On “White Fragility” A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism

Matt Taibbi:

“…A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category…”

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The self-destruction of higher education continues apace – tweet has been deleted

This woman says she is right! You may not disagree. She is highly credentialed. Is she educated?

Washington Post, 2019 Journo of the Year – tweets and deletes. This is who they are. If you continue to get news from them, it’s your own fault.

Fresh evidence Obama ordered up the phony Russiagate scandal

Post Editorial Board:

“…Files unsealed in the final stages of Michael Flynn’s years-long court struggle reveal a real stunner — confirmation that President Barack Obama played a central role in foisting the whole phony Russiagate “scandal” on the country.

Notes handwritten by (now disgraced) FBI agent Peter Strzok show Obama, with then-Veep Joe Biden playing along, encouraging the FBI and Justice Department’s investigation of Flynn, even as they were told his actions “appear legit.”

The document, plainly Strzok’s notes of FBI chief Jim Comey’s account, offer more details of the Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting of Obama, Biden, Comey, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

On learning that the FBI was set to close its investigation into Flynn after finding no evidence of wrongdoing, Obama and Biden suggested finding ways to keep it open, with Biden bringing up the (dead letter) Logan Act.

More, the notes have Obama ordering the continued investigation be kept secret from the incoming president and his people: “Make sure you look at things and have the right people on it.”

In the new administration, holdovers Comey and Yates did manage to take out Flynn, sidelining any effective White House oversight of the rogue Russiagate probe — and allowing it to metastasize.

Biden told ABC last month, “I know nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn.” Was he lying, or has his memory grown that bad?

US Attorney John Durham is reviewing the origins of the Russiagate probe to see just what was unlawful or inappropriate. The public needs to hear his report well before November’s election…”

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Push back on the crazy anti-police movement

Hundreds Back Blue At Rally In Support Of Police In Manassas

“A rally attendee from Manassas said police supporters can no longer let their voices get drowned out by people protesting police actions.”

Catherine Herridge practices real journalism

If you believe the quacks in the MSM, it is your own fault. What is the number of this deep state fueled plot to hurt Trump? There have been so many breathless reports and the walls have been closing in for so long, I have forgotten.

CNN’s Van Jones Secretly Helped Craft the Weak Trump Police Reform He Praised on TV

The ex-Obama aide’s willingness to help Trump—whom he once dubbed among the “worst people ever born”—has drawn the ire of liberal allies while gaining him fans in Jared and Kimye

Blue on blue

When women were women

A perfect miss with every shot — Miss Isabel Bonsack of St. Louis, Mo., has a right to feel happy that her fellow members of the Camp Greystone archery team are skillful markswomen. August 23, 1928.

Kim Strassel on the Circuit Court ruling in the Flynn Case

Kimberley A. Strassel:

“…House Judiciary Committee Democrats were back at their “politicized Justice Department” theme this week, calling a disgruntled former lieutenant of special counsel Robert Mueller to accuse the department of giving special treatment to President Trump’s allies. Too bad the testimony came on the very day a federal court confirmed that Mr. Mueller’s team and the Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in misconduct.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit did so via an order requiring Judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss charges against former national security adviser Mike Flynn. Most of the focus has been on the legal merits of the ruling. Judge Neomi Rao’s compelling opinion rebuked Judge Sullivan for ignoring the department’s call to drop the case and instead setting himself up as both prosecutor and jury. This was a win for the separation of powers, even as it was a step toward justice for Mr. Flynn.

Largely overlooked was the decision’s rebuke of the FBI and the Mueller team. The D.C. Circuit became the first federal court to acknowledge the misconduct that Attorney General William Barr is trying to bring to light. Most of the courts that oversaw Mr. Mueller’s prosecutions were asked to do no more than rubber-stamp a plea deal or sign off on a jury verdict. But Mr. Flynn, backed by tenacious lawyer Sidney Powell, fought the charges—forcing the Justice Department to review its actions, acknowledge its bad acts, and move to dismiss its case. Democrats and the press cast this outcome as evidence of Mr. Barr’s “politicization.” The circuit court begs to differ.

The Justice Department’s credibility was at stake here. Judge Sullivan bought into the same Democratic conspiracy theories, which is why he refused Justice’s motion to dismiss and appointed retired judge John Gleeson to act as shadow prosecutor. He argued the Justice Department wasn’t entitled to the usual “presumption of regularity.” And if the circuit judges thought there was anything to claims that Mr. Barr was playing political favorites, it could have allowed the process to continue.

Instead they bluntly noted that there was no “legitimate basis” to question the department’s behavior. They even slapped Mr. Gleeson for relying on “news stories, tweets and other facts outside the record.” By contrast, Judge Rao’s opinion notes: “The government’s motion includes an extensive discussion of newly discovered evidence casting Flynn’s guilt into doubt.” It points out that this includes “evidence of misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” It finishes by noting that each government branch must be encouraged to “self correct when it errs.”

The court’s conclusion is obvious. All it had to do was look at the voluminous evidence the Justice Department supplied. Its briefs proved the FBI had improperly pursued Mr. Flynn, keeping open an investigation that produced no evidence, ginning up a “violation” of the seldom-enforced Logan Act, sandbagging Mr. Flynn with an interview that had no “legitimate investigative basis.” It even provided new FBI notes this week suggesting that then-President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were improperly engaged in the investigation. The department’s filings showed that the Mueller team had consistently denied defense attorneys exculpatory information. And it explained the straightforward process by which it had reached its decision to withdraw: Mr. Barr in February appointed veteran U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen to review the case, and in May Mr. Jensen concluded dismissal was “the proper and just course.”…”

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds

The Democrats Indulge in a Death Wish

Conrad Black:

“…Joe Biden’s present lead in the polls is a levitation. These are the dangling entrails of the panic that the national political media, which are unofficially conducting the Democratic campaign in the unheroic absence of the putative nominee, have sown about the coronavirus and the impression, desperately promoted, identifying Trump with the recent chaos.

A public opinion climate worn down by lengthy social confinement, arrested economic activity, and high unemployment is especially vulnerable to disgruntlement about its leaders. Given the pandemic, the recession, and the worst rioting in America in over fifty years, Trump has done well to maintain his approval rating in the mid-forties.

All of these elements are evaporating: the increasing incidence of the coronavirus is practically irrelevant since the fatality rate has declined by about 80 percent. Over 90 percent of those who contract the illness have minimal or no symptoms and each such person becomes a barrier to the spread of the virus, as those who have had it and have recovered are much more resistant to it thereafter. This phenomenon is known inelegantly as “herd immunity”: once the virus has gone through society, that society is substantially invulnerable apart from those with diminished immunities.

The increasing incidence of COVID-19 cases has been amplified in the anti-Trump media. The president, who was so reviled for inability to test competitively with other countries in March, has produced a regime in which an incomparable total of about 30 million Americans have now been tested…

and

…A remarkable fact about the continuing chronic disorder is the absence to date of a serious backlash. It seems that the national political media have been partially successful so far in portraying the president as unsympathetic to the victims of police excess and to the discontents of the African-American community generally. They have thus saddled independent opinion with the illusion that the president is responsible for the obscene levels of destructive urban violence and effrontery to the most revered personalities and events in American history.

And the president is only just beginning to draw public attention to his Democratic opponents’ ambiguous response to the mindless hate-filled violence of the mobs that have surged through many of America’s great cities. He is also just beginning to point out the extent to which this urban discontent is based on the incompetence and corruption of the Democratic city political machines that generate most of that party’s votes and to which Joe Biden has been bound hand and foot for nearly 50 years.

The Democrats’ prayerful attempts to retard the economic recovery, swaddled in fear-mongering and humbug about the coronavirus, run up against the popular ambition for restored prosperity. There is immense liquidity in the system, and the only feeble barrier to a sharp economic revival is Democratic media defeatism about the pandemic. It won’t work…

and

…The attorney general, William Barr, has indicated that the Durham investigation into the origins of the monstrous scam of the Russian collusion investigation will be heard from before the end of the summer. There is no reason to believe that Biden himself will be charged, but the allegations against other senior officials of the Obama regime will not enhance the prestige of the Democrats. Biden’s limited verbal agility will be sorely challenged in explaining what he was doing while unprecedented, unconstitutional skullduggery was initiated by senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration, some of which skullduggery he must have been aware.

The Democrats, their confident masquerade as clear winners notwithstanding, have already done a campaign course correction. They have killed Senate debate on police oversight reform—they don’t want the problem resolved; they want police brutality and oppression of African-Americans as election issues, while ignoring mob violence and the physical, fiscal, and public relations assault Democratic and BLM spokespeople have launched against the police. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explicitly has blamed the death of George Floyd on Trump, without elaboration. The president has his limitations but this is malignant lunacy…

and

…Despite the tumult and the controversy, aggravated by this president’s peculiar abrasiveness, he appears to have taken difficult executive decisions promptly and successfully and has guided the country through very serious challenges unfazed by the threat posed to his tenure of office.

The Democrats have descended to depths of mudslinging, demagogy, and indulgence of racial violence and national self-hate never before plumbed in a U.S. presidential election. They are afflicted by a death wish, and in the national interest and for their own sake, that wish must be granted by the voters…”

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Doug Santo