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."