The mayor of San Fransisco, Mayor London Breed, recently announced a complete change of philosophy on her woke approach to dealing with social ills.
Mayor Breed has initiated a series of policies to deal with high crime rates in her city, which is essentially a reversal of her previous progressive policies, especially efforts to defund the police. For example, in February of this year crime data indicated a more than 300% increase in burglaries over the previous year.
In one scene of the 2019 film “Knives Out” the featured American family has a bit of debate about current events. Immigration is the topic of discussion in this particular scene. Predictably, the discussion displays a leftwing perspective but only a caricature of a rightwing perspective. The primary point raised, the one with the most emotional and moral weight the audience is supposed to identify with (the leftwing point, of course), is “they are putting kids in cages”. Perhaps the audience is supposed to feel vindication at the statement, given this movie was released during the Trump years, and obviously Trump is widely condemned for the problem. This should remind the audience that in recent years there was coast to coast outrage about putting migrant children in chain link cages.
But people actually familiar with the rightwing perspective know better.
Dear President McCartney:
I am writing to notify you that effective today, I am resigning from my position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life at Smith College. This has not been an easy decision, as I now face a deeply uncertain future. As a divorced mother of two, the economic uncertainty brought about by this resignation will impact my children as well. But I have no choice. The racially hostile environment that the college has subjected me to for the past two and a half years has left me physically and mentally debilitated. I can no longer work in this environment, nor can I remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity and freedom.
The news that Disney fired actress Gina Carano offers a rare closer look at an evolving cultural battle dominating America. First, let’s review her actual words that Disney deemed so awful.
“most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Regardless of what one thinks of using a Nazi comparison (don’t pretend you didn’t notice the progressive left uses such a comparison every day, it’s near impossible to miss) it wasn’t “anti-semitic”. If you’re offended by her comparison I hope you’re equally offended when the left accuses the right of fascism or compares the right to Hitler or to the Nazi party. Aside from the dubious moral scruples of those claiming to be offended, the offense itself is a curious thing. Offending people is now regarded as “harm”, creating an “unsafe” environment. And “damaging” words of this sort need to be regulated. After all, approved speech is much safer than free speech, right?
Aside from the ostensible selective outrage about offending people (the New York Post’s Kyle Smith points out some clear hypocrisy of progressive compassion) let’s take a closer look at the issue of “harm”.
Poll taxes, reading tests, racial segregation and the like are notorious examples of what was truly institutionalized racism in America. When such things were commonplace they were found in areas where Democrats dominated the political landscape. Tremendous progress against such discrimination has been achieved since the 1960s, the decade which gave us the 24th Amendment (banning poll taxes for federal elections), numerous Civil Rights Acts, and more.
Perplexing and disturbing as such hate may be, what’s even more so is witnessing the return of similar discriminatory policies, and in seeing who is promoting and demanding them.
original article: The BLM Platform Destroys Black Lives That Matter
July 13, 2020 by Peter van Buren
James Powell was 15-years-old when one hard summer the NYPD killed him. He’d been sitting on an apartment stoop with some other black teenagers when the building superintendent grew frustrated after the kids refused to leave and sprayed them with a garden hose.
A cop arrived, claimed Powell had a knife, and shot him twice. No one saw a knife but the cop. A quick ambulance response might have saved Powell’s life but ambulances don’t arrive quickly in that part of town. The cop was cleared by a grand jury.
If you don’t recognize the name James Powell it might be because he was killed in 1964, just two weeks after the Civil Rights Act passed. His death led to Project Uplift, a War on Poverty program to create jobs in Harlem which you also are unlikely to have heard of. A few years later the boulevards not far from where Powell was killed were renamed for Adam Clayton Powell, Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King. In 2020 “Black Lives Matter” was painted in bold letters on one of the streets nearby. You can now even ask Alexa and she will respond, “Black lives matter. I believe in racial equality.”
That black people’s lives matter isn’t debatable, but how much they really matter is a real question. It would be beyond cynical to make a Groundhog Day remark out of James Powell’s life and its aftermath, but not beyond the truth.
orignal article: The BLM movement could not be more wrong
June 17, 2020 by William Clouston
Its key claims don’t stand up to scrutiny and its proposals would be a disaster for black and white people alike.
One of the most dispiriting aspects of recent events has been the uncritical acceptance by large sections of society, government and our institutions of the political programme of the Black Lives Matter movement. A wave of emotion has washed over our culture which seems to have robbed people of sound judgement. BLM’s objectives stand out as nonsensical even at a cursory glance.
related article: Bari Weiss claims bullying led her to quit the New York Times
July 14, 2020 by Jonathan Berr
Dear A.G.,
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.
A few years ago Ben Shapiro made a remarkable comment at a speaking event at an American university. Well, he’s made many of those, which is one of the reasons his name is so widely known. It really doesn’t matter which university he was at on this occasion since this scenario would play out exactly the same at 99% of American universities. And it doesn’t matter precisely when since this scenario would play exactly the same this year, 5 years ago, or 15.
original article: A Year Ago, the Media Mangled the Covington Catholic Story. What Happened Next Was Even Worse.
January 21, 2020 by ROBBY SOAVE
Journalists and pundits who frantically doubled down on their initial bad takes deserve more criticism.
On the weekend of January 18, 2019, a short video appeared on Twitter that purported to show a group of Catholic high school boys—one young man, Nicholas Sandmann, in particular—harassing a Native American elder named Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Uncommon Sense 
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