Breakfast For The Brain Weekend Edition

Have a great weekend!

Democrats Can’t Quash the ‘Big Lie’

Via American Greatness

The “Big Lie,” of course, isn’t that the 2020 election was stolen—it’s that the election was perfectly fair and lawful

Six months later, the “Big Lie” won’t die.

The Left and NeverTrump have tried everything in their collective power to punish critics of the 2020 presidential election: Social media accounts, including those belonging to Donald Trump, have been deplatformed. Republican lawmakers have been cut off by longtime donors, threatened with legal recourse, and worse.

Nonviolent Trump-supporting Americans who traveled to the nation’s capital on January 6 to protest dubious election results in swing states now face criminal charges. Nearly 75 million Americans are considered potential “domestic violent extremists” by their own government and nearly half their countrymen agree.

Lives and careers are being destroyed—and the Biden regime is only getting started.

The news media portray election doubters as conspiracy theorists or QAnon cultists. CNN’s Jake Tapper this week threatened to ban from his show any Republican who peddles the “Big Lie” about election fraud. Speaking on the same network responsible for perpetuating any number of lies related to Donald Trump, from tales of Russian election collusion to disrespectful MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic teenagers, Tapper had a major meltdown.

“The lie about the election on its own is anti-democracy, and it is sowing seeds of ignorance in the populace, and obviously has the potential to incite violence,” Tapper ranted. “But beyond that is, if you’re willing to lie about that, what are you not willing to lie about?”

Tapper insisted that history would harshly judge politicians who “lied” about the election. “History sees you being a coward. They are afraid of Republican voters who have been lied to by a very sophisticated propaganda machine led by President Trump but augmented by plenty of others.”

Projection much?

Beleaguered Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a martyr to the very same people who just a decade ago wanted her father charged with war crimes, now clings to political relevance based on her nonstop condemnation of the January 6 protest and her election fraud denialism. Naturally, Cheney found an appropriate outlet for her latest tantrum—the opinion pages of the Washington Post—where she attempted to lecture a Republican Party with a voter base that wants nothing to do with her.

“[F]ormer President Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen,” Cheney wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday. “Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6.”

Like so many NeverTrumpers, Cheney dutifully tied the events of January 6 to alleged delusions about an unfair and unlawful election. So, brainwashed MAGA Man, you think the 2020 election wasn’t on the up-and-up? Then you’re no better than the deplorable insurrectionists who “stormed” the Capitol that day, warns Cheney and her fellow travelers at National Review.

And yet.

Tens of millions of Americans still refuse to submit to this endless bullying campaign. According to recent polls, the percentage of Republicans who still view the 2020 election as illegitimate is the same as it was six months ago. Now, as then, nearly three in four Republicans do not think Biden won the election; 70 percent of Republicans in a CNN poll taken late last month said Joe Biden “did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency.”

Read the entire article HERE.

What critical race theory is really about

By Christopher F. Rufo

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it — and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism.

Originally, the Marxist left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: The workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class and usher in a new socialist society.

During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream — the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

Read the entire article HERE.

Racial Politics At Disney: The Wokest Place On Earth

Via City Journal

The Walt Disney Corporation famously bills its amusement parks as “the happiest place on Earth,” but inside the company’s headquarters in Burbank, California, a conflict is brewing. In the past year, Disney executives have elevated the ideology of critical race theory into a new corporate dogma, bombarded employees with trainings on “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and “white saviors,” and launched racially segregated “affinity groups” at the company’s headquarters.

I have obtained a trove of whistleblower documents related to Disney’s “diversity and inclusion” program, called “Reimagine Tomorrow,” which paints a disturbing picture of the company’s embrace of racial politics. Multiple Disney employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals, told me that the Reimagine Tomorrow program, though perhaps noble in intent, has become deeply politicized and engulfed parts of the company in racial conflict.

The core of Disney’s racial program is a series of training modules on “antiracism.” In one, called “Allyship for Race Consciousness,” the company tells employees that they must “take ownership of educating [themselves] about structural anti-Black racism” and that they should “not rely on [their] Black colleagues to educate [them],” because it is “emotionally taxing.” The United States, the document claims, has a “long history of systemic racism and transphobia,” and white employees, in particular, must “work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed.” Disney recommends that employees atone by “challeng[ing] colorblind ideologies and rhetoric” such as “All Lives Matter” and “I don’t see color”; they must “listen with empathy [to] Black colleagues” and must “not question or debate Black colleagues’ lived experience.”

In another module, called “What Can I Do About Racism?,” Disney tells employees that they should reject “equality,” with a focus on “equal treatment and access to opportunities,” and instead strive for “equity,” with a focus on “the equality of outcome.” The training also includes a series of lessons on “implicit biases,” “microaggressions,” and “becoming an antiracist.” The company tells employees that they must “reflect” on America’s “racist infrastructure” and “think carefully about whether or not your wealth, income, treatment by the criminal justice system, employment, access to housing, health care, political power, and education might be different if you were of a different race.”

In order to put these ideas into action, Disney sponsored the creation of the “21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge” in partnership with the YWCA and included the program in its recommended resources for employees. The challenge begins with information on “systemic racism” and asks participants to accept that they have “all been raised in a society that elevates white culture over others.” Participants then learn about their “white privilege” and are asked to fill out a white privilege “checklist,” with options including: “I am white,” I am heterosexual,” “I am a man,” “I still identity as the gender I was born in,” “I have never been raped,” “I don’t rely on public transportation,” and “I have never been called a terrorist.”

Next, participants learn about “white fragility” and are asked to complete an exercise called “How to Tell If You Have White Fragility.” The program interprets beliefs such as “I am a good person, I can’t be racist” and “I was taught to treat everyone the same” as evidence of the participant’s internalized racism and white fragility. Finally, at the conclusion of the 21-day challenge, participants are told that they must learn how to “pivot” from “white dominant culture” to “something different.” The document claims that “competition,” power hoarding,” “comfort with predominantly white leadership,” “individualism,” “timeliness,” and “comprehensiveness” are “white dominant” values that “perpetuate white supremacy culture”—and must be rejected.

Read the entire article HERE.

Software Company Prohibits Politics at Work — and 1/3 of Its Employees Quit

Via The New American

Perhaps there’s something about the fraction one-third. That’s how many angels are said to have followed Lucifer into Hell.

It’s also the percentage of employees at a software company named Basecamp who recently quit after their boss told them they could no longer turn the workplace into a hell of political discord.

As the New York Times reported on April 30, “About a third of Basecamp’s employees have said they are resigning after the company, which makes productivity software, announced new policies banning workplace conversations about politics.”

“Jason Fried, Basecamp’s chief executive, detailed the policies in a blog post on Monday, calling ‘societal and political discussions’ on company messaging tools ‘a major distraction.’ He wrote that the company would also ban committees, cut benefits such as a fitness allowance (with employees receiving the equivalent cash value) and stop ‘lingering and dwelling on past decisions,’” the paper continued.

“Basecamp had 57 employees, including Mr. Fried, when the announcement was made, according to a staff list on its website,” the Times also informed. “Since then, at least 20 of them have posted publicly that they intend to resign or have already resigned, according to a tally by The New York Times.”

While Fried’s entire blog post is worth reading, the section on political discussion is particularly notable. He wrote:

No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore. Update: David has shared some more details and more of the internal announcement on his HEY World blog.

But Fried doesn’t just want personal political beliefs out of the workplace. He’s also taking the workplace out of employees’ personal lives, as his blog section below explains:

No more paternalistic benefits. For years we’ve offered a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmer’s market share, and continuing education allowances. They felt good at the time, but we’ve had a change of heart. It’s none of our business what you do outside of work, and it’s not Basecamp’s place to encourage certain behaviors — regardless of good intention. By providing funds for certain things, we’re getting too deep into nudging people’s personal, individual choices. So we’ve ended these benefits, and, as compensation, paid every employee the full cash value of the benefits for this year. In addition, we recently introduced a 10% profit sharing plan to provide direct compensation that people can spend on whatever they’d like, privately, without company involvement or judgement.

These policies reflect an earlier, more common-sense-oriented time. When my mother obtained one of her first jobs in the 1940s, her boss said, laying down the ground rules, “At home you do what you want; here you do what you’re told.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Demand For Ass Implants Booms During Pandemic

Via Zero Hedge

In the early days of the virus pandemic, things didn’t look so hot for the field of plastic survey. Hospitals were overrun with COVID-19 infections and banned all elective procedures, limiting plastic surgeries. But sometime after, when the economy reopened, and hospitals allowed elective surgeries, demand for butt implants soared.

Bloomberg, citing data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), says there were broad declines for minimally invasive and surgical cosmetic procedures during 2020. Botox and soft-tissue fillers remained popular with consumers. But it was buttock augmentation, or butt implants were a massive hit among consumers. Cosmetic procedures for the implants last year were up 22%, from 970 to 1,179.

Dermatologist Ava Shamban said the lockdowns likely triggered those with flat buttocks to receive implants after spending their days surfing Instagram and seeing influencers and models with “higher, tighter rounder assets. ”

The typical butt implant is not cheap, costing more than $5,000, and has a durability life of approximately ten years. ASPS doesn’t provide data on the average age or gender of those who received buttock augmentation during 2020, but we would assume it was bored millennials who still had a job. Unless stimulus checks were spent on ass implants, there are no data points supporting this.

Here are some examples of before and after buttock augmentations:

Read the entire article HERE.

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