MLK: Waging Wars Abroad is Inconsistent with Insisting on Non-Violent Protest

Martin Luther King:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967.

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Inconvenient Discrimination Against People from Asia

As reported by Renu Mukherjee at City Journal, "Inconvenient Discrimination: The American Psychological Association once acknowledged bias against Asian Americans in college admissions; today, it would rather not."

In 2012, the American Psychological Association (APA) published an online essay about discrimination against Asian Americans in college admissions. Penned by a psychology graduate student named Yi-Chen (Jenny) Wu, the essay argued that such discrimination might make American teenagers of Asian origin hesitant to identify as such and thereby negatively affect their racial and ethnic identity development and mental health. At the time, the APA described the subject of Wu’s essay as a “relevant psychosocial and psychological health and well-being topic.”

A decade later, the organization no longer believes this.

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Christopher Rufo Uncovers Massive Dysfunctional DEI Bureaucracy at the University of Florida

I assume lawsuits are forthcoming to dismantle what Rufo has uncovered at University of Florida. This is a long thread documenting the shocking amounts of premeditated divisiveness purchased by the University a the cost of $5 million/year. That money could have hired a lot of professors and lowered tuition for a lot of students. That these programs might be "well intended" is no defense. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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Allegory of the Wasp and the Caterpillar

Some wasps paralyze caterpillars by stinging them, then injecting their eggs into the motionless caterpillar, who now serves as the wasp’s incubator.

Today, many good-hearted people have been “stung” by accusations (or the fear of accusations) that they are racist, transphobic or unpatriotic. They are paralyzed into silence. Some of them become incubators for things they don’t really believe, e.g., We must fight racism is by dividing people into “races” and segregating us from each other. E.g., One’s sex is something one feels, not something determined the type of gamete one’s body is designed to produce.E.g., Public health professionals asserting baseless COVID claims.

I’ve spoken to many of these paralyzed fearful people. They tell me that they remain silent because they are uncomfortable, worried about losing friends if they speak or worried about the financial repercussions of speaking out.

It might be that we have lived too well and for too long as a society, causing us to be of shape, intellectually flabby and afraid of being called names. We might need to endure much more difficult times before we are able to regroup and recalibrate. Consider the maxim:

Hard times create strong people.

Strong people create good times.

Good times create weak people.

Weak people create hard times.

Many people tell me that they “can’t” speak up, but “can’t” is mostly a state of mind. This reluctance to speak up doesn’t bode well for a country established upon the idea of individual liberties, a place where the citizens themselves must be in charge lest the tyrants take over.

This is a country founded on the idea that it is one’s duty to dissent for free speech to work. As Martin Luther King famously warned: “A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”

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School District Quietly Drops Honors Classes in the Name of “Equity.” Parents Respond.

One aspect of the great academic leveling in the name of equity. This video features one school district, but others are trying to do this too. I'm proud of these parents for speaking up with passion and common sense.

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