their entire point is to ensure that women, who supposedly face disadvantages in male-dominated fields, receive a leg up. It makes no sense at all that a 40- or 50-year-old man, who has enjoyed the benefits of his sex for his entire career, can decide he is a woman and receive the benefit of the set-aside at the expense of a firm helmed by a woman who is more likely to have experienced the circumstances the law aims to compensate for.

The fact of the matter is that while academics and activists have been running around willy nilly changing the definition of sex and inventing 72 (at least) new pronouns, none of this has been rooted in any kind of confirmable science. It is farcical to think that the state can somehow keep up with such changes or pursue policies regarding sex without a workable and consistent definition.

The move also means that those with the most radical views about the sexes will not be able to impose them on our society and laws. In effect, it will mean that this objective standard will replace a hodgepodge of rules, regulations, and definitions of gender as it pertains to the federal government.

What will not and should not change is individuals and non-government related institutions’ abilities to pursue whatever policies in regard to gender they choose to appear as. Nobody is being told that he can’t identify or accept the gender identity of a person however he wishes. Newspaper style guides will still be free to define gender however they wish, and obviously private individuals can make their own choices as well.

The simple fact is that there is no compelling scientific basis upon which to believe a person can change sexes. While many believe that one can do so, it’s just that: a belief. And many do not share that belief. Foisting this metaphysical assertion on all of the federal government’s actions in absence of any actual legal text to support it, as the Obama administration tried to do, was the wrong decision.

Some will call the Trump administration’s decision discriminatory or bigoted, but nothing could be farther from the truth. For government purposes, using the scientific, historical, and standard definition of sex and gender is the only sensible path, and the administration is right to follow it.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Most days, I read or skim five newspapers. Like many, I strive for some sort of balance. But it is difficult. Families and friends avoid politics for fear personal animosities will subsume relationships. Partisanship is everywhere, especially in the media. Either we, as a people, have become reflective of the them, or they of us. We read and listen to one side; we ignore (and condemn)those who think differently. Think of our universities, network TV and late-night comedians. The consequence is that real news is hard to discern. We all have examples of a news item picked up by The Wall Street Journalthat is ignored or exaggerated by The New York Times, or vice versa. Editorial pages smack of hypocrisy, sanctimony, mendacity and schadenfreude, depending on which side of the story the editor finds him or herself. Often, I find myself – and I am sure I am not alone – tossing the papers aside in frustration and picking up a novel, a Wodehouse for its comic relief, or a Times crossword puzzle for its mental stimulation. I am not without prejudice, as you all know, so find myself wondering:why is the Left so consumed with hate? I know many of these people and many are friends. And I know they wonder:why am I so stupid, insensitive and obtuse? I don’t think I am, and my guess is that most of my friends are not filled with hate. But we have allowed extremists to define our opinions; and politicians, watching which way the clouds move, sail with the wind.

The problem, as I see it, is that both sides fail to recognize that we, generally, have the same ends – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (and all that encompasses). It is in the means to achieve common goals where we differ. In recent years, as rhetoric has amplified, a desired political end has justified not only nasty words but acts of violence, “whatever it takes,” as one Democrat put it. We saw it in the Senate Visitor’s Gallery during the Kavanaugh hearings and in restaurants that forced out Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ted Cruz, among others. Listening to the bickering of Senators last month reminded one of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” “…where ignorant armies clash by night.” “Never argue with a fool,”my father used to say, “for a passer-by could not tell which was the fool.” Like a lover’s quarrel, both parties may be at fault, but both parties are not equally at fault. Despite a mainstream media that would have us believe otherwise, it is the left that has elevated hateful discourse to new levels.

In a Wall Street Journalop-ed last September titled “Why the Left is Consumed with Hate,” Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institute explained what he thought was the answer: “The great crisis for the left today – the source of its angst and hatefulness – is its encroaching obsolescence.” Perhaps? I don’t know. In my opinion, part of that angst stems from the failure of the progressive Presidency of Barack Obama to leave a lasting legacy. Despite being elected President twice and remaining popular as an ex-President, Mr. Obama, over the course of his eight years in office, saw Democrats lose the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Worse, Democrats lost heavily in state and local elections. In 2008, there were twenty-eight Democrat governors and twenty-two Republican governors. Eight years later, Democrats had lost twelve governorships and Republicans had gained eleven. (Bill Walker of Alaska is an Independent.) During those same years, Democrats lost over a thousand state legislative seats. Mr. Obama may remain personally popular, but he destroyed the Democrat Party.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/21/wolves

If the New Democratic Party was smart, it would do what the old Democratic Party did long ago: always sound centrist if not conservative in the last weeks of a campaign, get elected, then revert to form and pursue a left-wing agenda for a year or two—and then repeat the chameleon cycle every two to four years.

But although many Democrats in Trump states still dance the old bipartisan two-step, lots of blinkered progressive wolves don’t even bother to put on the sheep’s clothing.

Evidently, the new progressive and radical Democratic Party is far more honest—or perhaps far more hubristic—than in the past. So what now looks and sounds like a wolf is a wolf. Democrats have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from 2016. Or rather, they still believe it is 2008 all over again, with a host of wannabe Obamas on the 2020 horizon, all appealing to identity politics, Maenad feminism, and neo-socialism. The hipster theory is that 30 percent of the present electorate will always vote en masse for unapologetic progressives, and that bloc number, due to changing demography and persuasive street theatrics, soon will grow to 50 percent of all voters.

More to the point, the strategy of hating Trump 24/7 and fueling the 90 percent negative media coverage of the president had seemed to be a winning hand—given that Trump has usually below 45 percent approval in most polls, and pundits promised a huge blue wave neutering what certainly would be Trump’s last two years in the White House.

Yet the result of a progressive wolf baying proudly like a left-wing wolf is that as we head to the 2018 midterm, progressives may soon blow what should be, by history’s analytics, a big win for the out party in any president’s first term.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-universally-bad-idea-1540147422?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Bad ideas just won’t die. Ronald Reagan’s goal was to “leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” But they keep coming back, albeit in different forms. Of today’s bad ideas—from net neutrality to open curriculum and living wages—the most dangerous is the universal basic income.

For twisted reasons, Silicon Valley, the embodiment of meritocracy and incentives, thinks universal basic income will be the next great economic force. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is helping to fund a UBI pilot program in Stockton, Calif. He even wrote a book about the idea—something about 1%-ers paying money via tax credits—hardly original.

He’s not alone. Barack Obama has recently expressed interest in the idea. So have Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff and others in Silicon Valley. Why? I figure it’s their misplaced guilt about patriarchal dominance over workers displaced by automation. That’s a triple crown of bad excuses.
Photo: iStock/Getty Images

The enthusiasm seems infectious. In July, Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar told the Intercept, “We need to start having a conversation about automation and a regulatory framework so that if jobs simply go away, what are we going to do with the workforce?” It wasn’t a long chat. This summer, Mr. Pawar introduced legislation for a pilot program that would give $500 a month to 1,000 families. Think of it as a new version of walking-around money. Never mind that Chicago can’t even afford to fund its public-employee pensions. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-reason-they-hate-trump-1540148467

Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared.

The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten.

This has happened before, in the 1980s and ’90s and early 2000s, but then the financial crisis arrived to save liberalism from certain destruction. Today leftists pray that Robert Mueller will put on his Superman outfit and save them again.

For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful.

Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American—except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.

In 2010, Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of “the ruling class” back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a “cold civil war.” Now he applies the “logic of revolution” to our current political scene.https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic/

The primary objective of any people who find themselves in the throes of a revolution is to find ways of diverting its logic from its worst conclusions.

Prior to the 2016 election I explained (After The Republic) how America had already “stepped over the threshold of a revolution,” that it was “difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate how it might end.” Regardless of who won the election, its sentiments’ growing “volume and intensity” would empower politicians on all sides sure to make us nostalgic for Donald Trump’s and Hilary Clinton’s moderation. Having begun, this revolution would follow its own logic.

What follows dissects that logic. It has unfolded faster than foreseen. Its sentiments’ spiraling volume and intensity have eliminated any possibility of “stepping back.”

The Democratic Party and the millions it represents having refused to accept 2016’s results; having used their positions of power in government and society to prevent the winners from exercising the powers earned by election; declaring in vehement words and violent deeds the illegitimacy, morbidity, even criminality, of persons and ideas contrary to themselves; bet that this “resistance” would so energize their constituencies, so depress their opponents,’ that subsequent elections would prove 2016 to have been an anomaly and further confirm their primacy in America. The 2018 Congressional elections are that strategy’s first major test.

Regardless of these elections’ outcome, however, this “resistance” has strengthened and accelerated the existing revolutionary spiral. We begin with a primer on such spirals, on the logic of mutual hate that drives them, and on their consequences; move to a general description of our evolution’s driving logic, describe the 2016 elections as the revolutionary spiral’s first turn and the “resistance” thereto as the second. Then we examine how the “resistance” affects the other side, and how this logic might drive our revolution’s subsequent turns.

The Cycle and Us

Corcyra’s revolution in 427 BC, the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, is a paradigm of revolutionary logic. Thucydides tells us that the citizens’ divisions had been of the garden-variety economic kind. Its Assembly had taken an ordinary vote on an ordinary measure. But the vote’s losers, refusing to accept political defeat, brought criminal charges against their opponents’ leader. By thus criminalizing differences over public policy, by using political power to hurt their opponents, they gave the revolutionary spiral its first turn. The spiral might have stopped when the accused was acquitted. But, he, instead of letting bygones be bygones, convinced the assembly to fine those who had brought the charges. After all, they had to be taught not to do such things again. The assembly approved the fine. But the second use of political power to hurt opponents gave the revolutionary spiral its second turn. Had the original wrongdoers paid up, the problem might have ended right there. Instead, outraged, they gave it the third push, bursting into the Assembly and murdering him. That ended all private haven from political strife. Civil war spiraled into mutual destruction, until the city was well-nigh depopulated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/weve-grown-accustomed-to-trump-1539815943

It’s hard to prove intangibles, harder still when they are in motion, like October clouds, moving rapidly across millions of minds.

One obvious but neglected intangible is worth noticing in the weeks before the elections: The country—consciously or unconsciously—has gotten used to Donald Trump. Twenty-one months into his administration, Mr. Trump has been processed, or half-processed—even subtly domesticated—by the large, complicated American mind, which is improvisational and on the whole incoherent except in moments of national crisis.

Even progressives to whom he is a monster treat him now as, at least, a familiar monster, another of the many disruptive, destructive realities of the 21st century. Life is a matter of learning to live with monsters. Mr. Trump hasn’t destroyed the world yet, as his enemies predicted he would.

In fact, life goes on, much for the better in many neighborhoods. To progressives this is disconcerting—anticlimactic. The market is up. Unemployment is way down. North and South Korea are talking. The Mueller thing goes on and on, but who knows about that? It’s off the screen for the moment.

These days, you only rarely see those psychiatric manifestoes on Facebook and Twitter claiming that the man is psychotic or infantile. They were common in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency but the diagnosis loses its force when a voter reflects how psychotic and infantile the culture itself has become. Mr. Trump’s peculiarities don’t seem unusual when compared with the extreme bizarreness, not to say pathology, that is routine on the left.

People get used to the strangest things, once the novelty has passed. Same-sex marriage, a preposterous idea not long ago, is almost everywhere accepted. The world adjusts to new conditions and factors in the Kabuki of opposition and ridicule. A monster may become a cartoon—the Tasmanian Devil. Alec Baldwin’s (never quite accurate) impersonation on “Saturday Night Live” has become part of the Trump routine now. People laugh, or they don’t laugh, but either way, they get up Sunday morning and go about their lives.

Among progressives, contempt for Mr. Trump is an article of faith and hardly worth mentioning anymore at a dinner party. If you are dining with like-minded people, it’s boring to go on and on about the president; if those around the table disagree about him, it seems best to avoid politics altogether.

Americans have given up trying to persuade one another, I suspect. Either their adrenaline is spent, or else they know from experience how dangerous the Trump-stirred passions are—how deeply enraged friends may become at friends, what carnage the spasms of emotion may cause. One tires of politics as road rage. Plenty of people remain almost crazy with anger, and the country’s political and cultural forces overall remain centrifugal, driving people to extremes. Yet civilizing and mitigating countercurrents are at work beneath the surface.

The Kavanaugh confirmation fight clarified many Republican minds in advance of the midterm elections. It half-reconciled even many Never Trumpers to a president who has been so little to their moral or aesthetic taste. They have been driven toward Donald Trump by the Jacobin performance of the left, starting with the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and spilling into the streets among the Maxine Waters and George Soros Brigades. CONTINUE AT SITE