RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/08/americans-are-sick-of-placebo-government/

What people want from politicians is not to put on the same tired show they have been watching for years. They want them to get things done.

The extreme disconnect between the political class and the people they ostensibly serve is by now extremely clear. It was the primary factor behind Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency, as the left largely abandoned the working class in favor of woke ideologies and their special interests.

At a certain point, the lip service politicians pay to the working class’s needs and concerns was not enough, and they lost their votes. Naturally, it was at that point Democrats suddenly decided the working class was really racist all along.

That, it seems, is the defining characteristic of our politics today. Politicians do not actually legislate to resolve the things their constituents need them to address. Instead, they leave voters with placebos, a useless sugar pill designed to do nothing but give consumers the illusion that their problem has been addressed.

Democrats don’t have a monopoly on this dynamic, and neither do “establishment” Republicans. Everyone does it.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/mon-growing-evidence-capitol-attack-pre-planned-undercuts-trump-impeachment

Days before former President Trump’s impeachment trial begins, newly filed federal charges against anti-government activists offer fresh, compelling evidence that the accused perpetrators of the Capitol riots pre-planned their attack days and weeks in advance and in plain sight of an FBI that vowed to be vigilant to extremist threats.

A dozen FBI affidavits supporting charges against the more than 200 defendants show rioters engaged in advance planning on social media sites. The planning included training, casing sites, identifying commanders on scene, and requests for donations of cash, as well as combat and communication gear.

More than a half dozen of the suspects are now charged with conspiracy to commit violence for actions predating the Jan. 6 riots. The early actions identified in court documents date back to November, with planning and rhetoric accelerating after Christmas, court records show.

That growing body of evidence raises questions about whether the FBI and other security agencies acted proactively enough to thwart the violence. It also undercuts the House Democrats’ impeachment claim — supported by 10 Republicans — that Trump’s speech spontaneously incited the riots, legal experts told Just the News.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/08/big-brother-comes-to-america/

At first I couldn’t believe what I was reading. A writer for the New York Times was enthusiastically supporting a call made by ‘several experts’ around the Biden administration to create a Reality Czar. Apparently, a Reality Czar is needed to counter the campaign of disinformation being pushed by bitter conservatives.

The NYT commentator concedes that giving someone the authority to pronounce on what is and isn’t real ‘sounds a little dystopian’, but suggests it is warranted by the threat of ‘disinformation and domestic extremism’. The experts promoting the enthronement of a Reality Czar are unapologetic advocates of giving the government the power to decide what is true, what is real. They hope that the establishment of a reality task force ‘could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis’.

The NYT is not alone in demanding that the government take an active role in determining what is true. Recently, New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights published an alarmist report about the allegedly distorted perceptions held by millions of conservatives. Apparently, huge numbers of conservatives wrongly believe that their views are suppressed by digital platforms on partisan grounds. To prevent this view from gaining greater influence, the authors of the report call on the government to set up a ‘new Digital Regulatory Agency’. No doubt this agency would become another tip of a spear to be hurled at anyone who accuses the giant social-media companies of showing bias against the political right.

The principal aim of the Stern Center’s report is to restore trust in the moral authority of the mainstream media in the US. It fears that millions of Americans no longer trust the media as a reliable source of information because they have bought into the belief that it is biased. It argues that people’s distrust of the media and their ‘wrong’ belief that social media are biased against conservatives will escalate in coming years, especially as social-media companies increase their ‘fact-checking’ operations.

https://spectator.org/trump-operation-warp-speed-biden/

“I think the [Trump] administration deserves some credit getting this off the ground with Operation Warp Speed,” conceded then-President-elect Joe Biden in late December upon he and his wife Jill getting their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Wilmington, Delaware.

Biden’s notable concession to Trump didn’t get the attention from his media partisans that it should have. That’s no surprise. They revile Donald Trump, they made it their mission to run him out of office, and they shape their “journalism” accordingly.

As for Biden, the concession was gracious, but he should say more. A lot more.

In fact, it would be a great gesture of unity — the very unity that President Biden says he seeks, and a gesture of goodwill and decency that Trump advocates would remember appreciatively — if Biden paused to more deliberately thank and recognize Trump’s efforts. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s going to do that, and the terribly biased liberal media certainly will not be stepping up with any awards for the dreaded MAGA man.

That’s a shame. It’s yet more rancorous, toxic, bitter partisanship, by a media that claims to be objective. It’s not right. It fails to recognize a truly historic accomplishment by Trump and the biomedical community.

We are now full-throttle into the mass distribution of vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic. And let there be no doubt: the swiftness of the development and delivery of these vaccines is a remarkable achievement. I want to underscore the point by revisiting what I wrote about in several columns here in The American Spectator last spring, most notably placing President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed into historical context — looking particularly at the polio vaccine that was pioneered by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Considering that comparison really helps us to understand what a big deal Operation Warp Speed has been.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/when_american_lawyers_are_taught_to_hate_america.html

It is no longer a surprise why so many American students have come to despise their own country.  The latest example of deliberate misinformation comes from the New Jersey State Bar Foundation (NJSBF).  Claiming that “informed citizens are better citizens,” the NJSBF issued a May 20, 2020 article titled “Explaining the Roots of Institutional Racism.”

Institutional racism was baked into the U.S. Constitution, dating back to when the Founding Fathers were determining how to calculate the number of seats each state would have in the House of Representatives.  Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution states: ‘…shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons … three fifths of all other Persons.’ Those three-fifths persons were slaves.

In fact, the “words ‘slave’ [and] ‘slavery’ do not exist in the Constitution.  Thus, as escaped slave abolitionist, Frederick Douglass stated ‘[a]bolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered.’  Thus, Douglass steadfastly believed that the government created by the Constitution ‘was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.'”

In the “1776 Report” now scrubbed by the Biden administration but available here, one learns that Douglass “initially condemned the Constitution, but after studying its history came to insist that it was a ‘glorious liberty document.'”