RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/our-incoherent-and-dangerous-diversity-talk-bruce-thornton/

Ever since Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell midwifed “diversity” in the 1979 Bakke decision, this dubious notion has become ever more duplicitous and dangerous. By enshrining a superficial reduction of real-world diversity into the law, Bakke has given illiberal ideologies a tool for suppressing true diversity of minds and character to further their tyrannical power­­––which we’ve witnessed for decades, and is now culminating in today’s “cancel culture” and censorship by online oligarchs.

George Orwell’s dystopian future of Newspeak and “memory holes” is dangerously closer to becoming our tyrannical reality.

Like all tyrannies, today’s censorship and silencing of dissenting voices began with words being distorted to take on spurious meanings that serve factional political ideologies and interests. In 1978, Powell needed something to justify discrimination on the basis of race, proscribed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in order to salvage the affirmative action programs that had relied on illegal quotas to mitigate ethnic and racial disparities in hiring, contracting, and university admissions.

But the “diversity” that followed was the most superficial sort––physical appearance, the “yellow, red, and black and white” of the old Sunday School hymn “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” As such it echoed the same specious arguments made for legal segregation, which was justified by the “scientific racism” that was becoming popular among cognitive elites in the late 19th century. It too was legitimized by a Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which legalized unconstitutional segregation’s fig-leaf of “separate but equal.”

Over the following years, it became obvious there was no evidence to support the alleged benefits that could make “diversity” a  “state interest” compelling enough to justify the obvious discrimination practiced by programs based on racial, ethnic, sex, or sexual preference identities. The same weakness vitiates the later, equally vague, truly Orwellian concepts such as “inclusion” or “tolerance.” These empty verbal vessels have been filled with a political ideology that seeks exclusion and intolerance of those whose politics are different from leftist progressivism’s.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/04/dems-covid-19-bill-is-a-grab-bag-of-leftist-goodies-not-stimulus/

After a group of 10 Senate Republicans duly trudged to the White House on Monday to show their “bipartisanship” on yet another COVID-19 stimulus bill, President Joe Biden did the predictable: He looked at their outreached hand of political comity and spat on it. Just as well, since the only thing the Democrats’ plan will “stimulate” will be more debt.

Biden and his party were never really interested in bipartisanship at all, despite their claims to the contrary. The whole point of this choreographed Kabuki political theater was to humiliate the Republicans, who foolishly took Biden and the Democrats at their word.

Republicans had suggested a more-or-less stripped-down bill of “just” $600 billion, compared to the Democratic wish-list of $1.9 trillion, which includes such non-COVID-19-related items as a $15-an-hour national minimum wage, a $350 billion bailout for poorly run states and cities, $170 billion for K-12 schools and colleges, $25 billion for “rental assistance,” and so on. Democrats also want checks of $1,400 for most households.

Republicans seek checks of $1,000, but would exclude families with more than $50,000 in income from the handouts. Their spending on all other aid is roughly two-thirds what the Democrats seek.

In rejecting compromise, Biden gave Congress a green light to totally ignore Republican input by passing a stimulus package through reconciliation, not the normal budget process. That will require a simple majority of 51 senators, not a supermajority of 60, to pass.