Who Gets To Define What’s Patriotic?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/03/who-gets-to-define-whats-patriotic/

Last week, President Joe Biden said it’s the patriotic duty of Americans to wear masks while outside. Years ago, while campaigning as Barack Obama’s running mate, he said it was patriotic to pay higher taxes. It’s hard to decide if these statements are more akin to the ramblings of a child or are uncomfortably similar to Third World despots who demand obedience from their subordinated citizens.

Frankly, they’re both. Making a distinction is virtually impossible.

When we hear Biden try to force his view of patriotism on the country, we think of Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” the 1971 comedy in which a Castro-style revolutionary declares that not only “from this day on,” the official language of the banana republic of San Marcos “will be Swedish,” in addition, “all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.” It’s about commanding, not persuading.

Biden wakes up every morning in the White House – whether he knows it or not – but that doesn’t give him the authority to define patriotism, nor to expect us to follow without question or dissent.

We concede that patriotism is not easy to define. We’re familiar with the line that one man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot, and we’re quite aware that waving the flag is sometimes nothing more than just creating a light breeze.

But we also know that George Washington warned us to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism,” and Theodore Roosevelt said “patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official.”

The U.S. Can Support Freedom’s Ferment in Iran Follow the example of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which helped bring about the Soviet collapse. By Ray Takeyh

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-can-support-freedoms-ferment-in-iran-11619986320?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Even Iran has its bipartisan moments in American political circles. Democrats and Republicans alike now largely agree that the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, needs to be renegotiated and its provisions strengthened. Members of both parties believe that any prospective agreement must address Tehran’s ballistic missiles and its suspect regional activities. Yet often missing is any serious consideration of Iran’s human-rights record. The most consequential victims of the theocratic regime are its own citizens, and their plight shouldn’t be ignored.

Human rights have played an important role in U.S. diplomacy. During the Cold War, American officials routinely brought up the Soviet Union’s repressive policies with their Russian counterparts. In 1975, as part of the Helsinki Accords, the U.S.S.R. agreed to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.”

Soon, so-called Helsinki groups appeared in the Soviet bloc as civil-society activists used the Kremlin’s pledges against it. More than arms control and arms buildups, the Helsinki Accords triggered changes that loosened Moscow’s totalitarian grip. The accords empowered dissidents and highlighted Soviet domestic misdeeds.

One paradox of Iran is that conversations about the Islamic Republic are at times more sophisticated in Tehran than in Washington. Far from being beaten into ambivalence, Iranians are engaged in an informed discussion about their government’s priorities and even the viability of the regime. Former government officials, enterprising intellectuals, dissident clerics and reformist newspapers such as Sharq question many aspects of Islamist rule. They may be shut out of power, but they still command a national platform.

Will Peru Get on the Marxist Path? Presidential front-runner Pedro Castillo favorably quotes Lenin and Castro. Mary Anastasia O’Grady

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-peru-get-on-the-marxist-path-11619986216?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Peruvians will vote in a runoff presidential election on June 6, and if the polls are correct, Marxist candidate Pedro Castillo will win. An upset by his rival, center-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, is not impossible, but she is definitely the underdog.

Ms. Fujimori trails Mr. Castillo by 10 percentage points in a Datum poll released Thursday night. Importantly, some 22% of those surveyed say they are either undecided or will cast a blank vote because they don’t support either candidate. Voting is mandatory in Peru.

Until Saturday Ms. Fujimori had been confined to campaigning in Lima because she is the subject of a criminal investigation. That prohibition on travel has been lifted and she now has six weeks—an eternity in Peruvian politics—to make up for lost time.

Mr. Castillo’s thinking is frighteningly similar to that of the late Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. Chavismo strangled Venezuela’s democratic institutions, sent human capital fleeing, destroyed the economy, and generated widespread poverty. The military dictatorship is now headed by Nicolás Maduro with important intelligence backing from Havana.

Venezuela was once one of the most advanced countries in the region. Today Venezuelans live primitively, often without running water, electricity or basic medical supplies.

Sorry, Professor, We’re Cutting You Off Funding higher education now means subsidizing the political activists who have hijacked it. John Ellis

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorry-prof-were-cutting-you-off-11619974459?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

An advanced society functions by creating a series of institutions, telling them what it wants them to do, and funding them to do it. Institutions like the police, fire departments, courts and schools do the jobs society creates them to do. But one American institution—higher education—has decided to repurpose itself. It has set aside the job given to it by society and substituted a different one.

Higher education had a cluster of related purposes in society. Everyone benefited from the new knowledge it developed and the well-informed, thoughtful citizenry it produced. Individual students benefited from the preparation they received for careers in a developed economy. Yet these days, academia has decided that its primary purpose is the promotion of a radical political ideology, to which it gives the sunny label “social justice.”

That’s an enormous detour from the institutional mission granted to higher education by society—and a problem of grave consequence. For the purpose that academia has now given itself happens to be the only one that the founding documents of virtually all colleges and universities take care to forbid pre-emptively. The framers of those documents understood that using the campuses to promote political ideologies would destroy their institutions, because ideologies would always be rigid enough to prevent the exploration of new ideas and the free exercise of thought. They knew that the two purposes—academic and political—aren’t simply different, but polar opposites. They can’t coexist because the one erases the other.

The current political uniformity of college faculty illustrates the point. It meets the needs of the substitute purpose very well, but only by annihilating the authorized one. Analytical thinking requires exploring a range of alternatives, but political crusades require the opposite: exclusive belief and commitment. That’s how far off course academia has gone in its capricious self-repurposing.

Affluence + Secularism = Boredom = Leftism The only way to prevent the Left from destroying America and its core value of freedom. Dennis Prager

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/affluence-secularism-boredom-leftism-dennis-prager/

Just as physicists look for equations to explain the natural world, I have always thought it useful to look for equations to explain human nature. For example, in my book on happiness, I offer this equation: U = I – R. Unhappiness = Image – Reality. The difference between the images we have for our life and the reality of our life is one way of measuring how much unhappiness we experience.

Here, I offer another theorem, this time to help explain leftism. A + S = B = L Affluence + Secularism = Boredom = Leftism

The search for an equation to help explain leftism (as distinguished from traditional liberalism) emanates from these facts:

Most leftists come from the upper and upper-middle class. This was true for the two founders of leftism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx was supported by his family and by Engels, who was a wealthy businessman and the son of a very wealthy businessman. All the Western spies for the Soviet Union were economically secure. And the great funder of radical causes today is a billionaire — George Soros.

Nearly all leftists are irreligious people. And the breeding place of leftism, the university, is the most secular institution in modern society.

These two facts produce a problem: Many people lack meaning in their lives. And lack of meaning is another way of stating “boredom” — a boredom of the soul.

Biden Administration Cites 1619 Project as Inspiration in History Grant Proposal By Andrew Ujifusa

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/biden-administration-cites-1619-project-as-inspiration-in-history-grant-proposal/2021/04

The Biden administration wants a grant program for history and civics education to prioritize instruction that accounts for bias, discriminatory policies in America, and the value of diverse student perspectives.

In describing the basis for the new grant priority for American History and Civics Education programs, the administration cites the scholar and anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi, as well as the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine project that highlights slavery and its legacy as a central element in America’s story.

“It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions,and experiences of all students,” the April 19 notice in the Federal Register states. 

Calif. professor on leave after berating student for calling police ‘heroes’ By Jon Levine

https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/college-professor-berates-student-for-calling-police-heroes/

An adjunct professor teaching her first-ever course at a California college was placed on leave this week after she ripped a student during a class presentation because he said he regards police officers as  “heroes.”

The unidentified Cypress College educator was apparently triggered Wednesday during 19-year-old business major Braden Ellis’s Zoom presentation on cancel culture in the US, in which he noted how even animated kids TV shows such as “Paw Patrol” have come under fire from unhinged cop-haters, Fox News reported.

Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities: #1 Harvard University Discriminating against Asian applicants.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-1-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#1: Harvard University:

Harvard University is widely regarded as America’s most prestigious university. It is also one of its most racist, deliberately using discriminatory and stereotypical ratings of Asian applicants’ personalities as “lacking” and “one-dimensional” to reduce their chances of obtaining admission to the prestigious university.

In 2014, Harvard was sued in federal district court by a coalition named Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits all schools which receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race. The suit charged that Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants in undergraduate admissions decisions, using an admissions formula that hinders Asian applicants’ chances of admission by consistently giving them a low “personal rating”—a subjective measure of personality traits such as kindness, courage, and likeability. Through an examination of Harvard’s previously secret admissions data, SFFA was able to show that Asian-American applicants to Harvard face rampant racial discrimination.

Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University who testified in court on behalf of SFFA, concluded that Asian-American applicants have the lowest chance of admission to Harvard out of all races despite scoring highest in all objective measurements of achievement.

“Race plays a significant role in admissions decisions,” Arcidiacono wrote in his expert report. “Consider the example of an Asian-American applicant who is male, is not disadvantaged, and has other characteristics that result in a 25% chance of admission. Simply changing the race of this applicant to white—and leaving all his other characteristics the same—would increase his chance of admission to 36%. Changing his race to Hispanic (and leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 77%. Changing his race to African-American (again, leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 95%.”

Netflix’s Crude, Racist Propaganda Wins an Oscar The Left knows that racial agitation is more compelling than truth. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/netflixs-crude-racist-propaganda-wins-oscar-mark-tapson/

If, like most of America, you don’t care about Hollywood’s Academy Awards anymore and you missed its recent all-time lowest-rated broadcast, then you likely haven’t heard about an ugly bit of Black Lives Matter agitprop that scored an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

The woke propagandists at Netflix, the streaming service that made multi-million dollar deals with the Obamas and with former British royals Meghan and Harry to create social justice content, produced the half-hour film titled Two Distant Strangers. It was written and directed by Travon Free, whose credits as a writer include leftist political comedy for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and The Daily Show. It centers on a young, black graphic novelist named Carter who is trapped in a time loop somehow and, Groundhog Day-style, is forced to re-live deadly encounters with a police officer named Merk.

Spoilers follow:

The officer – white, of course – is a caricature of racist evil (“merk” is slang for committing violence, usually killing). Carter, by contrast, is polite, affluent, and intellectual. Over and over in a sort of living nightmare, he experiences being rousted by the cop on the street for no reason, in confrontations that always end with the unarmed Carter being killed – first suffocated to death in a chokehold while complaining “I can’t breathe” (sound familiar?), then shot to death by the trigger-happy Merk in subsequent run-ins.

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