"We often stop to laugh, or cry, about our obscene modern obsession with ‘progress’. But do we ever stop to ask whether demonstrating our alleged progress has replaced progress itself?…Hypocrisy is nothing new. The media mammoth covered #MeToo with a vengeance, only to shrug when it turned out that similar misdeeds were happening in its own ranks. The senators and activists who said ‘Believe all women’ turned out not to believe us, if it meant rankling prominent members of their party. But our willingness to believe in a progress that doesn’t exist — that’s new. And it’s pathetic.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/feminism-has-failed-us-progress/
==================
“…these movements did not fail. They were never intended to succeed in the sense of actually ending racism or changing the climate. They were designed as political stunts, fundraising slams, a way to promote some person into celebrity status with the help of a compliant media. That’s the flimflam…The failure of peace, love, drugs, and rock and roll to change the world in the 1960s eventually gave us the cynical and self-centered “Me Generation” of the 1980s.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/resistance-selfish-and-cynical/
==================
“A serial killer whose victims were all women and a registered sex offender who raped a female minor before transitioning were among the six male criminals who were transferred to the prison.
“Prisoner Donna Perry, formerly known as Douglas Perry, was convicted of killing three sex workers. Before being charged, Perry reportedly traveled to Thailand to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. Prosecutors argued in court that Perry had the procedures done to avoid suspicion for the murders he committed.
“In the state of Washington, convicted male felons who identify as women have been transferred to the Washington Corrections Center for Women, formerly the only women-only prison in the state, and have in some cases sexually exploited the female inmates residing there.
“The Washington Department of Corrections maintains that transgender applicants must make a compelling case justifying their request to be housed at a female prison, but the burden of proof is quite low in practice…
““The only prerequisite is that the men must identify as female. They aren’t required to have had reassignment surgery, don’t need to be in the process of transitioning, nor do they have to be on a hormone regimen. The only requirement is that they must proclaim to identify as a woman.”
==================
“When I mentioned to colleagues that schools were open in Europe or Florida, they looked at me as though I was somehow a threat. Before school closures, I had nothing but respect for other teachers and for the leadership of the teachers union. But in my view the treatment of children during the COVID era has been a moral stain on the profession. During over a year of online learning, an unforgivable crime was committed against public school children and families. And as it unfolded, everyone around me said it was acceptable, necessary, and even good.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/school-closures-covid-alex-gutentag
==================
“Look, there’s no reason to weasel-word it: The history of Hollywood, which is to say the history of 20th-century American culture, is impossible to talk about without talking about Jews. So it was a surprise to learn that the Academy Museum—a newly opened space dedicated to movies and moviemaking by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, built at a cost of $500 million—doesn’t have much to say about the Jews who made it all happen in the first place…We’re still tying ourselves into knots about Thomas Jefferson. Imagine if the Academy Museum had installed a statue of Jack Warner, one of the founding fathers of the movie business. So cultural institutions like the Academy Museum elect to sweep the ugly parts off-screen. It’s easier to avoid the mishegas.”
https://www.commentary.org/articles/rob-long/hollywood-history-jews-academy-museum/?fbclid=IwAR0QnEJNVLjomjDEZBsYrsHDMhLuoSOGhFkeY9NME03DJ_a5P3gSGwlw9jA
==================
The Loudoun County sheriff accused the school district's superintendent of taking actions that enabled a male student who had sexually assaulted a girl in a girls' restroom to go on to assault another student in another public school. The sheriff also questioned the superintendent's promised investigation into the assaults.
Loudoun County Sheriff Michael Chapman made these claims in response to Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) Superintendent Scott Ziegler, who had sent a letter accusing Chapman's office of failing to meet the requirements of Virginia law in notifying LCPS about the charges the male student faced.
Chapman's letter noted that Ziegler knew about the May 28 assault at Stone Bridge High School "the day it occurred," and he noted that Juvenile Intake notified LCPS of the student's arrest on July 9.
Chapman added, "despite knowing the serious nature of the offense, LCPS decided to place this individual back into [another] high school population" and "the consequences of that decision resulted in a second student being victimized by the same defendant" on Oct. 6 at Broad Run High School.
==================
“The big news of the day is President Biden’s announcement of the reappointment of Jay Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve and the promotion of Lael Brainard to vice chairman from governor.
““Jay,” the President basically said, “you're my guy because in our conversations you have promised to maximize employment and to make climate change a top priority and, in your speech a month ago, you said how hard the Fed would work to solve entrenched inequities.”
"By the way, in congressional testimony, Ms. Brainard has repeatedly refused to answer a direct question as to whether she believes in capitalism or socialism. How hard can it be for a former treasury official and long-time Fed official to come out in favor of American capitalism. Well, I guess in her case, it’s difficult.”
https://www.nysun.com/national/what-biden-failed-to-say-about-the-reappointment/91763/
==================
Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on rising gas prices: "We're working through an energy transition...The reality is, we have to take some time to get off of oil and gas, we recognize this. This is a transition."
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1462870579342622723
==================
“If the United States manages to put down the woke revolution, it will be because a critical mass of liberals chooses to reject it. Conservatives, opposed to wokeness from the start, can make arguments and stand up for their principles individually. But they can’t stop the liberal-to-woke conversion process that turns mildly left-of-center Americans into cosplay Black Panthers overnight. The liberals themselves are the gatekeepers of their own movement and its institutions. Given that these institutions—news media, social media, entertainment, academia, and the current majority party in Washington—shape so many aspects of American life, it’s mostly up to liberals to halt and reverse the transformation of the country.”
“Despite the book’s title, McWhorter dispenses with the term woke altogether. Borrowing, with acknowledgment, from the conservative writer Joseph Bottum, he deems the woke “the Elect.” The term evokes the social-justice warrior’s smugness in his sense of having come to higher moral knowledge. The Elect also has a helpfully medieval resonance to it: “This is apt, in that the view they think of as, indeed, sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are.” The Elect are, to some degree, inquisitors.
“From there, McWhorter makes his most convincing argument—that Electism is not a political persuasion at all but a religion. “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion,” he writes. “I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.””
==================
“Should Biden step down, 2023 will be pretty awful for Democrats, as a new presidential contest — in the face of substantial losses in the 2022 elections — will deepen party divides. But what would make it far more disruptive is Pelosi’s departure. (Though not certain, it is expected.) And like Biden, if she is leaving, she surely doesn’t want voters to know that before next year. Pelosi is a master tactician able to unite squabbling Democrats in ways no one else in her party can, so her absence would be an incalculable loss if Democrats are facing minority status with a lame-duck president. At that point, when a new GOP majority in the House looks to impeach President Biden, it will be the least of the Democrats’ worries.”
==================
“Many look at [Rittenhouse] and see someone who, perhaps naively, thought he could protect a community he knew (his father lives in Kenosha) and help people who were suffering. But many others—including his President—see Kyle Rittenhouse as the embodiment of white supremacist violence and entitlement, though there is no evidence that he harbors any racially-inflected views. White supremacy used to mean disliking nonwhites. Now it’s defined by who nonwhites don’t like.”
==================
“There’s a certain brand of weak-sauce conservative pundit, many of whom have populated the airwaves of cable news channels and other corporate media venues, which depends for its sustenance on remaining ‘acceptable’ to those who are not conservatives … Let’s hope that somebody is less ‘acceptable’ and more willing to accurately assess the state of America brought on by two decades of weak-sauce conservatism’s constant retreating…Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg won’t be missed.”
https://spectator.org/addition-by-subtraction-at-fox-news/
==================
'You bet my bail reforms will kill people': Shocking 2007 admission by woke Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisolm who freed Waukesha parade killer three weeks ago on $1,000 bond:
==================
“On the very same day that Rittenhouse was declared not guilty, Andrew Coffee, a black man from Florida, was, too. Coffee shot and killed his girlfriend after he mistook the use of a flashbang grenade during a police raid as gunfire, and exchanged fire with officers. He was cleared of all charges. In another blow to the racial narrative being pushed by many in the press, a white cop from Missouri was convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of a black man on the same day that the Rittenhouse and Coffee verdicts came out. In another emblematic case, Stephen Spencer of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., shot an unarmed white man during a physical confrontation. He was acquitted on the same self-defense grounds that kept Rittenhouse out of prison. And on Sunday, a father daughter duo made use of their right to open-carry, standing guard alongside a protest of the verdict. Per the New York Post, they themselves were defending property on the night of the Rittenhouse shootings.”
==================
“Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild. When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/tgif-inflation-rises-russiagate-falls
==================
“It’s always interesting when we are lectured about “democracy” by a continent which features governments that throw people in jail for speech crimes and control virtually every economic interaction.”
==================
“These days, an aroma of delusion lingers, with ideas presented to us from a supposedly brave new world that is, in reality, patently nonsensical. Yet we are expected to pretend otherwise. To point out the nakedness of the emperor is the height of impropriety, and I suspect that the sheer degree to which we are asked to engage in this dissimulation will go down as a hallmark of the era…The notion seems to be that practitioners and scholars, across disciplines, must devote a considerable part of their time to putatively antiracist initiatives. It’s a bold proposition, but given how shaky its actual justification is, it is reasonable to think that lately this devotion is being imposed by fiat, as opposed to being an organic outpouring. And if the price for questioning that notion is to be seen as sitting somewhere on a spectrum ranging from retrogressive to racist, it’s a price few are willing to pay. One is, rather, to pretend.”
==================
For the hard left, this is only the start of the battle, not its end. When the rules work out badly for the left, they don’t start playing by them. They try to change the rules.
That’s why there was so much of a frenzy to destroy him: Because if Kyle Rittenhouse, slayer of pedophiles and defender of his community, is allowed to go free, then others might see him as a model rather than a warning to cower.
Think about how much effort went into destroying this young man. Rep. Cori Bush, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and President Joe Biden denounced him as a white supremacist domestic terrorist, all without evidence.
They can come after executives like Brendan Eich; policemen like Bill Kelly; actors like Gina Carano; gym teachers like Tanner Cross; students like Nick Sandmann; bakers like the Gibson family; parents like Scott Smith and Tara McNeally, professors like Dorian Abbot and Mike Adams.
Here in America, whether it’s a statue of George Washington, the bones of St. Junipero Serra, or a teenager standing up for his community, the message is the same: Cower, or fall.
The iconoclasm, the violence, the cancel culture and legal intimidation: These things work in concert, and they’re not about hurt feelings — they’re about control.
==================
“It’s hard to remember an abuse of power more tin-eared — and premeditated — than Mr. Garland’s October 4 memo. Plus, too, Americans just saw, in the election in Virginia, the power of the issue of leftist educators insinuating themselves between pupils and their parents. Mr. Garland has given the Republicans a way to seize this issue on the national level as Americans once again prepare to go to the polls….So long as the Democrats control the House, Mr. Nadler will block the committee from getting tough with Mr. Garland. Yet Republicans are a few seats away from regaining control. The administration’s siccing the FBI on parents deserves full exposure in the coming year.”
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/merrick-garland-becomes-an-issue/91751/
==================
“The progressive clerisy — and its fellow-travelers in the media — had no interest in the facts or the law. They demonstrated this with easily disproven false statements about the trial from beginning to end. The only thing they cared about was an outcome in keeping with their ideological presuppositions…at the same time that much of the left-wing commentariat has pooh-poohed critical race theory as an obscure academic doctrine taught only in the law schools, it has clearly absorbed CRT’s contention that even seemingly race-neutral proceedings that have seemingly race-neutral outcomes are instruments of white supremacy.”
==================
“The spectre of communism no longer haunts Europe. But it does occasionally jump from behind the curtain and shout “boo”. Sometimes the surprise comes from the least likely spots. … A world without capitalism is still the aim. But a city with more social housing will do for now.”
https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/18/last-of-the-commies?utm_campaign=the-economist-today&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2021-11-23&utm_content=article-link-5&etear=nl_today_5
==================
“GCC [global climate change] isn’t like a religious cult; at its roots, it is a religious cult. No, hardly for everyone. Not for Gates, nor for all the companies and individuals and doomsayers who are simply cashing in with what’s called greenwashing,” falsely presenting products as being more environmentally friendly to gain market advantage…But cult or cults it is, including sub-cults like that of St. Greta — mobbed by crowds wherever she goes. Among the indicators is that prophecies that don’t come to pass such as the earth being covered by water by the year 2000 are just premature, not wrong. And never even explained away or apologized for, just ignored. Trust us, the rapture is coming! … [Climate geoengineering?] The climate change cult won’t look into it because it might actually work.”
https://spectator.org/whos-afraid-of-climate-geoengineering/
==================
“The great obstacle standing in the way of the race-Marxists’ twisted vision of “equity” is, ironically, the principle of “equality.” Enshrined in the equal-protection clause of the Constitution, the merit-based principle of equality before the law is often what the race-Marxists mean when they use phrases like “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” Like other forms of socialism, the progressive program seeks equality of outcome, but as Friedrich Hayek explained, equal outcomes require making the laws themselves unequal in their application, which is to say arbitrary. This is why socialism must always lead to arbitrary dictatorship. It is also why enshrining differential treatment of races in the law — the political agenda of critical race theory — can only lead to permanent racial castes locked in mutual antagonism.”
==================
“Hence, the problem (or at least one of them): The vaunted "two-state solution" functionally requires the dissolution of one of the existing three governing bodies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel demurs and the other two are at war with one another. On a broader scale, the area of what was formerly known as Mandatory Palestine was supposed to become the original "two-state solution." It includes the Kingdom of Jordan. The modern Palestinian movement was conceived to erase Hashemite-ruled Jordan in 1964, making the current king of Jordan an unlikely partner for either Hamas or Fatah. In fact, as Israel protects Fatah from Hamas, it protects King Abdullah II from Palestinian radicals of all sorts, as well as from Iran and its proxies.”
https://www.newsweek.com/other-war-opinion-1652657
==================
“…our Ruling Class and its woke shock troops sought to smear, silence and bankrupt Kyle Rittenhouse so he couldn't defend himself against an assault for which it bore responsibility. And then, the Ruling Class and its media abettors threatened to sic the mob on the jury to seal Rittenhouse's fate. Kudos to the jury for refusing to cave to the mob. But that it ever came to that point is an indictment of a society that increasingly accepts mob rule over the rule of law….This is the Left's entire modus operandi, in a nutshell: Inflict pain upon the political opposition and, if the opposition remains unbowed, exploit that response to justify still further power grabs. The only proper moral response is to refuse to be silenced and cowed: To confidently, courageously and boldly stand for the American way of life, and all it entails, and to never submit.”
https://www.newsweek.com/kyle-rittenhouses-crime-was-standing-woke-mob-opinion-1652737
==================
“You can't [win] with a generation that's been smothered by participation trophies. "White people suck 2024" isn't a winning message. …they should do the math, but that would be entertaining white supremacy.”
==================
“At the moment, this ideology [-] intellectually simplistic, politically obdurate, and morally merciless as any that wreaked havoc in the 20th century [-] goes by different names. Conservatives call it “cultural Marxism,” which sounds good but distorts its complex history. Liberals call it “political correctness,” a term invented by Western Communists to disparage the rigidities of Stalinism. Digital natives call it “cancel culture,” because of the power it wields through social media. Lindsay and Pluckrose’s “applied postmodernism” is the most accurate term, but it is highly unlikely to leap the species gap and appeal to the masses. That leaves “wokeness,” a black slang expression dating back to the blues, which is proving to be one of those pungent American coinages embraced by friend and foe, at home and around the world. If wokeness has not yet achieved Gleichschaltung—the Nazi term for total control and transformation of society—it is not for lack of trying.”
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/dare-we-joke-about-the-woke/?1=1&
==================
“It is a popular misconception that the Constitution enshrines a right to bail. What the Eighth Amendment actually says is: “Excessive bail shall not be required[.]” Translation: Bail is not constitutionally required in every case; but where bail is granted, it must not be set at so high a level that it is illusory – that there really is no bail because the accused cannot meet the conditions.
“My default position is against imposing on the states Washington’s one-size-fits-all prescriptions. Yet on this one, the states really should adopt the federal bail law. Because there has never been any doubt that the Eighth Amendment safeguard against excessive bail applies to the federal government, Congress has more experience dealing with it, and it has enacted law that the Supreme Court has endorsed. The law makes clear that bail not only may but should be denied in appropriate cases.”
==================
“What if you asked the same in the so-called “developing world?”… basically every poll you’ve ever seen indicating that people want more done to “combat global warming” is false. They want someone else to do the job. Which is actually completely rational. But the takeaway is that if the earth is warming, and it’s because of greenhouse gases, then it will continue to do so. Any country that plays along is sacrificing its citizenry for nothing.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/we-arent-serious-about-fighting-climate-change/
==================
“The Milwaukee district attorney told the truth when he “guaranteed” that this kind of reform would lead to murder. Woke prosecutors are angry now not because six people are dead and scores more maimed in Waukesha but because one of their own told the truth about the consequences of these policies. And the only safe guarantee going forward is that this type of bail reform — along with de-prosecution, de-carceration, and de-funding of police — will lead to more mayhem.”
==================
“For many of us who have followed the mass murder of the Yazidi people of Iraq and have marvelled at the courage of Murad, the TDSB decision came as a shock. It reeked of ignorance and subservience to an Islamist attitude that has infiltrated too many institutions of Canada, especially urban schools where cafeterias have been turned into prayer halls, with gender apartheid on full display. Last Friday, after the censorship of both Murad and lawyer Marie Henein, another author selected by the book club, by the TDSB became world news, the board attempted to backtrack. Colleen Russell-Rawlins, director of education, issued a statement described as a “clarificatio.”: “An opinion that did not reflect the position of the Toronto District School Board was shared with the organizer of the book club prior to staff having an opportunity to read the books – something that is routinely done before giving them to students. Staff are currently reading both books and anticipate being able to add them to the list of titles used in the corresponding course(s).””
“Who are these mandarins of political correctness and wokeness who are currently reading the book? Sounds more like the censor board of Pravda during the days of the USSR. The TDSB decision is not merely about censorship. It is about the drumbeat of ‘Islamophobia’ that has made every concerned citizen worry that he or she does not end up with the tag of “racist” throughout their lives. The sword of Islamophobia now hangs over the heads of most Canadians who wish to keep religion and politics separate and outside the public domain. But they dare not stand up for the values of liberal secular democracy that are the foundations of Canadian values. When the largest education board in Canada surrenders itself to the whims of Islamist sensitivities, and Nadia Murad is designated as a possible contributor to Islamophobia, then rest assured the dikes have been breached.”
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/fatah-the-outrageous-censorship-of-nadia-murad
==================
