Monday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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Liberal Press Intensifies War on Suburbs

Via American Greatness

Suburbs are not racist. They are not ecologically unsustainable. They are beautiful, and we need more of them.

While conservatives routinely, and accurately, characterize the establishment media in America as being profoundly biased both against President Trump and, more significantly, biased against everything that is even slightly right-of-center, they don’t generally consume this media. Because it is inescapable, they’ll see an example of liberal media bias here and there, find it frustrating, and move on to One America News or the Epoch Times, or their favorite conservatives on Twitter.

This is a mistake. The major networks and the major newspapers don’t just relentlessly poke at President Trump, they reinforce—also relentlessly—every piety and supposed axiom and premise of leftist ideology. Right-of-center people need to be aware of this and understand how it works.

Another powerful example of media bias is found in America’s major cultural magazines: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and New York magazine. Now routinely including feature-length articles on every conceivable public policy issue, these magazines hammer away, establishing certain truths as “beyond debate” where, in reality, there needs to be impassioned debate. The cumulative impact of these articles is a leftist intelligentsia in America that is increasingly closed-minded about an expanding array of issues.

“Suburbs” as Code
A recent article in New York exemplifies the degree to which partisan propaganda has replaced impartial analysis about what is a deceptively mundane issue. In the article’s subtitle in the print edition, “The System—Segregation and the suburbs,” the reader is already subjected to an editorial opinion. The implication is suburbs are inherently racist and unjustifiably segregated.

The cover photograph, of an elderly white man using a gasoline powered mower to cut his front lawn, adds additional context designed to subconsciously reinforce a political message: Old privileged white people live in suburbs, burning fossil fuel to mow their water-wasting lawns. The already indoctrinated will infer even more from this photograph: Who does this old man think he is? What does he contribute? Why is his life so comfortable when so many people are in need? How can we correct this injustice?

Writer Zak Cheney-Rice leads off by stating, “To really understand the suburbs as imagined by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, you first have to understand that neither of them is really talking about the suburbs. They are talking about segregation.” Got that? “Suburbs” is code for “segregation.”

Cheney-Rice goes on to claim that late in Trump’s campaign, the president fell back on appeals to racist suburbanites because he’d failed on the big issue which was to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Through his article, Cheney-Rice recites arguments that are no longer questioned in polite company: suburbs equate to “white housing exclusivity,” the origins of suburbs were “white flight,” suburbs are a sanitized way to achieve racial segregation, and in turn, segregation is “a means of resource accumulation and protection.”

Most of what Cheney-Rice argues, however, falls short when compared to facts and history.

To support his arguments regarding white flight and intentional segregation, Cheney-Rice has to reach back to the early 1960s. Nobody disputes that segregation was a reality back then, but “back then” was 60 years ago. The author uses Atlanta as a case study in white flight and segregated suburbs, but admits a few paragraphs later that Atlanta’s suburbs are now largely integrated.

And what about California’s suburbs? Most of them were built to accommodate new residents, as California’s population exploded during the 1960s and 1970s. Suburbs in California and throughout the American West were built because people liked living in detached homes with yards, and had absolutely nothing to do with “white flight.”

Big Progressive Lies

The problem with articles that perpetuate the myth that suburbs are inherently racist is that it can be used to justify extreme solutions that are ultimately counterproductive. As Trump repeatedly pointed out in his remarks on America’s suburbs, overall, they are already over one-third populated by ethnic minorities. And while the media never reported it honestly, Trump would always go on to say how everyone living in suburbs, including ethnic minorities, worked hard to achieve that lifestyle, and none of them want to see their quality of life destroyed.

The progressive war on suburbs is one of the biggest issues of our time because this war relies on two big lies—that suburbs are racist and that suburbs are ecologically unsustainable. By accepting these lies, we will not only lose our suburbs, we will lose, in all facets of our lives, our property rights, our prosperity, and our incentive to work and achieve.

Read the entire article HERE.

State Department Says Anti-American Educators Undermine U.S. Efforts to Counter China

Via The Washington Free Beacon

The United States’ ability to counter the rise of China is being undermined by anti-American attitudes in the education system, according to a new State Department report outlining a longterm strategy to compete with China.

The agency said Americans need to be educated about the strategic threat that Beijing poses to U.S. interests and called for government officials and the public to have access to English translations of Chinese Communist Party speeches. Such an effort, according to the State Department, could be undermined by high school and college systems that are hostile to America’s founding principles and history.

“America’s grade schools, middle schools, high schools, and colleges and universities have to a dismaying degree abandoned well-rounded presentations of America’s founding ideas and constitutional traditions in favor of propaganda aimed at vilifying the nation,” the paper reads. “In the face of these polarizing forces, the United States must reclaim its own legacy of liberty.”

Rachelle Peterson, a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, called the State Department’s assessment of American education “spot on.” Young people raised with a “biased, disfigured teaching of our own history” will be “receptive to Chinese propaganda,” according to Peterson.

“For years, students have been taught American history as an unbroken chain of violated promises, ignoring the groundbreaking work Americans have done to advance the cause of personal liberty and individual responsibility,” Peterson said. “Is it any wonder that students, convinced America is inherently bigoted, find Chinese propaganda persuasive?”

The department said Beijing will present an intractable problem for years to come and will not simply be an issue for the current administration.

Read the entire article HERE.

Holocaust Museum In Florida Sparks Outrage After Adding George Floyd Exhibit

Via The Daily Wire

A Holocaust Museum in Florida has sparked controversy after opening up an exhibit to honor George Floyd, whose death in police custody earlier this year sparked months of violent riots and looting across the United States.

“A new exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center in Maitland features powerful and inspiring photos taken in the wake of George Floyd’s death,” Orlando 6 reported. The man behind the photographs in the exhibit, John Nolter, went to the location where Floyd was arrested by law enforcement officials to take pictures of people reacting to his death.

Lisa Bachman, Assistant Executive Director of The Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida, said in a statement: “You don’t just see this exhibit. You feel it. The expressions and thoughts of each person photographed tells a story that has a very universal message. It is one that can heal and bring us together. It shows us we are not alone in our thinking.”

Online, news that the museum had opened an exhibit to honor Floyd sparked outrage, with many commenting that it was disrespectful to victims of the Holocaust.

Ezra Levant, founder of Rebel News, wrote: “George Floyd is added to a Holocaust museum? That trivializes and distorts the Holocaust and its six million Jewish victims. And it grotesquely implies that American police are Nazis.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Giant Rats Overtake New York’s Central Park

Rat school is in session as fed-up New Yorkers try to learn how to deal with a surging rodent population.

Rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires that can cost thousands to fix. And there are so many that residents are kvetching about them every chance they get — 311 hotline complaints about rats have totaled 12,632 so far this year — a third more than the 9,042 for all of 2019.

With the Upper West Side teeming with the hungry critters, Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal and the city Health Department sponsored the latest incarnation of “Rat Academy,” two hours of rat prevention training livestreamed Tuesday to nearly four dozen supers, tenants and homeowners. The city began such training sessions about 10 years ago.

Gail Dubov, president of the West 83rd Street Block Association, has a “Ph.D in Rat Academy” from sitting in on a couple of sessions, including Tuesday’s. “Rats are devious,” she pronounced with authority, “and they’re smart.”

Dozens who belong to Upper West Siders for Safer Streets have posted their gargantuan vermin sightings on Facebook, including Melanie Sloan, whose daughter is Scarlett Johansson.

“Central Park is overrun with huge fat rats,” Sloan wrote. “I saw a man on a bench in the rambles swatting them unsuccessfully with a rake.”

Not a day goes by that Amanda Levine doesn’t see at least one rat. She sprays her Jeep Grand Cherokee with a cocktail of cinnamon and mint oils and water — under the hood and on all four wheel bearings — to ward off the critters. In her apartment complex, at 107th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway, her neighbors tell her they hear scratching behind the walls.

Levine ticks off four reasons why she thinks rats have invaded the UWS: outdoor dining, more homeless New Yorkers, shoddy street cleaning and the biggest — trash not being picked up often enough, both from the cans on sidewalk corners and the stacks of bags hauled to the curb by building supers.

Read the entire article HERE.

Andrew Cuomo To Receive International Emmy For ‘Masterful’ COVID-19 Briefings

Via NPR

The Emmys have always had a soft spot for politicians. In the past two decades, the annual television awards have dealt out nods or outright wins for a slew of famous names: There’s Selina Meyer, for one, not to mention Josiah Bartlet and Claire and Frank Underwood, among others.

The thing is, most of those politicians are, you know, fake.

The International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced Friday that it is breaking with tradition and awarding its International Emmy Founders Award to a real politician who is currently in office. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is being honored his daily coronavirus briefings earlier this year.

“The Governor’s 111 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,” the academy’s president and CEO, Bruce Paisner, explained in a statement announcing the decision. “People around the world tuned in to find out what was going on, and New York tough became a symbol of the determination to fight back.”

The Founders Award, which Cuomo will receive Monday, annually recognizes an individual or group that “crosses cultural boundaries to touch our common humanity.” Since its inception in 1980, the award has gone to a slew of superproducers, industry executives and, yes, even a politician. Former Vice President Al Gore won the prize in 2007, but by then, he was out of office.

Cuomo has not responded publicly to the announcement.

Read the entire article HERE.

Joseph Stalin To Receive International Emmy For His Outstanding Hunger Relief Efforts

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

NEW YORK CITY, NY—The 2020 International Emmy Awards have announced their nominees for their hotly anticipated and highly credible award ceremony this year. In addition to giving New York Governor Andrew Cuomo a leadership award for his excellent pandemic leadership and skill in not killing thousands of innocent nursing home residents, the organization has also announced another recipient: Joseph Stalin.

According to sources, Stalin will receive a posthumous award for his outstanding hunger relief efforts. In addition, he will be honored for his masterful skill in crafting a narrative that caused even the imprisoned victims of his regime to sing his praises.

“We can’t exactly say that Stalin’s hunger relief efforts were totally successful, but he really did try,” said International Academy President & CEO, Bruce L. Paisner. “Stalin was a master at crafting a narrative. People tuned in to hear his words of wisdom, even as he starved them to death. That’s a skill worthy of honor.”

Stalin will not be the only world leader honored at the 2020 Emmys. Here is a comprehensive list of the other nominees:

• Mikhail Gorbachev—for outstanding leadership of Chernobyl cleanup
• Kim Jong Un—for groundbreaking human rights activism
• Hugo Chavez—for innovations in decreasing population of feral cats
• Scar the Lion—for bringing together lion and hyena in the Pride Lands
• Greta Thunberg—for outstanding performance by a child actor
• Gavin Newsom—for electricity management and sidewalk cleanliness in California
• Joel Osteen—for scriptural accuracy
• Joseph Biden—for being most “clean and articulate” president since Obama
• Kamala Harris—for award-winning laugh
• Lord Denethor—for outstanding stewardship of Gondor
• Kathleen Kennedy—for excellent management of Star Wars franchise
• King Solomon—for chastity
• McDonald’s—for excellence in ice cream machine maintenance
• The International Emmys—for most legitimate award organization

“We admire all of these nominees — not so much for their real-world achievements, but for their incredible ability to make it seem like they had real-world achievements,” said Paisner. “We look forward to announcing the winners!”

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and culture HERE.

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