EDUCATION Comments turned off

Reality Check for NYC Department of Education By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on September 29th, 2017

You know how low the bar is when you read the proud statement that no one has been murdered in a NYC high school sine 1992. You also know how meaningless a 73% high school graduation rate is in a school where more than half of those graduates were chronically absent in their senior year. The middle school that feeds into that high school had a pass rate of 13% on the statewide reading test and 5% in math. Simply put, 87% of the students who couldn’t read at an 8th grade level and 95% who couldn’t do 8th grade math were promoted into high school and subsequently shoved out with diplomas regardless of academic competence This Bronx high school with the lofty title of The Urban Assembly Wildlife Conservation School is headed by a non-profit organization that also runs 20 other schools in New York, all with pretentious claims to professional aspirations in law, justice, global commerce, media studies, environmentalism etc. It’s in the news today because it appears that one of the eponymous wildlife was actually inside the school and stabbed two fellow students, killing one and hospitalizing the other.

On its website, The Urban Assembly lists three pages of prestigious partners from the public, private, not-for-profit and higher education sectors – such impressive names as the Office of the Bronx D.A., JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Brooklyn Law School – even the New York Yankees. Will these partners look more closely at the 20 other schools supervised by this group now that the shocking failure rates on standardized tests give the lie to that inflated high school graduation rate? The murder has spurred demands for metal detectors in these schools but there should be an equal demand for mental detection on the part of overseers and the Chancellor of Education What is the point of a Board of Advisors and support from the community if they are not challenging the lack of achievement in the most basic tools of learning – reading and math? You can’t have a future in any career if you can’t read or count. And who is checking the budgetary expenses of schools with glaring disparities between test results and graduation rates? This is a red flag even for do-gooders suffering from cognitive dissonance and especially for politicos who have been steadily pushing the scandalous crisis in education under a thickly piled rug.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France May Finally Be Getting Serious About Anti-Semitic Violence A hate-crime law has been in effect since 2003, but until recently prosecutors hesitated to employ it. By Eliora Katz

Posted By on September 29th, 2017

Seventy-eight-year-old Roger Pinto was sitting in his suburban Paris home the night of Sept. 7 when three young men broke in and cut off the electricity. They knocked Mr. Pinto unconscious, according to his account, and when he came to, one of them said: “The Jews have lots of money, and you will give us what you have.”

They tied up and beat Mr. Pinto, his 72-year-old wife and their son, held them for several hours, and eventually ran off with jewelry, cash and credit cards. The Pintos were treated for minor injuries. Authorities are investigating the attack as a hate crime: “The motivation for this cowardly act seems directly related to the religion of the victims,” said Interior Minister Gérard Collomb.

Such an acknowledgment is unusual in France. Parliament enacted a hate-crime law in 2003, in response to attacks on Jews during the height of the second intifada in Israel. But the idea of crimes motivated by bias sits uncomfortably with the French Republican model, based on the notion of integration into a uniform national identity. France officially does not classify its citizens according to race, religion or ethnicity.

Thus officials have often equivocated about designating anti-Semitic attacks as hate crimes. In 2014 four armed burglars allegedly broke into a young Jewish couple’s residence and raped the 19-year-old woman while pinning down her partner. As in the Pinto case, the suspects demanded money, asserting: “Jews, you have money at home, you do not put it in the bank.” Prosecutors charged the suspects with group rape, robbery and abduction but dropped hate-crime charges this past February.

French authorities initially denied anti-Semitic motives in the brutal 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi by a band of Muslim thugs styling themselves the Gang of Barbarians, only to acknowledge them at trial three years later. The clues weren’t hard to find: When the working-class Halimis couldn’t pay the ransom his captors initially demanded, the gang replied: “Go and get it from your synagogue.” They also contacted a rabbi and told him: “We have a Jew.”

This past April Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew (who had no direct relation to Ilan Halimi), was killed when a neighbor allegedly broke into her third-story Paris apartment, beat her and pushed her out the window. The suspect was captured in another neighbor’s apartment, where he was holed up chanting verses from the Quran. (The suspect has claimed insanity.) Only last week, after months of pressure from the Jewish community, did French prosecutors classify Sarah Halimi’s killing as a hate crime.

Jews have also been prominent public targets. A man pledging allegiance to Islamic State killed four at a Parisian kosher supermarket just after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, and Mohammed Merah’s 2012 shooting rampage at a Jewish school in Toulouse also took four lives. Pro-Palestinian protesters chanted “Death to the Jews” and “ Hitler was right” in 2014, as they marched through Paris setting Jewish shops ablaze and besieging synagogues. Street assaults, graffiti and taunts are common.

The violence and hostility are taking a toll on the community. Whereas 30 years ago most French Jews enrolled their children in public schools, only about one-third do today. Some 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006, more than 20,000 of them between 2014 and 2016. After the 2015 supermarket murder, 12,000 soldiers were deployed to protect Jewish institutions. But there are half a million Jews in France, and the army isn’t big enough to guard all of their homes. CONTINUE AT SITE

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Never-Trump Triumvirate What do Rand Paul, Susan Collins and John McCain have in common? Very little. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on September 29th, 2017

The press corps is busy quizzing the president, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader on their plans for tax reform. The question is why they aren’t chasing after the three people who actually hold all the power.

If the past eight months have proved anything, it is that all the 24/7 news coverage of Donald Trump’s antics, all the millions of words devoted to Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s plans, have been a complete waste of space and time. In the end, control of the entire policy agenda in Washington comes down to three senators. Three senators whom most Americans have never had a chance to vote for or against. Three senators who comprise 8% of their party conference. Arizona’s John McCain, Maine’s Susan Collins and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. Forget Caesar, Crassus and Pompey. Meet the Never-Trump Triumvirate.

At least the House Freedom Caucus scuttles GOP legislation based on shared principles. Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have also led revolts against bills, again based on shared criticisms. But what do the Arizona maverick, the Maine moderate and the Kentucky libertarian have in common? Very little.

Well, very little save motivations that go beyond policy. And that is the crucial point that is missing from the endless analyses of the McCain-Collins-Paul defections on health care. The media has treated the trio’s excuses for killing their party’s top priority as legit, despite the obvious holes in their objections over policy and process. What in fact binds the three is their crafting of identities based primarily on opposition to their party or Mr. Trump. This matters, because it bodes very ill for tax reform in the Senate. Overcoming policy objections is one thing. Overcoming egos is another.

Mr. McCain, who is gravely ill with brain cancer, has decided his final legacy will be a return to the contrarian “straight talk” persona of old, which wins him liberal media plaudits. The Arizonan has never gotten over losing the presidency, and it clearly irks him that Mr. Trump succeeded where he failed. His personal disdain for the president is obvious, and his implausible excuses for opposing the Graham-Cassidy health-care reform are proof that this is personal.

Ms. Collins is reportedly days away from deciding whether she’ll ditch the Senate gig and run for governor. That potential campaign has guided her every move for at least a year now—perhaps her entire career—and was clearly among her reasons last summer to abandon her party’s nominee and publicly excoriate Mr. Trump. It is a basic precept in Washington that Sen. Collins votes in whatever way best serves Sen. Collins. Right now that means being Never Trump.

Mr. Paul worked hard during his first Senate campaign to reassure Kentuckians that he was not his father, and it turns out that’s very true. Because even Ron Paul was to be found with his party’s House majority on issues that truly mattered, and largely saved his defections for the lost causes that produced 434-1 votes. Sen. Paul’s standards for “conservative” policy are as varying as the wind, and lately they blow toward whatever position can earn him the title of purest man in Washington.

The press was fixated this week on Mr. McConnell’s bad week, which is an easy piece to write. But it ignores the obvious reality that the Triumvirate seems to have never had any intention of letting its party succeed. After all, a senator who intended to stand firm on “regular order,” as Mr. McCain said, would have informed his colleagues of that demand at the beginning, rather than allow his colleagues to set up for another vote and then dramatically tank it (again) at the last minute. A senator who voted for “skinny” ObamaCare repeal in the summer on the grounds that anything was “better than no repeal,” in the words of Mr. Paul, would not suddenly engineer an unreachable set of demands for his vote on an even better repeal.

The Senate has no lack of lime-lighters. Nor is it low on Trump critics. Think Nebraska’s Ben Sasse and Arizona’s Jeff Flake. The difference is that the clear majority of the critics aren’t allowing ambition or disdain get in the way of votes for better policy.

But this raises the question of whether the White House understands that the Triumvirate is also the prize on tax reform. Mr. Trump took a shot at Mr. McConnell this week, but the president needs to shift his focus to those who hold the actual power. Those dinner invites to Chuck and Nancy would be better reserved for Ms. Collins. Its internal conversations need to focus on what forms of flattery or policy or misery might appeal to the political motivations of Messrs. McCain and Paul, and get them on side. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Prepare for the Worst With North Korea By Matthew R. Costlow

Posted By on September 29th, 2017

Failure is an option, especially when it comes to U.S. policy towards North Korea. Decades of diplomatic efforts have failed to de-nuclearize and pacify Kim Jong Un’s regime while parallel efforts to deter small-scale conventional and large-scale cyber-attacks have also failed.

Despite these failures, however, U.S. policy-makers appear to still be enamored with the idea of getting up, dusting themselves off, and going for one more spin on the North Korean nuclear merry-go-round: provocation, emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, a new round of sanctions, failure of diplomatic talks, provocation, ad infinitum.

There are ways to break this cycle and achieve some form of success, options which the Trump administration appears to be considering.

However, while the Trump administration hopes for success in these endeavors, it should not forget to prepare for failure. Previous failures in U.S. and allied diplomacy and deterrence have led to dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in damages. Future failures could lead to the death of millions and damages measured in trillions of dollars.

Paradoxically, preparing for failure, in either diplomacy or deterrence, is the greatest way to increase the probability of success. If Kim Jong Un believes the United States can mitigate or significantly contain the consequences of a failure of diplomacy or deterrence, he may be less likely to initiate a provocation in the first place.

So what does preparing for failure look like in U.S. policy?

To begin, U.S. and allied policy-makers must examine why deterrence has failed, or nearly failed, in the past. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara both lobbied for the use of Soviet nuclear weapons against the United States to advance the cause of the “socialist camp.” The Cuban leaders were rational in their own atypical non-Western way but were willing, even eager, to die for their cause. Kim Jong Un may not be all that different. His provocations may look crazy to the Western mind, but coldly rational to him.

The difficulty of deterrence is that it does not work in the same way universally, considering the diverse set of cultural values that each foreign leader holds. Demonstrating this reality in an academic setting, researchers in comparative psychology recently showed East Asians and Westerners the same picture for a short period of time and then asked the subjects what they remembered about the picture. The two groups, who saw the exact same picture, gave very different answers, in part, due to their cultural values which compelled them to focus on some things in the picture and not others.

This same dynamic recently manifest itself on the Korean peninsula. A few weeks ago, the U.S. military made the decision to withhold U.S. bombers from bilateral exercises with the South Koreans to signal North Korea its willingness to de-escalate the situation. Days later North Korea tested its largest-yield nuclear weapon ever. In the words of General Vincent K. Brooks, Commander of U.S. Forces Korea: “Apparently the changes in the exercise did not matter.” Both sides saw the same picture but gave different answers.

In fact, there is very good evidence that North Korean leaders hold dramatically different cultural values than the United States, namely, their elevation and devout protection of their leader’s “honor.” U.S. leaders regularly accept offenses to their honor as the price of politics. However, East Asian cultures in general, and North Korea, in particular, hold honor in much higher regard and are willing to go to greater lengths to defend it. This has major implications for the failure of deterrence and diplomacy.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Yes, the U.S. Navy Can Shoot Down North Korean ICBMs Its Aegis ballistic-missile defense system is already capable and can be more so with certain upgrades. By Henry F. Cooper

Posted By on September 28th, 2017

North Korea continues to test its nuclear weapons and its means to deliver them, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that can reach America. We clearly need the best ballistic-missile defense (BMD) systems possible.

Even with this urgent need, some think we still have time, because they think that North Korea still must develop greater accuracy and the means to reenter the atmosphere before it can threaten us.

In the Wall Street Journal, I recently observed that North Korea could detonate nuclear weapons above the atmosphere to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and shut down the electric power grid indefinitely. Following such a burst over America, millions could die from starvation, disease, and societal collapse.

Guess what? North Korea recently highlighted its interest in a high-altitude “super powerful EMP attack” as a “strategic goal.” As in 2012 and 2016, it could launch a satellite to approach us from our mostly undefended south, this time with a nuke on board.

We need to enhance our limited ground-based BMD system in Alaska and California. Aegis BMD ships deployed around the world can augment that homeland-defense capability. But a false narrative is being spread in numerous articles: that these ships cannot shoot down ICBMs, except possibly in their terminal phase as they approach their targets.

That myth is a legacy of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which made it illegal to defend the American people against ballistic missiles. The United States bet on the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, which promised that we would destroy the Soviet Union if it attacked us.

It was my privilege to serve as President Ronald Reagan’s chief defense and space negotiator, defending his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) while learning all about the ABM Treaty as the “cornerstone of strategic stability,” as the Soviets and the U.S. liberal elite described it. Then as President George H. W. Bush’s SDI director, I advocated a “global protection against limited strikes” mission, including a new role for theater-missile-defense (TMD) systems to protect our overseas troops, friends, and allies.

The ABM Treaty permitted TMD systems. So I advised Admiral Frank Kelso, the chief of Naval operations, to ensure that Aegis BMD efforts were limited to building a TMD capability; otherwise, MAD acolytes, who were committed to the ABM Treaty, would kill it in the cradle.

Fortunately, that strategy to secure the political viability of Aegis BMD worked — but perhaps too well. Many mistakenly think that Aegis BMD can do no more than provide TMD capability. Even after President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, little was done to make Aegis BMD all that we thought it could be in the early 1990s.

Nonetheless, in early 2008, when a threatening satellite was shortly to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, President Bush chose Aegis BMD to shoot it down before its toxic fuel could threaten folks on the ground. In a heroic concerted effort, dubbed the “Burnt Frost” mission, the Navy succeeded in destroying the satellite, an uncooperative target traveling faster than an ICBM.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Silicon Valley Turned Off the Left and Right After years of regulation immunity and radical profiteering, Silicon Valley mega-corporations are alienating their friends on both sides of the political aisle. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 28th, 2017

When Left and Right finally agree on something, watch out: The unthinkable becomes normal.

So it is with changing attitudes toward Silicon Valley.

For the last two decades, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other West Coast tech corporations have been untouchable icons. They piled up astronomical profits while hypnotizing both left-wing and right-wing politicians.

Conservative administrations praised them as modern versions of 19th-century risk-takers such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, and other tech giants were seen as supposedly creating national wealth in an unregulated, laissez-faire landscape that they had invented from nothing.

At a time when American companies were increasingly unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble world arena, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook bulldozed their international competition. Indeed, they turned high-tech and social media into American brands.

The Left was even more enthralled. It dropped its customary regulatory zeal, despite Silicon Valley’s monopolizing, outsourcing, offshoring, censoring, and destroying of startup competition. After all, Big Tech was left-wing and generous. High-tech interests gave hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing candidates, think tanks, and causes.

Companies such as Facebook and Google were able to warp their own social-media protocols and Internet searches to insidiously favor progressive agendas and messaging.

If the Left feared that the tech billionaires were becoming robber barons, they also delighted in the fact that they were at least left-wing robber barons.

Unlike the steel, oil, and coal monopolies of the 19th century that out of grime and smoke created the sinews of a growing America, Silicon Valley gave us shiny, clean, green, and fun pods, pads, and phones.

As a result, social media, Internet searches, texts, email, and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech certainly was not subject to the rules that governed railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and television and radio.

But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have now changed on both the left and right.

Liberals are under pressure from their progressive base to make Silicon Valley hire more minorities and women.

Progressives wonder why West Coast techies cannot unionize and sit down for tough bargaining with their progressive billionaire bosses.

Local community groups resent the tech giants driving up housing prices and zoning out the poor from cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.

Behind the veneer of a cool Apple logo or multicolored Google trademark are scores of multimillionaires who live one-percenter lifestyles quite at odds with the soft socialism espoused by their corporate megaphones.

Conservatives got sick of Silicon Valley, too.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ohio State Student Refuses to Reveal Preferred Pronouns: ‘If It Looks Like a Duck…’ By Tom Knighton

Posted By on September 28th, 2017

Whoever thought pronouns, those innocuous little words that take the place of other nouns in the English language, would ever cause so much of an issue? It was pretty simple when I was a kid. If someone was a girl, you used “she” and if the person was a boy, you used “he.” Today, however, that’s problematic. Are you misgendering someone by assuming — because they have long hair, a dress, and boobs — they’re a girl?

So, to solve this “problem,” some have started stating their preferred pronouns so everyone will know what to use at any given point.

At The Ohio State University, this has become a thing among the student government, but one student is outright refusing. From The College Fix:

Nick Davis is someone who likes to stand up for common sense and his personal beliefs.

[…]

Today, he continues to buck left-leaning tendencies at the state’s flagship campus. Recently Davis, a member of the Undergraduate Student Government’s General Assembly, declined to put his preferred gender pronouns on his name tag.

Of the 40 student senators, Davis is the only one who did not go along with adding it.

The “He/him/his” “She/her/hers” additions to the name tags were not required. Nor, Davis said, did he think it was needed, at least in his case.

“I don’t think it is necessary when it comes to myself personally,” he told The College Fix.

He went on, “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s safe to assume it’s a duck. I look like a male, I sound like a male, it’s safe to assume I’m a male.”

Seems fair enough.

While Davis doesn’t appear to be catching much of a backlash over his stance (at least not yet) this whole thing is stupid.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Narrative Fail: Russia Facebook Ads Showed Support For Black Lives Matter, Clinton By Debra Heine

Posted By on September 28th, 2017

The Democrat’s Trump/Russia collusion narrative took a major hit this week when Facebook leaks about Russia-linked ads forced disappointed Dems to walk back their anti-Trump messaging. Congressional leaders, in the meantime, have reportedly renewed their focus on team Obama’s election year political espionage.

The anti-Trumpers had a promising story-line — “Trump and Russia colluded on Facebook” — that had to be downgraded to merely “Russia sought to create incivility and chaos” when it was discovered that the Russia-linked group in question promoted issues and groups on both sides of the political spectrum.

According to Facebook’s investigators, the company sold up to $150,000 worth of ads to a Russian government-affiliated troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency which bought the ads through hundreds of phony Facebook pages and accounts.

The intelligence community describes the Internet Research Agency as “a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin.”

At least one of the over 3,000 Russia-bought ads, which Facebook will soon turn over to Congress, promoted Black Lives Matter and specifically targeted audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, CNN reported, Wednesday.

The Black Lives Matter ad appeared on Facebook at some point in late 2015 or early 2016, the sources said. The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson.

New descriptions of the Russian-bought ads shared with CNN suggest that the apparent goal of the Russian buyers was to amplify political discord and fuel an atmosphere of incivility and chaos, though not necessarily to promote one candidate or cause over another. Facebook’s review of Russian efforts on its platform focused on a timeframe from June 2015 to May 2017.

These ranged from posts promoting Black Lives Matter to posts promoting gun rights and the Second Amendment to posts warning about what they said was the threat undocumented immigrants posed to American democracy. Beyond the election, Russians have sought to raise questions about western democracies.

According to the Washington Post, other ads showed support for Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

“This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst. “It shows they the level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues.”

Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that there’s “no evidence yet” that Russians and Trump officials colluded on the Facebook ads, but said “it’s an area the committee continues to investigate.”

While the Trump/Russia collusion investigation ran into a speed bump, this week, the unmasking probe gained steam.

Congressional republicans have turned their attention to team Obama’s efforts to obtain highly classified intelligence information on Trump and his allies before the inauguration.

U.S officials familiar with the situation told the Washington Free Beacon that Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee “place renewed attention on the investigation” into why highly classified intelligence community reports were obtained and then leaked to the press.

Congressional leaders are also reportedly interested in finding out why former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and other senior Obama officials made an unusually high number of unmasking requests during the final months of the Obama administration.

“It was understood in the Bush administration that unmasking was out of the ordinary; it was something rare that you might sometimes do but needed a special and easily defensible reason for doing,” said a former official who served in several Republican administrations. “You could not ask out of mere curiosity, nor obviously for political reasons. There needed to be a clear, direct national security justification.” CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Despite Legislative Setbacks, Trump Winning War on Regulations By Simon Constable

Posted By on September 28th, 2017

President Trump might not be winning when it comes to shuffling legislation through Congress, but the same cannot be said when it comes to regulatory rollback.

On the latter matter, his actions set a historic precedent. That is likely good for the economy and may help explain the surging stock market.

“There’s a massive movement on regulations in the first few months of Trump,” says David Ranson, director of research at HCWE & Co.

How massive? As Mr. Trump might say, it’s Bigly.

In the first place, the administration isn’t producing a ton of new regulations.

“By virtually any measure, dating back through two Democratic presidents and one Republican president, the lack of regulatory output is historic,” states a recent study by the American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank.

“Actual output was just 8 percent of the historical average,” AAF says.

The study looked at data on regulations from 1994 through 2017, specifically focusing on the period Jan. 23 to May 23 during each year.

Better still, the White House team have been busy nixing regulations.

Under the Trump administration, 64 percent of reviews by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs “have resulted in withdrawn rules,” which compares with withdrawal rates of 25 percent in 2009 and 55 percent in 2001, the report says. Both 2001 and 2009 were the first years of the prior two administrations.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of all is that the cost of introduced regulations was a fraction of those in past periods. This time the AAF reviewed data for the years 2005 through 2017.

“There have been $4.2 billion in regulatory costs since January 23, 2017,” the report states. “The 2005 to 2017 average is $26 billion.” Figures include the costs of independent agencies.

Or put another way, costs imposed by the administration are running at just 16 percent of the historical norm.

“Across the board, the results indicate a significant diminution in the number of regulations approved and a notable uptick in the number of withdrawn measures (previous rules from the Obama Administration no longer under consideration),” the report reads.

So what?

The fact that the administration is rolling back regulations in this way is good for the economy.

“My impression is that heavy regulation might slow growth and it certainly increases costs,” says Dr. Ivo Pezzuto, professor of global economics at ISM Business School in Paris.

Put another way, when regulation gets rolled back then business costs fall, profits rise, and growth can accelerate. At least that is the theory.

Statistical analysis shows this to be true as well. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Revisiting Orwell to Understand our Times When Big Brother is really watching you. Scott S. Powell

Posted By on September 28th, 2017

Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. “Big Brother,” a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive use of “telescreens” by the ruling class.

Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism written in novel form in Animal Farm and 1984 came shortly after Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published at the end of World War II. But it took the shocking revelations from books on Nazism and Soviet Communism, by scholars like William Shirer and Robert Conquest in the 1960s, to really make Orwell relevant for teaching to the masses educated in American public schools. And it was not just an academic exercise insofar as Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was at that time brutally crushing all resistance, enforcing the Soviet model of totalitarian control on East European countries that became satellite states of Moscow.

Reading Orwell, it was thought, would help American students appreciate their freedoms and gain perspective and critical faculties so as to understand socialist totalitarianism and its defining features: 1) the institutionalization of propaganda designed to warp and destroy people’s grasp on reality, and 2) the fostering of group think, conformity and collectivism designed to eliminate critical and independent thinking. By making the press subservient to the state, these two features would prevent the rise of an opposition movement or party and protect and perpetuate one party control.

Orwell described the scope of the totalitarian enterprise, noting in one section of 1984 that “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

The concepts of “newspeak” and “doublethink” in Orwell’s 1984 are fully manifest in what we now experience as political correctness. Newspeak is the distorted reality accomplished by manipulating the meaning of language and words, while double think is the conditioned mental attitude to ignore reality and common sense and substitute and embrace a distorted or false narrative to the exclusion of other views. As Orwell notes, “the whole aim of Newspeak and Doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” This is the goal of political correctness, and it explains why its adherents tend to be so intolerant—shutting down speech from the politically incorrect on college campuses across the county, demanding that historic statues and monuments associated with the Confederacy be taken down, and demanding that people with opposing views on such subjects as climate change and gay marriage be silenced, fined or arrested.

Many assume there is a long way to go before the American government has the power of Orwell’s Big Brother. After all, the thinking goes, the press in the U.S. is not controlled by the government so Americans cannot be so easily brainwashed as they theoretically would be through state-controlled propaganda.

But what if the universities and the educational system and the major television and print media institutions embrace the groupthink that ingratiates them with the ruling elite? What if the culture shapers in Hollywood and the advertising industry on Madison Avenue follow a similar path in participating in and reinforcing the same groupthink norms?