In The New York Times, "Colonialism" Explains Everything

  • Why, oh why, is the world so unfair and unjust? In one of the latest narratives of the left, “colonialism” has recently become the trendiest part of the explanation. Or maybe it’s the even more evil variant, “settler colonialism.”

  • But didn’t colonialism end just about everywhere around 60 or more years ago? Sorry, but that doesn’t matter. Something as evil as colonialism has magic tentacles that can cause injustice and unfairness and ruination extending out multiple generations beyond the time when it came to an end.

  • This can go to quite absurd lengths.

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Claudine Gay Has Resigned As President Of Harvard. What Next?

  • The news arrived today in my inbox at 1:27 PM, in an email from Claudine Gay herself. She wrote me “to share that I will be stepping down as president” of Harvard. Fourteen minutes later, that email was followed by an official announcement to the same effect from the Harvard Corporation.

  • Of course, Ms. Gay took the opportunity to blame her downfall on racism of unnamed adversaries. “[I]t has been . . . frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” What personal attacks and racial animus exactly, Ms. Gay? What I have seen (and contributed to) is plenty of fair criticism of the sort that everyone who operates at the level of President of Harvard must deal with every day. Since when is it a “personal attack,” let alone “racial animus,” simply to document a record of enforcing woke orthodoxy on campus, or of allowing anti-semitism to flourish, or of committing more than 40 instances of clear plagiarism in an already sparse record of academic publication?

  • Anyway, with Gay gone, the ball goes back to the board known as the Harvard Corporation to find a replacement as President. What can Harvard expect in the next round?

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Millions Of People Of Color Endure Grueling Thousand Mile Trek In Effort To Enter Systemically Racist White Supremacist Hellhole

Millions Of People Of Color Endure Grueling Thousand Mile Trek In Effort To Enter Systemically Racist White Supremacist Hellhole
  • The United States: As you know, it is a systemically racist, white supremacist hellhole. It is filled with structures and barriers intended to oppress people of color and make them suffer. Or at least, you know those things if you read the usual sources from left-wing institutions and journalists. I’ll give you several examples in a moment.

  • But then, how to explain the undeniable fact that millions of people of color are enduring almost unimaginable hardships every day in the effort to reach and then gain entry to this hellhole.

  • The most recent example is on the front page of today’s New York Times. The headline is “Blinken Seeks Mexico’s Help To Slow Surge”; but the accompanying photo — occupying most of the front page above the fold — is particularly revealing. A caravan of thousands of people is shown surging forward toward the U.S. border, with nearly every single visible face having a noticeably dark complexion.

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Claudine Gay Update -- Now It's Allegations Of Data Falsification

Claudine Gay Update -- Now It's Allegations Of Data Falsification
  • It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.

  • Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject.

  • My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”

  • In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day.

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The Progressive Approach To Homelessness Comes To Madison, Wisconsin

The Progressive Approach To Homelessness Comes To Madison, Wisconsin
  • “Homelessness” is one of my favorite topics because it provides an endless supply of examples of clear, dramatic, and immediate failure of the government programs supposedly intended to assist the poor and vulnerable.

  • All of the big progressive cities follow some version of the same policies, which in summary amount to spending more and more money to provide “housing first” as the obvious solution to homelessness. All of these cities have rapidly stepped up spending over the past decade on promises to the voters to solve the homelessness problem with more subsidized housing; and all of them have then seen homelessness rise relentlessly along with the spending.

  • It’s almost impossible to believe that nobody can learn from this experience.

  • For today I’ll provide the latest update from Los Angeles, as well as look at how a very similar approach has worked out in the smaller (but equally progressive) city of Madison, Wisconsin.

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