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Monday, January 29, 2024

PCR: The Biden Regime’s Coup Against Constitutional America Is Leading to Civil War

 

From Paul Craig Roberts:

“President” Joe Biden, who is in office only through electoral fraud, has committed high treason against the United States of America.  Why hasn’t he been arrested and put on trial?

In taking the oath of office Biden is sworn to protect the Constitution of the United States, but he has violated the Constitution, which requires his removal from office and punishment for high treason against the United States.

In addition to violating the Constitution and oath of office, Biden has violated moral and ethical standards and according to abundant evidence felony laws, from the consequences of which he is being protected by the Department of Justice (sic), the FBI, media, and the US Congress.  

This article will not make the full case against Biden.  It will focus on two major treasonous acts. One is that Biden has not only refused to defend US borders, but also he has worked consistently to keep US borders open to massive invasion, fully assisted by his regime, of millions of invaders who are overrunning American cities and communities.  The other is that while leaving America’s borders undefended, Biden has unconstitutionally committed Americans to three wars in defense of the borders of other countries without required Congressional approval. 

That Biden’s extraordinary crimes and violations of the Constitution go unpunished is evidence that the American Constitutional system of government has collapsed.  The US is no longer a republic with a democracy and a rule of law.  America is an unaccountable dictatorship in which American patriots are sentenced to prison for exercising their First Amendment rights.  Trump supporters who exercised their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly were falsely branded “insurrectionists” and sentenced without evidence to prison. Accusation alone served as “evidence.”

Article IV, section 4 of the US Constitution requires the federal government to protect each state against invasion.  This the Biden regime has steadfastly refused to do, instead aiding and abetting the immigrant-invaders who are overrunning Texas and other states.  Without any doubt, the Biden regime has broken the contract between the federal and state governments.  Biden has openly invited civil war by repeating Abraham Lincoln’s violation of the Constitutional contract between the federal government and the states. Whereas Lincoln only targeted the Southern states, Biden has violated his responsibility to all states. Under Biden’s open border policy, even blue cities, such as Denver, are crying for help against the immigrant-invaders that the federal government is aiding and abetting.

Article I, section 10, clause 3 of the US Constitution says that the states have “sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”  In response to the federal government’s refusal to protect American borders, Texas governor Greg Abbott has taken steps to defend Texas’ border.  Twenty-five other governors have backed him, some offering to send their state national guard to the defense of Texas.  The traitor in the White House said he would arrest every police officer and every national guardsman who interfered with the success of the immigrant-invaders’ Washington supported invasion.  

In other words, to be clear, the traitorous Biden regime has firmly and completely aligned itself with foreign invaders against American citizens.

Such open high treason is complete evidence that the real enemy of the American people is Washington.

Three liberal Democrat researchers at Yale University have published a report that the number of illegal aliens in the US is more than twice the number of the reported 11 million.  Their figure is north of 22 million.  The announced policy of the Democrat Party is to legalize all of these illegals and give them the right to vote, in the expectation that they will vote Democrat as the Democrats let them in and gave them power.  This means a permanent one-party state, which is a tyranny.

So another crime committed by Biden and the entirety of the Democrat Party is the intentional act of creating a tyranny out of a Constitutional Republic.

Simplicus writes about this at length providing abundant information and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s statement invoking Texas’ Constitutional right to protect Texas’ border, a right challenged by the traitor in the White House and the anti-American, anti-white Democrat party whose overriding goal is to replace the American population. 

JHK: The Desperation of Our Illegitimate Ruling Junta is Increasing

From J.H.Kunstler at Clusterfuck blog:

This deliberate, treasonous policy was rightfully declared an “invasion” last week by the Governor of Texas, requiring the human wave to be met with real force, not the welcome wagon that the federal border patrol has been turned into. The result so far is a real-live Mexican stand-off between the regime in Washington and the state of Texas, joined by twenty-five other sympathetic US states willing to send men and material to seal the border.

      None of this is reported in Monday morning’s New York Times, by the way, though you can read Is Dying Your Hair Bad for Your Health there. Nor will you read about the caravan of American truckers striking out from all points around the country to “peacefully protest and pray” at the border while Texas attempts to settle its hash with “Joe Biden.” Nor will you read about the uprising of European farmers blocking highways to protest ruinous EU rules on food imports, diesel fuel prices, carbon emissions inanity, and, of course, the officially-enabled tide of Africans and jihadists flooding into EU member states.

      “Joe Biden’s” response so far is to say he’ll attend to the border situation only if Congress green-lights another massive aid package for Ukraine, a dishonest proffer from any angle. Ukraine is a lost cause that should never have been a cause of ours in the first place. Yet securing the US border is a principal duty of the executive branch, not some optional fringe benefit to be used as leverage for other projects. Congress has already got impeachment articles ready for Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, who has lied repeatedly under oath about the border being “secure.” But it’s obviously not enough. The failure is entirely “Joe Biden’s” and warrants his impeachment on its face, aside from all the evidence of bribery and racketeering among him and his family.

     The best move would be to impeach both the president and his proclaimed “border czar” Veep Kamala Harris — which would put Speaker Mike Johnson in the oval office. But the impeachment process is too slow and awkward for that. So, now I will tell you where all this is actually going: “Joe Biden” will seize an excuse to declare a national emergency and subject the US to some manner of martial law.

      The excuse could be an outbreak of violence in the quarrel between the states and the feds over the border. Or it could be a widening of the war in the Middle East, a direct confrontation with Iran that would draw in Russia and Turkey and kickoff World War three, a war we would have an excellent shot at losing, considering our DEI-ravaged, over-vaxxed army, our obsolete naval carrier groups that can be sunk by hypersonic missiles, and our depleted reserves of armaments already fobbed off by Ukraine and, lately, given to Israel in the Gaza campaign to destroy Hamas. If such a war didn’t set off a world-ending exchange of nukes, it would at least collapse the economies of Europe and America and, with that, many governments, including possibly ours. And what role might all those recently-arrived illegal aliens play in such a fiasco? Any way you cut it, we’d be in for chaos and hardship.

     Or, if we somehow avert major war, “Joe Biden” can try the national emergency ploy when the much-heralded (by the WHO) “Disease X” trots onstage. (And we must ask whether that will just be a delayed side-effect of the mRNA vaccine deaths?) Ultimately, the purpose of any national emergency at this moment in history, whatever prompts it, will be to suspend the 2024 elections. The Democratic Party has gone so completely off-the-rails psychologically that it will do anything to avert losing control of the government.

     The Lawfare cases aimed at knocking Donald Trump off the game-board were assigned to corrupt and stupid prosecutors who are botching their jobs in perfect sequence. They are already baking the cake for Fani Willis’s farewell office party in Georgia, and Jack Smith is being undermined daily by the emergent truth about government’s role in fomenting the J6 riot. The ridiculous judgment rendered last week in the E. Jean Carroll defamation charade, is certain to be reversed on appeal. Note the assembled tweets below attributed to Ms. Carroll’s “X” account and draw your own conclusions about her character, especially her sexual proclivities. (By the way, Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled them inadmissible as evidence for Mr. Trump’s defense.)

       Now, where the next national emergency or some kind of martial law is concerned, the catch is that at least half of America will refuse to comply with diktats coming out of Blob Central. They’ve had enough trips laid on them. The government has been flirting dangerously with the loss of legitimacy as the disastrous “Joe Biden” term grinds on, but this would really ice it. Whatever other tragic consequences follow, it would be the end of our constitutional republic, and history will install “Joe Biden” in the Hall of Infamy as the man who killed it.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Trump Wins by Double Digits, Despite Massive Numbers of Democrats voting for Haley

 

Yes, it’s just a poll, but there has been widespread publicity of an effort by Dems to organize in NH and vote for Haley in an effort to stop or embarrass Trump. That is reflected in an exit poll at CNN.

Insane Democrats just HAVE to blunt the increasing enthusiasm for Trump.

In reality, Trump probably won by a MUCH BIGGER MARGIN than what was reported and finalized. It might have been more like 70% Trump, 30% Haley, but I'm just guessing a repeat of Iowa.

Expect a Trump blowout in SC??

Musk and Ackman Explain Why DEI is Racist, Destructive and Fundamentally Anti-Semitic


Musk comments are from The Epoch Times. Bill Ackman’s comments are from Twitter

“Diversity, equity, inclusion, these all sound like nice words. But what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation, and it’s against merit,” Mr. Musk said. “Thus, I think, [it] is fundamentally anti-Semitic.”

During the interview, Mr. Musk noted that the solution to address this DEI problem is for universities to focus on merit. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a man, [or] woman, what race you are, what beliefs you have. What matters is how good are you at your job or what are your skills?” he said.

‘DEI Just Another Word For Racism’

This is not the first time the tech billionaire has raised concerns over DEI initiatives. On Jan. 11, Mr. Musk questioned DEI hiring in the airline industry in response to a series of tweets by author James Lindsay that detailed the various DEI policies implemented by Boeing.

“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening,” Mr. Musk said in a post on X.

In another post, he wrote: “People will die due to DEI,” referring to the recent midair accident involving Alaska Airlines’ Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft.

On Jan. 4, he criticized this controversial initiative, saying, “Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism.”

Earlier this month, Mr. Musk said, “DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it,” as he agreed with hedged fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who shared his view about anti-Semitism at Harvard.

Bill Ackman’s Extremely Well-Deserved Diatribe Against DEI Generally and especially at Harvard

From Bill Ackman’s Twitter comment:

I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The [Doug here: The Marxist…] techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity—which is absurd.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.

I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.

America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.

I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.

When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.

I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.

I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.

In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.

Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.

While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.

I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.

All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.

This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.

The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.

The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.

The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.

Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.

The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.

The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?

In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.

The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.

The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.

And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.

It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.

The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.

According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.

Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.

In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.

So what should happen?

The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats. The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.

The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.

Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus. Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.

These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.

A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.

A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.

Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.

We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

 

Monday, January 22, 2024

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby's viral ‘drag queen’ video sparks outrage

From Hindustan Times

Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines is facing severe backlash after a video of him dancing while dressed as a drag queen resurfaced on social media

Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, is facing severe backlash after a video of him dancing while dressed as a drag queen has resurfaced online. Recently, the 56-year-old was heavily criticised for a 2021 interview where he explained his company's diversity initiatives. After the years-old video went viral on social media, Kirby raised many eyebrows about the efficiency of workers at United Airlines and the safety of its flights.

The viral video was shared on X, formerly Twitter, via Libs of TikTok along with the message, “This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of @united. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into @united. This video should tell you everything you need to know.” Within just three hours, the video amassed 2.7 million views on the platform, sparking outrage among netizens.

Just days earlier, Kirby's statements from his now-viral 2021 interview drew heavy criticism from netizens.

In the video, he asserted that his company was committed to ensuring that 50 percent of their hires should be women or people of colour.

“One of the things we do is for every job, when we do an interview, we require women and people of color to be involved in the interview process, bringing people in early in their careers as well and giving them those opportunities, uh, and creating a stronger bench,” Kirby said in the interview, per Fox News.

Kirby's statement and his company's diversity policy were heavily criticised by many. In response to the video, billionaire Elon Musk wrote, “This is messed up.” Centre for Security Policy Senior Analyst J Michael Waller wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “He can always set a good example and resign immediately, leaving his high-paid position, salary, bonuses and stock options to someone more diverse.”

Kirby's statement and his company's diversity policy were heavily criticised by many. In response to the video, billionaire Elon Musk wrote, “This is messed up.” Centre for Security Policy Senior Analyst J Michael Waller wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “He can always set a good example and resign immediately, leaving his high-paid position, salary, bonuses and stock options to someone more diverse.”

Another user wrote, “Here’s Kirby LARPing as a CEO, assuring us that he’s going to DEI the heck out of United’s cockpits.” Yet another user said, “Is this satire? Your telling me this is the CEO of one of the largest airlines in the world? Jesus Christ help us.”

Friday, January 19, 2024

Javier Milei Schools the Communists & Socialists at the WEF

 

Transcript from StoppingSocialism.com:

Good afternoon. Thank you very much.

Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. Some have been motivated by well-meaning individuals who are willing to help others, and others have been motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste.

We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. Do believe me: no one is in better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.

Thirty five years after we adopted the model of freedom, back in 1860, we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally.

But before having the discussion, it would first be important for us to take a look at the data that demonstrate why free enterprise capitalism is not just the only possible system to end world poverty, but also that it’s the only morally desirable system to achieve this.

If we look at the history of economic progress, we can see how between the year zero and the year 1800 approximately, world per capita GDP practically remained constant throughout the whole reference period.

If you look at a graph of the evolution of economic growth throughout the history of humanity, you would see a hockey stick graph, an exponential function that remained constant for 90% of the time and which was exponentially triggered starting in the 19th century.

The only exception to this history of stagnation was in the late 15th century, with the discovery of the American continent, but for this exception, throughout the whole period between the year zero and the year 1800, global per capita GDP stagnated.

Now, it’s not just that capitalism brought about an explosion in wealth from the moment it was adopted as an economic system, but also, if you look at the data, what you will see is that growth continues to accelerate throughout the whole period.

And throughout the whole period between the year zero and the year 1800, the per capita GDP growth rate remains stable at around 0.02% annually. So almost no growth. Starting in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, the compound annual growth rate was 0.66%. And at that rate, in order to double per capita GDP, you would need some 107 years.

Now, if you look at the period between the year 1900 and the year 1950, the growth rate accelerated to 1.66% a year. So you no longer need 107 years to double per capita GDP – but 66. And if you take the period between 1950 and the year 2000, you will see that the growth rate was 2.1%, which would mean that in only 33 years we could double the world’s per capita GDP.

This trend, far from stopping, remains well alive today. If we take the period between the years 2000 and 2023, the growth rate again accelerated to 3% a year, which means that we could double world per capita GDP in just 23 years.

That said, when you look at per capita GDP since the year 1800 until today, what you will see is that after the Industrial Revolution, global per capita GDP multiplied by over 15 times, which meant a boom in growth that lifted 90% of the global population out of poverty.

We should remember that by the year 1800, about 95% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. And that figure dropped to 5% by the year 2020, prior to the pandemic. The conclusion is obvious.

Far from being the cause of our problems, free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty across our planet. The empirical evidence is unquestionable.

Therefore since there is no doubt that free enterprise capitalism is superior in productive terms, the left-wing doxa has attacked capitalism, alleging matters of morality, saying – that’s what the detractors claim – that it’s unjust. They say that capitalism is evil because it’s individualistic and that collectivism is good because it’s altruistic. Of course, with the money of others.

So they therefore advocate for social justice. But this concept, which in the developed world became fashionable in recent times, in my country has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years. The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn’t contribute to general well-being.

Quite on the contrary, it’s an intrinsically unfair idea because it’s violent. It’s unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively. Or can any one of us say that we voluntarily pay taxes? This means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom.

Those who promote social justice start with the idea that the whole economy is a pie that can be shared differently. But that pie is not a given. It’s wealth that is generated in what Israel Kirzner, for instance, calls a market discovery process.

If the goods or services offered by a business are not wanted, the business will fail unless it adapts to what the market is demanding. They will do well and produce more if they make a good quality product at an attractive price. So the market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward.

But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less.

The pie will be smaller, and this will harm society as a whole. Collectivism, by inhibiting these discovery processes and hindering the appropriation of discoveries, ends up binding the hands of entrepreneurs and prevents them from offering better goods and services at a better price.

So how come academia, international organisations, economic theorists and politicians demonise an economic system that has not only lifted 90% of the world’s population out of extreme poverty but has continued to do this faster and faster?

Thanks to free trade capitalism, the world is now living its best moment. Never in all of mankind or humanity’s history has there been a time of more prosperity than today. This is true for all. The world of today has more freedom, is rich, more peaceful and prosperous. This is particularly true for countries that have more economic freedom and respect the property rights of individuals.

Countries that have more freedom are 12 times richer than those that are repressed. The lowest percentile in free countries is better off than 90% of the population in repressed countries. Poverty is 25 times lower and extreme poverty is 50 times lower. And citizens in free countries live 25% longer than citizens in repressed countries.

Now what is it that we mean when we talk about libertarianism? And let me quote the words of the greatest authority on freedom in Argentina, Professor Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr, who says that libertarianism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression, in defence of the right to life, liberty and property.

Its fundamental institutions are private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, and the division of labour and social cooperation, in which success is achieved only by serving others with goods of better quality or at a better price.

In other words, capitalist successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is a hero.

And this is the model that we are advocating for the Argentina of the future. A model based on the fundamental principle of libertarianism. The defence of life, of freedom and of property.

Now, if the free enterprise, capitalism and economic freedom have proven to be extraordinary instruments to end poverty in the world, and we are now at the best time in the history of humanity, it is worth asking why I say that the West is in danger.

And I say this precisely because in countries that should defend the values of the free market, private property and the other institutions of libertarianism, sectors of the political and economic establishment are undermining the foundations of libertarianism, opening up the doors to socialism and potentially condemning us to poverty, misery and stagnation.

It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it’s been tried out. It’s been a failure economically, socially, culturally and it also murdered over 100 million human beings.

The essential problem of the West today is not just that we need to come to grips with those who, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overwhelming empirical evidence, continue to advocate for impoverishing socialism.

But there’s also our own leaders, thinkers and academics who are relying on a misguided theoretical framework to undermine the fundamentals of the system that has given us the greatest expansion of wealth and prosperity in our history.

The theoretical framework to which I refer is that of Neoclassical economic theory, which designs a set of instruments that, unwillingly or without meaning to, end up serving intervention by the state, socialism and social degradation.

The problem with Neoclassicals is that the model they fell in love with does not map reality, so they put down their mistakes to supposed market failures rather than reviewing the premises of the model.

Under the pretext of a supposed market failure, regulations are introduced. These regulations create distortions in the price system, prevent economic calculus, and therefore also prevent saving, investment and growth.

This problem lies mainly in the fact that not even supposed libertarian economists understand what the market is because if they did understand, it would quickly be seen that it’s impossible for there to be market failures.

The market is not a mere graph describing a curve of supply and demand. The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures.

If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence.

Consequently, if someone considers that there is a market failure, I would suggest that they check to see if there is state intervention involved. And if they find that that’s not the case, I would suggest that they check again, because obviously there’s a mistake. Market failures do not exist.

An example of the so-called market failures described by the Neoclassicals is the concentrated structure of the economy. From the year 1800 onwards, with the population multiplying by 8 or 9 times, per capita GDP grew by over 15 times, so there were growing returns which took extreme poverty from 95% to 5%.

However, the presence of growing returns involves concentrated structures, what we would call a monopoly. How come, then, something that has generated so much well-being for the Neoclassical theory is a market failure?

Neoclassical economists think outside of the box. When the model fails, you shouldn’t get angry with reality but rather with a model and change it. The dilemma faced by the Neoclassical model is that they say they wish to perfect the function of the market by attacking what they consider to be failures. But in so doing, they don’t just open up the doors to socialism but also go against economic growth.

For example, regulating monopolies, destroying their profits and destroying growing returns would automatically destroy economic growth.

However, faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful – and the empirical evidence that it has failed couldn’t have been otherwise – the solution proposed by collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation, which creates a downward spiral of regulations until we are all poorer and our lives depend on a bureaucrat sitting in a luxury office.

Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda: they left behind the class struggle based on the economic system and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life and to economic growth.

The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman. Libertarianism already provides for equality of the sexes. The cornerstone of our creed is that all humans are created equal and that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the Creator, including life, freedom and ownership.

All that the radical feminism agenda has led to is greater state intervention to hinder economic process, giving jobs to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society. Examples are ministries of women or international organisations devoted to promoting this agenda.

Another conflict presented by socialists is that of humans against nature, claiming that we human beings damage a planet which should be protected at all costs, even going as far as advocating for population control mechanisms or the abortion agenda.

Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have taken a stronghold in our society. Neo-Marxists have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world, and this they have achieved by appropriating the media, culture, universities and also international organisations.

The latter case is the most serious one, probably because these are institutions that have enormous influence on the political and economic decisions of their member states.

Fortunately there’s more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard, because we see that if we don’t truly and decisively fight against these ideas, the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of state regulation, socialism, poverty and less freedom, and therefore, worse standards of living.

The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path. I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it’s only ridiculous if you only limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it’s an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances.

Today, states don’t need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.

This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted ideologies in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, socialist, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists.

Ultimately, there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to the one that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history.

We have come here today to invite the Western world to get back on the path to prosperity. Economic freedom, limited government and unlimited respect for private property are essential elements for economic growth. The impoverishment produced by collectivism is not a fantasy, nor is it an inescapable fate. It’s a reality that we Argentines know very well.

We have lived through this. We have been through this because, as I said earlier, ever since we decided to abandon the model of freedom that had made us rich, we have been caught up in a downward spiral – a spiral by which we are poorer and poorer, day by day.

This is something we have lived through and we are here to warn you about what can happen if countries in the Western world, that became rich through the model of freedom, stay on this path of servitude.

The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be, how much you may have in terms of natural resources, how skilled your population may be, how educated, or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank – if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.

Therefore, in conclusion, I would like to leave a message for all business people here and those who are not here in person but are following from around the world:

Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen.

Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing.

Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch and unconditional ally.

Thank you very much and long live freedom!

Pastor Corey Brooks: America Works, DEI Doesn't

 

Corey Brooks: A Christian Man who still believes that American ideals remain the answer for ALL individuals and communities —-not all this DEI racism crap. His ministry serves Chicago’s South Side. Read about him here
From Pastor Corey Brooks writing for Tablet Magazine:

When I step out of my church on Chicago’s South Side onto King Drive, I can see the infamous and massive Parkway Gardens—Michelle Obama’s first home before it became a dilapidated housing project. Behind the projects is an elementary school where only 4% of the kids are proficient in math and 6% in English. The nearby Walgreens and McDonald’s fled not too long ago, leaving us with no pharmacy, fewer jobs, and two boarded-up, graffitied buildings. Few people own their homes. Gangs control the streets. And nearly everybody I see on the street has had a family member shot.

My community has been bombarded with one liberal policy after another since the 1960s.

My community is so far behind that I no longer look at the data showing how we’re on the bottom of every education and socioeconomic chart. I see the evidence every day. That’s why it sickens me whenever I read news of our culture war over DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), most recently during the public trial of Claudine Gay. What struck me was that several DEI advocates, in their defense of Gay, claimed to be fighting for communities like mine. They talked of how not everybody is born equal, how systemic racism is in the DNA of America, how white supremacy keeps us down at every turn, and the absurd oppressor-oppressed binary that leaves no gray area for nuance.

This experience was disembodying. It was like listening to people who don’t know you talk about you as if they knew you from way back when. Sometimes this disconnect between this DEI ideology and the realities of my community was so deep that it was laughable.

For instance, while DEI ideologues and beneficiaries like Gay may share the same skin color with us, there is very little, if anything, that my community had in common with a woman born to a wealthy Haitian family and schooled at the best of America’s schools. These DEI advocates were exploiting the pain of my community to gaslight their opponents and this troubled me the most because it hurts and hinders our efforts to truly make lasting progress.

The reality is that DEI is an ideology for the privileged. It helps people like Claudine Gay who exploit race for power and prestige and it hurts communities like mine by exploiting them for poverty-porn.

Let me give you an example of what my life as a pastor to my struggling community is actually like. One late night several years ago, I remember looking out my office window across the street at the empty lot where I had dreams of building a community center when I heard footsteps in the hallway. One never knows what to expect in this neighborhood and the last person I expected to see was Jonathan Watkins. I knew him around as a gang member and had tried to talk to him several times.

He stepped into my office, looked at me, and said, “Pastor, I just had my first kid and I lost her today.”

That morning he had strapped his 6-month-old baby girl, Jonylah, into the car seat. He was about to drive her to day care when a bullet entered through the car window and killed her instantly. Jonathan was shot badly, too. He belonged to a gang, and the shooting was gang related.

My community has been bombarded with one liberal policy after another since the 1960s.

The pain on Jonathan’s face was terrible. I knew retaliation was on his mind since so few murders around here are ever solved. I feared losing him back to the streets.

Over the next several months, I counseled him in the ways of Christ and how to live on the legal side of the world. He went through job trainings, learned how to build credit and opened his first bank account. I got him a job working for Pat Milligan at Metro Ford.

Then one day he quit and disappeared. He told Pat that he could make more money in the streets than washing and buffing these cars. I also knew that he had bought a gun in the days after his baby’s death and that he knew the identity of the killer. I feared losing him to prison or worse.

I feared that I had failed to help Jonathan. I knew the struggles he faced, inside and outside. God can be a powerful help in a troubled man’s life. So can regular work. So can having a mentor who knows your situation and can help you understand your responsibilities to yourself and to your community. But in that moment, I feared that the forces arrayed against Jonathan, and within Jonathan, were simply too great for him to overcome. As someone who lives and works on the South Side of Chicago, I understood what he was up against.

DEI ideology didn’t offer Jonathan a better life; it has no ability to help him. It doesn’t offer faith, and it doesn’t offer meaningful work. It doesn’t live with us on the South Side of Chicago. It’s manipulative rhetoric, a way of exploiting Jonathan’s tragedy, and the tragedy of thousands of young men like him, on behalf of professional-class ideologues who seek to use our pain to fuel their rise through American institutions. Their stock-in-trade is a soul-destroying poison whose moral and real-world effects are as negative for our communities as those of any other drug that is sold here.

When I was younger, I used to believe in the power of race. I thought there was meaning in it. When I first arrived in Chicago from the Indiana countryside where I’m originally from, I was amazed by how many diversity type of programs there were in Chicago to help my new congregation. In my youthful earnestness, I attended these workshops where I heard a variation of the same message: We will help uplift you so you can diversify the world. But whatever hopeful energy that was stirred up within these workshops was often deflated not too long after we walked out the door.

It took me a while to understand that these trainings failed because they were grounded in race and the only way to get ahead was to play the race game. Another thing I noticed about these diversity meetings was that, as time went on, there was an increasingly totalitarian focus on race that made me uncomfortable, as a pastor and as a human being. It eventually reached the point where race and racism became the only acceptable explanations within the context of diversity language for whatever happened out in the world.

But what truly bothered me was that these diversity initiatives, especially the latest DEI version, blamed the failures of my neighborhood on white supremacy. Red-lining and block-busting certainly played a role in defining our neighborhood—a negative role. But the reality is that my community has been bombarded with one liberal policy after another since the 1960s.

We were encouraged to move out of our homes—many admittedly not in good condition, but which we owned—and into housing projects where we had zero equity. Man-in-the-house rules broke apart too many families. Our schools produced far too many illiterates. For decades, our culture celebrated and rewarded Black deviancy, as shown on countless rap videos. The only way too many of our children know how to buy food is with Uncle Sam’s dollar. All the while, government officials and nonprofit overseers whispered sweet nothings into our ears while getting paid.

I saw this coming as far back as 2011. One night that year, I remember staring out my church office’s window at the garishly ugly motel across the street. For too long, I watched kids pass by the ungodly scenes of drugs, prostitution, and murder at the motel on their way to school. I pleaded for help from everyone and received nothing. I realized there was no true interest in ending the decline, and that my community was on its own.

The very government that ran our community down to the ground and seduced those coming out of four centuries of oppression with policies of dependency, would not help us.

It was at that moment that I became free. The act of looking beyond race freed me up to see real solutions to my community’s problems.

Not too long after that 2011 night, I walked across the street from my church, placed a ladder against the motel, and climbed to the roof where I stayed for 94 days until I raised enough money to buy and tear down the building that had become a blight on our community.

In doing so, I behaved not as a Black man but as an American citizen. It was when I used America’s own principles as my guiding light that I made progress. My community could see it, and they could feel it. The motel was gone. Prostitution, drugs, and murders all went down.

That is why when I hear DEI advocates describe the American principles of merit, freedom, and agency as white supremacist values, I know that this language is toxic for my community and for the lives we are trying to save. The rhetoric of victimization isn’t truthful. It only weakens our ability to solve our own problems and deepens the damage done to our communities by post-1960s liberalism.

That is why the recent decision of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to eliminate some of Chicago’s top schools in the name of equity was so devastating to our communities. What equity means for these DEI folks is achieving parity with Blacks on the bottom, instead of strengthening our ability to lift ourselves up. The framework of negative achievement that DEI offers is truly insulting. After 60 years of failing to end intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, and intergenerational illiteracy in my community, the DEI folks have decided to lower America down to our level—right at the moment when we’re trying to get out of it.

Ever since I came down from that motel rooftop, I have preached American principles to the kids in the streets of Chicago’s South Side. I never focus on race, the violence, or the poverty around them—they know all about that already. Instead, I tell them what they never hear in the streets: that they are worthy, that they are somebody, that they have a purpose in life, and that they have the tools and the ability to create positive change for themselves and for their community.

The tools I give them are timeless and universal: Respect your parents, be on time, study hard, work hard, pray, be responsible, be accountable, don’t blame the white man, save money, build credit, plan for the future, get married, be a parent. You fall—get back up. Just do it.

I drilled those words into Jonathan in the months before he lost his daughter, and which was why I was particularly despondent when he disappeared. Then, one day, he came up to me. We hugged, and he told me he had, as I feared, found out the name of the shooter, and had been debating taking vengeance for his daughter’s death for some time. “I wanted to,” he told me. “But you showed me my better self, and that’s what kept pulling me away from doing it.”

What I tried to explain to him was that hope lies in American principles. Despair and further generations of poverty, disease, and hopelessness lie in the DEI principles. We may be on the bottom of America, but the power of American principles and America’s promise are equally ours. The tragedy is that false promises of uplift from outsiders have blinded us to our greatest power for so long: ourselves.

Recently, I found myself standing next to Jonathan in front of the office window. He now works for my community center, Project H.O.O.D. (Helping Others Obtain Destiny), as a core member of our violence-impact team. He is also a father to three beautiful children. Across the street, we watched workers, cranes, and lifts working together to build the community center of our dreams. It was not the tomfoolery of DEI, which is a modern form of blackface, but our belief in ourselves and our own dignity, belief in the power of our community, and belief in America that is making the reversal of decades of decay possible.

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

THE TEN MOST DANGEROUS COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD FOR CHRISTIANS IN 2023

Also see the GCC Post of Raymond Ibraham’s A Pandemic You Rarely Hear About: 360 Millon Christians Persecuted Worldwide

From Open Doors US World Watch Report for 2023 

Over the 30 years of the Open Doors World Watch List reporting, the global phenomenon of Christian persecution has grown exponentially. Today, more than 360 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith. In 1993, Christians faced high to extreme levels of persecution in 40 countries. This number has nearly doubled to 76 countries in 2023. For this reporting period, in the top 50 countries alone, 312 million Christians now face very high or extreme levels. Worldwide, 1 in 7 Christians now experience at least “high” levels of persecution or discrimination; with 1 in 5 in Africa, 2 in 5 in Asia, and 1 in 15 in Latin America.

NORTH KOREA

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is unique because there is not even an appearance of religious freedom. As the regime cracks down on what it sees as foreign influences, if Christians are discovered, they and their families are deported to labor camps as political prisoners or executed. For Christians, gathering together is almost impossible and is only attempted in absolute secrecy with minimal numbers.


SOMALIA  

Christians in Somalia face extreme persecution. They are explicitly targeted by the terrorist Islamist group al-Shabaab and are frequently killed immediately upon discovery. Even being suspected of having converted to Christianity can greatly endanger one’s life. Anyone found in possession of any Christian materials, including the Bible, is executed, often with the blessing of their family and community 


YEMEN

In the midst of war and strife, Christians in Yemen are increasingly facing violent attacks and lengthy incarceration. Converts to Christianity are even more vulnerable to physical and mental abuse, sexual assault, rape, forced marriage, and honor killings.

ERITREA

The Eritrean authorities only recognize the Eritrean Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran churches, along with Sunni Islam. As a result, non-traditional Protestant churches are frequently subjected to raids and members imprisoned for long periods of time. Members of these churches are regarded as unpatriotic foreign agents. The lifting of UN sanctions has not corresponded to any alleviation in pressure for Christians.
 

 LIBYA

Libya has no functioning government and is primarily run by Islamist terrorist organizations, Organized Crime Groups and drug cartels. Christians are targeted for kidnap, rape, slavery and extra-judicial killings. These crimes are perpetrated with complete impunity. Christians who convert from Islam are routinely killed by their own families as a matter of honor.
 

 

NIGERIA 

Nigerian Christians face violence from Fulani Militants in the Middle Belt, Boko Haram and ISWAP in the north and bandits throughout the border regions. This year, terrorist attacks happened as far south as Ondo State, with 41 Christians murdered in one church on Pentecost Sunday.

 

 PAKISTAN

Apart from Nigeria, Pakistan is the only country awarded the maximum violence score by the Open Doors World Watch List. Christian women and girls are still regularly targeted for abduction, rape and forced conversion. The country’s infamous blasphemy laws remain a constant threat to Pakistan’s beleaguered Christian community. All Christians suffer institutional discrimination.

 

IRAN 

Violent attacks and abductions targeted at Iranian Christians have increased this year. Converts face extreme hostility from their families and communities, and pastors are regularly arrested, prosecuted and given lengthy prison sentences for “crimes against national security.”

 

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan remains a brutal place for Christians to live. It has dropped significantly in the World Watch List ranking solely due to the fact that many Christians were forced to flee in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover last year. Christian converts remain in grave danger in Afghanistan and their mere existence requires they live in deep hiding.

 

SUDAN 

Last year, Sudan dropped in the World Watch List after the fall of the al-Bashir government and some positive legislative changes. Current authorities are now, however, forcibly closing churches and arresting pastors, and it is clear that extremist rule has returned. In addition, the integration of local community police forces and the continued presence of armed militia and terrorist groups mean that Christians remain under the constant threat of violence.

 

READ THE REST OF THE REPORT HERE.