The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
We Few, We Miserable Few
by Heather Mac Donald
by Heather Mac Donald
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Top Headlines
Report: Trump rolls back $60 billion more in regulatory savings. (The Washington Free Beacon)
War on cops? U.S. murder rate expected to rise 8% in 2016. (Washington Examiner)
Iowa becomes the 35th state to adopt "stand your ground" legislation. (National Review)
AG Sessions: MS-13 gang could be designated as terrorist organization. (The Hill)
How did New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo make $783,000 on memoir that sold 3,200 copies? (The Buffalo News)
UC Berkeley rewards liberal violence by not allowing Ann Coulter speech. (The Daily Signal)
Modern college yields results: Census says more Americans 18-to-34 now live with parents than with spouse. (CNS News)
Trump signs bill giving vets more choices for health care. (CNS News)
U.S. considers re-imposing all sanctions on Iran, dismantling nuke deal. (The Washington Free Beacon)
Assad repositions Syrian planes near Russian base, expecting Trump won't dare to bomb there. (Hot Air)
Policy: The economy is rushing toward a fiscal reckoning. (American Enterprise Institute)
Policy: Renewable energy myths abound. (Heartland Institute) ~The Patriot Post
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Mariachi band interrupts meeting
with Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner
by Sean Langille
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ A Mariachi band interrupted a meeting on Wednesday between Colorado GOP Sen. Cory Gardner and local business leaders... Gardner was hosting a meeting with the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce when the band began playing at the back of the room as the senator was answering questions. Local outlet KOAA reported that the band paid $250 to become members of the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce so they could attend the meeting. The Colorado Republican has come under fire for not hosting town hall meetings and meeting with Latino constituents...
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CIA and FBI in Joint Investigation to Find Mole
who Leaked Classified Info to WikiLeaks
by Philip Hodges
{eaglerising.com} ~ The CIA and the FBI are working together in a joint investigation to expose the moles responsible for leaking classified information to Wikileaks... Described as one of the worst security breaches sustained by the CIA, Wikileaks released information in March related to classified spying programs used on electronic devices, and other tools such as ‘weaponized malware’ and the ability to frame a foreign country for hacking. Sources familiar with the investigation say it is looking for an insider — either a CIA employee or contractor — who had physical access to the material. The agency has not said publicly when the material was taken or how it was stolen... http://eaglerising.com/42924/cia-and-fbi-in-joint-investigation-to-find-mole-who-leaked-classified-info-to-wikileaks/
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DNC Chair Perez Demonstrates
Why He Is And Should Be Loathed
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ DNC Chairman Tom Perez is a despicable individual, foul-mouthed, seemingly just for the sake of it, one of those skinny little guys in high school that used it and smoking cigarettes to look grown up, who still hasn’t quite achieved that milestone... He’s been cursing a lot lately, whenever he’s behind a lectern and with an audience of people, in front of him. He’s apparently confident that there are no Sunday school teachers left in the Democrat Party or if there are, he’s sending them a message that they need to get with the times. This is the new, profane Democrat Party, raising their foul mouths and voices as one, including everybody in a diverse hatred of America and our historic decencies. Accept the Dems as they are, just as they claim to accept everyone else. That’s a brilliant strategy, Perez. He shows why he had to resort to a debate in order to be anointed, another instance of liar-Clinton debate tampering, with zero charisma and decision making skills, having opted to drag commie Bernie Sanders around with him on his “unity tour.”...
http://rickwells.us/dnc-chair-perez-demonstrates-why-he-is-and-should-be-loathed-dems-will-lose-big/
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Europe: Making Itself into the New Afghanistan?
The brave work of the artist Mimsy, "ISIS Threaten Sylvania",
The brave work of the artist Mimsy, "ISIS Threaten Sylvania",
which satirized the brutality of ISIS
by Giulio Meotti
by Giulio Meotti
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ Maastricht, in the Netherlands, is the picturesque city that gave its name to the famous treaty signed in 1992 by the twelve nations of the European Community at the time... and which paved the way for the foundation of today's European Union and the single currency, the euro. Maastricht, however, is also the home of "Tefaf", the most important art and antiques fair in the world. The art work "Persepolis" by the Italian artist Luca Pignatelli was already scheduled when the commission ordered it removed. The work, built in 2016, combined a Persian Islamic rug and a female head. "We are all humbled and speechless", Pignatelli declared, pointing out that his work had initially aroused the enthusiasm of the commission. The fair's explanation was that Pignatelli's work was "provocative". The officials of fair presumably did not want to offend Islam and possible Muslim buyers with Pignatelli's combination of the mat (used by Muslims for prayer) with the woman's face. "We are shocked, this is the first time this has happened and I think it is legitimate to talk about it", Pignatelli said... https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10208/europe-afghanistan
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Trump Must Stop Allowing liar-nObama Holdovers
to Set His Iran – and Other – Policies
by SECURE FREEDOM MINUTE
by SECURE FREEDOM MINUTE
{familysecuritymatters.org} ~ President Trump was reportedly furious when he learned that the State Department had issued a statement on Tuesday declaring Iran in compliance with the so-called nuclear "deal."... Mr. Trump has repeatedly reviled that accord as the worst ever negotiated because Iran can comply with it and still get the Bomb. Consequently, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was directed to hold a press conference yesterday describing the many ways in which the threat posed by Iran - non-nuclear and nuclear - continues to intensify. He stressed that all aspects of U.S. policy, including the future of the deal, are under review. If that review is influenced by the same liar-nObama administration holdovers who claim Iran is complying with its obligations, however, it will be no more accurate, objective or acceptable than the misleading statement the State Department issued on Tuesday. Clean house, Mr. President. http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/trump-must-stop-allowing-obama-holdovers-to-set-his-iran-and-other-policies?f=must_reads
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We Few, We Miserable Few
by Heather Mac Donald
{city-journal.org} ~Black students at Pomona College and neighboring schools in Claremont, California, have published an open letter declaring their hostility to free speech—other people’s free speech, that is. The letter shows that the faculty of the Claremont colleges are failing in their most basic educational duties.
The manifesto, written by “We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges,” was triggered by a statement on academic freedom by outgoing Pomona College President David Oxtoby. Oxtoby’s statement in turn responded to a student blockade that tried to shut down a talk on policing I was supposed to give at Claremont McKenna College on April 6. Leave aside for a moment the signatories’ unblemished ignorance regarding free speech and the role of unfettered discourse in creating their own liberties. Viewed purely formally, the letter is a major embarrassment to the faculty of Pomona and the Claremont colleges.
It is filled with excruciating solecisms “Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves” garbled regurgitations of High Theory. “The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’ that the institution promotes”; and sheer head-scratchers of incomprehensibility “To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07 pm since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives.” Gnawing question: Why not a 4:08 pm deadline?
Does this student writing demonstrate the value of a Pomona education? Several of the co-signatories are graduating this year or the next. Are their professors satisfied with their command of the English language? What grade would this incoherent tract receive if turned in as a term paper—a D? Or, more likely, an A? Faculty undoubtedly fear correcting the writing of “marginalized students,” lest they suffer the same scourging as UCLA Education Professor Val Rust did when he tried to induct some of his Critical Race Theory students into the protocols of academic prose.
The content of the letter, such as it is, should alarm the faculty as well at least those faculty who have not inspired “We, few's’” tortured efforts at Foucauldian post-modernism. The students appear to argue that the ideal of free speech is based on a mystifying and oppressive concept of unitary truth, and that such a concept solidifies white supremacy: “The idea that there is a single truth—‘the Truth’—is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment . . . This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”
“We, few of the Black students here at Pomona, etc.” have it exactly backward. Free speech is the best tool for challenging hegemonic power. Absolute rulers seek to crush non-conforming opinion; the censor is the essential bulwark of tyrants. Without the Enlightenment and its challenge to unquestioned authority, “We, few of the Black students” would not even be at the Claremont colleges, because those secular, independent colleges might not even exist. It would be interesting to know how many Enlightenment philosophers “We, few” can even name; it is of course virtually certain that they have read none. Freedom of the press and of speech was essential in the fight against slavery and Jim Crow; how do “We, few of the Black students here at Pomona, etc.” think that those battles could have been waged without the First Amendment rights that the “We, few” now think they despise?
Moreover, “We, few of the Black students” only pretend to be postmodern relativists. They are fully confident that they possess the truth about me and about their oppressed plight at the Claremont schools. An alternative construction of their reality—one, say, that pointed out that as members of fantastically rich, tolerant, and welcoming American colleges, they are among the most privileged human beings in history—would be immediately rejected as contrary to the truth and not worth debating. “We, few” would also reject the alternative truth that far from devaluing Black students, the administrations of the Claremont colleges have undoubtedly admitted many with levels of academic preparation far below that of their white and Asian peers, simply to fulfill the administrators’ own self-righteous desire for “diversity.”
Typical of all such censors and petty tyrants, “We, few of the Black students” now want to crush dissent. They ask the Claremont University Consortium to take action, both disciplinary and legal, against the editors of the conservative student paper, the Claremont Independent, for the open-ended sins of “continual perpetuation of hate speech, anti-Blackness, and intimidation toward students of marginalized backgrounds.” These are the demands not of relativists but of absolutists determined to solidify their power.
As for “We, few’s” gross misreading of my work, it shows that reading skills are in as short supply at the Claremont colleges as writing skills. My entire argument about the necessity of lawful, proactive policing is based on the value of black lives. I have decried the loss of black life to drive-by shootings and other forms of street violence. I have argued that the fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined is a civil rights abomination. And I have tried to give voice to the thousands of law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who are desperate for more police protection so that they can enjoy the same freedom from fear that people in more wealthy areas take for granted.
The ungrammatical list of attributes that “We, few of the Black students” say disqualify me from speaking—“Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live”—unsurprisingly displays the ignorance already familiar from the rest of their letter, since I was an early and documented opponent of the Iraq war and all such efforts at regime change. The other epithets are not worth responding to.
{city-journal.org} ~Black students at Pomona College and neighboring schools in Claremont, California, have published an open letter declaring their hostility to free speech—other people’s free speech, that is. The letter shows that the faculty of the Claremont colleges are failing in their most basic educational duties.
The manifesto, written by “We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges,” was triggered by a statement on academic freedom by outgoing Pomona College President David Oxtoby. Oxtoby’s statement in turn responded to a student blockade that tried to shut down a talk on policing I was supposed to give at Claremont McKenna College on April 6. Leave aside for a moment the signatories’ unblemished ignorance regarding free speech and the role of unfettered discourse in creating their own liberties. Viewed purely formally, the letter is a major embarrassment to the faculty of Pomona and the Claremont colleges.
It is filled with excruciating solecisms “Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves” garbled regurgitations of High Theory. “The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’ that the institution promotes”; and sheer head-scratchers of incomprehensibility “To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07 pm since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives.” Gnawing question: Why not a 4:08 pm deadline?
Does this student writing demonstrate the value of a Pomona education? Several of the co-signatories are graduating this year or the next. Are their professors satisfied with their command of the English language? What grade would this incoherent tract receive if turned in as a term paper—a D? Or, more likely, an A? Faculty undoubtedly fear correcting the writing of “marginalized students,” lest they suffer the same scourging as UCLA Education Professor Val Rust did when he tried to induct some of his Critical Race Theory students into the protocols of academic prose.
The content of the letter, such as it is, should alarm the faculty as well at least those faculty who have not inspired “We, few's’” tortured efforts at Foucauldian post-modernism. The students appear to argue that the ideal of free speech is based on a mystifying and oppressive concept of unitary truth, and that such a concept solidifies white supremacy: “The idea that there is a single truth—‘the Truth’—is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment . . . This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”
“We, few of the Black students here at Pomona, etc.” have it exactly backward. Free speech is the best tool for challenging hegemonic power. Absolute rulers seek to crush non-conforming opinion; the censor is the essential bulwark of tyrants. Without the Enlightenment and its challenge to unquestioned authority, “We, few of the Black students” would not even be at the Claremont colleges, because those secular, independent colleges might not even exist. It would be interesting to know how many Enlightenment philosophers “We, few” can even name; it is of course virtually certain that they have read none. Freedom of the press and of speech was essential in the fight against slavery and Jim Crow; how do “We, few of the Black students here at Pomona, etc.” think that those battles could have been waged without the First Amendment rights that the “We, few” now think they despise?
Moreover, “We, few of the Black students” only pretend to be postmodern relativists. They are fully confident that they possess the truth about me and about their oppressed plight at the Claremont schools. An alternative construction of their reality—one, say, that pointed out that as members of fantastically rich, tolerant, and welcoming American colleges, they are among the most privileged human beings in history—would be immediately rejected as contrary to the truth and not worth debating. “We, few” would also reject the alternative truth that far from devaluing Black students, the administrations of the Claremont colleges have undoubtedly admitted many with levels of academic preparation far below that of their white and Asian peers, simply to fulfill the administrators’ own self-righteous desire for “diversity.”
Typical of all such censors and petty tyrants, “We, few of the Black students” now want to crush dissent. They ask the Claremont University Consortium to take action, both disciplinary and legal, against the editors of the conservative student paper, the Claremont Independent, for the open-ended sins of “continual perpetuation of hate speech, anti-Blackness, and intimidation toward students of marginalized backgrounds.” These are the demands not of relativists but of absolutists determined to solidify their power.
As for “We, few’s” gross misreading of my work, it shows that reading skills are in as short supply at the Claremont colleges as writing skills. My entire argument about the necessity of lawful, proactive policing is based on the value of black lives. I have decried the loss of black life to drive-by shootings and other forms of street violence. I have argued that the fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined is a civil rights abomination. And I have tried to give voice to the thousands of law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who are desperate for more police protection so that they can enjoy the same freedom from fear that people in more wealthy areas take for granted.
The ungrammatical list of attributes that “We, few of the Black students” say disqualify me from speaking—“Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live”—unsurprisingly displays the ignorance already familiar from the rest of their letter, since I was an early and documented opponent of the Iraq war and all such efforts at regime change. The other epithets are not worth responding to.
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