90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Morning Mistress

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1819

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

By attempting to silence speech about certain issues, woke mobs actually breed extremist positions which they hope to eradicate.

When Dave Chappelle’s sold-out comedy show was recently canceled by First Avenue theater, we saw some strange rhetoric from the online mob that orchestrated the cancellation. The petition by these 128 activists stated that Chappelle has “a record of being dangerous to trans people” and his “actions uphold a violent heteronormative culture.”

This curious newspeak is borrowed from the language of Critical Theory, a supposed scholarly field that has matured over the past decade. While you may be familiar with Critical Race Theory, another main category is Queer Theory. This is where the First Avenue activists got their inspiration and rationalization for their actions.

Critical Theory, rooted in postmodernism, has produced a radical political sect that can be called the Illiberal Left. Highly visible on some college campuses (famously at Evergreen College in 2017), they seek to stamp out speech that counters their idea of absolute truth. They are modern-day thought police with the power of social media.

A profound examination of Critical Theory is found in the book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. It dismantles the flimsy assumptions of Theory and separates the noble idea of social justice from the quasi-religious zealotry of Social Justice.

Wokeness is a more familiar term alluding to the new speech police and victimization movement. To resist this ideology, it helps to understand the Critical Theory underpinnings which explicitly reject reason and science to push the idea that truth comes from identity or “lived experience.”

Indeed, the Illiberal Left denies classic liberal tenets such as individuality and universal truth developed by Enlightenment thought. Ironically, our modern systems of reason and science stemming from Enlightenment rationalism give them the equal rights enshrined in law which permit their vociferousness.

Stephen Pinker, cognitive psychologist and leading intellectual, authored a book called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. It details the amazing progress humanity has made on all fronts, with an entire chapter showing how equal rights have fully taken hold in countries ridiculed by Critical Theorists.

The Civil Rights, Feminism and Gay Pride movements of past decades have brought crowning achievements in equal rights under liberal democracy, but this progress is not enough for Critical Theory proponents.

To see how the opposite works, they should consider Saudi Arabia where 41 citizens were recently beheaded for taking part in pro-democracy demonstrations. Or how Salman Rushdie was just stabbed on stage for speaking against Islamic theocracy.

Now that equal rights are guaranteed by many countries to all people of all types—and society has shown great progress in embracing diversity—the Illiberal Left has a strategy to maintain cynicism. Racism and bigotry exist everywhere in society, and all people are categorized as either oppressors or oppressed. It’s their duty to root out hidden weaves, using the assumption that oppressed identity or lived experience bestows absolute truth.

Critical Theory claims that simply because science, reason and humanism were developed largely by white men of the 18th century, these systems are illegitimate. What they ignore is that, unlike Critical Theory, Enlightenment systems are self-correcting/self-examining and evolve as universal truths are uncovered.

While it’s true that science was bastardized by ruthless power seekers in the past (their arguments would now be immediately and totally debunked), the story of Enlightenment is one of positivity and inclusiveness. Liberal democracy has dismantled oppressive structures in...

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Zuckerberg's Meta Rolling Out 40 Teams to 'Protect' Midterm Elections by Disrupting Groups and Censoring Content

Facebook is rolling out its rules for the midterm elections in a post from Meta about how it plans to throw its weight around in the weeks leading up to the November midterm elections.

According to a post published last week from Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, 40 teams will be monitoring the elections.

The post cites one side of the forces allegedly trying to disrupt an election by noting that Meta has “banned more than 270 white supremacist organizations, and removed 2.5 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally on Facebook in the first quarter of 2022.”

No specific mention was made about Facebook banning content from left-wing groups or their activities.

For the midterms, Clegg’s post said the company will employ “advanced security operations to fight foreign interference and domestic influence campaigns, our network of independent fact-checking partners, our industry-leading transparency measures around political advertising and pages, as well as new measures to help keep poll workers safe.”

“As we did in 2020, we have a dedicated team in place to combat election and voter interference while also helping people get reliable information about when and how to vote,” the post stated.

Facebook will partner with the Biden administration as well, through an alliance with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to the post.

The company will also work with the National Association of Secretaries of State, which is led by Tahesha Way, the New Jersey secretary of state who was embroiled in a lawsuit with former President Donald Trump over the conduct of her state’s election s in 2020.

Another partner Facebook identified was the National Association of State Elections Directors, which is headed by...

A new NPR opinion poll (by Ipos) and accompanying article argues that many Americans wrongly believe immigrants use “public benefits” at higher rates than the U.S.-born. NPR should have done its homework, as it is certainly not “false and misleading” to think that immigrant households make heavy use of welfare programs. In fact, it is well established that immigrant-headed households access most public benefit programs at higher rates than native-headed households.

NPR cites no data to support its position. Instead, it simply states that many immigrants are barred from welfare programs. However, most legal immigrants have lived in the country long enough to access welfare or have become citizens. Moreover, all legal immigrants and even illegal immigrants can receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children. An analysis of the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) by the Center published last year, based on data collected before Covid-19, shows that immigrant households use nearly every type of welfare program at higher rates than U.S.-born households.

The heavy use of welfare programs by immigrant households is not because immigrants are lazy and don’t work, nor it is because they all came to get welfare. Rather, a larger share of immigrants have modest levels of education and are more likely to be poor. As a result, immigrants are more likely than the U.S.-born to turn to taxpayers to support themselves or their children.

In our prior analysis we looked at the following programs: Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food program, free or subsidized school breakfast and lunch, food stamps (officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP), Medicaid, public housing, and rent subsidies. All of these are means-tested anti-poverty programs. (In an effort inflate the use rate of the U.S.-born, some advocates of high immigration have tried to argue that social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare should be counted as welfare. But these programs are not means-tested – they are open to all participants who pay in to the system – and are therefore not welfare as traditionally defined.)

Summary information from our prior analysis: