The State Department's Toxic Equity Agenda

At City Journal, "Woke forces are working to turn America’s diplomatic corps into an arm of the Democratic Party":

Though support for the Black Lives Matter movement has plummeted over the last 12 months, many United States embassies and consulates will fly BLM flags again this year to mark Juneteenth. The display of BLM and Progress Pride flags, including at the U.S. Embassy in Vatican City, is just part of the State Department’s woke equity agenda, spearheaded by Ambassador Gina Abercrombie–Winstanley, the department’s first chief diversity and inclusion officer.

Winstanley participated in an Equity Town Hall this past week in order to discuss the State Department’s Equity Action Plan, which reads like something cooked up in the Evergreen State College faculty lounge. The 19-page document promises to “embed equity into U.S. foreign policies,” to “embed intersectional equity principles into diversifying public diplomacy,” and to “increase inclusive, equitable messaging to combat disinformation.”

A year ago, when I condemned the State Department in the Wall Street Journal for flying the BLM flag, BLM’s public support stood at around 50 percent, depending on the poll. Now that support has plummeted to 31 percent, according to a recent poll. A leaked cable in May 2021 revealed that State authorized posts to fly the BLM flag for the remainder of the year. A source told me that a February 2022 cable encouraged posts to fly BLM flags for Black History month and other occasions. The cable indicated that State Department lawyers believe that flying the flag isn’t a violation of the Hatch Act, which prevents federal employees from engaging in political activities at work. I asked a State Department spokesperson to confirm if posts were still authorized to fly BLM flags...

The embassies are overseas, though our country's being destroyed from within.

Keep reading.

 

The Good White Man Roster

From Freddie de Boer, "a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit":

You could be forgiven for thinking that we’re witnessing the end of the era of the white man. Headlines saying such are not hard to come by, after all, and media and academia are captivated by the notion that we white men must soon give way to women and people of color and, like, gray ace demisexuals or some such. So funny, then, and so profoundly American, that some of the most successful self-marketers of the 21st century are white men. They are, in fact, Good White Men.

These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. These are the guys who always stand behind women, ready to catch them when they fall, which they will inevitably do because of fucking patriarchy, man, and if people would just read their bell hooks maybe we’d be getting somewhere!, please like share and subscribe. These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.

There’s nothing wrong with being a white man who wants to do good. I am one, after all. The trouble is that the Good White Men believe that white men in general have some sort of inherent badness, that at the very least white men bear a special burden of helping to end injustice and to “center” women, people of color, and other minority groups, to step back and let others speak. Good White Males think whiteness and maleness are problems to be solved. The trouble here is twofold. First, simply by nature of being Good White Men, by the very act of endlessly talking about the sinful nature of other white men, the Good White Men exonerate themselves from the very critique they advance. Constantly complaining about the evil done by white men inherently and invariably functions to contrast themselves with other, worse white men. Being the white man who talks about the poor character of most white men cannot help but shine your own character. No matter how reflexively you chant that you realize that you yourself are part of the problem, no matter how insistently you say that you’re included in your own critique, you aren’t. You can’t be. To be the one who makes the critique inevitably elevates you above it.

He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted...

 Continue on to the (familiarly hilarious) list, here.

Jeremy S. Adams, Hollowed Out

At Amazon, Jeremy S. Adams, Hollowed Out: A Warning about America's Next Generation.

Democrats Mobilize Demonization

Well, er, speaking of the devil. I just wrote about this a minute ago, "Lincoln Project's Attack on Elise Stefanik is Evil":

And now here's Caroline Glick, "Demonization, American Style":

Demonization, the effort to portray a political rival as an inhuman monster, has long been a means to mobilize public support. The ancient Romans did it. The Soviets didn’t know there was another option.

While negative campaigning has long been a tried and true method for winning elections in the free world, actual demonization was fairly rare, particularly in the United States, actual demonization was a fairly rare phenomenon until after the turn of the century. But in recent decades, and with unprecedented intensity and venom since 2016, the Democrats have aped the Soviets and adopted demonization as their main political tool for winning elections. The primary object of their hatred is former President Donald Trump.

Last Sunday, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi showed how it is done in an interview with CNN. The interview focused on the Democrat Party’s concern that the conservative majority in the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the federal mandate for abortions and letting the separate states decide for themselves whether to place limitations on the procedure. Concerns among Democrats and the party’s progressive base rose exponentially earlier this month when in a shocking break with the past, a source at the Supreme Court leaked a draft judgment on the issue authored by conservative Justice Samuel Alito to Politico.

Sunday, CNN‘s Dana Bash asked Pelosi if the fact that conservatives are now the majority on the Supreme Court means that the Democrats dropped the ball on abortion rights. Pelosi rejected Bash’s assertion and instead blamed Trump.

Brimming with rage Pelosi seethed, “Who would have ever suspected that a creature like Donald Trump would become president of the United States, waving a list of judges that he would appoint, therefore getting the support of the far-right, and appointing those anti-just freedom justices to the court?”

In that one sentence, Pelosi managed to demonize Trump, demonize Trump voters and delegitimize three sitting justices of the Supreme Court. It bears noting that as Pelosi made these remarks, Democrat activists were staging threatening demonstrations outside the homes of conservative justices.

Pelosi’s statement wasn’t an isolated event. It was part of an overall partisan strategy ahead of the Congressional elections in November. President Joe Biden gave voice to it in a speech last Friday where he spoke of “Ultra MAGA Republicans.” Just to make clear what he was talking about, he called Trump “King MAGA.” MAGA, or Make America Great Again, was of course Trump’s election slogan in 2016. Since then, MAGA has become shorthand for Trump supporters.

The obvious purpose of Biden’s coinage of “Ultra MAGA” was to link all Republicans to Trump and to make the 2022 elections a referendum on Trump, the demonic “creature” even though Trump isn’t on the ballot and the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress.

The administration is so excited by the new term their invented that Biden’s spokeswoman bragged that “Ultra MAGA” was the product of six months of market research.

Wednesday, Politico reported that the progressive fundraising giant Moveon.org is launching a $30 million “Us vs. MAGA” ad campaign ahead of November. Moveon.org executive director Rahna Epting told the progressive online publication that the purpose of the campaign is to tie Republicans to Trump, who all right-thinking people hate because he threatens the very existence of America.

The idea of using demonization as a political tool was most powerfully introduced to radical US politics by political guru Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals became the political bible for revolutionary leftists in the Democrat Party. There Alinsky warned his disciples that in light of the unpopularity of their America-hating agenda, the way to win is by distracting the public from their actual agenda and to focus their target audience instead of on their political opponents, whom they would defeat by presenting him as the devil.

One of Alinsky’s star pupils was a young coed at Wellesley College named Hillary Rodham, better known by her married name Hillary Clinton. Alinsky’s methods were adopted and taught in the 1990s by a community organizer in Chicago named Barack Obama.

As the US moves into elections mode, the last thing the Democrats want to talk about is policy. The only issue they may want to run on is abortion, and it’s unclear how popular the issue will be in swing states and districts. The more the US public feels the impacts of the Democrats’ economic, energy, and social policies, the lower the party’s polling numbers drop. Every day another shocking story appears about the fruits of the Democrats’ revolutionary agenda.

This week, for instance, the school board in Kiel, Wisconsin, a small town of some 3,000 people decided to charge three middle school boys with sexual harassment.

Their crime?

They didn’t refer to a girl in their class as “they” or “them” after she said she decided she is no longer willing to be referred to as “her” or “she,” because she no longer considers herself a female.

According to Critical Race Theory expert Christopher Rufo, depending on the questions asked, between 60-80% of Americans oppose revolutionary sexual policies. The more stories appear like the one from Kiel, Wisconsin, or even more distressing ones about children given sexual hormones by school officials without their parents’ knowledge or consent, the more voters abandon the Democrat Party in fear.

The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their agenda isn’t to move toward the public by ending their support for sex-change operations for minors. They remain stridently committed to their agenda. The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their policies is to castigate the Republicans as the evil acolytes of Trump who share his demonic characteristics – first and foremost, “racism.”

Last weekend, an 18-year-old racist antisemite murdered 10 people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Biden, Democrat politicians from coast to coast, the progressive media, and Hollywood stars all rushed to blame Trump, Fox News, and the entire Republican Party for the slaughter. Never mind that the same day, a Chinese man motivated by hatred of Taiwanese entered a church attended by Taiwanese immigrants in California and opened fire killing one and wounding four other worshippers. Last December, a black racist mowed down six people, and wounded 77 more, (all white) at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Republicans didn’t blame Biden and the Democrats.

Tuesday, Democrat advertising executive Donny Deutsch explained the Democrats’ post-Buffalo massacre efforts on MSNBC. In Deutsch’s words, the Democrats’ mission post-Buffalo is to, “Brand every Republican,” as the party of “racist, violent replacement theory.”

“Take a branding iron, put it on them so any mainstream Republican has to wear that badge.” Notably, the Democrats’ “Ultra-MAGA campaign hasn’t raised any concern among Republicans. Indeed, immediately after Biden launched it, the Republican National Committee began printing “Ultra MAGA” t-shirts to give away to party donors.

Some 95% of Republicans voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. Despite its near-unanimous support, the Democrats’ demonization of the former president did have an impact at the margins of the party and among independent voters. Members of these groups were convinced that Trump and the Republicans are a demonic force that threatens the soul of America.

It wasn’t the likes of Deutsch who convinced them. That job was carried out by a smattering of former Republicans who share the Democrats’ visceral hatred of Trump. In the 2018 Congressional elections, and to an even greater degree in the 2020 presidential race, members of this tiny minority of Republicans appeared nearly around the clock on progressive media organs to castigate Trump and his voters as dangerous, racist and evil. While their overall impact was indiscernible, in all-important swing states where Biden’s margins of victory were miniscule, they appear to have made a difference.

Today the same group of former Republicans is working full throttle at the side of the Democrats to prevent their former party from winning the mid-term elections and taking control of Congress.

Sitting at Deutsch’s side on the MSNBC panel Tuesday was political activist and former Republican Miles Taylor. While serving as a mid-level official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, Taylor anonymously published an op-ed in the New York Times and a book where he claimed that many officials inside the administration believed that Trump was a danger to the United States. These officials, he said, were working together to subvert Trump’s policies and save America from its duly elected president. Now Taylor is running a well-funded Super-PAC, where “former Republicans” run campaign ads against Republicans.

Taylor explained that the goal is to shame Republicans into leaving the party.

“I tried and failed to save the party in my own little way,” he said.

“We tried to prevent Trump from rising in 2016. Some of us tried from within to contain his reckless impulses. We thought we beat him in 2020, but we didn’t. Trumpism is alive and it’s well and it’s fueling this so that what conservatives need to do is convince other conservatives to quit the Republican Party.”

It’s hard to know what these former Republican conservatives tell themselves when they see empty shelves in supermarkets, $4.00/ gallon gas, cratering stock markets, and boys being persecuted for being boys in schools across America. It’s hard to know what they tell themselves when they see children indoctrinated to reject their biological sex and hate their parents and their country.

But what is clear enough is that through their efforts to demonize their fellow conservatives, former party and former president, these Trump-hating former Republicans enable the progressive revolution. Under the mask of anti-Trump paranoia, this revolution rejects the foundations of the United States and seeks to transform the country from the land of the free and the home of the brave into the land of the unfree, and home of the bullied, cowed and socially engineered.

 

Lincoln Project's Attack on Elise Stefanik is Evil

I don't think I've ever posted on the Lincoln Project. I've basically ignored "Never Trumpers" since President Trump was first elected, and even before. They're nothing to me. I do like Amanda Carpenter, as I've known her on Twitter a long time, though it bothers me she writes at the Bulwark, perhaps the home base of traditional conservative attacks on populist nationalism in the U.S., and especially Trump. 

But I gotta say, this Lincoln Project campaign spot is so over the top attacking Rep. Stefanik as evil, that it's evil. 

Demonizing your political opponents is just a thing in the online world. You'd think folks in elite Washington would take a step back and perhaps practice the teeniest moderation and civility. But no. Dehumanizing your political enemies is the best way to mobilize your base these days. It's off-putting, to say the least. 

A dark turn. 

WATCH:

PREVIOUSLY: "Rep. Elise Stefanik Rejects Allegations of Invoking 'Great Replacement Rhetoric' (VIDEO)."

Buffalo and the Myth of Racist America

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "Democrats want to create another George Floyd moment."

Rep. Elise Stefanik Rejects Allegations of Invoking 'Great Replacement Rhetoric' (VIDEO)

She had a killer interview with Harris Faukner on Fox this morning. She's spunky and fired up. I love her message. Last night's primaries were a disaster for the Democrats, and she's expecting the GOP to sweep into power and start shutting down the left's radical agenda next January.

It's no wonder Democrats are now trying to destroy her, alleging her campaign spots have invoked the dreaded "great replacement theory."

At the Wall Street Journal, "GOP Leaders Face Calls to Denounce White Supremacy, ‘Replacement’ Theory":

Stefanik rejects any tie between party rhetoric and racist violence as Cheney criticizes Republican leadership.

WASHINGTON—Some GOP lawmakers are calling for Republican Party leaders to forcefully denounce white supremacy, after the deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., sparked renewed focus on political rhetoric related to race and immigration.

Eleven of the people shot at the supermarket were Black, and two were white. In documents posted online that police think the alleged shooter wrote and compiled, he cited racist conspiracy theories he discovered on Internet message boards. At several points, he condemns both Democrats and Republicans as being controlled by a Jewish conspiracy.

In the documents, the writer presents racist and anti-Semitic views and references the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory centered on the notion that whites are being systematically replaced with other racial groups and immigrants. Police said he targeted the grocery store because of its location in a Black neighborhood. In one document, he attacks immigration as “ethnic replacement.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, in which 10 people were killed, Democrats and some Republicans who are vocal critics of former President Donald Trump and his political movement called for other GOP lawmakers to condemn white supremacist rhetoric. Mr. Trump rose to prominence during his first presidential campaign in part by deploying harsh language about illegal immigrants that his critics said often was dehumanizing and racist.

After a woman was killed at a 2017 march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump wavered on condemning the marchers, at one point saying there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), who was kicked out of the Republican House leadership last year after sharply criticizing Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, said House GOP leaders have enabled white nationalism and anti-Semitism and must renounce those views within the party. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Ms. Cheney tweeted.

Back in February, she said party leaders should have been tougher on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) for speaking at an event organized by a white nationalist.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) tweeted that the “replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed.” Mr. Kinzinger, who isn’t running for reelection, said Republicans need to oust Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, along with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).

“We’ve never supported white supremacy,” Mr. McCarthy said Monday night. “The suspect is the very worst of humanity and for political individuals to try to make some political game out of this shows how little they are.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Liz Harrington, said, “It is truly disgusting to use an evil act of mass murder by a mentally ill individual against your political opponents. But nothing is beneath the Democrat Party. Our prayers are with the victims and their families.”

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican Whip, said Republicans have been very vocal against white nationalism. He also referenced the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game practice that left him badly wounded, saying he knew from experience that the aftermath of a tragedy is a time for prayers, not ratcheting up the rhetoric and blame.

Ms. Stefanik, in a statement, said she was “heartbroken and saddened to hear the tragic news of the horrific loss of life” in Buffalo. Her camp rejected the idea that being tough on illegal immigration amounted to promoting white supremacy or racism.

Stefanik senior adviser Alex deGrasse said any attempt to tie the shooting to Ms. Stefanik “is a new disgusting low for the left, their Never Trump allies” and the media. “Ms. Stefanik has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”

The comments came after scrutiny of her past campaign ads. The Washington Post reported that Ms. Stefanik’s campaign committee paid for Facebook ads last year that said Democrats were seeking a “permanent election insurrection” by giving millions illegal immigrants citizenship in an attempt to bolster their election chances...

 

Duke Graduation Speaker 'Surprised' That Some Passages From Her Speech Were Taken From a Recent Commencement Speech at Harvard (VIDEO)

So surprising. *Eye-roll.*

If you plagiarize you're going to get caught. I catch a number of students plaigarizing every semester, and this is on simple assigned essays, not research papers. Students probably spend more time scouring the web than actually writing a four-page think piece. Sadly, even scraping stuff straight from Wikipedia is a thing. Even more sadly: When I notify my dean she does nothing but to tell me, "let this be a lesson for the student." 

Right. 

In other words, cheat, violate written college rules and ethical standards --- for which in the past a students could be suspended or expelled --- and get off scot-free. Not so fast, I say. I'll give the student a "0" on the assignment, and they can complain all they want. A plagiarized paper is worth nothing. *Sigh.*

At WSJ, "Duke Commencement Speaker Takes ‘Full Responsibility’ After Similarities in Speech Spark University Probe":

Parts of her speech included passages similar to those in a 2014 Harvard graduation speech; Duke says it is investigating the matter.

A Duke University student said she is taking “full responsibility” for parts of her commencement speech that included passages similar to those in a Harvard University graduation speech years ago, prompting a university probe.

Undergraduate commencement speaker Priya Parkash spoke to her fellow classmates at Duke’s graduation ceremony on Sunday. The following day the Duke Chronicle—the university’s student newspaper—reported that several passages of Ms. Parkash’s speech were similar to that of a Harvard speech in 2014 given by then-student Sarah Abushaar. Duke is investigating the matter, a spokesman said.

A public-relations representative for Ms. Parkash said in an interview that she incorporated ideas for passages provided by friends without researching if they had been used previously. She didn’t find out until after the speech that those passages had come from a speech given at Harvard, her spokesman said.

“I was embarrassed and confused to find out too late that some of the suggested passages were taken from a recent commencement speech at another university,” Ms. Parkash said in an earlier statement provided through the PR firm. “I take full responsibility for this oversight and I regret if this incident has in any way distracted from the accomplishments of the Duke Class of 2022.”

Michael Schoenfeld, a spokesman for Duke, said the university is aware of the allegations and has “initiated a process to understand the facts of the situation.”

“Duke University expects all students to abide by their commitment to the Duke Community Standard in everything they do as students,” he said.

Parts of Ms. Parkash’s speech were similar to passages from Harvard undergraduate speaker Ms. Abushaar’s 2014 commencement address, with references to Harvard swapped for Duke.

Ms. Abushaar didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In her speech, Ms. Parkash spoke about her experience being Pakistani and going through airport security checkpoints, wearing Duke gear as a way to prove she wasn’t a threat. Ms. Abushaar made similar comments about going through airport security as a Middle Easterner in Harvard attire.

Both speakers joked about how their respective campuses could be their own independent countries.

“We had our own version of the Statue of Liberty, the John Harvard statue; our own embassies, the Harvard clubs of Boston and London; a tax collection agency, the Harvard Alumni Association; and endowment larger than more than half the world’s countries GDPs,” Ms. Abushaar said in her 2014 speech.

In Ms. Parkash’s speech on Sunday, she said, “We are home to several consulates…we also have our own version of Christ the Redeemer, the statue of James Buchanan Duke…we also have an IRS with its surprisingly bubbly fleet of tax collectors, the Duke Alumni Association; we also have the equivalent of the Federal Reserve, DUMAC, which manages an endowment larger than the GDP of one-third of the countries in the world”...

Yep. You can see that comparison at the video above.

 

Biden's Incoming Press Secretary Laughs When Asked Who Is Handling Baby Formula Crisis

From Katie Pavlich, at Townhall, "Incoming White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked onboard Air Force One Wednesday afternoon about the ongoing baby formula shortage rattling American parents."

"The shelves are wiped out," CBS News' @CHueyBurns says on the baby formula shortage in the U.S., calling it an "urgent need for families right now."

"You're starting to see pressure applied in terms of government accountability...A lot of questions about the supply chain." pic.twitter.com/hTju1wJbLS

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 9, 2022

Leaked Draft Overturning Roe v. Wade Plunges Supreme Court Into Disarray

Well, that was the plan along, right?

Previously, "Abortion Fight Takes Center Stage on Capitol Hill, Campaign Trail."

And at the New York Times, "A Supreme Court in Disarray After an Extraordinary Breach":

The leak of a draft majority opinion overruling Roe v. Wade raises questions about motives, methods and whether defections are still possible.

WASHINGTON — Sources have motives, and the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade raises a question as old as the Roman Empire. Cui bono? Who benefits?

Not the Supreme Court as an institution. Its reputation was in decline even before the extraordinary breach of its norms of confidentiality, with much of the nation persuaded that it is little different from the political branches of the government. The internal disarray the leak suggests, wholly at odds with the decorum prized by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., was a blow to the legitimacy of the court.

Relations among the justices, too, on the evidence of questioning at arguments and statements in opinions, have turned fraught and frosty. “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked when the challenge to Roe was argued in December, as it became clear that five justices were ready to overrule the decision.

The fact of the leak cannot be separated from its substance. Only a move as extraordinary as eliminating a constitutional right in place for half a century could transform the court into an institution like any other in Washington, where rival factions disclose secrets in the hope of obtaining advantage.

“Until now, a leak of this kind would have been unthinkable,” said Peter G. Verniero, a former justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. “The protocol of our highest court has been seriously ruptured. The leaking itself reflects another sad step toward casting the court as a political body, which, whatever your preferred jurisprudence, is most unhealthy for the rule of law.”

The court sustained collateral damage in March, when it emerged that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent incendiary text messages to the Trump White House in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack and that Justice Thomas not only had failed to disqualify himself from a related case but also had cast the sole noted dissent.

The harm from the leak was more direct, raising questions about whether the court is capable of functioning in an orderly way.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is dated Feb. 10, or almost three months ago. Under the court’s ordinary practices, additional drafts have circulated since then, as Justice Alito refined his arguments, made changes to accommodate his allies, responded to criticisms in one or more draft concurrences or dissents — and, crucially, worked to make sure he did not lose his majority.

The draft was marked “opinion of the court,” meaning it was intended to reflect the views of at least five justices. Politico, which obtained the document, reported that five members of the court had voted to overrule Roe soon after the argument in December: Justices Alito and Thomas and the three members of the court appointed by President Donald J. Trump — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Those five votes were in keeping with the questions those justices asked at the argument. They were also consistent with Mr. Trump’s vow to appoint justices who would overrule Roe, which established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

That lineup remains unchanged as of this week,” Politico reported.

Still, Justice Alito was no doubt worried that Chief Justice Roberts, who sketched out a middle-ground position at the argument, might threaten his majority. The chief justice suggested that the court could uphold the Mississippi law at issue in the case, which bans abortions after 15 weeks, but stop short of overruling Roe outright...

International Workers' Day

Yesterday, actually, May 1st.

According to Wikipedia,"the date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association."

Here's more, "Workers of the World Unite! May Day Celebrates Working-Class Solidarity":

The origins of a holiday celebrating workers can be traced back to labor and trade union movements in the late 19th century. As dreadful working conditions in factories became highly publicized during this period, particularly in meat packing plants, through works such as Upton Sinclar’s The Jungle, movements to improve working conditions (both for workers and for public health and safety) grew in size and intensity. On May 3, 1886, as workers rallied to demand an eight-hour workday in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, mass confusion erupted when a bomb exploded in the crowd and the police opened fire on the crowd. The Haymarket Affair, as this event is remembered, was used as pretext for widespread repression of workers and for the arrests of labor organizers, radicals and immigrants.

Not coincidentally, as progressive organizations and labor parties around the world began to celebrate International Workers Day on May 1 in commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, Labor Day was established in 1894 in the U.S. on the first Monday of September with the support of the American Federation of Labor, in part to distance the labor movement from its more radical elements. May Day continues to be celebrated around the world; and in the US, it has taken on special significance for immigrants’ rights activists. The convergence of the demands of workers for better wages and working conditions, and the demands of immigrants for dignity and freedom from the violence imposed by the immigration enforcement regime, is a fitting tribute to the role that immigrants have played in the labor movement in the United States.

The history of the labor movement is largely the history of human beings, living at the margins of mainstream society, uniting in solidarity, asserting their rights and fighting for a better, more fair world. It unfortunately remains true that racism, xenophobia and white supremacy redound to the benefit of those with economic and political power. From racist appeals to white supremacy that destroyed radical efforts during Reconstruction towards true multiracial democracy, to the xenophobic red scare that followed Haymarket and the repression of the Black Panther Party, racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric represent not only an existential threat of violence for marginalized people, but also a powerful weapon used by the ruling class to undermine solidarity among working people. Immigrants and marginalized people continue to be used as scapegoats for crime, poverty and other societal problems which can rightly be attributed to systems of exploitation that entrench privilege and power, and not those oppressed by these same systems.

It is, in many ways, the time of monsters. The Trump presidency ushered in a new era of domestic repression of Black and brown people and brought violent white supremacist rhetoric back into American mainstream political discourse. President Biden was elected with broad progressive support but has largely failed to roll back the worst Trump-era immigration policies. The COVID pandemic laid bare the harsh reality facing American workers, forced to risk their health and livelihood, often without adequate workplace protections, while America’s billionaires added nearly $2 trillion to their net worth. The United States continues to spend more on its military than the next nine countries combined while millions of its people are unhoused.

And yet, a new generation of the working class—union members and unorganized workers alike, students, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, Black, brown, and Indigenous people—stands ready to meet this political moment and organize to demand a better future. Workers at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island recently won the first union victory at any Amazon facility, led by a Black supervisor who was fired after organizing a walkout to protest unsafe working conditions at the start of the pandemic. Activists throughout the state are mobilizing to shut down the ICE Processing Center in Folkston in solidarity with detainees on hunger strike in the facility. And here in Athens, a coalition of organizations are demanding Community Benefits Agreements for large public projects, and United Campus Workers of Georgia are campaigning for a living wage for UGA workers. This May Day, let their struggles be our struggles. The only way forward is with solidarity among the multiracial working class of the United States and workers of the world.

Yes, because our pampered and privileged "students" and LGBTQIQ+ plus activists are taking all the assembly line-workers' jobs, low-skill manual laborers' jobs, fast-food and retail workers' jobs, and those in cleaning and janitorial services, the food industry, construction labor, longshoreman, parking lot attendants and car washers, truck drivers, and low-level white-collar worker positions, and more! 

Down with the colonialist, racist, multi-phobic finance capitalists of the world! 

Hey, hey! Ho ho! Late-stage capitalism's got to go! 

Yes, these "industrious" purple-haired campus proletarians have joined in working class solidarity with all the world's expropriated and oppressed! *Yawn.*

More here, "Workers around the world mark May Day with rallies for better working conditions."

Democrats Hemorrhaging 'Black' America's Support in U.S. Cities

This is killer! 

At the New York Post, "Blacks might be on the cusp of a second Great Migration – this time in the voting booth":

“Black America is wising up to [Democrat failures] and the question now is whether or not it is too late,” said conservative commentator Candace Owens, noting that “every single metric is worse for black America under a Biden presidency than under a Trump presidency,”

There are 30 million voting-age African-Americans, and 92 percent of those who voted pulled the lever for Biden in 2020. But only 69 percent support him today, according to a recent CNN survey. A new Quinnipiac poll put black support for the president at just 58 percent, with 20 percent strongly disapproving of his leadership.

David “Shaman” Ortiz, 29, is among the growing list of disillusioned former Democrats. The bi-racial Brooklyn native, former City Council staffer and political activist marched with Black Lives Matter in 2020. This year he protested outside the US Capitol waving “F–k Biden,” “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Trump 2024” flags, sharing the images on social media.

“I’ve been the boots on the ground for the other side. So I know. It’s time to paint New York City red,” said Ortiz, who recently switched his voter registration from Democrat to Republican.

He said the public education system and left-leaning mainstream media leave black children “malnourished of the truth,” teaching them to believe only Democrats care about their issues, despite what he says is growing evidence that their policies are devastating minority communities.

Black urban communities across the nation beset by social ills have been run almost exclusively by Democrats for decades. Rising crime, failed schools, illegal immigration and anger over COVID mandates are all among issues forcing this constituency to reject the Democrat Party, political observers said. So too is the failure of the Biden Administration to live up to campaign pledges.

“You do realize … a lot of black people feel like Democrats have kept no promises since they’ve been in office,” radio host Charlamagne the God told Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg this month.

Conservative commentator and Post contributor Deroy Murdock led a group that filed a lawsuit arguing that a new city law which will allow non-citizens to vote in local elections comes at the expense of African-American voters.

“Black voters finally are concluding that continuing to vote Democrat and expecting improved results is the quintessential definition of insanity,” said Murdock.

Crime continues to ravage the black community in almost all American cities, wildly out of proportion to population. African-Americans were the victims in 65 percent of all NYC murders in 2020, according to NYPD data, despite representing just 20 percent of the city’s population.

Black students, meanwhile, have underperformed their peers for decades in what school Chancellor David Banks called an “outrageous” failure of public education.

The burden of illegal immigration is also unfairly foisted upon African-American communities, pundits say. Illegals captured at the border and then secretly flown into the New York area by the Biden Administration are not placed in cushy Cobble Hill or the Upper East Side. They’re dumped instead on poor, mostly minority neighborhoods and schools.

“I think that the sharp decline in support [for Democrats] correlates directly with the administration’s effort to create a sharp incline in importing Hispanics over the border,” said Owens. “The black vote is being threatened.”

A new generation of black Republicans is hoping to capitalize on disaffected Democrats in November, including US Senate candidate and former NFL star Herschel Walker in Georgia, who raised $5.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2021; Congressional hopeful John James in Michigan; and Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Kendall Qualls.

“There is resentment over crime and education and there is resentment over BLM, all of it tied to the Democrat Party,” said Qualls, who lived as a child in Harlem where he said he watched his mom robbed on the street in broad daylight. Decades later, he added, life for black residents in Harlem is no better.

“The seismic shift is cultural, not political,” said Qualls. “Our cultural roots are faith, family and education, not this crap we see today.”

Walker told The Post: “Across the country, black Americans are realizing that policies from President Biden … are actively failing their communities. We are focused on reducing inflation, restoring public safety, securing our borders, increasing school choice, and addressing mental health — not on dividing people over race.” Democrat insiders agree minority voters are losing confidence in the party’s leadership...

 More.

Inside Twitter, Fears Musk Will Return Platform to Its Early Troubles

Yep, there's a tremendous level of fear back at HQ. It's freaky. 

I mean, all this time our Twitter overlords were making the site a "safe space" for their cuckolds and non-binary gender non-conforming psychiatric outpatients (especially their confused, dsyphoric young women with social contagion). And now with Boss Elon recalibrating the shots, it's the end of the world as they know it.

Nah I say ... just wait till November, for the congressional midterm earthquake and concomitant tsunami that washes Pelosi and the Democrats out to sea. It'll be great --- all those 2016 crying-scream-memes were getting a bit old anyway.

At the New York Times, "Content moderators warn that Elon Musk doesn’t appear to understand the issues that he and the company will face if he drops its guardrails around speech":

Elon Musk had a plan to buy Twitter and undo its content moderation policies. On Tuesday, just a day after reaching his $44 billion deal to buy the company, Mr. Musk was already at work on his agenda. He tweeted that past moderation decisions by a top Twitter lawyer were “obviously incredibly inappropriate.” Later, he shared a meme mocking the lawyer, sparking a torrent of attacks from other Twitter users.

Mr. Musk’s personal critique was a rough reminder of what faces employees who create and enforce Twitter’s complex content moderation policies. His vision for the company would take it right back to where it started, employees said, and force Twitter to relive the last decade.

Twitter executives who created the rules said they had once held views about online speech that were similar to Mr. Musk’s. They believed Twitter’s policies should be limited, mimicking local laws. But more than a decade of grappling with violence, harassment and election tampering changed their minds. Now, many executives at Twitter and other social media companies view their content moderation policies as essential safeguards to protect speech.

The question is whether Mr. Musk, too, will change his mind when confronted with the darkest corners of Twitter.

“You have said that you want more ‘free speech’ and less moderation on Twitter. What will this mean in practice?” Twitter employees wrote in an internal list of questions they hoped to ask Mr. Musk, which was seen by The New York Times.

Another question asked: “Some people interpret your arguments in defense of free speech as a desire to open the door back up for harassment. Is that true? And if not, do you have ideas for how to both increase free speech and keep the door closed on harassment?”

Mr. Musk has been unmoved by warnings that his plans are misguided. “The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

He went on to criticize the work of Vijaya Gadde and Jim Baker, two of Twitter’s top lawyers. Ms. Gadde has led Twitter’s policy teams for more than a decade, often handling complicated moderation decisions, including the decision to cut off Donald J. Trump near the end of his term as president. A former general counsel for the F.B.I., Mr. Baker joined Twitter in 2020.

Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, did not directly respond to the criticism, but in a tweet he wrote, “Proud of our people who continue to do the work with focus and urgency despite the noise.”

Employees of Twitter and other social media companies said that Mr. Musk seemed to understand little about Twitter’s approach to content moderation and the problems that had led to its rules — or that he just didn’t care. Some of the suggestions he has made, like labeling automated accounts, were in place before Mr. Musk launched his bid.

“He’s basically buying the position of being a rule-maker and a speech arbiter,” said David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who worked with the United Nations on speech issues. “That has been really fraught for everybody who’s been in that position.”

In its early years as a small start-up, Twitter was governed by one philosophy: The tweets must flow. That meant Twitter did little to moderate the conversations on its platform.

Twitter’s founders took their cues from Blogger, the publishing platform, owned by Google, that several of them had helped build. They believed that any reprehensible content would be countered or drowned out by other users, said three employees who worked at Twitter during that time.

“There’s a certain amount of idealistic zeal that you have: ‘If people just embrace it as a platform of self-expression, amazing things will happen,’” said Jason Goldman, who was on Twitter’s founding team and served on its board of directors. “That mission is valuable, but it blinds you to think certain bad things that happen are bugs rather than equally weighted uses of the platform.”

The company typically removed content only if it contained spam, or violated American laws forbidding child exploitation and other criminal acts.

In 2008, Twitter hired Del Harvey, its 25th employee and the first person it assigned the challenge of moderating content full time. The Arab Spring protests started in 2010, and Twitter became a megaphone for activists, reinforcing many employees’ belief that good speech would win out online. But Twitter’s power as a tool for harassment became clear in 2014 when it became the epicenter of Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign that flooded women in the video game industry with death and rape threats.

“If there are no rules against abuse and harassment, some people are at risk of being bullied into silence, and then you don’t get the benefit of their voice, their perspective, their free expression,” said Colin Crowell, Twitter’s former head of global public policy, who left the company in 2019.

In response, Twitter began expanding its policies...

More at that top link, and, on "Gamergate," see the Other McCain, "GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives."

A Tyranny of Moral Minorities

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "When the will of 2% of the country is imposed on the other 98%":

When pilots and flight attendants announced the end of the mask mandate in-flight, most passengers cheered. Everyone except the media which claimed the masked were the victims.

Biden, in an unexpected moment of sanity, said, "it's up to them” whether people wear masks.

But since Biden has as much impact on the policy of his administration as the shoeshine guy at Union Station, the DOJ and the CDC have triggered a legal challenge to the federal court ruling.

Biden and the entire D.C. elite don’t like wearing masks. Most people don’t. Universal masking is mandated to accommodate a vocal minority, most of whom are not immunocompromised or otherwise especially vulnerable, but who still demand that everyone accommodate them.

This tyranny of minorities has long since come to define the Democrat coalition which knits together single-issue victimhood voters whose pet issue, whether it’s police shootings, green energy, racial justice, men pretending they’re women, or the right of teachers to sexually indoctrinate kindergartners against the wishes of their parents, must take precedence.

That is why the Biden administration will fight for an otherwise unpopular mask mandate.

Democrat political authority comes from the moral authority of defending oppressed minorities. The old Democrat party which asserted that it represented an oppressed majority being kept down by men of wealth has made way for a coalition of increasingly implausible minorities.

That’s the wide gap between the party of Jackson and of Obama. And it’s Obama’s party now.

Beyond the racial minorities of the civil rights movement, the moral minority consists of wealthy white elites, their sexual fetishes, cultural obsessions, and neurotic tics. Masking is just the latest neurotic tic that the decadent element that makes up its ruling base demands of all of us.

From police defunding to mandatory masking to men roleplaying as women, the outré demands are a minority even within the Democrat coalition. But the minority of minorities, by banding together, take something that only 2% of the country might want and turn it into something that the 31% of Americans who identify as Democrats are obligated to support on the party line.

And if the Democrats win, the will of the 2% is ruthlessly imposed on the 98%.

Each minority horse trades intersectional political acceptance for its cause in exchange for supporting everyone else’s causes. The black nationalists get slavery reparations and police defunding while the men who wear dresses get to be on the women’s swim team. Feminists get abortion until the last nanosecond of birth and environmentalists can have the EPA regulate backyard puddles. And wealthy hipster remote workers can make everyone wear masks.

Everyone gets what they want but the tradeoff is they all get even more things they don’t.

Fanatics and extremists are willing to make that tradeoff while terrorizing everyone else. The echo chamber of cancel culture is really a cooperative of crazies acting in concert to protect their own special privilege because they know perfectly well that in a healthy society and political culture their brand of insanity would never receive a hearing, let alone a mandate.

And they know that their best offense is by destroying norms to normalize their insanity.

The minority of minorities coalition forces Democrats to accept crazy premises and then to vocally defend them even when they don’t believe in them. Civil rights, once rooted in recognizable arguments about racial equality, has soured into esoteric culture wars. The simplicity of lunch counter sit-ins has given way, as it was always going to, to deconstructionist lists of grievances written by academic committees with their own specialized vocabularies.

Leftists still speak with the moral authority of victimhood even when they’re millionaires, but the moral language, once so clear and simple, pitting workers against bosses, black protesters against fire hoses, continues to be appropriated for every new incomprehensible cause.

Obama’s rise promised to revive the old moral assertions of civil rights for a new generation, instead he buried them under new layers of irony, postmodern exercises in egotistical empowerment, and deconstructionism, delighting the media while alienating Americans.

In the Biden era, the moral assertions weaponized for social media have become fumblingly ineffective. The Left declares that it must wield power in order to protect the power of corporations like Disney and the right of teachers to push sex ed to kindergartners. The remoteness of these causes from any classic paradigm of the oppressors and the oppressed reflects the distance that the Democrats have traveled from any notion of democracy.

The tyranny of minorities also ‘minoritizes’ morality into siloed causes that few can relate to.

Intersectionality labors to sell the various causes to those who have already bought into the coalition. The entertainment industry rushes to turn the incomprehensible trending mishmash of causes categorized as identity politics talking points into songs and shows to sway the public.

Morality requires universally agreed on values which moral minorities attack at every turn. The great effort to transform the existence of moral minorities into its own moral authority through intersectionality requires unsustainable amounts of messaging and outright intimidation. Cancel culture terrorizes people into not speaking or even thinking for fear they’ll run afoul of constantly changing codes that no one except their cultural oppressors can even keep track of.

Totalitarian states deploy mass propaganda like this either at the height of enthusiasm for their revolutions or at their insecure decline when everyone is starting to lose faith in the revolution. And it’s been a generation since even the faithful believe in the cause rather than the anti-cause characterized by a rotating cast of conservative hate objects in the media and social media.

The best evidence that the minority of minorities cause has become incomprehensible even to its adherents is the extent to which it relies on anti-cause outrages rather than a utopian vision.

What does the Biden administration stand for? What are MSNBC, Jon Stewart, and their cast of celebrity activists fighting for? Tellingly, the very title of Stewart’s failed new Apple TV show, The Problem with Jon Stewart, signaled this inability to articulate a positive vision of his politics.

A country faced with real problems has less patience for the moral narcissism of elites.

The tyranny of moral minorities uses an assembly line of victimhood to assert their right to absolute power, but both the causes and the problems have become alien to the crises, inflation, crime, and despair, that threaten to dominate the American body and soul.

The Old Left could have met economic crises with class warfare, but the Postmodern Left has lost any tenuous hold it ever had on economic issues. Even its familiar prescriptions of social welfare are centered around the preoccupations of its coalition with green energy nuttery, racial equity supremacy, and gender and transgender politics so that mere economics takes a backseat to what has become the far more exciting Marxism that puts identity over money.

How can you do class warfare when you’ve become a movement of billionaires whose supreme causes are electric cars that cost more than the average annual income, the sexual fetishes of wealthy men, and the fussiness of remote workers who don’t like being around other people?

It’s getting increasingly hard to disguise the fact that leftist revolutions aren’t about liberating the majority, but about enslaving it to the cultural obsessions of a tiny minority.

You can only dress up the tyranny of an upper class in oppressed drag for so long.

The moral minorities aren’t out to liberate anyone, including themselves, but to force everyone to use the words they want, to eat and dress like them, and to live like them.

There’s a leftist term for that, it isn’t revolution or liberation: it’s colonialism.

When 2% of the country gets to tell everyone else how to live, that’s true oppression.

Now their masks, literal and metaphorical, are coming off and they fear that more than anything else because power can simply be defined as a question of who has to accommodate whom?

In the sky or on the ground, in the classroom or the office, the answer is all too clear.

Harvard's Slave Photos Raise Many Questions

Following-up, "Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)."

At the New York Times, "The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing."

This is Renty below, in a very famous photograph you may have seen before.

From the article:

For a century, they languished in a museum attic. Fifteen wooden cases, palm-size and lined with velvet. Cocooned within are some of history’s cruelest, most contentious images — the first photographs, it is believed, of enslaved human beings.

Alfred, Fassena and Jem. Renty and his daughter Delia. Jack and his daughter Drana. They face us directly in one image and stand in profile in the next, bodies held fixed by an iron brace. The Zealy daguerreotypes, as the pictures are known, were taken in 1850 at the behest of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. A proponent of polygenesis — the idea that the races descended from different origins, a notion challenged in its own time and refuted by Darwin — he had the pictures taken to furnish proof of this theory.

Agassiz wanted images of barbarity, and he got them — implicating only himself. He had hand-selected his subjects in South Carolina, seeking types — “specimens,” as he put it — but each daguerreotype reveals an individual, deeply dignified and expressive. Their hurt, contempt, fatigue, utter refusal are unequivocal. The photographer, Joseph T. Zealy, who specialized in society portraits, did not alter his method for the shoot; he carried on as usual, using the same light, the same angles, giving the images their unsettling, formal perfection.

Agassiz showed the pictures only once. They were then tucked away at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Rediscovered in 1976, they have been at the center of urgent debates about photography ever since...

 

Union Head Randi Weingarten Says Parents Are Stoking the Flames of War (VIDEO)

At Red State, "Randi Weingarten is the President of the American Federation of Teachers and perhaps the person who is most to blame for the horrific abuse our children have suffered in the public education system over the last two years ... On a recent podcast, the AFT President suggested the current trend of parental interest and parental rights activism is “propaganda” and intimated that parents fighting for their liberties is akin to stoking warfare."

WATCH: 

How the Gay Rights Showdown Threatens Disney's Unprecedented Self-Rule in Florida

One of the big culture war stories of the moment. 

Governor DeSantis is a fighter.

At the Los Angeles Times, "The speed at which the legislature has acted against Disney reflects the growing tension between the company’s outwardly progressive stance on social issues and Florida’s conservatives":

For more than half a century, Walt Disney World has effectively operated as it own municipal government in central Florida.

A 1967 state law established the Reedy Creek Improvement District, giving Walt Disney Co. extraordinary powers in an area encompassing 25,000 acres near Orlando where the sprawling themed resort now sits. The law grants Disney a wide range of abilities, including the power to issue bonds and provide its own utilities and emergency services, such as fire protection.

The law is partly what convinced Disney to come to Florida in the first place and allowed it to flourish and become the state’s largest private employer, with nearly 80,000 jobs.

Now, though, that special designation is under serious threat as Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican legislators wage an escalating culture war against Disney over the Burbank-based entertainment giant’s opposition to legislation that it considers to be anti-gay.

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday approved a bill that would dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government. The action came a day after the Florida Senate passed the bill that would dissolve all independent special districts established before 1968, including Reedy Creek. State senators voted 23 to 16 in favor of the bill during a special session of the state Legislature.

“Disney is a guest in Florida,” Republican Rep. Randy Fine, who sponsored the bill, tweeted on Tuesday before the vote. “Today, we remind them.”

DeSantis, who had previously backed legislative efforts to revoke Disney’s special privileges, on Tuesday expanded the special session to consider the elimination of the district. The bombshell announcement dropped just hours before the special session that was originally intended to focus on congressional redistricting, which has also been controversial. The lawmakers also approved DeSantis’ redistricting map that favors Republicans.

DeSantis and conservative commentators have spent weeks blasting Disney for its opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which the governor signed last month. Disney has said its “goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts.” The company also pledged to “pause” all political donations in the state as it reevaluates its approach to advocacy.

Disney’s Chief Executive Bob Chapek first voiced opposition to the bill, nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” by its opponents, after receiving blowback from employees. Chapek, who initially resisted getting involved to avoid Disney becoming a political football, spoke out only after the bill passed the state Legislature.

The Parental Rights law bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through Grade 3 “or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” LGBTQ activists say the law amounts to a homophobic attack on queer youth.

The speed at which the legislature has acted against Disney reflects the growing tension between the company’s outwardly progressive stance on social issues and Florida’s conservatives, particularly DeSantis, who many observers believe will mount a presidential run in 2024.

Some observers had seen the rhetoric as mere grandstanding. But proving a point against Disney may matter more now to DeSantis’ base than the traditional business-friendly aims of economic conservatives, analysts told The Times.

“I thought that this was an effort to shoot across the bow and cause Disney to steer in a slightly different direction, and that wiser minds would prevail,” said Richard Foglesong, author of “Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando.” “That could still happen. But what’s really behind this is the culture war. Things have changed. This is not the Republican Party of the Bushes.”

But aspects of how the dissolution of the Reedy Creek Improvement District would work are still unclear...

Disney's making a big mistake, and they'll lose, badly.

 

How Feminism Got Hijacked

From Zoe Strimpel, at Bari Weiss's Common Sense, "The movement that once declared 'I am woman, hear me roar' can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?":

“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”

“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”

“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”

The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)

“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.

What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”? Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.

But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.

It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.

How we got from there to here is the story of an unbelievable hijacking. Two, actually.

It was only five decades ago, in the 1970s, that women—mostly white, middle-class and from places like New York, Boston and north London, and fed up with being sidelined by their comrades on the left—forged a new movement. They called it Women’s Liberation.

At the start, Women’s Liberation was seen as the domain of women with money—like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, in the United Kingdom, Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott. But soon it became the movement of everyday mothers, daughters, wives, working women, poor women, and women regularly beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands.

They embodied a politics of action: protesting, writing, lobbying, setting up shelters. They formed sprawling, nationwide organizations like the National Organization of Women, the National Abortion Campaign and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

And at the center of their politics was an awareness of their physicality, a keen understanding that the challenges women faced were bound up with the bodies they had been born into. Exploitation at home and at work, the threat of sexual violence, unequal pay—all that was a function of their sex. Nothing better summed up the ethos of Women’s Liberation than “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Every feminist had a copy or had read one. It sold something like four million copies. It was a bible. That’s because “Our Bodies, Ourselves” rejected the old, Puritan discomforts with female sexuality that, feminists argued, had prevented women from realizing themselves, and empowered women by educating them about their own bodies.

By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause. There was an obvious irony: It was women’s liberationists who had successfully made women a topic worthy of academic scholarship. But now that the feminist professoriat had the luxury of not worrying about the very concrete issues the older feminists had fought for, feminist professors spent their days reflecting on their feminism—exploring, reimagining and rejecting old orthodoxies.

“As soon as the academics got hold of feminism, they ruined it,” said Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosophy professor formerly of the University of Sussex and the author of “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.” “It should be and is a grassroots movement about women and their interests. Academics just took it away from them.”

It wasn’t just that these academics took it upon themselves to develop fiendishly complex theories about women, dressed up in a fiendishly complex language. It was that this hyper-intellectualized feminism, by embracing this hyper-intellectualized language, excluded most women. It transformed feminism from activism to theory, from the concrete to the abstract, from a movement that sought to liberate women from the discriminations imposed on them by their sex to a school of thought that was less interested in sex than gender...

Still more.

 

Boston School Has Transgender Explain to 4 and 5-Year-Olds That Sometimes Babies Are Assigned the Wrong Sex

At AoSHQ, "David French: Republicans Are 'Against Free Speech' Because They're Instructing Government Employees What They Can Teach Kindergarteners."

Federal Reserve Expected to Raise Rates at Half Percentage Increments to Help Cool Inflation

The Fed folks are freaking out. 

Inflation is battering consumers, home owners, businesses, travelers, and agriculture, industrial, and manufacturing concerns, to name a few. Fuel prices remain at record levels, generalized inflation is spilling over to the rest of the economy, and continuing supply chain pressures (especially from China amid a new coronavirus crackdown) are crimping the availability of a variety of foods, consumer products, and basic industrial inputs, etc. As noted preciously, it's getting so bad consumers are even cutting back on basic necessities.  

People are hot and mad too. Inflation is the number one concern of regular Americans. And depending on how fast the Fed pulls the switch, there's some alarm that a recession could be coming down the pike.

Things aren't likely to cool off before the November midterms either. President Biden's so rattled and confused he's been cursing at members of the White House reporting pool.  

At the Wall Street Journal, "Fed Signals Faster Pace of Rate Increases, Bond Runoff Likely":

Minutes show central bank officials in March spelled out plan for shrinking $9 trillion asset portfolio next month to help cool inflation.

Federal Reserve officials signaled they could raise rates by a half-percentage point at their meeting early next month and begin reducing their $9 trillion asset portfolio as part of their most aggressive effort in more than two decades to curb price pressures.

Minutes from the Fed’s March 15-16 meeting, released Wednesday, showed that many officials last month were prepared to raise rates by a half-point but opted for a smaller, quarter-point increase because of concern over the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Stocks fell and bond yields rose in the midst of expectations of a more aggressive Fed policy tightening process than previously anticipated. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which rises when bond prices fall, climbed to 2.606%, a three-year high, from 2.554% on Tuesday and 2.409% on Monday. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.2%, while the S&P 500 fell 1% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.4%.

Officials last month approved their first interest rate increase in more than three years, raising their benchmark rate to a range between 0.25% and 0.5%. They also penciled in a series of additional rate increases this year to take rates closer to 2%, with inflation having surged to a four-decade high.

The minutes revealed for the first time how officials expect to shrink their asset holdings much faster than they did last decade, which would serve as another key tool for tightening monetary policy. Officials neared agreement on a plan that, after a roughly three-month ramp-up, would allow up to $95 billion in securities to mature every month without being replaced.

The Fed’s plans have sent tremors through the mortgage market, where the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose last week to 4.9%, the highest rate since late 2018, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

In the three weeks since they last met, many Fed officials have indicated that they could support raising rates by a half-percentage point instead of the traditional quarter-point at their next meeting. The Fed hasn’t raised rates at consecutive policy meetings since 2006 and hasn’t raised rates by a half-point since 2000.

Investors in interest-rate futures markets now anticipate half-point increases at the Fed’s next meeting, May 3-4, and at the following gathering, in June.

On Tuesday, Fed governor Lael Brainard, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to serve as the Fed’s vice chairwoman and has previously been an influential voice warning against prematurely pulling back stimulus, underscored in a speech the importance of reducing high inflation.

Ellen Meade, a former Fed economist who is now a policy consultant, said that based on those remarks there is no reason not to expect a half-point increase. “It would have been an opportunity to push back at this point in time,” Ms. Meade said. “She really laid out the progressive case for why inflation fighting needs to be front and center.”

Consumer prices rose 6.4% in February from a year earlier, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, the Commerce Department’s personal-consumption expenditures price index. Core prices, which exclude food and energy, climbed 5.4%. Those readings were the highest in around four decades.

Fed officials a year ago described higher inflation as transitory. They backed away from that characterization last fall, as the labor market healed rapidly and price pressures broadened to a range of goods and, more important, labor-intensive services.

Still, as recently as January, the Fed had expected inflation to diminish this spring as supply-chain bottlenecks improved. The war in Ukraine and potential lockdowns in China to deal with more-contagious variants of the coronavirus have ended any expectation of near-term relief from improving supply chains.

“That story has already fallen apart,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said March 21. “To the extent it continues to fall apart, my colleagues and I may well reach the conclusion we’ll need to move more quickly. And if so, we’ll do so.”

The central bank is still counting on inflation slowing later this year as supply-chain problems ease and as more workers return to labor markets. But unlike last year, Mr. Powell said the central bank could no longer set policy by forecasting that such relief would materialize.

“As we set policy, we will be looking to actual progress on these issues and not assuming significant near-term supply-side relief,” he said...