Daryl Hall Gets It Right

In an interview with Salon, musician Daryl Hall (of Hall & Oates fame) responded to a left field question about “cultural appropriation”, the idea that white people should not appropriate the culture of ethnic and racial minorities. Daryl gave the interviewer a dose of rationality that cut right to the core:

“Are you trying to say that I don’t own the style of music that I grew up with and sing? I grew up with this music. It is not about being black or white. That is the most naïve attitude I’ve ever heard in my life.” When the interviewer said he agreed with him, Daryl responded: “I’m glad that you do, because anyone who says that should shut the f**k up.” Indeed.

After being told it was academia saying that, Daryl said academia was a “hotbed of idiocy”, the most accurate description anyone has ever provided. He further schooled the interviewer:

“Anyone who knows about music, about culture in general, understands that everything is much more natural. Everything is a mixture. We live in America. That’s our entire culture. Our culture is a blend. It isn’t split up into groups. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool – worse than a fool – a dangerous fool.”

In one brilliant statement, Daryl explained the nature of America’s “greatness” and one of the main reasons for the widening divide in our society. Shredding the idea of “cultural appropriation” in music, he exposed the foolishness of the entire concept and made it clear that it has gone too far.

Sane reasoning such as Daryl’s will not sit well with the unreasonable PC crowd, but it needs to be heard. The idea of “cultural appropriation” is very divisive and if left unchallenged, it will infect everything it touches and split the country to a point of no return. It is in direct opposition to the “melting pot” that built this country and could put us on a path to destruction. Sadly, that may very well be its intent.

Thank you, Daryl, for a much needed dose of reality.

David J. Hentosh

Read ‘Em and Weep – By The Numbers

The following is worth pondering:

Obamacare became law in 2010 primarily to provide health insurance for 30 to 40 million uninsured (approximately 10 to 12% of the population). Today, 20 million are still uninsured, health insurance costs continue to rise, and a growing number of illegal immigrants are obtaining free health care.

It is estimated that 3.5% of the population is homosexual. Only .3% of the population identifies as transgender but there is a push to pass new restroom laws in order to make them feel comfortable. Little concern is evident for the comfort of the other 99.7%.

Concern also seems to be missing for the 8.4% who have a substance use disorder, the 47,000 who died (in 2014) from a drug overdose, or the hundreds of thousands of veterans who died waiting for applications for care to be processed.

There were 12,942 gun homicides in 2015. There are over a million abortions, 41,000 suicides, 47,000 opioid drug deaths, and 88,000 alcohol-related deaths each year.

1.2 million high school students drop out each year. Only 37% of high school seniors are academically prepared for college but 65% will enroll in college after graduating and over 20% of them will take remedial classes.

Everyone from President Obama and John Kerry to Rachel Maddow uses the 97% scientist consensus to validate global warming, a percentage proven to be totally bogus.

The government claims a 5% unemployment rate but that ignores 94 million able-bodied people who can work but choose not to work or have stopped looking for employment. 34% of all Americans financially support the rest of the country.

According to Homeland Security, 99% of illegal immigrants who overstay visas aren’t investigated.

The top 1% earners pay 23.6% of taxes, amounting to 33.7% of their income. An estimated 45.3 % of households pay no federal income taxes.

An estimated $6 “billion” was spent in the 2012 political campaigns when 126 million people voted. That works out to $47.60 spent per voter. Approximately 93 million eligible citizens did not vote.

David J. Hentosh

College Coddling

At Brown University, a debate between two women on whether or not there existed a “rape culture” on campus was felt to be too traumatizing for some students. Any criticism or doubt of the existence of a rape culture was felt to be “invalidating people’s experiences” and “damaging”, so the school set up a “safe space” for students complete with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies.

This school-provided kindergarten atmosphere is little more than a coddling of students raised in a progressive, PC culture that considers differing opinions to be “hate speech”. Colleges once deliberately subjected students to differing opinions in order to broaden their minds. That was the very goal of a “liberal” education. Now, it seems to be the exact opposite and “safe places” are proliferating on college campuses across the country to protect students from the “hostile environment” created by differing opinions.

Colleges have gone from challenging students to coddling them and the idea of “higher learning” has been lost. Remedial courses are on the increase for students ill-prepared for college and the curriculum has been dummied down at many schools to keep students matriculating. After 12 years of an overwhelming progressive and liberal education, students entering college have been conditioned to one view of complicated issues with no tolerance for dissent. Colleges are continuing that conditioning.

The government helped create this college coddling of students with the Title IX demand that schools receiving federal money (pretty much all of them) assure that the environment does not become hostile to students. Although this was addressing sexual assaults on campus, schools are playing it safe by allowing students to define “hostile environment” and, of course, it has gone overboard.

Colleges are more concerned with money than prestige, so they are coddling students used to being coddled rather than make waves (or lawsuits) by trying to expand their minds with differing views. Thus, colleges are caving in to outrageous demands and allowing students to run the show. Parents paying for much of this are the ones truly in need of “safe places”.

David J.Hentosh

WTF??

Black Lives Matter protesters disrupted students studying in the library at Dartmouth University by screaming obscene and racist remarks such as “F**k you, you filthy white f**ks” and “F**k you, you racist shits” and getting into physical altercations with the students. Dartmouth’s Vice Provost for student affairs, Inge-Lise Ameer, apologized…to the BLM protesters for the negative responses and media coverage that they received. WTF??

While French President Francois Hollande labeled the Paris attacks an act of war, President Obama called them a “setback” and Secretary of State John Kerry expressed surprise that the Paris attacks lacked the “rationale” of the Charlie Hebdo murders. WTF??

Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson minimized the dangers of illegal immigration and Syrian refugees arguing that “maybe” terrorists sneaking into the US would become patriotically Americanized and their anger would go away because we have a history of successfully integrating immigrants. WTF??

In Lowell, Mass., Lindsay Miller has been allowed to wear a pasta strainer on her head in her driver’s license photo because she is a religious member, a “Pastafarian”, of “The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster”, officially recognized as a religion in Poland. WTF??

Colorado’s State Legislature will hold a vote in June on whether or not to legalize the purchasing, selling, and distributing, of hard drugs including heroin, meth, cocaine, and peyote. According to State Senator John Perry Barlow, legalizing these drugs will “empty out the dregs of our prisons and bring in millions of dollars in tax revenues for our state” and “make drug abuse treatment a more viable option for addicts and doctors alike”. WTF??

Princeton students are demanding the university “acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson”; University of Texas students are demanding a tuition-free education and cancellation of student debts; and Occidental College students are demanding campus safety officers stop wearing bullet-proof vests. WTF??

David J. Hentosh

Athletic Blackmail

When the University of Missouri’s football team joined student protesters and threatened not to play a scheduled game against BYU at Arrowhead stadium in Kansas City, school president Tim Wolfe’s resignation was signed, sealed, and delivered before he even had a chance to consider it. The moneymaking power of college athletics was the driver.

Forfeiting that game would have cost the university the million dollars it already guaranteed BYU for agreeing to play. Added to that would be millions lost from renting Arrowhead stadium and all the subsequent revenue from tickets, concessions, parking, and TV broadcasting. When you compare that with the university president’s salary of approximately $459k, forcing Wolfe’s resignation seems like a sound economic decision, but it will have consequences.

The protesters will treat this as a victory from “speaking truth to power”, but it was blackmail by the football team that did the talking and now, a dangerous precedent has been set. Would the university have caved if the football team threatened to forfeit a game unless Republican speakers were banned from the campus? What if the demand was to provide refuge and scholarships to illegal immigrants? How about a demand to replace every white administrator with an African-American or fire teachers who do not toe the PC line?

Some will argue that this is different because it was about the serious issue of racism but there really is such a thing as a “slippery slope”, and the unleashed economic power of a football team can become very slippery, indeed. Wolfe’s resignation will not solve any racial problems the university may be experiencing and it was forced before allegations, circumstances, or culpability could be fully determined. It was, simply, knee-jerk blackmail – and it worked all too well.

Students and student athletes taking control of a university does not bode well. Holding a school hostage for any reason is just another form of the anarchy we see rising in the streets. Allowing it could prove to be much more costly in the long run than the loss of a football game. We can only hope this is an isolated incident but power corrupts and college athletes across the country are now fully aware of the power they have. Call it “higher learning”, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.

 

David J. Hentosh

Far Left = Far Out

It gets nuttier and nuttier. The far Left sifts everything through a PC/racist filter that transforms reality into a fantasy world that would be laughable if it wasn’t taken so seriously. Unfortunately, it is taken seriously and that sucks the humor out, making it simply pathetic.

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry scolded a guest on her show for using the word “hard-worker”, explaining: “I want us to be super careful when we use the language ‘hard worker,’ because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like”. Thank you, Melissa, for reminding us about slavery because we often forget to be obsessed with it in our daily routines and language.

She did, however, further define a hard-worker “in the context of relative privilege” (because that is the only context we should be concerned about) as “moms who don’t have health care”. It is a wonder that her “privileged” guest, Latino activist Alfonso Aguilar, didn’t break down in tears and apologize for his callous misuse of the English language – or just break down laughing.

Attempting to re-define words and ways of speaking to advance the far-left agenda has become ridiculous, especially in colleges. The University of Tennessee, bowing to the LGBT community, recently published guidelines for replacing common pronouns such as ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘him’ and ‘her’ with the strange terms ‘xe’, ‘zir’ and ‘xyr’ in order to “make the university ‘welcoming and inclusive’ and stop people feeling marginalized”.

Staff members at the school were also advised to eliminate roll calls (which somehow marginalize students) and greet each student separately, asking them to “announce their name and pronoun of preference” to be used when addressing them. With several pronouns to choose from, it seems students would have to take notes to keep it all straight lest they offend someone during the semester.

Luckily for students, there was a backlash calling these proposals ridiculous and absurd, forcing the university to “clarify” that nobody would be forced to use them. A university spokesman (spokesperson?) said, “we do not dictate speech”, but that seems to be exactly what the university’s “inclusive practices” are attempting to do. We all know that “practice makes perfect”, so it’s just a matter of time before they become mandatory.

David J. Hentosh

PC Revision of History

More and more, the progressive left is emulating a repressive regime such as the old Soviet Union, North Korea, or Iran. It is not only speech and thought they are trying to curtail, control, and dictate, they are attempting to re-write history to match their fantasy version of reality.

Michael Todd Landis, an Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University is taking the current targeting of the Confederate flag to a new level by attempting to change our language and even our very understanding of the Civil War. With his PC rhetorical changes, Landis rivals the old Soviet Union in revising history.

Landis wants to eradicate perfectly understandable and appropriate words and terms from the era such as “Negroes, “suffragates”, “war between the states”, and even the word “Union” describing the northern side. His suggestion of replacing the “Compromise of 1850” with “Appeasement of 1850” sounds like it comes from a Saturday Night Live skit but, sadly, Landis is all too serious.

In his progressive PC world, “plantations” should become “labor camps”, “slave-owners” should become “enslavers”, and “Union” should just become “The United States”, thus, wiping out even a hint of the South’s place in history. He claims that these offensive terms “obscure rather than illuminate”, but his ideas do nothing but obscure reality.

It is true that history is often distorted and written by victors. Errors of that sort can and often should be corrected, but changing the language of the time to appease those today who are offended by everything is pure foolishness.

The erroneous goal of political correctness is to “correct” history, language, perceptions, and even thoughts. “Correct” in this context does not mean making it free from error; it means setting it right – and therein is the problem. The PC police are setting it right for whom? For Landis, it is for him and only those who think like he does. We can only hope that is a very small minority.

David J. Hentosh

Let Them Eat Cake

There is no Christian doctrine, commandment, or Papal encyclical forbidding baking a cake for a lesbian wedding celebration. Refusal to do so is a personal decision to make a statement against same-sex marriage. It is a distortion of religious doctrine to claim it goes against religion and a disingenuous shifting of personal responsibility.

However, a business should be able to decide who it will do business with as long as there is no legally defined discrimination involved. The two Christian bakers who refused to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding were not discriminating against lesbians. They had served them previously but decided that a wedding cake was a step over a personally-set line based (erroneously) on their interpretation of their religion. They should have a right of refusal and a right to their beliefs.

The two lesbians were familiar with the bakers, having done business with them previously, and knew they weren’t “homophobes” or lesbian-bashers. They, too, decided to make a personal statement by filing a discrimination complaint with the state knowing that the bakers weren’t truly discriminating. Their actions were agenda-driven and displayed intolerance and insensitivity. Not satisfied with the acceptance the LGBT agenda pursued and achieved, they decided to force the issue to legally obtain approval.

Two wrongs do not make a “right”, and both parties in this sad story are wrong. This is a perfect example of how agenda-driven politics has eradicated common decency. Both sides decided to take a political stand instead of just respecting and accepting each other’s feelings and views. It was no big deal for the lesbians to find another baker as it was no big deal for the bakers to just sell them a cake. There was no harm done either way.

In today’s society, the progressive agenda screams the loudest, demands the most and, unfortunately, almost always wins. Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industry decided the bakers unlawfully discriminated and punished them with a $135K fine for “damages”. It is not clear at all what the damage was or what the lesbians “won” but the bakers certainly have been harmed.

What is clear is that society and common sense lost, the bakers are financially ruined, and the lesbians get to eat cake.

David J. Hentosh

A Liberal’s Criteria for Being Black

“Professor” Darron T. Smith’s column about Mia Love over at the Huffington Post perfectly displays an elite, out-of-touch, liberal view on race that continues to be a detriment to the black community and the country. It also reeks of racism.

The title of Smith’s blog begins with “She looks black, but…” which is a despicable insult to any member of the black community. Mia Love IS black, she doesn’t just “look” black, and she certainly doesn’t need Smith to instruct her on how to be black.

Mia Love is a female Republican who beat out a Democrat to win a seat in the House of Representatives and it baffles Smith that any black woman could be a Republican. He believes that Mia, who belongs to what he labels the “fringe religion” of Mormonism, “represents one of the most discriminated-against racial groups in the country” and he can’t understand how she can “negotiate so many foreboding white contexts” and belong to a group that “lags behind in every major social indicator”.

The “professor” pontificates further, condemning Mia and others like her as being “out of touch with the political realities of African Americans” who are “the only group to vote their political interests”. This ignores the reality of the damage done to the black community by leftist policies designed to maintain dependency and the lack of any return for blindly voting as a bloc for the inexperienced Obama.

Smith has the audacity to say that Mia’s “accomplishment is quite dangerous for people of color”. The only danger it poses is to Smith’s narrow and prejudicial views. Mia’s accomplishment shows that breaking out of the black liberal stereotype is more than just possible; it is also liberating and promising.

It is hypocritical for Smith to utter such backward and prejudicial nonsense while considering himself to be a liberal champion for diversity. He has a pigeon hole for blacks, a pigeon hole for whites, a pigeon hole for women, and a very special pigeon hole for black women. What a sad, small world he lives in.

David J. Hentosh

Rising Censorship

River Springs Charter Schools in California instructed librarians to remove Christian-themed publications as well as any books written by Christian authors or distributed by Christian publishers from the shelves. One supposes the next step would be to burn them.

Imagine, if you can, that a school ordered the removal of books by gay authors, black authors, or Muslim authors. The uproar would be monumental and the media would swarm like bees. The very idea of banning books usually brings outrage but removing Christian books is not even news-worthy.

It wasn’t just subject matter determining removal. Mere association with Christianity was the criteria being used and that brings this to a new level that should be frightening to all. It puts Christianity on the same progressive-deemed evil level as guns, smoking, virginity, and American tradition. It also ramps up the far-left’s censorship campaign.

Blind to its own hypocrisy, the far-left continually tries to censor opposing views while forcing their progressive agenda everywhere. In schools, many books with homosexual, pro-Islamic, or pro-abortion content are pushed onto students and parent’s attempts to remove them are met with indignant diatribes on free speech and diversity. Crosses, bibles, prayers, or even American flags, however, are not allowed because they “might” offend someone.

This rise in censorship was encouraged by Obama’s election. The far-left felt that one of theirs was now in the White House and, therefore, believed the majority agreed with their agenda and silencing of the opposition. Obama started speaking out against FOX News and progressed to the point where reporters now say the White House demands they change their reports to be more favorable to the administration.

From the LA Times refusing to print letters from global warming “deniers” to network news shows ignoring stories unfavorable to the administration, attempts at censorship by the left are increasing. A change in Washington is needed to stem the tide of censorship. Use your vote wisely or that, too, could end up censored.

David J. Hentosh