RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://reason.com/2021/12/20/against-faucism/

Last week, the CEOs of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines told Congress that they do not think mask requirements make much sense on airplanes, where the air filtration systems are superior to what is typically found in an intensive care unit.

“I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” said Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

Unwilling to let anyone undermine the case for keeping a government mandate in place, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci threw cold water on the idea.

“You have to be wearing a mask on a plane,” he said bluntly on television Sunday.

When ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Fauci specifically if he thought we would ever reach the point where we did not need to wear masks on planes, he responded: “I don’t think so. I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people—you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/abigail-shrier-on-freedom-in-an-age

A few weeks ago, my friend Abigail Shrier—who you surely remember from this essay or this investigation—was invited to give a speech at Princeton. Abigail is the author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” a bestselling book that, for obvious reasons, is also a lightning rod.

This being a college campus in 2021, you can imagine what happened next. The event was moved off campus. It was limited to 35 people. And the police were called in because of threats.

But despite the limited audience, Shrier’s message that night was loud and clear: don’t buckle in the face of the mobs. Don’t become a sock puppet to your institution or employer or social circle. Tell the truth. Speak your mind. Reclaim your freedom.

It’s a speech that deserves to be heard by as many people—especially young people—as possible. So today, we share it with all of you in the hopes that you’ll pass it along.

And if you’d rather listen to Abigail read it, just click here:

…….

The question I get most often—the thing that most interviewers want to know, even when they’re pretending to care about more high-minded things—is:  What’s it like to be so hated? I can only assume that’s what some of you rubberneckers want to know as well: What’s it like to be on a GLAAD black list? What’s it like to have top ACLU lawyers come out in favor of banning your book? What’s it like to have prestigious institutions disavow you as an alum? What’s it like to lose the favor of the fancy people who once claimed you as their own?

So, perhaps I’ll begin by telling you a little bit about myself mainly because I’m not so different from many of you.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-courts-covid-vaccine-test-sixth-circuit-osha-mandate-11640034808?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Justice Antonin Scalia famously wrote that Congress doesn’t hide elephants in mouseholes. But that’s essentially what a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals majority said Congress did late Friday when they lifted a stay on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccinate mandate.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last month stayed OSHA’s “emergency temporary standard” after finding the agency exceeded its legal authority by requiring that employees of private employers with 100 or more workers be vaccinated or tested weekly. The Biden Administration appealed to the Sixth Circuit, where numerous other lawsuits were consolidated.

Judges Julia Smith Gibbons and Jane Branstetter Stranch rescued the mandate by deferring to the Administration. They say Congress gave OSHA the power to issue emergency orders to protect workers from “grave dangers.” The Labor Secretary merely must find “that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents” that are toxic or physically harmful and that an “emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.”

Covid meets the dictionary definition of an “agent,” the majority says, ergo OSHA can issue its mandate. The majority also says new variants support OSHA’s determination that Covid still poses a grave danger, and it is not “appropriate to second-guess that agency determination considering the substantial evidence, including many peer-reviewed scientific studies, on which it relied.”

But the question the judges are asked to decide isn’t whether Covid is a grave danger, as Judge Joan Larsen explains in her potent dissent. The question is whether OSHA acted within the law as written by Congress. It certainly didn’t as we read the law.

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

The Biden Pentagon is obsessed with “extremism.” The moment Lloyd Austin was confirmed as Biden’s Defense Secretary, he put the entire military on a 60-day stand down to purge “extremism” in the ranks. Apparently, that stand down was ineffective because Austin is back again, this time with new rules that are again meant to counter “extremism” by preventing troops from engaging in “extremist” activities. The wise and/or paranoid among us believe that those new rules are an effort to clear the ranks of conservatives, especially Trump supporters (and, I bet, DeSantis supporters).

Ostensibly, the newly issued rules for “handling protest, extremist, and criminal gang activities in the Armed Forces,” state some obvious things that troops aren’t allowed to do, such as political violence, supporting terrorism, etc. These general descriptions of bad things allow the Pentagon enormous leeway in penalizing troops who have political views that are inconsistent with the Biden administration’s goals. We already know that, for help figuring out what extremists are, the Pentagon relies on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hard-left organization that defines anything that’s not leftist as terrorist or extremist.

We also know that the obsession that requires a whole new set of rules is inconsistent with the current data about actual “extremism” in the ranks. Although the U.S. military has around 1.3 million active-duty personal, the AP article breaking the news about the rule changes concedes that only about 0.008% of the military is official “extremist”:

According to the Pentagon, fewer than 100 military members are known to have been involved in substantiated cases of extremist activity in the past year. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/three_retired_generals_loudly_demand_a_military_coup_in_2024.html

Democrats claim that democracy is under attack in America and Democrats must act decisively to protect it. They’ve been trying to end the filibuster, nationalize voting, and pack the Supreme Court. The most ominous “fix,” which hinges on the myth of a “January 6 Insurrection,” sees retired generals argue that the military must purge the ranks of Trump supporters and prepare for a military coup to block a future contested election. This is unconstitutional, illegal, and spells the end of American democracy.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that leftists are loudly worrying about democracy’s end while ignoring all they’ve done to end democracy, such as bringing in millions of illegal aliens, many of whom are being given the vote; destroying centuries-old governing traditions such as the filibuster; packing the court; ending the Electoral College; and more.

If Democrats can kill the Senate filibuster (and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the only thing stopping them, not the craven Senator Mitch McConnell), they have the unfettered ability to enshrine vote fraud and pack the Supreme Court. The latter move spells the final—and deeply unconstitutional—progressive rewrite of our Constitution, and ends our constitutional republic.

The wild card in all of this, though, is what would the military do if, in fact, the progressives were able to achieve these goals (or even if they weren’t). Three retired officers have signaled that they want to purge the military of Trump supporters, and then plan a takeover of the military and related federal agencies that coordinate with the military to effect a coup in 2024. Considering the current state of the Pentagon, this may be more than a progressive fantasy.

Thirty years ago, when I was a U.S. Army Infantry Officer, our military was unquestionably a politically neutral, colorblind institution. It was the single most well-integrated institution in our nation and, indeed, was the primary engine integrating our nation.  But progressives have done everything they can to turn the military into a dysfunctional machine warped by racial, sexual, and gender identity divisions. This began with Obama, who injected the toxic myth of white supremacy and the tenets of critical race theory.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/27/cultural-appropriation-as-civilizational-education/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

The West draws on the best from everywhere

The scientific director of Cana­da’s Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health resigned in early No­vember after she was revealed to have falsely claimed to be a Native American. Carrie Bourassa, who represented herself as a member of the Métis nation, turned out to be of Russian, Polish, and Czech extraction. Bourassa, of course, is one of many ethno-preneurs who in recent years have played this kind of costume drama.

Rachel Dolezal is among the most famous: the white woman who, pretending to be black, rose to become president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash. But such cases are now too common to be thought of as aberrations. Ward Churchill built his career as a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder by pretending to be Cherokee. Fake Cherokee ancestry also served Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) as she advanced her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Jessica Krug, a professor of African-American history at George Washington University, passed herself off as black and was well known for her black “rage,” until she confessed that she was white and that her whole career was rooted in a “toxic soil of lies.”

These are instances in which individuals achieved some degree of prominence by carrying a false claim of ancestry all the way to a wholly fictitious biography, including a fake cultural identity. Eliza­beth Warren earned widespread mockery for the supposed family recipes she contributed to a cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow.” There are plenty of others who could be added to the list, just as there were once plenty of blacks who passed as white.

These days the cultural dynamics as well as the spoils of affirmative action favor whites passing as Native American or black — so much so that, according to a recent report, more than a third of white college applicants lie about their race by claiming to belong to a racial minority.