53percenter's Blog

Across the country in Denver, the weather won’t be much different, as The Denver Channel reports, “Mild through the weekend, cold, rain and snow next week!” What’s going on? I thought the planet was heating up, with melting icecaps, rising sea levels, and less than 12 years before the earth burns to a crisp?

YouTube screen grab

We have been hearing this song and dance for several decades now. The global warming chicken littles keep telling us that snow is a thing of the past and we had better get used to it, along with a warming planet.

In 2000, British newspaper The Independent ran this headline, “Snowfalls are just a thing of the past.” In 2014, The New York Times ran a sequel headline, “The end of snow?”

Yet here we are, at the end of April, planting our gardens and facing snow in much of the country. If this is evidence of global warming, then Bernie Sanders’s popularity is evidence that the Democrat Party has shifted to the right. Good luck selling that.

One important factor always neglected by the climate warriors is the Sun, a ball of fire a million times larger than the Earth, the source of life on Earth, as well as destruction if the fires ever were extinguished, or expanded. If we were a few million miles closer to or further from the Sun, life on Earth would cease to exist. Just look at Venus and Mars, neighboring planets either too hot or too cold, respectively, for life as we know it.

Even the Earth’s tilt toward or away from the Sun is enough to cause our seasons, with large temperature variations and the difference between food production or not. Yet climate warriors ignore the Sun, instead focusing on human activity, driving SUV’s, flying in airplanes, and running our air conditioners.

Sunspots, according to the National Weather Service, “Are areas where the magnetic field is about 2,500 times stronger than Earth’s, much higher than anywhere else on the Sun.” Sunspots are quite large, about the size of the Earth, and are several thousand degrees cooler than the surrounding Sun surface.

Sunspots lead to solar flares, surface explosions which “release as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT.” These flares emit x-rays and magnetic fields which blast the Earth as geomagnetic storms, disrupting power grids and satellites, and warming the Earth.

Sunspots are not random but instead follow an 11-year cycle, from a minimum to a maximum. Sometimes the cycles last longer, for unknown reasons, with a 70-year period of near zero sunspot activity from 1645 to 1715, called the Maunder Minimum, or Little Ice Age. Enough of science class, how is this relevant now?

As reported by the Express, we are now entering one of these 11 year cycles as the Sun enters a solar minimum. As they report,

During a solar maximum, the Sun gives off more heat and is littered with sunspots. Less heat in a solar minimum is due to a decrease in magnetic waves.

Fewer magnetic waves equates to the Sun being slightly cooler, and experts are expecting the solar minimum to deepen even further before it gets warmer.

With less magnetic waves coming from the Sun, cosmic rays find it easier to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere and are more noticeable to scientists.

While cosmic rays have little effect on our planet, one of the reasons scientists monitor them is to see when the Sun has entered a solar minimum.

Now, with cosmic rays at an all-time high, scientists know the Sun is about to enter a prolonged cooling period.

The bottom line is that decreasing sunspot activity translates to a cooling planet, contrary to the doomsday non-scientific pronouncements of Al Gore and Alexandria Occasional-Cortex. Sunspot activity typically follows an 11-year cycle, but as noted above, there may be other perhaps longer cycles as occurred in the 1600s leading to a 70-year mini ice age.

Then there are even longer climatic cycles, with real ice ages occurring every 100,000 years. These glaciations end with a 10,000 year inter-glacial warming period, the current such warming period soon ending, as distinguished scientist S. Fred Singer wrote in American Thinker.

Clearly there are factors at play in climate cycles that we barely understand and certainly cannot control. Some play out in shorter time spans, which we as humans can observe directly. Others are on a far longer and grander scale than human existence, much less our individual life spans, which are merely the blink of an eye by comparison.

Aside from solar activity and sunspots, there are volcanic eruptions emitting more greenhouse gas per eruption than years of worldwide human activity. What other forces are at play? That’s for scientists to discover. Our solar system is a mere speck in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is another speck in the vast universe.

It’s the ultimate in hubris to believe climate revolves solely around human activity. Yet politicians, rather admitting the obvious, that we don’t know far more than we do know, blame an ever-changing climate on everything from flatulent cows to processed meats.

Much like the Russian collusion hoax, the left creates a narrative to fit their agenda, putting conclusions before research and discovery. Instead they would be better served by applying the scientific method of observing, formulating a hypothesis, testing it against observations, modifying and refining the hypothesis, until after extensive testing it accurately predicts future events.

Otherwise it’s just more blather and fear mongering, just as we heard for over two years with Russian collusion fantasies that turned out to be nothing. Just as late April snow, in the eyes of the left, is further evidence of a warming planet.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn and Twitter.

The last thing we expect mid-spring is snow.  Yet that’s just what we have. As the Weather Channel reports, “It may be late April, but Winter Storm Xyler will make you forget that it is spring in the Midwest this weekend as it is expected to bring some unusually heavy late season snowfall.”

Snow is heading to New York as well, despite the state’s all-out effort to combat global warming by attempting to ban plastic straws and now hot dogs. From the New York Post, “Upstate NY may get up to 3 inches of snow this weekend.”

Across the country in Denver, the weather won’t be much different, as The Denver Channel reports, “Mild through the weekend, cold, rain and snow next week!” What’s going on? I thought the planet was heating up, with melting icecaps, rising sea levels, and less than 12 years before the earth burns to a crisp?

YouTube screen grab

We have been hearing this song and dance for several decades now. The global warming chicken littles keep telling us that snow is a thing of the past and we had better get used to it, along with a warming planet.

In 2000, British newspaper The Independent ran this headline, “Snowfalls are just a thing of the past.” In 2014, The New York Times ran a sequel headline, “The end of snow?”

Yet here we are, at the end of April, planting our gardens and facing snow in much of the country. If this is evidence of global warming, then Bernie Sanders’s popularity is evidence that the Democrat Party has shifted to the right. Good luck selling that.

One important factor always neglected by the climate warriors is the Sun, a ball of fire a million times larger than the Earth, the source of life on Earth, as well as destruction if the fires ever were extinguished, or expanded. If we were a few million miles closer to or further from the Sun, life on Earth would cease to exist. Just look at Venus and Mars, neighboring planets either too hot or too cold, respectively, for life as we know it.

Even the Earth’s tilt toward or away from the Sun is enough to cause our seasons, with large temperature variations and the difference between food production or not. Yet climate warriors ignore the Sun, instead focusing on human activity, driving SUV’s, flying in airplanes, and running our air conditioners.

Sunspots, according to the National Weather Service, “Are areas where the magnetic field is about 2,500 times stronger than Earth’s, much higher than anywhere else on the Sun.” Sunspots are quite large, about the size of the Earth, and are several thousand degrees cooler than the surrounding Sun surface.

Sunspots lead to solar flares, surface explosions which “release as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT.” These flares emit x-rays and magnetic fields which blast the Earth as geomagnetic storms, disrupting power grids and satellites, and warming the Earth.

Sunspots are not random but instead follow an 11-year cycle, from a minimum to a maximum. Sometimes the cycles last longer, for unknown reasons, with a 70-year period of near zero sunspot activity from 1645 to 1715, called the Maunder Minimum, or Little Ice Age. Enough of science class, how is this relevant now?

As reported by the Express, we are now entering one of these 11 year cycles as the Sun enters a solar minimum. As they report,

During a solar maximum, the Sun gives off more heat and is littered with sunspots. Less heat in a solar minimum is due to a decrease in magnetic waves.

Fewer magnetic waves equates to the Sun being slightly cooler, and experts are expecting the solar minimum to deepen even further before it gets warmer.

With less magnetic waves coming from the Sun, cosmic rays find it easier to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere and are more noticeable to scientists.

While cosmic rays have little effect on our planet, one of the reasons scientists monitor them is to see when the Sun has entered a solar minimum.

Now, with cosmic rays at an all-time high, scientists know the Sun is about to enter a prolonged cooling period.

The bottom line is that decreasing sunspot activity translates to a cooling planet, contrary to the doomsday non-scientific pronouncements of Al Gore and Alexandria Occasional-Cortex. Sunspot activity typically follows an 11-year cycle, but as noted above, there may be other perhaps longer cycles as occurred in the 1600s leading to a 70-year mini ice age.

Then there are even longer climatic cycles, with real ice ages occurring every 100,000 years. These glaciations end with a 10,000 year inter-glacial warming period, the current such warming period soon ending, as distinguished scientist S. Fred Singer wrote in American Thinker.

Clearly there are factors at play in climate cycles that we barely understand and certainly cannot control. Some play out in shorter time spans, which we as humans can observe directly. Others are on a far longer and grander scale than human existence, much less our individual life spans, which are merely the blink of an eye by comparison.

Aside from solar activity and sunspots, there are volcanic eruptions emitting more greenhouse gas per eruption than years of worldwide human activity. What other forces are at play? That’s for scientists to discover. Our solar system is a mere speck in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is another speck in the vast universe.

It’s the ultimate in hubris to believe climate revolves solely around human activity. Yet politicians, rather admitting the obvious, that we don’t know far more than we do know, blame an ever-changing climate on everything from flatulent cows to processed meats.

Much like the Russian collusion hoax, the left creates a narrative to fit their agenda, putting conclusions before research and discovery. Instead they would be better served by applying the scientific method of observing, formulating a hypothesis, testing it against observations, modifying and refining the hypothesis, until after extensive testing it accurately predicts future events.

Otherwise it’s just more blather and fear mongering, just as we heard for over two years with Russian collusion fantasies that turned out to be nothing. Just as late April snow, in the eyes of the left, is further evidence of a warming planet.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn and Twitter.

A good definition of a liberal might be someone who tries to ignore the actual nature of reality. Thus, many politically correct formulations distort reality even to the point of denying the differences between the sexes.

Ignoring the nature of reality can get particularly dangerous when applied to economics. The nature of money calls for having sufficient control over the money supply to prevent the breakdown of the system. It calls for keeping debt levels low.  Some liberals are now trying to turn conventional economy policy upside down by changing all the rules.

The new economics is called Modern Monetary Theory or MMT for short. MMT is gaining traction among high-profile Democrats and other liberals that are looking for ways to finance social and ecological programs that they hope to implement in the future. The present monetary system with its $22 trillion-and-growing debt is too rigid and constraining. Something new is needed to provide more flexible and expandable financing. The answer is MMT.

The Basic Tenets of MMT

Critics say that MMT is neither monetary nor a theory. It more closely resembles a political opportunity, since it puts everything in the hands of enlightened politicians. Its promoters keep the theory sufficiently vague to avoid close scrutiny. They tend to stay outside of the mainstream economic journals and inside social media.

Nevertheless, liberal economist Heather Boushey claims that the theory has moved to center stage in the political debate. It is the catchphrase of economists, pundits, and politicians who “hold it up as the answer to our economic problems.”   Prof. Stephanie Kelton of Stony Brook University (with two co-authors) summarize the theory’s magic formula as “Anything that is technically feasible is financially affordable.”

The two basic tenets of MMT are dear to liberal hearts. First, governments can spend much more than they tax. Secondly, promoters claim that governments should uses taxes, not as a generator of revenue, but as an instrument of inflation control and achieving equality.

MMT advocates say that deficit spending does not matter for countries like the United States that borrow in their own currency. Governments can issue money using mechanisms like the Federal Reserve to self-finance their budgets.   

The MMTers claim that the present monetary policies of setting interest rates and controlling the money supply by the Fed are no longer needed as tools for balancing an economy.

The new tools for job creation and economic growth should be increased federal spending and taxation. When things get rough, the government can spend its way to full employment by printing up money. When the economy booms and inflation threatens, the government can contract the money supply by taxing it down to acceptable levels.

Creating a Climate of Instability and Distrust

MMT takes the control of policy out of the hands of economists and puts it into those of politicians. It replaces long-term planning with short-term spending. Such policies will have more immediate effects since increased spending impacts the economy directly. MMTers claims politicians will not abuse their newly acquired powers since they can be voted out if they err in judgment. More likely than not, politicians will probably be rewarded by the amount of MMT-funded pork that they can bring back to their districts.

Most conventional economists observe that failure to think in the long term creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust that destabilizes markets. Moreover, the far-out ideas of MMT have never been tested, but, like deficits and taxes, that does not seem to matter. No one really cares that not even liberal economists like Paul Krugman give it much credence. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers, for example, called it “voodoo economics.”

It is a sad reflection of these Twitter times in which nothing has consequences, and everything runs on impressions and emotions. In the age of fake news, fake money makes sense. It is enough to “feel” and “believe” that it will work and finance the Green New Deal for it to gain acceptance.   

Meanwhile, no one answers the real question of who is going to pay down the federal debt.  

A good definition of a liberal might be someone who tries to ignore the actual nature of reality. Thus, many politically correct formulations distort reality even to the point of denying the differences between the sexes.

Ignoring the nature of reality can get particularly dangerous when applied to economics. The nature of money calls for having sufficient control over the money supply to prevent the breakdown of the system. It calls for keeping debt levels low.  Some liberals are now trying to turn conventional economy policy upside down by changing all the rules.

The new economics is called Modern Monetary Theory or MMT for short. MMT is gaining traction among high-profile Democrats and other liberals that are looking for ways to finance social and ecological programs that they hope to implement in the future. The present monetary system with its $22 trillion-and-growing debt is too rigid and constraining. Something new is needed to provide more flexible and expandable financing. The answer is MMT.

The Basic Tenets of MMT

Critics say that MMT is neither monetary nor a theory. It more closely resembles a political opportunity, since it puts everything in the hands of enlightened politicians. Its promoters keep the theory sufficiently vague to avoid close scrutiny. They tend to stay outside of the mainstream economic journals and inside social media.

Nevertheless, liberal economist Heather Boushey claims that the theory has moved to center stage in the political debate. It is the catchphrase of economists, pundits, and politicians who “hold it up as the answer to our economic problems.”   Prof. Stephanie Kelton of Stony Brook University (with two co-authors) summarize the theory’s magic formula as “Anything that is technically feasible is financially affordable.”

The two basic tenets of MMT are dear to liberal hearts. First, governments can spend much more than they tax. Secondly, promoters claim that governments should uses taxes, not as a generator of revenue, but as an instrument of inflation control and achieving equality.

MMT advocates say that deficit spending does not matter for countries like the United States that borrow in their own currency. Governments can issue money using mechanisms like the Federal Reserve to self-finance their budgets.   

The MMTers claim that the present monetary policies of setting interest rates and controlling the money supply by the Fed are no longer needed as tools for balancing an economy.

The new tools for job creation and economic growth should be increased federal spending and taxation. When things get rough, the government can spend its way to full employment by printing up money. When the economy booms and inflation threatens, the government can contract the money supply by taxing it down to acceptable levels.

Creating a Climate of Instability and Distrust

MMT takes the control of policy out of the hands of economists and puts it into those of politicians. It replaces long-term planning with short-term spending. Such policies will have more immediate effects since increased spending impacts the economy directly. MMTers claims politicians will not abuse their newly acquired powers since they can be voted out if they err in judgment. More likely than not, politicians will probably be rewarded by the amount of MMT-funded pork that they can bring back to their districts.

Most conventional economists observe that failure to think in the long term creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust that destabilizes markets. Moreover, the far-out ideas of MMT have never been tested, but, like deficits and taxes, that does not seem to matter. No one really cares that not even liberal economists like Paul Krugman give it much credence. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers, for example, called it “voodoo economics.”

It is a sad reflection of these Twitter times in which nothing has consequences, and everything runs on impressions and emotions. In the age of fake news, fake money makes sense. It is enough to “feel” and “believe” that it will work and finance the Green New Deal for it to gain acceptance.   

Meanwhile, no one answers the real question of who is going to pay down the federal debt.  

The indoctrination of young Americans is the goal of those who control curriculum in public schools and colleges. Faculty, administrators, and textbook writers all do their part to create a narrative of an America that should be ashamed of its racist  exploitative past, and ready to overhaul a capitalist system that benefits the few and cheats the many by robbing them of their fair share.

The new Advanced Placement history textbook is a case in point. Paul Mirengoff writes at Powerline:

…beginning in 2020, many Advanced Placement students will be using an American History textbook that suggests President Trump is mentally ill and that depicts him and many of his supporters as racists. The book asserts that “[Trump’s] not very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.” (snip)

The textbook goes further. It says that Hillary Clinton supporters “worried about the mental stability of the president-elect.” (snip)

The textbook clearly is using “Clinton supporters” as a device to plant the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable, a proposition for which there is no basis other than raw hatred of the man.

The book’s publisher defends its handiwork, saying that it underwent “rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.” No doubt.

Here is an alternative from Steven Hayward of Powerline:

Next month our friends at Encounter Books will publish Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred M. McClay, who is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. (snip)

Suggestion: urge your high school history teachers and your school district to adopt this book, and if you have a child in history—and especially AP history—get a copy of this book and have your kid read this alongside whatever leftist slop is being thrown at them by their public school.  And everyone else should support this enterprise by buying a copy.

Rich schools, like Yale, always have more money to throw at diversity, equity and inclusion, which is why they are so easy to shake down. Heather Mac Donald writes at the Wall Street Journal:

Yale President Peter Salovey announced a major expansion of the school’s diversity bureaucracy this month, providing a case study in how not to lead a respected institution of higher education.

The pretext for this latest accretion of bureaucratic bloat was a May 2018 incident in a graduate student dorm. Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old doctoral candidate in philosophy, called campus police at 1:40 a.m. to report someone sleeping in a common room, which she believed was against dorm rules. Yale administrators knew Ms. Braasch had psychological problems and that she had a history of bad blood with the sleeping student, Lolade Siyonbola, a 35-year-old doctoral candidate in African studies. But because Ms. Braasch is white and Ms. Siyonbola is black, the administration chose to turn the incident into a symbol of what Mr. Salovey called the university’s “discrimination and racism.”

Yale leaders immediately announced a slew of new initiatives: “implicit bias” training for graduate students, grad-school staff and campus police; instruction in how to run “inclusive classrooms”; “community building” sessions; a student retreat to develop the next phase of equity and inclusion programming. Despite this flurry of corrective measures, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s secretary and vice president for student life, ominously declared there was still “much more to do.”

That “more” was soon in coming. Yale commissioned an outside diversity bureaucrat—Benjamin Reese, vice president of institutional equity at Duke—to evaluate its diversity infrastructure, which, predictably, he found sorely lacking.

A small retreat by Amherst College’s PC Police: Richard Bernstein writes at Real Clear Investigations:

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.

Withdrawn from circulation, but why?

What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

But it wasn’t just the right piling on. Members of the predominantly liberal Amherst faculty, who were not consulted about the guide as it was being drafted, criticized it too.

At a post-release meeting of some 70 faculty members, “the people who departed most strenuously from the guide were on the left, including transgender faculty members,” said one of those present, Francis G. Couvares, the chairman of the Amherst History Department, speaking by phone.

Soon after, the language guide was withdrawn from circulation, erased from the college website, with college President Carolyn Martin proclaiming it “counter to the core academic values of freedom of thought and expression.”

Heather Macdonald, writing in City Journal, on a couple of campuses where Administrators appear to have the semblance of a spine:

On April 9, at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Professor Camille Paglia, famed nemesis of victimology feminists everywhere, gave a university-wide lecture entitled “Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.” A self-described “non-binary” student, Joseph McAndrew, had organized a protest against the speech after failing to get it moved off campus. McAndrew was upset by recent interviews Paglia had given. (snip)

McAndrew masterfully blended victimology and the consumerist model of education in his complaint against Paglia. “We’re giving a space for her following to come, into our safe space that we pay to be in,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. A photo of the protest shows a group of well-fed, healthy, eminently protected, privileged teenagers sitting in a lobby under a large banner reading “Camille Paglia, Stop Victim Blaming.” They hold signs such as “Sexual Assault Is NEVER the victims [sic] fault.” A male lays his head on the shoulder of a female, who gives him a supportive hug; presumably both procured affirmative consent for this Platonic embrace.

About 30 minutes into Paglia’s lecture, someone pulled a fire alarm, following the Middlebury precedent. All 17 floors of the building where Paglia was speaking had to be evacuated (snip)

On many other campuses, such tactics would have been greeted by either dead air from the administration or an expression of concern for the University of the Arts’ wounded “survivors.” President David Yager, however, denounced the repressive mindset spreading from American campuses to the culture at large. The suppression of speech “simply cannot be allowed to happen,” he wrote in a campus-wide email the day after the shutdown. “I firmly believe that limiting the range of voices in society erodes our democracy. Universities, moreover, are at the heart of the revolutionary notion of free expression: promoting the free exchange of ideas is part of the core reason for their existence. . . . Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: Not now, not at UArts.” While his email did not mention the protest or the fire alarm activation, which would have been ideal, the protesters understood that Yager was referring to them. (snip)

The University of Arizona has gone one better than Yager. On March 19, two agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol were giving a presentation at a job-recruiting fair, having been invited by the undergraduate Criminal Justice Association. Protesters invaded the room and continuously screamed “murder patrol” and “murderers,” preventing students from listening. “We won’t stop until you get off our campus,” the protesters shouted, as they hounded the agents into their cars. In a sharp departure from the norm, the campus police have filed criminal-misdemeanor charges against the disruptors, for “threats and intimidation” and “interference with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution.” And the university president, Robert Robbins, after issuing a bland statement about “ensuring safety” for students and respecting others’ right to speech, followed up with a far more explicit denunciation. The “incident with the Border Patrol officers” was a “dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus,” Robbins wrote. “Student protest is protected by our support for free speech, but disruption is not.” 

Another horror story at Sarah Lawrence- none dare accuse administrators of bias. David French writes at National Review Online: 

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.” (snip)

Abrams told an important truth. And he’s been punished for it. As our Madeleine Kearns reported last November, his office door was vandalized, students called for him to be punished, anonymous individuals falsely accused him of sexual misconduct, and when Abrams urged the college president, Cristle Judd, to take a strong stand in favor of academic freedom, he said that she “asked whether he thought it was appropriate to write op-eds without her permission and further suggested that his article had been hostile toward his colleagues.”

It turns out that Abrams’s ordeal isn’t over. Yesterday, a group of students calling themselves the “Diaspora Coalition” began a sit-in and issued an extraordinary set of demands, including demands aimed directly at Abrams.

The indoctrination of young Americans is the goal of those who control curriculum in public schools and colleges. Faculty, administrators, and textbook writers all do their part to create a narrative of an America that should be ashamed of its racist  exploitative past, and ready to overhaul a capitalist system that benefits the few and cheats the many by robbing them of their fair share.

The new Advanced Placement history textbook is a case in point. Paul Mirengoff writes at Powerline:

…beginning in 2020, many Advanced Placement students will be using an American History textbook that suggests President Trump is mentally ill and that depicts him and many of his supporters as racists. The book asserts that “[Trump’s] not very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.” (snip)

The textbook goes further. It says that Hillary Clinton supporters “worried about the mental stability of the president-elect.” (snip)

The textbook clearly is using “Clinton supporters” as a device to plant the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable, a proposition for which there is no basis other than raw hatred of the man.

The book’s publisher defends its handiwork, saying that it underwent “rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.” No doubt.

Here is an alternative from Steven Hayward of Powerline:

Next month our friends at Encounter Books will publish Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred M. McClay, who is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. (snip)

Suggestion: urge your high school history teachers and your school district to adopt this book, and if you have a child in history—and especially AP history—get a copy of this book and have your kid read this alongside whatever leftist slop is being thrown at them by their public school.  And everyone else should support this enterprise by buying a copy.

Rich schools, like Yale, always have more money to throw at diversity, equity and inclusion, which is why they are so easy to shake down. Heather Mac Donald writes at the Wall Street Journal:

Yale President Peter Salovey announced a major expansion of the school’s diversity bureaucracy this month, providing a case study in how not to lead a respected institution of higher education.

The pretext for this latest accretion of bureaucratic bloat was a May 2018 incident in a graduate student dorm. Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old doctoral candidate in philosophy, called campus police at 1:40 a.m. to report someone sleeping in a common room, which she believed was against dorm rules. Yale administrators knew Ms. Braasch had psychological problems and that she had a history of bad blood with the sleeping student, Lolade Siyonbola, a 35-year-old doctoral candidate in African studies. But because Ms. Braasch is white and Ms. Siyonbola is black, the administration chose to turn the incident into a symbol of what Mr. Salovey called the university’s “discrimination and racism.”

Yale leaders immediately announced a slew of new initiatives: “implicit bias” training for graduate students, grad-school staff and campus police; instruction in how to run “inclusive classrooms”; “community building” sessions; a student retreat to develop the next phase of equity and inclusion programming. Despite this flurry of corrective measures, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s secretary and vice president for student life, ominously declared there was still “much more to do.”

That “more” was soon in coming. Yale commissioned an outside diversity bureaucrat—Benjamin Reese, vice president of institutional equity at Duke—to evaluate its diversity infrastructure, which, predictably, he found sorely lacking.

A small retreat by Amherst College’s PC Police: Richard Bernstein writes at Real Clear Investigations:

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.

Withdrawn from circulation, but why?

What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

But it wasn’t just the right piling on. Members of the predominantly liberal Amherst faculty, who were not consulted about the guide as it was being drafted, criticized it too.

At a post-release meeting of some 70 faculty members, “the people who departed most strenuously from the guide were on the left, including transgender faculty members,” said one of those present, Francis G. Couvares, the chairman of the Amherst History Department, speaking by phone.

Soon after, the language guide was withdrawn from circulation, erased from the college website, with college President Carolyn Martin proclaiming it “counter to the core academic values of freedom of thought and expression.”

Heather Macdonald, writing in City Journal, on a couple of campuses where Administrators appear to have the semblance of a spine:

On April 9, at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Professor Camille Paglia, famed nemesis of victimology feminists everywhere, gave a university-wide lecture entitled “Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.” A self-described “non-binary” student, Joseph McAndrew, had organized a protest against the speech after failing to get it moved off campus. McAndrew was upset by recent interviews Paglia had given. (snip)

McAndrew masterfully blended victimology and the consumerist model of education in his complaint against Paglia. “We’re giving a space for her following to come, into our safe space that we pay to be in,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. A photo of the protest shows a group of well-fed, healthy, eminently protected, privileged teenagers sitting in a lobby under a large banner reading “Camille Paglia, Stop Victim Blaming.” They hold signs such as “Sexual Assault Is NEVER the victims [sic] fault.” A male lays his head on the shoulder of a female, who gives him a supportive hug; presumably both procured affirmative consent for this Platonic embrace.

About 30 minutes into Paglia’s lecture, someone pulled a fire alarm, following the Middlebury precedent. All 17 floors of the building where Paglia was speaking had to be evacuated (snip)

On many other campuses, such tactics would have been greeted by either dead air from the administration or an expression of concern for the University of the Arts’ wounded “survivors.” President David Yager, however, denounced the repressive mindset spreading from American campuses to the culture at large. The suppression of speech “simply cannot be allowed to happen,” he wrote in a campus-wide email the day after the shutdown. “I firmly believe that limiting the range of voices in society erodes our democracy. Universities, moreover, are at the heart of the revolutionary notion of free expression: promoting the free exchange of ideas is part of the core reason for their existence. . . . Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: Not now, not at UArts.” While his email did not mention the protest or the fire alarm activation, which would have been ideal, the protesters understood that Yager was referring to them. (snip)

The University of Arizona has gone one better than Yager. On March 19, two agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol were giving a presentation at a job-recruiting fair, having been invited by the undergraduate Criminal Justice Association. Protesters invaded the room and continuously screamed “murder patrol” and “murderers,” preventing students from listening. “We won’t stop until you get off our campus,” the protesters shouted, as they hounded the agents into their cars. In a sharp departure from the norm, the campus police have filed criminal-misdemeanor charges against the disruptors, for “threats and intimidation” and “interference with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution.” And the university president, Robert Robbins, after issuing a bland statement about “ensuring safety” for students and respecting others’ right to speech, followed up with a far more explicit denunciation. The “incident with the Border Patrol officers” was a “dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus,” Robbins wrote. “Student protest is protected by our support for free speech, but disruption is not.” 

Another horror story at Sarah Lawrence- none dare accuse administrators of bias. David French writes at National Review Online: 

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.” (snip)

Abrams told an important truth. And he’s been punished for it. As our Madeleine Kearns reported last November, his office door was vandalized, students called for him to be punished, anonymous individuals falsely accused him of sexual misconduct, and when Abrams urged the college president, Cristle Judd, to take a strong stand in favor of academic freedom, he said that she “asked whether he thought it was appropriate to write op-eds without her permission and further suggested that his article had been hostile toward his colleagues.”

It turns out that Abrams’s ordeal isn’t over. Yesterday, a group of students calling themselves the “Diaspora Coalition” began a sit-in and issued an extraordinary set of demands, including demands aimed directly at Abrams.