Heather Mac Donald and "the Pursuit of Equity"

 

Some readers describe Ann Coulter as a flame-thrower, and her columns are always provocative, whether you agree with her or not.  However, at TakiMag she’s just reviewed Heather Mac Donald’s book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. And the review is excellent – and informative:

“No Biggie, Just the End of Civilisation”

. . . It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

And her review concludes:

Luckily, learning to identify and treat disease isn’t such a big deal at today’s medical schools, anyway. Instead, the faculty are charged with teaching about “systems of power, privilege and oppression.” More than half of the top 50 medical schools now require students to take courses in systemic racism, Mac Donald notes. I’m sure that will be a huge relief when doctors miss your brain tumor.

In 2021, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that it would spend $2 billion … to find a cure for brain cancer? Parkinson’s disease? Heart disease? NO!!! The $2 billion would go to promoting “diversity and inclusion in science.”

In 2022, the National Cancer Institute, funded by you, taxpayer, decided to change its mission from conquering cancer — and really, who cares about that? FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS! — to guess what? Yes!!! Promoting diversity! Instead of Outstanding Investigator Awards being granted solely on the basis of merit, the gender and race of the researchers would have to be considered.

All this has done wonders for the morale of doctors. Mac Donald quotes one cancer researcher: “It’s the end of the road for me as a Jewish male doctor.” A UCLA doctor told her that the smartest undergraduates in science labs are saying, “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”

In response to this dystopic future, Mac Donald asked an oncologist, “When would white and Asian male scientists fight back? How much longer would they continue to allow their hard work and accomplishments to be disparaged and sidelined?”

He emailed back: “We value our jobs. We need our jobs. Our peers will turn on us. Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned.”

That’s why, Mac Donald says, it falls to the rest of us to never shut up about the tearing down of standards, to put forth “unapologetic defense(s) of color-blind standards,” and to “relentlessly provide the data that explain the lack of racial proportionality in meritocratic institutions.”

To paraphrase Orwell: If there is hope, it must lie in the uncancelable.

Read the whole column here.

# # #

The lethal consequences of going “woke”

 

The editorial board at Issues and Insights examines some of the lethal consequences of going “woke”:

The Wages Of Woke Are Death

Going woke means more than, as the saying says, going broke. It also means the ultimate loss of life. The grip of wokeness on our society will eventually kill Americans.

Let’s begin with health care. Medical school students, whose learning should be focused on the healing arts, are being taught social justice ideology. Apparently, white supremacy, oppression, and structural racism must be addressed by America’s doctors-to-be, as well as the sin of being white.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion studies are being required at some schools, which of course crowds out time used in the past to acquire the knowledge and develop the skills needed to be a good doctor. Politics have no place in medical schools, but there they are.

At the same time, some schools, as many as 40, are dropping standardized testing for diversity’s sake, reports the Daily Caller. The Medical College Admission Test, which “determines an individual’s ability to problem solve, think critically, and understand concepts about medical study,” does not serve the purposes of the social justice mafia. Now there are other legitimate academic avenues to medical school outside the MCAT. But as we’ve seen in other institutions of higher learning, standards designed to demonstrate and ensure competence are being killed off.

Given these facts, it’s a certainty that many of this country’s doctors of tomorrow and beyond will not have the competence needed to keep patients alive and well. Americans will die or suffer unnecessarily because wokeness demanded that the medical community marginalize them.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine professor and associate dean who wrote “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns,” says the ​​”quiet woke revolution” that had been capturing medicine “erupted in spring 2020 into a full-blown revolution.” 

One win for the woke insurgency is the American Medical Association’s “Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.” Goldfarb says that “unlike other social justice programs, this program is lethal” and “will tangibly reduce the quality of medical care, and almost every American will suffer its side effects.” If medical schools “cut training time in biochemistry and pharmacology for future doctors” to make room for studies that are political in nature, someone is bound to die.

Then the editors put the field of engineering under the same microscope.  Next they look at the military.  And here are their conclusions:

Wokeness is winning because our institutions have become cowardly and complicit; businesses are afraid they will fall behind if they don’t score well on the Corporate Equality Index, which is a Maoist extortion racket that demands prescribed behavior from companies; and the average American is scared of being ostracized and canceled for not just uttering but even holding opinions the mob doesn’t like.

Unless and until we overcome our fears, the malicious and depraved will continue their booted march through our culture and our economy. No one should be frightened to say that a system based on race, ethnicity, or gender over competence, intellect, and ability is dangerous. It is in fact mortally dangerous. 

The full editorial is here.

# # #

The ‘Why’ of Corporate Wokeism

Douglas Andrews at PatriotPost defines corporate “wokeism”   It’s systematic blackmail.  One shakedown after the next.  Here’s how it works:

Uncovering the ‘Why’ of Corporate Wokeism

The radical Human Rights Campaign’s so-called Corporate Equality Index is a powerful Oz-like force behind the leftism of American business.

Yesterday, we wondered what Bud Light’s VP of marketing was thinking when she made transgender cultist Dylan Mulvaney a corporate spokesman. Today, we’ll ponder what powerful American companies are thinking when they listen to leftist nincompoops like Alissa Heinerscheid.

Because now we know what they’re thinking.

What they’re thinking is: We’d better not piss off the hard-left extortionists at the Human Rights Campaign. And, more specifically, We’d better not run afoul of the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.

The HRC, whose overriding goal is “to ensure that all LGBTQ+ people, and particularly those of us who are trans, people of color and HIV+, are treated as full and equal citizens within our movement, across our country and around the world,” seems committed to achieving these ends by any means necessary, however brutish. And while it wouldn’t be fair to tar the entire of the HRC with the same brush as its cofounder, Democrat megadonor Terry Bean, who was arrested in 2014 and indicted in 2019 on charges of sodomy and sex abuse with a 15-year-old boy, we think it’s safe to say that his spirit lives on within HRC’s mission.

Fundamental to that mission is the organization’s so-called Corporate Equality Index, which works a lot like the Mob’s protection racket: Nice business ya got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.

Launched back in 2002, the CEI “has become a roadmap and benchmarking tool for U.S. businesses in the evolving field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer equality in the workplace.”

And not only that. Lest you think the HRC is obsessed only with sex, more recently the organization has come to wield the Left’s other cultural cudgel: race. . . .

Read the full article here.  

# # #

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr

 

The Editorial Board at Issues and Insights observed that today marks

the 55th anniversary of the day the murderous James Earl Ray took the life of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader should be allowed to rest in peace, but he is being slain yet again, this time by a mob of mediocre minds with rock-bottom character that seeks to overturn his life’s works.

In what is widely acknowledged as his greatest speech, King dreamed that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

. . .

He couldn’t have been clearer about his vision for a color-blind society. And in the 40 years that followed his death, our country moved in that direction, year by year, heart by heart.

But much has changed. The woke mob, critical race theory, and the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) movement have reopened a once-gaping, raw wound that had almost closed. Consider just a few of the many instances in which our “leaders” and institutional luminaries not only reject King’s teaching but actively try to return this country to an era of segregation and ugly, unapologetic bigotry. . . .

The editorial concludes:

Locally, teachers, administrators, and school boards are wrecking the MLK legacy. If they’re not telling white students that they are racist, should be ashamed of themselves, and indulging radical speakers who believe schools are “spirit murdering” black children, then they’re lowering standards to aid minorities, fully consistent with the soft bigotry of low expectations.

And then there are the DEI shysters such as Robin DiAngelo, a white woman who has grown fabulously wealthy making progressive rich whites feel guilty for sins they haven’t committed (while simultaneously being disappointed by them), and telling “people of color” they “need to get away from white people and have some community with each other.”

None of this is what Martin Luther King Jr. lived or died for. But it’s a pot of gold for grifters, race hustlers, status seekers, political hacks, and just plain mean people. At least we know who they are.

Full editorial is here.

# # #

Mac Donald: The Corruption of Medicine

 

Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine.  In her most recent column at City Journal, she comments on “The Corruption of Medicine”:

The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s traditional concerns. The preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.” (Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome, making the preamble’s boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance which conveys both [sic] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly ironic.)

. . .

And so medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.  . . .

Read Ms. Mac Donald’s full article here.  Her sad conclusion: “The guardians of science have turned on science itself.”

Exit question: What criteria would you use to decide on which doctor to choose for your open-heart surgery?

# # #

Medical Schools: The New Church of Woke

 

It keeps getting worse.  Here’s Jim Thompson at Red State on “Medical Schools: The New Church of Woke”:

The effort to turn medical schools into expensive schools of sociology started before 2022. In 2019, the effort for equity and inclusion was being added, ad hoc, to how professors taught medical classes. Nothing grips the mind like informing medical students that systemic racism is to blame for obesity and other medical conditions inherent with a person’s personal and unhealthy choices.

The push to blame everything on racism hit overdrive in 2020, when George Floyd, an addict loaded on fatal doses of illegal drugs, died. Medical schools went on strike. Students left their classrooms and headed to “church” — outdoors, wearing masks and kneeling with “Black Lives Matter” signs. It’s quickly becoming a traditional denomination for the left: Photos of medical students kneeling and heads bowed for protesting too much whiteness in white coats.

Now, there is a concerted effort to take up the time of medical students with religious indoctrination – a catechism of systemic racism, anti-racism, equity, diversity and inclusion.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has released its official Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Competencies for medical students to commit to memory and practice. No longer is it good enough to be a good doctor; now, before a student, then resident medical doctor, can ply their trade, they must be full, card-carrying members of a cult.

. . .

The medical profession has already given itself a black eye for following the COVID protocols required by the CDC and NIH.  It’s getting worse.  Read the rest at RedState here.

# # #

Unintended consequences or deliberate destruction?

 

At American Thinker, Patricia McCarthy published an excellent summary of the damage inflicted on America to date by the Biden administration.  Here’s some of it:

. . . The damage this progressive cult has done has crippled America in nearly every way possible.  As Steve Feinstein has written, "[t]hese Democrat policies have tangibly and dramatically degraded the quality of life in America[.]"

Inheriting a nation that was energy independent under Trump, Biden put an end to that on day one.  To say his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan was catastrophic is a gross understatement.  He left billions of dollars of state-of-the-art military equipment there and effectively handed Bagram AFB to the Chinese.  Thirteen young Americans were killed needlessly, and thousands of Americans were left stranded to the Taliban.

We do not know as yet, but Biden's folly with Putin and Ukraine could lead to nuclear war.  Biden's devastatingly poor judgment has knocked the dollar off its hundred-year run as the global currency while Putin's ruble has rebounded.  None of the above would have happened or would be happening if Trump were still in office — and everyone knows this.  In short, this administration is the most destructive in American history by any measure.  Biden's Cabinet is the most incompetent in history.  The nation may never recover and the criminal cabal that put him in office is responsible.

Thanks to investigative journalists Peter Schweizer and Miranda Devine, we know that Biden and his son Hunter are congenitally corrupt and virtually owned by the Communist Party of China.  They also used Ukraine as a financial playground, as did the Clintons.  Under the circumstances, it is not outside the realm of possibility that COVID was part of a plan to see Trump ousted from office, to make mail-in ballots seem necessary and to destroy the Trump economy in one fell swoop.  We know that Fauci and his evil pals obsessed with making viruses more dangerous have long-term ties to China, as does Biden, and as do numerous other NeverTrumps in Congress.

. . .

When Obama came to office, he liked to think he was elected to manage our decline.  It was Obama who weaponized the FBI, the CIA and the DOJ.  Obama hated America; he set back race relations at least fifty years.  With the advent of Black Lives Matter, the Democrat party lurched farther to the left; they've now gone so far left that they are aligned with the CCP.  It is as though they have adopted Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 as a handbook for the running of the United States.  Can all this damage done be chalked up to stupidity and incompetence, or is it by design?  . . .

Click here for the rest. 

# # #

Victor Davis Hanson: The Real Reset

 

Victor Davis Hanson thinks that things will get better. His column at American Greatness, “The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming” concludes:

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—and arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies. 

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked. 

Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the “color our skin.”

The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre “mainstream” media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.

The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.

I hope he’s right.  But if election integrity is not restored, all bets are off.  His full column is here.

# # #

Book review of “Maverick” - about Thomas Sowell

 

Charles Murray reviews Jason L. Riley’s new book Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell as well as an overview of Mr. Sowell’s contributions to “race, political philosophy, and economic theory.” Here are a few extracts published in The Claremont Review of Books:

The Immortal Sowell

In a reasonable world, Thomas Sowell’s life would be celebrated in the same way we honor Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson—as a black hero, born into a genuinely systemically racist America, who not only endured but prevailed.

. . .

Jason Riley, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (2014), outlines Sowell’s personal history in his new biography, Maverick, but does not dwell on it. Instead, Riley decided to give readers an overview of Sowell’s thought. It was a formidable task. I counted 36 book titles in his Wikipedia bibliography, and that total doesn’t include collections of essays and revisions of earlier books. His work has touched on virtually every important social and economic policy issue of our era. How does one summarize it without either oversimplifying Sowell’s contributions or losing the reader’s attention? It can be done, Riley demonstrates, with clean prose and a journalistic narrative. Maverick is a pleasure to read.

Diverse as Sowell’s topics have been, most of them may be grouped under three headings: race, political philosophy, and economic theory.

. . .

One measure of Riley’s success is that I finished Maverick inspired to read Sowell’s books that I had missed and to reread some of the ones I thought I already knew. And that, I hope, will be Maverick’s impact on others as well: to get people in the 2020s and beyond to read Sowell. He has so much to teach to a new generation—and most emphatically, to the generation that is redefining the American Right.

. . . When researching Losing Ground in the early 1980s, I was startled to discover that 19th-century thinkers had analyzed the moral hazards of welfare with far greater sophistication than the public intellectuals of my era. In 2021, reminded by Maverick of all that Sowell has accomplished, I had a parallel reaction: Sowell’s analyses of a host of social and political issues are more sophisticated and acute than those of just about everyone who writes on the same topics today. As far as I can tell, every argument that one might make against the positions of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi had already been laid out by Sowell by the mid-1970s, and no one since has described them better. Forty-two years ago, Knowledge and Decisions provided a deeper analysis of the dysfunction of modern welfare states and administrative states than anything in the contemporary debate. Thirty-five years ago, A Conflict of Visions identified the dynamics that drive today’s political polarization. With Maverick, Jason Riley makes the case for what I consider to be the core truth about Thomas Sowell’s legacy. He would be seen as one of a handful of seminal intellectuals of the last half-century—in a reasonable world.

Full book review is here. 

# # #

Crispus Attucks: America's First Patriot

 

image credit: americanhistorycentral.com

February is Black History Month.  Athena Thorne offers us this history lesson at PJ Media:

Black History Month Should Begin With Crispus Attucks,
America's First Patriot

Every February, America goes through a month-long ritual where it reminds everyone that blacks and whites have beef, and black people only matter historically when they’ve been victimized by white people. Setting aside the first part — the incessant picking at a great scab that is never allowed to heal — black people are taught to feel angry, less important, and, through their identity as victims, trained to measure any success they might have as a function of either a defeat for or a gratuity from white people.

If Black History Month were truly meant to be a paean to black Americans, it would highlight blacks whose historical contributions to America include more besides ending slavery and overcoming prejudice. While those are undoubtedly massive steps forward for any society, they are not uniquely American.

. . .

Crispus Attucks’ name ought to be as well-known as Paul Revere’s: Attucks [a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry] was the first American Patriot killed as he confronted the British at the very beginning of the American Revolution.

. . .

In March of 1770, tensions were running red hot between American colonists and their British rulers. On that fateful day, Attucks helped lead a group of angry sailors who confronted British soldiers stationed in Boston. The sailors wielded clubs, hurled snowballs, and shouted at the soldiers. In a panic, the soldiers fired into the crowd. Attucks was the very first person killed in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre, a pivotal event that brought the colonies and England to the threshold of war.

Crispus Attucks lay in state in Faneuil Hall alongside the other four men killed in the Massacre. The City of Boston waved segregation laws so he could also be buried with them. It is right and just that he was so honored, and he deserves to be a household name in this country.  . . .

Crispus Attucks was the very first American to give his life to the cause of liberating the colonies from British rule and creating the freest, greatest nation man has yet conceived. How is that not at least as important?

Read the rest here.

# # #

 

Trump Rally in Arizona: update

 

From CTP contributor Pat:

Trump's Arizona speech was magnificent. He addressed so many issues that the MSM is ignoring and the RINOS are avoiding. Let’s just list some of them:

• The coldblooded murder of Ashli Babbitt by a Capitol Police Officer
• The incarceration of January 6th protestors in Gulag conditions without due process
• The role of Government informants/ agents provocateurs on January 6th, including Ray Epps
• Highlighting election fraud in Arizona and elsewhere
• The border crisis
• Rampant inflation and the energy policies that are partially fueling it
• The decision of AT&T [and DirecTV) to drop OAN from its streaming service – he didn’t say to boycott AT&T --  but he did
• The utter humiliation the US suffered with Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan
• The loss of our hard-earned energy independence
• Medical care dependent on race
• Covid mandates

To which I would add, re: the Afghanistan disaster – deliberately leaving behind billions in state-of-the-art equipment and supplies for our sworn enemies was unprecedented in history. 

Liberals Keep Voting for the Progressive Left

 

Dennis Prager posted "The Left Is Evil and Liberals Keep Voting for Them" last week at AmericanGreatness.  As we head into the next election, maybe we can try again to explain to our liberal family member and friends. 

. . . liberalism and leftism have virtually nothing in common. In fact, leftism is the enemy of liberalism—as a handful of liberals such as former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, former Young Turk Dave Rubin and others have come to recognize.

The Left has never believed in free speech and has suppressed dissent wherever it has assumed power. Free speech is a pillar of liberalism, and it has always embraced dissent.

The Left rejects the anti-racist ideal of colorblindness. Colorblind is the liberal racial ideal.

The Left supports racial segregation—such as all-black dorms and separate black graduations. Liberals have always advocated racial integration.

The Left has always loathed capitalism. Liberals were always major advocates of capitalism—recognizing that only capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

The Left has always been anti-Israel. Liberals have always been fervent supporters of Israel.

The Left has always held America in contempt. Liberals loved this country. A liberal wrote “God Bless America.” No leftist would write such a song.

Leftists want to defund the police. No liberal does.

The list of liberal-Left differences is as long as the list of left-wing positions.

Yet, it is liberals who keep the Left in power. Were it not for the liberal vote, the Left would have no power.

Why do liberals vote Left? Why do liberals vote for those who have contempt for virtually everything they, the liberals, hold dear?

The question is all the more apt given that it is conservatives who protect virtually every liberal value. It is conservatives who seek to preserve free speech, racial integration, love of America, a strong Israel and capitalism.

So why do liberals vote for the Left, for the very people who hold liberals and their values in contempt?

Mr. Prager has answers;  click here.

# # #

David Horowitz’s "I Can’t Breathe"

At FrontPageMag.com, Mark Tapson  reviews David Horowitz’s new book I Can’t Breathe, a book that takes a deep dive into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. "The self-proclaimed trained Marxists who founded that subversive movement exploited, and continue to exploit, [26 black] victims in order to incite a civil war in America by hyping a false narrative of the systematic targeting of blacks by law enforcement.”  

I have not yet read Mr. Horowitz's book, but Mr. Tapson’s review provides solid information on the many race hoaxes and propaganda that are tearing apart America’s social fabric.  Here’s part of the review:

Horowitz’s aim with the book is to puncture BLM’s grotesque narrative, which is supported by the Democrat Party and amplified by its media enablers. He begins the book with a summary of our current racial divide, which was exacerbated by deadly, nationwide BLM rioting – “a summer of insurrections” – in 2020 that constituted “the costliest sustained acts of civil disorder in American history.” The siege of Portland by violent leftist activists, the Democrat movement to defund police departments and the subsequent crime waves that swept the nation, the anti-American messaging, the 2016 massacre of five white cops in Dallas at the hands of a BLM-inspired black extremist – Horowitz weaves all these ugly threads and more to create a dark tapestry of the devastation that Black Lives Matter’s myth-making has wrought:

The casualties of the scorched-earth war unleashed by Black Lives Matter dwarf the total casualties of all the alleged racial injustices the organization has protested. The atrocities instigated and inspired by BLM encompass scores of innocent wounded and dead, both black and white… Surveying these disasters, one could reasonably conclude that, thanks to Black Lives Matter campaigns to abolish police departments, advances in both race relations and protections for urban black communities have been set back fifty years.

Horowitz compiles the names of 26 black victims BLM claims were murdered or maimed by the police since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 sparked the launch of the movement. They include the aforementioned Martin, Floyd and Taylor, as well as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Race, and Freddie Gray, to name some of the most well-known. Then – in chapters on how the BLM movement began, grew, and went national and then international – Horowitz goes on to dissect all 26 incidents according to the facts, backed up by over 70 pages of endnotes. He demonstrates how BLM has lied about every single one in its quest to aggravate racial tensions and rip America apart at the seams. . . .

The full review is here.  Highly recommended.

# # #

Betsy McCaughey: Build Back Broke

 

Betsy McCaughey was a go-to resource when Congress was preparing to ram Obamacare down our throats.  Today in the New York Post, she gets into the weeds with the bazillion dollar Build Back Better bill:

Democrats are quarreling over the price tag of their Build Back Better bill. But the real problem is what’s in it. The bill coerces workers to join unions, imposes racial preferences on every facet of life and redistributes money from workers to takers.

Fortunately, the bill is in limbo. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va) insist the bill has to be pared down to less than half its current price tag. The far left is outraged. But the bill can’t pass without every Senate Democrat supporting it.

Not passing it would be best: This bill is as un-American as it gets. Here are some of its details, which Democrats would prefer you not see. Judge for yourself.

Here are the bullet points:

• First-generation down-payment assistance: Most people work and save for years to buy a home. This bill makes them into suckers. It gives $6.8 billion to low-income first-time homebuyers with no conditions. It’s part of President Biden’s scheme to increase racial and economic diversity in the suburbs.
• Home-efficiency rebates: The bill offers up to $14,000 to homeowners who lower energy use by installing new heat pumps, air conditioning systems, insulation and energy-efficient appliances. It’s a pot of gold for homeowners who qualify and tens of billions of dollars in new business for [union] contractors.
• Direct-care workforce: The bill awards $1.48 billion to labor unions and community organizations to recruit and train workers to care for the elderly or disabled at home. Top priority is training workers in their rights and organizing them. This is your tax dollars at work creating a new army of likely Democratic voters.

Click here for the rest of the column.  None of it is good news.

# # #

Think Piece of The Day: Victor Davis Hanson

 

This blog is a huge fan of Victor David Hanson. His perspectives as a specialist in classical history always gets my attention.  In his column at American Greatness, ("Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds"), he starts off:

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

. . .

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

. . .

What are the lasting consequences of all this madness? 

The Left should hope that House Republicans are Marquess of Queensberry players and do not emulate the Democrats’ behavior. They should hope that a Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee would not monitor the phone records of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). For if the opposition did gain the majority in November 2022, Joe Biden’s past involvement with foreign monied interests, and the evidence of his shady behavior from his own son’s laptop texts offer a far more convincing case of impeachable offenses—failure to report to the IRS off-the-books income, influence peddling, and abject lying about foreign quid pro quo involvement—than does a single Ukrainian phone call.  All that exposure is well aside from Biden’s deliberate decision not to enforce, as his job requires, federal immigration law. 

Do read the rest here.

# # #

Wokeness erasing America

 

Most excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

. . .

Full article is here.

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David Horowitz's The Enemy Within

 

David Horowitz is a recovering red-diaper baby;  his background is here.  Today on FrontPage, Jason D. Hill reviews Mr. Horowitz’s latest book:

. . .  David Horowitz has identified the nature of that second virus. I think that he reasons that it is deadlier than COVID-19, and that its deleterious consequences are far more destructive and long-lasting than any biological infection.

… This latest book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, Horowitz locates the political ideology destroying every democratic and Enlightenment value on which our constitutional republic was founded. The invasive virus identified by Horowitz is a left-wing reactionary politics ensconced within the Democratic Party.

The philosophical root of this ideology which ties it to several movements that suffuse our culture, whether it be radical feminism, Black Lives Matter, Islamic Jihadism, the equity movements, reparation movements, the trial by media of Justice Brett Kavanaugh or, what Horowitz describes as the racist anti-racist rhetoric of Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nahesi Coates, is: “Identity Politics.”

Horowitz defines it as a radical ideology that is “racial and collectivist, and that privileges groups over individuals and demonized those who fall on the wrong side of its social equation. As a worldview Identity Politics is fundamentally at odds with America’s core principles of individual freedom, accountability, and equality, which have been the foundation of the nation’s progress for more than two hundred years.”

. . .

The rest of this article is here.  Mr. Horowitz was a guest on OAN's Tipping Point this evening. He is always outstanding. 

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What is Critical Race Theory?

 

Our household subscribes to Imprimis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College.  Every month, we receive their publication which features an article adapted from a lecture on campus.  It is always good value.  This month’s edition features Christopher F. Rufo’s insights into Critical Race Theory.  It is an eye-opening discussions, and here is a very short extract.  

Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula.

There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression. 

. . .

On the grassroots level, a multiracial and bipartisan coalition is emerging to do battle against critical race theory. Parents are mobilizing against racially divisive curricula in public schools and employees are increasingly speaking out against Orwellian reeducation in the workplace. When they see what is happening, Americans are naturally outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas—race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation—which violate the basic principles of equality and justice. Anecdotally, many Chinese-Americans have told me that having survived the Cultural Revolution in their former country, they refuse to let the same thing happen here.   

Read the rest here.

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She Says it All

 She gets it.  And in less than a minute.

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A local success story to punch back against Critical Race Theory

 

From our friends at Ohio Value Voters:

On March 6th we alerted you to mandatory Critical Race Training at Beachwood High School coming soon on March 11th. Yesterday, on March 8th, in a packed school board meeting, outraged citizens held nothing back when they spoke to the Beachwood School Board. Watch Jonathan Broadbent expose the school board of quietly changing policy that gives teachers a new right to "express their opinions" instead of the current policy that has been in existence since the beginning of the school system: WATCH HERE The rest of the meeting grew in intensity as tax-payers and parents spoke truth to power in the following block-buster school board meeting video: MUST WATCH VIDEO Below is our Email from March 6th A group of parents in Beachwood Ohio are recommending that all parents keep their children home on 3/11/21 or otherwise remove their children from upcoming "mandatory" Critical Race Training. Every study including "1776 Unites" shows that "Critical Race Theory" leads to MORE racism and division. Parents are urged to attend the Beachwood Board of Education meeting on March 8, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. to voice your concern regarding this mandatory training.   The Beachwood Board of Education meets in regularly scheduled meetings on the second and fourth Monday of each month at 7:00 pm, in the Fairmount Community Room, 24601 Fairmount Boulevard, Beachwood, Ohio. 44122 phone: (216) 464-2600 Click this link for more information: What is Critical Race Theory? A good example of local citizen involvement.  # # #