By Mike Huckabee
July 10, 2020
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CANCEL CULTURE IS OUT OF HAND
Seeing all the leftist elitists who’ve helped give us this odious “cancel culture” scrambling to keep from getting devoured by it themselves is like watching a chimp juggle kitchen knives: it would be amusing if it weren’t dangerous to innocent bystanders.
The assault on anyone for expressing a non-leftist-approved opinion has gotten so out of hand that dozens of what passes for “intellectuals” these days – a brain trust ranging from Noam Chomsky to Vox.com’s Matt Yglesias – signed an open letter in Harper’s magazine, making a long-overdue defense of “open debate and toleration of differences” against people who claim that hearing different viewpoints is a form of violent oppression. (To be fair, a few of the signers, such as author Salman Rushdie and Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov, have experienced genuine oppression.)
Well, you could predict what happened next: the “cancel culture” snowflake mob immediately attacked the signers for oppressing them by defending free speech and freedom of thought, which are apparently now “dog whistles” for racist, homophobic, transphobic, Nazi hate speech. That led some of the noodle-spined signatories to quickly backtrack and repudiate their own letter. One denied that she agreed to sign it, even though Harper’s produced the emails proving it. Others claimed they would never have signed it had they known that some people whose views differ from accepted leftist dogma had also signed it – in other words, they never would have opposed ostracizing people who hold different views if they knew they’d be associated with people who hold different views.
And now, it’s finally come down to what always happens in every situation: leftists have made a huge mess of things, and the conservatives they despise are forced to come in, clean up their mess and save them from themselves. As in this entertaining write-up of the story by the editors of National Review, who in making the case that even cowardly liberals who want to censor others have free speech rights lament that they can’t believe they actually have to defend Matt Yglesias.
This write-up from Reason.com is also worth a read. It’s titled, “Are We Living In Crazytown?” (Answer: Yes!)
The moral of the story is that nobody should be “canceled” because of their political beliefs, even writers for leftist publications. The only thing that should be canceled is subscriptions to leftist publications.
PS – In a related story, I’d like to point out that after Kanye West announced that he was running for President, President Trump congratulated him on his great “trial run” for the White House.
Meanwhile, Democrats and other leftists, terrified that he might draw away the black votes that they see as their divine right (remember, if you don’t vote for Joe Biden, you’re not black) targeted West with hateful social media posts, songs mocking his intelligence and even threats. He’s received death threats before for making non-PC political statements. So we’ve found yet another exception to the left’s “black lives matter” mantra: any blacks who get in the way of the Democrats’ political ambitions.
A SALUTE TO FORD MOTOR COMPANY
A salute to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Hackett for finally demonstrating to other corporations the proper way to deal with “cancel culture” cranks on their payrolls. We’ve seen far too many companies cave in to the childish demands of crybully leftist staffers, from the publisher who canceled Woody Allen’s autobiography to the New York Times, who fired an editor for daring to run an op-ed by a Republican Senator. So when some employees of Ford demanded that the company stop making police cars because they’re “accessories to police brutality and oppression” and “racist policing policies,” Hackett politely but firmly refused. He couched it all in a lot of soft-soap liberal buzzwords to keep from offending anyone, but the point was clear.
Personally, I would have suggested that if their consciences wouldn’t allow them to do their jobs, there are plenty of other people who’d be happy to take them, while, to quote Bill Murray from “Ghostbusters,” “someone with your qualifications would have no trouble finding a top-flight job in either the food service or housekeeping industries.” That’s also what should have been said to the entitled snowflakes at the Times and the publishing house, two businesses where there are easily a thousand eager applicants for every open position.
By the way, I’ll throw the Ford CEO a salute, but only with my index finger. If he wants the full-hand salute, then the Ford Foundation should stop giving money ($7.6 million since 2018) to groups like Black Lives Matter that are now pushing to defund the police departments that buy police cars from Ford. That’s both bad politics and bad business. You’d think the shareholders would bring that up to him.
Now, here’s a CEO who deserves the full-hand salute for bravery…
JOE BIDEN UNVEILS ECONOMIC PLAN
Joe Biden unveiled his economic plan in Pennsylvania Thursday. If I had to sum it up in a few words, they would be: “Exactly like Trump, only with a lot more government. And he doesn't really mean it.”
It’s almost funny to see how much “America first” rhetoric Biden has cribbed from Trump, after spending the past three years accusing Trump of being a xenophobic fascist for putting America first. I guess it’s not xenophobic if you don’t really mean it. I have to assume Biden’s talk about bringing back manufacturing jobs from overseas and standing up to China and being “laser-focused on working families” is all banana oil. That’s because he’s done nothing about any of those issues during 42 years in government, the last eight as veep to a President who scoffed that Trump would need a magic wand to bring back manufacturing jobs. Also, Biden mocked Trump for suggesting that China was our adversary. And frankly, I don’t think he can laser-focus on anything these days
What he’s mostly done is take popular buzzwords from Trump, like “bring back American manufacturing jobs,” and parrot them while proposing a lot of big government plans that would actually retard growth. Before the pandemic (from CHINA) knocked down the economy, Trump was standing up to China, renegotiating bad trade deals, bringing manufacturing back to the US and creating real private sector growth, with record low unemployment in all demographics and wages rising for the first time in years.
One of the biggest keys to that was that Trump cut taxes and slashed the onerous regulations that were acting like a boot on the neck of business. Biden now claims he will “stimulate” the economy by having the government spend hundreds of billions of dollars on American goods (with money raised from new high taxes on Americans, who might have spent their money on American goods themselves if they hadn’t had to send it to Washington) and tons more new regulations to pick winners and losers in the markets and punish industries that don’t do what he wants them to do.
Sorry, but I’ve seen those policies, and their lousy results, before. I believe it was during the Obama-Biden Administration. Trump calls his plan, “Keep America Great.” If Joe is looking for a name for his, I’d suggest “The ‘Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me’ Plan.”
WAR ON RACIST MATH
War On Racist Math: Some researchers at Michigan State University are trying to retract their own study that proved there is no epidemic of disproportionate police shootings of black people. Not because it’s factually incorrect, which it isn’t, but because they’re under pressure from the social justice warrior/academic leftist crowd after conservatives cited the study to dispute their claims that there is such an epidemic.
The study found that there is no greater number of police shootings of black suspects that would be expected, given their population numbers and crime and arrest rates. As for the claim that cops only kill unarmed black people, more unarmed white than black people are killed by police, even if you include off-duty cops and deaths by means other than gunshots. These aren’t opinions; they’re taken directly from police report statistics. But the study’s authors want to retract it, not because it’s incorrect, but because they claim the media are “misusing” it – by quoting it accurately.
The authors missed the boat by not presenting the most obvious reason for retracting it: math is racist. As argued on Twitter by self-described “teacher, scholar, social justice change agent, Chicagoan, PhD student, architecture enthusiast, wannabe math person, BLM always” person Brittany Marshall, “the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.” I can see why she describes herself as a "wannabe" math person.
Naturally, this was greeted with, shall we say, some skepticism. But Marshall had her woke defenders, who argued, “Standards aren't objective. That's the whole point. Math isn't objective either. It's always down to interpretation.” And “Just because we’re told standards/math are objective doesn’t mean they are.” And “I think everything needs to be looked at politically. We cannot say that anything is objective because people are not objective. I HAVE to look at the source and the history because there’s pretty much always an agenda of some sort, whether it’s visible at first or not.”
So if you feel threatened by the rigid white patriarchal standard that 2 plus 2 equals four, and you’d feel safer and more personally validated if it equaled 3 or 5 or 22, you go right ahead and believe that. Nobody has the right to oppress you into thinking otherwise! But to anyone who still has the ability to think clearly, as the linked article suggests, all these comments added together equal an urgent warning to remove your children from public school now. I’d also make it a point never to get on any airplane designed by an engineer who attended a “progressive” university.
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
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