The ‘Anti-Racist’ Who Wasn’t By Charles C. W. Cooke

http://The ‘Anti-Racist’ Who Wasn’t By Charles C. W. Cooke

A trendy progressive ideology buckles under the weight of its own paradoxes.

T oday’s edition of the Washington Post comes with the comforting news that the psychiatrist who told an audience at Yale’s medical school that “she fantasized about killing White people” was, in fact, simply expressing to the world how deeply she cares. In an April 6 lecture, prosaically titled “Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” Aruna Khilanani explained that she dreamed of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fu**ing favor.” Perhaps because they lacked the tools to interrogate and educate themselves, some observers responded rather negatively to these ideas. But, as Khilanani clarifies today, they have got her completely wrong: What she said was not the product of a demented, bigoted, Charles Manson–esque mind, but of a legitimate “frustration about minority mental health,” a desire to “have more serious conversations about race,” and, ultimately, love. Khilanani does what she does, she told the Post, “because I care.”

Well, that’s a relief.

It does not take an exquisitely trained mind to understand why the oft-trailed and much-coveted “Conversation about Race in America” never actually happens in earnest — and, indeed, why it is unlikely ever to happen in earnest. Thanks to the ever-shifting pseudo-scientific nonsense that underpins almost every contemporary “academic” framework, the plain words a given person uses when discussing race do not tend to matter much these days. What matters, instead, is how our self-appointed arbiters of taste wish those words to be perceived. Thus it is that any self-evidently racist comment made by a favored player is immediately justified in terms that would typically be reserved for an especially pretentious exhibit of modern art — “the intermittently blank canvas explores the tension between sound and electricity in an era of existential dread” — while the jokes, mainstream political opinions, unfortunate coincidences, and childhood indiscretions of the disfavored become crystallized into the permanent mark of the Klan. Who, in his right mind, would consent to talk on the record under these rules?

Capitol ‘Terrorism’ Commentary by Former Counterintelligence Chief Highlights FBI’s Politicization Problem By Andrew C. McCarthy

The erosion of public trust in the FBI is a big problem for the country — for both the rule of law and national security.

S tories such as the one Isaac Schorr reported Wednesday are a big part of why the FBI has lost so much of its good will on Capitol Hill and among the public.

It is not like some barroom blabbermouth called for the prosecution of former Trump officials and a number of congressional Republicans on the theory that they constitute the “command and control element” of a “terrorist group” that attacked the Capitol. Frank Figliuzzi was, for some of the Obama years, the FBI’s top counterintelligence official. And that was after he held other major supervisory positions, managing the work of hundreds of agents, particularly in Cleveland and Miami.

Figliuzzi knows he is mouthing Democratic Party political messaging that has no grounding in a rigorous analysis of evidence and applicable law — the kind of analysis the FBI wants Americans to believe it performs without grinding political axes. Yet he also knows that people who care what Frank Figliuzzi says care only because of his perceived authority as a former high-ranking FBI national-security official. His audience figures that Figliuzzi is an insider, publicly saying what the bureau is quietly thinking.

In reality, what he’s saying is bunk.

Federal prosecutors are a notoriously ambitious bunch. They well know that making cases against the former president, his aides, and pro-Trump congressional Republicans, especially terrorism cases, would thrill the Biden Justice Department. It would also please the FBI — not just the top echelon but rank-and-file agents who are not partisans, but who are well aware that over 100 cops were injured in the lawless melee at the Capitol. A prosecutor who could make such a case would be a star for life: invited to hold forth on the NBC news circuit even more often than Figliuzzi.

Figliuzzi is echoing Attorney General Merrick Garland, who told the Senate that the Capitol riot was the most “dangerous threat to democracy” he’s ever seen. For context, President Biden’s AG made that absurd claim in the course of decrying white supremacism as the nation’s “top domestic violent extremist threat.” (In Obama/Biden-speak, “violent extremist” means terrorism.) We are to believe that Trump supporters are neo-Nazis, more dangerous than Hamas, more dangerous than the Taliban, and — applying the standards of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar — even more dangerous than the United States itself.

Prosecutors hear this stuff. They want nothing more than to make the case. If it were makable.

Government lawyers are also well aware that Democratic lawmakers, egged on by progressive legal scholars, larded their “Incitement of Insurrection” impeachment article with an allusion to the 14th Amendment — specifically, to Section 3, which potentially bars from holding federal office people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. The transparent point of this was to lay the groundwork for legal efforts to disqualify the 147 Republicans who supported the untenable Trump gambit to pressure Vice President Pence and Congress into rejecting the certified electoral votes of states whose election results Trump was contesting.

The Congressional Black Caucus Is Blocking A Black Republican From Joining The Group Kadia Goba

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kadiagoba/byron-donalds-congressional-black-caucus-membership

Rep. Byron Donalds, who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election win, hasn’t heard back from the powerful CBC.

The Congressional Black Caucus is blocking membership to Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican from Florida who has tried to join the organization, a source familiar with the CBC’s plans told BuzzFeed News.

It’s been six months since the members who won election in 2020 were inducted into the CBC, a powerful and nominally nonpartisan group of Black lawmakers in Congress. Donalds, who won election for the first time last year, has not been included in that group.

The Florida representative’s office said Donalds has talked to at least three members of the CBC about joining the group, whose members are now at the forefront of police reform talks and responsible for highlighting the racial inequities around COVID-19. He’s not received an answer and the likelihood of that happening a quarter way into the 117th Congress looks bleak.

“Congressman Donalds has expressed interest in joining the CBC, but has yet to receive an official invitation,” said a Donalds aide. “If given, he’d gladly accept.” The CBC did not respond to questions about the status of Donalds’ membership, or why he was not being let in.

The snub highlights the divide between Democrats and their Republican counterparts since Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol during the certification of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Some Democrats have refused to partner with Republicans on legislation since the mob attack, especially if they voted against accepting the election results. Donalds was one of the Republicans who voted to deny Biden’s win.

The caucus has a history with Black Republican members of Congress. Sen. Tim Scott, arguably the most powerful Black Republican lawmaker right now, declined an invitation from the group in 2010 when he was first elected to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives.

Is a bogus Iran deal upstaging the Abraham Accords? By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/is-a-bogus-iran-deal-upstaging-the-abraham-accords-opinion-670725

Testifying before a Senate committee on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken danced around the issue of indirect negotiations in Vienna over a renewal of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran from which former US president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.

“I would anticipate that even in the event of a return to compliance with the JCPOA, hundreds of sanctions will remain in place, including sanctions imposed by the Trump administration,” he said, hastily adding, “If they are not inconsistent with the JCPOA, they will remain unless and until Iran’s behavior changes.”

However, he acknowledged, “We don’t know at this stage whether Iran is willing and able to do what it would need to do to come back into compliance.”

America’s top diplomat may have caused news outlets around the world to highlight what could have been misconstrued as a hard-line stance toward the regime in Tehran, but he wasn’t fooling anybody else, least of all the ayatollahs. The very fact that he referred to an Iranian “return to compliance” to the deal it never upheld is sufficient cause for them to hold their ground and allow the West to grovel. You know, just as it did when Barack Obama was in the White House and intent on reaching the disastrous agreement in the first place.

It’s important to note that Blinken’s remarks came a day after International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi bemoaned the Islamic Republic’s refusal to cooperate with him on anything related to nuclear activity.

“I reiterate the requirement for Iran to clarify and resolve these issues without further delay by providing information, documentation and answers to the agency’s questions,” he told the IAEA Board of Governors. “The lack of progress in clarifying the agency’s questions concerning the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations seriously affects the ability of the agency to provide assurance of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.”

A House That Has Done What a House Should Do: A Tribute to a Great American by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17453/alfred-joyce-kilmer

National leadership is meant to reside in the White House, capable of providing America with a shared vision that allows democracy and its citizens to thrive and flourish. And yet this White House may mirror the darkness that Kilmer mourns.

Kilmer knew what he was fighting for. He insisted on leading multiple patrols that put him in harm’s way. He wore the uniform of the “Fighting 69th” because he was a patriot who embraced American exceptionalism before the world even knew that a world power founded on freedom had been born.

He was an American doughboy killed by a German sniper in the closing months of World War I, defending freedom, literally on the front lines.

Sergeant Alfred Joyce Kilmer left behind a wife and five children. He also left behind a library of poetry that still speaks to us at a time of political turmoil and deep division within a country; a nation that remains the world’s last best hope for a cause that Kilmer courageously died for.

This Isn’t Your Father’s Left-Wing Revolution Today’s revolutionaries aren’t fighting “the Man”—they are “the Man.” By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/09/this-isnt-your-fathers-left-wing-revolution/

Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either were going to take over America or destroy it. 

One of their favorite psychodramatic mottos was “Change it or Lose it,” even as protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion—and almost anything and everything. 

Sixties radicals tutored America on long hair, wire-rim eyeglasses, and who was a drag, a square, a bummer, and who was hip, cool, groovy, mellow, and far out. Most of these silly revolutionaries were not unhinged Weathermen killers or SDS would-be Communists, but just adolescents along for the good-time ride.

With the end of the draft in 1972, the winding down of the Vietnam War, the oil embargoes, and the worsening economy, the ’60s revolution withered away. Cynics claimed the “revolution” was always mostly about middle-class students with long hair, kicking back during the peak of the postwar boom, indulging their appetites, and ensuring they would not end up in Vietnam. 

It is not even true that the ’60s at least ensured needed reform. The civil rights movement and equal rights for women and gays were already birthed before the hippies, as were folk songs, and early rock music. 

Instead, what the ’60s revolution did was accelerate these trends—but also radicalize, manipulate, and coarsen them. 

The grasping “yuppies” of the 1980s were the natural successors to let-it-all-hang-out hippies. The ’60s were at heart a narcissistic free-for-all when “freedom” often entailed self-indulgence and avoiding responsibility. 

Is the Biden Administration Helping Iran to Achieve Its Nuclear Dream? by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17454/iran-biden-nuclear-dream

The improvement in Iran’s technical ability to develop nuclear weapons is the result of a number of steps Tehran has taken during the past year to increase its nuclear activity, all of which constitute clear violations of the terms Tehran agreed under the JCPOA.

Consequently, if the predictions are correct and Raisi emerges triumphant in the presidential elections [June 18], the prospects of the hardliners making any tangible concessions over the country’s nuclear programme will be negligible…. [Raisi] made his name during as a prominent member of Iran’s notorious Death Commissions, when opposition activists were either executed or sent to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq war.

As a result, the only achievement of Mr Obama’s deeply-flawed nuclear deal with Iran will have been to enable the ayatollahs to achieve their dream of acquiring nuclear weapons, with all the implications that will have for the future security of the globe.

The most likely outcome of US President Joe Biden’s ill-considered attempt to revive the nuclear deal with Iran is that it will lead to a dramatic reduction in the time frame Tehran requires to build an atomic warhead.

One of the central goals of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) struck with Iran by former US President Barack Obama was to delay Tehran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons for more than a decade.

At the time the deal was agreed in 2015, intelligence experts predicted it would take it Iran about one year to develop the technological know-how to develop a nuclear warhead if Iran was allowed to continue with its nuclear activities.

In an attempt to slow Iran’s research into nuclear weapons, the JCPOA required Tehran to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. For the next 15 years, Iran would only enrich uranium up to 3.67%.

Yet, despite the JCPOA being in force for nearly six years, the latest estimates suggest that Iran is only a matter of months away from having the ability to produce sufficient quantities of weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear warhead.

Turkey’s Erdogan Whips Up Antisemitism by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17435/turkey-erdogan-antisemitism

“Anywhere which was connected with these people or with these prophets who were all Muslims becomes a Muslim territory…. So any place like this [Israel] had to be freed…. had to be liberated. So, Islam appeared… from their point of view — as a liberator. And therefore, there is no Islamic occupation…. So, there is no Islamic occupation. There is only Islamic liberation.” — Moshe Sharon, Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, YouTube, September 10, 2015.

Such accusations are, of course, totally false, but imagine how many ignorant people worldwide they infect with violent Jew-hatred.

In reality, both Muslim Arabs and Ottomans violently invaded Jerusalem and remained occupiers there for centuries.

What actually needs to be condemned is Hamas’s terrorism. It is Hamas that aims to destroy Israel, that commits war crimes, and that attempts genocide… as seen, for example, in Article 7 of the Hamas Charter. Moreover, it is Hamas that harms its own people and puts them in danger, and uses them as human shields: an additional war crime. Hamas has made no secret of advocating the use of civilians as human shields.

Erdogan’s offer to change the administration of Jerusalem is an open assault on the sovereignty and security of Israel. The three religions are already present and enjoy religious liberty in Jerusalem, unlike the tiny, dying non-Muslim community in Turkey…. Erdogan also issued a threat — his word — to Jerusalem if he does not get his way….

A major reason for this Jew-hatred appears to be irresponsible leaders who repeat hateful propaganda while remaining completely blind to, or proud of, their own crimes.

As Hamas indiscriminately bombed Israeli cities from May 11 to May 17, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered a speech in Ankara in which he targeted both Israel and Jews with antisemitic slurs. Erdogan disseminated countless falsehoods that misinformed the Turkish public about Israel, the Jewish people, Gaza, and other issues — all the while fanning the flames of antisemitism.

In discussing the Islamic history of Jerusalem, where the Jews were living for more than a thousand years before Islam even appeared with Mohammad (c. 570-632) — and scooping up ancient Jewish leaders on the way:

“Jerusalem… is a region that hosts the most ancient settlements of humanity. Many prophets who were also our prophets, from Prophet Abraham to Prophet David and Prophet Solomon, lived in these lands and left their marks on these lands.”

A peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journal publishes a grotesque anti-White screed By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/a_peerreviewed_psychoanalytic_journal_publishes_a_grotesque_antiwhite_screed.html

Critical Race Theory reared its ugly head in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association when Donald Ross, a San Francisco-based psychoanalyst (and teacher) shared with the world the fact that “whiteness” is a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” One of his colleagues was also good enough to offer an approving review in the same issue.

The American Psychoanalytic Association is a real organization, founded in 1911 and has over 3,000 members. It also publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (“JAPA”).

In its most recent edition, JAPA published a peer-reviewed article by Donald Moss, who is White. In 2017, Moss received the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl award for work against prejudice.

Moss is currently a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He works to “understand and dismantle structured forms of hatred– ‘hating in the first person plural’–racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia.” (And yes, that quoted sentence is gibberish.)

You’ll find more gibberish in Moss’s JAPA article, entitled “On Having Whiteness.” However, gibberish or not, anyone can grasp the racial hatred. According to the abstract:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure

To appreciate how utterly vile and insane this is, substitute the words “Black” or “Jew” in place of White, and you’ll be reading something that would be perfectly at home in the Journal of the American Nazi Society or the Annals of the KKK. Moss’s affiliation happens to be with the “Green Gang,” which targets “hatred” toward the “natural world.” (Whites apparently aren’t natural.)

Social Media Blitz Exposes Campus Racism Triggered by Critical Race Theory Rooting out the new racism espoused by the radical Left. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/tonight-social-media-blitz-exposes-campus-racism-sara-dogan/

A cutting-edge social media campaign conducted in April and May by the David Horowitz Freedom Center targeted and exposed the racist and segregationist actions and programming of prestigious colleges and universities taken under the guise of “anti-racism” and Critical Race Theory. Ten prestigious institutions of higher education including Harvard University, the University of Southern California, Georgetown University, and the University of Minnesota were outed for their racist leanings and decisions.  

The universities targeted by the Freedom Center’s campaign were included among the “Most Racist” for varied reasons, but the unifying theme was their allegiance to the new philosophy of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a radical revision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that each American be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While Dr. King and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s promoted “colorblindness,” CRT pushes the opposite view, that our character and our place in society is predetermined by our skin color.

As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo explained recently in an interview with The Atlantic, “Critical race theorists believe that American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, preach freedom and equality, but are mere ‘camouflages’ for naked racial domination. They believe that racism is a constant, universal condition: it simply becomes more subtle, sophisticated, and insidious over the course of history. In simple terms, critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of White and Black. But the basic conclusions are the same: in order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic, and political revolution.”

Guided by this ahistorical revolutionary subtext, America’s colleges and universities have increasingly promoted racially-segregated classes and “anti-racist” training programs which actually endorse racist tropes and promote racial conflict.  To combat this return to Jim Crow, the Freedom Center published a report and created a new website, TopTenRacistUniversities.org, exposing the Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities in America. The social media campaign served to highlight this report and its conclusions and bring them to a wider audience.

Harvard University, #1 on the Freedom Center’s list of most racist universities, was sued for blatant discrimination against Asian applicants in spite of their superior academic achievements, made possible by characterizing their personalities as “lacking” and “one dimensional.”