A Peek at America before 1950 and the Assault by the Left, by Anthony DeBlasi.

Picture a neighborhood composed of low and middle income families, each with two parents, no homeless people, no street drugs, safe to walk the streets at night. Is this the figment of an overactive imagination? Well, it is in fact a peek at a neighborhood in New York City where the son of immigrant parents read The New York Times every morning in high school, before orchestra rehearsal. Me. The principal, strongly authoritarian and well loved, opened a weekly assembly of highly diverse youngsters by reading a psalm from the Bible. Tough-as-nails, yet tenderhearted teachers passed on a tradition of excellence in thought, expression, and civility while preparing us for a wide range of careers in a free and independent America.

This typical school of 1940s New York City had higher standards and grade profile than any counterpart today and operated on a budget far smaller in equivalent dollars than any current public school budget. In these “backward” times, the schools were free of substance abuse problems, sexual promiscuity, and identity problems. There was an abiding respect for the authority of teachers and parents and for the dignity of every person regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. There were clubs in my school for religion, for foreign languages (including Latin). A Reporters’ Club recorded significant events for the school paper. There were toy drives for a local hospital . . . The list of extracurricular engagements was long. …

Mid-20th century saw a rapid loss of understanding regarding timeless constants relating to the fundamentals of life. “We are living at a time when the status of man is undergoing profound upheavals,” observed Igor Stravinsky in 1947. “Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportions. This failure to understand essential realities is extremely serious. It leads us infallibly to the violation of the fundamental laws of human equilibrium.”

So much “progress” by white upper middle class leftists. They are better off. Imagine if they had to get real jobs where they were paid by the market, on a voluntary basis, instead of living off tax dollars collected by threat of force. This includes the hordes of vocal lefties who are government consultants or work for an NGO, or some other product of big government by the left. No wonder they are always on about moral differences and how bad other people are — a combination of projection and guilty conscience.

Insights of a Recent Immigrant to Australia. This was written in the last couple of weeks by an Indian-Australian to an Indian friend of his in the US, who forwarded the commentary to a friend of his in England, who sent it to us at The Wentworth Report. All appropriate permissions were obtained, but the authors wish to stay anonymous.

It is highly politically-incorrect, because it breaks the commandment that only whites can be criticized. But it’s a first hand witness account, so it is presumably realistic. Of course, one must not generalize further.

Today I went to the Medicare office to get a bill sorted. Sri Lankans and Indians have taken over the whole department in this particular branch. The service levels have gone downhill from what I remember, compared to before about 2010 when it was all Aussies.

They all seem confused and keep asking each other for help in filling simple forms. The two aunties were discussing some kitchen recipe while one of them was serving me. I felt like I was in Chandigarh Passport Office. This is in inner South East Melbourne, the wealthiest part of Melbourne. Even if I didn’t experience any of this, the fact that the out of all places, the Medicare office branch now employs a security guard is revealing!

I came to this outer suburb called Dandenong in 2005. There were mostly whites here then, and minorities were mostly Chinese and some Afghan refugees. Today, 15 years later, it’s completely Sudanese and Somali refugees, Indians, Chinese, Turks, Afghans, etc. A couple of streets are no-go zones, because Sudanese youth have a habit of bashing people up gangsta style for no reason other than “why not?”.

I know that there exist a couple of places in Melbourne where you can pay (bribe) to pass your driving license because of Indians working inside who have setting [i.e. corrupt arrangements] with driving instructors.

If you call the Australian Tax Office for a query, God forbid if you get an Indian on other side; the best option is to disconnect and try again until you get an Aussie. Something that will take you 30 minutes with the former will be resolved in 5 minutes with the latter, and the latter will treat you like a human being.

There is now a situation where this trend will continue without major pushback from Aussies, unless immigration from these cultures is halted or significantly cut back as a public policy. Fortunately that’s already happening with Australia; the quota for the number of permanent resident visas has been reduced, on top of which barely 50% of the quota is being issued. But I have bad news for you, inside news — most of those who don’t qualify for permanent residency in Australia do qualify for permanent residency in Canada — through the provincial schemes and Canada’s generally inferior immigration system.

I know many who have gone from Aus to Canada. You see, no one in their right mind would do this because Aus is a significantly more liveable/better country than Canada, but the Aus immigration system is now pushing the bottom 70% to Canada.

Progressivism leads to poorer education outcomes for blacks and latinos. By John Hinderaker.

Is the West better off for all that leftist “progress” since the 1960s?

Apparently not blacks and latinos in education, according to a new report by Chris Stewart of Brightbeam, titled: “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All.”

Stewart is a liberal activist from Minnesota who undertook to find out why the Twin Cities’ left-wing public schools have some of the country’s worst achievement gaps between white and minority (black and Indian) students.

Stewart compared achievement by race in a number of cities that he classified as progressive or conservative. The results didn’t surprise me, but they shocked Stewart. Conservative cities (as ranked by political scientists used as a reference for the study) consistently did a better job of closing student achievement gaps — sometimes, to zero — than progressive cities.

Stewart’s group looked at a number of variables that they thought might help to explain these findings. The result:

Of all the factors we looked at, progressivism is the greatest predictor.

The Brightbeam study does not attempt to explain the causation that its numbers clearly reveal, but calls on those who run progressive school districts to rethink their assumptions. Bacon’s Rebellion offers some obvious possibilities:

* Agency. By blaming racism and discrimination for the woes afflicting minority communities, progressives deprive minority students of agency — the sense that they control their own destinies and that their efforts will make a difference. If minority students see themselves as victims of systemic racism, why bother working hard and “acting white”?

* Discipline. Progressives have implemented “social justice” approaches to school and classroom discipline on the grounds that suspensions and other punishments disproportionately affect minorities. The resulting breakdown in classroom discipline has the perverse effect of disproportionately harming the minority students whose classes are being disrupted.

* Lower standards. As an offshoot of the “self esteem” movement, progressive educators don’t want to damage the self-esteem of minority students. Accordingly, they have lower expectations and set lower standards for minorities to offset the advantages that white students have from “white privilege.”

Impeachment: Trump Versus Dean Wormer.

You vote for it, and the majority of the country is in favor of it, and it doesn’t happen. Is Democracy not real anymore? By Steve Sailer. About Christopher Caldwell’s new book, Age of Entitlement.

Highly recommended:

“In order to use this new right-based system, rather than the traditional voting-based system, you need to convince the government that there some historical emergency going on, some terrible abuse, that someone’s behaving wickedly — in the same way that the southern segregationists and southern sheriffs were. Increasingly that role of official wicked person gets played by people who defend ordinary American institutions.”

Ok, but we have the same phenomenon through out the West, such as it the UK, Australia, and Canada, but those other countries did not have slaves, segregation, or a large black population. Perhaps they copied the US anyway? Or the left simply learned to use these new political tools anywhere?

Steve Sailer:

The Age of Entitlement is an explosive rethinking of history since JFK’s assassination that comes to the reactionary conclusion that the only salvation for American conservatism is to repeal the sainted 1964 Civil Rights Act and restore the constitutional right to freedom of association.

This is a striking judgment for Caldwell, a sober and cultured … thinker, to arrive at; his career has been largely spent writing for the respectable right, such as the Financial Times, the late Weekly Standard, and The Wall Street Journal.

This is not to imply that Caldwell wants to go back to Jim Crow, just that, much as Burke did a better job in 1790 of forecasting the course of the French Revolution, he finds that the old Southern critics of the new order foresaw the implications of the civil rights revolution more clearly than did its advocates:

Those who opposed the legislation proved wiser about its consequences than those who sponsored it…. A measure that had been intended to normalize American culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination has instead wound up nationalizing Southerners’ obsession with race and violence. …

Caldwell summarizes his thesis:

…what had seemed in 1964 to be merely an ambitious reform revealed itself to have been something more. The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible…. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave — it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsements of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.

The author notes that the two parties now consisted of the winners (Democrats) and losers (Republicans) from the new quasi-constitution imposed in the 1960s:

The Democrats were the party of those who benefited: not just racial minorities but sexual minorities, immigrants, women, government employees, lawyers — and all people sophisticated enough to be in a position to design, run, or analyze new systems. This collection of minorities could, with discipline, be bundled into an electoral majority, but that was not, strictly speaking, necessary…. Sympathetic regulators, judges, and attorneys took up the task of transferring as many prerogatives as possible from the majority to various minorities.

In contrast:

Republicans were the party … of yesterday’s entire political spectrum, of New Deal supporters and New Deal foes….

Caldwell continues:

Those who lost the most from the new rights-based politics were white men. The laws of the 1960s may not have been designed explicitly to harm them, but they were gradually altered to help everyone but them, which is the same thing…and because the moral narrative of civil rights required that they be cast as the villains of their country’s history. They fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.

Caldwell argues that racial preferences and politically correct censorship are not perversions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as optimists like myself have long argued, but logical concomitants:

…affirmative action and political correctness…had ceased to be temporary expedients. They were essential parts of this new constitutional structure, meant to shore it up where it was impotent or self-contradictory, in the way that Chief Justice John Marshall’s invention of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison (1801) had been a shoring-up of the first constitution.

To Caldwell, privatized censorship, also known as political correctness, was:

…an institutional innovation. It grew directly out of civil rights law. Just as affirmative action in universities and corporations had privatized the enforcement of integration, the fear of litigation privatized the suppression of disagreement, or even of speculation. The government would not need to punish directly the people who dissented from its doctrines. Boards of directors and boards of trustees, fearing lawsuits, would do that. …

Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of “diversity” advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them. …

Aggrieved minorities no one had considered in 1964 had a mysterious set of passwords and procedures that would require government and business to drop everything and respond to their demands.

Most terrifyingly, the conventional wisdom … has drifted toward the notion that the world’s 7 billion non-Americans deserve the civil right to move to America, and only un-Americans (who are “not who we are” as Obama would taunt) would dare oppose that.

Conservatives can’t even count anymore on at least having the majority of citizens on their side when they lose in the courts, agencies, and boardrooms on issues of Diversity – Inclusion – Equity:

A Tomorrow-Belongs-to-Me tone crept into many descriptions of American demographic change. The torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, who had a message to convey to their elders. The message was: Die.

The War on Racism slowly but inevitably became the War of Racism, with whites as the designated racial inferiors:

It turns out to be a difficult and unnatural thing to replace a system of prejudice with a system of real equality and respect. It’s a lot to ask of people. As Friedrich Nietzsche understood, it is far easier, for both former perpetrators and former victims alike, simply to transvalue the prejudices—so you wind up with the old world turned upside down.

Cape fear: Inside the Aurukun ‘war zone’. By Sarah Elks. Australia, 2020.

It’s sweltering in Aurukun, far north Queensland, on January 4. A mob has been burning down houses and terrorising locals since a 37-year-old man was allegedly stabbed to death on New Year’s Day.

Aurukun

The victim’s grieving relatives and allies have taken to the streets of Aurukun, torching six houses and smashing two more, hunting for those allegedly responsible and their families. …

Two teenagers, 17 and 18, have been charged with murder, and 29 people have been charged over the violence that followed.

The police station in the Aboriginal community, on the far northwest coast of Cape York, is in lockdown. Police inside are watching the violence via a network of CCTV cameras lining the streets.

[Army veteran Tim White], a veteran of the bloody Somalia conflict in of the 1990s, was in Aurukun when the man’s death ignited old tensions between two of the town’s clans.

But unrest had been growing for months. Local authorities had lost control of daily fighting in the streets, fuelled by sly grog in the dry community over Christmas.

Now, in early January, senior police are calling White, asking him to find and remove Freddy, a local man being pursued by the rioters after he threw insults at the grieving family of the dead man that morning.

White is in his armoured vehicle. Two elderly women step onto the dusty road, pleading to be evacuated to a camp 80km out of town, where White is already providing sanctuary to more than 100 terrified locals. He loads them up, and they have a message: “Freddy is on the back of your truck.”

He turns back to the road. About 60 men “of fighting age” are in front of him, and 30 behind. They’re brandishing weapons — axes, metal bars — and they want Freddy. The urgent voice of a police senior sergeant crackles over White’s CB radio: “Evacuate! Evacuate.”

But there’s nowhere to go. He panics for a second, and then stops still, and the advancing mob stops too, before ransacking the truck, digging through the back for Freddy. White insists he’s got only women and children onboard. Freddy somehow slips away unnoticed and White and his evacuees are allowed to leave. …

The signs were there:

Warning signs had been obvious for months. School attendance, a symptom of community social health, had slumped to an all-time low of 38 per cent in the second term of last year.

By November, the police station had seven vacancies — two sergeants, one senior constable, and four constables — with the empty roles being filled by temporary deployments from elsewhere in the region.

There were still tensions between two of the community’s clans after a 30-year-old man was run over by a car and murdered in late 2015. The same families were allegedly involved in the New Year’s Day murder, with the roles reversed.

Minutes of council meetings tell of rising tensions, escalating violence, consumption of sly grog and home brew, regular break-ins, and daily fighting in the streets. …

Deputy Premier Jackie Trad is the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships. Asked whether she knew of the unrest in Aurukun last year, whether she was personally warned, and what she did about it, Trad says: “No concerns were brought to my attention.” …

More bureaucrats and more money to pay them is always the answer, right leftists?

“Someone has lost their life, eight homes have been destroyed, 400 people have been left homeless, because people are making a cheap buck from sly grog, from someone else’s misery.”

[Aboriginal leader Dion Creek] says there needs to be an overhaul of the way government deals with Aurukun.

“This idea of throwing (government) money at problems needs to stop. There’s been tens of millions of dollars pumped into Aurukun. This situation now is unprecedented. Hundreds have fled the community fearing for their lives. If this was anywhere else, there would be a royal commission.”

When are all Australians going to be held to the same standards of behavior? To ask the question is to answer it…

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Obama called Trump a ‘fascist’ during phone call, “You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House”. By Daniel Arkin.

Barack Obama called Donald Trump a “fascist” in a phone conversation with Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia during the 2016 presidential election, Kaine says in a video clip featured in an upcoming documentary about Hillary Clinton.

Kaine, Clinton’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, recounts the call during an exchange with Clinton that was caught on camera in 2016. Kaine’s wife, Anne Holton, was also present.

“President Obama called me last night and said: ‘Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House,'” Kaine says before adding with a laugh that Obama “knows me and he knows that I could tend to err.”

Clinton replies, nodding, “I echo that sentiment.”

She then puts her hands to her chest and says, “But that’s really — the weight of our responsibility is so huge.”

Well that explains a lot. Democracy is secondary to the right outcome, which justifies  … almost anything.

Impeachment trial is Dems’ misdirection, by Miranda Devine.

Trump has been meticulous in keeping his promises to the American people, and his almost Tourette-like candor frustrates the Democrats’ demonization project.

Impeachment is their only way to drown out his good news because they don’t yet have a candidate capable of beating him in November. They’re afraid that any reasonable voter will say he has earned the right to a second term.

So, instead, they run protection for the Bidens. That’s the ugly truth of this impeachment. When Joe Biden was President Barack Obama’s vice president, America exported its own brand of kleptocracy to Ukraine, while giving lectures about corruption.

What other explanation is there for the undisputed fact that troubled drug addict Hunter Biden was paid more than $50,000 a month by corrupt Ukrainian energy company to sit on its board, despite having no credentials?

Hunter told us why. Because his last name is Biden.

Why did the Biden name open doors in Ukraine? Because Hunter’s dad was vice president, openly boasting of the power he had to switch off a billion dollars in aid to that struggling country.

It stinks and Biden is starting to panic, judging by his tears on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” yesterday. …

The panic set in Monday, when an ally of Bernie Sanders labeled Biden corrupt in a piece for the Guardian.

“Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate,” wrote Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law School associate professor. She didn’t mention Ukraine, but alleged he did favors for donors. …

It shouldn’t matter if Ukraine conducts an investigation if Biden is innocent.

If there’s a plausible explanation for Hunter’s Burisma job, then the outraged moralists on the Democrats’ impeachment team should tell the American people.

Instead, they spend hours in the Senate weaving a fantastic narrative about “evil” Trump, trying to breathe life back into their Russia collusion myth, which actually has been discredited, not by friendly media outlets, but by the Robert Mueller and Michael Horowitz reports.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff echoed Bates Wednesday dismissing corruption allegations against Biden as “baseless conspiracy theory,” “widely debunked by Ukrainian and American experts alike . . . a smear tactic against the political opponent that President Trump apparently feared.” …

Trump’s speech in Davos on Wednesday was a tour de force of optimism showcasing the American miracle Democrats are pretending isn’t happening: “Today, I hold up the American model as an example to the world of a working system of free enterprise that will produce the most benefits for the most people.

“A pro-worker, pro-citizen, pro-family agenda demonstrates how a nation can thrive.”

The restoration of American greatness is what Trump is offering, but he is burdened by the sore losers on the other side who are doing nothing but setting up an alibi for their next defeat.

Prince Harry and Meghan have ‘no intention’ of selling milk to the Chinese, by Victoria Ward.

In a marked contrast to relatives such as Peter Phillips, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex insist they will not use their royal heritage to sell anything in the commercial marketplace. …

Royal sources confirmed that the couple were planning to pursue careers in television, investigating executive producer roles such as that taken by Prince Harry, 35, on the forthcoming mental health series he has co-created with Oprah Winfrey, the chat show star, for Apple television.

Similarly, the deal Meghan, 38, recently signed with Disney, involving a voice-over in return for a donation to Elephants Without Borders, is expected to form a blueprint for her future work.

The couple have not ruled out lucrative speaking engagements but are likely to be extremely selective about the events they choose and will be keen to maintain a focus on the causes close to their hearts such as mental health, conservation and female empowerment.

Last week, Peter Phillips, the Queen’s grandson and Prince Harry’s cousin, was ridiculed as it emerged he had used his royal connections to sell milk on Chinese television. The 42-year-old son of Princess Anne appeared in two adverts for a state-owned dairy firm boasting about being brought up on Jersey milk.

Get woke, go broke? We shall see.

People try to break messages out from WuHan as coronavirus spreads

There’s no hard information yet on what is happening, but there are some worrying signs. At this state, we don’t know.

Might be a wise precaution to order some face masks, e.g. on eBay.

UPDATE: Coronavirus: 10 more suspected cases in Australia investigated. By Natasha Robinson.

There are now five confirmed cases of coronavirus diagnosed in Australia – four in NSW and one in Victoria.

Six of the ten new suspected cases under investigation are in NSW, and four are in WA.

hat-tip Grant