Monthly Archives: September 2021

A Portland State University philosophy professor is resigning from his position after the university Sacrificed Ideas For Ideology.

In a scathing letter to the universitys Provost Susan Jeffords disseminated through Bari Weisss substack, Peter Boghossian explained that the academic institutions unwillingness to accept free thinking is harming education.

Boghossian first joined PSU more than 10 years ago. During his time teaching, Boghossian explained that he often invited guest speakers to campus not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didnt.

From those messy and difficult conversations, Ive seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds, he wrote. I never once believednor do I now that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

Over the years, however, Boghossian said that the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible and transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicatedthe universitys truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense wherestudents are now afraid to speak openly and honestly, he continued.

Under the guise of fighting off microaggressions and bigotry on campus, the professor said PSU systemically sacrificed free-thinking and dialogue. When he called attention to the incidents of illiberalism and began asking the administration hard questions about their lurch toward homogenous thinking, Boghossian was met with retaliation and an investigation into whether he was beating my wife and children.

The universitys investigation found nothing to back up the claim, but the professor said there was no apology for the false accusations. Instead, Boghossian was told he was not allowed to render my opinion about protected classes or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges.

Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations, he warned. I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers no matter how absurd could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.

Boghossians attempts to draw attention to this phenomenon through an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy were only met with more vandalism and physical pushback from students and the university without any consequences.

Shortly thereafter,swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators, the professor wrote.

Boghossian said this series of events pushed him to realize that every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, beeninitially condemned.

Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas, Boghossian concluded. This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didnt?

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Portland Professor Resigns After University 'Sacrificed Ideas For Ideology' - The Federalist

(Watchthevideofor the monologue and an interview with WMAL and The Daily Callers Vince Coglianese on the how we can fix our foreign policy.)

The war in Afghanistan is finally at its end. It was a catastrophe and a mess a mess that some of us saw up close, a mess that some of us are still living through in Kabul and a mess that cost many lives.

Theres no nice way to say this, but somebody has to: There have been a lot of bad reactions on the right to the Afghan calamity. The great majority of these reactions are simply misguided, but some are flat-out stupid and a few are truly ghoulish.

What unites all of them is partisanship: The need to hit Democrats, and the Democratic Party, for being the enemy the reason everything is wrong.

That need is understandable: Its very difficult to resist that partisan urge when the Democratic Party has politicized everything in daily life, from your church to your bathroom, and from your distant ancestors to the skin color they handed down. But when we gaze out on the ruins of our foreign policy, on the wounded and maimed young men and women growing old around us and on the graves of the fallen we need to resist partisanship at all levels.

Why? Because this war this catastrophe implicates all parties in Washington.

It started under a Republican who ran as a non-interventionist; it was escalated by a Democrat who beat out Hillary Clinton in part by emphasizing his opposition to wasteful wars abroad. Both those presidents eventually ended up parroting the talking points of pompous, dishonest, and incompetent Ivy League politicians presented to the public as generals.

And if were honest, President Donald Trump ended up parroting many of those talking points as well. Hes parroting some of them right now.

Trump saw in 2016 how insane Americas endless wars are, but like so many 20th century Americans, great and small, he had a fatal love for the myth of the American general the Douglas MacArthur, the George S. Patton, the Ulysses S. Grant never realizing that those men are long gone.

Now, in the last chapter of this 20-year book, a Democrat has forced through a sloppy exit. It was uglier than it needed to be, but it was, mercifully, an end. Now the rush is on to blame him for the entire thing, but we cant fall for that.

Youve likely been told about a lot of controversies things that at first glance fill any American with rage. Some are true, like the surrendering of Bagram, but others, like so much of this war, are missing crucial context.

One example is the list of Americans and green-card holders we handed to the Taliban. That was infuriating, right? Why would we give them such a list? But to quote everyones least favorite Democrat, what difference did it make?

The answer is basically none because the Taliban controlled the perimeter of the airport like a nightmare version of the TSA, if there is such a thing. In order to get through that perimeter, American persons needed to show their green card or their American passport. No one else was getting through those lines, and the Taliban were checking the list for us.

Does that sound bad? It is; but it is not made worse by us giving them a cross-reference.

And guess what: They had the information already. They knew who was in country at least as well as the Afghan government knew and at least as well as the seriously imperfect State Department had communicated to them because the Taliban had the Afghan government, computers, personnel, and all. At that point, they were (and still are) the Afghan government, so sadly, as one American whos evacuated dozens of American persons told The Federalist, the list wasnt Secret-Squirrel stuff.

But now its the worlds biggest hostage situation! Unfortunately, it already was. That ship had sailed; that train had left the station. That government you sacrificed a trillion dollars and 2,300 of your finest fellow citizens propping up? That government fled the country carrying $169 million in cash. (At least they thought to bring their toys with them.)

It was the Talibans country, and that gave them power. That is the sad truth about defeat the bitter reality of losing a war. But its better to accept the truth than cause even more harm through denial and misdirected outrage.

All of this was known; all of this had been reported. A lot of people are just angry or misdirected, but some people are lying to you about what happened. Theyre lying because they want President Joe Biden to take all the blame for a disaster they did just as much to create. Theyre lying because even now, they want to restart a war America was never going to win.

But not everyone is lying. Some mean well. This is a hard one, because any one of us can fall prey to poisonous thoughts if we arent vigilant.

Allow me to start with an example. There are a lot of flags in my neighborhood: American flags, Nationals baseball team flags; theres a Lannister flag from Game of Thrones, a few for foreign soccer teams, and one Gov. Ron DeSantis flag (which I love).

More than any of these, there are a lot of rainbow flags a pennant that keeps getting stranger and stranger. Right now its a Black Lives Matter transgender rainbow, and a few really avant garde ones have a symbol for prostitutes too. Its annoying, but fine its a slice of America.

One day I asked a neighbor, What do you think about me flying the Vatican flag in June, our only month specifically devoted to a cardinal sin?

She replied that she thought I ought to fly that flag from time to time and that most people probably wouldnt recognize it, but before I do anything ask myself, Where is this coming from? Am I flying our flag out of a Christian spirit? Out of love? Or is it to troll my neighbor?

I had to think about that. I love the Catholic Church; I love her coat of arms the triple crown and Peters keys to the kingdom; I think it should be represented in Washington; but was that why I was suggesting this?It was a hard question to ask myself. It took looking inward and I didnt like every answer I found.

Heres the point: There have been a lot of memorials to our honored dead. They deserve it they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old and we must ensure that they are not forgotten.

In the last couple weeks, a lot of people put up 13 flags in their yard. It was lovely to see; God bless those men and women. But so help us God, make sure we do this with goodness and with love in our hearts. Did you put out flags when Americans died under Presidents Trump and Bush?

Its not an inconsequential question: its an important one. During the peak of COVID, by RFK stadium (where a good number of people drive by entering Capitol Hill), a city-owned green space was filled with American flags and a counter was put up to number the dead attributed to COVID-19. Was this done to honor Americans who had passed?

We got our answer when they took it down after the election. The answer was no the people who erected this [quote] monument were ghouls, feigning grief for the dead in order to serve based political ends. It reminded me of my old hometown left-wing newspaper, which would print the names and faces of our war dead under President George W. Bush but dropped the practice not long after he left office.

When we put up flags to honor the dead, we must always ask ourselves why this tragedy is different and what it means to us and we have to pray on that. We need to always think deeply when we remember them or we do them no service.

Since the deadly attack on Kabul airport, weve been flooded with pictures and videos of grieving parents whose young children were killed like so many others in that Godforsaken country. Immediately, and over and over again, Ive heard good people I know planning political ads around these messages ads designed to hurt their political opponents, and help their political friends.

Its gruesome, and Ive told them that. There might be a place for it, but search yourselves: Do we honor their memory in this way? Its an honest question and there are different right answers but if you think we do so by just throwing out the ruling party and electing the one we like better, Ive got 20 years of failure to show you.

America will only survive by being an actual country. Its history, its traditions, its institutions, and its heroes cant simply be the squabbling ground for political factions. Thats one reason the War in Afghanistan dragged on so disastrously for so long: Many people knew it was a sham and a mess, but very few people wanted to take the political hit for ending it.

Dont let the awful end of our latest war just be another political news cycle proving that this party is smart and good and the other is stupid and bad. Turn it in a positive direction: Demand better policies, better priorities, and better people from both parties going forward. Dont see this as a way to win the next election see it as a way to have a better country 10, 20, 100 years from now.

Do we want to honor those brave men and women who laid down their lives, or who came home bearing the scars of that war, both physical and mental? We all know some of those people. Theyre having a very difficult time right now.

Its a hard time for this country. If we want to honor them if we want to show them their sacrifice was worth a solitary damn to us well do this right.

This is our chance to right Americas twisted foreign policy. We cant miss it.

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Afghanistan Was A Bipartisan Disaster, And We Must React Accordingly - The Federalist

The Biden administration bowed to the nations largest teachers union and changed its masking guidance for schools in May, newly discovered emails from Americans for Public Trust indicate.

One day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on May 13 that fully vaccinated people did not have to wear masks, the National Education Association threatened the White House with a scathing letter demanding an explanation.

The NEAs first draft of the letter demanding clarification on masking complained that the CDC releasing the guidance without accompanying school-related updates creates confusion and fuels the internal politicization of this basic health and safety issue.

CDC has consistently said, and studies support, that mitigation measures, including to protect the most vulnerable, remain necessary in schools and institutions of higher education particularly because no elementary or middle school students, and few high school students, have been vaccinated, the draft continued. This will also make it hard for school boards and leaders of institutions of higher education to do the right thing by maintaining mitigation measures. We need CDC clarification right away.

After corresponding with the White Houses director of labor engagement Erika Dinkel-Smith, who orchestrated a phone call between CDC DirectorRochelle Walensky and the NEAs President Becky Pringle, the teachers union released a toned-down version of their original statement to the public and the corporate media who, according to the emails, were targeting the union for a response to the guidance change.

CDCs new guidance on vaccinated people highlights again the critical importance of everyone, including all students who are now eligible, getting vaccinated as quickly as possible, the new statement from Pringle said. CDCs current recommendation that schools continue to implement existing school-related guidance, including the mandatory and correct use of wearing masks and continuing of social distancing, is an important and welcome clarification about the protections that need to be in place in our schools.

All schools teaching students from kindergarten through grade 12 should continue to implement proper mask-wearing and distancing at least through the end of the 2020-21 school year, she added. These key mitigation measures for safe in-person instruction should remain in place in schools and institutions of higher education to protect all students and others who are not vaccinated.

One day later, the CDC changed its guidance to recommend universal masking in schools regardless of whether teachers, staff, and eligible students were vaccinated or not.

This batch of emails came just weeks after we already exposed the teachers unions influenced the CDC on school openings, Americans for Public Trust Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News. Lo and behold, less than two weeks later, theyre at it again, but this time in relation to mask guidance.

The administration later fully reversed its initial guidance, recommending everyone (not just students) wear masks regardless of vaccination status, after modifying it to accommodate the teachers unions agenda.

Earlier this year, CDCDirectorRochelle Walensky publiclyadmitted that the agencys new school reopening guidelines were informed by the opinions of anti-in-person-learning teachers unions. This input from some of the same people who have stalled school reopenings in cities across the nation, Walensky said, resulted in direct changes to the guidance.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Emails: Biden CDC Caved To Teachers Union Pressure To Mask Students - The Federalist

Over the weekend, the magazine Rolling Stone published an article with a shocking claim: a hospital in Oklahoma was so overwhelmed with patients injured from self-treating cases of COVID-19 with the horse dewormer ivermectin that gunshot victims were having to wait for emergency treatment. A photo paired with the article showed a line of people waiting, presumably, for entrance to the overrun hospital.

The article quickly made the roundsamong the corporate press and lefty pundits. Rachel Maddows official Twitter account, with 10.5 million followers, blasted out an interview with Dr. Jason McElyea discussing the issue, which was the basis for Rolling Stones coverage.

The problem? As with so much of the hysteria media spin these days, the story, the headline, and the photo were all, frankly, BS. The entire story was based around the claim of a single source: Dr. Jason McElyea, who, it turned out, hadnt worked at the hospital for two months.

The magazine issued a correction, which, in a sane world, would have been a full retraction. The update included a statement from Northeastern Hospital System Sequoyah, a regional healthcare provider in Oklahoma:

UPDATE: Northeastern Hospital System Sequoyah issued a statement: Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room. With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months. NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care. We want to reassure our community that our staff is working hard to provide quality healthcare to all patients. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify this issue and as always, we value our communitys support.

So, in summary: the whole story was fake, the community was needlessly terrified, a good portion of the country was led to believe that stupid people (e.g.: Republicans) were ingesting horse dewormer (e.g.: awidely prescribed antiparasitic; the doctors who pioneered its use to treat parasitic infections in humans wereawarded a Nobel Prize in 2015), and the hospital had to waste resources responding to a manufactured PR storm.

Meanwhile, crisis actors in the corporate press contributed to the hysteria, uncritically sharing a story with a claim so facially outrageous and thinly sourced that it should never have made it to print.

If only this situation was a rare occurrence. But this type of mistake-riddled, advocacy pushing error is a feature of the corporate press: they insisted for years that Trump was compromised by Russia, that COVID-19 can be spread in schools and grocery stores but not in massive protests, that last summers riots that resulted in as much as $2 billion worth of damageand up to25 deathswere mostly peaceful.

Just last week, USA Todays fact-checkers, whose work product is used by Facebook and other social media companies as the basis for banning users for spreading misinformation, fell all over themselves to say Joe Biden wasnt checking his watch during the transfer ceremony for the bodies of 13 US service members killed in the recent terrorist attack in Kabul. But the reality mugging was even too much for USA Today to spin. The paper was forced to issue a throat-clearing retraction.

Journalists and fact-checkers are human,wrotethe posts author, Daniel Funke. We make mistakes. When we do, we correct them and try to make it right.

Perhaps, but this is hardly a consistent standard, and even then, one rarely applied. And the same press that demands grace for itself never, ever bestows it on the rest of us. Rest In Peace all of the social media accounts who have run afoul of corporate fact checks, only to later have their misinformation be proven correct.

We live in a world where the corporate press doesnt care about running down facts, presenting a well-sourced story, or even one with any context. These ivy-league journalism school grads care about one thing: using their platform as an advocacy tool for their ideological goals. And its become abundantly clear that they dont care how stupid they look putting forward stories controlled by confirmation bias, and are completely unashamed when their hypocrisy is pointed out to them. Because they know that no professional or financial consequence is coming just more backslapping, promotions, and awards from the countrys sneering smart set.

Rachel Bovard is The Federalist's senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

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Corrupt Corporate Media Spreads Disinformation On Ivermectin Patients Overwhelming Hospital - The Federalist

While in an exile that lasted until his death, the poet Dante Alighieri wrote an epic that changed the world. It deals with timeless themes: hopelessness, struggle, heaven and hell, morality, pilgrimage, ignorance, and hope. Seven hundred years later, people are still reading his work. What an amazing legacy.

The 700th anniversary of Dantes death is this Sept. 14. To celebrate this septcentennial, a coalition of college professors have put together what they hope will be the worlds largest Dante reading group. To make broad involvement possible, the 100 Days of Dante project is stretching the 100 days of reading from Sept. 8, 2021 to Easter 2022, scheduling three cantos per week. Churches, schools, individuals, and book clubs all over the world are joining in.

To help people of all abilities and backgrounds participate, the project will send, via email and podcast, each canto on the appropriate day, plus an accompanying explanatory video. It is also providing supplemental materials such as discussions, further reading, and explanatory notes. Participants will have read Dantes entire Comedy by the end, as the work is comprised of 100 cantos.

Here is an introductory discussion about the program from several participating professors that I found helpful and whetted my appetite for the project.

I read large selections of The Divine Comedy in college English and have tried multiple times since then to read the entire trilogy Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso but so far have failed. Its a big, complex, weird work. This is my chance to try again with what in education jargon is called scaffolding: with help and hand-holding from people with more knowledge and experience.

For me, its not just a matter of filling in a major blank in my classics education, emailed a friend who is participating through a reading group at her church. Its about getting spiritual sustenance in these dark times!

100 Days of Dante is put on by Baylor University Honors College, in conjunction with the University of Dallas, Gonzaga University, Torrey Honors College at Biola University, Templeton Honors College at Eastern University, and Whitworth University. Anthony Nussmeier, who is involved on behalf of the Univerity of Dallas as the head of its Italian program, told Aleteia, We really want to emphasize the idea of the poem as a Christian epic, one that is informed by Christianity and one that can inform Christians with its wisdom, even in 2021.

Nussmeier noted the project is a great fit for anyone who might be interested in the intellectual underpinnings of western Christianity. Not just western Christianity, either, but the Western literary tradition. Dantes poem famously reveres the ancient Roman poet Virgil as Dantes guide on his pilgrimage. Virgil, of course, is the poet who composed the famous Aeneid.

Dantes epic reflected, incorporated, and pushed Virgils work forward in a Christian context, in a crowning example of the Western traditions fusion between Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. The Divine Comedy was in turn highly influential on later authors and thinkers, from Geoffrey Chaucer to John Milton to Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

It also features the use of the poets vernacular for great works instead of Latin. Dante was a highly educated Latin scholar, yet he purposely chose to write in Italian. This has been of particular importance historically to authors keen on expressing and embodying their nations identity and cultural development, all the way up to Americans like Nathanael Hawthorne and Mark Twain many centuries later.

The Divine Comedy is a work of exile, of confusion, despair, and disorientation. It is about how Dante makes sense of his exile and confusion through a vision of the transcendent. I dont know about you, but that sounds timely to me right now.

Its a text that has something truly for everyone, in every discipline, Baylor University professor Matthew L. Anderson, the projects originator, told Aleteia. Its a masterpiece, and we really want people to gain some wisdom about their own lives, about the times we live in, from this ancient text, and for them to experience how a text like this can really shape and change how they see the world.

You can sign up to participate through the thrice-weekly emails and videos all free at 100DaysOfDante.com. If you wish to buy a translation in hard copy to follow along, Anthony Esolens fresh translation is highly acclaimed. You can preorder that trilogy here (its sold out until October). Im going to buy myself my copies later as a reward for keeping up with the project.

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To Celebrate 700 Years Of Dante, Read With Thousands Across The World - The Federalist