Displaying posts published in

July 2021

Ban Critical Race Theory from K–12 Classrooms: A Response to the New York Times By Cameron Hilditch

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/ban-critical-race-theory-from-k-12-classrooms-a-response-to-the-new-york-times/

There can be no credible objection to prohibiting the racially based shaming of children.

O ne of the interesting lexical shifts that took place during the Enlightenment had to do with the way in which we speak about civil magistrates. As the manifold forms of classical liberalism espoused by Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau began to supplant throne-and-altar autocracies across Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, political figures ceased to be called “rulers” and began to be called “leaders.”

This change was not a coincidence. Rule, as Harvey Mansfield helpfully pointed out during a recorded conversation with Bill Kristol a few years ago, is the means by which a society is given its particular character by its political institutions. Rulers indoctrinate, enforce, and set the boundaries for acceptable beliefs and behavior in a given polity. It’s always the attempt of the ruler to take his or her country or people in a given direction, and, for that reason, rule is always partisan.

The early classically liberal theorists believed that rule was not a necessary or inevitable feature of human relations. They believed that a primal state of natural freedom and equality among all people could be imagined which preceded the division of people into rulers and ruled, and they thought it possible to construct a political system that would safeguard this primordial condition by allowing each individual to exercise an attenuated form of the natural liberty which he had enjoyed in this “state of nature.”

For these liberals, then, the starting point for thinking about human action was apolitical. Furthermore, they argued that politics should only be introduced voluntarily and always with an eye towards protecting the pre-political freedoms of men and women. This view was in contrast to the older, ancient notion of Aristotle’s that “man is by nature a political animal.” From this Aristotelian perspective, human freedom and equality are thought to be political achievements rather than natural facts. No “state of nature” that pre-exists politics is admitted into this scheme of thought. Politics is inevitable, and so, as a result, is the fact of rule.

All of this might seem needlessly abstract and far removed from the debates roiling the United States today over the bans placed by several states on the teaching of critical race theory in K–12 classrooms, but an understanding of how the ancient and liberal understandings of rule differ is actually indispensable to understanding this conflict.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a guest essay jointly authored by Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams which argued against anti-critical-race-theory laws. The reasoning of the essay is fatally flawed. To understand why, it’s enough to understand the classically liberal conceptual framework within which its argument is made.

The Keystone XL Goes to Court The pipeline’s owner wants $15 billion to redress Biden’s arbitrary permit withdrawal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-keystone-xl-goes-to-court-11625784485?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The climate lobby cheered in January when President Biden revoked the State Department’s 2017 presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. Now the bill is coming due, and U.S. taxpayers may have to pay.

Keystone owner TC Energy last week filed a Notice of Intent to take legal action against the U.S. government for withdrawing the permit. In a press release the company called the decision a “breach” of North American free-trade obligations. In June TC Energy officially canceled the Keystone XL and took a $1.81 billion writedown. It wants $15 billion in damages as part of a Nafta legacy claim under the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The U.S. has never lost before a Nafta arbitration panel. But TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) has a good case. To prevail, TC Energy will have to show that it had good reason in March 2020 to believe that its $9 billion investment was protected by the U.S. permit when it announced that it would “proceed with construction.” In other words, that it had a logical expectation it would be allowed to complete the pipeline and operate it. After years of environmental and other reviews, that was a reasonable conclusion.

Mr. Biden’s reversal on his first day in office was also irregular. Normally a company would have a chance to make its case, and the Administration would engage in a review. But Mr. Biden wanted theater for the environmental lobby, which trumped respect for an investor’s right to be treated fairly.

TC Energy isn’t challenging the Administration’s climate views, and its suit isn’t about reviving a project that promised to carry 830,000 barrels of Canadian crude a day to the Gulf Coast. The same oil will now be carried on trains, trucks and ships, albeit with greater risks of a spill and greater use of carbon energy. The company merely wants compensation for lost investment that is tantamount to expropriation under international law.

Donald J. Trump: Why I’m Suing Big Tech If Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can censor me, they can censor you—and believe me, they are. By Donald J. Trump

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-j-trump-why-im-suing-big-tech-11625761897?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

One of the gravest threats to our democracy today is a powerful group of Big Tech corporations that have teamed up with government to censor the free speech of the American people. This is not only wrong—it is unconstitutional. To restore free speech for myself and for every American, I am suing Big Tech to stop it.

Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations. The internet is the new public square. In recent years, however, Big Tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media—banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.

No longer are Big Tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence. They are manipulating and controlling the political debate itself. Consider content that was censored in the past year. Big Tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true. In the middle of a pandemic, Big Tech censored physicians from discussing potential treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, which studies have now shown does work to relieve symptoms of Covid-19. In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post—America’s oldest newspaper—for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden’s family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute.

Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social-media accounts of the sitting president. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you—and believe me, they are.

Former Colombian Telenovela star now an Orthodox Jew in Israel

https://www.timesofisrael.com/former-colombian-telenovela-star-now-an-orthodox-jew-in-israel/

Sarah Mintz, who was born Maritza Rodríguez, was a hugely famous TV personality who gave up her career to move to the Jewish state and live a religious lifestyle.

A Colombian telenovela star who converted from Catholicism to Judaism before getting married is now living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel.

Sarah Mintz, who was born Maritza Rodríguez, married her husband, the Emmy Award-winning Mexican TV producer Joshua Mintz, in 2005. In 2014 she gave birth to twin boys, Akiva and Yehuda. And in April of this year, the family relocated to Jerusalem after years of moving toward religious observance.

“For more than 25 years I had a career as a TV host, actress, model, in the theater on the red carpets — what didn’t I do,” Mintz told Channel 13 news in a recent interview. “But none of it compares to what I have today.”

Mintz, who has 1.6 million followers on Instagram, now describes herself in her bio as a “Jewish Orthodox Fashion & Lifestyle Influencer.” The former actress, who now wears a wig and full-coverage clothing, posts regularly about modest fashion and her love for Judaism and Israel.

A Threat Assessment for American Jewry, Part One Which of the recent samples of anti-Semitism—on the street, on campus, in Congress, or in the clergy—is the greatest threat to America and the Jews?Ruth Wisse

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2021/07/a-threat-assessment-for-american-jewry-part-one/

Which of the following samples of anti-Semitism—all having occurred in the last few months—is the greatest threat to America and the Jews?

1) Hamas-style gangs pursuing and attacking Jews in New York and Los Angeles.

2) Campus intimidation of the kind that makes the chancellor and provost of Rutgers University retract the statement they had previously issued against acts of anti-Semitism.

3) Elected members of the U.S. Congress who abet the war against Israel in this country.

4) Open letters by dozens of rabbinical students “in tears” over Israel’s forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes, and by scholars of Jewish studies and Israel studies who “share the pain of Gazans.”

The good news is that Jews are no longer alone in identifying the danger. Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, is one of many political commentators who now warn that anti-Semitism has reached, as she put it to the Wall Street Journal in May of this year, “pandemic proportions.” Speaking as someone who has herself experienced discrimination, she writes that anti-Semitism is based on the same belief as racism and other forms of prejudice, namely that “the other” is inferior and not entitled to the same rights as alleged superiors. She empathizes with the pain of Jews “in the same way that Jews sympathized with the racist oppression” suffered by black Americans.

Her acknowledgment of the danger of anti-Semitism is welcome and indispensable. At the same time, she mischaracterizes the problem. The legacy of slavery presents a very different challenge to Americans than the one presented by the organization of politics against the Jews, and those differences call for opposite responses. The idea driving the abovementioned attacks is not the Nazi claim that Jews are biologically inferior but the claim of Israel’s adversaries that Jews occupy other people’s land. In fact, Brazile’s anxiety was probably quickened by some of her fellow black Americans who include Jews in their attack on white supremacy and the Jewish state. Today’s attacks accuse Jews of their unfair superiority.

These distinctions in no way subordinate one set of injuries to another, but each requires its own diagnosis. Assessing the dangers that anti-Semitism poses to the Jews and America may help to clarify what it is and isn’t. I discuss them in ascending order of threat.

Is Israel a Colonial State? Alex Grobman, PhD

https://jewishlink.news/features/44860-is-israel-a-colonial-state

The Arab success in framing the Palestinian Arab/Israeli conflict by making Israel the aggressor, has forced Israel to counter the fabrications, defend her actions and even justify her own raison d’être. Historian Joel Fishman calls this manipulation of language an “inversion of truth and reality … an assault on empirical and rational thought, the foundations of modern culture.” There is a pressing need to debunk the myths that have become such an integral element in the media war against Israel and to discredit those who disseminate them. One of the most ubiquitous lies is that Zionists are a “tool of imperialism.”

The San Remo Conference

At the San Remo Conference in San Remo, Italy, in April 1920, the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers—Britain, France, Italy and Japan—met to define the precise boundaries of the lands they had conquered at the end of World War I. As part of a peace agreement, Turkey yielded jurisdiction over the land it had ruled from 1517 to 1917, including the Holy Land.

Israel and two dozen other countries were created from the states of the former Ottoman Caliphate. For Christians, even those who spoke Arabic, the Holy Land was “Palestine,” which, as Allen Hertz (formerly senior adviser in the Privy Council Office serving Canada’s Prime Minister and the federal cabinet) points out, was “for centuries nothing more than an historical reference, i.e., a fond memory of the early 7th century CE, when Palestine was still a province of the Roman-Byzantine Empire, where Christianity was then the official faith.”

It is important to note that the Mandate and the Balfour Declaration only state that the “civil and religious” rights of the inhabitants of Palestine are to be protected. There is no mention of the national rights of the Arab people (or, for that matter, any other people).

Palestine: Never a Separate Country

President Isaac Herzog’s grand entrance By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/president-isaac-herzogs-grand-entrance-opinion-673280

It wasn’t surprising when Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy asserted on Wednesday that Israel’s societal discord was worse than the Iranian threat. Nor was the fact that he made the claim during the swearing-in ceremony of Isaac Herzog as the country’s 11th president.

It has become par for the so-called “Center-Left” to bemoan the condition of the country in this fashion. Invoking the terrorist regime in Tehran when talking about internal strife in the Jewish state that it vows to wipe off the map has a twofold purpose.

One is to accuse the Right, led by former prime minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, of causing the political rift that’s supposedly chipping away at Israeli democracy. The other is to minimize the real and present danger posed by the Islamic Republic and its proxies – or at least to imply that Netanyahu has been exaggerating it for decades in order to keep himself in power.

During most of his seven-year tenure as president, Reuven Rivlin honed the art of expressing this view through the use of flowery language to issue heartfelt warnings about the soul of the nation.

It’s a neat trick to admonish the public, while simultaneously professing to love and serve all of its sectors, regardless of political affiliation or ethnic background. It’s the president’s job, after all, to remain above the fray that besets Knesset debates and committee meetings. And Rivlin pretended to perform with aplomb this almost impossible feat in a country filled with a “stiff-necked people,” about whom it is quipped, “Two Jews, three opinions.”

But he hasn’t always been delicate when voicing his criticism. At the opening of the Knesset’s winter session in October, for instance, he announced, “It appears to me as if we have lost the moral compass that was with us from the state’s independence until today – the compass of fundamental principles and values that we are committed to uphold.”

WHY I’M NOT WRITING “Black” and why I may start! John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-im-not-writing-black?token=

A small part of me has always sensed that black when referring to race might be capitalized. The racial concept of black is so far removed from the core meaning of the color that it qualifies as very much a proper noun, a concept in and of itself, of a kind that suggests being couched as a label.

And if we’re in for a renovation of the term we use for referring to black people – and given how such things go it was about time: Negro yielded to black in the late 1960s; African-American settled in 25 years later; since the mid-2010s I’ve been wondering what would be next – Black is a damned sight better to me than African-American ever was.

* * *

I never liked it, and have only ever used it when grace required it. Black has always been good enough for me. For one, since the 1990s so many actual Africans have emigrated to the U.S. that the term African-American is increasingly confusing. Is a descendant of slaves in America “African-American” in the same way as the child of parents who grew up in Ghana and speak Twi at home? And let’s not even get into that white Africans in South Africa sincerely feel themselves, when relocated here, to be “African-Americans,” as do people from Africa of South Asian descent.

And overall, the African connection feels too distant to me to justify an ethnic designation. Opinions will differ on this, but to me, black Americans are not remotely “African” in the sense that, say, the Sopranos were Italian-American. Without the languages, with only extreme refractions of the music (as jazz and rock) or food, with different tastes and even values, I find the “African” designation forced – especially considering that “Africa” is no one thing (note how vacuous and depersonalizing it sounds to call white people “European”).

When “African-American” settled in, a critical mass of black people felt differently. The idea was that calling attention to our “roots” in Africa lent a certain sense of legitimacy, indicating that slavery was not the root, the essence, of what black people are. But this always struck me as an oversimplification of black history, and perhaps even a symptom of internalized dismissal. My “roots” are with the black people of my ancestry who forged lives right here in America, racism and the rest be damned. We might even respect what our ancestors thought. Black people even a generation past slavery who had known slaves born in Africa did not tend to think of themselves as “African.” I’m pretty sure my great grandfather John Hamilton McWhorter II, of whom one photo survives, did not. My great aunt T.I., trotting in the 1980s up the steep staircase at the North Philadelphia train station in her nineties, was not “African” in any sense: she was an American black woman.

Xi Jinping Is Mobilizing China for War, Possibly With Nukes by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17547/china-mobilizing-war

Beijing looks as if it is preparing for a full-scale invasion of Indian territory…. Ladakh is not the only hotspot. There is a Chinese encroachment in India’s Sikkim as well as incursions in neighboring Bhutan and Nepal.

Lately, Xi’s references in public pronouncements have become unmistakable, and his subordinates have been clear that Xi believes that everyone outside China owes him obedience.

Xi, while spouting tianxia-like language and bellicose words, has been getting the Chinese people ready for war.

The changes signal the growing clout of the People’s Army inside the Party and highlight the militarization of the country’s external relations. China is fast becoming a military state.

Xi Jinping on July 1 told the world what he is going to do. We are, in all probability, in the last moments of peace.

China in recent weeks has sent tens of thousands of troops to its disputed border with India in Ladakh, high in the Himalayas.

Beijing looks as if it is preparing for a full-scale invasion of Indian territory.

This deployment occurred while Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, in the words of the Communist Party’s China Daily, made a “pro-peace, pro-development, and pro-cooperation speech” to celebrate the centennial of the Party’s founding.

“The Chinese people have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will,” Xi said on July 1.

Scapegoats, Boogeymen, and Hobgoblins The Biden Administration, the bureaucracy, military, media, academia, Silicon Valley, and corporate boardrooms across America don’t know how to explain, much less solve, our mounting crises.   By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/scapegoats-boogeymen-and-hobgoblins/

The world may be increasingly baffled by 2021 America, and its sudden scapegoating of “white supremacist” hobgoblins for problems it cannot or will not solve. 

Roughly 400 Americans were shot over the past July 4 holiday weekend. About 150 of them were killed. The majority, both of the shooters and the victims, were inner-city, African-American males. The level of violence approaches the bad casualty days of the recent Afghan and Iraq wars. 

Meanwhile, during the carnage, progressive black leaders, from Representatives Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to Cori Bush (D-Mo.), blasted America’s foundational holiday and the country at large for its white supremacy and the current supposed lack of freedom for African Americans. 

During 120 days of rioting, arson, and looting during the summer of 2020, the country suffered about $2 billion in property damage, roughly 25 deaths, and some 14,000 arrests. 

Rioters burned down a Minneapolis police precinct. They set afire a federal courthouse in Portland. And they tried to incinerate the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church next to the White House. Downtown areas of Portland and Seattle were taken over by rioters, who occupied entire city blocks with impunity. 

Most of those arrested during the violent summer were either released or eventually had their charges dropped or vastly reduced. Although many of the Antifa and BLM rioters shouted revolutionary slogans, called for violence against the police, and carefully organized their rioting on social media, neither the media nor the government ever declared the rioters to be conspiracists or insurrectionists. 

In contrast, when roughly 500 renegade Trump supporters, in buffoonish fashion, broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the media and government immediately claimed it was a carefully planned “armed insurrection.” But no one was arrested for possessing or using a gun. 

Headlines blared of five killed. But four died of natural causes and three of those deaths were among Trump supporters. The only violent death was also of a Trump supporter and military veteran, lethally shot by a Capitol police officer while entering through a window. Her shooter remains unidentified.