This Week in the Bari Weiss WOKE Lysol Echo-Chamber (1/9)
David Shasha
The Return of Marty Makary COVID Denialism!
For those who might have missed it, I first discussed FOX News Trump macher Dr. Marty Makary back in November, as part of the Bari Weiss Troll the Libs COVID Denialism notes:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/a6Diln-pGbE/m/Hithm5AmBgAJ
Makary is a good ol’ boy, working hard on behalf of the Alt-Right Death Cult:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/fauci-thanksgiving-vaccinated-americans-unvaxxed-makary
Have a good time!
Infect your neighbor!
The other Whore of Trump gave us another Makary masterpiece on Tuesday:
This one is about college campuses, obsession of the Trump Right:
Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.
I always enjoy hearing about “critical thinking” when it comes from the Neo-Con echo-chamber where no contrary information is ever presented.
The article then becomes a PILPUL fest of misleading COVID disinformation; laying out an endless array of empty numbers, designed to make sure that we distrust government safety measures and vaccine mandates.
He then does the whataboutism that seeks to minimize the dangers of COVID:
In other words, a total of 803 American children have died from Covid or with Covid over the last two years. That’s less than the number of total deaths from both influenza and RSV infection in a typical year before the pandemic. A recent study of children in Germany found that no healthy child between the ages of 5 and 17 died of Covid during a 15-month period when nearly all were unvaccinated. Zero. In the whole country.
And yet there is very much a public health crisis facing young people. It is a crisis that’s been created by these draconian Covid policies—a crisis that’s the result of depriving young Americans of the basic enjoyment of life and the benefits of human connection.
A study conducted by The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that combats suicide among young people, found that, over the course of 2020, 31% of parents said their child’s mental health was worse than before the pandemic. There has been a surge in hospital visits for self-harm, a surge that was particularly acute among adolescent girls. The U.S. Surgeon General recently declared a mental health crisis among young people globally, citing 25% of youth experiencing depressive symptoms and 20% experiencing anxiety symptoms.
We can close the note with the following re-affirmation of FOX News groupthink, attacking groupthink!
The medical establishment is intoxicated with groupthink, just as it had in believing that Covid spreads through surface transmission, in instituting barbaric policies that prohibited people from visiting their dying loved ones, and in shutting children out of school for a less contagious variant last year. Concerned citizens should challenge medical dogma with data.
And telling us we need to “live with Covid” by using “common sense”:
It’s time to learn to live with Covid by using some common sense practices: If you’re sick, stay home. If you’re around someone vulnerable, be careful. If you’ve been exposed, wear a real, quality, N95 mask. For the young who have natural or vaccinated immunity, it’s a mild virus that will circulate for the rest of their lives.
It is the perfect example of how Trumpist thinking has taken over the Right Wingers.
Rufo Machers Glenn Loury and Amy Wax Continue to Make America Safe for White People!
In case you missed it, I recently posted an Uncle Tom Loury item on Trumpracist Amy Wax and her love of White Supremacy:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/nclVRFzzxuI/m/A3EunBMpDQAJ
Their conversation promoting White Supremacy was so popular, we got a second post with readers’ comments:
On Tuesday the Trumpist rag Law and Liberty – against Law, against Liberty – gave us Wax’s opus attacking Affirmative Action, because that is how the Neo-Con Echo-Chamber works:
It is the usual Neo-Con Bakke deal:
Apart from diversity’s effect on racial achievement gaps, the very notion that its pursuit has pedagogical value, let alone enough to justify a departure from meritocratic colorblindness, lacks any reliable foundation. There is simply no credible evidence that diversity, as that term is currently employed, makes for a better educational or classroom experience. The asserted and predicted upside of diversity, which is to have students exposed to a wide range of divergent viewpoints, simply has not occurred. Rather, affirmative action has created the very opposite situation—an educational establishment increasingly locked into a narrow straitjacket of acceptable discourse, peddling double-think, double-talk, and political correctness, devoted to selectively ignoring reality, and dedicated to the demolition of basic principles of intellectual discourse that have previously served as the widely accepted touchstones of the liberal academic enterprise.
Praising White Supremacist Charles Murray – again!
Given these developments, decisively defeating affirmative action will require nothing less than a bold and deep critique of the now dominant expectations, rhetoric, and assumptions about racial groups that undergird the drive to manipulate racial demographics. What is needed is a full and frank acknowledgment of the dramatic countercultural consequences of banishing affirmative action and returning to what Charles Murray in his new book Facing Reality deems the American Creed: an impartial, colorblind, merit-based system for educational and economic advancement. Given current realities, those consequences would be stark.
As Murray shows, the unpleasant reality is that, at least as things currently stand, groups are not equal on average in intellectual potential (as measured by IQ tests), academic ability (as reflected by achievement tests), and competence (as documented in empirical measures of job performance). What this means on the ground is that, without racial preferences, equal outcomes by race and the progressive ideal of racial “equity” in American society is not an achievable goal and will not be any time soon. More specifically, abandoning racial preferences and returning to colorblind, meritocratic standards will lead to significantly fewer low-performing minorities earning places in demanding professions and positions of authority.
With the additional tantalizing detail of one of the book’s authors, Maimon Schwarzchild:
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/maimon-schwarzschild
If he is with The Federalist Society, you can be sure that the august professor is no Maimonidean!
https://www.sandiego.edu/events/law/detail.php?_focus=58948
Indeed, we can see that there is always bipartisan support for Israel, and for Trump’s positions on Israel.
The White Supremacy is part and parcel of Rufoworld, and Weiss and Loury are all in.
Is Somebody Trying to Cancel Joan Didion?
I wasn’t exactly sure where to put this note – given all the Right Wing Tikvah garbage that has glutted the week that marks the one-year anniversary of the Lysol Insurrection – but I suppose that the Bari Weiss section is as good a place as any:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/joan-didion-conservative.html
As his Wednesday column shows definitively, as if we need further confirmation, Ross Douthat is a deeply troubled White Catholic Radical male.
Of all the strange discussions of the late Joan Didion, this takes first prize.
For those who might have missed it, I posted my article on the classic movie “True Confessions,” arguably the most brutal takedown of Catholic Church financial and ethical corruption from Hollywood, in honor of the late Didion:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/JouVJ9saloo
Douthat would do well to watch the movie, and see his own beloved Roman conspiracy be laid out on a decrepit platter.
His Didion column is more of his ravings about Cancel Culture, which oddly focuses on Norman Mailer:
If it’s really true, as Michael Wolff reported on Monday for Richard Rushfield’s Hollywood newsletter The Ankler, that Random House will not be releasing a planned compilation of Norman Mailer’s writings on some sort of political-correctness grounds — Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro” was allegedly invoked as a cassus cancellatus — then honestly, I’m a little bit disappointed in cancel culture.
No one cares whether Random House publishes a new collection by the late macho man author, or whether another outlet does. And this is indeed the essence of the hypocrisy that is what the fake Cancel Culture outrage is all about: there is no inherent right for anyone to have their work published by anyone. It is still a free country, and individuals and corporations make their choices. Those of us who have been Cancelled by the Right Wing fanatics know that truth all too well.
In the case of Douthat and Didion, it appears that the Neo-Con radicals see her as one of them, Nellie Bowles and Bari Weiss included:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/qjmDyZbaLxg/m/DD-pIXaJDAAJ
I am still scratching my head over this, as Didion – whose work I barely know – moved from Right to Left over the years, but largely remained outside the binary, seeing herself more as an iconoclastic disrupter.
Douthat is creating tension and divisiveness where none exists, but this indeed has been the world of the Right Wing Culture Warrior; a person who uses Fake News as Outrage and whines like a White Snowflake with their fake grievance.
David Shasha