Marxism can be best understood as the unproductive of society demanding a place at the top of a new hierarchy. They prey upon the productive members of society and redistribute the success of others to themselves through violent revolution. It is an ideology of envy and failure.
Ibram X. Kendi, the controversial author of How to Be an Antiracist, has been revealed as not only a hustler of horrid ideas but also a poor businessman. Kendi was appointed the head and founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research in 2020 following the aptly named “summer of love,” which saw riots in most major cities over calls for “racial justice.”
Now, Boston University is committing mass layoffs of employees, as the Center has lost the $43 million that was donated to it at its opening. There have also been several complaints about management practices. The Center is laying off much of its staff as it switches to a new model that it hopes will keep it alive. It is another profound case of fiat academia being inefficient and unproductive, as well as peddling half-baked half-dead ideas.
Kendi is not an original thinker so much as a wannabe-philosopher who repaints bunk ideas to drum up societal conflict. Kendi’s general philosophical thesis could be summed up simply as “Everyone is racist, and that extends to all of society. History can be understood as a white supremacist culture getting better at hiding its underlying racism.”
Kendi and other critical race theorists theorize that, throughout history, so-called advancements in the welfare of racial minorities are merely a white supremacist culture’s success at better hiding its racism. One can summarize it best with a quote from the thriller The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
The devil, for Kendi, would be “white supremacy” in culture. Every so-called advancement—from the outlawing of slavery to the end of Jim Crow laws—is simply this devil getting better at hiding itself.
This is not an original idea on Kendi’s part in any respect. One can trace these ideas back to the philosophical ancestor to critical race theory: Karl Marx. When one analyzes critical race theory, it becomes abundantly clear that it is a portrayal of Marxist conflict and power theory but with the dimensions of race applied rather than class. Rather than the bourgeoise class oppressing the proletariat, it is the white class oppressing the nonwhite classes of society.
A fundamental aspect of Marxist theory is that of the substructure, or base, and the superstructures of society. Marx posited that the fundamental relations in society are economic ones, between the working class and the exploitive capitalist class. The base creates the superstructure, which includes art, politics, religion, and other social relations that supposedly exist to reinforce the base. This is where Marx’s famed line “Religion is the opiate of the masses” comes from. Religion, as an aspect of the superstructure, exists to draw eyes away from the social relations that matter in the minds of Marxists.
Why do this? Who is the intended victim? Why Wuhan to begin with?
Makes the original bat sandwich story look pretty lame. No one in Washington, except possibly Rand Paul, seems concerned government bungling turned the population into lab rats and crippled world economy…and it is starting again.
Furthermore, this gain-of-function research project is partially funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has denied its knowledge of these experiments.
According to the preprint paper, the Omicron spike-bearing virus is able to effectively and robustly escape vaccine-induced humoral immunity just like the Omicron variant. In addition, unlike the naturally occurring Omicron variant, the Wuhan-Omi-S chimeric virus efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells.
The creation of a new recombinant COVID-19 virus at Boston University, viewed as a “Frankenstein virus” by many, has raised a public uproar. This is not merely a risky gain-of-function experiment on “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs)”, it is a creation of an enhanced pandemic pathogen. NO “potential” here.
What is the rationale for this statement? What is the chimeric virus that we talk about here?
A team of researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories posted a paper on October 14, 2022, on BioRxiv, a preprint server for biology, revealing that they had created a lab-made COVID-19 chimeric virus with reverse genetics technology.
Specifically, they’ve swapped the S gene of the spike protein in the original SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan strain with the corresponding S gene from the Omicron variant. So, the lab-made Chimeric virus (Wuhan-Omi-S chimeric virus) has all the genes from the Wuhan strain, which is much more pathogenic than the Omicron strain, except the S gene, which is from the highly transmissible yet relatively mildly pathogenic Omicron strain.
According to the preprint paper, the Omicron spike-bearing virus is able to effectively and robustly escape vaccine-induced humoral immunity just like the Omicron variant. In addition, unlike the naturally occurring Omicron variant, the Wuhan-Omi-S chimeric virus efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells.
Furthermore, it has killed at least 80 percent of infected K18-hACE2 mice (a type of transgenic mice expressing human ACE2 receptors), whereas the mortality rate of the Omicron variant was zero while the Wuhan strain caused 100 percent death in two weeks in control experiments in the same transgenic mice. This 80 percent mortality in the mice model by the Wuhan-Omi-S chimeric virus was observed in a two-week period. The paper did not provide any further observations on whether the surviving 20 percent of mice eventually died faster than the control mice group infected with Omicron variants.
The defenders for this risky study stated that the chimeric virus product showed reduced pathogenicity (100 versus 80 percent mortality) when compared to Wuhan strains, so it is not a gain-of-function study. However, this is an unjustifiably optimistic statement. The study did not provide any detailed or comprehensive pathology exam of different organs in the transgenic mice infected with the Wuhan-Omi-S virus. For example, do we know that this chimeric virus has the same neuropathogenesis as the Omicron or Wuhan viruses? This study did not provide any data on that.
In addition, although this experiment was presented as a swap of the S gene on the backbone of the Wuhan strain, it could also be viewed as swapping other viral genes on the backbone of the Omicron strain, considering the overall high genome homology among different variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Rather than study individual gene motifs that might have influenced the Omicron variant’s pathogenicity, researchers at Boston University instead swapped all the pathogenicity-related viral gene motifs/sites from the Wuhan strain into the Omicron strain.
Then, this study is a bonafide proven gain-of-function study: it makes the Omicron virus obtain more virulent factors, enhancing its infectivity and pathogenicity in in vitro and in vivo experiments. And this publication did not reveal any study to test the transmissibility of the chimeric lab-made virus in animal models. Is the Wuhan-Omi-S virus more or less transmissible in animal models? Can any of the researchers in this study 100 percent guarantee that this new chimeric virus is not more transmissible in different animal models, e.g. golden hamsters, ferrets, and primates?
This study presented the main conclusion: “while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by 53 mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.” However, it is a known fact that other genes outside S are involved in viral-host interactions at different steps of the viral life cycle and many genes outside S are relevant to viral pathogenicity in different tissues, organs, and animal hosts. So, by combining the pathogenicity-related components of the ancestral Wuhan strain and Omicron’s spike protein, the researchers would surely expect to create a virus that’s both highly deadly and highly transmissible. Even though it might be lucky that the final chimeric virus strains are less deadly and/or less transmissible than the Wuhan and/or Omicron strains, there is no guarantee that the degree of the risks or threats cannot be precisely controlled or assessed. The researchers at Boston University are intentionally playing with fire with clear knowledge of the risks involved.
So, in essence, Boston University researchers created a lab-made Omicron variant with enhanced pathogenicity. As Omicron is a clear pandemic pathogen, taking over Delta and other COVID-19 virus variants, this study has created an enhanced pandemic pathogen. Not an “enhanced pandemic potential pathogen.”
It is true that we don’t know whether this lab-made chimeric virus can out-compete natural omicron variants when co-circulating in human society. And defenders of this gain-of-function study also argued that similar recombinant variants existed early this year, the Deltacron, which contains a Delta variant backbone with an Omicron S gene. They argued that the Deltacron did not generate a pandemic wave and was quickly replaced with Omicron variants, and therefore, this experiment at Boston University did not generate additional risk. So, are these defenders arguing that humankind was simply too lucky and we need to create additional risks ourselves?
This study is absolutely playing with fire and should be totally forbidden. It is unbelievable that Boston University allowed this research to be carried out. It is an ultimate failure of the bioethics committee that evaluates biomedical research projects at Boston University.
Furthermore, this gain-of-function research project is partially funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has denied its knowledge of these experiments. As the related grant documents and the communication between Boston University and NIAID are not currently released to the public, it is surely unverifiable whether NIAID was aware of these experiments during the whole process. Nevertheless, it suggests that the oversight mechanism to review grants related to “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs)”, set up by NIAID after the 2014 pause of all gain-of-function studies, did not work at all in this incidence.
She has since walked back her embarrassing flub by claiming she meant Milton Friedman but this explanation does not wipe out her error. She would never make the equivalent when referencing a communist. That is you are never going to hear AOC call Karl Marx, Groucho Max.
It costs a pretty penny to earn a diploma in stupid.
The annual list price to attend Boston University — including tuition, fees, room, and board — currently rounds out to $70,000. To acquire a degree in economics from this tony institution of higher learning, an undergrad must complete courses in calculus, microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis, empirical economics, statistics, and assorted electives.
Four years, 52 credits and nearly $300,000 later, the school promises that BU economics majors will depart “with a firm understanding of core microeconomic and macroeconomic theory” and the “empirical skills that are essential to applying economic reasoning in our increasingly data-driven world.”
How, then, to explain the abject economic illiteracy of meteoric media darling and democratic socialist “political rock star” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? The 28-year-old BU alumna graduated with an economics and international relations degree in 2011. She calls herself a “nerd” and bragged about her academic credentials, tweeting earlier this month:
“How many other House Democrats have a degree in Economics like I do? Trying to find who out here is going to be in the Gini Coefficient Appreciation Squad.”
The upstart New York congressional candidate has been hailed by pundits, newspapers, and pols as “sharp,” “smart” and “extraordinary.” BU’s associate provost and dean of students Kenneth Elmore gushed that Ocasio-Cortez is “brilliant — she is boldly curious and always present. She makes me think and could always see multiple sides of any issue. . . . I can’t wait to see what happens when her time truly comes.”
But when the time came to put her BU economics education to work, Ocasio-Cortez flunked. On PBS last week, she asserted that “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.” Moreover, the erudite B.A. holder in economics posited, “unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.” Read the rest of this entry »
An acquaintance of mine recently asked me if I took media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seriously? Without hesitation, I answered in the affirmative. Let me explain why.
In full disclosure, I admit I have a soft spot for AOC. She’s an adorable little girl with sparkling eyes and boundless energy. Sure, she’s undeniably a moron, but a pleasant moron. I can’t help it, I just like pleasant people, even if they’re a little short on intellect.
What’s most remarkable about AOC is that she does something Radical Leftists almost never do: smile! And not just any old smile. Hers is the kind of smile that lights up a room and makes everyone around her feel good.
More full disclosure: AOC reminds me of a Puerto Rican girl in New York City who I dated in my mid-twenties. She, too, sported an infectious smile, and her enthusiasm was always in high gear.
What made her different from AOC, however, was that not only was she intelligent, she also possessed an understanding of how the real world works that belied her age. Of course, she had the advantage of not having her thought processes stunted by a four-year misinformation campaign at a prestigious eastern university.
Not so, however, with AOC. Sadly, she got lobotomized by Boston University’s finest anti-American, socialist professors. By the time she graduated, she was fully prepared to take on the evils of Western civilization and play a key role in the fundamental transformation of the United States of America.
MCViewPoint 
