Tag: hypocrisy

Poised To Lose Battle Over Gun Ads, City Bans All Advertising But Its Own

Spoiled brats upset at losing a game sometimes take their ball and go home so nobody can play, but can petulant politicians do the same with advertising venues? That’s the question as city officials in Flagstaff, Arizona, end advertising at the local airport rather than allow a firearms-related business to advertise its services to tourists. Well, they’re discontinuing advertising for everybody except a city agency that promotes select businesses. That’s unlikely to resolve the dispute.

Earlier this month I covered the case of Rob Wilson, who wanted to continue advertising his Timberline Firearms & Training to people visiting the high-desert community. “Officials rejected the ad, telling Wilson that its representation of shooting sports violated the city’s ban on displaying ‘violence or anti-social behavior’ and its new advertising policy against depicting guns,” I wrote.

That policy hadn’t even been approved yet. “The City’s Facility Advertising Policy remains in draft form,” Flagstaff Public Affairs Director Sarah Langley told me via email. It was scheduled for consideration at the November 14 council meeting. Langley added that part of the city’s objection is that Timberline’s new advertisement is a video, unlike the rotating still images used in past ads. Arizona’s Goldwater Institute, which represents Wilson, denies any such change and shared with me a video identical to the current one and date-stamped August 13, 2019.

Not that still vs. moving images should make a difference.

It quickly became clear that Flagstaff’s city government didn’t want Wilson’s business, or gun-related businesses in general, advertising at its facilities and was scrambling to come up with a justification. But government agencies are limited in their ability to pick who can and can’t speak on public property.

Keep reading

Elites Meet: 70,000+ Attendees Flying to Dubai for COP 28 Climate Summit

Ladies and gentlemen, please return your seats and tray tables to an upright position, fasten your seatbelts and prepare for landing… That is the order more than 70,000 people will hear as they arrive mostly by private and commercial jets to attend the COP 28 climate conference that begins Thursday in Dubai.

The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP28, in the United Arab Emirates is expecting close to a record turnout for the annual gathering of the globalist elites to vent their never-ending call for international climate action.

King Charles will be flying in especially to deliver the opening address as he joins tens of thousands of others who have eschewed the benefits of video conferencing in favour of boarding carbon-spewing aircraft for their travels even as flying creates more carbon emissions than any other form of transportation.

According to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the massed 70-000-plus attendees will be double the number of COP21 delegates in Paris, the landmark summit during which the Paris Agreement was adopted.

Keep reading

AOC Ripped for Calling NYC Unaffordable for Working-Class

The New York Post editorial board ripped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., after she complained that New York City was too expensive for “working-class people.”

The board agreed that the lawmaker was right but pointed the blame at her for pushing the very policies that have made the city too expensive.

The editorial, published Tuesday, began by stating, “For once, AOC is right: ‘They can’t afford to live here anymore,’ she said Monday of working-class Gothamites. The thing is, it’s the policies that she and her progressive allies want more of that have made the city so expensive.”

Ocasio-Cortez made her comments during a town hall meeting this week, arguing that it wasn’t the rich who were feeling the heat of the expense but working-class people.

“The people who are moving out of the city are not by and large the wealthiest people. They’re the working class. They can’t afford to live here anymore,” she said, while making a pitch to tax the city’s rich more.

Keep reading

Tiny Fraction Of Global Elites Emit As Much Carbon As Bottom Two-Thirds Of Humanity

Critics who rail against the hypocrisy of wealthy global elites jet-setting on carbon-spewing private planes while pontificating about the need for the rest of us to cut our climate footprints just got a boost from a new study.

It turns out that the world’s richest 1 percent emit about the same amount of carbon as the world’s poorest two-thirds, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Oxfam International.

This means that a small sliver of global elites, or 77 million people, have produced as much carbon as the 5 billion people that make up the bottom 66 percent by wealth, per the study.

The study also estimates that it would take roughly 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99 percent to produce as much carbon as the wealthiest billionaires do in just one year.

The study was based on research compiled by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and examined the emissions of various income groups up to 2019. In summary, it suggested that the private jet-setting class of global leaders and policymakers, who take private planes to lead summits addressing the assumed dangers of climate change, may warrant charges of hypocrisy.

The analysis was published as global leaders prepare to meet for climate talks at the COP28 summit in Dubai later in November, where, much like other climate conferences, some elite participants will likely pontificate on the need for ordinary folk to end their reliance on cheap fossil fuel energy to make their ends meet.

Keep reading

Professors: Free Speech And Intellectual Diversity Are Not Essential To Higher Education

In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss how academics are now leading an anti-free speech movement on campuses that challenges the centrality (or even the necessity) of free speech protections in higher education. The latest such argument appeared this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Two Arizona State University professors — Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell — wrote that free speech concerns yield too much to the “right wing” and that free speech should not be given the protection currently afforded by universities and colleges. Indeed, they argue that free speech may be harming higher education by fostering “unworthy” ideas.

Amesbury teaches religious studies and O’Donnell teaches history at ASU. They wrote an article titled “Dear Administrators: Enough with the Free Speech Rhetoric! It Concedes Too Much to the Right-Wing Agenda.”

The two academics challenge the long-held view of the centrality of free speech to higher education. Notably, many of us have been alarmed by the erosion of free speech on our campuses, but Amesbury and O’Donnell seem to worry that there is still too much protection for opposing views. Worse yet, they suggest that the free speech objections are often part of a right-wing funded agenda.

In fairness, to the two professors, they do not reject the overall value of free speech, but challenge “the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions.” They insist that higher education is about finding truth and that means that false ideas are inimical to our mission as educators. Indeed, they question the need for “intellectual diversity”:

Our contention is that calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges’ central purpose, namely, the production of expert knowledge and understanding, in the sense of disciplinarily warranted opinion. Expertise requires freedom of speech, but it is the result of a process of winnowing and refinement that is premised on the understanding that not all opinions are equally valid. Efforts to “democratize” opinion are antithetical to the role colleges play in educating the public and informing democratic debate. We urge administrators toward caution before uncritically endorsing calls for intellectual diversity in place of academic expertise…

A diversity of opinion — “intellectual diversity” — isn’t itself the goal; rather, it is of value only insofar as it serves the goal of producing knowledge. On most unanswered questions, there is, at least initially, a range of plausible opinions, but answering questions requires the vetting of opinions. As some opinions are found wanting, the range of opinion deserving of continued consideration narrows.

As a threshold matter, what is so striking about this argument against intellectual diversity is that it is made at a time with little such diversity in most departments. Seeking a wider range of viewpoints on departments does not “concedes too much to the right-wing agenda.” It acknowledges a growing problem across higher education, It is an educational agenda that has prompted many of us to raise the reduction of intellectual diversity.

Keep reading

How to Make Society Accept and Embrace Genocide ‘With This One Simple Trick’

In a glaring display of hypocrisy that has become all too common in the partisan theater, many on the right, who once proudly wore the badge of anti-war, have pivoted their stance amidst the bloody conflict in Gaza. Their anti-war voices, once loud against interventions and regime change wars, have muted, revealing a troubling inconsistency. The invasion of Gaza by Israel following the horrific attack on the Jewish state by Hamas has been met not with calls for peace and diplomacy but with a hawkish embrace of military aid, interventionist policies, and the wholesale embrace of genocide — a significant departure from their previous calls for non-intervention.

This flip-flop is a stark illustration of the power of party lines to cloud judgment, to turn the rational into zealots for causes they once denounced. It’s a phenomenon we at The Free Thought Project have documented extensively over the years, highlighting the cognitive dissonance that grips individuals when party loyalty eclipses principle and rational thought. The abrupt shift from advocating fiscal responsibility and caution in foreign entanglements to endorsing further indebtedness and military support for Israel reflects the influence of partisan lines over these easily dismissed principles. It clearly indicates how easily the masses can be swayed by party loyalty, even when it contradicts their previously held values.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent escalations in Gaza. The same individuals who once cried foul over foreign entanglements now stand idly by or, worse, cheer as Israeli forces launch devastating attacks on Gaza, claiming the lives of thousands. The death toll, a harrowing figure predominantly composed of civilians, women, and children, seems to be just another statistic to those who’ve traded their anti-war ethos for a seat at the partisan table. The Ministry of Health in Gaza has released chilling numbers that paint a picture of a population under siege: over 11,100 Palestinians have been killed, with a disproportionate number of the victims being children and women. 1 out of every 200 Palestinians is now dead — which is nothing short of genocide — and instead of decrying it, many are begging for more.

This about-face isn’t limited to war either. For years, Republicans lambasted the left for its rabid intolerance toward opposing viewpoints, decrying the ‘cancel culture’ that silences dissent. Yet, in a disheartening twist, these cries for free speech seem to vanish into thin air when it comes to the defense of Israel’s actions. Any criticism of Israeli policy is met not with debate but with attempts to silence and discredit—a tactic they once condemned.

Keep reading

San Francisco Clears Homeless And Cleans Sh*t-Covered Streets For World Leaders Next Week

Progressive city leadership in crime-ridden San Francisco has undertaken a massive effort to improve the city’s image, which has been tarnished with shit-covered streets, homelessness, and open-air drug markets. These measures have been implemented as a temporary solution ahead of the global trade summit that will flood the city with world leaders and corporate executives beginning today. 

The annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is San Francisco’s largest international event since world leaders gathered in the town in 1945 to sign the charter creating the United Nations. A lot has changed in the metro area in 78 years, including radical leftists in City Hall that have pushed failed ‘defund the police’ policies that have transformed parts of the region into an out-of-control, crime-infested hellhole. 

The New York Post confirmed the wonderful folks in City Hall began pushing “drug addicts, dealers, and homeless” from the downtown area to other parts of the city, an effort that some believe is to conceal their failed policies from the international community during APEC. 

Keep reading

Biden ‘Countering Islamophobia’ While Incinerating Gaza Is The Most Democrat Thing Ever

In what is arguably the most liberal thing ever to have happened in all of human history, the Biden administration has announced its plans to develop a US National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia even as it helps Israel massacre Muslims by the thousands in Gaza.

“For too long, Muslims in America, and those perceived to be Muslim, such as Arabs and Sikhs, have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents,” reads a White House statement on the announcement. “We all mourn the recent barbaric killing of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian American Muslim boy, and the brutal attack on his mother in their home outside Chicago.”

This comes as the death toll from the US-backed bombing campaign in Gaza nears 10,000, including 3,760 children, in what experts and authorities around the world are describing with increasing frequency as a genocide. If these people were Jewish instead of Muslim, they would not be trapped in a giant concentration camp while the IDF hammers them with a nonstop barrage of military explosives, but because of their ethnicity they are subjected to this horror.

Keep reading

Democrats Say They’re Fighting Inequality. But Many of Their Policies Favor the Rich.

In the grand ballroom of American politics, Democrats have long waltzed to the melody of progressivism while ridiculing Republicans’ preference for outdated tax cut tunes. Ironically, they don’t want to pay for their style of big government with higher taxes on ordinary Americans, which their expansionary ambitions would require. Instead, they loudly proclaim that they want to tax the rich. It remains to be seen how true this is.

Indeed, while Democrats profess their devotion to social justice and fight against income inequality, they often push for policies that favor the rich. Take their nonstop battle over the last five years to ease the tax burden of their high-income constituents.

The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.

That’s a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn’t bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.

Contrast this with the refusal by moderate New York Republicans to vote for Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) for House speaker in exchange for doubling the deduction cap to $20,000 for individuals and $40,000 for married couples. Now, this might mean these guys really didn’t want Jordan as speaker, but they wouldn’t roll over even in exchange for tax cuts for their own constituencies.

Would New York Democrats be so principled? Back in 2021, 17 of 19 members of this delegation threatened to block a Democrat-sponsored infrastructure bill if the SALT deduction cap wasn’t entirely repealed. I would have been OK with that crony bill failing; I highlight this incident only to reveal some Democrats’ commitment to tax breaks for rich blue-state voters.

Keep reading