90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, June 26, 2020

Cambridge Rewards Academic Who Said 'White Lives Don't Matter' With Full Professorship

Cambridge University academic Priyamvada Gopal revealed Thursday that she was promoted to a full professorship after receiving backlash for stating that "White Lives Don't Matter."

Gopal this morning announced on Twitter that she's "delighted" to reveal that "last night Cambridge promoted me to a full Professorship."

Gopal said Monday on Twitter: "I'll say it again. White Lives Don't Matter. As white lives."

"Abolish whiteness," Gopal said in a follow-up tweet.

Not surprisingly, Gopal received a lot of pushback and a Change.org petition was signed by over 19,000 people demanding she be fired.
Nonetheless, Cambridge responded with a statement defending their academics' "right" to express their "lawful opinions" which others "might find controversial."

Though Cambridge rushed to defend Gopal's right to say "White Lives Don't Matter," last year they rushed to sack academic Noah Carl for conducting "problematic" research criticizing incest and studying the relationship between immigrants' nation of origin and their crime rates.

Gopal's treatment also stands in stark contrast with that of Jake Hepple, who on Monday flew a "White Lives Matter" banner over a...

SOLZHENITSYN’S PROPHECY

On June 8, 1978, a man with a craggy face and a beard came to Harvard University, where I was then a graduate student, to give the annual commencement address. The man was not a Harvard graduate. He was not a professor. He was not an American. He did not speak English. His address, given in his native Russian with simultaneous English translation, was not universally well-received. I suspect that some Harvard officials regretted their decision to invite him to speak.

The man’s name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was a brilliant novelist who had spent several years as a political prisoner in the gulag in the Soviet Union. He was a strong Orthodox Christian and a fierce critic of atheistic communism and Soviet tyranny. His writings had exposed the corruption, cruelty, and injustice of the communist regime that had come to power in Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and would remain in power until 1989—a regime that had enslaved its own people and reduced those of many other nations to serfdom under puppet governments. It was a regime as totalitarian and as murderous as the Nazi regime in Germany, which the U.S. and Britain had allied with the Soviets in World War II to defeat.

In 1978, the Cold War was raging, and the U.S. was still reeling from its humiliation in the disastrous war in Vietnam. Anti-Americanism was flourishing both abroad and at home. Many Americans—particularly young Americans—had lost faith in their country, its institutions, its principles, its culture, its traditions, its way of life. Some proposed communism as a superior system; many suggested what came to be known as “moral equivalency” between American democracy and Soviet communism. By 1978, to suggest such equivalency had become a mark of sophistication—something to distinguish one from the allegedly backward hicks and rubes who believed in the superiority of the American to the Soviet system. There were many such “sophisticated” people at Harvard. And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Harvard to confront them and others.

His speech was not, however, an encomium to America or the West. On the contrary, it was a severe critique—one might even say a prophetic rebuke—and a warning. Of course, Solzhenitsyn did not argue for the moral equivalency, much less the superiority, of the Soviet system. He hated communism in all its dimensions and he loathed the gangsters who ruled the Soviet empire. What he faulted America (and the West more generally) for was its abandonment of its own moral and, especially, spiritual ideals and identity.

He viewed the West’s weakness, including its weakness in truly standing up to Soviet aggression, as the fruit of the materialism, consumerism, self-indulgent individualism, emotivism, and narcissism—in a word, the immorality—into which we had allowed ourselves to sink. Solzhenitsyn, the (by then) legendary human rights activist, warned America and the West that we had become too focused on rights and needed to refocus on obligations. We had come to embrace a false idea of liberty, conceiving of it as doing as one pleases, rather than as the freedom to fulfill one’s human potential and honor one’s conscientious duties to God and neighbor.

At the heart of this moral confusion and collapse, Solzhenitsyn argued, was a loss of faith, and with it the loss of a particular virtue—the virtue of courage.

Here are Solzhenitsyn’s own words:

Today's American Culture Celebrates The Grievance Culture, But Hopeful Victims Are Only Left To Oppress Themselves.

Court: Injured officer can sue Black Lives Matter organizer

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A Louisiana police officer injured during protests over the 2016 killing of a black man can sue a Black Lives Matter organizer on the grounds he acted negligently by leading people to block a highway, a federal appeals court has ruled.

The Baton Rouge officer, identified only as John Doe in court records, had sued DeRay Mckesson and others who gathered as part of the Black Lives Matter movement after police fatally shot Alton Sterling, The Advocate reported. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2017, citing First Amendment rights and noting Black Lives Matter was too loosely organized to sue.

But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the officer should be able to argue that Mckesson, a prominent Baltimore activist, didn’t exercise reasonable care in leading protesters onto the highway, setting up a...

Good News, Bad News: Why Aren't Spiking Coronavirus Cases in Emerging Hotspots Crushing Hospitals?

As new coronavirus cases surge across a large swath of the country, with real spikes occurring in certain states, what are we to make of what's happening? It's undoubtedly true that increased testing is leading to increasing raw numbers of people testing positive, which helps explain a significant portion of this effect. But that's not the whole story, as infection rates are also up in places like Florida (though they're roughly stable nationally). Gov. Ron DeSantis has conceded this point, which was echoed by one of the state's GOP Senators, himself a former governor. That said, there are less worrisome statistics that mitigate the serious jumps in cases we're seeing. What's going on? Let's start here:

The trend looks similar in one of the largest states in the country, whose Republican governor started opening the economy back up on May 1:

The Trump administration is also highlighting the fact that daily US coronavirus deaths fell in recent days to the lowest number since the month of March. That's welcome news, no doubt, but COVID deaths lag several weeks behind infections, so the current snapshot on that metric could deteriorate shortly down the line. These data points, however, appear to be more hopeful:

It would have sounded farfetched just weeks ago. It doesn’t anymore.

As the city of Minneapolis moves to dismantle its police force, Minnesota state Rep. Steve Green on Tuesday stated the obvious that virtually everyone else has been tiptoeing around and pretending isn’t there: “What you’re looking at, in my humble opinion, is communism moving into Minneapolis and St. Paul.” And not just Communism, but the Leftist/Islamic alliance. Green asserted that Antifa and Muslim organizations plan to “police Minneapolis under Muslim rule.” Those who scoff at such a notion simply aren’t paying attention to recent developments.

The Minneapolis City Council voted two weeks ago to abolish the city’s police force. Its plans beyond that have so far been sketchy, but something is going to have to be put in place as an alternative to the police. The New York Times noted that “many have called for relying more on self-policing by the community, in the way attendees often do at events like music festivals, with the police stepping in only when a true emergency arises. Some cited as an example how, in the days after the killing of Mr. Floyd, teams made up of dozens of members of the American Indian Movement patrolled streets and directed traffic in the Little Earth housing community in Minneapolis.”

If members of the local community end up policing Minneapolis, what might that look like? Back in 2016, a series of Minneapolis Muslims in man-on-the-street interviews stated matter-of-factly that they preferred Islamic law over American law. We have seen Sharia patrols in Germany, Britain, and even New York City, where the Muslim Community Patrol (MCP) is decked out in uniforms that strong resemble New York Police Department uniforms, and drives cars carefully designed to look like NYPD cars, to enforce “fundamentals of the Sharia.”

Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj explained what that meant: “The mosques need protection and the MCP cars can help stop people who were not following the rules and regulations of the sharia, doing what they’re not supposed to...