Tara Henley Describes the Identitarian Left

Who are these people? Here's one tell: You will not find them on the streets actually helping to improve the people they claim they care about. You will not find them in the kinds of colleges that most people attend. You won't find them inviting open-ended discussions with the people they disagree with.

Tara Henley tells us more about the Identitarian Left, whether you call them this or whether you call them Woke Moralists or Social Justice Warriors or whatever:

One term I’ve heard lately that’s helpful in unpacking the new left is “identitarian moralism.” This phrase captures the new left’s puritanical thrust and quasi-religious fervour, along with its festishization of identity, while also signaling its ability to shape-shift to take up the Twitter cause du jour, whether that happens to be pandemic public health policies or, this week, recasting Madeleine Albright as some sort of feminist icon. What remains consistent, across all fronts, is a strident illiberalism.

Let’s be clear: If you do not agree with the new left’s list of approved narratives, it one hundred percent expects you to keep your mouth shut (or, alternatively, to “do the work” of “listening and learning,” ideally on Instagram, so that you can be shunned and shamed in as public a manner as possible).

The goal of the new left is, in fact, explicitly to shut down debate of any ideas deemed “harmful,” so as not to perpetuate the harm. This unfortunately leads to an endless parade of bad faith arguments, since the goal is never to make sense or persuade people, but rather to bring discussions to an abrupt halt.

It also leaves a great number of people politically homeless.

Who is Tara Henley? Someone who lives by her principles. A former decorated reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Here is why she resigned at the end of December 2021:
It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.

It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.

To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.

To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.

Continue ReadingTara Henley Describes the Identitarian Left

The Washington Post has Reckless and Incoherent Joe Biden’s Back

Joe Biden's reckless/incoherent rhetoric could get us all killed. I'm talking about his recent rhetoric. That's on top of the fact that American news media has been pummeling us with non-stop unreflective pro-war messages leading up to the current sorry state of the world. We are where we are not because of a sober cost-benefit foreign policy analysis. This war has turned into theater or, perhaps, the existential version of the Superbowl, where U.S. officials refuse to open up a dialogue with Russia. That would be the thing that grown-ups would do when their conduct is nudging up the nuclear clock which, in 2018, was already at two minutes to midnight.

Here's a "solution." In case Joe Biden says something incoherent or reckless, the Washington Post headline writers are there to save the day. You see, Biden didn't mean what he said, that thing that could result in a civilization-ending nuclear holocaust.

Glenn Greenwald:

President Obama's own arguments about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine — namely, that “Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one” and therefore the U.S. should not risk confrontation with Moscow over it — were widely maligned as Kremlin assets if not agents. Others who urged the U.S. to try to avert war through diplomacy — by, for instance, formally vowing that NATO membership would not be offered to Ukraine and that Kyiv would remain neutral in the new Cold War pursued by the West with Moscow — faced the same set of accusations about their loyalty and patriotism.

Most taboo of all was any discussion of the heavy involvement of the U.S. in Ukraine beginning in 2014 up to the invasion: from micro-managing Ukrainian politics, to arming its military, to placing military advisers and intelligence officers on the ground to train its soldiers how to fight (something Biden announced he was considering last November) — all of which amounted to a form of de facto NATO expansion without the formal membership. And that leaves to the side the still-unanswered yet supremely repressed question of what Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland referred to as the Ukrainians’ "biological research facilities” so dangerous and beyond current Russian bio-research capabilities that she gravely feared they would "fall into Russian hands.” . . .

As a result of the media's embracing of moral righteousness in lieu of debating these crucial geopolitical questions, the U.S. government has consistently and aggressively escalated its participation in this war with barely any questioning let alone opposition.

The central question for Americans from the start of the war in Ukraine was what role, if any, should the U.S. government play in that war? A necessarily related question: if the U.S. is going to involve itself in this war, what objectives should drive that involvement?

Prior to the U.S.'s jumping directly into this war, those questions were never meaningfully considered. Instead, the emotions deliberately stoked by the relentless media attention to the horrors of this war — horrors which, contrary to the West's media propaganda, are common to all wars, including its own — left little to no space for public discussion of those questions. The only acceptable modes of expression in U.S. discourse were to pronounce that the Russian invasion was unjustified, and, using parlance which the 2011 version of Chris Hayes correctly dismissed as adolescent, that Putin is a “bad guy.” Those denunciation rituals, no matter how cathartic and applause-inducing, supplied no useful information about what actions the U.S. should or should not take when it came to this increasingly dangerous conflict.

That was the purpose of so severely restricting discourse to those simple moral claims: to allow policymakers in Washington free rein to do whatever they wanted in the name of stopping Putin without being questioned. Indeed, as so often happens when war breaks out, anyone questioning U.S. political leaders instantly had their patriotism and loyalty impugned (unless one was complaining that the U.S. should become more involved in the conflict than it already was, a form of pro-war "dissent” that is always permissible in American discourse).

Matt Taibbi knows how to connect the dots:

Continue ReadingThe Washington Post has Reckless and Incoherent Joe Biden’s Back

Shamed News Media Elites Refuse to Come Clean Regarding Hunter Biden’s Laptop

What more proof do we need that Left-leaning "news" media thinks that its main job is to get particular people elected? See Matt Orfalea's mashup on Hunter Biden's Laptop. Then See Matt Taibbi's new article: "The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity: A development in the infamous laptop story further proves the "Russian Disinformation" tale was itself disinformation, shaming a herd of craven media stenographers."

Now consider this excerpt from Matt Taibbi's article:

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley.

Continue ReadingShamed News Media Elites Refuse to Come Clean Regarding Hunter Biden’s Laptop

What Harvard did to Economist Roland Fryer

Glenn Loury introduces a narrative that tells a story about what happens when a person diligently follows the evidence where it leads, but where it leads conflicts with a prevailing cultural-media narrative. In this case, Fryer's research showed police have not been killing unarmed "black" men at a rate greater than they kill unarmed "white" men. Wikipedia's version: "In 2016, Fryer published a working paper concluding that although minorities (African Americans and Hispanics) are more likely to experience police use of force than whites, they were not more likely to be shot by police than whites."

This is the story of the Harvard community reacted to those inconvenient numbers.

Glenn Loury introduces the video:

Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period.

He was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur “Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly covered in the mainstream media. His research upends many commonly held assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence. It is tremendously creative, rigorous, and consequential scholarship, and it cannot be simply written off because it happens to challenge the status quo.

To do the kind of work Roland does, you have to be more than brilliant. You have to be fearless. And I cannot help suspect that now Roland is paying the price for pursuing the truth wherever it leads. Several years ago, he was accused of sexual harassment by a disgruntled ex-assistant. In my opinion and that of many others, those accusations are baseless. But Harvard has used them as a pretext to shut down Roland’s lab, to curtail his teaching, and to marginalize him within the institution.

I’ll not mince words. Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They have unnecessarily, heedlessly tarnished the career of an historically great economist. Again, I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital research not because it was flawed but because they found the results to be politically inconvenient. “Veritas” indeed.

I’m not the only one infuriated by what is happening to Roland Fryer. The filmmaker Rob Montz has made a short documentary about this subject. I’m interviewed in it alongside others who see this fiasco for what it is, some of who have much to lose by publicly coming to Roland’s defense. People need to see this film. They need to know the truth about Roland Fryer. So I ask you to watch and to judge for yourself, and if you feel so moved, to share it as widely as possible.

Continue ReadingWhat Harvard did to Economist Roland Fryer