By Selwyn Duke

In the wake of a Dutch citizen being arrested for wearing a cute, furry pig hat at an anti-Muslim-migration protest comes another example of politically correct law enforcement: a man in Florida facing life in prison for vandalizing a mosque, an act that included leaving a slab of bacon at the front door. Meanwhile, as Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer points out, "In Portland, Mohamed Mohamud attempted to commit jihad mass murder at a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. He got thirty years in prison, and his lawyers are claiming that sentence was draconian and should be reduced." Spencer continues, "This indicates yet again that Muslims in the U.S. are rapidly becoming a protected class, of whom authorities are particularly solicitous." Michael Wolfe, the Florida bacon bad boy, "deserves punishment. The punishment should fit the crime," he concludes.

For sure. And let's be clear on something: The crime here was vandalism and criminal mischief. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. I've long inveighed against "hate-crime" laws, which, serving to punish thought (at least within a certain context), are as un-American as legislation comes. 

Of course, it's entirely possible Wolfe won't get the maximum sentence. But the very fact that you can face life in this country for vandalism and criminal mischief is yet another sign that we're becoming an Orwellian dystopia. 

By Selwyn Duke

When Governor John Kasich said recently that he probably should be running in the Democrat Party, he wasn’t kidding. Although seeking office in Cuba might be even more fitting.

Taking a break from lecturing us on how we must accept amnesty, the presidential contender recently weighed in on the case of the Oregon bakers fined $135,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a faux wedding. Mentioned briefly in Thursday’s GOP presidential debate, here are his comments, made on Monday at the University of Virginia:

I think, frankly, our churches should not be forced to do anything that’s not consistent with them. But if you’re a cupcake maker and somebody wants a cupcake, make them a cupcake. Let’s not have a big lawsuit or argument over all this stuff — move on. The next thing, you know, they might be saying, if you’re divorced you shouldn’t get a cupcake.

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By Selwyn Duke

Got privilege? Because if you’ve got the rap, rationalizations, and rhetoric to bloviate about “white privilege,” you can make millions. Glenn Singleton (shown) sure has.

Singleton, a black man, is the founder of Pacific Educational Group (PEG), which has made millions of dollars teaching “white privilege” peppered with Marxist dogma to America’s schoolteachers. PEG’s ostensible goal is to improve the education of blacks and other minorities. But central to its program is that blacks are held down by “white privilege,” the notion that the educational system and wider society are infused with white-supremacy-spawned “white norms” and thus handicap black and Hispanic kids. And what are these norms? Hard work, planning for the future, and punctuality are among them. And black norms? PEG cites one as being “collectivism.”

And PEG has been collecting cash for quite a while.

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

“About 80 percent of the people who are given amnesty, when they’re registered to vote, will vote Democratic,” notedTexas congressman Lamar Smith in 2014. While his number could be a bit low, he was shining a light on a poorly hidden agenda: Today’s im/migration, illegal and legal, amounts to a Democrat get-in-the-vote scheme. And now it’s apparent that the Obama administration is attempting to cut to the chase and enable illegal aliens themselves to cast ballots.

In fact, the federal government’s current actions are so outrageous that just yesterday a federal judge called them “unprecedented” and “extraordinary.”

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

Arrested for wearing a cute, furry pig hat? That's what happened to a man in the Netherlands while participating in a protest against the destructive Muslim migration into his country (video below). No Muslim were around, mind you, and, presumably, no one complained. But the politically correct cops still thought it could be "insulting." 

By the way, whose country is the Netherlands now, anyway? 

I should mention that I find the police's actions insulting; political correctness is insulting, period — especially to one's intelligence. 

And what are the prohibitions here? Can you wear a fluffy dog hat? I mean, dogs are considered unclean in Islam, too. Can you say "oink" or "woof"? And as Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer points out, what will be forbidden in 5 or 10 years? Just today 100 Muslim rioted in Belgium because a woman refused to wear a headscarf. "Tolerance" is not a big word with these folks. But, hey, ain't diversity grand? Remember, our strength lies in it. 

By Selwyn Duke

Americans have increasingly come to believe that the Fourth Estate is a fifth column, with polls showing that only about 20 percent of the public trusts the media. Yet there’s a type of information-entity manipulation that’s probably more insidious but perhaps less well known: social-media bias.

This type of bias is about suppression as much as expression. And a good example is the recent revelation by a source inside Twitter that the company is stifling conservative users by blacklisting them and employing a process known as “shadowbanning.” Speaking exclusively to Breitbart Tech, the source also disclosed that Twitter places favored users (generally liberals) on a “whitelist,” which gives them a higher profile in search results than their popularity warrants.

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

The Left sure likes rights; so much so that it even invents them. The latest example is presidential contender Bernie Sanders’ (shown) claim that Barack Obama has a “constitutional right” to appoint the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s successor. Of course, governmental branches don’t have “rights” — they havepowers. Obama certainly has the power to nominate a Supreme Court justice. And the Senate has the power to confirm that individual or not do so.

Senator Sanders made the comment in an interview with Face the Nation’s John Dickerson on Sunday (video below). Addressing a Republican intention to not consider any of Obama’s nominees so close to the November election, the avowed socialist said, “The idea that Republicans want to deny the president of the United States his basic constitutional right is beyond my comprehension.” Sanders repeated this mistaken notion just one answer later, insisting that “we cannot allow the Republican majority in the Senate to deny the president his basic constitutional right.”

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

Occasionally I like to share with readers mostly forgotten gems of analysis and philosophical thought. Below is the beginning of just such a work: "Music and Morality," a chapter from William Kilpatrick's book Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong. 

Kilpatrick is a great thinker, and this chapter offers much food for thought. Its message will, sadly, not be well received by many today, but is certainly something everyone should take to heart. I suggest you read it and drink deeply from his cup of wisdom. 

No, this chapter is not about the latest dirty lyrics in the latest rap groups latest album (though some are included). Nor does it deal with rumors that the members of such and such a rock group are devil worshipers (though they might be). Rather, it attempts to get at an effect of music that is more basic than the lyrics or the singers persona. We can start our discussion of this effect with the common observation that we tend to learn something more easily and indelibly if its set to a rhyme or song. Advertisers know this and use it so effectively that we sometimes have difficulty getting their jingles out of our heads. But there are more positive educational uses. Most of us learned the alphabet this way and some of our history as well (Paul Reveres Ride, Concord Hymn ). Recently some foreign language courses have been developed which employ rhyme and song as the central teaching method. Similarly, one of the most successful new phonics programs teaches reading through singing.

This raises an interesting possibility. If Johnny can be taught to read through rhyme and song, might he also begin to learn right and wrong in the same way? It seems that something like this did happen in the distant past. As I noted earlier, the Iliad and the Odyssey played a vital role in the formation of Greek youth. But the ability of the Homeric bards to memorize these vast epics was due in large part to the rhythmic meter and repetitive structure of the poems. In turn, these epics were often sung to the audience to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. In short, the foundational cultural messages of the Greeks were conveyed by sung stories. Education in such cultures, writes Kieran Egan of Simon Fraser University, is largely a matter of constantly immersing the young into the enchanting patterns of sound until they resound to the patterns, until they become musically in tune with, harmonious with, the institutions of their culture.

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

The death of the intrepid Justice Antonin Scalia has shaken the political world. If his successor’s appointment cannot be delayed until the next presidency, it’s assured that an unassailable hard-left majority will control the Supreme Court. This will mean, conservatives warn, the end of significant Second Amendment rights, curtailment of many religious freedoms and a consistent rubber-stamp for the “progressive” agenda.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of replacing Scalia — the court’s pre-eminent legal mind — with even a pale imitation is slim. For it to happen

• the Senate will have to exhibit fortitude and delay the confirmation of a successor.
• a Republican will have to win the presidency.
• the GOP will have to retain the Senate in Nov., and 24 GOP seats but only 10 Democrat ones are up for grabs.
• the Republican president in office will have to nominate someone not a wolf in constitutionalist’s clothing; the chances of this alone happening are likely less than 50 percent.

The probability of all four of the above coming to pass isn’t great. And, regardless, while we will fill the great Scalia’s position, we’ll never fill his shoes. Yet perhaps the real solution to this problem lies with something Scalia himself said — just last year.

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By Selwyn Duke

While a Pakistani city was busy banningValentine’s Day, Mother Nature put her own chill on the holiday closer to home: Low-temperature records were shattered in parts of the Northeast, with one area in New York registering a wind chill of minus 114 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Big Apple felt the freeze, setting a February 14 record of -1° F (actual temperature). But that was downright balmy compared to Watertown, N.Y., 300 miles north, where the mercury dipped down to -37° F. Yet it was Amasa, Michigan, and North Conway, New Hampshire, which had the nationwide low, with a spittle-solidifying -40° F.

And you can blame it all on migration across the border — migration of air across the Canadian border, that is. AccuWeather.com writes that the arctic temperatures were assisted “by a southward shift in the polar vortex,” which “is a storm that is typically centered near the North Pole and tends to keep the coldest air trapped in northern Canada. Occasionally, this storm weakens or shifts enough to allow frigid air to plummet southward into the United States.”

Read the rest here.