Descent into a Clown World

  

At Freedom First Network, J B Shurk explores America’s “Descent into a Clown World.” Here’s an extract:

Just as the beer companies, fake conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them, the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a display of repugnant pusillanimity.  I wonder whether the Judases will one day regret it.  I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with lifelong allies.  When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will eventually be forced to fight back or surrender.  By that time, though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.

This has always been the shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist revolution that did not devour itself.  By yielding to those who have always hated them and betraying those who have long defended them, companies choosing to comply with woke orthodoxy are now entirely dependent on remaining in the Marxists’ good graces.  Yet grace is not something Marxists possess in any discernible quantity.

It is not that politically conservative and religious Americans have blindly defended corporate interests in the past, but rather that liberty-loving, rights-protecting people tend to mind their own business.  Their first reaction to a company’s success is not envy.  They do not immediately turn their sights on how best to confiscate another’s good fortune.

People who work hard for what they own do not worry about what somebody else owns.  They simply seek to be left alone.  . . .

One problem is that while communists are organized, passionate, and good at messaging, conservatives “simply seek to be left alone” – it’s just not an effective marketing message.

The full article is 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 endless war against merit

 

This blog frequently links to historian Victor Davis Hanson’s essays. At his recent essay at American Greatness, he considers the definitions and consequences of socialism and its derivatives ("Do We Even Know We Are All Socialists Now?”).  Here’s his conclusion:

. . . A final note: the Orwellian police state is central to socialism, since the ideology is contrary to innate human nature and when fully implemented quickly ruins all that it touches and is commensurately despised in its fruition. So to force compliance is a 360 degree, 24/7 project that transcends all our institutions and culture.

That is why the woke FBI goes after counter-revolutionary parents at school board meetings or traditionalist Catholics rather than Pentagon leakers or Islamic terrorists.

That is why the FBI and the CIA respectively tried to warp the 2016 election with the phony Steele dossier and in 2020 probably did so by suppressing the truth about the “bombshell” evidence found on wayward Hunter Biden’s laptop.

That is why news disappears off Facebook and the old Twitter. That is why the order of Google search results seems bizarre. That is why Disney or Budweiser suddenly virtue signal their nihilist politics, or why Nike makes the mediocrity Colin Kaepernick a multimillionaire, or Stanford University attempts to purge vocabulary such as “citizen,” “immigrant,” and “American.”

Once socialism takes hold, every mediocrity, every ossified bureaucracy, every constipated careerist, every hack writer and nobody actor, comes out of the woodwork to find his socialist “fair share” of what he lacked in talent or accomplishment.

In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”

Read the rest here.

# # #

The Cleveland Haemosporidians?

 

The Cleveland Indians will always be the Cleveland Indians for me. The Indians’ mascot will always be Chief Wahoo.  But over at PJ Media, Robert Spencer explains what's really going on:

With skyrocketing crime and inflation, a steady exodus of sane people from her state, and test scores of students in the state plummeting, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-Planned Parenthood) and her henchmen have turned their attention to the most burning issue of our day: sports team mascots that offend the woke. Now New York’s remaining residents can look around at their smoking ruin of a state, as they watch the people who broke into their house drive off in their car and console themselves with the thought that nowhere in their formerly green and pleasant land is anyone being traumatized because there’s a sports team around called the “Indians.”

The Albany Times-Union reported Tuesday that “the New York Board of Regents has officially banned all uses of images and names for school mascots related to indigenous people.” At this late date in the woke-ification of America, there wasn’t even any controversy over this: “The board voted unanimously Tuesday morning, without discussion.”

This was the culmination of a process that has been going on for a good while: “The proposal was announced by the state Education Department in November, and education officials have been urging school boards to begin the process to change mascot images and names ever since.” Why is anyone on the New York Board of Regents paying attention to this matter at all? Because, you see, fans of teams called the Indians and Chiefs and Braves and even Redskins never realized it, but all the time they were rooting for their teams, they were really indulging in an act of hate.

In the Left’s view, you see, people name their sports teams after things they despise. 

. . .

The war against mascots is also completely inconsistent. There are ongoing efforts to force the Minnesota Vikings to change their name because the name “Viking” supposedly glorifies colonialism and white supremacism. But if the “Viking” name glorifies whiteness, why don’t the “Chief” or “Warrior” or “Indian” names glorify Native Americans? The war against mascots is, in other words, simply another Leftist effort to make Americans generally ashamed of their own culture and heritage. A nation that is ashamed won’t have the will to defend itself. . . .

Read the rest here. 

Exit question:  In the interest of keeping fans ashamed of themselves and their team, why did not the Tribe owners select The Cleveland Worms instead of the Cleveland Guardians?  Or, if it was important to keep “dians” in the new name, well then, how about

The Cleveland Haemosporidians?

(For utterly fascinating information about the “avian haemosporidian parasite,” click 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.

# # #

An Anti-woke Alternative to Amazon

Some good news.  Selwyn Duke at The New American reports on an alternative shopping source for conservatives:

Stop Giving Money to People Who Hate You:
The New Anti-woke, Amazon-like Alternative

. . . there’s a new big-business player in town: a patriotic online marketplace called Public Square (PublicSq.).

. . .

. . . corporate political correctness is now status quo. For instance, major companies have been found conducting woke training that involved “putting ‘marginalized’ staff above ‘privileged’ staff, learning to ‘decolonize their minds’ and combating aspects of an alleged ‘White supremacy culture,’ such as perfectionism, individualism and objectivity,” reported Fox News in 2021.

A few more of a multitude of examples are Covergirl having a male “cover girl,” Lyft allowing users to choose their “pronouns,” Gillette advertising with a “transgender” teen’s first shave, and PayPal banning users critical of Islam. Then there are all the corporations that donated approximately $100 million (and perhaps more) to neo-Marxist organization Black Lives Matter.

The PublicSq. endeavor came on the heels of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which also was an effort to break the woke industrial complex’s stranglehold on America.

. . .

[CEO Omeed] Malik was also on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday evening, and he and host Carlson made a point we ignore at our own peril. “We are slouching towards social credit scores in this country,” said Malik, “and so we need to create this economy to insulate ourselves from that — because the battlefield for liberty will be around commerce, not just politics.” . . .

Read the rest here.

# # #

The Decline of Higher Education

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson goes through all sorts of “woke” reasons that colleges and universities are failing.  The full article (“Are Universities Doomed”) is at The Daily Signal here, but here’s his conclusion:

How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.

VDH could as well be describing the decline of western civilization itself.

# # #

Do you have a 401(k)?

 

An alert for readers with 401(k) account, from Jeff Mordock at The Washington Times:

Biden Blasted For Weaponizing Corporations In
‘Woke Capitalism’ Retirement Ploy

The Biden administration has quietly finalized a rule allowing employers to funnel workers’ 401(k) funds into investments that support woke causes that address issues such as climate change and diversity.

The Labor Department recently approved the rule affecting roughly 150 million workers and $10 trillion in assets covered under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.

The rule says asset managers and retirement plan administrators should consider environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors when selecting investments. . . .

The full article is behind a paywall, so here’s the rest of it from JD Rucker’s transcript via NOQ:

. . . That would encourage money managers to balance financial returns with investments that support wind and solar energy or have diverse boards of directors.

The rules also remove a restriction blocking employers from using an ESG fund as a default option for workers automatically enrolled in 401(k) plans. That means workers could be supporting causes that don’t align with their political views.

It also rescinds Trump-era regulations that require retirement plan administrators and asset managers to choose investments based solely on participants’ financial interests.

This is just another reason why I STRONGLY recommend everyone of all ages move their wealth or retirement into a self-directed IRA. Don’t let advisors and retirement companies quietly compel you to lose money on woke investments even as they make more money thanks to the Biden-Harris regime’s priorities.

Heads up.

# # #

 

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.

# # #

Discrediting our Founding Fathers: cont’d

 

The headline at the New York Post:  “Founding father James Madison sidelined by woke history in his own home”.  This blog recently linked to a similar reportabout Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home Monticello.  And reader Ribicon at the Lucianne site – an aggregator – posted this comment and link:

Selection from 45 goals for the takeover of the USA by the communist party, as stated in 1963 [and as entered into the Congressional Record].

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the 'common man.'"

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the 'big picture.'"

The link: https://rense.com/politics6/com.htm [https://rense.com/politics6/com.htm]

Exit question: How many of these goals have been met?  (Spoiler Alert: most of them.)

# # #

As Hollywood dies

 

Daniel Greenfield (a/k/a Sultan Knish) is a regular contributor to FrontPageMag.  His recent piece on “What the Death of Hollywood Means for America” explores the cultural decline in America and across the globe.  In short,

The fall of the studio system overturned the industry’s innate conservatism and while it ended many abuses and unleashed the talent, the end result was that movies became increasingly at odds with the values and morals of the American public. The decline of the networks likewise unleashed cable and then streaming programming that was oriented culturally leftward..

. . .

As Hollywood dies, America and the world will be poorer for it, not for the billion-dollar woke digital cartoon factory that it has become, but for a time when a centralized entertainment industry did not have to be a mass propaganda machine feigning popular support for a regime. 

That is exactly what it is now.

Mr. Greenfield’s full article is here.  Sad. 

# # #

Elon Musk’s diagram

 MUSK MUSES ON POLITICS

Diagram at NY Post via Off The Press

[click to embiggen]

This doodle says a lot.  Most of the liberals I know seem unaware that the Democrat party has been taken over by the “woke” progressive left.  Elon Musk gets it. 

# # #

Politics Descends Upon American Medicine

 

image credit:  mikelweisser.org

Robert Graboyes has a disturbing piece at Discourse Magazine, “A new guidance document for medical professionals emphasizes critical race theory and social justice at the expense of patient care.”  Here are some extracts:

In October, two of the most powerful medical organizations in America—the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges—released “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” or AHE. Its 54 densely packed pages admonish American physicians to regiment their speech to conform with woke terminology. The document implores doctors to abandon ordinary expressions in favor of politically charged, politically correct circumlocutions.

Medical professionals are now expected to traverse a linguistic minefield, abandoning hundreds of familiar expressions and replacing them with tortured academic cadences. Failure to conform, the document implies, is a severe moral failing.

This is not merely replacing the simple with the sesquipedalian. The doctor’s every utterance must contain an air of accusation. When someone is ill, it is because someone else is to blame. Previously, a caring doctor might have told an African American patient that his lineage makes him especially vulnerable to diabetes. No more. In woke-speak, the word “vulnerable” is verboten. Now, the doctor must refer to the patient as “oppressed,” “made vulnerable” or “disenfranchised.” Someone, or some grotesque societal failing, is to blame for the patient’s higher-than-average risk of diabetes. The explanation for this particular lexical shift is representative of AHE’s tone and worldview. . .

. . .

The entire document reads like final exam essays written by a student who forgot to study—endless strings of half-remembered vocabulary words assembled randomly in hopes that the professor will count the words but not read them. Every med student, every doctor in America must endure hundreds of such homilies and conform or be weighed in the balance and found wanting. Doctors must abandon the notion that a patient bears some individual responsibility for his or her health status. Whatever ails you, somebody out there did it to you. In the search for scapegoats, AHE taps into the fashionable academic catechisms of critical race theory and intersectionality and swears fealty to both.

. . .

In “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage: Say No to the Woke Revolution,” Bari Weiss masterfully describes the wokeness phenomenon. While she does not specifically address AHE, her descriptions provide a valuable lens on the document. Woke ideology “begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. . . . [P]ersuasion . . . is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings. . . . Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.”

. . .

Public health exhibits a recurring pattern: (1) Declare that X is now a public health issue. (2) Declare that X is in crisis. (3) Flout legal and constitutional norms to quell said crisis. During the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared that housing evictions were within the realm of public health and that evictions in high-infection areas constituted a crisis. The CDC therefore assumed authority to ban residential evictions, nullifying state property laws nationwide. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually curtailed the CDC’s presumed authority.)

Full article is here.

RELATED:  Ted Noel, MD:  "The NIH Is Going Full Gestapo" at TruthBasedMedia. 

# # #

Ministry of Fear

 

Michael Walsh explores America's future in this essay at The Epoch Times.  He is not optimistic.  Here are his concluding thoughts:

Instilled Fear

Worse is the now-instilled fear of others; the justifiable fear of the anarchy in the streets unleashed by Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the knockout game, the assault on Asian-Americans, and other random acts of street violence no longer reined in by now-defunded police forces around the country.

Fear of further arbitrary and unconstitutional lockdowns, mask “mandates” of dubious or non-existent legal authority, and a thousand other trivial miseries that collectively add up to the very definition of tyranny, including “cancel culture,” speech police, and “woke” institutions and corporations that seek to impose crackpot notions of sex and sexuality on a population now too cowed and enfeebled to resist and fight back.

In the name of “health,” we are experiencing a monstrous evil, every bit as pernicious as the twin totalitarian catastrophes of National Socialist Germany and communist Russia during the last century—evils only finally suppressed at great cost in lives and treasure.

With the current unholy alliance between the Democrats and “woke” big businesses, what we are seeing is something akin to Italian fascism under Mussolini, in which the captains of industry (very much including social media, which at this point needs to be destroyed) work hand-in-glove with Washington in order to impose such things as speech codes and overt censorship that government alone cannot do.

How else could someone like Bill de Blasio—aka Warren Wilhelm, Jr., the socialist mayor of New York City—get away with his recent decree that patrons of restaurants, gyms, and cultural events must show proof of vaccination in order to gain entry? But rule-by-decree is now the norm in blue states such as New York and California, something unthinkable just two years ago.

Worse, we are finding it almost impossible to effectively combat. When the John Roberts Supreme Court failed the nation by refusing to hear the state of Texas’s lawsuit challenging the election, it signaled that it didn’t have the belly for a fight, no matter what the stakes, or how clearly the Constitution itself spelled out the court’s jurisdiction under Article 3, which states in Section 2 that “the judicial power shall extend to… to controversies between two or more states; between a state and citizens of another state.”

With its abdication, the Roberts Court—surely the worst since the heyday of Earl Warren, if only by its utter passivity in the face of the threat to our republican democracy—indicated that the American people were henceforth on their own, and ushered in the age of our very own Ministry of Fear. Unless it is smashed, its reign is likely to last a long time.

The full article is here.  And it’s not pretty.

# # #

Chief Wahoo on unemployment

To follow up on yesterday's news announcing the Cleveland Guardians, here's the Babylon Bee with another good one:

Unemployment Up 800% Among Ethnic Mascots

And from Paula Bolyard at PJ Media:

RIP Cleveland Indians:
Brave New Name Will Honor Traffic Pillars
on a Crumbling Bridge

. . . The name change depresses me. I’m sad that my grandkids will never know the joy of cheering for the Cleveland Indians—like their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents before them. If they even bother to watch the team, they’ll be cheering for a stupid traffic pillar. I feel the same way I did when Art Modell up and moved the Cleveland Brown to Baltimore in 1995, leaving fans with an empty stadium and the rights to the name. A part of our collective history died that day and the team has never really recovered. “The Move” joined a long and storied line of disappointments for Cleveland fans (there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the topic). But it’s more than just the Indians’ name change. Our history is being erased by a small minority of noisy activists, statue by statue, logo by logo, name by name. They’re using 1984 as an instruction manual to shove our entire history down the Memory Hole. Meanwhile, their fellow travelers are inundating our schools with fake history, heavy on social manipulation and light on education.

I refuse to accept the premise that I’m a racist because I love the Cleveland Indians—the name, the logo, and Chief Wahoo. I’m sick and tired of having my motives called into question at every turn because of my skin color. I will never EVER cheer for the Cleveland Guardians. Instead, I’ll join the many loyal Tribe fans who will no doubt continue to cheer for the Indians. And we’ll wear our black-market Wahoo gear proudly, celebrating the history of the team and the bravery of our Native American brothers and sisters.

I grew up with the Cleveland Indians, and when I read the change to “Guardians” – I made no connection between that name and these “guardians on the Hope Memorial bridge.  No, it's just another politically correct decision that will sadden and irritate the fans. 

# # #

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.

# # #

Sports Illustrated goes “woke”

 

Eric Utter published a piece about Sports Illustrated over the weekend at American Thinker.  I am not much of a sports fan, but his opening paragraphs offer a good summary of the cultural decline in America.  And his article is a good follow-up to my blog yesterday on the future of arts communities – if there is a future.  Mr. Utter begins:

The Left ruins everything. Television. Movies. Economies. Cities. Lives. Religion. Comedy. Sports. Everything. Literally everything.

It does so in many insidious ways. It divides us with multiculturalism and critical race theory. It makes some groups bitter, envious, and indolent by telling them they are victims of other groups’ bigotry…and that there is nothing any of the groups can do about it. It revises history, changes language, and restricts speech, all in an effort to restrict thought. It brandishes “wokeism” as a weapon and “cancels” those it dislikes. All of this has led to a more ignorant—and less fun—America.

The left has recently rendered sports less a form of entertainment that can bring all of us together and more of a vehicle to lecture and hector fans, in an attempt to hammer them into strict conformity of thought. We have all seen this with anthem protests, BLM messages, boycotts, etc., etc.

And now, even a once nearly-revered sports publication, Sports Illustrated, has completely given in to the mendacious minority mob that demands all things be seen exclusively through the prism of race/class/gender/politics. Sports Illustrated, like nearly all mainstream media, has leaned left for many years but has just recently completely abandoned all balance and objectivity in an apparently desperate—if puzzling­—attempt at virtue-signaling.

. . .

Mr. Utter then goes into specifics based on the latest issue.  Read the rest of Mr. Utter’s piece here.

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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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Roger L. Simon: The Big Snitch Is Here—America Goes Stasi

 

The other day. Roger L. Simon posted a piece at Epoch Times that should frighten any of us.  America is turning into – or has already turned into -- a police state:

Many, particularly those on the right, worry the United States is turning into China, but we are a Western nation coming out of a (mostly) Western tradition.

I believe we should be as much concerned, if not more, that we are beginning to resemble East Germany with its State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst), better known as the Stasi.

As Wikipedia reminds us:

“One of the Stasi’s main tasks was spying on the population, primarily through a vast network of citizens turned informants, and fighting any opposition by overt and covert measures, including hidden psychological destruction of dissidents (“Zersetzung,” literally meaning “decomposition”). It arrested 250,000 people as political prisoners during its existence.”

I was reminded of this Zersetzung and its psychological destruction of dissidents—soon we may all be classified that way, if not already—by a photo I received this morning from a (necessarily anonymous) friend who works at the Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, among the most prestigious hospitals in the country.

With his/her permission, I am sharing it with you.

This person photographed an announcement taped to a wall at the hospital that read: “Implicit Bias Anonymous Reporting System.”

Beneath these ominous words was the usual digital code symbol automatically connecting a cellphone to the “system,” as if the hospital were a restaurant during COVID providing a hands-free menu for your convenience.

In other words, it was a convenient posting for how to snitch on your friends and colleagues for their “implicit bias,” whatever that is. (I’m probably exhibiting some just by writing this.)

I asked my friend, who has known the hospital well for many years, whether this could be a joke, but was vehemently assured it wasn’t. Joke or not, it gives a clear idea of where the powers that be at that hospital—and many others, I would wager—stand.

My friend tells me that staff gets “constant political crap” from the chairwoman of the hospital for showing bias against “protected minorities,” whatever that means—although they observe the Hippocratic Oath and treat all patients the same anyway.

You could call this growing atmosphere Stasi Lite—maybe we should name a beer after it—not to mention a good way to keep potential dissidents in line.

. . .

We must be on watch if it happens to us. This Stasi-like existence is working on our minds, consciously or unconsciously.

We may be used to it already to some degree because of Big Tech, but this is more than one turn of the screw further. With Big Tech, although they know all, or most of all, about us, they’re only interested intermittently. Sometimes they ignore us, as long as we keep our digital heads down.

The State Security Service—be it Chinese, East German, or American—is always interested.

So be careful if you have, in your past, present, or future, any “implicit bias,” let alone “explicit bias,” because that could mean, as we know … just about anything.

Read the full article here.

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