Please note that you can leave a comment on any of our posts at our Facebook page.  Subscribers can also comment at length at our Angel's Corner Forum.

JANUARY 5,  2022

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

DUMB AND DUMBER – OVERNIGHT:  The author of "The 1619 Project" just can't get anything right.  From Fox:   New York Times Magazine reporter and 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones falsely claimed this week that the Civil War – which began in April 1861 and resulted in an end to slavery in America – began in 1865, the year the war actually concluded.  "We did not stop the expansion of slavery, and enslavers dominated the presidency, Senate and Supreme Court until 1865, when the North was reluctantly drawn into a war that ultimately ended slavery," Hannah-Jones wrote in a series of comments shared to Twitter discussing the end of slavery in America.  After being called out for the mistake, Hannah-Jones, who was named to TIME's list of the "100 most influential people" in 2021, claimed her message was "poorly worded" and placed doubt on whether anyone would believe she did not know "when the Civil War started."  Yeah, who would think that?

January 5, 2022       Permalink

WHAT?  THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED THIS?  ARE THEY SEEKING REDEMPTION? – OVERNIGHT: IT SEEMS THERE'S LIFE IN THE OLD GRAY LADY YET:  FROM PJ MEDIA:

Thomas Edsall, one of the few decent contributors at the New York Times, published a valuable piece of journalism Wednesday on the sheer size of philanthropic commitment to left-wing “racial justice” measures. 

With nearly 3,000 words of interviews and assorted content, he explores how much money — nearly $25 billion it turns out — was donated by progressive elites to divisive racial endeavors after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Before Floyd’s death, Candid — a website for wealthy “people who want to change the world with the resources they need to do it” — said philanthropic entities provided about $3 billion in “racial equity funding” from 2011-19. Since then, Candid found, “50,887 grants valued at $12.7 billion” and “177 pledges valued at $11.6 billion.”

Among the top funders are the Ford Foundation, at $3 billion; Mackenzie Scott, at $2.9 billion; JPMorgan Chase & Co. Contributions Program, at $2.1 billion; W.K. Kellogg Foundation, $1.2 billion; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $1.1 billion; Silicon Valley Community Foundation, $1 billion; Walton Family Foundation, $689 million; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, $438 million; and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, $350.5 million.

This is the largest amount of philanthropy ever spent on one cause in such a short period — probably by a factor of 10.

This institutional caving-in to bogus theories of racial inequity and victimhood is mind-blowing and also poses a great danger to Democrats because these causes are so far left of where even their voters are, much less where everyday Americans are.

Some liberal strategists worry about unintended political consequences from this surge in virtue signaling.

Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, a center-left think tank, told Edsall:

“Whether inadvertent or not, some progressive foundations are funding work that is shortsighted and harmful to the long-term progress they hope to achieve. It’s crystal clear that some ideas being pushed by activists and funded by lefty foundations go beyond that paradigm, treading into territory that is flat-out politically toxic and that undermine our collective goals.”

And it’s all failing, too.

COMMENT:  It's comforting to see people wake up, as opposed to woke up.   There are some signs that the woke era is falling asleep, and that some corporations that enthusiastically wrote checks are having buyer's remorse.  We hope that's true.  There no guarantees, because the corrupt racial ideas of the last few years are deeply embedded in academia and the press.  But voters, at the polls, seem to be heading our way.

January 5, 2022       Permalink 

JANUARY 4,  2022

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE: 

THESE AREN'T THE TEACHERS WE KNEW – FROM NATIONAL REVIEW:   The Chicago Teachers’ Union, which represents 25,000 teachers in the city, voted Tuesday to strike against in-person schooling and conduct remote instruction until the Omicron spike subsides.  The 600-member House of Delegates, the CTU’s governing body, decided to refuse to teach in the classroom until January 18 or until the virus infection rate hits below the threshold set last year. As pledged, Chicago Public Schools will cancel classes on Wednesday but keep schools open for students. Schools had resumed in-person learning Monday following the two-week winter break.  Last year’s school closure threshold is a test positivity rate of ten percent or higher that has increased for the previous seven consecutive days, each day at least one-fifth higher than the week before, according to the Chicago Sun Times.   It's time to tell these unions who owns the schools.  The unions are run from the hard left.  That's not where the parents are.  The best idea I've heard recently about education, although it is not new, is that funding should go with the student, not with the school or district.  If a parent isn't pleased with the school, that parent can pull his or her child out and enroll the child in another school.  The funding, which is paid for by taxes, would follow that student to the new school.   We used to have something called the G.I. Bill of Rights, established right after World War II, to provide tuition payments for those who had served, giving them a new start in life.  It worked very much on the same idea I just noted.  A former service member would choose a school, gain admission, and then direct the federal government to make payment directly to that school.  It worked superbly.  It should be tried among civilians today.
   

A SMALL VICTORY – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:  Facebook did an about-face after banning the account of Heroes of Liberty, a conservative children’s book publisher whose works include biographies of Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell and Amy Coney Barrett.  Andy Stone, spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook, tweeted Monday that the decision last month to disable permanently the publisher’s account was a mistake.  “This should not have happened. It was an error and the ad account’s been restored,” Mr. Stone said.  His tweet came in response to a post from Fox senior political analyst Brit Hume, who called the ban “sickening.”  Mr. Hume and others rallied to Heroes of Liberty’s defense after editor and board member Bethany Mandel said that Facebook had shut down the newly launched publishing house’s advertising account over the “disruptive content” of its ads.  The company officially launched in November but had invested “considerable resources into building our brand on Facebook” beginning in July.  “When Facebook shut down our account, we lost all the data that we carefully gathered for the last six months,” Ms. Mandel said in a Monday tweet. “We can’t communicate with the audience that we built. Our ad account is permanently disabled. The consequences to our business could be devastating.”  Some on the left say that Facebook can do whatever it wishes because it's a private company.  Maybe so, but I wonder if anyone still uses the term "public trust."  There was a time when some publishers regarded their enterprises as public trusts, as well as private firms.  They had a sense of obligation and citizenship.  Haven't seen too much of that lately.

January 4, 2022       Permalink

WONDERFUL GLENN LOURY – OVERNIGHT:  A distinguished African-American scholar who's been right all along, but never gets the credit he deserves.  From College Fix: 

Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown University, defended “unabashed black patriotism” and other “unspeakable truths” in an essay for the Jan. 2022 issue of First Things.

Loury wrote the piece based on a speech he delivered at the 2021 National Conservativism Conference.

“I am a patriot who loves his country,” Loury said.

He acknowledged the persistence of racial inequity, but denied that racism alone can explain it. In order to “stay in touch with reality” and avoid misinterpreting social problems, Americans need to consider other factors. Even more, viewing racism as the only source of American problems such as police killings contributes to social division.

“The right idea here,” he argued, “is the ethic of transracial humanism propounded by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.”

“We, as citizens of this great republic, must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress the universality of our humanity and the commonality of our interests as Americans…By contrast, those who promote anti-whiteness (as Black Lives Matter activists do) will reap what they sow, in a backlash of pro-whiteness.”

Loury went on to urge his fellow black Americans to view the American dream as their birthright.  He stressed the emergence of a black American middle class and the comparative wealth of black Americans compared to other groups throughout the world. He called out wokeness as denial of the reality of black opportunity and progress:

“The very fact that the cultural barons and elites of America…have bought into woke racialism gives the lie to the notion that the American Dream doesn’t apply to blacks. It most certainly and emphatically applies. To deny this is to tell our children a lie, a lie that robs black people of agency and self-­determination.”

“Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness,” he said.

Black Americans should take pride in their country and in their Western cultural inheritance, Loury said, to which we owe crucial ideas about human rights and the rule of law. Inspired by these ideals, America accomplished the greatest transformation of the status of enslaved people in history:  “Emancipation, the freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition—that was a new idea. It was a Western idea, brought to fruition in our own United States of America.”

COMMENT:  What a terrific man.  I'm surprised he's been allowed to work in the academic world, and in an Ivy League school no less.  If black America could have more leaders like Loury, it would be further ahead.  But I fear that the woke crowd is in control for the moment, thanks to the support of a compliant and maturity-challenged press.

January 4, 2022       Permalink