EDUCATION Comments turned off

Washington and Lee University has decided to continue under its current name, disappointing advocates who wanted to see the institution reject namesake Robert E. Lee. By Lilah Burke

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/06/07/washington-and-lee-maintain-name-face-opposition?utm_campaign=https:

After much conversation, pushback and debate, the Board of Trustees at Washington and Lee University has voted not to change the institution’s name. The latter part of the name honors Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate States Army and former president of the institution. The board voted 22 to 6.

The name had been the topic of serious conversation at Washington and Lee for the past few years, and advocacy for a change was redoubled after the murder of George Floyd. In the wake of national protests, many colleges and universities re-evaluated their institutions and made changes to symbols and traditions.

The board took up the issue last July and said it would consider and vote on the decision this month.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Critical Race Theory Will Destroy Our Military Dakota Wood 

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/16/critical-race-theory-will-destroy-our-military/

Dakota Wood, senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense and the editor of Heritage’s “Index of U.S. Military Strength. Previously, he served for two decades in the U.S. Marine Corp.

As a young Marine Corps first lieutenant assigned to an infantry battalion in the late 1980s, I had charge of the unit transport section of operators, mechanics, and supervisors tasked with taking care of our fleet of combat vehicles.

This group of Marines, like all with whom I served over a 20-year military career, was a wonderful cross section of America representing all walks of life.

My maintenance and operations chiefs were American Samoan and an African American, respectively. Our collection of more junior Marines included blacks, whites, and Latinos, young men from Texas, New Jersey, California, and West Virginia, among others.

They came from the city and the country, from poor and middle-class families. Some were Catholic, others Protestant, and some had no strong affiliation with any organized religion.

In the maintenance bay, on the equipment lot, or in the field we would hear a musical mix of country, rock and roll, heavy metal, and rap.

Everyone pitched in to accomplish the mission during unit fitness runs, shop clean-up, preparing for inspections, embarking equipment for deployments to Japan and South Korea, and supporting battalion operations during training and exercise events.

Everything just worked and worked well. Why?

Because they were all Marines, wearing the same uniform, supporting the same combat organization, serving the same country. They all had been through the same training. They had to measure up to the same standards. They had to make the same cutoff scores for promotion.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Murder on the Tel Aviv Beach … The strange, unsolved—and ominous—mystery of Chaim Arlosoroff Daniel Gordis

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/murder-on-the-tel-aviv-beach-?token=eyJ

Just after dark on the evening of June 16, 1933 (88 years ago today, precisely), Chaim Arlosoroff and his wife, Sima, went for a stroll on the Tel Aviv beach.

Arlosoroff was the head of the Jewish Agency’s political department and effectively the foreign minister of the yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community of Palestine. As he and Sima walked along the beach, two men approached out of the dark, one shining a flashlight in Arlosoroff’s face while the other pulled out a gun and fired. Arlosoroff died on the operating table a few hours later.

We’ll never know if Arlosoroff would have been killed had he not, years earlier, had an affair with the woman who would become the wife of Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s infamous Minister of Propaganda.) We’ll come back to that very strange twist, or tryst, below. But what we do know is that Arlosoroff was the first political assassination in the history of the yishuv/Israel. He’s worth recalling today not only for that, but even more ominously, because segments of Israeli society seem determined to replicate the circumstances that led to his murder.

In an earlier posting, “Picture the protesters, they’re worth a thousand terrifying words,” we spoke about the political environment that had Israel in its grips as the Yair Lapid / Naftali Bennett coalition seemed to be taking shape. Not much has changed since then. True, Israel has made it past some hurdles: whether you like the coalition or not, Israel at least has a government, and might succeed in passing a budget for the first time in two years. Bennett has managed to stay alive not only politically, but actually alive, thanks to Shin Bet security that he was provided earlier than would otherwise have been the case.

But the accusations of treason are hardly over. At yesterday’s Flag Parade in Jerusalem, which mercifully passed without major incident, one could see more than a few protesters holding up signs with the words “Bennett, shakran”—Bennett, The Liar. That, of course, is precisely what was said about Rabin, who was also, like Bennett, called a traitor.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Distinguishing Respect From Patronizing Condescension In Matters Of Race Francis Menton

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-6-15-distinguishing-respect-from-patronizing-condescension-in-matters-of-race

In our current national moment, distinguishing respectful conduct or language toward others from patronizing condescension in matters of race is of great importance. You might think that making this distinction would be easy, but I suggest that in many circumstances it is not easy at all.

Recently, many things that have become the latest fashion in what practitioners think is heightened respect appear to me to be exactly the opposite — condescension. That can be the case even where the respect-that-is-really-condescension is demanded by the recipient. And I am not the only one noticing this phenomenon.

Let’s consider a few examples.

Several weeks ago Princeton University announced that an intermediate knowledge of Greek or Latin would no longer be required for a major in Classics. John McWhorter discusses that decision in a June 10 essay at Substack with the title “Revisiting Classics at Princeton: Exempting Black Kids From Challenge Is Lousy Antiracism.”

McWhorter opens by quoting Princeton’s own statement about the change to show that “of especial interest to black students . . . today’s racial reckoning, . . . the department openly acknowledges, was the primary spur for this change.” It seems that, with the Greek and Latin language requirement, the Princeton Classics Department had difficulty attracting black students to the major. McWhorter comments:

The tacit idea is people guilty about their white privilege saying over a Zoom meeting “If we want to have more black students, we can’t be making people learn Greek and Latin anymore.” Ugh – see how that reads when exposed to the sunlight? . . . Anything but that patronizing condescension. . . . [A]ny public discussion that both reviles the idea that black people are less intelligent than others while also lustily demanding that it’s “racist” to submit black people to cognitive challenges is hopelessly incoherent. . . . [T]his exemption culture is premised on a basic assumption that it’s unsavory to require serious challenge of black students Because Racism. No. You don’t get past racism by creating new forms of it. Scrapping traditional challenges should only be on the table after black kids have mastered the challenge anyway.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

This Florida Mom Who Spoke Out Against CRT In Schools Warns Parents To Be Vigilant About Curriculum By Paulina Enck

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/16/this-florida-mom-who-spoke-out-against-crt-in-schools-warns-parents-to-be-vigilant-about-curriculum/

Quisha King is not going to sit by and allow her children, or anyone else’s, to be indoctrinated into the racist lies of critical race theory without putting up a fight. The Floridian mother of two went viral from a speech she made at a school board meeting, in which she spoke in favor of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s proposal to ban critical race theory from public schools in Florida, which the state Board of Education passed unanimously last week.

Many states are not so lucky, however, with the racist ideology being enacted in schools across the country, in both blatant and subtle ways, from prep schools in New York and New Jersey to government primary schools in the Midwest.

I spoke with King about her activism to prevent these racist lies from pervading schools. That viral speech is far from the start of her fight, as she noted: “I’ve been learning about CRT for over a year now, and I’ve been seeing a lot of the policies that are being pushed onto our children from the school board. I have been speaking at local school board meetings as well about CRT and them putting our children down, essentially. Putting them in these ‘oppressor,’ ‘oppressed’ categories. When I saw that a vote was coming up, I thought it was important that I make my voice known.”

“I know a lot of parents feel the same way I do, but some are just, quite frankly, a little intimidated or scared to speak up about it,” she added.

As a mother of two black children, King is particularly concerned about how critical race theory will harm black kids, who are being told they are less capable and will accomplish less than their white peers, due solely to their skin color.

“That is destructive for any young mind to believe that they can never rise up to the level of their own dreams, goals, and the things that they want to accomplish,” King said. “I think that’s a terrible way to start kids off into life, by telling them they are oppressed, especially today. Black Americans are the most successful black people in the entire world, so why in the world would we tell black children or any child that they are oppressed? If you tell a child they can’t do something, eventually, they won’t even try.”

One of King’s children attends public school while the other attends private school, thanks to school choice.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

At NATO And G7, Biden Advances An ‘America Last’ Foreign Policy By John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/16/at-nato-and-g7-biden-advances-an-america-last-foreign-policy/ 

President Biden’s first foreign trip wasn’t just an embarrassing disaster, it heralds the return of the disastrous foreign policy of the Obama-Biden era.

The most important takeaway from the recent G7 and NATO summits in Europe isn’t President Biden’s many embarrassing and unsettling mental lapses, long pauses, and rambling non sequiturs, but the clear message coming out of these meetings: the United States is returning to an Obama-Biden era “America Last” foreign policy that puts the interests of multilateral institutions and international partnerships above the interests of the American people.

That policy shift was perhaps best encapsulated in a quip from President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said of Biden, “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club and very willing to cooperate.” And of course it’s true. At the close of the G7 Summit, Biden boasted that America is “back at the table,” and described the summit as “extraordinarily collaborative.”

So what did this extraordinarily collaborative club manage to accomplish? One of the G7’s most pressing tasks heading into the summit was what, if anything, it would do about an aggressive and intransigent China. What the group settled on was doing almost nothing.

With each passing week it becomes more obvious that COVID-19 almost certainly originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. We can’t say for sure because the Chinese Communist Party has been blocking efforts to discover the origins of the virus ever since the outbreak began. But at this point, with zero evidence that the virus emerged naturally, the answer seems obvious enough.

Yet all the G7 could manage was a tepid call for a new World Health Organization-backed study on COVID’s origins, as if another investigation by the compromised WHO will yield something more. The G7 also cooked up a plan to dump $40 trillion into infrastructure (a bill likely to be footed largely by American taxpayers) for the developing world to compete with China’s Belt and Road initiative.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

You’re Not Woke, So You Can’t Play By George Leef

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

A college player on the women’s volleyball team has been kicked off because she didn’t agree with the leftist ideology being force-fed to the team.

The absurdity of American higher education is on display at the University of Oklahoma. As we read in this Campus Reform story, a player on the women’s volleyball team has been kicked off because she didn’t agree with the leftist ideology being force-fed to the team.

So even athletics are now controlled by people who demand conformity to the foolish tenets of diversity and social justice. No matter if you’re a good player — if you think wrong thoughts, you are not wanted.

The player, Kylee McLaughlin, is suing the university for a minimum of $75,000, plus legal fees. Let’s hope this gets to the jury and the jurors decide to let the defendants know what they think about this astounding intolerance. Perhaps some administrator at OU will remember the Oberlin case and settle fast.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

-Putin Must Watch a Lot of Cable News By David Harsanyi

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/putin-must-watch-a-lot-of-cable-news/

After his meeting with Joe Biden in Geneva, Vladimir Putin held a presser where he adeptly aped some of our partisan hyperbole to deflect attention from his own authoritarianism.

“People are shot and killed every day [in the U.S.],” Putin told reporters when asked about his crackdown on domestic political opposition. “You don’t have a chance to open your mouth and you’re shot dead.” Shooting a person for any reason other than genuine self-defense, despite what gun-controllers might have us think, isn’t sanctioned by the state or supported by any organization in America. Though people are also murdered every day in Russia, which has a substantively higher homicide rate than the United States.

Putin had also preposterously suggested that Ashli Babbitt, shot when she joined a mob that stormed the Capitol, was a victim of “assassination” by the police — which, I suppose, is also a tacit admission that he was behind the attack on the now-imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny and numerous journalists.

“America just recently had very severe events, well-known events, after the killing of an African American,” Putin explained. “And the entire movement developed known as Black Lives Matter. I’m not going to comment on that but here’s what I do want to say. What we saw was disorder, destruction, violations of the law, etc.” Russia has been using racial tensions in the United States to deflect attention from its widespread, sometimes genocidal, actions since the 1930s. Riots do break out from time to time in the United States. Riots, though, rarely break out in police states. Not long ago, Russian police arrested 3,000 people and shut down thousands more for peacefully attending “unauthorized” events.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Republicans press education secretary on China’s foothold in US universities During the Trump administration, the Education Department opened investigations into schools including Harvard and Yale By Evie Fordham

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-education-china-us-universities-miguel-cardona-banks-foxx

Reps. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., pressed Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for answers about his department’s plans to investigate China’s financial foothold in the U.S. university system.

“The American public deserves to know that their money is not being compromised by Communist China and other adversarial nations,” the Republicans wrote in the letter sent on Wednesday. “The FBI warned colleges a decade ago about how hostile actors use campuses for spying, propaganda hubs, and faculty recruitment. Unfortunately, too many institutions failed to take this warning seriously.”

“The previous administration modernized the reporting process and found over $6.5 billion in unreported gifts and contracts and opened 19 university investigations. However, the Department has closed only four of those investigations to date. Moreover, you have not started or provided status updates on any other investigations into foreign gifts or contracts,” the letter continued.

The lawmakers demanded information including the number of staff analyzing the Higher Education Act’s foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements, the total amount of reported foreign gifts and contracts in the Jan. 31 reporting period, and whether the Department has opened any related university investigations. Banks and Foxx asked Cardona and his staff to respond to them within two weeks.

In this Jan. 28, 2020 file photo, Connecticut State Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona speaks with Berlin High School students while on a tour of the school. (Devin Leith-Yessian/Berlin Citizen/Record-Journal via AP) (AP)

“The lack of progress we have seen on this issue since your confirmation as Secretary is alarming, and we are concerned the Department is not treating threats from China and other adversarial nations seriously,” Banks and Foxx wrote to Cardona.

The investigations hinge on Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires schools to report foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000. During the Trump administration, the Education Department opened investigations into schools including Harvard and Yale over unreported foreign funds from countries including China.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America   Advocating double standards for people on top and everyone else is a bad idea By Charles Murray

Posted By on June 17th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/identity-crisis-politics-race-wreck-america-charles-murray/

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years of evolution. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes than people who were suspicious of them. People who were loyal to their tribe were more likely to pass on their genes than people who stood apart.

The invention of agriculture and the consequent rise of complex societies exposed another aspect of human nature that had enjoyed less scope for expression in hunter-gatherer bands: acquisitiveness, whether of money, status or power. Whatever its evolutionary roots may be, the empirical consistency of human acquisitiveness over the eons is impressive. The open-ended desire for more money, status or power has been natural; to voluntarily limit one’s wealth, status or power has been unnatural.

The combination of acquisitiveness and loyalty to the interests of one’s own group (be it defined by ethnicity or class) shaped human governments for the subsequent 10,000 years. The natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders to a lesser or greater degree, usually greater. The rare attempts to try any other form of government were unstable and short-lived. The American founders’ idealism lay in their belief that an alternative was possible. Their genius was to design a system with multiple safeguards against the forces that had made previous attempts self-destruct.

America proved that a durable alternative to the natural form of government was possible — a constitutional republic combined with carefully circumscribed democracy. The idea behind that alternative eventually spread around the world, but neither the United States nor any other country that has made it work has ever been out of danger. If we decide that our system for tending the garden needs to be replaced, and if the replacement should prove to be even slightly less devoted to keeping nature at bay, the garden will be reclaimed by jungle within a few decades.