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WASHINGTON The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murray's appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters. Some of them denounced "eugenics," thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics controlled breeding to improve the heritable traits of human beings was a progressive cause.

In "The Bell Curve," Murray, a social scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, found worrisome evidence that American society was becoming "cognitively stratified," with an increasingly affluent cognitive elite and "a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution." They examined the consensus that, controlling for socioeconomic status and possible IQ test bias, cognitive ability is somewhat heritable, that the black/white differential had narrowed, and that millions of blacks have higher IQs than millions of whites. The authors were "resolutely agnostic" concerning the roles of genes and the social environment. They said that even if there developed unequivocal evidence that genetics are "part of the story," there would be "no reason to treat individuals differently" or to permit government regulation of procreation.

Middlebury's mob was probably as ignorant of this as of the following: Between 1875 and 1925, when eugenics had many advocates, not all advocates were progressives but advocates were disproportionately progressives because eugenics coincided with progressivism's premises and agenda.

Progressives rejected the Founders' natural rights doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said freedom is not the natural capacity of individuals whose rights pre-exist government. Rather, freedom is something achieved, at different rates and to different degrees, by different races. Racialism was then seeking scientific validation, and Darwinian science had given rise to "social Darwinism" belief in the ascendance of the fittest in the ranking of races. The progressive theologian Walter Rauschenbusch argued that with modern science "we can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part."

Progressivism's concept of freedom as something merely latent, and not equally latent, in human beings dictated rethinking the purpose and scope of government. Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard, in his 2016 book "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era," says progressives believed that scientific experts should be in society's saddle, determining the "human hierarchy" and appropriate social policies, including eugenics.

Economist Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American Economic Association and whose students at Johns Hopkins included Woodrow Wilson, said "God works through the state," which must be stern and not squeamish. Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin, epicenter of intellectual progressivism, said: "We know enough about eugenics so that if that knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation." Progress, said Ely, then at Wisconsin, depended on recognizing "that there are certain human beings who are absolutely unfit, and who should be prevented from a continuation of their kind." The mentally and physically disabled were deemed "defectives."

In 1902, when Wilson became Princeton's president, the final volume of his "A History of the American People" contrasted "the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe" with southern and eastern Europeans who had "neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence." In 1907, Indiana became the first of more than 30 states to enact forcible sterilization laws. In 1911, now-Gov. Wilson signed New Jersey's, which applied to "the hopelessly defective and criminal classes." In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes saying that in affirming the law requiring the sterilization of "imbeciles" he was "getting near to the first principle of real reform."

At the urging of Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, during World War I the Army did intelligence testing of conscripts so that the nation could inventory its human stock as it does livestock. The Army's findings influenced Congress' postwar immigration restrictions and national quotas. Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist, said the Army's data demonstrated "the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups."

Progressives derided the Founders as unscientific for deriving natural rights from what progressives considered the fiction of a fixed human nature. But they asserted that races had fixed and importantly different natures calling for different social policies. Progressives resolved this contradiction when, like most Americans, they eschewed racialism the belief that the races are tidily distinct, each created independent of all others, each with fixed traits and capacities. Middlebury's turbulent progressives should read Leonard's book. After they have read Murray's.

George Will writes for the Washington Post. His syndicated column appears Sundays and Thursdays.

The rest is here:
Progressives part with their past - Bismarck Tribune

Saber-rattling, or agenuine threat? Left-wing groups arewarning Democratic Senators that if they don't fight against President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, they may find themselves out of a job. It's unclear if these organizationshave the wherewithal or resources to follow through on that challenge, but Chuck Schumer's caucus is no doubt acutely aware that their base is demanding nothing short offull-blown "resistance" at every turn -- and some of the loudest elements of said base are making sure that these lawmakers never forget it (via Jazz Shaw):

A "do or die" issue, says the woman from the extremeabortion lobby. Fact check: Literally true. A quick digression on abortion, since the Left is obsessed with maintaining America's radical status quo on the issue: In case you missed it, Planned Parenthoodturned down an offer from the Trump administration to maintain its federal funding if the organization stopped performing abortions. That's no surprise.Despite all the misleading and downplayingspin, abortion is amajor component of Planned Parenthood's business model -- especially when they could augment their revenues through theghoulish sale of harvested fetal organs. It should be underscored that in the event that Roe v. Wade were overturned, abortion would not become illegal nationwide; instead, states would set their ownabortion-related laws, with some abortions remaining legal in all 50 states. Many jurisdictions would, however, implement additional common-sense restrictions on the practice, a good number of which arebroadly popular with the American people. Anyway, back to Gorsuch. The Hill piece notes that conservatives are "winning the message war," as liberals have failed to convince the public that Trump's pick is an extremist:

Yet some within the professional Left are ratcheting up their threats, led by unserious bomb-throwers like Michael Moore (who recentlytweeted about the wonders of Socialism in, um,collapsing Venezuela):

These rumblings must be music to the National Republican Senatorial Committees' ears. The Democrats' left-wing base is not representative of the overall American electorate, especially in the 30 states carried by Donald Trump last fall. Senate Democrats from ten of those states (this list, plus Michigan)are up for re-election next year; five of whom represent states Trump won by 19 percentage points or more. If incumbent Democrats are forced to spend energy and money fending off insurgencies from their ideological left, they'll be in an even weaker position in a general election setting. Numerous Democrats have already indicated that a Gorsuch blockade isn't going to materialize, with somecandidly admitting that he'll be confirmed. I'll leave you with some positive reviews from Democrat-aligned Maine Sen. Angus King, who's sounding an awful lot like a "yes" vote:

Parting thought: If thenot-entirely-unsubstantiated buzz is true, and there's another vacancy on the Court opening up in the relatively near future, the calls for an all-out Democratic filibuster will grow much louder. If Schumer and company choose togo that route, Senate Republicans must be prepared to follow through on the Reid Rule and break the filibuster with 51 votes, or re-implement the'two speech' precedent. The stakes would be too high not to hold Democrats to their own standards.

Tillerson Recuses Himself from Keystone Pipeline Decision

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Angry Progressives: Damn Right We'll Primary Democrats Who Don't Oppose Neil Gorsuch - Townhall

After the epic failure of the Democratic Party losing to a reality TV star in November theres been (the predictable) talk among the party aboutreflection.

Apparently corporate media executives skipped those meetings, as they continue to force feed the same stale, Democratic political operatives whose collective failures and faulty thinking created President Trump.

Over the last 24 hours, Ive seen disgraced former DNC Chair Donna Brazile, Hillary Clintons communications chairman Jennifer Palmieri, and Clintons longtime aide and adult fan girl Neera Tandenall on MSNBC to fear monger on the great Russian boogeyman and give their pearls of wisdom on how to resist President Trump.

Over on CNN, the network continues to book the same establishment Democrat pundits who graced the screens before the election. You know, the ones who were wrong about Clintons strength, Trumps unpalatability, and how angry and economically hurting a substantial portion of America is (easy to miscalculate when they all live in coastal bubbles).

One of the figures who led the pack of Democratic Party dummies was John Podesta, who WikiLeaks exposed as a ruthless, tone-deaf, and stone-cold political operative whose elitism and embrace of 1990s political thinking helped push an inauthentic, unpopular candidate like Clinton, while helping to smear a verypopular Bernie Sanders. (For his great success, he landed a cushy columnist gig with The Washington Post.)

Dont get me wrong: Im not saying being politically inept and questionably corrupt means you dont have the right to go out and earn a living. This Murderers Row of centrist, slayers for the status quo, have every right in the world to appear on cable news and in prestigious newspaper columns. More power to them.

The question is: Why does the corporate media, who sat stunned after Donald Trump became President Trump, reflexively go back to the same well that got everything so wrong rather than, gee, I dunno, book some progressive pundits who warned against the catastrophe lying ahead if the establishment pushed Clinton as the nominee.

Not to be a homer for my boss, but as Cenk Uygur wisely forecasted, Iceberg right ahead! as early as last summer.

But you dont see Cenk on cable outlets or in The Washington Post much. OrSanders national surrogate Jonathan Tasini, who loudly warned against a Clinton nomination and underestimating Trump; or Glenn Greenwald, whose website The Intercept did some of the best reporting on Clintons conflicts and corruption during the campaign (cable news will have him on only to fear monger and try and pound him into submission over Russia).

The list of other strong progressives whose political instincts were much sharper and correct than the usual suspects continuing to stain the airwaves is long: Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, David Sirota of International Business Times, Lee Fang of The Intercept, Michael Tracey of The Young Turks, Shaun King of The New York Daily News/The Young Turks, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, and many more. (Ironically, these figures probably view it as a badge of honor not to take part in the corporate-media-industrial-complex echo chamber, but thats not the point.)

What corporate media is showing in its continual embracing of failed politicos who excel in regurgitating progressive-sounding platitudes but, in reality, love the big-money, Wall St. Democratic Party theyve helped build, is that they themselves want the status quo.

Cable news, print, and digital would rather follow the day-to-day web of President Trumps tweet storms and the resistance to him than focus on the exploding progressive movement swirling around this country (and winning many local legislative seats).

And why wouldnt they? These failed pundits are their friends: As WikiLeaks showed, Chuck Todd held Jennifer Palmieris birthday party at his home during the campaign; bigger picture, the revolving door between anchors and columnists and pundits and operatives has been wide open for years.

As I exposed, Donna Brazile was literally feeding questions to the Clinton campaign while working as a CNN contributor so naturally, MSNBC had to have her after her DNC Chair position ended!

For the Americans who still consume traditional news on TV or in newspapers, the result of being continually exposed to these failed politicos who keep passing on their failed ideas and thinking is the status quo remaining.

After all, why would voters choose something different if they have no idea there is a progressive movement exploding all around them.

Jordan Chariton is a Politics Reporter for The Young Turks, covering the presidential campaign trail, where hes interviewing voters on both sides. Hes also a columnist for Mediaite and heres his latest column. Follow him @JordanChariton and watch videos at YouTube.com/tytpolitics.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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Why Media Still Loves Failed Corporate Democrats Over Progressives - Mediaite

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There is a lot to dislike about the new GOP House ObamaCare replacement bill. But it contains at least one excellent plank: its reforms to Medicaid, America's government-run insurance scheme for the poor.

Unsurprisingly, progressives have eagerly criticized the GOP's Medicaid reform as an attack on the poor. This is nonsense.

Medicaid is a disaster. It is, by a mile, the worst health insurance scheme of any kind in the developed world. A number of studies have suggested that people on Medicaid have no better, and often worse, health outcomes than those without insurance.

To take just one example, a landmark University of Virginia study suggested that people on Medicaid are 13 percent more likely to die from surgery than those without insurance. This study looked at 893,658 operations from around the U.S. from 2003 to 2007, and controlled for age, gender, income, geographic region, operation, and 30 medical conditions. Similarly, the so-called Oregon study (since it was done in Oregon) showed that Medicaid recipients are either no better off, or worse off, in terms of health outcomes, than those without insurance.

The problem with Medicaid isn't money. The United States government spends nearly half a trillion dollars a year on Medicaid. Maybe in a perfect world we'd be spending more, but surely if the net effect of all that money is that the health outcomes are exactly the same (or worse!) than spending zero dollars, the problem is not in the money. The problem is the way the program functions, which has barely been tweaked since 1965.

Conservatives have lots of ideas about how to fix this, and have been pushing them for literally decades. Now, maybe those ideas leave a lot to be desired. But when you consider the fact that Medicaid is on balance worse than doing nothing at all, if you cared as deeply about the lives and flourishing of poor people as progressives say they do, maybe you'd be willing to try anything.

The problem is that progressives have, relentlessly and consistently, demagogued this issue. Any conservative attempt at Medicaid reform is immediately portrayed as an attempt at mass murder. During the passage of ObamaCare, which achieves most of its coverage increases by expanding Medicaid, the Obama White House rejected all Republican attempts to "trade" Medicaid expansion (a progressive goal) for Medicaid reform (a conservative goal), inevitably justifying itself by claiming that any reform would hurt the poor, pretending not to know that they are already being hurt.

During the 2012 presidential race, the Obama campaign ludicrously described then-vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's proposal to "block grant" Medicaid as a 30 percent cut; given that the whole concept of a block grant is to spend the same amount of money, but administer it locally, this is like claiming that 10 equals 7.

As it happens, RyanCare 2.0's reform of Medicaid isn't exactly a block grant, but a per-capita allotment. (This idea was first floated by Bill Clinton in 1995. After all these years of being told conservatives couldn't criticize ObamaCare because it was "originally a Republican idea," I imagine now no progressives will criticize RyanCare's Medicaid reforms.) But the basic idea is the same: Give the states money to run Medicaid, and let them decide how to do it locally. This is a good idea.

Why? Because the problem is not how much money is spent on the program, it's how it's designed, so it makes sense to change the design. As is, Medicaid is a hybrid state-federal structure, which should be clarified. And more generally, when it comes to an incredibly complex field like health care, it's generally better to try several localized approaches at once rather than just one centrally mandated one.

Again, the current program is not even close to good. It is an abysmal failure. Many reforms don't achieve all they set out to do, but it's hard to imagine a reform that could do worse than the status quo. And, again, the political attitude of the progressive camp on this score is not to propose alternatives, but simply to decry any alternative as tantamount to a war on the poor.

There are many issues on which reasonable people can honestly disagree about what's best. This is not one of them. There are too many issues, Medicaid being a big one, public schools being another, where progressives are just so obviously, evidently, and objectively failing to adequately help the worst-off in society (while at the same time being infuriatingly self-righteous about it), simply because of their ideology, which dictates that public dollars spent, not results on the ground, is the criterion for successful public policy.

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The bald-faced hypocrisy of progressives' refusal to reform Medicaid - The Week Magazine

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Well heres an interesting twist to the whole Russians hacked the election thing the Democrats led by the suggestive powers of the former President, Barack Obama have been trying to press into the public collective mind: The Russians are now accused of demanding hush money from progressive groups.

Those wascally wabbits. Theyre everywhere it seems, nowadays.

Heres how Bloomberg puts it: Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms.

Theyve demanded their blackmail bucks by Bitcoin, apparently. To the tune of $30,000 to $150,000, depending on the organization.

And what exactly does that amount of Bitcoin buy?

Good question. Heres the answer: It covers up funding information tied to the big-time anti-President Trump movement thats been riding high on liberal waves for months.

This is huge. Democrats and leftists have been trying to sell the idea for months that all these Hate Trump protests in the streets, on college campuses and so forth, have been completely of, by and for the people, and not staffed with paid agitators and facilitators.

Of course, the smart money has been on George Soros, and his leftist cohorts but Dems have gone out of their way to deny the connections.

Now, we may have clarity.

According to this Bloomberg report, a dozen or so left-leaning groups have reportedly faced extortion in just the few months since the presidential election. Most are unnamed. But one is not.

The Center for American Progress you know, that nonprofit that claims to be nonpartisan but is led primarily by pit-bull progressive defenders of Mr. Obama and former President Bill Clinton, like Tom Dashle and John Podesta is one of the groups allegedly asked to cough up hush money for the Russians. A CAP spokesperson said this to Bloomberg: CAP has no evidence we have been hacked, no knowledge of it and no reason to believe it to be true.

But what else would CAP say?

Painting a picture of impromptu, organic protests against the president has been a cornerstone of the lefts messaging against Mr. Trump from the get-go. On top of that, its not like CAP is this bastion of honest wheelings and dealings. The FBI has already pointed fingers at the group as the mastermind of the hacking into the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

Lucy, I think youve got some splainin to do.

Mr. Trump has been calling out the protest movement as bunk for months, saying in one tweet in late February: The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!

Insert the word paid in front of liberal activists, and were probably getting a bit closer to the truth.

Read more:
Russians hit progressives for anti-Trump hush money: Report - Washington Times