SelwynDuke.com

Steve Martin on Carrie Fisher: Can a Man Still Notice a Woman’s Beauty?

By Selwyn Duke

Most of us wouldn’t criticize a man mourning a friend, but most of us aren’t the politically correct thought police. Never shy about crashing a party — or a funeral — they reared their heads again when comedian Steve Martin paid tribute to his friend Carrie Fisher, who passed away Tuesday at the age of 60.

Martin’s trespass was to send a tweet stating, “When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.” The reaction was swift.

What sexism!

What misogyny!

What a pig!

What…what….

What nonsense, I say.

Read the rest here. 

Would There Ever Be a “Problem of Blackness” Course?

By Selwyn Duke

“The white race is the cancer of human history,” insisted writer Susan Sontag in 1967. Since then, anti-white race-hatred has gained enough currency to breed “white-privilege” theory, a college professor expressing a desire for “white genocide,” and “Problem of Whiteness” courses in academia — the latest example being one disgorged by the University of Wisconsin.

We might not have heard much about the course if it hadn’t been slammed by State Assemblyman Dave Murphy, who complained that it presumes "white people are racist" and that taxpayers should be "expected to pay for this garbage."

Read the rest here. 

Anti-Trump Discrimination: Good. Christians Against Homosexual “Weddings”? Bigotry!

By Selwyn Duke

If you’re a Christian businessman who doesn’t want to service a faux wedding, you may be destroyed by your government. But if you’re a restaurateur who doesn’t want to serve Trump voters, well, hey, you’re just exercising your rights.

This message comes through loud and clear after a Hawaii café recently posted a sign stating, “If you voted for Trump you cannot eat here! No Nazis.”

Read the rest here. 

Facebook’s Snopes Fact-checkers: A Prostitute, a Dominatrix, an Accused Embezzler

By Selwyn Duke

CLAIM: “Facebook 'fact checker' who will arbitrate on 'fake news' is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes — and its staff includes an escort-porn star and 'Vice Vixen dome.'”

Although the above is the form used to introduce topics at “fact-checking” website Snopes.com, don’t hold your breath waiting for this particular claim to appear there anytime soon. This isn’t because the quoted sentence, a Daily Mail headline, is true or untrue. It’s because it’s all too revealing about Snopes’ CEO — in a “the emperor has no clothes” kind of way.

Read the rest here. 

Antitrust should be used to break up partisan tech giants like Facebook, Google

By Selwyn Duke

How much face time will your news story get on Facebook? How many eyes will ogle it on Google? Too often, this is apparently determined not by whether the story is “fake” news or newsworthy, but by whether it’s politically correct. And it’s time to break up the Internet’s left-wing, information-conduit oligopoly. 

If “knowledge is power” and “The pen is mightier than the sword,” entities controlling what pens you see are powerful indeed. As to this, consider that Facebook and Google “account for 75% of all the referrals major news and entertainment sites now receive,” according to a Politico report in July. 

Read the rest here. 

George Washington’s Rules for the Radically Right

By Selwyn Duke

If George Washington gives up power in the wake of American independence, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” Thus remarked our first president’s adversary, King George III, after being told that Washington would likely follow his victory by retiring to his Mount Vernon home. Yet the king’s incredulity would be met with a striking reality: Washington would relinquish power twice. Once “at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon,” wrote the Cato Institute in its 2006 piece “The Man Who Would Not Be King,” “and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington.”

The reason my essay on “killing our heroes” was entitled “Where Have You Gone, George Washington?” (The New American, April 4, 2016) is that our first president is the closest thing to a real-life storybook hero we may find in American history. Though the Cherry Tree tale concerning a six-year-old Washington telling his angry father “I can not tell a lie: I cut the tree” is itself a fib, conjured up by Washington biographer Mason Locke Weems, there is a reason a woman, quoted by historian Karal Ann Marling, stated, “If the tale isn’t true, it should be.” For the  myth perfectly encapsulates the man.

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Infantile Nation: How Breeding Overgrown Children Begets the Nanny State

By Selwyn Duke

A United States naval midshipman, David Farragut, commanded a captured British vessel during the War of 1812 — at age 12. Now major universities provide “healing spaces” with Legos, coloring books, Play-Doh, and puppies for students who “can’t handle” Donald Trump’s election victory.

In 1798, Giocante Casabianca, who was 10 to 13, would not abandon his post without his commander’s word, and perished on his ship’s fiery deck during the Battle of the Nile. Today, undergraduates demand protection from “microaggressions,” which can include statements such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.”

Calvin Graham became the United States’ youngest decorated war hero, receiving the Bronze Star and Purple Heart at 13, serving heroically aboard the USS South Dakota during WWII. (He’d lied about his age to military recruiters.) Now college students demand “trigger warnings” when a professor might ­present something traumatizing, such as The Great Gatsby, whose “trespass” is that it portrays suicide, domestic abuse, and graphic violence.

Why, we might say today’s little snowflakes need to “man up,” but watch out! That term is verboten on some campuses because, supposedly, it’s “offensive” and distressing. But what’s really distressing is that many “adults” today aren’t half the boys our ancestors were.

Read the rest here. 

Merry Christmas!

I wish you all a very merry & blessed Christmas. May the reason for the season infuse your minds, hearts and souls. 

Selwyn Duke

Christmas a Reminder of Why Satan Should be Booted from Public Sphere

By Selwyn Duke

The increasing presence of Satanic displays during Christmas, permitted under the notion that all “religious observances” deserve equal space in the public sphere, is evidence of our country’s growing need for a separation of insanity and state.

This phenomenon is evident in Florida this month, where a pentagram next to a Nativity scene and a menorah in Boca Raton reads, “May the children hail Satan.” A pole for “Festivus,” a fictional holiday created by the television program “Seinfeld,” has made headlines in nearby Deerfield.

Read the rest here. 

Conservatives Like “Merry Christmas”; Liberals Like “Happy Holidays”

By Selwyn Duke

Ah, liberals. They really are a breed apart (mostly from sanity). And a timely example of how we’re a divided nation concerns the conservative/liberal dispute over how to greet people at Christmastime.