I’m so old, I remember when Reality was supposed to have a “liberal bias.”
And Reality has been doing violence to much of the Left’s cherished agenda for the past few days.
UPDATE—
Leftist ideas can’t withstand debate. Leftists know that, which is why they’re always trying to silence their opponents, generally in the name of some sort of decency or compassion that they themselves spectacularly lack.
A short while ago, Arron Walker received this email about his @AaronWorthing account—
Aaron was simply using an old Saturday Night Live catchphrase to point out how the Fifth Amendment constrains any government investigation.
Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin were unavailable for comment.
… there’s been a bit of a shakeup. The left-wing hate group has fired its founder and airbrushed his bio from their website. Morris Dees’ sudden transition to unpersonhood has been met with smiles for the karmic irony by some, including my podcasting partner Stacy McCain.
Newsbusters reports that SPLC internal emails have surfaced that contain “complaints regarding sexual harassment and racial biases in promotion and hierarchy.” Of course, such complaints are grounds for firing in the current SJW environment, but in Dees’ case they’re not new. Similar allegations appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser in 1994.
Why fire Dees now?
Discovery. The SPLC settled one lawsuit for over 3,000,000 bucks rather than go through the discovery process and trial. There are other suits pending, and the discovery process can be messy, especially if one has something to hide. It may be that they think that throwing their founder under the bus will appease their critics and moderate their losses. If that’s the case, they don’t understand how people on the right think.
Stay tuned.
Colorado lost its first attempt to crush Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop in a 7-to-2 Supreme Court decision affirming the baker’s First Amendment right to practice his religion and not bake a cake dedicated to promoting something contrary to his beliefs. In response, the Colorado (so-called) Civil Rights Commission filed a second case against Phillips. In response, Phillips sued the Commission in federal court alleging violation of his civil rights.
The Daily Signal reports that both the Commission and Phillips have dropped their cases.
The members of the state’s commission could have been held “personally liable” for harassment if the matter continued, said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
“It’s probably because they may have finally gotten scared that they were going to get hit with sanctions for, in essence, directly thumbing their nose at the Supreme Court and the court’s decision in this issue,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “It could make them personally liable for damages if they abuse their positions to try to harass an individual.”
In the 7-2 majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated [Phillips’] objection[.]”
It’s amazing how the possibility of being held personally responsible for one’s virtue signaling can change someone’s perspective. Actual accountability and the possibility of real consequences usually moderates behavior.
We need to see more of this.
Joel Kotkin has an essay posted at Tablet titled Why Social Justice Is Killing Synagogues and Churches. He begins by noting that as religious organizations become more focused on “social justice” their membership invariably declines.
However satisfying to its practitioners, the emphasis on social justice is clearly not attracting more worshippers. Almost all the religious institutions most committed to this course are also in the most serious decline, most notably mainstream Protestants but also, Catholics and Reform and Conservative Jews. The rapidly declining Church of England, which is down to 2 percent share among British youth, is burnishing its progressive image by adding the use of plastics to its list of Lenten sacrifices, but seems unable to serve the basic spiritual and family needs of their congregants.
Judaism and Christianity both teach that we should treat one another fairly and with compassion, but that is not the central point of either religion. Both rest on the first principle of their shared scriptures—
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
All their other teachings are commentary on that fact, explaining how to go about living in a proper relationship to the Creator. We are called to good works as part of a loving relationship with God and, by extension, our fellow creatures. When people neglect that vertical relationship with God and focus only on the horizontal relationship with each other, they ignore the reason that were called by God. They have wandered away from what should be their real common purpose.
Ultimately, … religions … can only hope to thrive if they serve a purpose that is not met elsewhere in society.
Just so. Society cannot do for us what God can.
The College Fix reports that a person wearing a cowboy outfit at Wake Forest caused someone to file a racial bias complaint.
The Old Gold & Black reports someone ended up filing a Bias Incident Report (BIR). According to Chief Diversity Officer José Villalba, the “official” Bias Incident group concluded the person in the pic was “impersonating a cowboy by wearing a Western-style shirt with part of an American flag on it and a lasso across his chest and shoulder.”
Apparently, someone unfamiliar with cowboys thought the lasso was a noose.
Nevertheless, Student Senators Miles Middleton and Fadi Narouz “understood” the lasso to be a noose, and at a February 12 Student Government General Assembly meeting decided to bring up the issue as well as other matters of a racial nature — like “Caucasian students behaving rudely to employees of color” and “students of color being scared to enter certain spaces on campus.”
Middleton conceded that if the Bias Incident group said the lasso wasn’t a noose that he would “take them on their word.” However, he said he had his “own set of opinions about how the campus should be dealing with these types of things in a deeper manner.”
The picture that caused the controversy was taken at a campus Subway restaurant. Maybe Wake Forest should add a Roy Rogers restaurant to improve the students’ general knowledge of American culture.
BTW, the hangman’s knot used to make a noose and the honda knot used to make a lasso are two very different knots.
Alas, it seems my favorite SJW doesn’t understand how Twitter works.
It Twitter had an IQ filter set for a lower limit at around 90, it’s traffic would plummet, something an advertising-based service can’t afford. She’ll just have to deal with the capitalist reality of the situation.
