wokeness

Down With College

Featured image 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 »

Nope, ‘Woke’ Is Not a Polite Way of Saying the N-Word

Featured image 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 »

Assume Nothing: Edward Jay Epstein speaks

Featured image 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: »

Judge Duncan comments

Featured image 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 »

Stanford University Disgraces Itself

Featured image 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 »

United Airlines Touts All-LGBTQ Flight Crew; Customers Not Amused

Featured image 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 »

Feel Good Headline of the Day

Featured image 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 »

The News of the Day In 12 Minutes

Featured image 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 »

Dulling Dahl for dullards

Featured image 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 »

Hulk Hogan Whiffs

Featured image 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 »

What Happened to Canada?

Featured image 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, »

Bill Maher Crushes It Again

Featured image 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 »

Mathematx

Featured image 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 »

Coward Watch Update

Featured image 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 »

Physicians—Heal Thyself, Fast

Featured image Dr. John Calhoon, the outgoing president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, posted the slide immediately below as part of his farewell remarks. See if you can spot anything wrong with it: Of course you know what happened next: Dr. Calhoon was called out for his “hurtful” remarks by the STS’s new president and board of directors. You’d almost think the STS board had confused Dr. John Calhoon with John »

The Woke Purge in the Sciences

Featured image Matthew M. Wielicki, professor of geosciences at the University of Alabama, has announced in a Twitter thread that he has decided to leave the university, and some of his reasons are becoming depressingly frequent in the sciences: Why I am leaving the University of Alabama: Some internet sleuths have discovered that I will be leaving my faculty position in the Department of Geological Sciences after this semester so I thought »

Time to Call Out the Cowards

Featured image One of Stan Evans‘s many great quips was that it was fortunate Republican politicians were pro-life, since they spend so much time in the fetal position. The lack of fight in congressional Republicans was a source of endless frustration for Stan, and despite some indications the new House GOP majority may pick some worthy fights, in some areas they are already proving to be a colossal failure. The Washington Free »