The Democrats' Jihad Against Hydroxychloroquine

The Democrats' holy jihad against any medical professional who suggests the safe, controlled application of Hydroxychloroquine could provide therapeutic benefit to certain patients who are experiencing symptoms of the coronavirus has reached a new level of insanity.

In recent days, the big tech, social media behemoths inserted their own medical opinion into the national conversation over the use of this long-approved prescription drug for COVID patients. They censored and removed a video with multiple medical professionals, including a professor at Yale's schools of medicine and epidemiology, providing a second opinion to the overwhelming media narrative that this drug is somehow dangerous despite the fact that malaria and lupus patients have safely used the drug for decades.

Democrats have lined up alongside their pals in the media to demonize the drug and any medical professional who dares to suggest it might... might prove beneficial. They've seen this drug as a political weapon to injure Donald Trump and anyone who supports him and they seem comfortable with the possibility that people could suffer and maybe even die if they are not able to take advantage of this therapy if their doctor happens to be one of the many who believe it could help.

So, what would the Democrats recommend to individuals suffering from the Chinese Wuhan pandemic crippling our economy and isolating our children, condemning them to mediocre remote classrooms with no healthy social interactions with their peers?

Apparently, they think y'all should just get high.

Friday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked about the various provisions set forth in her House "stimulus" bill that relate to cannabis policies and cannabis banking laws that appear to have nothing to do with the pandemic-related economic disaster the bill is supposed to address.

The speaker explained to the intrepid reporter that the cannabis laws are directly related to COVID. "I don't agree with you that cannabis is not related to this," Pelosi explained. "This is a therapy that has proven successful."

There you go.

A cursory search of various medical websites, the CDC, and even the corrupt WHO, provides no results on the medical efficacy of marijuana for patients suffering from COVID-19. In fact, one would assume that inhaling smoke into one's lungs while suffering from the devastating respiratory condition would be, at the very least, counterproductive. But Pelosi has spoken. Let them smoke pot.

Let's just be clear on where the Democrats are on the politics of COVID-19 pharmaceutical therapies (not that pharmaceutical therapies for a devastating virus should be politicized at all, but this is the world the Democrats and the media have created so let's play along).

If you are a medical professional, a doctor, an epidemiologist, or a professor of medicine at a prestigious university and you suggest some therapeutic benefit from a drug that President Trump has suggested might deserve some attention, you must be silenced and you must be condemned because Orange Man Bad.

Instead, you should just grab your bong, head down to your recently-legalized pot dispensary in a Democrat-controlled city, and get high, my friend.

These people should not be allowed to be in a position of power.

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Sweden tells staff to work from home for the rest of the year to make life safer for those going into the office a day after revealing it is seeing a 'very positive' drop in new covid cases

Sweden has today told staff to work from home for the rest of the year to manage crowding on public transport after revealing it is seeing a 'very positive' drop in new covid cases yesterday.

The recommendation, which is directed at those 'who have the possibility to work from home,' will remain in place until the New Year and is designed to make things easier for those who need to physically go to work.

It comes after the country's top epidemiologist announced yesterday that Sweden was witnessing a 'very positive' downward trend, with the lockdown free country recording 318 new cases today and serious cases in need of intensive care falling.

But the country has had 80,100 total cases of coronavirus, and one of the highest per capita death tolls in the world - well above Denmark, Norway and Finland which have each seen fewer than 1,000 deaths.

Public Health Agency noted that 'if our contacts go up again there is a considerable risk of a new spread during the autumn'. 

Sweden has been an outlier in its coronavirus response. It has kept schools for under-16s open and has not closed cafes, bars, restaurants and most businesses. Masks have been recommended only for healthcare personnel.

Its approach has been based on an attempt to gain herd immunity, but the World Health Organization has warned against pinning hopes on an immune response after contracting the virus.   

Nevertheless, Sweden now has a similar infection rate to the UK with a handful of people are now being admitted to intensive care per week, down from as many as 45 per day at the height of the crisis.

Deaths have also fallen, with 56 fatalities announced in the last week compared to 101 in the previous seven days.

Swedish officials have promised to launch an investigation into the country's coronavirus response.

The commission has a broad mandate to look at how the virus arrived in Sweden, how it spread, the government's response, and the effect on equality.

The commission will report on elderly care at the end of November, although its final conclusions are not due until 2022, ahead

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1619 Project Founder Admits It's 'Not a History,' But a Fight to 'Control the National Narrative'

On Monday, Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of The New York Times‘ “1619 Project,” admitted that her project is not a history and that the battle over it is about “memory” — a fight to “control the national narrative.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has moved to defund schools that teach the project.

“The fight over the 1619 Project is not about history. It is about memory,” Hannah-Jones tweeted. “I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”

She claimed the 1619 Project “never pretended to be a history,” but said it involves “using history and reporting to make an argument.”

“The fight here is about who gets to control the national narrative, and therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself. One group has monopolized this for too long in order to create this myth of exceptionalism,” Hannah-Jones added. “If their version is true, what do they have to fear of 1619?”

The 1619 Project aims to redefine America’s past, claiming the country’s true founding occurred in 1619, with the arrival of the first black slaves to Jamestown, rather than in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Focusing on race, the project aims to deconstruct various aspects of American society as racist and oppressive.

Yet early on, the project met with criticism from real historians. Hannah-Jones had claimed that “one of the primary reasons” the colonists revolted against Britain in 1776 was to preserve the institution of slavery. Slavery was not one of the motivating factors of the revolution. In fact, the revolution disrupted slavery. The Times eventually had to post an embarrassing correction.

Not to worry, because the 1619 Project isn’t history, Hannah-Jones says. But she also encourages supplemental history curricula based on the project. She also insists that the project is true, even if it isn’t history but rather journalism and narrative.

The 1619 Project isn’t true

Yet the project is not an accurate reflection of American history. For one thing, there were black slaves, and black freedmen, in America for a century before 1619. Whoops!

The Smithsonian Magazine disputed the 1619 Project because the Spanish brought slaves to present-day South Carolina in 1526.

“In 1526, enslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina. Those Africans launched a rebellion in November of that year and effectively destroyed the Spanish settlers’ ability to sustain the settlement, which they abandoned a year later. Nearly 100 years before Jamestown, African actors enabled American colonies to survive, and they were equally able to destroy European colonial ventures,” the magazine reported.

Ignoring these and other pre-1619 slaves “effectively erases the memory of many more African peoples than it memorializes,” the Smithsonian Magazine article argued. Therefore, the New York Times project “silences the memory of the more than 500,000 African men, women, and children who had already crossed the Atlantic against their will, aided and abetted Europeans in their endeavors, provided expertise and guidance in a range of enterprises, suffered, died, and – most importantly – endured.”

Of course, the 1619 Project is also false in a much deeper sense. Its narrative delegitimizes the very real benefits of American freedom and prosperity by claiming that racist oppression is the central truth behind the country’s ideals, while in truth the country was founded in pursuit of freedom and equality but the Founders allowed slavery to persist, laying the groundwork to defeat it eventually.

The pernicious narrative of the 1619 Project also carries devastating effects. At its heart, the project aims to demonize America’s founding and heritage.

The 1619 Project uses Marxist critical theory to demonize America and inspire an unguided and destructive revolution. Portland activist Lilith Sinclair expressed a similar idea when she said, “There’s still a lot of work to undo the harm of colonized thought that has been pushed onto Black and indigenous communities.” As examples of “colonized thought,” she mentioned Christianity and the “gender binary.” She said she organizes for “the abolition of … the “United States as we know it.”

Marxist critical theory encourages people to deconstruct various aspects of society — such as capitalism, science the nuclear family, the Judeo-Christian tradition, even expectations of politeness (as the Smithsonian briefly taught) — as examples of white oppression. This inspires an aimless and destructive revolution.

When vandals toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland, they spray-painted “1619” on the statue. When Claremont’s Charles Kesler wrote in The New York Post “Call them the 1619 riots,” Hannah-Jones, responded (in a since-deleted tweet) that “it would be an honor” to claim responsibility for the destructive riots and the defamation of American Founding Fathers like George Washington.

In a November 9, 1995 op-ed, the 1619 Project founder condemned Christopher Columbus as “no different” from Adolf Hitler and demonized the “white race” as the true “savages” and “bloodsuckers.” She went on to describe “white America’s dream” as “colored America’s nightmare.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) expressed a similar sentiment when she called for the “dismantling” of America’s “economy and political system,” in order to root out supposed racist oppression.

Yet the “1619 riots” have arguably oppressed black people far more than the U.S. supposedly does. The riots have destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments. At least 22 Americans have died in the riots, most of them black.

This narrative undermines the positive aspects of America and encourages hatred toward the very country that provides its citizens with an unprecedented degree of freedom and prosperity. It encourages violent riots in the name of racial justice, even though those riots make life concretely worse for black Americans.

The 1619 Project may bring forward the stories of black Americans who have been overlooked in the past, and that would be admirable. But Americans must reject its pernicious aim to twist the national narrative against the Founders, capitalism, and more.

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IN BRIEF

Bill Clinton visited Jeffrey Epstein's private island, unsealed court documents suggest (Fox News)

ACLU sues Portland police to block them videotaping demonstrators (The Daily Wire)

"Peaceful protests": Twenty-four people have died since violence erupted following George Floyd's death (The Daily Caller)

NBA players protest the national anthem as league returns to action (Reuters)

Trader Joe's announces it will not pander to a petition calling product names "racist" (UK Daily Mail)

"Big Four" tech titans Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google add $250 billion to their combined market value (UK Daily Mail)

Grand jury indicts Tennessee Democrat state senator on theft charges (AP)

Chinese and Russian hackers are sanctioned by Europe for the first time (MIT Technology Review)

Policy: COVID eviction moratoriums are unnecessary, unfair, and economically harmful (The Daily Signal)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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