Covid And The Rising Education Revolution

 

Covid And The Rising Education Revolution

What Covid has made clear is that the future doesn’t need to look like the past.

Stephan Blackwood, The American Conservative

When will things return to normal? all of us have asked, plaintively, more than once, as we’ve seen the repeated delays, new variants, and so on perpetuate the cloud of Covid yet another season. A return to normal for the paradigmatic activities of human life—for weddings and funerals, for breaking bread with our friends, for work and worship and business; for these a return to normal can’t come soon enough.

But then there are other domains—activities, industries, systems—where Covid has been not so much an inhibiting muzzle on normally flourishing activities as a spotlight revealing sickness, dysfunction, and decay.

In these domains, the rot was generally perceptible pre-Covid but the pandemic brought it unignorably into view. Pandemic preparedness, for example, and the inexcusable failure of the CDC spring to mind. Or the vulnerabilities of supply chains—the insanity that medications keeping millions of Americans alive were dependent on foreign manufacture, for example. Or the determined narrative control by the media, increasingly brazen over the last years, but intensified further still with masks, vaccines, and lockdowns; the policing of what you are allowed to say and what you can’t; and the deeply disturbing politicization of public health.

But perhaps above all Covid has revealed profound dysfunction in education: local officials, teachers’ unions, the whole system at large, has been a disaster. Many children lost more than a year of school and associated core function development; worse still, that cost was borne especially heavily—and will be in the future, too, as the deficit compounds over time—by the most vulnerable, by those with the least help or ability to adapt.

But that systemic failure in education was less a result of the pandemic than it was the manifestation of longstanding disease. Average outcomes have been weak to mediocre by nearly any measure for decades. And those average outcomes, mediocre though they are, hide much worse, more broken, and sadder realities still. There are vast numbers at the bottom: millions of children with life-alteringly low levels of literacy, numeracy, and civic and cultural education.

The system has been failing for decades. But then, during the pandemic, we didn’t have even that! Schools were closed, or open only intermittently, for more than a year.

But how did we get to a point where something of such paramount importance as the education of the young was left in the hands of those who cared—or at least were able to do—so little about it?

In higher education, too, the handling of Covid has been disastrous, as students were essentially defrauded by institutions that pretended their remote offerings were of adequate or even equivalent value to the in-person education they replaced. The hubris of this pretense was breathtaking.

But they overplayed their hand.

There are times when you might continue to put up with a dysfunctional relationship or system just because you’ve gotten used to it, and were unaware there were alternatives: thinking, “this is just how relationships are, people are abusive and mean,” or that “this is just how food is, stale and overpriced,” or “this is what a home is, ugly and dark.” But then along comes a bracing encounter—perhaps things get suddenly worse, becoming consciously intolerable; or perhaps you have an experience of real love or beauty or belonging—that jolts you into recognizing that things were not as they were meant to be, that there must be another way; that you were made for something more.

For many, the pandemic was such an event. At the primary and secondary level, the failing educational system to which we had been accustomed—even that, suddenly was gone, with parents completely powerless to bring it back.

But if you starve people long enough, they’ll start growing food again. The suppression of even a failing and exploitative system led to the recognition for many parents that they could do it themselves. Why send my kids into the hands of an essentially abusive and wildly ineffective system at all?

Faced with the frustrations and inconsistencies of school shutdowns, I know several parents who simply got together with a few other families, pooled their money to hire a teacher and started their own one-room schoolhouses in their living rooms.

When you can hire a Ph.D. in physics as a math tutor, a classicist for Latin, both for modest expense over the internet, then mix in some history and music, a lot more literature and free play, and thereby offer your children an education superior to any school in the country—why not just do that?

Those, I know, were options not everyone had. But my point is that although the situation had been bad for decades, it was only the shutdowns that finally necessitated a search for alternatives and broke the psychological hold of the status quo.

Many of these trends, of course, were well underway in K-12 before the pandemic hit: home schools, classical schools, charter schools, even unschooling—but the systemic failure during Covid, combined with the bandwidth revolution, have fundamentally changed the game.

So too in higher education. Why pay $50k for an online education that could be had for a small fraction of that? Why submit to the low-grade credentialing and soul-diminishing indoctrination in the first place?

What the past year has revealed, in other words, is that we’re under no obligation to return to the status quo. We will, of course, at last resume the too-long suppressed activities of weddings and funerals and of breaking bread together, and so on; many of us have gone far too long without those.

But there is no reason to return to an essentially abusive and exploitative and madly ineffective educational system, wasting our money and demeaning the souls of our children and youth and fundamentally betraying our country and culture.

No. What Covid has made clear is that the future doesn’t need to look like the past.

In fact, not even the past looks like the past. Our bloated, ossified, high-cost, unresponsive, and ineffective system is in fact highly anomalous by historical standards.

Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Dante, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Johann Sebastian Bach, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, and Maya Angelou: These people had diverse material circumstances, educational backgrounds, and lived in very different times. But do you know what none of them had? A four-year college degree.

Is it not possible that the experiences and institutions that shaped them—from homeschooling to apprenticeships to tutors to vocational schools to religious organizations to boarding schools to self-instruction to a year or two of college—might serve as models for the cultivation of talent again today?

Our current one-size-fits-all approach to higher education—rigid, four-year degree programs steeped in activist ideology, all at exorbitant cost—has been failing badly and for too long.

Tuition has increased 500 percent in the last 30 years, nearly eight times faster than wages. Meanwhile, the effort to increase access through federally-backed student loans has only incentivized further increases in cost and corresponding debt—perversely saddling those least able to carry it with the heaviest burdens and the worst outcomes.

Nor have we lacked for clear-headed assessment of the problems. William F. Buckley sounded the alarm in 1952 with God and Man at Yale. Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Education in the West, which could have been written yesterday, followed in 1965; Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in 1985; while Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, a history of the academy’s ideological takeover, and the long march through the institutions it made possible, appeared more than 20 years ago.

But while the problems of higher ed have been apparent—and seemed intractable—for nearly a century, three major historic developments have lined up to create the conditions now for widespread reimagination and reform

First, there is the quickly growing awareness of the corruption and cost, the ineffectiveness, and debilitating indoctrination of our institutions of higher education; of their upstream influence over every other aspect of our culture from the media to the boardroom; and of the failure of efforts to reform from within. We have reached a tipping point.

Second, there is a bandwidth revolution: the technological breakthroughs in the transfer of information. The internet and accompanying technologies enable us to do things we never imagined possible, to connect people anywhere, and at a very low cost. It is bigger than Gutenberg.

Third, there is the crisis of meaning: We live at a historic inflection point in which millions of people are seeking answers to the loneliness and fragmentation, the degradation and alienation of our world. One needn’t look further than my friend Jordan Peterson to see how great that yearning is—for deeper forms of self-understanding, and more spiritually substantial forms of life. There is a tidal wave of demand.

Each of these is a major historic development of its own, but together they create unprecedented conditions for revolutionary innovation and reform.

Young people—and the not so young—are clamoring for alternatives. How indeed could it be otherwise? Our deepening civic alienation and cultural degradation have people of all ages starved for understanding, for depth and purpose worthy of their own sacred lives.

The pandemic has revealed deep dysfunction, but the real story isn’t Covid-19, but the state of fatal disrepair it has revealed. For at stake in education is not a mere component of our cultural infrastructure, but its most vital activity, its lifeblood: at once the means of individual realization and of the handing on of memory, of knowledge and wisdom from old to young.

Inaction in the face of educational failure is thus the sign of ultimate surrender: the end of the road.

And yet, from slumbering fatalism, and decades of passivity in the face of deepening crisis, we now have a chance to emerge. But that opportunity is also an existential necessity. The realization of each individual, those living now and those yet to come, and the life of our culture, our civilization itself, all depend upon it.

Stephen Blackwood is president of Ralston College. He can be found on Twitter as @stephenblackwd.

HOW MANY STRANDED AMERICANS?

 HOW MANY STRANDED AMERICANS?

John Hinderaker, Powerline 

As Scott has noted, the Biden administration now claims that having extracted around 6,000 Americans from Afghanistan, only a very few remain–a few hundred, or maybe just one hundred. But these numbers are radically different from what the administration was telling us only days ago.

The first estimate I saw from an administration spokesman was that there were between 5,000 and 10,000 Americans in Afghanistan. Just two weeks ago, Jen Psaki told us with seeming specificity that there were 11,000, or perhaps more:

We are — there have been — how the process works, I should say — I’ll tell you — is that there are individuals who will self-identify as American citizens — that number is around 11,000. Beyond that — around the country — beyond that, though, there are individuals who may not have self-identified, who may come and request assistance and come to the airport.

We’re going to work to assist, of course, American citizens, but we also have a responsibility and an obligation to help the men and women who served by our sides, many of your — the sides of your colleagues, as translators, and as interpreters, and our locally employed staff, and others.

Q So, just to confirm, 11,000 in the entire country, not just in Kabul? 

MS. PSAKI: Well, I would just say, that’s the self-identified number, right? So — but we will continue to provide assistance. And we are prioritizing American citizens. We are also working to get additional officials out who have played an important role.

There obviously was some kind of process in which around 11,000 people “self-identified” as American citizens, yet that number has now been dropped to 6,000. Why? Further, subsequent to Psaki’s August 17 press conference the administration estimated that there were 10,000 to 15,000 Americans in Afghanistan.

If the Biden administration has tried to explain why its estimates of the number of Americans in Afghanistan, made just days ago, were so drastically off the mark, I haven’t seen it. Failing a meaningful explanation, one is tempted to assume the worst: that the administration has no idea how many Americans it has left to the mercy of the Taliban and is simply pretending that there were around 6,000 Americans in-country when the evacuation began because that is the number its pathetic operation was able to save.

Biden’s first 200 days

            

Biden’s first 200 days

Hugo Gurdon, Editor, and Chief, Washington Examiner. 

Joe Biden, like most presidents, made much of supposed achievements in his first 100 days. Remember how, arriving in office, he promised 100 million COVID vaccine doses in that period. It was a soft target, for, as some of us pointed out, the vaccination pace on Inauguration Day, for which he could claim no credit, was sufficient to reach his goal. But by touting it, he demonstrated the significance attributed to the 100 days milestone.

Less attention is paid to the 200 days milestone. This is a mistake. For the first 100 days is a three-month blur when an administration is taking shape and its successes and failures haven’t had time to come into focus. It’s in the second hundred days, when the razzmatazz and newness are over and an administration has lost its first freshness, that one can really judge.

Biden’s second hundred days have been an unmitigated disaster.

It was then that inflation soared above 5%. It was on Aug. 9, Biden’s 199th day, that Democrats released their fiscally reckless and culturally destructive $3.5 trillion budget plan, drafted by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders with the intention of reshaping American life with a big expansion of the ballooning welfare state.

It was in Biden’s second 100 days that illegal immigration turned from a mere fiasco into a national crisis. The number of illegal migrants doubled in January to 78,417 compared to the same month of 2020, as Latin Americans accepted Biden’s invitation to come north, no questions asked. The numbers jumped again each month, and by his 100th day, the March numbers were out at a shocking 173,283, five times what they’d been a year earlier. Yet it was only in his second hundred days that it became clear there’d be more than 2 million illegal border crossings this year, that there’d be no decline in arrivals during the intensely hot summer months as the administration has promised, and that Biden had created the worst immigration crisis in more than 20 years.

Then came the worst disaster so far, America’s collapse in Afghanistan. It was on Aug. 10, Biden’s 200th day in office, that the Taliban overran three provincial capitals and it became obvious that their barbarian blitzkrieg would consume the entire country, ending America’s 20-year efforts against them in a humiliating rout.

This debacle is like the turn of a kaleidoscope that rearranges all the pieces into a new, unrecognizable, and startling pattern. The picture of America’s place in the world has been changed irrevocably. Friends and foes everywhere are reassessing their relationship with us. The former are making worried inquiries about whether our “leader” has entirely lost his marbles. The latter, knowing that America under Biden is no longer to be feared, are taunting America with unconcealed contempt.

We are living through a sort of implosion, in which no one seems to be in charge of America and our elected chief executive is a weak and shambolic embarrassment.

This is what Joe Biden has wrought in his first 200 days.

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY: All of us have wondered who is behind this president? He’s clearly not in charge and I think Americans have a right to know who's in charge. Last night on Laura Ingraham's show, I believe it was Congressman [Mark] Green said that he was briefed that the president was told not to close Bagram Air Base and he did it anyway, and so we know that Joe Biden has bad judgment but we also know he’s not there and I’m sorry, 13 military members are dead. Hundreds of Americans are trapped behind enemy lines and the American people deserve to know who is in charge and if he's not up to the job, something has to be done. This is unsustainable.

Dems in Congress should impeach him.

 

If Biden were a Republican, Dems in Congress would have impeached him. They should

Victor Davis Hanson | Tribune Media Services

Biden keeps repeating that he was bound by Trump’s planned withdrawal. Really?

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. 

Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs. 

Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities. 

Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis — only to beg the Kingdom to rush to export more of its hated oil before the U.S. midterms?

Why not, when Biden asks Russia’s Vladimir Putin to request that Russian-related hackers be a little less rowdy in their selection of U.S. targets?

And why not, when our own military jousts with the windmills of "white supremacy" as Afghans fall from U.S. military jets in fatal desperation to reach such a supposedly racist nation?

Biden keeps repeating that he was bound by former President Donald Trump’s planned withdrawal. 

Really?

A mercurial Trump repeatedly demonstrated that he was willing to use air power to protect U.S. personnel and to bomb an Islamic would-be caliphate. The Taliban knew that and so struck when Trump was gone.

Biden claims he was bound by Trump’s decision to withdraw and thus cannot be blamed for his reckless operation of a predetermined departure. But all Biden has done since entering office is destroy Trump pacts, overturning past agreements on energy leases, protocols with Latin America and Mexico on border security, and pipeline contracts.

No sooner did Biden claim he was straitjacketed by Trump than he reversed course to defend not just his own withdrawal but the disastrous manner of it. Biden claims that he has no free will while insisting he would have done nothing differently if he did.

In a sane world, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense would resign. We have heard for too long their careerist boasts about assigning climate change as their chief challenge. For too long they have virtue-signaled their critical race theory credentials to Congress. For too long they have bragged about rooting out alleged white supremacists from their ranks. For too long they have sparred with journalists while fighting Twitter wars and issuing cartoonish commercials attesting to their woke credentials. 

In other words, they sermonized on anything and everything — except their plans to prevent a humiliating military defeat of U.S. forces and their allies. 

Our intelligence and investigatory agencies are just as morally suspect. The legacy of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and Andrew McCabe has been the destruction of the reputations of the CIA, NSA and FBI.

Current and retired intelligence lackeys and careerists all wasted years promulgating Russian "collusion." They swore Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian "disinformation." 

They surveilled and unmasked officials and hatched adolescent plots against an elected president. All that was more important to their careers than warning of the growing threats in Afghanistan. 

In the aftermath of the Afghan debacle, we must de-politicize and de-weaponize these warped agencies and incompetent institutions. 

We could get a symbolic start by pulling security clearances from all retired operatives, officers and diplomats who go on television to offer partisan analysis. 

The retired and pensioned top brass should finally be held to account if they violate tenets of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. When four-star generals lecture the nation that an elected president is a Mussolini or Nazi-like but keep mum during the greatest military setback in a half-century, they should forfeit exemptions from existing military codes.

Retired officers who revolve in and out of corporate defense contractor boards and Pentagon billets should have a cooling-off period of five years before leveraging their inside knowledge of the Pentagon procurement labyrinth.

As for Biden, his team in defeat threatens the victorious Taliban with possible ostracism from global diplomacy as the price of their illiberality. We are to assume that in between executing women, the Taliban will fear losing the chance to visit the U.N. in New York.

Biden has defied a Supreme Court ruling and assumed that it was a good thing to have broken the law. Under his watch, the fate of America’s border, equal enforcement of the laws, economy, energy, safety from crime, foreign policy and racial relations have imploded — and in seven months no less.

If Biden were a Republican, the current Democratic House would have impeached him. It would have been right to have done so.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is the author of more than two dozen books, ranging in topics from ancient Greece to modern America. He lives in Selma, California. 

The Celestial Empire Fights Back

The Celestial Empire Fights Back

Three Asian-American authors offer interesting perspectives on how America can, and ought to be, an example to the world and how to stand up to their school boards.

 Ken Masugi, American Greatness. 

As the Taliban forces America into submission, we wonder about our country’s claim to greatness. What has our global prosperity and power brought us? In Federalist 11, Alexander Hamilton excited his readers’ imagination for a world where America, by its example, would liberate oppressed and backward peoples from enslavement and savagery.  In this way, a strong America is a civilizing force.

Hamilton spreads the revolutionary fire of the Declaration: “Africa, Asia, and America have successively felt [Europe’s] domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the mistress of the world, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit.” 

The Declaration of Independence condemned the barbaric, British-inspired slave revolts of  King George, but the new nation would constitute the greatest slave revolt in human history. “It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race,” Hamilton proclaims. “Union will enable us to do it.” On this point, Lincoln would reassure Americans some 75 years later, and the 20th century has given further proof of America’s model and action for the world.

America once could show corrupt Europe, both its politicians and intellectuals and their American imitators, that only in the new republic can men show their true human selves. Contrary to the nonsense that in America “dogs cease to bark” free American air clears the minds and throats and allows human reason and speech to guide political life.

Although the immigrant Hamilton wanted future Americans from across the seas to come here and settle, he (as did the other founders) wanted citizens who respected and strengthened republican institutions. In other words, they didn’t want just anyone to come.

Today, three of Hamilton’s most effective supporters are the daughter and sons of Asian immigrants who, in various ways, would overthrow the critical race theory emanating from tyrannical German and French sources. These lively minds are the Filipino Chinese-American Yale law professor Amy Chua, Korean-American writer Wesley Yang, and Chinese-American journalist Kenny Xu.

Their arguments should inform today’s patriotic citizens, in particular those who are battling their local school boards and governments against the imposition of alien ideologies attacking the Declaration of Independence. 

Before reading them, I had long thought that the best essay I had read on Asian Americans was Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Asians,” in his 1992 book Days of Obligation. Reflecting on his life in the “Chinese” city of San Francisco, Rodriguez makes trenchant observations about how identity is formed by people other than from one’s own tribe, in his case, Irish nuns and a south Indian relative added to his Mexican ancestry. In school, he became Americanized and “ended up believing in choices as much as any of you do.” As a professor, his Asian students, because they were opposed to it, made him aware that he was putting too much emphasis on class participation. “Like most other American teachers, I equated intelligence with liveliness or defiance.”

In fact, the entire essay, barely 16 pages, is a commentary on Jessica, Shylock’s treacherous daughter, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Shylock is the despised Jewish financier of Venetian prosperity. Venice’s Christian businessmen mock him while seeking low-interest loans from him. Shylock is content with this commercial relationship, but his daughter falls to the wooing of a young Christian lad and loots Shylock’s home, running off with the young man. Immigrant children observe Rodriguez, become Jessicas, rejecting spiritual tradition and faith while taking their fathers’ gold and then disappearing with other uprooting persons. “Foolish immigrant parents.” (An excerpt appears here.)  

Each of the Asian authors mentioned above deals with the flourishing and thwarting of immigrant ambitions in America. 

Amy Chua in her remarkable (and quite misunderstood) memoir—not about the superiority of Chinese parents but, as she says, “about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.”

In her vivid account of raising her daughters, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua captivated and horrified readers. She detailed with alternate glee and frustration her demanding approach to disciplining her young daughters to become successful musicians and model Chinese daughters. (An excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.)

Having now read the entire book, I see I had initially overlooked its literary qualities. (I had first heard of Chua when Patrick Buchanan praised her first book. Many scholars too, I add, approved of its observation about how ethnic conflicts shape national policies.) 

The war story—a metaphor I adopt from the mom’s account—between mom and daughters (ranging from threats of starving to burning stuffed animals) and brutal music practice sessions—is deliberately appalling and, at least in parts, exaggerated. It is a book to be taken seriously though not always literally. It shows the toughest of tough love, and it seems she succeeded, at least according to the glowing profiles that emerge. (Today the older daughter, Sophie, having clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, serves in the U.S. Army in the JAG corps, while the younger daughter Lulu attends Harvard law school.) Their father, Yale law professor, Jed Rubenfeld, occasionally intervenes in the book when the children blow up at mom. 

Chua advises, “Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.” Chinese parents demand excellence. Often the Chinese approach gets results, while the Western often produces mediocrity and insecurity. (Later she admits that other immigrants have similar ethics. The cartoon version is seen here.) 

We see Professor Chua’s comeuppance—and her becoming the student—when, in a kind of postmodern development, she and her daughters critique the book as it is being written; by then the kids are in high school. 

Mother: “I refuse to buckle to politically correct Western social norms that are obviously stupid . . . I actually think America’s Founding Fathers had Chinese values.” That is, as Sophia rebuts, not a “totally Chinese way of thinking” but rather “an American way of thinking.” 

Instead of hiding the book from the local politicians who want to discriminate against high-achieving Asian-American students, it should elicit admiration and not resignation from parents who might even be tempted to resort to bribery (or its close relative, political power) to get their kids into colleges they regard as socially acceptable. This Tiger Mother is what you’re up against, and she will devour you.

Patriotic activists might also get a mixed message from Wesley Yang’s 2018 collection of profiles, Souls of Yellow Folk. The title is deceiving, for we might think of it as a version of W.E.B. DuBois’s classic, Souls of Black Folk, but Yang’s “yellow” does not refer merely to race but to various forms of cowardice. He crafts discerning profiles (like a disgusting spectacle one can’t turn away from) of horrifying and often appalling people such as the Korean-American student mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho. “He looks like me . . . ”

And as to his identity, Yang also confesses, “I have never dated a Korean woman. I don’t have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one.” He notes, with some admiration, that Chua’s Battle Hymn is “a very American project—one no traditional Chinese person would think to undertake.” Yet the academic assertiveness, he notes, does not produce Asian-American prominence in the ruling class or even corporate management. 

Do Asians lack imagination? Yang in a recent interview describes the regnant “successor ideology,” the confused racial advocacy that serves as racial justice equity in social and academic contexts.  

In exploring non-Asian topics, Yang portrays cowardice or reticence, a form of mikropsuchia or unmanly lack of ambition, in grotesque online sex sites, an internet genius who committed suicide when confronted for hacking the academic repository JSTOR, and finally, racial divisions over exploitative episodes—flyers with the message, “It’s OK to Be White” and indeterminate but actionable definitions of “white supremacy.” The calculated cowardice of school boards and local government produces an “intricate system of racial casuistry, worthy of Jesuits, . . .  a beguiling compound of insight, partial truths, circular reasoning, and dogmatism operating within a self-enclosed system of reference immunized against critique and optimized for virality.”  No friend of Trump, Yang is nonetheless a spirited voice for reason. 

In An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy, Kenny Xu has provided more reasonable (or at least less yellow-bellied) school boards and their energetic allies a comprehensive guide to how politics, culture, and the new “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ethic damage the futures of Asian-American students and employees. 

The young author’s book details how Harvard (and other elite schools) craft policies that result in discriminatory practices against Asian-Americans in order to bolster more black, Hispanic, and favored white applicants. On academic standing alone, the Asians clearly prevailed over the others. The book as a whole is not about the cases but how the prejudices that led to Harvard’s approach are found in society in general. Asians are an “inconvenient minority,” which overcomes discriminatory barriers but fall prey to other, invidious practices. I have previously reviewed this book for Liberty Fund’s Law and Liberty site, but Xu’s understanding of “meritocracy” needs a defense.

Meritocracy is a republic that requires loyalty to the regime, and in the American instance, an understanding of and action promoting the founding principles of equality and liberty. Compare what Aristotle says about officeholders: they must love the republic, first of all, and next perform their duties well, and finally be just and virtuous. Woke education attacks the first two in the name of a twisted notion of the third. 

As Xu’s book points out, leading Asian-American academics already have adopted the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ethic. His response, focusing on Asian-American super skills, is wanting. His overall argument needs to satisfy the patriotic and virtuous elements of citizenship in order to be part of Jefferson’s natural aristocracy. This would be a kind of populism needed to attach these great performers to their country. That would obliterate Harvard’s and other woke admissions policies that are subverting academia. Of course there are plenty of other changes required before Harvard and higher education generally can be made safe for democracy, but that can be the subject of Xu’s next book.

These resources and authors should be familiar to all Americans interested in giving the American democratic republic a vital future. Each answers Richard Rodriguez’s observations and gives advice that would produce more grateful Jessicas. 

In antebellum America, The Merchant of Venice was the Shakespeare play performed most frequently. Jessica’s father Shylock initially wins his court case demanding a pound of flesh from his enemy Antonio. When, in Act IV, scene 1, the Venetian judge asks that Shylock relent from this barbaric demand, he replies,

You have among you many a purchased slave, . . . 

You use in abject and in slavish parts,

Because you bought them: shall I say to you,

Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?

. . . You will answer

‘The slaves are ours:’ so do I answer you: 

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,

Is dearly bought; ’tis mine and I will have it.

If you deny me, fie upon your law!

There’s an even deeper tie of the Merchant of Venice to America: not just America’s conquest of the Jessicas so dear to immigrant fathers but America’s grappling with an ultimate rejection of slavery through its embrace of equality. That is another tale I’d like to relate to sometime.

Ken Masugi, Ph.D., is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He has been a speechwriter for two cabinet members, and a special assistant for Clarence Thomas when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Masugi is co-author, editor, or co-editor of 10 books on American politics. He has taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he was Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor; James Madison College of Michigan State University; the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University; and Princeton University.

Are We in a Revolution and Don’t Even Know It?

 

Are We in a Revolution and Don’t Even Know It?

We are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them. 

The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable. 

“Workers of the world unite!” was the old Marxist internationalist war cry. The perceived enemies of coerced socialism were nationalism— and the idea of singular countries defined by borders containing unique citizens legally distinct from mere migratory residents, and sharing ties and traditions that transcended race and class. All that is now problematic. 

If it is true that two million illegal aliens will cross the southern border with impunity in the current fiscal year, then the Biden agenda is apparently to help erode the idea of citizenship and anybody defined as an American. Under the socialist ethos, the indigent in Yucatan and the impoverished migrant from Nigeria have as much right to enter and live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And their respective rights under the living Constitution are now nearly identical. 

In just seven months, our southern border has vanished. Apparently, it was an artificial construct that obstructed the migrations of the global community. We are back to a natural, pre-civilizational and Rousseauian idea of freeing migrating tribes from the chains of civilization. And what better way to start than dispensing with unique borders, citizenship, and the idea of a nation state? 

Socialism aligns foreign policy with the interests of the global oppressed rather than the citizens of a particular nation. In reductionist terms, what do lifting sanctions on Iran and appeasing its theocracy, reaching out to Hamas and snubbing Israel, and allowing the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan have in common? Just as the United States is trying to rebrand itself as a sort of new, non-Western nation, so it clumsily seeks to recalibrate its foreign policy to cease support for the overdog, the American client, and the more Westernized. We are to believe that an empowered Persian Shiite crescent offers equity to the silenced of the Middle East. The Taliban, perhaps regrettably, better represents indigenous Afghan culture than does the Westernized bourgeois elite in Kabul. Hezbollah and Hamas are the more authentic Middle Easterners than the Western Zionist interlopers of Israel. In other words, our foreign policy is in a revolutionary flux. 

Liberals try to yank capitalism to the left; but true revolutionaries seek to dismantle the very tenets upon which it is based. No wonder that a recent poll showed most Democrats had a more favorable view (59 percent) of socialism than of capitalism (49 percent). 

So, the Right shouts “They are socialists!” And the Left fires back “smears and lies!” while quietly the Biden Administration has already begun systematically to warp the rules of free-market capitalism. In other words, we are apparently all to be socialists now. 

By continuing to suspend rental payments to landlords who have no redress to the courts for violations of their contractual leases, the government essentially has redefined private property as we know it. Who really owns an apartment or a room in a house if the occupant has not paid rent since last spring? Is the de facto owner the renter in physical control of the unit, or the increasingly impotent title holder who must still pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep? 

Do we still recognize the principle that those who owe money must pay it back? Biden is talking about vastly expanding any prior idea of student loan debt cancellations by massive new amnesties. As capitalism transitions into socialism, what about the parents who saved to pay their children’s tuition, the students who worked part-time and took only the units they could pay for, or the working-class youths who decided loans were too risky and preferred instead at 18 to go straight to work? 

Are they hapless Kulaks? And what do we name the indebted students and the loan-sharking universities who finagled a collective $1.7 trillion in student debt? Revolutionaries? Who pays for what others have incurred? 

Supply and demand under capitalism adjudicate wages and thus the rate of unemployment. But have we ever seen an expanding economy seeking to meet pent-up consumer demands for goods and services without the labor to meet that need? The workers are everywhere and nowhere, but the government has deliberately persuaded millions not to return officially to work, given rising unemployment compensation is more remunerative than the wages of working. Have we now finally embraced the old Marxist canard, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? 

Inflation and the devaluation of the currency are now seemingly a good thing; printing dollars erodes the savings of the thrifty and money spreads to those who allegedly need and deserve it. 

Note we owe nearly $30 trillion in national debt. Yet as the Biden Administration runs a $2 trillion annual deficit, it pushes an “infrastructure” bill that will mean additionally somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion of more printed cash. Ronald Reagan talked of “starving the beast”—cutting taxes to deprive the voracious bureaucratic state of its fiscal food. 

Now instead we are “gorging the beast”: exponentially expanding government with so much debt that higher taxes are inevitable. And with the red ink comes redistribution in the socialist sense of borrowing more to give to the deserving, and taking more from the undeserving—to borrow even more for the more deserving still. 

Socialism does not believe in the construct of “merit,” given it is predicated on free will that trends supposedly towards selfishness, and results in an absence of “equity”: that is why colleges have dropped standardized tests for applicants, and are jettisoning traditional ideas of “exclusionary” honors programs. 

Remember, under socialism, in T-ball style, we all win—or lose. Our shared purposes are not to help meet and surpass purportedly artificially constructed standards of excellence to ensure greater prosperity, security, and comfort, but to demolish such ossified constructs, and rebrand the formerly failed as the now successful. 

The revolution has already redefined crime as a construct in the eye of the bourgeois beholder. Our woke elite told us to cool it for 120 days of last summer’s riots, looting and arson, since in the words of the “1619 Project” architect and former New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Torch a federal courthouse, a church, or police precinct and why worry over mere “brick and mortar”? Take over a few city blocks and, presto, we have a “summer of love.” 

“Defund the police” became a socialist slogan supposedly to remind us that “crime” is what the rich call going into Walgreens to grab something they never fret about needing. COVID-19 is not the real reason why prisoners are freed from jails and prison to commit new crimes at an alarming rate. Indeed, those people didn’t really commit crimes so much as reflect society’s bad karma of arbitrarily labeling what they did as “crimes” in the first place, which in truth were often simply cries from the heart.  

Two years ago, it would have been considered absurd that youth would ride bikes into drug stores and steal with impunity as security guards watched, or thieves could enter into Neiman-Marcus department stores and skip out with thousands of dollars of rich people’s favorites. Over $2 billion in “stuff” was destroyed in 2020. And almost none of the violence was ever properly investigated, the perpetrators arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, or incarcerated. 

In such revolutionary times, no one knows any more what is and is not a crime. Illegally storming the border when positive for COVID-19? Destroying a public statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Looting a corporate chain store? Knocking out an Asian-American septuagenarian? Or turning over the tables of Jewish-Americans as they eat? Taking over municipal blocks and declaring the confiscation an autonomous zone? Not crimes. “Illegal parading” inside the U.S. Capitol building? Crime.

Twenty years ago, on the eve of 9/11, there were earlier heated debates over cash reparations. The acrimony has now again resurfaced after the rioting that followed the death of George Floyd. 

Yet the Left this time around did not envision reparations as just monetary gifting for the distant descendants of the enslaved and the generations who grew up under Jim Crow. Rather, it is already recalibrating the Great Society doctrine of “proportional representation” quotas, achieved through “disparate impact,” into new reparatory and disproportionate quotas and allotments. 

We are jettisoning the old idea under our Lebanese-like system of racial spoils that each group deserved representation in hiring and admission commensurate to its percentages of the population—trumping many traditional meritocratic criteria of examination scores, grades, or prior work experience. 

No more. If one examines current fall 2021 entering classes at many of our elite universities, many minority groups will enroll with numbers disproportionate to their current demographic percentages but proportionate to the idea of reparatory “overrepresentation.” 

The same holds true of the racial make-up of new television shows and commercials, pilot training programs, and corporate board room representation. Again, the idea is that blacks, for example, should be represented in percentages exceeding 12 percent in any coveted honors or awards—to make up for past underrepresentation, given prior mere proportionality offers no reparatory justice. 

In a strange way, for all the furor over reparation payments, the issue already is beginning to be settled quietly by our major institutions. Note class consideration will have no role in such disproportionate and compensatory action. 

Another revolutionary crackpot idea was ending nuclear power and fossil fuels and replacing them with wind and solar generation that would power our homes and our new envisioned national fleet of electric cars. No one quite believed the revolutionary Left would be so suicidal as to spike the energy costs of the middle class, make the United States dependent again on imported oil from the autocratic Middle East and Russia, and strangle the oil and gas industry that had enriched America. 

But without much debate, Joe Biden has cancelled the huge ANWR oil and gas project in Alaska. He shut down the Keystone Pipeline and destroyed Alberta’s export of oil to the United States. He nixed all new fossil fuel leases on federal lands. He discouraged frackers from using their full inventory of rigs. As gasoline heads to $5 a gallon, Joe Biden, in the months before the next midterm elections, asks OPEC to send us its hated carbon fuel to help our addicted, but suddenly furious, commuter-voters.  

Here is a final reminder of why the revolution has already turned society upside down. The canniest elements of the aristocracy always cut deals with the revolution and indeed often remain the nomenklatura. What unites Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the Silicon Valley billionaire crowd are the exemptions they purchased from revolutionary justice. 

In the old days they would have gotten dachas on the Black Sea coast and three dial phones on their desks. These days they keep their billions if they give a hundred million dollars in “civility” bounties here to Van Jones (ex-truther and expert on why white people are supposedly responsible for mass shootings) or there seed $500 million to key voting precincts to help ensure the good people defeat the bad. 

In 1961, Cubans were not quite aware that they were experiencing a Marxist takeover. Nor were Russians fully cognizant in 1917 of the plans that the Bolsheviks had for them over the next few decades. It is hard to see during anarchy, chaos, and collapsing institutions that leftists still have an agenda for what will emerge on the other side. 

In other words, we are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.

It’s Not Just About The Masks

 

It’s Not Just About The Masks

We have not just lost our minds, but given them up voluntarily.

Peter Van Buren, The American Conservative.  

It was never just a mask, it has always been a way of thinking. “Mask” is just shorthand.

I got dumped from my volunteer work at the Hawaiian Humane Society for choosing not to wear a mask outside while walking their dogs. Neither science, the CDC, nor the state requires a mask outdoors, and I’m fully vaccinated. Some staff bot saw my naked face and informed me of their “policy.” I asked why they had such a nonsensical policy, and her only answer was “it is our policy.” The conversation ended like an ever-growing percentage of conversations in America now end, with her saying, “Do I need to call security?” I didn’t enjoy it, but I think she did.

I was left with no good to do this week, and a simple, real Covid-19 question. Why are fully vaccinated people treated the same as the unvaccinated? Everyone on the plane wears a mask and goes through the same mock social distancing. Everyone at a restaurant, office, concert, etc., does the same. The answer is at the heart of whether public policy in America will shift and allow us to crawl back into our lives.

The biggest reason for treating vaxxed and unvaxxed people the same miserable way is the claim that vaccinated people can still get Covid enough to pass it on. Funny thing is you can actually “get” the measles even after being vaccinated. The vax is actually only 97 percent effective, similar to the Covid ones. But nobody talks about measles or demands we wear a mask to prevent their spread. We simply accept and deal with the risk.

The next question is really, really hard to find an answer to. How many vaccinated people actually get Covid, the so-called “breakthrough” cases?

That exact number is critical because it is the pivot point for the risk vs. gain decision our society needs to make. If we cannot make a wise choice we will be struggling with and fighting over the restrictions on our lives and livelihoods forever. If we assume we’ll never have full vaccination and that breakthrough cases are a non-zero number and likely always will be then we need to make an informed decision about risk. So is it a non-zero number like, duh, “smoking causes cancer,” or a non-zero number like “very few people die from meteor strikes (or from the measles)?”

The current public policy decisions on risk are haphazard. All 50 states have different rules, many large cities, too, and each and every company. There are different rules if you take a bus or want to go dancing. One grocery store demands masks, another does not. It makes no sense. It becomes not a considered decision but an example of lack of public policy leadership. Into that leadership void enters superstition, pseudoscience, politics, voodoo, and most of all, fear.

So what are the chances of a fully vaccinated person getting a breakthrough infection? It turns out this pivotal question is not clearly answerable, but we act as if it is, with consequences for our lives, mental health, education, commerce, and more. Even for our stray dogs.

I started with Google and “What are the chances of getting COVID after being fully vaccinated?” expecting the answer in 0.0039 seconds, like when you ask what year some historical event happened. Nope. AARP says “less than one percent of fully vaccinated individuals have been hospitalized with, or have died from, COVID.” That’s a small number but does not fully address the question.

Over to NPR, which reports, “On rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others.” What does rare occasions mean? This is supposed to be, you know, science, so we finally get some numbers from the CDC: Out of 159 million fully vaccinated people, the CDC documented 5,914 cases of fully vaccinated people who were hospitalized or died from Covid-19, and 75 percent of them were over age 65. That means only 0.0000037 percent of vaxxed people were hospitalized or died, most of them elderly. That is a very small number. It is a lot less than one percent and a lot less than rare. Chances of dying in a car wreck are many tens of thousands of times higher and yet we drive on.

However, it still does not answer the question of how dangerous the vaxxed but unmasked are in terms of transmitting the virus. No one really knows. Recent scare headlines calling for reinstated restrictions and vax mandates are based on a single outbreak, 469 cases, in one city in Massachusetts, that appears to show (at variance with existing studies) 75 percent of those infected had been vaccinated and oddly, almost all of those people (87 percent) were male. Most of the infected were asymptomatic or experienced mild symptoms. No deaths.

What is believed is the a) Delta variant of Covid makes a b) temporary home inside a vaccinated man’s nose or upper respiratory area, c) outside the immune system. It waits there to be d) blown out and then be e) received by an f) unvaccinated person. So, all these things have to work out for it to matter. It is not simply a chore of toting up how many vaccinated people tested positive and then hitting the panic button. As one doctor put it, “We really need to shift toward a goal of preventing serious disease and disability and medical consequences, and not worry about every virus detected in somebody’s nose.”

Bottom Line 1: We need to stop the obsessive, simplistic, and misleading counting of positive tests and focus on real world consequences.

Requiring everyone wear masks again based on one outbreak may seem as if it can’t hurt, but it does. Organizations waste time and credibility enforcing measures that have limited if any impact (consider how many masks are so old, dirty, improperly worn, etc., to be fully useless.) To simply dismiss the reality of numbers with a blithe “well you can’t be too careful” only works if you imagine Covid restrictions have no secondary or tertiary effects.

Economies have been devastated. Education has disappeared for large numbers of kids. Despair grows menacingly. Suicide attempts by teen girls increased 26 percent during summer 2020 and 50 percent during winter of 2021. We are killing children to save them.

Economic inequality got a booster shot. The power of government has grown alarmingly. The ability to shape how we live, shop, work, and eat has been handed randomly to a near-endless range of actors, from the president to governors empowered with “emergency edicts” to clerks ever-anxious to call security not on shoplifters but on an exposed nose.

Americans’ irrational fears were created by politicians and the media, and have become a profit center. The New York Times for months ran columns saying Trump’s vaccine was another government syphilis experiment. The vice president refused to take the shot during the campaign. Biden took it, then went right on masking as if it didn’t work.

It was a very successful campaign to propagate uncertainty for a political purpose. It is all their fault vaccine acceptance now varies by political party, where we live, and how much education we have. It’s a form of blowback—the information operation worked too well.

So we won’t concede the reality kids are unlikely to get sick and should go to school. That the vast majority of deaths occur among the elderly with comorbidities, not the general population. That ill-fitting masks and wiping down groceries with Clorox are theater. That the debate has become a political argument instead of an evidence-based one. That everybody agrees the CDC has lost credibility until one side needs it for some partisan purpose. That previously healthcare decisions started with the premise of “first, do no harm,” while today there is no conversation allowed about the balance of benefits and damages. That we simply tally the collateral damage while the virus remains unaffected.

Bottom Line 2: If we are to heal as a society there is only one answer, at some point we must simply ask what works and do that.

But we lack the political leadership to say what’s true, so we’re going back to “let’s just argue about masks and mandates.” Meanwhile the virus continues to find unvaccinated hosts. The economy won’t snap back. Biden is facing a mini civil war over required vaccinations and restarting lockdowns but has no plan. Things will hit the fan in September as Hot Vax Summer sputters, when every school district does something different, and federal unemployment supplements run out.

People have grown weary of being afraid and grown weary of being subject to the paranoid demands of safety fetishists. Many did what they were told to do—get vaxxed—only to find themselves stuck inside the same dysfunctional loop of mask/unmask. We are killing ourselves. Somehow that must be factored into our Covid response.

Bottom Line 3: We can’t resolve the pandemic until we end the panic and the politics. Can Biden do that?

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

What is American wokeness really about?

 What is American wokeness really about?

Victor Davis Hanson, JWV. 

Most Americans were as indifferent to the U.S. women's soccer team's recent loss to Sweden in the Olympics as they were excited about the team's World Cup win in 2019.

In between was the team's nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue-signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg, becoming more pinched the more she is tuned out.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac used her corporate grifting to buy four homes. The one she bought in California's Topanga Canyon is surrounded by a new $35,000 security fence.

Critical race theory guru Ibram X. Kendi offers virtual, one-hour workshops for $20,000 a pop. He is franchising woke re-education kits — in between bouts of damning capitalism as a catalyst of racism.

The woke movement is a slicker, more sophisticated and far more grandiose version of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's shakedowns of the 1990s. Those, at least, were far more honest in leveraging cash with charges of racism — and came without the academic gobbledygook of critical race theory.

Our freeways are jammed. Airports are crammed. Labor is short. Huge pent-up consumer demand for essentials and entertainment outpaces supply. Yet Major League Baseball's recent All-Star Game saw record low television viewership — about a quarter of the audience of 40 years ago, when there were 100 million fewer Americans.

The Summer Olympic Games are getting anemic TV ratings. The NBA's crashing TV ratings have followed the downward trajectory of the NFL's ratings. Woke sports earn the same public disgust as the accusatory and boring Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.

Cable news networks CNN and MSNBC fueled the story that former President Donald Trump allegedly colluded with Russia. They contextualized (to excuse) the summer looting and rioting of 2020. And they cheered on two impeachments as a prelude to their 24/7 woke drumbeat. Their ratings, too, have now dived.

Never has TV been more politicized. Sitcoms, dramas and commercials are designed more to resonate woke messaging than to entertain. So naturally, dismal TV ratings reflect the expected public boredom that ensues when art serves politics.

How many times will disingenuous Dr. Anthony Fauci swear that he never sent federal money to the Wuhan virology lab for gain-of-function research, or blame his critics for pointing out his gyrating advice on masks, or offer yet another noble lie on herd immunity?

In short, Americans are worn out from elite virtue-signaling and woke performance art from critical race theory capitalists, multimillionaire CEOs, revolving-door Pentagon brass, Malibu celebrities and credentialed elite.

The problem is not just that most of America is exhausted from being smeared as racists, or hearing that a wonderful country — the most free, just, equitable, affluent and leisured in civilization's history — must continually pay penance for its past and present. The public is more tired of projectionist hypocrisy. Those who scream the loudest are usually the most guilty of woke crimes.

The woke madness coincides with an epidemic of crises that go largely ignored as a distracted America cannibalizes itself.

The border is being breached at a time of pandemic. Migrants barge in without either COVID-19 testing or vaccinations — during a coronavirus spike that has government officials talking about going door to door to roust out American citizens to get vaccinated.

Whiteness is supposedly the cause of America's problems. But our inner cities are suffering historic levels of violent crime. Couldn't our critical race theory accusers take time out from their merchandising to address the soaring violence?

The Biden administration denies that huge deficit spending and generous cash payments to workers fueled inflation. But America hasn't seen anything like the current price hikes and labor shortages in the last 40 years.

The military, CIA and FBI have lost the confidence of the public — and not just because of their woke politicking. They are perceived as distracted and ignoring their primary missions of winning wars, catching terrorists before they strike, and offering superb intelligence about our enemies.

Wokeness is many things. But increasingly it seems a cover for careerism, profiteering and utter incompetence.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

Cringe worthy Joe Biden...

Joe, this is elder abuse, where is your family? 

Absolute farce, Biden-Lemon town hall

 

The absolute farce that was the Biden-Lemon town hall

Joe Concha, The Hill

The activism that infects much of modern journalism was featured under the lights of primetime on Wednesday night during President Biden's CNN town hall in Cincinnati.

Exhibit A came when the topic turned to the filibuster and the president signaling that abolishing it would throw Congress “into chaos,” likely angering many on the far left, including the moderator. 

“If you were to filibuster, you had to stand on the floor and hold the floor,” Biden said in explaining why he supports returning to a time when senators had to be present in the Senate chamber to filibuster.

“So, you had to take — there were significantly fewer filibusters in those days. In the middle of the civil rights movement.”

“Let me talk to you about that,” CNN host and town hall moderator Don Lemon attempted to interrupt.

"Well, let me finish my answer, because I'd tell you what I'd do. I would go back to that, where you have to maintain the floor. You have to stand there and talk and hold the floor. You can't just say..."

"I understand that," Lemon, now playing the role of activist, jumped in again. "But what difference does that -- if you hold the floor for, you know, a day or a year, what difference does it make?"

“Here's the thing for me,” Lemon continued, shedding the last pretense of objectivity. “You talked about people -- and this is important for people who look like me. My grandmother would sit around when I was a kid, 5th grade, had a 5th grade education. I learned that she couldn't read when I was doing my homework. And she would tell me stories about people asking her to count the number of jelly beans in the jar – or the soap in – so why is protecting the filibuster, is that more important than protecting voting rights, especially for people who fought and died for that?"

Oh, what an absolute farce. 

Lemon was supposed to be the town hall’s moderator, not the lead spokesman of Blow Up the Filibuster PAC. 

This is the same anchor who claimed during a recent PBS interview: "I don’t do opinion. And I know — the difference for me is, I do point of view."

What is it about the filibuster – and the prospect of abolishing it – that exposes so many “journalists” for the activists they really are?

“When it comes to the filibuster, immigration is a big issue, of course, related to the filibuster, but there's also Republicans who are passing bill after bill trying to restrict voting rights," PBS's Yamiche Alcindor said during Biden’s first and only formal press conference in March. "[Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer's calling it in an existential threat to democracy.

"Why not back a filibuster rule that at least gets around issues, including voting rights or immigration? [South Carolina Congressman] Jim Clyburn, someone, of course, who you know very well, has backed the idea of a filibuster rule when it comes to civil rights and voting rights," Alcindor finally concluded.

Yup. That was an actual question. And not included in this "question" was Alcindor failing to quote then-Sen. Biden's own words back to him from a speech he called one of the most important of his career in 2005, regarding said filibuster. 

"It is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country," Biden said in 2005 in arguing against eliminating the Senate filibuster. "No longer would the Senate be that 'different kind of legislative body' that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the 'saucer' to cool the passions of the immediate majority."

The only decent questions to come out of the CNN town hall were asked by audience members, most notably from the co-founder and owner of Cincinnati restaurant group Thunderdome.

"We employ hundreds of hard-working team members throughout the state of Ohio and throughout the country. And we're looking to hire more every day as we try to restart our restaurant business. The entire industry, amongst other industries, continue to struggle to find employees," said John Lanni in reflecting the sentiment of many restaurant owners across the country. "How do you and the Biden administration plan to incentivize those who haven't returned to work yet? Hiring is our top priority right now."

Biden went on to filibuster – for lack of a better term – for minutes before making this intellectually insulting and evidence-free conclusion: "I think it really is a matter of people deciding now that they have opportunities to do other things, and there's a shortage of employees. People are looking to make more money and to bargain. And so I think your business and the tourist business is really going to be in a bind for a little while."

Lanni seemed unimpressed with the answer. “I was hoping he would recognize it is every industry’s dilemma,” Lanni told the Cincinnati Enquirer afterwards. “We are in a labor crisis and we need to find a way to incentivize people to get back to work. I just heard restaurants are going to have a hard road going forward and that we need to pay our workers more. That’s happening and it’s still not enough."

He added: "I feel like he didn’t really answer the question." 

The final question of the evening went to Lemon, who ended things appropriately, considering the tone and context of the evening. Per the CNN transcript:

Lemon: "Mr. President, you've been the big guy for six months now in the White House. Can you take us behind the scenes, something that was extraordinary or unusual that happened that stands out to you?"

Biden: "Yeah, 'Mr. President, you didn't close the door. ... Mr. President, what the hell are you going out at this time for?'" (Laughter) "You know, it's a wonderful honor. As you can tell, I hope I have very good manners, but I'm not very hung up on protocol." (More laughter.)

The joke is on you, the American viewer or voter who simply wants the president to be challenged on the myriad of problems facing the country: Rising inflation (the president says his spending bills would reduce inflation), skyrocketing violent crime (Biden argues it's a gun problem), a border that isn't secure (with a record number of migrants entering the country this year, topping 1.1 million recently) and an an opioid crisis that is killing a record number of Americans (with a 30 percent jump in drug overdoses in 2020 over 2019).  

No matter: Here's how the network is spinning the event.

In his CNN town hall, Biden tackled Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and misinformation and delivered some tough economic love as he discussed pressing issues.

Part of Biden's tackling of COVID-19 included his claim that vaccines prevent people from getting the virus. (It doesn't — just ask those six Texas Democrats and a White House staffer who tested positive in breakthrough cases recently.) 

And then there's his answer about whether children 12 and younger should be vaccinated. This is verbatim: "The question is whether or not we should be in a position where, you, uh, um, are why can't the, the, the experts say we know that this virus is, in fact, uh, um, is going to be, or, excuse me, we know why all the drugs approved are not temporarily approved." 

Got that?

Biden hasn't held a formal press conference in 119 days. If last night's performance – with the friendliest of friendly moderators largely running the show – is any indication of how Biden would perform in a free-wheeling session with the press, then don't expect to see him in that kind of format anytime soon. 

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist for The Hill and a Fox News contributor.

The People v. Critical Race Theory

The People v. Critical Race Theory

Lawsuits are a vital tool in the struggle against race-based programming in public schools.

Kimberly Hermann, City-Journal 

The battleground for America’s future is in our nation’s K-12 public schools. Public schools across the country have replaced traditional education with race-based programming in the name of “equity” that evidently justifies punishing students as young as four years old based on the color of their skin.

For years, critical race theory in schools flew under the radar, but now, thanks to investigative reporting by Christopher Rufo and others, parents have seen enough. They want their state-funded schools to stop promoting concepts like race essentialism that divide Americans into groups based solely on skin color.

America remains a government of laws, not men. The American Founders knew that a strong government could threaten liberty, so they dispersed powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches and then placed ultimate sovereignty in the hands of the people. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, our federal structure assigns unique powers to each branch of government for “keeping each other in their proper places”—the critical separation of powers.

Public schools are an arm of the government. The check on their power resides in the courtroom. It is long-settled law in America that the government cannot discriminate against people because of the color of their skin. We call this equality under the law, and it is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment and in our civil rights laws.

“Classifications of citizens solely on the basis of race are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” the Supreme Court has declared. “They threaten to stigmatize individuals by reason of their membership in a racial group and to incite racial hostility.”

It was to defend these principles that a brave teacher in Evanston, Illinois, represented by the Southeastern Legal Foundation, where I am general counsel, recently filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop Evanston/Skokie School District 65 from discriminating against its teachers and students on the basis of race through illegal and unconstitutional teacher training, classroom curriculum, and overall policies. The lawsuit became necessary after the Biden administration withdrew, without explanation or legal justification, the Department of Education’s January 2021 finding that the school district’s policies and procedures violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since 2017, District 65 has openly declared its commitment “to focusing on race as one of the first visible indicators of identity.” The lawsuit challenges what this commitment looks like in practice. For example, the district required its teachers to attend mandatory “antiracist” training, part of which involved segregating teachers into racially exclusive affinity groups and requiring them to engage in racial discrimination against one another. District 65 also required teachers to participate in mandatory “privilege walks,” in which they were segregated by skin color. Through these trainings, teachers were conditioned to see one another’s skin color first and foremost.

District 65 then turned to students. It divided them into racially exclusive affinity groups, required them to participate in racially segregated “privilege” walks, and administered race surveys to students. The district’s curriculum for pre-K through eighth grade includes books that reinforce discriminatory messages, such as Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.

Unfortunately, the facts of the lawsuit against District 65 are not unique. Parents and teachers across the United States need to speak up. Legislators need to uphold their oath to the Constitution. More lawsuits will no doubt be needed to stop school districts from implementing practices that turn the idea of “equity” into a license to punish Americans because of their skin color.

Kimberly Hermann is general counsel for Southeastern Legal Foundation, a national constitutional public interest law firm and policy center. 

Blinken’s obscene invitation to the United Nations

 

Blinken’s obscene invitation to the United Nations

Post Editorial Board. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s invitation to UN “experts” to investigate “the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia” in the United States is an utter travesty.

Bits of Blinken’s announcement were pure boilerplate, e.g.: “Great nations such as ours do not hide from our shortcomings; they acknowledge them openly and strive to improve with transparency.”

But the UN human-rights bureaucracy is all about politics, not truth. Most of the functionaries are left-leaning hacks, while the higher ranks respond mainly to orders from back home — from nations that mostly aren’t democracies and hold natural rights in utter contempt. Iran, China, Russia — countries that would never allow, much less invite, such an investigation will hold up the report as evidence of the Evils of America (while their despotic leaders chuckle to themselves about our self-destruction).

So the UN special rapporteurs on racism and minority issues that Blinken specifically invited to come take a look (along with “all UN experts who report and advise on thematic human rights issues”) are guaranteed to accentuate the negative, basically endorsing all the claims of American radicals and then some. UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has already endorsed reparations, a hot-button issue for the US left.

Sadly, Team Biden is routinely siding with racial radicals across the board, embracing pernicious “critical race theory” (and the tenet that all whites are irredeemably racist) in policy and in training across the government, including in the military.

Blinken and other Bidenites think they’re winning easy points with their party’s noisome left (or, worse, buy this bunk themselves), but it’s a huge loser with the great American center. And it’s beyond appalling that the head of the State Department actually invited UN apparatchiks to come in and support America’s own far-left culture-warriors.

Fair trade....

 

NSA reading private emails, planned to leak

So, NSA is in bed with the media, hey, defund the NSA...

NSA has been reading my private emails, planned to leak the contents

Intelligence agencies are not the friends of Americans, they are dangerous

 Tucker Carlson | Fox News.   

Last week, we told you that the Biden administration's largest intelligence-gathering agency, the NSA, had been reading my private emails. Even noting that out loud is weird. It's one of those segments we never thought we would do ever. 

But the country has changed that much that fast. And honestly, the whole thing was kind of shocking. The government was spying on us? Come on. It seemed crazy, but it's true. And no one in Washington appeared to be shocked in the slightest. In fact, the usual shills right after our segment had a ready explanation for it. 

Either it never happened at all, they said, just a cable news show lying for ratings, or there must have been a good reason it happened. And they begin furiously making excuses for the NSA. A powerful, heavily politicized spy agency surveilling journalists who've been critical of the regime? No problem. It's perfectly normal. Just don't call it spying. 

But it's not normal - at all. It is Third World, and as we told you repeatedly, it did happen. Now, that has been confirmed. Yesterday, we learned that sources in the so-called intelligence community told at least one reporter in Washington what was in those emails. My emails. It was nothing scandalous in there. Thank God. We're happy to report that. 

Late this spring, I contacted a couple of people I thought could help get us an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I told nobody I was doing this other than my executive producer, Justin Wells. I wasn't embarrassed about trying to interview Putin. He's obviously newsworthy. I'm an American citizen. I can interview anyone I want and I plan to. 

But still, in this case, I decided to keep it quiet. I figured that any kind of publicity would rattle the Russians and make the interview less likely to happen. But the Biden administration found out anyway, by reading my emails. I learned from a whistleblower at the NSA plan to leak the contents of those emails to media outlets. Why would they do that? Well, the point, of course, was to paint me as a disloyal American. A Russian operative. Been called that before. A stooge of the Kremlin, a traitor doing the bidding of a foreign adversary. 

And of course, I'm hardly the only person who's been accused of those things in the last several years. We've seen this movie several times now. At the same moment, the Communist Chinese government increases its already stunning level of control over this country, our leaders prattle on about the threat of Vladimir Putin. He's an evildoer, they tell us. A totalitarian dictator. 

Vladimir Putin does things that no American leader would even consider. He runs domestic disinformation campaigns. He lies to the public. He punishes people for opposing him, or for believing the wrong things. He even uses intelligence agencies to spy on his own citizens. Beyond the pale stuff. So no decent American would interview Vladimir Putin, at least no reporter from Fox News. That was the point they wanted to make. That's why they plan to leak the contents of my emails to news organizations. And yesterday, as noted, we learned they actually did it. 

Even now, some of the media are claiming that we deserve this. Emailing with people who know Putin, are you? Of course, the NSA is watching you. That's what you get. But that's hardly the point. By law, the NSA is required to keep secret the identities of American citizens who've been caught up in its vast domestic spying operations. So by law, I should have been identified internally merely as a US journalist or American journalist. That's the law. 

But that's not how I was identified. It was identified by name. I was unmasked. People in the building learned who I was and then my name and the contents of my emails left that building at the NSA and wound up with a news organization in Washington. That is illegal. In fact, it is precisely what this law was designed to prevent in the first place. We cannot have intelligence agencies used as instruments of political control. 

Both parties used to agree on that. Democrats were especially adamant on the point, but not anymore. So that's exactly what is happening here. We need to find out how this happened, who did it, who allowed it? 

Paul Nakasone would know the answer. Paul Nakasone is the highly political director of the NSA. Paul Nakasone would have been required personally to approve my unmasking. That's how it works. Paul Nakasone should explain who asked for that unmasking and he should do it immediately. 

Avril Haines would also likely know the answer. Haines is the even more political director of National Intelligence who oversees all of it. She may have approved the unmasking as well. She would certainly know who asked for it and who approved it. That's her job to know. She should release that information immediately, tonight. And if Avril Haines does not release that information, she should be forced to release that information. 

We don't have a lot of power, we’re just a TV show. But we're going to keep pushing for that because it matters. Not just to us, but to the entire country. You can't have a democracy in a place where unaccountable spy agencies keep people in line by leaking the contents of their emails, discrediting them with their own emails, which they thought were private. It doesn't work if you allow that. And we suspect congressional Republicans will also demand an answer. 

Many have finally awakened to the fact that the intelligence agencies, which they have blindly supported for so long, are not, in fact, their friends. They're not the friends of anyone in this country. They're dangerous. That's obvious. 

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the July 7, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."