There is No Such Thing as Social Justice

Here Another element of the secular value system

John Droz jr. Jun 14, 2024 

Where is it promised (and by who) that Life is Fair? There is no such promise!

In fact, the exact opposite is true: Life is guaranteed to be unfair and unjust!

In addition to just bad luck, every citizen of the planet will have unfairness and injustice repeatedly thrust upon them due to one or more of their: nationality, age, gender, weight, height, appearance, intellect, sexual preferences, economic status, health, language, associates, education, beliefs, habits, etc., etc.

In other words, we are continuously treated unjustly due to perceived dissimilarities.

Wouldn’t it be great if people had no biases, and didn't engage in inequitable treatment for fellow travelers with any of these differences?

If we are going to have an aggressive campaign for “social justice,” then why stop at the nationality issue? (BTW, the claim that US minorities are being disproportionately harmed by law enforcement isn’t supported by statistics.)

So why not: Seniors Matter, Women Matter, Intelligence Matters, Height Matters, etc?

The bottom line is that (even assuming good intentions) this business of trying to make Life “fair” (i.e., social justice) is pounding a round peg into a square hole. It’s tackling an impossible challenge. This means that the leaders of such movements: 1) are ignorant about life’s realities, or 2) have a very different agenda.

Another MAJOR matter here is that current “social justice” campaigns are NOT about individual injustices, but rather purported group injustices. These groups are amorphous categories like “minorities.” And there is also the insidious time factor: are we talking about current injustices, or things that happened 500 years ago?

Further, the proponents of social injustice have no qualms about causing new individual injustices, supposedly to deal with a group injustice. What is happening in women’s sports is a perfect example of this hypocrisy. What these campaigners are creating is a new maligned group (women athletes) who in the future will have to be compensated for the absurdities imposed by today’s social justice alarmists!

This is typically what happens when humans fabricate value systems on the fly. As explained in a prior commentary, this is really about establishing a secular religion (value system) to replace the Judeo-Christian standards America was founded on. Please watch this excellent short video on Social Justice…

There is nothing wrong with trying to improve our lot and our society — as long as we keep things in perspective. So what should we do when faced with an apparent social injustice? How about:

1. Make sure we understand all the facts. These days we are inundated with rumors, one-sided stories, misinformation, and outright deception.
2.  Once a response seems appropriate, start by assuming the best about the apparent transgressor. That person may actually be the bigger victim.
3. Begin with a positive response. The adage that we get more with a drop of honey than a gallon of vinegar has great merit.
4. In responding, don’t cause another social injustice in the process. Don’t get caught up in a group response that may well have a completely different agenda.
5. Often the most effective response is setting a good example (e.g., consistent with the new Testament). Make sure your own house is in good order before casting a stone.
6.  Pray for the perpetrator. They are likely a sad soul in need of help.

What do we do when such remedies and changes are slow, or ineffective?

It comes down to having reasonable expectations. If we expect that Life can be made to be fair and just for everyone, then we have bought into an illusion and are guaranteed to live a life of frustration and unhappiness.

On the other hand, if we accept that Life is always going to be unfair, then we focus on saving our own soul so that we get to the place where everything will be fair and just.

Put another way: God is the only hope we have for Social Justice. Our attempts to substitute human standards for God’s, are laughably incompetent.

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?

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Social Justice Policing Replaces Law Enforcement

Real crimes increase as police focus on ideological enforcement. 

John Klar - Guest Author July 18, 2023 Liberty Nation News

Many Americans are shocked by proposals to reduce police protection while opioid deaths skyrocket, borders are flung wide, and urban businesses are trashed and ransacked on national TV as political protests. Yet increasingly public safety servants are not investigating rape, burglary, and drug use but are enforcing social justice codes.

Police Protect Pride

In New York City, for instance, CNN recently reported that the Hate Crime Task Force is investigating “a criminal mischief pattern” of vandalism against Pride and transgender flags. This despite a 22% surge in major crimes in the city in 2022, including robbery and burglary, according to The New York Times.

Progressive dogma calls for simultaneously defunding and reprogramming police departments. A key ideological initiative is to “decarcerate,” to soften the enforcement of laws and undermine police authority. The kingpin of this jurisprudential experimentation in New York City is Alvin Bragg. According to Daily Signal writer Jarrett Stepman, “One of the crimes his office won’t prosecute is armed robberies of businesses. Suspects in those cases who make off with less than $1,000 in stolen goods will now be charged with the lesser crime of petty larceny, a misdemeanor. Among the other crimes his office will no longer prosecute are resisting arrest, fare beating, prostitution, and trespassing.”

The Pride flag destruction in NYC is part of a national spate of such incidents during Pride Month, even as San Francisco and other major cities succumb to a scourge of drugs, gang activities, and related crime. A recent burnout by a car on a Pride-flag crosswalk in Kirkland, WA, garnered national attention, as the once speech-tolerant left called for criminal sanctions for “hate speech.” USA Today reported on June 8:

“In the past week alone, Pride flags have been stolen, slashed or burned in at least five states, including California, Utah, Arizona, Nebraska and Pennsylvania. That’s on top of similar incidents in California and New York in May, including a man that defecated on a pride flag in Manhattan.”

Those defacing Pride and BLM insignia are expressing their political discontent with the government-imposed domination of the ideologies those symbols represent. This is free expression, clearly protected from government criminalization by constitutional law (unlike burglary, armed robbery, and business burning).

Ironically, when it comes to torching flags in political protest, the American flag has featured prominently as a controversial symbol. The Nazi flag is legally protected political speech, unquestionably hateful though it be. But the same liberties that permit the display of a Confederate or Nazi flag also permit the burning of Old Glory. Government is restricted in the United States from regulating citizens’ religious and political expression, and this includes extending special favor to the national flag.

As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy observed in his concurrence in Texas v. Johnson: “I agree that the flag holds a lonely place of honor in an age when absolutes are distrusted and simple truths are burdened by unneeded apologetics. Though symbols often are what we ourselves make of them, the flag is constant in expressing beliefs Americans share, beliefs in law and peace, and that freedom which sustains the human spirit. The case here today forces recognition of the costs to which those beliefs commit us. It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt.”

Penalizing those who disagree with the symbols of rainbow-gay pride, trans-rights, LGBTQ2+, or skin-color-focused sloganeering displays intolerance. It is “poignant but fundamental” that these flags do not protect those who dare whisper discontent.

This was similarly expressed by the Supreme Court in United States v. Eichman: “Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered, and worth revering.” Just so, punishing desecration of Pride and BLM flags dilutes the very freedoms symbolized by the American flag.

The government is bound by First Amendment shields from regulating expression, yet that is exactly what government protection of social justice symbols constitutes. In a recent case of Pride flag desecration in New Jersey, Harrison Township Mayor Lou Manzo exhibited the dangers of government censorship. In a Courier Post report: “’This incident also serves as a reminder that hateful minds still exist and simply ignoring it actually enables this behavior,’ [Manzo] continued … Township police have started a ‘full investigation,’ which includes contacting the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office and filing a bias incident form, the mayor said in a statement.”

A bias incident form is not likely to be seen for publicly burning an American flag. Burglars are not pursued or imprisoned, but stolen gay flags merit “full investigation.” The government now regulates “hateful minds.”

Social Justice or Real Justice?

In words that apply to Pride flags (even when burned hatefully), the 1989 Johnson decision warned: “If we were to hold that a State may forbid flag burning wherever it is likely to endanger the flag’s symbolic role … [w]e would be permitting a State to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox’ by saying that one may burn the flag to convey one’s attitude toward it and its referents only if one does not endanger the flag’s representation of nationhood and national unity. To conclude that the government may permit designated symbols to be used to communicate only a limited set of messages would be to enter territory having no discernible or defensible boundaries.”

New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and other states enforce woke orthodoxy in a nation that permits its own flag to endure burning as a symbol of liberty. These other state-erected, protected, or endorsed ideological flags are symbols of political oppression, of freedoms denied. To say so by objecting to their public display by burning them is verboten.

America’s police are being employed as Taliban-like enforcers of the state woke religion, replete with criminal investigations of anyone who defaces the reverence extended to the rainbow flag. This while rising numbers of burglaries, rapes, and robberies go uninvestigated or are unpunished once proven. In this upside-down woke world, law enforcement is policing citizen expression to enforce the woke cult at the expense of public safety and free speech. Perhaps this new face of police abuse merits defunding.

Attorney-farmer John Klar hosts the Small Farm Republic Substack and podcast from his Vermont farm. His new book is Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival. 

Read More From Guest Authors

How the EPA Turned into a Toxic Leftist Social Justice Slush Fund

By Daniel Greenfield May 08, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

When the EPA announced that it was launching a completely unnecessary Office of Environmental Justice, the move was hailed by Beverly Wright: the head of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. And the EPA’s press release quoted the leftist activist.

Now the new office will be sending at least $10 million to the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice as part of billions in a slush fund to be distributed to leftist groups.

The Biden administration’s incredibly corrupt $740 billion ‘Inflation Increase Act’, which badly worsened the nation’s economic situation, was a black hole of grift and graft.

And Senate Democrats had to pass it for everyone to find out just how bad it was.

The $3 billion in “justice block grants” were supposed to go to organizations that would improve air quality. But an initial $177 million in environmental justice grants are going to assorted leftist activist groups and their academic allies. With 17 organizations dividing up $177 million, there’s $10 million and change for all of them. And less money for those being taxed to pay for it.

The $177 million is to be used to turn the organizations into ‘Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers’ which is a fancy way of saying that they’ll help leftist groups apply for grant funding and, in the process, be able to shape who gets what.

With billions of dollars at stake, the $177 million stolen from taxpayers by corrupt politicians is only the first of a massive fortune in government spending that is feeding inflation and diverting money that should be going to shore up Medicare and Social Security to Biden’s leftist allies.

Wright conveniently sits on Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, she co-founded the National Black Environmental Justice Network, which worked with the Biden campaign, and had claimed that, “Donald Trump becomes the first President to champion environmental racism and injustice.”

The original executive director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network was Damu Smith. The black nationalist was a longtime supporter of Marxist guerrillas abroad, especially in Latin America, and had addressed a Farrakhan rally by telling members of the racist hate group that, “white men are wreaking havoc in our community.”

Damu Smith had founded Black Voices for Peace after 9/11 to oppose bombing Al Qaeda and blamed the Islamic terrorist attacks on our foreign policy. As part of his anti-Israel hate campaign, Smith had been in the Jewish State when he fell ill and later died.

Another recipient of one of the EPA’s big checks is West Harlem Environmental Action or WE ACT headed by Peggy Shepard: the former press secretary for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign and a local Democrat activist. Like Wright, Shepard sits on Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and even acts as its co-chair.

The Biden administration is dispensing massive grants to members of its own council.

Peggy Shepard had denounced Trump and had aggressively pressured Biden for money.

Biden had agreed to the Justice40 pledge which meant that 40% of a proposed $2 trillion in spending on the political hoax of global warming would go to minority groups.

“I’m very concerned about how that 40 percent is administered,” Shepard had claimed.

With that much looted money at stake, carved out of the flesh and blood, the earnings, savings and futures of Americans, by greedy special interests, we should all be very concerned.

Amazon’s former boss Jeff Bezos, and the owner of one of the world’s largest ‘mega-yachts’ supplied by a fleet of choppers, also runs a $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund. The Fund had pumped millions into the lefty activist groups to help them take American taxpayer money.

The Bezos money was to be used to “hold the Biden administration accountable for carrying out its Justice40 initiative.” $4 million from Wright’s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and $6 million from Shepard’s West Harlem Environmental Action were to be used to “ensure federal funding from Justice40 ‘goes where it’s intended.’”

Invest four or six million and get back ten million plus. It’s a good investment strategy.

To add to the blatantly partisan nature of this slush fund, the Biden administration’s big meeting of environmentalists had included Shepard, alongside Tom Steyer, a Democrat presidential candidate, and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, who was picked by Biden to oversee the $370 billion in “environmental” spending from the ‘Inflation Increase Act’.

How will a Democrat political operative possibly direct all of that green environmental cash?

The EPA was already a piggy bank for leftist causes: Biden’s Justice40 initiative cuts his black nationalist allies in on the action. Instead of only white leftists profiting from environmentalism, 40% of the loot will be passed on to the black Democrat activists who helped put Biden in the White House. And could there be anything ‘cleaner’ and ‘greener’ than billions in payoffs?

Intersectional exercises like ramming an environmental justice office into the EPA are about creating a more complex network of graft under the guise of intertwined leftist causes.

Away from the green grift and graft, real environmental disasters continue to unfold. Last week, a truck carrying 40,000 pounds of toxic soil from East Palestine overturned on the highway.

“We know that so many communities across the nation have the solutions to the environmental challenges they face. Unfortunately, many have lacked access or faced barriers when it comes to the crucial federal resources needed to deliver these solutions,” EPA boss Michael Regan claimed. “Today we’re taking another step to break down these barriers.”

Regan wasn’t talking about East Palestine, whose residents have the wrong politics and skin color, but his agency’s racial grants. The racist EPA boss had taken over two weeks to visit East Palestine and only stayed long enough to assure them that everything was fine before getting back to his day job of claiming that only black people can be the victims of environmental hazards.

Back in East Palestine, many residents are leaving. They don’t trust his empty reassurances.

East Palestine and Justice40 both form a picture of what real environmental racism looks like.

Under the Biden administration, the EPA has become more of a leftist slush fund than ever, and the real victims of environmental racism, like those in East Palestine, are the ones left behind. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Social-justice programming for every college student

By Nicholas Giordano

The social-justice warriors are pushing full steam ahead with their plans to turn our classrooms into indoctrination dens. The State University of New York system, in which I’m a political-science professor, just announced expanded “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice” requirements for every degree program starting in fall 2023.

That’s right — DEISJ classes are required to earn a degree, even in departments outside liberal arts such as math, science and engineering.

These initiatives do nothing more than cultivate division, distort reality, eliminate the power of the individual and insult any fair-minded person. DEISJ is a cultural movement, not an academic discipline, inhibiting academic freedom and doing little to prepare students for the workforce.

This curriculum has no place in education. Americans — parents, students, employers — need to defend our nation’s academic institutions, which are critical to forming a citizenry equipped to uphold our republic through economic productivity and civic engagement.

DEISJ drives are a cancer spreading throughout American institutions. To meet SUNY’s requirements, students must master specific criteria for spotting and responding to “dynamics of power, privilege, oppression, and opportunity” in all aspects of the past and the present.......To Read More.......

Jack Smith, Clinton's DOJ Hit Man, Comes After Trump

Daniel Greenfield November 30, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Bruce Wasserstein, a billionaire backer of the Clintons, provided a $25 million donation to Harvard Law, future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, then serving as dean, welcomed it. The gift built on the Wasserstein Fellows Program already established at Harvard Law which brought “outstanding public interest lawyers” to Harvard and provided them stipends of up to $24,000 to meet with and influence students toward social justice at the prestigious law school.

When Jack Smith became a Wasserstein Fellow, even while, unironically, serving as head of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, seemingly soliciting and accepting a grant funded by a leftist billionaire (but who watches the integrity of the head of the Public Integrity Section) he joined a list of leftist activist lawyers working for the ACLU, Earthjustice, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Soros’ Open Society, Catholic Charities and the UN.

The mission of the Wasserstein Fellows was to gather “a diverse group of accomplished public interest lawyers who are enthusiastic about sharing their passions with law students on how to utilize their legal education to promote social justice.” Those passions included illegal migration, letting criminals get away with committing crimes and dismantling America.

How the DOJ’s Jack Smith would go about promoting social justice was a question that was answered twice. At least twice in public view where everyone could see and hear it.

The latest came when Attorney General Garland picked Smith as the Special Counsel to go after Trump. But before that anyone wondering what Jack Smith did to be chosen as a social justice lawyer would have had to be paying close attention to the IRS scandal that took place a year before he was made a Wasserstein Fellow.

Under Obama, the IRS and the DOJ had illegally targeted conservative nonprofits in order to silence political dissent. While Lois Lerner, sourly testifying before Congress, became the profoundly unsympathetic face of the IRS, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee revealed who was playing a key role in criminalizing dissent.

“The Justice Department convened a meeting with former IRS official Lois Lerner in October 2010 to discuss how the IRS could assist in the criminal enforcement of campaign-finance laws against politically active nonprofits. This meeting was arranged at the direction of Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith,” the Committee stated.

According to the Republican National Lawyers Association, “Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith told investigators that officials at the Justice Department discussed targeting conservative nonprofit groups with Lerner as early as October 2010.”

A year later, Smith became a Wasserstein Fellow.

Despite all this, Smith flew under the radar. While Lois Lerner was denounced, Smith remained virtually as anonymous as his name, including his actual name, John Smith, but Smith was just doing his job. Not on our behalf, but for those who had put him in his role.

Smith had been handpicked to run the DOJ’s public integrity section by Lanny Breuer.

Breuer, Bill Clinton’s Special Counsel who defended him during his impeachment hearings, and then Sandy Berger, after he stole classified documents from the National Archives to cover up Clinton’s actions, had been brought in by Obama to head up DOJ’s criminal division.

The Clinton consigliere, widely disliked, distrusted and hated even by fellow Democrats and lefties over his connections and client list, a man whom no one in D.C. believed had an ounce of integrity, then brought in Jack Smith to do some of his dirty work.

Would Lanny Breuer have picked anyone with integrity to head public integrity?

A New York Times review of some of Breuer and Smith’s cases appear to focus almost entirely on Republicans, touching on names like Sen. John Ensign, Rep Tom DeLay, Rep. Jerry Lewis, and Rep. Don Young, while mentioning the convictions of Rep. Rick Renzi and Gov. Bob McDonnell: respectively pardoned and overturned.

Public integrity under Obama meant targeting Republicans. It still does under Biden. Much as it did under the Clintons. Three corrupt administrations united by their abuses of the DOJ.

When a new day seemed to be dawning after Trump’s victory, Jack Smith made a timely exit from the government and became the head of litigation for the Hospital Corporation of America.

The Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) had become stocked with Obama administration veterans a few years earlier.

Marilyn Tavenner, almost as much of a staple of Obama scandals as Lois Lerner, who had headed the disastrous Obamacare rollout and tried to explain why the website wasn’t working, had come out of HCA. Nancy-Ann DeParle, the architect of Obamacare, became an HCA director.

Their real purpose of the HCA-Obamacare connection wasn’t to implement things on the consumer side, but to help broker a dirty deal that brought HCA on board with Obamacare. When King v. Burwell was poised to take on Obamacare, the HCA filed a brief on behalf of the illegal program to defend the exchanges as part of the dirty deal that it had made with the Obama administration.

Even as future Senator Rick Scott, the ousted former CEO of HCA, campaigned against Obamacare, warning, “If we have more government involvement we’re going to have dramatically worse health care”, Biden boasted of the HCA joining a deal to “cut costs” to make Obamacare work.

With that kind of history, Jack Smith going to work for HCA made a lot of sense.

To ordinary people, Smith’s career, the DOJ, war crimes prosecutor in Yugoslavia and the head of litigation for a hospital chain seem interestingly random. They do have one thing in common.

These were all priority projects of the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton had been obsessed with a government takeover of healthcare long before Obama. The disastrous intervention in Yugoslavia was a Clinton project. And the Clintons had been fixated on seizing control of the DOJ and punishing their political enemies.

That is what the DOJ began to do from Hillary’s abuse of FBI files to Russiagate.

Even Smith’s role as a Wasserstein Fellow has a familiar ring to it.

Bruce Wasserstein had a history with the Clintons. When Rahm Emanuel left the Clinton White House, he got a job running Wasserstein’s office in Chicago. And before long, the Clinton adviser and future Obama Chief of Staff and Mayor of Chicago had made $16 million.

Wasserstein did more than just host fundraising events for Bill Clinton, alongside Alec Baldwin, not to mention donating to Hillary Clinton, Gore, Schumer and so many other Democrats. (Although he was also briefly Mitch McConnell’s brother-in-law.) On his passing the corporate raider was praised for his “passion for social justice”. He never saw Hillary Clinton rise and fall.

It may be a coincidence, but Smith’s resume is what one might expect of a federal careerist with Clinton connections. Even his extended European vacation was the sort of thing that Clintonites used to build up their resumes. That resume became outdated in the Obama era, but Smith still seemed able to hit a lot of the right notes.

Smith was even named one of the “International Gender Champions” and claimed that he was “strongly committed to working with my Office to ensure that gender equality, as part of diversity and inclusion, is a key consideration to everything we do.”

There is one curious final note as to how Smith was picked as the Specialist Prosecutor for the Yugoslavia war crimes trials in the Hague. Smith was chosen in 2018 “after a selection process organised by the European Union” and was “appointed by the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo mission head, Alexandra Papadopoulou”. In 2020, Papadopoulou, a Fulbright Scholar, became Greece’s ambassador to the Biden administration.

Washington D.C. may appear small compared to some other major cities, but it’s a vast hive of careerists, contractors, consultants, lobbyists and activists all scurrying around the stone and glass buildings, the eateries and shops, whose relationships to each other are as entangled as they are hostile to us. As George Carlin once said, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

Jack Smith is a lifetime member of the club. And now he’s been given the biggest job of his career. It’s not one that is likely to reap much in the way of immediate rewards. Just ask Bob Swan Mueller III, but it’s an act of public service to the political network that runs D.C.

And parts beyond, into the European Union, which helped contribute to Russiagate.

Since Smith’s leg was broken after a bicycle accident (a hazard in the Biden administration), he’ll be running the investigation of Trump from Europe. And no one finds it odd that an investigation of a former president will operate from the capital of the European Union.

But it’s not like we run our own country anyway.

The upper echelons of the administrative state are a network of political alliances by ambitious men and women looking for the next rung to power. They don’t work for us. Instead they serve their sponsors and use political connections to navigate the public-private career ladder.

The media is already building up Smith’s mythos. “A  Justice Department lawyer out of central casting,” the New York Times gushed, with a “grizzled mien”. And, “an idealist and a brilliant independent thinker and a gutsy lawyer”. Central casting always needs good actors to play the part and fool the people long enough for the next phase of the plan to kick into action.

And, at least unlike Bob Mueller and Joe Biden, Jack Smith probably knows where he is. And he knows who really runs things and whom he needs to serve to get that next big job.

 

A Liberation Theologist Offers Salvation to Minority White Supremacists

Daniel Greenfield November 04, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Miguel De La Torre, a former president of the Society of Christian Ethics, showed up at a small Catholic university, telling students that minorities can be white, but that they can also be saved.

“Those of us who are colored, some of us can also be white," the professor of Latinx Studies at the Iliff School of Theology assured all races suffering from whiteness. "But the good news is there is salvation."

The lecture by De La Torre, who is also an ordained minister, claimed that minorities "with colonized minds seek to assimilate to a Euroamerican version of Christianity" and proposed a post-colonial alternative based "on the revolutionary activities of the Young Lords".

Students at Carlow University, founded by the Sisters of Mercy, could look forward to abandoning "EuroAmerican Christianity" for the much more authentic theology of a racist Puerto Rican street gang.

Much of this material already showed up in De La Torre's books, “Burying White Privilege: Resurrecting a Badass Christianity” and "Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers".

"A White Christian worldview can be advocated by those who are black or brown, Jew or Muslim, queer or heteronormative, atheist or humanist," De La Torre argued in “Decolonizing Christianity”.

In the woke professor's excitingly inclusive world, anyone can be a white supremacist.

All you have to do is believe.

Or defend the current "political, economic, and social structures" and "embrace white philosophical and theological paradigms." That could potentially encompass the Bible and the entire western canon. Not to mention notions such as private property and the nuclear family.

But what does the “badass believer” believe in?

“I don’t know if there is a God or not; and quite frankly I really don’t care,” De La Torre told them.

Instead he urged students to, "crucify whiteness".

To be a truly badass believer is to believe in nothing except your own impassioned rhetoric.

De La Torre claims that he’s not a theologian, but he’s quite interested in “Liberation Theology”, just not the actual kind. His theology is reducible to the familiar leftist formulas of power relations and the eternal Marxist Manichean struggle of the oppressor and the oppressor.

Thus, he writes that, "to read Genesis is to read the testimonies of illegal aliens", but also that "one of the book's purposes is to provide moral justification for the eventual genocide of the promised land's original indigenous inhabitants."

The Bible can be mined for social justice purposes, but is ultimately evil.

“The decolonization of the minds of people of color begins with the total rejection of the dead white God and the dead white Jesus. And let the dead bury the dead,” he argues elsewhere.

What better message could there be for the Catholic Carlow University and his own Methodist Iliff School of Theology?

The salvation of minorities from Euroamerican Christianity is De La Torre’s business. The child of Santeria worshipers, De La Torre joined the Young Republicans and became a born-again Christian. After getting into a conflict with conservative Christians, he was reborn as a leftist “Baptecostal Catholic Santero” and constantly retells his own wokeness conversion story.

"It took years of decolonizing my mind of the subtle white supremacy I was taught," he writes in an article attacking the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

By "decolonizing" his mind, De La Torre actually colonized it with unsubtle racial supremacism.

The best way to understand the true meaning of a leftist term is to invert it. Decolonization, colonizes. Liberation theology, enslaves. Social justice is individual oppression. Radical love is traditional hate.

In the introduction to Decolonizing Christianity, De La Torre, a white Euro-American man of Cuban origin who identifies as an oppressed minority, declares that it's "not written for Euro-Americans in the futile hope of shaming or encouraging them to do the right thing. For almost 250 years, white Christian terrorism has been the legitimized law of the land."

Could there be anything more Christian than writing off millions of people because of their race?

The paradox of leftist radicalism is that it is an inverse faith, defined by the negative dark images it projects onto others, while lacking any meaning or substance of its own.

Leftism is a void cloaked in outrage. Its ravenous desire to be angered by the stories of victims is used to disguise the hubris of its appetites. Leftists don’t believe in God, because they want to be gods. Yet they’re incapable of creating, only destroying. What does that make them?

That is why leftists always accuse others of their own sins.

Suffering from racism, they campaign against it. And they prescribe their nobler social justice racism, rooted in intersectionality, post-colonial analysis and fifty academic texts, as the answer.

Liberation Theology, like its Tikkun Olam counterpart in Judaism, and all the various social justice theologies, are obsessed with evil, but incapable of envisioning good apart from it.

And thus, in keeping with another of his books, De La Torre told students to choose “hopelessness.”

“I fight for justice not because I am going to win,” he said, “I am not."

Leftists never claim to have won. Winning would involve accepting responsibility and accountability. The Communists took over the Soviet Union, but would never admit to having won, instead blaming all their problems on the Czarist regime or on domestic subversion. A Biden administration that admitted to having won would have to take responsibility for the economic crisis, instead of playing the victim and blaming corporations, or Putin.

A movement of perpetual victims who seek absolute power, yet claim to be powerless, is at the dark heart of leftist narcissism. Leftists, if you believe them, are always the underdogs, always oppressed, even when they have all the wealth and power. They are always abused, even and especially when they’re the ones doing the abusing.

Consider the spectacle of the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, backed by the wealth of Amazon’s former CEO, claiming that any criticism of her is harassment, only to then stalk and doxx another woman because she disagreed with her political views on Twitter.

The Left demands the total inversion of truth as a precondition of belonging to its movement. Its mysteries are rooted in its hypocrisies. It multiplies absurdities until it even inverts itself. It seeks new enemies to fight until, but without those enemies, which require its followers to destroy parts of themselves, those men and women have no idea who they even are anymore.

"As a committed liberationist-leaning Christian, I may have no choice but to say the Shahada and convert to Islam if I wish to be faithful to my beliefs," De La Torre insists at one point.

Having thoroughly decolonized himself, De La Torre is ready to be colonized all over again.

Since the cult of social justice is the search for the greatest gold mine of victimhood, what else is there for a Baptecostal Catholic Santero to do except become a Muslim?

If you don’t believe in God, you may as well not believe in Allah. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. Thank you for reading.

Victims Wanted

Daniel Greenfield July 31, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

The replacement of women was always inevitable. The idea that slightly less than half the world’s population and slightly more than half of America’s population was an oppressed minority group never made much sense. And the time always comes when yesterday’s oppressed minority group intersectionally ages out into tomorrow’s oppressors. Minority groups that don't die as victims live long enough to see themselves become the villains.

Jews were replaced by Muslims, women and gay men by transgenders, and the time will come when Muslim transgenders are replaced by something even more excitingly cutting edge.

Radicalism, primarily a hobby of upper class white people, requires a steady supply of victims whose stories they can inhale, emote, appropriate and polish up into a bloody revolution. The less exotic the victims, the more likely they are to be replaced. Upwardly mobile successful groups make the least appealing victims. That’s what happened to the Jews. And now it’s happening to gay men. Asians are in even bigger trouble on the victimhood front.

An ideal victim is in a perpetual state of socioeconomic misery and brewing with violence. The trick is fighting to liberate them while keeping them in that same state, available for weekly revolutions and sad sack stories to be consumed by suburban woke ladies at book clubs.

Revolution is about money and power for a select few, but for the dulled denizens of a society that has long since blurred fact and fiction, reality and ideology, the performance is the thing. Political metafictional narratives distill a police shooting into books, movies, and an entire culture which being both real and fiction are more compelling than either fiction or the real world.

The George Floyd fandom took a career criminal dead of a drug overdose, made him a meme, and immersed countless liberals commuting cautiously into the city into a racial rebellion against the imaginary evil empire of systemic racism at the mere cost of wrecked neighborhoods and thousands of deaths. Black Lives Matter leaders got Hollywood deals and mansions out of it.

When it works, it works. The Holocaust was a compelling story, but the sequel sucked. The Jews, instead of going back to concentration camps every decade, successfully built their own country, survived multiple wars and have a thriving tech industry. Any script doctor worth his salt would take a look at such a script and shake his head. The dramatic twist some of the Moscow playwrights came up with was that the Jews were now the Nazis. Didn’t see that one coming?

The plot twist kicks in all the time.

American history is a litany of oppressed groups, the Irish, the Germans, the Swedish, the Jews, and the Italians who arrived, struggled and then got houses in the suburbs. Their social justice great-grandkids have been taught to sneer and call them all “white guys”. And then there was the working class, the coal miners, once the subject of labor ballads, now accused by Rolling Stone and the Harvard faculty driving around in their Teslas of destroying the planet.

Appalachia never made it big, but old stories eventually need to be swapped out for new ones, or at least rotated. You can’t just have back-to-back race riots. The insurance companies won’t stand for it. And even George Soros might lose some money on his investments. Instead you program in some abortion protests, terror attacks, a bunch of new sexual identities, and then bring out the race riots. Left jab, right cross, badda bing, bada boom. That’s social justice.

And social justice incentivizes minority groups to fail and go on failing. A minority group that succeeds is no longer a victim. But it also has to fail in ways that get attention. High suicide rates and overdoses alone won’t do it. Victim culture is about allowing the Elizabeth Warrens out there to live out their fantasies. A minority group needs to be somewhat exotic. It must have a culture to be fetishized and misunderstood. It must be both desired and abhorred so as to shock upper-middle-class parents, but in a way that will make them feel guilty for being shocked.

Which is to say that minorities can’t let their act get stale. A compelling moral case helps, but this is about entertainment. A Columbia student working on his degree in journalism must be able to imagine bombing government buildings in the name of your cause. And enjoy it. The mix of condescension, appropriation and repressed violence is the force that gives American leftists meaning. All that projection needs exciting minority victims as its object.

And when minorities no longer deliver, they get replaced.

Initially there are hints, like "Latinos Must Confront 'Ingrained' Anti-Black Racism" (NBC News), "White Gay Privilege Exists All Year, But It Is Particularly Hurtful During Pride" (also NBC News), and "How To Talk To Your Asian Immigrant Parents About Racism" (still NBC News).

(Why does NBC News hate Latinos, gays and Asian immigrants so much?)

When the hints, shouts and UN resolutions stop working then, as with the Jews, there’s rage, violent threats and renewed calls for genocide. The only way to show the victims who stop being model victims how to be proper victims is by making them victims all over again.

And then maybe they can be rescued.

Victimhood is meant to be a baton, a torch passed from the oppressed, who can now afford to be the oppressors, to the newly oppressed who just got here and are already “so tired” of performing the “unpaid emotional labor” of complaining about all the microaggressions.

Privilege requires taking the blame for all of it, but also deciding whom to pay attention to.

Civil rights has long ceased to be a liberation program and has become an art theater piece Only crazies and celebrities think that being seen is power. Performing can be lucrative and emotionally fulfilling to narcissists, the insecure and the emotionally damaged, but real power comes from being in the audience, from buying the ticket and holding the remote control.

The oppressed perform while the oppressors watch. The modern oppressed are eager to perform their oppression on demand, to shout and wail when the camera comes on, to condemn the audience for needing to watch even as they demand that it watch them, conflating liberation and degradation because performative outrage looks like power to those with no sensibility.

This repulsive circus is alien to a culture of equality which comes from self-reliance. Entangled dependencies create grievances while the moral power of independence frees us from blaming others. Equity, unlike equality, is premised wholly on blame, its central moral premise is “accountability” by which it means that everyone must confess to a relationship, must accept a role as the oppressor or the oppressed while knowing that those roles may change any time.

Anti-racism has the oppressed demanding that the oppressors commit to oppressing them so that they can demand the privileges of the oppressed. Critical race theory is the conviction that the power of the oppressors is unlimited and inescapable. Its greatest trick is convincing the oppressed to oppress themselves so that the oppressors continue to pay attention to them.

Desperate professional victims enact their own rituals of victimhood, sometimes getting rich in the process, but mostly wrecking their communities and giving themselves mental disorders, because they can’t imagine any form of power except reenacting their own degradation. Robbed of anything to rebel against, they fight phantoms like “white fragility”, “white silence” or “color blindness”, furiously protesting the refusal of their putative oppressors to go oppressing them.

There is power in maintaining the bond between the oppressor and the oppressed. Some actors, no matter how much they hate their typecast part, will go on playing it because it’s the only role they know and the checks are good. Victimhood is a lot like that. And professional victims fear losing their audience and having it move on to a more dynamic minority group redolent of otherness, capable of unreeling a better elevator pitch sob story, most of all.

White wokes need their victims and victims need their wokes. The emotional sadomasochistic relationship yields vast amounts of political power and a relevant identity in an age where most identities, along with business models and private lives, have been swallowed up by the social cloud. The stories we tell also tell us who we are. Are we the heroes or are we the villains?

Heroes need victims to save. And villains need victims to persecute. What do victims need?

 Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.   Click here to subscribe to my articles. Thank you for reading.

Kellogg’s Goes Woke While Its Workers Go Broke

Daniel Greenfield October 21, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In the late 19th century, John Harvey Kellogg, a eugenicist and celibate vegetarian, became the leading health food nut of the era and along the way accidentally invented corn flakes.

Back then Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium was a spa for the rich where patients got electric baths and enemas (the subject of a scathing parody in the book and movie, The Road to Wellville). These days, Battle Creek, Michigan is in much worse shape and Kellogg’s is the area’s biggest employer. But the corporation, like most of its multinational woke ilk, spends most of its time virtue signaling social justice while outsourcing American jobs.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, another of the multitude of hijacked radical foundations, is the biggest shareholder of Kellogg's through the Kellogg's Foundation Trust. The left-wing activist foundation had originally been founded as the W. K. Kellogg Child Welfare Foundation by John's brother who idealistically but foolishly told his board, "Use the money as you please, so long as it promotes the health, happiness, and welfare of children."

An example of the Kellogg Foundation's promotion of the happiness of children is its Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Implementation Guidebook which claims that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is racist, and saying, “People are people. We are all alike regardless of the color of our skin,” is even more horrifyingly racist.

A century after John Kellogg’s involvement with the Race Betterment Foundation which called for a registry deciding who should be sterilized in order to improve the “race”, an idea later embraced by the Nazis, Kellogg’s is hopelessly racist. The only difference is that it traded eugenic racism against black people for social justice racism against white people.

Kellogg’s cereal pushes Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby board book on parents to teach that even white babies are evil racists. “We know that by two years old children are already consuming racist ideas,” Ibram X. Kendi declared. That wasn’t true until he got started.

With some help from Kellogg’s.

But while Kellogg’s was working hard to promote the ”health, happiness, and welfare of children” by feeding them sugary cereals and teaching them that white people are evil, it was also busy wrecking the economy of Battle Creek, Michigan to make a little more money.

It didn’t count though because much of the Kellogg’s Battle Creek workforce is white.

Under CEO Carlos Gutierrez, later Bush's Commerce Secretary, much of the operation was shut down and moved to Mexico. After that Battle Creek's unemployment rate went from 3.9% to 7.5%.

"He knows exactly what it takes to make American businesses grow and create jobs," Bush said of Gutierrez.

Which was true. Just in Mexico.

Since then, Gutierrez became Romney's Hispanic chairman, and endorsed Hillary and Biden, but not until he created Republicans for Immigration Reform after turning on Mitt Romney for not being sufficiently supportive of replacing Americans. "I think we lost the election because the far right of this party has taken the party to a place that it doesn't belong," he huffed.

Maybe some Republicans opposed to endless immigration used to have jobs in Battle Creek.

The workers who do still have jobs in Battle Creek are on strike. 1,400 workers are now walking the picket line after Kellogg's announced that it would cut 212 jobs

The local union president, a fourth-generation worker, said that they were tired of Kellogg's moving jobs to Mexico.

"We work seven days a week, that’s what we do. In exchange for that, we live the American dream. At the end of the day, that’s what they want to take from all of us."

Kellogg’s prefers the Kendi dream of getting rich by accusing Americans of racism while screwing the American working class. And it’s not just the American workers who get the shaft from the woke virtue signalers in the C-suite. A few years ago, Kellogg's moved its cereal plant from Ontario to China. And it closed its Australian plant and shifted over to Thailand.

When Kellogg's isn't firing its American workers and trading them for foreign workers who will work for a fraction of the cost, it's terrorizing its workforce with Equity, Diversity & Inclusion. While Kellogg's won't pay its workers fairly, it has hired a roster of diversity executives who make 4 times their salary to tell them how racist they are.

CEO Steve Cahillane responded to the drug overdose death of George Floyd and the subsequent devastating riots by the Black Lives Matter racist hate group by falsely claiming that there were "racial injustices" and declaring that "in North America, we cannot reinforce strongly enough our commitment to a diverse and inclusive environment". In North America, maybe not as much in actual racist countries where Kellogg's offers fewer “race conscious” classes.

The 360 degree turn from the Race Betterment Foundation to the Kellogg’s Race Conscious learning series shows that horseshoe theory also applies to woke cereal companies.

“Kellogg recognized, along with the rest of the country and world, that we had entered a point of no return in terms of social justice,” a quote in Kellogg’s Equity newsletter screams. “What if we created a dialogue about the intersectionality of race and food?”

Or what if Kellogg’s stopped firing workers while telling them they’re racist?

While Kellogg’s touts the “Fight for Food Justice”, it treats its food workers like garbage. C-suite woke virtue signaling can cover up a multitude of sins. That’s why it’s taken over corporations. Instead of actually practicing ethics and decency, major corporations now hire diversity executives to assemble social justice word salads that make Corporate America sound like Che.

The more jobs Kellogg’s cuts at its Battle Creek birthplace, the more it talks about equity.

Kellogg’s boasts that it’s a Top 50 Company for Diversity and that diversity and equity are “paramount to achieving our success”, but the real secret sauce is cheap foreign labor.

An Amnesty International report accused Kellogg's and a variety of woke food multinationals, including Unilever, the parent company of antisemitic BDS advocate Ben and Jerry's, of getting palm oil from plantations where 8-year-olds worked under hazardous conditions.

While the C-suite virtue signals about social justice, children are dropping out of school to labor on plantations, women are working for $2.50 a day, and breathing in toxic pesticides.

“I don’t go to school,” a 10-year-old boy working on a plantation said. “I carry the sack with the loose fruit by myself but can only carry it half full. It is difficult to carry it, it is heavy. I do it in the rain as well but it is difficult…My hands hurt and my body aches.”

No one actually likes to see how the woke sausage or the cereal gets made.

"George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are among the many names burned into our consciousness," Kellogg's CEO Steve Cahillane declared.

Maybe the name of that 10-year-old boy or the fired Kellogg’s workers should be burned into his consciousness instead. But accusing America and white people of racism is cheap, running an ethical company is expensive. Just stop by Battle Creek or a woke palm oil plantation and find out how many children had to suffer and how many American workers had to lose their future so that Tony the Tiger could rot children’s teeth with sugar and their souls with racist wokeness.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Corporate America, immigration, recent

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Where Have You Gone, Atticus Finch?

By Jack Cashill 

In the archives of legal fiction, two characters best embody historic liberal self-perception. One is attorney Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. The other is Juror #8 in the 1957 film, 12 Angry Men.

Today, each is an endangered species. In his defense of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, Atticus ignored public opinion. He stared down the mobs intent on extra-legal justice and protected his ”mockingbird” as best he could. 

The unlikely mockingbird today is former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. As Chauvin learned quickly, if he did not know it beforehand, today’s vestigial liberals identify not with Atticus but with the mob. Hell, as even Snopes had to concede Vice President Kamala Harris “encouraged her supporters to donate” to a nonprofit called the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) that was bailing out members of the mob arrested for rioting after George Floyd’s death. Chauvin’s crime, like Robinson’s, was being of a certain race in a society that increasingly sees justice only through the prism of race. 

Like the fictional Robinson, the real-life Chauvin represents one of a long and growing line of sacrificial lambs offered on the altar of racial “justice” to expiate the nation’s imagined sins. Ever impatient, the mobs from the very same liberal metro could not wait for Chauvin’s official immolation to demand the sacrifice of a new lamb. This time, the mobs have shown no scruple about sating themselves on a female officer. To them, it mattered not a whit that veteran Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, officer Kim Potter clearly showed no racial malice in her accidental shooting of Duante Wright, a troubled archetype from a subculture slowly being crushed under the weight of rigidly enforced dishonesty.........To Read More....

• Minneapolis’s prosecutors always knew George Floyd died of natural causes October 21, 2023 Tucker Carlson reports on the story, but what’s really worthwhile is listening to Vince Everett Ellison, who is amazing. More
•   October 21, 2023 ‘Tucker on X’ Episode 32: ‘The Whole George Floyd Story Was a Lie’ In episode 32 of his newest production “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson declared “the whole George Floyd story was a lie” and discussed with Vince Everett Ellison how the Democratic Party uses men like Floyd to advance its agenda and maintain power.

 

All Together Now: Recite The Equity Communication Pledge

Could the Social Justice woke warriors be a little more specific about their idea of equity and how far are they willing to go with their woke oppression, thought police, and woke Marxist indoctrination? 

By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh ——Bio and Archives--April 7, 2021

Cover Story | 5 Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

Prince William County, Virginia, being at the forefront of the woke diversity revolution, has a Racial and Social Justice Commission.  Racial and Social Justice Commission (pwcgov.org)

The County’s Board of Supervisors approved the commission on Oct. 19, 2020. It was tasked with reporting on “the state of racial and social justice for people of color” in the county and making policy recommendations to the local government. The entity’s initial focus is on policing, public education, and the ‘provision of government services.’” ‘You Want Us To Recite This?’: County ‘Social Justice Commission’ Starts Tense With Unannounced ‘Equity Pledge’ (The Daily Caller)........To Read More....

The Long March Through the Corporations: Book Review

March 25, 2021 Mike Gonzalez @ Law and Liberty

 

That all cultural institutions in America have been taken over by the Left is beyond question. The media, the academy, Hollywood—all are now in its clutches. Conservatives still cling to talk radio, just as tightly as they do to their guns and bibles, as President Obama so dismissively put it, but that is about the only redoubt of the “sense-making” institutions they still have.

This was no accident. Those who have studied the genesis of this annexation know that it was a deliberate “long march through the institutions.” That campaign was conceived in the late 1960s by the violent German activist Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of the non-violent but much more dangerous Frankfurt School academic Herbert Marcuse, who approved of Dutschke’s plan.

Today, this strategy manifests in the demand that institutions be “woke.” The term, borrowed from African-American slang for being awake, has come to mean not just any type of liberalism, but one denoted by an obsequious obsession with social issues, denunciations of “whiteness,” the insistence that the freest and most prosperous society today is hopelessly racist and in need of deep change, and the intolerant resolve to censor any deviation from any of these concepts through cancel culture. Other American institutions are teetering on the verge of a woke takeover.

The Churches—as in the institutionalized Abrahamic faiths—have long been bastions of conservatism by their very nature, but they are now in danger of seeing their commitment to true justice and the care for the poor and the stranger hijacked in the name of Social Justice, a concept that undermines religion. Social Justice abandons forgiveness and concentrates on punishment—especially, but not only, through forced redistribution of resources according to membership in categories of the supposedly oppressed and marginalized. Forgetting past sins, which the Bible repeatedly tells us is what God routinely does, is verboten.........To Read More....

 

Standing Up to the Mob

John Stossel Jan 20, 2021

Joe Biden says he'll "advance racial equity" by making "bold investments" in "Affordable Housing," aiding "businesses owned by Black and Brown people," establishing an "Equity Commission," etc.

Gosh, that'll do it.

Others demand reparations for slavery, more social programs and defunding the police.

Yet, economist Thomas Sowell says, "I haven't been able to find a single country in the world where policies advocated for Blacks in the United States lifted any people out of poverty."  Sowell's a Black man who grew up in poverty. His father died before he was born, and his mother died soon after.  "We were much poorer than the people in Harlem and most anywhere else today," he reflects. "But in the sense of things you need to get ahead, I was enormously more fortunate than most Black kids today."

That's because he discovered the public library. "When you start getting in the habit of reading when you're 8 years old, it's a different ballgame!"........... To Read More.....

 

The Woke Movement is Leninism 4.0: Political Commentator Dr. James Lindsay

By Gary Du and Jan Jekielek January 15, 2021  

  

Dr. James Lindsay, an American-born author and political commentator, called the “woke” movement promoted by Black Lives Matter and other left-wing activists Leninism 4.0.

“Now we have the attempt to apply Leninism to the American context, using corporations as part of the toolset, for example. And so we call this movement the ‘woke’ movement. We talked about woke capital with all the corporations … the woke movement is Leninism 4.0,” Lindsay told Jan Jekielek, host of The Epoch Times’ American Thoughts Leaders program on Jan. 13.

Lindsay explained that the first 3 versions or flavors of Leninism through Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, each tried to fix the problems from the previous version.

The “woke” movement that has evolved today focuses on the issues of social and racial justice and has become a catchword used by Black Lives Matter activists on the streets.........To Read More.....

 

 

The Politics of Affliction

New York City’s progressive leaders apparently believe that it is their mission to disrupt the comfort of their constituents.

Seth Barron December 17, 2020

There was no shortage of suffering in New York in 2020. With the Covid-19 pandemic, economic hardship, rioting, and street violence, there’s been plenty of misery to go around. But according to some prominent elected officials and bureaucrats, the fun’s only getting started. They seem to see it as part of their job—really, their duty—to make sure that New Yorkers feel the pain.

At a Brooklyn rally in early June, commemorating the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams gave an impassioned speech. Before a crowd of thousands of mourners—who gathered en masse despite the risk of exposure to Covid and the city’s state of emergency forbidding public assembly—Williams denounced critics of the protesters. “The people who have been affected the most have been uncomfortable for 500 years!” he thundered. “If one person is comfortable, we all should be comfortable. But if one person isn’t, we all shouldn’t rest.” As a prescription for society, this standard of comfort would be hard to universalize. But Williams elaborated: “We must always, always comfort the afflicted. But in order to get justice, we must afflict the comfortable.”...........To Read More......

Lab Coat Tyranny

California is using “public health” as a rationale to push progressive political goals.

 

Christopher F. Rufo October 9, 202

Public health authorities in California have unveiled a “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” that requires counties to meet new “health equity metrics” in order to emerge from the current Covid-19 lockdowns. It’s a broad experiment in social justice. Under the plan, counties must reduce “disparities in levels of transmission” in “low-income, Black, Latino, [and] Pacific Islander” communities before they can move forward with reopening. In effect, local businesses must remain closed until local bureaucrats are satisfied that ill-defined racial quotas have been met.

The underlying assumption of the blueprint is that race-based coronavirus disparities are the result of “systemic racism,” despite zero evidence that the state’s coronavirus policies have been discriminatory. The plan ignores potential differences in culture, behavior, and underlying health, resting instead on the premise that racism is the driving force behind every disparate outcome. The blueprint also subverts the democratic process. Unelected public health officials are restricting essential freedoms, including mobility, worship, and economic activity, without deliberation by the state legislature or the possibility of review or appeal..........To Read More.....

 

Rutgers Declares Grammar Racist

English Department pledges to incorporate 'critical grammar' into program

Chrissy Clark - July 24, 2020

The English department at a public university declared that proper English grammar is racist.

Rutgers University's English department will change its standards of English instruction in an effort to "stand with and respond" to the Black Lives Matter movement. In an email written by department chairwoman Rebecca Walkowitz, the Graduate Writing Program will emphasize "social justice" and "critical grammar."

Walkowitz said the department would respond to recent events with "workshops on social justice and writing," "increasing focus on graduate student life," and "incorporating ‘critical grammar' into our pedagogy." The "critical grammar" approach challenges the standard academic form of the English language in favor of a more inclusive writing experience. The curriculum puts an emphasis on the variability of the English language instead of accuracy........To Read More....

Rutgers University declares proper grammar racist; standards to be adjusted

July 25, 2020 | Frieda Powers

Rutgers University’s English department has declared that correct grammar puts some students at a disadvantage and changes will now be made to address “social justice” and “critical grammar.”
Standards in English instruction will be adjusted now that proper grammar has been deemed racist by the public university, according to an email from Rebecca Walkowitz, a professor of English and chairwoman of the English Department at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

 Former Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain slammed the move in a recent Fox News appearance, explaining how Black Lives Matter supporters and activists are essentially pushing for “lowered standards” for black students who should be given “special treatment.”

In order to “stand with and respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement, changes will be made to the Graduate Writing Program, as the Rutgers English department will introduce “workshops on social justice and writing,” according to an email titled “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.”............More here..........

Breakdown: The Ferguson Effect

The unwinding of law and order in our cities has happened with stunning speed.
 

Heather Mac Donald July 1, 2020 

Reprinted with permission from the  City Journal.  I recommend subscribing to their e-mail alerts. 

It took several months for the first iteration of the Ferguson Effect to become obvious. Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in August 2014, triggering local riots and a national narrative about lethally racist police. Officers backed off proactive policing in minority neighborhoods, having been told that such discretionary enforcement was racially oppressive. By early 2015, the resulting spike in shootings and homicides had become patent and would lead to an additional 2,000 black homicide victims in 2015 and 2016, compared with 2014 numbers.

Today’s violent-crime increase—call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect—has come on with a speed and magnitude that make Ferguson 1.0 seem tranquil. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May was justly condemned—but the event has now spurred an outpouring of contempt against the pillars of law and order that has no precedent in American history. Every day, another mainstream institution—from McDonald’s to Harvard—denounces the police, claiming without evidence that law enforcement is a threat to black lives.

To be sure, the first manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement had a mouthpiece in the Oval Office, lacking now. It doesn’t matter. Presidential imprimatur or no, the reborn Black Lives Matter has gained billions of dollars in corporate support, more billions in free round-the-clock media promotion, and a ruthless power to crush dissent from the now-universal narrative about murderous police bigots. During the two weeks of national anarchy that followed the death of George Floyd, cops were shot, slashed, and assaulted; their vehicles and station houses were firebombed and destroyed. American elites stayed silent. Since then, police have continued to be shot at and attacked; the elites remain silent. Monuments to America’s greatest leaders are being defaced with impunity; anarchists took over a significant swathe of a major American city, including a police precinct, without resistance from the authorities. And a push to defund the police gains traction by the day.

The rising carnage in the inner city is the consequence of this official repudiation of the criminal-justice system. The current tolerance and justification for vandalism and violence; the silencing of police supporters; and police unwillingness to intervene, even when their own precincts are assaulted—all send a clear message to criminals that society has lost the will to prevent lawlessness. In Minneapolis, shootings have more than doubled this year compared to last. Nearly half of all those shootings have occurred since George Floyd’s death, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune analysis. On Father’s Day, a mass shooting on a crowded street uptown struck 11 people. The next day saw a chain of retaliatory shootings—the first next to a park filled with children, the next, 90 minutes later, on a notorious gang-dominated street intersection. In nearby St. Paul, reported firearms discharges have more than doubled. The same gangbangers are getting shot repeatedly. One 17-year-old boy has been shot in four different events over the last month and a half.

In Chicago, 18 people were killed and 47 wounded in drive- and walk-by shootings last weekend. The fatalities included a one-year-old boy riding in a car with his mother (the gunman drove up alongside and emptied his gun into the vehicle) and a 10-year-old girl struck in the head inside her home; a group of youth on the street outside her house had started shooting at another group of youth nearby. The previous weekend in Chicago, 104 people were shot, 15 fatally. The deceased included a three-year-old boy riding in a car with his father on Father’s Day—his gangbanger father was the intended victim—and a 13-year-old girl shot in her head in her home.

New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to the New York Times. At 4 a.m. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.

Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,” a Milwaukee police inspector told the Police Executive Research Forum, referring to the violence and the low officer morale. Shootings are spiking in Indianapolis. Other cities will show similar increases once their crime data are published.

By now, these drearily mindless gang shootings echo one another. Another three-year-old boy was shot in Chicago with his gangbanger father on another Father’s Day, this one in 2016; the boy is paralyzed for life. The young children recently shot inside their homes also recall Ferguson 1.0 incidents. In August 2016, a nine-year-old girl was shot to death in Ferguson on her mother’s bed while doing homework. The gunman was a 21-year-old felon on probation from a robbery conviction who deliberately shot at least six bullets into the home, located near a memorial for Michael Brown. But the pedigree of these domestic drive-bys is longer and more ominous. In New York, children used to sleep in bathtubs before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton began restoring lawfulness to the city in 1994; we are fast returning to that pre-Giuliani era.

In Baltimore, homicides are higher so far this year than in 2019, which had the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings, which eclipse those of June 2019, include a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by the father of the woman’s unborn child, according to the police.

The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population. But the defund-the-police advocates and the Democratic establishment have said nothing about the growing loss of black lives.

Instead, the Black Lives Matter movement is tweeting about police defunding, last weekend’s gay pride marches, and NASCAR’s Bubba Wallace, the subject of yet another hate-crime hoax. DeRay Mckesson, an early BLM organizer in Ferguson, is retweeting about whether homophobes are secretly gay. Activist Shaun King, who recently called for vandals to destroy stained-glass windows portraying the Baby Jesus and Mary, is retweeting that Mount Rushmore is an act of vandalism. Ja’Mal Green, a Black Lives Matter organizer in Chicago who was arrested in 2016 for assaulting and attempting to disarm an officer, offered a $5,000 reward on Saturday for information on the killing of the one-year-old boy in Chicago, but coupled that offer with another call to defund the police. Since then, Green has been tweeting about abortion rights and the extradition of President Trump to Iran. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is tweeting about abortion rights, gay pride, and Trump’s culpability for the coronavirus epidemic. The Vera Institute for Justice, a liberal criminal-justice think tank, announced on Monday that “now is the time to spend less on policing” in order to “create safer communities for Black people.”

Actually, now would seem not to be the time to spend less on policing, with gunslingers retaking control of urban streets. The timing of the defund movement was always a puzzle, coming as it did after weeks of destructive riots during which law enforcement was wildly overmatched. Such a demonstration of the violence that lies just beneath the surface of civilization would not, one might think, be the best opening pitch for an argument to shrink police manpower and resources further. Yet the defund idea took off, with the media making sure that the looting and arson became a hazy memory (at least for those whose life’s work did not go up in flames) while alleged police racism remained in the headlines. The establishment, in further proof of the elite betrayal of the principle of law, was happy to forgive and forget the riots as an understandable release of black rage. And now, the self-described champions of black lives are pressing ahead with their anti-cop campaign, with a breezy indifference to countervailing evidence.

While 307 people have been murdered this year in Chicago, the Chicago police have killed three suspects, all armed and dangerous. In 2018, the New York Police Department recorded its lowest number of fatal civilian shootings—five—since records were first kept in 1971. (Data from 2019 have not been published.) All five victims were threatening or appeared to be threatening officers with guns or knives.

The Minneapolis Effect will not be confined to intra-racial gang violence. Sadistic and gratuitous attacks on elderly citizens have been accelerating in recent weeks—a 78-year-old woman punched casually on the head in Brooklyn; an 80-year-old man knocked to the ground, dragged, and robbed in the Bronx; and a 92-year-old woman slammed into a fire hydrant in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park. The high-volume delegitimization of American justice and the incessant drumbeat about white supremacy will likely result in an increase in black-on-white violence, which already accounts for 85 percent of all interracial attacks between blacks and whites.

Meanwhile, criminal-justice leaders themselves are surrendering. The New York Police Commissioner has disbanded the department’s most effective tool for getting illegal guns off the street, the plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit. Officers across the country are being told to ignore low-level offenses, and urban D.A.s are refusing to prosecute public-order arrests, on the ground that Broken Windows policing is racist—until, that is, an outbreak of particularly irksome disorder becomes too widespread, as is the case with the current fireworks discharges. The head of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association in New York has advised its members to use their “utmost discretion” in responding to fireworks complaints unless New York mayor Bill de Blasio “unequivocally commits to having our officers enforce fireworks infractions AND the District Attorneys verbally commit to processing fireworks offenses” (emphasis in original). Otherwise, warns the LBA president, officers are merely being set up for a new slew of phony civilian complaints.

Ambushes await officers who respond to gunfire alerts, illegal house parties, and other crimes. This weekend, New York officers were assaulted with bottles and garbage by a group of about 500 people at 3:45 a.m. in Harlem as they tried to find the source of a shooting picked up by ShotSpotter technology. A Baltimore officer was shot in the stomach earlier this month while trying to break up a large party in West Baltimore. Such parties are the seedbed of gun violence; the day before, a gunman had shot into a crowd at another large Baltimore party. One of Baltimore’s defunding groups, “Organizing Black,” was unmoved. “ABOLISH THE POLICE is the goal,” it wrote on Twitter, “FUCK THE POLICE is the Attitude.” Two car thieves in Chicago struck an officer with their stolen car and dragged him a short distance this June. In late May, crowds threw glass bottles at Chicago officers as they tried to arrest gun suspects; in one case, the crowd tried to free the suspect from a patrol car.

These are no longer the warning signs of a possible breakdown of civilized life. That breakdown is upon us. If local and national leaders are unable to summon the will to defend our most basic institutions from false and inflammatory charges of racism, they have forfeited their right to govern. Unless new leaders come forth who understand their duty to maintain the rule of law, the country will not pull back from disaster.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestseller The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.