[JohnRawls]

Why do you think there should be subsidies and guarantees for businesses? A lack of subsidies and guarantees for businesses doesn't "fuck" anybody, unless the government induced investors into a business with the promises of subsidies and guarantees.


According to the scientist, they are not under threat. Overwhelmingly, the people dying from coronavirus are elderly. There aren't a lot of elderly children.

You just said that it is the democrats that are responsible for the unemployment. Democratic line has been massive assistance to small and medium businesses and to the average joes. Mitch and Graham have always been about removing that or stopping that assistance in the first place. Now you are switching the tune.

Nobody is asking indefinite guarantees for businesses here. But once again, under Trump, he provided assistance to Boeing and other large businesses and shafted the small to medium ones. The small businesses got the loan program which the banks refused to give and used it to refinance their own clients who mostly were more than small businesses. At best they were medium enterprises. As one of the people, who stood against that, you are sure easily bending over to the Republicans and ignoring it.

[Doug64]

Neither agricultural workers nor delivery drivers have as much exposure to the virus as teachers and students, because the latter have to be confined in enclosed spaces together for a longer period of time than the former.

But of course, all of them should take the necessary precautions if they do need to interact with anybody else.

Except that experience says that children aren’t either at risk of either catching or spreading the Wuhan virus. Their teacher would be more at risk from each other than their students. Which leads one to wonder just why the teachers’ unions are stupid enough to fight reopening.

Will Teachers’ Unions Reelect Trump?

During the next six weeks the nation’s 51 million public school students, with the assistance of their parents, would normally be preparing for the next phase of their education. This year, despite the absence of scientific data indicating that a return to in-person class attendance increases the risk that students or educators will contract COVID-19, the teachers’ unions are resisting school reopening. This flouts the will of parents whose taxes pay the teachers, disregards the failure of large-scale distance learning, and ignores the emotional damage children suffer pursuant to the social disruption that accompanies school closures. According to a recent Gallup survey, a clear majority of parents want schools reopened:


Fifty-six percent of parents with children who attend a K-12 school prefer their children’s instruction be fully in person this fall. Meanwhile, 37% prefer a hybrid program in which students attend school part time and do some distance learning, while 7% want full-time distance learning for their children.

In other words, most parents agree with President Trump’s position as he summarized it during his July 7 remarks concerning the urgent necessity of reopening the schools: “Everybody wants it. The moms want it, the dads want it, the kids want it. It’s time to do it.” Yet Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), published a column in Sunday’s edition of USA Today threatening to hold public school systems hostage until the taxpayers cough up a $116.5 billion ransom. She admits that this would constitute a 19 percent increase over pre-virus funding: “The average school will need an additional $1.2 million … above what we currently spend.”

Evidently, Weingarten is unable to see that brazen exploitation of the epidemic by AFT, combined with crazy demands to defund the police by affiliates like United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), is a political loser for her Democratic vassals — including their presidential nominee. The latter will be forced to defend the teachers’ unions while Trump increases pressure on him to choose between them and the children. If the schools aren’t open by Election Day, there will be Hell to pay for Biden. By that time, the parents (i.e. the voters) will exact a gruesome revenge at the ballot box. Yet our erstwhile vice president continues to bray pseudo-scientific balderdash such as this:


This year going back to school is going to look very different. And we know how hard it’s going to be for families all across the country.… Everyone wants our schools to reopen. The question is how to make it safe and how to make it stick. Forcing educators and students back into classrooms in areas where infection rates are going up or remaining too high is just plain dangerous.

This nonsense has been repeatedly debunked by epidemiologists such as John Ioannidis of Stanford University and Knut M. Wittkowski of Rockefeller University. Moreover, as Liz Harrington at Townhall reports, “Twenty-two European countries reopened their schools back in May, and it did not cause ‘any significant increase in coronavirus infections among children, parents, or staff.’ ” Scientific studies have been conducted in Germany, Ireland, and France that independently reached the same conclusion. The fear-mongering by teachers’ unions and Biden is about politics rather than science, as Dr. Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution recently reiterated in an interview with KUSI News:


We know it’s factually true and proven all over the world that people under 18 have very little, if any, risk.… The data is clear. Whether it’s from Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, the United States, Asia, all over the world.… Children almost never transmit the disease. In fact, Switzerland is contemplating stopping even testing children because it’s irrelevant.

The only real question that remains is the following: Why do teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians believe keeping schools closed is a winning issue for them? Presumably they think that, if the schools remain shuttered, millions of parents will be unable to return to work pursuant to the absence of child care. This would, according to the scenario, prevent the economy from recovering — a failure the Democrats hope voters will blame on President Trump. The problem with this plan is their assumption that the electorate is largely made up of morons, particularly Trump supporters. This is the same mistake the Democrats have been making about the voters since June 2015.

They assume that, when UTLA members refuse to return to work until the police force is defunded and charter schools are shut down, the voters can’t see that their actual agenda is unrelated to student safety. They really seem to believe that, when members of the Durham (N.C.) Association of Educators (DAE) decline to resume classroom teaching until Medicare for All and welfare benefits for illegal immigrants are enacted, the voters are unable to see that their goals are political rather than educational. They would have us believe that a lawsuit filed by the Florida Education Association (FEA) against GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis actually involves the state constitution’s safety requirements.

None of this passes the laugh test. There is no scientific data supporting the claims of teachers’ unions or Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, that a return to in-person instruction increases the risk that students or educators will contract COVID-19. All of their sound and fury is about the November election, and it signifies nothing but partisan politics. Only 7 percent of parents want schools to remain closed. The other 93 percent want the “educators” to get off their posteriors and do their jobs. If they refuse to do so, and the Democrats support their intransigence, it will create a wave of resentment among the voters that President Trump will easily ride to a second term in the White House.

[Pants-of-dog]

What is wrong with you people?

You are literally politicising your children’s health.

[Wulfschilde]

The disease practically doesn't hurt children but some day, most of them are going to need to get jobs.

Like seriously, what country are you from because most countries already re-opened their schools. I'm not going to hold my breath for an answer though.

But I didn't come here to shoot down this guy again. I came here because I need to get something off my chest. Kanye west said that he's afraid his wife is trying to get him "locked up like Mandela." And that's when I realized it: anyone who doesn't support Kanye for President is probably a racist.

Even Trump would never tell these truths:

"Even if my wife wants to divorce me after this speech, she brought North into the world even when I didn’t want to. She stood up and she protected that child. You know who else protected a child? Forty-three years ago, who do you think protected a child?” he said while crying.

"My mom saved my life. My dad wanted to abort me. My mom saved my life. There would have been no Kanye West because my dad was too busy," he said.

The rapper then posted what appeared to be a screengrab from a text message to Kris Jenner that said, “This is Ye You ready to talk now Or are (sic) still avoiding my calls.”

That's so sad. Liberals would have denied us Kanye West

Future President West also has a lot of successful business stuff under his belt, unlike the orange man:

The other tweets mentioned Vogue editor Anna Wintour who, West said, “always showed me love but when I told her I was going to GAP she looked at me like I was crazy Then she called back kissing my a--.”

Recent polling shows that Mr. West would garner 2% of the vote, with a 2.9% margin of error. It's small but a man has to start somewhere.

[blackjack21]

You just said that it is the democrats that are responsible for the unemployment. Democratic line has been massive assistance to small and medium businesses and to the average joes. Mitch and Graham have always been about removing that or stopping that assistance in the first place. Now you are switching the tune.

The Democrats are responsible for most of it. The massive assistance to business has been from both parties. Democrats only control the House. As it is, the assistance mostly went to wealthy connected people's businesses, not small mom-and-pop shops.

But once again, under Trump, he provided assistance to Boeing and other large businesses and shafted the small to medium ones.

Trump didn't shaft anyone. The legislation called for banks to administer the paycheck protection program, and the well-connected were first in line as they had legal teams that knew the ins-and-outs before the general public did.

The small businesses got the loan program which the banks refused to give and used it to refinance their own clients who mostly were more than small businesses.

Yes, and this legislation originated in the House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi's leadership. It is fundamentally bi-partisan. This is a long way from something that can be blamed on Trump. Washington insiders took care of their own.

Recent polling shows that Mr. West would garner 2% of the vote, with a 2.9% margin of error. It's small but a man has to start somewhere.

He started way too late.

[BeesKnee5]

Is this likely to have an impact in Ohio?

https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/07/ ... eport.html

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was arrested Tuesday morning ahead of an announcement about a $60 million federal racketeering case related to Ohio’s new nuclear bailout law, according to sources and media reports.

FBI agents, who were assisted by the Perry County Sheriff’s Department, were deployed to Householder’s property in Glenford, the Dayton Daily News reported. The investigation centers on House Bill 6, the $1 billion-plus ratepayer bailout of two Ohio nuclear power plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions (now Energy Harbor) that Householder helped push through last year with the help of millions in dark money, according to the Toledo Blade.

Besides Householder, four others have been arrested, according to sources and media reports: former Ohio Republican Party Chair-turned-consultant Matt Borges, prominent lobbyist Neil Clark, FirstEnergy Solutions lobbyist Juan Cespedes, and Householder aide Jeff Longstreth. All are currently in custody, according to a source.

[Doug64]

What is wrong with you people?

You are literally politicising your children’s health.

Yes, the Democrats have proven they will go to any lengths to defeat Trump. And if that means hundreds of thousands of children have their education damaged and their futures put at risk, it's just one more necessary sacrifice.

[Drlee]

As usual Doug64 seems to be blind to the terror, disability and death that is happening in our country. He is giddy about his notion that we are "only" loosing 264 per million in Florida and Europe is 305. What an asshole attitude to have. Anti-intellectual, deliberately deceptive and dangerous. Are we learning about Mormons from him or just modern conservatives?

Before the election we will likely see 250,000 deaths. And the fact is that inaction at the federal level accounts for the majority of them. At the federal level means President Trump.

[Doug64]

Watch this before before Youtube takes it down! After all, it's hilarious and pokes fun at Woke culture, of course it's going to go down:

https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg

As usual these days, @Drlee again chooses to emulate Trump's standard tactics rather than offer anything like a rebuttal. It's truly sad, the fall from someone that used to be worth holding a debate with.

But then, Drlee is hardly alone:

Trump opponents' worst traits are Trump's fault

You could say it's all Donald Trump's fault. His bad qualities -- his carelessness about facts, his obstinance about admitting error, his contempt for others' views -- have turned out to be contagious, to the point that you could argue they're more damaging to his opponents than to him.

This started early on, during the 2016 campaign. "I will look at it at the time," Trump replied when asked during the final fall debate whether he would concede if he lost. "That's horrifying," Hillary Clinton replied, quite reasonably.

But maybe not so horrifying. Clinton, Obama administration intelligence, law enforcement appointees and Democrats generally spent more than two years advancing, without serious evidence, their Russian-collusion theory. Delegitimizing an election result, previously seen as horrifying, suddenly became OK.

Or perhaps this was a case of projection, the psychological term for assuming your adversary would do what you would do if you were in his or her shoes.

Projection may also be at work when Trump's political opponents emulate his habit of refusing to admit error and apologize for mistakes.

A prime example is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who, like the president, grew up in one of the more verdant neighborhoods of Queens, the son of a man who rose from humble beginnings to considerable renown.

Cuomo has been hailed, not least by himself, as a hero for his response to COVID-19. But his judgment, as even CNN's Jake Tapper has argued, has not been flawless. His health commissioner's March 25 order requiring nursing homes to admit patients infected with the virus clearly resulted in the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of elderly residents whose vulnerability was apparent early on.

As I argued in a mid-May column, this order (and similar ones in New Jersey and Michigan) may have been issued to keep hospital ICUs from being overwhelmed -- which seemed a possibility at the time but didn't happen.

But Cuomo, who defends lockdowns as worthwhile if they save just one life, insists he made no mistake. A better defense is to admit that no policy can prevent every virus death and that balancing risks of unknowable magnitude will always be subject to error.

Trump's carelessness with facts, his frequent criticisms of "fake news" and his cavalier remarks about making it easier for public figures to sue for libel made many of his opponents fear he would clamp down on freedom of speech.

Some liberals began describing themselves as The Resistance, summoning up visions of French resistance to the Nazis. "Democracy dies in darkness," The Washington Post started proclaiming on its front page.

Perhaps projection was at work here as well, for the unhappy fact is that the parts of our society that are most firmly controlled -- and almost entirely peopled -- by those on the left half of the political spectrum are also the places where freedom of speech is most under attack: academia and journalism.

Speech codes and restrictions, as readers of my columns know, have become standard operating procedures in many, perhaps most, colleges and universities. They are justified on the theory that certain speech -- labeled, plausibly or not, as bigotry or racism -- is tantamount to violence.

Newsroom pressure resulted in the resignation of New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet last month and the resignation of editor Bari Weiss this week. As she wrote in a stinging resignation letter to publisher A. G. Sulzberger, "A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else."

"Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times," she went on. "But Twitter has become its ultimate editor." No coincidence, perhaps, that it's also the favorite medium of expression of Donald Trump.

A more notable journalist is resigning this week, Andrew Sullivan from New York Magazine. He is full of contempt for Trump, but he has been writing about "the crudeness and certainty" of "the new orthodoxy" that America is "systematically racist, and a white-supremacist project, from the start," which is the central thesis of The New York Times' 1619 Project.

This unorthodoxy surely hasn't gone unnoticed in the New York Magazine newsroom, though Sullivan will surely land on his feet. And he'll go down in history with Jonathan Rauch as the pioneering advocates who literally changed a nation's mind on same-sex marriage.

Rauch and Weiss are among the 150 signers of the Harper's Magazine letter endorsing "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society." The letter starts with a rote description of Donald Trump as "a real threat to democracy," but its clear thrust is that the real threat to free exchange today is not Trump but his perhaps-projecting opponents.

But Barone is wrong about one thing, it's hardly just in reaction to Trump--it's been going on for awhile, Trump's 2016 victory just kicked it into overdrive:

The Left is Now the Right

In August, 2005, Rolling Stone sent me to cover a freak show. In a small Pennsylvania town called Dover, residents contrived to insert a sentence about teaching “intelligent design” into the curriculum, and fought for its right to do so in an extravagantly-covered trial in the “big city” capital of Harrisburg.

Dover’s school board president, Alan Bonsell, was a fundamentalist who believed God shaped man from dust. It was said Bonsell would stand at his window at night, wondering, as he gazed at the stars, at the intervening hand of God. “If you can’t see that, you’re just not thinking clearly,” he said. His wife supposedly told him he looked like Chuck Norris.

The bureaucratic atmosphere Bonsell presided over was not kind to the eggheads trying to teach. When the head of the district’s science department, Bertha Spahr, begged the board not to promote “intelligent design,” listing past Supreme Court decisions about religion in classrooms, another fundamentalist board member named Bill Buckingham – an ex-cop who wore a lapel pin in the shape of both a Christian cross and an American flag – shouted her down. “Where did you get your law degree?” he snapped. Author Laurie Lebo in the book The Devil in Dover described what happened next:


Neither Nilsen nor Bonsell spoke up to address Buckingham’s rudeness to the thirty-year veteran teacher. Spahr pulled back, shocked, and then sat down without saying a word.

It was after this meeting in October, 2004 that a passage about teaching “gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory” was inserted into the curriculum. The science geeks fought back, however, and roughly a year later I sat in a packed courtroom with overeducated reporters from all over the world who came to gape at the spectacle of rural ignorance showing its rump in an American courtroom.

When a Christian attorney named Robert J. Muise tried to cross-examine the smooth-talking Superstars of Science who’d flown in from places like Brown and Harvard to denounce “intelligent design,” journos murdered their thesauruses looking for new words for “hayseed.” The chuckling press section felt like front row of a comedy club.

Dover’s failed school board rebellion inspired multiple books, law review articles, and films, including a Nova doc that won a Peabody award. For decades, whether in Arkansas or Texas or Louisiana, every time even a small group of fundamentalists tried bullying teachers via this stacking-the-school-bureaucracy trick, northern press heathens would descend in mammoth numbers. Especially in 2005, which felt like the dawn of a new thousand-year reign of Bushian conservatism, liberal audiences jumped at any opportunity to re-create the magic of one of their foundational knowledge-over-superstition parables, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Fifteen years later, America is a thousand Dovers, and the press response is silence. This time it’s not a few Podunk school boards under assault by junk science and crackpot theologies, but Princeton University, the New York Times, the Smithsonian, and a hundred other institutions.

When the absurdity factor rocketed past Dover levels this week, the nation’s leading press organs barely commented, much less laughed. Doing so would have meant opening the floodgates on a story most everyone in media sees but no one is allowed to comment upon: that the political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.

Conservatives once tried to legislate what went on in your bedroom; now it’s the left that obsesses over sexual codicils, not just for the bedroom but everywhere. Right-wingers from time to time made headlines campaigning against everything from The Last Temptation of Christ to “Fuck the Police,” though we laughed at the idea that Ice Cube made cops literally unsafe, and it was understood an artist had to do something fairly ambitious, like piss on a crucifix in public, to get conservative protesters off their couches.

Today Matt Yglesias signing a group letter with Noam Chomsky is considered threatening. Moreover a lot less than booking a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit can get you in the soup – a headline, a retweet, even likes are costing people jobs. Imagine how many movies Milos Forman would have had to make if Jerry Falwell had been able to get people fired this easily.

This is separate from the Democratic Party “moving right,” or in the case of issues like war, financial deregulation, and surveillance, having always been in lockstep with the right. This is about a change in the personality profile of the party’s most animated, engaged followers.

Many who marched against Dick Cheney’s spy state in the early 2000s lost interest once Donald Trump became a target, then became full converts to the possibilities of centralized speech control after Russiagate, Charlottesville, and the de-platforming of Alex Jones, with even the ACLU wobbling. (Some of the only left media figures to be consistent on this issue work at the World Socialist Web Site, which has gone after woke icons like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Internet censorship). Support for the “radical transparency” concept that made Wikileaks famous receded in favor of a referendum on the political and sexual iniquity of Julian Assange: many activists today are more concerned with who than what and find nuance, contradiction, and double-meaning repulsive. Bad person = bad idea!

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it was the exact profile of Bush-era conservatives, who were so famously impervious to irony that corporate America could not develop for them one functioning comedy concept. Just five years ago, the Atlantic ran one of many investigations into the issue, quoting University of Delaware professor Dannagal Young:


Stephen Colbert, for example, may say that he’s looking forward to the sunny weather that global warming will bring, and the audience members know this isn’t what he really means. But they have to wonder: Is he making fun of the kind of conservative who would say something so egregious? Or is he making fun of arrogant liberals who think that conservatives hold such extreme views?

As Young noticed, this is a kind of ambiguity that liberals tend to find more satisfying and culturally familiar than conservatives do… In contrast, conservative talk radio humor tends to rely less on irony than straightforward indignation and hyperbole.


The old Republican right’s idea of “humor” was its usual diatribes against Bad People, only with puns thrown in (are you ready for “OxyClinton”?). As a result the Fox effort at countering the Daily Show, the 1/2 Hour News Hour — a string of agonizing “burns” on Bush-haters and Hillary — remains the worst-rated show in the history of television, according to Metacritic. The irony gap eventually spelled doom for that group of Republicans, as Trump drove a truck through it in 2016. However, it’s possible they just weren’t as committed to the concept as current counterparts.

Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture created a graphic on “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture” that declared the following white values: “the scientific method,” “rational, linear thinking,” “the nuclear family,” “children should have their own rooms,” “hard work is the key to success,” “be polite,” “written tradition,” and “self-reliance.” White food is “steak and potatoes; bland is best,” and in white justice, “intent counts.”

The astute observer will notice this graphic could equally have been written by white supremacist Richard Spencer or History of White People parodist Martin Mull. It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and “linear thinking” are white values?).

The exhibit was inspired by white corporate consultants with Education degrees like Judith Katz and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who themselves echo the work of more consultants with Ed degrees like Glenn Singleton of Courageous Conversations. Per the New York Times, Courageous Conversations even teaches that “written communication over other forms” and “mechanical time” (i.e. clock time) are tools by which “whiteness undercuts Black kids.”

The notion that such bugbears as as time, data, and the written word are racist has caught fire across the United States in the last few weeks, igniting calls for an end to virtually every form of quantitative evaluation in hiring and admissions, including many that were designed specifically to combat racism. Few tears will be shed for the SAT and ACT exams, even though they were once infamous for causing Harvard to be overpopulated with high-scoring “undesirables” like Jews and Catholics, forcing the school to add letters of reference and personal essays to help restore the WASP balance.

The outcry against the tests as “longstanding forces of institutional racism” by the National Association of Basketball Coaches is particularly hilarious, given that the real problem most of those coaches are combating is the minimal fake academic entry requirement imposed by the NCAA to help maintain a crooked billion-dollar business scheme based on free (and largely Black) labor. The tests have been tweaked repeatedly over the years to be more minority-friendly and are one of the few tools that gave brilliant but underprivileged kids a way to blow past the sea of rich suburbanites who feel oppressed by them… But, fine, let’s stipulate, as Neon Bodeaux put it, that “them tests are culturally biased.” What to make of the campaign to end blind auditions for musical positions, which the New York Philharmonic began holding in the early seventies in response to complaints of discrimination?

Before blind auditions, women made up less than 6 percent of orchestras; today they’re half of the New York Philharmonic. But because the change did not achieve similar results with Black and Hispanic musicians, the blind audition must now be “altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.” This completes a decades-long circle where the left/liberal project went from working feverishly to expunge racial stereotypes in an effort to level the playing field, to denouncing itself for ever having done so.

This would be less absurd if the effort were not being led in an extraordinary number of cases by extravagantly-paid white consultants like DiAngelo and Howard Ross, a “social justice advocate” whose company billed the federal government $5 million since 2006 to teach basically the same course on “whiteness” to agencies like NASA, the Treasury, the FDIC, and others.

It’s unsurprising that in the mouths of such people, the definitions of “whiteness” sound suspiciously like lazy suburban white stereotypes about Black America, only in reverse. They read like a peer-reviewed version of Bill de Blasio’s infamous joke about “CP Time.”

It’s perfect cultural satire, like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode showing what ensues when Larry David is put in charge of creating a racial sensitivity exhibit for charity. The Smithsonian story is essentially the same tale of bubble-thinking run amok as the infamous “Museum of Creation” exhibit showing Adam and Eve partying with dinosaurs, only featuring opposite politics.

Those creation exhibits inspired multiple loving treatments from some of our best press humorists. In a predictable pattern, however, major media mostly did not go near the Smithsonian story until it became the focus of attention from chortling conservatives. Only at that point did headlines like the following appear in the Washington Post:


African-American Museum site removes ‘Whiteness’ chart after criticism from Trump Jr. and conservative media

Once, the right couldn’t see or comment upon its own absurdities, and instead spent most of its time whining about being frozen out of the media at the exact moment its messaging was becoming hegemonic, e.g. when we weren’t even able to watch a football game without someone trying to shove Rush Limbaugh or Dennis Miller onscreen. Now the left has adopted the same traits (the NBA restart played on a “Black Lives Matter”-emblazoned court is going to make those old Monday Night Football broadcasts seem chill), with a major difference: it has the bureaucratic juice to shut down mass media efforts to ridicule its thinking. These are the same pontificating, stereotyping busybodies Republicans used to be, only this time, they’re winning the culture war.

“Diversity through segregation” sounds like another idea clipped from poor over-invoked George Orwell, but it surged in recent weeks as the Smithsonian-style conception of “antiracism” caught fire.

In the media context, diversity consultants recently invited Intercept employees to a “Safe Space Conversation” that would feature “two breakout groups – one for those who identify as people of color and one for those who identify as white.”

The same strategy is used in DiAngelo’s version of antiracist training. A theater employee forced to go through her program described the shock of being separated into “affinity groups” in this episode of the Blocked and Reported podcast. If you’re wondering what employees who “identify as white” can learn from being put in a room without minority co-workers and urged to “express themselves sincerely and honestly,” you’re not alone. Is “learning to speak in the absence of Black people” a muscle any sane person believes needs development?

At Princeton, the situation was even more bizarre. On July 4th, hundreds of faculty members and staff at Princeton University signed a group letter calling for radical changes.

Some demands seem reasonable, like requests to remedy University-wide underrepresentation among faculty members of color. Much of the rest of the letter read like someone drunk-tweeting their way through a Critical Theory seminar. Signatories asked the University to establish differing compensation levels according to race, demanding “course relief,” “summer salary,” “one additional semester of sabbatical,” and “additional human resources” for “faculty of color,” a term left undefined. That this would be grossly illegal didn’t seem to bother the 300-plus signatories of one of America’s most prestigious learning institutions.

The Princeton letter didn’t make much news until a Classics professor named Joshua Katz wrote a public “Declaration of Independence” from the letter. Playing the same role as the Dover science teacher who feebly warned that teaching Intelligent Design would put the district at odds with a long list of Supreme Court decisions, Katz said it boggled his mind that anyone could ask for compensation “perks” based on race, especially for “extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors.”

Katz also complained about the letter’s support for a group called the Black Justice League, which he described as a “local terrorist organization” that had recently engaged in an Instagram Live version of a kind of struggle session involving two students accused of an ancient racist conversation. Katz called it “one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed.” The video appears to have been deleted, though I spoke with another Princeton faculty member who described seeing the same event in roughly the same terms.

In response, University President Christopher Eisengruber “personally” denounced Katz for using the word “terrorist.” Katz was also denounced by his Classics department, which in a statement on the department web page insisted his act had “heedlessly put our Black colleagues, students, and alums at serious risk,” while hastening to add “we gratefully acknowledge all the forms of anti-racist work that members of our community have done.”

That statement was only signed by four people, though there are twenty faculty members in the Classics department, but the signees all had titles: department Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies, head of the Diversity and Equity Committee. The pattern of administrative leaders not only not rejecting but adopting the preposterous infantilizing language of new activism – I am physically threatened by your mild disagreement – held once again. Not one institutional leader in America, it seems, has summoned the courage to laugh in this argument’s face.

The saving grace of the right used to be that it was too stupid to rule. Politically defeated liberals secretly believed that in a moment of crisis, the country would have to be turned over to people who didn’t think hurricanes were punishment for gay sex and weren’t frightened to enter a room with a topless statue. In an effort to console such readers, reporters like me were sent to mock every Dover-style cultural stooge-fest and assigned strings of features about dunces like Michelle Bachmann, who believed energy-saving light bulbs were a “very real threat to children, disabled people, pets, senior citizens.”

The right still has more than its share of wing-nuts, the president being the most famous, and we’re allowed to laugh about them (in fact, it’s practically mandatory). Unfortunately, a growing quantity of opposite-number lunacies – from a chess site temporarily shut down by YouTube because of its “white against black” rhetoric, to an art gallery director forced to resign for saying he would still “collect white artists” – is mostly off-limits. If we can’t laugh at time is a white supremacist construct, what can we laugh at?

Republicans were once despised because they were anti-intellectuals and hopeless neurotics. Trained to disbelieve in peaceful coexistence with the liberal enemy, the average Rush Limbaugh fan couldn’t make it through a dinner without interrogating you about your political inclinations.

If you tried to laugh it off, that didn’t work; if you tried to engage, what came back was a list of talking points. When all else failed and you offered what you thought would be an olive branch of blunt truth, i.e. “Honestly, I just don’t give that much of a shit,” that was the worst insult of all, because they thought you were being condescending. (You were, but that’s beside the point). The defining quality of this personality was the inability to let things go. Families broke apart over these situations. It was a serious and tragic thing.

Now that same inconsolable paranoiac comes at you with left politics, and isn’t content with ruining the odd holiday dinner, blind date, or shared cab. He or she does this infuriating interrogating at the office, in school, and in government agencies, in places where you can’t fake a headache and quietly leave the table.

This is all taking place at a time when the only organized opposition to such thinking also supports federal troops rounding up protesters for open-ended detention, going maskless to own the libs, and other equivalent madnesses. If you’re not a Trump fan and can’t reason with the other thing either, what’s left?

Ambrose Bierce once wrote there were “two instruments worse than a clarinet — two clarinets.” What would he say about authoritarian movements?

[Sivad]

[Hindsite]

Hold on their buddy. It is the republican pitch to cut down on subsidies and additional guarantees for businesses. It was trump and republicans who royally fucked them.

So you think they should hold on to their buddy.

[JohnRawls]

So you think they should hold on to their buddy.

They should. If they don't go big dick and proud then i don't see how they can turn this around with the whole unemployment and covid mess. The idea that the economy can recover while the pandemic is raging on is absurd because even if you remove the lockdown people will still not want to go out. It is human behavior 1 0 1. Nobody wants to die for no reason.

[Drlee]

IF Doug64 thinks I am going to read that wall of text he is mistaken.

Clearly we can see that he is a Trump supporter who is desperate because his dude is fucking the pooch as they say.

Yesterday Trump actually tried to act like an adult. He even said he thought that wearing a mask might be OK. But of course nobody is believing him. We do believe him when he says Covid is going to get worse before it gets better. He is the main cause of that.

He is a glory hound and not being able to stage is idiots on parade spectacles is killing him. So he is going to use the daily briefing on Covid as a substitute.

What he is going to do is pick a fight with China. He already started by shutting down the Houston Consulate. China will retaliate. Trump will escalate. So here is some advice. If there is anything you need that is made in China, which is just about everything, get some now. A major trade war is Trump's best chance for reelection.

[skinster]

I reckon Trump is going to win again.

[Potemkin]

IF Doug64 thinks I am going to read that wall of text he is mistaken.

That's a pity; it's actually quite an interesting wall of text.

[JohnRawls]

I reckon Trump is going to win again.

Very good, which means Biden will win almost 100% now.

[skinster]

Ultimately it doesn't matter to me either way, but the predictions I've seen lately make me think about the prediction before the last election that were completely wrong.

[Pants-of-dog]

Yes, the Democrats have proven they will go to any lengths to defeat Trump. And if that means hundreds of thousands of children have their education damaged and their futures put at risk, it's just one more necessary sacrifice.

And Trump wants to put children’s lives at risk in order to get elected.

What is wrong with you people that you will risk the health of your own kids just to keep someone like Trump in power?

[Drlee]

What is wrong with you people that you will risk the health of your own kids just to keep someone like Trump in power?

Why is it that the democrats are the only ones even talking about lowering the death toll?

Disgraceful.

Any civilized country would have run the administration out of town by now.

[Doug64]

And Trump wants to put children’s lives at risk in order to get elected.

What is wrong with you people that you will risk the health of your own kids just to keep someone like Trump in power?

What risk? If there’s one thing we can be sure of right now, it’s that children in schools aren’t at risk from the Wuhan virus, and in the case of younger children aren’t a risk to others. Here’s a good look at what we know so far: School openings across globe suggest ways to keep coronavirus at bay, despite outbreaks. And this is where the Democrats are going to find themselves in trouble, because parents can read.