It has been 20 years since The Office first graced our television screens - and continues to be watched, referenced and talked about after all that time.

But creator and the man behind the (let's face it, awful) boss, David Brent, has suggested that the show would not be made now, as a result of cancel culture.

Speaking to the BBC, which aired the fly-on-the-wall comedy in the early noughties, Ricky Gervais said: "I mean now it would be cancelled. I'm looking forward to when they pick out one thing and try to cancel it.

"Someone said they might try to cancel it one day, and I say, 'Good, let them cancel it. I've been paid!'.'"

Some of the jokes in the show, mostly made by Brent and his sidekick Gareth (played by Mackenzie Crook), perhaps have not aged particularly well - but Gervais says we're not meant to relate to him.

He says: "In The Office, the audience are encouraged to identify not with the ignorant Brent, but with the characters Dawn and Tim, and the victims of Brent's ill-conceived comments are never racial or gendered caricatures, rather they are ordinary, intelligent people."

More recently, shows such as Little Britain have come under fire for insensitive and often racist and transphobic depictions of people, which led to calls for the programme to be removed from streaming services.

Even 20 years on, The Office, which only ran for two seasons and two specials, is still widely regarded as one of the best British comedies of all time, and launched the careers of the likes of Martin Freeman, Lucy Davis and Patrick Baladi.

In 2015 it was awarded Broadcast's best show of the past 20 years award, and has won a host of Baftas, Royal Television Awards and Golden Globes.

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Gervais even wrote and starred in a film spin-off called David Brent: Life On The Road, which followed the character on his ill-fated music career.

But its lasting legacy is undoubtedly its much-adored US version, which launched in 2005 and ran for nine seasons.

Gervais wrote the first season of the American iteration with long-time writing partner Stephen Merchant, with Steve Carrell taking on the Brent-inspired role of Michael Scott, and it turned people like Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer into household names.

Both versions of The Office are available on Netflix.

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Ricky Gervais suggests The Office would not get made now due to cancel culture and political correctness - Sky News

China's foreign vice minister said Friday that America's hegemony is falling, but noted that it would still be hard to surpass the U.S. as a leading world power.

Speaking to the Chinese state media outlet Guancha on Friday, Le Yucheng said the U.S. continued to represent the strongest, most powerful nation in the world, but that the country was suffering from an idealogical perspective.

"The U.S. decline is not a decline in strength but a decline of hegemony," Le said, according to the South China Morning Post. "No matter a country's strength, hegemonic power is bound to wither, hegemony is not popular."

Nonetheless, Le continued by stating that the U.S. was "still a strong and large nation in the number one spot," and that "it will be hard to overtake it over a relatively long period of time."

The Chinese foreign minister went on to criticize President Joe Biden for approaching China with an aggressive stance, and claimed that the administration is attempting to both destroy and contain China.

"The biggest challenge faced by a superpower like the United States will always come from within, and destroying China is by no means a prescription for solving American problems," Le said, according to The Post. "We hope that the United States will return to reason and the right path of dialogue and cooperation, with no need to turn resisting China into a policy, nor containing China into 'political correctness'," he continued.

Le added that U.S.-led international groups, such as the Asia-Pacific focused Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), and Group of Seven Nations (G7), are examples of the country attempting to define the "international community," while going against China. The foreign minister also rebuked the U.S. and other Western nations for accusing China of committing human rights violations in Xinjiang.

In January, the U.S. became the first country to officially declare China's actions to be genocide, following reports that the nation has placed over 1 million Uyghurs into detainment camps in the Xinjiang region and forced them to work in hazardous conditions against their will. The country has also been accused of using sophisticated techniques to hack into the phones and technologies of ethnic minorities.

Le's statements on Friday come as several U.S. officials are sounding the alarm that China's economy and military are growing at rapid rates.

Last month, Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney warned that China is on track to become "the most powerful economy in the world and the most powerful military in the world," likely representing the most significant challenges to U.S. foreign policy.

"I think the president is increasingly aware of that challenge, as is his secretary of state, [Antony] Blinken, and I think they're looking to try to pull together our alliances to wake up to that reality and take action to dissuade China from the path of confrontation and military aggressiveness," Romney said during an interview on CNN's State of the Union.

Similarly, in a recent interview published in the Financial Times, senior NATO officer Stuart Peach remarked on China's rapid military expansion.

"It is quite shocking how quickly China has built ships, how much China has modernized its air force, how much it has invested in cyber and other forms of information management, not least facial recognition," Peach told the news outlet.

Newsweek contacted the White House for additional comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.

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Chinese Foreign Official Says U.S. Dominance in 'Decline' But Will Be Hard to Overtake - Newsweek

There is a reason why New York State mandates teaching about the Holocaust and why state legislators, led by state Sen. Anna Kaplan, have pushed for school districts to teach the Holocaust in more robust, purposeful ways rather than a casual mention.

They point to the rise of antisemitism.

In fact, you only have to listen to the garbage coming out of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who compared a public-health mask-wearing mandate to genocide, and those who knock on doors to encourage people to get the COVID-19 vaccination to brown shirts who beat and murdered Jews in the street, to have a glimpse of what ignorance breeds.

So it is really disturbing that the shite christo-fascists have now taken aim (again) at public education, specifically targeting woke teachers. The word woke is used as a slur (like political correctness or liberal), to refer to anyone who has made an effort to understand and empathize with others.

Laws are actually being proposed to ban the teaching of the made-up critical race theory which is extended to teaching about slavery, Indian genocide, Jim Crow, KKK, lynching, but especially how systemic racism is responsible for disparities in todays wealth, housing, education, jobs, voting rights and criminal justice for example, how systemic racism could factor into a police officer suffocating a man to death in front of a crowd of people pleading for mercy without care or concern.

The aim behind the campaign to whitewash history and replace truth with propaganda is the same as the attack on science (evolution, climate change), public health (coronavirus, gun safety) and education: a backlash against the policies being advanced to promote more equity now that the impact of inequities have been so starkly revealed in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd murder.

What have public health, climate action, and social equity have in common? They require a sense of community, common cause, public purpose. The commons which in white christo fascist parlance is socialism communism Marxism and anathema to America (that is capitalism).

Just as the attack on mask-wearing, the basis for the attack on critical race theory is totally bogus: CRT is not actually part of the K-12 curriculum, but rather, is an issue taught in law schools to examine how systemic racism has become embedded in criminal justice.

But the term has become shorthand for anything that is critical of United States history and might burst any myth of American Exceptionalism. The fuse was lit by the self-examination after the publication of the New York Times 1619 project.

Public education has been a target of right-wing conservatives going back to Reagan, as much because of the fight to force prayer in school and public tax money for parochial schools as to weaken teacher unions, among the largest unions still in existence and typically supporting Democrats.

Their fear is that if children grow into adults who respect others and see the injustice of economic, political and social inequities, if they realize that the American Dream is rigged, they might actually embrace policies and politicians to correct it.

Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, Trump declared. It will destroy our country adding teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.

To counter such education, he formed a 1776 Commission for Patriotic Education so that our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their souls.

Already, there have been literal attacks on school board members and meetings, and right-wingers taking over seats on school boards.

States have passed bans on teaching critical race theory but what does that mean practically? You cant teach about slavery in Colonial America, the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Indian Wars, Sitting Bull?

We told our members you can do what your professional obligation requires teach honest, accurate United States history, some of it is uncomfortable, but helps kids become critical thinkers when they understand the facts and can draw their own conclusions, AFT President Randi Weingarten said on MSNBC. We will defend that, just like the Scopes Trial of old, when they tried to stop teaching Evolution. Its very important to be able to teach accurate history.

To survive in this world, you need to be able to think. You need to be able to hold different things in your heart, in your head at same time. If you dont help kids develop those muscles, to see diversity as strength, it will hurt them.

But Weingarten added, Some teachers wont have the stamina or courage to teach Civil War or January 6. People will be afraid to push kids to think.

And lest you think this controversy is far away and not a risk to our schools, the rightwing have used textbooks to spread their political and social engineering.

Texas has frequently faced scrutiny for its state curriculum standards (called Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS), Kate Slater writes in Who Chooses the History Textbooks? on the today.com site. In 2014, NPR reported on some of the curriculum controversies, one of which included listing Moses as one of the original Founding Fathers.

But because Texas has one of the highest populations of public school students (approximately 5 million) it carries an undue influence on national textbook publishers and the content that they include or do not include in their textbooks. The narratives that they feature, which are then taught to millions of middle and high school students, have at times come under fire for being racist and xenophobic.

For example, a McGraw-Hill textbook referred to enslaved people as workers and compared the Atlantic slave trade to other patterns of immigration. They have also sought to embed Intelligent Design alongside Darwins theory of Evolution, and have dismissed climate science.

The Great Neck School District, Nassau County and New York State school boards associations and superintendents associations should consider a policy to refuse to order any textbook which contain whitewashed or propagandized history, science, social studies, as edited to satisfy Texas.

Instead, when it comes to history or social science, our students would be better served with project-based curriculum that enable them to learn for themselves how to find and analyze original sources or different sources and voices. This also teaches important techniques to distinguish fact from fraud on the internet.

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Viewpoint: School districts need to actively reject assault on teaching the truth of US history - Opinions - The Island Now

On July 12, were launching a new podcast at Vox that tries to do the interview show a little differently. Hosted by Sean Illing and Jamil Smith who promise not to refer to themselves in third person after this Vox Conversations will explore big ideas and hard questions with the most fascinating people we can find.

We want Vox Conversations to be a home for honest discussions about everything from the relationship between democracy and fascism to psychedelics and mental health to the intersection of sports, politics, and culture. Whatever the topic, well bring our whole selves to the conversation each and every week, pushing our guests to a place of real engagement, without pretense or bullshit. We both have strong points of view and youll hear that, but youll also hear attempts to probe, not preach, and to look for mutual understanding where we can find it.

We believe a good conversation is open, authentic, and makes room for surprises. To learn anything, you have to be alive to whats being said, and you have to be willing to be changed by it. This is easy to do when talking to someone with whom you agree. Its much harder to do when its someone you dont agree with, or perhaps even mistrust.

If we do anything on this show, we hope it at least creates a space for this kind of dialogue. We will make mistakes; we will poke holes in liberal and conservative orthodoxies, and we hope to ultimately challenge the deepest assumptions we and our audience hold about the world. But the goal of the show will always be to dig into the ideas behind a given question, not to win a debate.

The first episode, on Monday, July 12, features Sean in conversation with The Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig, discussing forgiveness and performative cruelty in the social media era. We talk about why its not just so damn hard to forgive, but also why our society lacks a coherent story to tell us how a person whos made a public misstep can make amends.

Youll hear our second episode, featuring Jamil and author Kiese Laymon on Thursday, July 15. The two discuss writing through racial and familial trauma, and with reference to Laymons recently re-released novel Long Division, talk over what it means to have a complex entity undergo revision whether that be a literary work, or a still far-from-perfect United States.

In the coming weeks, youll hear conversations with Bill Maher on political correctness, Michael Pollan on drugs and the nature of consciousness, Larry Krasner on the work of progressive prosecuting attorneys in Philadelphia, and many, many others.

New Vox Conversations episodes will be released every Monday and Thursday. Follow us now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

See original here:

In the Vox Conversations podcast, Sean Illing and Jamil Smith bring a new kind of interview show - Vox.com

The three authors go on:

Animosity toward Democratic-linked groups predicts Trump support, rather remarkably, across the political spectrum. Further, given the decisive role that Independents can play in elections, these results suggest that reservoirs of animosity are not necessarily specific to a particular party, and may therefore be tapped by any political elite.

Before Trump took center stage in 2015, Republican leaders were determined to stymie Democratic policy initiatives, resist compromise, and make it clear that Republicans desire to score political victories and win back power from Democrats, Kane wrote in his email, but establishment Republicans generally did not openly demonize, much less dehumanize, Democratic politicians at the national level.

Trump, Kane continued,

wantonly disregarded this norm, and now Trumps base may come to expect future Republican elites to be willing to do the same. If this practice eventually comes to be seen as a winning strategy for Republican politicians as a whole, it could bring us into a new era of polarization wherein Republican cooperation with the Demon Rats is seen not just as undesirable, but thoroughly unconscionable.

Most significantly, in Masons view, is that

there is a faction in American politics that has moved from party to party, can be recruited from either party, and responds especially well to hatred of marginalized groups. Theyre not just Republicans or Democrats, theyre a third faction that targets parties.

Bipartisanship, Mason continued in a lengthy Twitter thread, is not the answer to the problem. We need to confront this particular faction of Americans who have been uniquely visible and anti-democratic since before the Civil War (when they were Democrats).

In their paper, Mason, Wronski and Kane conclude:

This research reveals a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain. Trumps unique ability to do so is not the only cause for normative concern. Instead, we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters political judgments. Should America wish to become a fully multiracial democracy, it will need to reconcile with these hostile attitudes themselves.

Adam Enders, a political scientist at the University of Louisville, and Uscinski, in their June 2021 paper On Modeling the Social-Psychological Foundations of Support for Donald Trump describe a Trump voter profile: an amalgamation of attitudes about, for example, racial groups, immigrants and political correctness that rivals partisanship and ideology as predictors of Trump support and is negatively related to support for mainstream Republican candidates.

In an email, Enders described this profile as fitting those attracted to Trumps

relatively explicit appeal to xenophobia, racial prejudice, authoritarianism, sexism, conspiracy thinking, in combination with his outsider status that gives him credibility as the anti-establishment candidate. The Trump voter profile is a constellation of social-psychological attitudes about various racial groups, women, immigrants, and conspiracy theories that uniquely predict support for Donald Trump.

Uscinski and Enders are the lead authors of a forthcoming paper, American Politics in Two Dimensions: Partisan and Ideological Identities versus Anti-Establishment Orientations, in which they argue that

Our current conceptualization of mass opinion is missing something. Specifically, we theorize that an underappreciated, albeit ever-present, dimension of opinion explains many of the problematic attitudes and behaviors gripping contemporary politics. This dimension, which we label anti-establishment, rather than explaining ones attitudes about and behaviors toward the opposing political coalition, captures ones orientation toward the established political order irrespective of partisanship and ideology.

In the case of Trump and other anti-democratic leaders around the world, Uscinski and Enders contend that

anti-establishment sentiments are an important ingredient of support for populist leaders, conspiratorial beliefs, and political violence. And, while we contend that this dimension is orthogonal to the left-right dimension of opinion along which partisan and ideological concerns are oriented, we also theorize that it can be activated by strategic partisan politicians. As such, phenomena which are oftentimes interpreted as expressions of far-right or far-left orientations may not be borne of left-right views at all, but rather of the assimilation of anti-establishment sentiments into mainstream politics by elites.

Anti-establishment voters, Uscinski and Enders write, are more likely to believe that the one percent controls the economy for their own good, believe that a deep state is embedded within the government and believe that the mainstream media is deliberately misleading us. Such voters are more prevalent among younger people, those with lower incomes, those with less formal education, and among racial and ethnic minority groups. In other words, it is groups who have historically occupied a tenuous position in the American socio-economic structure.

The most intensely partisan voters very strong Democrats and very strong Republicans are the least anti-establishment, according to Uscinski and Enders:

Those on the extremes of partisan and ideological identity exhibit lower levels of most of these psychological predispositions. In other words, extreme partisans and ideologues are more likely to express civil attitudes and agreeable personality characteristics than less extreme partisans and ideologues; this contradicts growing concerns over the relationship between left-right extremism and antisocial attitudes and behaviors. We suspect this finding is due to strong partisans and ideologues being wedded to, and entrenched within, the established political order. Their organized, relatively constrained orientation toward the political landscape is built on the objects of establishment politics: the parties, party elites and familiar ideological objects.

That, in turn, leads Uscinski and Enders to another contrarian conclusion:

We find that an additional anti-establishment dimension of opinion can, at least partially, account for the acceptance of political violence, distrust in government, belief in conspiracy theories, and support for outsider candidates. Although it is intuitive to attribute contemporary political dysfunction to left-right extremism and partisan tribalism, we argue that many elements of this dysfunction stem from the activation of anti-establishment orientations.

One politician whose appeal was similar to Trumps, as many have noted, was George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, who ran for president four times in the 1960s and 1970s, openly using anti-Black rhetoric.

Link:

Opinion | Trumps Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up - The New York Times

Media should speak for moderates, tooFox News gets a large amount of attention from left wingers.On the other hand, I dont notice NPR, CNN, or Mother Jones getting much attention from the right.By focusing so much on this one right-wing source, it would appear theyre acknowledging theres less of them.The mainstream media tends to lean Democrat.Just like with the government, those who dont consider themselves liberal or conservative (the huge number of Americans who tend to decide elections) are not represented much in the media.Would it change anything if they did have influence?I cant speak for other moderates who dont consider themselves liberal or conservative, but here are some questions I could see a mainstream media which doesnt lean Democrat that could be asked:Given that Blacks suffered greatly from policies Joe Biden helped create, why would the intelligent Barack Obama pick him as vice president? Why do anti-war candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Howard Dean never become vice president?Why does peak oil get so much more attention than other resources that are also depleting?Given the claim that organic produces higher yields in developing countries, food is wasted giving it to farm animals, and vegan food is cheap, why should we believe a mostly vegan and organic diet cant feed the world?Since Wall Street gives huge donations to both parties, maybe they should stop donating if voter suppression bothers them.Colin YunickCharlton

Black leaders should denounce vulgarityThe BET awards, which highlight Black achievement, awarded Cardi B a Grammy and a Video of The Year award for her Megan Thee Stallion-assisted No. 1 hit WAP. A celebration of deviant sexuality was also part of the evenings festivities.If youre like me, who had a hard time keeping up with the cool kids, the acronym WAP might bestir a memory from the Dark Ages, when a similar term was used by cloddish xenophobes in regard to Italian immigrants.No, that would be totally out of place in this gathering, where delicate sensibilities and political correctness charge the atmosphere.If, like me, you dont have a confidant whos not only wise to the ways of the world, but tech-savvy to boot, to provide the lyrical content of this masterpiece.Im a bit tongue-tied to even attempt to gently describe the content. Hint: Its about sex and its graphic. Most likely the easiest way to access this, what I would call trash, would be your teenagers smartphones. Caution: It could provide some mutual embarrassment.Black leaders should denounce events such as the BET Awards.They arent true allies in helping boost Black societys PR problem, if one exists. I see them as a Trojan Horse.Gordon F. SchaufelbergAmsterdam

Caroline Streets issues are not newThere have been problems on Caroline Street since Caroline Street became the late night place to party in Saratoga Springs.The commissioner of Public Safety should know this, and I am sure the assistant police chief knows this.The problems have not started with BLM or are caused by gangs from Albany.The city has been trying to solve this problem for years.One former Public Safety commissioner tried to get the bars to close earlier. The bars fought this for months and the city backed off.The city needs to address the problems on Caroline Street, but trying to blame outside influences will not solve the problem.We are in the summer season, and it is discouraging that the Public Safety commissioner and the assistant police chief seem so unprepared to handle a problem that the city faces every summer.Karen KlotzSaratoga Springs

Online lettersCommenters to online letters who fail to follow rules against name-calling, profanity, threats, libel or other inappropriate language will have their comments removed and their commenting privileges withdrawn.

To report inappropriate online comments, email Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney at[emailprotected]

Categories: Letters to the Editor, Opinion

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Letters to the Editor Tuesday, July 6 - The Daily Gazette

After the fall of colonialism in Africa, most of the countries adopted parliamentary and electoral system of democracy. This was some five decades ago. But as for now, this is slowly changing. The new hobgoblin is haunting Africa- the specter of dynastic dictatorship lurks all over in full gear to take over the people based democracy. This specter is evident in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon, Togo and many other countries of Africa.

For example, Tanzania has maintained a very beautiful environment for intellectual and ideological culture but still it has been ruled by a dynastic dictatorship of the CCM that only gives the cronies of Julius Nyerere opportunity to contest for the top political office. This has been so despite the fact that the CCM dictatorship in Tanzania has held hostage the people of Tanzania in poverty for the past six decades.

Cameroon is a more contemporary example, where President Paul Biyas son is now making a name for himself on Cameroons political scene to take over the job of his 88-year-old father who has held the top office since 1982. Franck Biya, the son of Paul Biya, has always kept the low profile working as a businessman and entrepreneur. But now, there is political evidence in Cameron that he is preparing to take over. The social media in Cameroon is flooded with images of Franck Biya for his candidacy.

It is not a surprisethat some economically powerfulgroup of businessmen, politicians and government alliesin Cameron have formed The Frankistes Citizen Movement for the Peace and Unity of Cameroon, a political movement in Cameron led by a powerful businessman by the nameMohamed Rahim Noumeau, calling on Franck Biya to run for the presidency in the next general election.

However, it is notable that Franck Biyas presidential ambitions dont come as a total surprise in the context of the region. There are sporadic cases of dynastic politics in Africa, for example; Togos current president Faure Gnassingbe took over as the nations leader in 2005 following the death of his father, President Gnassingbe Eyadema. Eyadema had ruled Togo for 38 years. Comparatively in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), incumbent president Felix Tshisekedi was elected to lead the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) after his father, former president Etienne Tshisekedi, died in 2017. In Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has excessively empowered his wife Janet and his son General Muhozi to a clear extent that they are better placed to take over from the now aged Museveni.

Those supporting dynastic politics in Africa have always borrowed a leaf from the political past to justify their choices by pointing out similar situations around the world in the Bush family, John Adams Family in the United States, Kenyattas family in Kenya and Gabons President Ali Bongo Ondimba, who were elected following their fathers exits from politics.

The situation in Kenya is currently the practical justification for Historys accusation of parliamentary attitude towards human problems with intellectual vulgarity. This charge has not been false accusation; there is enough evidence in Kenya showing ever present mediocrity in parliamentary decisions whenever it comes to upholding dignity of the poor through good governance. Currently, this tradition of parliamentary cretinism is evident in the bill under debate before the parliament of Kenya seeking to criminalize Kenyas poor peoples thinking about their poverty. In the bill, it is suggested that any person in Kenya speaking in public about the few rich and politically connected families as the chief supporters of bad social-cum-political policies responsible for putting bad governance in place and hence serial failure by successive governments to improve welfare of a common Kenyan will be criminalized. Thus, it is like the political class in Kenya is technically criminalizing class consciousness.

This bill is provoked by the specter of class conflict in the current public political discourse where the majority of Kenyans now want to vote by basing on their class. Kenyas majority of voters belong to the economically disadvantaged class composed of rural peasants and the lumpen jobless in the urban areas. These two economically powerless communitiesare now threatening to evolve into a spontaneous voting monster that will thin-out of power the traditionally powerful political class that have always enjoyed political power to perfect unfair accumulation of dirty riches. Kenyas politically powerful class is threatened because it is only made up of just a dozen of families with dynastic tendencies which have unfairly piled heaps on other heaps of riches throughout five decades of formation of the Kenyan state. However, it is now becoming realistic that the handfuls of rich and politically connected families are nothing before the masses that have been held in poverty by bad governments for ages.The poor voters in Kenya have now realized their strength and thus they are publicly discoursing voting as a political block to thrash out the small class of blood-sucking patrimonial bourgeois from political power.

Some paradox is that Kenya has been famed for being a superlative economic power of East Africa, but it is so unfortunate to learn that the greater portion of Kenyas economic prosperity is infamously in the hands of the state which operates like private property of those few that are politically advantaged and well profiled financially. The rest of this national economic prosperity again is held as private property of the politically correct, both in a historical and in a contemporary sense. Thus, Kenyas economic exuberance is not a fact. The available technicalreality contradicts the conventional information, the reality is that ninety percent of sixty million Kenyans wallow in urban poverty, rural squalor, rural landlessness, urban destitution and wretchedness in the wynds of slums, credit-unworthiness, ignobling jobs, rural malnutrition, urban pollution, insignificant education, teenage mother-hood, economic despair, induced drug addiction, miss-education, perennial joblessness, sex-working and commercial homosexuality, and all other sorts of social-economic powerlessness.

The above conditions are socially challenging, and it is psychologically obvious that any person living in such challenging and hope-fettering conditions will be overtly conscious about these conditions. This social-psychological phenomenon is known as class consciousness. It is this social-political phenomenon of class consciousness that is now dictating Kenyas political discourse, a discourse which is predominantly reflecting volatile nature of mass emotions of those that have been politically alienated for decades.

But if one can think correctly and help to think and question What was to be expected by those that have been alienating over forty million workers in Kenya? Nothing else other than the alienatorcoming face to face with sad reality that when you alienate forty million workers you convert them into forty milliongravediggers. They will dig the grave for no one else but for you the alienator. And no kind of parliamentary law has ever been successful in muffling the grave diggers from realizing their natural right; still it can be projected or be extrapolated that no amount of selfish parliamentary legislation in Kenya will stop the forty million plus grave diggers from realizing their natural right of digging the grave for a dozen families that make the deep state, the system, the cartel or the patrimonial bourgeoisie in Kenya.

In spite of all the rudimentary and feasible evidence from active history in support of the above observations, Kenyan law-makers and parliamentarians are giving a euphorically unanimous support to this anti-class consciousness bill. They are doing so without reading the signs on the wall or even consulting with the people of Kenya to establish the human law that is currently lighting the political path of the people of Kenya. The Parliamentarians have ignored the people as if they are not aware that human law is natural, but parliamentary law is artificial-and always nature abhors the vacuum. So, let not those two hundred self-righteous parliamentarians in Kenya think that they are able to pin down the revolutionary energy of forty million workers that have become tired of being victims of economic alienation and political exploitation. The only law that can forestall this looming hobgoblin from the netherworld taking its course in Kenya is the law that upholds genuine inclusivity, genuine economic mainstreaming, genuine empowerment and un-pretentious transfer of political power and economic enjoyment to the people through a constitutional mechanism.

Currently, the Parliamentarians in Kenya are not alive to this flip-side of the anti-class conscious bill because of their effortless service to club norm of conditioned mental tetheredness to bourgeoisie pressure. It is incidental bourgeoisie trapping that a cash-focused career parliamentarian treating politics as a family business cannot escape. In fact, history of parliamentary politics teaches that, it requires different political mindset and moral mettle to serve in a parliament that is a protg of shrewdly calculating bourgeoisie machinations without succumbing to snobbery required to serve bourgeoisie trappings.

Unfortunately, they are thesame shrewd and wily Bourgeoisie interestsare the ones dictating party nominations in Kenya, a process which has always given the people of Kenya morally punctured politicians that are out to be goons of tribal paramount chiefs, politicians that fight at the funeral gathering only to be kicked down in order to prove their policy or ideology; politicians who taste the texture of any social policy before them by using theirtongues then stomachs but not by using their supposed glowing fire of the intellectual consciousness supposed to be the light for their political ideology. I mean bourgeoisie slyness has given Kenya five decades of parliamentary politicians that make Kenyas parliament to be a perfect specimen of Marxs social diagnosis that a parliament is an instrument of the politically powerful to oppress the powerless workers by relying on the mutton-headed persiflage and anent blabbering by its leather-tongued members living in constant fear that maybe their mandibles have of-late lost germ needed to be appreciated by the bourgeoisie capitalists as mouths for hire.

Worthless again is the misplaced fear of those Kenyan politicians sought to be criminalized by the criminal law that will come from the anti-class consciousness bill. Those politicians of the hustler narrative are innocent, they have been innocent, and they are pre-emptively innocent when it comes to establishing political culpability to pre-emptive crime of being class-conscious crusaders of the rights of the workers. Their political history has no record of them being class-consciousness political leaders; they have been purely class-insouciant money making ethnic based politicians. The only criminal charges they qualify to face are; thievery of state resources, land-grabbing, crime against humanity, murder of Newspaper editor, murder of business competitor, murder of election officer, money laundering, election fraud and or being accomplice to murder of human rights activists. However, it has been hard for them be charged with these crimes because they often mutate like HIV virus-from political correctness to political enmity and then back to political correctness.

And though there was a befitting law with which to criminally charge the accused Kenyan politicians for committing crime of perpetrating class-conscious politics, still this law would be prosecuting wrong people given that ever since Kenya has never had a class conscious politician. The present political speeches about hustlers competing with dynasties for presidency dont amount to any class-conscious or revolutionary conscious politics. These are only little Machiavellian tricks to achieve parochial intentions of dissembling and perfecting dissolubility to exploit or take advantage of the already prevailing volatile relation between the few that superbly own and the non-owning masses at pain with their history of being economically abused.This prevailing volatility is a naturally occurring phenomenon known as class-conflict. It is not a philosophy of any politician, or malicious afore-thought or mens rea-inner evil intentions of some politicians. It is a natural phenomenon which dictates that; with or without a politician, the end to bourgeoisie exploitation of the poor workers is always a class based conflagration that has the poor masses ejecting violently the few oppressive bourgeoisies from political power-the dynastic bourgeoisie from power.

I want to end up this paper by pointing out that the dynastic bourgeoisie were not created by God to be eternal leaders as most of rural people in Africa have been manipulated to believe. Dynastic bourgeoisie are selfish political opportunists. They have been properly described by different Post-colonial scholars ranging from Achille Mbembe to Isa Shivji, Mahmod Mamdan to Ernest Wamba dia Wamba as those elected leaders that want to replicate colonial style of leadership for selfish reasons. These scholars have also on several occasions pointed out how the dynastic bourgeoisie have evolved, devolved or grown in Africa by stating that the dynastic bourgeoisiehave all based their growth on abuse of political power through corruption, militarization of politics, manipulation of the media to work as propaganda machinery for the dynastic bourgeoisie, impoverishment of the masses, financing of regular political violence, financing the structure of the police state, making university education to be too expensive beyond the reach of the poor and establishing a very dedicated snobbish civil service and public service systems.

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Why Africas post-colonial democracies are threatening to become dynastic dictatorships - Face2Face Africa

Jul 10th 2021

WASHINGTON, DC

PARENTS ARE outraged by a new curriculum. Politicians worry that educators are indoctrinating pupils with un-American revisionist history. Progressives argue that this updated version of the curriculum reflects an American reality that should not be hidden from children. Both sides clash at school meetings, teachers are under fire. At issue could be the current controversy over critical race theory in classrooms. Or it could be one of the many skirmishes during the past century over history education, from whether it was pro-British to whether it was pro-Marxist.

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Critical race theory (CRT), which has become the battleground this time, originated in the 1970s as a legal perspective that emphasised the role of systemic racism (as opposed to the individual sort) in replicating inequality. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think-tank seeking to prevent the teaching of critical race theory in schools, describes the set of ideas thus: a perspectivethat believes all the events and ideas around usmust be explained in terms of racial identities. Complicating the argument is the fact that some conservatives use the phrase to encompass everything from discussions about institutional racism to diversity training.

Twenty-six states have introduced measures that would limit critical race theory in public schools, according to EdWeek. Federal legislators are also piling into the debate. Seven Republican senators, including the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, reintroduced the Saving American History Act in June to limit federal funding to schools that use a curriculum derived from the 1619 Project, a set of Pulitzer-prize-winning essays published by the New York Times magazine that puts slavery at the centre of the nations founding and development (and received mixed reviews from professional historians). The federal bill, originally introduced in July 2020, is mostly symbolic: Congress has little control over state and local curriculums, and the bill is unlikely to pass when there are Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. But the politics is clear. Republicans are convinced that a war on critical race theory is good politics, even if attempts to ban it might prove unconstitutional.

Tennessees bill, signed by the governor in May, prohibits public schools from teaching concepts that promote discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress. Texass law specifically bans the 1619 Project, prevents teachers from giving course credit for social or public policy advocacy, prohibits required training that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex, and restricts teaching that slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States. Idahos legislation prevents any public institution, including colleges, from compel[ling] students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to the concepts that individuals are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past. In May, Idahos Lieutenant Governor assembled a taskforce to protect our young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism.

It is unclear how widely the theory, as described by either liberals or conservatives, is being taught in classrooms. According to the Heritage Foundation, another conservative think-tank, 43% of teachers are familiar with CRT, and only 30% of that group view it favourably (about one in ten overall). Even so, the National Education Association (NEA), Americas largest labour union, recently issued a statement embracing CRT.

This contest over how to tell the national story may seem new, but it is part of a century-old fight. The battle began once schooling became compulsory in all states in 1918. In the 1920s David Muzzey, a historian, was branded a traitor for his textbook An American History, which, according to critics, undermined the American spirit with pro-British distortions of the revolution and the war of 1812. According to Gary Nash, a historian, an opponent of Muzzeys text claimed that American children would now sing God Save the King instead of Yankee Doodle Dandy after reading it. Attempts to ban the book were unsuccessful: it sold millions of copies.

Other controversies followed. In the 1930s, Harold Rugg, an education professor, was accused of Sovietising our children by conservatives, who claimed that his textbook focused on American social ills and propagated Marxism. The McCarthy era spurred investigations into teachers labelled as Communist sympathisers. In the 1970s textbook wars led to violence in West Virginia, where protesters bombed schools and injured journalists over books with controversial multicultural content. Liberals have also attempted to censor materials. In the 1980s E.D. Hirsch, a literary critic and professor, published a list of common knowledge for American children that became a New York Times bestseller. Liberal critics accused Mr Hirsch of prioritising the achievements of white men and Western European perspectives.

Perhaps the most analogous fight, though, was in the 1990s over voluntary national history standards. The optional curriculum, originally conceived under the George H.W. Bush administration and continued under Bill Clinton, was lampooned by conservatives. Lynne Cheney, the wife of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was running for president, declared her opposition in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled The End of History. Mrs Cheney accused the standards of political correctness and lamented the lack of white male representation in the curriculum: Ulysses S. Grant had only one mention and Robert E. Lee had none, against Harriet Tubmans six. The Senate passed a resolution to condemn the voluntary standards, killing the curriculum.

These attacks are always connected to whats going on in politics at that time, says Mr Nash, who helped create the voluntary national standards. The Understanding America Study, a nationally representative survey by the University of Southern California, found that Americans are united on the importance of civics education for children. With little partisan disagreement, a majority of parents agree that it is important for children to learn how the government works (85%) and about voting requirements (79%).

But political differences emerge over who should appear prominently in history lessons. Parental opinion diverges on the importance of learning about women (87% of Democratic parents favour this versus 66% of Republican parents) and non-whites (83% versus 60%). The divide is greater on discussions of inequality. A majority of Democratic parents said it was important for pupils to learn about racism (88%) and income inequality (84%) compared with less than half of Republican parents (45% and 37% respectively).

Conservatives tend to argue that pupils should learn one unified, optimistic version of American history, and that learning about specific groups is divisive. Critical race theory is destructive because it advocates for racial discrimination through affinity groupings, racial guilt based on your ethnicity not your behaviour, and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our freedom is based, explains Matt Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute. Meanwhile, liberals are open to a more fragmented, less flattering version of the countrys past.

It is this view which seems to be gaining ground. Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States (told from the perspective of women and racial minorities) is also grouped under the critical-race-theory debate by the Goldwater Institute: it has sold 2m copies since 1980. The 1619 Project is taught in many school districts including Chicago. According to the NEA, nine states and the District of Columbia have laws or policies establishing multicultural-history or ethnic-studies curriculums.

Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-profit organisation, urges liberal Americans to take conservative concerns seriously, or potentially face a terrifying boost of far-right nationalism. It is going to get more intense as polarisation gets worse and as trust goes down, he says. If each successive history war grows more intense, he adds, Where do we end up in ten to 20 years?

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "The history wars"

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Patriotism and polarisation America's history wars - The Economist

Divided America may be a cliche but its political impact is deepening. As Democrats and Republicans prepare for next year's crucial midterm congressional elections, the two parties are not just offering different answers to similar questions, they are talking about completely different aspects of reality.

Parties often want to focus on different matters. But the extent to which Democrats are preparing to run on governance, the economy and recovering from the pandemic, while Republicans are laser-focused on culture and grievance, is remarkable.

Republicans will if need be talk about the economy and attribute the post-pandemic boom that is already underway to tax cuts under former president Donald Trump. But unless there is a sudden downturn or inflation scare they are likely to avoid the topic.

Democrats will tend to claim credit for all economic progress. But they will also highlight the supposed benefits of their big plans for the US economy, especially if they can pass another major spending bill before November 2022.

Even if they can't, President Joe Biden is seeking to engage the US government with the economy to an extent unknown in recent decades, primarily through executive orders that do not require congressional approval.

The White House Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force is the centrepiece of a plan to revive US manufacturing. Claiming to have learnt from crises during the pandemic regarding medicines, personal protective equipment, ventilators and other core medical requirements, Mr Biden wants to ensure that the US becomes independent of international suppliers in manufacturing such key products without relying on a complex global supply chain.

It's part of the Biden version of "America First" economic nationalism. Rather than rely on tariffs, as Mr Trump did, and ignore the reality of complex global supply chains, Mr Biden hopes to revitalise manufacturing by insisting that the US needs to be self-sufficient on broad categories of items.

That is all probably too detailed for much of the electorate, but most of the public, including many Trump-supporting Republicans, want the government to play a major role in overseeing economic growth and securing large numbers of well-paying jobs.

Fortunately for Republicans, liberal activists sometimes overplay their hands

Democrats are going to run on that issue and they will easily link it to the striking success the Biden administration has had in making Covid-19 vaccines available to all adult Americans in very short order.

Many Trump supporters and others are refusing vaccinations, which is the only reason the project has stalled just short of the stated goal of 70 per cent national inoculation by now.

Some Republican House members may try to run on an anti-vaccination and anti-mask platform. But most will avoid the issue altogether, save to again credit Mr Trump with having overseen the development of the vaccines in his last year in the White House.

Instead, Republicans are now focused on three cultural issues in which the federal government is sometimes barely, if at all, involved, but that certainly have a long track record of efficacy.

They will stress their categorical opposition to illegal and even legal immigration, with appeals to both anxieties about low-skilled wages and more cultural and racial xenophobic sentiments. Of the three, that's the only genuinely federal issue.

Republicans will also point to rising crime rates, attempting to link that to Democratic control of most large cities and falsely painting Mr Biden as leading an agenda to "defund the police".

There is almost always a strong racial component to such language, with violent crime invariably, if sometimes implicitly, attributed to African-Americans and Latinos.

Vice President Kamala Harris then US Senator with her aide Julie Chavez Rodriguez (R) during the Asian and Latino Coalition event on August 10, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa, US. Getty Images/AFP

But perhaps their biggest bet is on a "culture war" motif with "Critical Race Theory" serving as the main target. CRT has come to mean many different things. But it now frequently serves as a synecdoche for woke progressivism that is perceived to be, and sometimes can indeed be, an overly aggressive and even irrationally doctrinaire, hard-liberal approach to racial and, more controversially, transgender issues.

Despite the prevalence of QAnon and other bizarre conspiracy theories, and the near ubiquitous personality cult around Mr Trump, within their own ranks, Republicans will try to paint Democrats as the ones who have "gone crazy," and been taken over by a radical, illiberal and oppressive "cancel culture" ideology.

All that has little to do with Mr Biden's policy agenda, but Republicans are probably right that it is their biggest opportunity to make gains with a public that is otherwise likely to welcome more competent, expansive and ambitious governance on issues like the economy, infrastructure and climate change.

What is often being attacked as America-hating CRT is simply the public and academic unpacking of the reality that no society can impose centuries of slavery and mandate almost 100 years of segregation and racial discrimination without it leaving deep structural and institutional imprints and lacerations.

Fortunately for Republicans, liberal activists sometimes overplay their hands, and come across as power-hungry ideologues demanding conformity to their, often highly debatable, identity-based assertions. That inevitably alienates many people, and even alienates several African Americans and Latinos, not to mention many committed liberals and traditional leftists.

The irony is that Republican state legislatures across the country are by law mandating a countervailing political correctness which, for example, in Florida, effectively prohibits an honest discussion in schools about the role of racism in American history and present day society.

Such controversies are perennial and cyclical in the US. The cultural battle over race and identity peaked in the late 1960s, the mid-1990s and are again a focal point today. The explosion of anti-racist sentiment following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last year virtually insured that the right would launch an organised "anti-anti-racism" pushback, which is the core of this controversy.

It's ironic that the Republicans' best allies in this debate are precisely some of the most zealous, hyper-progressive identity liberals, much to the dismay of many traditional class-oriented leftists.

The midterms will be about how much traction "culture war" issues can gain against an impressive commercial comeback under Mr Bidens ambitious economically oriented agenda. The midterms appear set to pit emotional impulses against pocketbook concerns and symbolic and cultural anxieties against pragmatic interests.

So, November 2022 will indicate whether the US national economy, manufacturing and jobs are more important than ethnic and cultural morale among the still-dominant white American constituency.

Excerpt from:

Where's the US headed in next year's crucial midterm election? - The National

Rev. J. Patrick Street| Guest Columnist

Todays culture prides itself in redefining right and wrong and what is truth. The everything-is-relative excuse justifies this mind set. The Book of Judges reveals the essence of this cultural mind-set … everyone did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).

The moral decline of America, including many in the church, does not alter Gods word and its view of right and wrong. To truly please and honor God, obedience to the Scriptures is still our only option. It has been said, As the home goes, so goes the church, and as the church goes, so goes the nation.

There are three things it will take to bring the glory back to America before it is too late. America needs families with strong foundations. Today in America we have compromised the absolute biblical authority and morality. Parents are losing their kids because we are not the examples we need to be. We want them to obey but they see us going our own way, doing our own thing. Our inconsistencies will be magnified in our kids and what we allow in moderation our kids abuse in excess. I share this because bringing back glory to America has to start with my house and your house.

America needs preachers with strong principles. The guidelines for living that are found in the Bible enable us to live lives that bring honor and glory to God. The apostle John wrote that obeying the Word of God is proof of our salvation (1 John 2:3-6; 1 John 4:6). He also says the commandments of the Lord will not be harsh to the believer, but they will delight the soul (1 John 5:3). Those who live out the teachings of the Bible will grow and be blessed.

America needs a government under Gods control. Hold on. Hang with me. If you study history and not try to revise it, there is no question that our republic was founded on biblical, Christian principles. And when we take God and biblical morality out of our nation, it begins to unravel and decline.

We have lost our foundation. Politicians talk about values but whose values?Judges keep striking down laws of common sense in favor of political correctness which protects criminals of all ranks. We have lost our moral compass. Why do you think all the immorality in America is so common place? The answer is simple because every man does what is right in his own eyes.

July 4, 1776, was born one nation under God … 245 years later it needs to be born again. I believe that God is bringing a revival to His church. Don't believe the liberal left that says because we believe in God and the Bible we should just shut up. It's because we believe in God and His word that we are compelled to stand up and speak up. The Lord is igniting the revival flames in our homes and churches that will affect America.

Rev. J. Patrick Street is the lead pastor of Redeemer Church in Marion. He can be reached at coachpatstreet@gmail.com.

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Pastor column: Bring the glory back to America - Marion Star

Savage right-wingers who are also no-exceptions Trump loyalists, like Mo Brooks, are about the only candidates safe from a primary purge on ideological grounds. Photo: Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Heading toward the 2022 midterm elections, Republican-watchers are fascinated by the aggressive role Donald Trump intends to play in GOP primaries. Aside from his plans of vengeance toward those who egregiously crossed him at some point over the past half-century, he is selectively backing candidates whom he can claim as his very own. Indeed, the former president has already endorsed ten Senate candidates, two House candidates, and five candidates for state offices (one for a 2021 election). More important, his potential endorsements have Republican candidates and proto-candidates scrambling to prove their MAGA credentials so as to head off, or at least partially neutralize, the possibility that the Boss will give the magic nod to an opponent. The most obvious example of this phenomenon is in the Ohio U.S. Senate race, during which candidates had an Apprentice-style audition with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in March, with one aspirant, J.D. Vance, subsequently launching his candidacy by apologizing for criticisms of the 45th president back in 2016.

But loyalty to Trump isnt the only essential trait for Republican candidates in a party that (in this century, at least) seems haunted by fears of heresy more than it is tempted by dreams of diversity and outreach. Trumpism has simply been added to previous conservative litmus tests. Revealingly, Herschel Walker one high-profile potential candidate for the U.S. Senate whom Trump has strongly encouraged to enter the race is alarming some conservatives in Georgia because he hasnt been ideologically vetted, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Herschel Walker will need to come back to Georgia and campaign. He will need to show that he is a conservative, Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman and 2020 Senate candidate, said on his radio show.

I have never heard Herschel Walkers position on pro-life. I havent, Collins said. Ive never heard his position on gun control. Ive never heard his position on a lot of these issues that are conservative issues.

This demand was significant because Collins himself is a MAGA stalwart, having served as Trumps chief defender on the House Judiciary Committee during the former presidents first impeachment. But he wont take Trumps word for it that Walker is ideologically kosher: The current Republican front-runner for the 2022 Senate nomination needs to publicly pledge his allegiance to culture-war causes like banning abortion and outlawing any outlawing of a single gun.

Certainly, abortion and guns represent two major issues on which any sort of heterodoxy is disqualifying for nearly all Republican candidates. The once-robust pro-choice Republican caucus in Congress is now down to two veteran senators: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. A good indication of how obligatory anti-abortion views have become was provided by recent party-switcher Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey. He had a strongly pro-choice voting record as a Democrat, but one of his first House votes as a Republican was on behalf of a failed effort to force a bill banning all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy onto the floor. Similarly, one of the vanishingly few congressional Republicans open to any kind of gun regulation, Senator Pat Toomey, is retiring next year. On both of these cultural issues, Republican opinion seems to be hardening. The ascendant conservative view on reproductive rights is now fetal personhood as a matter of federal constitutional law, rather than simply a reversal of Roe v. Wade, and a return of abortion regulation to the states. And on guns, the big conservative trend is constitutional carry, a rejection of any firearms licensing provisions, which is closely associated with the even more dangerous idea that the Second Amendment was designed to give teeth to a right to revolution against a tyrannical government.

But these are hardly the only litmus tests of true conservatism that survived or even flourished in the Trump era. Tax increases remain verboten, as evidenced by their absence from the recent bipartisan infrastructure package in the Senate. Anti-government rhetoric, an inheritance from the Goldwater-to-Reagan conservative movement that was intensified by the tea-party phenomenon of the Obama era, now has even greater power thanks to the Trumpian doctrines of a traitorous deep state and a corrupt Swamp dominating Washington. Hostility to organized labor is now universal in a party that used to more than occasionally secure union endorsements for its candidates (unless you take seriously the eccentric endorsement by Marco Rubio of an effort to organize Amazon workers or the more general revolt against woke corporations).

There are obviously some tenets of traditional conservatism that Trump has called into doubt as orthodoxy. Several are really restorations of Old Right thinking: the abandonment of free-trade principles for a return to the protectionist creed that animated Republicans from the Civil War to World War II, an America First repudiation of neoconservative commitments to alliances and interventionism, and a return to the nativism that has always been just under the surface in Republican politics. While Trumps sometimes incoherent views on these topics havent become totally obligatory for Republicans just yet, gestures in his direction probably are required. Its hard to imagine, for example, more than a smattering of Republicans vocally opposing a border wall, or calling for closer trade relations with China, or saying something nice about NATO, much less the United Nations. In international relations, Trumps determination to throw money at the Pentagon and his unremitting bellicosity have made his isolationist tendencies more acceptable to the Cold War set.

Theres one very loud new habit of Republicans that Trump has elevated from a fringe extremist preoccupation into a near-universal habit in the GOP: the attacks on political correctness, wokeness, cancel culture, and now critical race theory that present a violent antipathy to cultural changes deemed threatening to white patriarchal hegemony (or, stated more neutrally, to the Great America Trump has promised to bring back). All these phantom menaces are nicely designed to make old-school racism and sexism respectable.

All in all, its a complicated landscape that ambitious Republicans must navigate to safely rise within the Trumpified GOP. The safest are hard-core conservatives of the old school who downplay Reaganite views that are now out of fashion and who add in conspicuous personal loyalty to Trump and whatever he wants at any given moment. Examples of this formula are Ted Cruz, the members of the House Freedom Caucus, and, above all, Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Mo Brooks, who is still doing penance for endorsing Cruz in 2016, in part by personally participating in Trumps January 6 insurrectionary rally. Trump is close to the once-unlikely accomplishment of making true conservatism and Trumpism identical. The big question is whether his personal presence as a presidential candidate or a hurricane-force disrupter is necessary to seal the deal.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Its Tough to Prove Youre a True Conservative in the Trump Era - New York Magazine

What have been the all-time game-changing TV comedies? I Love Lucy in the 1950s definitely; the social realism of Till Death Us Do Part in the 1960s perhaps; and then onwards through the decades by way of the absurdist humour of Monty Python and the long character story arcs of Cheers. And then on a Monday evening early in the new millennium the 9 July 2001 to be precise a sitcom by first-time writer-directors and set in the Slough offices of fictional paper merchants arrived completely unheralded on BBC Two. The Office would go on to change TV comedy for the next 20 years.

With no laughter track and borrowing the style of the then ubiquitous docu-soap, a genre kick-started by the 1997 fly-on-the-wall series Driving School and often coming with similar blandly descriptive titles like Airport and Vets in Practice, an urban myth has grown up that there were those who initially didnt even recognise The Office as comedy.

Most of us certainly wouldnt have recognised the cast the now very well-known likes of Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook, Lucy Davies and of course Ricky Gervais, who wrote and directed The Office alongside Stephen Merchant. The title sequence featuring the drab, brutalist exteriors of Slough the roundabout, bus station and office blocks set to the wistful Mike DAbo song Handbags and Gladrags (as sung by Scottish rocker Fin Muir) also didnt offer many clues that a sitcom revolution was afoot.

The interior setting (actually an unused office at the BBCs Teddington Studios) was instantly recognisable as somewhere we might all have worked at one time or another a beige universe of trilling phones, paper being shuffled and (this being 2001) the occasional churning of a fax machine. Watching today, over a year into mass working-from-home, The Office might either induce wistful longing for a lost communal way of being or wonderment at how we ever spent our lives in such crummy environments.

The manager David Brent (Gervais) sees himself as an entertainer and all-round brilliant boss even when making grossly unsuitable remarks to receptionist Dawn (Davies); equally self-deceiving is bored sales-rep Tim (Freeman), who tells himself that this isnt his destiny as he bickers over the stapler with desk-sharing creep Gareth (Crook).

It captured that particularly modern form of the office that late-capitalist, neo-liberal mixture of ennui and anxiety, says Ben Walters, who wrote about the show in a book for the British Film Institutes TV Classics series. The double bind of being stuck in this god-awful situation that might be taken away from you at any time.

The naturalistic depiction of mundane everyday life at Wernham Hogg was helped by the absence of a laughter track but was chiefly enhanced by the then-innovative mockumentary format, the characters acknowledging the cameras with a sly glance or (in Brents case) a full-on cheesy grin. Although the mockumentary form had been around for a while, most notably in the films of Christopher This Is Spinal Tap Guest The Office was the first time many television viewers had experienced it.

The characters acknowledgement of the camera really upped the cringe factor, says Walters. When you had them looking into the lens, looking right at you, that really pulls you into the situation in a really uncomfortable way.

The Office launched the career of Mackenzie Crook, pictured here with Gervais

(BBC)

Indeed, along with Steve Coogans Alan Partridge and Garry Shandlings Larry Sanders, The Office marked the genesis of a whole new genre that came to be known as cringe comedy, and nowhere was this more cringey of course than when Brent was tying himself into knots of political correctness when faced with non-white or disabled characters. We thought it was interesting to write about the hypocrisy of people who think theyre politically correct, and the resultant awkwardness when they try too hard, as Gervais put it at the time.

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Brent may have been what Walters calls a pathetic ogre in the tradition of Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty, but over the course of two series and a brace of Christmas specials, he went on a redemptive journey the tragic clown getting a reprieve. Importantly, there was compassion here as well as cringe. But if you were looking for the real heart of The Office, it was to be found in the romance between Tim and Dawn.

The traditional sitcom storytelling mode is circular, says Walters. By the end of the episode everyone is back where they started. But in terms of David Brents career and Tim and Dawns romance, it does develop. Indeed, Richard Curtis, whose sitcoms include Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley, has said of The Office: It got better in ways I hadnt expected that it would have proper tragic and romantic dimensions was a shock.

Office romance: Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis)

(BBC)

We intended the show to have a happy ending, but we wanted it to be moving and uplifting without being mawkish, Gervais has said, and Walters reckons the Tim-and-Dawn romance was innovative in British sitcoms. There had been these big US sitcoms Friends especially where the romantic plotting had become as important as the comedy, he says. And having the presence of the cameras being acknowledged added another layer to the office flirtation, with cameras picking up every little glance and touch on the shoulder. It upped the ante and made it more suspenseful and affecting.

With a total of just 14 episodes two more than the similarly self-truncated Fawlty Towers The Office has been far more influential than John Cleeses comedy classic. This is partly down to the huge success of the American remake, which ran for nine seasons and made a star of Steve Carrell, while four failed attempts were made at transporting Fawlty Towers to an American setting.

Arguments have raged ever since about which of the two versions of The Office is the better, a pointless dispute that Gervais deflated in a recent podcast when asked about how he felt about claims that the US version were bigger and better. F***ing rich, he responded (Gervais and Merchant were executive producers of the American remake and therefore earned a considerable payday from it).

Steve Carell leads the cast of The Office US

(NBC)

But its The Offices mockumentary approach that has proved most influential a style now so ubiquitous in both British (This Country, Pls Like, People Just Do Nothing, Twenty Twelve, Come Fly with Me and so on) and American sitcoms (Modern Family, What We Do in the Shadows, Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation, etc) that David Baddiel was once driven to complain about this idiot idea that this is the only sort of sitcom we should have.

But if the likes of Miranda and Mrs Browns Boys have since clawed back some of the demand for traditional studio-audience sitcoms, the mockumentary goes from strength to meta-strength one episode of Disney+s WandaVision even being a pastiche of Modern Family and The Office.

And all this has its roots in a goatee-bearded middle manager with a talent for self-deception. If there is another reason that The Office has stood the test of time, reckons Walters, its because its chief protagonist, with half an eye on the camera and in constant need of affirmation, anticipated social-media culture. David Brent was very much an early adopter who took very seriously creating a narrative and self-image though being filmed, he says.

Here was this pathetic micro-celebrity but David Brent loved it and was all over it, and while he was not very good at it, actually that was the future and we all live in it now. To a greater or lesser degree, we all keep an eye open for where the camera is. Pathetic as he was, unfortunately these days most of us are David Brent.

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The Office at 20: Why were all David Brent now - The Independent

PARISFrench President Emmanuel Macron called for international regulation to curb the spread of ideological extremism in Western democracies, chiding tech companies and political correctness for allowing it to flourish.

Speaking to a group of reporters inside the lyse Palace, Mr. Macron said the storming of the U.S. Capitol was a sign of the Wests failure to rein in social media platforms, allowing them to become incubators of hate, moral relativism and conspiracy theories.

The French leader chided tech companieswithout naming themfor giving former President Donald Trump a platform to spread hate for years before taking action. Twitter Inc. banned Mr. Trumps personal account in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, citing the risk of further incitement of violence. Facebook Inc. announced a temporary suspension of Mr. Trump after the riot before extending that action indefinitely.

All those who allowed President Trump to succeed waited until they were entirely sure that he had no power left to then wrap themselves in dignity and now say Lets take away his whistle, Mr. Macron said. Why didnt they shut down his accounts before all this happened?

Mr. Macron said governments had delegated too much authority to tech companies by expecting them to act as stewards for Western democracy. This is an issue for real international regulation, Mr. Macron said.

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Frances Macron Calls for Regulation of Social Media to Stem Threat to Democracy - The Wall Street Journal

Russias state-controlled media has been turning to a disinformation playbook it has used before in a bid to discredit protesters agitating for the release from prison of Kremlin critic AlexeiNavalny, say analysts.

Navalny was detained on his return to Moscow for parole violations after recovering in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning. His arrest has triggered the largest anti-Kremlin protests seen in Russia since 2011, and Washington is being blamed for the demonstrations, with Kremlin officials and state media presenters alleging that Western powers, mainly the U.S., are behind the agitation.

Washington is becoming a convenient pretext for accusations, although in reality it has very little to do with what is happening, Donald Jensen, director of the United States Institute of Peace, a research organization, told VOAs Russian service. This is a question for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and the Russian people, and it is clear that a significant minority of Russians are unhappy.

Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russias security council, has compared the Navalny protests to the popular Maidan uprising in Ukraine of 2013-2014, which he and other Kremlin officials also accused the West of fomenting.

He told the state-owned weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakti the West needs Navalny, To destabilize the situation in Russia, for social upheavals, strikes and new Maidans.

What this can lead to we see in the example of Ukraine, which in essence, has lost its independence, he added.

Maidan revolt

Disinformation analysts also are drawing comparisons to the Maidan revolt not as an example of Western intervention, but in terms of the Kremlins information management strategy launched to try to save Putin ally President Viktor Yanukovych from ouster.

They say many of the same memes, tropes and conspiracy theories dissimulated during the Maidan revolt are being used now to try to shape a narrative discrediting pro-Navalny protesters.

In 2013, when hundreds of thousands of pro-Europe protesters occupied Kyivs Maidan to demand Yanukovychs resignation, Kremlin-controlled media portrayed the people behind the uprising as being opposed to traditional, socially conservative Russian values of family and religion.

Among the memes Russian disinformation channels broadcast were those conflating the agitation with homosexuality, warning of the risk that a homo-dictatorship would be established in Ukraine, according to analysts.

Theres a long tradition of pro-Kremlin propaganda using homophobic rhetoric to discredit pro-democracy activism, said Zarine Kharazian, an analyst at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, part of the Atlantic Council, a U.S.-based research group. The lab studies disinformation campaigns.

The protesters in the early days of the revolt were predominately young and their occupation of the Maidan, one of Kyivs central squares, was sparked by Yanukovychs decision not to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Because the EU supports same-sex marriage, Russias state-controlled medias starting point was that the European Union was homosexual, and so the Ukrainian movement toward Europe must be, as well, according to Yale academic Timothy Snyder.

Writing in his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder noted, In November and December 2013, the Russia media covering the Maidan introduced the irrelevant theme of gay sex at every turn.

'Political pedophilia'

As the anti-Kremlin protests erupted this week in Moscow, St. Petersburg and about 70 other towns across Russia, state-controlled media appeared again to color the political agitation with sexual politics, accusing protest leaders of political pedophilia, part of an official claim that most protesters were manipulated minors.

Sociologists say the protesters came from a range of age groups, although some 25 percent were 18- to 25-year-olds. Nonetheless, Russian officials say Navalny and his supporters have been exploiting the vulnerability of children and the young, persuading them to demonstrate in the streets. This is a serious operation, alleged Valery Fadeyev, head of Putin's human rights council.

TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of Rossiya Segodnya, complained on his marquee show News of the Week. There are people who are so low, they drag children into politics, like political pedophiles. Is this bad? Its horrible. Other presenters on Russian newscasts also tagged protesters as political pedophiles.

Pedophilia, with or without the qualifier political, is a charged word in Russia, say disinformation analysts. They argue that the government has a long propaganda history of linking homosexuality with pedophilia. They say labeling the protesters as pedophiles has to be understood within a larger state project of defining Russias identity in terms of traditional values, delineating Russia from a Western world often portrayed by the Kremlin as dissolute and decadent.

I do think its an attempt to paint opposition protests as Western and fundamentally at odds with traditional Russian values, said Kharazian. The equating of homosexuality and pedophilia is based on common homophobic tropes of homosexuality as unnatural or in some way perverted. And beyond Maidan, these homophobic narratives have also been applied to protests in Armenia, Venezuela, Georgia and elsewhere.

It is hard to say if this tactic will work for a wide swathe of Russians, but for those already receptive to anti-Western propaganda, it certainly is potent, she said.

Putin avoided mentioning his foe Navalny by name in a midweek speech to the World Economic Forum. But he warned against the destruction of traditional values. The social and values crisis is already having negative demographic consequences, from which mankind is at risk of losing entire civilizational and cultural continents.

Putin himself has defended Russia's anti-gay laws in the past by equating gays with pedophiles, saying Russia needs to cleanse itself of homosexuality.

In an interview in 2014 with ABC TV, on the eve of the Sochi Olympics, he suggested that gays are more likely to abuse children. And in September 2013, Putin talked about the excesses of Western political correctness, which he said had reached the point where there are serious discussions on the registration of parties that have propaganda of pedophilia as their objective.

Jakub Kalensky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a colleague of Kharazian, says the Kremlin-controlled medias homophobic tropes are playing into the prejudices of some of the more conservative Russians. Its not just about influencing the audience, but also using the audience's prejudices to discredit the protests, he said.

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Why is Kremlin Tagging Protesters Political Pedophiles? - Voice of America

Harriet Tubman, circa 1870

HB Lindsey | Underwood Archives | Getty Images

The Biden administration will revive the push to make Harriet Tubman the face of a new $20 bill, an effort that was shelved during former President Donald Trump's term.

"We're exploring ways to speed up that effort," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday after being asked if the new administration would pick up the Obama-era initiative.

An updated $20 note featuring Tubman, the former slave who became an icon of the abolitionist movement, was originally set to be unveiled around the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

But Trump's Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, announced during a 2019 congressional hearing that the redesign would be delayed until 2028. Mnuchin said at the time that the primary reason for redesigning a currency is to combat counterfeiting efforts.

Psaki said Monday that the Treasury Department is "taking steps to resume efforts" to put Tubman's image on the front of the new $20 bills.

It's important for the bills to "reflect the history and diversity of our country," Psaki said, "and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that."

Tubman's face on the bill would replace that of Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president. Trump was such a big fan of Jackson that he featured a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office. Joe Biden, who took office last Wednesday, removed the painting.

Trump before being elected had called the plan to replace Jackson with Tubman "pure political correctness."

A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department echoed Psaki's remarks in a separate statement to CNBC. Jack Lew, the Treasury secretary under former President Barack Obama who spearheaded the effort to put Tubman on the $20, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Redesigning the bill is an intricate process that will take time and require more changes than just a simple face swap. For example, it took 11 years to develop the blue security strip that now adorns the $100 bill.

Producing the new $20 notes with robust anti-counterfeiting technology and other security measures in place will require a new high-speed printing facility, which is currently scheduled for 2025.

Concepts for an updated $50 note are in development.

Originally posted here:

Biden's Treasury revives push to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill after Trump shelved it - CNBC

Dear Editor

To reduce potential confusion I begin this essay with the admonition that no president has represented my interests since JFK. We havent had a free press since at least acting President Reagan and slick Willie. What we have are Propaganda Outlets. Political correctness increases: our free press establishes official truth. Youre free as long as you stand where youre told and say whats expected.

On 1/6 the Dems found a political godsend enabling them to frame their opposition as enemies of the state, damned to ideological purgatory. The Dems now conduct a war of annihilation. The hildabeest said, during an interview, Trump and his deplorables took their orders from Putin. Divide and conquer is the tactic of the rulers and successful as ever.

Consensus is the only way to solve conflict.

If you think the game aint rigged, you aint been paying attention. It follows the same pattern as every other convenient crisis used by government as an excuse to expand its powers, and remove freedoms, at your expense. If you dare to subscribe to any views contrary to the governments you may be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

Biden signaled its open season on any opposition: The opposition wont sit still and be abused.Theyll respond so, anticipate consequences. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, was the question in 1950, but now its centered on the orange man.

Biden said On this January day my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together, uniting our people, and uniting our nation. I ask every American to join me in this cause. He itemized the target: Anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, violence and lawlessness.

The Biden gang speaks to the Not-Biden Rabble with a sense of conviction that theyre better people and more competent; the rabble are deluded simpletons, who need guidance from their intellectual, moral, and cultural superiors to re-direct their peasant yearnings for a better life into the approved Track.

On inauguration night, Antifa mobs rioted in Portland and Seattle. Similar mobs gave us a summer of rioting, looting and arson after George Floyds death. Democrats never condemned these mobs, but they did the activities of 1/6. Referring to the 2011 invasion of Wisconsins state capitol Nancy Pelosi praised it as an impressive show of democracy in action.

Police brutality certainly is Americas sin. To purge it, we have to kneel. To remove systemic racism while kneeling, white people have to apologize for their privilege. Slaverys next; to free ourselves from that we have to destroy sculptures as white people judge themselves while kneeling and repenting of their white privilege. White supremacy is the latest fiction. I havent seen much of that since the seventies. Now its the new burning issue.

De-fund the police calls have become fund the secret police. Domestic terror bills creating new DHS units to monitor extremism are being advanced. During summer BLM riots were called acts of courage. They even declared an autonomous zone taking over government buildings, yet our free press never used the words insurrection, sedition, or treason. AOC praised these mostly peaceful protests and said the point is to make people feel uncomfortable.

If you feel uncomfortable that 25,000 troops were in the district of corruption, then were told youre a conspiracy theorist. Remember, ignorance is strength, so you must obey the experts. When you accept the accusation, which its become, that someones a conspiracy theorist, youre allowing another to do your thinking for you. Replace that term with: critical thinker.

The media says its their job to control what you believe. Americans in the Land of the Free have had their free speech censored by most media, which features who and what they want while forbidding different views. Welcome to double standard America.

You cant make someone be someone else. You might convince them with patience and evidence.

A majoritybelieve journalists/reporters mislead by knowingly presenting false or exaggerated news; most news organizations favor a political position more than informing citizens. Americans can see that the news is the same no matter which channel you watch. The hypocrisy is thick. Party loyalists are a huge problem because they wear blinders. We expect the media to hold the powerful to account but its mostly image marketing.

After the Trump supporters, with much evidence they were directed by Antifa masquerading as trumpers, stormed the Capitol on 1/6, the media piled on. Their first move was to make it a story about race. The Trump extravaganza had nothing to do with race, but a confederate flag or two and suddenly its a KKK rally to hear the TV present it. Covid blowback, unrestricted immigration, wars of choice, election fraud, but were told its about race. Imagine the outcome/response if BLM had done 1/6? An unarmed Trump supporter at the Capitol was shot dead. If a black protester died by police in 2020s incessant BLM riots, lootings and arsons, hed already be on a postage stamp.

The TV tells us that immigrants from failing countries need free admission to the empire but neglect to remember/consider, the reason theyre running is because our empire has continually destroyed their elected governments that dont toe the empires line, creating mayhem in their countries.

Racism is an endless game of political correctness ignoring that, worldwide, there are differences others have trouble getting past, especially when you factor in the crime of micro aggression whatever that means. Disney is now, with a straight face, calling Peter Pan and Dumbo racist.

Who needs fiction writers these days when we have the Democratic Party? Our ministry of truth sells lies so well, many accept them. All the presstitutes said that theres no evidence of fraud, and all who support examining the evidence are enemies of democracy.In other words, democracy is a stolen election.If you protest the theft, you oppose democracy.

America is close to the monolithic control of information that Orwell predicted in 1984. Big Tech has banned debate about government policy on the coronavirus, and any discussion of election fraud is treated as a crime.One mans misinformation is anothers truth: ignoring Israels crimes is an example of that, as is the recent election. The world clearly sees that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

Our free press was joyous at the arrival of slow Joe. You can sleep easy again: the party of peace, tolerance, and reconciliation has returned. They want to heal and unify the nation, but clearly the only way to do so is to create enemies lists and silence anyone with dissenting opinions.

Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, said, Me-first capitalists are going to be the first peoplelined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. Ill happily provide video commentary. Companies like Twitter are a big part of the efforts to unify the nation deleting 70,000 accounts using 1/6 as an excuse. The completely fair and objective media says that simply acknowledging this tech purge makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Axios wrote:Right wings new conspiracy: The silencing. They said that only crazy conspiracy theorists believe that there are efforts to silence their voices. In other words, dont believe your lying eyes.

Its illegal for businesses to discriminate due to peoples ancestral origin, but its legal to prohibit opinions. In the manner of No Colored signs on the door of businesses in the 50s they have every right asprivately owned businessesto do business with whomever they wish. The Left is defined by its psychotic doublethink. Its intolerant while advertising itself as open-minded. It promotes discrimination in the name of combatting it.

What are they afraid of, and who have we become?

The first amendment says you shall make no laws restricting free speech. Were told we must ensure harmful speech is regulated to guarantee broad participation in the public dialog thats essential to our democracy. Were told that thefirst amendment needs removal because right-wingers are speaking in unapproved ways. This open-ended condition can be interpreted however any official feels necessary.

Were told Twitter is big, so anti-vaccination/anti-war/pro-Russia/Covid denial viewsare going to cause panic so we must redefine free speech; Offensive, misinformation, and hate speech will be discoveredoften. Everythingcan be made to meananything. The ministry of truth has arrived.

Sowell wrote: If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today. Our free press presents selected information designed to do your thinking for you.

Our political/media class have beenpushing for more authorityto solve their fear of domestic terrorism. New domestic terror policies were in the works before 1/6. Internet censorship isincreasing normalized, and digital armiesare encouraged to report suspects to the authorities, just like the Soviets. An incredibly large part of America seems to have no problem with any of this.

Monopolistic Silicon Valley tycoons are censoring worldwide political speech, just like the TV news. Theres lots of narrative manipulation going on to keep it from being obvious.

The way to stem the tide of whatever concerns you is to eliminate conditions which created it.

Trump was successful by using the widespread awareness that theres a swamp that needs draining: a corrupt political system unconcerned with your interests. Governmentoften does evil things and lies about themassisted by our free press leaving people to imagine whats happening behind closed doors. People see that the system has failed them. Those interested in ending Trumpism/populism would act to end the corrupt political system, from top to bottom.These changes arent being promoted by our political/media class because they speak for an empire that depends on these things.

Corruption enables campaign donations and corporate lobbying/revolving doors,to advance the ruling interests; Government secrecy enables members to conspire (ops, conspiracy theory) to advance the empires agendas. The lying mass media manufacture yourconsent for wars in a system which doesnt serve your interests.

Youre not going to change Americas existing fascist system by expanding an authoritarian monster: you need drastic actual change.

If you dont comply with the ruling parties dogma and agenda, your ability to work, communicate, express your once-free-opinions will come to a halt. The Biden gang doesnt seem to care that there are costs for persecuting Trump and 75 million Americans. It cant be long until those consequences arrive, violently.

Criminalizing opposition to our government is insanely dangerous. The globalist ruling classes have reminded us who is in charge, and how quickly they can remove the democratic and legal facade. The War on Populism is becoming the War on Domestic Terror, one part of the Global War on Terror.

The treatment by the propagandists at CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/Bloomberg/Fox, et al, of 1/6 proves that when they lie, mislead, quote biased official sources, and reject as conspiracy theory anything opposing their misrepresentations, they can fool half the country. Im reading about arrests for spreading misinformation.

Craig Dudley

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LETTERS / To Ensure That There - High Country Press

Palm Beach Post

In two prophetic books, Animal Farm: A Fairy Storyand 1984,the British essayist George Orwell depicted a future world in which the state would exercise complete control over all facets of social life.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," Orwell wrote. "If that is granted, all else follows.

Sadly, Orwell's depiction of state-controlled life is being ignored and challenged today by the "cancel culture"cult. Nonviolent free speech, our First Amendment right in our Constitution, is being attacked vitriolically and is tearing our nation apart. People are being fired from their jobs, expelled from schools, blacklisted, abused verbally and even harmed physically by simply declaring, for example, "All lives matter."

A surge of selective censorship has been directed at conservative ideas especially if those ideas are not consistent with the narrative of the political elitists and advocates of political correctness.

Freedom of speech is one of the powers of freedom of the will. It is the right to speak and think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. It is the polar opposite of political correctness, which is used as a weapon of fear and is a threat to our nation's survival.

My past and present stance on mob violence of any kind has been to confront it without prejudice. Wrong is wrong no matter who you are, what color you are, what religion you are, or what your politics are. Sadly, the hypocrisy is in plain sight today when individuals react vigorously but selectively to criminal behavior that fits their own interests and agendas.

Well-meaning citizens or large segments of our population who protest peacefully or vote differently cannot be branded as pariahs just because the majority in government power want to maintain Orwellian control as Big Brother.

Our nation was built on compromise and a free exchange of ideas. If we abandon these two tenets, our future is doomed. If we disrespect our First Amendment, knowing full well that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, then perhaps we should recall the words of the providential biblical figure who said as his life ebbed away beneath a crown of thorns, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!

We must embrace the gift of free will granted to us by Providence, and stand up and resist political correctness in every form. If not, we may be forced to accept that 2+2=5.

DR. DAVID TUCKER, PALM BEACH GARDENS

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Point of View: 'Cancel culture' is tearing the nation apart - Palm Beach Post

Ill readily admit that the face gracing the $20 bill is not our most urgent issue not with 420,000 people needlessly dead and 45 Republican senators saying that their insurrectionist in exile should get a pass.

But we can all agree that symbols are important, define who we are as a people and help us craft our national narrative.

So, in that sense, it surely matters whether the face on the $20 bill depicts a racist genocidal white guy who enslaved human beings or a Black woman who repeatedly risked her life to successfully free human beings. The good news is that the Biden administration intends to right a wrong by putting Harriet Tubman where she belongs.

As press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put (Tubman) on the front of the new $20 notes. Its important that our money reflect the history and diversity of our country.

Well, yeah. White men werent the only people who built this nation. Black women have never appeared on American currency. Tubman, a fugitive slave and heroine of the Underground Railroad, rescued hundreds of African-Americans from servitude.

She was a Union spy during the Civil War, recruited ex-slaves for a Union regiment, and led an assault that freed 700 more. In her late 70s she delivered speeches for womens suffrage, but died seven years before women won the right to vote.

Wait, let me back up a bit.

Did Psaki say that the Biden administration wants to resume the process to put Tubman on the $20 bill?

When did that process start and why did it stop?

Take a wild guess why it stopped.

Back in 2016, President Barack Obamas Treasury secretary announced a plan to replace facial incumbent Andrew Jackson starting in 2020. But that plan was quickly shelved during the MAGA occupation. As the MAGA candidate had signaled during the 2016 campaign, when asked about replacing Jackson with Tubman, I dont like seeing it. I think its pure political correctness.

In his mind, the reality of racial diversity and the truth of our national narrative was political correctness. And he was reportedly blunter in conversation with White House aides. According to Omarosa Manigault Newman, the ex-aide who last year wrote the book Unhinged, her boss told her what he really thought about Tubman: You want me to put that face on the $20 bill?

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was thus tasked with telling Congress that the switch to Tubman was unfeasible because of security concerns, something to do with unspecified counterfeiting issues.

And so the woman who once said that slavery is the next thing to hell was thereby consigned to the back of the bus.

Besides, the insurrectionist-in-chief loved Jackson and put the guys picture on the Oval Office wall. In his words, Andrew Jackson had a history of tremendous success for the country.

If living as a member of the landed gentry with slave labor and ethnic-cleansing Native Americans is what constitutes success, then, yes, Jackson was boffo.

As the recent excellent book Jacksonland chronicles in great detail, Jacksons style of negotiating (with Native Americans) was frank and coercive. In talk after talk over the years, he told native leaders he was their friend, and that he wanted to pay for their land but that if they failed to sell, white settlers would take their land for nothing.

Jackson, his family members and his closest business associates, ultimately stole more than 45,000 acres. Having thus enriched himself prior to becoming president, he worked with his postmaster general to suppress anti-slavery mail from northern abolitionists.

Yes, were only talking here about faces on currency. But its high time we honored people such as Tubman who truly made America great. This was a woman who in her last years preached hope to people of color during the worst of Jim Crow. She once said: Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

And she was right on the money where she belongs.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Dick Polman is a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia. His column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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Dick Polman | Show me the money: Put Tubman on the $20 bill - TribDem.com

Nearly everyone in Connecticut knows that its capital city, Hartford, is a mess, and that its largest city, Bridgeport, is too. Yet for saying so about Hartford in an essay in The Wall Street Journal on New Year's Day, former gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski continues to generate outrage from news organizations and the establishment leaders they strive to give voice to. Predictably enough, none of the responses has addressed Stefanowski's specific criticisms. Instead the responses have constituted only mindless boosterism for Hartford.

Decades of boosterism haven't improved the city but the latest installment may be meant to prevent the failure of Connecticut's urban policies from becoming the issue it should be.

For example, why, despite ever-greater state spending on Hartford, do its demographics grow only poorer and its schools never improve?

Though it was already insolvent and a ward of the state, why was Hartford allowed to borrow tens of millions of dollars to build a minor-league baseball stadium, leading to a $500 million bailout by state government? State government could have prevented that disaster, so why didn't it?

Why did Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin pander to the "defund the police" crowd by reducing the city police budget by $2 million only to have to appeal for state troopers a few weeks later as crime in the city exploded?

Even the news organizations purporting to serve Hartford have yet to pose such questions. With his essay Stefanowski began to do so, and the response from those news organizations was only: That's mean! Don't do that again!

What'sreallymean is leaving Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven in perpetual poverty and dysfunction, where they will stay until the failures of policy and management are acknowledged. As Stefanowski wrote, state government shares responsibility for those failures. Those who took offense at their mere mention now share responsibility too.

* * *

COURANT'S P.C. POSE: Congratulations to the Hartford Courant for pledging, in the name of social justice, to do less of what it hardly had been doing anyway: publishing police photos, "mug shots," of arrested people.

This pledge was just a load of what is called virtue signaling, since few mug shots have appeared in the Courant lately not because of concern for social justice but because of the newspaper's long retreat from local news.

Of course this retreat doesn't contradict the Courant's argument that mug shots can be prejudicial and contribute to racial stereotyping. But crime itself is racially disproportionate, and it is not stereotyping to acknowledge it. A mug shot doesn't stereotype; it signifies an actual arrest. Andanyarrest publicity is potentially prejudicial.

So is the publicnotto be reminded that crime is racially disproportionate, just as family disintegration, educational failure, and poverty are? And is criminal justicenotto be watched closely so injustice may be diminished? Are only the arrests and mug shots ofwhitepeople to be published?

One could get that impression lately, as national news organizations are going out of their way to publicize any trivial incident in which a white person mistreats a Black person, like the incident the other day in New York City where a white woman mistakenly accused a Black teenager of stealing her cell phone. Meanwhile there is no reporting of trivial incidents in whichBlacksmistreatwhites. Are there no such incidents, or is political correctness overwhelming the news?

* * *

TEACHING MOMENT LOST: University of Connecticut President Thomas C. Katsouleas toadied to political correctness again last week in responding to an internet petition urging the university to "condemn" two students from Stafford who attended the "Stop the Steal" protest in Washington that ended with the attack on the Capitol. There was no allegation that the students broke the law, but one was photographed with the infamous provocateur Alex Jones.

Responding to the petition, Katsouleas wrote that Jones is "despicable." Katsouleas didnot write that the university has no business condemning anyone for peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights.

So a teaching moment was lost. Instead the P.C. petitioners were reminded of how easily the university president can be made to dance. Students may be learning that much anyway.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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No one dares to answer for the disaster of Connecticut's cities - Journal Inquirer

The White House will resume the Obama-era push to put Harriet Tubmans image on the $20 bill, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes, Psaki said in response to a reporters question during the daily briefing. Its important that our money reflects the history and diversity of our country and Harriet Tubmans image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that.

Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, was a 19th-century abolitionist and conductor of the Underground Railroad, risking her life to rescue dozens of enslaved people and bring them to freedom after she escaped herself. Tubman learned the escape houses and secret routes throughout the Underground Railroad, making her an asset to the Union military during the Civil War, according to the National Womens History Museum. Tubman also joined the fight for womens suffrage after the Civil War ended.

In 2016, the Obama administration set out to redesign the $20 bill, replacing Andrew Jackson, who enslaved people and both fought Native Americans and forced them to move from their land. The Obama administration was hoping for a release of the new bill in 2020 to mark the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, a right that could at that point be exercised mainly by White women.

The project to get Tubman represented on the currency was delayed during the Trump administration. In the spring of 2019, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said counterfeit issues would make it impossible to unveil Harriet Tubman on the bill by 2020, the deadline set by the Obama administration. Trump, who put Jacksons portrait in the Oval Office, had criticized changing the image on the bill, saying it was being done out of pure political correctness.

Psaki said that the Biden administration doesnt have a set deadline for the release of the new bill but that the administration is working on it.

Were exploring ways to speed up that effort but any specifics would of course come from the Department of Treasury, said Psaki.

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Originally published by The 19th.

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Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill: Biden Administration Says It's Resuming the Effort - GovExec.com