Star Parker: Democrats Are 'The Party of Anti-Christ'

Because of its support for abortion on demand, including in the ninth month of pregnancy, the Democratic Party is "evil" and is "the party of Anti-Christ," said conservative author and activist Star Parker, the founder of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

Parker made her remarks during a Facebook Live interview earlier this year with Patrina Mosley, the director of Life, Culture, and Women's Advocacy at the Family Research Council.

Mosley spoke about Rep. Steve Cohen's (D-Tenn.) support for abortion and the donations given to liberal lawmakers by the abortion industry and asked Parker why that "symbiotic connection is there"?

Parker, author of Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor, said, “Well, the Democrats have always been the party of control. They are the party of slavery, they are the party of Jim Crow, they are the party of the welfare state."

"So, I am not surprised that the Democrats are invested so heavily in making sure that the truth is not out," she said. 

"The people that saw [the exchange with Rep. Cohen] were surprised, I suppose—in particular, those that are voting for Democrats," said Parker. "I don’t think that they understand how evil that the Democrat Party has become and how entrenched it is in the Democrat philosophy and their platform—abortion, killing what God calls His reward.”

“It is the party of anti-Christ,” she said.

“They do not believe anything of Scripture," said Parker.  "When the Bible says don’t do something, they want to do it. When the Bible says do do something, they don’t want to."

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Urban America's Vagrancy Outrage
    
It’s appropriate that the U.N. special rapporteur devoted to adequate housing has visited encampments in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Mumbai — and San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley.

The homeless situation in those cities and others around the country is positively Third World, a blight that shows the persistence of human folly and misery, despite what we take to be our steady progress to greater enlightenment and prosperity.

San Francisco is a crown jewel of the new economy, and a sink of vagrancy. One of the more compelling pieces of reportage that The New York Times has run recently was on the dirtiest block in San Francisco, the 300 block of Hyde Street, blighted by discarded heroin needles and other filth.

In the 21st century, in the richest country on the planet, you would think that we would have figured out how to live without having to step around human feces. The experience of San Francisco says that, against all expectations, we haven’t — or at least we forgot how.

It used to be a journalistic trope that homelessness spiked whenever a Republican occupied the White House, but it’s more obvious than ever that it is an endemic social problem. Homelessness is roiling the politics of impeccably progressive cities like San Francisco — where tech barons split on a proposal for a new tax to fund homelessness programs — and Seattle.

In an article for the journal National Affairs, Stephen Eide of the Manhattan Institute recounted how we got here over the past 50 years.

Cities wiped out or drastically diminished their skid rows, once a last-ditch housing recourse for men who had hit bottom. As urban renewal and regulations to improve the quality of housing eliminated these down-on-their-luck areas, the people who once lived there decamped to public places.

We “deinstitutionalized” the mentally ill, too often a euphemism for dumping them onto the streets and into jails. About 20 to 30 percent of the homeless are mentally ill.

Meanwhile, the number of single-parent families drastically increased. Women only rarely lived on skid row, but poor families headed by single mothers are a large component of the homeless. Eide notes that in New York City “two-thirds of the homeless population is comprised of families with children, and around 90 percent of those families are headed by single mothers.”

These large-scale trends have been met with a new, more permissive legal environment. The Supreme Court in 1972 made it more difficult for city police forces to hustle along vagrants, and subsequent free-speech jurisprudence has made outlawing panhandling tricky. Civil commitment of the mentally ill has become highly restricted. The American Civil Liberties Union is a great de facto friend of vagrancy.

Not that anything is easy in this area. The hard core of the homeless population is cut off from human relationships and finds the perverse freedom of the streets more appealing than the structure that would come with assistance. Many refuse help, either because they are too sick to make rational decisions or they don’t want to deal with any rules.

Eide suggests localities do more to nudge the homeless to make use of social services, and allow more dense housing to create a greater housing stock overall, thus reducing some of the upward pressure on rents.

But the beginning wisdom is to consider the status quo intolerable, and resist the advocates who want to normalize panhandling and camping, and the associated drug abuse, petty crime and disorder. Houston has had success with a tough-love policy of more services, coupled with a crackdown on encampments and other public nuisances.

One of the advantages of modern society is that people don’t have to live in public, or in squalor. That it is widely accepted in some of our greatest cities is an outrage of our age. It is deeply harmful to our civic life, and does no favors for the men and women living in parks and highway underpasses.

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1,600 “Scientists” Defy Science To Support Transgender Activism

This story came out earlier this week but it was shocking enough that it bears a look. The transgender activist community was all abuzz on Thursday over a letter that had actually been featured in the New York Times a week earlier. Buzzfeed picked it up and ran with it, adding to the celebratory mood. The document in question was an open letter published by a gaggle of 1,600 scientists who are rejecting the anticipated HHS memo defining sex and gender in traditional, scientifically accepted terms for purposes of Title IX questions.

What’s truly amazing is the fact that these supposed pillars of the scientific community are calling on the Trump administration to reject such notions and formulate a policy which is more scientific and ethically based.

The memo states that any disputes about a person’s sex would be clarified using genetic testing, which scientists who signed the letter called unscientific and unethical.

“This proposal is fundamentally inconsistent not only with science, but also with ethical practices, human rights, and basic dignity,” the scientists wrote.

Among the signatories are eight Nobel laureates.

The letter emphasizes that both biological sex and gender are on a spectrum and are not clear cut.

For a document supposedly written by scientists, the arguments being put forth sound suspiciously unscientific. Like many in the social justice warrior club, the authors are claiming that centuries of established medical science are simply wrong. Fair enough. If you’re a scientist it’s your job to reexamine the data and provide new information as it is revealed through research. But that’s the problem. By their own admission, these scientists are signing onto a document which states they can’t prove what they’re saying. Here’s one example:

“Though scientists are just beginning to understand the biological basis of gender identity, it is clear that many factors, known and unknown, mediate the complex links between identity, genes, and anatomy.”

So you don’t understand it yet. And you’re leaning on factors both known and unknown. What kind of research is this? Did it involve a deck of tarot cards? Here’s another one:

Mollie Manier, an assistant professor of biology at George Washington University and one of the coauthors of the letter, told BuzzFeed News, “The science on gender is very much still in development, but more importantly, the lived experiences of transgender and intersex people should not be co-opted by a genetic test.”

You’re basing your conclusions on science that’s “in development” and rejecting what we already know in favor of “the lived experiences” of people.

The authors go on from there to adopt a favorite trick of activists and attempt to conflate the conditions displayed by the tiny fraction of the population with legitimate intersex traits caused by genetic anomalies (a completely valid topic) and all of the people who just really, really, really feel like they were born in the wrong body. Granted, some men produce more or less testosterone than others. That doesn’t make the ones producing less women. Ditto for females and estrogen levels.

What we’re seeing here is the downstream effects of the corruption of the educational system by liberal politics. As schools are overrun by social justice warriors and those controlling the flow of grant money bend to liberal demands, we’re seeing this nonsense now being passed off as science. And as it bleeds over into other areas, everyone in society will be paying the price for it.

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The three great lies corroding western cultures

PAUL KELLY, commenting from Australia

The degeneration in the culture that drives the corrosion in our politics has its origins in three great lies now being propounded daily in our universities, media, corporates and obviously among the politicians.

These lies are becoming embedded in our discourse. National politics in America and Australia was once about the fight for control of the shared narrative or common destiny. Not any more. Politics is about tribal messages derived from the breakdown of the agreed national ethos.

The recent statement of this pathology based on the US university sector comes from American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff in this year’s "The Coddling of the American Mind", and in this column I have drawn on their thesis as modified by my own assessments.

In the 1980s politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Australia's Bob Hawke offered appeals based on the shared national imagination — Hawke won office in 1983 calling for consensus under the slogan: “Bob Hawke — Bringing Australians Together”. Reagan helped Americans manage adversity with his “It’s morning again in America” slogan, a fusion of nostalgia and optimism.

The Haidt-Lukianoff book is based on the “three great untruths” in our cultural and university life now spilling into politics.

* The starting lie or untruth is that disputes and differences today are a battle between good and evil, between the oppressed (the virtuous victims) and the oppressors (evil tyrants of the status quo.)

This turns the mundane injus­tices of everyday life into a moral contest. Yet it is a contest based on distorted morality. There are many illustrations: if you don’t support radical action to curb climate change you are a moral threat to society and betraying your friends. In short, your support for the status quo marks you as a bad person no matter how many charities you support.

In her recent Helen Hughes lecture for the Centre for Independent Studies, Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann called out the technique: “If there is a gender pay gap then this is because men are oppressing women. If there is a gap between the earnings of immigrants and a native population, then this is because the native population is oppressing the immigrant group. If there are health discrepancies between LGBTI people and heterosexual people, then this is because of discrimination. This simple formula gets repeated over and over and over again.” Eventually this false logic seems to become the only way a sensible person would think. In fact a sensible person, while recognising discrimination as a factor, would analyse the other explanations at work to avoid reaching the wrong conclusion.

As Lehmann said, a conclusion endlessly repeated — that the gender pay gap is caused by sexist oppression — takes hold when a considered analysis shows the fact that women have children is critical in the explanation. Adopting a conflict framework, an oppressed versus oppressor narrative, means politics becomes more divisive and problems are harder to solve because the analysis is wrong. One reason for this is while many advocates would like to solve the problem they have a higher motive; their purpose to dismantle the power structure, whether it is allegedly patriarchy or white supremacy or heteronormativity.

The Haidt-Lukianoff book argues the key to an inclusive community is to create the sense of common humanity, not tribalism based on gender and race. The authors point out that in his heroic 1960s civil rights campaigns Martin Luther King declared his dream was “the American dream” and asked the entire nation “to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed”, to honour equality beyond race. King relied on American values. He aspired to unite, not destroy. He appealed to one America, not a collection of tribes. Haidt and Lukianoff contrast the impact of the oppressed-oppressor paradigm that enshrines “whiteness” as a power construct. They quote a student’s essay: “White death will mean liberation for all.”

These days social issues are frequently presented in mainstream media as rituals of injustice and grievance. This mentality originated in Marxist ideology. Once you believe social problems arise primarily because of power and the oppressed-oppressor conflict, then the scene is set for tribal warfare justified by a moral principle.

Referring to American universities, the authors state an enduring reality: “The more you separate people and point out differences among them, the more divided and less trusting they will become.” None of this is to say power is irrelevant. It is always relevant. Indeed, academic opposition to the Ramsay Centre courses on Western civilisation is an insight into the pathology. The Ramsay people are bad because they arrive, the critics assert, in the name of white supremacy, racism, neo-colonialism and so forth. They represent the oppressors and you cannot deal or debate with oppressors; you can only resist them.

* The second great lie or untruth from the Haidt-Lukianoff analysis is people will be weaker by being challenged in their ideas and preconceptions. They need to be protected and made safe. This is the notion of a fragile society. It was given focus last year in the campaign against the same-sex marriage plebiscite when politicians and mental health experts united against a democratic vote and debate because its extremes would damage too many people.

Because identity politics relates to the personal, it becomes dan­gerous. It is not just your political views being threatened, it is your identity. That makes it a health issue. Female students in the US have refused to hear lectures denying America is a rape culture because it threatens to invalidate their own identity and experience.

In this world the public policy test to prevent trauma and offence becomes a subjective test. This was the issue in relation to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Defenders of the law said subjective views must prevail and what mattered was how people felt — whether people felt offended and intimidated. Haidt and Lukianoff say that if people and students come to believe they cannot handle offence then they will become less able to do so. Fragility begets more fragility. The authors say leaders and health professionals have made the wrong call.

The task of institutions and universities is to “prepare students for conflict, controversy and argument” and students must learn that having cherished beliefs being questioned is not a personal attack on them but preparation for life. At present institutions are “setting up a generation for failure”.

* The third lie the authors nominate is “the untruth of emotional reasoning”, the false nostrum you must “always trust your feelings”. Much of our political and media debate now revolves around displays of emotions to prove you care. Be unemotional and you are uncaring. The oppressor-oppressed mentality largely thrives on emotion at the cost of reason.

“In an age of social media, cyber trolls and fake news it is a global crisis that people so readily follow their feelings to embrace outlandish stories about their enemies,” Haidt and Lukianoff state. They quote Hanna Holborn Gray, president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”

Because politics operates at the intersection of emotion and reason, it becomes hostage to the cult of emotional reasoning; witness the appeal of Donald Trump among many. Social media generates a mob mentality based on emotion. Once emotion takes control, people view the world through one single lens, not through a more balanced understanding based on reason.

Single-lens emotion is the path to anxiety and depression for people and hysteria and irrationality in politics. Human beings are tribal creatures and civilisation was supposed to lead us from the tribe to society. Are we regressing?

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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