Are facts white nationalist?

Ann Coulter at her sarcastic best:

I gather it would be proof positive of “white nationalism” to point out that the only group discriminated against in college admissions is white people.

We’ve heard a lot about discrimination against Asians lately, which reminds me: Asians are SO lucky they’re not white! Otherwise, America’s leading hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, would be churning out reports on the worrying rise in Asian Supremacy.

In fact, however, a recent study by Georgetown University (probably White Nationalist), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (presumed hate group), found that if colleges admitted students based solely on SAT scores, every single ethnic group would decline, except one: whites.

Yes, even fewer Asian students would be admitted on an SAT-only admission standard. (I presume this is because Asians have better GPAs than white students.)

Obviously, this was NOT the purpose of the study. I’m pretty sure it was supposed to ferret out some small pocket of racism that had somehow passed undenounced. But when the only race being discriminated against turned out to be whites, the study was locked in a lead casket and dropped to the bottom of the sea.

This isn’t a new phenomenon: The New York Times was writing about it 30 years ago. In the late 1980s, whites were about 62 percent of California’s high school graduates, but constituted only 45 percent of those admitted to its universities. As a university official told the Times, “Whites are the only group underrepresented.”

Today, the Times would be tracking down that official to make sure he was fired.

The lie of “white privilege” is treated as an implacable fact throughout our cultural institutions, no matter how manifestly absurd it is. Thus, in the discredited book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh,” authors Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly act as if a half-Puerto Rican girl entering Yale in the 1980s deserves a place in the civil rights pantheon along with the Little Rock Nine.

[If it seems like that is the only New York Times article I’ve read this year, it practically is. Every counterfactual, hateful, lunatic impulse of the left was contained in that single book excerpt, so it’s all you need.]

The authors write: “Yale in the 1980s was in the early stages of integrating more minority students into its historically privileged white male population. The college had admitted its first black student in the 1850s, but by [Debbie] Ramirez’s time there, people of color comprised less than a fifth of the student body."

How many POCs do Pogrebin and Kelly think should have been at Yale? According to the U.S. Census, the country barely reached 20 percent minority by the end of the 1980s. By miraculous coincidence, the ethnic composition of the Yale student body matched the country exactly. It’s almost as if the university was basing admissions on strict ethnic quotas!

It’s said that every generation thinks it invented sex. I say, every generation thinks it invented race and gender consciousness. Pogrebin and Kelly claim that “college campuses of the 1980s had yet to be galvanized by the identity and sexual politics that course through today’s cultural debates.”

Were they both in a coma in the 1980s?

In 1987, the year Ramirez and Kavanaugh graduated from Yale, Jesse Jackson led hundreds of protesters in a march on Stanford University chanting “Hey hey ho ho! Western Civ has got to go!”

The following year, the Times reported on a decades-long assault on the accepted canon of great literature as merely the choices of “elitist” “white men.”

Throughout the period that the authors imagine Yale was wall-to-wall white privilege, our media produced daily “Racism Updates,” leading to Joe Sobran’s parody of a New York Times headline: Earthquake Destroys New York; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.

If Ramirez had applied to Yale Law School after college, she would have had a five times better chance of being admitted than a white applicant like Kavanaugh -- simply because she had one Puerto Rican parent.

Talk about privilege!

This is based on a massive study of law school admissions in the 1990s conducted by Linda F. Wightman -- again, intended to prove the opposite of what it actually did prove. Her study fell into the hands of Stephan Thernstrom, who analyzed the data, and his results were published in the New York University Law Review in 1998. (WHITE SUPREMACISTS, ALL!)

With the same grades and scores, Puerto Ricans were 5.3 times more likely to be admitted to a top-tier law school like Yale than a white applicant. Every ethnic group except whites got a boost -- African Americans, Asians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and “Other Hispanic.” The more prestigious the law school, the stronger the preferences.

To every color in the rainbow coalition: YOU’RE NOT BLACK! Affirmative action is supposed to be for the descendants of American slaves. See? We owe them something. Nobody else. Without the legacy of slavery, affirmative action is just institutionalized anti-white racism.

By now, race discrimination against whites is de rigueur. Forget being embarrassed, this is race discrimination with attitude. And it’s all justified by the nonsensical phrase: “white privilege.”

If you mention it -- citing such white nationalist front groups as Georgetown University, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The New York Times and the New York University Law Review -- you, too, could be a white nationalist.

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The Disgraceful Campaign against the Salvation Army

Damaging photos of Pete Buttigieg have surfaced — ringing a bell for the Salvation Army.

The images of the South Bend, Ind., mayor and Democratic presidential candidate participating in the Red Kettle Ring Off, a friendly competition between officials from South Bend and nearby Mishawaka over who can raise more for the Salvation Army during a day of bell-ringing, date from 2017.

The gay publication Out reported them as if it had broken a major, or at least a noteworthy, story. “Pete Buttigieg Volunteered for the Homophobic Salvation Army,” read the headline. The piece noted, accusingly, that it’s “something he’s apparently been doing for years. He also held a mayoral event at a Salvation Army center in South Bend last year.”

If you think that volunteering for an organization that is raising funds to provide food and housing, among many other services, for the needy is an inherently praiseworthy act, you haven’t been following the woke left-wing activists cutting a swath through American culture.

Any institution, no matter how storied or how generous, is subject to a punitive campaign of social ostracism that is often highly effective. In today’s environment, what seems preposterous one moment is inevitable the next, and after one target is ground into submission, another is quickly found.

The Salvation Army would seem a bridge too far. Its red kettles are iconic, as much a part of Christmas as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or “Miracle on 34th Street.” During the heavily commercial Christmas season, the red kettles are a token of charity and fellow feeling. It takes a perverse worldview not to have fond feelings about this tradition, which is spectacularly successful on its own terms, raising almost $150 million a year.

But the commissars of political correctness aren’t amused, and don’t let sentimentality interfere with their dictates.

They’ve already accomplished what would a few years ago have been considered impossible — bullying the explicitly Christian restaurant chain Chick-fil-A out of its donations to the Salvation Army. The army is now so radioactive that the pop singer Ellie Goulding threatened to cancel a halftime performance at the Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving, kicking off the red-kettle campaign, over the group’s alleged anti-gay bigotry.

The first thing to know about the Salvation Army is that it is a church, founded by the Methodist preacher William Booth. He started his Salvation Army, with military ranks for its clergy, to reach the hungry and the needy through service. With more than 1.5 million members and a presence in roughly 130 countries, it is a spectacular example of, as Billy Graham once put it, “Christianity in action.”

As such, it obviously reflects Christian morality. “Soldiers, the core group among members,” one religious writer explained, “take covenant vows that cover doctrine, loyalty, willingness to evangelize and help the needy, and clean living (no alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography or profanity).” The army’s position that marriage should be between a man and a woman isn’t an exotic invention, but standard Christian teaching.

The idea that the Salvation Army has an anti-gay animus stems largely from its opposition to anti-discrimination laws that it worried would impinge on its conscience rights, and criticism over its policies regarding transgender people (especially the practice of some places of assigning people to male or female facilities depending on their gender at birth). The organization has made clear again and again, though, that its services are available to all.

Commenting on the scandalous Buttigieg bell-ringing images, the press secretary for the left-wing Alliance for Justice opined, “I know the photos are two years old, but still, I can’t help but wonder if Mayor Pete just looks at what LGBTQ activists have been working on for years and then chooses to spite it.” Or perhaps he was rational and broad-minded enough to appreciate the massive good done by one of the most admirable institutions in the country.

SOURCE






Terror is stalking our streets but it has NOTHING to do with ISIS

An unusual viewpoint from Peter Hitchens:

A crazy man kills innocent people and within minutes everyone, from Scotland Yard to the BBC, is saying it is Islamist terror. But is this true?

Please explain to me, if you can, how the actions of Usman Khan could possibly have advanced any cause.

His victims were gentle academic people of the sort who tend to play down warnings that Islam is dangerous to our society.

By killing them he did not make Islamic rule more likely. On the contrary, by evoking the disgust and pity of millions, he made life harder for his fellow Muslims, not least the peaceful ones who do not share his anger.

I prefer to think about things rather than rush into judgment about them. I read very carefully all the accounts of Khan’s miserable life and death.

His original terror conviction was, in fact, based on some very stupid and nasty things he had said or discussed. He had not killed anyone or built a bomb.

It seems very clear he was deliberately seeking to be shot by police.

By killing them he did not make Islamic rule more likely. On the contrary, by evoking the disgust and pity of millions, he made life harder for his fellow Muslims, not least the peaceful ones who do not share his anger    +4
By killing them he did not make Islamic rule more likely. On the contrary, by evoking the disgust and pity of millions, he made life harder for his fellow Muslims, not least the peaceful ones who do not share his anger

Just before he went crazy with knives, he is alleged to have shouted he had a bomb, when he did not.

Two separate witnesses of his last moments, who watched the awful scene from buses on London Bridge, recounted that he pulled his coat back to reveal what looked like a suicide belt, so leaving police with no real choice but to kill him in case it was real.

But what had turned him from a fairly normal schoolboy into the bloodthirsty braggart who was sent to prison?

And then into an unhinged person who murdered benevolent strangers and contrived to get the police to shoot him dead?

I looked for the usual explanation, and found it. I found it in a throwaway line that the writer of the article had not thought especially important.

After dropping out of school, Khan ‘started hanging around with drug gangs’.

Somehow, I suspect this involved consuming the product. And I would be amazed if the product was not marijuana – whose use is increasingly associated with severe mental illness and violent crime.

As in so many of these stories, if you read a long way down, this was when his personality changed.

The previous wimp and bully’s victim was now a death-and-glory preacher. A former classmate ‘could not believe the change in Khan when he saw him preaching on the streets’.

I have looked into the background of almost every mass killer in the USA, Japan, France and Britain in recent years. It is astonishing how many of them turn out to be abusers of marijuana.

Quite a lot of crazy people – the Leytonstone knifeman, Muhaydin Mire, is an example of this – latch on to religious or political causes to make themselves feel more important and less lonely.

Mire was an undoubted marijuana user. He was so off his head that he genuinely believed that Anthony Blair was his guardian angel. His family had repeatedly begged the authorities to take him into some sort of care.

But those authorities did nothing, as they often do nothing about the severely mentally ill.

He had to stab someone, and shout some meaningless political slogan, before they acted. And then they ridiculously pretended he was a terrorist.

Alas, there are alarming numbers of people on the streets of this country now, out of their minds thanks to supposedly ‘soft’ marijuana, who will not be locked up until it is too late.

Most of these cases barely rate a mention, outside local papers.

But when they can be categorised as ‘Islamist terror’, they barge their way on to front pages and news bulletins. And we then totally miss the point of them.

The real terror in this country today is marijuana, an illegal drug the police have stopped even trying to control, with terrible effects on increasing numbers of its users.

This will become appallingly clear in the years to come.

The question is, will it become clear in time to prevent the legalisation of this drug, now sought by one of the greediest, richest and most cynical lobbies in human history?

SOURCE





Activism and emotion pale beside science and reason

What Greg Sheridan writes below is pretty right -- with one exception. He writes as if "we" are involved in all the current chaotic events.  But that is precisely wrong. None of the current irrationality is the doing of conservatives.  It is entirely the doing of the Left. Conservatives just stand aside and watch in horror at it all.

The challenge for us all is to work out what has corroded the rational faculties of the left.  That will not be easy.  All we can certainly tell is that it is deeply emotional.  Is it despair at the abject failure of all their past initiatives to bring about a new Eden?


Here’s the punch line — political culture in the West has become so crazy that in the pursuit of love and justice people increasingly practise hate and violence.

In a sign of the deepening political crisis in Western culture, strikes and protests crippled most of France on Friday. The protesters were upset that the government might marginally raise the retirement age. These are successor mobilisations to the Yellow Vest protests a year ago in which hundreds of thousands of people paralysed and vandalised the French capital. Emmanuel Macron was going to implement a small fuel price increase as part of combating climate change.

The French protests illustrate the broader cultural crisis of Western politics in two specific ways. First, it is core religious dogma of all progressives that radical action must be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Activists never level with people that this must mean drastically reduced living standards. So when inevitably climate action explicitly reduces living standards, the public rebels.

Second, the French protests ­illustrate a deeper element of the Western crisis: a new contempt for the processes of politics and reasoned decision-making. There is contempt especially for election results that progressives don’t like, and a deep belief that all such ­results are corrupt in themselves and, in any event, partake of an ­inferior morality to the overriding morality of the progressive cause.

There are plenty of anti-democratic tendencies on the right, ­especially among the deadly fringe of white supremacists, anti-Semites and racists generally on the far right. But it is the progressive world view that is promulgated in state education systems across the West — from preschool to university — and in state-owned broadcasters, and in the Hollywood-dominated entertainment industry and in most mass media (with honourable exceptions).

These progressive causes range from climate change through the gender politics agenda, the redress of past racial injustice, aggressive secularism intent on removing ­religion from the public square, ­intersectional identity crusades through income and wealth redistribution and ending inequality.

There is some measure of justice in all these causes. But their most ardent proponents take them to unreasonable, at times insane, extremes. And, most important, their champions see them as so morally transcendent as to justify breaking all the rules of democratic politics, as justifying physical direct action as well as the foulest abuse imaginable.

This is a deep crisis in Western political culture and Australia is experiencing it fully. Let me offer some examples. Conservative senator Cory Bernardi retired from the Senate this week and warmly thanked the Australian Federal Police for their help over the years. Bernardi is not an extremist. He also does not claim any victim status. But it turns out people have come to his home making threats, his wife has been subject to vicious texting abuse, people have threatened savage violence against him and the schools his kids attended. This sort of thing goes on across the board ideologically.

The three causes that excited the most abuse for Bernardi were his opposition to same-sex marriage, his opposition to strong ­action on climate change and his criticisms of Islamism, although the latter was by far the least of it.

Gerard Henderson is a distinguished columnist on this newspaper. Among many subjects he considers, he has written lucidly and at length, and in a vein similar to lawyers and scholars, about aspects of the legal judgments against George Pell, who was convicted of child sexual ­assault offences. Pell asserts his innocence and his appeal will be heard in the High Court next year.

Louise Milligan, an ABC journalist who wrote a book attacking Pell that has been criticised by Henderson, among others, for ­alleged factual problems, tweeted that Henderson was “a vile bully” and was involved in “pedophile protecting”. Not by the wildest ­interpretation could you construe anything Henderson has ever written as sympathetic to or protecting pedophiles. Yet if you didn’t read Henderson’s columns and only saw Milligan’s tweets, you would form a wildly inaccurate view of him. And yet Milligan is a mainstream journalist. Her ­offensive tweets are a minor example of the way a sense of righteous rage blinds activists to considerations of fairness, civility or keeping in touch with reality.

These examples are straws in the wind. There are thousands upon thousands of others. Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute has written an interesting short book, Our Very Own Brexit. He diagnoses, correctly, a certain “hollowing out” of our political system, a loss of faith in it. Where he is seriously mistaken is in concluding this is likely to produce ­triumphant right-wing populism that would be expressed through one side of politics wanting to end immigration to Australia.

Right-wing and left-wing populism end up being very similar, but left-wing extremism is much more pervasive in Western societies than right-wing extremism. Jeremy Corbyn is, according to numerous polls, just a “regulation polling error” (as British journalist Liam Halligan puts it) from becoming prime minister next week, with all his decades of support for terrorists, anti-Semites, dictators and communists. There is nothing remotely equivalent on the right.

The movement most likely to produce extremism in our politics is green activism. We have seen in the Occupy Wall Street, farm ­invasion and Extinction Rebellion demonstrations a contempt for normal politics, a determination to take direct action and a settled conviction that mere democratic election confers no legitimacy on a government. And the accompanying conviction that anyone who opposes these movements justifies extreme rhetorical, and sometimes physical, attack.

John Anderson, former deputy prime minister and long-time cattle farmer, thinks there is every chance extremism on climate change will hurt Australia economically, blight the future of young people and polarise and coarsen our politics, without doing anything to help the planet.

One of Anderson’s great qualities is balance and restraint, qualities little esteemed in this moment of cultural derangement. He tells me: “On climate, we have to adopt a mixture of mitigation and adaptation. But the world is not going to end. Internationally, grain prices are low because production keeps rising ahead of demand.”

Feeding the world, he says, causes 30 per cent of global emissions. Should we stop feeding the world? Anderson surprises me with his priority policy prescription: “Reducing food waste would be our most important contribution. Australia wastes something like 40 per cent of the food it produces and uses.”

What a wonderfully unglamorous, unromantic, undramatic, practical thing it is we really need to do — stop wasting food.

“There is an effort to delegitimise our industry,” he says. “The problem is the debate has moved from science and reason to one of political activism and emotion. People are involved in these campaigns with very different agendas.

“It involves a lot of people who have come to loathe our culture and our history and think capitalism and profits are dirty words. This overlooks the enormous positive contribution of the West.

“Competition and innovation in business, combined with a lot of compassion, have contributed to reducing the proportion of malnourished people in the world from 40 to 50 per cent 50 years ago, to 15 per cent now. Life expectancy has doubled. Education has kept increasing.”

Farmers, he says, care passionately about the climate and the mix of policies he would like to see focuses on better farming, less ­dependency in farming on fossil fuels, greater carbon sequestration and a reduction in energy intensity in feeding the world. (Though he says we must recognise no carbon reduction policy of ours will have any effect on droughts or fires.)

These are gradual, ameliorative measures of the type Western ­societies have undertaken in confronting countless problems before, but they won’t fire a demon­stration, cause anyone to glue themselves to the road, invade a farm, threaten a politician’s family, so they stand against the perversities of the zeitgeist.

Ideology and emotion are everywhere destroying good policy options. Says Anderson: “Every scientist will tell you that one of the most valuable transition fuels we have is gas, but we’ve allowed the Greens to demonise even gas.

“Gas could save us from exporting our industries to places that use energy far less efficiently and will produce much greater greenhouse gas emissions. We could easily end up de-industrialising Australia without doing anything to lower emissions on the planet.”

Anderson draws deeper cultural lessons: “Our young people have been trained to rely on their emotions rather than facts.”

Modern education and culture, he thinks, tell young people that the world is divided between completely good people and completely bad people, and “climate change hysteria could be the tipping point for Western societies”.

How we got to this point is a huge intellectual debate. Many writers see the loss of religion, the loss of unifying transcendent ­belief, as key.

Os Guinness in Last Shout for Liberty argues the West is still ­adjudicating the conflict between the American Revolution, which was a conservative movement to allow citizens to pursue lives of virtue and tradition with minimum interference from the state, and the French Revolution, which empowered the state to do anything.

We need to break free of the syndrome that now grips the West, of ever greater protest, ever more vitriol, ever feebler politics held in ever greater contempt.

Oh, and ever greater competition from rising nations untroubled by these complexes.

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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