USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/doj-nominee-worked-with-hunter-biden-at-big-law-firm-tied-to-ukrainian-energy-giant/

Florida Sheriff To Blue-State-Migrants: "Don't Vote The Way You Did
Before, Or You'll Have Here What You Had There, Guaranteed."
https://www.theepochtimes.com/florida-sheriff-to-migrants-from-blue-states-dont-vote-the-way-you-did-before-or-youll-have-here-what-you-had-there_3858197.html

No, You Are Not Paying A Higher Relevant Tax Rate Than Billionaires
https://www.aier.org/article/you-are-not-paying-a-higher-relevant-tax-rate-than-billionaires/

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20891974-cor-selecteddojdocuments-2021-6-15-final
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20891976-cor-selecteddojdocuments-2021-6-15-final-1
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20891970-georgia-election-contest
https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-blocks-certification-of-pennsylvania-election-results_3593327.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/georgia-to-investigate-after-fulton-county-official-says-election-forms-are-missing_3858979.html





> Woke Fail...

Disney fans complain that Disney World is too woke.

Professors Call For Hate Speech Protections To Be Extended To Animals
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/06/19/not-in-front-of-the-shih-tzu-professors-call-for-hate-speech-protections-to-be-extended-to-animals/

Coca-Cola Diversity Policy Risks Violating Anti-Discrimination Laws,
Shareholders Warn
https://www.theepochtimes.com/coca-cola-diversity-policy-risks-violating-anti-discrimination-laws-shareholders-warn_3866486.html

Many US Cities Are Starting To Resemble Post-Apocalyptic Cesspools As
America's Collapse Accelerates
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/many-u-s-cities-are-already-starting-to-resemble-post-apocalyptic-cesspools-as-americas-collapse-accelerates/

Joe Rogan Warns "What's Happening In Mexico Could Easily Happen Here"
Due To Defunding Of Police
https://summit.news/2021/06/16/video-joe-rogan-warns-whats-happening-in-mexico-could-easily-happen-here-due-to-defunding-of-police/



Welcome To Wokespeak: Its Logic-Defying Rhetoric Is Making Heads Spin
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/15/welcome_to_wokespeak_its_logic-defying_rhetoric_is_making_heads_spin_780731.html

In the midst of the nation’s racial upheaval last year, media outlets
including the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Washington
Post rushed to start capitalizing the word “Black” in reference to
African Americans, some announcing the move as a long-overdue gesture
of respect. While RealClear has not changed its style, the change
elsewhere prompted newsroom soul-searching on whether to write
“white” or “White” in reference to people of European descent.
Capitalizing the term made sense as a simple matter of consistency.
But the argument for lower-casing “white” staked its own moral
claims. One was that capitalizing it would legitimize white supremacy.
Another was that “white” in lower case is an apolitical description
of a skin color; it doesn’t merit capitalization because whites
don’t represent a shared culture.  News organizations adopted
inconsistent policies on the question – the AP, Times and others
voted for “w”; the Washington Post and National Association of Black
Journalists chose “W.” But the notion that there is no white culture
drew jeers of derision from some quarters. It was virtually impossible
to pretend not to see that white culture is routinely cited to refer
to white supremacy and white privilege as a shorthand for the
cultural biases, prejudices and values that prop up systemic racism.
Both ideas – that white culture is omnipresent and nonexistent –
can’t be true. Or can they?  The white culture conundrum is one of
many such paradoxes in today’s topsy-turvy woke culture, where
colorblindness once represented the ideal of being unprejudiced,
but now marks the epitome of racism.  These apparent contradictions
can cause confusion, frustration and moral whiplash in a swiftly
changing society where many people fear that one wayward move can
result in a public flogging or a pink slip. Yet as the public seeks
guidance, the fractured market of ideas seems unable to provide
clarity on which rules apply in which situation.  “These contradictions
and conundrums have hit like an avalanche,” said Jason Hill, a
native of Jamaica and author of the 2018 book, “We Have Overcome:
An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People." Distinct white culture
is, except when it isn't: The AP announces its Black/white
capitalization policy. Associated Press Everyone needs to be aware
because at some point they are going to be caught in these conceptual
snares,” said Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University.
“Most people are caught off-guard and cede their position. If you
try to argue your way out, they’ll ensnare you in more traps.” The
paradoxes come in a variety of iterations, from moral imperatives
to abstract propositions. In Ibram X. Kendi's best-selling book,
"How to Be an Antiracist," the celebrity professor writes that
cultural relativism is "the essence of cultural antiracism. To be
antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on
the same level, as equals." Taken literally, Kendi’s dictum would
mean that the antiracist culture he envisions is no better than the
racist culture he blames for racial disparities in health, wealth,
education and other measures. Yet it's impossible to read Kendi's
work as anything but a critique of racist culture, and by extension,
gun culture, rape culture and consumer culture.  This paradoxical
pairing of a radical cultural critique with a radical cultural
relativism is hardly unique to Kendi, but one of a growing number
of widely circulating self-cancelling propositions.  Take gentrification,
often invoked as an example of systemic racism because it can lead
to the displacement of generations of black residents by incoming
affluent whites. The famed antiracist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has
described gentrification as a crime, and others have denounced
whites moving into black neighborhoods as ethnic cleansing,
colonization and genocide.  Yet the reverse of gentrification –
white flight from increasingly black neighborhoods – is also deemed
a racist reflex by some, Coates among them, because it abandons
once thriving schools and communities to neglect and disrepair.
Hence the paradox: Condemning gentrification and white flight seems
to leave no room for movement in any direction, inducing a moral
paralysis.  “If both advocating for integrating city neighborhoods
and advocating for retreat to safer suburban neighborhoods can be
painted as racist -- and there are many examples equivalent to this
one -- almost anyone could be ‘canceled’ at any time,” said Wilfred
Reilly, author of the 2019 book “Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is
Selling a Fake Race War.” “It makes almost every conversation not
among close friends into a booby-trapped environment,” said Reilly,
a political science professor at Kentucky State University, a
historically black college.  Some critics of progressive politics
describe these paradoxes as the inevitable consequence of sloppy,
illogical thinking based on emotional arguments and political
expediencies. The inconsistencies can also result from the social
justice movement’s strategy of “problematizing” – a philosophical
posture that deconstructs and delegitimizes existing values and
institutions as systems of oppression when seen through the lens
of race, gender and power. Indeed, the term “woke” refers to being
hyper-aware of the constant microaggressions and oppressions that
become evident everywhere once one gets into the mindset of
problematizing, or turning everything into a problem.  Others see
the self-cancelling propositions in more sinister terms: as moral
double-binds and Orwellian doublespeak deliberately designed to
deceive, entrap and neutralize political opponents.  “They’re not
bugs, they’re features,” said Greg Lukianoff, president of the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free
speech and other individual rights of students and faculty at
colleges and universities.  “It gives you infinite power over your
opponent if you can literally have your argument any which way that
works to your advantage,” said Lukianoff, co-author of the 2018
book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and
Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.” To be sure, any
large movement will have discordant voices and divergent opinions,
and a certain amount of viewpoint diversity is inevitable. In all
human affairs, from politics to religion, there seems to be no
shortage of hypocrisy. Fabio Rojas, a sociology professor at Indiana
University, said the visibility of paradoxes in the realm of social
justice is a testament to the movement’s ascendance in Western
societies.  “Social justice is the theory of the moment. It’s all
that we’re doing,” said Rojas, author of the 2007 book “From Black
Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an
Academic Discipline.” “Right now the social justice world is gigantic,
very popular.” Still, many antiracist advocates don’t see these
conundrums as contradictory, but as being situationally true in
specific contexts, and also dependent on other nuances, such as
whether a word like “culture” is being used literally or metaphorically.
Ron Scapp, an academic specialist in ethnic studies, is among those
who acknowledge the contradictions and paradoxes as real, not
imaginary; but Scapp says they are not the result of muddled thinking
or an underhanded attempt at emotional blackmail. They simply reflect
the ubiquity of systemic racism that permeates so much of American
society, which means that we encounter racism wherever we turn, and
all our options are morally fraught.  This sensation of feeling
trapped is what is often meant by the idea that facing one’s white
complicity in structures of oppression will necessarily cause white
people to experience discomfort and even distress, because they
have no place to hide in the society they have created, said Scapp,
a professor of humanities and teacher education at the College of
Mount Saint Vincent, in New York, and past president of the National
Association for Ethnic Studies.  “The options aren't painless –
this comes with a price,” Scapp said. “And doing good doesn't mean
that you get to feel free from any pain or inconvenience that history
has set us up for. There's some white people who want a quick and
easy out, to buy their way out of that history." Several critical
race theorists told RealClearInvestigations that another factor
might be at play in the calling out of contradictions: a whiff of
white privilege in demanding perfect logical consistency without
bothering to attend to context or to the literal and rhetorical
uses of language.  “There might be some element of that [white
privilege] involved in demanding logical consistency where it’s so
easily shown that there is none,” said Robert Westley, a Tulane
University law professor who specializes in critical race theory
and reparations. “If we suspend the rhetoricity of language and
just approach it in a logical way, then you could generate these
kinds of contradictions all day long.” In many intellectual traditions,
logical consistency is not considered to be the loftiest human
intellectual attainment, and rationalism lacks the prestige of
paradoxes, enigmas, koans and riddles. In the Anglophone world,
contradictions have been celebrated as transcendent by the playwright
Oscar Wilde, poet Walt Whitman and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who declared that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds.” Political theorist Saul Alinsky, the author of the 1971
community organizing guide “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer
for Realistic Radicals,” gamely advised: “In the politics of human
life, consistency is not a virtue.” Paradoxes aren’t the sole domain
of the activist, but also are a tendency of progressive scholarship.
For example, we are told that women are equal to men in all areas
of competency, but studies show that women are more effective in
84% of leadership skills and in 13 of 19 areas of leadership
effectiveness, according to research reported in Harvard Business
Review.  It is accepted as a self-evident truth that slavery and
segregation enriched white America at the expense of African
Americans. But research also shows the opposite: that racism acts
as a drag on the whole economy – retarding investment, growth,
purchasing power, consumer spending and depressing other metrics
-- which economically harms white people, too, according to a report
in The New York Times.  The most fertile ground for contradictions
might well be the diversity and equity industry, which seems to
have outpaced the pulpit in its zeal for issuing moral precepts.
A recurring theme in the social justice movement is the plea for
an honest conversation about race, where all perspectives are
respected. But the public is also getting the inverse message: that
it is imperative for whites to remain silent to make room for
marginalized voices and to stop centering their privileged experiences.
In the antiracist consulting world, it is a truth universally
acknowledged that organizations should hire people of color to
promote diverse viewpoints and insights from those employees.  But
according to materials from The Walt Disney Co., recently leaked
to City Journal, there is a limit on exploiting black wisdom. “Do
not rely on your Black colleagues to educate you. This is emotionally
taxing”; “Do not call on your Black colleagues to represent the
voice of their community”; and “Be aware of tokenism, when Black
professionals are expected to be representative for their entire
race.” Critical race theorist andré douglas pond cummings (who
writes his name in lowercase letters), said this is actually sound
advice for an organization that has hired one or two token black
employees. The problem of tokenization disappears when organizations
have true diversity with many black colleagues representing multiple
black perspectives, said cummings, a business law professor at the
University of Arkansas at Little Rock who has taught courses on
corporate justice and “Hip-Hop & the American Constitution.” He
said many of the paradoxes will become moot in a socially just
society.  “Maybe some of these seeming incoherences or inconsistencies
just need time to come to a place of coherence,” cummings said.
Appeasing moral scolds can present a special challenge for homebuyers
who want to be “on the right side of history” and increasingly see
their words and actions as moral statements. The real estate dilemma
of gentrification versus white flight is particularly acute for
someone who might opt for a hybrid automobile over a gas-guzzling
SUV and insists on shopping at businesses that support Black Lives
Matter. A home purchase, the most expensive personal investment
most people will make, becomes imbued with the greatest moral
significance of all.  Rachel Garshick Kleit, a professor of city
and regional planning at The Ohio State University, has taught
classes on and written about teaching “The Socially Just City.” She
said her students have been torn between the two impossible options
when they think about home ownership as a personal moral decision.
“They were in moral conflict over it in a class discussion,” Kleit
said. “They were trying to figure out what their personal responsibility
was.” Gentrification is deeply personal for all involved. In a 2019
New York Times article about gentrification in Raleigh, N.C. –
headlined “The Neighborhood's Black. The New Home Buyers? White.”
-- a community organizer vented her frustration: “Our black bodies
literally have less economic value than the body of a white person.
As soon as the white body moves into the same space that I occupied,
all of a sudden this place is more valuable.” Some critical race
theorists are willing to grant moral absolution on this point. The
moral predicament of home ownership arises out of the default
culture’s fixation with individualism, said Westley, the reparations
specialist at Tulane. The critique of gentrification and white
flight is not so much a moral litmus test for individual white
homebuyers, according to Westley and Kleit, but a critique of the
government policies that shape real estate markets in ways that are
harmful to people of color.  “I think you have to get out of this
individualist paradigm where it’s all about me and what I do, as
opposed to it’s about what we do as a society and a community,”
Westley said.  'Endless Contradictions, Fabrications and Fantasies'
The topic of woke paradoxes has received scant attention, but it
hasn’t escaped notice altogether.  Conservative British author
Douglas Murray grappled with the issue in his 2019 book, “The Madness
of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.” He traced the cause of the
linguistic convolutions to the social justice movement’s emphasis
on identity politics and its jettisoning of traditional liberal
principles such as colorblindness. This manner of thinking distorts
the benefits of liberalism (that is, civil rights gains for minority
groups) into a type of idolatry, elevating identity politics as an
end unto itself. This confusion leads to “endless contradictions,
fabrications and fantasies,” Murray wrote.  As a paradox-spotter,
Murray has few peers. Murray depicts social justice activism as an
incarnation of the Orwellian principle that revolutions start out
professing that all people are equal but then slip into the
self-serving belief that some people are more equal than others.
Though Murray doesn’t mention the U.S. Declaration of Independence
– “all men are created equal” – slavery and discrimination might
well be one of the most egregious examples of this unfortunate
tendency.  Murray does cite other examples. One is a 2014 study by
Australian researchers that found that children of same-sex couples
are healthier and happier than children brought up by straight
couples. In another study, UCLA researchers found that gay couples
are more likely to stay together than straight couples (and,
surprisingly, lesbian couples).  Murray also noted the perplexing
declamations that women are more capable than men. This incongruity
gained currency after the Great Recession of 2008, which was allegedly
caused by too many men in positions of power in the finance and
banking industry. Christine Lagarde, former head of the International
Monetary Fund (now president of the European Central Bank), blamed
the financial meltdown on the underrepresentation of women on the
boards of banks and in regulatory agencies. “If it had been Lehman
Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers,” she was quoted as saying,
repeating a favorite mantra, “the world might well look a lot
different today.” According to Murray, who is gay, one of the
“central conundrums” of our time is expressed by people with
marginalized identities: You must understand me. / You will never
understand me.  Murray dubbed these moral strictures as “paradoxical,
impossible demands.” “The inherent willingness to rush towards
contradiction” is “not enough to stop this new religion of social
justice,” Murray wrote. One reason “why contradiction is not enough
is because nothing about the intersectional, social justice movement
suggests that it is really interested in solving any of the problems
that it claims to be interested in.” That left Murray with only one
possible conclusion: “Their desire is not to heal but to divide,
not to placate but to inflame, not to dampen but to burn.”







Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the current "revolution" in
America is being waged by the youth, at the behest of radical
leftists, of course. Also, much like the Chinese Cultural Revolution
of the 1960s, the American “Woke Revolution” is hellbent on destroying
any and all vestiges of traditional society, especially those that
celebrate freedom, individualism. Old ideas, such as equality of
opportunity and meritocracy, are now moot. Old customs, such as
vigorously defending one’s right to freedom of speech, are long
gone. And, old habits, such as the Protestant work ethic and rugged
individualism, have been seriously undermined. In place of these
“old” aspects of our culture, the Woke Revolution desires to turn
our society on its head. The Woke Revolution, like the Cultural
Revolution, is predicated on Marxist ideology. Individualism is
being replaced with communalism. Equity, better known as equality
of outcome, now trumps equality of opportunity. Sadly, even Martin
Luther King Jr.’s “dream” of a color-blind society has given way
to critical race theory, which is the epitome of racism. And, above
all else, class warfare reigns supreme. No longer is America the
land of opportunity. Henceforth, it shall be known as the land of
oppression. Perhaps most disconcerting when one compares the Cultural
Revolution to contemporary America is the disdain for the past. In
China, this manifested in mass book burnings and wanton destruction
of historic monuments. That sounds a lot like what’s been happening
in America recently. The parallels between China’s Cultural Revolution
and America’s Woke Revolution are becoming closer by the day.