90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, January 5, 2023

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1954

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.

Visage à trois #695

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #869

The New House Majority Must Impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

Impeaching Mayorkas is the only option for those who understand that playing by the conventional rules of Washington simply isn’t good enough.

s the new House Republican majority gets sworn in this week, they have no choice but to use the only mechanism at their disposal to highlight the emergency unfolding at the border: impeaching Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. His acts of nonfeasance include acting on the president’s orders and presiding over a situation in which the border is, for all intents and purposes, being erased.

GOP moderates — many of whom are members in good standing of the Washington uniparty — think they are obligated to pursue “governance.” This sets up a conflict in which anything the new majority does that is aimed more at exposing the administration’s catastrophic policies will be skewered as mere obstructionism and proof that Republicans are incapable of governing.

But they can — and must — ignore those criticisms given the almost complete breakdown of efforts to prevent illegal immigration in the last two years.

GOP moderates may be inclined to ignore the security dilemma and simply move to grant a path to citizenship to people who were brought into the country illegally as children — the so-called “Dreamers.” But the vast majority of conservatives as well as independents and many border state Democrats understand that anything, however well-meaning, that is done to encourage further illegal immigration, as almost certainly would be the case for action on the Dreamers, is unacceptable. The Democrats’ effort to secure a new, broader amnesty is at the heart of the current crisis.

Mayorkas will not be thrown out of office since the Democratic Senate will never convict him even if the GOP’s narrow House majority impeaches him, and it will be labeled as grandstanding and a colossal waste of time. But stunts like that and the hearings in which they can finally bring the various elements of this catastrophe before the public in a way that has not been done before. It is the only option available to those who understand that the consequences of what is happening at the border are so serious that business as usual or playing by the conventional rules of Washington politics simply isn’t good enough.

The latest figures for illegal immigration for November 2022 illustrate the extent of the problem. In that month alone, a record...

Visage à trois #694

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85 times campus cancel culture took down speakers, scholars, statues and more in 2022

Campus cancel culture continued to be a force to be reckoned with in higher education, with 85 victims of the woke mentality and another 47 attempted cancelations over the last 12 months.

In sum, The College Fix’s Campus Cancel Culture Database tracked a total of 132 examples of the weaponized phenomenon, an average of more than two incidents per week in 2022.

“For those who think cancel culture was just a fad, it’s not, and we’ve got the receipts,” said Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix. “Campus crybullies — and the administrators who enable them — continue to wreak havoc on academic freedom and free speech.”

The database was launched in September 2021 with more than 1,400 entries and currently sits at 1,617 entries.

It defines cancel culture as any effort by people or groups to identify someone or something as offensive or unacceptable and seek in some way to censor or punish the transgressor or item.

The database tracks and quantifies both successful cancelations as well as attempted efforts, which can still have a chilling effect on freedom of thought.

Some of the most high-profile cancelations over the last year include:

• a New York University chemistry professor who was fired for tough teaching;

• a mob of demonstrators who shouted down a Q&A with incoming University of Florida President Ben Sasse;

• left-wing rioters who forced Tomi Lahren into hiding, ending her speech at the University of New Mexico;

• State University of New York at New Paltz students kicked out of a sex abuse survivors group over their Jewish identity;

• the successful protest that prompted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to back out of teaching a law class at George Washington University;

• Texas State University’s axing of the “Bluebonnet Lady of Texas” dorm name due to her Daughters of Confederacy link;

• a top female scientist who lost her university position over her 13-year-old “Michael Jackson” Halloween costume;

• and Georgetown University’s suspension of a prominent law scholar for his tweet criticizing President Biden’s “affirmative action” Supreme Court nomination process.

The year’s cancel culture victims also included a campus nickname — George Washington University’s “Colonials” is gone — and honorary degrees scrapped, namely Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani.

Building names and other monikers also took a big hit in 2022 with nine cancelations, including the decision by some schools to remove the word “women” from clinic names to promote diversity.

Several paintings also got the toss, including a portrait of Robert E. Lee from West Point and a depiction of old white men smoking cigars mothballed at from Leiden University.

Tenured professors remained under fire when they stepped out of line. Longtime Princeton University classics Professor Joshua Katz was fired in May, ostensibly for not cooperating with a probe of his sexual relationship with an undergrad 15 years ago. But the truth was he offended the Black Lives Matter crowd.

Convocation speeches also served as targets, with two shut down this year, one at...