wokeness
April 5, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a right-wing populist political party whose members fiercely oppose the elitist, globalist agenda now favored by leftists around the world. On Friday, the morning after news broke of New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Donald Trump, AfD member of the Bundestag Petr Bystron stood before his colleagues to deliver remarks on the state of U.S. politics and the September
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March 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson

The great Michael Ramirez has turned his easel to the Stanford disgrace featuring the shoutdown of Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan. We have followed the reporting of Aaron Sibarium and the opinion of the editors at the Washington Free Beacon on this deeply disgusting story. It is a disgrace without bottom. Michael’s cartoon of the day is posted at his Substack site under the title “Stanford Universilly” along with links
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March 20, 2023 — Steven Hayward

As suggested here yesterday, the idea for a multi-billion dollar “reparations” payment to blacks in San Francisco is swiftly proving unpopular with San Francisco’s oh-so-progressive citizens. And so the city’s board of supervisors is reacting according to script: San Franciscans who oppose the reparations plan are racist. Bet you didn’t see that coming. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: ‘Overheated and irrational’: S.F. politicians take constituents to task over racist reparations
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March 20, 2023 — John Hinderaker

For the last 50 years or so, public policy in the U.S. has trended toward the view that everyone, more or less, should go to college. This was a sharp departure from the historical norm, when higher education really was higher, and only a small minority obtained four-year degrees. It has become increasingly evident that the payoff for sending most kids to college is minimal, both for them and for
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March 16, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer

Far-left journalist and former MSNBC contributor Touré doesn’t appreciate the Right’s use of the word “woke” to describe those who disingenuously find systemic racism lurking behind every one of social ills. He took to Twitter on Wednesday to inform us: At this point woke is a slur. The way the right uses it is an undercover way of saying “those people,” or “non-white people.” It’s a polite way of saying
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March 16, 2023 — Scott Johnson

In my comments on his new book I expressed my regard for the incomparable Edward Jay Epstein and his autobiography Assume Nothing, just published by Encounter Books. I wanted to follow up with Ed to bring the book to your attention again and perhaps to spark your interest in reading it. Below is my written interview with Ed geared to the publication of the book on March 7: Power Line:
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March 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson

The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium covers the plight of free speech in higher education. He contacted Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan after he was made the object of the Two Minutes Hate at Stanford Law School with the support of one Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As Steve Hayward noted in “Stanford University disgraces itself,” Judge Duncan was beyond inclusion. His inclusion
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March 10, 2023 — Steven Hayward

I didn’t think it was possible for Stanford University to sink any lower into the woke abyss, but they have found a way. This week the Stanford Law Federalist Society invited Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan to speak. A mob of students decided to heckle him such that he could not speak. Judge Duncan requested that an administrator come and address the situation, and hence arrived Tirien Steinbach, Stanford’s Associate Dean of
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March 2, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer

United Airlines took to Twitter this week to proclaim that an all-LGBTQ+ crew had just completed a flight from San Francisco to Sydney. A video inside the tweet showed two employees unveiling the image of a koala bear – wearing heart-shaped sunglasses – waving an enormous LGBTQ flag on the side of the aircraft. The airline may have been surprised to learn that for many passengers, safety trumps diversity. Although
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February 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward

This Bloomberg story is a few weeks old, but worth savoring nonetheless, as I expect it is the beginning of a new trend that will spread rapidly, eventually reaching college campuses when revenues start to fall as enrollment declines: At Twitter, the diversity, equity and inclusion team is down to just two people from 30, one former employee said. A DEI worker who was let go from a popular ride-share company said
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February 20, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Several years ago, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation started a show called “Insiders,” featuring three liberal hosts. In an inspired moment, Sky News, which is more or less the Fox News of Australia, started its own program called “Outsiders” with three conservative hosts. I frequently appear as a guest on Outsiders, most recently on the show that aired yesterday. Ringleader Rowan Dean was out this week, so regular hosts Rita Panahi
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February 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Piers Morgan calls the rewriting of deceased author Roald Dahl’s books by his publisher a “woke overhaul.” Morgan’s New York Post column links to the Telegraph’s “stunning, damning exposé” headlined with the GIF “The (re)writing of Roald Dahl” (behind the Telegraph paywall). What’s it all about? Morgan writes: “It’s about the latest salvo in a relentless war on language and art heritage by dementedly self-righteous woke wastrels who think they
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February 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward

Larry Hogan was probably the only electable Republican in heavily Democrat Maryland, and did a decent job in a few respects contesting the Democrat-dominated legislature there. But as a prospective presidential candidate (as he is thought to be considering) he’d have been more suited as a running mate for Wendell Willkie or Harold Stassen, because he proves in this short clip from Meet the Press that he’s totally clueless about
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February 5, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Canada was once a land of fishermen, lumberjacks, oil drillers and Mounties. What the Hell happened? In the Telegraph, Zoe Strimpel writes: “Canada is testing sinister wokeness to destruction.” The madness of Trudeau’s Canada has reached a fresh, painful high. New rules have come into effect that allow adults in British Columbia – the capital of which is addict-packed, overdose-ravaged Vancouver – to possess 2.5g of ecstasy, cocaine or heroin,
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February 4, 2023 — Steven Hayward

There is something drastically wrong when the most prominent voice in popular culture on behalf of common sense about our runaway wokery is Bill Maher. And yet he keeps killing it, once again on last night’s broadcast ratifying what we’ve reported here several times—that today’s woke climate and cancel culture resembles nothing so much as Mao’s infamous (and murderous) “Cultural Revolution.” Chinese liberals (in the old and correct sense of
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January 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward

Sometime back around 1990, I was privileged to get to spend some time with Jaime Escalante (d. 2010), the Bolivian-born high school math teacher whose compelling story was made into a feature film, Stand and Deliver, which featured Edward James Olmos playing Escalante. Escalante had become nationally famous in the 1980s when 18 of his hispanic students from a low-income east Los Angeles neighborhood scored highly on the AP calculus
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January 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward

We noted here the other day, in “Physicians—Heal Thyself, Fast,” how the Society of Thoracic Surgeons had publicly rebuked their outgoing president John Calhoon for the sin of affirming the older understanding of individual merit. Apparently that initial groveling apology wasn’t sufficient to placate the woke mob, so the new president has issued a new statement: A Statement from STS President Thomas MacGillivray Earlier this week, STS issued an apology
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