“When I talk about free speech, I often ask the audience two questions. First, did you know that the Supreme Court has been steadily expanding free-speech rights? Second, do you feel freer to speak now than you did five years ago? The answers are always the same — some variation of “no” and “heck, no.”
The first assertion is undoubtedly true. Federal courts have consistently protected free speech from government interference and have been relentless in shutting down viewpoint discrimination. When government officials target speech because of a speaker’s views, they lose time and again.
At the same time, millions of Americans (tens of millions!) are extraordinarily reluctant to express even the most mainstream of (particularly) social conservative views. They’re convinced(correctly!)that if they do that, they’ll be publicly humiliated, investigated, and perhaps even lose their jobs. They’re convinced(correctly again!) that outspoken liberals enjoy greater opportunity in key sectors of the economy, and if conservatives want to thrive, they best keep their opinions to themselves.
Two recent incidents highlight this concern. The first comes courtesy of actress Lena Dunham, the paradigm of the celebrity social-justice warrior. Early last Thursday morning, she tweeted at American Airlines that she’d heard two of its employees engaged in “transphobic” talk.
Specifically, she said she heard two flight attendants talk about how they thought transgenderism was “gross,” and they’d “never accept a trans kid.” She did not see them harassing anyone. She was simply eavesdropping on a conversation.
How did American Airlines respond? By launching an investigation into the offending employees (they couldn’t substantiate Dunham’s claims). Is that now the standard? Will American Airlines investigate employees without any allegation that they’ve actually mistreated a single customermerely on the grounds that their employees’ private conversation offended a leftist?
The second incident comes courtesy of Google, one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. An anonymous employee penned a multi-page memo addressing why there are fewer women than men in key fields in the tech industry. In the memo, he noted that Google values gender and racial diversity but has created an “ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.” This means that Google responds to gender imbalances with “extreme and authoritarian” measures. At the extreme, it views all gender disparities as “due to oppression.” Its authoritarian response is to “discriminate to correct this oppression.”
The writer than explores at length cultural and biological differences between men and women and then proposes some measures to increase female representation in the field without resorting to discrimination.
And how did his colleagues respond? How did Google respond? Employees demanded that he be fired.Google then penned a response that contained this ominous paragraph:
Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.(Talk about chutzpah!) But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.
That was a thinly veiled warning. Speak your mind, but know that HR is looking over your shoulder. And late Monday, Google lowered the boom. It fired software engineer James Damore for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” He wrote a memo describing how Google was intolerant of dissenting voices.Google proved his point. (Update: as the WSJ reports, not only is there more to this story, but more than likely, in the end,James Damore will be just fine.)
…The primary victims of this new culture of groupthink are social conservatives and other dissenters from identity politics. In field after field and company after company, conservatives understand that the price of their employment is silence. Double standards abound, and companies intentionally try to keep work environments “safe” from disagreement. Radical sexual and racial politics are given free rein.Disagree — and lose your job.
It takes a person of rare constitution and moral courage to speak up.And that’s precisely how the far Left likes it…”
Seriously, assuming for the moment Dunham’s account is accurate…which is doubtful…these stories are a cross between Orwell’s Thinkpol ferreting out thoughtcrime and this scene from the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers:
We honestly don’t know which is scarier: the fact these events unfolded…or The Left’s inability to see them for what they are.
So what’s a right-thinking Conservative to do? First, as Kurt Schlichter notes at Townhall.com, it’s high time we…
“A woman gave birth the other day, and the liberal media squeed in delight, which is weird – usually the media only cares about babies in the context of waxing them in the womb. Plus, don’t the sacraments of the Weird Weather Religion deem babies bad for Mother Earth, just like pets? Yeah, you can take Bitey when you pry her leash out of my cold, dead hands. Better pry my guns out first.
But this particular birth was celebrated because the mother was pretending to be a man, and her delusion was so intense that she apparently partook of surgical mutilation and chemical intervention to (not really) conform her body to her delusion. I guess we’re supposed to marvel at her physical transformation, but that would be a lie too. She looks like a woman with some surgery and a scraggly goatee. It’s not beautiful.It’s sad. But we’re not supposed to tell that obvious truth.We’re supposed to join in the lie and praise the Emperor’s New Secondary Sex Characteristics.
Of course, the media is delighting in debasing and humiliating itself by proudly and ostentatiously announcing that “A Father Has Given Birth.” Those broken by Orwell’s villains used to exclaim, with tear-streaked faces, how they now loved Big Brother. Today, they writhe in thunderous prog-gasms, ecstatic in their submission, shrieking that they love Beard Mother.
I don’t care what you do to yourself; you don’t get to make me lie.
See, this is where we’re supposed to nod and mouth the word “father” too, where we are supposed to become complicit in what we all know to be a ridiculous falsehood. And by doing so, we are expected to cede our dignity and our sovereignty by giving them the power to make us lie. To enforce it, you get fascists like Lena Dunham waddling about, eavesdropping for heresy, pausing occasionally to remove the bran muffins from her stupid mouth to point and shout “THOUGHTCRIME!”
It’s an old totalitarian trick – you break the will and the spirit of your enemies by forcing them to say, over and over again, what they and everyone knows to be false. After all, truth-telling is the province of the free and the proud, not the enslaved and the humiliated.
That woman is nota man. She is not a father, and she never will beno matter how much she wants to be and no matter how much you threaten us in order to make us lie and say so.
See, that was easy. The truth just rolls off your tongue if you let it…”
Second, we need to put our money where our mouths and principles are by, to the greatest extent possible, defunding those who promote such politically-correct perversity.
Let’s begin with Google: delete your Gmail account…use another search engine…download another mapping service…find another translation app; in other words, don’t feed the beast! We formerly browsed with Firefox…right up until the Mozilla “community’ forced out CEO Brendan Eich for his opposition to gay marriage. Likewise, there are alternatives to Google.
Gotta take to the air? Don’t fly…
…KLM…if for no other reason than their lack of familiarity with how seat belts actually function! Are other airlines any different? Can’t say with certainty; but when we become aware of their positions, we’ll react accordingly.
Need insurance? Don’t get it from Progressive, or Geico for that matter. Though Geico at least has great commercials, is there any spokesperson on the planet as obnoxious as…
And when your alma mater comes calling for contributions, think twice. Receiving this screenshot concerning ours…
…only served to strengthen our resolve to never contribute a dime to an institution wedded to politically-correct principles so antithetically opposed to its supposed mission. What’s next: political officers in the fashion of Stalins’ commissars to ensure loyalty to the politically-correct pronouncements of the day? And how are these delicate little GLB (the good doctor left out the transgendered!) snowflakes supposed to endure the rigors of combat if they can’t handle life in the Yard?!?
Hells bells; the Naval Academy looks askance at applicants who’ve taken Ritalin, yet the powers-that-be are currently allowing a Plebe to undergo “gender reassignment” surgery. Not only will the procedure be on the taxpayer’s dime, but the disturbed individual will be allowed an additional year to graduate…again, at taxpayer expense.
Here’s the juice:
Complete and utter madness at that!
Speaking of utter insanity, consider this next item courtesy of Townhall.com, as Christine Rousselle reports…
PETA Says Eating Cheese is Sexist
“…Can food really be sexist? Yes, when it’s the product of imprisonment, rape, reproductive control, kidnapping, and abuse. (Like, what: a Bill Clinton birthday party on Air Epstein?!?)
Contrary to popular belief, female cows produce milk only when they’re pregnant or nursing. They make milk for the same reason that human women do: to feed their babies. Cows who are imprisoned on dairy farms are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination again and again on rape racks. Rape racks. All for your milk, cheese, and yogurt.
PETA investigations have shown that farm workers kick, whip, and jab laboring mother cows and others who had just given birth. Eyewitnesses also filmed workers attaching chains to unborn calves’ legs when their mothers had difficulty giving birth and yanking the babies out of their birth canals, causing the laboring cows to cry out…”
Yeah,…like in almost everyepisode of Dr. Pol:
Holy cow, not only did this right-wing reactionary use a chain to force a calf’s birth, he waterboarded him immediately thereafter!!!
It’s not enough these megalomaniacal misfits have killed The Greatest Show on Earth and seriously wounded SeaWorld; now they’re after our meat and cheese!
Trust us, if Progressives had their way, there’d be…
Liberals, here’s a little 411: you may be winning the culture war among Millennials and the MSM because of the previous President’s politics and skin-tone…
…but this out-of-control political correctness is part and parcel as to why…
…Hillary’s home ain’t 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In a related item highlighting how political correctness…i.e., “feelings”…override facts, here’s a real shocker from Cortney O’Brien, also courtesy of Townhall.com:
“…”The issue of family planning services, cancer screenings, and women care probably does resonate with us more than it does with our male colleagues, and to me it was so unfair to single out one Medicaid provider and say to women in particular, ‘You can’t choose which health care provider you want to go to,’” Collins explained…”
Except that Intentional Infanticide doesn’t fill the role either of the dimwits describe!
So Collins’ solution is to…ensure the advent of single-payer health care…where NOBODY (other than Congress and the rest of the 1%ers) gets to choose their provider!
Yeah,…
…THAT oughta work!
And in the Environmental Moment, as this forward from Climate Depot via Bill Meisen reports…
“…According to Deadline Hollywood, Gore’s sequel “grossed $900K, averaging $5,000 (per screen). That brought its cume (cumulative) over seven figures, landing at $1,052,000. Its weekend gross placed it 15th in the overall box office as of Sunday morning. Paramount said it will expand the title to over 500 locations next weekend. UK Daily Mail reports that Gore’s sequel made “less than original – despite appearing on more than TWICE as many screens.”
The box office performance will disappoint Gore, who had urged his followers to pack movie theaters to send a message to “Trump and the other climate deniers.”…”
In a related item, the WSJ describes the disconnect between Environazi fantasy and the cold, hard truth of reality:
“Writing in the New York Times this week, environmentalist Fred Strebeigh describes gazing over an icy stretch of Siberian wilderness that has been largely closed to human visitors for an entire century. It’s not clear which humans wanted to visit, but Mr. Strebeigh does explain which human deserves the credit for what is “the first in the world’s largest system of most protected nature reserves.”
The conservation area is called Barguzinsky Zapovednik. Writes Mr. Strebeigh:
Barguzinsky began a chain of 103 zapovedniks, or nature reserves, that protect 68 million acres of Russia. Most zapovedniks date from the Soviet era and provide the world’s highest level of protection to the most land within any nation, under the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s designation of “strict nature reserves.”
How did Russia — hardly considered a cradle of environmentalism, given Joseph Stalin’s crash program of industrialization — become a global pioneer in conservation?
Much of the answer begins with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.In 1919, a young agronomist named Nikolai Podyapolski traveled north from the Volga River delta, where hunting had almost eliminated many species, to Moscow, where he met Lenin. Arriving at the Bolshevik leader’s office to seek approval for a new zapovednik, Podyapolski felt “worried,” he said, “as before an exam in high school.”
The exams in young Podyapolski’s high school must have been real killers. This column can only imagine how worried one would be to meet Lenin, who founded the Soviet empire and didn’t even express regret when one of his murderous purges resulted in the execution of his own cousin.
As luck would have it, at the conclusion of the meeting Podyapolski was neither shot nor beaten to death, but instead allowed to implement his conservation plan. Mr. Strebeigh writes that “Lenin, a longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping, agreed that protecting nature had ‘urgent value.’”
Outdoorsy as he was, Lenin did not see such value in humans. While he may not have murdered as many people as his successor Stalin, Lenin created the infrastructure to impose misery on a massive scale. According to historian Robert Service:
Lenin’s ideas on violence, dictatorship, terror, centralism, hierarchy and leadership were integral to Stalin’s thinking. Furthermore, Lenin had bequeathed the terroristic instrumentalities to his successor. The Cheka, the forced-labour camps, the one-party state, the mono-ideological mass media, the legalized administrative arbitrariness, the prohibition of free and popular elections, the ban on internal party dissent: not one of these had to be invented by Stalin.
…If the dictator had been a student on a contemporary U.S. college campus, he might have expressed his approach this way: Live local, think global, stay hopeful—and kill people.
Regardless, Mr. Strebeigh concludes: “For now, at least, Lenin’s legacy is preserved and Russia remains the world leader, ahead of Brazil and Australia, in protecting the most land at the highest level.”
Yeah,…and Mussolini, for all his fascist faults, at least had the trains running on time!
The Gulag Archipeligo. Or else he knows about it, and simply values empty wilderness more than human life…like Lenin! So much for Progressives’ presentation of anything Russian as “collaboration”!
Turning now to International News of Note, writing at NRO‘s The Corner, the great Victor Davis Hanson wonders…
Is Kim Jong-un an Evil Buffoon or an Evil Genius?
Kim Jong-un has accomplished something that neither his grandfather nor father pulled off during the last 70 years: bringing an existential threat to the shores of the United States. North Korea’s handful of missiles that are soon to be pointed our way will be seen as posing a greater existential threat than do the far more numerous nuclear-tipped missiles of Russia and China — on the premise that by feigning (?) madness Kim is far more likely to use them. How weird that the really dangerous adversaries are seen as posing a far lesser danger than the far weaker one. Iran is looking at all this as a tutorial.
That fact alone has changed completely the strategic calculus of the Korean peninsula. Almost every decision that the U.S. will now make, as opposed to those of the last seven decades, will hinge on the premise that a nuclear nut can now threaten the lives of millions on the U.S. West Coast. Even in the age of North Korean technological incompetence and American high-tech excellence, a sophisticated society assumes it cannot live with the idea that there is a 1-2 percent chance that a lone North Korean nuclear missile — due to a supposedly insane finger on the button that claims it is indifferent to threats of U.S. massive retaliation — could at any moment actually get through U.S. defenses to reach Pacific Heights or South Central LA.
The result is that inevitably there will be a growing disconnect between South Korean and American strategic concerns, as our own policy will focus on the ramifications not just in terms of the sanctity of Seoul, but of the U.S. mainland. Such a shift in emphasis will be manipulated not just by North Korea but China as well as they insidiously remind South Korea that the U.S. is predicating its Korean strategy now solely in terms of its own self-interests. We should expect in the future lots of trial-balloon diplomacy from China suggesting U.S. troops vacate South Korea or a demilitarization of the peninsula, all predicated on the idea that Kim’s new gambit can be used to gain lots of concessions in the interest of “peace.”
How we came to this juncture is a tale of 30 years of bipartisan failure, or, to paraphrase Machiavelli, it is easier to cure a disease in its adolescence when its symptoms are harder to detect, but nearly impossible once there is no doubt about it pernicious presence.
We’d say neither; rather he’s a spoiled brat, never having been subjected to boundaries or discipline.
His four predecessors having decided to spare the rod and spoil the child, our current President has decided, at least by his words…
…to provide a reality check. As we noted in the comment accompanying our Video of the Day (accessible in link #1 at the top of the page), NO U.S. President…excepting the Manchurian Muslim…could or can accept a North Korean Sword of Damocles…
…hovering over the West Coast.
Keep in mind, though Iran is closely watching events unfold (and this is a very salient point!), we’re not yet dealing with Islamic zealots convinced of their place in Paradise. Kim’s generals will only play along with his bluff provided their own personal survival isn’t at stake.
In our humble opinion, this is the glaring error in the strategy Bush II employed against Iraq…along with signing McCain/Feingold, No Child Left Behind and refusing to veto a single Tom Delay-inspired-overspending-budget.
Had Dubya sent a Tomahawk strike every nightagainst every single one of Saddam’s known hideaways…along with any suspected underground emplacements…how long could it have been before his senior military decided they needed to live more than he did?!?
Kim Jong-Un’s “supporters” are no different.
Only time will tell if Trump’s deeds match his words…inartful though they may be.
Which brings us to The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a day with a truly sordid story straight from the International Edition of The Crime Blotter, as Michael Brown reports…
“A Christian missionary who teaches dirt poor children in Nigeria sent me a link to a very disturbing story, telling me that this same story was being featured in every newspaper she saw today. It is a tale of unspeakable evil. Yet without this missionary writing to me, it is a story we rarely hear in the West. Are you ready for some stomach-churning reading?
The army is nowappealingto Muslim parentsnot to “donate” their children to Boko Haram to be used as suicide bombers. That’s right. Parents are giving their children to these Muslim terrorists to blow themselves up and murder other people. How can this be?
In the words of Brigadier General Sani Usman, “The Nigerian Army wishes to appeal to religious, traditional and community leaders, as well as all well-meaning Nigerians, especially in the North-East of our country, to help dissuade people from donating their daughters or wards to Boko Haram terrorists for indoctrination and suicide bombing missions.”
What does he mean by “well-meaning Nigerians”? What kind of well-meaning person would donate their child to Islamic terrorists to be a suicide bomber?
The army intercepted some would-be suicide-bomber girls, from whom “it was discovered that most of these hapless minors were ‘donated’ to the terrorist sect by their heartless and misguided parents and guardians, as part of their contribution to the perpetuation of the Boko Haram terrorists’ dastardly acts against the Nigerian society and humanity.
“The acts of these parents and guardians are not only barbaric, but condemnable and unacceptable. Nigerians have a responsibility and obligation to collectively mould our children and wards. Consequently, members of the public are kindly requested to be more vigilant, security conscious and report any suspicious persons or those whose daughters or female wards are missing or have not been seen recently.”
And then, the most disturbing words of all: “Boko Haram terrorists have so far used more than 145 girls in suicide bombing missions between January and July 2017” – although, the article notes, the figure could actually be higher.
This is unimaginable. One hundred and forty-five girls (if not more) have been used as suicide bombers in the first seven months of this year. Why do we hardly hear about this in the West?…”
One reason, and one reason only, immediately comes to mind: the MSM’s knee-jerk, politically-correct protection of Islam from any negative coverage whatsoever:
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