RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/two-months-later-hows-the-lifting-of-the-mask-mandate-going-in-texas/

When Texas governor Greg Abbott lifted the state’s mask mandate on March 2, he was simply leaving it up to individual businesses to decide whether they wanted to require masks depending on circumstances. As expressed by Beto O’Rourke, who called the GOP a “cult of death,” here was the typically temperate response of many in the Democratic Party and its media wing, otherwise known as “the media”:

They literally want to sacrifice the lives of our fellow Texans, for I don’t know, for political gain? To satisfy certain powerful interests within the state? This isn’t hyperbole. You heard our lieutenant governor, arguably one of the most powerful positions in the state of Texas, say on Fox News at the beginning of the pandemic, we are willing to die. Old people are willing to sacrifice their lives in order for the economy to reopen. . . . Unconscionable, unacceptable, we’re not accepting it. We’re moving forward on an individual and collective basis to help our fellow Texans.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-3-some-sensible-black-voices-are-on-to-the-antiracism-scam

As Critical Race Theory and “antiracism” have swept through academia and the media and corporations over the past few years, seemingly almost no one in those institutions is able to see the thinly concealed and vile racism embedded in these ideologies. Here is Ibram Kendi’s famous articulation of what he calls “antiracism”:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

So in other words, simply treating black people as adults and expecting them to make it on their own in a non-discriminatory world is not an acceptable remedy. Instead, blacks are to be permanently dependent on assistance from the government and/or whites. As I put it in a post back in April 2019, the “antiracism” agenda evidences:

the utter contempt in which the self-anointed elites of our country hold members of minority groups, most particularly African Americans. Somehow, these elites — or at least some very substantial number of them — have decided that African Americans are not capable of accepting personal responsibility in life or of being treated like adults.

Meanwhile, Kendi gets rich off peddling his neo-racism, and plenty of others make various sorts of comfortable livings off the trendy ideology, whether as teachers or as diversity deans at colleges or as corporate diversity officers. But are there any black thinkers who are seeing through the smokescreen of Orwellian “antiracist” verbiage and calling out the ideology for just how destructive it is for the supposedly intended beneficiaries?

The answer is that there is a small but growing number, and they are deserving of greater exposure. So let me give a small shout out to some of the more prominent examples.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/people-getting-fired-for-referring

It has become clear over the past year that our racial reckoning has shaped attitudes about the N-word. Or, among a certain few who scare the rest of us into pretending to agree.

As someone who is both a linguist and commentator, I am in an awkward position on the N-word. The linguist describes; the commentator opines. In my new book Nine Nasty Words, which publishes tomorrow, in the chapter on the N-word I try to stick with just describing. However, many will wonder how I “feel.” I have opined here on this topic before; in anticipation of the publication of Nine Nasty Words I will share some further thoughts.

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A widely discussed documentary on James Baldwin in 2019 was carefully titled I Am Not Your Negro, as opposed to what Baldwin actually said in an interview, “I am not your nigger.” In 2019 when literature professor Laurie Scheck ventured a discussion in a class at the New School in New York on why Baldwin’s actual phrasing had been elided, she uttered the word itself – only to be reported to the administration by students in her class and narrowly avoid being fired. And then, more recently, she was indeed fired, with no compelling reason given. It is hard to imagine that continued evaluation of the N-word incident in light of the “racial reckoning” starting last summer had nothing to do with this.

It has become almost hard to keep up with the episodes of this kind of late. As I have discussed here, law professor Jason Kilborn was barred from the University of Illinois in Chicago’s campus as a threat to black students’ safety after in frustration referring to himself in satire as a “monster” in a conversation with black students intended as a healing one. The conversation’s spark? His writing “n*****” in an exam question about employment discrimination, that had bothered no one until – golly, wonder why? – this year.

About ten minutes before this, Greg Patton had been dismissed from a class he was teaching at the University of Southern California for mentioning that in Mandarin, the equivalent of the hedging “like” in English is “nèi ge, nèi ge” which translates as “that, that …” but sounds like, well, you know. Not only had Patton given the lecture countless times before with no problems, but – you couldn’t write this better – the class was on communication in global markets!! Yet the usual suspects went about for weeks claiming that Patton had committed a kind of “violence” added to the grinding burden that being black in modern America is.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/soviet_tyranny_warmed_over_is_still_tyranny.html

A colleague recommended I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a long and deep look into the abyss of Soviet communist oppression in the first half of the 20th century.  In her opinion, “everyone should read this book.”  I must agree — the world would probably be a better place if the book was required reading in universities, especially in the West.  It should also be taught in high schools, at least in excerpts.  Sadly, in the age of the tweet, Solzhenitsyn’s 700-odd agonized pages are probably doomed to general neglect.  More’s the pity.

Mark Twain said long ago: “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  The Gulag Archipelago, though intended by its author as a forlorn memoir to the hundreds he saw ground up by the Soviet state, is also the most powerful of warnings.  Communism is still with us.  Its central themes have never been extinguished.  Its salespeople are still out on the street.  The seductive lies of dead ideologues have never lost their power to persuade.  They have changed a little, adapted to new cultures, new eras, and new technologies — but in the end, the Devil’s siren song still rhymes.

One hardly knows where to begin.  Let’s start with the political usefulness of the common criminals — people Solzhenitsyn summarizes as “thieves.”  In Soviet prisons and labor camps, the truly antisocial elements were made the jailers of the rest.  They could torture, rape, and sometimes kill their fellow prisoners with near impunity.  “Thieves” were officially designated as a victim group, a people wronged by capitalist oppression.  They were not to blame for their own actions.  They were, in the terminology of communism, “socially friendly elements.”  The people whom the state didn’t like, on the other hand, the people who had lingering ideas of individual rights and freedoms, or who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were the peoples’ enemies — the socially undesirable.

This exaltation of the criminal classes was not merely a feature of the penal system, but permeated the judicial system as well.  Sentences for property crimes and violent crimes tended to be light.  When ideology dictates that bad is good and good is bad, the results are predictable.  Crime, fear, and suffering flourish.

When we see the knee-jerk movement to “end mass incarceration,” to “abolish the police,” and then watch as the mob terrorizes and loots city after city — we can only assume that the current revolution is progressing nicely.  The left has begun to release the pent up power it has long been nurturing in our prisons, leavening it with a hefty dose of race-hatred to increase its ferocity and garnishing it with a dollop of class envy for the sake of old-time Marxist nostalgia.  You cannot say the Marxist narrative hasn’t kept up with the times, but the core doctrine remains unaltered: thou shalt terrify and cow the populace with such sociopathic operatives as come to hand.  Nor is such doctrine in any way unique to Soviet communism.  Other socialists have played variations of this tune.  The Fascists had their black shirts and the Nazis had their brown shirts in the early stages of their development.  We now have BLM.  A thug is a thug is a thug.  His color is irrelevant.  By any other name, a fist is a fist, and a burning bottle of gasoline smells as sweet.