Nikole Hannah-Jones wants both races to be equally miserable

The New Neo Posted on by

Margaret Thatcher made a memorable point in 1990 about socialism. Her example involved the standard of living:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, head of the 1619 Project, seems to take the same tack as the leftists in the above clip, only Hannah-Jones spoke about the situation of black people and white people in Cuba:

In 2019, around the original launch of the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones identified Cuba as a model for racial equality. The 1619 Project claims to unearth systemic racism in the United States, and the original version claimed that the “true founding” of America came not with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but with the arrival of the first slaves in Virginia in 1619 (the first slaves actually arrived far earlier). In an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Hannah-Jones suggested the U.S. should follow Cuba in fighting racism.

“Are there candidates right now — or even just places — that you think have a viable and sufficiently ambitious integration agenda, and if so, what is it?” Klein asked Hannah-Jones on his podcast, recently unearthed by The National Pulse.

“I’m definitely not an expert on race relations internationally,” Hannah-Jones began. She also admitted that “it’s also hard to look at countries that didn’t have large institutions of slavery and compare them to the United States.”

“If you want to see the most equal multi-racial democ… — it’s not a democracy — the most equal multi-racial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” Hannah-Jones said…

“Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere. I mean the Caribbean — most of the Caribbean — it’s hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small, they’re countries run by black folks, but in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism, which I’m sure no one wants to hear,” Hannah-Jones argued.

This was not a one-off for Hannah-Jones. She had written pretty much the same thing back in 2008:

“Black Cubans especially are wary of outsiders wishing to overthrow the Castro regime. They admit the revolution has been imperfect, but it also led to the end of codified racism and brought universal education and access to jobs to black Cubans,” she argued. “Without the revolution, they wonder, where would they be?”

Where would they be? Probably a lot better off. The Cuban revolution happened in the late 50s, and I am pretty sure that without Communism the black population of Cuba would have made even more progress between then and now than it actually has made. They certainly would have had more liberty – as would the white population of Cuba.

And it’s not even as though what Hannah-Jones is saying about race relations and racism in Cuba is true. Plenty of Cubans dispute the Party line that racism is gone in Cuba:

Typically the proponents of the elimination of racism position are close to the revolutionary government, supportive of the revolution in total, and/or come from an older generation of Cubans that are more familiar with pre-revolutionary racism. They argue that the dismantling of economic class through socialism destroyed the material perpetuation of racism. In 1966, Castro himself said that, “Discrimination disappeared when class privileges disappeared.”…

While many opponents of the revolution, such as Cuban emigrants, argue that Castro created race problems on the island, the most common claim for the exacerbation of racism is the revolution’s inability to accept Afro-Cubans who want to claim a black identity. After 1961, it was simply taboo to talk about race at all. Antiracist Cuban activists who rejected a raceless approach and wanted to show pride in their blackness such as Walterio Carbonell and Juan René Betancourt in the 1960s, were punished with exile or imprisonment.

Esteban Morales Domínguez, a professor in the University of Havana, believes that “the absence of the debate on the racial problem already threatens {…} the revolution’s social project.” Carlos Moore, who has written extensively on the issue, says that “there is an unstated threat, blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead.” He says that a new generation of black Cubans are looking at politics in another way.[24] Cuban rap groups of today are fighting against this censorship; Hermanos de Causa explains the problem best by saying, “Don’t you tell me that there isn’t any [racism], because I have seen it/ don’t tell me that it doesn’t exist, because I have lived it.”

It seems that Hannah-Jones would have had to flee Cuba, or be imprisoned, for speaking the way she does. Here she’s rewarded for it. But like the good leftist that she is, she nevertheless praises Cuba for its racial policies.

The way it was

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently was on an airplane and sitting next to me was a young man in his mid-twenties, sporting a full set of complicated tattoos. He was very talkative, and as we were chatting I mentioned that the first time I ever was on an airplane was in 1960.

He was utterly flabbergasted. If I had said 1860, he could not have seemed more surprised.

He said to me that everything must have been so different back then, and I agreed it was pretty different. He wanted me to explain what it was like. One of the things I mentioned is that airplanes used to often fly without being at all full. Another was that the flight attendants wore really sharp uniforms. And still another was that the passengers dressed up for flying – such as, for women, dresses and high heels.

He was even more flabbergasted. “Why?” he asked. “Why would they dress up?” I tried to tell him that was just the way it was in general. People took pride in the way they looked and most people dressed up to go out, and that very much included plane flight.

There was more to the conversation, but that’s the part that sticks with me. That, and his utter surprise.

Notes from a middle school teacher: on CRT and its spinoffs

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A Rhode Island middle school teacher writes:

I love being a teacher and I care a great deal about my students, almost all of whom are non-white. This past 2020/21 school year was a sad and worrisome turning point for me as an educator. Providence K-8 teachers were introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.

Yes, I am speaking about the controversial critical race theory that has infiltrated our public schools here in Rhode Island under the umbrella of Cuturally Responsive learning and teaching, which includes a focus on identities. You won’t see the words “critical race theory” on the materials, but those are the concepts taught. The new, racialized curriculum and materials focuses almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative, and have created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before.

That is exactly what one might expect from a curriculum so racist and divisive. I can only conclude that this is the intent of those who designed and implemented this sort of poisonous indoctrination.

I believe they were also hoping it would fly under the radar. And after all, what choice do most parents have, particularly if both must work or if there’s a single parent and little time for homeschooling as well as not enough money for private school? COVID allowed more parents to see the CRT sausage being made, as it were, and now there’s more public knowledge about it and more parents incensed about it.

Not enough, but more.

To continue [emphasis mine]:

We did not need a new curriculum for students to learn about slavery and racism. We already did that, in great depth, relying in part on the writings of great African-American authors.

American history now is being retold exclusively from the perspective of oppressed peoples during the Revolutionary period through to the Civil War, and also in the literature of the Civil Rights movement. From my position in the classroom, it seemed that much of American history and literature was getting wiped out. No one of these new books, standing alone, would be problematic, it’s the new lack of diversity of perspective that is the problem. Although the 1619 Project itself has not yet been introduced, the historical perspective now has shifted to making slavery and racism the defining events of the founding and growth of America.

Public schools are now largely dominated by leftist thought and pedagoguery – especially in blue states and cities – teaching a generation of children to hate their country and that its basis is in Original Sin. This is not new, but it’s gotten far worse.

Please read the whole thing, even if think you’re already familiar with the sort of process it describes.

What’s today?

The New Neo Posted on by

Bastille Day.

Now, that was an insurrection.

And by the way:

In 1790, Lafayette gave the wrought-iron, one-pound and three-ounce key to the Bastille to U.S. President George Washington. Washington displayed it prominently at government facilities and events in New York and in Philadelphia until shortly before his retirement in 1797. The key remains on display at Washington’s residence of Mount Vernon.

Palloy [the man in charge of disassembling the Bastille a few months after the storming] also took bricks from the Bastille and had them carved into replicas of the fortress, which he sold, along with medals allegedly made from the chains of prisoners.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Physicist Max Born is singer Olivia Newton-John’s grandfather

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It’s one of those random facts, perhaps meaningless, that I nevertheless find interesting.

From Born’s Wiki page:

Max Born was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function”…

In January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In May, Born became one of six Jewish professors at Göttingen who were suspended with pay; Franck had already resigned. In twelve years they had built Göttingen into one of the world’s foremost centres for physics. Born began looking for a new job, writing to Maria Göppert-Mayer at Johns Hopkins University and Rudi Ladenburg at Princeton University. He accepted an offer from St John’s College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, and a textbook, Atomic Physics, that soon became a standard text, going through seven editions. His family soon settled into life in England, with his daughters Irene and Gritli becoming engaged to Welshman Brinley (Bryn) Newton-John (Olivia Newton-John’s parents; Born is Olivia’s grandfather and Irene is her mother) and Englishman Maurice Pryce respectively.

Not only that, but Olivia Newton-John is not the only one of Born’s descendants in the music or acting business. There are more:

Born was survived by his wife Hedi and their children Irene, Gritli and Gustav. Singer Olivia Newton-John is a daughter of Irene (1914-2003), while Gustav is the father of musician and academic Georgina Born and actor Max Born (Fellini Satyricon) who are thus also Max’s grandchildren. His great-grandchildren include songwriter Brett Goldsmith, singer Tottie Goldsmith, racing car driver Emerson Newton-John, and singer Chloe Rose Lattanzi.

Well, they say that an aptitude for music and math are often linked.

Another effort to get rid of my extra stuff – and this time a more successful one

The New Neo Posted on by

During the COVID lockdown time, some people engaged in self-improvement projects. They went on a diet and got fit. They decluttered their homes. They learned a foreign language.

Not me. I languished. Even though I was home practically all the time, it seemed to sap my energy. One of the things I knew I needed to do was to get rid of extra stuff and streamline and order my belongings. But with no one coming to visit, I lost some of the motivation I’d always had for cleaning up and clearing out: guests.

I’m not a hoarder, thank goodness, so the situation’s not utterly out of control. But instead of getting better, it got somewhat worse. Papers piled up. I’d start a cleaning task and run out of steam. Tomorrow I’ll do it, I thought. But tomorrow came and since there was no time pressure, I postponed things. Again. And again.

But now that we’re free to move about the country, and people are visiting once more, I’ve found a burst of energy. Suddenly I was able to do more decluttering in a day than I’d been able to do for months. I’m not finished, by any means. But at least I’m on the way to tackling a great deal of it.

At last.

And for quite a while, no masks either. In the market I would say only about 10-20% of the customers are wearing masks. I even was in a store the other day and not all the employees were wearing masks; that’s a first for me.

It’s a big relief, isn’t it, to see faces again?

Robert Woodson and The Woodson Center

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I saw Robert Woodson briefly on Mark Levin’s show, and the work he’s doing at the Woodson Center seemed impressive. So I’m calling your attention to the Center’s website. From the “about us” description:

Low-income individuals and neighborhood-based organizations should play a central role in the design and implementation of programs to address the problems of their communities.

An effective approach to societal problems must be driven by the same principles that function in the market economy, recognizing the importance of competition, entrepreneurship, cost efficiency, and an expectation of return on investment.

Value-generating and faith-based initiatives are uniquely qualified to address problems of poverty that are related to behavior and life choices.

The main focus of the center is youth violence intervention and prevention in inner cities. I don’t know much more about the Center except for what Woodson said, and what I’ve read on the website. But it seems like they’re doing worthwhile work, and there’s no question that it’s needed work.

Here’s Woodson’s Wiki page, and this is what he has to say about the genesis of something he calls the 1776 Unites campaign:

In February 2020, The Woodson Center launched the 1776 Unites campaign, with the support of scholars, journalists, and entrepreneurs like Carol Swain, Glenn Loury, John Sibley Butler, Clarence Page, Wilfred Reilly, Robert Cherry, and Coleman Hughes, among others. Woodson has stated that his central motivation in founding 1776 Unites was to counter the “lethal” narratives embedded in The 1619 Project. “This garbage that is coming down from the scholars and writers from 1619 is most hypocritical because they don’t live in communities [that are] suffering,” he said. In an interview with Fox News host Mark Levin, Woodson called The 1619 Project’s thesis “one of the most diabolical, self-destructive ideas that I’ve ever heard”. He argued that the assumptions behind The 1619 Project are actually a form of “white supremacy” as they are predicated on black Americans having no agency and being incapable of overcoming adverse circumstances.

Darryl Cooper explains what the right has been thinking for the last few years

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I highlighted Darryl Cooper’s explanatory Twitter thread in this post last Friday. I knew the minute I read the thread that it was something special, because it accomplished a task that had seemed extraordinarily difficult: explaining the genesis of the last five or so years of step-by-step deepening alarm and disillusionment on the right in a way that almost anyone could understand it.

Later, Tucker Carlson read the thread on his show and it went viral. Trump even cited it in a speech. The author probably didn’t know quite what hit him, but now he’s written an essay appearing on Substack that explains the whole thing further.

Here’s one of many highlights:

For two years, Trump supporters had been called traitors and Russian bots for casting ballots for “Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster.” They’d been subjected to a two-year gaslighting campaign by politicians, government agencies, and elite media. It took real fortitude to stand up to the unanimous mockery and scorn of these powerful institutions. But those institutions had gambled their power and credibility, and they’d lost, and now Trump supporters expected a reckoning. When no reckoning was forthcoming – when the Greenwalds, and Taibbis, and Matés of the world were not handed the New York Times’ revoked Pulitzers for correctly and courageously standing against the tsunami on the biggest political story in years – these people shed many illusions about how power really operates in their country.

Trump supporters know – I think everyone knows – that Donald Trump would have been impeached and probably indicted if Robert Mueller had proven that he’d paid a foreign spy to gather damaging information on Hillary Clinton from sources connected to Russian intelligence and disseminate that information in the press. Many of Trump’s own supporters wouldn’t have objected to his removal if that had happened. Of course that is exactly what the Clinton campaign actually did, yet there were no consequences for it. Indeed, there has been almost no criticism of it.

Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution – government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia – blew right past it and gaslit them for another year. To this day, something like half the country still believes that Trump was caught red-handed engaging in treason with Russia, and only escaped a public hanging because of a DOJ technicality regarding the indictment of sitting presidents. Most galling, conservatives suspect that within a few decades liberals will use their command over the culture to ensure that virtually everyone believes it. This is where people whose political identities have for decades been largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed not only partisan, but all institutional boundaries. They’d been taught that America didn’t have Regimes, but what else was this thing they’d seen step out from the shadows to unite against their interloper president?

Much of Cooper’s essay repeats his Twitter thread, but in less chopped-up form. I think it’s masterful. But again, there are some things with which I disagree. For example, Cooper still makes a point with which I took issue in my initial post when I wrote:

I don’t agree with everything [Cooper writes]; in particular, I don’t think that “the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.” No; Gabbard may be an unusual Democrat with a few conservative values, but she’s a Democrat and the press would have supported her win if it was her vs. Jeb.

There’s something else Cooper writes with which I disagree: “Some Trump supporters, unfortunately, thought the license for political violence applied to everyone; the hundreds of them now sitting in federal jails learned the hard way that it wasn’t true.” That’s true of some who actually did engage in violence, but it wasn’t true of the “hundreds” sitting in federal jails. Most of the people locked up right now for January 6th offenses engaged in no violence at all.

[NOTE: I also recommend this essay by Roger Kimball on the topic of Cooper’s Twitter thread.]

LEGO crimes

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some of the allegations against January 6th demonstrator Robert Morss:

Federal agents seized a plastic replica of the Capitol building from the Pennsylvania home of Robert Morss during his arrest on June 11. Justice Department officials are citing the Lego model as evidence in the criminal case against Morss for his involvement in the January 6 protest: “During his arrest, law enforcement recovered some clothing and other items that appear to match those he carried with him on the 6th—including a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, a neck gaiter, a military utility bag, a black tourniquet, and military fatigues. (Law enforcement also recoverd [sic] a fully constructed U.S. Capitol Lego set.)”

So wrote government prosecutors in a July 2 filing asking the D.C. District Court to deny Morss’ release while he awaits trial on nine counts, including assaulting police officers and disorderly conduct.

While dangerous criminals daily threaten the safety of innocent people in cities across the country—and many are released on bail—the FBI continues its nationwide manhunt for Capitol protesters while the Justice Department repeatedly petitions the court to keep the accused incarcerated for months on end.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who despicably compares January 6 to the Oklahoma City bombing, recently bragged his office reached a “benchmark” of 500 arrests.

Please read the whole thing; it’s not just about Morss.

You will almost certainly be completely unsurprised to learn that the DOJ lied about the state of Morss’s LEGO set. It turns out that it was not assembled:

The US Capitol Lego set that federal authorities claimed to have recovered from an alleged rioter “fully constructed” was actually not assembled at all, according to new court papers.

An assistant US attorney in DC clarified in a letter filed on Friday that all 1,000-plus pieces of the plastic model seized from Robert Morss were still loose in the box.

“Please note that after a review of the photographs from the search, there appears to have been a miscommunication and that statement appears to be inaccurate,” prosecutors wrote.

“The Lego set was in a box and not fully constructed at the time of the search, as pictured below,” they added.

So, how’d they get it wrong? It’s not an easy error to make. And what else have they gotten wrong, and/or lied about?

Morss is charged with assaulting police officers. I wondered what the details were on that; did he hit anyone, for example? Here’s what I’ve found so far:

According to court documents and video footage, on Jan. 6, Morss was on the lower west terrace of the U.S. Capitol, where he led an assault on police and organized support from other rioters. In body-worn camera (BWC) footage, shortly after 2 p.m., Morss can be seen unsuccessfully trying to push through a fence separating the crowd from the Capitol while officers repeatedly asked the crowd to back up. As depicted in the BWC footage, after being asked to back up, Morss grabbed an officer’s baton and tried to rip it away. He is seen again attempting to rip items, including a metal fencing barricade and a helmet visor, from the hands of officers. At 2:57 p.m., Morss is visible in surveillance footage at the entrance of the tunnel to the Capitol. Morss is seen directly confronting officers, pulling against their shields and passing the stolen shields back into the crowd. Around 3:07 p.m., Morss yelled out, “Hey everyone with a shield, back up and organize! Make a shield wall! Organize right now and make a shield wall.”

Morss walked out of the tunnel around 3:14 p.m. and rejoined the crowd. At 3:48 p.m., he was captured on video near the archway entrance to the lower west terrace doors, where he and other rioters climbed through a broken window into the Capitol around 4:17 p.m. Video posted online shows rioters inside the room handing through the broken window furniture which other rioters used to attack officers guarding the lower west terrace doors. Morss can be seen around 4:30 p.m. inside the room and looking out after another window had been broken.

Is taking a baton from an officer and not using it on anyone “assaulting” the officer? It’s something, but is it assault?

And what if the LEGO set had been fully assembled? What would that have indicated of any import? Nothing. A LEGO set obviously is nothing like an architectural drawing. It gives no inside information beyond the most rudimentary nature of the building itself, familiar even to many children. In fact, it’s primarily a child’s toy.

It’s a ludicrous charge not worthy of mention even if true (which it wasn’t). We already know that Morss went to the Capitol to protest. Having an interest in the Capitol is a given, and meaningless. The charge is there in order to indicate some sort of thought crime in which even contemplating the building itself is considered evidence of some sort of evil intent.

And of course, as we already know, it was a lie anyway. Maybe the next thing the prosecutors will do is to claim that the fact that the LEGO set was still in pieces means that Morss actually wanted to blow up the building and render it destroyed – in small bits. No argument is too absurd for them.