A Leftist admits Leftist hypocrisy but says it is justified

Writing on the Leftist "Medium" site, a Seattle graphic designer is full of rage.  Excerpts below. His admission of the shallowness of Leftist claims is refreshing but he goes on to say that what really matters is that Leftists are fighting a huge fight against vast injustices.  The vastness of the injustices in the world is apparently sufficient to justify almost any opposition to it.

So what are these vast injustices?  He seems principally concerned about that old chestnut, black/white inequality.  Somehow whites are responsible for black failure and, to correct that, great and coercive changes are needed.

The immutability of low black economic success does not seem to faze him.  That it persists in the face of extensive affirmative action policies does not interest him.  He shows no serious interest in the causes of the situation at all.  It is all just WRONG and he and a heroic band of progressives must fight to overturn it.  He has elected himself as a hero of rightness and justice.

Black disadvantage first prominently manifests itself in the schools.  Blacks just find it very difficult to do the same work as their same-age white peers and about a third of of them drop out, never graduating from High School at all.

But teachers are overwhelmingly Left-leaning and have over the years turned themselves inside out in an attempt to bridge the black/white educational "gap".  But nothing works.  The gap barely changes regardless of what policies and ideas are thrown at it.  So that shows with perfect clarity that the gap is rooted in something inside blacks themselves.  Blacks are just not good at doing many important things.  The problem is IN blacks, nobody else.  So our Seattle graphic designer is tilting at windmills.  Far from doing any good for anybody he is just banging his head on a brick wall -- but it appears to make him feel big.  That he is in fact a great steaming nit he cannot acknowledge


I have some difficult news for everyone: Progressives aren’t interested in diversity. We aren’t interested in inclusion. We aren’t interested in tolerance. The progressives I know give exactly zero shits about those things.

We have no interest in everyone getting treated the same. We have no interest in giving all ideas equal airtime. We have no interest in “tolerating” all beliefs. I don’t know where this fairy tale comes from, but it’s completely disconnected from every experience I’ve had with progressive liberal folks in my lifetime.

When conservatives cross their arms and glare and shout “It’s not fair! You’re supposed to welcome everyone but you aren’t being nice to me!” it stings about as much as if they shouted, “It’s not fair, you’re supposed to be wearing tutus and juggling flaming donuts!”

The progressive liberal agenda isn’t about being nice. It’s about confronting evil, violence, trauma, and death. It’s about acknowledging the ways systemic power, systemic oppression, systemic evil, work in our world around us. I’m not fighting for diversity. I’m not fighting for tolerance. I’m fighting to overturn horrific systems of dehumanizing oppression.

What We’re Actually Confronting

Take a few facts on race. White America is exhausted of Blacks invoking 200-year-old history as an excuse for their problems. They’ve had it just like whites since the Emancipation Proclamation. Or since MLK. Or since Obama made it into office.

Let’s pause on this. I live in Seattle, Washington. A liberal city if there ever was one. Full of cheery whites with “Black Lives Matter” signs in their windows. But in Seattle, Washington, black residents make less money than white ones. 5% less, 10% less? No. The average black Seattlite’s income is less than half of the average white Seattleite’s income.

Less than half.

So, either there are unspoken forces at play that make it twice as hard for black people in Seattle to earn money, or black people are exactly half as intelligent and hard-working as white folks. Take your pick. But be honest about which one you’re choosing.

How’s the country as a whole? Well, on average, white families have more wealth than black families. How much more? Is it 200%, like Seattle’s income disparity? 500%. No. White families in the US, on average have 1700% the wealth of black families.

How much progress have we made on racial equality in America? Well, apparently we’re 1/17 of the way there. Only 16/17 more to go.

I have a four-year-old white son. A black boy his age, in the same income bracket, same level of education, will live, on-average, 5 years less than him. Half a decade. Mysteriously.

That same black boy has a higher chance of spending time in prison than my son. How much higher? 110% the rate? 150% the rate? Nope, 500% as likely to be imprisoned.

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Envoy Says Trump Willing to ‘Stand Up and Push’ for Global Religious Freedom

President Donald Trump is committed to pushing for greater tolerance of different faiths by governments around the world and dismantling an “iron curtain of religious persecution,” his envoy for religious freedom said in an interview with The Daily SIgnal.

“Most people in the world move by what their faith tells them,” Sam Brownback, the former Kansas governor who is Trump’s international ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, said in the interview.

“Much of the world—we’re looking at numbers now—nearly 80 percent live in a religiously restrictive atmosphere, so they don’t have freedom of religion,” he said.

But in the United States, Brownback said, “religious freedom is a foundational right, it’s a God-given right,” and “governments don’t have the right to interfere with it.”

“So we’re going to push on it,” he said. “And the reason it’s so important is it impacts so many people, and so few countries are willing to really stand up and push for it.”

Trump nominated the Kansas Republican for the job in July 2017, while he was in his second term as governor after a stint in the Senate from 1996 to 2011. He resigned as governor and assumed the ambassadorship Feb. 1.

Brownback grew up a Methodist, converted to Catholicism in 2002, and as of last year attended a nondenominational evangelical church in Topeka, Kansas, according to an article by the Religion News Service.

Brownback, 62, called the current state of international religious freedom “not good” for citizens of countries such as Iran who live in “restrictive atmospheres.”

“Unfortunately, I think the religious restrictions have been growing over the last 20 years,” he told The Daily Signal in the Nov. 30 interview. “There are places where it’s quite good. But the trend line has been against religious freedom.”

“Yet,” Brownback added, “I think [the administration can make progress] with the United States really leaning in on this, pushing on this, and then showing to countries, ‘If you want to grow, one of the key things you can do is provide religious freedom.’”

Iran’s Islamist regime is a sobering example of what people face in countries that actively restrict religious liberty, he said.

“In Iran, you get caught, you’re going to jail, or you can get a hand cut off, or you’ll be killed for practicing a faith that’s different than the dominant Shia religion there.”

Brownback said Trump has made international religious freedom a focus of his administration. He said the inaugural Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, a conference hosted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, showcased the president’s commitment.

A total of 84 countries participated in the meeting, held July 24-26 in Washington, and the gathering included 1,000 representatives of civil society and religious groups, he said.

“I think what we found, because we did this on such short notice, is that we’ve hit a vein. This is something that touches a lot of people, and it touches them very deeply,” Brownback said, emphasizing that governments around the world not only have fallen short in providing their citizens with religious freedom, but also have taken steps to prevent it.

“Governments have been messing in this space in an increasing role for the last three decades,” he said. “It needs to stop.”

Brownback said organizers plan to hold a second international gathering next year and to set up regional meetings on specific topics in other countries.

“There are a number of countries who are stepping up to do this,” he said. “And my hope is, really, we can bring this iron curtain of religious persecution down. The same way as the Iron Curtain of communism came down, so you can get that burst of freedom as the world wakes up.”

Brownback said the release in October of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor held for two years in Turkey on terror and treason charges, showcases Trump’s commitment to religious freedom.

“He’s an amazing man, Andrew Brunson, and President Trump’s an amazing president,” Brownback said. “He, the president, Trump, got that done.”

Trump’s work for Brunson’s release was remarkable, he said, including tariffs on aluminum and steel from Turkey that “tanked” that country’s currency.

“It was gratifying to see an administration go to bat for somebody that was innocent, in spite of all the other equities and all the other relationship issues we have with Turkey,” Brownback said. “They said, ‘This guy is an American citizen being wrongly treated, and we’re going to go to bat for him,’ and they did. I was delighted to see him get on out.”

Brownback said his role as international ambassador-at-large for religious freedom has given him the opportunity to hear many stories of people like Brunson who are faithful even in adversity.

“You can elevate the topics, and that’s been very gratifying, but the most gratifying thing is when you talk with people that you help get out of jail,” he said, adding:

The beauty of their soul that’s gone through such persecution just really grows my faith, because I look at that and I’m just so impressed with the peace and the joy that they have. You can’t counterfeit it. You can’t act this way. It has to be a real thing that flows out of you. And I get to meet people and work with people like that every day.

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US Pushes Back Against ‘Reproductive Rights’ Language in UN Texts

The United States waged a lonely struggle at the United Nations on Monday as it opposed language that some advocacy groups have used to promote abortion – and even a global “right” to abortion.

The U.S. attempted, without success, to remove references to “reproductive rights” and “reproductive health services” in two resolutions – one relating to child, early and forced marriage, and the other to preventing sexual harassment of women and girls.

The votes went overwhelmingly against the U.S., which stood alone in one (131-1, with 31 abstentions) and was supported by only Nauru in the other (134-2, with 32 abstentions).

After the amendment to delete four paragraphs from the text on child, early and forced marriage failed, U.S. delegate Sofija Korac explained the administration’s stance, voicing U.S. “concerns about wording that exceeds prior international consensus on issues related to reproductive health care.”

The United States believes that women should have equal access to reproductive health care,” she said, adding that the U.S. continues to support commitments laid out in key documents that came out of the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, and the 1995 Beijing world conference on women.

“As has been made clear over many years, there was international consensus that these documents do not create new international rights, including any ‘right’ to abortion,” Korac said.

While the U.S. supports “the principle of voluntary choice regarding maternal and child health and family planning,” she said, it does “not recognize abortion as a method of family planning, nor do we support abortion in our reproductive health assistance.”

Soon after his inauguration President Trump reinstated a Reagan-era policy prohibiting federal funding for organizations promoting or performing abortions abroad.

That “Mexico City policy” was subsequently strengthened, to cover all U.S. foreign health assistance, not only funding for family planning programs as had been the case earlier.

Korac reminded the U.N. on Monday that the U.S. remains the largest bilateral donor of reproductive health and family planning assistance.

Since the 1994 and 1995 U.N. conference documents referred to by the U.S. delegate, pro-abortion advocacy groups have frequency asserted that the term “reproductive rights” includes abortion.

Some NGOs, citing those documents, have sought to pressurize governments to annul or amend their abortion laws. At the same time they, and supportive governments, have accused Republican administrations in Washington of trying to “roll back women’s rights” by opposing the vague terms in U.N. documents.

In its annual country reports on human rights for the year 2017, the State Department earlier this year removed subsections on “reproductive rights” for each country assessed, which had been inserted by the Obama State Department.

Instead the department reverted to the requirement – in legislation dating back to 1961 – for the annual report to “include information on practices regarding coercion in population control, including coerced abortion and involuntary sterilization.”

Accusing the State Department of having “omitted vital information on reproductive rights” from the report, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records relating to the decision.

When the CRR filed a second FOIA lawsuit earlier this month, its foreign policy counsel Stephanie Schmid said it would continue to hold the administration accountable, to ensure that U.S. foreign policy “promotes, rather than hinders, women and girls’ access to basic health care like contraception, safe abortion, and maternal health care in order for them to achieve economic, social, and political empowerment.”

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Secularism Is Attempting to Destroy Christmas – And America

The Christmas season is upon us, with trees up, lights twinkling and general merriment abounding.

These things put most people in the Christmas spirit—but some will say “reason” should prevail instead.

Here are just a few examples:

The Chicago chapter of The Satanic Temple was recently permitted to place a statue in the Illinois Capitol building alongside displays of a Nativity scene and a menorah. The sculpture, called “Knowledge Is the Greatest Gift,” depicts the forearm of a woman holding an apple with a snake coiling toward her hand.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation posted a “free-thinking” banner in a New York park declaring “Reason’s Greetings,” as well as erected two digital billboards in Atlanta depicting a snowy scene with the phrase, “At This Season of the Winter’s Solstice May Reason Prevail.”

FFRF also demanded that several Ohio towns cease displaying nativity scenes this Christmas season. After the mayor in Ravenna relented and announced there would be no nativity this year, townspeople protested. The town of Dover was also forced to remove its nativity and Ten Commandments display. In Streetsboro, however, the mayor says the nativity will stay up after receiving a similar threatening letter several years ago.

Another nativity scene was removed from a park in Woodland, Washington, where it had been displayed for 40 years. The mayor decided to move the scene to a privately-owned spot after several complaints.

The atheists are ready again to try to save the U.S. from the season’s irascible burdens of “tidings of comfort and joy.” But the annual roadside “Humbug!” proclamations and community banners elicit little more than a “ho-hum.” Each December, atheists have put up strategically placed, carefully worded signs and made efforts to turn people away from Christmas. But when groups like these work to promote a worldview that denies God and undermines truth, there are repercussions in terms of human behavior—tragically negative ones. At this point, atheists will say that the greater tragedy is to believe in a “mean old man in the sky” or an “antiquated book of fairy tales.”

But the reality is this: the encouraged, and often enforced, secularism we are living with is destroying the country. As a scholar, I would argue that the atheists’ anti-Christmas efforts are vacuous from the standpoints of historical fact and logic. To get any sort of traction in the public consciousness, or the press, atheists must have something to “ride on”—usually something directly or indirectly Christian. These attempts to evangelize for unbelief represent the atheists’ annual attempt at relevancy. This season is an opportunity for the God-deniers to emerge from their ideological vacuum and enjoy some momentary news coverage. But this requires the presence of and reality of Christianity. Strangely enough, God and Jesus have to “be there” in order for the atheists to fight recognition of them—thus highlighting the schizophrenic nature of these annual campaigns and of atheism itself.

At a time when more youth are leaving their faith behind or identifying as the religious group “nones,” the culture needs God more than ever—and Christmas is a time when many find Him.

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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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