Elites choose to live in cocoons white enough to burn your retinas, even as they mock the middle of the country as the land of mayonnaise and Wonder Bread and Klan rallies. For all their professed enthusiasm for America\u2019s melting pot, they don\u2019t mix and don\u2019t want to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there\u2019s the United States of America,\u201d Obama said to the cheering stadium. \u201cWe are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>Barack Obama<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nThere aren\u2019t many open white supremacists left in America. In a nation with almost 200 million white people, the various factions of the Ku Klux Klan have fewer than ten thousand members between them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not obvious why abortion should be the one nonnegotiable value of feminism, or even a value at all. The earliest feminists saw nothing virtuous about it. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the first suffragettes, called abortion the \u201cmurder of children.\u201d Susan B. Anthony referred to it as \u201cinfanticide.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Clinton received oral sex from a twenty-two-year-old intern named Monica Lewinsky. When the story became public, he and his wife attacked Lewinsky as delusional and a \u201cstalker.\u201d The ensuing publicity destroyed Lewinsky\u2019s life. The Clintons never apologized to her, or even suggested they felt remorse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In the summer of 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy went to a party on a small island adjacent to Martha\u2019s Vineyard, Massachusetts, called Chappaquiddick. A little before midnight, he left in his Oldsmobile with a young unmarried aide named Mary Jo Kopechne. Apparently drunk, Kennedy accidentally drove off the side of a narrow wooden bridge into a tidal canal. The car landed upside down, but Kennedy swam to safety. He left Mary Jo Kopechne in the car. Kennedy fled the scene and went to bed. Likely afraid of being charged with drunk driving, he did not alert authorities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Fishermen found Kopechne\u2019s body the next morning. Divers estimated that she had survived for several hours in the Oldsmobile, her head in an air pocket, until she finally suffocated from lack of oxygen. She could easily have been saved if Kennedy had called for help. The scandal that followed likely ended Kennedy\u2019s presidential aspirations, but it did nothing to dim his popularity with feminists. Kennedy was an absolutist on legal abortion. That was more important than the killing of an individual woman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In 2016, a social media celebrity named Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother in an apparent honor killing in the Pakistani state of Punjab. Her crime? Posting pictures of herself online. It was one of at least one thousand honor killings in Pakistan that year, and every year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In most cases the perpetrators are never punished, possibly because they enjoyed wide community support. A 2014 survey by Pew Research found that more than 40 percent of all Pakistanis believe honor killings are justified if the killing involves a woman who engaged in premarital sex or adultery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Migration from the Islamic world has led to a wave of sex crimes in Europe. During New Year\u2019s Eve celebrations in Germany at the end of 2015, hundreds of women in Cologne were groped and sexually assaulted in public by mobs of men, almost entirely of Arab or North African origin. Stunningly, the police initially reacted by ignoring the attacks entirely, bothering to investigate only after widespread complaints on social media exposed the cover-up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In the British city of Rotherham, a group of Pakistani men abducted, sexually abused, and raped more than 1,400 children, primarily teenage girls, for more than a decade. Police and local government knew about the crimes, but did nothing. Officials feared that singling out the Muslim community for investigation would be decried as racist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The 2017 Women\u2019s March on Washington might have been a useful time to mention the millions of women around the world oppressed by Islamic regimes. Instead, organizers adopted as their motif a picture of a Muslim woman wearing an Islamic headscarf, perhaps the most familiar symbol of men\u2019s control over women in the Islamic world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Cochairing the march was Linda Sarsour, a Muslim American separatist who not only wears a hijab but has vocally defended the sharia codes under which women around the world are oppressed. In 2011, Sarsour remarked that Ayaan Hirsi Ali didn\u2019t deserve to be a woman and should have her vagina taken away as punishment, presumably in addition to the genital mutilation Ali had already endured as a child.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
If you spent decades punishing anyone who acknowledged inherent sex differences, transgender politics is what you\u2019d wind up with. The core belief in transgenderism is that biology isn\u2019t real: sex is not determined at the DNA level; it\u2019s determined by appearance. If you look like a man, you\u2019re a man. If you look like a woman, you\u2019re a woman. You are what you say you are, even if it\u2019s a description you invented yourself. Anyone who doubts you must be fired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Employees of Facebook came up with more than seventy gender choices for their site. The choices include asexual, gender neutral, polygender, agender, bigender, gender fluid, gender variant, neutrois, pangender, transmasculine, as well as something called two-spirit, which one noted expert on gender identity described, unhelpfully, as \u201ca sacred, spiritual and ceremonial role that is recognized and confirmed by the Elders of the Two Spirit\u2019s ceremonial community.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A 2013 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that two-thirds of children who say they believe they were born the wrong gender change their minds and come to accept their biological sex. Another study, by clinical psychologist Devita Singh, found that without adult intervention, 88 percent of kids ultimately evolve out of gender confusion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
On Gender & Privilege<\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe average American man dies five years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics. They\u2019re also twice as likely to die of a drug overdose.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Seventy-seven percent of all suicides are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic pace. Between 1999 and 2014, there was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths among middle-aged American men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
You often hear of America\u2019s incarceration crisis. That\u2019s almost exclusively a male problem, too. More than 90 percent of inmates are men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A recent study found that almost half of young men failed the army\u2019s entry-level physical fitness test during basic training. Fully 70 percent of American men are overweight or obese, as compared to 59 percent of American women.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. The statistic is repeated everywhere. But that number compares all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both meaningless and intentionally misleading. It\u2019s a talking point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Once you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in similar jobs for the same period of time\u2014and that\u2019s the only way you can measure it\u2014the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using census data found that single women in their twenties living in metropolitan areas now earn 8 percent more on average than their male counterparts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019d have to ignore an enormous amount of research data to repeat the pieties of 1970s-era feminism, but Obama did. At the very moment he was lamenting the lack of educational opportunities for women, more girls than boys were graduating from high school. Far more were graduating from college. Women now earn 62 percent of associate\u2019s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor\u2019s degrees, 60 percent of master\u2019s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Under Obama, the White House solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations to encourage female achievement in higher education. At the time this was happening, one study showed that there were already at least four times as many privately funded college scholarships available for girls as for boys.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
There are more than two million more women than men enrolled in American colleges. On most campuses, men are a distinct minority. At Carlow University in Pittsburgh, women outnumber men by more than six to one. Yet almost every campus has a women\u2019s studies department. In many of them, the stated goal is to fight expressions of masculinity and disempower men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nA survey by the local NBC station in the spring of 2018 found garbage strewn over all 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco. On more than forty blocks, there were discarded hypodermic needles. Close to one hundred blocks had piles of human feces. \u201cThe contamination,\u201d said an infectious disease specialist from UC Berkeley, is \u201cmuch greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
With every passing year, the goals of the environmental movement become steadily more abstract. Environmentalists have shifted their focus from the tangible world, with its feces-covered sidewalks septic enough to infect pedestrians with E. coli, to concerns invisible to the naked eye, or even to science.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
On Environmentalism<\/h2>\n\n\n\nIn 2011, at the urging of environmental groups, the Obama U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service granted an exemption to industrial wind companies under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. For most Americans, killing an eagle, even accidentally, remains a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Corporate wind farms can kill eagles with impunity. And they do. Wind turbines destroy hundreds of bald eagles every year. That\u2019s in addition to more than a quarter million other birds of various species, including hawks, owls, and songbirds crushed by turbine blades. Some experts believe the actual number of dead birds is much higher, possibly in the millions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Two years after granting its initial exemption, the Obama administration gave a power company in California legal protection in the event its wind farms killed California condors, a critically endangered species with a wild population of fewer than three hundred. For the first time in many decades, killing condors was legal, as long as they were killed by wind turbines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Sierra Club, which was formed to maintain hiking trails in Yosemite, now takes a vigorous position in favor of transgenderism and taxpayer-funded abortion. Its website includes a section on \u201cEquity, Inclusion, and Justice,\u201d with articles like \u201cSilence Is Consent: Solidarity with All People Fighting Oppression.\u201d In the summer of 2017, the Sierra Club signaled its opposition to the \u201cunsustainable whiteness\u201d of environmentalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
If you can take a private jet to a global warming summit without guilt, you\u2019re probably not going to be troubled by a few inaccurate predictions, even if those predictions formed the basis of flawed public policy that affected the lives of billions. Climate change activists give themselves permission to make mistakes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In 1989, officials at the United Nations predicted that entire countries would be annihilated if warming trends weren\u2019t reversed by 2000. In 2007, the UN\u2019s former head of the IPCC predicted that if \u201cthere\u2019s no action before 2012, that\u2019s too late.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In 2008, ABC\u2019s Good Morning America estimated that, because of climate change, New York City would be underwater, \u201chundreds of miles\u201d of the country would be on fire, and a billion people would be \u201cmalnourished\u201d by 2015. By June 2015, ABC said with confidence that a carton of milk would cost $12.99 and a gallon of gas would be $9. \u201cThat\u2019s seven years from now,\u201d said anchor Chris Cuomo. \u201cCould it really be that bad?\u201d As it turned out, no. But that didn\u2019t prevent the head of NASA\u2019s Goddard Research Center from predicting in 2009 that Barack Obama had \u201cfour years to save Earth.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Clearly there\u2019s still a lot we don\u2019t know about climate change. To be fair, there\u2019s still a lot we don\u2019t know about a lot of things. After more than one hundred years of research, scientists haven\u2019t figured out what much of the human brain does. Researchers can\u2019t agree on the evolutionary purpose of sleep. These are basic questions, yet they remain shrouded in mystery. This is why hubris is the enemy of accurate conclusions. The minute you imagine a scientific debate has been settled, you start predicting nine-dollar gasoline.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Within academia, the pressure to conform to climate orthodoxy has rendered the scientific method irrelevant. Judith Curry, a longtime climatologist at Georgia Tech, resigned from her tenured position because of what she described as \u201ccraziness in the field of climate science.\u201d Over the course of her career, Curry has published two books and 186 articles on climate. But by 2016, the field was so politically fraught that academic journals refused to publish research that deviated from conventional opinion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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"Ship of Fools" Book Highlights<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n