politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: Daily Digest

Saturday, 10 April 2021

Daily Digest

BLM Founder Cashes In
Today In Covid Response Fiasco
Liberalism’s Zero-Sum Racial Spoils System
The Week in Pictures: Infrastructure Edition

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 04:36 PM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors calls herself a “trained Marxist” and is a bitter enemy of free enterprise, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t enjoy the finer things in life. The Daily Mail reports that she has bought herself a $1.4 million home in an exclusive section of Los Angeles that is almost entirely white:

A Black Lives Matter co-founder and self-professed ‘trained Marxist’ has raised eyebrows by purchasing a $1.4 million Los Angeles home, in a largely white district.

Patrisse Cullors, a 37-year-old ‘artist, organizer, and freedom fighter’, has bought a three bedroom, three bathroom house in Topanga Canyon, complete with a separate guest house and expansive back yard.

“Freedom fighting” pays very well these days.

The AP reported that Black Lives Matter took in $90 million in donations last year. It’s not clear if or how Cullors is paid by the organization, as its finances are opaque.

That last observation is very true. But with $90 million rattling around in BLM’s coffers, it is not surprising that its leaders have cashed in. More on the house and its environs:

In her new zip code, 88 per cent of residents are white and 1.8 per cent black, according to the census.

This is what it looks like. The main house, not the guest lodge:

It has been obvious from the beginning that BLM is a hustle, much like the Southern “Poverty” Law Center. Nevertheless, as you would expect, the social media titans are running interference for Cullors and her fellow scammers:

Jason Whitlock, a sports journalist, tweeted that: ‘She had a lot of options on where to live. She chose one of the whitest places in California. She’ll have her pick of white cops and white people to complain about. That’s a choice, bro.’

So Whitlock’s account was blocked by Twitter. Some truths are just too inconvenient.

Today In Covid Response Fiasco

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 03:33 PM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

Has there ever been a time when the world’s “elites” have been either so incompetent, or so corrupt, as at present? One silver lining of the covid epidemic is the light it has shed on the quality of leadership in government, public health and media. The fiasco of leadership on covid is a daily phenomenon; here are a few current instances.

Over the last year, the World Health Organization has been exposed as a politicized, corrupt and inept organization. At the American Institute for Economic Research, Jeffry Tucker points out how the WHO has fudged some of the most basic concepts in public health to advance its political agenda:

The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity.
***
Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.

That is the correct definition. But then it changed:

However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.

That definition was simply wrong.

In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.

There must have been quite a bit of push-back, because in January the WHO backed off and corrected its definition, while still focusing on vaccination:

Via InstaPundit.

Tech titans like YouTube have suppressed discussion of covid and its treatments by banning any opinions (or any facts) that don’t toe the line of the WHO or the CDC, whatever that ever-changing line may be at the moment. Lives undoubtedly have been lost as a result of the lack of a vigorous debate over the best approaches to covid.

In a particularly egregious instance, YouTube has banned a high-level medical discussion of the appropriateness of forcing school children to wear masks:

This week, YouTube deleted footage of a COVID-19 roundtable discussion between Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and medical experts from Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard. The doctors and medical experts reportedly disputed Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance that children wear masks in school to stop the spread of COVID-19.
***
[T]he panel included Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University; Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician, epidemiologist, and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford University; and former Trump White House COVID-19 advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.

I suppose the key fact here was that Ron DeSantis participated. YouTube and the other tech oligopolies are desperately trying to prevent him from being elected president in 2024.

Finally, in the interest of free and open debate, this video features Dr. Ryan Cole. Dr. Cole, like many other practicing physicians, believes that the policies that have been followed by the public health establishment have been misguided at best. He emphasizes the importance of Vitamin D, and argues among other things that we already have a cheap and effective treatment for covid in Ivermectin. He doesn’t think much of the current vaccines, either. Here it is for your consideration:

I don’t know whether everything Dr. Cole says is correct or not, but I do know that vigorous debate on an important topic like covid is vitally important, and that debate has been suppressed.

Liberalism’s Zero-Sum Racial Spoils System

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 07:07 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

Liberals have long believed that economics is a zero-sum process (think back to Lester Thurow’s old book, The Zero-Sum Society): people only get rich by taking from the poor. You see this in liberals’ long-used rhetoric about how income tax cuts, which allow people to keep more of what they earn, are described as “redistributing” wealth. The idea of positive wealth creation seems beyond the grasp of most liberals.

Now transfer this same zero-sum thinking to the domain of race, and you see the same problem: if advancement is marked out strictly on racial lines, as is now Democratic Party orthodoxy, you get stories like this from Buzzfeed:

Biden Is Already Facing Pushback From His Own Base On Judicial Nominees

President Joe Biden announced his first judicial nominees last month, a slate intended to send a message about his commitment to diversity. Liberals are eager for Biden to reshape the bench after four years on the sidelines, but they've also already shown they're prepared to call him out if his picks don't embody the depth of professional and racial diversity they want to see.

The White House announcement of Biden's first nominees on March 30 was met with an immediate chorus of praise from liberal advocacy groups and Democrats in Congress. But that evening, two Latino civil rights organizations, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and LatinoJustice PRLDEF, released a statement saying they were "extremely disappointed" that just one of the 11 nominees was Latinx.

Ed Whelan points out, “nine of the eleven nominees are female, five are African American, three are Asian American—I'm including one who is Arab American (as well as Muslim)—and one is Latina. All three of the nominees to federal appellate positions are African American women. None of the nominees is a white male (unless you count the Arab American as white).”

You can see where this is heading: racial groups will increasingly fall out with one another over the spoils of office, hiring, college admissions, etc. Question for liberals: does a just society require that everything be apportioned by quotas reflecting the relative racial and ethnic populations of the country? It’s worked so well for Lebanon, I can’t imagine how it could go wrong here.

The Week in Pictures: Infrastructure Edition

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 03:47 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

First, an announcement: there won’t be an episode of the 3WHH podcast this week. Both Lucretia and I are traveling, and we just don’t have the infrastructure to pull it off. What?—you say! Are we the only two Americans left out of Biden’s “infrastructure” bill? Apparently so. (Meanwhile, if you’re still jonesing for a podcast fix, I did another guest turn on the Ricochet podcast last night. Drinks were had. As you’ll be able to tell.)