Monthly Archives: June 2021

The last few years has seen the introduction of one deceptive and destructive cultural idea after another. First it was wokeness, or extreme political correctness, which places more value on how woke you are to a problem rather than looking at the problem objectively and considering the facts. This lack of free thinking is leading inexorably to another sinister tool of political radicals: cancel culture, which is the Marxist-style denouncing and public shaming of any opposing thought one finds offensive, or that doesnt fit the narrative or aims of a particular political group or movement. Now, a close cousin of wokeness and cancel culture is attempting to sneak its way into one of the most influential institutions in our society our schools and that threat is Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Critical Race Theory has its origins in Marxism and has found its modern expression in the 1619 Project, an anti-American alternative history that teaches the United States didnt start in 1776 but, rather, with the arrival of slaves in the New World in 1619. Its spiritual antecedent, CRT, is an academic discipline based on racial theory and class struggle that blames societal problems on whiteness and teaches that our law and the history of our country is inherently racist. The goal of CRT is not equality of opportunity, which is something at which America thrives. After all, more people in the United States have been lifted out of poverty than in any nation at any time in modern history. Rather, the goal is to distort American history and overturn the ideals on which this country was founded imbued in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Take, for example, the teachings of one of Critical Race Theorists biggest cheerleaders, Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. According to Kendi, (I)n order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist. Doesnt this sound like the Marxist goal of destroying capitalism through CRT and identity politics? The author of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, had this to say about her motivations: (T)he white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world. Is this the message we want to send to our kids about equality and coming together as a country?

Thats really the issue, isnt it? How this affects our children. Critical Race Theory is not about equality, social justice or any other dressed up rhetoric. Its an attempt to indoctrinate our children into a false ideology that is its own form of discrimination. Students all over the country would be taught they are responsible for events that happened centuries before they were born and that the answer to discrimination against others in the past is discrimination against them in the present. Its wrong and it cant be allowed to continue.

Why, then, is CRT going forward, seemingly unabated? Its because too many Americans are afraid of speaking out about political and social issues, especially when race is involved. If someone does speak out, they are attacked with the cynical political tool I mentioned above cancel culture. Action is the answer and thats why I filed Senate Bill 586 in the Missouri Senate. This bill would ban the teaching of divisive concepts like any race is superior to another or that any persons moral character is determined by their race or that the United States is fundamentally racist. We all know these are lies and that the logic and underpinnings of these concepts is flawed. In fact, teaching one race is superior to another or a race should feel guilt or psychological distress because of their race is the very definition of racism, and it has no place in classrooms.

We cant erase the history of country and the sins of our past by creating new ones. And teaching a new form of racial discrimination in our schools would be doing just that. Critical Race Theory must be combatted for the subversive and politically-motivated movement that it is and that starts with passing public policy like SB 586. This cant wait until next year when the Legislature meets again. The governor should call an extra session, and we should join the likes of Texas, Tennessee, Arizona and others, and say NO to Critical Race Theory in our schools.

If you have any ideas, questions and concern, please feel free to contact me at the State Capitol: (573) 751-2108, rick.brattin@senate.mo.gov or by writing to Sen. Rick Brattin, Missouri State Capitol, Room 331, Jefferson City, MO 65101.

God bless and thank you for the opportunity to work for you in the Missouri Senate.

Read this article:

Sen. Rick Brattin's Capitol Report for the Week of May 31: Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and the Indoctrination of America's Children ...

Jesse Brown| The Herald News

Jesse Brown, 43, of Plymouth, is a candidate for Congress.

For the past 10 years, the 9th Congressional District has been represented by Bill Keating, a professional politician who has been running for one office or another since before the day I was born. Its fair to say that there are few people who have spent so long in Washington and accomplished so little.

During his entire time in Congress, Keating has sponsored 84 bills, and not a single one is significant and substantive. To give credit where credit is due, in 2011 Keating did get one bill signed into law an act renaming the post office in Sagamore Beach. Thats the one and only bill he sponsored that became law.

A closer look at his voting record shows that he voted with Nancy Pelosi on every single vote in the last Congress. I dont agree with anyone 100 percent of the time, but it seems Keating is just along for the ride, taking his orders from on high. Its hard to imagine that the residents of Pelosis San Francisco share precisely the same interests as the residents of New Bedford, Fall River or Cape Cod.

I think the 9th District can do better than a go along to get along career politico.

I was raised by a single mom and some good friends who filled in the significant gaps while mom worked three jobs to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Life wasnt easy, and there was no such thing as just skating by.

I joined the Marines when I was just 17 because I knew that for all the challenges I faced as a kid, America had already blessed me with all the opportunity I needed to climb out and up. And thats literally what I did.

After I was honorably discharged from the Marines, I put the skills I had learned to work as a technician climbing cell towers. Its not a job for the faint of heart. After working my way up the ladder, no pun intended, I decided that to make the best life for my newborn daughter I would start a business of my own.

Today, that business, Heidrea Communications, is one of the largest veteran-owned businesses in Massachusetts employing around 70 workers and doing projects throughout New England and New York.

Along the way, I started Heidrea for Heroes, a charitable organization that helps veterans, their families and others who are in need with customized solutions for their specific challenges. Its the most rewarding work Ive ever done and Im grateful to have had the opportunity to meet and help so many of my fellow veterans who sacrificed for our country.

For all its greatness, America has some big challenges. There is a crisis at the border. Runaway spending. Socialism is on the march. They want to defund the police, and political correctness has run amok. Its because of career politicians like Bill Keating whose only mission is to hang on to the perks and power that come with public office.

Im still a young man with more to offer the community, state and nation that has given me so much. Im not one to sit on the sidelines or chirp from the back bench, and it frustrates me to no end to see the gridlock, petty partisanship and sandbox politics that dominate Washington.

Ive worked hard for everything Ive ever had, and I know we can do better. Im running for Congress because I want to help, and I think I can. Its time for a change, and if Im given the privilege of representing you in Congress, Ill bring the same determination, energy and sense of duty that Ive brought to every endeavor. And I wont let you down.

Jesse Brown, 43, of Plymouth, is a candidate for Congress.

Read the original:

Opinion: Massachusetts' 9th Congressional District can do better than Keating - Fall River Herald News

With or without Donald J. Trump atop the party, the Republican strategy for the 2022 elections and beyond virtually assures race and racism will be central to political debate for years to come.

Why it matters: In an era when every topic seems to turn quickly to race, Republicans see this most divisive issue as either political necessity or an election-winner including as it relates to voting laws, critical race theory, big-city crime, immigration and political correctness.

Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.

The big picture: These topics pit the mostly white GOP against the very diverse Democratic Party. It's unfolding in local school boards, national politics and on social media.

An Axios-Ipsos poll on race relations last month shows this starkly, Axios managing editor Margaret Talev writes:

There's a massive gulf between how Republicans and Democrats view race a 66-point gap on whether the U.S. must continue making changes to give Black Americans equal rights to white Americans.

There's a 48-point gap on whether the events of the past year led to a realization there's still a lot of racism in the U.S. and a 49-point gap on whether the protests were good for society.

Of all demographic groups, white people were the most resistant to structural reforms to address institutional racism a gap driven by Republican sentiment.

Chris Jackson of Ipsos Public Affairs says the GOP focus on race looks counterproductive at first, since a majority of Americans favor continued efforts to equalize the playing field for Black Americans.

But the pollster said a closer look reveals that the GOP's focus is more strategic around specific ideas that drive culture wars and could potentially move swing voters.

Here's where the GOP sees an opening: In our poll, just one in five white independents supports the "defund the police" movement.

Half of white independents say the media exaggerates stories of police brutality and racism.

Two in five white independents say social policies, including affirmative action, discriminate unfairly against white people.

Those issues prime this slice of the electorate for messaging that paints Democrats as extreme on issues around race.

Between the lines: Republicans have at times played on racial fears for decades. It became more explicit in the Trump era.

More from Axios: Sign up to get the latest market trends with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free

Original post:

Race central to Republican strategy for 2022 and beyond - Yahoo News

Until 1991, when Clarence Thomas was nominated and then confirmed to the Supreme Court, the most prominent black conservative in America was likely Thomas Sowell, the Chicago-trained economist and polymath. From his longtime perch at Stanfords Hoover Institution, Sowell has, through his books, newspaper columns, and television appearances, done as much to popularize free market economics and to level biting critiques of liberal thinking on race, education, and civil rights as any conservative intellectual of the past 40 years, black or white. Now, he is the subject of a new book, Maverick, by columnist and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley, who attempts to take the measure of one of the eminences of the modern Right.

Maverick is an intellectual biography of Sowell, meaning that its focus is more on its subjects ideas, as revealed in his published writing, than on the facts of his life or psychology. We get only the briefest glimpse of Sowells childhood and young adulthood: Born in rural, segregated North Carolina in 1930 and orphaned at a young age, he was adopted by a great aunt who moved him first to Charlotte and then to Harlem. After dropping out of the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, Sowell worked odd jobs and then spent time in the Marines before enrolling in college, first at night classes at Howard University and then at Harvard, from which he graduated with a degree in economics in 1958. After taking a masters degree at Columbia, Sowell then followed his mentor, the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, to the University of Chicago to pursue his doctorate. There, Sowell, an undergraduate Marxist, was exposed to the ideas of two other libertarian-leaning Nobel Prize winners, Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. Though Riley is at pains to stress that Sowell was no mere sock puppet for his white professors, it was this encounter with the hard-nosed, empirical, free market economics of the Chicago school that paved the way for Sowells shift, in the late 1960s, toward the political Right.

Maverick is structured as a loosely chronological account of Sowells career as a public intellectual, supplemented with personal details from Riley's interviews with Sowell and some of Sowells own correspondence, published in 2006 under the title Man of Letters. Broadly speaking, we see Sowell moving from an early interest in classical political economy and the history of economic thought his early scholarly publications included essays on Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx and a book, based on his dissertation, on the 19th-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say toward the more general inquiries into subjects such as racial inequality and political theory for which he is best known today.

Sowell is an absurdly prolific author (he published 36 books between 1971, when he turned 41 years old, and 2018, when he turned 88) who has tried his hand at a vast array of subjects, meaning that Riley faces a difficult task in providing a concise survey of his thinking in less than 250 pages. But on the whole, he does an admirable job, introducing readers to not only Sowells better-known arguments for instance, that unequal outcomes among minority racial and ethnic groups are better explained by cultural traits than by discrimination, or lack of discrimination, on the part of the majority but also works such as Knowledge and Decisions (1980), in which Sowell both popularized Hayeks theory about how market prices work as a decentralized means of communicating information and broadened the theory's application beyond the field of economics. We also get an ugly glimpse of the way that Sowell has at times been treated by the black liberal establishment, which has accused him of being an Uncle Tom, an unthinking mouthpiece for white conservative interests, and much else that isnt fit to print.

But if Maverick serves as a useful survey of Sowells ideas, it at times sacrifices depth for breadth. Riley emphasizes over and over again that Sowell is, as his title suggests, a maverick and a contrarian who likes to think for himself. But too often, these assertions of Sowells uniqueness serve as a substitute for any meaningful engagement with the broader social and intellectual currents that shaped his work. To cite one small but frustrating example, we are twice told that Stigler threatened to resign as Sowells doctoral adviser because he believed that Sowell had a mistaken interpretation of "Says Law," the idea, in economics, that supply creates its own demand. The point of the anecdote is to illustrate Sowells independent-mindedness, but Riley never, at any point, explains the substance of Stigler's and Sowells disagreement. Perhaps it was over some minor technical point that would bore the general reader, but this is, after all, an intellectual biography of an economist. Those who are easily bored wont be reading it in the first place.

The greater missed opportunity, however, comes in Rileys cursory treatment of what is surely the most obvious and unavoidable fact about Sowell: that he is a black conservative. Riley notes in passing that Sowell, like Clarence Thomas and Glenn Loury, came from a distinctly working-class background and so was always socially separated from the politically liberal black middle class. And Riley mentions the influence on Sowells thought of an earlier generation of black intellectuals such as E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, John Hope Franklin, and Kenneth Clark. But it is only that a mention. We are given little sense of how Sowells ideas fit within this tradition of black thought (indeed, only Fraziers ideas are even briefly summarized); rather, we are made to understand Sowells departure from mainstream black thinking as a matter of his prioritizing facts and evidence over emotion and political correctness. Consider, by contrast, the following passage from Corey Robins The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, on how Sowells brand of free market conservatism fit within a certain strand of black thought that stressed the need for black people to achieve autonomy from a white-dominated political process:

In the black experience, argues Sowell, economics has always been more important than politics. Politics is the sphere of white domination and rule; economics, the medium of black transformation and progress. At the moment of African Americans greatest degradation and despair, at the moment of their most acute powerlessness, it was the laws of capitalism that did the most to mitigate and constrain the despotism of white America. With all his supremacist hauteur, the white man was not the master of his house. His posture of superiority, his sense of power, was pushed and pulled by forces beyond his control: by the laws of nature, as refracted through the imperatives of the capitalist market.

Whether one agrees with Robins analysis or not, such attempts to explain how Sowells black identity informs his conservatism and vice versa are especially welcome today, when racial politics threaten to swallow the whole of national politics and when, at the same time, some of the most perceptive and influential critics of the anti-racist establishment are black conservatives and classical liberals, including Loury, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Kmele Foster, as well as, in a different register, Kanye West and Candace Owens. Some of these figures embrace a post-racial identity Foster, for instance, refuses to identify as black but others, such as Loury, West, and Owens, put their blackness, and their concern for the welfare of black people, front and center in their politics. I had hoped that an intellectual biography of Sowell, one of the earliest and most prominent figures in this minitradition, might help me understand the present by casting light on the past. Maverick is fluent and informative, and useful for anyone approaching Sowells work for the first time. But it leaves these larger questions not merely unanswered, but unasked.

Park MacDougald is Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.

See original here:

The enigma of Thomas Sowell - Washington Examiner

Not a great week for journalism at the ABC, News Corps Sharri Markson tweeted on Monday, when the week was barely a day old.

It is hard to remember the last time a News Corp columnist declared it was a great week for journalism at the ABC. Marksons tweet linked to a story in The Australian that quoted former Attorney-General Christian Porter saying his dropping of his defamation claim against the ABC was a humiliating backdown by the ABC.

Apart from reporting the settlement, the main basis for the article was that the ABC had warned its staff not to claim victory following Porters withdrawal, and to be careful in the way they talked about it.

At such a legally sensitive moment, one might have thought the ABC warning to staff was mere prudence, but it also points to more recurring issues about how media organisations view their journalists statements on social media. These issues are likely to become more common, not less.

Read more: View from The Hill: Porter decides it's time to 'fold em' in ABC defamation case

Last weekend, the Sydney Morning Herald published a story quoting Liberal Senator and former ABC journalist Sarah Henderson saying the national broadcasters social media policy was woefully inadequate.

There are genuine dilemmas here. Journalists as professionals and employees are subject to certain disciplines. What they tweet can and will affect the way others perceive their work.

Conversely, as citizens, they also have the right to free expression.

In April, The Australians economics editor, Adam Creighton, sent this tweet:

Does such a cri de coeur affect how readers regard his judgement and capacity to report? Or should he have the right to say how he feels?

The ABC is the Australian media organisation that has most earnestly sought to resolve these dilemmas. It has four eminently sensible guidelines:

do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute

do not undermine your effectiveness at work

do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views

do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

Henderson pointed to two breaches of these guidelines. One was from an ABC lawyer who called the Coalition government fascist and Prime Minister Scott Morrison an awful human being on Twitter, and then resigned. Henderson said he should not have been allowed to resign, but should have been fired.

Her other example involved what she called Laura Tingles trolling of a prime minister last year. This is an inaccurate use of the word trolling, but increasingly politicians (and journalists) seem to equate any criticism of themselves on social media as trolling.

Tingles single offending tweet concluded we grieve the loss of so many of our fine colleagues to government ideological bastardry. Hope you are feeling smug Scott Morrison. The tweet was posted late at night after a farewell function for her friend and colleague Philippa McDonald, and it was deleted the next morning.

Read more: Latest $84 million cuts rip the heart out of the ABC, and our democracy

It is asking a lot of ABC journalists to feel detached and impartial about government cutbacks to their own organisation that adversely affect the careers of their colleagues. Nevertheless, the ABC has a large investment in Tingles public credibility, and the tweet was immediately addressed internally.

ABC Managing Director David Anderson injected an unusual note of common sense when he was asked whether Tingle was reprimanded during a Senate estimates hearing. He called Tingles tweet an error of judgement and said theres a proportionality that needs to be applied.

The larger danger is that journalists, especially those at the ABC, will get caught up in public controversies surrounding their own work. While at one level they clearly should have the right to defend themselves, the problem is the temptation to succumb to the cheap point-scoring in which critics often engage, to be dragged down from the professional standards of the original program.

Though recent public controversies have focused on apparent breaches on social media not being sufficiently punished, there are also dangers and potential injustices in an unduly restrictive approach.

The most obvious victim of a journalist being punished for social media activity was SBS football commentator Scott McIntyre, who posted a series of tweets on ANZAC Day in 2015 about the cultification of an imperialist invasion.

Read more: Conspiracy theories on the right, cancel culture on the left: how political legitimacy came under threat in 2020

Then-Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull thought they were despicable remarks which deserve to be condemned, and contacted the head of SBS, Michael Ebeid. Ebeid fired McIntyre the same day.

Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson was then quoted as saying McIntyres freedom of speech was not being curtailed, and that his historical claims will be judged very harshly.

Whatever the merits of his ANZAC tweets, they had no relationship to his role as a football commentator. Is his reporting on soccer compromised by his views on the ANZAC tradition?

This episode illustrates that political correctness and cancel culture are found across the political spectrum and media organisations will continue to grapple with these issues as the social media profiles of their journalists continue to grow.

Follow this link:

Journalists are not going to stop tweeting. But should media outlets exert more control over their posts? - The Conversation AU