Posts Tagged ‘Totalitarians’
An important election in Iran
In this case the recent election of a new President of Iran, where whoever is chosen by the Council of Guardians and who has the approval of the Ayatollah Kahmenei – the person actually running Iran – goes on to win the general election.
There have been “surprises” in these elections over the years, but that’s usually been when the Ayatollah has not expressed any favouritism for any one of the permitted candidates. This time he did.
The product of this joke of an election system turns out to be probably the biggest piece of shit that has ever crawled into that position., and that’s saying something considering his predecessors.
Both of the following articles should be read.
———————–
First, a concise piece by historian Dominic Green, who has a biting wit, Iran’s president, a schreibtischtäter:
Raisi is what Hannah Arendt would have called a schreibtischtäter, a ‘desk murderer’: a functionary who orders dirty work while keeping his own hands clean.
…
In the 1980s, Raisi was a young regional prosecutor. He was part of a four-man ‘death committee’ which ordered the disappearance and killing of thousands of the Islamic revolution’s enemies. You may be shocked to hear human rights’ groups claiming that due process was frequently ignored during this judicial massacre.
He also has not changed over the decades:
… when protests against the clerical dictatorship broke out in 2019, Raisi, as head of the Iranian judiciary, granted blanket impunity to government officials and security forces responsible for unlawfully killing hundreds of men, women and children, and subjecting thousands of protesters to mass arrests and at least a hundred to enforced disappearance, and torture and other ill-treatment’.
Is it any wonder that Raisi won the presidency with the lowest turnout in Iran’s post-1979 history: 48 percent nationally, down from over 70 percent in 2017, with only 28 percent bothering to vote in Tehran.
Green argues that with this election the JCPOA nuclear deal is more dead than when Trump withdrew the USA from it. Not that that will stop the Biden Administration from trying to re-enter it:
Raisi has already said he won’t meet Biden. He has issued a ‘non-negotiable’ rejection of the American goal of adding Iran’s ballistic missile program and support for terrorism to follow-on negotiations. The Iranian negotiators will use the prospect of Raisi taking office in August to lever more concessions from the desperate Americans. But the election of Raisi in the first place has already confirmed the futility of returning to the Iran Deal.
…
It is the Supreme Leader, 82-year-old Ayatollah Khameini, who heads the Iranian regime, and the military-industrial complex controlled by the IRGC that is its arms and legs. Raisi is a product of their interdependence and corruption. He may yet inherit Khameini’s throne. This is one reason why the pro-Democratic ‘echo chamber’ is spinning his merits in sequence with the centrifuges.
That last crack is referring to Obama’s point man on the JCPOA, Ben Rhodes, who boasted in an interview with the New York Times Magazine in 2016 about how he had created a media “echo chamber” to help get the deal passed. An article in the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine, A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru, noted the famous description by Rhodes of the MSM he manipulated:
Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
———————–
The second article, Ebrahim Raisi, the clerics ruthless enforcer, is longer and goes into more historic detail about his ugly past, including the political games that were going on behind the scenes of the 1988 executions:
The 1988 executions sparked a debate within the regime, just as Khomeini had intended. The supreme leader wanted to separate the true believers from the skeptics. His heir-apparent, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, objected to the killings, and in a secret recording released in 2016, he can be heard chastising Raisi and his fellow executioners.
Shades of Mao and his Cultural Revolution designed to purge the CCP of reactionary elements and purify it. All this history leads to this moment:
By 2016, there were unmistakable public signs that Khamenei was grooming Raisi to succeed him. When it comes to personnel, Khamenei has always displayed a keen eye for talent and loyalty. And Raisi’s promotions all required the personal approval of the supreme leader.
…
Which helps explain why, this year, the Guardian Council disqualified a high number of presidential candidates — not only did “moderates” get axed, but even the hard-line former speaker of the parliament, Ali Larijani, was removed from the ballot. As a result, Raisi ran nearly uncontested, with no real competitors.
So he’s the next Ayatollah. He’s even been given “management” positions that enabled him to build a legacy beyond that of executioner, being placed in charge of huge sums of money via the Astan-e Qods Foundation in Mashhad, which runs the Imam Reza Shrine, visited by millions of pilgrims a year and with $15 billion in assets.
The article draws the appropriate conclusions that the US will have to confront:
Raisi’s win in a fully rigged election strips the system of its off-ramps. The once-popular reformist notion that the theocracy could liberalize itself through its own constitutional provisions has died — except perhaps abroad among Western leftists. The Republic of Virtue is drowning in corruption and class divisions that are as pronounced as those in the last days of the shah.
The regime has no answers to the myriad problems the nation faces. Even hooking up with China will not save them in the long run as they continue to disconnect further from the Iranian people, whose protests are answered only by brutality because the Ayatollah’s know it also:
A nation that saw massive protests once a decade now sees them more frequently. In the latest nationwide revolts of 2019 and 2020, sparked by a drop in fuel subsidies, even the working classes joined the protests. Iran’s ethnic minorities, who probably make up 50 percent of the country’s population, have also become increasingly vocal in expressing their grievances.
They have the same conclusion on the nuclear deal as well:
These two clerics, who will likely reinforce each other’s hardest impulses, both understand what Washington appears to have missed: The era of arms-control diplomacy has ended. The Islamic republic’s nuclear trajectory will not be impacted by further negotiated restraints.
The US may succeed in getting JCPOA back, but it will make no difference and ultimately what happens to the Iranian nuclear weapons programme is down to the Israelis.
It’s just an academic theory
I see there has been some ruction here in New Zealand about a high school activist group (School Strike For Climate Auckland or SSFCA) breaking itself up because of its inherent White Supremacy.
Apparently the group was “advised” about this problem by Maori and Pasifika groups also engaged in “fighting Climate Change”. I was amused that Chris Trotter covered this story with the title, Losing The “Struggle-Session” Over Climate Change:
The statement released by SSFCA was heart-breaking. To find an historical precedent for the document’s abject self-negation and unqualified acknowledgement of guilt it is necessary to go back to the “struggle sessions” of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s. Or, even further back, to the “confessions” tremulously delivered by the broken victims of Joseph Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. The shaming and vilification required to reduce these idealistic young people to a state of such utter intellectual prostration proves conclusively that human viciousness is not a trait peculiar to those whose skins are white.
That’s because I’ve covered this insanity in a series of posts over the last year titled The Struggle Sessions, and yes, its treatment of humans is “heart-breaking”, although it’s hard to hold back the schadenfreude as the theory now hits some of the very people who wielded it not five minutes ago.
In the light of such occurrences as SSFCA’s it’s quite amazing that we’re suddenly seeing people, particularly the MSM, suddenly blathering about how this is “just an academic theory” that perhaps is being used badly by “fringe groups”.
Bullshit! This is spreading fast and wide through mainstream institutions and pushed by supposedly mainstream groups like teachers, and it is hitting your kids and grandkids. They know it better than you, as shown by the following two examples.
First up is a short speech by some 15 year old kid at a school board meeting for Rosemount High School, located in a suburb of Minneapolis.
At least he had the good sense to tell them he was quitting the school and going elsewhere to be educated in how to think critically.
The next example is a lot sadder. It’s a letter written by a high school student to his former English teacher, who recently resigned from Dwight-Englewood School in protest to the introduction of Critical Race Theory. The letter was released by Columbia university professor of linguistics, John McWhorter (whose take on “systemic racism” I wrote about earlier)
Dear Mrs. Stangel-Plowe,
I truly hope you do read this email, but I understand if you are too busy to. I am extremely grateful that you were my teacher this year, and for the ideas you finally brought to light recently. I hope you realize how big of an impact you made on our community. Unfortunately, all of what you said is true; I know many students that are scared to speak out on their opinions in fear. I have reluctantly prohibited myself from saying certain things in class also in fear of sounding politically incorrect. I see the negative effects of this toxic community in my fellow students and faculty every day.
Namely, my eighth grade English teacher taught us for the first two weeks about pretty much how awful white men are. For two weeks, I did not speak a single word in her class. My fellow white male classmates left the classroom every time feeling the same way. For lack of a better word, those teachings made me feel like horse shit, like worthless scum undeserving of living.
Later during that year, in my history class, my white classmates were constantly using the pronoun “we” when talking about slavery. Eventually, I had to raise my hand and remind them: that “we” were not and are not a part of these despicable acts. Most of our parents were refugees from foreign countries, whose ancestors were also oppressed and persecuted. This year, I have battled with countless generalizing and oppression towards white men. There are girls, whom I am friends with, that genuinely believe that all men are misogynistic. I see movements on social media like #KAM which stands for “Kill all men”; people don’t realize how strongly that affects boys in an extremely negative way.
Even now, I am struggling and frightened to fully express my opinion to my girlfriend, who believes that most white men are oppressive beings. Everyone is talking about your letter, many many students including myself are extremely grateful for what you’ve done. My friends and classmates feel much more comfortable expressing their voices and many minds are changing. So I am once again thanking you for trying to improve our school. I wish I could put into words the extent to which I admire and thank you. I wish I could describe to you the good that you have done. I aspire to be as brave as you some day.
With endless amounts of love and respect,
-Your former D-E student
You can see how this sort of “education” could produce sad, frightened young teenagers like the ones who formed SSFCA, whose actions show that it’s not just US high school kids who are imbibing this garbage.
Oh, and the first thing that second boy needs to do in terms of “bravery” is dump that toxic POS “girlfriend” before she fucks him up permanently.
“Even North Korea is not this nuts”
That’s not from this Babylon Bee tweet, despite it being another of their wonderful pieces of satire.
Now you may be thinking that photoshopping North Korea’s Kim Jong Un into a modern American university lecture theatre is over-the-top, even for a satirical story.
But that would be before you read this article about a North Korean defector named Yeonmi Park, who has recently graduated from Columbia University.
Park is one of the more famous defectors, having written a 2015 memoir called “In Order to Live”, in which she chronicled her life in the repressive regime of North Korea and her eventual escape with her mother. At the age of 13 she saw people die of starvation right in front of her. When she and her mother managed to get across the border into China they were captured by human slavers. Having been freed by Christian missionaries she still ended up having to walk across the Gobi desert before she got to South Korea.
Then she moved to the USA and went to one of the great Ivy League universities.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” she said. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
Her money quote:
“Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”
When you read the details she supplies about her education you can understand why she came to this conclusion.
Like in North Korea, Park said she witnessed example after example of anti-Western sentiment and guilt-tripping. During her orientation, for instance, a staff member scolded her for liking classic literature, such as the writings of Jane Austen.
“I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” Park said of her orientation. “Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”
Heh. I encountered a number of feminists in the 1980’s with a very low opinion of Jane Austen, because she did not fit their conceptions of what a feminist was. To say the least their opinions of the woman were primitive and reductive, but by the late 1990’s things had turned around, with increased celebration of Ms Austen’s feminist traits.
Just in time to now be a “colonialist” and a racist.
Her professors gave students “trigger warnings,” sharing the wording from readings in advance so people could opt out of reading or even sitting in class during discussions, Park told The Post.
“Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was ‘safe space,’” she said.
“Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men.” Some of the discussions of white privilege reminded her of the caste system in her native country, where people were categorized based on their ancestors, she said.
The similarities with North Korea mounted up, but at least the North Koreans had some rationale in defending their system, which they did partly by hating on Americans. As Ms Park points out there seem to be rather a lot of Americans who also hate America.
When it came to gender pronouns and manipulation of the English language, Park was even more confused.
“English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?” she remembered asking herself. “It was chaos. It felt like the regression in civilization.”
It is a regression in civilisation. And it comes from being in a “safe space”.
“Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like,” she said. “These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced. They don’t know how hard it is to be free.”
The paradox of supposedly being taught about “oppression”, “injustice” and being “free” is that it’s producing graduates who actually don’t know anything about them.
Park said as a child she had thought dictator Kim Jong Un was “starving” and overworked until she was in South Korea and was shown pictures that showed how large he was in pictures compared to other people who looked thin and hungry.
“That’s what it does when you’re brainwashed …. Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?’ Because I never learned how to think critically. That is what is happening in America, people see things but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”
More paradox, this time courtesy of “Critical Theory”. Or perhaps irony is a better term?
“You guys have lost common sense to a degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend,” she said. “Where are we going from here? There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos. I guess that’s what they want, to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a Communist paradise.”
I don’t agree with that last, although I can see why she would think that. The fact is that outside of a tiny fringe of real Marxists there are few who believe in that, mainly because there are so many grifting, money hungry Leftists tearing things up just to make a buck for themselves:
- Patrisse Cullors of Burn Loot Murder,
- Whiter-Than-White Robin DeAngelo of “White Fragility” fame,
- Social Media Socialist Nicole Sanchez, with her “Tax The Rich” t-shirt – and her BMW and $2 million apartment.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t cause an awful lot of damage to American society as they claw in the money while forcing everybody else to bend to their whims.
Eventually, Park stopped arguing with her professors and “learned how to just shut up” so that she could graduate.
…
“I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free.”
Well she did still graduate, and she got to talk to reporters about this – but only once she escaped from the university, and to paraphrase Andrew Sullivan, once we all live on campus…
The Struggle Sessions – Back to Academia
Back to the world where it all started – Academia. The following article from Aero magazine, Listening at the Great Awokening, has a concise but comprehensive take on what Woke Politics is doing to American universities.
All the accents and cadences of critical race theory can be identified. Williams, Sarah Lawrence, Evergreen and Yale could really be Any Residential College in Any Town.
As such I’d be interested to know how much of this crap is slipping into New Zealand universities.
But that article deals with a lot of student protest. Here are two specific stories of how actual academic research is being screwed up as a result of the Great Woke Fest. First up is how two academics withdrew a study they’d conducted on police shootings. After studying “917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings“, they had reached the conclusion that there was:
“no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
The two researchers from the University of Maryland made it clear that they stood by their analysis and findings and there has been no dispute about such. So why withdraw it?
Politics! Right-Wing attorney and Police researcher Heather MacDonald had cited it during her testimony before Congress in September 2019 as well as in a City-Journal article, although the shit did not really hit the fan until she wrote another article on June 3rd of this year for the WSJ. In the post-Floyd era such thoughts were unacceptable. As MacDonald wrote in a subsequent WSJ article:
My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.
Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.” Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.
They did not explain exactly how it had been “misused”. A better explanation was that they were saving their own necks, and to aid that they also tried throwing MacDonald under the bus, as she described:
The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.
The “political climate” in American universities that those authors are terrified of is also seen with this from NorthWestern University Law School in Chicago, one of the most prestigious in the nation.
If you think that my description of all this as a Maoist Struggle Session is exaggerated then just look the chat stuff on this screen capture of a Tweet.
There had been a similar example around the same time from the world of political science, courtesy of a Democrat political consultant, David Shor, who Tweeted some advice as the George Floyd riots were cranking up:
“Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”
He even cited a very dense Poli-Sci paper by a Princeton political scientist, “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting.”. Clearly he was worried about his Party, but others did not see it that way. The most popular Tweet response: “white dems to black people in 2020: ‘could you die more quietly? We have an election to win,’”
Shor was fired within days. He must have been pissed off when, a few months later, CNN mouthbreather Don Lemon said the following:
“Guess what, the rioting has to stop….Chris, as you and I know, it’s showing up in the polls, it’s showing up in focus groups. It’s the only thing right now that’s sticking.”
Last I heard Lemon still has his job, but that’s because by then the Democrats had figured out that the riots were not their magic bullet in defeating Trump.
But the following example is worse, because the academic concerned had to write a “secret” letter to some – but only some – of his colleagues.
Dear profs X, Y, Z
I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.
What a great learning and teaching environment to exist in. And he’s not wrong.
In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.
I’m getting vibes of “If only Stalin knew”. This poor bastard still believes the “diversity” schtick, even as he raises a question that answers itself:
In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system.
Not one alternative eh? Well duh!
The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.
It’s a mystery!
The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians.
I feel so sorry for this guy. He actually thinks that modern universities are places where academic research into socio-political questions is still academic rather than political and ideological. And he really does not understand that his next comment will be greeted with “Yeah? And?“
Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.
He goes on to examine this axiom in some detail, applying the sort of research powers you’d expect, including noting how much of these truths are based on anecdote or “transparently motivated“. You can read it for yourself but some of his key points are as follows:
- If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans?
- None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”.
- Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter,
He also could have looked at non-crime stuff for evidence of a lack of White Supremacy in the USA.
So fanatical are these people that even legal and financial punishment won’t dissuade them, as was seen with the hits taken by the formerly prestigious Liberal Arts university, Oberlin College in the middle of last year:
The jury handed down a staggering $11 million verdict against Oberlin for a smear campaign against a local business and awarded another $33 million in punitive damages to the targeted mom-and-pop store, Gibson’s Food Market and Bakery.
The bakery, which had served Oberlin students for decades, had got a couple of shop-lifting university students arrested. Unlike past ages when shame meant something, they counter-attacked by accusing the bakery of racism. This was whole-heartedly backed by the university, which launched an all-out attack to destroy the bakery’s business via cancelled business, public attacks and protests that fully involved the staff. The lawsuit loss came as a shock..
Oberlin’s defenses — it was neutral in the dispute between its students and the store — were shredded at trial (admirably covered in detail by the Web site Legal Insurrection).
… but obviously not enough of one:
I received an even more defiant letter from Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar on June 14 vowing that “this is not the final outcome.” Ambar warns of a “lengthy and complex legal process.” Indeed, I’m now hearing from infuriated Oberlin insiders this week that the college persists in treating the Gibson family horribly and refuses to end the horror show, all while blithely assuring alumni that “we value our relationship with the town and region that are our home.”…
Oberlin alum Beth Kontrabecki Walters summed it well for me in her reflections on campus life and the Gibson’s verdict: “What was once considered a forward-thinking and prestigious institution has now become the poster child for intolerant, myopic crybabies. Oberlin should not appeal this decision. … The multimillion-dollar reward to Gibson’s is the public’s way of sending a message; it’s high time these insulated left-wing incubators put an end to the out-of-control politically correct culture
The article documents examples over three decades of how Oberlin has been pulling this shit on the local community and students. But I don’t think they, or most of these universities can change themselves given how embedded this racist crap is, as can be seen by this official student categorisation system used by the University of California:
I’ve seen this somewhere before:
In 1984, for example, “518 coloureds became white, 2 whites became Chinese, 1 white became Indian, 1 white became coloured, 89 coloureds became black.
Surely U-Cal is not far away from undertaking the same steps as Apartheid South Africa. It would hardly be less crazy and racist than what they’ve got. The only real solution will be public de-funding and/or the loss of students until even tenured professors get fired, as has happened at Evergreen University. In fact the greatest impact has been from the impact of the Chinese Sinus Rot.
Every disaster has a silver lining, but this one needs to be much brighter and stronger – looking at those numbers I’d guess at least 3 million stronger.
The Struggle Sessions – Everyday Life
So far in the Struggle Sessions I’ve looked at where it came from, its effects in Academia, MSM, and even Science.
But it’s beginning to hit home to everyday people as well.
Some of this is obvious, as shown by Matt Taibbi’s article on the MSM:
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who argued for police reform and attempted to show solidarity with protesters in his city, was shouted down after he refused to commit to defunding the police. Protesters shouted “Get the fuck out!” at him, then chanted “Shame!” and threw refuse, Game of Thrones-style, as he skulked out of the gathering. Frey’s “shame” was refusing to endorse a position polls show 65% of Americans oppose, including 62% of Democrats, with just 15% of all people, and only 33% of African-Americans, in support.
Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. White protesters in Floyd’s Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for “forgiveness… for years and years of racism” are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in “African kente cloth scarves”?
There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes,
Heh. What is not deeply weird is the classic feature of Nineteen Eighty Four, in which history is constantly updated, and woe betide anybody who does not keep up:
Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I’m tired and racist.
I’ve referred before to Andrew Sullivan’s 2018 piece, We All Live on Campus Now, which pointed out that campus insanity was going to spread beyond universities as people graduated:
Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on…
The reason I don’t agree with this is because I believe ideas matter. When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well.
To put it another way: the Culture Wars in the USA matter because their impacts are real and spreading not just across the USA but across the Western world. Sullivan has followed that article up with this one in 2020, Is there still room for debate?:
In the last couple of weeks, as the purges of alleged racists have intensified in every sphere, and as so many corporations, associations, and all manner of civic institutions have openly pledged allegiance to anti-racism, with all the workshops, books, and lectures that come with it, I’m reminded of a Václav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”
Short answer: NO! With regard to Havel, I thought I’d coined that phrase in 2007 on Kiwiblog. Nuts!
A lot of the crap that’s hitting the corporate world outside of the MSM places Sullivan is writing about, is a nasty little polemic called White Fragility. Back to Taibbi again as he reviews this ludicrous best selling book, Taibbi is not gentle. The book is actually being used as a basis for “training” in the Human Resource departments of US corporations and government departments, hardly surprising given that its author, Robin DiAngelo, is a former corporate consultant. She certainly landed on the gravy train with this one.
DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory…
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…
Writers like DiAngelo like to make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone)…
Put simply, the book is dumber than the average business book of the last forty years, and is certainly having worse consequences than something like the hideous 1980’s tome, In Search of Excellence, which, as just one example, highlighted IBM just before it started going down the crapper. It’s not surprising that White Fragility manages to twist the story of Jackie Robinson completely inside out, arguing that people back in the 1940’s believed that “Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites”. Taibbi really takes issue with this:
There is not a single baseball fan anywhere – literally not one, except perhaps Robin DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he “finally had what it took to play with whites.” Everyone familiar with this story understands that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the racist institution known as Major League Baseball….
Robinson’s story moreover did not render “whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible.” It did the opposite. … Robinson’s story, on every level, exposed and evangelized the truth about the very forces DiAngelo argues it rendered “invisible.”
It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.
Heh! But that’s what you get when dumb theories are applied to the real world, which is the story of Critical Race Theory. Because of his grounding in Old Fashioned Socialism Taibbi spends more time sticking it to the Capitalist Masters using this shite…
For corporate America the calculation is simple. What’s easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There’s a deal to be made here, greased by the fact that the “antiracism” prophets promoted in books like White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom of speech, etc.
… than he does sticking it to his fellow Lefties who have pushed it for twenty years now. Still, I appreciated this bit:
White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
Read the whole thing.
And the real-world impacts on people are here, as a former HR person describes how she saw the shift when VP of Diversity and Inclusion for Apple, Denise Young-Smith was forced to resign for saying the following at a conference:
“Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.” Her answer was met with a round of applause at the session. Young Smith went on to add that “there can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”
Ms Young-Smith is Black and that was in 2015, before the whole White Fragility and Critical Race Theory really got started in the HR departments, as witnessed by the city of Seattle:
In the US this is happening in Federal Departments as well:
The “HR” components in various offices are not run by “political appointees”. These offices are run by career officials who carry over from one administration to the next. In my experiences over 22+ years, EVERY such office was stocked by raging left-wing liberals. Political leadership was largely powerless to “rein them in” because any such action would be seen as being based on the “content” of their HR advocacy, and itself the subject on HR complaint. The people in those positions are pretty much “independent operators” within the agencies where they work, and the greater workforce is compelled to be silent about their pushing left-wing social policies under the guise of “HR” compliance.
Including – I shit you not – Sandia National Laboratories, a nuclear weapons lab, where it was found that expectations of competence are “devastating” to lesbians and “people of colour.” And where white male employees found themselves subjected to psychological abuse, before being told to issue hand-written apologies, atoning for their maleness and the colour of their skin. I don’t know about you but I very much like people working around nuclear weapons to be competent, although perhaps this is just another Leftie angle at eliminating such weapons?
All of which was why Trump issued an Executive Order to refrain from teaching this racist crap in Federal areas:
The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions…. [A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory/”white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these un-American propaganda training sessions.
Naturally this was categorised by helpful propagandists like Chris Wallace of Fox News as merely “teaching racial sensitivity“, and he did that in one of the Presidential debates. Awww…. who could be against something so moderate? The incoming Harris-Biden administration will reverse that EO and put CRT training on steroids. But the same shit is happening in private sector corporations and their “training sessions” as well.
But here is just one of many examples of this how horror is hitting ordinary people outside of HR departments – as it is ultimately intended to:
Last night I talked to a mother who described how her 11-year-old daughter is at a loss to know how to respond to the pressure she faces from her peers and others on Instagram to include a BLM hashtag on her posts. ‘Can I just post a cake that I baked on Instagram?’, she asked. When young children are faced with the demand to conform or else, it is clear that a powerful mood of illiberal intolerance is sweeping our societies. Threatened with being ostracised, children as young as 11 and 12 now feel compelled to fall in line. Suddenly, the term ‘peer pressure’ has acquired a whole new dimension.
Of course even your innocent little kids can’t escape. That’s one of the core aspects of totalitarian ideas. But I’ll leave the last word to Tatinia McGrath:
The Struggle Sessions – A Soviet Perspective
In the middle of the great tumult of the Woke brigades of the USA, one magazine – The Tablet – had an interesting, disturbing take on them.
The article, The American Soviet Mentality, was written by Izabella Tabarovsky, who grew up in Russia and who specialises in Soviet history.
She begins the article by describing the collective demonisations of Boris Pasternak (his most famous work is Doctor Zhivago) following his being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature:
Within days, Pasternak was a target of a massive public vilification campaign. The country’s prestigious Literary Newspaper launched the assault with an article titled “Unanimous Condemnation” and an official statement by the Soviet Writers’ Union…
…A few days later, the paper dedicated an entire page to what it presented as the public outcry over Pasternak’s imputed treachery. Collected under the massive headline “Anger and Indignation: Soviet people condemn the actions of B. Pasternak” were a condemnatory editorial, a denunciation by a group of influential Moscow writers, and outraged letters that the paper claimed to have received from readers.
She goes into detail about all the aspects of this, including attacks on others like composers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev; writers Anna Akhmatova and Iosif Brodsky; and others, pointing out that the hounding could go on for years and destroyed people’s lives, health and ability to create.
Of course it all sounds awfully similar to the recent Twitter rage mob attacks on writers, reporters and editors described by Taibbi, Sullivan and others. Tabarovsky looks at those as well, but while she compares this situation to the USSR she also makes the point about the ordinary people involved:
But while the policy in the USSR was by and large set by the authorities, it would be too simplistic to imagine that those below had no choices, and didn’t often join in these rituals gladly, whether to obtain some real or imagined benefit for themselves, or to salve internal psychic wounds, or to take pleasure in the exercise of cruelty toward a person who had been declared to be a legitimate target of the collective...
… The mobs that perform the unanimous condemnation rituals of today do not follow orders from above. But that does not diminish their power to exert pressure on those under their influence...
… Sergei Dovlatov, a dissident Soviet writer who emigrated to the United States in 1979 [said]: “We continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote four million denunciations?” It wasn’t the fearsome heads of Soviet secret police who did that, he said.
As a former Soviet herself she understands the mentality that drives these people, even as it threatens them too with ever greater and more precise demands for loyalty to the kollektiv:
Those of us who came out of the collectivist Soviet culture understand these dynamics instinctively. You invoked the “didn’t read, but disapprove” mantra not only to protect yourself from suspicions about your reading choices but also to communicate an eagerness to be part of the kollektiv—no matter what destructive action was next on the kollektiv’s agenda. You preemptively surrendered your personal agency in order to be in unison with the group.
… How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?
A point also made by Princeton professor Robert George in The Superior Humans of Today. Tabarovsky finishes on a note that I find very depressing as she writes of her adopted home and expresses a grim feeling:
Those who remember the Soviet system understand the danger of letting the practice of collective denunciation run amok. But you don’t have to imagine an American Stalin in the White House to see where first the toleration, then the normalization, and now the legitimization and rewarding of this ugly practice is taking us.
… I used to feel grateful that we had left the USSR before Soviet life had put me to that test. How strange and devastating to realize that these moral tests are now before us again in America.
… From my vantage point, this cultural moment in these United States feels incredibly precarious.
The Struggle Sessions – Inside the MSM
Even people who are quite Far Left are beginning to notice how badly the Woke World is starting to spin out of control. When it comes to some, like Andrew Sullivan, who initially supported the Iraq Invasion, there’s plenty of history for his critics to attack in ways they would not have done when they thought he was on their side.
But here’s another detailed analysis of this Woke nonsense from that scourge of Republicans and the Right, Matt Taibbi, as he writes in, The American Press Is Destroying Itself. First, let’s establish his throat-clearing TDS bonafide:
Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem.
Boom… tish.
Now on to the good stuff. I would urge you to read the whole thing, even if it is lengthy. He covers much of the same newsroom rage-mobbing sessions already covered in the post, The Right to Openly Discuss Ideas Must Be Defended. But he goes into far more detail about the Lee Fang case at the Far left site The Intercept, and has some extra items that never drew much public attention:
There were other incidents. The editors of Bon Apetit and Refinery29 both resigned amid accusations of toxic workplace culture. The editor of Variety, Claudia Eller, was placed on leave after calling a South Asian freelance writer “bitter” in a Twitter exchange about minority hiring at her company. The self-abasing apology (“I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH”) was insufficient. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editor, Stan Wischowski, was forced out after approving a headline, “Buildings matter, too.”
He gives a brief summation of the interaction of Woke World and traditional American “Liberals”:
On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres.
The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
He goes on to make a number of points about how this is now impacting the MSM, first in terms of internal debate:
- The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers — apart from scaring the hell out of editors — is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.
- It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.
- All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.
- However, because it is politically untenable to discuss this in ways that do not suggest support, reporters have been twisting themselves into knots. We are seeing headlines previously imaginable only in The Onion, e.g., “27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.”
Then he describes what this means for what is reported, and understand that this is happening in the newsrooms of almost all the US MSM, whether it be the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and New York Times or CNN, and will likely be hitting foreign MSM like the Daily Telegraph and the Economist sooner or later, if it hasn’t already. There is a common pool of journalists.
- There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.
- The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains
- The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions.
- press activism is limited to denouncing and shaming colleagues for insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.
- Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?
Ha! Given what we have seen recently with the MSM, the question has already been answered,
Children of the Privileged Revolution
The funny thing about almost all revolutions is how they don’t conform to the standard Leftist mythology about the poor and oppressed rising up against their rulers.
Whether it’s the Peasants’ Revolt or the French Revolution the fact is that a great many revolutionaries have been folk who were quite well off and reasonably educated. And this is before we get to the leaders, often self-proclaimed, of such revolutions: pampered little Middle-Class creeps like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Castro and the rest.
And as the USA finds itself in the middle of the Antifa/Burn-Loot-Murder problems we see this history being repeated.
The children in this photo are (L->R):
- Hope Walz, daughter of Minnesota Democrat Governor Tim Walz.
- Chiara de Blasio, daughter of NYC Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio
- Jeremiah Ellison, son of Minnesota Democrat Attorney General, Keith Ellison.
- Isra Hirsi, daughter of Lefty firebrand grifter and Democrat member of Congress, Ilhan Omar.
Let’s start with Hope. On the night the riots broke out that would ultimately burn down Minneapolis businesses owned by Blacks and other ‘small people’, little Ms ShitStirrer was on the line from her Daddy’s place to her Antifa/Burn Loot Murder mates, with precious inside information:
Some years ago there was a horror movie that included the scary line: “The calls are coming from inside the house“. In this case, the Governor’s mansion. How very public-spirited of her.
Over in New York City Chiara was pulling much the same stunt, although she did at least get out into the streets where she and a hundred others blocked the road and then disobeyed police orders to move. Lots of shouting for justice but at least rocks or frozen water bottles were not thrown at the cops this time. She was arrested merely for unlawful assembly and her dear old Communist Dad said it was great how much she cared. As one commentator noted:
Chiara cares enough to raise the temperature and incite others. But not enough to dirty her hands.
Perhaps we should be grateful for such timidity. Otherwise she might be following in the footsteps of another privileged piece of human garbage, Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground mates, who were quite happy building nail bombs and such in the late 1960’s. Ayers Daddy was Thomas G. Ayers, chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison (1973 to 1980) who had more than enough wealth to spring his precious spawn from jail.
Back in Minnesota, Jeremiah, slogging through the aches and pains of long, rugged days as a Minneapolis city councillor – where he’s advocating for defunding the local cops – made clear where he stands: ‘I hereby pledge my support for ANTIFA“. His Dad must also be proud as to how far the acorn has not fallen from the tree.
Which brings us at last to Isra “yes, i’m 17 and i hate capitalism.”.
As The Spectator archly noted:
The capitalist hell of America carried her mother from a Kenyan refugee camp to the House of Representatives. The white supremacists of the Beltway now hold Mrs Omar in working-class penury on $174,000 basic, plus more perks than you can shake a Molotov cocktail at. Let it burn.
Perhaps it’s less having a wealthy, grifting politician as a parent than just having a wealthy parent:
John Malkovich’s son was arrested at a violent Black Lives Matter rally in Portland, Oregon, where marchers attacked cops trying to protect their union building amid chants of “burn it down,” according to authorities….
His low-level charges fall into the category that Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt said his office will not even prosecute…
However, some of the Oregon State Police making arrests have been federally deputized, which means protesters like Malkovich could face federal charges
So I guess his wealthy Daddy might need to hire an expensive lawyer or six after all.
Finally there’s this little piece of work from New York City, Clara Kraebber, a wealthy 20 year old Rice University student. Daddy is a professor with the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry while Mumsy owns an architect firm in Manhattan.
Did I say wealthy? A few years ago they purchased a $1.8 million apartment in the Upper East Side. They also own a second home in Connecticut.
She was one of eight BLM rioters arrested after they were seen running around a tony part of New York smashing windows, to the tune of $100,000 worth of damage. Apparently this was just part of some general “low-level” mayhem unleashed by a couple of sub-species of Burn Loot Murder, The “New Afrikan Black Panther Party” (the “k” is a nice touch) and the “Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement.” One of the arrested faces two counts of criminal possession of a weapon, but I’m guessing little Ms Kraebber thought that it’s cool to hang with that sort of person – in between protesting for more gun control.
One cop summed it up pretty well:
“I wonder how her rich parents feel about their daughter. How would they feel if they graffitied their townhouse? This girl should be the poster child for white privilege, growing up on the Upper East Side and another home in Connecticut. This is the height of hypocrisy.”
Oh come on. Her parents are probably just as proud of her mad SJW skillz as the other parents quoted above. And these little Far Left shits don’t give a damn about being accused of their “double standards” and “hypocrisy”. They’re not going to change their ideas or practices just because they’re “confronted” with such things. They’re well aware of it and don’t care about such “standards” or “principles”. They’re just going to laugh in your face. They care about having power over others and their entire lives are built on those lines. And they’re probably right; they’re going to get away with all this, as they usually do:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
It’s a mark of the success of American society that such privilege is now multi-racial. I can only hope that when the Revolution does come and I’m up against the wall, that these creatures will be beside me.
The Struggle Sessions – MSM (John Kass)
In an earlier post I covered some examples of how “Woke” had turned into a weapon that is destroying free speech and people.
The latest example is John Kass. I’ve often referred to this long-time Chicago Tribune reporter because of his well-balanced and deeply informed views of that city and its politics. He is actually the reporter who took over from the legendary Mike Royko.
But back in late June he wrote an article for Jewish World Review, One wrong ‘like’ will get you canceled:
Michael Korenberg, the chairman of the University of British Columbia’s board of governors, was forced to resign. I don’t know his Canadian politics. But I do know his thought crime.
He was accused of having liked tweets by Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative who dares mock Black Lives Matter, and other tweets praising President Donald Trump and condemning the violent antifa movement. All Korenberg did was like them. He was denounced. He groveled. Then he was gone.
Kass had barely finished that column when he landed in exactly that sort of shit with a Trib story that covered the explosion of violent crime in Democrat-run cities across the USA.
He ignored the Mayors and their machines and looked at the DA’s and other prosecutors who are releasing criminals on to the streets, starting with Cook County’s very own state’s attorney Kimberly Foxx – already mentioned in The Chicago Way and Chicago loses against BLM – and how people like her had got elected as DA’s, starting with Foxx’s massive $2 million election support from George Soros:
“These Democratic cities are also where left-wing billionaire George Soros has spent millions of dollars to help elect liberal social justice warriors as prosecutors. He remakes the justice system in urban America, flying under the radar.
Kass had just stepped into a no-go zone that the Far Left thought it had fenced off from criticism via mockery (“a conspiracy theory”). And it was his own group that jumped him. All nine members of the Chicago Tribune Guild executive council went after him with a letter to their Tribune colleagues, and mockery was no longer sufficient:
“The odious, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that billionaire George Soros is a puppet master controlling America’s big cities does not deserve a mainstream voice, especially at a time when hate crimes are rising…
We ask that the paper, and Kass separately, apologize for his indefensible invocation of the Soros tropes.”
Kass of course had not even mentioned that Soros was Jewish, nor did that have anything to do with the topic of Soros’s political strategies and objectives. It was basically the usual “Shut Up Racist Because Reasons“, that had already played out in the NYT. More importantly was the “odious” fact that reporters were behaving like political operatives – as indeed most of them are nowadays. As it turned out, Kass was well aware of how this bullshit game is played when he responded:
Soros’ influence on these races is undeniable and has been widely reported. But in that column, I did not mention Soros’ ethnicity or religion.
You’d think that before wildly accusing someone of fomenting bigoted conspiracy theories, journalists on the union’s executive board would at least take the time to Google the words “Soros,” “funding” and “local prosecutors.”…
I will not apologize for writing about Soros.
I will not bow to those who’ve wrongly defamed me.
I will continue writing my column.
The paper demoted him from his position as their “lead columnist”, but were so gutless that they tried to palm it off as part of an overall reorganisation.
I don’t think they fooled anybody. Especially not Slats Grobnik.
Pelosi Goes Postal
Despite disagreeing with almost all of her Democrat policies over the years I’ve always had a grudging respect for Nancy Pelosi, the US Speaker of the House and currently the third most powerful leader in the USA. One could basically say the second, given that the VP position is a big nothing in actual power, despite the best efforts of the likes of Gore and Cheney.
She’s a huge fundraiser for the Democrats, from her incredibly wealthy position on the heights of San Francisco (she’s worth something like $200 million). She’s also crafted heavyweight legislation such as Obamacare and the TARP packages during the GFC, as well playing the partisan game hard, especially as House Democrat Leader, whether to victories in 2006 and 2018 or losses in 2004, ’10, ’12, ’14 and ’16.
She’s 80 years old and occasionally has had a few word salad problems, but unlike Biden is still sharp on attack.
But she’s now lost the plot.
“They’re doing everything they can, suppress the vote, with your actions, scare people, intimidate by saying law enforcement will be there, diminish the role of the postal system in all of this.
“It’s really actually shameful,” she added. “Enemies of the state.”
Can you imagine the storm that would arise were Trump to say this about the Democrat Party? In this case Republicans did speak up, including two with direct experience of the results of this sort of divisive shite :
“Disgusting: Nancy Pelosi just called Republicans ‘domestic enemies.’ I was shot because of this kind of unhinged rhetoric. Where’s the media outrage?” – Rep. Steve Scalise
“Now THIS puts lives in danger. Believe me, I know firsthand. And, @SteveScalise knows better than anyone.” – Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH)
She continues to say things that escalate division in this country and now she’s labeling those who are in a different political party “enemies”. Nancy, you once said our words should calm and unite. What changed? – Rep Rick Crawford (R-AR)
“What changed” is obvious; despite all the crowing about opinion poll leads the Democrats are growing increasingly uneasy at the thought that Biden may lose to Trump. The hysteria among Democrat voters must not only be maintained but tuned up further.
Incidently the postal stuff she’s referring to was last week’s conspiracy theory played out on the MSM; that Trump and the GOP are weakening the US Postal Service in myriad ways in order to defeat vote-by-mail, which will supposedly be vital in a Lockdown election. Their “attacks” included cutting funding, removing post boxes and so forth. I’ll just list a few points about why that was so crazy, courtesy of Byron York, who patiently dismantled the story in detail:
- The USPS was given the ability to borrow $10 billion to help re-structure. The Democrat screams arose because they wanted an extra $25 billion applied as top-ups to keep the place ticking along without change.
- The claim was that without it postal voting would be endangered. In fact there was nothing in the proposal that the money be applied to such.
- The USPS already handles 142 billion pieces of mail each year, so handling some 300 million ballots over several weeks – if every registered voter voted by mail – would be no issue at all.
- Thousands of post boxes were removed during the Obama Administration, as well as letter-sorting machines – for the very sound reason that letter volumes have declined, as they have globally.
- Postal ballots will still be collected from people’s personal mailboxes, to which mail is and will be delivered and collected.
- The USPS was the one reminding various State and local governments that there are deadlines involved for sending and receiving mail and that mail-voting could screw up in some places if the electoral authorities didn’t get their shit together. But that’s not the USPS’s problem.
Actually the following cartoon summarises it all very well, although the fact that it’s now quickly vanished makes it clear that the Democrats knew it was bullshit from the start.
Meantime, we have to just accept that 2020 is going to be one of the ugliest US elections ever – and yet not be too disturbed by the resulting hysteria.
“Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes,” – Connecticut Courant editorial opposing the election of Thomas Jefferson as President, 1800.
It’s the “openly taught and practiced” that makes that one so special. Still, “Enemies of The State” has a distinctly chilling 20th century feel to it, especially coming from a Leftist.
adolffinkensen
Gravedodger
Nick K
pdm1946
Psycho Milt
The Veteran
Tom Hunter