General
No Biggie, Just the End of Civilization
/31 Comments/in General/by Ann CoulterWhatever you had planned to do for the rest of the day, please drop it and read this right now: Heather Mac Donald’s new book, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”
It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for Black people not doing well on standardized tests.
Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting Black people’s self-esteem.
To consider just one arena, I don’t think you’re going to like the medical care you’ll be getting under the new regime. Just like in the wildly successful Soviet Union, science must be subordinated to politics, specifically “racial justice.”
The American Medical Association, the American Association of Medical Colleges and the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) have all agreed that medicine is racist.
The New England Journal of Medicine “presents a nonstop stream of articles on such topics as the ‘Pathology of Racism,’ ‘Toward Antiracist Allyship in Medicine,’ and ‘How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities,’” Mac Donald writes.
And “Scientific American produced a ‘special collector’s edition’ on ‘The Science of Overcoming Racism.’”
(It’s fantastic that scientific organizations are finally dedicating themselves to something important like racism, and not something boring, like cancer or Alzheimer’s disease — Unpack your privilege!)
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) aired a podcast in 2021 in which the deputy editor, Edward Livingston, suggested that inequities in medical care be addressed without accusing doctors of “racism.” Both he and JAMA’s editor in chief were promptly denounced and fired, the editor replaced with a Black woman.
Black leaders now head the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center, the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center, the University of Pittsburgh Division of Medical Hematology/Oncology, the Wake Forest School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Pharmacy, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the Massey Cancer Center at VCU, the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Department of Medicine at UCLA’s medical school.
What could go wrong? Most of America’s largest cities have Black mayors, and everything is fine.
But at least your doctor will be able to diagnose your disease correctly and you won’t die on the operating table, right? … RIGHT? (Anybody else remember the affirmative action doctor who took Allan Bakke’s place at the University of California Medical School at Davis and ended up killing his patients?)
In 2021, Mac Donald writes, “the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test was in the 71st percentile. … The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile — a full standard deviation below the average white score.” [KM: Same for average Black-White differences on IQ tests, which are highly heritable. But of course, that won’t be mentioned here.]
Naturally, therefore, medical schools responded by dropping the MCAT for Black and Hispanic students, offering them admission on the basis of their “strong appreciation of human rights and social justice,” as the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai puts it.
Things don’t get better at medical school, where Black students again score a full standard deviation below white and Asian students on Step One of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE). This is the test given after the second year of medical school to evaluate students’ knowledge of anatomy, biochemistry, pharmacology, physiology and so on. It is multiple-choice and graded by computer.
Conclusion: The computer is racist. In January 2022, the USMLE dropped grades for Step One altogether and converted it to pass/fail.
On one hand, no one will get a bad grade. On the other hand, there will be no way to distinguish one medical student from another, whether Black, White or Asian. Research laboratories, residencies, hospitals and medical centers, like the Mayo Clinic, will just have to roll the dice. (Playing hide-and-seek with the most promising scientific minds should turbo-charge medical discoveries!)
Luckily, learning to identify and treat disease isn’t such a big deal at today’s medical schools, anyway. Instead, the faculty are charged with teaching about “systems of power, privilege and oppression.” More than half of the top 50 medical schools now require students to take courses in systemic racism, Mac Donald notes. I’m sure that will be a huge relief when doctors miss your brain tumor.
In 2021, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that it would spend $2 billion … to find a cure for brain cancer? Parkinson’s disease? Heart disease? NO!!! The $2 billion would go to promoting “diversity and inclusion in science.”
In 2022, the National Cancer Institute, funded by you, taxpayer, decided to change its mission from conquering cancer — and really, who cares about that? FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS! — to guess what? Yes!!! Promoting diversity! Instead of Outstanding Investigator Awards being granted solely on the basis of merit, the gender and race of the researchers would have to be considered.
All this has done wonders for the morale of doctors. Mac Donald quotes one cancer researcher: “It’s the end of the road for me as a Jewish male doctor.” A UCLA doctor told her that the smartest undergraduates in science labs are saying, “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”
In response to this dystopic future, Mac Donald asked an oncologist, “When would white and Asian male scientists fight back? How much longer would they continue to allow their hard work and accomplishments to be disparaged and sidelined?”
He emailed back: “We value our jobs. We need our jobs. Our peers will turn on us. Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned.”
That’s why, Mac Donald says, it falls to the rest of us to never shut up about the tearing down of standards, to put forth “unapologetic defense(s) of color-blind standards,” [but see Thaddeus Z. Imas’s “The Conservative Commitment to Color Blindness Is Cowardice, Not Principle] and to “relentlessly provide the data that explain the lack of racial proportionality in meritocratic institutions.”
To paraphrase Orwell: If there is hope, it must lie in the uncancelable.
COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER
How To Bribe The Supreme Court
/5 Comments/in General/by Ann CoulterThe sole purpose of the media’s sudden fixation on the Supreme Court’s “ethics” is to morally intimidate conservative justices by reminding them that the left controls the culture. Since they lost abortion, liberals have been in a panic that the court will junk other liberal sacraments, like gay marriage and affirmative action, too. That’s the reason for the stream of calumnies directed at the justices.
As usual, the main target of the left’s rage is Thomas. We’re supposed to be appalled that Thomas’ billionaire friend Harlan Crow took the justice and his wife on a vacation that (the media claim) would have cost Thomas more than $500,000!!!
Well, yeah, but Thomas and his wife, Ginny, weren’t going alone. They hadn’t just won a cruise sweepstakes. They were joining Crow on a vacation he was taking anyway. Cost to donor: a few extra chicken cutlets and string beans.
Crow sounds like a great guy, but when you’re going on vacation with a benefactor, it isn’t like he’s handing you an expensive bauble. You are the expensive bauble.
We went on a cruise on my private yacht in Indonesia and served Jeroboam of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945.[Meh.]
We went on a cruise on my private yacht in Indonesia and Justice Clarence Thomas was our guest. WINNER!!!!
Cui bono? Everybody!
The media want us to believe that generosity from personal friends is an ethical issue, but that’s because that’s not how liberals bribe government officials. They bombard their targets with the sort of public adoration that money can’t buy — or the sort of public hate that money can’t block. Your choice: Be beloved from every corner of society or be subjected to nonstop ridicule.
Adored: Anthony Fauci, BLM, Michelle Obama, Trevor Noah, transgenders, Ukraine, black people, pot, Elon Musk (pre-Twitter), Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Hated: Ron DeSantis, the Proud Boys, Melania Trump, Dave Chappelle, Christians, Russia, white people, cigarettes, Elon Musk (post-Twitter), Clarence Thomas.
Thus, during her quarter-century on the court, Ginsburg was showered with alms from the media, Hollywood, universities, television, publishing, the music industry, museums, clothing manufacturers, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Post Office and an array of nonprofits.
It’s a miracle she ever had time to write opinions with the constant procession of awards, retrospectives, portraits and honors — the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture; the LBJ Foundation’s Liberty & Justice for All Award; the World Peace & Liberty Award; a lifetime achievement award from Diane von Furstenberg’s foundation; the 2020 Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center; and the World Peace & Liberty Award from the World Jurist Association and the World Law Foundation.
I would wager that most people would prefer ceaseless public praise to a cruise, no matter how nice the yacht.
The U.S. Postal Service produced an RBG “Forever” stamp; the U.S. Navy named an oiler the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg”; Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center put on a large-scale exhibition on her life; the Cleveland Museum of Natural History named a species of praying mantis after her; she was slobberingly interviewed by Stephen Colbert; a Sam Adams beer was named in her honor; and she received honorary degrees from literally dozens upon dozens of universities.
It’s curious that the very cultural institutions bestowing all these goodies on liberals don’t see them as “gifts” at all. There are no somber invocations of “ethics” when the Sundance Film Festival features a North Korean-style documentary about Ginsburg. Nor when The New York Times gushes that Ginsburg was “a trailblazing feminist … [continuing] to point the way toward greater equality … she never wavered in her commitment to the court as a vehicle for a more just and more equal America. She was a dogged, tireless fighter … [gag, gag, gag].”
Try to imagine that string of accolades being given to Thomas, much less the Tiger Beat worship — the coloring books, documentaries, bobbleheads, and so on.
It’s inconceivable. In fact, the “honors and recognition” section on Thomas’ Wikipedia page contains a single item: “In 2012, Thomas received an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross, his alma mater.”
The only reward a conservative titan like Thomas will receive in this lifetime will be his friends spending their own money to enjoy his company. So the media have decided that’s a conflict of interest. Fawning media coverage worth millions of dollars: not a conflict of interest.
Let’s compare!
Value of private supporters’ gifts to Justice Thomas over the years: Maybe a few million dollars — and that’s according to liberals, although the donor was going on these vacations with or without Thomas, so the cost to him was minimal.
Value of liberal institutions’ gifts to Justice Ginsburg over the years: approximately $3 trillion.
It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have a Supreme Court that isn’t dying to impose faddish liberal ideas on the country by claiming to discover never-before-seen constitutional rights. If anything, the Dobbs opinion should have calmed lefties. Abortion is no longer a “constitutional right,” so now it’s up to the states. And guess what, liberals? Americans are voting to allow abortion!
But Democrats are mostly neurotic women, so “calm” is not their middle name.
Contrary to the left’s self-advertisements as huge fans of democracy — Democracy Dies in Darkness! — the last thing they want is people voting on their crazy ideas. That’s why they’ve got to discredit the current court.
If all goes according to plan, Trump will lose another election for the GOP next year, handing Democrats super-majorities in Congress, whereupon they will pack the court. Finally, liberals will have their magical Supreme Court back! How much is that penumbra worth to you, New York Times?
COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER
Soros-Funded Prosecutor Pushes Dubious Tiki Torch Prosecutions for Political Reasons
/20 Comments/in General/by Joseph Jordan and Glen Allen, EsqAs the politicization of the American judicial system accelerates, emboldened prosecutors are navigating into uncharted waters to please wealthy donors, raise their national profile, and distract from the crime epidemic they have helped unleash.
Following the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, Albemarle County’s chief prosecutor Robert Tracci declined to bring charges under Virginia Code Section 18.2-423.01-B against nationalist protestors who marched with Tiki Torches at the University of Virginia, arguing that such cases would be difficult to prove in light of the First Amendment issues involved.
The Virginia law, a class 6 felony, prohibits the burning of objects in a public place with the intent of intimidating a person or group of persons. Few criminal charges have been brought under this statute, and when they have been applied, prosecutors have had mixed success. In Virginia v. Black, a 2003 Supreme Court case dealing with the constitutionality of a closely-related cross-burning statute, the Court upheld the statute in part, holding that given cross-burnings’ “long and pernicious history as a signal of impending violence,” they could amount to “true threats” not protected by the First Amendment. But the Court also struck down part of the statute, holding that cross-burning by itself, without additional evidence of intent to intimidate, could not support a conviction.
This is the formidable Constitutional obstacle Tracci cited in his decision not to pursue the Charlottesville marchers. But his prudent decision was attacked by his opponent, Jim Hingeley, during the 2019 Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney race. Hingeley, who according to the Virginia Public Access Project received donations from George Soros ($5,000) and local activist billionaire Sonjia S. Smith ($114,000), was able to ride the avalanche of money to a commanding 56% to 43.5% victory over Tracci.
Four years later, Hingeley has overseen an overhaul in Albemarle County’s criminal justice system but the results have been problematic. In his first year in office, the murder rate in Charlottesville increased 30% year over year, according to data compiled by the Daily Progress. According to FBI crime data, there were no murders in Charlottesville in 2021. In the last seven months, however, the same city has suffered a surge of violence, already counting 14 homicides. The public safety situation for UVA students in Charlottesville has become so dire that university administrators are now supporting a task force of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials seeking to drastically increase police patrols around the campus and more stringently deploy no-trespass orders against mostly Black people from areas around the school, according to a report last month in the school’s paper, UVA Today.
Hingeley now finds himself on the defense against public discontent. But rather than taking firmer steps to protect UVA students and Charlottesville residents from violent crime, it seems he seeks to distract from his experiment’s failure by pivoting to the tiki torch prosecutions.
In recent months, Hingeley’s office began expending scarce resources during a crime wave by hunting down multiple Unite the Right protesters across the country under the “burning objects” statute. Three men, Tyler Dykes, Dallas Medina and Wil Zachary Smith, were surprised when five years after the Charlottesville march, they were arrested on out-of-state charges and transported to Virginia.
The men, all charged with the same crime, have so far been treated differently depending on the judges they have drawn. In the case of Medina, the judge allowed him to return to his home in Ohio until his next hearing in June. Smith, from Texas, has been held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional jail without bond since January for a 2018 charge of pepper spraying a member of Antifa during the tiki torch march. Last February, a grand jury indicted him for the burning objects charge as well.
The most astonishing development has been Dykes’ experience. Dykes, of South Carolina, is only 25 years old, but has become a successful small business owner. During his bond hearing last week, the Assistant County prosecutor argued for Dykes to be held without bail by presenting a blog post from a group called “Atlanta Antifa” that purports to show evidence that he is still involved in nationalist political activity unrelated to the tiki torch case. Atlanta Antifa members are currently facing domestic terrorism charges for their violent actions seeking to prevent the construction of a police training facility in Dekalb County, Georgia, but this did not dissuade the prosecutor from entering their highly editorialized and largely irrelevant profile of Dykes as official evidence.
The judge, who is African-American, agreed with Dykes’ attorney that he was not a flight risk, yet granted the prosecutor’s request to hold him in custody until trial based on the opinion of an anonymous Antifa group on the internet.
The race, political views, or media diet of a judge, prosecutor, or defendant should not be allowed to play a role in the American criminal justice system, yet both in Albemarle County and the nation at large, these previously sacred rules that underpin the integrity of our justice system have been casually brushed aside. For those who cross the ideologies of wealthy campaign donors, freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate are no longer civil liberties that can be taken for granted.
Reprinted with permission from the American Free Press.
Glen Allen is an attorney and founder of the FREE EXPRESSION FOUNDATION, a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation dedicated to the defense of citizens denied their Constitutional right to free expression See more at Free Expression Foundation,org, or write FEF, PO Box 65242, Baltimore, MD 21209-9998
The New Baby-Killers
/31 Comments/in General/by Ann CoulterExtremists have got to learn to take half a loaf. Just like the cheap labor-demanding GOP donors, pro-lifers need to be told: You can’t get everything you want. If Republicans give you this, they’ll lose their jobs, and the people who’ll replace them want you dead.
Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot. That’s why I’m begging them to stop pushing wildly unpopular ideas. These fanatics are going to get millions more babies killed when Democrats win supermajorities in both houses of Congress and immediately pass a federal law making abortion-on-demand the law of the land.
They’re also going to get a lot more adults killed when those same Democratic supermajorities pass laws taking our guns, defunding the police and packing the court, among other great Democratic ideas.
We’ve been rolling our eyes at pro-choicers forever, telling them to calm down, that overturning Roe would just return the issue to the states. Blue states would make abortion legal until the kid turns 14. A few states, like Louisiana, would impose tough restrictions, but most states would come out in the middle — allowing abortions in the first trimester, plus parental notification laws, and exceptions for rape and incest.
Instead, the moment Dobbs was released, pro-life nuts rushed to the mics, saying, This is gonna be great! We’re going to ban abortion from the moment of conception and prosecute the mothers for murder!
The Democratic Party has been using abortion to scare suburban women in every election cycle for 50 years. Now, Republicans are finally giving them something to be scared about.
In Michigan, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Tudor Dixon, said she opposed abortion for 14-year-old girls who’d been raped because giving birth to her rapist’s baby could be “healing.”
Does the name Todd Akin mean anything to you? Anything at all? Richard Mourdock?
Dixon lost by 11 points.
Pennsylvania responded, Watch this! Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for governor, called abortion the “number one” issue of his campaign and said he looked forward to signing a six-week abortion ban. In 2019, he’d called for criminally prosecuting women who got abortions and doctors who performed them.
Mastriano lost by 15 points, taking the Republican Senate candidate down with him.
If we don’t bind and gag these pro-life militants, in about two more election cycles, we’ll have no Republicans in office anywhere. Good luck saving babies then!
Of course, it’s possible that there were other things voters didn’t like about Dixon and Mastriano.
Ah, but we also have pure test cases. Since Dobbs, there have been a total of six statewide ballot initiatives exclusively about abortion. The pro-life side lost every single time. They lost in blue states, in purple states and in red states. They were not outspent. These were direct-to-the-people votes. The tiniest restriction on abortion failed — even wholly theoretical restrictions! Every expansion of abortion rights won.
Army of Todd Akins: I don’t care! They’re wrong! They’re evil! What about the babies??? [Please give me a standing ovation now.]
In Montana, a proposal merely to require doctors to give life-saving treatment to babies born alive after a botched abortion lost 53% to 47%. Trump won Montana by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
In Kansas, pro-lifers wrote a ballot initiative that would have amended the constitution to clarify that it said nothing at all about abortion. The initiative placed no new restrictions on abortion, but simply moved the issue from the courts to the legislature.
It failed by 18 points, 59-41, losing in every congressional district in the state. Trump won Kansas by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
Kentucky voted on a similar initiative, proposing to amend the state constitution to say: “… nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”
That initiative lost 52-48. In 2016, Trump won Kentucky by a whopping 30 points, and in 2020 by 25 points.
In three other states, Michigan, Vermont and California, voters put a right to abortion in their state constitutions.
Six ballot initiatives expressly on abortion, and the pro-life side lost ’em all.
We’ve been waiting half a century to get Roe overruled so Americans could finally vote on the issue. Well, guess what? They’ve voted! In the privacy of the voting booth, the people have spoken, and what they’ve said is: We don’t want the stupid and incompetent having any more babies.
The fanatics cite three Republican governors who won reelection after signing six-week abortion bans as proof that a certain miracle governor in Florida hasn’t just nuked his own presidential chances by approving such a law. All three governors signed their six-week bans when Roe was still the law of the land. All three bans were tied up in litigation on Election Day.
But more important, in the entire country, only one incumbent governor lost in 2022 — pro-life, pro-choice, it didn’t matter. Thirty-six governors up for reelection; 35 won.
The only flipped governorship was in Nevada, where the winning Republican, Joe Lombardo, said he opposed a national abortion ban. Luckily, abortion was a complete nonissue because state law already allows abortion up to 24 weeks and can only be changed by a vote of the people. (Lombardo also said there was no fraud in the 2020 election, for any Republicans who care about winning.)
But even in the face of a brutal 6-0 losing record, there are still pro-lifers who will say, I’m proud and I’d do it again! (Did you see my write-up in Catholic Insights magazine?)
This is our “DEFUND THE POLICE” faction — people whose ideological zealotry outruns their rationality.
Fine, be a showoff. Just understand, you’re going to get a lot more babies killed. I hope that’s worth your moral preening.
COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER
Tom Sunic banned by Twitter
/23 Comments/in General/by Tom Sunic, Ph.D.I was purged from the twitter the same day, yesterday, as Kevin MacDonald and James Edwards – I suspect along countless other “deplorables” in the USA who were shut down probably the same day. No explanation was given, no nothing. I must confess I did not write laudatory tweets about antifa multiracial diversity; nor did I comment favorably about Papal ecumenical interracial foot-kissing homilies about non-European migrants, but never ever did I post hostile remarks about any particular individual, or any group of non-European people.
The Twitter decision doesn’t surprise me at all; I’ve been writing over the last 30 years — also in TOO —that the censorship in the USA is continuing where the Soviet Union left off. I know what I am talking about. My family and I were all proscribed in communist ex-Yugoslavia for several decades. My father, an ex-lawyer, even served prison time for “hostile anti-communist literature.” Now we are witnessing the same intellectual purges, albeit adorned with fancy/demonic euphemisms such “hate speech” and “ethnic sensitivity training” in the USA/EU — akin to the ex-Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, i.e., the NKVD.
Historically, this is the case when the System is bound to implode. Check out the civil wars of Marius vs Sulla in the first century BC, and, later on, the “damnatio memoriae” in which the memories of many Roman emperors were erased. Many of these emperors lasted no more than a few months each. Chaos on the doorstep.
Cancelled!
/67 Comments/in General/by Kevin MacDonaldJust found out that James Edwards and I (@tooedit) have been “permanently suspended” from Twitter.
This is the message I got: Your account is permanently suspended
After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t Tweet, Retweet, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal.