RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-our-federal-overseers-do-science/

Emails between Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci show a coordinated campaign against the Great Barrington Declaration.

Phil Magness, that irrepressible foe of statism, managed to obtain emails between White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins in which they hatch an attack on the Great Barrington Declaration. (The GBD was authored by three well-known epidemiologists, arguing that the best approach to COVID was not locking down, but targeted protection for the truly vulnerable.)

Dissent from the federal government’s chosen strategy was quite unwelcome. “There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises,” Collins wrote in reference to the GBD. Real scientists would investigate the premises first, then decide if the declaration should be subject to a “takedown,” but no such thing ever happened. The authors were disparaged, their motives impugned, their conclusions ridiculed, but one looks in vain for anything like a scientific counter-argument.

It’s enough to make you suspect that the real objective of Fauci and friends was expansion of government authority rather than protection against disease.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/how-biden-blew-it/

It is tough to find a modern presidency that has collapsed as swiftly as this one.

I t didn’t have to be this way.

If he had wanted to, President Biden could have fulfilled the promises that he made during his campaign and set himself and his party up for a successful 2022. He could have ignored the hollow passions of Twitter and cable TV, lowered the temperatures that so mar our quotidian politics, and delivered the quiet, limited, competent leadership that he promised during his inconspicuous run for the office. Recognizing that his party enjoyed only the barest of congressional majorities, he could have scaled back his lofty ambitions and ensured that his own focus and the focus of the public at large were as tightly aligned as possible. He could have narrowed his initial COVID bill, eschewing the entreaties to go big and limiting the scope of its relief to the desperate alone. He could have made the bipartisan infrastructure bill a centerpiece, rather than an afterthought, of his first year. He could have grasped that, because federal power is so limited, his role in fighting the pandemic would be exclusively oratorical. He could have understood that people care deeply about illegal immigration and gotten serious about limiting it, even as he struck a kinder tone. Having realized that inflation was clearly not set to be “transitory,” he could have directed the sum of his efforts toward alleviating it. And, while he was doing all that, he could have paid attention to the details that his job throws up in abundance — particularly in the foreign-policy realm — and thereby avoided the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan that drove a stake through his presidency within six months of his taking his oath. A little more humility, a greater willingness to say “no,” and a more acute understanding of why he won in the first instance would all have gone a long way.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/16/12-times-joe-biden-completely-made-up-stories-lied-or-said-something-crazy/

President Joe Biden has a long list of slip-ups in his political history, and his first year in the White House was no exception. In addition to bumbling through national addresses and mixing up the titles of world leaders, Biden infamously misremembered his past, lied, and even made up several stories to score points with his audience. Here are just a few of such incidents.

1. Joe Biden’s Made-Up Amtrak Story

At a 50th-anniversary event for Amtrak in Philadelphia, Biden said that when he was vice president, a train conductor congratulated him for traveling 1.5 million miles on Amtrak. A Fox News report out on May 5, however, pokes holes in the president’s account.

“When I became vice president, one of the Capitol Hill newspapers estimated that I had taken more than 7,000 round trips on Amtrak over my career,” Biden said. “I think that’s an exaggeration. I’m going to rely on those two conductors. … One of them was a guy named Angelo Negri.”

Biden continued, telling the audience Negri estimated Biden had traveled 1.5 million miles on Amtrak trains around his fourth or fifth year as vice president, which would have been in 2013 or 2014.

“My mom was sick, and I used to try to come home almost every weekend as vice president to see her,” Biden said. “I got on the train and Angelo Negri came up and he goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ and he grabbed my cheek like he always did. … He said, ‘Joey, what’s the big deal? One-point-three million miles on Air Force Two? Do you know how many miles you traveled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No, Angie, I don’t know.’ He gave me the calculation and he said ‘You traveled 1.5 million miles on Amtrak.;”

As Fox News pointed out, however, an obituary for Negri says the conductor retired in 1993, decades before Biden’s supposed story took place, while he was still a senator from Delaware. Biden’s mother died in 2010.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/14/forcing-people-into-covid-vaccines-ignores-important-scientific-information/

The attacks on free speech and science are unrelenting. Academic publisher Elsevier’s suppression of an article documenting the myocarditis risk of the COVID-19 vaccines, with no excuse or pretext offered, is incredible enough. Viewed alongside Twitter’s censorship of the American Heart Association, YouTube’s suppression of a panel discussion of vaccine mandates on Capitol Hill, and the Orwellian call by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins for critics of the government’s COVID-19 policies to be “brought to justice,” the trend is positively chilling.

Now more than ever, we need substantive debate about decisions that affect the health of hundreds of millions of people, including views counter to official positions. Instead, we have National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s absurd claim “I represent science” as proof of how one-dimensional our COVID-19 policymaking has become.

These are just a few examples of the wave of censorship that has accompanied COVID-19, uniting government bureaucracies with obedient news media, academia, scientific publishing, and powerful Big Tech companies. Above all, this concerted campaign suppresses all disagreement about topics including potential early treatments, the natural immunity of recovered individuals, and the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Differing viewpoints on these topics are swiftly labeled “disinformation,” but in fact represent principled dissent based on a large and growing body of scientific evidence.

Universal Vaccination Based on False Premise

https://johnkassnews.com/glenn-loury-chicago-born-on-woke-policy-driving-violent-crime-and-crushing-black-america/

By John Kass

The rise of violent crime in urban America, nurtured by the policies of liberal defund-the-police Democratic mayors and the woke prosecutors protected by woke newsrooms, is now completely out of control.

And the other day when a CTA bus driver was mercilessly beaten by a mob on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago—just part of a larger spree of weekend violence–those Chicago politicians whose policies helped fuel the chaos were silent. Paul Vallas, a possible mayoral candidate, posted the horrific video.

I was angry and retweeted, calling out Chicago politicians who didn’t respond.

But Professor Glenn Loury responded. He was born here. If you don’t know about him, you should.

Loury is a well-known professor of economics at Brown University, writer, thought leader, a champion for academic freedom. He makes speeches, writes essays and books, and runs a YouTube podcast called “The Glenn Show,” often with John McWhorter of Columbia University.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-unseen-side-of-cancel-culture

In the wake of the controversy surrounding his latest Netflix special The Closer, Dave Chappelle received an Emmy nomination for his 2020 special 8:46. Many have gleefully declared that the nod proves that cancel culture does not exist. “Only one grammy nom[ination] each for Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, and Louis CK!! Cancel culture strikes again!!” snarked Buzzfeed reporter David Mack.

But such reactions show that this phenomenon is widely misunderstood. I don’t like the term “cancel culture” because it confuses as much as it clarifies, and that’s partly why its most pernicious side is so easy to miss. Dustups involving big stars attract lots of attention—but we shouldn’t judge cancel culture simply by what happens to a celebrity in the crosshairs. Instead, the greatest impact often falls on those far removed from the original scene of the outrage. Cancel culture’s impact is best measured not by grand explosions of controversy, but by what remains unseen and unsaid. Here are some examples.

In 2015 I directed a feature documentary, Can We Take a Joke?, which explores the clash between comedy and outrage culture (“cancel culture” had yet to emerge as a widely-used term). Among the figures featured is Karith Foster, a comedian-turned-diversity trainer who brings humor and a “common humanity” approach (which emphasizes what all people have in common) to the fraught world of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The film introduced Foster’s ideas to a wider audience. But a new development may stymie her ascent: After getting booked to speak at a well-known California college, she was disinvited. A supportive administrator warned Foster that she had been placed on a watchlist for essentially eschewing what is sometimes called the “common enemy” approach favored by DEI trainers (in which people are defined as “oppressor” or “oppressed” based on race, sex, and other characteristics).

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_sovietstyle_conditions_in_which_january_6_arrestees_molder.html

Every totalitarian regime has foul prisons in which they confine people who dared to oppose the regime. Sadly, in the Age of Biden, it turns out that America is no different. George Parry has written about the conditions at the D.C. jail in which those arrested for the January 6 riots are confined, and what he writes should horrify every person who believes in the Constitution and Due Process of Law.

To fully appreciate what’s happening in D.C., here’s a quick reminder about the rights Americans have before, during, and after being arrested:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.