Supreme Court Opinion does not apply to Private Parties

Salon article:

I was one of the lawyers who helped win marriage equality. And yes, the GOP can take it away
And they might not even need another landmark legal battle to do it

Knowing that the courts will demur, could the GOP launch a similarly successful offensive on marriage equality? You bet. It's already happening.

A couple of weeks ago, a letter from a Texas state representative calling on the Attorney General to declare that private citizens can ignore federal law was making the rounds on social media. ...

The Republican Party Platform, a 66-page conniption fit, mentions the word "marriage" 19 times and the phrase "one man and one woman" five times under three separate headings ("Religious Liberty," "Marriage, Family, and Society," and "Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary"). If the GOP can get the gun to the head of marriage equality, you'd better believe they'll squeeze the trigger. The question is: How will they go about it?

The letter says:

The State of Texas has not amended or repealed its marriage laws in response to Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015). And the Supreme Court has no power to amend formally or revoke a state statute or constitutional provision — even after opining that the state law violates the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. See Pidgeon v. Turner, 538 S.W.3d 73, 88 n.21 (Tex. 2017) (“[N]either the Supreme Court in Obergefell nor the Fifth Circuit in De Leon ‘struck down’ any Texas law. When a court declares a law unconstitutional, the law remains in place unless and until the body that enacted it repeals it”); Texas v. United States, 945 F.3d 355, 396 (5th Cir. 2019) (“The federal courts have no authority to erase a duly enacted law from the statute books, [but can only] decline to enforce a statute in a particular case or controversy.” (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). The federal judicial power extends only to the resolution of cases and controversies between litigants. The fact that a federal district court has enjoined state officials from enforcing the Texas marriage laws1 in no way affects the existence or validity of those laws with regard to private parties, who are not even bound by the Fourteenth Amendment — let alone the Supreme Court’s purported interpretations of it. See Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

California is the most leftist state, and its constitution says that marriage is between a man and a woman. The gay lobby has made no serious attempt to remove this clause.

This is not a loophole. The gay lobby probably could have legalized same-sex marriage in some states, but they decided to bet everything on everyone going along with a majority opinion on the Supreme Court regarding death certificates and estate taxes.

It hasn't happened. I would not be surprised for the courts to say that they have no authority to force private parties to recognize a marriage that is not a marriage under statutory law or religious tradition.

The recent Supreme Court abortion arguments had the liberals mostly arguing in favor of authoritarianism:

[Justice Sotomayor] Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

To ask the question is to admit the stench.

How Medicine got Corrupted

Psychiatrist Sally Satel writes in Quillette:

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote a book called PC, M.D. How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. One chapter explored “multicultural counseling,” a form of therapy that encouraged white clinicians to ask themselves, “what responsibility do you hold for the racist oppressive and discriminating manner by which you personally and professionally deal with minorities?” ...

Today, the Indoctrinologists are officially in.

She goes on to describe the situation today. It is so much worse, that it is a wonder what she could have been complaining about 20 years ago.

She concedes:

I strongly agree that much of black Americans’ disadvantage in health and access to care is the cumulative product of legal, political, and social institutions that have historically discriminated, and sometimes continue to discriminate, against them. Systemic racism may indeed have broad explanatory value regarding health disparities,

People say this, but with no data to back it up. I doubt it. Do Blacks get better treatment in African countries? No. Blacks come to the USA, and they do not leave.

AIDS Unfairly Infects Certain Groups

In 2013, a woman got fired for jokingly tweeting: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Apparently people were offended by the observation that gay Black men get AIDS more than others, but not it is San Francisco news:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday unveiled his new HIV/AIDS strategy to end the more than 40-year-old epidemic, calling for a renewed focus on vulnerable Americans — including gay and bisexual Black and Latino men, who his administration says are too often stigmatized even as they are disproportionately affected.

Under current wokeism, we must have policies so that the White female AIDS incidence matches that of gay Black men.

Anti-racism is a Form of Anti-Whitism

Ibram X. Kendi writes in Atlantic magazine:

“critical race theory is explicitly anti-white,” to use the words of Christopher F. Rufo, a travel-documentary filmmaker turned leading critic of CRT. At his final campaign rally, in Loudoun County, Virginia, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin said, “What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race where we divide them into buckets and one group is an oppressor and the other is a victim and we pit them against each other and we steal their dreams.”

Republicans provoked a backlash against CRT, which they also call anti-racism or wokism. Their backlash won 2021 elections. “But it wasn’t a backlash of parents,” William Saletan found in his close study of polling data. “It was a backlash of white people.”

How many Americans know that the claim that anti-racism is harmful to white people is one of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology? Americans are familiar with white-supremacist movements like the Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Proud Boys. But they don’t seem to recognize white-supremacist ideology—the most venomous form of racist ideology. I suspect that many Americans don’t know how much white-supremacist ideology shapes their political thought and America’s political discourse, and allows juries to exonerate racism and convict anti-racism.

He wants Whitew to pay reparations to Blacks until Blacks have as much money as Whites.

Those supposed white-supremacist movements probably have a combined membership of less than a thousand people. Meanwhile Wokism has taken over all of the major centers of power and influence.

I found this definition:

Anti-Whiteism or Anti-Whitism [an-ti-white-is-um]

noun

1 all concepts, ideologies, actions and everything derived therefrom (such as opinions, policies, laws, rules) that inflict injury on white people i.e. European people.

2 hostility towards whites.

3 the infliction of harm on whites by many implicit and explicit means and methods.

4 presupposing that whites are more privileged (a common myth) and therefore must be brought to non existence and ultimately white-erased.

5 the personal hate of whites because the whiteness of their skin. this case is often called (anti-Whiteness) Note: Anti-Whiteness or Whiteness is a term used by Anti-Whites to mean whites are inherently racist and must rid themselves of their “Whiteness”. This term is not recognized by the white community.

Clarification of use: Anti-White does NOT mean Anti-racist.

Yes, Kendi is anti-whitist.

It is interesting to see how antisemitism compares to antiwhitism. The NY Times reports:

Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who officially declared on Tuesday that he is running in next April’s presidential election, is the loudest and most extreme voice of French racism today. ...

The great irony is that Mr. Zemmour, twice convicted of inciting racial hatred and discrimination, is a Jew ...

With the advent of mass immigration from France’s former colonies, antisemitism was largely replaced by anti-Black and, especially, anti-Arab racism. ...

for Mr. Zemmour there is no crime for which Muslims are not guilty. The cause of exurbanization, with working people forced to drive to work from their distant homes? The immigrant “occupation” of cities and their suburbs. The spread of drugs? All immigrants’ unaccompanied minors are drug dealers. The cause of resource shortages in hospitals? Immigrants’ abuse of a system to which they don’t contribute.

His solution to these problems — and every other — is simple. Like the antisemites of France’s past, he wants to reduce the presence of immigrants in the country’s life.

The immigration is making France less French, and a less desirable place to live.

Thses articles regularly conflate race with religion. Islam is not a race, and those who are anti-Islam do not like white Moslems.

"Semite" is a racial category, while Judaism is a religion, and Israel is a nation. There is no agreement on whether anti-Israel people should be called antisemitic.

Likewise, some who are anti-American are really anti-white. It is not always clear whether they are against the race, the nation, or Christianity.

All the News that Fits We Print

A libertarian law professor writes:

All the News that Fits We Print

According to the New York Post and some other conservative media, Darrell Brooks, the man who drove his car into a parade in Waukesha killing at least six people, had pro-Hitler, anti-semitic and violently anti-white material on his social media account. Googling on [Darrell Brooks Hitler] I found no mention of it in any mainline source. The New York Times has a long story on Brooks with no mention of those facts — and the claim that "The suspect’s motivations are unclear." The Wall Street Journal has had multiple stories on Brooks but I cannot find any mentioning the social media.

It is possible that the conservative sources are lying but I think it unlikely, since if they were I would expect the NYT or other left of center media to call them on it. It looks very much as though the mainline media are deliberately hiding facts they don't want their readers to know.

Yes, they are deliberately hiding facts.

In Kenosha Wisconsin, there was a violent White male rioter who went around starting fires and calling people the N-word, but those mainline news media called Kyle Rittenhouse the racist instead.

An NPR Radio story starts:

From Charlottesville to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the public has come to realize that white supremacists pose as much, if not more, of a threat as Islamic extremists.

It goes on to tell a story about how Somali Moslems invaded a Kansas town, and some FBI informants discussed a bomb plot.

There was no Jan. 6 insurrection. There was a Black cop who shot and killed and unarmed White woman, but no white supremacists were involved. No Whites killed anyone. In Charlottesvilles, a White guy did drive a car into a crowd, but it was not near as bad as the Waukesha driver.

More Dubious Trials

This must be the season for dubious trials.

Ghislaine Maxwell appears to be a stand-in for sex-trafficking charges against the deceased Jeffrey Epstein. She and Epstein may be guilty of somehting, but the charges are unconvincing. First, they are all for events that happened over 25 years ago. Second, the charges are very vague, and do not say where and when the supposed illegal acts took place. Third, half the charges are for conspiracy and perjury.

It is hard to believe that they abused dozens of girls, and no one complained until 25 years later. I would not be surprised if she is innocent of the main charge of "enticing", but guilty of uncharged crimes.

The complainers are all prostitutes and gold diggers. They got paid for their services, and now they seek to cash in by telling 25-year-old stories that no one can verify.

We still don't know how Epstein made his fortune, or how he got so friendly with so many big-shots. There are rumors that he was running an extortion racket. It is hard to believe that Epstein made that much money legitimately, without any paper trail. Maxwell surely knows, but isn't talking. This trial is unlikely to give us any answers.

Elizabeth Holmes is on trial for Theranos. Yes, she was running a scam, but she is largely on trial for the Silicon Valley game plan of fake it until you make it. Her investors should not have been so gullible.

Too bad federal trials cannot be televised.

The NY Times reports:

Prosecutors who say Bill Cosby belongs in prison are asking the United States Supreme Court to throw out an appellate court ruling earlier this year that overturned his 2018 conviction for sexual assault on due process grounds. Mr. Cosby walked free from prison in June after serving less than three years of a three-to-10-year sentence. ... Patricia Steuer, 65, who has accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said that although she appreciated the effort to appeal what she viewed as a flawed decision, she was not optimistic about the outcome.

This is sick. That was over 40 years ago. They were only able to convict Cosby by denying his constitutional rights, and flooding the court with recovered-memory accusations.

The Masculinity Gap

Noah Carl writes:

The gap in masculinity between the left and the right seems to have widened over time. In the early 20th century, the left was as masculine as the right, or nearly so. Today, the right is unquestionably more masculine. What happened? ... The remainder of this post reviews nine separate publications, covering several different methodologies, which all triangulate on the same conclusion: the right is more masculine than the left.

There is also an IQ gap.

American Journal of Psychology:

The past 30 years of research in intelligence has produced a wealth of knowledge about the causes and consequences of differences in intelligence between individuals, and today mainstream opinion is that individual differences in intelligence are caused by both genetic and environmental influences. ...

In this article I discuss 5 lines of research that provide evidence that mean differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups are partially genetic.

This should not be surprising. Intelligence evolved because it is heritable and useful. Group differences are expected.

This has little consequence, if you treat people as individuals.

If you are committed to Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, then it is crucial. It means that racial differences cannot be attributed to racism or socioeconomic background. They are genetic. In part, at least.

The Left keeps saying that we need a racial reckoning. Okay, figure out the genes for intelligence differences. If you are not doing that, then you are not even getting started.

The Salvation Army gets Woke

The Chriatmas season is starting, that means the Salvation Army will be out collecting donations. Do not give. It has turned anti-White.

News:

The Salvation Army wants its white donors to give it more than just money this Christmas season. Its leadership is also demanding they apologize for being racist.

It's part of a push by the Christian charitable organization to embrace the ideas of Black Lives Matter, an activist group working to, among other things, "dismantle white privilege" and "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure."

The Salvation Army's Alexandria-based leadership has created an "International Social Justice Commission" which has developed and released a "resource" to educate its white donors, volunteers and employees called Let's Talk about Racism. It asserts Christianity is institutionally racist, calling for white Christians to repent and offer "a sincere apology" to blacks for being "antagonistic.. to black people or the culture, values and interests of the black community."

"Many have come to believe that we live in a post-racial society, but racism is very real for our brothers and sisters who are refused jobs and housing, denied basic rights and brutalized and oppressed simply because of the color of their skin," one lesson explains. "There is an urgent need for Christians to evaluate racist attitudes and practices in light of our faith, and to live faithfully in today’s world."

In an accompanying Study Guide on Racism, Salvation Army authors explain that all whites are racist, even if they don't realize it.

“The subtle nature of racism is such that people who are not consciously racist easily function with the privileges, empowerment and benefits of the dominant ethnicity, thus unintentionally perpetuating injustice," it says.

"Sunday school curriculum that only uses white photography and imagery" is an example given that perpetuates injustice.

"We must stop denying the existence of individual and systemic/ institutional racism. They exist, and are still at work to keep White Americans in power," the lesson says.

"These systems give privileges to white people"

Think about that, if you consider donating to a man in a Santa outfit with a Salvation Army bucket. You would be donating to a racist organization that is working to exterminate White people.

Big Cities are Victims of Looting

The term "looting" is now considered racist, so we see organized smash and grab.

CNN reports:

A wave of "smash-and-grab" crimes is plaguing upscale stores in major US cities, with mobs of thieves making off with expensive goods in brazen, nighttime raids.

At least 18 people broke into a Nordstrom department store in Los Angeles Monday night and stole thousands of dollars in merchandise, the city's police chief said.

The thefts followed a rash of similar incidents over the weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area. A group of thieves swarmed the Southland Mall in Hayward on Sunday evening, wielding hammers to smash cases at a jewelry store before grabbing items and fleeing.

The Leftists Dems continue to make heros out of some of the worst scum. Arbery, the Rittenhouse attackers, the Waukesha killer driver, Ferguson's Michael Brown, etc. were all career criminals that nobody wants to be living near.

to No, they are not all Black. If you want to live in a civilized society, then we need aggressive law enforcement to keep these guys in jail.

Instead we have Democrats who are aggressively letting these criminals out of jail.

Georgia has convicted the citizens who tried to confront Arbery. Evey the bystander neighbor who recorded the video has been convicted of murder. The state has also passed a hate crime law, and a law abolishing most citizens arrests.

These changes seem very bad to me. In traditional American law, the police are not really that powerful. Their power to arrest suspects and use lethal force is not that much different from that of ordinary citizens.

The authoritarian Left wants to change that. They want stronger police powers and weaker citizen rights. Before long, the police will be enforcing vaccine mandates by forcibly injecting resisters, and citizens will not be allowed to carry guns.

Researchers Ignore what is Abhorrent

Researchers often just look for what they want to see. Social science researchers often exclude possibilities that seem philosophically objectionable. Here is an example.

Julia Galef said:

I wanted to tell you when you were talking about how common it is in a lot of social science research to just ignore the alternate hypothesis that genes are causing the correlation, as opposed to the parenting causing the outcomes... It reminded me very much of my experience reading through a lot of the research on — as I was researching for my book — the research on how self perception affects your success.

Julia: Because there's all these studies looking at how people's self image affects their success at various things. And the conclusion is always: “You should have a positive self image, because people with positive self images tend to be more successful.”

And either it's just not acknowledged that a possible alternate explanation is that people with positive self images are more likely to actually have positive traits that help them succeed... Either that's not acknowledged, or occasionally it is acknowledged, and just dismissed out of hand as, “Well, of course not.”

I remember this one paper where they were reporting these results, and then there was a footnote where it said “Some people might object that people with positive self image have greater inherent talent than people without. But we can dismiss that, as it is obviously abhorrent.”

Wow. If you discover that success is correlated with positive self-image, then the obvious explanation to test is that the success causes the positive self-image, and failure causes negative self-image. But the reseearcher refused to even consider the possibility!

I don't even see why it would be abhorrent. It seems good and natural that success would improve self-image. Don't we want to succeed in order to improve ourselves?

I can only guess that there is some leftist repulsion of some people doing something to make themselves better than others. But the reverse causality seems abhorrent to me.

Michael Shermer writes:

Scientific American Goes Woke

A case study in how identity politics poisons science

In April of 2001 I began my monthly Skeptic column at Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the country dating back to 1845.

He goes on to explain how the magazine became leftist and unscientific, and rejected his columns with comments like these:

But we’re unwilling to publish a piece that suggests — even in a quote attributed to someone else [Carol Tavris] — that sexual harassment and the phenomenon of abused children growing up to be abusers are less of a problem than most people imagine. ...

You say, essentially, that things are better, especially for minorities of various kinds, than ever in history, your evidence being, basically, “you can look it up.” It may be true ...

Driving while black” is still a thing, as is getting shot by cops ... And worldwide, fascist and authoritarian regimes are on the increase.

In essence, you cannot report facts if they counter exaggerated stories that usefully promote a leftist narrative.

Here is a NY Times article complaining about scientists collecting data:

In 1981, when scientists in Hungary sampled the blood of Roma people incarcerated in Hungarian prisons, they classified prisoners as Romani based solely on their appearance, which the authors of the new paper argue is unscientific.

In 1993, another group sampling Romani DNA concluded that there were three distinct ethnic groups in the country, drawing a line between “the genuine Hungarian ethnical groups” and “Jews” and “Gypsies” — a research premise the authors of the new paper argue was racist.

Any data collected inevitably draws attention to differences between ethnic groups.

More Dubious Jury Verdicts

The past week has been big for jury verdicts.

Breitbart reports:

A mistrial was declared in the murder trial of 48-year-old illegal alien Billy Chemirmir, accused of murdering 24 elderly Americans across Collin County and Dallas County, Texas, as the jury remained “hopelessly deadlocked” 11-to-1. ...

Rather than being deported — and thus making him ineligible to ever secure legal status in the U.S. — Chemirmir was able to use a loophole in the nation’s legal immigration system, allowing him to obtain a green card after marrying an American citizen. In November 2007, Chemirmir was approved for a green card.

Chemirmir had a criminal record, Breitbart News exclusively learned, including convictions for drunk driving, trespassing, assault, and obstructing a police officer.

The Georgia jury convicted the three White men in the Arbery trial, and now a prosecutor is being prosecuted for an administrative decision not to prosecute:

Yet the theatrics from the defense have diverted scrutiny away from the seediness of the original prosecutor, Jackie Johnson, who in September was indicted on criminal charges for violating her oath of office and obstructing police when she allegedly showed the McMichaels favorable treatment and ensured they would not be arrested after Arbery's death.

Such charges against prosecutors are almost unheard of.

I did not follow this case closely. They convicted the neighbor who recorded the video. I don't see how that can be murder.

The Wash. Post announces:

Here's what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV.

No, it was not a tragedy caused by an SUV. It was a murderous attack by a crazy pro-Hitler, Trump-hating, anti-White Black man who drove an SUV into a Christmas parade. At least they raised his bail from $1,000.

Here is his picture.

The one on the left is his real picture. The one on the right is what was shown in CNN, where they lightened his skin so that he would not look Black.

Jury Bankrupts Charlottesville Rally Organizers

This more bad news for free speech. Dozens of lawyers and millions of dollars were used to sue some political activists into bankruptcy.

BuzzFeed reports:

A Charlottesville Jury Ordered White Nationalists To Pay $25 Million To Victims Of The "Unite The Right" Rally

The jury found the white nationalists violated Virginia state laws, but they could not reach a verdict on federal conspiracy charges.

Apparently the trial consisted mostly of a character assassination.

I am no fan of the defendants. They could be all racists and horrible people, for all I know. But all they did was to organize a political rally in favor of preserving Civil War monuments. Their rally was canceled when counter-protesters showed up and started a riot, and police did not stop it.

One man got caught in the riot, and appeared to panic and drive his car into a crowd. One woman died. He was found to have a racist paper trail, so he is in prison for the rest of his life.

It did not look like murder to me, but I did not follow the trial. He had nothing to do with the organizers. The organizers had left by the time the riots started.

I doubt that the plaintiffs will collect as much money as they spent on the lawsuit. So why did they do it? They obviously want to initimidate right-wingers out of existence. Very few will dare defend something like a Civil War monument now.

The London Guardian has this complaint:

In America, it is reasonable to believe that Black people are scary. ...

The idea of the “scary Black person” manifests itself in every segment of the US criminal justice system. ...

The Rittenhouse verdict is proof that it is reasonable to believe that the fear of Black people can absolve a white person of any crime.

The only scary Black man in the case was Jump Kick Man, but his race was withheld from the jury.

The scary Black men are the ones the Left has lionized -- Trayvon Martin, Ferguson's Michael Brown, the Waukesha WI man who just drove an SUV into a Christmas parade, etc.

Not all Blacks are criminals, of course, or apologists for crime and parasitism. Here is one who has been driven to conservatism:

Seventy-three-year-old Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, was a conservative, then a progressive, and now he’s back on the right: “What has happened to public discourse about race has radicalized me.” ...

Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: “Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine!” He declared that his people are Black, but also proudly American. “Our Americanness is much more important than our Blackness,” he said, before adding, “We must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress universality and commonality as Americans.” This is the classical-liberal case against racial separatism and in favor of integration.

The rest of the essay is a Jewish complaint that, while Jews control most of the media and culture, there is a strain of Christian conservatism that is not under their control.

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order — a collective cultural identity.

The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian — and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.

The Orthodox Jews probably are better off if America becomes a more Christian nation. It is mostly the non-orthodox Jews who are at war with Christianity.

Update: Trial commentary here and here.

What this verdict means is that white Americans have effectively lost their First Amendment right of assembly. The precedent this sets: from now on, if white Americans dare to exercise their right to assemble and protest for the redress of their grievances in our increasingly anti-white country, Leftist authorities can engineer mayhem (as they did in Charlottesville) and then use private civil plaintiffs to levy astronomical damages against the organizers, for the sole purpose of bankrupting said organizers.

Two Visions of American History

The NY Times 1619 Project has brought attention to two competing visions of America.

1. America was founded on egalitarian and libertarian principles, and open to all who accept those principles. "All men are created equal."

2. America was founded as a White supremacist nation, for the benefit of the Whites living there and their descendents. The history of American greatness is that of White deeds, and White domination of other ethnic groups.

Now there is a Wash. Post review:

In the new book version, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who conceived of the overall effort and wrote its lead magazine essay, offers a few interpretations. In the preface, she cautions that the project is “not the only origin story of this country — there must be many.” Then, in the opening chapter, Hannah-Jones repeats the text of her original magazine essay and refers to Black Americans as the country’s “true ‘founding fathers,’” as deserving of that designation “as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital.” Some 400-plus pages later, in a concluding chapter, she writes that the origin story in the 1619 Project is “truer” than the one we’ve known. ...

In a chapter titled “Progress,” historian Ibram X. Kendi writes that the popular notion of America making steady, if slow, headway toward greater racial justice is “ahistorical, mythical, and incomplete.” The “mantra” of incremental improvement can undermine efforts to promote real equality. ...

Kendi then introduces something else he says is left out of the story — that America requires a “Third Reconstruction” to address the unfulfilled promise of the second. Here the 1619 Project’s project becomes explicitly political. Hannah-Jones fills in the details in the book’s final chapter, “Justice,” where she identifies the racial wealth gap as the most serious challenge for Black Americans. “White Americans’ centuries-long economic head start,” she writes, is what “most effectively maintains racial caste today.” To narrow that gap, the country must embark on “a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies.”

So the book favors the second view, that America is the doing of White people, and Blacks want more of the goodies.

Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions

John McWhorter writes in the NY Times:

To point out the nakedness of the emperor is the height of impropriety, and I suspect that the sheer degree to which we are asked to engage in this dissimulation will go down as a hallmark of the era: Do you believe that a commitment to diversity should be crucial to the evaluation of a candidate for a physics professorship? Do you believe that it’s mission-critical for doctors to describe people in particular danger of contracting certain diseases not as “vulnerable (or disadvantaged)” but as “oppressed (or made vulnerable or disenfranchised)”? Do you believe that being “diverse” does not make an applicant to a selective college or university more likely to be admitted?

In some circles these days, you are supposed to say you do. ...

The notion seems to be that practitioners and scholars, across disciplines, must devote a considerable part of their time to putatively antiracist initiatives. ...

The American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges have released a “guide” that urges practitioners to employ a left-leaning glossary in pursuit of “health equity.” The problem is that what they recommend would be all but inapplicable in the real world. ...

My point here isn’t to debate the pros and cons of affirmative action. There are legitimate arguments on both sides of that debate. My point is that the existence of various forms of affirmative action in admissions is a fact, and saying otherwise is fiction. Beyond this musical, it is often suggested that it is disingenuous, if not racist, to surmise that a Black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences.

He can get away with saying the obvious because he is Black.

What if Kyle had been Black?

PBS TV has video on what would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse were Black.

The guest said that it was understandable that the jury acquitted Rittenhouse, because he turned out to be innocent. But if he had been Black and guilty, then he probably would have been convicted.

They resent all the attention given to a White boy. It is a little like Gabby Petito, the White girl who went missing, along with her boyfriend. Both were later found dead, separately. The leftist press complained that similar attention is not given to missing Blacks.

So they searched for a comparable Black story, but could not find one. Likewise, they cannot find a story about a Black Kyle Rittenhouse.

If Rittenhouse had been Black, he probably would have had a criminal record. He would not have volunteered to remove graffite from the school. He would not be working as a lifeguard. He would not have bought the gun legally. He would not have had the impulse control to only shoot those who were trying to kill him. He would not have been slandered by CNN, PBS, Biden, etc.

He probably would not have even been charged. Most homicides in Chicago are by Blacks, and most are not charged. The killers go free, without a trial.

A year ago, the AP, Politifact, and NPR fact-checkers were saying that Donald Trump was wrong for saying that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. The self-defense was obvious to anyone, as many videos were publicly available. (The FBI videos were only released at trial.)

Why is it that the Wisconsin authorities did nothing to stop the Kenosha rioters? Why was law and order left to a 17-year-old boy?

The next time rioters try to burn Kenosha, I am pretty sure Rittenhouse will let it burn.

I found this online.

I am trying to figure out the point. On the left is Trayvon Martin, with his watermelon drink. On the right is Rittenhouse. Both were about 17 years old when they made national news in a deadly confrontation. Both were away from their poor broken homes. Trayvon Black, and Kyle White.

Some Differences. Kyle was defending life and property. Kyle ran away from conflict, and only shot when he had to.

Trayvon aggressively attacked an innocent resident, and was beating him to death.

In both cases, violent criminals died. Both juries found the killings justified.

This image was posted by an anti-White leftist who was surely inviting the comparison as a way of saying that Kyle should have been convicted. But the comparison just demonstrates the evil of the Left today.

There have been anti-Kyle protests in several cities.

I am trying to understand this pro-Trayvon anti-Kyle point of view. There is no serious dispute about the facts of either case. There were battles to the death. The good guys lived, and the bad guys died.

My conclusion is that today's Left is out to kill me and anyone who stands up for American civilization. And they want it to be a crime to defend ourselves. They want total subjugation. I don't see any other way to read it.

In case you doubt it, see tweets of Rep. Cori Bush:

The judge. The jury. The defendant.

It’s white supremacy in action.

This system isn’t built to hold white supremacists accountable. It’s why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free.

I’m hurt. I’m angry. I’m heartbroken.

Colin Kaepernick:

We just witnessed a system built on white supremacy validate the terroristic acts of a white supremacist.

This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed.

And the ACLU:

Despite Kyle Rittenhouse’s conscious decision to travel across state lines and injure one person and take the lives of two people protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake by police, he was not held responsible for his actions.

Unfortunately, this is not surprising.

The ACLU used to stand for civil liberties, but now it wants to punish White kids for crossing state lines!

Do some people believe that you need some sort of special permission from the government to cross state lines? I am sure the ACLU is not that stupid. It is grasping at straws to say that Kyle did something that sounds wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with an American citizen crossing state lines.

And he did not kill three Black men.

Update: Univ. of California Irvine put out this irresponsible statement:

The conclusion of this trial does not end the reckoning about systemic racism in the United States. If anything, it has simply made it more legible. Kyle Rittenhouse did not live in Wisconsin, but in Antioch, Illinois. ... Rittenhouse imposed himself on the protests in Kenosha. His assistance was not requested.

For this reason, the verdict conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies' matter.

UCI will continue its whole university approach to recognizing and responding to anti-Blackness as an existential threat to our mission as a public research university.

A UCLA law professor responds:

I would think that the verdict conveys a message that

There's a right to self-defense, whether against the "allies" of blacks or against the enemies of blacks or against anyone else.
That's particularly so if a person is pointing a gun at you, or reached for your rifle.
The prosecution has to disprove claims of self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.
Twelve jurors unanimously concluded that the prosecution hadn't met its burden.

In other words, UCI says that if the forces of Blackness want to burn your city down, then let it burn. The college students of today are being taught that this is the necessary reckoning about systemic racism.

This is the same university that announced that standardized tests were the best predictors of college success, but Blacks and Mexicans do not do well on them, and the law prohibits racial discrimination, so it is abolishing the use of such tests in admission.

Jerry Nadler goes Full White Hatred

Congress Jerry Nadler tweeted:

This heartbreaking verdict is a miscarriage of justice and sets a dangerous precedent which justifies federal review by DOJ. Justice cannot tolerate armed persons crossing state lines looking for trouble while people engage in First Amendment-protected protest.

They just won't let this go, will they?

Kyle Rittenhouse was not an armed person crossing state lines. His gun stayed in Wisconsin. He was helping people. There was no First Amendment protest. There was a violent and destructive riot, in violation of a curfew.

Any federal prosecution would be a violation of the double jeopardy clause of the Bill of Rights.

And what was heartbreaking? It was a self-defense case, and Nadler says nothing about that.

All this talk about "crossing state lines" is particularly offensive. We have free travel in the USA. Those who live near a state border do not need a reason to be allowed to cross the border. They can cross whenever they want, just as they cross the street.

It is really telling that the Rittenhouse critics are quick to complain about crossing state lines, as if something is wrong with that.

Nadler represents much of what is bad about the Democrat Party.

The NY Post lists 10 heinous lies about Kyle Rittenhouse.

NY Times covered up Kenosha riot details

A former NY Times reporter explains that he wrote a story on how the Kenosha riots hit the poor and multi-racial areas the hardest. The editors held up the story until after Joe Biden could be elected.

This was just one of the minor ways in which the Democrats manipulated the election.

I think this Kyle Rittenhouse trial is a real turning point. It has sharply polarized the USA.

I am trying to see both sides, but it is tough. The rioters are almost pure evil. They were criminals out celebrating criminal behavior by causing death and destruction of innocent parties.

Rittenhouse was almost pure good. The worst you can say about him is that he was naive, or inexperience, or to eager to help people who did not appreciate him.

The shootings were about a clear-cut case of self-defense as there can be. Rittenhouse was armed, and avoiding conflict. The rioters were chasing him and trying to kill him, with full knowledge of him having a loaded gun.

Michael Brown of Ferguson Missouri also charged a man with a loaded gun, with full knowledge that he was asking to get shot. It was alsmost suicide-by-cop.

And yet the Left tries to make heros out of Michael Brown, and the Kenosha rioters.

Kenosha is a disgrace. They let rioters burn their city, and then prosecuted the only guy standing up for law and order.

Update: The Kenosha jury has now determined its verdict: Not guilty on all counts. They ought to give Rittenhouse his AR-15 back, as he walks out of the courtroom. He may sue the news media who called him a murderer.

Rittenhouse's Gun Saved Lives in Kenosha

NY Times columnist Farhad Manjoo writes:

Binger’s argument had a power beyond this case.

That’s because it cleverly unraveled some of the foundational tenets of gun advocacy: That guns are effective and necessary weapons of self-defense. That without them, lawlessness and tyranny would prevail. And that in the right hands — in the hands of the “good guys” — guns promote public safety rather than destroy it.

In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.

This is the dumbest commentary I have seen on the case.

Black eyes? The rioters were burning buildingss down. They destroyed 100 cars. This was destruction that called for lethal force.

Rittenhouse's gun was a threat to the criminal rioters who were trying to take his gun away. Yes, his gun was promoting public safety.

Why would anyone chase a kid with a loaded AR-15? Think about that.

Now we learn that the Jump Kick Man has been identified as Maurice Freeland, a 40-year-old Black man with a criminal record. So maybe there is a racial angle to the case after all.

Meanwhile, the VP is getting harder to defend. Politico reports:

Psaki jumped to Harris’ defense on Twitter on Sunday, posting that the vice president is a “vital partner” to President Joe Biden, who has taken on “important challenges facing the country,” from voting rights to the crisis at the border.

“What I would note, though, and one of the things I really admire about the vice president: She is the first African American woman, woman of color, Indian American woman to serve in this job. Woman. I mean, so many firsts, right? It’s a lot to have on your shoulders,” Psaki said on Wednesday. “She is somebody who, at a much higher level than the rest of us, but who wants to be seen as the talented, experienced, you know, expert, substantive policy person, partner to the president, that she is. But I do think there have been some attacks that are beyond because of her identity.”

Andrew Anglin responds:

Who are these people who say negative things about people just because they don’t like their “identity”?

Well, that doesn’t exist. There are no such people. This is a stupid boogieman designed to appeal to morons who feel good about believing stupid lies designed to be emotionally charged.

They say I’m the number one racist hater, and I’ve never even once judged an individual person on their race or sex, ever. You see that I respect and listen to Glenn Greenwald, a faggot kike.

If I am a “racist,” it is because I acknowledge that generally, black people are stupid and Jews are subversive and satanic monsters. But if there is an individual of any race, or even if there is an individual woman, the only thing I’m ever going to judge is the individual.

I do not believe that anyone on the planet says bad things about Kamala Harris because she’s a woman and allegedly black. I don’t really even believe that anyone believes that happened, save for the dumb morons who believe everything because they worship authority (and are incapable of distinguishing between truth and “what the authorities said”).

People dislike Kamala Harris because she’s gross and evil. She got her job by sucking dick. She doesn’t believe in anything and will say anything. She was the number one person putting black people in prison; now she’s trying to abolish the cops.

Have you seen this space video?

I think he is correct about why Harris is disliked. She wants to be seen as a substantive official, but she cannot keep up with a senile and stupid President.

World should Begin Thinking like Women

The London Guardian reports:

“The world as designed by men has destroyed many things,” Cop26 delegates have been told, as leaders and campaigners warned that the climate crisis could not be ended without the empowerment of women.

Women and girls around the world suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate breakdown, as they are on average poorer, less educated and more dependent on subsistence farming. A UN report found 80% of those displaced by the climate emergency are women. ...

Angelica Ponce, executive director of the Plurinational Authority for Mother Earth in Bolivia, said: “The world as designed by men has destroyed many things. The world should begin thinking like women. If it was designed by a woman, it would end violence against women and children.

“We want to be in the corridors of power and take part in decisions at international level to end this struggle of climate justice,” she said. “As indigenous women, we live day-by-day the cruel reality of climate change in our land.”

If the world were designed by women, then we would have never had the Industrial Revolution.

Another article:

In a stirring speech at the opening of the Cop26 world leaders summit, Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, asked: “When will leaders lead?” The problem she identified is that “both ambition and needed faces are not present in Glasgow”. The over-representation of white men in climate change decision-making processes is stifling for both the imagination and the implementation of transformative solutions. Globally, only 26 women serve as heads of government and state. ...

For example, studies on “conservative white males” in the US and Norway have highlighted the connections between climate change denialism, patriarchal beliefs and rightwing nationalism.

Jews Oppose Teaching Balanced History

The Jewish publication Haaretz reports:

Education officials in the Canadian province of Alberta on Friday repudiated official diversity guidelines that call for highlighting the Nazis' economic achievements and “positive qualities” of European settlers who oppressed of the country’s indigenous population, following uproar by Jewish organizations.

The document, which was posted on the provincial Education Ministry's website and entitled “Guidelines for Recognizing Diversity and Promoting Respect”, urged teachers to consider whether classroom resources “reveal both the positive and negative behaviors and attitudes of the various groups portrayed.”

“For instance, if a video details war atrocities committed by the Nazis, does it also point out that before World War II, the German government’s policies substantially strengthened the country’s economy?” the document asked. ...

According to the CBC, Jewish Federation of Edmonton President Steve Shafir said that he and his colleagues would be meeting with ministry officials to discuss the issue, saying that while the federation was not looking to find someone to blame, it wanted to “ensure that there are some safeguards in place to ensure something like this doesn't happen again.”

The removal of the document was also welcomed in Israel.

“There are no ‘positive aspects’ to Nazism.

I am just trying to follow the logic here. Canada now cannot tell children any of the benefits of European settlements, because that would like acknowledging the good things that Nazis did, and that would be upsetting to Jews, so we must destroy any documents saying that education should be balanced.

Kids who Wish for Lighter Skin

Pakistani-American Wajahat Ali writes in the NY Times:

My 5-year-old daughter, Nusayba, twirled around in her princess dress, fixing her silver tiara and checking out her newly applied eye shadow and red lipstick in the bathroom mirror. Then she examined her beautiful, brown skin.

“I don’t like my skin color,” she declared. “I wish my skin was lighter. It’s prettier.”

The man continues to explain how he and all his Pakistaani relativies are obsessed with skin coloer.Much more than any White Americans I haave ever met.

He also explains how he is bitter and resentful towards other ethnic groups. Again, much more so that any White Americans I know.

Importing these Pakistanis is importing racial and skin-color hatred.

I grew up in a Pakistani immigrant home, where the obsession with pursuing light skin tone was as common as eating dal-chawal with our hands or hearing the adhan for prayer. An auntie at the birthday party would offer comments such as, “She’s so beautiful, but, tragically, she is dark-skinned” or “For a girl with dark skin, she’s actually pretty.” ...

I tried my best to get her into “Ms. Marvel,” a comic book series about a Pakistani American Muslim superheroine, but she prefers Elsa and Anna from “Frozen.”

You would think that he would appreciate America for being much more tolerant than his native Pakistan. But no, he hates America.

Covid Vaccine was Tested on White People

The covid-19 vaccine trials were suspended because too many White people signed up to be guinea pigs.

Drug approvals take too long, and there are probably many unnecessary delays in the system. But covid-19 was an emergency, and Pres. Trump ordered rapid work on a vaccine.

NPR Radio reports:

ARONCZYK: Now, Pfizer is enormous. And they decide they don't need money from Operation Warp Speed for R&D. But the government has promised to pay them $2 billion for their shots if they work, essentially providing them with a very big incentive.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And then while they're doing all these trials, something happens that has a surprising effect on all this; George Floyd is murdered in Minneapolis. And the reckoning over race that follows touches everything, including the race to find a vaccine.

Dr. Francis Collins is the director of the National Institutes of Health. He's actually Dr. Fauci's boss and one of the key players in making Operation Warp Speed happen.

FRANCIS COLLINS: I was deeply moved by what had happened in our country and this just glaring example of how we have not gotten past our long and gruesome history of racism. And it was playing out daily in the presence of COVID-19.

ARONCZYK: People of color were disproportionately getting sick and dying from COVID. And at this point in time, Dr. Collins is overseeing the pharma companies that are in phase 3, that are recruiting tens of thousands of people to try out the shots. And he looks at who Moderna has been signing up.

COLLINS: They felt this enormous pressure to recruit quickly 'cause it's a public health crisis, and people are dying. And if you're trying to recruit quickly, you recruit the people who are most likely to say yes. And that tends to be white people, especially young, healthy white people.

ARONCZYK: Dr. Collins goes to Moderna's executive team, and he's like, what are you going to do about this? And he says that their response was less than satisfying.

COLLINS: I mean, it was hand-waving.

ARONCZYK: Right.

COLLINS: And this is where I got fairly directive.

(LAUGHTER)

COLLINS: And I made a little speech about, OK, if that's the strategy you're going to pursue, you may have a vaccine that turns out to be safe and effective for white people, but you will have failed, and we will not defend you.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So at this moment in the pandemic where it feels like every second matters, they pump the brakes. They don't want to go forward with the trials because, Dr. Collins says, if the people testing the vaccine don't represent the American public, the public won't trust the vaccine. Moderna then recruits more people of color.

ARONCZYK: So at this moment, you make this request to diversify the trials. What happens? Does it slow things down a little?

COLLINS: (Laughter) It, in fact, did have a modest effect of that sort.

ARONCZYK: But, Dr. Collins says, just by a week or two.

Collins thinks that it is funny that people died while he played racial games with vaccine testing.

All of the brainwashed experts now say that race is just a social construct, with no scientific or medical significance. If that is true, then there is no need to even pay attention to the race of the test pool.

Even if there are some racial differences, they would not justify delaying the vaccine. No matter how they did the testing, there would be groups who have reason to be more cautious about the vaccine.

In essence, they killed White people, because of George Floyd.

This is another way in whice the election was stolen. As the above broadcast explains, Pres. Trump bet big on rapid vaccine development, most people did not believe it was possible. The trial test results were held up until after the election.

Here is reported evidence that some of the Pfizer vaccine trial was faked. This is all the more reason the feds should have watched the scientific validity of the test, instead of the diversity politics.

Why the Left hates Kyle Rittenhouse

I am trying to figure out why leftists hate Kyle Rittenhouse so much.

A Black, Trump-hater, pro-riot, professor Issac Bailey writes on NBC News:

Those protesters made him shoot them. It was their fault, and only theirs, not Rittenhouse’s. He was trying to do good, to protect this dying nation.

And that’s the same nonsense claim people have been using throughout the U.S.

Predominantly white voters were trying to defend their freedom, so they flocked to an open bigot like Donald Trump and stormed the U.S. Capitol. Angry parents, most of them white, are storming school board meetings demanding an end to critical race theory lessons to protect white children from feeling “guilt” about America’s violent racist history and how it has created the foundation of inequity we still see today. Politicians and local officials — again, many of them white — have stoked this by framing the teaching of race and books that explore its context as something constituents should defend their communities from.

The truth is that too many white Americans probably see themselves in Rittenhouse — afraid of anyone, whether white or of color, who wants to live in a more equitable country — even if some don’t want to say so out loud.

Rittenhouse shot some criminal White rioters. He was charged with the most serious possible charges. The case was assigned to the most experienced and pro-prosecution judge.

The Left has tried to make heros out of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson Missouri's Michael Brown, George Floyd, and now the criminals and rioters who attacked Rittenhouse. Why?

I think they see Rittenhouse as America's last honest man. Not yet brainwashed. Not yet intimidated. Not yet castrated. The Kenosha adults let the riots go on for 3 days. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris encouraged the rioters. Other cities rioted also. No one had the guts to do anything.

Bangladesh demands Reparations for Industrialization

So what was the point of the Glasgow climate meeting? Apparently it was to demand the West to pay reparations for CO2.

The NY Times reports:

Year after year, calls have steadily grown louder for industrialized nations responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions already heating up the planet to own up to the problem — and pay for the damage. ...

“The term ‘loss and damage’ is a euphemism for terms we’re not allowed to use, which are ‘liability and compensation,’” Mr. Huq said. “‘Reparations’ is even worse.”

The United States, which is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases historically, has long been cool to the idea. But in Glasgow, it signed a statement agreeing to “increase resources” for loss and damage, without committing to anything more specific. ...

Estimates of the amount of money required to address loss and damage varies widely, from roughly $300 to $600 billion a year by 2030. At the moment, rich countries have failed to shore up the $100 billion they promised to deliver annually by 2020. That aid is designed to help countries adapt to climate change; it doesn’t include funds to address permanent damage.

I guess the argument is that the Industrial Revolution somehow made Bengladesh worse off. But that is absurd. It previously had much worse poverty and famines and other problems. Those countries have no damages at all.

Another NY Times article reveals:

Documents show how the conservative group worked with lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices could go before running afoul of federal laws.

The paper acts as if it has stolen documents to reveal a scandal. But all it tells us is that a conservative group was careful to abide by the law.

Update: Today's Science Friday is on:

Activists And Vulnerable Nations At COP26 Seek More Than Promises

Action on climate change is slower than many activists would like. And why payment for “loss and damage” is crucial for vulnerable nations.

I haven't heard it yet, but leftists have taken over science communications, so I am sure it favors paying Third World reparations.

Rittenhouse headed for Acquittal

There are two big differences between the Derek Chauvin and Kyle Rittenhouse trials.

Chauvin's trial was dominated by expert witnesses giving dubious opinions of questionable relevance.

Rittenhouse testified for his defense, and explained why he did what he did.

Update: There was another thing Rittenhouse's testimony revealed. He is someone who may be perceived as easily bullied.

Rittenhouse avoided conflict thoughout the riots, refused to argue with anyone, offered to help people, and generally seemed weak. It seems quite likely that his attackers assumed that he is someone who will not fight back. That is, they could take away his gun and he will not shoot.

It would have been irresponsible of him not to shoot.

All of the charges carry long prison terms, except for one misdemeanor gun possession charge. I wonder if that could withstand a Second Amendment challenge. At age 17, he could have been in the army, or hunting, or doing target practice, and apparently Wisconsin law allows that. But not self-defense? The jury instructions on this point have not been announced yet.

While a lot of the Left is hoping for a guilty verdict, I have yet to hear an explanation of what Rittenhouse should have done. Run faster? Allow hostiles to take his gun? Fire warning shots into the air?

Arguably he violated curfew, but he was not charged with that. He had as much right to be there as anyone else. He only shot when he had to shoot, and he did not hit any innocent bystanders.

The Hallmark of Whiteness

From NY Times Magazine, in July:

Singleton, who holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, and who did stints in advertising and college admissions before founding what’s now known as Courageous Conversation in 1992, talks about white culture in similar ways. There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.” He spoke about how the ancient Egyptians had “ideas about how humanity works that never had that scientific-hypothesis construction” and so aren’t recognized. “This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?” For Singleton, society’s primary intellectual values are bound up with this marginalization.

Another NY Times article quoted geology professor Phoebe A. Cohen:

What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.

Cohen now complains that her views were tweeted out of context.

Intellectual debate and the concept of “rigor” are often seen as the pinnacle -- that is, the most ideal form -- of intellectualism today in American higher education, a type of discourse that is prioritized and prized in a system that was created by and for white men. ...

For centuries, a very thin slice of our society -- primarily white, Christian, wealthy, non-disabled, cisgender men -- has defined rigor in Western education systems. ...

As you can see, it took me much more than a sentence to accurately express my point of view, because these issues are complex and require context and nuance, which The New York Times reporter didn’t include.

As I can see, her opinions are just as ignorants and misguided as they appear. She wrote all this to justify censoring a White man giving a science lecture, because he previously expressed some mainstream pro-meritocracy opinions.

Woke is a Racial Slur

The Federalist site reports

A staff writer for Slate says people who use “woke” as a term to describe the progressive takeover of American culture are guilty of using a racial slur.

“If you’re not black and started using ‘woke’ pejoratively sometime post-2018 or so (or worse, don’t know anything about the earlier iteration of the term), I think it’s fair to consider it a racial slur,” he tweeted on Sunday. “And it doesn’t mean I’m gonna do anything to you, or that anyone else will. But it doesn’t mean I won’t either.” ...

Multiple “journalists” from other corporate media outlets liked or retweeted Anderson’s original post. ...

Anderson has long maintained that “woke” is a term “stolen from black folks … and repurposed” to be a word that Americans of any race frequently use. Anderson has complained about the word for at least two years.

I had no idea. And he is threatening me for using the term.

The NY Times reports on the latest snowflake story:

During a hockey game last week between the Armstrong River Hawks and the Mars Fighting Planets, a number of Armstrong Junior-Senior High School students began chanting “inappropriate and abusive language” at the Mars goalie, according to the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League. On Thursday, the league announced that Armstrong students would be prohibited from attending games for the remainder of the season, including during the playoffs.

People used to complain about fights at hockey games.

This was not a school event, but a private hockey club game.

Psychologists Admit to Making Racial Distinctions

The American Psychological Association confesses:

During this devastating global health crisis, the country also witnessed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May of 2020. ...

In 2020, APA launched a series of efforts aimed at dismantling racism in psychology, in APA, and in society more generally. As part of this effort, the Association sought a historical review of how psychology and APA have harmed people of color since the formal institutionalization of U.S. psychology in the late 1800s. ...

1892: The American Psychological Association is founded, with G. Stanley Hall as president and 31 White males elected to membership. ...

1913: A 70-page psychological monograph reports inferiority of school performance among Black children in integrated schools in New York, a finding the author attributes to “race heredity” (Mayo, 1913). ...

1933: Psychologist Raymond Cattell argues against the “mixture of blood between racial groups” (Cattell, 1933, p. 155). A few years later, he declared that Black individuals have “contributed practically nothing to social progress and culture” and argued against their full citizenship (Cattell, 1937, p. 56). Cattell argued that these individuals should “be brought to euthanasia” for this inferiority. In 1972, he again argued that such “race mixing” would result in “the intelligent maintainers of the culture being completely replaced by lower intelligences” (Cattell, 1972, p. 154). He continued to maintain the dangers of race-mixing through the early 1990s. ...

1954: Brown v. Board of Education is decided, ending legal segregation in the United States. The work and testimony of psychologists Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark, along with other social science research, was used to support desegregation and cited in the final decision (Kluger, 1975, Jackson, 2001).

That research was that Black children preferred White dolls over Black dolls. Supposedly forced racial school busing was going to solve that problem. It did not.

Everyone praised that Supreme Court decision, but it was based on some very dubious and demeaning ideas about Blacks. Namely, that Blacks kids need to be in classes with White kids or else they will find White dolls preferable. Why is it the business of the court to decide what color dolls kids should be playing with?

It is disgraceful that today's psychologists support this pseudoscience.

Here is another big Supreme Court decision, based on bogus social science, as explained by Amy L. Wax:

Disparate Impact Realism

In Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the doctrine, first articulated by the Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424 (1971), that employers can be held liable under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for neutral personnel practices with a disparate impact on minority workers. The Griggs Court further held that employers can escape liability by showing that their staffing practices are job related or consistent with business necessity.

In the interim since Griggs, social scientists have generated evidence undermining two key assumptions behind that decision and its progeny. First, the Court in Griggs noted the absence of evidence that the selection criteria in that case (a high school diploma and an aptitude test) were related to subsequent performance of the service jobs at issue, and expressed doubt about the existence of such a link. But research in industrial and organization psychology (IOP) has repeatedly documented that tests and criteria such as those at issue in Griggs (which are heavily “g”-loaded and thus dependent on cognitive ability) remain the best predictors of performance for jobs at all levels of complexity. Second, Griggs and its progeny rest on the implicit assumption, reflected in the so-called 4/5 rule, that fair and valid hiring criteria will result in a workforce that roughly reflects the representation of each group in the background population. Work in psychometrics and labor economics shows that this assumption is unjustified. Because blacks lag significantly behind whites on measures of cognitive ability, most valid job selection criteria will have a substantial adverse impact on this group. The combination of well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability and the consistent link between ability and job performance generates a pattern that experts term “the validity-diversity tradeoff”: job selection devices that best predict future job performance generate the smallest number of minority hires in a broad range of positions. Indeed, the evidence indicates that most valid screening devices will have a significant adverse impact on blacks and will also violate the 4/5 rule under the law of disparate impact.

This decision has limited the ability of companies to hire competent workers, and probably cost us billions or maybe trillions in productivity.

Picture Shows Our Cultural Divide

I found this in my Facebook feed.

Greta is a mentally ill teenager with no substantive opinion on what to do about climate change, even though she complains about it all the time.

I am watching Kyle's trial, and I have yet to see any evidence of wrongdoing. He showed up at a riot, offering to help law enforcement or anyone needing medical assistance. A couple of deranged lunatics chased him, and tried to beat him up and take his gun. He did everything to avoid a fight, and ran away. When they got to him, he shot them.

What was he supposed to do? Run faster? Let the crazies take his gun? Assume that his attackers had good intentions?

No. If someone is chasing a guy with a gun, you have to assume that the chasers are looking to do lethal harm.

Perhaps Kyle's shooting was reckless because there were a lot of people present, and he could have hit an innocent bystander. Kyle did not appear to have the training and experience to avoid such an accident.

If Kyle had hit an innocent party, then probably a manslaughter charge would be appropriate. But he didn't. He only shot criminals who were physically attacking him and directly threatening to kill him. From what I have seen of the trial so far, it appears to be completely justified self-defense.

Also showing our cultural divide is a Neflix show:

In his new coming-of-age Netflix series, "Colin in Black & White," former NFL quarterback-turned-civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick is running deep into controversy, this time by equating professional football's draft process with modern-day slavery.

As the first episode opens, a flurry of football players, portrayed by Black actors, are seen charging across a field in front of white coaches.

"What they don't want you to understand is what's being established is a power dynamic," Kaepernick, dressed all in black, says.

"Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance," he continues. "No boundary respect. No dignity left intact."

Kaepernick is not really Black. He was born to a White woman, and then adopted by a White couple. It is not known that he has any slave ancestors.

The story is about how he learned to hate White people anyway.

His football career ended after he had a very bad season, and quit.

A NY Times advice column complains about White adopting Black kids, especially if the parents believe that All Lives Matters. It suggests dishonestly befriending the family in order to teach the Black kid a racial hatred that he might not otherwise learn. It quotes a Black woman saying “As a Black community, these are our kids.” So the Black kid belongs to the Black community, not the White parents, must be instilled with Black identity.

She said Black kids adopted by non-Black families can have a hard time when their parents take a “colorblind” approach to parenting. This might look like deciding that a school is “good” based on academics alone,

Apparently, to a lot of Blacks, having an anti-White identity is more important than anything else.

Israel no longer owns Congress

In a recent interview, Donald Trump said:

The biggest change I’ve seen in Congress, Israel literally owned Congress –you understand that?– ten years ago, fifteen years ago.

And it was so powerful. It was so powerful. And today, it is almost the opposite.

You have, between AOC and Omar and these people that hate Israel with a passion, they’re controlling Congress. Israel is not a force in Congress anymore!

It’s amazing. I’ve never seen such a change. And we’re not talking about over a very long period of time, I think you know exactly what I’m saying. They had such power. Israel had such power, and rightfully, over Congress. And now it doesn’t!

It’s incredible, actually.

A Jewish publication adds:

The claim that Israel controls Congress has historically been treated as an antisemitic slander by antisemitism watchdogs. Omar herself got into trouble and apologized in 2019 when she suggested that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby purchases sympathy in Congress. ...

Trump suggested that he did not have a problem with the notion that Israel had once controlled Congress,

So who owns Congress now?

The Problem We All Live With

A new school controversy is the teaching of this 1964 Norman Rockwell painting. Barack Obama hung it in the White House. OJ Simpson's lawyers used it to manipulate the jury.

The Left today is obsessed with teaching racially divisive ideas. See this CRT summary for the main ideas. This used to be just a Jewish Marxist thing, but now it has infected the Democrat Party, schools, news media, Hollywood, and big companies.

So what is the problem? That we all live with? Is it the girl? The federal marshals? The graffiti? The painting seems to be deliberately ambiguous.

David French, who pretends to be conservative but more accurately described as controlled opposition, writes:

The complaint also takes issue with Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With, which depicts Ruby Bridges walking to school with the “n word” in the background and originally appeared, in 1964, in Look, a general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa. That’s right: They’re complaining about Norman Rockwell.

Why would parents appeal to a law meant to combat critical race theory to censor deeply troubling but wholly uncontroversial books?

If parents wants to remove the books, the obviously the books are controversial.

French claims to be a free speech advocate, but I don't see him saying that the schools should teach all the arguments for and against racial segregation. That would be essential to learning about America's racial history.

Kelly Clarkson Pays Big

The NY Times reports:

The Paradox of Alimony for Men
The Supreme Court ruled that alimony is gender neutral in 1979. But, to some, women having to dole out spousal support still comes as a shock. ...

Ms. Clarkson and Brandon Blackstock, an entertainment agent, split in 2020 after seven years of marriage. Despite a prenuptial agreement recently upheld in a Los Angeles court, Mr. Blackstock has been awarded temporary monthly spousal support of nearly $150,000, half of his initial ask. (Though he stated that he planned to exit the entertainment industry to become a full-time rancher on a Montana property owned by Ms. Clarkson, the ranch was awarded to her as per the couple’s prenuptial agreement.)

In addition to the monthly spousal support paid by Ms. Clarkson, Mr. Blackstock also receives child support of around $45,000 per month, despite Ms. Clarkson having been awarded primary physical custody of their two children.

I don't know why this is called a "paradox".

It is an abuse of language to call this "child support". You could not spend that much money on the kids even if you wanted to. The law does not require child support to be spent on children.

The legal system is twisted. I am just posting this as education. The law has created many marriage disincentives.

Taylor Swift is age almost 32, and unmarried. Any man she marries will have the power to walk away at any time, and become a rich man. She probably sees marriage and kids as too risky.

There are many other anti-marriage laws. This is just one example.

Kyle Rittenhouse Trial

Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial for shooting 3 men, killing 2. He could get a mandatory life sentence for murder.

All 3 men were attacking Rittenhouse. Here is the first:

Rosenbaum battled bipolar disorder and was homeless, according to The Washington Post, which reported he had been discharged from a hospital earlier in the day after a suicide attempt. He had spent more than a decade in prison in Arizona after being convicted of sexual conduct with a minor.

Rosenbaum, shirtless, chased Rittenhouse and threw something at his head, knocking his cap off. Then a couple of shots were fired. Rittenhouse very likely thought that he was being shot at, and turned and shot Rosenbaum.

The 2nd and 3rd men chased Rittenhouse some more, until he fell. The 2nd man hit him with a skateboard and trying to take his gun, and the 3rd waved a handgun, with apparent intention to shoot. Rittenhouse fired from the ground, killing the 2nd and wounding the 3rd.

This is a scandal that Rittenhouse is being charged with first degree murder.

If you are in the middle of a riot and you try to club someone with a gun, what do you expect to happen?

This seems like legitimate self-defense to me. First, Rittenhouse is running away the whole time. This is not a "stand your ground" defense. He was fleeing. Second, all 3 men were trying to do bodily harm to Rittenhouse in the midst of a riot.

Think about it. If you are openly holding a rifle, and someone chases you threatening violence, what do you do?

If hes an armed police officer, you drop you gun and hold up your hands. If he is a shirtless homeless crazy guy, you do not let him get close enough to grab your gun. You have to assume that he gets you down, he will take your gun and kill you with it.

I am not saying that Rittenhouse will be acquitted. The trial will micro-analyze everything he did. Even if his targets deserved to get shot, the prosecutor will probably argue that the shots were reckless, and could have hit an innocent bystander. My guess is that he will get convicted of a lesser crime, and then get a maximal sentence for that crime.

My hope for the American people is up, now that Virginia has turned pro-Trump. The Democrat ran for governor on race hatred, vaccine mandates, and removing parental influence from the schools. Virginians must have wised up to how horrible these policies are.

A columnist for The Hill says that "parental rights" is just a smokescreen for White supremacy:

Unlike their earlier defense of Confederate monuments, the "Parents’ Rights" campaign message at first glance looks to have zero to do with race.

That puts Democrats on the defensive. They are in the uncomfortable position of calling the attention of suburban white moms to divisive racial politics being used by Republican Glenn Youngkin’s campaign.

Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate, calls the Republican message a “racist dog whistle.”

Yes, everything good is a racist dog whistle. Glad to see Virginians saw thru this nonsense.

Update: For those who think White supremacists carried the Virginia election, we can quantify it. As of Nov. 3 evening, the election results are:

Governor
Glenn A. Youngkin Republican 1,658,633 50.82%
Terry R. McAuliffe Democratic 1,579,591 48.40%

Lieutenant Governor
Winsome E. Sears Republican 1,655,063 50.99%
Hala S. Ayala Democratic 1,587,318 48.90%

I assume that a White supremacist would vote for Youngkin, and against Sears, a Black woman. But there were at most 3,000 such votes. By comparison, Youngkin won by 80,000 votes. Therefore, White supremacists had nearly zero influence on this election.

Jews take over World Series

The Wash. Postreports:

As the 2021 baseball season opened, of the 750 players on active Major League Baseball rosters, eight were Jewish. This is a typical number in recent years. What’s remarkable — even historic — is that three of those eight players are still playing on baseball’s biggest stage, the World Series.

Indeed, the three — Houston Astros third baseman Alex Bregman, Atlanta Braves outfielder Joc Pederson and pitcher Max Fried — represent the largest contingent of Jews ever to take the field in a single World Series.

For more on baseball and other sports, see the Jewish Telegraphic Agency coverage.

Good for them. Blacks don't play baseball as much anymore, and we have too many players from the Dominican Republic. Someone has to pick up the slack.

Book tells the Philip Roth Story

Philip Roth is the world's most famous Jewish novelist, with 4 of his novels among the top 25 Jewish novels. He was a Jewish atheist who rejected some Jewish traditions, but his writings were very much about Jewish life.

A new biography reveals what a neurotic weirdo he was:

After becoming a bestselling author and National Book Award winner, Roth was paying 50 percent of his income for psychotherapy (for himself, a blonde to whom he was briefly married, and a stepdaughter who came with the blonde). ...

What did he do with the other half of his money at the time? By order of the New York Family Court, he was paying it to his plaintiff (the blonde). ...

One of the topics that Roth discussed with his psychoanalyst was his desire to kill his plaintiff and thereby more than double his spending power. (One reason that Roth was angry with his plaintiff, aside from her continuing bids for increased alimony, was that she had obtained his agreement to marry via fraud. She purchased urine from a pregnant woman and turned that into a positive pregnancy test result, which induced Roth to “do the right thing.”) The topic was being discussed with the medial-psychiatric professional at a tremendous weekly cost right up to the point that the plaintiff was killed in a car accident (1968), thus putting an end to family court litigation that had lasted longer than the marriage and to alimony payments and legal fees that consumed more than half of Roth’s income (he borrowed to pay his lawyers, his plaintiff, and the platoon of shrinks).

He was also a Trump-hater, and his politics was driven by weird paranoid delusions.

It is funny how Roth could reject much of Judaism, and then buy whole hog into Jewish psychoanalysis. I have never heard a good explanation of why Jews believe in that stuff so much. Maybe they are much more neurotic than non-Jews, but even if so, why did Roth continue to pay big bucks for it when it did not seem to be doing anything for him?

It seems to be one of those bizarre Jewish beliefs, like hating Trump. If I were to make a list of the top wacky Jewish beliefs, I think Psychoanalysis would be tops, and Marxism second. They believe in that stuff more than the Bible.

I found this message posted somewhere.

I am not sure about what motivates this. I have heard that schizophrenics get along better with other schizophrenics, than normal people. Pretty much everyone in psychotherapy is suffering from a serious mental illness, and those people often resent normal people, and seek to normalize mental illness.

The NY Times has an essay on why conservatives are happier than liberals.

Conservatives generally score higher on internal control as well as the Protestant Work Ethic, which emphasizes the inherent meaningfulness and value of work and the strong linkage between one’s efforts and outcomes, and is positively associated with achievement. Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to see outcomes as due to factors beyond one’s personal control, including luck and properties of the social system.

These differences have consequences:

Perceptions of internal control, self-efficacy, and the engagement in meaningful work are strongly related to life satisfaction.

This makes sense to me. It is hard to see how anyone in psychotherapy could be happy. Philip Roth was probably miserable.