Antisemitism, Antizionism, Jihadism and the Reunited Germany. News by Fred Alan Medforth
By Andrea Widburg
The interesting thing about revolutions is that it’s often a seemingly small thing that triggers them, just as the proverbial straw breaks the camel’s back. In 1775, a skirmish triggered the American Revolution. In 2023, Bud Light’s decision to give Dylan Mulvaney, America’s most famous “woman face” performer, beer cans with his likeness imprinted on them triggered an overwhelmingly strong reaction against corporate wokeness. A video from Fenway Park shows how deep American anger runs.
In 1775, the American shooting war began when the British headed to Concord to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock and to remove arms and powder they believed were stored there. This could just have been a local battle in a smoldering dispute. Instead, from that moment forward, the revolutionary spirit burst into flame, not just in and around Boston, but across the 13 colonies. It truly was, as Ralph Waldo Emerson later wrote, the “shot heard round the world.”
For some time now, there’s been a smoldering dispute between (a) those who believe in the science of human biology, along with the morals and social norms that flow from that science, and (b) those who believe that humans have the power to change their sex, along with the obsessive focus on children’s sexuality that flows from that belief. Moms for Liberty groups are trying to change what’s happening in the classrooms (and several legislatures have responded), but most Americans have been passive observers.
Americans have also been passive about the LGBTQ+++ takeover of the corporate world. As one American corporation after another has embraced “Pride,” they’ve just tuned out the rainbow-themed stores in June and the endless advertisements, product placements, and emails in which corporations have touted their love for all things LGBTQ. They’ve mostly stood by as the media—TV shows, movies, advertisements, etc.—have suddenly decided that the best people to hire are so-called “transgender” people. Heck, RuPaul’s Drag Race has long been a hit reality show.
Throughout these years, there’s been some pushback from affected groups (mostly parents) but, on the whole, ordinary Americans who didn’t have children in schools, didn’t engage. They tolerated.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was Budweiser’s decision to make a specialty Bud Light can for Dylan Mulvaney. It wasn’t just the can, though. It was Mulvaney frolicking in a bathtub in a bikini and makeup while celebrating his special can that finally put Americans over the top. That little twerp who is making millions from product placements had finally gone too far. Bud Light may taste like puppy urine (a guess, as I’ve never drunk either), but it’s still America’s beer, and this was a straw too many.
Completely spontaneously, without any need for fancy Astro-turf campaigns or callouts by Hollywood stars and TikTok personalities (although a few country stars joined in), Americans stopped drinking Bud Light:
To stem the hemorrhage, Bud gave its Vice President of Marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, a “leave of absence.” Then, Budweiser made a fawningly pro-American ad that failed to impress Americans.
Brendan Whitworth, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev issued a statement, saying, “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.” Americans recognize a non-apology apology when they see one and, again, were unimpressed.
Anheuser-Busch’s CEO tried next: “We will need to continue to clarify the facts—that this was one camp, one influence on a post and not a campaign.” Hey, guys! It’s another non-apology apology. And we’re not going anywhere without a real apology.
What’s happened, and what the people at Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser fail to comprehend, is that Americans now feel a sense of revulsion when they see Bud. It’s like Pavlov’s dog: Instead of drooling, they throw up a little in their mouths. Nothing illustrates more perfectly this visceral sense of revulsion than a video from Boston’s Fenway Park which is, ironically, located not that far from Concord:
I’m often asked whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future. I reply that I worry, but I have hope. One of the things that gives me hope is that this is proving to be a time of Black Swans (that is, entirely unpredictable events that dramatically change things).
Elon Musk turning Twitter, once the government’s favorite vehicle for censorship, into a free speech platform was a Black Swan. Fox News’s seppuku decision to deplatform Tucker Carlson may well be a Black Swan. The same is true for both Vivek Ramaswamy’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s decisions to run for president.
And Bud’s decision to give a creepy little woman-face minstrel show performer his own Bud Light can, is looking very much like one more Black Swan in a crazy year.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/a_video_from_fenway_park_shows_that_budweiser_is_in_deep_trouble.html
A new poll shows that a slight majority of Germans are turning against mass immigration, with 52 percent saying that they believe Germany should “take in fewer refugees,” an increase of 12 points since January 2020.
The results come just a week before a long-awaited migration summit which will involve federal and state governments meeting in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s office to discuss the ongoing crisis.
The poll, conducted for Infratest Dimap on behalf of ARD Tagesthemen and Die Welt, also asked respondents whether they see migrants as bringing more advantages or disadvantages. For 54 percent, they said the disadvantages of immigration outweigh the advantages, while only a third said that the “advantages” outweigh the disadvantages.
However, when it comes to skilled immigration, Germans are more supportive. For this type of immigration, 41 percent said they would like to recruit more of these workers, while 28 percent said the number should be kept at the current level. Only 23 percent wanted to recruit less of these workers.
Germans, however, have clearly soured on refugees with just 8 percent wanting to take more in, while 33 percent said the numbers should stay at their current levels. Another 52 percent want “fewer refugees.”
Alternative for Germany (AfD) voters are the least likely to support immigration, with 92 percent favoring restrictive policies. Meanwhile, 61 percent of FDP and 57 percent of CDU/CSU voters also want restrictions. Even one left-wing party takes a majority negative view on immigration, with supporters of Die Linke (Left Party) seeing more disadvantages than advantages (51 percent to 42 percent).
Polling on the topic of mass immigration has delivered similar results as of late, with a slight majority of Germans saying they do not want more immigration.
At the same time, AfD, the party most known for its stance against immigration, has hit a new high of 16.5 percent in national polls.
by Giulio Meotti
“I suspect that our intellectuals who admire Islam would be horrified if Islamic norms were imposed on them”, declares this week Rémi Brague, a medievalist at the Sorbonne and one of the leading experts on Islam.
Last Friday it was enough to go to Le Pontet, 17,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Avignon. The stadium fills up, in a phenomenal time lapse that says a lot, if not all, about how one religion falls and another takes its place. It is the great Islamic prayer that marks the end of Ramadan.
Avignon, the “city of the Popes”, in the Paris Match investigation today has become “the city of the Salafis”. “Most of the passers-by look alike, black veils for women, baggy afghan pants for men,” says Paris Match. “Most of them wear the believer’s beard, long and sometimes dyed with henna, as in the time of the Prophet. It seems to go back fourteen centuries. Gender segregation is respected: hairdressers for women, inaccessible to men; bars full of men, inaccessible to women. They serve coffee, tea, lemonade… Everything, except alcohol. It is a mini-Islamic republic”.
And the Wiesenthal Center also wonders if the former city of the Popes and of Christianity has not become a “centre of radical Islam”.
It does not only concern cities like Sarcelles, where the former mayor (of the left) Francois Pupponi has just said: “The Great Replacement exists: today’s population is not the same as yesterday”.
In Sarcelles, north of Paris, a 15-year-old girl returns home from high school. She wears a Star of David pendant. A man armed with a knife attacks her, cuts her face and runs away. Also in Sarcelles, an eight-year-old boy wearing a kippah was kicked and punched. We are in one of “Les émirats de la République”, the emirates of the Republic, from the title of Pupponi’s book.
Islam is changing the face of the entire French countryside. In Auzat, a village of 565 inhabitants on the border with Spain and Andorra, there is a mosque. As in Niederhaslach (1,400 inhabitants). And in Docelles (953 inhabitants), in Loupershouse (966 inhabitants) and Saint-Jean-Rohrbach (1,021 inhabitants).
But it is also happening in Italy, albeit twenty years later. In Brescia in recent days (the bishop and mayor were also present), thousands of Muslim faithful celebrated the end of Ramadan at the Brixia Forum. And in Spain, says an Iberian journalist in First Things in March, “there has been a 22 percent increase in mosques in just six months”.
Le Figaro takes us to a stadium in Saint-Denis, where there is the basilica of the kings and where Charles Martel rests, the one who rejected the Moors: “Yellow vest over the djellaba, Mehdi leads the faithful. ‘Salam alekum! Here the men! There the women!’ From 7:45 on Friday, a growing stream of Muslim worshipers, carpet under arm, thronged the entrance to the Landy stadium in Saint-Denis. The city has authorized the use of this outdoor venue, adjacent to the Stade de France, for Eid el-Fitr.”
“Men, women, children and prams arrive in party clothes, djellabas and hijabs. The stadium fills up before prayers, scheduled for 9am. Explains Amar, the secretary of the association that manages the mosque, ‘it’s nothing compared to the Delaune stadium. Four kilometers further on, it welcomes 7,000 worshipers every year for Eid el-Fitr’. As in the mosque, the men in front, the women behind. ‘Next year there will be even more people, this is the price of success’, assures a volunteer”.
At the same time, the same scene in Arles in Provence. And throughout the rest of the country.
By the day it is more and more evident that the “game over” declaration in Western Europe is ahead of us. The cause, however, is not the mass colonization of Western Europe, which has escalated several marches in recent years. The main cause is the rejection by the ruling elites of the values on which Western civilization was founded. Western elites have been quietly working to abolish Western civilization since the mid-1960s. Europeans were encouraged in every possible way not to have children, then immigration was forced upon them as necessary due to the collapse of the birth rate in Europe.
“Europe is one step away from Islamic globalisation,” said the great Algerian writer Boualem Sansal to L’Incorrect magazine this week, suggesting that France add green (the color of Islam) to its flag. “Saudis and Qataris think big and far, Europeans think small and short-term. Islam is divine, victorious, it came to Islamize and abolish, not to negotiate truces, but to forcefully implement the four commandments of Allah: unite the community, enlarge the house of Islam, fight the unbelievers and establish the Sharia. Islamism thrives, it’s everywhere, even where you can’t see it. It’s a deadly pollution, it’s in the air and in the wifi that the winds of venality, resignation and the woke push in the right directions”.
I’m back from a long tour in France, where I haven’t been since before Covid. The country is won over. It does not seem to interest anyone – except a few isolated intellectuals. As if there weren’t even a people anymore, as well as an identity, culture and religion. Visiting the Notre Dame construction site, one feels a sense of estrangement even from those sad ruins. Now they are making it a “green area”. And a large country is transformed, as Alain Finkielkraut writes, into an “airport” for tourists and migrants.
Is this the fate of the peoples of Europe? I want to leave. But to where?
Harman Singh Kapoor, a Sikh restaurant owner in London, and his family have become the target of persistent threats since they uploaded a video about the Khalistan movement on social media.
This occurs despite several police guarantees of safety and specialized safety procedures. According to the reports, the family has been the target of three attacks and does not feel secure in London. Just days after the Indian High Commission in London was vandalised last month, pro-Khalistan supporters attacked Harman’s restaurant named ‘Rangrez, the taste of Punjab’.
After that, Harman released a video that had two million views in only two days, which prompted threatening phone calls, online harassment, and social media trolls to target him and his family. Kapoor stated that the threats began after he posted a video on TikTok, in which he said, “This Khalistan movement started a while back and then it died down. Today again, a section of people who are settled in Canada, in England and Australia want Khalistan but those in India don’t want it. Those who need Khalistan should go back to India and ask for it.”
Harman said that after the video, he started getting death threats and that people started attacking his restaurant. He was threatened with death if he didn’t take down the video, shout pro-Khalistan, and burn the Indian flag.
The restaurant located in Hammersmith, West London, was also vandalised by the Khalistani elements in March in reaction to the video. Several men in masks and hoods had arrived at the restaurant, banged on the doors and asked those inside to come out and face them. After the video of the attack had emerged on social media, REACH-UK had urged the Met Police to take swift action against the perpetrators. “Majority of Sikh do not follow this ideology and hence are harassed by the Khalistani separatist. Provide protection to the minorities of UK,” they had added.
Harman said that threats of rape were also made against his wife and daughter. “Calls to rape and murder them were posted online along with our address. Videos of criminals licking images of my wife and daughter were also shared”, Kapoor continued.
The wife of the restaurant owner, Khushi also said that their car was being followed after the video went viral and that they had to go into hiding for around 10 days. “The restaurant was shut, we were scared, education of my children has suffered. Moreover, this is severe mental torture and the Police is not even helping us,” Khushi said in an interview with India Today.
Recalling the attack in the same interview, Harman said, “After I posted the video, I got two million views for it in two days. But, I started getting calls to take down the video else they would kill me and my family. I wondered who could threaten me like this as I am in the UK. However, five people came and attacked my restaurant. They raised slogans like “Khalistan Zindabad” and “Hindustan Murdabad” and asked me to burn the Indian flag, or else they said would kill me.”
Harman Kapoor also slammed the attackers and said that they were ‘sick’ and not ‘Sikhs’. “I wonder if these people are asking for Khalsa raj or gunda raj,” he added.
A group of pro-Khalistani activists demonstrated in front of the Indian High Commission in London on March 22. And the attack at Harman’s restaurant took place that same evening at 6.30.
On March 19, a group of pro-Khalistan activists broke windows, smashed doors, climbed onto the balcony, and took down the Indian flag at the Indian High Commission. One individual was detained by the police at the time, who eventually released them on bail so they could reappear in court in June.
The UK police however responded to the attack and said that they had reached the spot within 15 minutes of the attack. “We have been in regular contact with him (Harman) and are working to put extra safeguarding measures in place to ensure that he feels safe returning home. This includes panic alarms being installed at relevant properties and the offer of alternative accommodation. Our investigation is progressing, led by detectives from CID. This includes reviewing CCTV and other enquiries. We will continue to update the victim on a regular basis,” the police was quoted as saying by India Today.
Harman said that a second attack occurred at their place of residence on March 23 around 7:30 pm. “Police reached out to us. They said they would come again in two days to take our statements and arrest the suspects. But it is more than two weeks now,” said Harman who had fled into hiding to avoid the threats but had to return to work.
As per the reports, the family is living in constant fear and does not feel safe as the attackers are still at large. “Police told us that we are not on priority because nothing has happened to us. Unless someone is injured or hurt or killed, they can act in full force. Those who are harassing us know that till they don’t touch us, the police won’t do anything. So, these people are out in the open threatening and harrasing us while the police are waiting for us to be killed so that they can take action,” Harman alleged. “Do we have to die for the police to take action,” he remarked.
Reportedly, there are many Sikhs who are suffering due to the Khalistani supporters. An independent report, the Bloom review recently released a report on ‘How government engages with faith’ on April 26 and said that there are repeated cases of individuals being intimidated and threatened by aggressive Sikh activists, either directly or indirectly through family members, for openly standing against them.
The report commissioned by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called on the Rishi Sunak government to address the issue urgently and safeguard most of the Sikhs in the UK who do not support the extremist ideology.
The urgency of resolving the problem has been highlighted in the report. According to the research, fringe Khalistani groups intimidate and coerce the Sikh community in the UK. These pro-Khalistan organisations lobby political figures under the cover of human rights activity, which artificially increases their power and draws excessive attention.
As per the report, the acts of pro-Khalistan organisations project a false sense of legitimacy that is at odds with the Sikh faith. It is crucial to understand that the majority of British Sikh communities do not share the ideas of Khalistani separatists.
Snobbery abounds in establishment media as ever, as national broadcast boss says left-wing people are more likely to become journalists because they are more capable of critical thought.
Kai Gniffke, the head of the German state-owned broadcasting association ARD, has claimed that the reason government-backed journalism is overwhelmingly left-wing is that the job requires critical thinking.
Previous research into the association has shown that over 90 per cent of its volunteers vote exclusively for far-left parties — including the ruling Greens — during Germany’s elections. It is even alleged the broadcaster has a policy of totally blocking members of Germany’s right-wing opposition from appearing on its talk shows at all, not uncommon in Europe where right-populist parties are frozen out of the political process to whatever extent possible by the mainstream in the hope of starving them of oxygen.
In Germany, this process is despite the fact that the AfD are now the third most popular party nationwide, and the single most popular party in the country’s formerly Soviet-controlled eastern region.
However, dismissing criticism of the ARD’s overwhelmingly left-wing bias, Gniffke told one trade union publication during an interview that the outlet basically had no choice but to have that bias, as the job itself only attracts people who are capable of critical thinking.
“The journalism profession is more attractive to critical minds,” he said.
He also emphasised that while there were “conservative voices on ARD”, he also told the interviewer that the media outlet would not give a platform to anyone who, it deems, “rejects the democratic constitutional state and its fundamental values, norms and rules” of German society.
Accusations revolving around the alleged rejection of Germany’s “democratic constitutional state” have repeatedly been used in the country by both media outlets and government officials to silence critics, especially those within the European nation’s populist right wing.
Particular effort has gone into targeting members of the AfD, with the German courts giving security officials permission to spy both on the main party organisation, as well as its youth wing, the latter of which recently being classified as an extremist organisation that threatens democracy.
Things do not stop there, however, with one government official warning earlier this year that any young couple that decides to flee “multicultural life” in German cities by escaping to the countryside should be viewed as “right-wing extremists“.
“People think they are decent people, hard-working young people with children,” Dirk-Martin Christian, who heads up the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Saxony, remarked, before expressing concern that many of these young people were, in fact, seeking “intact national community” away from migrants in “remote areas” of Germany.
He went on to warn that these young people have been able to “gain acceptance” in rural communities by being nice and hardworking, warning that real Germans loyal to the state must work to alienate these individuals or risk allowing “extremists” to have “an easy time of it”.
The German federal government should stop talking about upper limits to its immigration policy, as such discussions send the “wrong signals,” a leading Green state politician has claimed.
Aminata Touré, who is the integration commissioner for the state of Schleswig-Holstein, recently told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper in an interview that the federal government must spend significantly larger sums of taxpayer cash on its migration policy; she also said they should not implement any quotas on skilled workers or asylum seekers.
“It makes no sense at all to send people away again who have not come to us as skilled workers, but who could work as skilled workers in time,” Touré told the newspaper.
She also called for the distinction between “good” and “bad” immigrants to be abandoned by German politicians. Touré insisted that deportations and repatriations are not conducive to building a “sensible migration and skilled labor policy,” calling for an end to determining asylum applications based on safe and unsafe countries of origin.
Rather than having quotas, German authorities should spend more to build up infrastructure to accommodate migrants and focus on improving public services.
“We in Schleswig-Holstein have worked out a kind of emergency plan with the municipalities. Stage one: The country ramps up initial reception capacity to ease pressure on cities and communities. That’s what we did, and that’s why there’s still free capacity now,” the Green politician said.
Touré criticized recent statements made by conservative politicians who have warned against a repeat of the mistakes from the “Merkel years” of mass immigration, describing them as “difficult.”
She insisted that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel had not “ducked away” from the migration issue, but had “tried to create a social consensus for her policies.” Touré urged German authorities to start preparing to put in place the necessary structures ahead of larger migratory movements in the coming years.
For this to succeed, however, the federal government would have to make more money available to her state, Touré said. She dismissed the current €2.75 billion pledged as inadequate, claiming it would not even come close to covering the costs of the states.
Her remarks are at odds even with some of her own Green colleagues, including Tübingen Mayor Boris Palmer, who recently told Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that “if we use all of society’s resources for the new arrivals, but there is nothing left for the local people, then this society will explode.”
Both comments come following the news that the German federal government will spend more than €36 billion this year on its liberal migration policy, leading many critics to claim that the country is increasingly turning to debt in order to fund the ongoing migration crisis.
There are many other indirect costs to mass immigration not often reported, including the surge in real estate prices, more traffic in cities, larger and more difficult classrooms, longer wait times for medical care, and a host of other quality-of-life issues that have led the majority of Germans to become increasingly resistant to more immigration.
The costs of the crisis also come at a time when Germans are dealing with elevated inflation and a weakening economy.
Last week the Wall Street Journal published a column by two scientists, Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov, detailing their travails in trying to get scientific journals to publish their “commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit.” They were met with rejection, one editor calling the essay “downright hurtful,” and another one writing that “the concept of merit . . . has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow.” It finally was published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which champions “free inquiry,” a fast-disappearing virtue in our age of “woke” intolerance.
The politicization of academic disciplines in the humanities or history or the “human sciences” is bad enough, but its dangers are nothing compared to the corruption of the hard sciences by illiberal identity politics. The roots of this dangerous ideology lie in the notion of “equity,” a fancy word for the equality of results. Both “equity” and ideological distortions of science have a long history of destructive outcomes.
The notion of absolute equality or radical egalitarianism was born 2500 years ago with democracy and its extension of political rights to non-elites. As Aristotle defined radical egalitarianism, “it arises from the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” As such it is inherently tyrannical, for given the unequal distribution of talent, brains, opportunity, industry, and sheer luck, only by unjustly reducing the equality of some can absolute equality exist for all.
And as James Madison said in his discussion of “faction,” the clashing “political interests and parties” that can threaten our freedom result from “unequal faculties of acquiring property”––just as we see today with “equity” and “disparate impacts” and the redistribution of wealth in order to mitigate what one faction deems are unfair distinctions based on a spurious “merit” that makes some wealthier and more privileged than others. “Equality of outcome” thus exacerbated this inherently contentious and divisive dynamic.
We should not accept, then, the injection of a political aim like radical egalitarianism––which has a long track-record of bloody failure––into an enterprise supposedly devoted to the scientific method for establishing the facts of nature.
Similarly, the corruption of academic disciplines, including the hard sciences, has a long history of destructive consequences. The authors point to Lysenkoism, after the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who in the Thirties preached unscientific ideas such as acquired traits, and the claim that modern genetics was a pseudoscience. Enforced by Soviet and later Chinese communist tyranny, “Implementation of his theories in Soviet and, later, Chinese agriculture led to famines and the starvation of millions. Russian biology still hasn’t recovered.”
And in this country, starting at the turn of the 20th century, “scientific racism” or “Social Darwinism,” and its practical application in eugenics, was prominent in our most prestigious universities. Thousands of women deemed “unfit” to reproduce were forcibly sterilized, and these pseudo-scientific theories gave Jim Crow segregation and bigoted immigration policies a patina of science that deflected their illiberal and antihuman motives. Worse yet, these ideas significantly influenced Nazi anti-Semitic policies and atrocities like the Holocaust.
More recently, our universities have seen the corruption of history by fanciful theories like Afrocentrism or “systemic racism” dressed up in the protocols of historiography or political philosophy, but in fact subordinated to political ideologies and factional interests, especially identity politics.
Earlier in the Nineties, academic feminism went down the rabbit-hole of the “Great Goddess” and its fake history fabricated from myth and the abuse of academic archaeology. This deity was allegedly worshipped in prehistoric “Old Europe.” Like the Golden Age of Hesiod, this was a time of idyllic harmony with nature, vegetarianism, peace, nature-worship, and communal egalitarianism. And it was matriarchal. This dubious history became a New Age fad in popular culture, its Noble-Savage Indianism and romantic environmentalism making it attractive for leftist doctrinaire feminists and romantic environmentalists.
As with other fake history, this fad flourished in universities, especially in Women’s Studies departments and programs. But traditional academic disciplines like archaeology and religious studies also lent their prestige and authority to a belief system that resembles a cult rather than the product of empirically based research.
For example, the work of the late UCLA professor of prehistoric archaeology, Marija Gimbutas, has been central to this dodgy academic sub-field. Especially important was her study of prehistoric statuettes like the Venus of Willendorf and its exaggerated breasts and buttocks, of which more than 80 intact or fragmentary artefacts have survived.
Although there are several different hypothetical explanations for these sculptures’ functions, Gimbutas accepted and encouraged the radical feminist assertion that they were evidence for the existence of a Goddess worshipped in prehistoric Europe. From this interpretation a whole fanciful history was created to explain not just the details of this imagined civilization, but the story of its demise at the hands of Indo-European horse-riding invaders called “Kurgans,” who conquered and occupied Old Europe, and sowed it with all the cultural, religious, and political dysfunctions of the West: slavery, colonialism, war, private property, patriarchy, inequality, and especially war. Notice how this fantasy dovetails with the Marxoid animus against, inter alia, colonialism and private property, that is central to leftist and “woke” ideology.
Gimbutas’ credentials and authority, moreover, sanctioned proponents of this myth-history to claim that it is fact-based. For example, one feminist champion of the Goddess, Merlin Stone, maintained that “archaeological, mythological and historical evidence . . . has proved that Her religion has existed and flourished in the Near East and Middle East for thousands of years.” But this historical fact has been rejected and suppressed by scholars because of their “sexual and religious biases.” Gimbutas herself made similar claims, evoking her “lifelong study” and the “preponderance of evidence” for the Kurgan invasion.
Yet few archaeologists and paleo-historians accept this history. In the preface of one textbook actually sympathetic to the Goddess theory, the authors acknowledge the “underlying tension between describing (the data, the interpretation, the past) and transforming these through a feminist lens.” The empirical evidence simply doesn’t exist to make the thesis persuasive.
This brings us to Coyne and Krylov’s warning about the “wholesale and unhealthy incursion of ideology into science,” and activists’ calls to “decolonize scientific fields, to reduce the influence of what’s called ‘Western science’ and adopt indigenous ‘ways of knowing . . . . But these ‘ways of knowing’ aren’t coequal to modern science, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.”
As a result scientific research is degraded both to justify politicization and deflect scrutiny from shoddy scholarship and missing evidence. The Goddess researchers also relied on softening the rationalist rigor of real research by justifying non-scientific subjective qualities like “intuition” that, as Gimbutas wrote, complements “lots (sic) of evidence” by making “you feel that you are right in what you are saying.”
No doubt Trofim Lysenko, American social Darwinists, and Nazi theorists of racial inferiority “felt” they were right too. But to protect against such atrocities of scientism, the rest of us need empirical evidence that can stand up to the scrutiny of peers and critics to avoid confirmation bias or politicization.
As historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin said of “intuitive historiography,” “In the end it is only scrupulous examination of the evidence of the past and the systematic self-critical piecing together of whatever can be empirically established, that can confirm one hypothesis and weaken or rule out others . . . Without reliable empirical evidence, the most richly imaginative efforts to recover the past must remain guesswork and breed fictions and romance.”
There are numerous other dangers to such corruption of science, including the damage to K-12 education from bad ideas that are incubated in colleges and universities, and then trickle down into those schools’ curricula, given that public school most teachers are credentialed by higher educational institutions.
But the worst effect of peddling corrupted science and fake history is that it does nothing for those whom its adherents claim to help, and deflects attention from their problems. Rene Denfeld in her 1995 said of the Goddess fad,
“Feminism today has taken a distressing step away from the path to equality onto a detour down the yellow brick road. Feminist leaders are now telling women to perform the modern equivalent of the Sioux Indian Ghost Dance, to spend our energies frantically calling up a mythical golden age in an effort to create a dreamlike future––because such rituals are better suited to our superior nature than fighting directly with men for our rights.”
So too with Afrocentrism and “systemic racism” that benefit not black people in need, but the cognitive elites who monetize these notions for personal gain. Letting destructive ideas like “equity” rather than merit determine who gets to study science will have similar malign effect both on our fellow citizens and the scientific disciplines compromised by politics and ideology.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-merit-comes-to-science/
