Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew [...]]]>
Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts remarked to interviewer Mark Levin on Sunday, “The problem is that the educational establishment don’t believe in great men and women any longer. They see for ideological reasons of their own, and the idea that no one is greater than anybody else, and so they won’t teach about heroes.”
History bereft of humans — both heroes and villains — is pretty hollow, so PragerU fills a big hole.
Founder Dennis Prager testified before a Senate committee last summer about his purpose in creating the videos and dedication to defending free speech in America.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media treats PragerU like an insect being dissected in a high school biology class, analyzing the details at length while missing the big picture. That’s what appeared in the New York Times Sunday front page article titled, “It’s Fox News for Teenagers, in Short Videos.”
That title makes the PragerU videos sound dumbed down which they definitely are not. The most recent edition, from January 6, features a discussion by Brit Niall Ferguson about the life and influence of Margaret Thatcher, a piece suitable for an educated adult desiring a brief refresher on the unique prime minister.
Still, the article provides history I didn’t know, one example being that Dennis Prager initially envisioned a traditional college but a brick-and-mortar edifice would have be prohibitively expensive.
The Times article was reprinted elsewhere, so click freely on the link following to read the whole piece:
]]>Right-Wing Views for Generation Z, Five Minutes at a Time, New York Times, January 4, 2020
BERKELEY, Calif. — Will Witt walked through the University of California campus doing what he does professionally, which is trolling unwitting young liberals on camera.
He approached students who seemed like good targets: people with political buttons on their bags, androgynous clothing, scarves. It was safe to say that the vast majority here in the heart of progressive culture would be liberal. Mr. Witt, whose bouffant and confident smile make him look like a high school jock from central casting, told the students that he had a question for them. If they agreed to answer, and they usually did, the game was on.
“How many genders are there?” Mr. Witt asked before turning and staring deadpan at the camera. Some people laughed and walked away. Most, knowing the camera was rolling, engaged.
“As many as you want?” a recent Ph.D. student responded, a little confused to be confronted with this question.
After some of the footage was edited in the back of an S.U.V. in a parking lot nearby, the video headed to Prager University, a growing hub of the online right-wing media machine, where Mr. Witt is a rising star and the jokey, Ray-Ban-wearing embodiment of the site’s ambitions.
Last year PragerU videos racked up more than one billion views, the company said. The Prager empire now has a fleet of 6,500 high school and college student promoters, known as the PragerForce, who host on-campus meetings and gather at least once a year for conventions. And this year, the company is expanding its scope. PragerU executives are signing stars of the young new right to host made-for-the-internet shows to fuel 2020 content, including a book club and a show geared to Hispanics called Americanos.
The goal of the people behind all of this — Dennis Prager, the conservative talk show host and impresario of this digital empire, and the venture’s billionaire funders — seems simple: more Will Witts in the world. More pride in American history (and less panic over racism), more religion (specifically in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition), less illegal immigration, more young people laughing at people on the left rather than joining them.
Mr. Witt, 23, said he was raised in a relatively liberal home by his mother, and when he arrived at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he was already leaning conservative. But he found his zeal for the culture war on campus. One of his classes offered students extra credit for going to a political protest. Mr. Witt submitted that he would go to a nearby speech hosted by the right-wing star Milo Yiannopoulos. The teaching assistant told him that would not count, he said.
He was frustrated, feeling lonely and at home watching videos on YouTube. The site prompted him with a bright animation made by PragerU. He can’t remember the first video he saw. Maybe railing against feminism, he said.
“I must have watched every single one that night,” Mr. Witt said. “I stopped going to class. Pretty much all the time I was reading and watching.”
He did not graduate from college.
The videos are five minutes each, quick, full of graphs and grand extrapolations, and unapologetically conservative. Lessons have titles like: “Why Socialism Never Works” (a series), “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”
To the founders and funders of PragerU, YouTube is a way to circumvent brick-and-mortar classrooms — and parents — and appeal to Generation Z, those born in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
Mr. Prager sees those young people as more indoctrinated in left-wing viewpoints than any previous generation, but also as more curious about the right. For these teenagers, consuming conservative content is a rebellion from campus politics that are liberal and moving left.
“We find more of them are open to hearing an alternative voice than many of their elders,” Mr. Prager wrote in an email. “Many suspect they have been given only one view, and suspect that view may often be absurd.”
The way PragerU presents that “alternative voice” is in the measured tone of an online university, carefully avoiding the news cycle and President Trump. That is part of its power.
“They take old arguments about the threat of immigration but treat them as common sense and almost normative, wrapping them up as a university with a neutral dispassionate voice,” said Chris Chavez, the doctoral program director at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.
PragerU’s website has a fine-print disclaimer that it is not an actual academic institution.
“PragerU’s ‘5 Minute Ideas’ videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center warned on its blog, citing videos like “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks,” hosted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who is black.
Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he has noticed an impact from PragerU’s content. “It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.
On PragerU’s website, there is little differentiation between its video presenters. So the late Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer appears on the same page as Michelle Malkin, the commentator who has defended overtly racist elements of the right. There’s Bret Stephens, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist; Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host; George F. Will, the anti-Trump conservative commentator; and Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader. For a teenager approaching the site, each headshot in the same size circle, it would be hard to tell the difference between them all. (Continues)
The New York Times recently was put in the crosshairs by a leaked memo showing the paper intended to shift its fake [...]]]>
The New York Times recently was put in the crosshairs by a leaked memo showing the paper intended to shift its fake news Trump reporting from Russia to Racism.
Perhaps reporters should stick to their original job of recounting facts rather than trying to shape public opinion, particularly when public distrust of the media remains at a record high.
]]>61% Welcome Public Scrutiny of Big League Reporters, Rasmussen Reports, August 28, 2019
The New York Times and others are complaining that allies of President Trump are targeting hostile reporters by exposing controversial social media postings from their past. But most voters consider these reporters fair game for public criticism.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 61% of Likely U.S. Voters think reporters at major news organizations like CNN, Fox News and the New York Times are public figures who deserve the same level of scrutiny as the people they cover. Just 19% disagree, although just as many (20%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Just over half (51%) say it is appropriate for elected officials to criticize specific reporters and news organizations. Thirty-nine percent (39%), however, view such criticism as a threat to freedom of the press. This compares to 48% and 45% respectively in February 2017 after Trump began criticizing specific news organizations that were targeting him. Ten percent (10%) remain undecided.
Rasmussen Reports bases its surveys on likely voters — those who have a history of voting in recent elections — as opposed to registered voters in general, many of whom historically don’t go to the polls.
A plurality (47%) of voters continues to believe that ideologically speaking the average reporter is more liberal than they are. Just 19% think that reporter is more conservative than they are, while 22% consider them ideologically about the same. Thirteen percent (13%) are not sure. This is consistent with findings in surveys for the past several years. (Continues)
One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.
PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may [...]]]>
One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.
PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may anger the far left. (Actually, we are a nation of citizens.)
The educational five-minute videos are aimed at a young audience to fill in the historical gaps left by the liberal education establishment, but the restrictions placed on some items are nonsensical: Mr. Prager learned from the first witness, a spokesman from Google, that the video about the Ten Commandments was put under restriction because it mentioned murder — negatively, of course, but those algorithms are strict!
Seriously, you would think that a major web publisher like PragerU would get responsible human attention.
]]>DENNIS PRAGER: I will take just a moment because my opening comment is under five minutes just to respond on the issue of the Ten Commandments video that was a placed on the restricted list by Google; the representative from Google mentioned that a reason that it would be on the restricted list was that it contains mentions of murder, so I was thinking, I have a solution that will I think appeal to Google. I will re-release it as that the Nine Commandments. That should solve the problem of including murder in my discussion of the Ten Commandments.
And as regards the swastika, yes, there is a swastika; it is again in the commandment of do not murder wherein I show that murder — there are people who believe murder is all right even today, and I use the swastika and the hammer and sickle as two examples. I would think we would want young people to associate the swastika with evil; that was why I had a swastika.
It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate, but I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing — Google and YouTube’s (and for that matter Twitter and Facebook’s) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds — threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.
In fact, never in American history has there been as strong a threat to freedom of speech as there is today.
Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University, PragerU as it often referred to.
I was born in Brooklyn NY. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the US Navy at the start of World War II. My father’s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on antisemitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.
He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on antisemitism, and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank God for living in America.
It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.
It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one’s country leaves a terrible hole in one’s soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.
And it breaks my heart for America, because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it. I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network, an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America’s moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age of 35, PragerU has achieved some success.
My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism, and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or “haters” only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.
PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime-ministers, four Pulitzer-Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO, or the former prime-ministers of Norway, Canada, and Spain, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
Yet, Google, which owns YouTube has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. “Restricted” means that families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.
Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments, as we have seen. Yes, the Ten Commandments.
We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given. But, of course, we know why. Because they come from a conservative perspective.
Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I therefore appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America’s crowning glory – free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, “first they came after conservatives, and I said nothing, and then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.”
Thank you.
Dr. Drew is very concerned about the dire public health [...]]]>
Dr. Drew is very concerned about the dire public health situation in LA. Years of liberal governance, increased drugs, worsening homelessness and general permissiveness have created a dangerous stew of communicable diseases from measles to bubonic plague. A Los Angeles Police officer has contracted typhoid and the LAPD station located in Skid Row suffers from a vermin infestation.
It can’t help that the current border anarchy has welcomed many thousands of poor Latin American peasants who have received no health screening. The public health threat of open borders has been too little discussed.
]]>LAURA INGRAHAM: Two hot topics and just a short time to get to them. So let’s bring in Drew Pinsky, board-certified internist. OK, Dr. Drew, great to see you. I have to begin with the shocking case out of L.A., and two friends of mine have told me about this. A police officer now has contracted that really rare and life-threatening illness, disease, typhoid fever. Fewer than 350 Americans contract this every year, so what is going on here?
DR. DREW PINSKY: We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now. We have the three prongs of airborne disease. Tuberculosis is exploding. Rodent-born, we’re one of the only major cities in the country that does not have a rodent control program. And sanitation has broken down. We had a typhus outbreak last summer. We will have a typhus as outbreak this summer. I’m hearing from experts that bubonic plague is likely. It’s already here. It will get onto the rat fleas. And then now finally we have this oral-fecal route contamination, which is typhoid fever — three cases, one confirmed, probably three.
This is unbelievable. I can’t believe I live in a city where this is not third world, Laura: this is medieval. Third world countries are insulted if they are accused of being like this. No city on earth tolerates this. The entire population is at risk. And God forbid if measles — this is a population that is sub-optimally immunized — if measles gets in, I just have an image of myself on knees in the gutter tending to people, because this summer is likely to be a very profound problem.
INGRAHAM: Meanwhile, we are welcoming in tens of thousands into California in the next few months of illegal immigrants, and I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of these migrants after they crossed the border. They have no papers, they have no identification, but they have a friend or a relative that they are going to go visit. A couple people had nowhere to go. So I don’t know how you check health records, and they are flooding into many cities in California, San Jose, L.A., San Diego.
PINSKY: And we can’t handle our situations such as it is. And there is a very bizarre thing going on where the government is somehow insisting that housing is the problem, when in fact we have chronic mental illness, we have addiction, we have people who don’t want to leave the streets. They literally won’t take the housing if we give it to them. And that is the population that is vulnerable. And it’s going to get so ill this summer, it scares me for their well-being.
Laura, I need your help. I want to pierce their shield of qualified immunity so we can go after them for reckless negligence. This is disgusting. It is reckless negligence. And we have to have a solution to this.
INGRAHAM: I know the businesses are upset, just like they are in San Francisco.
PINSKY: I don’t think you get how dire this is.
INGRAHAM: I do.
PINSKY: I’m telling you as a physician, like I’m standing on a railroad track, saying the bridge is out. This could be a very serious summer.
INGRAHAM: But where are the politicians? The liberal politicians in California care about people.
PINSKY: They are negligent, disgustingly negligent. It’s almost like — I was driving over and I thought, do they want the people on the streets to die? Is that it really, they don’t care if they all die? Is that really where we are now?
INGRAHAM: Dr. Drew, we didn’t have time to get into the six-figure rehab. We’ll have to have you back for that. That’s a shocker.
PINSKY: I’ll do it. You got it.
INGRAHAM: It’s a teaser for your next appearance. But thank you for sounding the alarm. This is not political. This is a health crisis now.
PINSKY: No, no. This is a health crisis that I have not seen in this country for 100 years.
INGRAHAM: Dr. Drew, thank you so much.
Below, President Obama is remembered by many as a severe scold on the subjects of immigration and muslim [...]]]>
Below, President Obama is remembered by many as a severe scold on the subjects of immigration and muslim diversity. In fact, the president actually said, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” to the UN Assembly in 2012.
The research reviewed more than 380,000 political speeches from 10 European nations from 1946 to 2017, so there is no shortage of examples.
Following is the press release from the Dutch researchers:
]]>Liberals Lecture, Conservatives Communicate, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Press Release, February 7, 2019
New study shows liberal politicians use more complex language than cultural conservatives
Some politicians use complex language, for instance long sentences with difficult words, while others communicate clearly and to the point. Can this difference be explained by the political ideology to which they subscribe? Yes, says a new study by researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA), who analysed over 380,000 speeches by politicians in several European countries between 1946-2017. The team’s results reveal that culturally liberal politicians use more complex language than their conservative counterparts. The results were published on 6 February in the journal PloS One.
The research was carried out by Martijn Schoonvelde (University College Dublin) and UvA researchers Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher and Bert Bakker.
The researchers found that politicians who hold culturally liberal views on topics such as immigration, the EU, abortion and euthanasia use more complex language than right-wing politicians. ‘What is striking is that we came across the same results across different countries, different speeches and different types of politicians’, says Schoonvelde. ‘For instance, our scores show that former culturally liberal British Prime Minister Gordon Brown delivered speeches that were markedly more complex than his successor, the culturally conservative David Cameron. We saw the same thing in Spain, where the language used by liberal Prime Minister José Zapatero was much more complex than that of his successor, the conservative Mariano Rajoy. There are also notable differences between countries. For example, the culturally liberal German politician Joschka Fischer and British liberal Nick Clegg score much higher for the complexity of their language use than the conservative Dutch politician Geert Wilders or his Swedish counterpart Jimmie Åkesson.’
Political dimensions
‘European politics are generally characterised by political competition along two dimensions: a sociocultural conservative-liberal dimension and an economic left-right dimension’, explains Brosius. ‘The former typically includes issues like European integration, immigration and the environment, and is the dimension in which we distinguish between cultural-left and cultural-right.’Political parties’ economic views do not explain the differences in complexity – the researchers found no association between economic left-right ideology and the complexity of politicians’ language use.
Persuasive message
According to Schumacher, the big question is why there are such noticeable differences in language use between politicians. A possible explanation is that politicians adjust their language use to appeal to the preferences of their voters. Shorter and clearer sentences may appeal to conservative individuals because they have a higher need for closure and consequently prefer more certain statements. Compound sentences with multiple clauses are more likely to convey ambiguity and may therefore appeal more to liberals who are generally more open-minded and tolerant of ambiguity. Bakker adds, ‘it could also be that politicians strategically use simpler or more complex language to appeal to constituencies with distinct personality profiles and associated preferences for linguistic complexity’. ‘After all, a persuasive message needs to resonate with the personality of the receiver.’Over 380,000 speeches
The researchers analysed 381,475 political speeches from 10 European countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and Sweden. The speeches, spanning several decades, included parliamentary speeches, party congress speeches and speeches from government leaders. The researchers calculated the complexity of each speech with the use of the so-called Flesch-Kincaid readability score. The ideology of a politician was measured on the basis of the ideological position of his or her party. The team then did statistical analyses.Hot Politics Lab
The researchers’ study forms part of a larger interdisciplinary research group, the Hot Politics Lab (www.hotpoliticslab.eu), which combines experiments, physiological measurement and automated text analysis to analyse the role of emotions, personality and language in politics.Publication details
Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher & Bert Bakker: ‘Liberals Lecture, Conservatives Communicate: Analyzing Complexity and Ideology in 381.609 Political Speeches’, in: PLoS One (6 February 2019). E0208450.
Hill appeared with [...]]]>
Tucker Carlson has had liberal university malfeasance in his sights for some time, but it’s a new message that America should shut the whole thing down. Specifically, that idea comes from Professor Jason Hill, who has written a book on the subject, We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People.
Hill appeared with Tucker on Friday, following a recent article by the professor.
TUCKER CARLSON: Jason Hill is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, but if we follow his advice he could soon be unemployed he just published a remarkable piece in The Hill newspaper saying that universities —and he’s worked in them for a long time — have become so overwhelmed by identity politics, socialism, anti-Americanism and dumbness that essentially they’re beyond saving.
He suggests that taxpayers and private donors pull funding and let the whole system collapse for the betterment of the country. Professor Hill is also the author of the book We Have Overcome which I have not read but plan to because his piece is literally that good. . .
PROFESSOR JASON HILL: I think these Bolshevik-loving welfare scholars have basically hijacked the system and are indoctrinating our students with not just anti-American invectives, but against the very core values that form our republic — capitalism, free speech, the morality of wealth creation.
(Spare video.)
Certainly many schools have become nothing but leftist training camps, worthy of Pol Pot. Many a young person has become unrecognizable to family when they return home after a thorough brainwashing. A 2017 report from Pew pollsters showed that a majority of Republicans see colleges as a negative influence on the nation.
Here’s the article from Professor Hill that got Tucker’s attention:
]]>A professor’s call to shut down our nation’s universities, The Hill, By Jason D. Hill, July 16, 2018
Thirty-three years ago, when I entered college, left-wing ideologies dominated American universities, and especially the humanities and social sciences. But one still could get a fair, balanced education by consulting traditional canonical texts that countered the dogma. Free speech was alive on college campuses. There were hisses and boos, of course, but for the most part, hearing perspectives different from your own was considered essential to your education. Few of us lived in our own curated silos.
Today, after 22 years of being a college professor, and having traveled much of America to lecture, I am sad to say the situation is not the same. The core principles and foundations that keep the United States intact, that provide our citizens with their civic personalities and national identities, are being annihilated. The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.
Our universities risk losing their status as learning sites and becoming national security threats. We need to defund them, disband and rebuild them with conservative principles — that is, values advocating individualism, capitalism, Americanism, free speech, self-reliance and the morality of wealth creation.
When the term “Western civilization” is equated with racism, cultural superiority and pervasive oppression, and students in my political philosophy class refuse to study the works of John Stuart Mill or John Locke (or any other white thinker) because they consider them white supremacists, there is no lower level of educational hell. The manifest destiny of the humanities and social science professoriat is to have politicized knowledge supersede truth, objectivity, facts and genuine learning.
There are many social ills taking place in the academy, but the cultural relativists who rule its turf would abolish reason, rational argument, appeal to traditional canonical texts as evidence for objective truths about our world, and belief in an objective reality. Too often, they deride reason as a Eurocentric creation used to rationalize the existence of colonialism, slavery and genocide of native peoples.
Ordinarily, the best way to counter an intellectual adversary is through a contest of rational faculties. The person with reality on his or her side, with the best relevant facts and strongest arguments, usually wins. But today’s scholars in humanities and social sciences increasingly declare that modern argumentation is a white, Western form of domination and linguistic imperialism that silences racial and ethnic minorities and devalues their “lived experiences.”
One cannot argue with such people. The only alternative is to shut them down.
(Continues)
For those who think the United States should be the welfare office for the world, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recent asylum restrictions are seen with horror. His decision is to end the gravy train of admitting women who claim abuse by the husband or BF got a front-page headline on Tuesday’s New York Times right under the historic handshake photo of President Trump and Kim Jong-un.
In 2007, I wrote a Vdare article Victim Visas — How America Stupidly Rewards Misfortune and Fraud, a shocker then and now. Washington is seriously misguided when it enacts visa programs that value a black eye more than a college education.
But in the decade since, immigration lawyers and anti-sovereignty activists have pushed the criteria ever further into the liberal crazy zone, where a foreign woman can claim abuse and get asylum to the US with little oversight of the truth.
Wait, why is a case of domestic abuse in El Salvador America’s problem? Why can’t they relocate to somewhere in their own homeland?
Lawyer at the Immigration Reform Law Institute Michael Hethmon observed, “Asylum was never designed to deal with those problems. Asylum is not some sort of global make-a-wish foundation.”
Assuming claims are true, there are many millions of potential cases from the piggyman Third World of muslims and hispanics. One study said the majority of Mexican women experience gender violence.
Below, women appreciate public transportation without sexual harassment on women-only buses in Mexico City.
America has a duty to the well-being its own citizens which is diluted by the irrelevant claims of foreigners. On a planet with a growing population, currently 7.6 billion persons, the do-gooder rescue project is becoming even more absurd and should be ended.
It’s racist to assume brown people can’t run equitable societies, although many require reform as happened in the First World regarding women’s rights not that long ago.
Attorney General Sessions’ sensible policy decision predictably caused shrieks from the well paid gaggle of illegal alien lawyers et al.
]]>Jeff Sessions says domestic abuse or gang violence are not legal grounds for asylum, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (reprinted from NYTimes), June 11, 2018
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday made it all but impossible for asylum-seekers to gain entry into the United States by citing fears of domestic abuse or gang violence, in a ruling that could have a broad effect on the flow of migrants from Central America.
Mr. Sessions’ decision in a closely watched domestic violence case is the latest turn in a long-running debate over what constitutes a need for asylum. He reversed an immigration appeals court ruling that granted it to a Salvadoran woman who said she had been sexually, emotionally and physically abused by her husband.
Relatively few asylum-seekers are granted permanent entry into the United States. In 2016, for every applicant who succeeded, more than 10 others also sought asylum, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. But the process can take months or years, and tens of thousands of people live freely in the United States while their cases wend through the courts.
Mr. Sessions’ decision overturns a precedent set during the Obama administration that allowed more women to claim credible fears of domestic abuse and will make it harder for such arguments to prevail in immigration courts. He said the Obama administration created “powerful incentives” for people to “come here illegally and claim a fear of return.”
Asylum claims have expanded too broadly to include victims of “private violence,” like domestic violence or gangs, Mr. Sessions wrote in his ruling, which narrowed the type of asylum requests allowed. The number of people who told homeland security officials that they had a credible fear of persecution jumped to 94,000 in 2016 from 5,000 in 2009, he said in a speech earlier in the day in which he signaled he would restore “sound principles of asylum and long-standing principles of immigration law.”
“The prototypical refugee flees her home country because the government has persecuted her,” Mr. Sessions wrote in his ruling. Because immigration courts are housed under the Justice Department, not the judicial branch of government, he has the authority to overturn their decisions.
“An alien may suffer threats and violence in a foreign country for any number of reasons relating to her social, economic, family or other personal circumstances,” he added. “Yet the asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune.”
His ruling drew immediate condemnation from immigrants’ rights groups. Some viewed it as a return to a time when domestic violence was considered a private matter, not the responsibility of the government to intervene, said Karen Musalo, a defense lawyer on the case who directs the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.
(Continues)
Chabot must not have thought deeply about how California turned from a very conservative state into a very liberal one — the [...]]]>
Chabot must not have thought deeply about how California turned from a very conservative state into a very liberal one — the transformation was caused by immigration-fueled demographic change. And Texas is facing the same disintegration. Sure, it’s a conservative powerhouse now, but hispanic population is the major growth factor. Open borders, big families and the attraction of the welfare system will transform a state rapidly, as we can see from California.
The new Texan is an upbeat salesman for his product, conservative Texas, which he has monetized into a moving business called Conservative Move. But anyone considering a major relocation might want to avoid the border region because even if immigration were to end tomorrow (which it should because of automation), the remaining hispanics maintain their big-government preference for generations.
Here’s a print story about Chabot, who is quite the salesman:
]]>California conservative flees to Texas, hopes others join him, Fox News, July 21, 2017
Are you a conservative who’s found yourself increasingly surrounded by liberals? Well, relocation to Collin County in the Red State of Texas may be just what you need to blow away your Blue State blues.
A company called Conservative Move says its aim is to help conservatives find the kind of lifestyle that suits them best. “Helping families move Right,” is the company’s slogan.
Founder Paul Chabot, 43, is a former Californian who recently told the Los Angeles Times that he and his family moved to McKinney, Texas, north of Dallas, after he became disheartened watching his native San Bernardino County become less and less conservative and more and more liberal.
“In California, it’s like the liberals can do no wrong,” Chabot told the newspaper. “No matter what we (conservatives) do, we’re beating our heads against the wall.”
After losing his bid to win California’s 31st Congressional District seat last November, Chabot and his wife, Brenda, decided that the Golden State no longer seemed to have room for anyone who was a “pro-life, pro-family, pro-faith conservative Republican.”
So far Chabot’s company hasn’t attracted any serious clients, but he has received more than 1,000 inquiries, the Times reported. Emails from frustrated California conservatives seem to echo Chabot’s own yearnings to live among more like-minded people.
“My boys’ minds have been taken over by the liberal teachings of the schools here,” a woman from Westlake Village, California, wrote to Chabot, according to the Times.
“Conservative views here are silenced,” wrote another woman, from Perris, California.
But living in Collin County, Chabot told the Times, is “like living a dream.”
Instead of the graffiti and gangs of California, he’s now surrounded by new homes, malls and golf courses – and taxes are lower.
But the Times notes that a rise in corporate relocations to north Texas has also brought more Democrats to the area. And it says Donald Trump took only 56 percent of the vote in Collin County in 2016, compared with 65 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012.
“There may be a fair number of conservatives who come here and say, ‘I like this much better than California,” Mike Rawlins, chairman of the Collin County Democratic Party told the Times. “But that’s a drop in the bucket. Ten or 20 years from now, they’re going to find out they don’t like it as much as they do now.”
The Washington Post used the language of criminality: Why was Trump lurking behind Clinton? How body language dominated the debate. October [...]]]>
The Washington Post used the language of criminality: Why was Trump lurking behind Clinton? How body language dominated the debate. October 10, 2016
A man who has been caught on tape gloating about groping women — and panting like a dog after a married woman — should not be seen stalking a woman in front of millions of television viewers. Not if he wants to improve his image, anyway.
But Donald Trump, looming behind Hillary Clinton like a mob boss, only reinforced his perception as a schoolyard bully in the second presidential debate Sunday night…
CNN’s body language expert Janine Driver called Trump’s movements a “pre-assault indicator.”
Candidate Trump did not sit and stay during the debate.
Do Democrats not understand how patronizing and ultimately harmful it is to their candidate to portray her as a tiny weakling who must be protected from a dominant man?
Hillary Clinton is running to be Commander in Chief, not school board member. If elected, she will be standing toe to toe with some very dangerous foreign leaders who want to take advantage of America’s growing weakness, as engineered by Obama.
Do liberals believe that Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and other overseas autocrats are gentlemen with perfect manners?
No, they will try to dominate Hillary in every way possible. Just a month ago, the Red Chinese snubbed President Obama by not providing a staircase for him to exit Air Force One when he arrived in Hangzhou for a G20 meeting. He was forced to leave the airplane via a basic ramp in the rear as a result of the calculated insult.
You can be sure that America’s nuclear-armed enemies will not be any nicer to a female president. A commander in chief who understands how dominance figures into leadership may be a better choice.
Movement analyst Tonya Reiman appeared on Fox Business Monday to discuss her observations. She was asked by host Maria Bartiromo, “What would be your most important takeaway in terms of body language?”
“Don’t lurk over the other candidate,” she responded. “That was unbelievable — the hovering. For a man that size, it’s almost menacing to be hanging over her that way. And the other thing about that is, the reason you have a town hall is so that one person sits while the other stands and gets all the attention. So him walking around throughout the entire time took complete posture away from her, so nobody’s really listening to her because they’re watching him lurk.”
And if any women should be worried about “menacing” men in connection with this election, it should be the American women who will be endangered by the more than one million Syrians and other Muslims that Clinton has promised to resettle into this country during her first term.
]]>Let’s not hurt jihadists’ tender feelings by portraying them as the stone-cold murdering monsters they really are!
The effort to stomp out creative self-expression via costumes is part of propagandizing modern Marxist beliefs of socialism and diversity using culture as a weapon. One symptom is the demolition of free speech and demanding race-based sensitivity where the rules change constantly. How better to destroy freedom than by just make everyone shut up.
In other words, traditional Americans must carefully respect the culture of every other tribe on earth, but it isn’t necessary for immigrants to respect ours, like learning English when they move here.
Another example is how using the phrase “illegal alien” (which is legal terminology, not race abuse) can now cause a college student to get a lowered grade.
Halloween is an opportunity for ordinary citizens to criticize the failed diversity ideology ever so slightly. But that liberal sacred cow must remain sacrosanct or else shrieking will ensue.
So a simple Mexican-themed party where everyone wore a sombrero required the University of Louisville to issue an apology, as did a taco fiesta at Clemson. Funny, Mexicans dress like Americans all the time, particularly when they are crossing the border illegally.
]]>Halloween Costume Correctness on Campus: Feel Free to Be You, but Not Me, New York Times, October 30, 2015
SEATTLE — Pocahontas, Caitlyn Jenner and Pancho Villa are no-nos. Also off-limits are geisha girls and samurai warriors — even, some say, if the wearer is Japanese. Among acceptable options, innocuous ones lead the pack: a Crayola crayon, a cup of Starbucks coffee or the striped-cap-wearing protagonist of the “Where’s Waldo?” books.
As colleges debate the lines between cultural sensitivity and free speech, they are issuing recommendations for Halloween costumes on campus, aimed at fending off even a hint of offense in students’ choice of attire. Using the fairly new yardstick of cultural appropriation — which means pretending for fun or profit to be a member of an ethnic, racial or gender group to which you do not belong — schools, student groups and fraternity associations are sending a message that can be summed up in five words: It is dangerous to pretend.
“If there’s a gray line, it’s always best to stay away from it,” said Mitchell Chen, 21, a microbiology major and director of diversity efforts at the Associated Students of the University of Washington. The university emailed to all students this week a six-minute video of what not to do for Halloween.
James Ramsey, lower right, the University of Louisville president, and his wife, Jane, upper left, hosted a Halloween party in Louisville, Ky. The University of Louisville has apologized after the photo showing Ramsey among university staff members dressed in stereotypical Mexican costumes was posted online.
There has already been one major cultural collision this week that fanned the flames: On Thursday, the University of Louisville in Kentucky apologized to the school’s Latinos after its president, James R. Ramsey, was photographed wearing stereotypical Mexican attire at a Halloween party for staff members on Wednesday. In a picture posted online, Mr. Ramsey wore a sombrero and fringed poncho and stood next to university workers who were dressed as members of a mariachi band, with sombreros, maracas and fake mustaches.
The term “cultural appropriation,” which emerged from academia but has been applied more broadly — say, to refer to Washington Redskins fans wearing feather headdresses or white people in cornrows — has drawn ire from opponents of political correctness. But supporters say it captures a truth: that the melding of cultures is often about which group has the power to take symbols, styles or language from another.
The video issued by the University of Washington shows students from various ethnic groups and of various sexual orientations saying that almost any portrayal of them can cause a wound: For example, dressing in drag can denigrate the struggles of gay and transgender people.
Among students at the school’s Seattle campus, “it’s all over social media — people posting things like ‘How not to be offensive this Halloween,’ ” said Long Le, 22, an industrial design major. He will be at his job at McDonald’s on Halloween — so he will be dressing, he said, as a McDonald’s worker.
Mr. Le’s friend Charles Ekeya, 22, an international studies major, said he found some of the new costume warnings to be snicker-inducing — though he said he certainly understood that parodies taken too far could hurt.
“There’s been a lot of joking about it: ‘Oh, I can’t be an Indian this year because it’s inappropriate,’ ” said Mr. Ekeya, who plans to dress as Spider-Man. “It’s becoming a bigger deal than it should be,” he added. “Everybody is like, ‘Oh, we should be careful.’ ”
While some costumes are clearly offensive to all, not everyone agrees where the boundaries should lie. John Leo, who edits an online magazine about higher education for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, characterized some of the colleges’ guidelines as “hypersensitivity to rules.”
“If you deal directly in stereotypes, you’re bound to irritate people,” Mr. Leo said. “But a lot of what passes for appropriation is simply normal costuming for Halloween, and I think that there’s a lot of oversensitivity to it. If it doesn’t seem mean or exploitative, I don’t see what the problem is.”
At Duke University, the Center for Multicultural Affairs has filled its Facebook page with images of young people holding up pictures of offensive stereotypes, including white people in blackface and a man dressed as a suicide bomber, with the hashtag #OurCulturesAreNotCostumes.
And at the University of Michigan, the dean of students has a webpagetitled “Cultural Appropriation — what is the big deal?” It urges students to ask themselves why they are wearing a particular costume, and then to consider how accurate it is in depicting a culture or identity.
“Still unsure? Don’t be afraid to ask someone!” the page urges. Photographs show students in acceptable costumes, including one dressed as Rosie the Riveter.
Students at various schools said in interviews that they viewed racial tension as the driving force behind many of the warnings, especially in the last few weeks, since stories about a fraternity party gone wrong at the University of California, Los Angeles, raised concerns at many schools. Some white students at the party dressed as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, with smudged faces and exaggerated, padded body parts.
Fraternities, in particular, have been warned. The North-American Interfraternity Conference said in a message to its members last week that they should take “necessary steps to ensure that member organizations make responsible decisions regarding event themes, costumes and social media.” It added, “Our goal is for fraternities to avoid promoting concepts that reinforce historical stereotypes and mock or offend various cultures, races, ethnicities or identities.”
Will Foran, a spokesman for the group, which represents fraternities with 370,000 undergraduate members, said the holiday could still be fun. “This is not political correctness run amok, but an opportunity to put our best foot forward,” he said.
Halloween costumes that offend somebody, somewhere — whether they reference the gore of zombie culture or the sexism of a Playboy Bunny — have been a college tradition since long before the first fake rubber severed hand. The judgment call, social and fashion experts said, is how far to go in pretending to be someone else, and whether the effect is flattery or mockery. The difference is not always obvious.
“If you are inspired by something that originates from another culture and you want to incorporate it into your wardrobe or beauty-makeup routine, then it is fine because it comes from an honest place of admiration,” Laia Garcia, the associate editor at Lenny, an online newsletter, wrote in an email.
But Halloween, Ms. Garcia said, is now often about ridicule. “Dressing up as Pocahontas (or Sexy Pocahontas, let’s get real), is offensive because it takes the whitewashed version of a whole group of people that have been victimized and abused in their own land,” and presents it as “a thing one can just try for a night,” she said.
Some schools advise that borrowing from any culture is demeaning and insulting unless the wearer is a part of that culture. In other words, do not put on a karate outfit with a black belt, the University of Washington advised in the video it sent to students, unless you actually earned that belt.
The nature of risk itself, some media critics said, is what students are really debating.
“It’s always possible that someone will be offended by this or that costume or statement or position, but you can’t base your behavior on that chance,” said Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University. “There has to be some room for stepping over certain boundaries.”
For all the worry about students’ seeking out the edge of shock or controversy on Halloween, a more innocent kind of hero-worship is alive and well.
Serena LaBounty, 20, a biology major at the University of Washington, said she planned to wear sweats and tell people at her Halloween party that she was Misty May-Treanor, the Olympic gold-medal-winning beach volleyball champion. Mr. Ekeya, the international studies major, said he was going as his hero as well.
“Got to be something cool,” he said. “That’s Spidey.”
