An insider at NPR describes the woke-shrinkage effect that has left even daily listeners like Les UDs wondering why so much of the language coming from the station smacks of a re-education camp.
In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
UD still gives NPR money. But she can’t stand the ideology-lecture feel of the place (not all the time; some of the time); she hates it that more and more of its stories/points of view make it sound like Chesa Boudin.
She gets that NPR has always leaned left. Les UDs do too. But Uri Berliner is right that lately it has tilted way the hell over.
[Danish PM Mette] Frederiksen emphasized that while individuals have the right to practice their religion, democracy must take precedence. “God has to step aside. You have the right to your faith and to practice your religion, but democracy takes precedence,” she told Danish news agency Ritzau.
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The Danes are probably going to extend their full face ban to schools and universities; the PM is also working to shut down prayer rooms there.
… in support of pro-liberal democracy presidential candidate Rafał Trzaskowski.
The just-elected pro-democracy president of Romania, Nicușor Dan, is among the marchers.
Photo taken by Mr UD’s cousin, Adam Soltan. (Click on pic for a better image.)
And with another pen stroke, a judge has just halted the Trump administration’s ban on international students at Harvard.
Surely, like all dictators and would-be dictators, Trump knows that unless he figures out a way to destroy America’s independent judiciary he’s not going to get all the goodies he craves.
A New Republic writer condemns as unpatriotic cowards the three Yale professors leaving Trumpian America for Canada. “[T]hey have decided to check out of their own communities long before they face actual state violence… [There is a difference between a person] who chooses to face down oppressors and one who ignores or betrays the call for solidarity in the face of oppression.”
Yet the author himself is here only because his father betrayed India, his native country. Does he also condemn his father’s preference to live in a freer, less corrupt, less tyrannical country? My grandfather hadn’t yet faced state violence when he left Cherkasy for the US. Should he have girded his loins and stayed?
Is the writer familiar with the excellent book, excellently titled Exit, Voice, and Loyalty? “In 1989, in the GDR it was the escalating dynamic of out-migration that led those who wanted to stay to take to the streets to demand change. Exit triggered voice, and both worked in tandem.” Many variants of exit and voice exist, and it’s quite possible that a powerful rejection by powerful intellectuals like the Yale Three will turn out to be far more galvanizing among protesters than their staying home.
The writer also overlooks the positive gesture toward Canada that their resettlement represents. Humiliated by the territorial rhetoric and economic targeting coming from the Trump administration, our far more democratic (at the moment) neighbor deserves as much support as we can give it, and few gestures of support are as powerful as actually going there and contributing, in this case, your prestige and institutional strength to a legitimate democracy under threat.
Well. You get what you vote for.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZK35yCTD
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And a reminder of his tragic homeland:
Trump loses, and the rest of us learn not to jump to conclusions about the Supreme Court.
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And permit me a nyah-nyah — I’ve been telling my political friends for years that all is not lost with the Supreme Court. I’ve told them that the Supreme Court will surprise them. They have laughed at me when I said that.
That’s one for UD.
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UPDATE: ‘[W]e’ll find out [in subsequent rulings] whether the Supreme Court intends to serve as a bulwark against a president who is hell-bent on asserting the unilateral power to control federal spending. If not, yesterday’s order may come to look like a momentary, ephemeral reprieve in Trump’s ongoing assault on Congress’s power of the purse.‘
“What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen…
And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”
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David Brooks
At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.
Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach [out] to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”
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Too right. But UD ain’t optimistic about things changing.
Germany’s new leader offers some introductory remarks.
A party whose base consists of culturally liberal, largely well-educated white Americans and a shrinking share of voters of color is almost by definition going to find it impossible to defend American democracy…
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[The future] requires a flexible Democratic Party platform that is willing to compromise on various social and economic issues (immigration, trans rights, tax policies) in the short run to protect democracy in the long run. It requires an ideological pivot toward more moderate voters who may not always agree with socially and culturally liberal whites.
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One theme that repeatedly emerges in the comments of political analysts is the need for the Democratic Party and its candidates to regain the center and to avoid the adoption of more extreme cultural and social policies that alienate the middle and working classes.
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From the comments section on this opinion piece:
The problem now is Democrats never have found a successor to the New Deal policies to mitigate wealth inequality and, as a result, leaned into the more successful cultural element until it literally became self-parody, possibly cresting in 2020 with calls for free health care for illegal immigrants and taxpayer paid …. gender affirmation treatment for prison inmates.
Until the Democratic party recenters on cultural issues to a simple, non-strident goal of fair and equal treatment for all self-identifying groups and finds its voice, and policy prescriptions, addressing the growing economic disparity, they won’t have a viable philosophy of governance – just an amalgam consisting of a combination of radical cultural advocacy groups and lawmakers passively supporting the economic status quo with small tweaks that fall far short of what is needed.
Yup, and it’s what UD‘s always saying: Read Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. It’s short. It’s a terrific elaboration on this comment, and, for UD‘s money, remains the best account of the suicidality of the left.