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US Military Ordered “Clandestine Burning” of Toxic Chemicals in Poor Neighborhoods

New research conducted by environmental justice scholars at Vermont’s Bennington College reveals that between 2016 and 2020, the U.S. military oversaw the “clandestine burning” of more than 20 million pounds of Aqueous Fire Fighting Foam in low-income communities around the country—even though there is no evidence that incineration destroys the toxic “forever chemicals” that make up the foam and are linked to a range of cancers, developmental disorders, immune dysfunction, and infertility.

“In defiance of common sense and environmental expertise, the Department of Defense (DOD) has enlisted poor communities across the U.S. as unwilling test subjects in its toxic experiment with burning AFFF,” David Bond, associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, said (pdf) in a statement earlier this week.

Noting that scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and even Pentagon officials have warned that “burning AFFF is an unproven method and dangerous mix that threatens the health of millions of Americans,” Bond characterized the decision of the military to dump huge stockpiles of AFFF and AFFF wastewater into “a handful of habitually negligent incinerators” as a “harebrained” operation as well as a manifestation of environmental injustice.

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The War on Sex

In his 1973 book The Inevitability of Patriarchy, the sociologist Steven Goldberg described sex as “the single most decisive determinant of personal identity.” Today, one wonders if such a book could even be published. Even if it were, it would certainly face a massive assault by the scholarly establishment, the “news” media, and much of the rest of elite culture, including that of many self-styled conservatives. The state of accepted pedagogy on this matter in our nation’s schools, including our universities, is now nearly the opposite of Goldberg’s argument that intrinsic biological differences irreducible to socialization exist between man and woman, differences that make the radical feminist dream of a society where men and women are functionally indistinguishable impossible to achieve. Increasingly, many in authority now take it as a matter of doxa—beyond any possible argument or demonstration of contradicting data—that sex is not a binary with two categories but a spectrum with many, and that gender is completely disconnected from sex, defined only by the whim of the individual.

The book that most fully demonstrates the radical angle of attack on Goldberg’s scientific view is one that might have had the most influence on elite thinking about gender and sex: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). The Berkeley professor’s book celebrated drag as a culturally revolutionary act that reveals what she asserts is the fact of gender’s unreality. Gender, Butler claims, is no more than a performance, and drag is a form of radical action against the illegitimate patriarchal system of power. Through this deviant practice, individuals can create alternative identities and subvert heterosexual power. If a biological man can lay claim to the female gender simply by changing clothing, applying some makeup, and altering his speech or mannerisms, the link of gender to anything biologically real is broken and we are in a (liberating) world of mirrors and drama.

Butler’s anarchist attack on “the compulsory order of sex/gender/desire,” that is, the cultural enforcement of the sex and gender binary, is consistent with the French poststructuralism of especially Michel Foucault, who saw society as a set of controls  to prevent the free expression of sexuality. This high priest for the sex/gender radicals died of AIDS after having almost certainly contracted the disease frequenting bath houses in the San Francisco area during the 1970s and 1980s. Here, Foucault tested his philosophical principles of sexual freedom in acts of anonymous, sado-masochistic, unprotected carnality with many other men.

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Minnesota’s New Social Studies Curriculum Would Racialize First-Graders, Teach High Schoolers About The Evils Of ‘Whiteness, Capitalism, And Christianity’

The Minnesota Department of Education released a draft of its new social studies curriculum standards, which place a new emphasis on diversity, equity, and gender.

The social studies curriculum is up for state-wide review during the 2020-21 school year as part of Minnesota’s 10-year cyclical curriculum review. The Department of Education’s standards committee has dubbed the new framework a “more inclusive approach to social studies education.”

According to a copy of the standards, the committee wants to begin social studies classes with a land acknowledgment. Land acknowledgments tell students that they are learning on land that was conquered by Americans, though once belonged to Native Americans.

“Minnesota is the contemporary and ancestral home of the Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples, and social studies education on this land will acknowledge and honor their contemporary and historical voices,” the draft reads.

Under the new standards, learning about social justice curriculum begins in the first grade. Six and seven-year-olds may be taught about systemic discrimination and how groups have fought against such discrimination.

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After Nine Weeks Without Press Conference, Biden Relies On Pre-Selected List Of Reporters At First One

While some presidents made a point to use a preferred press list in the past, Biden only fielded questions from 10 of the 25 reporters located in the White House’s East Room, many of whom injected their own agendas, bias, and narratives into their leading questions about immigration, the filibuster, and foreign policy.

One taxpayer-funded journalist at PBS asked if  the influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border is because Biden is so “moral” and “decent.”

“You’ve said over and over again, that immigrants shouldn’t come to this country right now, this isn’t the time to come. That message is not being received,” Yamiche Alcindor said. “Instead the perception of you, that got you elected as a moral, decent man, is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and trusting you with unaccompanied minors.”

Another reporter asked Biden if former President Barack Obama’s suggestion that the filibuster is “a relic of the Jim Crow era” is accurate, a sentiment that he readily agreed is true.

Even though multiple reporters were granted access to the indoor presser, certain White House correspondents such as Fox News’s Peter Doocy, who has a history of pressing White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki to answer his questions instead of giving him the runaround, were overlooked and never called on by the president.

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