Wednesday, July 15, 2020



Lifting Lockdowns Not the Culprit Behind New Surge in Coronavirus Cases, Doctor Says

Massive protests and proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border explains the recent surge in coronavirus cases far better than lifting lockdowns, Scott Atlas, M.D., a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told Fox News this weekend. Bucking various health experts who have defended the George Floyd protests in the name of fighting the “virus” of racism, Atlas ventured to state the obvious: that people “protesting, sharing megaphones, screaming” is a “setup to spread cases.”

Most of the new cases in the Southwest — in California, Arizona, and Texas — are sprouting up in counties closest to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“When you look in the southern counties of California, Arizona and the bordering counties of Texas — with the Mexico border — these are where most of these cases are really exploding,” Atlas told Fox News. “And then you look at the Mexico map and in Mexico, that’s where their cases are. Their cases are in the northern border zone states. And it turns out the timeline here correlates much more to the Mexico timeline of increasing cases than anything else.”

The doctor insisted that the lifting of lockdowns — the re-opening of various states — likely did not lead to the surge in new cases.

“When you really look closely at these so-called re-opening policies, whether it’s in Georgia or Florida or Texas, you know, we didn’t really see a big correlation of cases and hospitalizations from that,” Atlas said. “That’s really not true. That’s sort of some sloppy thinking, I think, again. We really … have to look closely at why these things are happening.”

He argued that “California didn’t really reopen. Yet they have cases coming up.”

Then Atlas touched on one of the main issues — the massive protests in the wake of the horrific police killing of George Floyd.

“They correlate mainly to two things — the big thousands and thousands of people with protesting, sharing megaphones, screaming. That’s a setup to spread cases,” the doctor said. “And also when you look at the analysis of the border counties, there’s a tremendous amount of cases coming over the border and exchanging with families in the northern Mexico states.”

The doctor warned that hospitals are getting crowded not just because of new cases but because hospitals are finally addressing “regular medical care” again. “We have locked that down before and that policy kills people. So we don’t want to go back to that,” he said. Indeed, the original lockdowns often put a halt to all “elective” surgeries, including heart surgeries and cancer treatments.

The doctor presented a two-part solution: “really protect the high risk in a more diligent way than we are, the very highest-risk group” and “increase the hospital capacity.”

Atlas’s remarks attributing the rise in coronavirus cases to the protests are important. Many left-leaning politicians, journalists, and even public health officials have insisted that the George Floyd protests and other mass demonstrations would not spread the coronavirus. Even last week, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the George Floyd protests while urging New Yorkers to avoid “large gatherings.”

Left-leaning news outlets have condemned President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies as a vector for coronavirus spread while giving a pass to — or even celebrating — the massive protests.

Yet even Mayor Jenny Durkan (D-Seattle), in her order to finally clear out the antifa occupation of CHOP, admitted that the lawless rioters who seized six blocks of her city had indeed spread coronavirus.

If Democrats wish to convince Americans that they are the Party of Science (TM), they must at least acknowledge the obvious about the protests.

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Are We 'Fragile' or Just Colorblind?

Two years ago, the nonfiction shelves had a bestseller by author Robin DiAngelo called White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Generally, a popular nonfiction book will stay on the bestseller lists for a few weeks, but recent events have given DiAngelo’s book a second bite of the apple.

As described there, the book “Refer(s) to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially… White fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue.” More succinctly, according to Dr. Jesse Lile — who wrote on the book last year at The Federalist — DiAngelo’s diatribe is “an inherently racist concept.”

Lile pointed out that the definition of white fragility — a term DiAngelo coined back in 2011 in the widely read International Journal of Critical Pedagogy — presents an automatic contradiction in terms: “According to [DiAngelo’s] definition, if a white person voices any disagreement, such disagreement may be categorized as argumentation (which is assumed to be fueled by anger, fear, guilt). Therefore it is one’s white fragility that causes him or her to disagree.”

“On the other hand,” Lile continues, “if a white person disagrees but doesn’t voice it (because he or she knows it will only draw such criticism and censorship), he or she remains silent or chooses to exit the conversation, and this too is due to white fragility. This means that whatever one does, he is termed fragile unless, of course, that individual agrees openly and submits to the label.”

And yet DiAngelo managed to create a 169-page bestselling book out of that one-note samba. Go figure.

It’s in that vein that we as a society can’t progress beyond the argument that, despite the fact that one is a subset of the other, it is only acceptable to proclaim “Black Lives Matter,” never that all lives matter.

While Dr. Lile can be dismissed as right-leaning (and therefore automatically racist), DiAngelo’s conundrum is receiving criticism from the Left as well. In a surprisingly critical look at the book (surprising since it was published in The Washington Post), reviewer Carlos Lozada noted, “Even as it introduces a memorable concept, ‘White Fragility’ presents oversimplified arguments that are self-fulfilling, even self-serving. The book flattens people of any ancestry into two-dimensional beings fitting predetermined narratives. And reading DiAngelo offers little insight into how a national reckoning such as the one we’re experiencing today could have come about. In a ‘White Fragility’ world, nothing ever changes, because change would violate its premise.”

Longtime leftist scribe Matt Taibbi was even more acidic, asking “Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?” Then he drops the gloves: “DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like ‘AMAZING!’ and ‘SAD!’ that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.”

In the end, though, the biggest problem with DiAngelo’s book is the premise that all who are white are guilty and must prove their innocence, which is impossible because they’ve never experienced being the innocent black person. Put another way, DiAngelo’s theory has no falsifiability. So much for Martin Luther King’s ideal of judging on character instead of skin color.

Sadly, we live in a time when Robin DiAngelo’s book is flying off the shelves, and demand for her services (which don’t come cheap — DiAngelo recently charged the University of Kentucky $12,000 for two hours of her seminar time) is at its peak. She may be laughing all the way to the bank, but we are all poorer for the Left having lent credibility to this rubbish.

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The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

Bruce Bawer

If you had told me a couple of years ago that a book like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism would be topping the bestseller lists and receiving accolades from all over, I wouldn’t have believed it.

And I’m speaking as someone who, in my 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, warned about the dire ascendancy of identity studies, which are far less about education than about ideological indoctrination and the promotion of social activism.

Although I focused in my book on Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies, I devoted a few pages to DiAngelo’s then-fledgling field, Whiteness Studies, which, given the current preoccupation with white racism, is now poised for prominence on a level outstripping even those behemoths.

There is a key difference between Whiteness Studies and other identity studies: to quote David Horowitz, “Black Studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil.”

Strangely, Whiteness Studies almost didn’t make it.

The election of Barack Obama made it difficult for practitioners to assert with a straight face that black Americans were still victims of brutal systemic white racism—the discipline’s principal claim. “Having Obama is, in a curious way, putting us behind,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era and now president of the American Sociological Association, admitted to CNN in 2012.

Charles Mills, a distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY whose books have titles like The Racial Contract, Blackness Visible, and Black Rights/White Wrongs, agreed, lamenting that Obama’s election had fooled many white Americans into thinking the U.S. was now “post-racial.” Among those who had been “fooled” was the African American linguist John McWhorter, now an associate professor at Columbia University, who in a December 2008 article for Forbes pronounced that racism was no longer a serious problem in the U.S.

Had this view become more pervasive, it would have been disastrous for Whiteness Studies, whose argument for its own existence is that the poorest white Americans continue to enjoy social and cultural privileges that people like Oprah and Obama don’t.

Even if you’re a white person who’s been passed over in college admission, hiring, and/or career advancement because of affirmative action, you’re still, in the view of Whiteness Studies, more privileged than a black person who’s benefited repeatedly from racial preferences.

Fortunately for Whiteness Studies advocates, Obama’s presidency proved to be anything but post-racial. He never missed a chance to tell Americans that race relations remained deplorable. That gave Whiteness Studies a shot in the arm.

In February 2015, The New York Times reported that elite primary and secondary schools in New York had begun holding “white privilege” seminars and courses. After Obama’s departure from the White House, the annual White Privilege Conference has grown apace, and the lists of course offerings in Whiteness Studies have expanded.

If you sent your child to Northwestern, he or she could sign up for “Deconstructing Whiteness,” a “6-week caucus” in which “undergraduate students who identify as white” can explore their own “biases and white privilege.” At Duke, your son or daughter could have taken Whiteness 101, described as “an entry point for students who want to address racial privilege and how it operates in society.” Students were told about “the history of whiteness in America” and encouraged “to become anti-racism advocates for change.”

Not only are white Americans suddenly preoccupied with their own supposed racism; in an effort to understand and eradicate it, they’re turning to merchants of Whiteness Studies ideology. Writers such as DiAngelo, who rejects colorblindness as a goal and paints a picture of a world in which race is the alpha and the omega, and Ibram X. Kendi, who considers it racist to fret about fatherless black homes, black-on-black crime, or the black achievement gap (and has two books on Amazon’s top ten), have become fashionable. 

Whiteness Studies has become big business. That marks a major step down from ordinary identity studies, which at least recognize factors other than sex and race as determinative of individual status.

By contrast, Whiteness Studies, as a rule, sees the world in strictly black-and-white terms, even in circumstances where race is all but irrelevant.

Take the case of Peggy McIntosh, whose 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” is one of the field’s founding documents. The daughter of a top Bell Labs scientist, McIntosh grew up in the wealthy suburb of Summit, N.J., was educated at Radcliffe, the University of London, and Harvard, married the son of a former president of Barnard College, and has spent her career on college faculties. In short, she’s extremely privileged. But the nature of her privilege isn’t racial.

As William Ray observed in a 2008 essay for Quillette,

"McIntosh confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy…One is left to wonder why, given her stated conviction that she has unfairly benefited from her skin color, there seems to be no record of her involvement in any charity or civil rights work…Nor, as far as I can tell, has she spent any time teaching the underprivileged or working directly to better anyone’s condition but her own. Instead, she has contented herself with a generous six figure salary, and has not shown any particular eagerness to hand her position over to a more deserving person of color."

What about black practitioners of Whiteness Studies? Typical of them is Yale’s Claudia Rankine,  who last year published a 6,000-word piece in The New York Times Magazine about her encounters with everyday racism.

Rankine explained that as she travels around the world “giving talks about my work,” she’s surrounded by white men. “That I was among them in airport lounges and in first-class cabins spoke in part to my own relative economic privilege, but the price of my ticket, of course, does not translate into social capital. I was always aware that my value in our culture’s eyes is determined by my skin color first and foremost.”

By contrast, Whiteness Studies, as a rule, sees the world in strictly black-and-white terms, even in circumstances where race is all but irrelevant.
If McIntosh chooses to portray her economic privilege as racial privilege, Rankine acknowledges her own economic privilege only to deny its impact on her social status, which, she insists, is solely race-determined.

Rankine’s examples of racism are astonishingly lame. At one airport, “a white man stepped in front of me” and she had to tell him to wait his turn. This has happened to everyone; but to Rankine, this incident, upon which she expatiates at length, reveals deep truths about “white privilege” and “white solidarity” in “white spaces;” to this man, she instructs us, her presence in his “white space” represented “an unexpected demotion.”

Even when a white stranger seated beside her on a plane chides the flight attendant for forgetting Rankine’s drink, Rankine interprets his act as a manifestation of “white male dominance.” She compares notes with him: although both have “Global Entry,” he never gets flagged by the TSA, while she’s sometimes stopped. One wonders: Are these the worst run-ins Rankine ever had with white people?

Rankine is Whiteness Studies: an exceedingly privileged person whose “work,” as she puts it, consists of pointing to ridiculously minor events in her lush life as evidence that she’s miserably oppressed. In fact, she owes her privilege to her ability to keep banging on about her oppression.

It’s a shabby way to make a living—mischievous, drenched in hypocrisy. It certainly has nothing to do with serious research, scholarship, or education. It’s social activism, based on grotesque misconceptions about how society works.

Such destructive nonsense has no proper place in an institution of higher learning. Like other identity studies, it’s a waste of time and money, having little or nothing to do with expanding a student’s knowledge of the world; but, even more than other identity studies, it’s malicious and dangerous, designed to sow hatred and intensify racial discord.

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The Agenda of Black Lives Matter Is Far Different From the Slogan

Visit the Black Lives Matter website, and the first frame you get is a large crowd with fists raised and the slogan “Now We Transform.”

This agenda isn’t what most people signed up for when they bought their Spanx or registered for Airbnb.

The goals of the Black Lives Matter organization go far beyond what most people think.

Many see the slogan Black Lives Matter as a plea to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, especially historically wronged African Americans. They add the BLM hashtag to their social-media profiles, carry BLM signs at protests, and make financial donations.

Tragically, when they do donate, they are likely to bankroll a number of radical organizations, founded by committed Marxists whose goals aren’t to make the American Dream a reality for everyone—but to transform America completely.

This might be unknown to some of the world’s best-known companies, which have jumped on the BLM bandwagon. Brands like Airbnb and Spanx have promised direct donations.

True, others like Nike and Netflix have shrewdly channeled their donations elsewhere, like the NAACP and other organizations that have led the struggle for civil rights for decades. These companies are likely aware of BLM’s ­extreme agenda and recoil from bankrolling destructive ideas. But it requires sleuthing to learn this.

Companies that don’t do this hard work are providing air cover for a destructive movement and compelling their employees, shareowners and customers to endorse the same. Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal TometiIn a
revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.”

That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”

Millions of Venezuelans suffering under Maduro’s murderous misrule presumably couldn’t be reached for comment.

Visit the Black Lives Matter website, and the first frame you get is a large crowd with fists raised and the slogan “Now We Transform.” Read the list of demands, and you get a sense of how deep a transformation they seek.

One proclaims: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”

A partner organization, the Movement for Black Lives, or M4BL, calls for abolishing all police and all prisons. It also calls for a “progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.”

Another M4BL demand is “the retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record ­expungement of all drug-related offenses and prostitution and reparations for the devastating impact of the ‘war on drugs’ and criminalization of prostitution.”

This agenda isn’t what most people signed up for when they bought their Spanx or registered for Airbnb. Nor is it what most people understood when they ­expressed sympathy with the slogan that Black Lives Matter.

Garza first coined the phrase in a July 14, 2013, Facebook post the day George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Her friend Cullors put the hashtag in front and joined the words, so it could travel through social media. Tometi thought of creating an ­actual digital platform, BlackLivesMatter.com.

The group became a self-styled global network in 2014 and a “fiscally sponsored project” of a separate progressive nonprofit in 2016, according to Robert Stilson of the Capital Research Center. This evolution has helped embolden an agenda vastly more ambitious than just #DefundthePolice.

The goals of the Black Lives Matter organization go far beyond what most people think. But they are hiding in plain sight, there for the world to see, if only we read beyond the slogans and the innocuous-sounding media accounts of the movement.

The group’s radical Marxist agenda would supplant the basic building block of society—the family—with the state and destroy the economic system that has lifted more people from poverty than any other. Black lives, and all lives, would be harmed.

Theirs is a blueprint for misery, not justice. It must be rejected.

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Hollywood's identity crisis: Actors, writers and producers warn of 'reverse racism' in the film industry which has created a 'toxic' climate for anyone who is a white, middle-age man

As the wooden boards are taken down from shopfronts and studio lots grind slowly back to life, Hollywood is basking in an unseasonable heatwave.

The famous boulevards shimmer in 40C haze and warm Santa Ana winds fan the Beverly Hills mansions.

Shaken by #MeToo, paralysed by Covid-19, the $50 billion film industry is finally emerging from a four-month lockdown – only to find a new and very different world, where tension is rising as surely as the thermometer.

For if the very public Black Lives Matter protests have polarised America, the silent fallout has now reached Hollywood.

A revolution is under way. White actors are being fired. Edicts from studio bosses make it clear that only minorities – racial and sexual – can be given jobs.

A new wave of what has been termed by some as anti-white prejudice is causing writers, directors and producers to fear they will never work again. One described the current atmosphere as 'more toxic than Chernobyl', with leading actors afraid to speak out amid concern they will be labelled racist.

The first sign came with one of the most powerful black directors in Hollywood, Oscar-winning Jordan Peele – the man behind box office hits such as Get Out and Us – stated in public that he did not want to hire a leading man who was white.

'I don't see myself casting a white dude as the lead in my movie,' Peele said. 'Not that I don't like white dudes. But I've seen that movie before.'

As one studio executive responded privately: 'If a white director said that about hiring a black actor, their career would be over in a heartbeat.' Few doubt it.

Peele is more vocal than most about his hiring policy, but his outlook is increasingly widespread. Dozens of producers, writers and actors have spoken to The Mail on Sunday about the wave of 'reverse racism' pulsing through the industry.

speaking on condition of anonymity, the executive confirmed that the climate is now toxic for any 'white, middle-aged man in showbusiness'. Their careers, 'are pretty much over'.

They continued: 'We're only hiring people of colour, women or LGBT to write, star, produce, operate the cameras, work in craft services. If you are white, you can't speak out because you will instantly be branded 'racist' or condemned for 'white privilege'.

'The pendulum has swung so far, everyone is paralysed with fear by the idea anything you say could be misinterpreted and your career ended instantly. There are a lot of hushed conversations going on, but publicly everyone is desperate to be seen to be promoting diversity and too terrified to speak out. It's imploding: a total meltdown.'

The failure to nominate actors of colour for the Oscars has been seen as a stain on Hollywood in recent years. But there are fears that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction – and that the movie and TV industries are 'on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown'.

The latest buzzword in Tinseltown is 'Bipoc' – an acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour – and 'Menemy', which means a white, male enemy of the diversity movement. 'Everyone wants to be able to check all the boxes for each new hire,' according to one Oscar-nominated insider.

'Directors normally have a say about who is in their project. Not any more. It's all about 'Bipoc hiring'. And it's coming directly from the heads of the studios who know their jobs are on the line. White middle-aged men are collateral damage. They are the Menemy.'

An actor in his 50s who has worked on some of the biggest shows of the past 20 years described how, during a recent audition, the casting director told him he was 'perfect for the part' but that they had been instructed to hire 'a person of colour' for the role. 'I get it, I really do,' the actor said.

'I understand Hollywood still has a long way to go before people of colour are properly represented on screen but how am I supposed to pay my mortgage, put food on the table? Everyone is terrified. And you can't say anything because then you set yourself up for public crucifixion.'

Dismissing such complaints, however quietly expressed, Selma director Ava DuVernay, now one of the most powerful black women in Hollywood, wrote on Twitter: 'Everyone has a right to their opinion. And we – black producers with hiring power – have the right not to hire those who diminish us.

'So, to the white men in this thread… if you don't get that job you were up for, kindly remember… bias can go both ways. This is 2020 speaking.'

It might seem an irony, then, that Hollywood has long been seen as the heart of liberal America. Leading figures from the industry have a reputation for lecturing the world on issues of human rights, diversity and the environment, from George Clooney's campaign to end the genocide in Darfur to Leonardo DiCaprio's missives on global warming.

But 'wokeness' is not only increasingly pervasive, it seems impossible to navigate. Killing Eve's Jodie Comer – celebrated for playing a bisexual assassin – last week faced intense criticism on social media for dating US sportsman James Burke, said to be a card-carrying Trump supporter, solely on the basis that he supported the President.

And Halle Berry had to apologise for 'considering' taking on the role of a transgender man in a forthcoming film project (instead of leaving it to a real transgender man).

Such is the culture shift that one studio is now preparing to shoot a film with an all-black cast and crew – a project which should normally give cause for celebration.

But when a white woman, a highly respected executive, was tasked to 'oversee' the production on location, she was told she would receive no on-screen credit. A source from the studio behind the project said: 'The kids making the film are fresh, great new talent. But they are kids. None of them are over 25. Most of them have never been on a movie set, let alone a movie which costs $20 million. They don't know the basics about how union rules work, about taking regular breaks or how long you can shoot in a day.

We need to protect our investment and make sure they get up on time and shoot what they need. Otherwise, we could have a multi-million- dollar train out of control.

'We're sending this woman, who is brilliant, to run things on the ground. But she won't get any title credit. People won't admit it, they can't admit it, but reverse racism is definitely going on. You could argue that it's a good thing, that this swinging of the pendulum so far the other way is only fair after years of white privilege. But at what cost? Surely it is best for everyone if people are hired on the basis of talent and ability? I can tell you, we are hiring people based purely on their ethnicity, gender and social-media profiles.

'If you are brown and female and gay then come on in. We're all getting diversity training. We're walking on eggshells during every Zoom meeting. It's got to the point where, if there's a person of colour in the meeting, we can't hang up before they do, for fear of it being considered offensive.'

One film editor who did dare to speak out has seen his career all but destroyed. Nathan Lee Bush, who has shot commercials for corporations such as Budweiser and Nike, criticised a post on a private Facebook group which read: 'I NEED AN EDITOR! Looking for Black Union Editors.'

Bush, who is white, described the advert as 'anti-white racism' and wrote: 'Look what we're asked to tolerate. The people openly and proudly practising racism are the ones calling everyone racist to shut them down, and anyone who dares to speak up is cancelled, their livelihood and dreams stripped from them by a baying mob.'

But voicing his concerns proved disastrous. One of Bush's main clients, the US restaurant chain Panera Bread, vowed never to work with him again and Bush has since been forced to apologise. 'I was literally just playing a video game when I casually wrote those words,' he said later.

'All I was trying to say is: 'Is the antidote to past discrimination based on skin colour more retributive discrimination based on skin colour?' I should have, however, realised this was not the time to bring it up. To anyone I offended, I'm very sorry.'

It has taken several tumultuous years for this perfect storm to gather. It began with the scandal over Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement. Now, as one insider puts it, the industry faces a 'tsunami which has turned everything upside down'. Some will say the change is overdue as, for all the warm words, Hollywood remains a privileged enclave.

Just five years ago, lack of diversity at the annual Academy Awards ceremony spawned the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite.

While last year's box office hits – films such as Black Panther, Get Out and Crazy Rich Asians – were a huge success, their casts, predominantly black and Asian, were not represented in the major acting awards. This year's winners – Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Renee Zellweger and Laura Dern – were all white.

Then came Black Lives Matter spawned in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd in May after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Demonstrations were held across America, the Confederate flag was burned and 'racist' statues toppled – while along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, protesters mingled with the (predominantly white) stars immortalised on the sidewalks.

Studios including Disney, Warner Bros, CBS and Netflix have shared messages of support for the BLM movement, and have vowed to spend millions to promote diversity and inclusion. New York Times writer Reggie Ugwu said: 'The industry is in the clutches of an extremely public identity crisis in which the fresh, multicultural image it aspires to is undermined by the observable evidence.'

But while the intentions are undoubtedly good, many fear it will have the opposite effect. One Emmy Award-nominated white writer said: 'I've never known people so fearful. Houses are being put up for sale. People are moving out because even when things get back to normal after the pandemic there's going to be no work.'

'It's about fairness,' another writer said. 'I've spent the past three years mentoring young, black writers. But now I'm out of a job and it's nothing to do with my abilities as a writer. People think of Hollywood as a place where dreams come true but for people like me, it's turned into a nightmare.'

Do you believe in thought crime? In picking people off, one by one, till everybody agrees with just a single point of view? Each week, we see this world come a little closer.

Many of the victims are famous. But people who are not remotely well known are writing to me every week to say that they, too, now fear for their livelihoods.

Still more are keeping their heads down, fearing what will happen if they dare to speak out against the dogmas of the time and the new totalitarians who promote them.

There's been a steadily rising tide of conformity in recent years. Increasingly, we have been told what we are allowed to say, hear, see and know.

Swarming over the internet, the Left-wing mob is waging a campaign to silence dissenting voices and get free-thinking people removed from their jobs. And they have succeeded. Now the wokerati want to enter the bedroom and say who we may sleep with, too.

Take last week's attempt to 'cancel' the Killing Eve actress Jodie Comer. Her crime? Nothing she has said or thought.

Instead, the online trolls had been enraged to discovered who she is dating. The supposed culprit is an American lacrosse player called James Burke.

His crime? Mr Burke is alleged to be a registered Republican and a Donald Trump supporter. Cue an internet meltdown and a demand by activists that Comer be prevented from working again.

It's ludicrous. How can anyone demand that we restrict ourselves to partners who are in 100 per cent ideological alignment with the views of a Left-wing sect?

The bullying of inoffensive Jodie Comer might be a new low, but I've seen it coming for some time.

Two years ago, a 26-year-old racing driver called Conor Daly lost his sponsors because of something said in the 1980s. Daly competes in the full-blooded series run by Nascar – the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing – which is much-loved in the southern USA.

Yet consider this: Daly was not alive at the time of the alleged offence. How had he mis-spoken before he'd even been born?

The answer is he hadn't. Daly lost his sponsorship because his racing driver father was alleged to have made a racial slur three decades earlier. And there was no reprieve.

This totalitarian instinct has crept up on us with amazing ease. It is the product of a vindictive Leftism which used only to reside on certain US university campuses.

Yet today, boosted hugely by the internet, this half-baked ideology, tribal and dogmatic, obsessed with the language of racial, sexual and gender politics, is running riot.

All decent attitudes, not least the British idea of fair play, have been driven out. It is perfectly normal to have a point of view and argue it. It is perfectly fine to dislike and even disdain some ideas. Who doesn't?

But no one has the right to get people fired or made unemployable because of views that differ from their own, let alone because of their partner's views.

That is neither democratic nor acceptable. It is fascism. Red fascism, but fascism all the same.

It is important we face up to this. Extremism can occur on all political sides. Every political and religious movement can become a focus for bitter people and radical malcontents. But in our age, the bullying totalitarians come from an ever-more assertive political Left.

Take last week's letter to Harper's magazine, signed by 153 artists, writers, and scholars. The letter called for an end to 'cancel culture' which sees online mobs trying to intimidate and 'de-platform' people simply because of their views.

As it happens, the letter was Left-leaning, including the compulsory attack on President Trump. The signatories, likewise, were almost all from the Left, suggesting little interest in 'reaching across the aisle'. But the sentiments were hard to disagree with – or so you might have thought.

The luminaries named at the bottom of the letter were picked off one by one. Did they know they were signing their name alongside the appalling 'transphobe' J. K. Rowling? Did they know a solitary conservative, George W Bush's former speechwriter, David Frum, had signed the letter? Soon enough, some signatories were apologising for signing in the first place.

At a certain stage of growing up, most of us come to understand that worldwide agreement with our own set of personally held views is not achievable, even if it were desirable. Which it isn't.

Today, however, we are dealing with an army of overgrown babies who never did make that realisation. They never did learn that the world is diverse in its opinions.

At university, they were told something positively dangerous: that people who disagree with them are not merely wrong, not merely ignorant, they are ill-informed bigots. And that, in order to achieve justice, these people must be cleared out of the way.

The world these activists are creating is vengeful and vicious, and increasingly dull.

Last week, a clip from a recent BBC comedy show, The Mash Report, was posted online. Even for those of us who long ago gave up bothering trying to find anything funny on the BBC, it was jaw-droppingly awful.

It included a segment of two unfunny comedians agreeing with each other in an unfunny manner.

At one stage the female comedian declared 'free speech is now basically a way adult people can say racist stuff without any consequences'. There was no hint of irony.

Wrong-headed certainty like this is ruining comedy like much else, as Ricky Gervais said just a few days ago. Who would dare to make a dangerous joke today? Much safer to make political sermons on the BBC under the guise of 'humour'.

Some people – especially if they are white and male – think the best way to get through this madness is to shut their eyes and swear allegiance to the big lies and presumptions of the time. They have seen how the mob comes for anyone who says something controversial.

Today, charities, public sector bodies and whole corporations are increasingly filled with people who have been told what to say and what to believe. Some have been told by their bosses what books they should read – a sinister development.

Last month I received a leaked letter sent out by an NHS boss in Birmingham. She had told those working under her to read four books on 'white privilege' so they could 'correct' their attitudes.

This is wrong, and people should stand against it while we have the chance. The woke warriors might like it were we to live in a dictatorship run by them. But we don't – not yet, at any rate.

We live in a democracy. One in which people have the right to voice their opinions and still have the right to date free-minded individuals who disagree with the mob.

The bullies want to stop the rest of us talking or thinking. It's time the rest of us answered back.

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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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