Monday, July 17, 2023
MSNBC roasted for article linking physical fitness to white supremacy
There is a brilliant specimen of dishonest Leftist argumentation below. What the author says is broadly true: The Nazis did stress physical fitness -- but but that does not show that ALL devotees of physical fitness are Nazis. "Some" does not equal "all".
In the paranoid fantasy world inhabited by leftists, there are few things that aren’t viewed as being impacted by the phantom threat of white supremacy and MSNBC invited an onslaught of ridicule upon itself for tweeting out an article sounding the alarm that staying in shape could be a sign a person might be a neo-Nazi.
On Monday, the leftist cable network posted a link to an article that was originally written last year by Cynthia Miller-Idriss who is proclaimed to be an “expert on extremism” in which she claimed “white supremacists’ latest scheme to valorize violence and hypermasculinity has gone digital” and that the far-right is exploiting physical fitness as a means to lure new recruits.
“The intersection of extremism and fitness leans into a shared obsession with the male body, training, masculinity, testosterone, strength and competition,” the article states.
In the article, which appeals to both the physical and mental slothfulness of MSNBC’s audience, the author sets the tone by invoking a familiar figure who is often used by intellectually lazy leftists to smear people with whom they disagree.
According to Miller-Idriss, “Physical fitness has always been central to the far right. In ‘Mein Kampf,’ Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with ‘fanatical love of the fatherland,’ would do more for the German nation than any ‘mediocre’ tactical weapons training.”
“With recruitment now moving from physical gyms to chat rooms, livestreamed fights, tournaments, festivals, and even combat sports video games, we’re seeing extremist fighting culture being combined with an entertainment culture that already valorizes violence and hypermasculinity,” she wrote.
The network’s tweeting out of the article and its ridiculous assertion was rightfully roasted by Twitter users with some big names weighing in.
“MSNBC thinks you’re a nazi if you work out lmaooo,” tweeted Tesla/SpaceX CEO and “Chief Twit” Elon Musk.
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One Bubble Is About to Pop...and No One Is Talking About It
The collapse in commercial real estate values will hurt everyone
The Biden administration, the media, Democrats, and Republicans are all either willfully ignorant or blithely unaware of the looming economic crisis that's about to hit. Inflation is part of the problem, but we're going beyond job creation reports and the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank. It's a crisis that could cause all the dominoes to fall, and it doesn't help that we have a president who gets outright exhausted after a few days of work. A looming real estate crisis threatens to nuke the whole system. The bleeding has already begun, and it could take decades for some "superstar cities" to recover, while some will tragically remain lost in the wilderness.
Office space and commercial real estate have become the Achilles heel of the economy, made even more vulnerable thanks to the COVID pandemic. Working from home exposed some companies to the benefits of not having an office, leading to cost-saving decisions to cut overhead costs. J.P. Morgan thought its office culture would return to normal once the COVID Nazis allowed us to go outside. Instead, he's cutting his New York footprint.
In June, Dror Poleg had a lengthy piece in The Atlantic that gave an apocalyptic economic projection, breaking down this pending crisis where banks and cities are about to endure a brutal blow to their balance sheets. With interest rates rising, landlords big and small are looking to turn their keys over to the bank in strategic foreclosure. Poleg, a financial investor and author who concentrates on technology's impact on urban economies, even quotes John Maynard Keynes regarding this trend: if you owe the bank $1,000, you're at their mercy, but if you owe them $1 million, the roles are reversed.
You see that in San Francisco, where downtown property values have plummeted by hundreds of millions of dollars. The owners of the Westfield San Francisco Centre shopping center gave their vote of confidence regarding a potential Bay Area comeback: they left. Seeing a $558 million mortgage on their books, they opted to give up the property to the bank. And they're not the only ones; there's a retail exodus occurring in the city.
Inflation and interest rates devalue these assets, impacting the banks and those who have invested portions of their portfolios in commercial real estate. Some pension funds have invested in these so-called "alternative investment" opportunities within real estate and private equity. The loans will be called in, and the pain will be indescribable.
More people working from home and cutting into public transit revenue, coupled with a less than rapid return in the retail sector, have contributed to less cash flowing into the coffers of urban America. Suppose you've ever watched the movie "The Irishman." In that case, there's a quote from Christopher Walken, who played real-life mobster and loan shark Shondor Birns, which feels appropriate given urban America's decreasing revenues and debt payments: "There's going to be interest on the money."
Poleg gives a detailed breakdown of how everything is interconnected and what it could take to reverse course. It will take years of government spending and a bailout to ensure everything doesn't go to hell. He also adds that the 1990s internet craze provided the theory that superstar cities would create a perpetual revenue base since the best and brightest in the fields of innovation would concentrate in these areas, despite the flow of goods being more efficient than ever. The problem, as he saw it, was that once online innovation became established, you could be productive anywhere, and people didn't need to move to cities as long as there was internet access (via The Atlantic/MSN):
During the first three months of 2023, U.S. office vacancy topped 20 percent for the first time in decades. In San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston, vacancy rates are as high as 25 percent. These figures understate the severity of the crisis because they only cover spaces that are no longer leased. Most office leases were signed before the pandemic and have yet to come up for renewal. Actual office use points to a further decrease in demand. Attendance in the 10 largest business districts is still below 50 percent of its pre-COVID level, as white-collar employees spend an estimated 28 percent of their workdays at home.
With a third of all office leases expiring by 2026, we can expect higher vacancies, significantly lower rents, or both. And while we wrestle with the effects of distributed work, artificial intelligence could drive office demand even lower. Some pundits point out that the most expensive offices are still doing okay and that others could be saved by introducing new amenities and services. But landlords can’t very well lease all empty retail stores to Louis Vuitton and Apple. There’s simply not enough demand for such space, and new features make buildings even more expensive to build and operate.
With such grim prospects, some landlords are threatening to “give the keys back to the bank.” Over the past few months, the property giants RXR, Columbia Property Trust, Brookfield Asset Management, and others have collectively defaulted on billions in commercial-property loans. Such defaults are partly an indication of real struggles and partly a game of chicken. Most commercial loans were issued before the pandemic, when offices were full and interest rates were low.
[…]
Banks have many reasons to worry. Rising interest rates have devalued other assets on their balance sheets, especially government bonds, leaving them vulnerable to bank runs. In recent months, Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature all collapsed. Regional institutions like these account for nearly 70 percent of all commercial-property bank loans. Pushing down the valuation of office buildings or taking possession of foreclosed properties would further weaken their balance sheets.
Municipal governments have even more to worry about. Property taxes underpin city budgets. In New York City, such taxes generate approximately 40 percent of revenue. Commercial property—mostly offices—contributes about 40 percent of these taxes, or 16 percent of the city’s total tax revenue. In San Francisco, property taxes contribute a lower share, but offices and retail appear to be in an even worse state.
Empty offices also contribute to lower retail sales and public-transport usage. In New York City, weekday subway trips are 65 percent of their 2019 level—though they’re trending up—and public-transport revenue has declined by $2.4 billion. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 retail-sector jobs lost since 2019 have yet to return. A recent study by an NYU professor named Arpit Gupta and others estimate a 6.5 percent “fiscal hole” in the city’s budget due to declining office and retail valuations. Such a hole “would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.”
Many cities face a difficult choice. If they cut certain services, they could become less attractive and trigger a possible “urban doom loop” that pushes even more people away, hurts revenue, and perpetuates a cycle of decline. If they raise taxes, they could alienate wealthy residents, who are now more mobile than ever. Residents making $200,000 or more contributed 71 percent of New York State’s income taxes in 2019. Losing wealthy residents to low-tax states such as Florida and Texas is already taking a toll on New York and California. The income-tax base of both states has shrunk by tens of billions since the pandemic began.
Finally, turmoil in office markets threatens retirement systems and the portfolios of individual people. Public and private pension funds have traditionally kept their assets in stocks, bonds, and cash. However, in recent decades, they have shifted toward so-called alternative investments, including commercial real estate and private equity. These investments now comprise a third of their portfolios, with real estate comprising more than half of these assets for many pension funds.
[…]
Cities will have to survive and adapt. In a world of consumer choice, locations must think like consumer products. One way to win is to double down on what only the biggest cities can offer—walkable streets, car-free transportation, and cultural and intellectual diversity. But smaller cities can emphasize shorter commutes, ample parking, proximity to nature, better schools, and lower taxes.
[…]
Cities can also lean into public-private partnerships. Such partnerships bring public and private resources together to finance, build, and maintain public facilities and spaces. In the late 20th century, such partnerships in New York City helped rejuvenate Times Square, revive Bryant Park, build the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and fund the New York Public Library. When executed properly, public-private partnerships can inject billions into urban development without sacrificing the broader public interest.
Realistically, though, whatever resources cities can muster won’t be enough. The federal government will have to provide significant, ongoing assistance.
Poleg adds that not every city can be saved (Pittsburgh has never recovered from the shifts in the economic climate) and warned that while New Yorkers are used to seeing a comeback, that could take decades, given the current economic climate. How revenue is shared among states, cities, and counties is also a subject for revision since his article cites how urban areas often don't receive enough cash from city workers who pay the lion's share of their taxes elsewhere.
On top of this incoming disaster, we have one of the largest labor union strikes on the horizon this summer as the Teamsters quietly prepare for war with UPS as their contract expires. There was hope that a crisis could be averted with concessions like air-conditioned delivery trucks, but things have broken down. If a strike happens, 350,000 Teamster members, who work as drivers for UPS, will walk out on the job.
The economy is hanging on by a thread, but no one will tell you.
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How False History Is Used to Justify Discrimination Against Asian Americans
The Leftist lies never stop
On June 29, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) in a landmark decision that overturned explicit race-based affirmative action in America. The decision was a major victory for Asian Americans—whom Harvard had routinely and openly discriminated against. To impose quotas on the school’s racial makeup, Harvard had systematically given Asian Americans lower “personality” scores on applications, the suit alleged, drawing from stereotypes of robotic and inscrutable foreigners from the Orient. It was the same tactic Harvard had used a century ago to systematically discriminate against Jews.
In the aftermath of the ruling, rather than celebrating the victory against racial discrimination, a number of prominent media figures advanced a narrative blaming Asian Americans for betraying other racial minorities. The narrative went as follows: Black Americans and their work leading the Civil Rights Movement are the reason you Asians are in America in the first place—how dare you now sell out the very people you should be thanking for bringing you here.
Jemele Hill, a columnist for The Atlantic, tweeted that an Asian American mother celebrating the court’s decision “carried the water for white supremacy and stabbed the folks in the back whose people fought diligently for Asian American rights in America.” Former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien quoted the same tweet, saying that the mother was “screwing over other people of color … Particularly those whose efforts in civil rights paved the way for your family to come to America.” And activist-attorney and House candidate Qasim Rashid claimed that “Asians were only able to immigrate to the United States b/c Black civil rights leaders passed immigration reform.”
This trope about Asian American debts did not emerge spontaneously in the last few weeks. It was seeded into the public discourse by the most influential project of historical reframing in recent American history: the activist-journalism of The New York Times’ “1619 Project.” In her opening essay for the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones asserts that “Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.”
Now taught across the country in public school curriculums, the claims of the 1619 Project have become official history. The purpose of Hannah-Jones’ narrative was to guilt-trip Asians into supporting affirmative action by drawing a direct line from the Black-led Civil Rights Movement to the sweeping immigration reforms that allowed Asians to emigrate to America.
Except that this narrative is utterly false. On the contrary, many Black Americans were understandably anti-immigration. In the early 20th century, Black workers in the then-nascent labor movement worried that immigrants—Europeans, West Indians, and Asians alike—would take away their jobs. A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the first successful Black labor union in America and a key organizer of the Civil Rights Movement’s 1963 March on Washington, maintained a hardline restrictionist stance on immigration. Randolph declared that “It is time to call a halt on this grand rush for American gold, which over-floods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living, race-riots, and general social degradation. The excessive immigration is against the interests of the masses of all races and nationalities in the country—both foreign and native.”
Randolph had the support of fellow restrictionist W.E.B. Du Bois, whose book The Souls of Black Folk originally made negative remarks about Jews before the 50th-anniversary edition swapped out the word “Jews” for “immigrants.” For example, the original 1903 version claims that “only a Yankee or a Jew could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants,” while versions from 1953 onward state that “only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants.” A reference to “shrewd and unscrupulous Jews” was changed to “shrewd and unscrupulous immigrants.”
And while history textbooks often present Booker T. Washington as a foil to Du Bois, Washington was also a restrictionist. In his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech, Washington sent a stern message to industrialists that employed immigrants instead of Black workers: “To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race—cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides.”
Some Black restrictionists indulged in explicit racial stereotyping, claiming that Japanese workers were unfit to work on American railroads because they were “too short to make down the upper birth [sic] without a ladder.” There is indeed a long history of Black nativism in America, from Reconstruction era antipathy toward Chinese railroad workers to the modern-day Twitter activism of the American Descendants of Slavery movement. It is not a uniquely racial story—other native working-class groups in America advocated against immigration for similar reasons—but it gives the lie to the claims now being used to morally blackmail Asian Americans.
A number of prominent media figures advanced a narrative blaming Asian Americans for betraying other racial minorities.
The myth that the Civil Rights Movement led to immigration reform comes from the false conflation of two separate bills signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Because the two bills were signed by the same president a year apart, it is easy to make the assumption that the passage of the first led to the smooth sailing of the second. Yet the two bills ran parallel when it came to their core advocacy groups. The Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, was the culmination of decades of advocacy by pro-immigration groups—mostly made up of Jewish, Irish, and Japanese activists—and most of all by one of its namesakes, Rep. Emanuel Celler.
Emanuel “Mannie” Celler was the Brooklyn-born grandson of German Jewish immigrants, and he took great pride in his family’s immigrant history. He loved telling a story about how his mother’s parents met in New York Harbor when the ship carrying them from Germany began to sink, throwing his grandmother into the water before his grandfather jumped in and rescued her, sparking a new romance in the New World. Mannie graduated from Columbia Law School before going into politics, and immediately made waves in 1922 when he ran for a House seat as a Democrat and managed to win his Republican-majority congressional district by appealing to hard-drinking immigrant voters fed up with Prohibition laws.
In Congress, Mannie quickly developed a reputation for his unapologetic pro-immigration advocacy. Anti-immigrant sentiment had surged in the wake of World War I’s carnage and the nationalist fervor that followed. In addition, the ethnic and religious composition of newer immigrants alarmed the WASP establishment, who decided after decades of heavy immigration to shut American borders. Celler gave his first big speech on the House floor passionately arguing against the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, a law that set severe quotas on Southern and Eastern Europeans and completely banned Asians from immigrating. In the years after the passage of Johnson-Reed, immigration ground to a halt—but Celler refused to accept that Johnson-Reed was the end of the American immigration experiment, and spent the next four decades of his life working toward overturning the act.
One especially urgent issue, for Mannie, was the persecution of German Jews by the Nazi government. While the American public murmured about the rumors coming out of Germany, public sentiment was stubbornly anti-immigration. Another member of a religious minority in America, Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, regularly broadcast fiery polemics against Jews on radios all across America.
In 1938, Celler introduced a bill that would allow the president to lift the quotas for victims of religious and political persecution. The bill was unpopular even among fellow Jewish leaders who already had to contend with antisemitic conspiracy theories, and saw the bad optics of a Jew proposing a bill that everyone knew was designed to let more Jews in. But Mannie didn’t care about optics—he wanted to save lives, and refused to back down.
As the news trickling out of Nazi Germany grew increasingly alarming, Congress refused to budge on the quotas. It took six grueling years of lobbying from Jewish lawmakers for FDR to establish the War Refugee Board (WRB), an agency that saved tens of thousands of Jews—but not before millions perished in the Holocaust. As WRB director John W. Pehle would later lament, the group’s work was “too little, too late.”
If being against affirmative action means carrying water for white people, then being for it just means carrying water for Black people. The Asian coolie forced to carry both buckets becomes strained under the yoke.
None of these setbacks was able to stop Celler’s zeal for immigration reform, for which he developed an incrementalist strategy to slowly chip away at the quotas. In 1946, Mannie managed to get the Luce-Celler Act passed, allowing a small number of Filipinos and Indians to migrate to America per annum and opening up a pathway to citizenship for them for the first time. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 chipped away even further, allowing 100,000 refugees to settle, although antisemites in Congress only voted for the bill after it was revised to limit Jews.
Celler became the chair of the House Judiciary Committee shortly afterward, and he used his expanded powers to push for the eventual dismantlement of the quota system. In 1950, Mannie managed to get Congress to amend the Displaced Persons Act to allow over 400,000 more refugees in, about a fifth of which were Jews. And over in the Senate, fellow German Jew Herbert Lehman also worked tirelessly to dismantle the quotas, even while the Red Scare propagated nativist sentiment by associating immigrants with communism.
In 1952, historian Oscar Handlin (who was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants) published the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. Written in a lyrical fashion rather than the standard droll academic cadence, the book almost single-handedly popularized the notion that America is a nation of immigrants. As Handlin wrote in his opening one-two punch of sentences, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
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Transgender Train Derails in Sixth Circuit
Republican legislatures in 20 states have banned the use of irreversible gender-changing procedures on children, overcoming the governor’s veto in five of those states with a sixth override likely. But in six of the 20 states, liberal federal judges blocked these good laws in response to lawsuits by liberal groups including the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center.
Now comes the first appellate decision, and it’s welcome news. On July 8, two of the finest appellate judges in the country, Jeffrey Sutton and the Trump-appointed Amul Thapar, delivered a setback to the transgender agenda by ruling to reinstate Tennessee’s new law against transgender operations on minor children.
The margin was 2-1 on the Sixth Circuit appellate court, with a Democrat-aligned judge dissenting. Appeals are still pending of bad district court decisions in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, and Kentucky, where beneficial state laws were blocked by federal judges.
Other states have refused to protect children from transgender operations, and this cultural battle is far from over. Other states have refused to protect children from transgender operations, and this cultural battle is far from over. In California, a recall campaign rages against a few conservatives who were elected last year to a school board near Los Angeles.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, considered the foremost health authority in our country until it mishandled the Covid pandemic, has come out entirely on the side of the transgender agenda. Recently the CDC’s website endorsed the ludicrous idea of “chestfeeding,” whereby transgender persons without breasts attempt to fake the production of breast milk with the use of dangerous drugs.
Politics is downwind from culture, and this past weekend the Netherlands crowned as the winner of its Miss Universe pageant a man competing as a trans woman. Sporting an elegant hairdo, this winning candidate had previously competed on the television show “Holland’s Next Top Model.”
The University of Cincinnati, ironically located in the same city where the Sixth Circuit presides, rescinded its reprimand of a teacher for flunking a student for using the term “biological woman.” Megan Rapinoe, the outspoken retiring player on the U.S. women’s soccer team, indicated she would welcome male-bodied trans women into that sport, even though her own women’s team was easily defeated by an under-15-years-old boys team.
The media and many judges are firmly on the side of the transgender movement, and they expect to win. A Clinton-appointed judge just ordered a public school to let a boy who identifies as a girl to use the girls’ bathroom, overriding a policy adopted by the elected school board in the town of Mukwonago, Wisconsin.
Law schools have fully embraced transgender follies, and unfortunately many courts will do likewise. The Supreme Court hires all of its law clerks from a handful of elite law schools, and those clerks perform the influential task of screening and describing cases before the Court either agrees to hear them or simply denies “cert” on a lower court decision.
The Supreme Court denied a recent application by West Virginia to reinstate its sensible law keeping boys out of girls sports, ducking this raging controversy just as the Court dodged all appeals about election fraud. For decades the Supreme Court accepted abortion cases only when the appeal was by the Left, and it will be interesting if Leftists appeal Judge Sutton’s decision against them.
Two years ago, Harvard Law School welcomed its “first transgender women of color” as teachers at the school. They joined two transgender men on the faculty, one of whom maintains a personal website that brags about “working with sex worker art collective that protested digital gentrification.”
Judge Sutton’s ruling is persuasive, and carries added weight due to his strong reputation as a “feeder” of clerks to the Supreme Court. Judge Sutton is notorious in some quarters for ruling against legal recognition of same-sex marriage in the case that was later overturned by the now-retired, left-leaning Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Tennessee’s new law, which was scheduled to go into effect on July 1st, prohibits “surgically removing, modifying, altering, or entering into tissues, cavities, or organs” of any person under the age of 18. It also bans “prescribing, administering, or dispensing any puberty blocker or hormone” to minor children.
“The State plainly has authority, in truth a responsibility, to look after the health and safety of its children,” Judge Sutton wrote with the concurrence of Judge Thapar. “Tennessee could rationally take the side of caution before permitting irreversible medical treatments of its children,” they added.
The court found it unlikely that the Supreme Court would create a new constitutional right to transgender operations, when no such right has existed in the Constitution for 235 years. “Life-tenured federal judges should be wary of removing a vexing and novel topic of medical debate from the ebbs and flows of democracy,” the Sixth Circuit majority concluded as they reinstated the Tennessee law.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
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