PBS Reporter Claims Black Surgeon General 'Offended' Black People by Trying to Save Them

One of the mysteries yet to be solved in the coronavirus pandemic is why African Americans and Hispanics are more susceptible to getting infected and becoming ill.

Surgeon General Jerome Adams had no answers when asked about it. But he implored minorities to heed the directives from the CDC about protecting against becoming infected.

Fox News:

"I want to close by saying while your state and local health departments and those of us in public service are working day and night to help stop the spread of COVID-19 and to protect you regardless of your color, your creed, or your geography, I need you to know that you're not helpless and that it's even more important in communities of color, we adhere to the task force guidelines to slow the spread," Adams said. "Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. And call your friends and family. Check on your mother, she wants to hear from you right now."
"And speaking of mothers, we need you to do this if not for yourself than for your abuela. Do it for your granddaddy. Do it for your Big Mama. Do it for your Pop-Pop. We need you to understand, especially in communities of [color], we need you to step up and help stop the spread so that we can protect those who are most vulnerable."

Adams, who happens to be black, was immediately attacked by PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor, who claimed that "there are some people online" already offended by his remarks.

"You said that African Americans and Latinos should avoid alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. You also said do it for your abuela, do it for Big Mama and Pop-Pop. There are some people online who are already offended by that language and the idea that you're saying that behaviors might be leading to these high death rates," Alcindor told Adams. "Do you, I guess, have a response to people who might be offended by the language that you used?"

Just who is it who was "offended"? Alcindor tweeted out right after Adams made his "big mama" remark that "some will find this language offensive" even before anyone had a chance to comment on it. That idea, and the idea that a black surgeon general would use "offensive" language in any context, is absurd.

Adams slapped Alcindor down. Fox News:

"I have a Puerto Rican brother-in-law. I call my Grand Daddy 'Grand Daddy.' I have relatives who call their grandparents 'Big Mama.' So that was not meant to be offensive, that is the language that we use and that I use and we need to continue to target our outreach to those communities," Adams explained. "It is critically important that they understand that it's not just about them and I was very clear about that. It's not just about what you do, but you also are not helpless."

He continued, "We need everyone -- black, brown, white, whatever color you are -- to follow the president's guidelines, the coronavirus guidelines and do their part because when I talked to the NAACP three weeks ago, it's important to note that one of the things that they asked me was will you help dispel the myths in this community that people actually can't get coronavirus if they're black. That was a myth that was out there that's actually very important for us to squash here."

Whenever a reporter or activist begins with "some people are offended," you naturally might wonder "who" would be offended. The reporter or activist will never give actual citations or evidence at all for such a statement. What they mean by claiming offense is that they are instructing people to be offended, not that anyone is really offended at all.

When I use the term "illegal alien," I get at least one person in the comments who scores me for using "offensive" language. I'm sorry but no illegal alien has ever approached me and told me that I'm hurting their feelings or offending them by using that term. So the question I have is, Why shelve a perfectly good description of someone who enters the country illegally because an imaginary offense is given?

Alcindor tried to shame the surgeon general for attempting to reach people of color with the message to stay safe and was mercilessly mocked for her stupidity.

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Progressive Destruction: The Pandemic is the Perfect Time to Abolish the Family

Amid lockdowns and “shelter-in-place” orders and social distancing from strangers and even friends, the coronavirus pandemic has been a time, for many of us, of reaffirming the centrality of family in our lives. For utopians of the radical left, though, the pandemic is an opportunity to deconstruct flawed, traditional familial bonds and remake the world along the lines of new-and-improved, collectivist possibilities. As author Sophie Lewis (pictured above) puts it bluntly in a recent opinion piece at Open Democracy: “We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.”

The author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis’ academic work “focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care,” which seems like a lot to fit on a business card.

Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it's time to abolish the family,” Lewis addresses what she calls “the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home” to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home, and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”

“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down… A quarantine is, in effect, an abuser’s dream – a situation that hands near-infinite power to those with the upper hand over a home.”

Lewis approvingly quotes feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, who had this to say in a tweet about the shelter-in-place imperative: “Households are capitalism’s pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in housework – cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse, molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more.”

Imagine the warped mind that equates the family home with “a pressure cooker” of child abuse, rape, and psychological torture. Do such things happen in some homes? Tragically, yes; of course they do. But family abolitionists see these horrors as inherent in the ideologically “coercive” institution of the nuclear family. They pay lip service to acknowledging that families can be a source of love, comfort, and safety, and they claim that their goal “is not the destruction of kinship ties” but an “expansion of that protection into broader communities of struggle,” as ME O’Brien writes at Pinko (which describes itself as “a collective for thinking gay communism”). And yet they relentlessly denigrate the nuclear family as an institution poisoned by what O’Brien calls “compulsory heterosexuality, misogynistic subjugation and familial violence.” They sneer at “family householders” as “white property owners, abusive patriarchs, homophobes and others most invested in the normative family” (O’Brien again).

But the domestic violence aspect is just the tip of the iceberg. The family is also apparently a capitalist plot for churning out – gasp – productive individuals. In an interview last year with the far-left The Nation titled “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family,” Lewis stated, “We know that the nuclear private household is where the overwhelming majority of abuse can happen. And then there’s the whole question of what it is for: training us up to be workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary-gendered and racially stratified system, training us not to be queer.” In her Open Democracy article, Lewis adds that “even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”

The vision of anti-family theorists like Lewis is to replace the ideological straightjacket of the family with a world of communes of “collective social reproduction,” in which the entire community cares for children and rescues them from “abusive parental relationships.” Apparently communes will be free of spouse beating, child abuse, and all the other dark shadows of human nature. Oh, and no compulsory heterosexuality.

They will also supposedly be free of homelessness. Calling comfortable housing “a basic human birthright,” Lewis recommends that we “open all the hotels and private palaces” for “housing for all,” “[f]ree all prisoners and detainees now, remake the care facilities as spacious self-led villages, and dismiss all the workers with full pay so they can leave their bunks forever, move in with their friends, and pursue laziness for at least the next decade.”

One would be forgiven for thinking that this kind of talk is Swiftian satire, but sadly, Lewis and her ilk are deadly serious – and brutally honest about it. Last year, for example, Lewis dispensed with the left’s usual tortured justifications for abortion and expressed her view that taking the life of the unborn is indeed killing, but “a form of killing that we need to be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.”

So for Lewis, the current pandemic is not a time “to acquiesce to ‘family values’ ideology”; on the contrary, it’s “an acutely important time to provision, evacuate and generally empower survivors of – and refugees from – the nuclear household.” In addition to hoping “to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this Plague and the coming Depression,” she looks forward to this crisis ratcheting up “the dialectic of families against the family, of real homes against the home.”

The nuclear family is the most elemental relationship building block of civilization (of course, civilization as we know it is precisely what the left wants to dismantle.)  It is a refuge, a source of strength and support, of identity and history, of love and forgiveness. It is home. Husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister -- the bonds these incredibly evocative words imply would not be expanded under the system Lewis is proposing; they would be dissolved. Are families perfect? Of course not. None of them is, because human beings aren’t perfect and never can be. We are fallen beings in a fallen world – this is the reality that the far left refuses to accept. There is no insanely totalitarian, collectivist nightmare that the left will not pursue with an evangelical passion to achieve their dream of the perfectibility of mankind, of paradise on earth. But that dream, as has been demonstrated in all places and in all times where it has been put into practice, is a mass-murdering lie.

And yet as extreme as Sophie Lewis’ anti-family, anti-capitalist animus sounds, everything she proposes is simply the end game of mainstream Progressivism: the abolition of capitalism; the abolition of private property; the abolition of traditional kinship; the abolition of literally every single tradition and institution of Western civilization, to be replaced by the enlightened, peaceful, self-regulated structures of communism – just as Karl Marx envisioned. Family abolitionists like Lewis are mainstream Progressives; what makes them seem extreme is simply their unabashed openness about their aims.

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UK: Elite bigotry about "Karens"

They are actually projecting.  What they say about Karens is largely true of themselves

‘It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and forget his own’, said Cicero. This is so true of the woke bourgeoise who bang on endlessly about ‘Karens’. You know Karens: they’re the busybody, always-complaining, helmet-haired women who stalk the nightmares of sophisticated middle-class people, especially the right-on millennial middle classes.

These people are constantly making memes of Karens, showing culturally and sartorially inferior women asking for the manager and generally making a fuss about everything. Which is hilariously ironic given that ‘Karen’-like behaviour – snitching to management, trying to get people sacked, moaning endlessly about every inconvenience – is the stock-in-trade of woke millennials. These Karen-bashers are the biggest Karens of all.

The feminist Julie Bindel has triggered a discussion about Karens by asking a simple question: ‘Does anyone else think the “Karen” slur is woman-hating and based on class prejudice?’ The furious response to Bindel’s question proves she has a point. Twitter went into meltdown, as is its wont, as PC leftists and black tweeters insisted that actually ‘Karen’ is a perfectly legitimate term to describe a swathe of white women who are shrill, given to complaining, and, of course, racist. As one headline summed up the debate: ‘White women say calling them “Karen” is a slur, black Twitter sounds off.’ That headline is almost too perfect. What people are essentially saying is that it is not a slur to refer to all thirtysomething white, ‘cis’, married women as Karens because that’s what they are: moany, racist, vulgar Karens. Erm… that’s prejudice. To paint an entire section of society as a samey blob is the definition of prejudice. Just because it’s coming from ‘black Twitter’ doesn’t make it okay. It’s still a nasty caricature based on racial, gender and class assumptions.

Where Bindel is most right is when she says the ‘Karen’ slur is classist. In this sense, it is the female equivalent of ‘gammon’, the pig-derived name that Corbynistas in particular use to refer to red-faced men of a certain age and a certain class. Whenever a fiftysomething bloke with a less than polished accent puts his hand up on Question Time and proceeds to slag off Jeremy Corbyn or stand up for Brexit, social media will explode with wails of ‘gammon!’. What they mean is ‘pig’ – subhuman, inferior. What is striking is that these apparently switched-on, uber-aware leftists who refer to middle-aged men as ‘gammon’ and thirtysomething women as ‘Karens’ always insist that they are attacking the middle classes. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t be okay. But it isn’t true. At all. Gammons and Karens are slurs invented by self-satisfied bourgeois elements to demean lower middle-class and working-class people whom they see as lacking grace and style.

The attempts to depict Karens as symbolic of the middle class actually demonstrate that we aren’t really talking about the middle classes here. So, Grazia magazine describes a Karen as being ‘generally from Generation X, so in her late thirties or forties. She is generally a middle-class white woman, with a specific haircut – what is often called a “can I speak to the manager” haircut. The hairstyle is that kind of American soccer-mum haircut…’ Karens can also be ‘racist, homophobic and transphobic’, apparently. The ‘soccer mom’ haircut is a giveaway here. If we really are talking about middle-class people, it’s a very specific form of middle class: the new arrivals into the middle class; the apparently unsophisticated types who, courtesy of their husbands perhaps, have suddenly found themselves in the more middle section of society. But they’re still uncouth, brash, and lacking in the social awareness of the older, better, more enlightened middle classes.

Think of those women who appear in virtually every Mike Leigh film, from Abigail’s Party to Life is Sweet to Secrets and Lies – the sad working-class woman with middle-class airs and graces who gets everything wrong and is always, but always, the villain of the piece. Properly middle-class theatregoers and cinema attendees have been laughing at these women for yonks. Karen-bashing continues this trend of looking down one’s nose at aspiring working-class women who think joining the middle class means having to become an irritating, bossy moaner. Stupid bitches. It’s the same with gammon. Anyone who says this is an attack on middle-class men is lying to themselves, and they know it. It is a classist slur aimed exclusively at lower middle-class men (‘golf bores’) or working-class men done good (the greatest crime in the eyes of certain middle-class leftists) who apparently reveal their foul origins when they bash Corbyn or insult the EU.

Class hatred unquestionably fuels Karen-bashing. There’s a twisted irony: ‘Karens’ are attacked for thinking they are better than everyone else, but Karen-bashing itself is a far more explicit expression of moral superiority and class hierarchy than anything a soccer mom could pull off when she’s complaining to the manager. Indeed, the woke left who loathe Karens are the biggest Karens of all. Invite a controversial speaker to campus, and they’ll go running to the manager (the university authorities): ‘Ban this person!’ Say something they don’t like and they won’t hesitate to tell your boss to sack you or deprive you of work (think of Maya Forstater after she criticised the cult of transgenderism). As for making sweeping racial generalisations: millennial socialists who have built an entire caricature out of white women called Karen are not in a position to complain about racial stereotyping. They’re its main purveyors right now.

These Karen-bashers are no better than the snobs who raged against ‘Sharons’ and ‘Traceys’ from Essex in the Eighties. Then, as now, ‘proper’ middle-class snobs were just spewing disgust at what they viewed as vulgar women lower down the class, morality and decency hierarchy. They’re going nuts over the suggestion that saying ‘Karen’ is a slur because they know it’s true.

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WHO Kowtows to China and the World Suffers

Placating Beijing's interests prevented WHO leadership from addressing the pandemic sooner.

The China Virus pandemic has exposed the fact that leadership at the World Health Organization (WHO) has become far more concerned with placating tyrants than advancing healthcare. Organized in 1948 as part of the then-recently formed United Nations, the WHO’s goal was “the attainment by all people of the highest possible level of health.” Right from its start, the WHO’s focus was predominantly epidemiological, addressing infectious diseases that have plagued the world. If only it had remained true to its mission.

Just as the UN has drifted away from the American and European values it was founded upon, the WHO has steadily moved away from its original founding values and has been caught carrying water for dictatorial regimes such as Beijing. But how did this happen? How did the WHO become so beholden to the ChiComs?

The Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe answers that question: “The WHO’s dictatorial sycophancy long predates the coronavirus. Beijing’s stranglehold over the organization began in earnest in 2006, when its hand-picked candidate won the election to become the WHO’s director-general. When Margaret Chan, herself a Chinese national, took charge of the organization, so did the interests of the communist party.”

And the response to this current pandemic only further demonstrates just how beholden the WHO has become to Beijing. As Mark Alexander noted, “It is now believed that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was elected to his position with China’s backing, is now running interference for Xi Jinping’s communist government propaganda campaign to deny responsibility for the outbreak. According to analysts Dr. Bradley Thayer and Lianchao Han, ‘Tedros apparently turned a blind eye to what happened in Wuhan and the rest of China and, after meeting with Xi in January, has helped China to play down the severity, prevalence and scope of the COVID-19 outbreak.’”

Meanwhile, it will be left to responsible nations like the U.S. to clean up China’s mess — a mess that could have been avoided if the WHO had followed its founding principles and properly alerted the world rather than concern itself with placating the geopolitical concerns of Chinese communists.

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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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