While we all came together for our national celebration of
gratitude last week, it was a bit more of a reach to find things to be grateful
for, as the Radical Left had a pretty good run in November, capping it with the
apparent stolen electoral victory of the ever more infirm Joe Biden. Indeed, the Radical Left pretty much ran the
table in November and exhibited more signs of raw totalitarianism than ever
before.
Awards and Accolades
The Radical Left has been busy lathering itself in awards
and accolades as of late. Time’s Person
of the Year contenders include despotic Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer,
whose singular claim to fame is chasing a 77 year old barber to the ends of the
earth for defying her proclamations. Also
making the list are the vacillating Dr. Fauci, and the omnipresent socialist
firebrand AOC. Bet on a real or
aspiring despot to be on the magazine’s cover this year. New York governor Andrew Cuomo won an Emmy
(?) for his handling of the COVID19 crisis, despite sentencing thousands of
senior citizens to their deaths with his inexplicable order to place infected
people into long term care facilities while a floating ship sat unused in New
York’s harbor. Not to be outdone, the
New York Times Book Review devoted the cover and five full pages to a gushing
review of volume 1 of Barack Obama’s 800 page doorstop, A Promised Land. Reviewer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche apparently
experienced near orgasmic bliss throughout his reading of Obama’s tome:
Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. It is not merely that this book avoids being
ponderous, as might be expected, even forgiven, of a hefty memoir, but that it
is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous
in places, the detail granular and vivid.
Move over, Toni Morrison.
Take a seat, Maya Angelou. James
Baldwin, your legacy is about to be trampled on by a demi-god.
November was a very good month for awards and
self-assessments for the Radical Left.
The Cancel Culture
Closer to home, at The University of Chicago, the cancel
culture mob went after geophysical sciences professor Dorian Abbot for raising
questions about the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts undertaken by the
university in the last several years. For
the record, Abbot’s views are not dismissive of DEI efforts generally and are
fairly benign:
(https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J_vf46R100Q84PBcScdoD0Z7QVfKC7gy/view)
Yet, student and faculty activists claimed that Abbot’s
views “threatened the safety and belonging of underrepresented groups within
the department” and made a list of
11 demands, that among other things,
diminished Abbot’s status and role and demanded that “steps be taken to
protect students and postdocs currently working with Abbot.” This is the third major test for the
university this year, as the cancel mob targeted economics professor Harald
Uhlig earlier this year for suggesting that defunding the police was a poorly
thought out goal of BLM. Sadly, the
English Department caved to the demands of the mob by announcing that it would
ONLY accept students wishing to do work in Black Studies. While the university fell on its face in
permitting the English Department to go down this path, to its credit, the
university affirmed its free speech principles in a missive released yesterday:
(https://president.uchicago.edu/page/statement-faculty-free-expression-and-diversity)
Ominously, the last paragraph also affirms the university’s
diversity and inclusiveness program, and while THAT statement seems rather
benign, it says nothing of what form
those efforts take, and whether academic excellence and free speech will
eventually become subordinate to those efforts.
Can the Chicago Principles coexist with DEI programs as they have come
to be? I remain skeptical. As one Twitter poster put it, “I’m beginning
to think that those people with “COEXIST” bumper stickers on their cars don’t
really mean it.”
Police Violence.
After enduring an entire summer of unrest, rioting and
looting across the U.S. and in much of Europe due to the George Floyd and
Rayshard Brooks incidents, it appears that police violence against law abiding
citizens in the West is just fine now, if it’s in connection with the violation
of COVID rules. The brutal treatment of
citizens in Toronto, London, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. associated with
lockdown is as nearly as bad as the
George Floyd incident. It is nearly as
bad as anything the #CCP has inflicted on its citizens. In Spain, a woman was tazed for bringing her
mother to her mother’s mental health counselor in violation of the COVID
rules. In Great Britain, a 78 year old
woman was manhandled for not wearing a mask.
In Toronto and the U.S., restaurant owners were arrested for keeping
their establishments open. A gym owner
in New York was fined $10,000 for remaining open (he is refusing to pay) These
were otherwise all law abiding citizens.
We are now treating normal, hardworking citizens like criminals, and we
are celebrating career criminals like George Floyd.
Even Pope Francis jumped on board, as he penned an op-ed in
the New York Times (which publication generally is contemptuous of
Christianity) in which he criticized those of us that are chafing at the sudden
loss of individual liberty. “As if
measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute
some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom, “ he
wrote. Further, “It is all too easy to
take an idea—in this case, for example, personal freedom—and turn it into an
ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.” Oh, where to even begin with this foe of the
Enlightenment?
Which brings me to another important question. The “experts” in the West all claimed that
opening trade with China would result in China becoming more like the
West. But almost 20 years after China’s
admission to the WTO, it appears that the opposite has happened. Western Europe and the U.S. have become more
bureaucratic and more tyrannical, and are showing signs of evolving into corrupt, one-party systems.
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