“Criminals are the most protected and coddled among the Democrats’ constituencies. You can see the results across the country. Twelve major cities, from Philadelphia to Portland, have suffered record-breaking murder rates this year. They have suffered those murders because local mayors and prosecutors don’t want to enforce the law.
“City officials such as Lightfoot and Foxx have proved themselves unfit for public office, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be voted in again and again…Governors and mayors, like Washington’s Jay Inslee (who tolerated the Seattle riots) and Chicago’s Lightfoot, should be recalled or defeated at the ballot box. But they won’t be. It’s just as Thomas Jefferson said: the government you elect is the government you deserve.”
https://spectator.org/lori-lightfoots-lament/
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“As early as 1977, the Sunday Times of London had caught on that the family story Haley told in Roots was “more tenuous than anyone had thought.” The New York Times reported on the Brits’ takedown of Haley, quietly acknowledging, “There appeared to be no factual bases … for Mr. Haley’s conclusion that he had actually traced his genealogy back to Kunta Kinte in the village of Juffure, Gambia.” When questioned, Haley insisted his errors were inadvertent and his intent had been to write “a symbolic history of people,” one that would, as the Times put it, “convey a larger truth.”
“In his 2010 biography of Obama, The Bridge, New Yorker editor David Remnick conceded that many of the racial incidents Obama recounted in Dreams were “novelistic contrivances.”
Remnick, however, was even more generous with Obama than Hearn was with Haley. Yes, Obama “darkens the canvas” to make a point about race, writes Remnick, but he does so to establish “an emotional truth.”
“In his 2012 biography, Barack Obama: The Story, the Washington Post’s David Maraniss dug a little deeper into Dreams. In his review of that biography, BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith “counted 38 instances in which [Maraniss] convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama’s own story of his life and his family history.” Not surprisingly, many of these fictional deviations have to do with race.”
“A Pulitzer Prize winner as were the other two “Davids,” David Garrow nailed Obama on the fabrication charge In his 2017 biography, Rising Star. With ample evidence to back up his charge, Garrow says of Dreams that it “was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.”
https://spectator.org/roots-dreams-and-the-unequal-punishment-of-fraud/
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“It’s very tricky being a commissioned officer in the military today, even a retired one. This administration seems more determined than previous ones to stamp out any dissent in the ranks. And to use the military to for its political purposes. It has the right hall monitor for the job in Thoroughly Modern Milley, more of a boot-licking courtier than a warrior. He seems more concerned about Republicans in the ranks than about the Chinese. Of course there have to be limits on what military officers say about the commander in chief and his horse-holders. No one I know questions civilian control of the military. But should generals and admirals really carry water for the political agenda of the political party in power? No, Virginia, white rage and climate change are not the biggest threats to America, or even what the military was established to deal with.”
https://spectator.org/good-luck-mr-scheller/
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“One lesson of the First Great Age of Political Correctness and the P.C. wars of the 1980s and '90s is that it was a huge mistake to think that because a movie like PCU skewered campus culture, the problem had already fixed itself. As a result, the problem was allowed to grow worse. We can't make that mistake again. The ideal time for achieving real change in higher ed was 30 or even 40 years ago. The next best time is now.”
https://reason.com/2021/12/13/the-second-great-age-of-political-correctness/printer/
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“A conception of the state that treats it as the primary educator of children is tyrannical from the start. Human beings, after all, form governments not to forfeit natural rights but to protect them. That parents are the primary educators of their own children is chief among those rights. But the Left’s view of the state is fundamentally unnatural and limitless. Left to their own devices, the statists would outlaw homeschooling and private education and herd all children into public schools.
“The public schools can’t even teach the most rudimentary subjects successfully. But what’s even worse is that they are poisoning the souls of children, indoctrinating them in a godless subjectivism. The survival of America will largely turn on whether or not this corrupt system is overthrown.”
https://spectator.org/the-reduction-of-public-schools-to-propaganda-camps/
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“David Bourget of Western University and David Chalmers of New York University surveyed 1,785 of their fellow English-speaking philosophers from around the world on 100 questions. A few generated responses on hot-button issues. The philosophers favored socialism to capitalism by a 53 percent to 30 percent margin, opposed capital punishment 75 percent to 18 percent, and favored legalized abortion 82 percent to 13 percent. Atheists outnumbered believers by 67 percent to 19 percent. With regard to political philosophy, 44 percent chose egalitarianism, 27 percent chose communitarianism, and 13 percent chose libertarianism. The more interesting questions involved philosophy, moral riddles, and abstract thought. They accepted a priori knowledge by a four-to-one margin. Just five percent accepted the possible worlds theory as opposed to 30 percent who opposed it and 55 percent who embraced it in an abstract sense. More found gender a social construct than a fact of biology or psychologically based. On the moral riddle on whether to push a man off a footbridge if it figured to save the five people walking below, the vast majority selected “don’t push.” By almost a five-to-one margin, philosophers reject the idea of entering into an “experience machine.” More approve of omnivorous eating habits than vegan or vegetarian ones by slim margins. The aim of philosophy? According to those surveyed, understanding, truth, wisdom, goodness/justice, and happiness in that order.”
https://philarchive.org/archive/BOUPOP-3
==============
Historically, both parties have cranked out unsuccessful education reforms, from George Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Barack Obama’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” (which EdWeek just quietly noted showed “no positive impact”). Only the current iteration of Democrats, however, is dumb enough to campaign on the idea that parents should step aside and let the same “experts” who’ve spent the last fifty years turning the American education system into a global punchline take full charge of their kids’ upbringing.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-democrats-education-lunacies
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Let’s make no mistake: “preferred pronouns” aren’t, as some would have you believe, just a courtesy. They are a form of compelled speech; they ask people to no longer trust their eyes, but instead do as they are told or be ostracised. I have previously written about the parallels between the current climate and the East German Stasi under which my whole family used to live. And it is becoming clearer by the day that those comparisons were not an exaggeration… Being de-platformed for your views is something one can challenge. Being quietly excluded from any kind of platform and conversation altogether leaves you with nothing.
https://unherd.com/2021/12/the-heretics-will-not-be-silenced/?1641274681634
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“The Hard Left infrastructure now reigns in the cities, and it increasingly calls the tune. But at the statewide and national level, it isn’t quite dominant within the Democrat Party. Because at the statewide and national level the leadership positions are chiefly filled by the devotees of the party’s most recent nominee.
“This matters. It’s the reason the Democrats did everything they could to screw Bernie out of the nomination in 2016 and 2020. If he’d become the nominee, he could have put his people in all of those jobs, and that would have been the end of the James Carvilles and Donna Braziles.
“Those old-school Dems are hanging on, just barely. They had to foist Biden on the public in order to hold power, but Biden is already past his shelf life.
“And there is no bench. Not when Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg are supposedly the leading lights in the party. … To build a bench in politics means developing a roster of capable and competent people who can govern. The Democrats have specifically rejected that as a fundamental mission of officeholding and have chosen social and cultural revolution instead.”
https://spectator.org/bernies-takeover-is-coming-soon/
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"Mr. Roberts, who is affiliated with Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, praises George III in terms that will warm the hearts of contemporary progressives. ... This book has echoes of the New York Times and its 1619 Project, which likewise portrayed the American Revolution as a racism-tainted effort to preserve slavery from British abolitionism."
https://www.nysun.com/national/the-george-iii-project/91857/
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“Big Disinfo has gained in popularity in mainstream media outlets in part because it claims to solve the problem of bad information while placing blame for it on anyone other than mainstream media. In fact, those diagnosing our illness and prescribing the cure are themselves purveyors of the “infodemic” they claim is upon us.
“The Aspen Institute’s Commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the Commission’s advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his site’s users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election. Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a “tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama.”
“The commission’s co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes.
“…The Aspen Commission’s report says that there is no such thing as an “arbiter of truth,” and yet our media gatekeepers have claimed that mantle for themselves—with decidedly mixed results—for some time.”
https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/the-real-misinformation-problem/
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“Assassins, which was first produced in 1991, is a full-frontal assault on the United States, as was Pacific Overtures 20 years earlier—both of which he wrote with librettist John Weidman. The former is about the supposed American love of violence, the latter about the evils of American imperialism. There’s no getting around this. [Sondheim’s] pitiless eye saw this country at its worst and then wrongly accepted the noxious idea that its worst was its nature.
“There is something oddly Oedipal about it as well. Sondheim had a monstrous mother of a kind that even Philip Roth could hardly have imagined; he said she tried repeatedly to seduce him after his father’s abandonment, and in the early 1970s, just before she was to have open-heart surgery, she wrote him a letter that said, “The only regret I have in life is giving you birth.” It may be hard to experience the love of country when you were raised by a mother who, on occasion, openly wished you dead.”
“…the life story of Stephen Sondheim is a testament to how everything was and is possible in America. That was true in the 1950s, even if—or maybe because—you were uncomfortably Jewish and uneasily gay. And it remains true today, even if—or maybe because—we can’t see it through the present-day haze.
Everything is possible. It’s not inevitable. It’s not your due. It’s just the chance America gives you.”
https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/stephen-sondheims-america/
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“Elizabeth Holmes, [t]he Theranos founder/Steve Jobs impersonator is probably headed to prison, just like (spoiler alert) the main characters in “Seinfeld” when their saga ended. Maybe she’s learned some kind of lesson; only Elizabeth Holmes can know. Certainly the rest of us haven’t.
“OK, hopefully we’ll think twice before we get our blood tested by a literal black box. But the Silicon Valley “fake it ’til you make it” culture that nurtured Holmes is stronger than ever. As Parmy Olson writes, there’s just too much VC money burning holes in too many pockets for anybody to stop and ask such nitpicking questions as “Is this actually a business?” or “Is that your real voice?”
“In fact, one of the many ironies of Holmes’s story is that, even as she goes to jail for fraud, investors are throwing money at stuff that barely bothers to hide its fraudulence anymore, Matt Levine notes. When you consider all the fortunes blown on JPGs of monkeys, you almost appreciate that Holmes went to the trouble to hire people, build black boxes and pose for business-magazine covers like a real CEO.”
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“Could the Blue States finally be coming around on States’ Rights? It’s not quite a stand in the schoolhouse door, fortunately, but four of the most Democratic states in the nation are asking the Supreme Court to turn back federal interference in their affairs. Not over civil rights, but taxes…In President Trump’s 2017 tax law, Congress capped that deduction at $10,000. So upset are the Blue States over this that they’re even invoking the Tenth Amendment, long favored by right wingers as a limit on the government.”
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/blue-states-come-out-for-states-rights/91870/
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“Biden’s visit to Theranos was even worse than Obama’s visit to Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that went bankrupt. The mumbo-jumbo of Holmes appealed to Biden. He swallowed her claims whole. “This is the laboratory of the future,” Biden said. “What’s most impressive to me is you’re not only making these lab tests more accessible, you’re charging historically low prices, which is a small fraction of what is charged now, while maintaining the highest standards, and empowering people whether they live in the barrio or a mansion, putting them in a position to help take control of their own health.”
“Bill Clinton lavished praise on Holmes. He invited her to his various blather-driven “summits” on health care. At one of those forums, he played the lowly role of interviewer as he lapped up her lies. The media loved lashing the Enron collapse to the Bushes, but reporters show no such inclination to tie the Theranos scandal to a liberal ruling class that propped up Holmes. She went to functions at the Obama White House, got Biden to endorse her company, and appeared on the covers of countless liberal magazines. But none of that featured in the media’s coverage of her verdict.”
https://spectator.org/elizabeth-holmes-a-product-of-the-ruling-class/
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“Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.”
https://unherd.com/2022/01/the-liberal-fantasy-of-the-capitol-coup/?=refinnar
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“Holmes tried and failed to wriggle out from beneath her own hype as the walls closed in. At her trial, the black turtleneck was gone, replaced by a blouse-and-blazer combination and an accessory diaper bag (the better to remind jurors and press that she’s a mother with a newborn at home.) Gone was the image of an ass-kicking visionary, hell-bent on success: Holmes’ defence rested in large part on the notion that she’d been helpless, cowed and manipulated by her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani…Yet the jury didn’t buy it — because Holmes is too brilliant a con artist to also be a damsel in distress.”
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"...we pleaded for non-Jewish allies to speak out. The brutal reality was that relatively few figures in public life considered it worth the hassle. One who did, repeatedly, was JK Rowling. She spoke out on Twitter, and most notably when she wrote a parody of Labour under Corbyn referring to his issues with the British Jewish community. For most British Jews she is a heroine.
"This latest assault on JK Rowling has nothing to do with any concerns about antisemitism. The only enemies of the Jewish people in this story are those who concoct fake allegations of Jew hate in order to smear a warrior against racism."
https://unherd.com/thepost/jk-rowling-is-no-antisemite/?mc_cid=d0ea43197e&mc_eid=22e9ae4a48
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“No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it…”
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“The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay" while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
“That number is zero.”
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-histrionics-and-melodrama-around
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