“The current eruption of anti-Biden signs and chants, however, is on another level, far more vulgar and widespread.”

11/1/21

Nov 1, 2021

I'm no Nostradamus, but my gut tells me that upcoming elections may not be kind to Democrats.

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“What they don’t want you to understand is what’s being established is a power dynamic. Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance. No boundary respect. No dignity left intact.”

— Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in his new Netflix special “Colin in Black and White,” comparing the NFL draft process to a slave auction. The special cuts to a line of black actors playing NFL prospects who morph into shackled slaves at an auction while their white “owners” whip them.
Note that Kaepernick chose to play in the NFL, and that in 2014 he signed a record $126 million contract with the San Francisco 49ers, and was paid $39.4 million before opting out in 2017. Note also that the NFL draft gives players of all races a voluntary chance to become multi-millionaires. How is that analogous to slavery? Making it to the NFL is literally the dream of thousands and thousands of guys out there. Not to mention, Kaepernick’s analogy is really, really disrespectful to the memory of those who actually endured slavery.

“Please be aware that there is an agitated moose with a wire wrapped around its neck in the neighborhood of Brayton Drive and Thuja Avenue. If you are trick-or-treating in the neighborhood please use caution.”

— A tweet from the Anchorage, Alaska police department.

“I know some people seem to not want to give up on the wonderful pandemic, but you know what? It’s over...You shouldn’t have to wear masks...vaxx, mask, pick one! You can’t make me mask if I’ve had the vaxx... the red states are a joy and the blue states are a pain in the ass.”

— HBO’s Bill Maher.

“White America, if you want to know who’s responsible for racism, look in the mirror.”

— The title of an article distributed to AT&T employees as part of the company’s racial reeducation program, “Listen Understand Act.” A leaked cache of internal documents revealed that the initiative is based on the core principles of critical race theory, including “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.”
This particular article claims that the United States is a “racist society” and lays out its thesis plainly: “White people, you are the problem. Regardless of how much you say you detest racism, you are the sole reason it has flourished for centuries.” The author, Dahleen Glanton, writes that “American racism is a uniquely white trait” and that “Black people cannot be racist.” White women, she claims, “have been telling lies on black men since they were first brought to America in chains,” and, along with their white male counterparts, “enjoy the opportunities and privileges that white supremacy affords [them].”
According to an anonymous senior employee, managers at AT&T are now assessed annually on diversity issues, with mandatory participation in programs such as discussion groups, book clubs, mentorship programs, and race reeducation exercises. White employees, the source said, are tacitly expected to confess their complicity in “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” or they will be penalized in their performance reviews.
This is “woke” authoritarianism. It operates through social pressure, the threat of ostracism, and indeed unemployment. When you have to attend an indoctrination session in critical race theory as a condition of employment, and when your reticence to join in is regarded as deeply suspect, and when others in the workplace can report you for what’s essentially wrongthink, that’s a kind of soft totalitarianism.

“If I had a magic wand, I would solve every problem that’s plaguing the city of Benton Harbor as we speak. However, government doesn’t work that way. The city of Benton Harbor is a creature of the state, and the state is a creature of the federal government.”

— Mayor Marcus Muhammad of Benton Harbor, Mich., where in a scene reminiscent of the water crisis in Flint, Mich., residents have been warned against using the city’s lead-tainted tap water.

“The nation reported adding 194,000 jobs in September, and Florida accounted for 84,500.”

— Florida governor Ron DeSantis. PolitiFact, which is an “independent” fact checking organization with the Poynter Institute, said that while Florida did indeed add 84,500 of the total 194,000 jobs, DeSantis’ statement is only “half true” because “The numbers are subject to revision, and can bounce around a lot from month to month,” and “The 194,000 figure is taken from a national calculation, so it’s not precisely comparable. The more accurate national figure is 363,000, making Florida’s share of the national gains smaller than DeSantis indicated.” If that’s not equivocation, I don’t know what is.

“For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.”

— The American Repertory Theater at Harvard University’s Loeb Drama Center, regarding a “Blackout” performance of a Macbeth play exclusively reserved for “Black-identifying” audience members. For Harvard to designate a performance as available only to students, faculty, or other patrons of a specified skin color appears to run afoul not only of state and federal laws, but also Harvard’s own commitment to fostering an inclusive environment for every member of the university community.

“Am thinking of starting a new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science.”

— A tweet from Elon Musk. When one Twitter user said that the name sounded better as “Texas Institute of Science and Technology,” Musk replied, “T is def first.” He then followed with, “Massachusetts has MIT, California has CIT, Texas has TITS.” (Note that the Tesla Models spell “S3XY.” Say what you will about Musk, but at least he has a sense of humor. Bezos is just an asshole.)

“I think white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate . . . The thing I want to say to you is, ‘We gotta take these motherf****ers out,’ but we can’t say that, right?”

— Brittney Cooper, a professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers, during “a session of the Root Institute conference.” This woman was even allowed to give a TED talk.

“My 6-year-old somberly came to me and asked if she was born evil because she was a white person, something she learned in a history lesson at school.”

— A mother speaking at a Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting. I’ve written at length about how critical race theory is being taught in K-12 classrooms because it really is a pretty serious issue—one that the media and leftists continue to dismiss or downplay. Over and over again I’ve read shallow, deliberately misleading articles by progressive scribes arguing that CRT is an esoteric legal sub-study only ever taught in law schools, and that anyone who’s concerned about CRT being taught in K-12 is really just opposed to benign pedagogical practices like teaching about slavery—the not so subtle implication being that you’re a racist, as only racists would oppose teaching “true American history.”
But this is a cheap semantic trick in which CRT is redefined as “history,” and those who’ve been claiming that college-level foundational texts of CRT aren’t literally being taught to schoolchildren — and therefore “CRT iS nOt bE TaUgHt iN sChOoLs!” — are just parroting the standard motte-and-bailey fiction peddled in the progressive echo chamber.
It’s called praxis, people: The principles and conclusions of critical race theory (oppressor/victim hierarchy, racial essentialism, equity over equality, America is an oppressive, racist country uniquely designed to harm its non-white citizens, etc.) ARE being taught, and they’re taught as fact—not as one of several contending “lenses” through which to view history. Kids are being taught to view themselves in a simplistic binary as either members of an oppressor class (white people) or an oppressed class (non-white people), with guilt and shame being the only acceptable moral stance for those who are the oppressors.
The “systemic racism” BS that purveyors of CRT always revert back to is used to reverse the scientific method: The hypothesis that racism is baked into every interaction and every social aspect is put forward as automatically true, so that thereafter all they have to do is find the “facts” that align with their theory and dismiss those that disprove it.
Consider, for example, that the leading intellectual of this unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap is Ibram X. Kendi, who charges school districts $20,000 to hear him talk for one hour—over Zoom. As the author of the unreadable hot garbage bound in book form and sold to affluent white liberals afflicted with a guilty conscience and desperate to let everyone know they’re not racist, Kendi’s core thesis — that racism is the single, self-evident cause of racial differences in everything from academic grades to incarceration rates to poverty and thus must be rectified using “antiracist discrimination” — reiterates critical race theory’s basic concepts. This guy is the king of tautological bullshit. When asked to define the word “racism,” he told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival that it is “a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.”
The bottom line is that CRT is not “the GOP’s new boogeyman.” It’s a toxic ideology that has seeped out of leftist academia and is being used as a cudgel to corral people under the same illiberal dogma, and it’s progressed to the point where it’s being taught to kindergartners in some schools. There is too much evidence easily available to credibly take the blind denialist stance and condescendingly dismiss the legitimate concerns of parents as being “distracted” by an “invention of the right.” That’s the very definition of intellectual dishonesty.

“The current eruption of anti-Biden signs and chants, however, is on another level, far more vulgar and widespread.”

— The Washington Post, in an article lamenting the “increasingly vulgar taunts” that “Trump supporters” have been hurling at President Biden. Besides being hypocritical in the extreme given that there were seemingly no limitations on the invective-ladened tirades and schizophrenic outbursts coming from Trump’s detractors during his time in office, many of whom continue to lease impressive amounts of psychological real estate to the former president (Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing), WaPo fails to talk about why people might be angry or upset with the current president, and instead focuses solely on “the Trump faithful,” which leaves the impression that the only reason anyone could be mad at Biden is — and this is still the media’s favorite rhetorical refuge — “because Trump.”
But the idea that we’ve only just recently reached the apogee of “inflammatory language” directed at the president is laughable, as are the overwrought affectations of leftists who think people saying “Let’s go Brandon” (a euphemism that many people are using in place of saying “F*** Joe Biden”) is comparable to a declaration of allegiance to ISIS. That is so, so ridiculous that it’s beyond my power to articulate.
“F*** Trump!” outbursts were celebrated. I mean, the hypocrisy here is stunning: The punditocracy and Twitterati were 100% okay with actually dropping f-bombs directed at the sitting president less than a year ago, and the media went out of its way to spotlight celebrities who did as much:

$10.14 Billion: The amount that American consumers spent on Halloween this year, an increase of more than $2 billion from 2020. The average consumer spent nearly $103 on costumes, candy and greeting cards—$10 more than last year.

8.5-10.5%: Expected growth in holiday sales during November and December relative to 2020, according to the National Retail Federation. The numbers, which exclude automobile dealers, gasoline stations and restaurants, compare with a previous high of 8.2 percent in 2020 to $777.3 billion and an average increase of 4.4 percent over the past five years.

47%: U.S. adults who favor increased funding for their local police departments—up from 31 percent in June 2020.

$450,000: Payment, per person, that the Biden administration is considering for immigrant families affected by the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, according to people familiar with the matter. Under the so-called zero-tolerance enforcement policy, immigration agents separated thousands of children, ranging from infants to teenagers, from their parents at the southern border in 2018 after they had crossed illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S.

95%: Rise in homicides in Philadelphia since 2016. Per capita, Philadelphia is on track this year to exceed New York City at its bloodiest in the early ‘90s.

71%: Americans who believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction — including 70% of independents and even 48% of Democrats — according to a Sunday NBC News poll.

20,160: The number of U.S. traffic deaths in the first six months of 2021, the highest six-month total since 2006 and 18.4% higher than the first half of last year. That percentage increase is the biggest six-month increase since the department began recording fatal crash data since 1975. The department, which includes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, announced that it will develop a national strategy for steps to save lives on the roads.

38%: The increase in COVID-19 shots among Minnesotans aged 12 to 17 since the state launched a $200 incentive program. To qualify, teens must get their first dose by November 9.

85: Number of vehicles in President Biden’s motorcade as he cruised through Rome on Friday, drawing criticism for the poor optics ahead of a global warming summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Biden departed for the trip Thursday after unveiling a $1.75 trillion framework for social and environmental spending that includes $555 billion in green-energy and anti-pollution spending that he wants Democrats to pass. After reaching the Vatican in the massive motorcade, Biden said he and Pope Francis discussed climate change.

$163 Billion: Cost of a transportation plan being considered by the San Diego Association of Governors (SANDAG) in which the city’s residents would be taxed for every mile they drive. SANDAG says the funding is needed because of decreased revenue from fuel taxes as more drivers opt for electric cars. The 30-year plan would slash greenhouse gas emissions and introduce everything from new public transit hubs to freeway improvements that ease commutes. They’re still looking into how to track a driver’s miles for the tax but may use transponders, smartphones, or odometers, leaders say.