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Our current maelstrom Dave Rubin and I discuss the state of the western world Melanie Phillips

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/our-current-maelstrom?token=

I was pleased to join the American commentator, Dave Rubin, on his show The Rubin Report. After acknowledging some of the milestones on my own political journey over the years, we talked about the great movements of thought that have precipitated our current cultural maelstrom on both sides of the Atlantic.

For me, the immediate cause of this turmoil lies in the terminal weakness of liberalism: its embrace of cultural relativism, the doctrine that all cultures and lifestyles have equal value. This prevents liberals from acknowledging that their core values, such as respect for all human life, freedom of conscience or equality for women, make the west superior to cultures which deny freedom and equality and treat human life as expendable.

The tragic paradox of liberalism is therefore this: that its core value of equality means it can’t uphold and defend its values, institutions and historic traditions in order to ensure its own survival. That’s why the west is in such trouble.

I also talked about how conservatism, which no longer understands what it needs to conserve, has lost the cultural plot. Oh – and how the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as US president signalled a fight-back by millions who are not prepared to stand by passively as their civilisation disintegrates.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academe’s Poisoned Groves: Lee Oser Reviews “The Breakdown of Higher Education” by John Ellis*****

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/academes-poisoned-groves/

The irony of the year 2020 is that our culture is blind. By forsaking the light of history, our universities appear worthy of a new Dunciad, where “universal darkness buries all.” We come late in a long history, and we are (or used to be) sensitive to the philosophical and political problems that defy simple narratives. But the story of how the modern world came about is our story. To “cancel” those who would tell this complex story accurately is to bury ourselves in darkness.

John M. Ellis’s urgent and indispensable book The Breakdown of Higher Education reaches us at a time when the cancel culture shows no sign of abating. Fortunately, Ellis possesses an acute consciousness of history. Knowing history, he puts the anarchy-inducing accusations of systemic racism and ubiquitous sexism in perspective. He shows where in our culture these familiar charges and their attendant moral commitments originated. It is brazenly ignorant to condemn the past according to present-day moral standards that are the product of that past.

Historical sensitivity is increasingly rare. The professoriate, with little exception, can no longer think historically. It is too wedded to political radicalism, which wants to destroy Western civilization and replace it with a society so righteous that people will have no use for history at all. In fact, Ellis cites research indicating that our college graduates know next to nothing about history. Most of them wouldn’t know the U.S. Constitution from a hole in the wall. Ellis reminds us that the Constitution was written and vetted by scholarly men who’d mastered one key lesson: don’t give tyranny an opening. Sadly, that kind of learning-opportunity is now forbidden, because the West is contaminated by racism and sexism. Ironically, then, the great if imperfect good of the U.S. Constitution, which laid the groundwork for the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, must be jettisoned because James Madison and his colleagues were no better than inspired geniuses working within their timeframe. They were not transcendent beings. They were not woke.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Never Missing an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity Rejecting peace for an entire century. Joseph Puder

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/palestinians-never-miss-opportunity-miss-joseph-puder/

Israel’s legendary Foreign Minister Abba Eban had famously quipped that “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” It is the most fitting attribute for the Palestinians. Historically, they have said no to the British Peel Commission of 1937, which promised them a state on 75% of mandatory Palestine. The Yishuv, Palestine’s Jews, who were originally called Palestinians during the British Mandate (1920-1948) said yes, despite of being offered a small piece of the second partition of Palestine. In the first partition of Mandatory Palestine, in 1922, Winston Churchill, then British Colonial Secretary, sliced off 34,495 miles originally slated to be part of the Balfour Declaration for a Jewish homeland, to create the Emirate of Trans Jordan. Of the remaining 10,309 miles, Jewish Palestine would be allocated a measly 2,577 miles.  

Instead of accepting self-determination for his people, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Arab-Palestinian leader also titled Mufti of Jerusalem, and Hitler’s ally, ordered the Arab Revolt (1936-1939). Arab-Palestinian violence was repaid by British appeasement in the form of the White Paper, which shut the doors of Palestine to European Jews in the face of the looming Holocaust. In 1947, the Palestinian Arabs said no once again when offered an independent state by the United Nations General Assembly. Instead, they launched a war of annihilation against the newly born Jewish state of Israel, which accepted partition, and declared statehood on May 14, 1948.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Moral Equivalence is Camouflage for Moral Cowardice One party stands for life, freedom, and unalienable rights. The other stands for raw power. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/moral-equivalence-camouflage-moral-cowardice-bruce-thornton/

NRO’s Jim Geraghty in his daily column indulged one of the NeverTrump favorite rhetorical devices: That the president is just as bad for the Republic as the radical Democrats, and neither side “wants to solve real problems.” Apart from the common mistaken notion that the Founders created our political order “to solve problems” rather than protect the liberty of states, towns, civic society, families, and individuals, this tic often obscures an unwillingness to identify clearly those guilty of creating conflict and disorder by equally apportioning guilt to both sides.

Moral equivalence becomes the camouflage for moral cowardice, a fear to assign responsibility where it is due.

During his discussion of the Democrats’ dilemma over how to spin the ongoing riots, Geraghty can’t help sniping at Trump:

But we all know that Donald Trump’s view on how to deal with an angry and potentially destructive mob is dramatically different from that of Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, or New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Trump’s administration sent U.S. Park Police into Lafayette Park, using “smoke canisters, irritants, explosive devices, batons and horses.” Quite a few observers contended the tactics used more force than necessary or that was justified by the situation. But we know Trump’s instincts are to overreact to the threat of mob violence, not underreact.

The Dem blue-state mayors underreact, but Trump overreacts because of his “instincts” rather than a sober and judicious analysis of the crisis. The two responses are morally equivalent. Hence in Lafayette Park, near the storied church “peaceful protestors” had set on fire, and swarming with violent thugs know for using bricks, rocks, commercial fireworks, frozen water bottles, skateboards, and other weapons against the police, Trump overreacted by using “smoke canisters, irritants, explosive devices, batons and horses.” In other words, standard non-lethal methods for dispersing a violent mob set on injuring others.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charts compare COVID deaths in countries that used hydroxychloroquine early and those that didn’t By James Stansbury

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/charts_compare_covid_deaths_in_countries_that_used_hydroxychloroquine_early_and_those_that_didnt.html

Monday, the Family Foundation of Virginia reported that the State health commissioner, Dr. Norman Oliver, intends to use his emergency powers to force every Virginian to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available. 

Virginia’s Gov. Northam (survivor of his infamous blackface scandal) has taken no official policy position so far.  However, the Democrat-controlled Legislature has killed at least three Republican bills that would have offered a way for someone with a sincere religious objection to be exempt from any COVID-19 vaccine mandate.  The most recent casualty, H.B. 5082, “would’ve ensured that Virginia didn’t mandate a COVID-19 vaccine if it is derived from human fetal tissue, changes the RNA or DNA of a person, or was not first tested on laboratory animals before being tested on humans.”  These actions triggered a “March against Mandates” in Richmond on September 2 by Virginia Freedom Keepers.

But wait — there’s more politics brewing.  Yesterday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch published a letter from a former FDA medical officer.  He agrees that using convalescent blood plasma from patients who developed antibodies works, and he cited its many successes dating back to the 1918 flu pandemic.  However, he claims that the number of people tested this time was “far out of proportion to the number needed for safety analyses.”   He also objects that authorities in the FDA and Donald Trump made overly optimistic claims that it could result in a 35% reduction in mortality and said this type of politics undermines the FDA’s credibility. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hong Kong’s Boat People The Chinese Coast Guard intercepts a dozen fleeing to Taiwan.

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kongs-boat-people-11599001124?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Hong Kong once was a refuge for Vietnamese and mainland Chinese who fled their homeland on boats in pursuit of freedom. Now Hong Kongers are fleeing their own city in the same way, and not all of them make it to safety.

The Chinese Coast Guard last week intercepted a boat carrying a dozen Hong Kongers, who ranged in age from 16 to 33, trying to sail to Taiwan. Some of the boat people faced serious charges related to pro-democracy activism or their role in last year’s protests.

At least one, democracy supporter Andy Li, was arrested in August under the new national-security law and faces up to life in prison if convicted. Hong Kong has long prided itself on an independent judiciary, but the accused understandably fear that the Communist Party will dictate from now on what happens in the Hong Kong courts as it does in China.

The Chinese Coast Guard arrested the 12 for unlawfully crossing the border. Little is known about their fate, except that they are detained in the mainland. On Monday the state-run China Daily wrote in an English-language editorial that “Hong Kong lawbreakers should give up the illusion of evading justice by seeking shelter on the island [of Taiwan] or elsewhere.” Beijing may want to make a chilling example of these unlucky fugitives.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“We Will Never Give Up”: Charlie Hebdo Republishes Mohammed Cartoons by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16443/charlie-hebdo-mohammed-cartoons

France is starting to reflect on the dramatic decline in its freedom of expression.

“My unfortunate client will be freedom….” — Richard Malka, attorney for Charlie Hebdo, Le Point, August 13, 2020.

Western democracies have paid dearly for the right to freedom of expression and, if not protected and exercised, it can disappear overnight.

“If our colleagues in the public debate do not share part of the risk, then the barbarians have won”. — Elisabeth Badinter, French philosopher; the documentary “Je suis Charlie”, September 9, 2015.

Yesterday, one day before the opening of the trial for 14 defendants accused of involvement in a string of terrorist attacks in France, which included the murders of their fellow journalists and cartoonists on January 7, 2015 at their Paris office, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo republished the “Mohammed Cartoons” under the title “Tout ça pour ça” (“All of that for this”). “We will never give up”, they said.

The defendants in the trial, some in absentia, “face a variety of charges related to helping perpetrators carry out attacks that killed 17 people over three days in January 2015.” In addition to the 12 victims in and around the office of Charlie Hebdo, a police officer was murdered in the street and four people were murdered in a kosher supermarket.

François Molins, then public prosecutor of Paris, recalled his arrival at the Charlie Hebdo office. He found “the smell of blood and gunpowder. In the newsroom, it is carnage. It is more than a crime scene, it is a war scene, with a frightening tangle of bodies”.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Democrats: The Party of Darkness A party built on race and the lust for violence and power.by Jeffrey Lord

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://spectator.org/democrats-the-party-of-darkness/

Call it The Party of Darkness. A political party with the worst human instincts imaginable — from blunt racism to a totalitarian-style lust for street violence. All of it in a quest for power.

So let’s take a look at the long history of the Democrats Party of Darkness and see where they are today — and where they threaten to take America in the 21st century.

Support for slavery? Check.
Support for segregation and Jim Crow? Check.
Support for the Ku Klux Klan? Check.
Support for the 1960s radical, violent Weather Underground? Check.
Support for the rioters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago? Check.
Support for the violence of Occupy Wall Street? Check.
Support for the violence of Antifa? Check.
Support for the violence of the “trained Marxists” running Black Lives Matter? Check.
Support for the conspiracy theory of Trump-Russia collusion? Check.
Support for Open Borders? Check.
Support for the impeachment hoax? Check.
Support for socialism? Check.
Support for infanticide? Check.
Support for the idea that “if you support Trump, you ain’t black”? Check.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Vote for the Czar, It’s Important: Ruth Wisse

Posted By on September 2nd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-for-the-czar-its-important-11598895028A Polish ex-Communist taught me a hard-earned lesson in the difference between bad and worse.

A Polish ex-Communist taught me a hard-earned lesson in the difference between bad and worse.

American politics are in such a scramble that we need to think about how we vote, not just for whom. Should our choice be determined by party loyalty, policy, the perceived qualities of the candidates? I turned conservative when I learned to vote for the lesser of evils.

That lesson was unexpected. On my first trip to Poland, in 1978, I was put in touch with a woman who offered to show me around the Jewish ruins. She was an excellent guide, but as we came to the memorial for the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, she said that I could learn about that phase of Jewish history on my own. What she had to tell me, however, I could hear only from her.

In the late 1920s in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), she had been a student of the Jewish literary historian Max Erik, a fervent Communist who one day stole across the sealed border to the Soviet Union so that he could join the great socialist experiment. Radicalized by him, she had joined the Communist Party, which was illegal in Poland. She followed his example and emigrated several years later. But once in Soviet territory, she was arrested as a “Polish spy” and sent to labor camps in the Gulag. In the last of them, she met her former teacher—before his execution in 1937. Erik didn’t want to talk, except to tell her one thing: “It was better under the czars.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Lockdown Has Gone From a Mistake to a Crime By Dennis Prager

Posted By on September 1st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2020/09/01/the-lockdown-has-gone-from-a-mistake-to-a-crime-n871865

Four months ago, I wrote a column titled “The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.” I explained that “‘mistake’ and ‘evil’ are not synonyms. The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil people.”

Regarding the economic catastrophe in America and around the world — especially among the world’s poor who are dependent upon America and other first-world countries for their income through exports and tourism — I wrote, “It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe.”

Unfortunately, I was right.

The world should have followed Sweden’s example. That country never locked down and has even kept children under 16 in school the entire time. As Reuters reported on July 15, the number of Swedish children between 1 and 19 years of age who have died of COVID-19 is zero. And the percentage of children who contracted the illness was the exact same in Sweden as it was in Finland, which locked down its schools.