Category Archives: culture

You’re Not Like Us

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Bion Bartning, Co-founder of Eos Products and Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism President, wrote in Sunday‘s Wall Street Journal of his children’s experience in what used to be (my characterization) a top-drawer private school, New York City’s Riverdale Country School.

The lower-school head had earlier written that “it is essential that parents/caregivers and educators acknowledge racial differences (as opposed to a ‘colorblind’ stance)” and offered reading recommendations such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” Families at Riverdale are encouraged to join school-sponsored “affinity” groups to bond with people from their ethnicity or skin color.

Then the Bartnings raised concerns to the school’s administration.

I have always felt a strong connection with Martin Luther King Jr’s dream of an America where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I advocate genuine antiracism, rooted in dignity and humanity. But the ideology underlying the “racial literacy” guide distributed by the school wasn’t like that. Instead of emphasizing our common humanity, it lumps people into simplistic racial groupings. It teaches that each person’s identity and status is based largely on skin color, and leaves no place for people like me, who are of mixed race [he’s an immigrant who’s Mexican/Yaqui and Jewish] or don’t place race at the heart of their identity.

The school master’s response—when it got around to it? It was buried at the end of an email exchange about another matter entirely:

I wonder if this might be a good moment to think whether or not this is the best school for you and your family—being philosophically misaligned is never a very good experience for all concerned.

[B]eing philosophically misaligned is never a very good experience for all concerned. That just adds to it. Wrong think demands expulsion of the wrong thinkers.

This is a naked repudiation of our nation’s years of effort toward the equality of opportunity that flows from integration. This is a demand for a return to the racist segregation of the last century. The Left is resuming, in spades, to its racist history.

Weasel Words

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We saw the value of Senator Joe Manchin’s (D, WV) promises and commitments when he said that he would not support a bill that didn’t have support and input from “his Republican friends”—and then voted for reconciliation on the Progressive-Democrats’ $1.9 trillion Wuhan Virus “relief” bill, passed on strictly party lines. And then he voted for the bill itself on strictly party lines. In neither case was there support from his “Republican friends.”

Manchin also has said he’s against doing away with the filibuster.  Here, though, we’re beginning to see another example of the valuelessness of his commitments.

On the matter of the Progressive-Democrat House’s election “reform” bill,

Top Democrats have voiced they’re not going to allow the filibuster to shut down the recent voting reform bill passed in the House. They suggested there should be reconciliation permission for proposals involving civil and voting rights.
Even Manchin has signaled his willingness to ditch the filibuster when it comes to the election proposal.

And

I’m not willing to take away the involvement of the minority. I’m not going to go there until my Republican friends have the ability to have their say also. … I’m hoping they will get involved to the point where we have 10 of them that will work with 50 of us.

Notice another item here, too. Ten Republicans are required to work with his Progressive-Democrats. No one from Party is required—nor even encouraged—to work with Republicans.

We need to remember this Newspeak definition of “work with” in the fall of 2022—not only in West Virginia, but across our republic.

Contempt

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President Joe Biden, through his Press Secretary Jen Psaki, said he’s just too busy to talk to the press (and, I add, to talk to us ordinary Americans). On the matter of holding a press conference,

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden is too busy with the COVID crisis, but it may happen by the end of March.

Recall that Biden also promised he’d talk to Congress (and through press broadcast of that to us) in early February—no wait, by mid- to late-February. Both of those promises have been reneged on.

Aside from that, Biden is claiming he’s too busy to find 40 minutes to talk to the press? Or, as his habit has been, he’s too busy to find 10 minutes to answer 5 carefully selected questions, for which he has the answers already scripted by his writers?

My credulity meter is pegged.

And this from Biden, also through his Press Secretary:

But this president came in during a historic crisis, two historic crises. A pandemic like the country had not seen in decades and decades, and an economic downturn that left 10 million people out of work.

A pandemic that already was coming under control because of a multiplicity of vaccines developed and for which distribution had begun under the prior administration. A pandemic whose “out-of-control” status already was an open question as actual hospitalization and mortality rate data started flowing in.

An economic downturn that already had been reversed months before Biden took office, and was in full swing when he was sworn in. A recovery sparked and facilitated by Republican-run States either not shutting down their economies in the blind panic to which Progressive-Democrat-run States had succumbed or starting to reopen their economies far sooner than those panic-riddled States.  (Panic-riddled—alternatively, those Progressive-Democrats were/are executing on their Party mantra of never letting a crisis go to waste as they moved to use the Wuhan Virus situation to accrete political power to Party and to them personally.)

Millions of Americans still out of work—mostly in those Progressive-Democrat-run States, whose authorities refuse to reopen their economies so Americans can go back to work.

Four expressions of contempt in one tweet and one short sentence. This is just Biden, typical of Progressive-Democrats, insulting our intelligence again.

Kancel Kulture

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Now the Left is after Dr Seuss.

Dr Seuss Enterprises said it will stop publishing six of the author’s books due to racial and insensitive imagery.

On the Kancel Kulture’s Fahrenheit 451 List are

  • And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street
  • If I Ran the Zoo
  • McElligot’s Pool
  • On Beyond Zebra!
  • Scrambled Eggs Super!
  • The Cat’s Quizzer

Never mind that these books, along with the rest of Dr Seuss’ works, fit perfectly the times in which they were written.

Never mind that all of his books, these included, were beloved by children and their parents all over the world.

Never mind that today they could be used to illustrate how mores evolve and to show that being acceptable in the past does not automatically make something acceptable today—nor does lack of acceptance today automatically eliminate acceptability in that past.

Never mind a myriad aspects of value and plain entertainment these books had and still have.

The Kancel Kulture demands to dictate to us what we’re permitted to read or to think.

Never mind the politically opportunistic hypocrisy, either.

Then-President Barack Obama (D) and Michelle Obama (Woke) as recently as 2015:

…pretty much all the stuff you need to know is in Dr Seuss

And again in 2018:

…the nature of human dynamics does not change from level to level.
I’ve been quoted saying this sometimes. Most of what you need to learn you can actually just, read Dr Seuss….

Now, in place of those words of praise is just … .

Start buying the banned books, while supplies last.

Obliviousness

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I wrote yesterday about the US Soccer Federation’s…foolishness…regarding its decision to allow its players to take a knee during our national anthem. After that bit of USSF wokeness, the USSF added to its miscreancy.

A US Soccer Federation’s Athlete Council member was removed Sunday after giving a speech at a meeting voicing his opinion against the organization repealing the anti-kneeling policy.
Seth Jahn, 38, was against the US Soccer Federation’s decision to repeal the rule for players barring kneeling during the national anthem.

What Jahn said, in part:

I’m sure I’m going to ruffle some feathers with what I’m about to say, especially given the athletes council that I’m on, but given the evolution of our quote-unquote, progressive culture where everything offends everybody, those willing to take a knee for our anthem don’t care about defending half of our country and when they do so, then I don’t have too much concern in also exercising my First Amendment right,” he said Saturday, via Stars and Stripes FC. “We’re here to get a different perspective. I also feel compelled to articulate that I’m of mixed race and representative of undoubtedly the most persecuted people in our country’s history, Native Americans.

He added some well-known statistics regarding cause and responsibility for the rampant nature of black violent deaths, statistics which the Left, and here the USSF, chooses to hide from. Then he went on:

I keep hearing how our country was founded on the backs of slaves, even though approximately only 8% of the entire population even owned slaves. Every race in the history of mankind has been enslaved by another demographic at some point time. Blacks have been enslaved. Hispanics have been enslaved. Asians most recently in our country in the freaking 20th century, have been enslaved. Natives have been enslaved. Whites have been enslaved. Shoot, I lived in Africa for two and a half years where I could purchase people, slaves, between the price of $300 and $800 per person, per head depending on their age, health, and physicality.
Where were the social justice warriors and the news journalists there to bring their ruminations to these real atrocities? And yet in all of history, only one country has fought to abolish slavery, the United States of America, where nearly 400,000 men died to fight for the abolishment of slavery underneath the same stars and bars that our athletes take a knee for. Their sacrifice is tainted with every knee that touches the ground.

The USSF? Its council gave this cynical rationalization, claiming Jahn was removed because his remarks

violated the prohibited conduct’s policy section on harassment, which prohibits racial or other harassment based upon a person’s protected status (race), including any verbal act in which race is used or implied in a manner which would make a reasonable person uncomfortable. The athlete’s council does not tolerate this type of language and finds it incompatible with membership on the council. While the council understands that each person has a right to his or her own opinion, there are certain opinions that go beyond the realm of what is appropriate or acceptable.

With that, the USSF has illustrated my point regarding its unseriousness—and its insulting attitude toward honest Americans. And has made manifest its own rank intolerance. Along with its claim that the Precious Woke of the USSF get to determine what speech is to be freely allowed and what speech is to be freely censored—and the speaker canceled.

They’re not oblivious, after all, nor are they mere tail turners—they’re overtly intolerant, and they consciously stand for everything America does not.