Diversity Lands on Mars

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The diversity movement has broken free of all earthly bounds

It was recently announced that 40% of management positions on Mars will be filled by minorities.

No, not the red planet, but my former employer, the privately-held Mars, Inc., a conglomerate with an estimated $37 billion in revenue and 130,000 employees.

The announcement is an example of how the diversity movement has become untethered from reality and is now being propelled across the ether by platitudes, virtue-signaling, group-think, double standards, and racial stereotypes.

The announcement was made almost simultaneously with the company changing the name of its Uncle Ben’s Rice to Ben’s Rice, after the Houston-based rice division had been accused of racial insensitivity for the former name and the accompanying caricature of a black man as venerable Uncle Ben. The accusation must’ve shocked the family owners, because they had always avoided politics and prided themselves on their progressive employment practices, high pay for plant workers, and concerns for all stakeholders.

No good deed goes unpunished in today’s hypersensitive America.

To digress for a moment, here’s why I’m qualified to speak about diversity and Mars:

In 1992, the Wall Street Journal published a long commentary of mine that touted the management philosophy of Mars, based on my experience working there as an executive in the 1980s. The article was subsequently used as a case study in business schools.

One of my responsibilities at the company was diversity, although it wasn’t called that at the time, because this was prior to the term being coined in 1990 by R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., in his landmark article in the Harvard Business Review. It was called equal employment opportunity or affirmative action and was often accompanied with sensitivity training and with the firing of managers and workers for prejudicial behavior—all of which I oversaw.

Mars was known for its marketing prowess and for high productivity and efficiency, a deserved reputation that was due in large part to its recruiting at some of the best business schools and engineering schools around the world, as well as its practice of rotating managers between divisions and countries in order to spread best practices across the organization. For example, when I worked at the headquarters of its U.S. confectionery division, the vice president of manufacturing was Dutch, the vice president of R&D was British, the division president was British, and the vice president of human resources had come from Mars’ pet food division.

The company’s divisional offices were always connected to a plant. Although one of the company’s first U.S. plants/offices was in Chicago, and although one of its first European plants/offices was in Slough, the working-class part of metro London, it preferred to locate its newer plants/offices in semi-rural locations in the States and Europe. The thinking was that the work ethic was better than in cities, and that cities had too many constraints in terms of limited space, poor truck access, and neighbors who might object to the noise and odors of 24/7 operations.

This is why, a half-century ago, the company moved the headquarters of its U.S. confectionery business, as well as the adjoining plant that made M&Ms, from Newark, NJ, to Hackettstown, NJ, in the northwestern part of the state near the Pennsylvania border.

It was of course more difficult to attract blacks and Hispanics in Hackettstown than in Newark. The same for semi-rural locations in the Netherlands and Germany. But these limitations were more than compensated for by its operations in diverse parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas.

Cultural dynamics changed within the company when the family retired from day-to-day operations. The dynamics further changed with Mars’ purchase of Chicago-based Wrigley in 2008 for $23 billion. It became more “professionally” managed, which is a euphemism for being managed in accord with conventional American business practices—practices that have resulted in manufacturing workers in other industries being treated like widgets and seeing their jobs shipped to Mexico and China.

It is Mars’ prerogative to change its longstanding management development policies and plant/office locations to advance diversity—and to send a potentially divisive message to its workforce that preferences will be given to some employees over others until 40% of managers are minorities. But there are two troubling societal aspects to this.

The first is legal. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act unequivocally states that employment decisions should not be based on race or ethnicity. Although it’s legal to eliminate racial and ethnic barriers to employment and promotion and to reach out to previously overlooked groups, it is legally questionable to favor some groups over others in order to meet some arbitrary racial mix—not that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cares about discrimination masquerading as diversity.

The second troubling aspect is the ambiguous meaning of “minority.” Most people would say they know what it means, but do they really?

They would say that in the context of diversity, “minority” refers to those races that are in the minority in America in terms of numbers, such as African Americans, Asians and non-white Latinos. Not only are there business benefits to this racial form of diversity, the thinking goes, but it’s a way of redressing past discrimination and achieving social justice for historically disadvantaged people.

 

A PhD dissertation could be written on the fallacies in this thinking, but since PhD dissertations put people to sleep, let’s look at the biggest fallacy.

The biggest fallacy of the current zeitgeist on diversity is that it is based on stereotypes. The underlying assumption is that all individuals within an official governmental racial category are the same in terms values, beliefs, outlooks, and socioeconomic circumstance. As such, all whites are seen as coming from privilege, even though many are impoverished, unlike, let’s say, college-educated emigrants from an upper-caste in India, or Latinos from the Spanish aristocracy of Mexico. Moreover, all whites are seen as being in the majority, even though there are over 100 unique ethnic minority groups within the so-called white race, such as Italian Americans, who are only six percent of the population, or Iranian Americans, who are only a tenth of a percent of the population.

Memo to stereotypers: A coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia didn’t grow up with the privileges and perspectives of a Mars daughter. Likewise, this grandson of a coal miner didn’t grow up with the privileges and perspectives of a descendant of a Boston blueblood family that became wealthy from the cotton trade. For you to believe otherwise suggests a political agenda or reflects appalling ignorance.

Japan, South Korea and China are manufacturing powerhouses and big markets for Mars and other American companies. But, ironically, they are not very diverse in terms of race, although China has some degree of ethnic diversity. Time will tell if diversity will prove to be a competitive advantage for U.S.-based companies. But even if it doesn’t, diversity should be pursued for other reasons, as long as it’s done legally and includes ethnic and socioeconomic diversity.

The only group that should be excluded from diversity considerations are aliens from the planet Mars.

‘1619 Project’ Founder Melts Down After Criticism Of Her Fake History

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This article was originally published by  the Federalist on October 16, 2020.

The lead writer of The New York Times’ anti-American “1619 Project” suffered a meltdown last week when a colleague at her paper offered fair criticism of its revisionist and inaccurate account of history.

On Oct. 9, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens published a more than 3,000-word essay outlining the project’s blunders that have led the academics with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke its award to the project’s chief essayist, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

“Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it,” Stephens wrote. “We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political issues of the day, not become the issue itself.”

Under this model, Stephens writes, “for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize – the 1619 Project has failed.

At the heart of his criticism is the project’s central thesis to revise the date of America’s “true founding” to the year 1619, when the first African slaves found their way to the colonies (Native American tribes had kept slaves on the continent for centuries by then). Several months after the campaign’s launch, now that it is infecting some 4,500 K-12 classrooms, the legacy newspaper stealth-edited the project to remove the language of its “true founding” to when the “moment [America] began.”

“These were not minor points,” Stephen wrote. “The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, ‘to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regards 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

The criticism sent the architect of the project into a rage, according to the Washington Post, predictably calling the fair-minded critiques of her deceptive scholarship racist.

“Hannah-Jones, though, was livid, and let Kingsbury and Stephens know it in emails ahead of publication,” the Post reported. “One the day the NAS called for the revocation of her Pulitzer, she tweeted that efforts to discredit her work ‘put me in a long tradition of [Black women] who failed to know their places.’ She changed her Twitter bio to ‘slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress’ – a tribute to the trailblazing journalist Ida B. Wells, whom the Times slurred with those same words in 1894.”

The revisionist project, which has attracted sharp scrutiny since its publication last year, has since maintained full editorial support from the newspaper despite major corrections to its essays and leagues of historians debunking its primary claims.

After a group of leading historians objected to the Times’ project’s false information, the magazine’s Editor in Chief Jake Silverstein wrote back that “historical understanding is not fixed.” In other words, the Times doesn’t care what historians with decades of experience think if it counters the religious narrative that critical race theory demands.

Several months later, the Times finally did issue a two-word correction to its lead essay authored by none other than Hannah-Jones clarifying that keeping slavery was only a primary motivation for some of the colonists rather than all of the colonists to seek independence from Great Britain. While it might seem a minor change, it’s actually a significant one provided that the project has been adopted widely into curriculum teaching children the United States was built for the sole purpose to oppress, a key tenet of the left’s critical race theory driving the nation’s 21st century woke revolution.

It’s worth noting this correction was made before the Pulitzer committee awarded Hannah-Jones its prestigious prize based on an essay that the Times admitted was historically inaccurate.

Despite the corrections, the inaccuracies, the controversies, and the criticisms of the project, Dean Baquet, the executive director of the Times, rejected Stephens’ arguments.

“Our readers, and I believe our country, have benefited immensely from the principles, rigorous and groundbreaking journalism of Nikole,” Baquet wrote, celebrating the work of the same writer who said “it would be an honor” for the nation’s explosion of deadly unrest which tore through the cities this summer to be named”the 1619 Riots.”

Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

This column from the Federalist is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The opinions expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of The Prickly Pear or of the sponsors.

A Perspective on Social Justice

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Consider the expression “social justice”. What does it actually mean? Presumably, everyone is in favor of justice, as opposed to unfairness. But let’s consider what the people bloviating most strongly actually mean by the expression. What do they really want?

In the broadest sense the expression suggests that someone (or some group) is getting more than they deserve, while someone else (or some other group) is getting less than they deserve. It is not necessarily money. It can be anything from treatment by police to treatment by banks when considering mortgage applications or treatment by employers when deciding whom to promote.

Proponents of social justice always assume that either there is bad will on the part of someone making decisions or else that unfair outcomes have been institutionalized by historical events. In other words, either decisions are being made by racists or inherent racism is just the way things have developed over time. Such racism may be either overt or covert. Here I am using the word “racism” to cover all forms of discrimination for reasons of gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

I don’t think there is much argument that overt racism has been on the decline for many years. It certainly is not gone completely but incidents of everything from lynching to official redlining are no longer acceptable. When they do occur (as it appears may have been the case in the George Floyd killing) public outcry swiftly condemns perpetrators.

It is the hidden aspects of the problem that is causing the recent upsurge in controversy. How do we account for disparate punishment of criminals by courts? How do we explain pay disparities between groups that seems alike except for race, gender, etc.? Why do certain groups never seem to make it into positions of preference, power or prestige?  Is “the system” somehow holding them back or do they have certain characteristics or behavior that is a root cause of the problem?

I do not want to get caught up in debate over whether cops arrest more blacks because blacks commit more crimes or the issue of why blacks get harsher sentences on average than white. I know the arguments on both sides and I know the remedies that have been suggested. If society does not like “search and frisk” policies, it has to choose between frisking fewer blacks, frisking more whites, or frisking no one. NYC is conducting a lab with respect to the third alternative under Mayor de Blasio and the results are not encouraging.

However, the debate over social justice has moved beyond preventing discrimination in the future to undoing it in the past. In its most daring form, it is called “a conversation about reparations”. It starts with a recitation of past history and argues that bad things that happened in the past have effects that carry over into current generations and prevent them from achieving equality. Therefore, the argument goes, society has a moral obligation to somehow make up to the current generation of “victims” for the past injustices to their forebears. For example, if slave families were callously broken up a century and a half ago, that should excuse weak acceptance of familial responsibilities among many black men today. Similarly, if slaves were denied an education, that explains (at least in part) why blacks tend to do less well in school today, since they may not have grown up in a family environment that fostered educational achievement.

While these arguments are weakened by the multigenerational time periods involved since slavery ended, nevertheless, they cannot be dismissed out of hand.

The question is what can and should be done about it, if anything?

No matter how one tries to present it in order to make it palatable, social “justice” boils down to taking money from one group (taxpayers) and transferring it either in cash or services to a group labeled as “victims” of past injustice, even if was perpetrated on others many years ago. The scheme proposed by Senator Warren involves a wealth tax, which is simply a way of clawing back “ill-gotten gains” and redistributing them. If an entrepreneur or CEO paid his employees starvation wages while rewarding himself handsomely, the concept is to recapture and redistribute some of his accumulated wealth.

In theory, that is not absurd, although obviously not all of those being clawed would agree that their wealth was obtained immorally. This is not like seizing Bernie Madoff’s stolen funds and making restitution to those whom he defrauded. This is an all-wise Government deciding who is deserving of fleecing, who was shorn and who should benefit from it all.

In practice, “reparations” is a non-starter, even if you believe it has moral value (which I don’t, for reasons I will get to in a minute). Here are some real practical problems.

  1. Who decides and on what basis?
  2. What is the justification for taxing wealthy individuals whose parents were immigrants and did not benefit from slavery?
  3. Do those who qualify on racial grounds but are already wealthy get benefits or do they pay a reparations tax?
  4. How can the public be protected from benefits going primarily to supporters of the party in power?
  5. Why just blacks? Many other groups have also suffered from lack of social justice. Once we start deciding on victims, where does it end?
  6. Reparations are just another form of reverse-discrimination, doing good for one group by doing bad for the rest.

America was created out of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. There is no question that various groups have been used and abused, starting with the indigenous peoples we threw off their lands and extending through various waves of immigrants. Not just black slaves, but also Irish, middle Europeans, Asians, Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, etc. all had to fight their way out of poverty and extreme, often brutal discrimination. Women also were in many ways kept in bondage for many decades. It may not have been as legal slaves, but they were systematically denied opportunities for education, training, and admission to professions for which they were deemed incompetent. Women were told they were mentally inferior.

This was all unjust. But tearing everything down in order to right the wrongs of the past will not make a stronger America. It will only strengthen the bitter animosity that divides us now. It will be in everyone’s interest to personally identify with some group of victims in order to get in on the largess. (Pocahontas comes to mind.) All of the groups mentioned above have made tremendous strides, sometimes helped by laws but more often by hard work and sacrifice. Little was handed to them on a silver platter. Now the folks clamoring for more social justice today want it for free, by taking from someone else, in order that they may live better. Confiscation is never a sound basis for social harmony and economic strength. Progress takes time, but we are increasingly living in a world dangerously used to and insistent upon instant answers.

Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of players in the NBA and NFL are black, the BLM movement insists that there is discrimination because too few coaches are black. There are few jobs more competitive than sports coaching. It is truly a matter of produce or perish. Black coaches have been appointed, but only a few have succeeded. I have no easy explanation. Undoubtedly, more will be tried. But is it not insanity for teams to aim for racial equality in the coaching positions instead of success on the field? If black coaches have talent, they will succeed, just as they have in the games. But most coaches fail. It isn’t easy nor should it be.

Some will argue that economic growth should take a back seat to social justice. This is the naive thinking of dreamers who believe that mankind is a perfectible species, capable of whatever sacrifice is needed to realize their dreams. While civilized humans possess an unusual willingness to help their neighbor and often exhibit a high degree of altruism, there are limits. Martyrs for a cause are in short supply. Dreamers would prefer that someone else be the martyr for their cause.

The economist Henry Hazlitt once summed it up by observing that when A and B get together and worry about the plight of C, they often call on D to do something about it. Hazlitt said that in that situation, the one that he worries about more is D.

I do not advocate doing nothing about discrimination, bad cops, etc. Specific situations need to be addressed, as it seems they have not been in the past. But defunding the police, toppling statues, rewriting history, and reparations are not the answer. Many injustices were ignored for too long and many remain to be corrected. Nothing, however, will be achieved by hatred and violence.

Ken Veit is a retired insurance company CEO and actuary.

The Injustice of Social Justice

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In today’s understanding of “social justice”, it is axiomatic that differences in populations are attributed to race.  This is precisely the position held by such enlightened organizations as the Ku Klux Klan.

People who are white are lumped together, regardless of socio-economic background or ethnic differences, and treated as a lump of humanity.  Likewise, are “people of color”.

This is the very essence of racism in that it treats all differences as a matter of skin color or in some cases, sexual preferences.

How just is this procedure?

Suppose you are on the Admissions Committee to assess and select incoming medical students for recently or long-established School of Medicine somewhere in the United States.  Imbued with the latest fads about “diversity”, “social justice” and “fairness”, you feel that you must admit people of color or marginalized sexual groups to have a “fair” admissions process.

In order to do this, you must downgrade objective criteria of performance such as grades, test scores, life experiences, the ability to write, to think and to deal with people.  For if you do use merit as the leading criterion, the mix of people you might select will differ from your goal to uplift underrepresented groups in the name of diversity, social justice and fairness.

Thus, a person of superior merit and achievement might well be rejected because of their skin color or because they aren’t defined as disadvantaged or of a particular group identity.  Is that fair treatment to a student that has worked very hard and sacrificed a lot to get where they are?  What if they are Asian?  Do you discriminate against Asians in favor of African Americans?  The answer to the latter is probably yes because that is precisely what many universities do.

What about the future quality of care provided by the medical schools of our nation?  If you don’t select, educate and train the best, are you likely to get the best outcomes for patients?  If the answer is no, is that ethical for the care of patients and supportive of the institutional reputation of a given medical school?  It has taken generations to establish and maintain that reputation, but does that simply get discounted in order to satisfy the desire to make the medical school classes look acceptable to the medical school faculty and administrators steeped in a culture of “diversity “, social justice and political correctness?

What about the patients and their families, some who travel hundreds or possibly thousands of miles to receive what they are led to believe is the very best treatment?  They are willing to pay premium prices for such care.  They come to the institution with some of the most difficult medical problems, many of life and death importance. But instead, in the future, the diversity-based selection of tomorrow’s physicians may well lower the quality of care because merit-based selection was not as important. You are not only being unfair (in medical practice, the more appropriate term in unethical) to future patients, you may well be defrauding them. And, by providing less than optimal care you may well injure or kill somebody.  Is that fair?  Is that just?

And what about the candidates themselves?  Having been selected by you in the name of diversity and fairness, they get the appointment that they otherwise may not deserve. Do they go to sleep at night wondering if they really are the best or are they simply a product of your diversity-based prejudice? Is that fair?  Is that just?

What does this process do to the medical profession itself?  Is the public justified in having confidence in professional training and treatment?  Or is that confidence now unjustified?  How do the members now view themselves?  Do they view themselves as the best life savers possible or just another institution corrupted by politics?

We use Arizona’s and the nation’s medical schools here as an example.  But you could make similar arguments about the teacher who forms your children, your lawyer, your tax accountant, your financial manager or your airline pilot.  In these situations, should you not expect the institution you are dealing with to provide the best possible service with the best personnel?  That can only be achieved by selecting and hiring the best people available.

Another way to look at this is to reverse the process.  Let’s look at professional basketball as an institution.  An institution incidentally, that loudly proclaims for “social justice.”

African Americans make up about 13% of the population.  A fraction of that are males in the age bracket to play professional basketball.  Yet, African Americans overwhelmingly dominate the game.

What if the NBA hired not out of merit but to achieve diversity so the team in question looks like the community it serves? Only about 6% of the population of Portland, Oregon is African American. Is that the way the Portland Trailblazers look to you?  If you really hired on the basis of the “community”, roughly one player should be African American, the rest white, Latino or Asian.  Incidentally, as Latinos are lumped together as a group (Cubans, Mexicans, El Salvadorans, etc.), how many Latinos are there in the NBA?  And where are the Jews?  At one time, Jews made up a considerable percentage of the NBA. The first basketball point ever scored in the NBA was shot by a Jew.

Was firing the Jews and hiring African Americans justice?  Yes, if replaced on the basis of merit and ability. But why is basketball more important than medicine?  Why does merit count when throwing an inflated bladder through a hoop but not when saving lives?

This is the problem you get into when all disparities in performance are assumed to be racial and compound the problem by arbitrarily lumping all individuals together into a group or class to be moved about like pawns in a chess game based on some quite arbitrary notion of diversity.

Social justice as practiced today is not justice, it is reverse discrimination.  You cannot reverse whatever historical injustice that may have existed by practicing injustice in the here and now.

 

 

Study finds a ‘Severe lack of Hope Scholarship (HS) awareness’ in all Florida school districts

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The following study was provided by the Florida Citizens Alliance:
Good evening Dr Graham- we have completed the assessment of all 67 counties regarding the Hope Scholarship. All 3 recommendations from the interim report several weeks ago are fully substantiated.
Bottom line, the Hope scholarship and it’s intended expansive nature are a best kept secret and 1000’s of students are being negatively impacted by the missed opportunity for a productive future.
These  recommendations from the interim report are confirmed:
Consequently, Florida Citizens Alliance is making this formal request that the FL Department of Education take 3 immediate actions:

  1. Update the FL DOE Hope Scholarship page to explain the expansive nature of the HS program to include a) school districts have an affirmative duty to explain bullying involves additional categories of threat, intimidation and harassment; b) bullying applies to anyone on school property or a school sponsored event including teachers, administrators, contractors , etc. ; c) student eligibility is immediate for any incident a parent “deems” to be bullying, threat, intimidation or harassment. and d) It is the responsibility of every person to report these incidents, not just parents.
  2. We strongly recommend the FL DOE website include an FAQ in English and Spanish ( feel free to use ours as an example) and  it specifically should address  types of new situations that qualify as scholarship eligible such as (but not limited to):– If a parent believes their child is being threatened or intimidated by age-inappropriate
    sexual content
  3. If a parent believes their child is being threatened or intimidated by advocating socialism and denigrating free markets
  •  If a parents believes their child is being threatened or intimidated by an employee teaching evolution as a fact or denigrating the biblical view of creation
  • If a parent believes their child is being threatened or intimidated by the Marxist propaganda of BLM or the 1619 project
  • If a parent believes their child is being threatened or intimidated by any form of religious indoctrination
  1. The FL DOE to send a letter to each school superintendent that specifically addresses their affirmative duty to create bullying policies , staff training and a parent awareness program featuring the expansive nature of the Hope Scholarship.
  2. The FL DOE provide formal training to the administrators of all private schools so they understand the Hope Scholarship as a tool they can use to help parents looking to remove their child from a public school “bullying” situation. This is especially needed for the over 800 private schools already certified to accept Hope Scholarship students.

**These actions are fully supported by existing statutes FS1002.40, FS 1003.42, FS 1006.28 , FS 847.012 and 847.001 and 876.01.
Our results: Full Spread sheet attached

  • 42 Counties that have no mention of the Hope Scholarship
  • 4  Counties have a bullying section with no mention of the Hope Scholarship in it.
    Hillsborough  Nassau Orange St. Lucie
  • 7 Counties with links to the FLDOE for the Hope Scholarship without any context
    Charlotte   Clay  Escambia Lee Monroe  Palm Beach Volusia
  • 6 counties that misrepresent the Hope Scholarship as Broward did
    Brevard Broward Indian River Manatee Marion Pinellas
  • 6 Counties that explain the Hope Scholarship as the current FL Doe site does (the DOE site currently fails to explain the expansive nature)
    Hernando Lake Leon Pasco  St. John’s Sarasota
  • 2 counties have a mention of the Hope Scholarship but don’t make it easy to find

We are happy to discuss but aggressive action by the FL DOE and School Districts is required. We understand from an email last week from you Dr Graham that an update to the FL DOE website for the Hope scholarship is in process. We eagerly look forward to it portraying the expansive nature of the Hope Scholarship.
Regards,
Keith Flaugh Managing
Director, Florida Citizens Alliance
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ENTIRE HOPE SCHOLARSHIP STUDY.
©Florida Citizens Alliance. All rights reserved.

“America’s Frontline Doctors” Should Not Be Censored

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On July 27, a video that allegedly made “false coronavirus claims” was taken down by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but not before nearly 20 million people watched it.
The people in that video, led by Dr. Simone Gold, have formed a group called “America’s Frontline Doctors,” with a mission to “counter the massive disinformation campaign regarding the pandemic.” They have reestablished an online presence, on multiple platforms, although it is hard to find. Hence we have added their profile to the Winston84 directory.
The debate over the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine has now completely disappeared from mainstream discussion. But Gold’s group, all of them MDs, maintain it can be used, especially in the early stages, to effectively treat COVID-19.
The even bigger question however is why medical doctors are, for what may be the first time in history, being harassed for prescribing HCQ, and being silenced for suggesting publicly that it has theraputic value in certain situations? And perhaps even bigger than that – why are Americans being trained to relinquish their constitutional rights whenever a “health emergency” is declared?
Which brings us to another profile we’ve just added, Debbie Georgatos, host of “America Can We Talk.” In a video released on 10/27, Georgato had this to say:

“The Left is planting the seed in the minds of the American people that a health threat legitimizes and justifies taking away the freedom of the people… when there’s a crisis, it is time to surrender our liberty.”

Watch out. Because COVID-19, and the next pandemic, and genuine medical issues, are not the only sources anymore of what the Left markets as a “health crisis.” Also being developed as a crisis of public health are the “right to housing,” systemic racism, and the climate emergency.
We’re going to learn a lot and endure a lot as we make our way through the COVID-19 pandemic. But one lesson we must not forget, is that the Left is attempting to medicalize issues of public policy that have nothing to do with medicine. Don’t let them.
RELATED VIDEO: The Censored DC America’s Frontline Doctor Video | Hydroxychloroquine

EDITORS NOTE: This Winston84 column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Heads Up, Liberal Jews––Don’t Be Jews with Trembling Knees

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“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
Those words were spoken by Menachem Begin in June of 1982, directly to the Democrat senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, who had confronted the Israeli Prime Minister during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony by threatening to cut off aid to Israel.
That’s right, only 32 years after the establishment of the tiny Jewish state, which was surrounded by 22 war-mongering, Israel-loathing Arab states, and only 35 years after the Holocaust savagely murdered––tortured and gassed-to-death––six-million Jewish men, women, children and infants, Senator Biden was once again terrorizing the Jews of the world with his menacing ultimatum.
Not a fluke, not a misstatement, not an error in judgement, but vintage Joe Biden, whose longtime antagonism and belligerence toward Israel has been exhaustively documented, most recently by Shmuel Klatzkin (Biden’s Hostility to Israel––read the whole article) and Janet Levy in AmericanThinker.com (Is a Vote for Joe Biden in the Interest of American Jews?).
EXAMPLES ABOUND
Levy reports a number of the Obama-Biden regime’s consistent anti-Israel policies:

  • Interfered with the 2015 Israeli elections with the goal of defeating the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
  • Their State Department granted $350,000 to OneVoice, a radical anti-Israel organization that supports the terrorist group Hamas,
  • They fully supported the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to destroy Israel economically. 
  • In 2016, Biden pressured Ukraine, an abstainer, to vote for U.N. Security Council measure 2334, which claimed that ancient and historic Jewish sites were “illegally occupied.”
  • They approved the same U.N. measure, which condemned Israelis building settlements, which emboldened the Palestinian Authority to call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea, Samaria, and the Jewish Quarter, reversing decades of U.S. vetoes against such moves.

Today, candidate Biden pledges to reopen the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) mission in Washington, D.C. And he vows, incomprehensibly, to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, in which the arch-terrorist state in the entire world has vowed to exterminate the State of Israel.
In addition, Levy points out that while Biden has given lip service to repudiating anti-Semitism, he has been thunderously silent when his fellow Democrats–– Reps. Ihlan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and simpatico Jew-hating activists Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, et al––spew their undisguised anti-Semitic bile for all the world to hear.
“Biden said he could never be silent on anti-Semitism,” Levy writes, “but raised no objections, as vice-president, to more than 60 White House visits by Al Sharpton, who incited anti-Jewish riots in New York City in the 1990s.” That’s the same Al Sharpton, I might add, who writer John Perazzo documents as being responsible for the horrific Tawana Brawley racial hoax, called the first black mayor of NY City a “Ni—er Whore,” delivered a speech at Kean College saying: “We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”
You get the picture of one of Joe Biden’s favorite pals.
LESSONS OF HISTORY
I was a very little girl––younger than six––when I first asked my parents why they were running frantically to meeting after meeting every evening, opening their checkbooks, delivering impassioned speeches, wringing their hands and shedding copious tears.
They told me what few American-Jewish parents ever told their children, so numb were they from disbelief and so eager to protect them from the ghastly truth, which was that adults and children just like them, just like us––six million of them––had been savagely murdered by Adolph Hitler and his “willing executioners” in Germany, Poland, all over Eastern Europe and even in “civilized” countries like France, simply because they were Jewish.
Jews who managed to flee Europe and come to America before the Holocaust––like my own and my husband Steve’s grandparents––and those who survived the killing camps and landed on our shores by sheer good fortune, thought they died and went to heaven on earth. For the first time in their lives––in fact, in Jewish history––they were free to breathe, to create, to pursue their dreams, to worship and to raise their children without fear.
Yes, there were quotas in colleges and graduate schools, Holocaust denial, and today an upsurge in Jew hatred, but nothing stopped Jews from succeeding and excelling and contributing disproportionately to American society and to the world, just as the Jews in Israel––only 72 years old––do today.
THE LEGACY OF PERSECUTION
But over 3,500 years of persecution exacts a heavy price. To understand, just think about the long-lasting toll the following events take:

  • A one-minute gunshot,
  • A two-hour bout of chemotherapy,
  • A three-week recovery from open-heart surgery,
  • A four-month lay-off,
  • An eight-month (so far) pandemic lockdown
  • A five-year recession.

All of the above are life-changing, diminishing, often devastating, sometimes annihilating.
Yet Jews continued on, their survival instinct stronger than the most crushing circumstances of their long and besieged history of being haunted, hunted and often destroyed in, among other cataclysmic events:

  • The Crusades.
  • The Inquisition.
  • The expulsion from Spain.
  • The Holocaust.
  • And always, the diaspora.

After the Holocaust, American Jews who followed politics––most did and do today––were forced to ask themselves, and taught their children to ask: Is it good for the Jews? Meaning, will this or that statement or policy or law lead to another Holocaust?
After all, the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s enjoyed tremendous success––in business, academia, the arts and sciences, society in general. Unlike the United States today, every college and university did not feature violent anti-Jewish protests or professors who taught anti-Jewish propaganda. Until the rise of Hitler, there were no elected officials––as there are in the U.S. today––spewing Jew hatred, not only with no disapproval from the powers-that-be but with total impunity.
TO ASK THAT QUESTION TODAY
Is Biden’s candidacy good for the Jews? I can say unequivocally and without hesitation that scandal-plagued Joe Biden, his inexperienced and effortlessly alienating VP pick Kalamity Harris, the truly regressive Obama-clone platform he’s running on––including high taxes, a weakened military, the support of terrorist groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, an anti-fracking return-to-energy-dependence, open borders, confiscation of your guns, and a viciously contentious relationship with Israel––would be terrible for America and disastrous for the Jewish state.
If you’re a liberal American Jew determined to pull the lever or mail a write-in ballot for Biden––don’t!
Don’t be a Jew with trembling knees. Your very survival and that of your family is at stake!
©Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved.

Response to France Ends Questions on Islamism

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Global outrage over Macron shows exactly what Islamism looks like

If there is one silver lining that comes out of the horror show that has been 2020, it should be that moving forward there is no further question or confusion about whether political Islam, i.e. Islamism, exists or what it looks like.
As yet another Islamist attack unfolds in Vienna, the tragic series of events out of France in recent weeks that began with the beheading of a French teacher by an 18-year-old Chechen immigrant who arrived in France as a child refugee, followed by the global reaction of Islamist leaders and organizations to France’s reaction to the attack (including in the U.S.), offers a full picture of how Islamism operates on multiple levels.
As reported by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, in New York, a group of mosques planned to protest outside the French consulate over their outrage of what they called French President Emmanuel Macron’s “vilification of Islam.”
Reacting to the attacks, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed that France “will not give in to terrorism.” He labeled the latest attacks “Islamist and terrorist madness.” Macron also stood by France’s commitment to free speech and the “right to blaspheme,” including the right to publish cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.
He said that while he could understand Muslim outrage over the publication of such cartoons by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, such outrage could never justify violence.
Macron was already in the crosshairs of French Islamists and their global compatriots for a speech he made on October 2 in which he stated that Islam was “in crisis globally.” In the speech, he announced a plan to tackle Islamist extremism in France.
In a statement, Majlis Ash-Shura, the Islamic Leadership Council of New York, wrote:

“The French President is directly provoking the Muslim world in his support of offensive and vulgar depictions of the beloved Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Moreover, he continues to directly terrorize the French Muslim community by raiding private homes and mosques over baseless accusations in the aftermath of the attack against a French teacher.
Prior to this incident, President Macron was already on a crusade against Muslim communities and basic religious practices, in the name of secularization and assimilation. France’s targeting of French Muslims seeks nothing but to further alienate an already marginalized community through religious discrimination and continue their historical mission of ‘civilizing’ communities they deem to be backwards by their own standards. 
The Muslim world will not tolerate such blatant disrespect of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and stands in solidarity with their French Muslim brothers and sisters.” 

The protest took place Sunday, November 1. There was no mention of the subsequent French terror attacks, including a second beheading in Nice.


In the U.S., the protest against France (which completely glossed over the dark underbelly of psychopathic criminality of the Muslim terrorists) wasn’t limited to the thousands of attendees in New York. Top Muslim scholar Yasir Qadhi took to Twitter to remind Macron of his mortality with rhetoric common among extremists.


(Last week, Clarion reported on how the Patriot Front, a newer generation of white supremacists, was biding its time waiting for the United States to fall so they could rise. Last week, Qadhi’s post to Macron saying that the legacy of Prophet Muhammad will outlast France, used similar rhetoric with the same intention: supremacy.)

What exactly is the legacy of Prophet Muhammad?

Islam is what its followers practice. In my lifetime, Islam’s legacy has been deadly violence, rage and a dangerously obsessive fixation on identity and prophet-worship. And why is it Muhammad’s legacy when Islam’s origin story is as it’s believed, derived not from man but from God?
Qadhi’s message, like those of many of his peers, does not mention God. The focus is love for the prophet, and in his name, killing for the prophet. This is at its heart one of the most broken things about what Islam has become in the 21st century: Idol worship.
Whether it’s from scholars or political figures, this distorted understanding of what Islam is, fuels the behavior that attempts to use force and untempered emotion to shift the political needle. Often driving that needle is this idea of “Islamophobia” and the claim of victimhood status. It’s a tactic used strategically when it’s advantageous to the cause (pointedly, it’s never used when Islamist organizations silence other Muslims, or when China freely carries out a genocide against Muslims, to name two examples).
Outside the U.S., Islamist leaders of Muslim nations are using the same strategy to exact policy changes from the West. One of the biggest drivers of this narrative, Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, called for a boycott of French products, a measure supported by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and the U.S. organization Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
CAIR is also pushing for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to investigate the treatment of the French Muslim community. The “treatment” CAIR is referring to is Macron’s clampdown on mosques that support the rhetoric of hateful imams, including those that posted content inciting anger against the now-beheaded French teacher.

How do Muslims understand Islam?

At the heart of this problem is that Islam’s “image” is currently managed and run by special interest groups, activists, hateful imams, politicians and other snake oil salesmen who are more interested in exploiting the West’s sympathy for what it sees as a marginalized community than they are in understanding and representing the teachings of the faith with stoicism, integrity and honesty.
This lot includes world leaders who use their global platform and power to act as warmongers under the banner of religious tolerance, as in the case of former Malaysian prime minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who said that Muslims have the right to “kill millions of French people.”
This mindset connects violent and non-violent Islamists — from lone attackers in France to a nation-state leader thousands of miles away. While some point to the events in France and label them a “jihadist mindset,” I argue that we have a bigger problem: the “Islamist mindset.” While of course, most Muslims don’t support or advocate for violence, many of them — after watching the events in France — question the right to free speech — not the killing.
Macron is right to fight the Islamist separatism currently tearing France apart. The good news is that he has Muslim allies — those who see Islamism for the poison it is — to do so. French-Tunisian Imam Hassen Chalghoumi, president of the Conference of Imams in France, went on record last month to denounce the murders and to call Islamism a disease and a poison.
Egyptian liberal journalist Khaled Montaser called the attacks in France “our backwardness … the worst insult to the Prophet.” In the West, author and journalist Tarek Fatah offered a series of critiques including calling out the hypocrisy of Islamists, who the next day are in line for visas to travel and live in the same Western countries they condemn.
To challenge Islamism, we cannot let the violence and tantrums of Islamists, no matter how great their status is on the world stage, to dominate the narrative. The story of Islam is still being written, and for it to have space in the future world of people, it must be an Islam in which its adherents have evolved beyond the identity forged by Islamists.
Islamism is a distortion of the Islamic faith, and it’s been a thorn in the side of any meaningful and lasting progress within Islamic theology for centuries. In the West, Islamists have used Islamism to weaponize the faith, silence critics and curtail — if not attempt to completely annihilate — free speech.
The events coming out of France are a live demonstration of how Islamists operate — from activism to violence, across individuals, organizations and world leaders.
COLUMN BY

Shireen Qudosi

EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

A Contagion of Hatred and Hysteria

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Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way.

That is why, earlier this month, with two other international scientists, I co-authored a proposal for an alternative approach — one that shields those most at risk while enabling the rest of the population to resume their ordinary lives to some extent.

I expected debate and disagreement about our ideas, published as the Great Barrington Declaration.

As a scientist, I would welcome that. After all, science progresses through its ideas and counter-ideas.

But I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal. The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me.

I am not a politician. The hurly-burly of political life and being in the eye of the media do not appeal to me at all.

I am first and foremost a scientist; one who is far more comfortable sitting in my office or laboratory than in front of a television camera.

Of course, I do have deeply held political ideals — ones that I would describe as inherently Left-wing. I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail.

I have strong views about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.

But Covid-19 is not a political phenomenon. It is a public health issue — indeed, it is one so serious that the response to it has already led to a humanitarian crisis. So I have been aghast to see a political rift open up, with outright abuse meted out to those who, like me, question the orthodoxy.

At the heart of our proposal is the recognition that mass lockdowns cause enormous damage.

We are already seeing how current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.

The results — to name just a few — include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health.

Such pitfalls of national lockdowns must not be ignored, especially when it is the working class and younger members of society who carry the heaviest burden.

I was also deeply concerned that lockdowns only delay the inevitable spread of the virus. Indeed, we believe that a better way forward would be to target protective measures at specific vulnerable groups, such as the elderly in care homes.

Of course, there will be challenges, such as where people are being cared for in their own multi-generational family homes.

I am certainly not pretending I have all the answers, but these issues need to be discussed and thrashed out thoroughly.

That is why I have found it so frustrating how, in recent weeks, proponents of lockdown policies have seemed intent on shutting down debate rather than promoting reasoned discussion.

It is perplexing to me that so many refuse even to consider the potential benefits of allowing non-vulnerable citizens, such as the young, to go about their lives and risk infection, when in doing so they would build up herd immunity and thereby protect the lives of vulnerable citizens.

Yet rather than engage in serious, rational discussion with us, our critics have dismissed our ideas as ‘pixie dust’ and ‘wishful thinking’.

This refusal to cherish the value of the scientific method strikes at the heart of everything I, as a scientist, hold dear. To me, the reasoned exchange of ideas is the basis of civilised society.

So I was left stunned after being invited on to a mid-morning radio programme recently, only for a producer to warn me minutes before we went on air that I was not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration. The producer repeated the warning and indicated that this was an instruction from a senior broadcasting executive.

I demanded an explanation and, with seconds to go, was told that the public wouldn’t be familiar with the meaning of the phrase ‘Great Barrington Declaration’.

And this was not an isolated experience. A few days later, another national radio station approached my office to set up an interview, then withdrew the invitation. They felt, on reflection, that giving airtime to me would ‘not be in the national interest’.

But the Great Barrington Declaration represents a heartfelt attempt by a group of academics with decades of experience in this field to limit the harm of lockdown. I cannot conceive how anyone can construe this as ‘against the national interest’.

Moreover, matters certainly are not helped by outlets such as The Guardian, which has repeatedly published opinion pieces making factually incorrect and scientifically flawed statements, as well as borderline defamatory comments about me, while refusing to give our side of the debate an opportunity to present our view.

I am surprised, given the importance of the issues at stake — not least the principle of fair, balanced journalism — that The Guardian would not want to present all the evidence to its readers. After all, how else are we to encourage proper, frank debate about the science?

On social media, meanwhile, much of the discourse has lacked any decorum whatsoever.

I have all but stopped using Twitter, but I am aware that a number of academics have taken to using it to make personal attacks on my character, while my work is dismissed as ‘pseudo- science’. Depressingly, our critics have also taken to ridiculing the Great Barrington Declaration as ‘fringe’ and ‘dangerous’.

But ‘fringe’ is a ridiculous word, implying that only mainstream science matters. If that were the case, science would stagnate. And dismissing us as ‘dangerous’ is equally unhelpful, not least because it is an inflammatory, emotional term charged with implications of irresponsibility. When it is hurled around by people with influence, it becomes toxic.

But this pandemic is an international crisis. To shut down the discussion with abuse and smears — that is truly dangerous.

Yet of all the criticisms flung at us, the one I find most upsetting is the accusation that we are indulging in ‘policy-based evidence-making’ — in other words, drumming up facts to fit our ideological agenda.

And that ideology, according to some, is one of Right-wing libertarian extremism.

According to Wikipedia, for instance, the Great Barrington Declaration was funded by a Right-wing think-tank with links to climate-change deniers.

It should be obvious to anyone that writing a short proposal and posting it on a website requires no great financing. But let me spell it out, since, apparently, I have to: I did not accept payment to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration.

Money has never been the motivation in my career. It hurts me profoundly that anyone who knows me, or has even a passing professional acquaintance, could believe for a minute that I would accept a clandestine payment for anything.

I am very fortunate to have a house and garden I love, and I couldn’t ask for more material wealth than that. Far more important to me are my family and my work. Yet the abuse continues to flood in, increasingly of a personal nature.

I have been accused of not having the right expertise, of being a ‘theoretical’ epidemiologist with her head in the clouds. In fact, within my research group, we have a thriving laboratory that was one of the first to develop an antibody test for the coronavirus.

We were able to do so because we have been working for the past six years on a flu vaccine, using a combination of laboratory and theoretical techniques. Our technology has already been patented and licensed and presents a rare example of a mathematical model leading to the development of a vaccine.

Even more encouraging, however, is that there is now a groundswell of movements — Us For Them, PanData19 and The Price of Panic, to name but three — seeking to give a voice to those, like me, who believe that the collateral damage of lockdown can be worse than the virus itself.

On Thursday, a broad coalition was launched under the banner of Recovery. Drawing people from across the mainstream of political views, the movement is calling for balance and moderation in our response to Covid-19, backed by a proper public debate and a comprehensive public inquiry.

I am delighted that it has received such a level of support.

For, ultimately, lockdown is a luxury of the affluent; something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries — and even then, only by the better-off households in those countries.

One way to go about shifting our perspective would be to catalogue all the ways in which lockdowns across the world are damaging societies. At present, I am collaborating with a number of colleagues to do just this, under the banner www.collateralglobal.org.

For the simple truth is that Covid-19 will not just go away if we continue to impose enough meaningless restrictions on ourselves. And the longer we fail to recognise this, the worse will be the permanent economic damage — the brunt of which, again, will be borne by the disadvantaged and the young.

When I signed the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4, I did so with fellow scientists to express our view that national lockdowns won’t cure us of Covid.

Clearly, none of us anticipated such a vitriolic response.

The abuse that has followed has been nothing short of shameful.

But rest assured. Whatever they throw at us, it won’t do anything to sway me — or my colleagues — from the principles that sit behind what we wrote.

Dr. Gupta is a professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

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This column  from  American Institute for Economic Research is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The opinions expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of The Prickly Pear or of the sponsors.

 

Kamala Practices Socialism Distancing

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More than a million people have watched Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) try to laugh her way through one of the most serious questions of this election. Would she bring her “socialist or progressive perspective” to the White House? In the “60 Minutes” interview that’s making plenty of voters queasy, Harris’s face freezes in stunned surprise before she cackles like she’d been asked the most ridiculous thing in the world. But is it? Not according to her own Twitter account, where — two days before the election — she shared her Marxist vision for America.
The post, which carries more than its share of risk, was a surprising move. After months of deflecting questions about his running mate’s extremism, Joe Biden will now have to spend the last 24 hours before the election explaining why Senator Harris is preaching “equity” over equality.” In the cartoon she shares on her feed, two men — one white and one black — are at the foot of the mountain. Only the white man can reach the rope and begins climbing. “Equality suggests, ‘Oh, everyone should get the same amount,'” Harris says in narration. “The problem with that [is], not everybody’s starting out at the same place.” She talks about the government giving everyone the same resources and support (read: redistribution of wealth) so that people can be on equal footing.
The backlash was almost immediate. “Sounds just like Karl Marx,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) argued. “A century of history has shown where that path leads. We all embrace equal opportunity, but government-enforced equality of outcomes is Marxist,” she insists. Congressman and former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw agreed, warning that this was “the false promise of the Left in one minute… They leave out the part where equity must be enforced with unequal — and tyrannical — treatment.”
For Joe Biden, who’s been trying to tamp down concerns about Senator Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) influence on his campaign, this latest post is a disaster. In a townhall last week, even NBC allowed the former vice president to be asked about the Democrats’ push for socialism. “Do I look like a socialist?” Biden fired back. “Look, I’m the guy that ran against the socialist,” he argued — without acknowledging the very uncomfortable reality that his own platform was co-written by Sanders and included the most radical policies ever embraced by a modern party. He, like the rest of Democratic headquarters, is obviously praying no one reads it.
Even Harris’s smile faded when “60 Minutes” anchor Norah O’Donnell reminded her, “You’re considered the most liberal United States senator.” Harris shrugged, suggesting that Mike Pence had made up that label at the debate stage. To her credit, O’Donnell pushed back. “Well, actually,” she said, through Harris’s nervous laughter, “the nonpartisan GovTrack has rated you as the most liberal senator. You supported the Green New Deal. You supported Medicare for All. You’ve supported legalizing marijuana.” As Brad Polumbo points out on NRO, “Whether she embraces the label “socialist” or not, Harris’s stated agenda and Senate record both reveal her to be positioned a long way to the Left on matters of economic policy.” And if Joe Biden is elected, she is one step away from running the country — and it’s a smaller step than people want to believe.
As Donald Trump said in the final debate, it isn’t just Harris pushing these agendas. Joe Biden has moved so far to the Left that he might as well be in another zip code from the Obama years. “He wants socialized medicine,” the president warned. And it doesn’t matter if he says it or not. “His vice president… wants it even more. Bernie Sanders wants it. The Democrats want it. You’re going to have socialized medicine.” Don’t trust what he says, Trump warned. Trust his platform. Trust his running mate’s voting record. Neither of them, I guarantee, will strike you as funny.
For election resources that cut through the media’s noise, get the facts at PrayVoteStand.org. Share the links of the Trump Accomplishments; the party platforms; the presidential, Senate, and gubernatorial voter guides; and so much more! Just because you’ve voted doesn’t meant you’re done influencing the outcome! Make sure your friends and church family have the tools they need to vote their biblical values!

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

America, Please Beware: A Toxic Theory of Race Relations in Our Schools

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Most Americans were not aware when a toxic theory of race relations deeply embedded itself into our culture, especially our schools.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) sounds like sophisticated academic reasoning, but it is not rooted in any science nor subjected to disciplined analysis. It is based on the assumption that white people are born with a belief in their own superiority and with fixed prejudice against other races. It can never be eliminated because it is ‘inborn’.

Racism is defined as the mindset of judging people on the basis of their race. It is profoundly racist to believe that any person’s beliefs can be reliably determined based only on their skin color.

CRT represents the exact opposite of the vision proclaimed by generations of American civil rights leaders, culminating in Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. King’s dream was of an America where races live together amicably, where color blindness was a shared goal and where race really didn’t matter that much.

To the CRT crowd, race infuses every aspect of life. It determines our character and behavior. If all white people are bigoted, then the nation they founded and its institutions must also be racist, so the notion of ‘institutional’ or ‘systemic’ racism naturally follows.

Critical Race Theory thus becomes the public ideological foundation of Black Lives Matter (despite their true Marxist identity and goals) and others wishing to foment hatred toward America. CRT also places the rest of us on a cruel hamster wheel. If we really are unable to forgo our innate racism, why even try? What good are attempts at interracial friendship and mutual acts of kindness? And if you object to being deemed automatically racist, that only provides further proof of your bigotry.

But does systemic racism really explain, for example, higher black incarceration rates? Blacks comprise 13% of America’s population, yet committed 53% of the murders in 2018, 54% of robberies and 34% of armed robberies, which would logically result in higher arrest and incarceration rates.

Asians, by contrast, comprise 5.6% of the population but commit to just 1.3% of the murders, 1.4% of the robberies and 2.1% of armed robberies. Is this proof that police have a pro-Asian bias and ignore Asian criminality?

Or is it more likely because across the races, there is a direct correlation between having a father in the home and crime rates. Take note of this ominous statistic – there’s a greater than 70% unwed pregnancy rate among blacks? Even more ominous, the Marxist founders of BLM advocate eliminating the nuclear family throughout society.

Still, almost unbelievably, CRT has become mainstream academic dogma in our universities. Although proponents avoid publicity, many parents are now discovering that even elementary school children are being introduced to the basics of CRT.

They’re serious. One national organization insists that “stopping the systemic dehumanization” requires “flooding our children with counter messages… until there is no racial inequality in incarceration and no brutality from the police and others.”

Educators in Chicago are provided with a “say their name” tool kit where Angela Davis, an unrepentant terrorist, admonishes that “in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.” In other words, kids, no room for discussion or nuance. You are either all in for BLM/CRT or you are the enemy of decency.

Major corporations, hoping to avoid racial shaming, are supportive. In the name of ‘diversity training’, white employees are told they should “struggle to own their racism“ and “invest in race-based growth“ .’Safe spaces’ are created where humiliated whites sit in mandated silence while black employees explain “the discomfort of their racism“ and “what it means to be black”. If they become too emotional or too mean, whites are not allowed to protest.

It’s chilling to think how far we’ve come from the days when racial hostility was in decline, when in response to our racist past, Americans were determined to do better and to bring us together. Critical Race Theory drives us apart and precludes the very initiatives that would support progress for black citizens.

Make no mistake, this is not an accident. CRT is not meant to improve the lot of blacks but to stoke the resentments that will enable the Marxist takeover of the American Republic that BLM and their radical allies fervently seek.

America, please beware.

 

Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.

Presidential Election Chaos When Black Lives Didn’t Matter

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A nation that somehow survived the chaos of the 1876 election can survive the expected chaos of the 2020 election.

You’re no doubt aware of the predictions of chaos if the presidential election is close, due to several states changing the deadlines for mail-in ballots.

If the predictions come true, the nation will survive the chaos, based on history. After all, it survived the extremely chaotic election of 1876.

That election was between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, to see who would replace incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant, whose administration had been tarnished by various scandals, especially scandals regarding the politically-powerful railroads, which had been paying off members of Congress with shares of stock in exchange for subsidies and land grants.

Like today, race was a big issue of the day.  It is not a stretch to say that unresolved racial issues back then laid the foundation for Black Lives Matter today.

In essence, Republicans were the party committed to ensuring that freed blacks were able to exercise their voting rights in the former Confederacy. Democrats, on the other hand, wanted to maintain Southern white supremacy, resorting to unspeakable violence if necessary.

Black lives didn’t matter much to Democrats after the Civil War.

To stem the violence, Grant had sent federal troops into the South, a military intervention that raised constitutional issues of states’ rights and further exhausted a nation already exhausted from the Civil War and the debts from the war. Southern blacks had won many elected offices because of military protection, but when the protection waned, so did their political power.

Blacks weren’t the only targets of racism. Irish immigrants in the North and South were hated about as much as blacks. Later, Italians and other Southern Europeans would replace the Irish as targets.

Ignorant of history, ‘woke’ Americans typecast all of the 100 or so white ethnic groups as coming from privilege, without realizing that Southerners put Italians in the same socioeconomic class as blacks, restricted them to black schools, and lynched eleven of them in New Orleans.

In 1876, Harper’s Weekly ran a political cartoon displaying ugly caricatures of blacks and the Irish on its cover by popular cartoonist Thomas Nast, who made a racist equivalence in the cartoon between “ignorant voters” of the Irish immigrant North and the black South.

An aside:  Several other liberal publications, including The Atlantic and The New York Times, have a sordid history in terms of racism, imperialism, and other issues, going back to the 19th century and much of the 20th century. Maybe their fixation on white guilt today is a projection of their own guilt onto those who don’t deserve such guilt.

Anyway, back to the election of 1876.

It would take a couple of pages to detail all of the shenanigans surrounding the election, so an overview will have to suffice here. Let’s begin with an excerpt from the book, The Republic for Which It Stands, by Richard White:

The Democrats had relied on fraud, violence, and coercion to suppress the black vote, and the Republicans marshaled fraud of their own and their control of the returning [election] boards to count out the Democrats. Even the Democrats agreed that Hayes had carried South Carolina in a corrupt and violent election where there were more votes cast than adult males. In Florida, first the courts and then the new Democratic legislature had intervened, resulting in three different counts, one for Hayes and two for Tilden. In Louisiana, the head of the electoral commission, with his eye on the main chance, tried to sell the results to the highest bidder, but although there is some evidence that both sides nibbled, they did not bite. The attempt failed.  Both states gave their electoral votes to Hayes.

The drama continued when Democrats got an elector in Oregon invalidated, which resulted in a tie in the Electoral College.  Congress then had to convene and officially count the votes, but couldn’t reach agreement on the count because of differing interpretations of the Twelfth Amendment and disputes over the constitutionality of its own rules.

Neither side wanted the election decided in the House or Senate. If the election were decided by having the president of the Senate count the votes, Hayes would win. If it were decided in the House, Tilden would win.

Civil War hero George McClellan, a Democrat and first commander of the Army of the Potomac, threatened to raise troops and march on Washington.

To break the stalemate, both sides agreed to create a Federal Electoral Commission, drawn from the Supreme Court, Senate and House. But that also split along partisan lines, until a compromise was reached and the impasse was broken by an associate justice of the Supreme Court, who voted for Republican Hayes. To get the vote, Hayes had to agree to not deploy federal troops in the South and leave the fate of Southern blacks in the hands of Southern Democrats. As a result, Democrats retained the House, Republicans retained the Senate, and the nation missed an opportunity to heal its racial wounds.

It would take another nine decades before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, both of which were followed by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society. All of these did much to advance equal rights and economic opportunities for blacks, but the last two also produced misguided welfare programs that led to the breakup of two-parent families, leaving most young black males today without a father in the household.

This is one of the leading causes, if not the leading cause, of crime, poor test scores, and economic disparities among African Americans—a causal relationship that is largely pooh-poohed by Democrats, who see traditional families as a white thing (and an Asian thing). This runs counter to their cliché that black lives matter, but at least they’re now saying that black lives matter, which is not what they said in 1876.

Lessons Learned From the Summer of 2020

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As we survey the results of what I am calling the of the Summer Maelstrom of 2020, what do we know?

We know that extreme views of race and gender, once isolated in the crazier confines of the university, are now mainstream on the streets of America.

We know that violence against persons and property are not only being condoned but encouraged. In the case of property, we have actually seen law enforcement state publicly they would not risk their members to protect property. City officials have also abandoned whole swaths of cities, allowing them to be looted, burned and devastated in the mistaken and craven belief that if an area for rioters to “act out and vent” were permitted, the violence would end.

In an open display of soft bigotry, there is no explanation why some groups require destruction as part of their political expression or emotional therapy. Who else gets this privilege?

It has lasted over 100 days in Portland, Oregon, one of the most Caucasian cities in America and so the rationale permitting criminal and destructive behavior, if it ever had validity, has been disproven.

We know that the ‘movement’ driving this unlawful and un-American behavior has a high percentage of white rioters and an unusually high number of angry women of all colors.

We know the movement is overwhelmingly from the radical, leftist side of the ideological and political spectrum. The movement is openly anti-Semitic and has made alliance with Islamic extremists. We know that outside money from people like George Soros and contributions from many American corporations and foundations are providing logistical and moral support to the lawbreakers. Black Lives Matters is the dominant driver, Marxist in its origin and vision and seems to operate seamlessly with Antifa, recognized now as a domestic terror organization.

We know when they are not peddling lies about police bias, they are pushing for socialism in the name of “social justice.”

We know that the mainstream press cannot be trusted to cover these stories. There are many ludicrous video-captured examples of “mostly peaceful protests” with the back drop of fires and looting.

We know that the American people sense they are being poked and prodded into a race war, but at this time they are still showing enormous patience.

We know from history that developments such as this have a distinct political fault line. Overwhelmingly, the rioters are progressive, leftist Democrats and those who want the violence stopped are mostly conservative, Republican and inner-city citizens who must live with the consequences of “sponsored rioting.”

We know that the almost all the afflicted cities have been under Democrat control for 50 years or more.

We know that city mayors and district attorneys, the elected officials who are supposed to enforce the laws with an even hand, have tilted the scales towards the rioters in most of the stricken cities. They reduce or eliminate bail and because of their own personal views, refuse to prosecute lawbreakers.

We know that leadership in cities having a high percentage of black police officers or black police chiefs or black mayors have done little if anything to discourage rioting and destruction. So much for the theory that good policing requires the force to look like the community.

When the police withdraw under political pressure, what results? It is not primarily about guns. It really is about the God-given right to protect oneself and one’s property which in many cases is the work of a lifetime. Such life-long effort cannot be replaced with the casual, often heartless response: “it’s insured” or “property can be replaced.”

We have known for years of the slow response in many urban areas to emergency calls but we rarely have seen officials simply abandon whole precincts to looting, burning, and murder.

Sensing this, the American people are buying arms and ammunition at a record clip. Guns are hard to get right now and the price of ammunition has gone up fourfold. Regrettably, we cannot be assured all these supplies are being purchased by good people.
Some years ago, the working definition of a “Conservative”, was a “Liberal” who had been mugged.

Undoubtedly, there are increasing numbers of people in urban areas who feel violated and frightened by the violence.

Confidence in public officials is hardly warranted, especially when these officials see themselves as part of the revolutionary movement.

These are the lessons to be learned from the Summer Maelstrom of 2020.

Peace, security and equal application of the law are on the ballot in 2020. Where do you stand?

CNN Butchers the Facts on Late-Term Abortions

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This article was originally published by JustFactsDaily on October 12, 2020

In a so-called “fact check” of the vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, CNN reporter Caroline Kelly presents a barrage of disinformation that hides the realities of late-term abortion and the agenda of the Biden–Harris campaign.

During the debate, Pence stated that “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support taxpayer funding of abortion all the way up to the moment of birth, late-term abortion.” CNN, which begins each of its fact checks with the phrase “Facts First,” uses a flurry of falsehoods to undercut Pence’s factual statement.

The “Medical Term” Farce

CNN begins its fact check with an attempt to delegitimize the phrase “late-term” abortion by declaring it “is not a medical term.” This claim is flatly disproven by medical journals that have published articles with titles like:

These medical journals and others, along with Planned Parenthood, abortion clinics, and media outlets have used the phrase “late-term” on numerous occasions to describe abortions that are performed from as few as 14 weeks into pregnancy to as many as 35 weeks or later.

More importantly, a vice-presidential debate is not a medical forum, CNN is not a medical periodical, and journalism guidelines bluntly instruct reporters to avoid medical jargon:

  • The book English for Journalists emphasizes: “A common source of jargon is scientific, medical, government and legal handouts,” and “if you write for a newspaper or general magazine you should try to translate jargon into ordinary English whenever you can.”
  • The New Oxford Guide to Writing states: “Jargon is technical language misused. Technical language, the precise diction demanded by any specialized trade or profession, is necessary when experts communicate with one another. It becomes jargon when it is applied outside the limits of technical discourse.”
  • The book Writing for Journalists drives home the point: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”

In violation of that journalism standard, journalists selectively use medical jargon in ways that obscure the facts that:

A common example of how media outlets use clinical jargon to sanitize the facts of abortion is by inconsistently and incorrectly using the word “fetus,” a medical term derived from a Latin word meaning “offspring” or “newly delivered.” Reporters frequently use this term to describe the object of an abortion, but they use the word “mother” to refer to a pregnant woman instead of the clinically accurate term, “gravida.”

And when the topic is not abortion, journalists often shun the word “fetus” and use “baby” or “child” in its place. In fact, the ombudsman of the Boston Globe once apologized to its readers because the paper used the term “fetus” to describe an unborn child who was killed when his mother was shot in the stomach. The apology was sparked by a torrent of criticism from readers who objected that the Globe “truly dehumanized” the “child” and that “every other news channel, TV, and newspaper called it a baby.”

Beyond their double standards, reporters often misuse the term “fetus,” revealing that they are out of their depth. Per Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, a fetus is “the unborn offspring in the postembryonic period, after major structures have been outlined, in humans from nine weeks after fertilization until birth.” Simply put, the word “fetus” applies from nine weeks after fertilization until birth. Yet, numerous major news organizations have misapplied this term to both before and after this period.

Late-Term Abortions Are Not Rare 

According to CNN, “Doctors say abortions performed later in pregnancy are exceptionally rare.” In truth, late-term abortions are far more common than deaths that the media portrays as frequent occurrences like firearm homicides, young adult Covid-19 fatalities, and murders committed by police officers.

A 2013 paper in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health estimates that “more than 15,000” abortions are performed each year in the U.S. “at 21 weeks or later.” The authors note that this amounts to about 1% of all abortions, “but given an estimated 1.21 million abortions in the United States annually,” “later abortions” add up to “a substantial number of abortions.”

Hence, these “exceptionally rare” late-term abortions are more numerous than the:

  • 12,000 murders per year committed with guns.
  • 6,000 Covid-19-related deaths of people under the age of 45.
  • 50 people per year who are executed under the death penalty.
  • 7 police officers per year who are arrested for murder or manslaughter in an on-duty shooting, and the 1–2 officers who are ultimately convicted of such crimes.

Most Late-Term Abortions Are Not for Medical Reasons

CNN claims that “abortions performed later in pregnancy” are “often” because “of a fetal condition that can’t be treated or in cases of maternal health endangerment.” This is a common talking point of abortion proponents, but the disclosures of abortion providers reveal just the opposite:

  • Martin Haskell, who is credited with inventing the partial-birth abortion procedure stated, “I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range…. In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective.”
  • Renee Chelian, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, said of late-term abortions, “The spin out of Washington was that it was only done for medical necessity, even though we knew it wasn’t so.”
  • Doctors at two New Jersey abortion clinics independently revealed that each of their clinics was performing roughly 3,000 late-term abortions per year and nearly all of them were elective and not for medical reasons.
  • Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, stated that late-term abortion are “primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses.”

The statements above are corroborated by a study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute—a research organization whose “Guiding Principles” include support for legalized abortion. As summarized by the New York Times, the study found that “only 2 percent of abortions done after 16 weeks of pregnancy are done because of fetal abnormalities,” and such abortions are “most often performed to end healthy pregnancies because the woman arrived relatively late to her decision to abort.”

Biden and Harris Support Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Up Till Birth

According to CNN, Pence’s statement about Biden and Harris is “partially misleading and partially false” because “a Biden campaign official told CNN that Biden supports Roe v. Wade—the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, as amended by Planned Parenthood v. Casey.”

However, the plain words of those court decisions prove that Pence’s statement is entirely accurate. This is because these rulings prohibit states from banning abortions at any stage of pregnancy if any abortionist claims it is for “the health of the mother.”

Importantly, Roe defines threats to a mother’s health so broadly that they can include practically anything. Some eye-opening examples of what Roe deems to be hazardous to “health” are the work of “child care,” the “stigma of unwed motherhood,” and “the distress” of parenting “an unwanted child.”

In Casey, the Supreme Court ruled that “Roe’s essential holding be retained and reaffirmed,” including “a confirmation of the State’s power to restrict abortions after viability, if the law contains exceptions for pregnancies endangering a woman’s life or health.”

Furthermore, Roe places all decisions about what constitutes “health” into the hands of abortionists. It does this by mandating that Roe “be read together” with Doe v. Bolton, a companion case that the Supreme Court issued on the same day. In Doe, the Court ruled that all abortion providers have full authority to decide if an abortion is necessary to protect a woman’s “health” based solely on their “best clinical judgment.”

Many states have passed laws that defy Roe and Casey, and Biden and Harris say that they will overturn all of them through a federal law that codifies Roe. They also support “repealing the Hyde Amendment,” which has restricted taxpayer funding of abortion for more than 40 years except in cases of rape, incest, and if the life of the mother is endangered.

CNN also alleges without evidence that “no candidate in either political party supports abortion ‘up to the moment of birth’,” but the fact is that Democrats blocked a bill in 2019 that would have required healthcare providers to “preserve the life and health” of children who are aborted and born alive. Harris was among the 42 Democrats who filibustered this bill in the Senate.

Summary

During the vice presidential debate, Mike Pence accurately and straightforwardly described the positions of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden on late-term abortions, noting that they support such abortions up to birth and want them funded by taxpayers.

Yet, CNN deceitfully claimed his statement is misleading in an article that it titled “Pence Echoes Trump’s False Claims at Vice Presidential Debate.” Furthermore, CNN laced its “fact check” with other canards that hide the harsh realities of late-term abortion and the fact that they are performed more than 10,000 times per year on healthy, conscious humans with healthy mothers.

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This column from JustFactsDaily.com is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The opinions expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of The Prickly Pear or of the sponsors.

Prop 207: Written by the Marijuana Industry, for the Marijuana Industry

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Prop 207 doesn’t simply decriminalize marijuana. That could have been done in a page or two. Marijuana sellers, instead, wrote 17-pages of changes to Arizona law, creating a lucrative recreational marijuana industry for themselves, at the cost of Arizonans. The sweeping changes in Prop 207 would impact current laws governing driving impairment, workplace safety, as well as protections through employers, landlords, and HOAs.

Perhaps the more egregious change is the elimination of Arizona’s DUI standard for marijuana impairment. Prop 207 rids the books of this law without replacing it with another clear standard of impairment. This makes it harder to prosecute impaired drivers, while we still lack the technology to gauge marijuana impairment during a roadside stop by police. This leaves police ill equipped to keep our roadways safe. Marijuana-related traffic deaths in “legal” states bear that out.

After Washington State legalized recreational marijuana, marijuana-related traffic fatalities doubled. In Colorado, someone died every three days in 2018 in marijuana related traffic crashes.

The tragedy on the roadways in these states shouldn’t come as a surprise, nearly 70% of marijuana users in Colorado admit to driving stoned, and almost a third, do it daily.

Prop 207 doesn’t limit the risks to roads. It ties the hands of employers who want to keep a drug-free workplace. The initiative forbids employers from taking any adverse action against employees based on their use of marijuana, and limits their ability to keep employees from coming to work stoned. Prop 207 only allows employers to prohibit employees from using marijuana and its high potency concentrates at the worksite. There is nothing stopping employees from using the drug, and then going to work stoned.

Consider the consequences of day care workers or employees at an elderly care facility.

The authors of Prop 207 put profits above kids by allowing the sale of marijuana-laced candies, gummies, cookies, and other snacks that appeal to kids. They further serve themselves by allowing advertising of such pot-snacks on TV, radio, and social media.

This, though we know marijuana use damages the developing brains or teenagers. It impacts learning, memory and coordination, causing academic failure, according to the Mayo Clinic. It inhibits brain development , causing permanent IQ loss, and it hinders learning, attention, and emotional responses. And, it can lead to long-term dependence. 

A study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that after the legalization of recreational marijuana, the number of cases of adolescent marijuana use disorder increased 25%. 

States that legalized recreational marijuana have among the highest teen use rates in the nation. Is this what we want for Arizona’s future?

The marijuana sellers who wrote Prop 207 are more concerned about creating and keeping a future customer base. That’s why they made using marijuana a statutory right under the initiative, and hamstrung landlords and HOAs to ensure nothing stops their customers from growing a dozen 10-foot tall plants in their back yard; and virtually no community can ban pot shops from their neighborhoods. They even included in the proposition front porch delivery, regardless of how many kids are playing out front.

You won’t find these details in their ads, on their road signs, or even in most news reports. Instead, they tout the 16% tax that they claim will bring much needed revenue to the state. But the tax is capped, and the revenue is earmarked, assuming it’s ever realized – which is unlikely.

In the six Western states with recreational marijuana, tax revenue accounts for less than 1% of state revenues. And Colorado spends $4.50 on marijuana related expenses for every $1 in marijuana revenue.

As these details emerge, support for Prop 207 drops. A recent poll shows support at just 46%, and opposition at 45%. Another poll puts likely voter support at just 47%. These are far lower numbers than early polls indicated.

As voters consider all the facts, they must remember this key point: Arizona laws passed by ballot initiatives are almost impossible to change or fix. The state legislature cannot remedy problems that arise. Arizona would be stuck with every detail of Prop 207, just as the marijuana industry intended.

Cindy Dahlgren

Communications and Media Specialist
The Center for Arizona Policy

O: 602-424-2525 | Mobile: 856-607-4208

www.azpolicy.org |  Subscribe to Engage Arizona

The History of BLM Matters

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Look. Let’s get this clear. Black Lives Matter as a civil rights slogan is perfect. Who could disagree? The phrase simply states what ought to be obvious to anyone who isn’t a racist. Matters grow more complicated when someone states “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.” Quickly, one is marginalized and even attacked as a racist.

Behind the slogan and the movement, however, is the organization of the same name: Black Lives Matter. BLM is under the leadership of committed Marxists advancing an anti-capitalist, anti-police, anti-nuclear family, anti-heteronormativity, anti-prison, anti-Israel and anti-fossil fuels agenda. Antifa’s agenda is nearly identical except they throw in a “global, communist order.”

In the past months we have witnessed the wholesale evaporation of the “peaceful” component in big city protests with rioting, arson and looting in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, New York, Atlanta and other “blue” cities. Even before this ominous turn, careful observers had noted that the “peaceful protestors” egged on, supported and covered the tracks of the violent aggressors, seeming to operate in a functional division of labor.

The insurrection then made a crucial tactical shift. The central target became the police. This includes other forces of law and order as well. It is not just a matter of having run out of statues to tear down or businesses to loot and burn. It is a tactical shift of these neo-Marxists to assault the fundamental institutions of the “state.”

The violence continues to be led by Black Lives Matter and autonomous white partners and auxiliary co-revolutionaries comprised primarily of the terrorist group Antifa. Certainly, not a syllable of opposition to the violence by any of these groups has been voiced let alone a commitment to end it.

Each of the three co-founders of BLM are admitted Marxists with ties to ‘60s black radical ideology. Patrisse Cullors’ mentor was a white Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who was on the Executive Committee of the Weather Underground. Eric Mann was a disciple of Mao and an admirer of Herbert Marcuse one of the leaders of the Frankfurt School prior to WW 2. He expected the intellectuals in Europe to replace the working class as a revolutionary force. Marcuse mused that “The ghetto population in the United States could be such a force.”

Aliza Garzar, another co-founder, admired and hailed Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army who was convicted for the murder of a police officer and escaped to Cuba. The third BLM co-founder is Opal Tometi. She actively supports the brutal dictator of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro.

Some argue that because BLM is decentralized you cannot paint everyone with the same brush. Hawk Newsome, leader of BLM of Greater New York recently declared “We pattern ourselves after the Black Panthers, after the Nation of Islam, we believe we need an arm to defend ourselves.”

The BLM head in Toronto, Yusra Khogali, another Marxist, stated that “white people are a genetic defect of blackness.” BLM’s Los Angeles head Melina Abdullah calls for dishing out “violence and pain” to whites. It goes on and on.

The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 abolished Jim Crow. Martin Luther King Jr sought an America where people would be judged by “the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.”

This did not sit well with the burgeoning Black Power Movement of the late ‘60s. Figures such as the Maoist Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party shaped black revolutionary and white revolutionary consciousness towards separatism and violence.

The anti-Vietnam War movement generated support for Third World revolutionaries and the “most oppressed” domestically. As Mao said “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The police have the guns. They must be “defunded” and defanged is the latest slogan. This is pure Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin made very clear in his book State & Revolution that power cannot be transferred to a new ruling class until the state and its monopoly of the means of violence is “smashed.” The Democratic Party’s local and national leadership has tacitly accepted this devil’s brew by defunding the police and stepping back from law and order.

The deeper danger and tragedy are that many in the Democratic Party’s leadership, as Obama once said, seek to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Obama declared at John Lewis’ funeral with great irony that the filibuster was a “Jim Crow” relic.

If the Democrats control both Houses of Congress and win the Presidency and the filibuster is ended for Senate passage of bills, simple majorities would be sufficient to pack the Supreme Court, give statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C., enshrine federal mail-in voting and a host of other measures truly commencing a fundamental transformation of the Republic.

We would enter a period of majoritarian tyranny that the Founders warned about. The Constitution would be well on the way to being shredded legally. And even this would not be the full end game of the likes of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Marvin A. Treiger, PhD was formerly the Youth Chairman of the Communist Party of Southern California, a member of the Maoist Revolutionary Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s. He converted to conservatism and Americanism in the aftermath of 9/11 while in a solitary three-month retreat. He resumed activism when Barack Obama became the Presidential nominee in 2008. Dr. Treiger is a retired Psychotherapist.

The Tragedy of Tucson: First in a two-part series on why the Old Pueblo isn’t prosperous

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With 1.05 million people, metro Tucson is Arizona’s second-largest metropolis. About 56% of that population is in the City of Tucson, about 36% is in unincorporated Pima County, and the remaining 8% is in the relatively nice suburbs of Oro Valley and Marana.

Once the territorial capital of Arizona, Tucson has a milder climate than Phoenix and is located in a prettier natural setting. But Tucson has fallen far short of its potential and lags behind Phoenix in key measures. It also lags behind other cities that, like Tucson, were once part of Mexico and, before that, part of the Spanish Empire. To wit:

Tucson Vs. Other Locales Poverty and Income

If the above were not bad enough, the City of Tucson has one of the highest rates of property crime in the nation. Moreover, its largest school district, the Tucson Unified School District, has some of the lowest test scores and graduation rates in Arizona. On the plus side, its University High School is one of the best in Arizona and it has some good private schools and charter schools, including the world-renown Basis schools. Generally, schools are better in the northern suburbs and in the southeastern suburb of Vail.

In a case of too little too late, residents of the city have voted for increased spending on city roads and parks, which are in terrible shape due to decades of deferred maintenance. Roads in the surrounding county are so bad that 90% of them are rated as substandard or failed. Even in wealthy neighborhoods in the Foothills to the north of the city, pavement is badly crumbled, alligatored and potholed. There are even some dirt streets just a couple of miles north of the city limit, smack in the middle of suburbia.

Blight of course goes hand in hand with poverty, but the rundown and seedy condition of much of the metropolis has nothing to do with poverty. It has to do with bad zoning, bad code enforcement, bad government, and bad maintenance of both public and private properties. Arterial and collector streets are littered, illegal signs and banners proliferate, landscaping is sparse, and tacky strip malls dominate the scenery.

In 1970, Life Magazine designated the major east-west thoroughfare of Speedway Blvd. as the ugliest street in America. Unfortunately, it is not the only ugly street in the metropolis.

Rivaling it for the top honor is Oracle Rd. (State Route 77), a major north-south artery that runs from center city, through a few miles of unincorporated county, and then through the town of Oro Valley. The ugliness of the stretch in the City of Tucson makes one weep in despair, but the stretch north of the city makes one consider suicide. The latter is devoid of landscaping and sidewalks but is full of weeds, litter and breathtakingly ugly commercial development. Judging by the condition of this state route, the state must hate Tucson, or maybe the state knows that Tucsonans will tolerate being treated as second-class citizens.

Downtown Tucson has been somewhat revitalized, but it came at the expense of a redevelopment boondoggle known as Rio Nuevo, which wasted $200 million, according to some estimates. If governmental incompetence were a salable export, Tucson would be richer than Silicon Valley.

Tucson is off the radar as a headquarters location by large corporations. This results in a brain-drain, as talented young professionals, including graduates of the University of Arizona, tend to move elsewhere for opportunities. Hard data on how many leave and where they go cannot be found, but anecdotes suggest that popular destinations are Phoenix, Denver and Dallas.

How did metro Tucson get this way? The second part of this series will answer the question in detail, but here is a preview: Tucson’s troubles were purposely inflicted decades ago on the metropolis by a cruel establishment that benefited personally from the status quo and had one overriding goal: not to become another Phoenix.

This is the real tragedy of Tucson.

Critical Race Theory Critiqued

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“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.” Thomas Sowell

Critical Theory is an umbrella term designating innumerable modes of revolutionary inquiry. The theories originated in the Frankfurt School and in Post-modernism. These may include critical race theory, critical psychiatry, critical literary theory, etc. The list proliferates. What they all have in common is the assumption that all theories or statements under a capitalist order need to be deconstructed. This, they argue, is because all such theories veil their true oppressive impact on the social order. Critical theory seeks to reveal the true consequences of theory when applied in real life.

For example, if you say “People should be judged by their character and not by the color of their skin,” you are expressing white supremacy ideology and white privilege. Why? Because such views make preferential hiring or entry into colleges appear discriminatory instead of understanding the handicaps for people of color generated by “systemic racism”. Privilege reversal is the only true way to level the playing field. “Hard work” and “Promptness” (that is, time itself) express whiteness which CRT inevitably expands beyond even skin color. So “whiteness” morphs into a set of qualities allegedly found among whites thus giving them more privilege and as such is to be condemned. Critical Language Theory assaults proper English as bolstering white privilege. I think you get it.

The theory is seductive because it purports to go beneath surface appearances and reveal the true expression of theory in life. The existence of inequalities is the data they use to fill their categories. Impressionable young intellectuals easily get high on a sense of having a superior and deeper understanding of the world. It provides them with a new vocabulary and a sense of moral virtue on the grounds they stand with the have-nots against the haves.

Critical Theory, besides other problems, fails on its own terms. It never analyzes the consequences of the application of itself as a practice when applied in society. In short, it masks its own meaning which is supposed to only be revealed in societal consequences. When we apply critical theory to itself, the “deeper truths” revealed are the revival of racism, the negation of individualism, the exacerbation of divisions, the introduction of cancel culture, the assault on the past, the invalidation of property, the intoxication with utopia and a host of other societal ills for which we now have plenty of data.

The following video does an excellent job of examining Trump’s recent cancellation of Critical Race Theory programs currently financed by your taxes through the Office of Management and Budget. Our President struck a great blow for liberty that will have huge implications for the training of those in the Administrative State. It is a long, past-due, swamp draining measure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJLdKbB-Rc&feature=youtu.be

Marvin A. Treiger, PhD was formerly the Youth Chairman of the Communist Party of Southern California, a member of the Maoist Revolutionary Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s. He converted to conservatism and Americanism in the aftermath of 9/11 while in a solitary three-month retreat. He resumed activism when Barack Obama became the Presidential nominee in 2008. Dr. Treiger is a retired Psychotherapist.

Black Lives Matter Accused of Cultural Appropriation

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The three Black women who founded Black Lives Matter have been accused of cultural appropriation by Professor E.Z. Pickens of Whatsamatter U near Boinksville, Pennsylvania.

Professor Pickens pointed out that the founders of BLM have claimed to be trained Marxists.

Professor Pickens explained that Karl Marx was German and Dutch, ethnically Jewish from a line of rabbis, the son of a Jewish couple that had converted to Christianity. He was a White European atheist, a racist and an anti-Semite. In short, a big White mess.

In addition, he pointed out that Marx was heavily influenced by the philosopher Hegel, who likewise was a White German. Additionally, Marx was informed by the socialist tradition that included French philosophers Saint Simon and Charles Fourier.

He also noted that Marx likely would not have succeeded in publishing his many works without the financial support of Fredrich Engels, a German industrialist. George Soros was not available then.

“Marx was the product of the certain strand of the European Enlightenment,” said Professor Pickens. “His views have roots in France and Germany, and he was published in the U.S by Horace Greeley. It was an all-White male project.”

Two of his daughters died in suicide pacts with their husbands. Hairy Karl must have been a suboptimal father.

Pickens also pointed out that Marx was a big hairy, binary revolutionary who treated his wife quite shabbily; even knocking up the maid much like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Why modern-day feminists would embrace the ideas of a male chauvinist who exploited women like Marx is beyond belief. He was almost as bad as Bill Clinton.”

Pickens, who holds the Chair in Ethnic Studies and Furniture Design, pointed out further violations. First, it is not appropriate for females to use male ideas. “You cannot really understand male thinking if you are female. It is pure and simple sexual appropriation.”

Secondly, “Black Americans have no right to appropriate the ideas of White Europeans for their own purposes.”

“Black Lives Matter is exclusively about the downside of the Black experience in America and ignores any comparative benefits or improvement. It has nothing to do with European male ideas,” he stated. “You’ve got to stay focused on contemporary misery. Either you take a knee for that or you will get a knee in the groin.”

“You simply can’t go around using the cultural and intellectual traditions of other people, especially if you are not the same color or sex.”

Pickens, who is African American himself, is renowned for the small research he has published on pygmies, concluding that “reliance on the ideas of White males does not fit with the Black experience. The modern Black family since the Great Society programs of the 1960s is largely matriarchal.”

“The last thing the movement needs is for a bunch of Black feminists to inject male ideas and promote the ideas of the White European oppressors.”

To date, Black Lives Matter has not commented on the matter.

An Ape Comments on the Divisiveness of Multiculturalism

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Decades ago, multiculturalism sounded like a good idea. Its premise was that the arts, literature, history, culture and education in general were too Euro-centric and white and should be broadened to include other races, peoples and cultures.

This good idea has morphed into the exceedingly bad and divisive practice of pointing out all of the injustices committed by white Europeans and their American descendants while ignoring the equal or worse injustices committed by other peoples. At the same time, the accomplishments of the other peoples have been highlighted while those of whites have been downplayed.

Take Native Americans. It’s undeniable that they have suffered from imperialism and genocide at the hands of whites. Only a closeminded ignoramus would not want this history included in a history of the USA.

But it’s also undeniable that many if not most Indian tribes, in a manifestation of their warrior culture, took slaves and engaged in some of the worst atrocities imaginable. Only an ideologue with a political agenda would want to hide that history.

Perhaps it’s understandable that Native Americans living in poverty on reservations and getting their healthcare from the incompetent Indian Health Services would feel that the telling of the dark side of their history would be like blaming the victims; and as such, they would want to stop the telling of that history in academia and elsewhere, claiming that it is hurtful and racist.

But that argument could also be made by whites who have been victims in history and had nothing to do with the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, colonialism, imperialism, Nazism, and Communism – and who are so poor, disadvantaged and powerless that it is absurd to claim that they are privileged and have somehow benefited from the subjugation of others.

It’s equally absurd to lay the entire blame for the horrible socioeconomic conditions in various countries on colonialism and imperialism, or again, to portray the citizens of those countries as being free of any responsibility for their own racism and injustices.

Take India, the maternal home of vice president candidate Kamala Harris, whose mother came from an upper caste known for its embrace of education, traditional families, industriousness and personal discipline. In other words, Kamala’s mother was from privilege, and by extension, so was Kamala.

Other privileged Indian castes with the same embrace of education, traditional families, education, industriousness and personal discipline have been the primary source of Indian immigrants to the USA, which probably explains why they rank the highest in household income. They’ve left behind one of the poorest, most polluted, and most racist and class-conscious nations in the world – a culture that existed before the arrival of English colonists.

Some Indians bring the class-consciousnesses with them to the USA, just as all immigrants bring negatives and positives of their culture with them. Case in point: One time, a CEO asked me to coach an Indian divisional president about his aloofness and air of superiority with his staff. I saw the behavior firsthand when we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant, where he treated the Indian staff like servants, snapping his fingers and not saying please or thank you.

This isn’t to suggest that he was representative of most Indians, but it is to state the obvious, or what would be obvious if multiculturalism curricula taught the good and bad of all races and ethnic groups – or more importantly, taught that all humans are imperfect by nature and are molded by upbringing, culture and class, in good and bad ways.

In my case, I share about 98% of my genes with apes and about 8% of those with extinct Neanderthals. And being of Italian ancestry, there’s no telling what races mixed their chromosomes in producing my ancestors, in view of the fact that horny Greeks, Persians, Africans, Jews, Germans and others tromped through the Italian peninsula for millennia.

If the multiculturalists insist on typecasting me, I wish they’d be accurate and describe me as an ape with a smattering of Neanderthal genes and mix of chromosomes from various races.

STAY INFORMED

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