Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Trump, Race, and Class
Article by Victor Davis Hanson in The National Review
Trump, Race, and Class
The president’s authentic bluntness may be more appealing to non-elites of all races than violence and condescending lectures.
There are some stunning indications that the supposedly satanic racist Donald Trump could be polling in some surveys around a 35-40 approval rate among Latinos and 20–30 percent among African Americans. Other polls are more equivocal but suggest an unexpected Trump surge among minority voters.
If those polls are accurate and predict November voting patterns, then Joe Biden could lose the popular vote as well as the key swing states by larger margins than Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College losses in 2016.
Indeed, some state polls by CNN and Trafalgar already show Trump to be near even in these purple states. The polling also suggests that, contrary to stereotypical exegeses, nonwhites of the large cities in the Midwest are not necessarily a monolithic voting bloc. So how can this be — given the Obama verdict that Trump is our generation’s Bull Connor, and the Never Trump assurances that the divisive Trump lacks the empathy and appeal of a “coalition building” John McCain or a BLM-sympathizer such as a marching Mitt Romney, and lacks as well the natural resonance the Bush family enjoys with Hispanics?
A number of things are going on that may explain some of these apparent mysteries.
One, Trump is finally beginning to reshape the Republican Party into a middle-class coalition of all races, deliberately pitted against the boutique leftist rich people in Hollywood, Wall Street, the New York and Washington media, Silicon Valley, and the Washington swamp. Trump boasts far more about lowering minority unemployment than reducing the capital-gains tax, more about reducing drug sentences than the need for unfettered global trade.
The topic of fairness across class divides resonates. Who after all wishes to listen to multimillionaire Nancy Pelosi rail about masks the same day she sneaks, unmasked, into a locked-down salon to get her hair done on the sly? Who wishes to follow the diktats of self-righteous governors such as Gavin Newsom, who pontificated about shutting down wineries only to keep his own open before being ratted out?
In that sense, many African-American middle-class voters might see Don Lemon as arrogant and foolish, much as white middle-class voters see Chris Cuomo this way. Or African Americans might disregard sermons from mansion-living, cashing-in Barack Obama the same way that white working-class voters in Ohio ignore the grifter Hillary Clinton when she offers them another homespun homily. African Americans might be as embarrassed by Maxine Waters’s rants as whites are by Nancy Pelosi’s — both women are insider, careerist politicians who are never affected by the consequences of their own soap-box ideologies. In other words, there is no reason to be locked into a racial matrix that assumes the proverbial “other” somehow always puts tribal solidarities over class affinities and society’s collective desire to be secure and safe.
Two, those very same people in the news, on television, social media, and the Internet often talk down to voters, of any race or color. They deprecate religion, right to life, and guns, and assume that any who disagree with their neo-socialist worldviews are ignorant rubes. Whether it’s a shrill Elizabeth Warren or a pompous Joy Reid, they exude pretension and self-righteousness. No one living in smoking California wants to be told that global warming or a dearth of solar power is the reason they can’t go to the mountain lake. Amid raging fires, Californians know that their anti-timber-industry state allowed millions of dead trees to rot as “mulch” that ended up as napalm. They also figure that the ensuing smoke and record heat caused power outages, when new-age wind and solar units went to sleep amid the smoke and night. The entire green-advocacy industry has become an elitist, shrill pastime for mostly wealthy whites who don’t much care about its consequences for working-class minorities — whom they’ve rarely met outside using their services.
Three, minority voters, like all voters, take politicians at their word and distrust what handlers claim their candidates said. They see that when Biden speaks extemporaneously, he not only appears cognitively challenged but racist as well, as if his inner self is now expressed, stripped of the speed bumps and guard rails of conscious self-censorship, social savvy, and awareness.
On camera, Biden may surround himself with people of color, but minorities nonetheless hear some crazy things exiting Biden’s garrulous mouth — the Corn Pop nonsense, the doughnut-shop riff, the condescending racism of “put y’all back in chains,” and “you ain’t black,” asking a black journalist whether he was a junkie or cocaine addict, assuring that all black people think the same way and lack the diversity of thought found in the Latino community, all as fillips to his prior racist history of suggesting that Obama was the nation’s first “clean” and “articulate” black man to run for office, and his even earlier nonsense about the racial “jungle” of the inner city.
No one likes to be lied to or ordered about. Just as the deplorables have been besmirched as smelly, Bible-clinging, gap-toothed, and Neanderthal by elite whites, so elite blacks and their white counterparts assume they can dictate to working-class blacks, slur ministers as minstrels, cheaply call dissidents Uncle Toms, swarm social media to slander black Trump supporters, and assume that it all resonates with a captive black constituency.
Local news, Fox News, YouTube, and social media occasionally break through the national left-wing media censorship of the violence in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Washington, and Chicago. And just as whites are sickened by young, nasal-sounding, cowardly, Antifa activists spitting in the faces of older black and white police officers and trying to burn them up in their own precincts, looting, and destroying shopping centers and stores of inner cities and downtowns, so too are blacks. Why would anyone sympathize with a cowardly, violent Antifa rioter, outfitted in his ridiculous, pretentious Road Warrior ensemble, screaming in his whiny high-pitched voice, reciting some pseudo-Marxist crib notes from a Sociology 1 class, assuming that he was the real brilliant strategist behind the BLM movement, only to sob and collapse into a fetal position or screaming meltdown when arrested, pushed back by the police, or challenged by counter demonstrators?
The upper-middle-class white leftist, in other words, is not a sympathetic figure among either non-elite blacks or whites. And perhaps the Marxist echelon of BLM and its enablers on television are not either. Minority voters are just as likely to see Antifa thugs as cowards and wimps, and they have no sympathies for inner-city looters who haul off Gucci bags.
Most of the white Antifa mob and its wannabe thousands do not live with minorities and did not grow up with them or go to school with them. Do working-class African Americans enjoy watching white college kids or baristas in knee pads with umbrellas or teachers on full paid sabbaticals or Zoom half-days, ordering their local Target to be torched?
In addition, lots of minorities prefer the company of white working-class people over the pajama-boy wimpy lingo and look of Antifa. In the view of many minorities and working-class whites, Antifa’s Revolución! is a sort of paid-for lark — playacting — but nonetheless a game now costing others by destroying property that is more likely used by minority shoppers than suburban middle-class brats. No one really likes to hear sermons from condescending journalists, academics, and celebrities. Again, given the thin margins of current elections, small changes in demographics can have radical results: If Joe Biden does not receive 88 percent of the black vote, then his Democratic ticket faces real trouble.
How ironic that the supposedly biased Trump staged an entire convention based on ecumenical class commonalities, when a week earlier woke wealthy liberal people, privileged white and minorities alike, lectured the nation from on high about America’s supposed moral shortcomings.
The pièce de résistance of the Democratic convention was the appearance of the two Obamas of Kalorama and Martha’s Vineyard fame — the one in his now accustomed affected inner-city patois explaining to the supposedly half-woke the dangers posed by wealthy privileged people (like himself?); the other in full teary-eyed Oprah therapeutic mode, implicitly warning about the racist Trump and his racist legions who any day might apparently jump over the security fences on Martha’s Vineyard.
The result may be that a fifth of blacks and over a third of Latinos watching the RNC and DNC conventions preferred authentic bluntness to disingenuous sloganeering.
So Joe Biden has both a race and class problem — the extent of which is not yet clear because polls showing his dramatic drop in minority support are not always reflected in general polls of either the presidential contest or Trump’s approval ratings.
What is clear is that Biden’s party has ridiculed and alienated the white working class — those who are not fragile and have no privilege but who are caricatured (by those who are guilt-ridden, privileged, and quite fragile) as inordinately advantaged.
At the same time, the Left hierarchy has patronized the black working class as unthinking and in need of elite guidance along the lines of the “you ain’t black” Biden directive. And now both groups, unlike in previous elections, may be voting for Trump in numbers scarcely believable for a Republican —if for no other reason than to send a message that the moral certitude and nonstop racial evangelizing of wealthier panderers is long past boring.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/trump-race-and-class/
How The Atlantic’s Helicopter Hit Job On Trump Follows The Left’s Propaganda Playbook
Not only was The Atlantic’s story not confirmed by the supposed corroboration of some of the details, there is no way you can confirm a story premised solely on anonymous sources.
On Friday, while President Trump celebrated yet another historic diplomatic achievement, with Serbia and Kosovo committing to economic normalization with each other and advancing their relationships with Israel, the press instead focused on a hit piece The Atlantic ran based on unnamed sources.
Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg opened his Thursday “exclusive,” by proclaiming that “when President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.”
Rather, Goldberg claimed, according to “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day,” “Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead.” The article continued with offensive quotes about our troops the unnamed sources attributed to Trump.
Soon after the article hit, named sources with undisputed firsthand knowledge of the visit cancelation refuted the charges. Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, calling the story “BS,” countered, “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion — this never happened.” Outspoken Trump critic John Bolton told Bloomberg he hadn’t heard the president say any of those things.
The Atlantic’s story also conflicted with Bolton’s recounting of what he called in his anti-Trump book a “straightforward decision to cancel the visit.” In it, he also confirmed that the “Marine One’s crew was saying that bad visibility could make it imprudent to chopper to the cemetery.” Likewise, Bolton’s memoir restated the rationale for not taking a motorcade, noting it posed “an unacceptable risk.” And then there were the government documents obtained in open-records requests that eviscerated The Atlantic’s tale.
As The Atlantic’s story crumbled, the Associated Press and Fox News claimed corroboration or confirmation of the story. However, as Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept explained in his must-read piece, “Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using ‘Confirmed’ to Mean its Opposite”:
But if one looks at what [the AP and Fox News] actually did, at what this ‘confirmation’ consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that ‘a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,’ while Fox merely said ‘a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.’
Not only was The Atlantic’s story not confirmed by the supposed corroboration of some of the details, but there is also no way you can confirm a story premised solely on anonymous sources: A journalist cannot possibly know if he is receiving confirmation of the facts by another source, or merely hearing the same lies from the same source who peddled the initial story.
Greenwald highlighted how that had happened when CNN falsely reported, based on anonymous sources, that “during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had received a September 4 email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to WikiLeaks’ servers containing the DNC emails which the group would subsequently release to the public ten days later.” MSNBC and CBS both “confirmed” CNN’s reporting, even though, as the outlets were later forced to admit, the email sent to Trump Jr., was actually dated Sept. 14, 2016 — after the WikiLeaks release.
So how did two outlets “confirm” the Fake News CNN had run earlier in the day? “All that happened,” Greenwald explained, “was that the same sources which anonymously whispered these unverified, false claims to CNN then went and repeated the same unverified, false claims to other outlets, which then claimed that they ‘independently confirmed’ the story even though they had done nothing of the sort.”
Revisiting the many hit pieces launched at Trump since he first entered the political sphere reveals the same technique in play, especially with SpyGate. The Atlantic’s latest contribution to the Fake News franchise struck a familiar chord, but not just one played in the press. Rather, the incident seemed eerily similar to the Crossfire Hurricane team’s use of anonymous press stories as supposed confirmation of the anonymously sourced Christopher Steele dossier in the four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications targeting Carter Page.
In seeking the FISA surveillance orders on Page, the DOJ and FBI relied heavily on the dossier that was compiled by former British MI6 operative Steele. Steele, in turn, purportedly relied on a network of unnamed sources and sub-source. Then the FBI in the FISA applications portrayed Steele’s “intel” as confirmed by media reporting.
For instance, the FISA applications included this lengthy passage that sought to imply confirmation of the Steele dossier:
On or about September 23, 2016, an identified news organization published an article, (September 23rd News Article), which was written by the news organization’s Chief Investigative Correspondent, alleging that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating Page with respect to suspected efforts by the Russian Government to influence the U.S. Presidential election. According to the September 23rd News Article, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that when Page was in Moscow in July 2016 to deliver the above-noted commencement address at the New Economic School, he met with two senior Russian officials. The September 23rdNews Article stated that a ‘well-placed Western intelligence source’ told the news organization that Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft. At their alleged meeting, Sechin raised the issue of the lifting of sanctions with Page. According to the September 23 News Article, the Western intelligence source also reported that U.S. intelligence agencies received reports that Page met with another top Putin aide-Igor Divyekin, a former Russian security official who now serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.
Of course, we now know that the “September 23 News Article” was the Yahoo news article and that the “well-placed Western intelligence source” was Steele. Thus what the FBI presented to the FISA court as confirmation of Steele’s reporting was nothing of the sort. It was merely an echo chamber.
The FBI repeated this deceptive strategy two additional times in the Page FISA applications, relying on Josh Rogin’s Washington Post opinion piece and Michael Crowley’s Politico article to together imply confirmation of Page’s status as a Russian agent. The FISA applications used those articles to paint Page as a Putin patsy who bore responsibility for the Republican National Committee’s supposed watering down of the party platform’s position on Ukraine.
However, Page had nothing to do with the RNC’s platform changes concerning Ukraine. Yet the FBI used the press-peddled speculation as evidence in the FISA applications. That “evidence” suggested to the FISA court that there was confirmation of Steele’s reporting that Page had struck a deal with Putin associates to accept a stake in Rosneft in exchange for lifted Ukrainian sanctions. There was no such confirmation, however, because there was no such deal.
It is bad enough that the press uses faux “confirmations” to push propaganda to serve its political purposes. But it is beyond the pale that the Crossfire Hurricane team used the same technique to obtain court-ordered surveillance of Page (and in turn the Trump campaign) and that the FISA court fell for this hoax.
Don’t expect the corporate media that perfected this means of propaganda to report on the government’s use of this technique in the Page FISA applications. It won’t. But since the public no longer needs the legacy media to learn the truth, the press’ self-imposed silence will do nothing but reinforce their reputation as purveyors of Fake News.
Kamala Harris Visits Jacob Blake and Family, Says She’s ‘Proud of Him’
Let me begin this article by saying that I don’t have an aversion to discussing the betterment of police procedures. I think laws that result in someone’s death over selling second-hand cigarettes, such as Eric Garner, are generally dumb and pointless. But what I do have an aversion to is being gaslit, and that’s exactly what is going on in regards to the Jacob Blake case.
Democrats are continuing to obscure the facts of what happened, ignoring the entire lead up to Blake being shot, while pretending that he’s an innocent victim.
Kamala Harris did that again today.
Democratic VP nominee @KamalaHarris spoke to Jacob Blake today, told him she is proud of him. pic.twitter.com/oCLYIcn3RS
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 7, 2020
What a fake, pandering hack. As a former state prosecutor who has dealt with use of force incidents many times, she knows exactly what happened here. She knows that Blake raped his girlfriend (to the extent that she still considered herself that), and allegedly not for the first time. She knows that he stole her keys and proceeded to try to take a car. She knows that there were three children in the backseat. She knows he assaulted officers and refused arrest after multiple attempts. She knows he brandished a knife as he walked around the front fender. Lastly, she knows that the police were begging him not to enter the vehicle and that a weapon was found on the floorboard.
Kamala Harris knows every detail of this story and she still pretends that she’s a racial warrior dealing with a grave act of discrimination when that was absolutely not what this was. Also of note is the fact that Blake’s father is a rabid anti-Semite, having pledged his loyalty to Louis Farrakhan and asserting worldwide conspiracies involving Jews.
Nothing Jacob Blake has done is worth being “proud” of. Quite the opposite. While any parent would be grieved by a son being injured, there is no reason to place them on a pedestal or forget the facts of what really happened. To do that is damaging, not just because the truth always matters, but because this drives away those who might otherwise have legitimate concerns about police procedure and overreach.
If you are going to lump in Jacob Blake with the Eric Garners of the world, then you’ve already set a standard so unacceptable by most Americans that there will never be any positive change. Harris knows this and doesn’t care. She’s just here to say whatever it takes to further her career. She’s a shameless void of a politician who doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near the reins of power, much less first in line to the presidency.
A Criminal Enterprise, a.k.a. the Democratic Party
Article by Shari Goodman in The American Thinker
A Criminal Enterprise, a.k.a. the Democratic Party
Somewhere within the last few decades, the United States was taken over by a clandestine criminal enterprise working under the radar to infiltrate and gain control of our media, schools, universities, unions, Hollywood, military and our halls of governance at the local, state, and federal level. They did so in conjunction with a new American oligarchy composed of billionaires seeking a One World Order and all too willing to fund their operations, along with the aid of foreign financiers such as Red China and parts of the oil rich Islamist world.
Within time, and with much of its funding coming from a billionaire oligarchy, they were able to hijack the entire Democrat Party who were only too willing to sell out the United States to the highest bidders while lining their own pockets with sweetheart deals made with Red China, Iran, and Ukraine. The admittance of Red China in 2001 into the World Trade Organization, backed and supported by Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, was the beginning of China's advance and the decline of the United States on the world stage. As American companies moved overseas along with the millions of lost jobs in cities throughout the United States, Democrats and some Republicans, sold us a bill of goods. They advanced the notion that we were moving towards a service economy and that cheap labor overseas meant cheaper products here at home. They failed to mention that the loss of our manufacturing industry to China, and in particular our pharmaceutical industry, posed a national security threat since China could threaten to stop selling essential goods to us. Nor did they mention that certain minerals, now mined in China, were critical to our military defense. These decisions were made against our national interests; yet, no one in Washington protested.
The rise of China onto the national stage brought forth opportunities seized upon by the husbands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Both were able to enrich themselves to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by engaging in business deals with Red China, where all companies are governed by the CCP, while the two senators sat in our Senate chambers. Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and his equity firm, were given a one and a half billion dollar contract by the Red Chinese on one of Joe Biden's Vice Presidential visits to the communist state, yet; incredulously, there was no oversight to check for impropriety. When Hunter Biden's company, Burisma, was offered a multi-million dollar deal in the Ukraine, the new Ukrainian prosecutor charged with rooting out corruption, was suddenly fired after Joe Biden threatened to withhold American financial aid to Ukraine. Incredulously and unabashedly, Biden later boasted on camera before an American audience that he had the prosecutor fired within a few short hours. Again, yawn from the media and our Justice Department.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, the political Bonnie and Clyde of our time, while in office, accepted millions of dollars in donations for their Clinton Foundation from dubious countries such as Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, and Ukraine. What was most certainly a "pay to play" scheme to enrich themselves, one has to ask how adversely was American policy shaped by the monetary donations collected by the Clintons during their many years in Washington. Furthermore, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton sold to Russia 20% of our uranium used to build nuclear weapons. The irony is not lost when she shamelessly concocted the fake Steel Dossier used as the basis for the Russia hoax investigation for the intended purpose of driving President Trump from office.
Former presidential candidate John Kerry, no stranger to treasonous acts, while Secretary of State and representing Barack Hussein Obama's administration, secretly transferred $150 billion of our taxpayers dollars in cash to the Iranian Mullahs who regularly scream "Death to America!" He did so without the consent of Congress; yet, silence and no calls for an investigation arose from Congress, the Justice Department and or the media for such a treasonous act. It is noteworthy to mention that Kerry's sons, John Jr. Heinz Jr., along with Hunter Biden, profited greatly from Kerry's days in office. According to leaked documents from the Ukrainian General Prosecutors office, all three were in possession of a slush fund to the tune of $3.5 million derived from money transfers from Burisma Holding, a Ukrainian gas company, between 2014 and 2015. https://thefederalistpapers.org/opinion/breaking-leaked-documents-show-tens-millions-ukraine-paid-kerry-biden-jr-fund
Additionally, the rise of Big Tech has created within the last few decades a new billionaire oligarchy and American aristocracy which have used their newly gained funds to finance and control public opinion at the expense of the American citizenry. While our country was founded on the principles of a government by the people, for the people, and of the people, in reality, Big Tech and the new American oligarchy now wield considerable power and appear to have taken the reigns of the Democrat Party. Big Tech has the means to erase our First Amendment rights and they are silencing Conservative voices on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets. In a convenient way of getting around campaign finance laws, the new oligarchy finances numerous NGOs who then turn around and fund the Democrat Party. Hungarian billionaire,George Soros, wanted in Ukraine for corruption and despised in Great Britain, Thailand, and Malaysia for currency manipulation, is responsible for the destruction of those countries' economies in 92' and 98'. He has donated over a billion dollars through these NGOs to gain control over policy and candidate decisions within the Democrat Party. In the first three months of 2020, he has donated over $28 million to Democratic PACs for this upcoming November election. For all practical purposes, he and his policies are on the Democrat ballot come November. With his monetary influence, it most likely is he who selected Obama as the Democratic nominee in 2009, and it is he who placed Heels Up Harris as the vice presidential nominee.
The unexpected election of President Trump, who promised to clean the swamp, serves as a threat to their continued corruption and reign. Their demonization and hate expressed for this president is purely personal. They know his reelection spells the end of their sweetheart deals, bribery, and money laundering schemes while sitting in our halls of Congress. With the aid of our adversaries, Red China and Iran, they have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at him. From the Russia hoax, impeachment, the Wuhan virus, and the current civil unrest in our streets, he has escaped and survived their evil deeds. The Democrats are now desperate and going for broke. They have exposed themselves as a corrupt criminal enterprise bent on regaining control of their corrupt money machinations while the country be damned!
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/a_criminal_enterprise_aka_the_democratic_party.html
Poll: Americans Trust The Media The Least For COVID-19 Information
Americans strongly distrust the media more than any other source for information on COVID-19, according to a new poll released by CBS News and YouGov.
The poll asked 2,493 registered voters questions about America, coronavirus, policy, and the presidential candidates.
With 2.4 point margin of error, results demonstrated that levels of trust in information provided by “Donald Trump, Your state’s governor, Anthony Fauci, The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Medical and health professionals, and National media” concerning coronavirus have all decreased since March 2020.
According to the 112-page battleground tracker report, only 35 percent of Americans trust the mainstream media for COVID-19 information, while 86 percent of Americans have trust in “medical and health professionals.” Over 60 percent trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 55 percent trust their state’s governor, 54 percent trust the CDC, and 40 percent trust President Donald Trump.
The largest fall in trust belongs to the CDC, which experienced a 36 percent drop in confidence since March 2020. While trust in governors dropped 14 percent and trust in the national media dropped 10 percent, the smallest decline in trust belongs to Donald Trump with only a 6 percent drop.
Low trust in the mainstream media shouldn’t come as a surprise. Whether it’s a lack of acknowledgment about violent riots or allegations against the president using only anonymous sources, the media has proven time and time again that it doesn’t deserve the American peoples’ trust.
How Is It That Government Agencies Come to Have Instruction on “Critical Race Theory”?
It’s a head-scratcher, isn’t it?
On Friday, a letter from the Office of Personnel Management went out to all federal government agencies directing them to stop all “mandatory instruction” being administered to the federal workforce on the subjects of “critical race theory” and “white privilege.”
While both these concepts benefit from quite a bit of “shape-shifting” in order to dodge criticism (“It’s not really about that…”), the general tenet of both is that the current reality of United States economic and cultural life is the result of — and entirely dependent on — historical institutions connected to slavery. From Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Education:
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a framework that offers researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers a race-conscious approach to understanding educational inequality and structural racism to find solutions that lead to greater justice. Placing race at the center of analysis, Critical Race Theory scholars interrogate policies and practices that are taken for granted to uncover the overt and covert ways that racist ideologies, structures, and institutions create and maintain racial inequality.
Another way you could phrase that is that CRT is a built-in excuse and alibi for failure — it runs counter to the concept of taking personal responsibility. It validates the notion “I’m not at fault for my failures.”
It ASSUMES that racism is the cause of all our ills as a society. There is no failure of a minority class that cannot be squeezed into this framework if one simply writes enough fact-free paragraphs of explanation.
So, how is it that the need for government employees to undergo training on this subject percolates up through the system to the point that nearly the entirety of the federal workforce was scheduled to undergo such indoctrination?
Every component of the government bureaucracy has some form of a “Human Resources” department to deal with issues of employee conduct in the workplace. These departments have budgetary authority to spend money on “workforce education” initiatives. Sometimes the spending process is initiated with bringing in an outside management “consultant” to review operations, evaluate strengths and weaknesses from a “human resources” point of view, and make recommended changes with regard to what are considered “best practices” now “in vogue” in corporate American.
The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions…. [A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory/”white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these un-American propaganda training sessions.
So, yes, taxpayer money is being spent in huge amounts to fund these programs. But the spending isn’t just connected to the programs themselves. That’s just the final component of the overall waste.
Governmental institutions always lag the corporate world in adopting management practices simply because of the longer lead-times involved in making changes. It begins with the contracting process to hire a consultant, the time needed by a consultant to evaluate an “insular” work environment, the time needed to prepare a report for the Agency that issued the consulting contract, the time for the agency to digest the report and recommendations, and then the time needed to put in place a process to implement accepted recommended changes — all of which combine to create a tremendous lag time between when someone in HR has an “idea” and when the impacts of that idea begin to show up in the workplace.
At the end of each year, the last two weeks are filled with emailed reminders to government employees about the need to complete video training exercises on a whole variety of subjects. These kinds of mandated training exercises always have some type of “HR” workplace awareness subject matter. They are invariably the result of some “consultant’s” report about what the agency needs to do better based on the consultant’s review of operations. Workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, diversity, etc., — every year as a federal employee you get hit with mandatory training sessions that involve watching videos, and sometimes having to take a “quiz” on the subject-matter to validate that you had, in reality, paid attention to the video rather than just letting it run in the background with the volume turned down (my personal practice).
The “HR” components in various offices are not run by “political appointees”. These offices are run by career officials who carry over from one administration to the next. In my experiences over 22+ years, EVERY such office was stocked by raging left-wing liberals. Political leadership was largely powerless to “rein them in” because any such action would be seen as being based on the “content” of their HR advocacy, and itself the subject on HR complaint. The people in those positions are pretty much “independent operators” within the agencies where they work, and the greater workforce is compelled to be silent about their pushing left-wing social policies under the guise of “HR” compliance.
In one office I know about, the head of HR would — without fail — on the first workday of every month have all the new “Aggrieved Party History Month” posters up on the wall at the entrance to the office as his/her first order of business. That person was also responsible for the pictures of Obama/Biden going up on Inauguration Day in 2009, but I’m told it took nearly six months for the pictures of Trump/Pence to go up in their place in 2017. Even though they were out of office, the Obama/Biden pictures remained up in a form of symbolic “protest” over the outcome of the election until the Trump/Pence pictures were delivered.
Finally, these various “HR” employees/managers from all different agencies have conferences where they get together and discuss government-wide HR policies. I’m 100% certain that what Pres. Trump has put a stop to with his Executive Order is the product of a wide-scale concerted effort to inject CRT nonsense into the federal workforce as a further method to further indoctrinate the “resistance” that is present within a largely liberal federal employee bureaucracy.
Who can imagine Pres. Bush 43 tackling this issue in the manner that Pres. Trump has done?
Yeah. No one. That was my guess.
How many of the rioting 'protesters' come from super-rich families?
Article by Ethel C. Fenig in The American Thinker
How many of the rioting 'protesters' come from super-rich families?
California Is a Failed State and It’s a Warning for the Rest of the Country
We have been some of the most fortunate people in the world because we are citizens of the most exceptional nation on the planet; the country that has been a beacon for the rest of the world.
There’s a reason that people have fled from all over the world to come to America.
As Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
We have seen, between the pandemic and the riots, how easy it can be for people to act like dictators or for the rule of law to slip away.
But in California, their leadership is throwing the state under the bus. They’re that flashing warning to the rest of the country about believing Democratic promises.
Warnings went out on Sunday about a possible failure of the grid if it continued to be overwhelmed.
From KTLA:
The California Independent System Operator, which runs the electrical grid for most of the state, declared a Stage 2 Emergency around 6p.m. and said rotating power outages are “likely” Sunday.Declaring an emergency allows the grid operator to use reserve power and tap into emergency assistance from neighboring authorities.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued a warning about shutting off appliances to conserve energy.
Residents are under a statewide Flex Alert, with electrical grid operators urging residents to reduce their power consumption from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. each day through Monday. Recommendations include setting thermostats to 78 degrees or higher and not using appliances during the peak hours.Outages were avoided Friday and Saturday largely because of individual conservation efforts, Newsom’s office said.“Even with these efforts, given the extreme heat storm, Californians may experience rolling energy blackouts this afternoon if users do not conserve enough energy to lower the demand on California’s power grid,” Newsom’s office said in a news release.
It’s not just hot in California, it’s hot in many other states, as well. Why do we in other states not have to ration electricity? Because we haven’t given over control to lunatics and versions of the “Green New Deal.”
Los Angeles is abandoning a plan to spend billions of dollars rebuilding three natural gas power plants along the coast, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Monday, in a move to get the city closer to its goal of 100% renewable energy and improve air quality in highly polluted communities.The mayor’s decision marks an abrupt change of course for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, where top staffers have argued in recent months that the gas plants are critical to keeping the lights on in the city.
Ya think?
But this is what Democrats want to bring to the country in general. California is a big flashing sign of why we should reject this, Biden, and Democrats in November.
HT: Twitchy
Confused At Sight Of People Eating Food, Communists Scream At Restaurants
U.S.—Communist marches around the country are peacefully intensifying. But the marchers have found a new target of their ire: restaurants. Never having seen people with plenty of food to eat, the commies are becoming agitated and confused and are calling for the closure of the evil capitalist eating establishments.
The communists were confused and frightened by the sight of people eating food aplenty. Concluding it was part of a sinister capitalist plot to take over the world and then raise the living standards for everyone, they demanded the restaurant be shut down.
"You guys are eating food? Smells like evil capitalism to me!" shouted one commie as he marched through a restaurant telling everyone to get up and leave. "All food bad! All food bad!"
"Eating food? Not on our watch!" shouted another commie. "Food! Is! Racist! Food! Is! Racist!" The commies then put all the food in a pile and burned it, not wanting people to get used to capitalist luxuries like eating and survival.
The commies were later caught saving most of the food and hoarding it for themselves, the future ruling class of our coming communist utopia. "No food good, food just for ruling class better!" they shouted.