VIDEO: Is wokeness really dead?

Is the voting public finally losing patience with progressive politics? How real is the anti-woke backlash? Brendan O'Neill, the chief political writer at Spiked (or Sp!ked, if you like) is the author of a new book which tackles these questions.

In, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism, and Technocracy, Mr O'Neill.makes the case that across western countries in both North America and Europe, the tide is turning against so-called “wokeism” and that the pendulum is swinging hard the other way. But, he warns, the hydra-headed monster isn't dead yet.

In this video, Mr O'Neill is interviewed by Spiked editor Tom Slater. They discuss how the elites' crazy ideologies are colliding with reality, common sense and public fury. If you can handle the English accents, you'll hear why he believes the common sense of the ordinary people is prevailing over woke politics, but that the left lunacy, although receding, is far from dead. 

 

There's a free speech issue here... indeed, freedom of thought... particularly in Canuckistan, where the Minister of Justice (so-called) announced on Tuesday that the Liberal government of Marx Carnage are ready to limit debate on their bill banning hate symbols, which also removes the religious exemption to some hate speech laws. 

Leftist ideology is inherently authoritarian. When moral certainty is paired with institutional power (universities, HR departments, media, professional bodies), dissenting views are treated as not mere disagreement but heresy.

As our old friend Dr Jordan Peterson learned, there are social and/or professional penalties for expressing unpopular views. The consequences of speaking out are such that academics and professionals find that discretion is the better part of value and start censoring themselves.

Disagreement from the prevailing orthodoxy is treated aas a moral defect. Framing complex social issues in binary moral terms -- you're either right (like us) or wrong -- reduces tolerance for ambiguity and gives people kudos for virtue signalling rather than the seeking of pragmatic solutions to problems.

Instead of being treated as individuals, people are now treated as members of identity categories. That's  how we find people "identifying as" a group of initials: L, G, B, T, 2S, POC, and so forth. This actually encourages divisions in society rather than the tolerant multiculturalism which is the stated goal of the ideologues. "Let's all form a circle, hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya'." Not any longer!

What I can't figure out is...

Book review: "The Jewish War" + BONUS VIDEO

Yesterday was the day fixed by President Trump by which Hamas had to accept his plan to bring an end to the unpleasantness in Gaza... or else! 

While we wait for all hell to break loose. let us consider the words of Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus ben Matthias, in The Jewish War. 

1950 years ago, Josephus wrote his contemporary account of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome. The insurrection began in 66 A.D. and lasted seven years.

The Middle East described by Josephus is perfectly familiar -- a politically fractionalized land populated with a humble of ethnic and religious groups, including Jews, Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Italians and a tiny community of Christians.

Each detests the others. Extreme political and theological views prevail. Terrorism and assassination are commonplace. Alliances are momentary. Grudges, personal. And neither colonial subjugation nor local autonomy suffices to keep the peace.

The political events are familiar too. Rome first intervened in the region as a peace keeper, brokering a dispute between Seleucid Mesopotamia and Ptolemaic Egypt. Later the Middle East appeared vital to Rome because Roman trade routes passed through the region and because of the Parthian threat to the empire's eastern frontier. The Romans were lured into deeper military and political involvement, and this triggered continual insurrections.

The rebellion of 66 A.D., however, did not begin as a war of national liberation. It began as communal rioting in the seaport town of Caesarea -- Greeks verus Jews over an empty lot next to a synagogue. This inspired sympathetic rioting in Jerusalem, and a ham-handed Roman attempt to quell the disturbances worsened them instead. The result was one of those great wallows siege, massacre, treachery, persecution, revenge, plunder, and self-destruction to which the Middle East is so often host. 

The rising in Jerusalem set off a reaction among the non-Jewish inhabitants of the region, who indulged themselves in wild pogroms, with killings taking place as far away as Damascus and Alexandria. Roman forces were not sufficient to quash the rebellion. Jewish forces were not sufficient to defeat the Romans in open combat. Guerilla warfare ensured, with predictable consequences to the populace.

The Romans were noted for vigorous foreign policy responses. The Emperor Nero sent Vespasian and three legions to pacify Judea. Using a great deal of slaughter and some tactics, Vespasian drove the rebels back to the environs of Jerusalem. He was prevented from ending the war, however, by political confusion at home. Sound familiar? Nero was ousted and three worthless and short-lived emperors followed within the year.

The Jews made use of this breathing space by engaging in urban warfare with themselves and committing all conceivable and some inconceivable atrocities upon their co-religionists. Vespasian himself was finally proclaimed emperor by the Roman army, and the war was resumed under the direction of his son Titus.

After a prolonged and disgusting siege, Jerusalem was taken. And after another prolonged and even more disgusting siege, Masada, the last rebel stronghold fell. The Temple was destroyed, the Jewish upper classes were dispersed, and a Roman army was permanently stationed in Judea. Even then the peace did not hold, and rebellion would break out anew during the reign of Hadrian. 

Normally the patterns of history are reassuring. But in The Jewish War, the shock of recognition is just a shock. Here, sixty generations ago, is nearly the same cast of characters engaged in exactly the same obsessive, vicious, and fatal behaviour for the same terrifying reasons on the same cursed, reeking, ugly chunk of land.

Who fails to learn history is doomed to repeat it. But was seemed doomed to repeat this history anyway. 

This review is adapted from "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old U.S. Middle East Policy Expert", by the late, great P.J. O'Rourke, in a little-known libertarian magazine called Inquiry, c. 1979. While you're letting that sink it, here's a very à propos musical interlude.

Canadian company won't embrace "wokeness", will stick to business

Cazart! At a time when big businesses in America and Europe are "taking a knee" to kiss BLM/gay ass, the largest publicly-traded company in Canada warned employees that their job is to sell products, not solve social problems. Tobias Lutke, CEO of e-commerce giant Shopify, laid down the law to employees demanding "woke" corporate virtue signalling, reminding them that anyone who was focused on other things when they were supposed to be working should not expect to keep their job. Believe it or not! 

Like many other corporations, Shopify is being pressed by some of its left-leaning employees to take an activist stand on causes such as "equity", "diversity", "inclusion", yada yada yada. Mr Lutke made it clear that doing so is not part of his company's strategy. 

"Shopify is also not the government," he wrote in an e-mail. "We cannot solve every societal problem here. We are part of an ecosystem, of economies, of culture, and of actual countries. We also can't take care of all your needs. We will try our best to take care of the ones that ensure you can support our mission."

That last part addressed complaints by six former employees over how the company has handled racial and social justice issues this past year. "Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family," Mr Lutke wrote, noting that "family thinking" makes it more difficult to dismiss workers who perform poorly. In other words, his company bases its personnel decisions on merit, not who you are or what disadvantaged group you represent.

He added that his company may see opportunities to nudge certain social causes forward, but does so "because this directly helps our business and our merchants and not because of some moralistic overreach."

Mr Lutke's letter to employees comes after Jason Fried, CEO of  American web software company Basecamp, announced that staff will no longer be permitted to engage in "societal and political discussions." He said in a blog post that Basecamp was not a "social impact company," adding, "Every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant."

10 radical new rules that are changing America

Note from Ed.: We rarely repost entire columns from other sources, but this one, by Victor Davis Hanson, is so cogent, so urgent, that it deserves to be read in full. This appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, 3/4/21. 

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently. 

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. 

As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution. 

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law. 

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim's fault as the perpetrator's. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer. 

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of "good" racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist. 

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America's founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws. 

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the "founders" than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable. 

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. "Noble lies" by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect "Neanderthals" from themselves. 

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating and air conditioning. 

6) Hypocrisy is passe. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters. 

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill and create sufficient public shelter areas. 

8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence. Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke. 

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project requires any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter are the new gospels. 

 Americans privately fear these rules while publicly appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized. The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and The Case for Trump. You can contact him by email at authorvdh@gmail.com. Tell him Walt sent ya!

VIDEO: What in Heaven's name is going on with Covid-19?

As our country fights to fend off a dictatorship of the liberal elites -- the politicians, their lapdog "experts", and the controlled media -- Michael Matt, editor of the Remnant newspaper, comments on the increasingly obvious connection between this situation and the Utopian vision of the population-controlling fanatics.

What are we to make of the growing nation-wide rebellion against Dr Fauci et al. attempting to keep us all under virtual house arrest, even though COVID19 surprised the experts by maintaining an amazingly low death rate?
What about sheriffs now refusing to enforce new, draconian lockdown measures called for by overzealous, democrat governors?
What is the connection between a Covid-19 vaccine and overpopulation?

Why in the middle of it all, is Pope Francis plugging his own climate change encyclical as part of an announced Vatican plan to rebuild a post-pandemic world?
What is the connection between closed Catholic churches worldwide, and Francis’ decision to betray the underground faithful Catholics in Communist China?
In short, Mr Matt asks, what in Heaven's name is going on?



Dear readers, we are in serious danger from those "leaders" in government and in the Church (Hello, Pope Bergoglio!) who are selling us out to the New World Order. I find it very hard to pray for them. Better to pray harder than ever...

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. We humbly beseech God to command him, and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the divine power thrust into hell Satan, and the other evil spirits who roam through the world, seeking the ruin of souls. Amen!

Canadian joke of the year [CBC please copy]

The "year-end round-up" season is almost upon us, so I thought I'd beat the Canadian controlled media (Hello CBC!) by declaring Justin Trudeau the Canadian joke ["newsmaker", shurely! Ed.] of the year. The joke is on the stupid Canucks who voted this oleaginous, metrosexual, narcissistic fraud into office for the second time. Are you frostbacks masochists or what?

Dear Canadian readers, I wish you a wonderful winter solstice and a politically correct new year. And may your border remain open to the flood of refugees, asylum-seekers, and dispirited never-Trumpers who will be coming your way in 2020.

Footnote: What you're just read is something you won't read or hear or see anywhere on the CBC, the state-owned Canadian Broadcorping Castration. The CBC is publicly funded, which means that the taxpayers of Canuckistan are paying for the steady stream of politically correct, leftie drivel than emanates from studios high above the common people of downtown Toronto.

I refer in particular to The National, the CBC's nocturnal emission which passes off propaganda as a newcast. This is not just my opinion, but that of the Financial Post's William Watson. Check out "CBC's The National brings Canadians all the news that's woke", published today. Subhead: "There are four essential components to The National: something climate, something anti-Trump, something Lefty-heroic and something Indigenous".

The alternatives -- the national newscasts of CTV and Global -- are still part of the Canada's lamestream media, but better than the Canuck version of the Clinton News Network. Adjust your watching accordingly. You're welcome.

Hiring based on merit "not really helpful to diversity”, sez prof

A long time ago in a Ford Galaxy far away, one of Walt's agents went to school with a chap named (((Alan Lenczner))). "Black Al", as he was known to his classmates, was an early champion of equal rights for homosexuals, same-sex marriage and diversity in all its other forms. [A loaded phrase, that. Ed.] He is also a first-class litigator, and founder of the Toronto law firm Lenczner Slaght.

The SJWs at Lenczner Slaght have decided, a bit belatedly, to jump on the "blind hiring" bandwagon, and recently sent out a self-congratulatory press release celebrating their enlightenment.

The ultra-PC goal of blind hiring is to judge potential hires exclusively on their abilities. No personal information about the candidate is to be considered, so anything that might identify candidates by gender, race, ethnicity, nationality or virtually anything is carefully scrubbed from their résumés.

Lenczner Slaght plans to remove every name from every résumé submitted as part of its 2019 summer student hiring process. Partner Shara Roy says that should prevent unconscious bias from seeping into hiring decisions and knocking white women and men and women of colour out of the running on the basis of non-white and non-male sounding names. "It’s not a magic bullet," she says, but is the firm's way of "trying to translate diversity within law schools into diversity on Bay Street." And it's a good bit of virtue signalling, as well.

But does it work?Does name-blind hiring make it easier or harder to diversify industries dominated by white people? Professor Eddy Ng, of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, says the answer isn't that simple. "Name-blind hiring only works if you have implicit bias." In other words, if you're pure and righteous, colour-blind and gender-blind, it doesn't make any difference.

And there's an unintended consequence. If you're into affirmative action, not knowing the name, gender, race etc of applicants can defeat your efforts to put straight white males at the bottom of the totem pole. In 2017 the Liberal government of Canuckistan tried concealing personal information — name, citizenship, phone number, address, languages spoken, religious references, and educational institution — on job applications, and found fewer people of colour actually made it through the first screening round than when that information was front and centre.

That's where you have to really know why you're using it, says the good professor: Do you want to diversify or do you want to counter implicit bias? There's a risk of people using it to legitimize their hiring process without actually diversifying, he adds. "They can say, 'Hey look, we keep hiring certain groups of people but it's not our fault because we went through this process where we treated everybody fairly. It's sort of like hiring in the dark. You're hiring essentially based on merit and that's not really helpful to diversity."

I, Walt, added the emphasis to that last sentence. When it comes to treating people fairly in today's politically correct world, that's all ye know and all ye need to know.

Canada's loony left, pro-Muslim "public" school board

There are two publicly-funded education systems in the province of Ontario, Canada. (Well OK, there are four, if you count the French-language counterparts to the two main systems, which are anglophone -- English-speaking.) There are Catholic schools, which are not quite what the name implies, since, being taxpayer-funded, they are required to admit all comers, Catholic or not. And there are "public" schools, which are supposed to be non-religious, but in practice push the new, politically correct religion of secular humanism.

The biggest public school board in Ontario -- in Canada, in fact -- is the Toronto District School Board, which is responsible for Pauline Johnson Junior Public School, in Scarberia, the northeastern ghetto of the Great and Diverse City of Toronto (John Tory, Prop.) That the school is this month celebrating "Tamil Heritage Month" tells you something about the character of the community, and the politics of the TDSB.

Pauline Johnson School is attended by students from literally dozens of different ethnic backgrounds. The majority are not "old stock Canadians", to borrow the appellation of former Prime Minister Steven Harpoon. There is not only a great mixing of races, but a great mixing of religions -- the diversity which Mayor Tory, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Prime Minister Justin "Mr Socks" Trudeau keep telling people makes Canada Strong. (Agent 3 says diversity certainly makes Toronto what it is. Whatever can he mean?) There are a few Christians, some Buddhists, some Hindus, some Sikhs and, inevitably, some Muslims.

One of the Muslim students is Khawlah Noman, who for the rest of her life is likely to be known as the "hijab hoax girl", following the unravelling yesterday of her story about having been attacked by a man who pulled back the hood of her parka, so as to cut (with a scissors!) her hijab -- an Islamophobic, anti-Muslim hate crime if ever there was one! Except there wasn't one. It was all a product of Miss Noman's vivid imagination.

OK, so the kid made the whole thing up. Some kind of plea for help, perhaps. Let it go at that. But the Toronto District School Board did not let it go at that. Today, questions are being asked about why, less than four hours after the initial police report, the TDSB organized a presser -- "press availability" is what they call it nowadays -- to let the tearful 11-year-old face television cameras and throngs of reporters who broadcast her horrific (and unlikely) story to the world?

In the photo we see Miss Noman, her mother, and her 10-year-old brother, who supposedly witnessed the attack. The concerned and caring lady comforting the girl is (((Shari Schwartz-Maltz))), TDSB Manager for Media Relations and Issues Management, who (a source tells WWW) set up the exercise in virtue-signalling. Even if the attack had happened, the appearance would have been unusual, as victims of crime who are minors are traditionally not identified by police or the media, let alone put before cameras to recite a rehearsed narrative and weep on cue.

(((Ms Schwartz-Maltz))) is no stranger to the pages of WWW. She is referred to in "Muslim prayers in Toronto schools: a Muslim viewpoint", WWW 7/7/11, defending a decision of the TDSB to set aside prayer rooms in its schools so the little Muslim kids can say their Friday prayers, while being taught about Islam and the virtues of Islamic society. This was before ISIS, so rumours that ISIS recruiting literature was passed out were likely untrue. It would have been Al-Qaeda, not ISIS.

That the Toronto District School Board is friendly to the so-called Religion of Peace is an undertatement. But hey, that's nothing more than compliance with the policy of the Ontario government (K. Wynne, Prop.) See "Islamization of Ontario schools still part of government agenda", WWW 15/4/12.

But it's not just Muslims that the TDSB likes. They're great believers in affirmative action, human rights (for some humans, at least), social justice and BLM. In a show of politically correctness, surprising even for Ontario, the Board decided, back in 2009, to set up an "Africentric Alternative School" (read: segregated school). It opened in the northwest corner of Toronto "in an attempt to reduce dropout rates and improve an achievement gap among the city's black students. While the school is open to students of all backgrounds, many [note: "many", not "all"] of the teachers are black to serve as role models for students."

The Africentric School was to be a three-year experiment. (((Ms Schwartz-Maltz))) appears again in an article in the Toronto Red Star (from which the above quote was taken) to spin the 2012 report on the results -- three years after the report was published, kinda quietly. The report found that in 2012, only 43% of students who started at the AAS and had not reached graduate age were still enrolled, while 57% had transferred to another school.

The report also identified "differences" between the original idea of the school "and the existing frameworks the school operates within," as well as funding challenges that are a "limiting factor to the school's success." (((Ms Schwartz-Maltz))) called it "a work in progress". Walt has been unable to discover whether any further progress has been made in the 2+ years since, or, indeed, whether the Africentric School is still in existence.

Speaking of affirmative action... a name that has been conveniently forgotten by proponents of the TDSB's liberal agenda is that of Chris Spence, who was the Director of the Toronto District School Board at the time of the Africentric School experiment. Dr Spence, as he then was, should have been a role model extraordinaire for the city's black yoof, being head of the biggest school board in Canada and a credit his race, yada yada yada. Unfortunately, he was obliged to resign, at the end of 2012, over allegations that his Ph.D. thesis was rife with "unattributed passages", plagiarized (copied) from other sources. When last heard from, Mr Spence was fighting for compensation for "constructive dismissal". He has not complained to the Ontario Human Rights Commission about systemic racism.

Speaking of race and black yoof, the latest politically correct folly of the TDSB is the cancellation, last November, of the "School Resource Officer" programme run for it by the Toronto Police Service. The programme placed uniformed police officers in dozens of mainly minority-majority public schools across Toronto. While SRO is SOP in many inner city schools in the USA, it was a first for Canada when introduced in 2008, a year after Grade 9 student Jordan Manners, age 15, was shot and killed at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate, one of Toronto's blackest schools.

Ever since, the SRO programme has drawn sharp criticism from activist groups such as Black Lives Matter Toronto, which made very vocal demands to scrap it as one measure to address "anti-black racism" in the education system. The Board trustees voted 18-3 in favour of cancelling the programme, after a report by staff recommended eliminating the program because "it caused some students to feel uncomfortable and even intimidated." That was in November. Last week the neighbouring Peel District School Board received a report showing that students benefit from the SRO programme in its schools. Go figure.

Every now and then militant secular humanists and anti-Catholic bigots call for the end of public funding for Ontario's Roman Catholic schools. As long as policies like those of the Toronto District School Board -- we haven't even talked about the new pro-LGBT sex ed curriculum yet -- are causing parents by the 1000s to enroll their non-Catholic children in the Catholic system, Catholic schools are in no danger of being defunded. There should be a lesson there for the public school boards, but will they learn it? Two chances: slim and none.

Alexandria church removes Washington AND Lee memorials to create "safe space" for everyone, no exceptions

Walt never darkens the doors of Episcopal churches for religious reasons, but occasionally visited some of the fine old churches dotted around the USA to admire the architecture or take a trip back in time to bathe in the warm waters of history. [Please don't try to be poetical. Ed.] One church well worth a visit for either reason is Christ Church, just off North Washington Street, in Alexandria, Virginia. It's just a couple of blocks west of historical Gadsby's Tavern, where both George Washington and I ate (although not at the same table or time).

George Washington worshipped at Christ Church. A small nameplate still adorns the family pew. Robert E. Lee was confirmed there, and his place is similarly marked. Larger plaques on either side of the sanctuary memorialized both men.

"Why the past tense?", I hear you ask. Why not "memorialize"? Because, dear reader, both plaquest were removed this weekend by order of the vestry, the committee which administers the church. According to a letter circulated to members of the parish this week, the plaques were taken down in order to make Christ Church more "welcoming", and to prevent people from feeling "unsafe" in the sanctuary. Seriously? Well, this is what the vestry said.

"Hebrews 13:2 says, 'Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.' Christ Church lives into this call, feeding the hungry with our Lazarus ministry, welcoming the stranger in our refugee ministry, and inviting all to worship with us. The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome. Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques."

The letter, signed by all 13 members of the governing council, goes on to insist that the eras in which the two famed men lived are "much different than our own." It continues:

"We understand that both Washington and Lee lived in times much different than our own and that each man, in addition to his public persona, was a complicated human being, and like all of us, a child of God. Today, the legacy of slavery and of the Confederacy is understood differently than it was in 1870. For some, Lee symbolizes the attempt to overthrow the Union and to preserve slavery. Today our country is trying once again to come to grips with the history of slavery and the subsequent disenfranchisement of people of color.

"Many in our congregation feel a strong need for the church to stand clearly on the side of 'All are welcome — no exceptions.' Because the sanctuary is a worship space, not a museum, there is no appropriate way to inform visitors about the history of the plaques or to provide additional context except for the in-person tours provided by our docents."

The original focus of this exercise in virtue-signalling was the plaque honouring Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately for the SJWs and do-good weenies, some churl pointed out that George Washington, too, had been a slave-owner. So both memorials had to go, although church officials covered themselves with the figleaf that both plaques are being removed because the two occupy opposite areas of the sanctuary and the aesthetic look of the church would have been "unbalanced" if only the Robert E. Lee plaque were to be removed.

Hellery shocked, SHOCKED by (((Weinstein))) revelations

Walt is gratified to learn that Hellery Clinton reads WWW. In "Why Walt hasn't written about (((Harvey Weinstein)))", posted 10/10, I said that I would comment on the sordid sex scandals of the fallen mogul as soon as La Clinton said something. Yesterday (114/10) Mrs Bill gave her network (CNN - Clinton News Network) the OK to release an interview Wednesday with Fareed Zakaria in which she put on her self-righteous face and said she was "sick" and "shocked" by the news of (((Harvey Weinstein)))'s reported decades of sexual assault against women.

"I was appalled," said the enabler and defender of the most lecherous POTUS since, errr, JFK. "It was something that was just intolerable in every way. And, you know, like so many people who've come forward and spoken out, this was a different side of a person who I and many others had known in the past." Apart from being ungrammatical, the last sentence simply doesn't have the ring of truth.

Nor does Mrs Bill's pledge to donate some -- not all, but some -- of the money he raised for her to charity. "Of course I will do that," she said. "I give 10% of my income to charity every year," she added. "This will be part of that. There's no doubt about it." All that was needed was a flashing "virtue signal!" key. Commissarka Pinkie suggests on The People's Cube that the Democrats will send Mr (((Weinstein)))'s dirty money out to be laundered by groups of women, who will give it back to the Democrats all clean and folded and April fresh.

My eyes are rolling too much to write more. I'll give the second-last word to celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who Tweeted the following:

Further reading (added 13/10/17): ABF (Absolutely Bloody Final) word [for this week. Ed.] goes to the Clinton News Network's "legal analyst", Jeffrey Toobin, who called the (((Harvey Weinstein))) scandal a dark mark on the record of Presidents Clinton and Obama and their lovely wives. Click here to read the story on Breitbart.