Displaying posts published in

July 2021

Keeping Up With Nikole North Carolina’s gain is Howard University’s loss. By Peter W. Wood

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/keeping-up-with-nikole/

No sooner does the Nikole Hannah-Jones story turn in one direction than it veers in another. My wife has a name for roads in rural Vermont that behave like this. She calls them ziggles, a portmanteau of zigzags and wiggles. You can drive them safely, but it pays not to pick up too much speed between veering one direction and another.

It seems like only yesterday that the esteemed board of trustees at the University of North Carolina voted nine to four to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ now infamous “1619 Project,” in order to quiet the controversy over the board’s previous decision to award the acclaimed journalist an academic appointment at the Hussman School of Journalism but not to award her tenure. 

Claiming racial discrimination, Hannah-Jones participated in a high-profile campaign demanding that the UNC board change its mind. And lo! It did. On June 30, the board conscientiously reviewed the case and decided, in the words of chairman R. Gene Davis, “to set the record straight.”

That’s an odd way for the road engineers to describe their plotting of a new ziggle. But let Chairman Davis explain: 

Let me be perfectly clear. Our motto is Lux et Libertas, light and liberty. We remain committed to being a light shining brightly on the hill. We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate and scholarly inquiry, constructive disagreement, all of which are grounded in the virtue of listening to each other.

Academic freedom has been robustly vindicated at UNC by capitulating to a woke mob that threatened the trustees and the university if it didn’t get its way. That’s how things are set straight in Chapel Hill these days. The trustees apparently have been studying Vermont road maps.

Of course, that was last week’s news. This week’s news was Hannah-Jones’ decision, announced on CBS News’ “This Morning” on July 6, that she was declining the UNC offer of a tenured appointment in order to accept the position of the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University.

The Darkening Shadows of 100 Candles by Daryl McCann

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/china/2021/07/ the-darkening-shadows-of-100-candles/

Helmsman Xi Jinping, dressed in his best Mao suit for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), presented himself to the captive population of the PRC, not to mention the (not-yet captive) world, as the third-most significant leader of the party: the successor to Great Helmsman Mao Zedong and Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping. In this, at any rate, Xi was not wrong. Everything else about the July 1 celebrations in Tiananmen Square was pretty much smoke and mirrors.

The great conceit of the Leninist dictator is that that connection between the party, the nation and the people is indivisible. The CCP, according to Xi, has always “loved the Chinese people”. At this point in Xi’s speech, one’s thoughts drifted to the party’s murderously quixotic Great Leap Forward (1958-62) which resulted in the death of approximately 45 million people. Liu Shaoqi (1898-69), at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, acknowledged the famine was 30 per cent the fault of nature and 70 per cent human error. In other words, the party was directly responsible for the death of 31.5 million people, even more than the 3.9 million (and counting) thought to have died on account of the CCP virus (also known as SARS-CoV-2).

The fate of Liu, one-time PRC head of state and author of How to be a Good Communist (1939), tells us much of what we need to know about Leninism with Chinese Characteristics. The former Chairman of the People’s Republic was demeaned, tortured, and purged by the party during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Officially designated a former-person, Liu (right) was sentenced to house arrest outside of Beijing and died, ignominiously, in 1969. Although his reputation had been trashed by the party for the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Liu was posthumously rehabilitated by Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping in 1980. His definitive rehabilitation, though, has now formally taken place. Helmsman Xi named him, along with Mao, Zhou, Deng and Zhu, as one of the great heroes of the party at the Tiananmen Square celebration.

As President Xi went on about “the spirit of the party”, I wondered what “the spirit of Liu Shaoqi” might have made of the occasion. Would he have been uplifted by the choir of 10,000 belting out patriotic songs about “national rejuvenation” – material, ethical, cultural, and ecological! – under the guidance of the party? Would the first appearance in the sky of the PLA’s Chengdu J-20 stealth fighters (left) have been a moment of immense pride? And, finally, would his induction into the pantheon of party legends have mitigated the shame he endured in the final years of his life?

France, Germany, and Britain Sound Alarm on Iran’s Nuclear Moves. The U.S…? By Bryan Preston

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/07/07/france-germany-and-britain-sound-alarm-on-irans-nuclear-moves-the-u-s-n1460117

On Tuesday afternoon, France, Britain, and Germany released a joint statement regarding Iran’s latest nuclear moves. VOA’s Jeff Seldin tweeted the statement out.

The three allies “note with grave concern the latest report by the IAEA confirming that Iran has taken steps in the production of enriched uranium material.” The statement further notes that Iran has no credible civilian use for its activities, leading the three to suspect that Iran is taking steps toward developing nuclear weapons.

It should be obvious why this is a gravely serious issue.

It’s made more grave by United States silence on the one hand, and Joe Biden’s obvious eagerness to get the Obama-era Iran deal back in vogue on the other. Like most American leftists, results that benefit Americans are of dubious value and matter a lot less to Biden than the appearances of inking some “historic” deal or initiating some government program that the media will cast as well-meaning. It’s the PR that sells the thought that counts.

Iran is not on strong footing these days, but that matters little. It’s internally as brittle as ever. Israel continues working solid diplomacy with some of its Arab neighbors after Trump’s historic Abraham Accords.

Iran lost power and even its “countdown to Armageddon” clock reportedly went offline in the blackouts. Yes, we’re having some blackouts too thanks to a grid that hasn’t kept up with population growth in Texas and an overreliance on wind and solar there and in other states. But America doesn’t keep a running clock that’s just counting down the seconds until we can annihilate someone based on their race and heritage. Iran does. That clock is what reportedly went dark.

Biden still wants to treat Iran as some kind of quasi-normal state despite the fact that it’s run by one of the world’s worst dictatorships — and one of the world’s most prolific sponsors of terrorism.

Nuclear weapons in such hands spell violence, misery, and doom.

In April 2021, Foreign Policy warned that Biden returning the United States to the Obama-era JCPOA would be unwise.

The ‘Hotel California’ doctrine of US military intervention By Michael Rich

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/the_hotel_california_doctrine_of_us_military_intervention.html

It is easy to remember why the United States invaded Afghanistan.  Our country had just been attacked by terrorists based there.  The nation was united in a desire to protect itself from further attacks and bring the parties responsible to justice.

It’s not so easy to remember whether the justification for the invasion was based on a broader policy, whether there was discussion at the time of what would constitute victory, or whether the invasion was an actual war in the traditional sense.  More to the point, it’s unclear whether those questions have answers today, even as we exit Afghanistan.

I’ve read several articles written by people with a ton more knowledge than I have about whether our country should stay in Afghanistan or leave.  A lot of the writers had personal experience fighting in Afghanistan.  The opinions they offer differ, with some arguing to stay and others arguing to leave.  The positions of Trump and Biden seem to be aligned on the side of leave, which is remarkable, given how much else they disagree on.

As an average citizen, I supported the decision to invade.  Like most people, the attacks scared the daylights out of me, and I was riled up more than at any other time in my life.  I suspect that our leaders were at least in part reacting to the zeitgeist as much as, or possibly more than they were thinking about the end game.

At this point, I don’t presume to know the correct answer on the stay or leave question, though I could make a solid argument for either course of action.  Stay: The situation in Afghanistan could quickly return to pre-9/11 conditions and again become a haven for terrorists plotting to attack us.  Leave: There’s nothing more to do in Afghanistan that would justify expending more blood and treasure than we already have, and we need to rely on Homeland Security and the “Intelligence Community” to defend ourselves from future terrorist attacks.  You can add in arguments about the positive or negative impacts on Afghanis from either point of view.  On this count, most people would acknowledge that leaving is going to hurt the segment of the Afghani population who want to avoid a return to the tender mercies of the Taliban, including and especially women.

Biden’s stupidest mistake By Frank Friday

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/bidens_stupidest_mistake.html

You can’t say Joe Biden hasn’t been busy in the months since he took office. Like most great artists, Biden is prolific. The medium he works in, of course, is stupid mistakes, and he cranks out new ones every day. It is hard to say exactly which one is stupidest of all — like determining which Rembrandt painting or Beethoven symphony is the best.

The current open-the-borders-but-blame-it-all-somehow-on-Trump policy may be the most consequential. I would estimate this will lead to at least 5 million Central American paupers in the USA before Slow Joe finishes his term.

But maybe the ugliest and most humiliating stupidity is happening right now with the Afghanistan pullout, the one and only Trump idea Biden wants to follow through with — although I think Pres. Trump was having second thoughts.

The U.S. achieved mastery over the Taliban years ago. Since 2016, only a handful of our soldiers have been lost there, none last year. While the U.S. military on a global basis loses about 1000 servicemen every year to routine accidents and training mistakes.

At this point, having spent so much blood and treasure to pacify the country, why are we in such a hurry to pull out the 3,000 or so soldiers training and advising the government forces? Forces that seem willing to keep doing their own fighting and dying if we give them just a small bit of assistance.

If we completely pull out and demoralize the Afghans, I think they fold up and quit. The aftermath will be a bloody disgrace, something like the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the original Afghan fiasco the British Retreat from Kabul in 1842. 

What Is China Doing? by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17551/what-is-china-doing

What does China want the narrative to be? The ideal outcome would be that the virus originated outside of China. Failing that, an acceptable outcome would be, as highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, that the virus “that killed millions of people and shattered the global economy” would be “among the world’s most consequential mysteries.”

There is one outcome that would be unacceptable to the CCP: China will do almost anything to keep the U.S. from concluding that the virus was developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The CCP is already taking steps to encourage the U.S. to reach “the right” judgment, and it appears to have people in the West, including in the U.S., who are willingly supporting those efforts.

The Lancet has again come out with an unjustified dismissal of the lab leak theory, couched in support for the G7’s call for a new COVID origins study, led by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Nothing could be better for China than having The Lancet as the messenger, lending scientific credibility to what the CCP wants the world to believe.

The July 5 publication of the letter in The Lancet is a strong signal that the CCP has launched an active disinformation campaign. The CCP will continue to spare no effort in ensuring that the COVID-19 virus appears to have originated somewhere other than China….

On May 26, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that he had asked the U.S. intelligence community to redouble its efforts to determine the origins of the COVID-19 virus. The U.S. findings are expected in about 90 days. So now we know what the Biden administration is doing, but what will the Chinese government, or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), do? In light of China’s obfuscation so far, it is absurd to imagine that it will be cooperating with the U.S. investigation. Neither will it be sitting idly by waiting to learn of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions. Instead, the CCP will be doing everything it can to shape the report and ensure that the findings will be released in a context saturated by Chinese propaganda.

What does China want the narrative to be? The ideal outcome would be that the virus originated outside of China. Failing that, an acceptable outcome would be, as highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, that the virus “that killed millions of people and shattered the global economy” would be “among the world’s most consequential mysteries.”

Asian-Americans are the Left’s inconvenient minority By Drew Allen

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/asians_are_the_lefts_inconvenient_minority_.html

“There are dark stains on the history of this nation,” writes Kenny Xu in the preface of his groundbreaking new book, ‘An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.’ But the purpose of Xu’s relevant and timely book is not to condemn America for its past, but to celebrate America for its triumphs.

Xu continues to say that “we should be proud to have made so much progress in mostly, though not completely, overcoming…”

The chief concern in America today is not how much further we have to go to fulfill our original charter of freedom and equality for all, but just how far we have regressed in recent years from achieving this end. Americans fought a bloody Civil War to right the wrong of slavery. Americans fought a non-violent Civil Rights Movement to end race based segregation and discrimination. 

Despite these important achievements, all that progress is being undone and at a rapid rate. Xu identifies the root cause of America’s rapid regression, writing, “the attack on Asian-American excellence represents the decline of a larger concept in American society that has allowed its culture of excellence to prosper: meritocracy.”

Xu achieves two critical things with his book: he simultaneously shines a spotlight on the disturbing and unsung attacks against Asian-Americans, while also explaining how this is ushering in the decline of America, as a whole.

Who Was Karl Marx? A new book delves into 200 years of his evil influence. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/who-was-karl-marx-daniel-greenfield/

Karl Marx is over two centuries old. Ideas that used to be radical have long since become stale. Socialism is about as new and exciting as the telegraph or Bernie Sanders. Marxism is most likely to be studied in the countries where, as its proponents claim, it’s never really been tried.

Who was Karl Marx beyond the bearded guy on t-shirts in Berkeley and Austin?

In Who Was Karl Marx?: The Men, the Motives and the Menace Behind Today’s Rampaging American Left, investigative journalist James Simpson paints a scathing picture of Marx, his disciplines, and the political movement created by the fake prophet of a real catastrophe.

Marx was “hypocritically greedy, petty, arrogant, lazy, selfish, dishonest, two-faced, lecherous, bigoted and brimming with hatred”, Simpson writes, backing that up with historical anecdotes.

Does it matter that Marx was a virulent bigot, that he hated most people, and even sired an illegitimate son, kept him in poverty, and never let him go past the servants’ quarters?

It might not matter if Marx were just a writer whose work was disconnected from his loathsome personality, but Simpson convincingly argues that, “progressivism’s end  product  is merely the  reflection of Marx’s personality, played out to devastating effect on the world stage.”

Marxism, in other words, is terrible because Karl Marx was a miserable human being.

The same holds true for much of the Left. Its theories don’t just fail because they’re poorly thought out, but because they’re expressions of malice directed at the rest of the world.

But Who Was Karl Marx? is not a biography of Marx, so much as it’s a sketch of key leftist figures, and the influence of their ideas on the present. The book may begin with Marx, but it goes on to Black Lives Matter and Antifa. It touches on Lenin’s obsession with destroying his opponents through relentless dehumanization and smear campaigns in order to clarify the contemporary leftist obsession with political correctness and cancel culture.

Moral Narcissism at the National Education Association The first K-12 teachers’ union in the U.S. to endorse the BDS movement. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/moral-narcissism-national-education-association-richard-l-cravatts/

On May 19th, the 6200-member United Educators of San Francisco teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” committing its members to sign on with the anti-Semitic BDS campaign, stating “that UESF endorses the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel,” thereby becoming the first K-12 teachers’ union in the United States to endorse the BDS movement.

Not to be outdone by its union brethren further north, chapter chairs of the United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the second largest teacher’s union in the country, also voted overwhelmingly in May in support of a statement, almost identical to the San Francisco version, that expressed its “solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for Israel to end bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah . . , [called] on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to stop aid to Israel [and endorsed] the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.”

The engagement of public school teachers in activism against the Jewish state continued unabated in June when the 3-million member National Education Association proposed two anti-Israel resolutions, New Business Item 29, which committed the NEA to “publicize its support for the Palestinian struggle for justice and call on the United States government to stop arming and supporting Israel,” and NBI 51, which would create a campaign to “use existing digital communication tools to educate members and the general public about the history, culture, and struggles of Palestinians.”

The rectitude of the NEA educators pushing for condemnations of Israel manifests itself as what has been termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement.

So, apparently, vilifying Israel and focusing singularly and obsessively on the Jewish state make the NEA’s moral narcissists feel that they are standing up for something important and making a moral cause for a people they see as victimized and oppressed, even when so many much more pressing and tragic social upheavals are taking place around the world. But it is Israel that the NEA puts in its crosshairs.

Good Omens For 2022 — For Now Will Republicans take advantage of the signs of doom for the Dems?Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/good-omens-2022-now-bruce-thornton/

The midterms are over a year-and-a-half away, which is a life-time in politics. But the Biden administration’s egregious incompetence and political tin ear are good omens for Republican chances of taking back the House and even the Senate.

Let’s start with the chaos at the border, and out-of-control and illegal immigration, one of the issues that helped Donald Trump win in 2016. The progressives want us to believe that the xenophobia and racism of the “deplorables” and “bitter clingers” accounted for Trump’s success. But quasi-open borders and sanctuary cities that protect felons and gangster are unpopular with most voters, including Latinos and blacks who bear the lethal cost of policies promoted by tony cognitive elites who don’t have to pay for their juvenile idealism.

Once the crisis exploded, Kamala Harris––or “Que mala” as she was called in El Paso––worsened the optics of the disorder: coyotes and cartel human traffickers getting rich; children penned up in “cages,” to use the Dems’ hyperbole; endless throngs in the hundreds of thousands streaming over the Rio Grande in broad delight, and being welcomed ashore by border agents. And her uncontrollable cackle and obvious lack of preparation reinforced the administration’s fecklessness.

And who can forget Kamala’s lame “root causes” rationalizations for conditions created by Biden’s reversal of all Trump’s policies that had the border under control? Guatemala’s president set the record straight when he fingered Biden’s irresponsible statement that the U.S. would “reunite families,” and his virtue-signaling rhetoric that accompanied his repudiation of Trump’s policies like the “Remain in Mexico” protocol for asylum seekers. If the Republicans are smart, the copious dramatic videos from this disaster will be broadcast 24/7.

Next, the Dems and the politicized DOJ have attacked states like Arizona and Georgia that are cleaning up their election laws to restore electoral integrity. Arizona’s reforms have been vindicated by the Supreme Court, which makes AG Merritt Garland’s witch-hunt pretty much DOA. The dishonest “voter suppression” rationale, one predicated on the insulting claim that blacks are too incompetence to secure photo I.D.s or find a polling place, is not convincing anybody beyond the hard-core Democrat constiuency of race-hustlers and electoral fraudsters. Most ordinary citizens outside the blue-state progressive silos want their votes to count, instead of being cancelled by fake ballots.

No more convincing are the desperate rationales for the steep increases in violent crime ever since George Floyd’s death while in police custody last May rationalized big-city mayors’ pull-back of their police forces, allowing BLM and their Antifa black-shirts to run wild for months. Worse, many Democrat mayors and politicians endorsed BLM’s “defund the police” demands, which created the Ferguson Effect on steroids. No surprise that cops have been retiring in droves, and gun-thugs are taking over public spaces. Finally, not content with their policy blunders, the Dems are trying to sell voters on the idea that Republicans’ have been defunding the police because they’re resisting Biden’s print-tax-and-spend bills. Voters aren’t going to fall for the old Marxist (Groucho and Karl) principle, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?”