Why The Biden White House Declared War On Classical Beauty In Architecture
On Monday, President Joe Biden broke with a century of precedent by demanding the resignations of four members of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts.
Classical architecture is not a partisan issue.
President Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, was an enthusiastic champion of the Greek Revivalism thankfully still visible in both the capital and his Monticello home. When he designed the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he took great care in the landscaping and architecture, knowing their likely effects on generations of young minds.
Fifty years later, President Abraham Lincoln insisted that construction of the Washington Monument and U.S. Capitol continue despite the bloody and costly war taking place sometimes just 50 miles from the seat of government. Public beauty in civic buildings, he believed, was crucial to the future of the Union.
Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt drew inspiration from the great Republican of the Civil War, championing the classical and moving ahead with Washington construction as he sought to prepare the country for the world war he saw descending on our fragile peace.
Democrat Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan played an interesting role in Washington’s architectural history, both helping to craft the 1962 General Guidelines that undid more than 50 years of ordered-classical government buildings, then later criticizing the modernism that took its place.
“Twentieth Century America,” he lamented in 1970, “has seen a steady, persistent decline in the visual and emotional power of its public buildings, and this has been accompanied by a not less persistent decline in the authority of its public order.”
The preference for the classical is not simply confined to politicians but is immensely popular with the public that lives among these buildings and sees them in either their daily business or on trips to their cities. A survey conducted by The Harris Poll and commissioned by the classicist National Civic Art Society found that, when presented with a picture of a modernist courthouse and a classical one, members of the public preferred the classical design by nearly 3:1, regardless of age, sex, or race.
But in academia and among elite art and architecture circles, the preferences of the American people and its leaders past and present are passe at best, and fascist at worst. On Monday, President Joe Biden broke with a century of precedent by demanding the resignations of four members of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, including Chas Fagan, Steven Spandle, Perry Guillot, and Commission Chairman Justin Shubow. His reason? He doesn’t like the classic aesthetic.
“The counsel’s office,” Bloomberg reports, “advised that President Joe Biden has the authority to remove the commissioners, whose staunch support for classical architecture does not align with his values.”
Fagan is a renowned sculptor and painter whose statue of former President Ronald Reagan stands in the Capitol Rotunda, whose statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks stands in the National Cathedral, and whose paintings include the Vatican’s official portrait of St. Mother Theresa and first lady Barbara Bush’s official portrait.
Shubow serves as the president of the National Civic Art Society, a non-profit organization that fights for classicism in public works, and is at the forefront of the battle to rebuild Manhattan’s destroyed Penn Station. Guillot’s works include the new White House Rose Garden and Children’s Garden, and Spandle’s work includes the White House’s beautiful new Tennis Pavilion.
The four men come from different backgrounds and disciplines, but all appear to have been targeted for removal to create a more “diverse” and less classically oriented commission, despite Guillot not considering himself a classicist and Shubow being the first Jewish chairman in the history of the commission.
Their replacements include urban planner and Howard University architecture professor Hazel Ruth Edwards, Andrew Mellon Foundation program officer Justin Garrett Moore, architect Billie Tsien, whose firm is responsible for the Obama Presidential Library design, and Peter D. Cook, whose designs include the Smithsonian’s sandcrawler-esque National Museum of African American History and a pavilion seemingly inspired by the Star Trek badge.
The purge, The Washington Post reports, followed a complaint from the deputy mayor of D.C., who told the Biden White House that because of the commission’s power to approve the city’s development, its members “could impede Washington’s progress toward racial and economic equity, climate change and affordable housing.”
All four replacement commissioners are modernists, none identify as white males, and three — Ruth Edwards, Garrett Moore and Tsien — are outspoken allies of the administration’s focus on race (and racism) in everything and above all else. “Biden,” the Post’s chosen search-engine headline reads, “removes four white men from Commission of Fine Arts.”
China Blasts Lab Leak Hypothesis as a “Conspiracy Theory”
State media demands investigation of U.S. bio-weapons facilities.
China has predictably blasted the COVID lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory,” with state media outlets demanding an investigation into U.S. bio-labs around the world.
The response came after the Biden administration was forced to task the U.S. intelligence community into investigating the issue having previously put a halt to a similar investigation started under Trump.
“Lately, some people have played the old trick of political hype on the origin tracing of [Covid-19] in the world,” said a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in DC. “Smear campaign and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of ‘lab leak’ is resurfacing,” he added.
The spokesman also said that focusing on the Wuhan Institute of Virology would make it “hard to find the origin of the virus” and would “seriously hamper international cooperation on the pandemic.”
The editor in chief of the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, responded to the issue by demanding an investigation into U.S. bio-weapons facilities such as Fort Detrick.
Atlanta City Councilman Who Voted To Defund Police Had Car Stolen By Kids In Broad Daylight
Antonio Brown, an Atlanta city councilman who voted to ‘defund the police’ last year, said he had his car stolen in the middle of the afternoon by a group of school-aged children.
The incident took place as Brown, who just joined the mayoral race in Atlanta less than two weeks ago, was meeting with community leaders at a ribbon-cutting ceremony around noontime.
“You don’t immediately think, ‘Oh, these kids are going to steal my car,’” Brown said, noting that one of the children “acted as though he had a gun.”
According to police the car, a Mercedes as described by WSB-TV 2, was stolen by “several males.”
Brown claims, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), that “he held onto the car and was dragged about a block down the road before letting go.”
Defund The Police In Atlanta
Brown is listed by Ballotpedia as non-partisan, but the AJC writes that he “pushes progressive policies.”
He joined six other city council members who voted in support of an ordinance described by Fox News as “to withhold $73 million of the Atlanta Police Department’s budget” last year.
“We need all of Atlanta to call in to every committee and full council meeting to demand we amend the budget and … reallocate $73M of police funds in order to reimagine public safety,” he said in an Instagram post at the time.
“We must stop the business of the city from moving forward until our demands are met.
The ordinance to defund the police in Atlanta was narrowly defeated.
Academic exposes how right-wing institutions use Facebook & Twitter to emulate Nazi propaganda machinery… and sell war to the West
Fake news is facilitating the destructive power of Western imperialism, according to a new book, ‘What Is Iran?’ In an exclusive interview with RT, author Arshin Adib-Moghaddam explains how the process works in practice.
Academic Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor in global thought and comparative philosophies at SOAS University, London, is the author of over 60 papers and six books on contemporary culture and politics.
In his latest work ‘What is Iran?’ he sheds fresh light on the title’s ever-burning question, along with analysis of Tehran’s history, domestic politics, international relations, and more. Along the way, Arshin identifies what he dubs the “fake news machinery” that oils the wheels of Western imperialism, and sells wars of aggression and plunder to the public.
RT spoke with him to discuss the concept in detail.
RT: How do you define “fake news machinery”?
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: Fake news machinery is a powerful assemblage of right-wing institutions, their staff, social media accounts, their political representation and global following. Fake news is the staple of right-wing politics.
In our techno-society, technology acts as a great incubator and facilitator galvanizing the process of disinformation. Facebook, Twitter and soon Clubhouse are what the Volksempfanger radio was to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Some of the facts and the truths are drowned by an armada of well-connected activists whose aim is solely confrontational and aggressive – against peace, against diplomacy, against immigrants, homosexuals, Jews, intellectuals, Muslims and anyone else identified as the enemy.
As such, this system of irrationality churns out lies on a continuous basis. The ultimate aim is power, of course. But we are talking about a particularly vulgar and destructive kind of power which is inherently inhuman, violent, and abusive, physically and psychologically.
RT: How does this process work?
AA-M: Typically, a narrative is concocted in order to buttress a particular policy. It is then picked up by the various channels of the machinery.
This is how right-wing functionaries inscribe the narrative of war in international relations; via institutions, such as the so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies; language, such as “America First;” mindsets, for example, “Why do they hate us?” and policies, for instance the doctrine of “pre-emption.”
Once a specific, right-wing project has bedded in, its supposed chivalry is loudly trumpeted, bundled up in a morally righteous and infallible narrative – in essence the legitimation of suppressive power – and stitched into the political fabric of world politics. It is in this sense that right-wing policy reveals itself as war – war continued by other means. The perverse irony of such ideology is, it makes some of us think it serves the liberation of mankind.
RT: What are some of the most egregious examples of fake news about the Middle East, and how does news media misreport the region more generally?
AA-M: Extremist politics, and I would count Trumpism as a part of this category, works with simple binaries as it reflects the uneducated and primitive mindset behind the right-wing world-view. Good versus evil, white against black, civilization opposing barbarism, and so on. The grey zones are denied, there is no complexity in the world of these people.
The so-called ‘Middle East’ comes in very handy in this dichotomization as the ultimate “other,” the black region full of Muslims that is ultimately unworthy of proper attention. Now the self-defeating irony of this type of world-view is that it leads to bad decisions. In the case of the neo-conservatives who gathered around George W. Bush, for instance, the process of myth making led to the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which gave impetus to the demise of US power in West Asia and North Africa and beyond.
Johns Hopkins professor says ‘ignore the CDC’ — ‘natural immunity works’
A professor at the renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine advised Americans recently to “ignore” guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention due to the public health agency’s puzzling refusal to recognize natural immunity from previous infection.
What are the details?
Dr. Marty Makary, who also serves as a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, suggested during a Tuesday appearance on “The Vince Coglianese Show” that 150 million Americans, or “half the country,” likely already have natural immunity to COVID-19 due to having been infected with the virus and then recovering.
Yet despite that staggering figure, Makary lamented the fact that the CDC, in concert with Biden administration officials, have neglected to recognize the reality of the situation. Instead, previously infected individuals who decline being vaccinated are routinely “demonized” by health officials who insist that virtually all Americans must be vaccinated before normal life can resume.
But “herd immunity” has already been reached, argued Makary, citing up-to-date vaccination and infection data to suggest that 80% to 85% of Americans are currently protected from the virus.
“I never thought I’d say this, but please ignore the CDC guidance,” Makary stated, advising Americans to “live a normal life, unless you are unvaccinated and did not have the infection, in which case you need to be careful.”
