Chester Finch (he/him) is a film critic and the Robert Mapplethorpe Professor of Pre-Colonial Criticism at Harvard University’s Department of Inclusionary Art. Right-wing provocateur and Daily Wire blogger Matt Walsh recently befouled American movie theaters with his immoral hate flick, Am I Racist? Walsh masquerades as a certiffied diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) instructor to lampoon an industry to which I have contributed thousands of dollars to exorcise the inherent racism that I didn’t realize I harbored until a DEI expert told me I did. Walsh describes DiAngelo and her like-minded DEI practitioners as grifters who prey upon naïve, guilt-ridden dupes. This cinematic abortion boasts a 98 percent positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes based on more than 1,000 verified ratings. Mainstream media “Top Critic” reviews appear noticeably absent. Perfect. Media critics should never acknowledge art that challenges or mocks fundamental tenets of woke progressivism. Chiefly, whiteness equals racism you can never conquer but can mitigate if you have a large enough wallet. You redeem yourself by paying a DEI instructor to harangue you into thinking you’re an irredeemable bigot unless you “do the work” to decolonize yourself from your whiteness. How you do the work is a bit murky. It seems to involve me paying ever-increasing sums of money to DEI specialists like Saira Rao to say, “So, our pedagogy is white women. Stop caping for whiteness. Stop … propping up whiteness. Join gender intersectional solidarity, and we can overthrow all of it.” I’m all for overthrowing whiteness; however, other than genocide, I’m not sure how you do it. Regardless, Rao and her charming business partner Regina Jackson unwittingly appeared in Walsh’s film for $5,000 to eat dinner with and badger the racism out of a dozen educated white female Kamala Harris supporters. Walsh, pretending to be a waiter, interrupts the Race 2 Dinner meal to crow about his DEI credentials and coaxes the ladies to raise their glasses to toast their racism. Jackson, who spends the dinner denigrating whiteness, laughs and lowers her glass, stating, “Wait a minute, I’m not racist.” I attended an Am I Racist? showing and observed moviegoers the way Jane Goodall does chimps. These specimens uproariously laughed whenever a DEI instructor offered profundities like, “Decentering whiteness requires a strategic approach to split the subconsciously racist part of the holistic self from the consciously racist self to reflect how the racial hierarchy builds upon the white patriarchal hegemony that oppresses a Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) orthodoxy.” A DEI expert says something like that and asks Walsh, “Does that make sense?” And Walsh deadpans, “Yes, what do you mean?” People couldn’t contain their laughter! Ordinary, uneducated white men and women tell Walsh they are not racist and don’t notice skin color, which is the most racist thing you can say in 2024. Worse, a salt-of-the-earth African American man says he feels likewise. Anyone watching might conclude most Americans hold this misguided view and, therefore, will never uproot their inherent racism, thereby depriving well-meaning DEI experts of millions of dollars. Walsh acts as a pied piper to this illiterate horde. He possesses nothing more than a high school education. While anyone can opine, lacking a college degree disqualifies you from serious consideration and signifies someone prone to making poor personal and financial decisions. I might take Walsh seriously if he had gone $675,000 into debt to obtain a Ph.D. in Gender Fluid Marionette Puppetry the way I did. Sadly, some of the most educated (ergo, morally superior) people in the world fell for Walsh’s chicanery, except for Ibram X. Kendi, the high priest of antiracism, who wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” If that doesn’t scream inclusion, nothing does. But Kendi escaped Walsh’s predations by either figuring out his identity or requesting $50,000 for a two-hour chat. The same cannot be said for antiracist high priestess Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, who spoke to Walsh’s faux persona for $15,000, only to be tricked into paying $30 in slavery reparations to one of Walsh’s black producers. DiAngelo gave the producer whatever was in her purse. I would’ve cut a check for at least $1,000 at the risk of overdrawing my account. Walsh describes DiAngelo and her like-minded DEI practitioners as grifters who prey upon naïve, guilt-ridden dupes the way three-card monte dealers sucker marks into following the queen (Kendi offers an excellent hour-long course on this for $10,000). How else should DiAngelo, Kendi, Rao, and Jackson earn a living other than by stoking racial resentment? They have families to feed. Walsh has a speaking fee for whenever he pollutes minds with his “judging people by the content of their character” tripe. As one of the DEI instructors in the film dismissively says, “Martin Luther King said a lot of stuff.” Mocking antiracism serves to delegitimize it. Based on the theater laughter, the movement could be in trouble. We must fight back! Leave humor to comedians like Hannah Gadsby, and what is acceptable for review (e.g., “Porky’s,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?,” “Orgazmo”) to cultured, tolerant people like me. READ MORE from Matt Walsh: A Draft of the Democrat Party Platform The Secret Service Chief’s Rousing Testimony       The post Matt Walsh’s <i>Am I Racist?</i> Properly Reviewed appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Too many people pretend to have read The Wealth of Nations and I think it’s time to reclaim the importance of pretending to have read The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is 301 years since Adam Smith was born and I love round anniversaries. I am amazed at the survival not only of his economic ideas but of his entire moral philosophy. This ability to understand the other, as well as the ability to negotiate, is typically human. Animals cannot do it. It is not that the 1,400 pages of the two great works are not objectionable today, but that reality has been determined to prove the Scottish thinker right, regardless of the evolution of theoretical battles. The best antidote to most of a nation’s ills remains the prosperity born of freedom not exempt from responsibility, of individualism not exempt from empathy. Freedom without responsibility, individualism without empathy, we already know it and it’s called Kamala Harris. You would not want to live in a society made up of millions like her. Conservatism is made up of several currents. Edmund Burke traveled a different theoretical route to end up in the same place as Adam Smith, perhaps that is why they agree even in the differences. Dynamiting mercantilism, improving the life of every man, building society from virtue and excellence, signing a pact with prosperity, trusting in the individual’s capacity to make better decisions than any institution, the language of exchange, understanding the ethics of sympathy, knowing how to listen to the inner voice of the “impartial spectator.” The author of The Wealth of Nations has so many accurate lessons and brilliant proposals that can be gleaned from his thinking that it is incredible that he has so few followers among Western politicians, who are more interested in learning economics by reading Marie Kondo, and ethics with Paulo Coelho, which is like learning the Ten Commandments while smoking marijuana. Between one democracy fest and the next, there is something Adam Smith wrote that should be engraved in our politicians’ hearts, including those on the right, who are always fearful when it comes to reducing the State: “Great nations are never impoverished by the prodigality or misconduct of some of their individuals, but they do fall into that situation due to the prodigality and dissipation of governments.” I try to put myself in the place of those political officials who indulge in inaction due to unfounded fears and I am unable to. Following the Scottish economist, I suppose I reject that sentiment or, to put it in plain English: my unbiased external spectator vomits upon imagining the situation. This is what Smith calls sympathy and we know today as empathy. Humans are empathetic, to the point that we can put ourselves in the shoes of others and feel what they are feeling, even if they are people we don’t love at all: think for example of the tax inspector who just caught a testicle in the elevator door of your block of flats. We don’t forget our hostility towards him, but neither do we wish him to lose a testicle either. This ability to understand the other, as well as the ability to negotiate, is typically human. Animals cannot do it, except in Disney movies, where everything is possible except the truth: even Tinkerbell is now black. The quotation from The Wealth of Nations is famous: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that,” unless we’re counting Hunter Biden at the nightclub. Perhaps because we are created in the image and likeness of God, human nature is a constant discovery: everything about us has a reason. “The agreeable passions of love and joy can satisfy and support the heart without any auxiliary pleasure,” writes the Scottish author, “The bitter and painful emotions of grief and resentment more strongly require the healing consolation of sympathy.” And so it is: we need help when we are sick, when we have lost the ability to face life with hope, when our ill health — be it physical or mental — pushes us into dangerous zones. It is much more difficult to die of joy; instead, too many have passed away sad and lonely. The 301st anniversary of Adam Smith should be an invitation to reclaim more insistently our spaces of freedom, in a time in which it is in clear retreat. The old economist was clear about this in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: we need to be free to take care of ourselves as best we can, we need imagination to put ourselves in the shoes of others and take care of them, and — I would add — we need the Wealth of Nations to be able to afford a good seafood dinner washed down with expensive wine and to celebrate how much better off we all are when we are allowed to live in peace and freedom. READ MORE from Adam Smith: Terrorists Used to Lose Their Heads. Today, It’s Their Balls. My Teachers Knew I Was a Bad Student The post 301 Years Being Right on Sympathy and Nations appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the first volume of his history of World War II, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill laid bare the root causes of the war. The blame fell squarely on the Western powers’ failure to recognize the growing threat of war and to act to prevent it. Had the Allies’ prewar affairs “been conducted with the ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households,” war could have been averted. The painful, common sense solution to the debt problem is a systematic reduction in domestic spending. Instead, they allowed “conditions to be built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most.” Churchill concluded with this warning for us today, “They (the Western powers) have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behavior towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale.” Defense Spending Two existential threats of staggering potential gravity face the U.S. today, one foreign and one domestic. The sadly shocking reality is the indifference with which these threats are sloughed off by not only the American public but by the leadership of both political parties.  Not since the end of the Cold War have the opponents of the Pax Americana gathered with such cohesion, determination, and aggression. The newly formalized alliance of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea threatens to drag the West into a global conflict for which it is ill prepared. This threat was recently laid out by the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy: “The U.S. faces the most serious and most challenging threats since 1945, including the real risk of major near-term war.”  The report concludes, “The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.” At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was spending over 5 percent of GNP on defense. In 2024, defense spending has fallen to approximately 3.5 percent. The cumulative result is a seriously depleted military capacity. The global nature of the opposing alliance has called into serious question whether the U.S. could respond to a multi-front world war. Historian and columnist Walter Russell Mead warned recently in the Wall Street Journal, “ World War III is becoming more likely in the near term, and the U.S. is too weak either to prevent it or, should war come, to be confidant of victory.”  National security is — or should be — a bipartisan issue. Neither party can escape blame for our current plight; but, sadly, neither party seems willing to call for the sacrifice and commitment needed to address the challenge. The Enormous National Debt Challenge The second existential threat is domestic, and it very much compounds the danger of the foreign threat. The 35-year decline in defense spending has been accompanied by an explosion in non-defense welfare and entitlement spending, with a commensurate explosion in the national debt. These numbers tell the story: From 1990 to 2024, the national debt has risen from under $5 trillion to over $35 trillion. The result of these compounding deficits has been that for the first time in our history, the annual cost of servicing the national debt in 2024 now surpasses the annual national defense budget. In 2024 gross interest payments on the national debt exceeded $1 trillion. Current projections estimate the national debt will exceed $54 trillion in 10 years. Congress and both political parties show no inclination to address this exploding problem. Implications of Debt The implications of the national debt threat are two-fold, and the consequences of both are dire. Deficit spending requires the ability annually to service (pay interest and rollover principal) national debt. No one knows the ultimate capacity of the financial markets to facilitate U.S. deficit spending; but at some point, if the deficits continue to accelerate, the markets will shut down and the U.S. will face the pain of bankruptcy. In the meantime, even as the financial markets accommodate our profligacy, the rising cost of debt service is slowly choking our military budget and limiting our ability to meet foreign challenges. The painful, common sense solution to the debt problem is a systematic reduction in domestic spending coupled with a re-setting of major entitlement programs (i.e., Social Security and Medicare) to insure their economic viability. Politicians find such belt tightening measures anathema. Neither party will campaign on the urgency of domestic spending cuts or the desperate need to restructure entitlement programs.  The confluence of these foreign and domestic threats demands a serious response. In the recent presidential debate, there was no serious discussion of either foreign threats or deficit spending.. The future of our country — and indeed the West — is at stake. Nothing less than Churchill’s “ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households” will enable the U.S. to avert the gathering storms of foreign adversaries and national bankruptcy. American voters intuitively know what common sense demands. But where is the clear-eyed, hardheaded, common sense leadership we need? READ MORE from Garland S. Tucker III: The Remarkable 1924 Coolidge vs. Davis Campaign A Prophet Without Honor: The Legacy of John W. Davis  Garland S. Tucker III, retired Chairman/CEO Triangle Capital Corporation, author of Conservative Heroes: Fourteen Leaders Who Shaped America- Jefferson to Reagan (ISI Books) and The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge and the 1924 Election (Emerald Books). The post Staggering Debt and Foreign Threats appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Charlotte Wessels has released “The Obsession,” her third studio set. The lead single was “The Exorcism.” “This album is significant, for on the one hand, telling such a deeply personal journey — through its unintended theme of fear and obsessive thoughts — and at the same time, representing the joy of finding the song’s true forms with everyone involved in the making of this record,” Wessels explained. This will be Wessels’ third solo effort. “Tales From Six Feet Under” (’21) and “Tales From Six Feet Under Vol II“ (’22) were the first two.  In February ’21, Delain disbanded but reformed a short time later with a new line-up that made its official live debut in August ’22. The post Ex-Delain Singer’s Third Solo Effort Has Dropped appeared first on RockinTown.

from SD Bullion: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

DIDDY TAPES will be used to control a lot of famous voices. You’ll be seeing a lot of celebrities ENDORSING KAMALA out of the blue. All the people in those tapes are now owned. They’ll be slaves to the government forever. — Patrick Bet-David – CEO of Valuetainment (Parody) (@notPBD) September 22, 2024

by Derrick Broze, The Conscious Resistance: Today we are thrilled to announce the creation of the Independent Media Alliance (IMA), a collaborative effort focused on promoting objective, fact-based media from a diverse team of journalists, podcasters, and writers. Our emphasis will be on countering narratives currently being seeded within the “alternative” media space, including, but […]

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that the Jewish state has “many capabilities that we have not yet activated, I repeat, we have not yet activated.” A foreign source has also confirmed that the sophistication of last week’s exploding pagers attack was “relatively low-level” and that Israel still has even more dramatic abilities. United with […]