QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Is your baby racist?

Kendi wrote Antiracist Baby because ‘you don’t want to assume children are “blank slates” — this leaves room for racist societal messages to shape their understanding of racism instead.’ I realize that Kendi must have spent the last few years in the library, but if he thinks that the messages transmitted to children in the current year are racist, then he is hopelessly mad. Tolerance, love, harmony, and acceptance are relentlessly beamed at the adults of tomorrow. They have been for decades. Antiracist Baby is merely a foothill in the ever-extending Hindu Kush of social justice books aimed at children. The sad persistence of racial conflict, racial grievances and social inequality more generally, suggests that they cannot be taught away by candy-colored didacticism.

The larger problem with Kendi, and with the movement he represents, is how plodding his intellectual scheme is. First he takes human society, the most complex mechanism in existence, and draws a line down the middle of every cog in it. Then he declares one side of the line Good (Antiracist), while the other is Bad (Racist). That’s about as crudely reductive as an idea can be. It’s like suggesting the Ninth Symphony can be adequately played with a couple of coconut shells.

Often, in conversation, or reading new novels, scanning tweets, or watching films, the enormous condescension we all sometimes have towards the past becomes apparent. Looking at some awful historical bloodbath, or well-chronicled catastrophe, we look back and say, ‘How could people be so stupid’, or, ‘How could they believe such idiotic things.’ Yet here we are with Kendi’s ideas, so celebrated, so stupid, and so eagerly believed.

So for the 21^st century left, kids are blank slates when it comes to gender, but when it comes to racism, Ibram X. Kendi believes “you don’t want to assume children are ‘blank slates.’” Gotcha — that race hustle is some hustle.

QED: The Wages of Woke: How Robin DiAngelo got rich peddling ‘white fragility.’

CHANGE? Black Pastors Demand Nike Drop the ‘Anti-Christian’ Marxist Black Lives Matter Movement.

THIS STORY HAS LEGS: Protesters Hang Blow Dryers on Tree Outside Nancy Pelosi’s Home: Angry salon clients want to get their hair and nails done.

TRUMP RECOVERY: 1.4 Million Jobs Added in August, Unemployment Rate Drops to 8.4%.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Death Comes to Portland (Redux), Plus the Last Word on Nancy’s Hair.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: When do antifa thugs recoil from violence?

Answer: When it is used against a stone-cold killer who happens to be one of their own.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

Joe Biden explores for gas.

Rich white feminist oppresses a black man, because justice.

The very last word on Nancy Pelosi’s hair, we promise.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

FIGHT FOR FIFTEEN: Storelift launches autonomous convenience stores using AI and computer vision.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE:

I BELIEVE THE TERM YOU’RE LOOKING FOR IS “ZAMPOLIT,” COMRADE: Black law students demand classroom diversity monitors to report ‘questionable conduct.’

ENTHUSIASM: Nearly 10 Miles Of Cars Line Up For Trump — And A Raucous Night In Small Town America. “The county paper predicted a crowd of 2,000-plus for President Donald Trump’s 7 p.m. hangar stop. There are more than twice that many vehicles in the parking lots and fields by 4.”

MOSTLY PEACEFUL ARREST: Suspect in fatal Portland protest shooting killed by feds during arrest attempt.

TALCOLM X, TAKE NOTE: ‘I Absolutely Cancel Myself’: George Washington University Professor Apologizes For Pretending To Be Black. “A George Washington University professor has apologized for pretending to be black, admitting Thursday in a Medium blog post that she is a white Jewish woman from Kansas.”

ACADEMICS AND PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS SEEM WEIRDLY EAGER TO DEMONSTRATE HOW NONESSENTIAL THEY ARE: University Of Iowa Condemns Faculty Sickout Protesting Campus Reopening Plan.

When university administrators figure out they can fire people for this, then claw back most of the money to the system while replacing them with adjuncts or low-paid entry-level hires, things are gonna be lit.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ‘The Atlantic’ Barfs Up 2020’s Worst Trump Hit Piece Yet. “The whole article is pathetic. Goldberg pretends to be legitimately curious about Trump’s patriotism but the whole thing reads like something a drunk BuzzFeed intern wrote after his daddy told him he was disappointed again.”

WARBIRDS IN OAHU SKIES: World War II era naval aircraft fly in formation over Oahu, celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the End of WWII Commemoration. Photo taken Sept. 1, 2020. The Pentagon caption doesn’t identfy the aircraft. Yes, they’ve had sloppy moments this year. Perhaps fretting over the ChiCom/Wuhan virus has distracted them. Or maybe they’ve been set up like Arch Duchess Nancy Pelosi von Blow Wash. Whatever. I’ll take a stab at aircraft identification. The two seaplanes appear to be PBY Catalinas of some type — aircraft assigned patrol bomber, long range surveillance and air-sea rescue missions. The Catalinas also had liaison and communications relay missions. The single engine combat plane looks like a TBF Avenger — a torpedo bomber that could handle other missions as well — tactical bomber, anti-submarine.

LEGALIZED LAWLESSNESS: Maine Dem Campaign Staffers Helped Bail Out Violent Criminals.

At least seven staffers for Maine Democratic Senate candidate Sara Gideon donated to a bail fund that releases looters and other violent criminals from jail.

Gideon’s staffers posted on social media about their donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a group that pays criminal bail for protesters and looters regardless of whether they were violent or which crimes they committed. The donations came after individuals involved with anti-police demonstrations began looting and burning businesses in Minneapolis.

The Minnesota Freedom Fund has said it does not consider individuals’ charges before bailing them out. “I will see [the charges] after I pay the bill because it is not the point,” Greg Lewin, the fund’s interim executive director, said of the group’s efforts. “The point is the system we are fighting.”

At least he’s honest, I suppose.

DEMOCRATS AND MEDIA — BUT I REPEAT MYSELF — HARDEST HIT: U.S. created 1.37 million jobs in August, vs 1.32 million expected; unemployment rate falls to 8.4%.

SO I TOOK A VERY BRIEF TRIP TO NASHVILLE to testify to the state legislature on pandemic policy. My talk mostly focused on the Tennessee Constitution, though there were short sojourns into many other topics.

You can see the video here. My part starts at about 25:00. I have to say, I didn’t expect the very kind remarks that Attorney General Slatery made after my talk.

UPDATE: Link was bad before, fixed now. Sorry! (Bumped).

CHANGE: Dead heat: Trump erases Biden’s 8-point lead in Pennsylvania as black voters abandon Democrat.

It’s almost as if lots of black voters don’t think BLM and Antifa stand for them.

PROF. JACOBSON: Democrats are telling us they will not accept a Donald Trump win. Are you listening? Ah, big deal, they said the same thing about Lincoln.

PUBLIC CORRUPTION CASES DOWN AFTER CITIZENS UNITED: That wasn’t supposed to happen. There was going to be a flood of corruption flowing from the hated 2010 Supreme Court decision. Institute for Free Speech looked at the data and guess what they found. Prosecutions were down in six of Obama’s eight years in the Oval Office.

HEH: These students figured out their tests were graded by AI — and the easy way to cheat.

On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He’d completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He’d received a 50 out of 100. That wasn’t on a practice test — it was his real grade.

“He was like, I’m gonna have to get a 100 on all the rest of this to make up for this,” said Simmons in a phone interview with The Verge. “He was totally dejected.”

At first, Simmons tried to console her son. “I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning,” said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he’d received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn’t have read his response in that time, Simmons knew — her son was being graded by an algorithm.

Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity’s AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students’ answers. And she decided to game it.

You can probably guess what happened next.