Harvard University’s admissions policy is proof that one can remember negative history, write about it in great and vivid detail, and still be doomed to repeat it. In the name of “affirmative action” and “diversity,” Harvard is doing to Asian-American applicants exactly what it once did to Jewish applicants: discriminate. Lee Cheng explains.
Elizabeth Warren is bent on using the race card, even if it means falsely claiming Native American heritage. Dennis Prager explains why race doesn’t matter.
“He kills people for a living… by his own standard.” — Dr. Mike Adams
(Via the DAILY WIRE) On Thursday, February 21, the University of North Carolina-Wilmington hosted a debate on abortion, which was organized by the College Democrats and College Republicans, among others:
The DAILY WIRE article notes the reason they posted the above debate:
The hour and a half-long debate also featured a Q&A in which the two professionals took questions from the crowd. At the 1:19:42 mark, a man asks Adams about the commonly discussed “rape exception” as it pertains to abortion.
Yep, good stuff.
This debate “TRIGGERED” ? (joking) in my memory a short conversation between Dr. Mike Adams and myself and a good book by him, “Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand.” I complained about a lack of (none in fact) footnotes to reference his quotes and some of his positions in it. (The part I wish to note is at the 11:50 to 12:10 mark above.) This is not a “take-down” of professor Adams at all. We probably agree 99% on the varied topics of politics and faith. It is however, a call to better scolorshipo of anyone writing a book, even if they intend it to be a quick read.
Just some feedback on your most recent book. Obviously it is geared for a “postmodern” audience. I had to put it down due to the lack of footnotes/references.I put down all books without them. I love your work, but the work reminded of Sean Hannity’s non-referenced screeds. Sorry to be so harsh… but no footnotes? Do your students get it that easy?
Dr. Adams makes a point about the direction of his book, linked above:
The footnotes were removed to make it resemble an email conversation. Emails don’t have footnotes. Come on.
To which I simply respond,
My emails do. At any rate, maybe the softcover will include them? I will then buy it and read it. Much thought your way. By-the-by, you up at Summit right now? If they ever talk about getting a speaker who combines choices and worldviews, keep me in mind. I am a “retired” ex-con.
The response by Dr. Adams was a funny quip that I laughed at then over Facebook and would laugh at if we were sharing some beers and time together as brothers in Christ. Here was his last point (where I chose to leave it):
Oh, yes, Sean. Will have the editor put them back in just so you’ll read it.
I merely responded: “Hahaha, yes.” My most recent note to Professor Adams was this (remember, I am picking up a conversation from May, 2013):
I just watched your wonderful take down of illogical positions by Dr. Parker. But I wish to note your point about “footnotes” in Parker’s book, and our discussion from 2013 — archived above.
Here is the convo from today, Dr. Adams:
That is why I did not use my book to establish when life begins. Your “point” is thus irrelevant.
My last response is,
All I am saying is that (as an example), is, on pages 31-33* (and others) when you separate out quotes [or] definitions, that the poli-sci person or someone grabbing the book from the sociology section of the book store could further their understanding FROM your book. Obviously this is a dead horse, but I encourage you in future endeavors to at least add some for context and reference for the bibliophile, thus encouraging even the millennial reader to further their reading scope. Blessings to you and yours Dr. Adams, from, “Still a Huge Fan and Supporter of all You Write and Do.”
Dr. Adams may be emotional that some yahoo he doesn’t know is telling him how to write a book. But I would encourage all who write books should include some power to their own references, thus separating out opinion versus factual claims.
* Pages 31-33
Even in theology if a person quotes Scripture, they don’t merely say “Matthew,” or, “Deuteronomy,” — they note chapter and verse.
(TRUE PUNDIT) The buzz at CPAC today started early thanks to a video that simply cuts to the heart of the many important issues that Conservatives in the United States have been driving, especially in recent years.
CPAC has entitled the video ‘FightOn’ and it is sure to fire up Conservatives as it leads with Ronald Reagan making prophetic comparisons to today’s insane headlines….
California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, delivered an inaugural addressearlier this week that accurately reflected the mentality of his supporters. Triumphalist, defiant, and filled with grand plans. But are these plans grand, or grandiose? Will Governor Newsom try to deliver everything he promised during his campaign, and if so, can California’s state government really deliver to 40 million residents universal preschool, free community college, and single payer health care for everyone? It’s reasonable to assume that to execute all of these projects would cost hundreds – plural – of billions per year. Where will this money come from?
While California’s budget outlook currently offers a surplus in excess of $10 billion, that is an order of magnitude less than what it will cost to do what Newsom is planning. And this surplus, while genuine, is the result of an extraordinary, unsustainable surge in income tax payments by wealthy people. California’s tax revenues are highly dependent on collections from the top one-percent of earners, and over the past few years, the top one-percent has been doing very, very well. Can this go on?
[….]
A cautionary overview of the economic challenges facing California’s state government would not be complete without mentioning the neglected infrastructure in the state. For decades, this vast state, with nearly 40 million residents, has been falling behind in infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers assigns poor grades to California’s infrastructure. They rate over 1,300 bridges in California as “structurally deficient,” and 678 of California’s dams are “high hazard.” They estimate $44 billion needs to be spent to bring drinking water infrastructure up to modern standards, and $26 billion on wastewater infrastructure. They estimate over 50 percent of California’s roads are in “poor condition.” In every category – aviation, bridges, dams, drinking water, wastewater, hazardous waste, the energy grid, inland waterways, levees, ports, public parks, roads, rail, transit, and schools, California is behind. The fix? Literally hundreds of additional billions.
What Governor Newsom might consider is refocusing California’s state budget priorities on areas where the state already faces daunting financial challenges, rather than acquiescing to the utopian fever dreams of his constituency and his colleagues.
Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting. — John McWhorter
John McWhorter delivers some brilliant social commentary (a shining light into Don Lemon’s career):
….Notable in Smollett’s account is that he sought to come off as an especially fierce kind of victim—the victim as hero, as cool. “I fought the fuck back,” he told ABC’s Robin Roberts in an interview. Smollett has long displayed a hankering for preacher status. His Twitter stream is replete with counsel about matters of spirit, skepticism, and persistence that sounds a tad self-satisfied from someone in his 30s. His mother associated with the Black Panthers and is friends with the activist Angela Davis, and in interviews Smollett has identified proudly with the activist tradition.
The problem is that amid the complexities of 2019 as opposed to 1969, keeping the Struggle going is more abstract, less dramatic, than it once was. Angela Davis is on T-shirts; it seems less likely that, for example, the Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson will be. How do you make as stark and monumental a statement as a King or a Malcolm these days? With a touch too much thirst for glory, and a tad too little inclination for analysis, one might seek to be attacked the way they were.
In john ford’sThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, a newspaperman advises, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” One take on Smollett’s story, if he turns out to have orchestrated it, will be that it was true in essence—a teachable example of the very real phenomenon of hate crimes. For a long time, the enlightened black person was to pretend that O. J. Simpson was framed by the Los Angeles Police Department, out of concern about the way the LAPD actually had treated black people for decades. For similar reasons, even today the idea that Michael Brown in Ferguson died with his hands up, although soundly refuted by all lines of evidence, retains status as almost an “alternative fact” in some quarters.
However, Smollett, in crafting his own “legend”—if that’s what happened—is less channeling Simpson and Brown than Tawana Brawley and Rachel Dolezal.
In 1987, Brawley claimed that six white men had abducted her, raped her, and left her in the woods covered with feces. They had scrawled racial epithets across her torso. That account turned out to be as fictional as it now sounds, but Brawley claimed as late as 1997 that “something happened to me,” a deftly vague statement. However, a key difference between Brawley and Smollett, pointing up the difference between 1987 and 2019, is that while Brawley lied to escape the wrath of her mother’s boyfriend after she ran away from home for four days, Smollett may have lied to look good to the public.
Dolezal, white, spent years with a spray tan, “identifying” as black and even heading a local NAACP branch, and had fabricated episodes of racist discrimination against herself. As Bryan Cranston’s dentist character on Seinfeld adopted Judaism for the jokes, Dolezal, one might say, took on blackness for the victimhood. She felt that her existence was more meaningful while she was “playing” an oppressed black person than living as a white person despite all the attendant privileges. Few news events more perfectly illustrated that in our moment, a claim of victimhood from a black person is a form of power. Only in an America much further past the old days than many like to admit could a white person eagerly seek to be a put-upon black person out of a sense that it looked “cool.” A Dolezal would have been unimaginable until roughly the late 1990s.
One could imagine that Smollett, if he was playacting, had a similar motivation. For Smollett, being a successful actor and singer might not have been quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America.
Assuming, again, that the reports are accurate, Smollett’s clumsiness would be an especially poignant indication of how deeply this victimhood chic has taken hold—almost as if he thought this was such an easy score that he didn’t even need to think too hard about the logistics. This story has been reminiscent, again, of Brawley, except that she was 15 and Smollett is, at 36, more than twice her age then. Consider, for example, this saliently implausible detail: If thugs put a rope around your neck, your first impulse when they were gone would be to remove it, but he still had it on when police first made contact. Really?
Smollett told Robin Roberts, amid initial skepticism about his account, that people would have been more open to his story if he had said the attackers were black or Muslim—missing, apparently, that the attackers’ being white made the story the most interesting possible one to all the people he was seeking to reach. Then, suddenly, even an actor is awkward in playing his part. He addressed an audience recently using note cards and callowly compared himself to Tupac Shakur, unaware that all of this is the hallmark of someone making something up, speaking from a script—telling a story, as it were……
The WASHINGTON EXAMINER goes after the partisan hate-group with this excellent article:
Newsrooms were on fire this week with terrible news: The number of hate groups in the United States has soared to record highs under President Trump.
There are most certainly hate groups in the U.S., and even one is one too many, but I’d encourage everyone to approach the numbers reported this week with calm and caution. There’s nothing partisan operatives would love more than for you to panic and to believe them when they suggest that the problem can be solved by expelling “the other team” from power. That the figures cited by newsrooms come via the decidedly unreliable and hyper-partisan Southern Poverty Law Center also doesn’t help anything.
The New York Times reported, “Over 1,000 Hate Groups Are Now Active in United States, Civil Rights Group Says.”
“Hate groups ‘surge’ across the country since Charlottesville riot, report says,” reads the headline from the Miami Herald.
“Trump ‘Fear-Mongering’ Fuels Rise of U.S. Hate Groups to Record: Watchdog,” U.S. News and World Report said in a headline that sort of gives the game away.
First, let’s keep things in perspective. Remember, for example, that the rise in the number of hate crimes is attributable in some way to the fact that there are more reporting agencies ( hundreds, in fact!) than ever before. It’s easy to say, “Oh, it’s all because of President Trump,” pointing to incidents like his disastrous Charlottesville statement. But the problem of bigotry is far older and deeper than the current administration. That the Trump White House isn’t helping anything is one complaint, but don’t fall for the suggestion that it’s the main driver.
In 2015, for example, the group put Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson on its “extremist watch list,” citing the one-time presidential candidate’s “anti-LGBT views.” Later, in 2016, the SPLC labeled women’s rights activist, female genital mutilation victim, atheist, and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali an “anti-Muslim extremist” because she opposes Islamic extremism. The British activist and extremist-turned-counterextremist Maajid Nawaz was placed in the same category. The SPLC lumps pro-family and pro-Israel organizations in with actual neo-Nazis.
As for the report the SPLC just released this week, IT CONCEDES THERE IS AN UPTICK IN THE NUMBER OF BLACK NATIONALIST GROUPS SINCE 2017, BUT IT DOWNPLAYS THIS FACT BY CLAIMING THOSE GROUPS “HAVE LITTLE OR NO IMPACT ON MAINSTREAM POLITICS AND NO DEFENDERS IN HIGH OFFICE.” I must’ve just imagined noted-anti-Semite and frequent Democratic guest Louis Farrakhan.
[….]
Hate groups are real. Hate crimes are real. The SPLC is not. It exploits hate groups to raise money and further political interests unrelated to the problem of hate. Don’t fall for the SPLC’s lies.
Manqué cineaste Simon Lynxx needs to raise money for his film, so he pays two black friends to mug elderly movie mogul Hermann Wolff, so Lynxx can rescue him and get cash out of gratitude. That’s from Take Five, a D. Keith Mano novel released in 1982, the year actor Jussie Smollett was born.
Nearly four decades later, Smollett is an actor in the Fox series Empire, centered on hip-hop artist Lucious Lyon, CEO of Empire Entertainment. In real life, not on the show, Smollett sends a threatening letter to himself showing a noose, then pays two black friends to attack him in Chicago, which they proclaim is “MAGA country!”
The pair beat Smollett and string a rope around his neck while yelling racist and homophobic slurs. Smollett somehow escapes unscathed. The tale soon unraveled, and as Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson put it, Jussie Smollett “paid $3,500 to stage this attack…
…The stunt was orchestrated by Smollett because he was dissatisfied with his salary,” reportedly more than $1 million per year before taxes.
Smollett paid the $3,500 to Abel Osundairo, his personal trainer, and Ola Osundairo, a former extra on Empire. Police have the check and a video shows the pair buying the masks. The story was less credible than Al Sharpton’s Tawana Brawley hoax, but Smollett cast himself as a Trump victim. So right from the start leftist Democrats were all in.
“The vicious attack on actor Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern-day lynching,” proclaimed Cory Booker. “I’m glad he’s safe.” In similar style, fellow presidential candidate Kamala Harris tagged the attack a “modern day lynching.” Green New Dealer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who believe walls are immoral, called it a “racist, homophobic attack.” The media echo chamber also chimed in.
On February 14 Robin Roberts interviewed Smollett on “Good Morning America.” Smollett contended he was a victim and did not orchestrate the alleged attack. According to Roberts, “It’s a setback for race relations, homophobia, MAGA supporters. I cannot think of another case where there is this anger on so many sides and you can understand why there would be.”
Yet as the story unraveled, Smollett’s siblings blamed the media……….
“The MAGA hat has nothing to do with inciting racism,” he said. “It’s the Left that wants to demonize Donald Trump, even though we have the lowest unemployment rate we’ve seen in 50 years, even though we have the lowest African-American unemployment rate that we’ve had in the history of the country, even though we keep moving in the right direction.” — SENATOR TIM SCOTT
(Watch Steven Crowder’s bit on Smollett) Jesse Watters has Andy Ngo (last name sounds like “Noh”) on his show to discuss the rise in “hate-crime hoaxes” in the era of Trump.
Andy wrote a piece in NATIONAL REVIEW that is excellent and full of links. But he ends the story with a jaw-dropping quote from Jussie Smollett… and I think it reflects the rejection of the Judeo-Christian God and shows the inward religious “Messianic” when one turns to social-justice or environmentalism:
“While I can only speculate as to Smollett’s motives, perhaps a clue can be found in his bioline on Twitter. Smollett writes: ‘I am simply here to help save the world’.”
To which G.K Chesterton says:
“When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”
Dennis Prager always points out that environmentalists are self-describing themselves as “saving the planet/humanity.” To which Prager responds in his deep — almost grandfatherly sarcasm — voice, “WHOA whoahoah… you are ‘saving the planet’.” The hubris of the Left is legend.
Andy had an excellent Twitter thread that cataloged a lot of these hate-hoaxes:
The twins noted some comments by Smollett that peaked their skeptical curiosity — other than the people yelling in Obama Country that this was MAGA Country…
Smollett supported Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the anthem — and he was unhappy the president wanted players to stand for the American flag.
In September 2017 on Sirius XM Progress Radio, Smollett said of Trump, “He’s a pig, a racist, a horrible human being. To me, Colin Kaepernick is very patriotic. He’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing as a citizen of this country. If anything, sadly, the person who was falsely elected to be president of the United States is actually the least patriotic person that we’ve seen in a long time.”
But since this “incident,” many real hate crimes have occurred to add to the large list of violence against Republicans. Obviously this is not a new story, here are some examples posted on my site:
However, it is now a widely known phenomenon, thanks to Smollett. Here are a few real hate-crimes that recently (since Smollett) that have happened:
On Saturday in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a man from Tennessee allegedly pulled a gun on a man wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat, stuck the gun in the MAGA-hat-wearing man’s face and reportedly threatened, “It’s a good day for you to die.”
The police report stated that the gun-wielding man was identified as James Phillips, 57, of Cottontown, Tennessee, according to WNKY. Phillips admitted he had given the finger to Terry Pierce and his wife, who were shopping at a Sam’s Club, as WBKO reported. WNKY added that according to the citation given Phillips, Pierce responded by giving the finger back at Phillips, prompting him to pull his gun….
The men throwing things at him was not captured on film — but the subsequent confrontation was.
“If you’re going to throw things at me at least do a better job. Why are you attacking a gay man?” Presler says on the video as he approaches the men. “Why are you attacking a gay Trump supporter, I’d like to know?”
The men appear somewhat stunned as he approached them, then asked why he supports President Trump. Presler cited the just-announced effort from the administration to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe. As he was making his point, one of the men yelled “f-ck that n-gga, boy.”
A 23-year-old model who’s appeared in the likes of Maxim magazine finally came forward this month to express her support for President Donald Trump. Elizabeth Pipko, who worked full-time on the president’s 2016 campaign, said she was tired of hiding her support, even if it meant she was risking future modeling jobs.
[….]
But along with potentially sacrificing high-paying modeling work, Pipko says she’s now on the receiving end of constant insults, including being called a “Nazi.” As a religious Jew, the young model took such an attack especially hard.
“Since admitting my support for the President and my work for the 2016 Trump campaign, I have been the target of some extremely inappropriate comments and insults,” Pipko said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “The words that people are using to address me are words that should never be used to speak to anyone, but more importantly, words than should never be used to attack someone simply because of their political beliefs.”
Our biggest undercover video yet. We go to an abortion clinic in Colorado to expose the truth about late term abortions — a truth the left, and media, do not want you to see.
…Representative John Ratcliffe appears with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the DOJ and FBI ‘soft coup’ attempt headed by Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
Ratcliffe also discusses the outlook with newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr and what actions he hopes AG Barr will take in the wake of mounting evidence that Andrew McCabe, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and former Acting AG Sally Yates were coordinating an effort to remove President Donald Trump.
PJ-MEDIA alerted me to the passing of a wonderful political commentator. Here is a portion of their tribute, as well as the video:
…He had only seemingly moved rightward from the time of his service to Jimmy Carter as his pollster and adviser, to his embrace of Trump. But Pat had not moved; rather the world had moved around him. Pat remained devoted to the Constitution, to moral goodness, and to the absolute necessity of doing what was right, even at great personal cost. He was the last honorable Democrat, and he knew it.
I’ll miss him personally and professionally — America will miss him even more.
Political parties, neither mentioned in the Constitution nor foreseen by the Founders, arose almost immediately and have, generally speaking, served the nation well. The two-party system as we know it today dates to the 1850s. This first CCA of the 2016-2017 academic year will consider the origin and development of the party system, as well as the history, principles, and current state of the Democratic and Republican parties. (Oct 15, 2016)
