Friday, July 17, 2020

When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?"


We’ve had Al Sharpton protests in New York City for decades. No protesters shot dead. In fact,
as Ann Coulter points out, talking about the The Era of the Drama Queens (Every Crisis Is a Triumph), she
can’t think of a single protest in the 21st century by black people, or by white people, that police have responded to with violence.

You have to go back to the Democratic National Convention protests of 1968 — and those protesters were white. If we’re including the National Guard, there was Kent State in 1970 — also white protesters. The most recent black protest that was met with police violence was Selma, 1965.

Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes? If you can produce examples of black people being billy-clubbed merely for protesting, we’d all love to see them. We’re looking for something more recent than 1965.
As it happens, there seems to be a lot of police brutality nowadays, but it occurs abroad, in places like Hong Kong and even in Western democracies like France. But the Chinese communists' far more egregious shenanigans — not to mention the slavery, past as well as present, inherent in their system — matter little to the authors of the 1619 Project, to players and other members of the NBA, and to Black Lives Matter's self-declared Marxist leaders, members of whom have shown "a soft spot" and admiration for foreigners as diverse as Mugabe, Castro, and Stalin.

In that perspective, Ann Coulter goes on to ask
What happened to your vaunted concern for China’s human rights violations -- the Uyghurs, the Falun Gong, Tibet, child labor?

 … China gave us this latest viral disease -- not to be confused with H1N1, Asian flu, SARS and bird flu, also from China --

 … The globalists are making a lot of money selling us crappy products, manufactured in a culturally backward, totalitarian regime with zero quality control and absolutely no interest in the well-being of our country.
From Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619:
woke and superwoke drama queens [like brave brave Sir Colin (Kaepernick)] are heralded for their fight against oppression (when it — allegedly — concerns American deplorables alone), but…

Not only do the brave sportsmen of the NBA who courageously vowed to boycott North Carolina for its "inhumane" transgender bathroom policies refrain from protesting the Chinese flag or the communist anthem, not to mention Chinese repression (regarding the NBA or just in general); they censor their (own) speech, they clamp down on spectators' free speech, expelling them in the process, and they shut down journalists (even MSM reporters).

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise


THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

"Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Thursday, July 16, 2020

"Propagandists": The New York Times "has largely abandoned dialogue and handed the keys to America’s greatest paper to a strident, new orthodoxy that will not tolerate intellectual diversity"


For the New York Times's own take on the resignation of Bari Weiss, Edmund Lee seems to provide a pretty fair and objective viewpoint.

Among the reactions in the Gray Lady itself to the departure of the writer and editor for its opinion department is the following from Stephen Newman, an associate professor of politics at York University in Toronto:
 … it cannot be denied that many on the left have adopted an intolerant posture toward those in their own ranks who deviate from what is currently considered politically correct opinion. Free expression is the centerpiece of liberal politics, and its defense must be a priority.

 … speech is not violence. Undoubtedly, words can sting. They can be hurtful and offensive. But the best remedy for the wounds inflicted by words consists of words spoken in rebuttal.
And from Carl Loeb of Fairfax, California, who identifies as a left-leaning centrist, we get this about the publisher of the ncel Culture Project:
My education trained me to greet the world with an open mind. I believe in dialogue, not debate. And as a Times reader since college, I can see it plain as day: The Times has largely abandoned dialogue when it comes to cultural issues and ideas. You’ve handed the keys to America’s greatest paper to a strident, new orthodoxy that will not tolerate intellectual diversity. God, how sad.

I used to love reading William Safire’s column in The Times; I didn’t agree with his politics, but I celebrated his dexterity with the language.

I never thought I’d turn to The American Conservative for comfort, but at least it has the guts to publish controversial opinions that run counter to conservative orthodoxy. I used to get that from The Times. Want to know how to sell more papers? Publish a greater diversity of ideas, generate more conversation and, every once in a while, make a Jacobin mad.
As for Ted Cruz, writes Anthony Leonardi (thanks to Ed Driscoll), the Texas Senator is a lot tougher, stating that the resignation of Bari Weiss reveals that the paper is nothing but a propaganda outlet:
In an interview with the Washington Examiner discussing his podcast Verdict, co-hosted by conservative commentator Michael Knowles, Cruz said Weiss's resignation amounts to an indictment of the New York Times that necessitates alternative forms of media consumption.

"They are propagandists. They don't pretend. There is no journalistic integrity. They don't aspire to it. It's not the objective. They are propagandists, and that's all they want to be," Cruz said. "I've never been a fan of the New York Times, but actually having a free press that are not propagandists is good for this country. Too many institutions have been destroyed by the tyranny of the modern left."

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Ethical Collapse and the "New McCarthyism": "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"


Asking why has the New York Times management let the inmates run the asylum, and quoting Matthew Continetti as comparing the "paper of record" to high school, Glenn Reynolds goes on to write in USA Today that
Once known as the “Gray Lady,” the Times now looks more like a middle school run by the "Mean Girls" crowd while the administration cowers in its offices. The proper response to a bunch of junior staffers complaining about articles that a paper publishes is something between “Go, write a piece explaining why that piece is wrong” and “Fetch my latte.”
This comes in the context of, as Brian Flood reports on Fox News,
New York Times opinion columnist and editor Bari Weiss [announcing] Tuesday she is leaving the Gray Lady, saying she was bullied by colleagues in an "illiberal environment," weeks after declaring there was a “civil war” inside the paper.
Weiss published a scathing resignation letter that she sent to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on her personal website, noting she doesn’t understand how toxic behavior is allowed inside the newsroom and "showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery."

  … Last month, Weiss offered insight about the internal battle among her colleagues following the publishing of an op-ed written by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. that sparked a major backlash from its own staff.

Hours before the Times offered a mea culpa for running Cotton's piece -- which called for troops to be sent in to quell the George Floyd riots -- Weiss claimed that a "civil war" was brewing within the paper.
 
In her resignation letter, Weiss noted that her own “forays into Wrongthink” have made her the subject of “constant bullying by colleagues” who disagree with her views.

“They have called me a Nazi and a racist,” she wrote.
“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” Bari Weiss adds in her letter.
This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.
Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.  
Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.
In 2018, Howard Kurtz reminds us, Weiss, the author of a book on anti-Semitism who describes herself as a centrist,
complained before about the social media “mob,” telling HBO’s Bill Maher two years ago: “Saying ‘I am offended’ is a way of making someone radioactive; a way of smearing their reputation.”

Who cannot think of the 1619 Project, when reading that
“I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”
While Ed Driscoll writes that "cancel culture claims another scalp", Instapundit's Tyler O'Neill lists some previous scalps:
Weiss’ resignation letter reads like the damning tell-alls from Google’s James Damore and Facebook’s Brian Amerige. Damore condemned Google as an “ideological echo chamber” for far-left ideas that would brook no dissent from stifling leftist orthodoxy. Amerige described Facebook as a “political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views.” Both described witch-hunts against conservatives oddly similar to the way the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) uses routine defamation to silence conservative groups as KKK-style “hate groups.”

 … Weiss concluded her resignation letter by noting that she had adopted Adolph Ochs’ 1896 vision:
“to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.” 
That is a marvelous idea, but one which it seems the Times will no longer stomach.
"Weiss is only conservative by Upper West Side standards," writes David Bernstein , "but her letter validates what a lot of people on the right have surmised goes on at the Times." Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has this suggestion:
PRESIDENT TRUMP SHOULD ANNOUNCE THAT HE’S ORDERING THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION AT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TO INVESTIGATE THE NEW YORK TIMES … Sounds like systemic racism and sexism to me. And DOJ has certainly launched investigations over less.
As it happens, ‘Bari Weiss’s letter was tame,’ a New York Times insider tells The Spectator's Dominic Green (thanks to Instapundit's Ed Driscoll).
Weiss’s online enemies are already assuming that she jumped before she was pushed. That alone would confirm the impression of ethical collapse at the Times. The radical left are running the paper, and no dissent is tolerated – not even from a US senator. But the truth, I hear, is that she left in disgust.

‘This was obviously her decision. It was just, “What am I doing here anymore? The place has gone mad.”’

It won’t stop with Weiss. Colleagues on the opinion pages and in the newsroom have, I’m told, ‘ratcheted up their disdain for moderates and conservatives’. Who’s next?

"Who's next"? The very same day, it was announced that columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan is leaving New York magazine, his professional home since 2016
 … New York editor in chief David Haskell confirmed Sullivan’s resignation in a memo to staff obtained by CNN Business.
 
 … "I am trying hard to create in this magazine a civil, respectful, intellectually honest space for political debate," Haskell said. "I believe there is a way to write from a conservative perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life while still upholding our values. I also think that our magazine in particular has an opportunity to be a place where the liberal project is hashed out, which is to say not only championed but also interrogated."
Haskell vowed to push for "work that challenges the liberal assumptions of much of our readership. But publishing conservative commentary, or critiques of liberalism and the left, in 2020 is difficult to get right, and thoughtful, well meaning people can come to different conclusions about it …"
Instapundit's Ed Driscoll knows where to get the money quote:
 … as Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner tweets
“Translation: I want to challenge our reader base but I don’t know how to do that without challenging our reader base”
Welcome to the brave new world created by cancel ghouls, also known as garbage people or, alternatively, as drama queens

• Update — New York Times readers chime in: The Gray Lady has largely abandoned dialogue and handed the keys to America’s greatest paper to a strident, new orthodoxy that will not tolerate intellectual diversity