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February 2022

The Real War on Science: Identity Politics By Andrew Follett

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-real-war-on-science-identity-politics/

Emphasizing wokeness over true scientific inquiry will turn humanity’s pursuit of scientific truth into little more than an exercise in demagoguery.

T he best way to stop racial discrimination is to directly enshrine it into law via affirmative action in universities, according to the head of a major scientific journal.

“As science struggles to correct systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, making it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts—including among scientists,” claimed an editorial in Science’s latest issue. It continued, “The dismantling of race-conscious admissions [to colleges] would deal another blow to equity in science.”

The editorial, titled “Science needs affirmative action,” was authored by none other than Science’s editor-in-chief: Washington University medicine and chemistry professor Herbert Holden Thorp.

Science is the most influential general-topic scientific journal, alongside its rival Nature. The prestigious peer-reviewed outlet boasts a weekly readership of almost 270,000 people and has been published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1880.

Thorp claims affirmative action “gives deserving students a chance that they might not otherwise have, adding excellence to the higher education system. It also acknowledges that not all students have an equal opportunity to excel at objective measures like standardized tests and grades, and it levels the playing field by giving students and universities the chance to spotlight other important attributes and factors in the admissions process.”

Down with Sabra? The Harvard Hummus Protests By Carine Hajjar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/down-with-sabra-the-harvard-hummus-protests/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

That’s right, Harvard students are protesting . . . hummus.

Students in Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) are demanding that the Mediterranean spread made by Sabra be taken out of dining halls because of ties to the Israel Defense Forces. This is merely one — albeit the creamiest — of many instances of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)-style protests against Israel on college campuses across the country.

The Harvard Crimson reported that on Tuesday, students gathered in Harvard Yard holding signs that say “Why does your hummus taste like apartheid?” and chanting “Don’t buy products laced with hate, Sabra funds a racist state.” Stickers on Sabra snack cups in dining halls say something similar (picture provided by a student at Harvard):

The QR code takes you to a document that states that Strauss Group, the company that co-owns Sabra with PepsiCo, has “openly and proudly admitted to funding the Israeli army.” Strauss Group is the largest food company in Israel. Sabra itself is headquartered in White Plains, N.Y. (I’ll quickly add that the linked document suggests “moral alternatives” to Sabra, including Cedar’s Hummus. Oh please, Cedar’s? Too much lemon if you ask me. I’ll also add that my Lebanese food snobbery leads me to look askance at Sabra too . . . but I digress.)

Strauss Group sends food and care packages to the Golani Brigade in the IDF. To pro-Palestine activists at Harvard, this amounts to the sponsorship of murder.

Dartmouth Republicans secure free speech — by fleeing campus By John Klar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/dartmouth_republicans_secure_free_speech__by_fleeing_campus.html

In an ongoing embarrassment for Dartmouth College, the once-venerable institution has repeatedly demonstrated that it is unable — or more likely, ideologically opposed — to allow students the free speech that once breathed air on its “Live Free or Die” campus.

The school’s student Republican organization has found the Dartmouth doors increasingly closed to any effort to discuss the anti-American ideology with which Dartmouth has surreptitiously polluted every aspect of campus life and curricula.  Thugs and criminals rule Dartmouth now, so the Dartmouth Republicans wisely arranged for their latest speaker — nationally acclaimed author James Lindsay — to speak off campus, where free speech is not (yet) verboten.

Dartmouth bureaucrats claim they favor free speech, while they elevate the rights of permitless, foul-mouthed, speech-silencing protesters over those of a peaceful student organization with a permit.  The nation first watched this disgrace when Madison Cawthorn spoke at Dartmouth, and hateful children screamed anti-police epithets to intimidate attendees.  But at least that event went forward, under security reminiscent of inner-city or prison policing.  The college feigns concern over security but has clearly demonstrated it has no concern about assaults on speech liberties.

The Dartmouth Republicans tried yet again, with national speaker Andy Ngo.  This time Dartmouth College canceled the event, claiming vague threats by far-left criminals who appear to have organized with campus Antifa (and perhaps college professors who hate America) to stifle opinions that expose the filth of their hateful cult.  The college silenced Ngo just an hour prior to the event, claiming that students’ free speech rights were protected because they were allowed to proceed remotely by Zoom.  Dartmouth officials claim that this “separate but equal” discrimination was merited by the criminal threats: Dartmouth favors criminals over the tuition-paying students whose rights it throttles.

Dark Money Link to Democrats’ Climate Probes . By Susan Crabtree

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/11/dark_money_link_to_democrats_climate_probes_147172.html

It was Democrats who nearly a decade ago first labeled the opaque funneling of millions of dollars into various political influence operations “dark money” and railed against the then-GOP-dominated practice.

Over the past two election cycles, however, Democrats have not only caught up but surpassed Republicans in channeling unlimited sums of special interest and billionaire spending through nonprofits that do not disclose their donors’ identities.

Liberal groups and political operatives allied with the Democratic Party have also grown more creative in the types of political influence operations the funds support. A little-noticed dark-money entity created at least three years ago to help Democrats in Congress work more effectively is now drawing scrutiny.

During the final years of the Trump administration, a small but powerful group of former Democratic congressional aides and Obama administration appointees created an organization to help House and Senate Democrats exercise their oversight authority over the executive branch. The group is funded through the largest liberal dark-money channel in the country: Arabella Advisors.

Called “Co-Equal,” the group at first aimed to assist Congress in exercising its power as a branch of government equivalent to the executive, helping Democrats rebuild their oversight muscle to investigate the Trump administration.

Why anti-racism should be resisted Parents are fighting the return of segregation BY Asra Q. Nomani

https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-to-resist-anti-racism/

“Young boys and girls must grow up with world perspectives”. On 22nd April 1965, Martin Luther King Jr, speaking at a meeting of the Massachusetts legislature, lamented the “tragedy” of school segregation. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the US had finally dismantled the Jim Crow laws — which King had joked about burying a decade earlier. The nation had come to King’s conclusion: “Segregation debilitates the segregator as well as the segregated”.

Almost six decades later, from Massachusetts to Colorado, Jim Crow is being resurrected in public schools — this time through euphemisms such as “affinity circles”, “affinity dialogue groups” and “community building groups”. Centennial Elementary School in Denver, for instance, advertised a “Families of Color Playground Night” earlier this winter, on a marquee board outside the school. Last week, the Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, hosted a “meet and talk” with actress Karyn Parsons from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — exclusively for its “Students of Color affinity group”. “If you are a student of color or multiracial, please join us!” the invitation from a seventh grade teacher read.

Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.