Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Yes, Critical Race Theory’s Critics Know What It Is. It's Wrong.
Law and culture almost always need some reform, but the work of racial justice begins, not with systemic critique, but with love based on the recognition that we are all children of God.
Fighting woke radicalism can feel like punching a fog. Wokeness, for lack of a better term, is often vague and ill-defined, a jumble of ideology and activism that lacks a clear structure even as it conquers institutions and remakes society.
But conservatives have found a vulnerable target in critical race theory, and we should keep hitting it, despite the complaints of our ideological adversaries. For example, in a Slate interview, “anti-racist” guru Ibram X. Kendi argues that conservatives are incorrectly and cynically “defining critical race theory at the same time they are attacking it.” MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid tweeted, “None of these people who have made attacking Critical Race Theory their life’s work HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT CRITICAL RACE THEORY IS!!!!”
Their claim that we don’t understand critical race theory is, of course, false. Many critics of critical race theory are quite conversant in it—and it is amusing to watch the people who promoted the grossly inaccurate 1619 Project suddenly get huffy about scholarly precision and rectitude. Furthermore, although not all of the parents objecting to critical race theory in their children’s schooling know its academic ins and outs, they know enough to recognize it as poisonous.
Critical race theory is unpopular not because of conservative propaganda but because it promotes poisonous racial essentialism and hatred. It is unpopular because it encourages neo-segregation, with business, schools, and other organizations separating people by race. It is unpopular because its ideal of equity leads to abolishing advanced math classes. It is unpopular because of incidents such as the University of Oklahoma punishing a volleyball player after she objected to woke racial indoctrination.
It is unpopular because it is the ideology behind a host of noxious corporate initiatives on so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion—often facilitated by grifting critical race theory advocates and allies such as Robin DiAngelo. It is unpopular because its acolytes will attack anyone.
Ordinary people were already disgusted by the fruits of critical race theory, even if they didn’t know the name of the ideological tree growing them. This is why campaigns against critical race theory in education are succeeding, and why many of its advocates are retreating.
For instance, in Virginia’s wealthy, deep-blue Loudoun County, Superintendent Scott Ziegler recently insisted that the public schools are “not indoctrinating students using critical race theory. Critical race theory is not a part of the curriculum.”
This disavowal is a triumph, but it could be ephemeral. Even passing laws against teaching critical race theory in public schools may prove but a brief victory. It is not only that it is difficult to write goods laws on this sort of subject, but that those charged with following and enforcing the laws may subvert them.
We should not expect the teachers, school boards, and education officials who have been pushing critical race theory to give up on it. As a satirical Babylon Bee headline put it, “Schools To Get Around CRT Bans By Just Beating White Kids With Sticks.” The Bee exaggerates, but only a bit.
It is therefore necessary, for both politics and policy, to persevere in this fight. Insofar as politicians who intelligently and effectively combat critical race theory are rewarded by voters—and that is likely—they have an incentive. And parents will remain motivated by the issue as long as it threatens to derail their children’s education.
But to truly defeat critical race theory we need to provide an alternative. Critical race theory is mostly warmed-over Marxism with race substituted for class, but it addresses a real human need by providing at least a partial answer, however inaccurate, to the perennial questions: What is wrong with the world, and how can we fix it? Those of us who reject its answers to these queries must provide responses that better address racial injustice and other inequalities, past and present.
This necessity is also an opportunity for Christians, if we are willing to accept it. After all, we believe our faith provides the fullest explanation of what is wrong with the world, as well as how to rectify it. Thus, even at its best, critical race theory and its ideas of systemic racism are a poor substitute for what Christians understand through the doctrine of original sin. It is not our race that makes us oppressors or oppressed, but sin—our own and that of others.
The Christian account of sin is both more personally accusing and forgiving than critical race theory. Although Christians acknowledge that the effects of sin can linger long and even be embedded in social, legal and political systems, we know that evil originates in the darkness of our own hearts. Christianity teaches that individual guilt is prior to systemic guilt, and it therefore provides for repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation in ways that critical race theory does not.
Law and culture almost always need some reform, but the work of racial justice begins, not with systemic critique, but with love based on the recognition that we are all children of God. This truth, rather than the racial suspicion and even essentialism encouraged by critical race theory, best enables us to identify and remedy injustice. The fight against critical race theory is therefore necessary to create space for the development of genuine love and justice.
Mexico prison: Six killed in fight between rival gangs
A fight between rival gangs in a prison in Mexico has left six inmates dead and at least nine injured, officials say.
The fight broke out on Tuesday afternoon local time in a jail in the city of Villahermosa in Tabasco state.
Guards said rival groups armed with home-made weapons were fighting for control of the prison.
The prison has been the site of deadly fights in the past. In February, two inmates classed as "high risk" were killed in a confrontation.
Guards said Tuesday's fight broke out in the prison courtyard when members of rival groups attacked each other with sticks and knives.
Riot police were deployed to the jail and local media report that almost 80 officers entered the prison to re-establish control.
Prison fights are not unusual in Mexico. According to the National Human Rights Commission, there were almost 1,000 fights in state jails in 2020.
There have also been a number of high-profile prison breaks, including those of Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, who managed to escape from two maximum-security jails before being extradited to the United States.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57580770
Is Trump the Future of the Republican Party?
Fire your local Mitt Romney and replace him with
someone who loves America and hates politics.
People think of Trump Derangement Syndrome as mostly a phenomenon of the Left, and mostly unprecedented. It’s easy to get the impression that Donald Trump has taught the Left to hate as they have never hated, and that all previous Republican presidents were moderate by comparison and much more broadly acceptable to America.
But the Left was just as vicious about George W. Bush in his day, and they hated him just as much. He was called a threat to world peace, a devotedly evil man, a stupid man, or all of these: To quote a 2004 Slate article, “he chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he’s something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.”
What is unusual about Trump is not that the Left hates him, but that a lot of the Right hates him, too. And by “a lot of the Right” I don’t refer to actual voters, who turned out for Trump in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented enthusiasm. I mean the rightist establishment—journalists, intellectuals, and professional politicians. A large portion joined the Left in espousing that Trump was a blowhard, a bully, and not a team player. They warned us that his tweets were alienating people. And by “people,” they meant themselves.
Trump’s tweets were actually hugely entertaining. They were the only good reason for checking Twitter, which I don’t do anymore. Interestingly, Trump tended to attack journalists, intellectuals, and professional politicians. He made fun of them. And there is nothing that upsets these people more than getting made fun of. No wonder they felt alienated.
Trump’s personality is a strawman. The real reason political professionals hate Trump is that Trump doesn’t believe political professionals are especially good at what they do. He doesn’t trust the traditional experts, and doesn’t think they have a good track record. When these people call Trump a “low-class loudmouth,” what they really mean is “Trump doesn’t take my advice.”
The Beltway experts were used to being listened to. They were used to guiding the elected GOP. Suddenly they were ignored. So they all sulked off to write books exposing what a terrible person Trump really was, and this allowed them to be absolved and reabsorbed by the swamp. (The swamp should properly be thought of as a gigantic martini shared by all the participants of professional politics.)
Here is a peculiar fact: Trump took the time to haggle with Boeing over the price of a new Air Force One. No ordinary Republican would do such a thing—Boeing is an important constituency. That’s why Republicans joined Senate Democrats, 98-to-1 (with Tom Cotton of Arkansas voting against) for the Senate to consider the Iran deal “not a treaty,” which allowed the deal to pass without a two-thirds majority, giving Republicans the luxury of a formal “no” vote while still giving Boeing permission to sell $16.6 billion of planes to Iran.
In comparison, Trump fighting with Boeing over the price of an airliner is exactly the sort of thing that gets the rightist establishment chortling with contempt. To them, it’s a laughably tiny amount of money and not even worth thinking about. They don’t understand the impression it makes on regular people when Trump talks about how an official had told him they could cancel the order for a mere $250 million.
The reason it makes an impression is not that people think Trump saved a huge amount of money in that particular case. It’s that people suspect the story is emblematic of how our government operates. They suspect it’s business-as-usual to be gouged for a few hundred million in everything the government does, and they suspect that most Republicans either don’t care or are complicit.
Trump, of course, was a tireless campaigner for Republicans who supported the America First agenda. He was a faithful political ally to many people who subsequently failed to stand up for him when the chips were down.
When journalists on the Right accuse Trump of not being a team player, the team they are talking about is not Republicans or even Americans, but politicians. Trump refused to act like someone who had lived his entire life inside the Beltway. He refused to trust the experts over the will of the voters. He refused to take the “I’ll-scratch-your-back-and-you-scratch-mine” attitude that has made so many people so rich at Americans’ expense.
A lot of the American Right, including many prominent writers and thinkers whom we had come to trust, revealed that in the single most important aspect of political philosophy they are functionally identical to the Left: They believe that they know better than the average American how to run the country. They believe that they know better than the average American how the average American should live his life. They may disagree with the Left about the particulars, but they agree on the fundamental principle that they, and only they, are smart enough to be in charge. They favor aristocracy over democracy.
In the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the vote with every minority group. He was a uniting figure except when it came to the people who were used to having the GOP’s megaphone. The future of the Republican Party may or may not be Trump personally, but it is through men like him—and only through men like him—that the Republican Party and by extension American democracy will survive.
Unfortunately there are 100 Mitt Romneys in the GOP for every Ron DeSantis. But that can change. Fire your local Mitt Romney and replace him with someone who loves America and hates politics. It’s alright if he makes the Beltway experts uncomfortable. In fact, it’s good if he does.
It’s Beginning to Look Like Enemy Action
Article by John Green in The American Thinker
It’s Beginning to Look Like Enemy Action
Dong Jingwei is a Chinese defector working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He served as Vice Minister of State Security in the Chinese Ministry of Defense. Before defecting, he was responsible for the counterintelligence efforts in China. He was in a position to know about all things “espionage” in China and is perhaps the highest-level Chinese defector the U.S. has ever had. Even though the legacy media is playing it down, this is a big deal.
It speaks volumes that the man who knows the identity of all the Chinese spies in our country chose to defect to the DIA and only the DIA. Further, it’s reported that the DIA is not sharing the information it’s receiving with the FBI or CIA. Now why would that be?
Dong provided details of meetings between U.S. officials, Chinese spies, and Russian SVR agents. He also provided details about how the Chinese government gained access to CIA communications, which resulted in the deaths of dozens of CIA assets. Anonymous sources are also reporting that members of the federal law enforcement community (i.e. FBI) are “scared s**tless” about Dong’s information.
Is it possible that the FBI and CIA are hopelessly compromised? As we’d say in Minnesota -- you betcha!
Dong has allegedly provided the names of Chinese spies working or attending universities in the U.S. He claims that a third of Chinese students in this country are actually PLA assets. To validate his claims, Dong has provided financial records showing which businessmen and public officials have received money from the Chinese Government. Private persons receiving money may or may not be illegal depending on what they’re doing for it. If they’re selling protected technology, it’s illegal. If they’re influencing public opinion, it may not be illegal, but is still problematic. However, public officials receiving money is a huge deal -- it’s either bribery or espionage.
How much are businesses, educators, public officials, and opinion influencers beholden to China? It appears to be a disturbing number.
Dong provided copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drives to the DIA. Granted, there’s not much that’s secret about that laptop anymore. But isn’t China verifying their possession of those drives kind of like a blackmailer showing his victim pictures of himself in bed with an underage girl? How incriminating is that picture when information from Hunter’s laptop is combined with financial records which the Chinese surely have? Maybe there’s more than one underage girl in that photo.
In 2015, the Aviation Industry Corp of China (AVIC) acquired Henniges Automotive. This acquisition is significant because Henneges Automotive provides stealth technology for the F-35 program. AVIC’s U.S. partners in this acquisition were none other than Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz. The acquisition was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Secretary of State John Kerry was a member of the CFIUS during this decision. He is also the stepfather of -- surprise, surprise -- Chris Heinz! Dong provided details of how China was able to acquire stealth technology after the U.S. approved its purchase of Henniges Automotive.
Anyone who doesn’t see that the Biden family financial ties to China leave President Asterisk vulnerable to blackmail is hopelessly naïve.
Dong provided copies of pathogenic studies to the DIA which show that the Chinese military was involved in the development of the COVID-19 virus. He also provided copies of Chinese models which predicted the spread and damage that the pandemic would do to the U.S. and the rest of the world. Given what we’re learning about Dr. Fauci and his “gain of function” research, we may have paid China to develop a weapon which was used against us.
Further, the Chinese government changed the travel plans of Chinese students returning to the U.S. after the Christmas break. Their travel plans were advanced so that they returned much earlier than originally planned -- prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. Dong reportedly claimed that they were tasked to gather information about the U.S. response to the pandemic. They were to gather information on:
- Policy changes
- Economic response and damage
- Impacts on the healthcare system
- Impacts on the supply chain
- Civil unrest
The implication is that even if the Chinese government did not intentionally release the virus, they intentionally let it spread and used it as an espionage bonanza. As a side benefit to the Chinese, COVID-19 provided the excuse for massive election changes, which facilitated the removal of President Donald Trump -- China’s greatest threat. They learned from the Democrats not to let a good crisis go to waste.
As far as we know, Dong has not provided any direct information about BLM or Antifa. However, the fact that returning Chinese students were tasked to monitor civil unrest is quite curious. If our FBI and CIA weren’t hopelessly compromised, they might consider following the money. But we already know that won’t be happening.
This all brings me to the most important point -- have we been under attack from China and didn’t know it? A colleague recently reminded me of the Goldfinger dictum: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, now that is enemy action.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/its_beginning_to_look_like_enemy_action.html
Juneteenth: George Floyd’s Critical Race Holiday
Juneteenth is an enormous win for the racism industrial complex.
If we could somehow strip away the dubious political context in which it was birthed, Juneteenth might indeed be worthy of national commemoration.
Slavery, while obviously not in any way unique to the United States, (it was practiced in generally far more hideous forms in the Caribbean and the Middle East, to say nothing of Africa, where it continues in many parts of that continent to this day), nonetheless represents a crime against human dignity and a stain on American history. The end of American slavery, consequently, should be celebrated.
But we cannot wish away politics from the inherently political task of choosing a national holiday. And therefore, it is impossible now to see Juneteenth in anything other than the political context in which it arose from obscurity (and don’t buy the media disinformation—until a few years ago, it was an obscure holiday, as we’ll see).
Juneteenth’s emergence as an official national holiday is the result, not of a desire for unification and celebration, but of the same cynical racial division that has brought us Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, proposed shakedowns in the guise of reparations, and a host of other ills. The promotion of Juneteenth from a largely regional and informal celebration to a sacred national holiday undermines American national and racial unity—it does not encourage it. And that is the precise intention of those who foisted it on America.
It is not a coincidence that the holiday is being referred to as the “Juneteenth National Independence Day” taking place in such close proximity to America’s actual Independence Day on July 4. This makes perfect sense in the context of the Left’s incessant desire to erase America’s history—as was the aim of the cynical “1619 Project”—and replace it with a litany of attacks on America’s founding and the descendants of those who accomplished it.
The name itself is a blatant piece of historical revisionism. More than 330 million Americans of all races and backgrounds enjoy the fruit of our independence from Great Britain. That is why we all celebrate 1776 as a unifying national event.
The abolition of slavery was a great moment for America, but it was not a refounding of the country. Juneteenth didn’t even end all slavery in the United States—that was not accomplished until the end of 1865 in two Southern border states that had stayed in the Union. The use of “independence” can only be seen in the context of the desire of the radical Left to erase America’s early history and actual independence struggle and to redefine American history solely in terms of systemic racism and racial grievance.
The emergence of Juneteenth from obscurity to become a national holiday is the culmination of the florid moral panic, in the wake of the death at the hands of police, of high-on-drugs, arrest-resisting, violent felon George Floyd, to whom the Left demands against all sanity that we pay homage as some sort of civil rights hero.
Passed almost immediately through Congress with scarcely any official opposition or debate, the failure to prevent the addition of an official holiday to foment racial grievance to the calendar stands as a singular display of cowardice and impotence by virtually all GOP members of Congress, who are clearly too scared of being called racists by the Left to stand up even against something that obviously will be used every year from now on for racial grievance-mongering.
The Left is engaged in a blatant bait-and-switch, using the entirely worthy exoteric meaning of the day as a source of moral and material blackmail. You don’t object to celebrating the end of slavery, do you, bigot?
Its esoteric meaning, and its actual function in our contemporary political system, are a different matter. The fact that many celebrants will not understand the esoteric meaning is a feature, not a bug, for those who wish to use Juneteenth as a political cudgel. They want average African Americans to perceive our attacks on their racial shakedown as an attack on blackness itself, though nothing could be further from the truth. In celebrating Juneteenth, the Left are trying to make you bow to their gods, and their patron saint, George Floyd.
The George Floyd Holiday
That Juneteenth has arrived as a national holiday at this particular moment is impossible to imagine without George Floyd. Larger than life statues of George Floyd were unveiled this Juneteenth in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere “celebrating” this 21st century “saint” of wokeness. Or, as Gallup put it in their Juneteenth poll explainer, “Debate about making Juneteenth a federal holiday has been renewed in the racial reckoning that emerged after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police last year.”
Context matters. To make Juneteenth a holiday in this environment is to confirm the Democrats’ and Black Lives Matters’ blatantly false narrative on crime and policing, to elevate the bogus George Floyd myth that innocent black men are being gunned down en masse by racist white policemen. GOP politicians have latched onto critical race theory as the latest bogeyman, but why even bother pretending we’re fighting critical race theory when we’re helping the Left create a federal critical race holiday, reifying unjustified contemporary black grievance, and equally unjustified anti-white vilification? Juneteenth is an enormous win for the racism-industrial complex.
Historically, America has chosen holidays that unify our nation and express its ideals.
Our original four federal holidays, ratified in 1870s, were largely religious in origin: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Day joined Independence Day (so central was July 4to our national identity). Over the years we added to these holidays honoring the American worker (Labor Day) and our soldiers (Veterans Day and Memorial Day). Columbus Day did not become a holiday until the 20th century, but has roots going back to the 18th century. Washington’s Birthday (still the official name for Presidents’ Day) increasingly honors all of our presidents, including the mediocre ones.
These festivals were celebrated in different ways at different times in our communities and honored our religious heritage, our discovery and founding, our workers and leaders, or our soldiers who fought and died for our country. Eventually and more controversially, these were joined by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, which is as much of a celebration of the African-American community’s long journey to legal equality as it is a celebration of a single hero with profound personal flaws.
Juneteenth’s Rise From Obscurity
Juneteenth, essentially, was a local celebration surrounding the 1865 discovery of slaves in Galveston, Texas of the then-two-year-old news about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which meant they were freed. The day was little noted outside of Texas until very recently. Then came the lockdowns and media-driven hysteria in which Trump was criticized by the media and the Left for holding a rally on June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (the site of an unquestionably horrific race riot, which the Left—again for political ends—has been cynically revisiting in recent months.)
In an ill-advised moment of capitulation to the Left, Trump rescheduled the rally to the following day, providing ammunition for radical opponents. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it,” Trump said later about the incident with his usual bluntness—and accuracy.
A search of Joe Biden’s Twitter archive showed no mention of Juneteenth until 2019, when he was already a candidate for president. While it is possible that this search may somehow have missed a mention, it captured over 6,000 tweets from Biden dating back some nine years, including several years in which Biden was tweeting on June 19 without ever mentioning Juneteenth.
If Biden was ignorant of Juneteenth or considered it too unimportant to mention before two years ago, he hardly would have been alone. Even after last year’s protests and Trump’s postponed rally threw Juneteenth into dramatically greater prominence, a Gallup poll releaseon the eve of it being declared a national holiday showed that 60 percent of Americans knew little to nothing about Juneteenth. Only 12 percent of Americans reported having “a lot” of knowledge about it. Twenty-eight percent had never even heard of it. Just nine percent of white and Hispanic adults (collectively almost 80 percent of Americans) said they knew a lot about it. Moreover, just seven percent of Republicans supported making Juneteenth a holiday—yet every single Republican senator voted for it. This is the anatomy of a world-historical gaslighting by the Left and an equally world-historical political failure on the Right.
Below is a Google Trends search (essentially a recording of how often, on a relative basis, searches are done for a term over time) shows that Juneteenth barely registered in the United States until four or five years ago—and this already includes the fact that it did have prominence in Texas, where it was already a state holiday.
Even in 2002, over 135 years after the fact, only eight states had any formal recognition of Juneteenth.
The Left Is Using Juneteenth as a Political Weapon
Predictably, as leading Republicans lamely “celebrated” Juneteenth in much the way that a eunuch might celebrate his castration, Democrats began using the holiday to make radical demands. Unions and corporations quickly got in the act with a rash of declaring corporate holidays and demanding extra benefits in the name of Juneteenth.
Recently elected U.S. Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.), who has quickly developed a reputation as one of the most noxious race-baiters in Congress, tweeted: “On this Juneteenth, remember that millions of incarcerated Black people are still in bondage and that the 13th Amendment still permits slavery. Our work is Black liberation in its totality”— implying, of course, that black convicted murderers, rapists, and others who are lawfully and appropriately punished, somehow are inappropriately punished and must be liberated.
Other left-wing racist politicians had tweets and statements that were scarcely less awful. Violence and riots accompanied Juneteenth celebrations in many jurisdictions. GOP senators were booed when attending Juneteenth celebrations, doubtless surprising the vast majority of them, whose political IQs likely do not exceed room temperature.
Meanwhile, the State Department’s official site celebrated Juneteenth by tweeting out a pan-African rainbow raised fist while condemning “systemic racism” as the Black Lives Matter flag waved in the background.
Race Hustlers Have Always Been Juneteenth’s Champions
As a localized, grassroots festive remembrance of freedom centered around the African-American community, Juneteenth was beautiful and meaningful. But the push to make it an act of national public obeisance has always been cynical.
The father of the Juneteenth holiday in Texas was left-wing activist legislator Al Edwards, who kept after it for years before winning official recognition. Here’s how Texas Monthly (not exactly known for its conservatism) described Edwards in 1983 (three years after he had succeeded in his push to make Juneteenth a state holiday) when he headlined their list of Texas’ worst legislators:
‘So unseemly was Edwards’ performance during the past session that it is destined to become the stuff of legend’. . . [Edwards was the] ‘The Pariah of the decade’. . . ‘If he was not trying to solicit a bribe, he acted exactly like a man who was.’. . .
According to the editors, Edwards was “indifferent to the important stuff; anything but indifferent to his own self-interest.” Of course, in subsequent years his history was sanitized—Edwards is valorized now as a “civil rights leader”—but his contemporaries in the days before political correctness had a more accurate measure of the man.
The first proposal for a federal observance of Juneteenth was offered by U.S. Rep. Barbara-Rose Collins (D-Mich.) in 1996. She was described by a contemporary columnist as “By any measure, an embarrassment.”
She had the third-highest absenteeism rate, missing one key vote because she was at the opening of a casino in Indiana, and another because she refused to fly coach. A high school graduate, she claimed to be a member of MENSA, the high-IQ organization, but the group had no record of her in its files.
She once filed a complaint against herself (!) with the Federal Election Commission, and was under investigation for misusing campaign, office, and scholarship funds. Five years ago, the Detroit Democrat was solidly defeated in a primary after she held a fund-raiser in a strip bar. The respected Almanac of American Politics concluded it ‘seems undeniable she was just not up to being a member of Congress.’
“I don’t like the race,” she once said bluntly of white people.
But of course, like many corrupt and incompetent race-baiting politicians before her, she was always happy to push racial politics for her benefit. It is not a coincidence that corrupt incompetent racists were those most aggressively pushing the Juneteenth holiday. They were never civil rights activists. They were racial-grievance activists, which is another thing entirely. Ironically, their tactics often imitated those of racist white politicians in the early 20th century, who distracted from their own corruption and incompetence by blaming their constituents’ problems on African Americans.
A Possible Solution: Celebrate as if American Unity Matters
In an ideal world, the GOP would take back Congress, come to its senses, and repeal the Juneteenth national holiday, returning it to its previous status as a largely private celebration. Having already voted for it, however, this will likely prove too great a leap for most of our caucus.
Given that, perhaps its status as a federal holiday could at least be combined with Martin Luther King Day. In the same way that we brought holidays for Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays together, we can honor both civil rights and the end of slavery with a unified holiday.
In fact, with the advent of Juneteenth as a federal holiday the MLK holiday seems even more inappropriate in the context of our history. King—a great man in many ways, profoundly flawed in many others—had a genuine moral conscience and eloquence that must be balanced by an often naïve and jejune political stance as well as his morally disgraceful private life (particularly for a minister). On balance, surely, he was a great man, and a great American, but we have had many great Americans in our almost two and a half centuries, and he is not, especially in the post-Juneteenth world, uniquely deserving of the honor of a holiday above all other Americans from history, which is the status we accord to him now.
If Washington and Lincoln can share their birthday holiday, King can share his holiday with a celebration of the African-Americans he helped to liberate, a process that began with Lincoln, continued on Juneteenth, and in which King played a critical role in culminating. Such a process of holiday combination would be politically challenging but is both morally and practically correct, balancing a genuine desire to celebrate African-American freedom, with a feeling that there should be one standard for American holidays and the reasons for which we celebrate them.
At a practical political level (likely the only thing that matters to most GOP elected officials) it would reduce back to a single holiday the number of times cynical demands could be made each year by our political enemies, who use history as a cudgel to beat us into submitting to their disastrous policy preferences.
But even if GOP elected officials are too cowardly to act, we as individuals can decline to submit to this demonstration of a holiday as moral blackmail. We cannot live in an America where we have one standard for African Americans and another standard for everyone else. That is not civil rights, it is the opposite of civil rights. It is not a celebration of the end of slavery, it is the creation of a new kind of slavery.
We must not live by the Left’s lies. If our politicians will not lead, we must lead ourselves and hope they follow. We must be straightforward in calling the current incarnation of the national holiday of Juneteenth what it is—a cynical and immoral attempt to divide Americans rather than unite them.
We must reject, without shame, apology, or equivocation, George Floyd’s critical race holiday.
Of Founders, Slavery and Freedom
Article by Eric Utter in The American Thinker
Of Founders, Slavery and Freedom
More people around the world are—at least nominally—free than at any
other time in history. Free from monarchs, dictators, communism,
fascism. Free from serfdom, servitude, slavery, deprivation and extreme
oppression. This has ironically led many to take their freedom for
granted. Especially in the West. Perhaps the longer you have had
something the less you cherish it. Because never before in human history
have so many people willingly ceded control of their minds, souls and
bodies to others. Examples of this are legion, perhaps none more
illustrative and chilling than the reaction to government mandates and
restrictions put in place during the coronavirus plandemic pandemic.
Healthy people must stay in their homes for two weeks
a year or more? No problem. We have to cover our breathing apparatus
with masks, indoors or out? Check. My job is “nonessential?” Yes, sir. I
can’t go see my dying grandmother? Okay. Daughter can’t get married if
she wants all her friends and family to attend and share her joy?
Whatever you say. “Experts” say I must inject an unvetted
foreign substance into my body if I wish to attend college or keep my
job? Thank you, sir, I’ll have another! We must keep at least six feet
apart from all other homo sapiens and eat our Thanksgiving dinner outside? Big Brother knows best!
Whether submitting to hoaxes, obeying frauds or allowing “educators,” “journalists,” Big Tech tyrants, corporate charlatans and unelected bureaucrats to tell us what to do, how to speak, how to think, and what is right, far too many of us have effectively knelt before the emperor. But the emperor has no clothes. It is time for us to acknowledge this fact.
(A brief aside: Those who would enslave us spent four years telling us that President Trump was an emperor, a tyrant. They opposed everything he did or said simply because he did or said it. Turns out, most of what he said was correct. And he was one man fighting, for us, against the vast systemic bigotry of The Left. He was, in fact, the anti-emperor, the embodiment of a true anti-fascist.)
Too many of us have put up with exorbitant taxes, punitive regulations, mindless mandates, and policies that make us less happy, less free and at greater risk of being physically harmed or killed. Enforced mask mandates for us but not for those burning down our cities. Protect our borders? No way. Defund the police? You bet.
This madness has to stop. But it can only stop when the vast majority of people no longer choose to be slaves and victims. When unprecedentedly large numbers of people effectively willingly enslave themselves, when they outsource their free will to a government entity, it is a sign of mass insanity, an Age of Delusion. “Voluntary” slavery is anathema to an individual soul, a free society, and to God Himself.
Sesame Street Airs 4-Hour-Long Special Where The Count Counts All 471 Genders
NEW YORK, NY—Children’s show Sesame Street introduced a new segment to help teach kids modern values and counting, where the character the Count counts all of the genders.
It started out simply enough. The Count pointed to a boy and said, “One. Ah ah ah.” Then he pointed to a girl and said, “Two. Ah ah ah.”
He then continued on to count genders for hours and hours, pointing at different genders and counting. He got all the way up to 471 in the 4-hour special, which then closed with a song "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others," where the Muppets found a Republican hiding in Sesame Street and burned down his business.
"Seven! Ah ah ah!" he said a few minutes into the counting of the genders while pointing at a Muppet dressed like a demiboy.
"Ninety-one! Ah ah ah!" the Count said about an hour later. "This is a two-spirit dragonkin - ah ah ah!"
The episode was sponsored by the number 7 and the letters LGBTQ.