“Peak Woke”

Mount Sinai embraces ideologically charged DEI programs in medicine

Last year, administrators at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine published an article describing the school’s long-standing “cultural change initiative.” Appearing in the journal Academic Medicine, the article is unequivocal in its charge. “We have to go out there and seek the truth,” it declared, “part of which is accepting that, if we are White, we are a big part of the problem. We are part of the reason that structural racism imprisons and oppresses people of color every day, everywhere they go, and no matter what they do.”

Teenagers used to crave fun and freedom. Today’s lot are more uptight than their parents.

In pre-industrial societies, you went straight from being a child to being an adult the minute you hit adolescence. Then you laboured on the land and you fought in wars. No one raised an eyebrow when Shakespeare had young teens Romeo and Juliet get married; in Italy, as in England, the age at which a couple could undertake marriage – without parental consent – was 14 for boys and 12 for girls. The idea of a teenager didn’t exist because those in their teens were all too exhausted having children, being parents, fighting wars and labouring on the land to even contemplate jiving, jitterbugging and the like.

The Salvation Army, having faced a massive backlash because of November’s “Let’s Talk About Racism” guide, doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. It’s now announced that, in January, it will be offering a two-day racial justice forum in Illinois. This turn to the left does not bode well for an organization that has already seen a significant drop in charitable donations since it decided to embrace leftist politics.

Idaho’s state motto is Esto Perpetua, or, in English, “It shall be perpetual.” That may well characterize the state’s population situation in the Pandemic Year of Our Lord, 2021.

Idaho realized the highest percentage increase in population in 2021 in America: 2.9%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Oxford University’s race equality task force has reportedly published recommendations that could see academics judged and hired based on what’s been described by one professor as a “woke score.”

The proposals are aimed at raising the number of hires from ethnic minority backgrounds, according to The Telegraph, which reviewed the task force’s consultation document. The equality panel reportedly noted that it was “important to embed EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion]” into “all recruitment.”

Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab will unveil his proposal to revise UK human rights legislation on Tuesday in a bid to challenge “wokery and political correctness” and prevent “spurious” claims being made.

The announcement of the reforms, which have already faced opposition ahead of their formal introduction, will coincide with the publication of an independent review into the Human Rights Act by the Ministry of Justice.

Ahead of Raab’s formal rollout of the overhaul, the Ministry of Justice warned that, unchanged, current human-rights legislation would allow free speech to be crippled “by wokery or political correctness.”

Woke ideology is losing support even among its own constituency.

Years ago at a block party in my old neighborhood, my next-door neighbor, a Mexican-American named Lawrence, introduced himself to a new resident, a white self-proclaimed activist lawyer. “No, no!” she scolded him. “Lorenzo!”

The chutzpah of a white woman telling a Mexican-American man how to say his own name still epitomizes for me the white elite Left’s obtuseness about their own patronizing arrogance, particularly when it comes to the ethnic “other” they supposedly champion. And it also reveals the way identity politics uses language to encode its reduction of complex, unique individuals into crude political caricatures that they label “diversity.”

An Idaho church has replaced a stained glass window of Robert E Lee, George Washington and Abe Lincoln with the country’s first black Methodist bishop wearing an LGBTQ scarf.

The late bishop Leontine Kelly, who passed away at age 92 in 2012, had lived in Richmond, Virginia with her family where monuments of former Confederate leaders, such as Lee, had lined Monument Avenue.

The statue of Lee, a former Civil War general and slave owner, was later removed by the city on September 8.

It threatens to destroy kids’ love of reading.

When I was a kid, the stories had normal plots. You know, an idiot wolf, a girl one fry short of a Happy Meal, a very heroic hero, and a really villainous villain. A couple of days ago I was taking a look at the books the school librarian is currently recommending to some 7- to 11-year-olds, and, if I’m being completely honest, I am pretty sure that the kids would would be better served intellectually if they spent the whole damn day on a Playstation instead of reading that huge mountain of crap.

Why do we Canadians accept mediocrity as the standard for health care and higher education, two bedrocks for a successful democracy? Both are jurisdictionally provincial, but they should be matters of national concern.