VIDEO INTERVIEW – JOHN GUANDOLO – ISLAMIC TERRORISM EXPERT
Thursday, May 2nd, 2024
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.
Americans were then set to witness a great experiment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.
In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.
But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?
The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.
But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.
Who was running things?
The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.
As a result, for one of the few times in American history, the hard left now had undreamt of power. And it was enhanced by a chorus in our compliant media, academia, corporations, the administrative state, foundations, entertainment, and popular culture.
VIDEO – MICHELE MORROW – THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR NORTH CAROLINA STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCxiCqInRRI
At Columbia in New York City, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have surrounded Jewish students to push them from a protest camp dominating the campus lawn. “Attention Everyone,” a voice says in a campus video, “Can I get everyone to form a human chain, we have a Zionist at the entrance of our encampment.”
The “Zionist” was a Jewish student whose friend wore a necklace with a Star of David, according to News Israel correspondent Neria Kraus. The Palestinian crowd followed the order to “slowly walk and take a step forward so we can push them out of the camp.”
Many protesters on and near campus wear masks or kaffiyehs to disguise their identities. Students have to walk through a gauntlet to get to class. The protesters carry banners calling to “Honor the Martyrs of Palestine” and a sign pointing to pro-Israel counterprotesters as “al-Qasam’s next targets.” Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas. That’s a call to kill Jews.
Former President Donald Trump declared that the November election will be “Christian Visibility Day” in opposition to President Joe Biden’s declaration of “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31, which coincided with Easter Sunday this year.
“Election Day, November 5th, will be the most important day in the History of our Country. It will also be Christian Visibility Day, the biggest turnout of Christians in the history of our Country!” the former president declared on his Truth Social account.
As Breitbart News reported, the president sparked controversy over the weekend when he used Good Friday to proclaim “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31, which coincided with Easter.
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The following is adapted from a talk delivered on February 15, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida.
The most consequential falsehood in American public policy today is the idea that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racial discrimination.
If a cancer research lab, for example, does not have 13 percent black oncologists—the black share of the national population—it is by definition a racist lab that discriminates against competitively qualified black oncologists; if an airline company doesn’t have 13 percent black pilots, it is by definition a racist airline company that discriminates against competitively qualified black pilots; and if a prison population contains more than 13 percent black prisoners, our law enforcement system is racist.
The claim that racial disparities are proof of racial discrimination has been percolating in academia and the media for a long time. After the George Floyd race riots of 2020, however, it was adopted by America’s most elite institutions, from big law and big business to big finance. Even museums and orchestras took up the cry.
Many thought that STEM—the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—would escape the diversity sledgehammer. They were wrong. The American Medical Association today insists that medicine is characterized by white supremacy. Nature magazine declares that science manifests one of “humankind’s worst excesses”: racism. The Smithsonian Institution announces that “emphasis on the scientific method” and an interest in “cause and effect relationships” are part of totalitarian whiteness.
As a result of this falsehood, we are eviscerating meritocratic and behavioral standards in accordance with what is known as “disparate impact analysis.”
Consider medicine. Step One of the medical licensing exam, taken during or after the second year of medical school, tests medical students’ knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and pathology. On average, black students score lower on the grading curve, making it harder for them to land their preferred residencies. Step One, in other words, has a “disparate impact” on black medical students. The solution, implemented last year, was to eliminate the Step One grading disparity by instituting a pass–fail system. Hospitals choosing residents can no longer distinguish between high and low achieving students—and that is precisely the point!
Republican leader Mitch McConnell and his senatorial stooge James Lankford promoted a federal bill that would send billions oversees to protect the borders of other countries, while allowing an invasion into the U.S. of nearly two million illegal aliens every year. A City Journal piece details how the Biden administration has every intention of allowing illegal aliens to flood the country regardless of negotiated “bipartisan” border bills. “Why is Biden releasing millions of illegal aliens into the U.S?” Because he thinks that his notion of ‘equity’ — which he extends to non-U.S. citizens — requires it.”
Equity has been the leading justification for radical progressive policies — from open borders to men playing in women’s sports — that undermine the American way of life. In forcing a subjective application of “fairness” to achieve equal outcomes, equity serves to redistribute permanent economic, political, and cultural power to the Left. Republicans — like McConnell, Lankford, and others — who negotiate with equity-espousing radicals should be sent packing for their duplicity.
Take recent dramatic events in North Carolina, for example.
The NC Republican Superintendent of Education Catherine Truitt heckled a speaker at a local county GOP meeting last week. The speaker, Johnston County school board member Michelle Antoine, took the stage to support Truitt’s opponent in the Republican primary. “Not true!” Truitt shouted several times as Antoine listed concerns about Truitt’s record on equity. When Antoine calmly continued, Truitt stormed out of the room.
In her attempt to shout down the speaker, Truitt exempted herself from her own September 28th, 2021 memo directing parents “to act with civility and respect for our teachers, local boards, superintendents, and school staff.” Parents must be polite and obedient when school officials mask and isolate children, but legitimate criticism of a sitting superintendent from within one’s party warrants vocal belligerence.
Antoine triggered the hostility after alerting the audience to Truitt’s prioritized programming in equity:
“One of the first things [Truitt] did when she went [into office] four years ago was create an office of equity that did not exist.”
“Not true! That’s not true! Don’t lie!” shouted Truitt from the audience.
Past emails authored by Truitt prove Antoine correct. In October 2021, Antoine emailed Truitt about the creation of an Office of Equity Affairs at the Department of Public Instruction (DPI). Truitt replied, “My new office is called the Office of Educational Equity because we are focused on equity for ALL students,” indeed taking credit for creating a department in charge of equity for North Carolina students.
According to Truitt’s own words, the “true definition” of equity is not the socialist principle of ensuring equal outcomes, but “giving all students what they need at the time they need it.” To support her position, Truitt included a graphic from UNESCO; however, the graphic — from a progressive globalist organization — contradicts Truitt’s arbitrary characterization of equity by picturing children standing on various sized boxes to equalize their heights to reach a chalkboard. Equal heights = equal outcomes.
By John Ellis
Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”
December 4, 2023
America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.
Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.
Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The coddling of criminals originated with academia’s devotion to Michel Foucault’s idea that criminals are victims, not victimizers. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Radicalized college journalism departments promote far-left advocacy. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. DEI started as a campus ruse to justify racial quotas. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”
Never have college campuses exerted so great or so destructive an influence. Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs. The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.
And there are other ways. Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage. Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.