“I will probably never read another novel by a straight white male.”
“I will probably never read another novel by a straight white male.”
9/13/2021
“That a black gubernatorial candidate can have eggs thrown at him by a white woman in a gorilla mask, with zero condemnation or coverage, tells you all you need to know about the left and their media allies. Everything is racist. Unless racism is targeted toward a Republican.” — Congressman (R-TX) and former Navy Seal Dan Crenshaw. Larry Elder is a Republican libertarian radio personality who polls show is most likely to win the California recall election if current governor Gavin Newsom is in fact recalled (voters will answer two questions: first, should Newsom be recalled? And second, who should replace him? In the first vote, Newsom needs to retain a majority of the voters. If he loses that majority in the first vote, whoever gets the most votes in the second will be California’s new governor). Elder also happens to be black. Recently, a white woman wearing a monkey mask was filmed throwing eggs at Elder, but the event was given practically z-e-r-o coverage by the mainstream media (The New York Times, for example, mentioned the incident in the 14th paragraph of a piece titled “The vice president pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area.” That’s it.) In early August, they were consumed with a story about a random, unidentified fan in a packed stadium supposedly yelling the N-word at a Colorado Rockies baseball game only for an “investigation” to reveal that it was merely someone trying to get the attention of the team’s mascot, “Dinger.” But when a white woman (and if you watch the video and her ensuing antics, it's very easy to surmise this is the same sort of person who thinks burning down buildings in Portland is a way to fight “fascism”) in a monkey mask throws an egg at a black candidate for governor, the airwaves are virtually silent. Rather than belaboring this annotation any further, I’ll let you decide what kind of conclusions should be drawn from this, and whether the shocking disparity in coverage says anything about the sincerity of the progressive catechism revolving around “systemic racism” and America being a “white supremacist” country.
“No way to over-state what a complete failure that is: with a huge corporation and cable access behind them.” — Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, after recent ratings from TVNewser revealed MSNBC's Joy Reid and Chris Hayes have both sunk to fewer than 100,000 people under the age of 55 watching their shows, which is considered the key demographic for advertisers. For context, the Fox News show with the fewest viewers in this category on Friday, Sept. 3 was “Your World with Neil Cavuto” at 1,390,000.
“When people are able to make choices without government interference for themselves — in terms of their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their family, in consultation with whomever they may choose — we are a stronger society.” — Vice President Kamala Harris. The comment was made during a “Reproductive Rights Roundtable” at the White House on September 9, the same day President Biden announced his federal vaccine mandate.1
“That’s not the role of the federal government.” — White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on July 23, 2021, when asked whether the White House would ever consider mandating a vaccine. On Friday, Psaki said that criticism of the recently announced mandate is “unfortunate, it’s disappointing, it’s sad.”
“Thinner, more energetic Kim Jong Un steals the spotlight at North Korea parade.” — The headline of a CBS News article.
“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that.” — Dr. Anthony Fauci, when asked why Americans who’ve previously been infected with COVID-19 should get vaccinated despite studies showing it’s unnecessary.
“There are privileges associated with being an American. That if you wish to have these privileges, you need to get vaccinated. Travel, and having the right to travel in our state, it’s not a constitutional right as far as I know to board a plane.” — CNN medical analyst Leana Wen. (Inter-state travel is in fact a constitutional right for American citizens [14th Amendment], and both your constitutional and unalienable rights cannot be held contingent upon your consent to federal mandates. Just FYI.)
“Progressives replace the liberal emphasis on tolerance and choice with a focus on compulsion and power. Classical liberals conceded that your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. Today’s progressives argue that your freedom to express your opinions stops where my feelings begin.” — The Economist. In a very surprising, but encouraging, break from the herd, the publication — practically the Bible for HR departments and boards of major corporations, many of which are staffed with illiberal “woke” morons enforcing the largest intentional program of systemic race and sex discrimination in living memory — devoted the most recent iteration of the magazine to rebuffing the identitarian authoritarianism coursing through the Left (i.e. — cancel culture and critical race theory, the latter of which they completely expose for the racialized post-modern Marxism BS that it is).
“And now these people are coming back to praise the people who were out to kill, out to kill members of Congress, successfully causing the deaths — ‘successfully’ is not the word, but that’s the word, because it’s what they set out to do — of our law enforcement.” — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a stern rebuke of Trump supporters planning a Sept. 18 rally outside the U.S. Capitol in protest of the hundreds of people charged in the Jan. 6 riot who are still being held without trial.
“I will probably never read another novel by a straight white male.” — Jessie Tu, a debut author whose work of fiction, A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing, “aims to recharge discussion on sex, power, race and loneliness.” Tu made the comment during an interview with The Guardian.2
“They have shown flexibility, and they have been businesslike and professional in our dealings with them in this effort.” — A National Security Council press release via the White House on relations with the Taliban.
94%: Percentage of Americans who support marriage between black and white people in the United States, according to a poll released by Gallup on Friday. When Gallup first asked the question in 1958, just 4% approved and 94% disapproved.3
3: Provinces that the Lions of Panjshir resistance fighters have seized from the Taliban.
1.5 million: Drop in total students for U.S. universities and colleges during the 2020-2021 academic school year, as compared to five years ago. Men have accounted for a whopping 71% of the decline. The pandemic accelerated the trend. Nearly 700,000 fewer students were enrolled in colleges in spring 2021 compared with spring 2019, a Wall Street Journal analysis found, with 78% fewer men.
99%: Percentage of COVID-19 hospital admissions between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30 who hadn’t been fully inoculated, which is defined by the CDC as two weeks after the second dose of a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or two weeks after Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose jab.
8: Total COVID-19 deaths among the 73 million children (17 and under) in America. Just 1,790 were hospitalized with the virus between Aug. 2020 - Aug. 2021, according to the CDC.
7,772: Total COVID-19 deaths from the virus alone (meaning no other underlying medical issue was present, like obesity, for example, which drastically increases the odds of “severe” illness from COVID-19) from Aug. 2020 to Aug. 2021 among Americans under 74, according to the CDC.4
5,202,277: The number of air travelers who were screened at TSA checkpoints over the Labor Day Weekend, up from 2,289,578 during the same long weekend in 2020, but still short of the pre-pandemic Labor Day weekend in 2019 (6,418,490).
$1.2 Billion: The estimated cost to fund Amazon’s recently announced college tuition program by 2025. Hourly employees who have worked at the company for at least 90 days will be eligible to have their college tuition and fees paid for, upfront, by the e-commerce giant in an effort to retain workers, the latest company to offer the perk in a tight job market.
100,000: People that UPS plans to hire for the busy holiday shipping season, many of whom the company said will get job offers within 30 minutes of applying.
$1,190: Price for high-fashion brand Balenciaga’s sagging sweatpants with fake boxer briefs sewn into the waistline. Critics are claiming the pants are an example of “cultural appropriation,” and that in addition to being “tremendously racist,” the brand is “gentrifying sagging.”
$31 Million: Aid that China is giving to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the form of food, winter weather supplies, vaccines, and medicine. Following a high-profile July meeting with Taliban leaders, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the group “an important military and political force in Afghanistan” and declared that they would play “an important role in the country's peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process.” According to NBC News, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid recently said, “China is our most important partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us.”
Let me be clear: I am not an “anti-vaxxer.” I think the vaccine is borderline miraculous given the circumstances and its apparent efficacy. What I am, however, is pro-choice and a constitutionalist.
The first thing I want to point out is how ridiculous it is that the mandate applies to all federal employees, federal contractors, and health-care workers at facilities that receive federal funding—except U.S. Post Office employees, who number well over 600,000, and who go door to door all over the country. And it really needs to be emphasized just how egregious of an abuse of power the mandate is. There’s no authority for this; it's a legislative action that bypasses the legislative branch, and Congress has not passed a law explicitly giving the executive branch the power to implement a private vaccine mandate. If you care about representative government — if you’re consistent regardless of who’s president — then it doesn’t matter if you like the policy; this mandate is an abuse of power, and it establishes a dangerous precedent going forward, one that Democrats will likely regret the next time a Republican takes power. Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree snaked into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency.
It wasn’t too long ago when Biden himself said he didn’t think a vaccine should be mandatory, and that he “wouldn’t demand that it be mandatory,” and so this is more than just incongruent; it's an about-face. With approximately 70% of the country vaccinated (which makes the “emergency” argument untenable, especially in light of empirically verifiable data), forcing a vaccine on a minority of unwilling people, many of whom are doubtlessly of the fervid anti-vaxxer variety who will react by digging in even further, is very likely to exacerbate political tensions in a country that’s already deeply polarized. If Biden's vaccine mandate is enforced, employers will be incentivized to terminate unvaccinated employees, and the mandate will cause a disproportionate impact on black Americans, according to data. Unvaccinated Americans are overwhelmingly low-income people, which means any punitive measures against those refusing vaccinations — loss of jobs, barring entrance to public spaces or travel, etc. — will disproportionately fall on the most economically vulnerable. And Biden’s delivery came across as punitive, which was a huge mistake, as countless psychology studies show that shaming people doesn't change their behavior.
So, why do this? Personally, I think it’s basically “agenda crowding”: forcing people to focus on something to distract them from something else—in this case, Afghanistan. Consider the timing, two days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Coincidental? Possibly. The withdrawal debacle has been very damning and has caused Biden's approval ratings to plummet across the board, and the longer it remains on the forefront of people’s minds, the bigger the stain on his presidency and the greater the impact it's likely to have on Democratic election prospects come ‘22 and ‘24.
Imagine, if you will, what the reaction would be if you replaced “white male” with literally any other demographic. It pains me that under the current woke zeitgeist, racism (and sexism, for that matter) is not actually racism so long as the people on the receiving end of the racism are the correct targets, in which case it's nothing more than the justified condemnation of those unwilling to become postulants or proselytizers for the Church of Woke, or proxies by association for past injustices (i.e. — slavery). White, heterosexual males are at the bottom of today's totem pole in the eyes of social justice crusaders who spend hours online every day looking for reasons to be offended and/or aggrieved.
The rational mind knows that you cannot reduce a person to a demonized version of his unchosen race and heterosexuality, but the woke are guided by illiberal identity politics, social-justice activism, and critical theory fundamentalism, all of which are tied together by a single thread: a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled. And, because they think white, heterosexual males are atop the privilege pyramid, they’re considered public enemy number one by default.
Under the ridiculous concept of “equity” that people are trying to replace the time-honored American principles of equality and merit with, rule number one is that the field must be tilted against those who’re privileged and reactionary (those who don’t subscribe to their agenda). That means restricting freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood where those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice (i.e. — a black transexual supersedes a black female because the former is doubly “oppressed” by dint of being both black and a transexual [in their eyes, transexual rights supplant female rights], and the black female supersedes a black male because she is doubly oppressed as a double minority as well).
This is the kind of huge progress on questions of race that is so rarely reflected or acknowledged in discourse for cynical and self-serving reasons. To say that the U.S. is a white supremacist country or inherently racist or oppressive is so asinine that it beggars belief. We voted a black man into office — twice! — and the current vice president is a black woman! Are there racists here? Of course. But there always will be; you simply cannot purge humans of tribalistic inclinations because it's simply how we're hardwired. And the oppressive characterization goes to show how truly ignorant some people are. Maybe open a book; read up on what oppression actually looks like, and for good measure, do a deep dive into firsthand accounts from WWII vets, ideally those who fought at Peleliu and Okinawa, or Normandy. Broaden your horizon and stop with the myopic BS.