POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

Schools Have Responsibility to Let Biological Males in Girls Sports If They’re Trans, Biden Pick for Education Secretary Says

President Joe Biden’s pick for Education Department secretary said Wednesday that schools have a responsibility to let biological males participate in girls sports if they identify as transgender.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questioned Miguel Cardona, the current Connecticut education commissioner, Wednesday on whether Cardona supports “boys running in girls track meets.”

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“If confirmed, it’s my responsibility and privilege to make sure that we are following the civil rights of all students, and that includes activities that they may engage in in high school or in athletics,” Cardona said.

“I think that it is critically important that education systems and educators respect the rights of all students, including students who are transgender, and that they are afforded the opportunities that every other student has to participate in extracurricular activities,” he said.

Paul asked Cardona whether it bothered him that “girls are being pushed out” of their own sports, telling Cardona that allowing biological males in girls sports would “completely destroy girls athletics.”

“I recognize and appreciate the concerns and frustrations that are expressed,” Cardona said, adding that he has had conversations with families who felt similarly to Paul.

“I understand this is a challenge, and I look forward to working with you and others,” he added, as Paul interrupted him to ask: “Do you think it’s fair to have boys running in the girls track meet?”

“I think it’s the legal responsibility of schools to provide opportunities for students to participate in activities, and this includes students who are transgender,” he said.

Biden signed an executive order in January that sets the stage for rolling out transgender protections—a move that critics protested through the hashtag “Biden erased women.”

“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” Biden’s executive order said, calling for “all persons” to receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.

“It is the policy of my Administration to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, and to fully enforce Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation,” the executive order continued. “It is also the policy of my Administration to address overlapping forms of discrimination.”

The order gives agency heads the authority to carry out these concepts by considering “whether to revise, suspend, or rescind such agency actions, or promulgate new agency actions” in order to comply with the policies set forth in the order.

Biden had previously pledged a number of times to sign the Equality Act, which would force public schools to allow biological males who identify as transgender girls into female athletics.

“President Biden’s executive order has directed federal agencies to eviscerate legal protection for women and roll back nearly 50 years of gains for women,” Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Christiana Holcomb told The Daily Caller News Foundation in January. “We’re going to have to wait and see how each agency either revokes current protection for women based on their sex or issues new policy guidance that allows biological males to, for example, compete in women’s sports.

“We’re going to see impact in the sports context, but far beyond that as well,” she added. “Especially in health care and women’s shelters, and restrooms and locker rooms. In fact, the executive order itself specifically called out school restrooms, locker rooms, and sports competitions. So we know that these things are coming. It’s a really scary prospect for the future of women’s sport.”

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https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/02/03/schools-have-responsibility-to-let-biological-males-in-girls-sports-if-theyre-trans-biden-pick-for-education-secretary-says

The Quest for Unity

President Joe Biden in his inauguration speech called for “unity,” promising he’d be the president for all Americans, even the ones who didn’t vote for him. I was reminded of the words of the noted philosopher Inigo Montoya (from “The Princess Bride”) to his associate, Vizzini. The criminal mastermind Vizzini kept using the word “inconceivable” over and over until Montoya finally replied, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Apparently, unity doesn’t mean the same thing to Biden’s supporters or his party. Since then, we’ve heard nothing but what the Left wants to do to Republicans who supported President Donald Trump. I’m not feeling the love!

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC the Republican Party is filled with white supremacist sympathizers, racists, misogynists, and insurrectionists who nearly killed her, don’t you know. And “they” are not suffering any consequences for their behavior, she complains.

John Brennan, the former head of the CIA, told MSNBC that the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” is much more dangerous than foreign terrorists. There are more of us than the foreign terror groups and we have “weapons” to carry out deadly attacks, he said, referring to the storming of the Capitol.

CNN’s Don Lemon likewise called Republicans domestic terrorists who frighten him more than foreign terrorists. He cites online radicalization, demonization of the “enemy” (anyone who disagrees with the Left) to justify their violence, and devotion to a “cult leader.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed, “The enemy is within the House of Representatives.” She’s frightened by the evil Republicans. She needs more money to protect Democrats from the Republicans.

I’m only scratching the surface of the insane, inflammatory rhetoric coming from leftists. They want Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton impeached because they asked questions about possible voter fraud. How dare they?!

We’ve seen social media partnering with mainstream media to eliminate any point of view that doesn’t support the Left’s cause. Now that Biden has won, they feel free to completely block anyone they want. Having the “wrong” opinion will get you canceled. Having worked for the Trump administration could cause you to never be able to find a job to provide for your family.

The First Amendment will only apply to those who have the “correct” opinions. The Second Amendment will be next in line to eliminate. It happens whenever socialism takes power. Communism is not far behind. Hello 1984!

Everyone condemned the assault on the Capitol. The media refuses to investigate any influence of antifa and how protesters were shown into the Capitol. And yes, some Trump supporters, stuck on stupid, were a factor.

But the Left’s hyperventilating over January 6 in DC when it was silent during the “Summer of Love” is hypocritical. Nearly $2 billion dollars of property was destroyed, several dozen people were killed, hundreds of law enforcement officers were injured, and the Left said NOTHING!

I’m not seeing anything that would indicate Biden or his supporters are the least bit serious about bringing unity to our country. They’re fully aiming to turn this country into something our Founding Fathers could never have imagined.

As Patriots, now is not the time to let discouragement take over. Thomas Paine said it better than I can: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women.”

https://patriotpost.us/articles/77455-the-quest-for-unity-2021-02-03

Why Are Progressives So Illiberal?

One common theme in the abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social, artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism.

To be a Silicon Valley executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political affinities.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.

Google calibrates the order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent. Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.

The $4-5 trillion market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of 19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.

Silicon Valley apparently does not believe in either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It exercises a monopoly over the public airwaves, and resists regulations and antitrust legislation of the sort that liberals once championed to break up trusts in the late 19th and early 20th century. As payback, it assumes that Democrats don’t see Big Tech in the same manner that they claim to see Big Pharma in their rants against it.

Wall Street donated markedly in favor of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in their respective presidential races. Whereas conservative administrations and congressional majorities are seen as natural supporters of free-market capitalism, their Democratic opponents, not long ago, were not—and thus drew special investor attention and support from Wall Street realists.

The insurrectionist GameStop stock debacle revealed how “liberals” on Wall Street reacted when a less connected group of investors sought to do what Wall Street grandees routinely do to others: ambush and swarm a vulnerable company’s stock in unison either to buy or sell it en masse and thus to profit from predictable, artificially huge fluctuations in the price.

When small investors at Reddit drove the pedestrian GameStop price up to well over a hundred times its worth, forcing big Wall Street investment companies to lose billions of dollars, progressives on Wall Street and the business media cried foul. They compared the Reddit buyers to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.

One subtext was: Why would nobodies dare question the mega-profit making monopolies of the Wall Street establishments? The point that neither the Reddit day-traders nor the hedge-fund connivers were necessarily healthy for investment was completely lost.

Surveys of “diverse” university faculty show overwhelming left-wing support, reified by asymmetrical contributions of 95-1 to Democratic candidates. The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. to make race incidental to our characters no longer exists on campuses. Appearance is now essential. More ironic, class considerations are mostly ignored in favor of identity politics. “Equity” applies to race not class. The general education curricula is one-sided and mostly focused on deductive -studies courses, and in particular race/class/gender zealotry that is anti-Enlightenment in the sense that predetermined conclusions are established and selected evidence is assembled to prove them.

We are also currently witnessing the greatest assault on free speech and expression, and due process, in the last 70 years. And the challenges to the First and Fifth Amendments are centered on college campuses, where non-progressive speakers are disinvited, shouted down, and occasionally roughed up for their supposedly reactionary views—and by those who have little fear of punishment.

Students charged with “sexual harassment” or “assault” are routinely denied the right to face their accusers, cross examine witnesses, or bring in counterevidence. They usually find redress for their suspensions or expulsions only in the courts. What was thematic in the Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the University of Virginia sorority rape hoax was the absence of any real individual punishment for those who promulgated the myths.

Indeed in these cases many argued that false allegations in effect were not so important in comparison to bringing attention to supposedly systemic racism and sexism. In Jussie Smollett fashion, what did not happen at least drew attention to what could have happened and thus was valuable. It was as if those who did not commit any actual crime had still committed a thought crime.

Almost all media surveys of the last four years reflect a clear journalistic bias against conservatives in general. Harvard’s liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy famously reported slanted coverage against Trump and his supporters among major television and news outlets at near astronomical rates, in some cases exhibiting over 90 percent negative bias during Trump’s first few months in office. Liberal editors can now be routinely fired or forced to retire from major progressives newspapers if they are not seen as sufficiently woke.

No major journalist or reporter has been reprimanded for promoting the fictional “Russian collusion” hoax—and certainly not in the manner the media has called for punishment, backlisting, and deplatforming for any who championed “stop the steal” protests over the November 2020 elections. The CNN Newsroom put their hands up and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”—a myth surrounding the Michael Brown Ferguson shooting that was thoroughly refuted. Infamous now is the CNN reporter’s characterization of arsonist flames shooting up in the background of a BLM/Antifa riot as a “largely peaceful” demonstration. BLM, of course, has been nominated for a Nobel “Peace” Prize. After the summer rioting, one could better cite Tacitus’s Calgacus, “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”.

A George W. Bush or Donald Trump press conference was often a free-for-all, blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden version devolves into banalities about pets, fashion, and food. The fusion media credo is why embarrass a progressive government and thus put millions and the planet itself at risk?

Andrew Cuomo’s policies of sending COVID-19 patients into rest homes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Still, the media gave him an Emmy award for his self-inflated and bombastic press conferences, many of which were little more than unhinged rants against the Trump Administration. Anthony Fauci’s initial pronouncements about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, its risks and severity, travel bans, masks, herd immunity, vaccination rollout dates—and almost everything about the pandemic—were wildly off. Yet he was canonized by the media due to his wink-and-nod assurances that he was the medical adult in the Trump Administration room.

It would be difficult for a prominently conservative actor or actress to win an Oscar these days, or to produce a major conservative-themed film. Bankable actors/directors/producers like Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson operate as mavericks, whose films’ huge profits win them some exemption. But they came into prominence and power 30 years ago during a different age. And they will likely have no immediate successors.

Ars gratis doctrinae is the new Hollywood and it will continue until it bottoms out in financial nihilism. When such ideological spasms contort a society, the second-rate emerge most prominently as the loudest accusers of the Salem Witches—as if correct zeal can reboot careers stalled in mediocrity. Hollywood’s mediocre celebrities from Alec Baldwin to Noah Cyrus have sought attention for their careers by voicing sensational racist, homophobic, and misogynist slurs—on the correct assumption their attention-grabbing left-wing fides prevents career cancellation.

Hollywood, we learn, has been selecting some actors on the basis of lighter skin color to accommodate racist Beijing’s demands to distribute widely their films in the enormous Chinese market. Yet note well that Hollywood has recently created racial quotas for particular Oscar categories, even as it reverses its racial obsessions to punish rather than empower people of color on the prompt of Chinese paymasters.

Ditto the political warping in professional sports. Endorsements, media face time, and cultural resonance often hinge on athletes either being woke—or entirely politically somnolent. A few stars may exist as known conservatives, but again they are the rare exceptions. For most athletes, it is wisest to keep mum and either support, condone, or ignore the Black Lives Matter rituals of taking a knee, not standing for the flag, or ritually denouncing conservative politicians. Those who are offended and turn the channel can be replaced by far more new viewers in China, who appreciate such criticism directed at the proper target.

Again, what is common to all the tentacles of this progressive octopus is illiberalism. Of course, progressivism, dating back to late 19th-century advocacy for “updating” the Constitution, always smiled upon authoritarianism. It promoted the “science” of eugenics and forced race-based sterilization, and the messianic idea that enlightened elites can use the increased powers of government to manage better the personal lives of its subjects (enslaved to religious dogma or mired in ignorance), according to supposed pure reason and humanistic intent.

Many progressives professed early admiration for the supposed efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s public works programs spurred on by his Depression-era fascism, and his enlistment of a self-described expert class to implement by fiat what was necessary for “progress.”

Even contemporary progressives have voiced admiration for the communist Chinese ability to override “obstructionists” to create mass transit, high-density urban living, and solar power. Early on in the pandemic Bill Gates defended China’s conduct surrounding the COVID-19 disaster. Suggesting the virus did not originate in a “wet” market was “conspiratorial”; travel bans were “racist” and “xenophobic.” In contrast, had SARS-CoV-2 possibly escaped by accident from a Russian lab, in our hysterias we might have been on the brink of war.

So it is understandable that progressivism can end up as an enemy of the First Amendment and intellectual diversity to bulldoze impediments to needed progress. To save us, sometimes leftists must become advocates of monopolies and cartels, of censorship, or of the militarization of our capital.

The new Left sorts, rewards, and punishes people by their race. And some progressives are the most likely appeasers of a racist and authoritarian Chinese government and advocates of Trotskyizing our past through iconoclasm, erasing, renaming, and cancelling out. San Francisco’s school board recently voted to rename over 40 schools, largely due to the pressure of a few poorly educated teachers who claimed on the basis of half-baked Wikipedia research that icons such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington were unfit for such recognition.

Absolute Power for Absolute Good

There are various explanations for unprogressive progressivism. None are necessarily mutually exclusive. Much of the latest totalitarianism is simple hula-hoop groupthink, a fad, or even a wise career move. Loud progressivism has become for some professionals, an insurance policy—or perhaps a deterrent high wall to ensure the mob bypasses one for easier prey elsewhere. Were Hunter Biden and his family grifting cartel not loud liberals and connected to Joe Biden, they all might have ended up like Jack Abramoff.

More commonly, progressivism offers the elite, the rich, and the well-connected Medieval penance, a vicarious way to alleviate their transitory guilt over privilege such as a $20,000 ice cream freezer or a carbon-spewing Gulfstream by abstract self-indictment of the very system that they have mastered so well.

Progressives also believe in natural hierarchies. They see themselves as an elite certified by their degrees, their resumes, and their correct ideologies, our version of Platonic Guardians, practitioners of the “noble lie” to do us good. In its condescending modern form, the creed is devoted to expanding the administrative state, and the expert class that runs it, and revolves in and out from its government hierarchies to privileged counterparts in the corporate and academic world.

Progressivism patronizes the poor and champions them at a distance, but despises the middle class, the traditionally hated bourgeoise without the romance of the distant impoverished or the taste and culture of the rich. The venom explains the wide array of epithets that Obama, Clinton, and Biden have so casually employed—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, ugly folk, chumps, and so on. “Occupy Wall Street” was prepped by the media as a romance. The Tea Party was derided as Klan-like. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were rightly dubbed lawbreakers; those who besieged and torched a Minneapolis federal courthouse were romanticized or contextualized.

Abstract humanitarian progressives assume that their superior intelligence and training properly should exempt them from the bothersome ramifications of their own ideologies. They promote high taxes and mock material indulgences. But some have made a science out of tax evasion and embrace the tasteful good life and its material attractions. They prefer private schooling and Ivy League education for their offspring, while opposing charter schools for others.

There is no dichotomy in insisting on more race-based admissions and yet calling a dean or provost to help leverage a now tougher admission for one’s gifted daughter. Sometimes the liberal Hollywood celebrity effort to get offspring stamped with the proper university credentials becomes felonious. Walls are retrograde but can be tastefully integrated into a gated estate. They like static class differences and likely resent the middle class for its supposedly grasping effort to become rich—like themselves.

The working classes can always make solar panels, the billionaire John Kerry tells those thousands whom his boss had just thrown out of work by the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It is as if the Yale man was back to the old days when the multimillionaire and promoter of higher taxes moved his yacht to avoid sales and excise taxes and lectured JC students, “You study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

There is no such thing as “dark” money or the pernicious role of cash in warping politics when Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, both through direct donations and through various PACs and foundations—channeled nearly $1 billion to left-wing candidates, activists, and political groups throughout the 2020 campaign year.

In sum, the new tribal progressivism is the career ideology foremost of the wealthy and elite—a truth that many skeptical poor and middle-class minorities are now so often pilloried for pointing out. Progressives have adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations, largely because solidarity with elite minorities of similar tastes and politics excuses them from any concrete concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races. The Left finally proved right in its boilerplate warning that the “plutocracy” and the “special interests” run America: “If you can’t beat them, outdo them.”

Self-righteous progressives believe they put up with and suffer on behalf of us—and thus their irrational fury and hate for the irredeemables and conservative minorities spring from being utterly unappreciated by clueless serfs who should properly worship their betters.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13400

The United States of Racial Quotas and Preferences

On Tuesday, six days into Joe Biden's administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice -- unconfirmable for a Cabinet post after her unembarrassed Sunday show lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack -- ventured into the White House press room to preview Biden's "equity" initiative.

With one possible exception, the specific policies announced were less important than the word "equity," invoked 19 times by Rice and nine by Biden. Ending federal private prison contracts, and strengthening relations with and combating "xenophobia" against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, are small potatoes as federal policies.

Not so, perhaps, with the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing initiative, started under former President Barack Obama, repealed under former President Donald Trump and now due for spirited revival. The idea is for the feds to reverse local zoning laws and plant low-income housing in suburbs deemed insufficiently diverse.

Actually, racial discrimination in housing has been reduced since the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, to the point that in metropolitan areas from Washington to Atlanta to Los Angeles, most blacks now live in suburbs, not in the central cities to which they were tightly confined in postwar America.

But for Rice and Biden, "equity" requires not equality of opportunity but equality of results. That's one of the fundamental tenets of critical race theory training banned by outgoing Trumpites and reinstated by Biden on day one.

A lower-than-population percentage of blacks in any desirable category, explains critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi, must be the result of "systemic racism" (a term Rice used twice and Biden six times Tuesday). If you don't agree, you're guilty of "white fragility" and you must be a "white supremacist."

As Andrew Sullivan trenchantly observes, "to achieve 'equity' you have to first take away equality for individuals who were born in the wrong identity group. Equity means treating individuals unequally so that groups are equal." This is exactly contrary to the central thrust of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It could easily be judged, in particular cases, to violate the 14th Amendment. Individuals discriminated against might have standing to go to court.

And there will surely be many such individuals. Rice made clear that the policies mentioned Tuesday are just a start. "Every agency," she said, with no suggestion of exceptions, "will place equity at the core of their public engagement, their policy design, and program delivery to ensure that government resources are reaching Americans of color and all marginalized communities -- rural, urban, disabled, LGBTQ+, religious minorities, and so many others."

That's a lot of preferred categories, but one suspects that, as in George Orwell's "Animal Farm," some preferred groups will be more preferred than others. What we're being promised is racial quotas and preferences in every conceivable program, in every possible corner of American life.

It may be objected that the United States is already well on its way to such a state of affairs. Racial quotas and preferences are firmly, almost fanatically, ensconced in higher education, at least in admissions to programs, if not in numbers of graduates. Corporate America's human resources departments, Kendi's most eager clients, revel in imposing racial quotas and enforcing "equity" orthodoxy.

Even so, something still sticks in the craw of most Americans about treating some people differently from others on account of race or ethnic identity. "You don't get to unite the country by dividing it along these deep and inflammatory issues of identity," Sullivan writes.

Proof of this came from the unlikely precincts of California last Nov. 3. Democratic politicians under the influence of critical race theory asked voters to vote yes on Proposition 16 to overturn the 1996 Proposition 209 referendum barring state government, including universities, from discriminating on the basis of race.

Some $20 million, with corporate elites happily kicking in, was spent to pass this Proposition 16, versus only $1 million to uphold Proposition 209. Yet Prop 16 -- and the legalization of racial quotas and preferences -- was rejected by California voters 57% to 43%. That's an even wider margin than the 55% to 45% by which 209 won in 1996, even though California has become far more Democratic since then: Bill Clinton carried the state by 13 points, Joe Biden by 29. That suggests that the Biden and corporate elite project to create a United States of Racial Quotas and Preferences is in conflict with a strong underlying current of American opinion that favors equal rights under law.

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2021/01/29/creators-oped-n2583866