Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Or its stupidity, depending on how you look at it.
… My primary beef with the ad campaign is that it clearly insinuates
that Kaepernick’s long period of unemployment is somehow linked to his
political activism, a conclusion that is speculative at best. The truth
is that during the 2016 season, Kaepernick’s last and the one in which
he made such a spectacle of himself, the 49ers won just two games out of
eighteen. Could it be that Kaepernick was fired not for showing
flagrant disrespect for his country but because he sucked at his job?
It’s hard to say. The 49ers have never said that they let their
quarterback go because of the whole kneeling thing. But they wouldn’t,
would they? No, they’d lie about it because admitting that they canned
their starting quarterback for that reason would mean that they don’t
support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. And that’s raaaaaaaacist!–just like the anthem itself.
It would also mean that they don’t support free speech—which they
aren’t required to. As liberals continually remind me, free speech does
not mean freedom from consequences. No one is putting Kaepernick in
jail. He merely lost his job, possibly for alienating the fans—a quite
reasonable justification for firing someone—and possibly for leading his
team to a last place finish in the NFC.
Could it have been a combination of the two? A quarterback who was at
least making the playoffs likely could have gotten away with all the
anthem kneeling—and the cops-as-pigs socks, and the Fidel Castro romanticism, and the Malcolm X hero worship. But not a loser like Kaepernick.
This whole debate about why Kaepernick was fired amounts to a tricky
surgical separation between two completely legitimate reasons for
termination. Sure, Kaepernick’s big mouth might be to blame. Employers
frequently discipline their employees for what they say. Of all the many
employers I’ve ever had not one has ever offered me “freedom of
speech”—or rather freedom from consequences of my speech—while on the
job. I’ve always known that my words could end up getting me fired if
they angered co-workers or customers. But on the other hand, Kaepernick
could have just been fired because his club felt like winning again.
Given that both reasons for termination are valid, who cares which played a greater role?
For all those who argue that Kaepernick was fired solely for his
activism, I would ask you to consider the fact that two other members of
the 49ers organization were also fired at the end of the 2016 season:
head coach Chip Kelly and general manager Trent Baalke. No surprise
there. When NFL teams finish last in their conference they often try to
make a clean break by dumping those in leadership positions. Such is
life in the competitive world of professional sports.
It isn’t difficult to see why Kaepernick would want the public to
believe that he was given a pink slip for taking a stand—or rather, a
knee. Otherwise we’d just think that he was fired for piss poor
performance.
My secondary beef with the Kaepernick ad campaign is that it fails to
address the real issue underlying the anthem-kneeling. We talk a lot
about whether he had a right to speak (of course he does) when we should
be talking about whether what he said was actually right.
In this great big country that we live in, there are bound to be
episodes in which police officers use force, sometimes deadly force, in
the course of their duties. In some cases that force is justified but in
others it isn’t. Kaepernick and the BLM movement seem unwilling or
unable to distinguish between the two.
When force is not justified we call that police brutality which is a
criminal abuse of government authority. We should absolutely condemn
police brutality.
But even in cut-and-dry instances of police brutality, racism cannot
simply be assumed as a motive. Doing so represents a logical leap that
depends on the very inexact science of attributing motives. We all
attribute motives from time to time, though BLM seems to do it
recklessly and with extreme prejudice.
The movement has created the impression that black people have
something to fear from the police simply for being black, as if cops go
out on patrol just itching to shoot a random black person. They ignore
the fact that more whites are killed by police
every year than blacks. Those incidents are usually featured only as
quick stories on the local news because they don’t fit the narrative.
The narrative is “Black man shot by white police officer”—which is
automatically assumed to be because the cop doesn’t like black people.
There’s no room in this tidy story for complicating detail. Was the
suspect resisting arrest? Did he have a gun or what appeared to be a
gun? BLM doesn’t care. Yet despite this wolf pack of supposedly racist
cops roaming the streets, black Jehovah’s Witnesses selling the
Watchtower on the street corner never seem to be gunned down despite
being just as black as Michael Brown or Eric Garner. Clearly something
else is at play here.
In reality, police officers of all colors occasionally shoot citizens
of all colors. Sometimes those killings are justified, sometimes
they’re not. Each incident is its own story with its own set of facts.
Of these aforementioned examples, the first (Keith Scott) was
justified and the second (Akai Gurley) was an unfortunate episode caused
by a nervous and inexperienced cop who negligently discharged his
firearm in the dark stairwell of a housing project. The last two of
these examples, which involved white victims, were completely
unjustified yet BLM ignores these and focuses instead on a burly thug
(Michael Brown) who tried to kill a cop with his own gun and a drug
dealer (Freddie Gray) who was fanatically resisting arrest.
Some evidence indicates that cops are more likely to shoot whites
than blacks because they don’t believe that their motives will be
second-guessed or that they will have to watch their backs for the rest
of their lives. In 2015, after a sheriff’s deputy in Kentucky killed a crazed white man
named John Fenwick, the sheriff himself was asked if he was afraid of
public backlash—a very dumb question indeed. When has a city ever burned
because a white guy got shot? Sheriff Ed Mattingley responded:
“We do
not want trouble. We are glad that he is white, and we shouldn’t have to
be worried about that.”
Glad he was white!
But Colin Kaepernick never took a knee for John Fenwick. Nor does he
speak up for Justine Damond or Daniel Shaver. He doesn’t care about
them. He cares about blacks who are shot by police, whether justifiably
or not, solely because they are black. There’s nothing heroic about that
and certainly isn’t a blow against racism.
… Colin Kaepernick peddles a very big lie—that cops routinely kill
blacks for sport—which has contributed to a lot of scattered corpses and
riots. …
You may agree with the letter and the spirit of what Colin Kaepernick (whose birthday is two days before the election) has to say, but you might have second thoughts and wince a mite (whatever the color of your skin) when you see the race-baitin' books that have most inspired him. In any case, because Colin Kaepernick has a new picture book out, the New York Times features an interview with the football quarterback in the paper's (By the) Book section.
Business memoirs are at hand as he navigates a new role as the founder of a startup to “democratize storytelling.” Meanwhile he has co-written “We Are Free, You & Me,” an illustrated book for kids.
… Why is writing for kids important to you?
Kids
are so impressionable. What they are reading and absorbing at a young
age will stay with them forever, so it’s important to make sure we give
them great and empowering books to read that help them lay a positive
foundation for the rest of their lives.
… Which books or authors inspired you as an activist?
“The
Autobiography of Malcolm X,” by Alex Haley, Malcolm X and Attallah
Shabazz; “Revolutionary Suicide,” by Huey P. Newton; “The Wretched of
the Earth” and “Black Skin, White Masks,” by Frantz Fanon; “Pedagogy of
the Oppressed,” by Paulo Freire; “Black Awakening in Capitalist
America,” by Robert L. Allen; “Women, Race and Class” and “Freedom Is a
Constant Struggle,” by Angela Y. Davis; “I Write What I Like,” by Steve
Biko; “Slave Patrols,” by Sally E. Hadden. These books are written by
incredibly brilliant minds and provide research and perspective that is
grounded in the liberation of oppressed people, specifically Black
people.
Do you expect to write a memoir one day?
Yes. My graphic novel memoir, “Change the Game,” was my first, based on my high school years. I will write a complete memoir in the future.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
James Baldwin, Alexandre Dumas and Toni Morrison.
There you have it: Also, Colin Kaepernick seems to have no interest in any author (in any human?) who ain't black.
The Dearborn-based Catholic priest …
seems to have caused chaos and dismay when he spoke out against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as “evil.”
“Cars have been torched,” said Graney. “Property has been destroyed.
Businesses looted and burned, and police officers and other people have
been intimidated, assaulted, and even murdered. All in the name of
justice.”
Naturally, some people said his message was beyond the pale. But I say, preach it, brother!
Miraculously, both survived. Though we don’t
know for certain that the perpetrator was a BLM activist, it isn’t a
huge leap to make in this current climate of anti-police enmity to think
that the shooting was meant to avenge the death of George Floyd.
We do know however that BLM activists made tracks
to the local hospital after the shooting in order to block the
entrances and exits. If BLM didn’t perpetrate the murderous act — and I
suspect it did — it at least applauded it. BLM activists were apparently
shouting, “We hope they f*cking die!” …
They later swarmedthe emergency room.
… Nike gave a shoe deal
to third-rate ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick for having the courage to
take a knee during the national anthem. His actions caused “pain,
anger, and frustration” among some NFL fans who made their gripes known
to the league. But the league didn’t care about those fans.
… But Kaepernick’s newfound fans, most of whom love his politics more
than his football, assert without evidence that he paid dearly for
speaking out about racism and police brutality, two of the fakest pandemics in America today. There is no epidemic of police violence against unarmed black men.
The disparate treatment between activists like Kaepernick and
activists like Father Paul Graney puts the lie to some of the Left’s
most common catchphrases. Here are just a few.
“Difficult Conversations”
If I’ve learned anything over the past few months it’s that we’re all
supposed to be having “difficult conversations” about race, privilege,
systemic racism, and police brutality. Some of us are forced by our
employers to participate in these difficult conversations under the
implied threat of losing our jobs.
All Father Graney was trying to do was to start a different kind of
difficult conversation with his parish. He soon learned that difficult
conversations about certain issues are prohibited because those
conversations are difficult for the wrong people.
Rest assured that conversations about race, privilege, systemic
racism and police brutality are not “difficult” for everyone. They’re
not difficult, for example, for the black lady who runs the “diversity
and inclusion” office at your workplace. It’s all she ever talks about.
She has a four-year degree in those subjects and she reads books about
them during her lunch break — just for fun!
These kinds of conversations are difficult for people who cannot say
anything lest they be accused of “whitesplaining,” using “dog whistles”
and “coded language,” or committing “microaggressions.” They’re
difficult for people who haven’t kept up with the latest terminology —
“Latinx,” “people of color,” “DREAMers” — and who know that at any
moment they might face an extreme social penalty for using a term that
was completely acceptable until just a few years ago. And they’re most
difficult of all for people who merely dissent from the domineering
white guilt narrative that is constantly being shoved down our throats.
In other words, these conversations are difficult for people who make
the mistake of believing that they are actual conversations. They
aren’t. They’re Maoist struggle sessions in which one side lectures and
the other side engages in copious amounts of self-flagellation. They’re
degrading and that’s the point.
The first thing you have to do during these Maoist struggle sessions
is to agree that you are hopelessly racist because not owning your
racism is racist in and of itself. Also, you may not sit quietly in the
corner and watch the clock tick by. When the wokeness police come
knocking, you do not have the right to remain silent because
“silence is violence.” Speech is also violence if the words express any
kind of disagreement. The only thing that is not violence is
unconditional surrender to their agenda coupled with a humiliating
petition for racial forgiveness — which may not be granted.
“Peaceful Protest”
Father Graney’s homily was a peaceful protest in the greatest
American tradition, yet he may still pay a price for it because not all
peaceful protests are created equal. Peacefully protesting police
violence against black people is lauded in our society; peacefully
protesting against the much more common occurrence of black violence
against police officers — or against one another — is not.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard the old “peaceful protest”
yarn used to defend anthem-kneeling football players. After years and
years of watching people lose their jobs for disagreeing with left-wing
orthodoxy, it seemed disingenuous that left-wing orthodoxy was suddenly
squarely behind peaceful protest. Talk about “strange new respect!”
Most people, I believe, would agree that peaceful protest shouldn’t
cost a person his job. Most people, that is, except employers. Not one
employer I have ever had has allowed me to “peacefully protest” while on
the clock — and I’ve had a lot of employers. Nor have I ever had a job
at which I had anything resembling unfettered free speech. I could have
been fired from any of my many jobs for remarks made in private
conversation, or even off the clock. I certainly would have been fired
if my aggressive political opinions had alienated even a handful of
customers — which is exactly what Kaepernick did.
The “peaceful protest” card immunizes people with the right opinions
from losing their jobs, being disciplined, or even being criticized.
However, those of us who engage in Wrongthink may not play this card.
And that includes Paul Graney.
But it’s a lie. Leftists never speak truth to power because they
never speak truth. The best they can manage is to speak untruths to
power and more often they don’t even do that. I don’t know what “power”
Kaepernick was speaking to, but I do know that he was far afield of the
truth. Cops are not hunting blacks for sport and in fact they kill more whites every year than blacks.
Father Graney on the other hand did speak truth to power.
We’re living through an epidemic of violence and destruction all
predicated on a myth and propelled by an evil, racist, anti-American,
anti-family group of Marxist agitators called BLM. His homily struck a
blow against the most powerful people of all: the architects of the
official narrative. I’m talking here about Big Government, Big Business,
Big Education, and most of all, Big Media. If that’s not speaking truth
to power, nothing is.
I sure hope Father Graney hangs tough. We as a society have a duty to
stick up for courageous truth-tellers. Not only should he not receive a
lick of punishment, he really ought to have his stature elevated in the
Church. Is it too soon to start talking about Graney for pope?
It can seem frightening when one realizes the extent to which the left has succeeded in alienating America's black community from the rest of the country.
Once a week, the New York Times Sunday Book Review features an interview with a published writer. Called By the Book and featuring a painting of the respective author by Rebecca Clarke, some of the questions are personal to the subject of the interview — which often seems to be done by email — while a handful of other questions features the exact same basic recurring inquiries, such as "What’s the last great book you read?" and what's "Your favorite book no one else has heard of?"
A number of writers are black, which is not a problem, needless to say, far from it, but you might have second thoughts and wince a mite (whatever the color of your skin) when you see the race-baitin' books that sometimes inspired the authors and notice to what degree they are exclusively, or mainly (but far from always), by other black writers (although sometimes by other minority authors, but invariably by leftists).
For instance, the favorite novelist of all time for Tiya Miles is "Toni Morrison — for her sheer bravery, breathless wordsmithing,
intellectual range and incomparable understanding of our emotional and
social realms. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins came to mind as a close second.
Her best-known novel [was] “Contending Forces” (published in 1900)".
A previous post on a(n in)famous football quarterback who authored a picture book was asked this question
Which books or authors inspired you as an activist?
“The
Autobiography of Malcolm X,” by Alex Haley, Malcolm X and Attallah
Shabazz; “Revolutionary Suicide,” by Huey P. Newton; “The Wretched of
the Earth” and “Black Skin, White Masks,” by Frantz Fanon; “Pedagogy of
the Oppressed,” by Paulo Freire; “Black Awakening in Capitalist
America,” by Robert L. Allen; “Women, Race and Class” and “Freedom Is a
Constant Struggle,” by Angela Y. Davis; “I Write What I Like,” by Steve
Biko; “Slave Patrols,” by Sally E. Hadden.
There you have it: … Colin Kaepernick seems to have no interest in any author (in any human?) who ain't black.
As for the question that almost invariably ends the By the Book interview in the NYT's Sunday Book Review section each week — "You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?" — Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are ubiquitous, returning again and again and again. (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)
Here are some of the black authors' actual replies: for Reginald Dwayne Betts the answer is "Lucille Clifton, Harold Bloom, Toni Morrison", for Brontez Purnell it's "Sappho, Anton LaVey and Maya Angelou", and for the rapper Common it's "James Baldwin, Nas, and Kahlil Gibran", while the aforementioned Colin Kaepernick answers
"James Baldwin, Alexandre Dumas and Toni Morrison."
As for Morgan Parker, the author of “Magical Negro” wanted to invite six people, not three, and not one of them not African-American:
June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin — but I’d be lying if I
said I wouldn’t get just as much fun and fulfillment from a night with
Angel Nafis, Danez Smith and Saeed Jones.
Regarding Glory Edim (who "created the Well-Read Black Girl book club"), she only wants four people, but needless to say, they can hardly be described as run-of-the-mill realists:
Toni Morrison, Nikole Hannah-Jones
and Trevor Noah. There would be whiskey, shared laughter and candid
commentary on everything. If I could add one more person, it would be Ta-Nehisi Coates!
“Lovely One: A Memoir” allowed the Times to interview Ketanji Brown Jackson (otherwise known as a Supreme Court justice), and she does list two whites ("Heather McGhee. Atul Gawande. Brad Meltzer.") for her ideal dinner party, but apart from that, it's blacks and/or leftists all the way through (Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s biography, “Civil
Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality,” “Born a Crime,” by Trevor Noah, “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,”by
Justice Stephen Breyer, “All That She Carried,” by Tiya Miles, in addition to a stack of memoirs — by Cicely Tyson, Viola Davis, Michelle
Obama, Sonia Sotomayor).
What’s the last great book you read?
Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s biography, “Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker
Motley and the Struggle for Equality,” is probably the last full book
I’ve read outside of work. I was just so grateful that this
extraordinary woman’s experiences and contributions finally got the
attention they deserved.
Indeed, Ketanji Brown Jackson adds that it "was crucial for me to maintain a relatively good relationship with my
daughters. Doing that well is the essential challenge of working
motherhood." Who knows? Maybe she does know what a woman is, after all!
A few years ago, the removal of Confederate flags was proceeding apace when the valiant leftists' next heroic step got into high gear, the destruction or removal of Confederate statues — something that was inevitably praised across the leftist sphere.
Mentioning a slippery slope after the Charlottesville riots, President Donald Trump said (in a speech that was deceitfully reported to make the president sound racist) that this would eventually lead to objections to the American flag, as well as to the banishment of statues and depictions of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — something that was mocked across the leftist sphere.
It didn't take long for the drama queens (i.e., the very people who had mocked Trump) to prove the Donald (and myself) right. Indeed, in 2016 (after eight years of a black president), a professional sportsman managed to unite leftists in awe, as the football player — one Colin Kaepernick — started kneeling during the national anthem, for the salutary reason to protest police brutality as well as racism in the USA. Since the Star-Spangled Banner ain't Dixie, isn't brave brave Sir Colin's virtue-signaling akin to protesting, if not (yet) demanding the outright removal of, not the Stars and Bars but the Stars and Stripes?!
Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of
statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen
anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval
Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds
that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS
militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient,
pre-Islamic statues and idols.
Bursting with valor, corporations were/are quick and eager to jump on the leftists' ban(d)wagon, introducing unisex bathrooms, banning the (legal) sale of firearms, or hiring Kaepernick as their spokesman — and obeying his dictates regarding their (US, not CS) flag-depicting products.
Let us swoon with admiration and praise to the high heavens the insight, the courage, and the activism of these outstanding individuals and of those first-rate institutions.
The praiseworthy institutions include, needless to say, members of the mainstream media such as the New York Times. As it happens, the newspaper of record has weighed in on historical matters three times in the past month or so: the 1619 Project, China's communist revolution, and the 9-11 attacks.
From the Times, we learn that the Founding Fathers, who in any case are (despicable) racists, turn out to have little to no real hand in the actual founding. As Lyman Stone puts it,
the 1619 Project … isn’t mostly about
helping Americans understand the role played by plantation agriculture
in American history. It’s mostly about convincing Americans [and foreigners alike (!)] that
“America” and “slavery” are essentially synonyms.
One should feel at least a little bit bad
about being American, because, as several articles are reported to say, the United States, in its basic DNA, is not a liberal democracy,
constitutional republic, or federation. It’s a slave society.
Indeed, America is uniquely, demonically evil, we are taught by the drama queens. This is reflected, moreover, in the death of every citizen, if black, at the hands of a
policeman, if white, which deserves universal condemnation and shows that the
nation of 300+ million deplorables is in fact a nightmare.
Shame, America! Shame! SHAME!
Regarding China and the Muslim world, on the other hand, there is not anything resembling a sh•thole in sight.
Indeed, writes the Times, Mao Zedong
"began as an obscure peasant" and "died one of history's greatest revolutionary
figures." (By the way: don't forget that Trump ‘May Be Responsible for Many More Millions of Deaths’ than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.) So,
China's communist founder, who went out of his way to murder 45 million
people, deserves nothing but praise and hagiography; while America's
revolutionaries must be condemned irrevocably for having slaves (which was
part of daily life at the time, including, yes, in Asia and in the Middle East).
As for the anniversary of 9/11, the "newspaper of record" sent
out a commemorative tweet ignoring the Islamist terrorists ("airplanes
took aim") and managing to downplay the number of the victims (is
2977 closer to "more than 2000" or simply to "nearly 3,000"?).
It's good to know that there are places outside the horrific United States that are so much better to live in than in that Yankee nightmare.
From America's newspaper of record, therefore, we are happy to learn that there does not seem to be any (or much) racism in China or in the Muslim world, there does not seem to be a single slave among the Chinese nor among the Muslims (nor has there ever been one throughout their respective histories), while deaths at the hand of the authorities in communist countries and in Muslim countries are just about unheard of. No, there is nothing about China or the Muslim world to be offended about or simply agonize over.
This is what our children in the West are taught in schools. No wonder so many of our kids protest against their own country while thinking kindly of foreign concepts like socialism.
This all brings us to the NBA and ESPN, along with a (growing) handful of other companies.
So: woke and superwoke drama queens are heralded for their fight against oppression (when it — allegedly — concerns American deplorables alone), but…
The assessment in the New York Post of Miranda Devine, who has more on Apple, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Qantas, Air France, Air Canada, and British Airways, is harsh:
The NBA’s kowtowing to China’s bullying is proof, if you ever needed it,
that woke capitalism is a sick con job. It is the opposite of “standing
for something.”
Regarding Ramona Shelburne's original tweet: In view of the fact that leftists' (self-serving) attitudes have "deeply offended many of [y]our friends and fans in [the United States]", how about referring to that as "regrettable" and showing just a little respect (not even great respect is demanded) "for the history and culture of [the United States]" while using sports "as a unifying force to bridge cultural divides and bring people together"?
As of this writing, not a single player, not a single coach, not a
single owner has spoken out in support of Morey. You couldn’t get all
those guys to agree on any topic in domestic American politics. But for
the first forty-eight hours of this controversy, the opinion of everyone
associated with the NBA was uniform. Our relationship with China has
not made them more like us. It has made us more like them.
Think about it: we have no shortage of professional athletes who
are willing to publicly denounce American cops who they deem abusive and
brutal. But everybody’s looking at their shoes as the cops in Hong Kong
beat the hell out of anybody in a mask and shoot people at point-blank range.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr has plenty to say when the
topic is mass shootings, Donald Trump, or Colin Kaepernick. But suddenly
he finds the topic of Hong Kong just too complicated and “bizarre” for him to comment.
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.
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.
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…
• 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"
• 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
• 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
Table of Contents:
I) Anti-Americanism and Double Standards in the Era of the Coronavirus
II) The Current Anti-Americanism Is But Part of a Much Larger Picture
I) Anti-Americanism and Double Standards in the Era of the Coronavirus
It's time to remind everybody of one of the initial reasons in 2020 that MSM could "inform" us, again, to what extent Donald Trump is racist (as well as xenophobic): when the news of the Corona virus (belatedly, thanks to the CCP) broke out in early January, the president almost immediately blocked travel from
China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) to the United States. (Later, I was told by a furious European that "America blames Europe for the virus," because Trump banned airplane entry from the EU.)
Five to six weeks later, it turned out that America's president seems to have been prescient, because, one after the other, all other countries not only followed suit, but basically shut down their borders to the entire world, and by March, the entire planet had done the same.
Now, did the press then remain consistent and call the leaders of all other countries racist (and xenophobic)? No, of course not. Did the MSM at least apologize to Donald Trump or did it simply express regret, more generally, some kind of mea culpa, to its viewers? No, of course not. Instead, the media silently dropped the matter.
Indeed, one reason for dropping the racist (and xenophobic) angle was that the MSM had found a brand-new reason, or angle, to demonstrate that President Trump is racist (and xenophobic): the President referred to the Coronavirus as the Wuhan virus and as the Chinese virus! (Terms that, incidentally, the… journalists themselves had been using for… weeks.)
Listen to Gail Herriot as she mentions the following precedents:
Examples include Asian flu, Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, Brazilian
hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, German measles, Japanese encephalitis, Lyme
disease, Marburg virus, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Pontiac
fever, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Spanish flu,
Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever, and West Nile virus.
Don Payne gives some more examples:
Trump calls it “Chinese Virus” because it IS a virus... that DOES come from China.
Ever hear of: Spanish Flu? Hong Kong Flu? Asian Flu? Ebola Fever? Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever? Swine Flu? German Measles? Bright’s Disease? Guillain-Barre Syndrome? Down Syndrome? Hansen’s Disease? Parkinson’s Disease? Bird Flu? Lou Gehrig Disease? Legionnaires Disease? Lyme Disease? West Nile Virus? etc.?
A GREAT many diseases, conditions and syndromes are named for the location... or the source... from which the disease originated... the researcher that identified the malady... a notable group, or individual patient, who contracted the disease... etc.
Calling the current outbreak the “Chinese Virus,” is right, proper, traditional and customary. It is NOT racist, demeaning, or prejudicial, to refer to it, using that term.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Evan Sayet mentions "Other disasters, too.....the Johnstown flood, the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago Cubs", while Don Payne adds that
Anyone avoiding Chinese Food restaurants... or, allegedly, attacking Asians... as a result of hearing that term... is either ignorant, uneducated, pathologically criminal or just stupid, beyond belief.
This follows the typical pattern of the Democrats, and their attack dog media, trying to create an issue, where NONE exists, for the purposes of smearing a President... to create a false justification for calling him a “hateful racist.”
This is a low, dirty, despicable, dishonest, dishonorable and shameful propaganda campaign... nothing more.
Democrats... always stirring the pot... even in a time of national crises.
Unconscionable.
Over at the American Spectator, Scott McKay does not find the term Kung Flu
offensive at all. Saying that the the Perpetually Offended do not
recognize what is nothing more than a workplace joke, he sets the record straight:
Weijia Jiang isn’t fooling
anybody. We know this is all partisan hackery. She isn’t offended by
“Kung Flu”; what she’s offended by is the fact Donald Trump is the
president and her party and political persuasion is in no particular
condition to dislodge him. So she throws “Kung Flu” at the wall, hoping
it sticks.
the
Democrats see the coronavirus outbreak as an opportunity rather than an epidemic. Having failed to bring down President Trump with ridiculous
conspiracy theories involving Russia and Ukraine, they are desperately
attempting to convince the public that he is somehow exacerbating the
COVID-19 crisis … the current Democratic rhetoric was a grotesquely
cynical ploy to mislead and frighten the public for the usual tawdry
political purposes
Moreover, the New Neo's third point for calling it the Chinese virus (after "(1) Many viruses are still called by place names signifying their point
of origin" and "(2) The virus actually did originate in China") is:
(3) And most of all, the Chinese engaged in a huge coverup of what was
happening back when alerting the world in a timely fashion might have
prevented COVID-19’s spread (see this).
Which is why the Epoch Times has chosen to call it the CCP virus (otherwise known a the ChiCom virus or the Chinese Communist Party virus).
Of course, nothing China's communists (or, for that matter, Russia's communists) do, or have done for the past 20 to 30 years, or for the past 60 to 70 years (including to their own people), has ever seemed to shock or offend many of America's media outlets and their Perpetual Outrage machines.
the insidious way in which the mainstream media,
which have spent the past three years obsessing about the spread of fake
news, operate like a cartel [think JournOlism], ruthlessly enforcing standards on
outsiders but refusing to police themselves.
As it happens, most of the so-called investigative media outlets — who, again, happen (sic) to be echoing China's commmunist party — have not shown an iota of interest where the virus came from, or who is guilty, or who is at least responsible.
It is the old use of the passive when a far left government are in power — in the U.S. or abroad — suggesting a leftist political project turns out to be some kind of natural disaster. It just happened. Unexpectedly. (Madeline Osburn offers a top-notch example in which one MSM outlet, the Atlantic, seems to have become the water boy for China's Communist Party.)
Imagine, now, if you will,
if some illness originated somewhere in the United States? What a
contrast! Then, you can bet your ass that everybody in the world, first and foremost the American people, would join in calling it the Pittsburgh flu, or the Texas virus, or the U.S. epidemic.
Indeed, in that case the media — which, remember, is not the enemy of the American people (how can you believe such a thing?!) — would have a field day, and a tidal wave of the harshest criticism imaginable would rain down upon America as well as on the country's system (capitalism).
These people hate your guts, America.
II) The Current Anti-Americanism Is But Part of a Much Larger Picture
The New York Times spent 2017, the centennial of the Russian
Revolution, seeking for anything and everything to laud about the Soviet Union's communists. In September 2019, the "newspaper of record" sent
out a commemorative tweet ignoring the Islamist terrorists ("airplanes
took aim") and managing to downplay the number of the victims. And (speaking of China as well as of communists) the Times sought to hail Mao Zedong as someone who "began as an obscure peasant" and who "died one of history's greatest revolutionary
figures."
Such perspectives lead Greg Price to observe that:
I would genuinely like to ask the editors of the New York Times if they regret the outcome of the Cold War
But: the NYT spent half of 2019, the 400th anniversary of an obscure (if admittedly heinous) and rather accidental commercial transaction in a tiny Virginia town involving at most 25-30 people (including the 20some African slaves), positing that the previously unknown transaction is more reflective of an entire country and of an entire people than historical documents 157 years (the Declaration of Independence) and 168 years (the Constitution) later that concerned every single one of its two and a half million inhabitants, as well as the power structure of the entire Western world.
After a torrent of criticism of the 1619 Project, to which the New York Times smugly failed to react in any substantive manner, the paper was forced to do so after the publication of a devastating article by… the newspaper's… very own fact-checker (!).
In her original essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, an a sort of an abstract, that
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact
that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their
independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the
institution of slavery.
Now she had no choice but to amend it:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact
that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to
declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to
protect the institution of slavery.
“The clarification is small — just two words — but important,” Hannah-Jones claimed on Twitter.
Noticing that Hannah-Jones's title does not feature a single change, Becket Adams reacts:
Along with not understanding the difference between “all” and “some,” it appears the New York Times reporter struggles also with the definition of the word “small.” Because amending her essay to say that some of
the colonists revolted to preserve slavery, as opposed to asserting it
was a driving force behind the entire revolt, is a hell of a lot more
than a “small” clarification.
Indeed: to add
that couple of words (some of), which happen to undermine the 1619 project's entire premise,while retaining the abstract's postulation — i.e., the phrase
"Conveniently left out of our founding mythology" — has now become
clearly fallacious, obviously deceitful, and plainly deceptive.
All this ties in with the rest of the culture in the past few years and decades. Think of America's valiant leftists and SJWs bravely stepping up to attack the Confederate flag. Mentioning a slippery slope after the Charlottesville riots, President Donald Trump said (in a speech that was deceitfully reported to make the president sound racist)
that this would eventually lead to objections to the American flag, as
well as to the banishment of statues and depictions of George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson — something that was mocked across the leftist
sphere. (This is something I too had predicted, back in June 2015, just as I
predicted in October 2008 that
charges of racism against the United States, in spite of the (then-hypothetical) election of a black man, will never cease…)
It didn't take long for the drama queens
(i.e., the very people who had mocked Trump) to prove the Donald (and
myself) right. Indeed, in 2016 (after eight years of a black president),
a professional sportsman managed to unite leftists in awe, as the
football player — one Colin Kaepernick — started kneeling during the
national anthem, for the salutary reason to protest police brutality as
well as racism in the USA. Since the Star-Spangled Banner ain't Dixie,
isn't brave brave Sir Colin's virtue-signaling akin to protesting, if
not (yet) demanding the outright removal of, not the Stars and Bars but
the Stars and Stripes?!
So: woke and superwoke drama queens are heralded for their fight against oppression (when it — allegedly — concerns American deplorables alone), but…
As can be seen with reporters and sports figures and millennials in general, the latest generation of American school children and college students graduating to adulthood have been brain-washed, by superwoke drama queens, with propaganda stating that there are only deplorables inside the U.S. of America (or, more generally, the West), and none outside of it.
One of the most urgent matters for reform now (are you listening, Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos?) is a thorough reform of America's educational system.
Why?
Because these people hate your guts, America.
Post-Scriptum:
Designed largely by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and members of the New York Times
editorial staff, the 1619 Project aspires—through essays, poems, and
short fiction—to rewrite entirely the narrative of American slavery, not
as an unwilling inheritance of British colonialism but asthe
love-object of American capitalism from its very origins. It reviews
slavery not as a blemish that the Founders grudgingly tolerated with the
understanding that it must soon evaporate, but as the prize that the
Constitution went out of its way to secure and protect.
… The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the
imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who
hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.
… Again: the 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory. And
like all conspiracy theories, the 1619 Project announces with a eureka!
that it has acquired the explanation to everything, and thus gives an
aggrieved audience a sense that finally it is in control, through its
understanding of the real cause of its unhappiness.
… And again: the 1619 Project is not history; it is ignorance. It
claims that the American Revolution was staged to protect slavery,
though it never once occurs to the Project to ask, in that case, why the
British West Indies (which had a far larger and infinitely more
malignant slave system than the 13 American colonies) never joined us in
that revolution.
… Finally: the 1619 Project is not history; it is evangelism, but
evangelism for a gospel of disenchantment whose ultimate purpose is the
hollowing out of the meaning of freedom, so that every defense of
freedom drops nervously from the hands of people who have been made too
ashamed to defend it.
