“In 1922, Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, proposed the adoption of “a quota system in order to solve the ‘Jewish Problem.’” Lowell was following the lead set by Nicholas Murray Butler, who had just succeeded in reducing “the proportion of Jews at Columbia from 40 to around 20 per cent within two years.” Fair Admissions says the tools Harvard formerly used to limit the number of Jews in its student body have been turned against Asian-Americans. These include, say, considering applicants’ non-academic qualities — “character and personality” and “interests and activities” — to create “a holistic admissions system.” Today, Harvard’s “personal rating” serves, as SFFA sees it, “to evaluate Asian-American applicants based on prejudicial assumptions and stereotypical characteristics,” with the goal of “reducing the admissions of Asian-Americans.””
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/will-president-biden-flinch-in-the-harvard/91790/
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“…Harris would refuse to analyze briefing materials set forth by employees but then scold them if she appeared unprepared. "It's clear that you're not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work…With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you're constantly sort of propping up a bully and it's not really clear why.””
https://www.businessinsider.com/kamala-harris-former-staffer-soul-destroying-criticism-aides-report-2021-12
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“So many of the Democratic Party’s woes can be traced back to a statistical error. After Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, exit polls showed he had prevailed despite losing the white vote by 20 points. The implications were enormous for both parties. Racial minorities were casting a rising share of the vote, reshaping the electorate in ways that seemed to doom the Republican Party and its heavily white coalition. After the election, a Republican autopsy recommended the party move to the center on social issues, including immigration, to win over Latino voters. Democrats, meanwhile, prioritized immigration reform, which they hoped Republicans would have no choice but to cooperate with. Nearly four years later, Times data analyst Nate Cohn discovered the entire premise of this belief was wrong. Those exit polls turned out to have significantly undercounted the old white working-class share of the electorate. In fact, it was these voters in the upper Midwest who had supplied Obama’s winning margin. Yet this correction came too late to budge what had become a settled belief across the political spectrum.”
https://apple.news/Auhj0Qa9YRb6jU6lximk7sw
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“[The] numbers, especially in Virginia and New Jersey, made the new pattern clear: As far as closely watched races with national implications go, there are no more low-engagement or low-turnout elections between Democrats and Republicans. And the results — a Republican victory in Virginia and a shockingly close finish in New Jersey — should fully put to rest the long-held left-leaning assumption that high turnout in competitive territories is almost always good news for Democrats.”
https://apple.news/Aj8ktVJHKQXWjybFSNOvegQ
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“In a recent interview, liberal comedian Bill Maher said, "For the first time in my life, I'm playing to a mixed audience...about 60-40 liberal to conservative. That never used to happen, never." Comedian Dave Chappelle—whose jokes about radical gender theory were met with predictable outrage from keyboard warriors and predictable praise from the right-wing Fox News crowd—is still beloved by comedy fans on the Left and the Right. "If this is what being canceled is like, I love it," he said. These comedians are tapping into a cultural realignment—traditional leftists and traditional conservatives united against the tyranny of a very small ruling class that doesn't want us to be free to think, say and do what we believe to be right. The backlash against "wokeism" has begun.”
https://www.newsweek.com/can-comedy-bring-left-right-together-opinion-1654993
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“Like President Biden and his medical adviser Anthony Fauci, the Cuomo brothers are just two more public figures deified by the media in a quest to destroy President Donald Trump who have fallen from grace with a thud. Of course, the moral compass at CNN is so awry that the network dithered for months…The moral of the Cuomo story is that bad people who abuse their privilege and believe the rules don’t apply to them do get their comeuppance. It’s comforting to know the moral universe still operates in an age when good is so often presented as bad and bad as good. The final icing on the cake will be when the Tappan Zee Bridge gets its name back and the Cuomo name fades into ignominy.”
https://nypost.com/2021/12/05/laughs-have-run-out-for-these-vile-cuomo-bros-devine/
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"The times that we're living in right now are forcing lots of people on both sides of the aisle to look at a thing, or hear a thing, and be told that what they're seeing and what they're hearing is not real. And you can't do that to people indefinitely and expect them not to push back somehow. You can't tell people that the border is secure and then show them images of tens of thousands of people flooding over it. You can't tell people that the evacuation of Afghanistan was a success and then show them people falling off of a plane... And you ask people who are watching a NASCAR race at home, who clearly hear the crowd yelling 'F*ck Joe Biden' to pretend that what they're really hearing is 'Let's Go Brandon.' I think what's happened is people have just become sick and tired of being told that what they're seeing and what they're hearing is not what they're seeing and hearing."
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“If you think American politics is wild today, check out the 19th century — it was bananas, and way beyond a couple of shady Russkies posting fake news on Facebook.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/democrats-legitimacy-gambit/#slide-1
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“CNN President Jeff Zucker stood by Chris Cuomo last spring after revelations that the star anchor had helped his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, navigate a sexual-harassment scandal…Mr. Zucker said suspending Chris Cuomo would be “punishment for the sake of punishing.” Everything changed this past week. New information surfaced—including detailed records from the New York attorney general’s office, a report from the law firm Cravath Swaine & Moore and an unrelated allegation of sexual misconduct—that sealed Chris Cuomo’s fate. Mr. Zucker was taken by surprise by the attorney general’s report, and felt Mr. Cuomo misled him, according to people familiar with the situation. On Saturday he completed a U-turn, firing Mr. Cuomo on a call, one of the people said.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/12/06/heres-how-chris-cuomo-was-able-to-survive-despite-gross-unethical-behavior-durin-n2600157?utm_source=thdailypmvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=272301c8f377cb4769525192b29cae221c10bb65c600b80a9e95a953d91ba2a2&recip=28870245
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“We will learn nothing from Oxford and Waukesha. Tragedies without a racial or political angle will always be glossed over…our media isn’t interested in stories about system failures.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/learn-nothing-from-oxford-waukesha-tragedies/
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“George Washington reckoned [in his] Farewell Address that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” to “political prosperity.” And then the famous words: “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” That — the exclusion of religious principle — is the hubris the Supreme Court exhibits in Roe v. Wade. It has taken a while but this has come into focus as a fundamental affront to limited, constitutional government.”
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/god-abortion-and-the-court/91794/
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Heart be still, but America is in the early stages of what could be a major political shift. On issue after issue, from soaring crime to inflation to critical race theory, Democrats and the far left are being forced to play defense because their radical policies are failing.
Those policies moved to the forefront with Joe Biden’s election and the elevation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to budget chairman. The resulting social-justice and climate-change agenda would “totally transform America,” Biden promised.
But less than a year later, the results are disastrous. The effort to reshape the nation is clashing with reality — and reality is winning.
The outcome is far from certain, but developments make me an optimist. The green shoots of sanity are all around us and are verified by Biden’s collapsing poll numbers, and recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere.
With apologies to Mark Twain, reports of the death of the political center were exaggerated. It is alive and well, and holding its ground against the socialist onslaught.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/04/incredible-shrinking-democrats-goodwin/
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As Vladimir Putin mobilizes forces on the Ukraine border and Chinese submarines patrol the Taiwan Strait, President Joe Biden’s State Department has made its priorities clear: The slave-made solar panels must flow.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy for climate, have been lobbying their fellow Democrats against including the measure in the annual defense bill. The reasons are equally comical and demented. Kerry is lusting for a Nobel Peace Prize for his climate work, which requires the cooperation of the Chinese. To hell with the Uyghurs so long as Kerry gets the international accolades that his failed presidential run and bumbling tenure as secretary of state didn’t give him.
Xinjiang is home to roughly half of the world’s supply of polysilicon, a raw material used to produce solar panels. A ban on its importation would send a message to the Chinese communists that the United States won’t tolerate its barbarous behavior. Merkley deserves credit for his unwavering support for the bill. The same can’t be said for his Democratic colleagues: House leadership won’t allow any deliberations on China-related legislation this week, despite empty assurances from the White House that it supports the bill’s swift passage.
No word from him yet on the Uyghurs, but we assume his deputy speaks for him, and the president, in urging Democrats to toss human rights under the bus in service of a climate deal.
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-to-uyghurs-drop-dead/
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There’s something counterproductive about the way contemporary race matters are caveated and couched in questions that so often lead to more questions, rather than to consensus. Often, today’s conversations seem motivated by identifying the element of racism in as many situations as possible. And too many times, this results in Möbius-strip discussions that go nowhere and help no one. I’’m guessing that some will think I’m oversimplifying. But my response is to ask: Are race issues so tangled that we can’t straightforwardly point ourselves toward some measure of general agreement — or even just peace? Are we dealing with complexity or just a kind of synthetic confusion? Confusion in race politics that — whatever it yields — is a new rather than classic version of The Struggle.
https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AC1F1AgOBD61Ya-oQwDHOMagsF0?reason=invalid_crumb
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It’s clear that the Biden administration overreached attempting to pursue a bold, liberal game-changing agenda with this nomination. It wasn’t the beliefs, history, or qualifications of the Cornell professor that were put to the test here; it was the question of whether the ambitions of the Biden team remain aligned with the national interest of the United States as 2021 ends and the stresses of 2022 loom on the horizon. The next nominee will need to have more conventional views for the Washington establishment to be comfortable.
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The biggest problem is that Lebanon isn’t entirely a sovereign state. Real reform can’t advance as long as foreign interference in the country, particularly Iranian support for the terror and political group Hezbollah, is a constant. After the end of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 2005, Hezbollah has only increased its grip on the state.
Hezbollah has great power over the pro-Syrian parliamentary coalition—the March 8 alliance. It has a history of rejecting prime ministers unless they are aligned with the group, as well as stalling the creation of new governments or collapsing existing ones. But the most significant way Hezbollah has controlled politics in Lebanon over the years has been through violence and assassinations.
Among the casualties are many who worked toward reform who were either assassinated or removed from office. Ronnie Chatah, a political commentator and columnist in Lebanon, is the son of Mohamad Chatah, a foreign policy advisor to then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri. Mohamad Chatah was assassinated in 2013. Days before he was killed, he sent a draft letter to parliamentarians to sign that called for Iran to reconsider its investment in Hezbollah for the sake of reform in Lebanon.
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“Yet another elite liberal institution denies science and embraces lawlessness. In this case, the denial hurts women, who liberals claim to champion and respect. Americans are tolerant and open-minded, but we don’t like to see underdogs crushed by unfair rules…We need to save women’s sports, which means preserving all the victories we fought hard for to recognize biological females as a distinct category from biological males. Collegiate swimming is zero-sum competition, where someone wins and others do not — at least for now (until the wokes ruin it by giving universal participation trophies).”
https://nypost.com/2021/12/07/transgender-athletes-victories-mean-women-and-girls-lose/
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“You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-turn-liel-leibovitz
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“It’s unusual to hear a district attorney speak in such plain terms in post-woke America. Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Kenosha DAs fall all over themselves to make excuses for not prosecuting violent rioters.
“San Diego’s district attorney is a refreshing change. San Diegans dodged a bullet when Summer Stephans was named interim DA after her predecessor left to pursue another political office in 2018. Her opponent in the following election was a George Soros bought-and-paid-for, soft-on-crime, open-up-the-jails “reformer.” Soros lackeys currently hold the top DA jobs in California. If San Diego hadn’t voted for Stephans, it would be overtaken by anarchy like Portland and San Francisco.”
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Critical race theory is best understood as a means to an end. What is that end? The elimination of disparities between racial groups. The foundational assumption of critical race theory is that all racial group disparities are de facto evidence of racism. This is why ostensibly race-neutral institutions like the criminal justice system or even the SAT are considered “racist” by critical race theory proponents.
Contrast this understanding of racism to the “traditional” conception of racism, which understood the term to describe individuals, organizations, and institutions treating people differently on account of their race. In the American context this usually entailed white people mistreating black people with the tacit approval of the law. Being aware of this distinction is key to understanding critical race theory and the deep division between subscribers and opponents of the framework.
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“President Biden’s shameful move to muzzle the US media is a cynical and desperate Kim Jong-un style attempt to hide the fact that his presidency is turning into a total disaster...The truth is that the mainstream media has bent over backwards to help him – by blatantly suppressing damaging stories in the run-up to the election, like his troubled son Hunter’s laptop escapades, and since he won, by virtually ignoring Biden Senior’s increasingly obvious and disconcerting cognitive issues. So for him to now moan about an unsupportive media and order his goons to ‘have a word’ with the offending journalists, is as ridiculous as it’s disgraceful.”
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“At the heart of critical race theory, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund says, is the idea that American racism is more than just “individual bias and prejudice.” It is “systemic,” because it is “embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequities.” Funny, but that sounds an awful lot like what Asian-Americans are experiencing these days, especially in education. They work hard to get into good schools—only to run up against an increasingly systemic orthodoxy on equity, which holds that Asian-Americans are taking more than their fair share. It helps explain why at Harvard Asian-Americans have both the highest average SAT scores and the lowest admissions rate of any racial group.”
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“Who could forget NY Democrats’ infamous “Green Light Law” in 2019? The bill, passed by the newly elected Democratic majority in the State Senate, gave drivers’ licenses to non-citizens. I vividly remember the debate as if it was yesterday, as my fellow Republicans and I predicted passage of the bill would lead to non-citizen voting. Given this record, it is not unreasonable to predict that it won’t be too long before more Albany Democrats jump onto the far-left bandwagon and blatantly try to bring non-citizen voting to the state level. There is already a Democrat-sponsored bill to grant citizenship and voting rights to everyone residing in New York illegally, with free education and health care to boot…Voters are seeing the far-left Democrats’ political power plays for what they are. All across our country, the election results on November 2 demonstrated a growing dislike for the radical agendas embraced by Democrats from President Biden right on down to locally elected officials.”
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“…the cynical effort to focus on the most absurd members of the opposition party is nothing new — especially as a means of deflecting attention away from your own problems. But when your champion is one of the most repugnant voices in Washington, the effort is transparently preposterous.
“You may recall a few years back when the Democratic Party backed out of censuring Omar for her numerous repulsive comments … Pelosi showed a special kind of creativity when she decided to reprimand Omar with a watered-down, platitudinous “anti-hate” resolution, which mentions Alfred Dreyfus, Leo Frank, Henry Ford, and “anti-Muslim bigotry,” but not Omar.
“The Squad already have outsized power. … The Biden administration already uses AOC’s branding for its climate-change agenda. And virtually every Democrat defends the administration’s every move. These are consequential politicians treated with reverence by the press.”
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“Those who insist that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria should be required as a precondition for identifying as transgender or obtaining any hormone treatments or sex-change surgeries are smeared as “truscum” and accused of gakekeeping and medicalizing queerness. Anyone who wishes to live as the opposite gender, or even as some new gender known only to him or her or xem or zir, must not be questioned or inhibited in any way, not even by the medical establishment. To suggest that we might want to pump the brakes in cases involving children or the mentally unstable is to out oneself as a transphobe.
In both cases, we saw a shift from “Look how compelling their reasons are” to “they don’t need a reason, you bigot!”Compassion stuck its foot in the door so that pure Nietzschean will-worship could barge into your living room and piss on your carpet.
“These questions conjure up a vision of a horrific future, a future in which a father who pleads with his depressed 11-year-old daughter not to kill herself is considered just as much of a monster as a father who urges his gender-dysphoric little girl to hold off on starting puberty blockers. “Her suffering is real!” the social justice warriors will scream. Or maybe they’ll borrow from NARAL’s playbook: “If the doctors won’t help her, she’ll just do it herself under unsafe conditions!””
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/assisted-suicide-new-trans-rights/
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