RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-murder-of-the-humanities/

For nearly 50 years the “humanities,” those courses in higher education that focus on the liberal arts, have been in crisis. This important front in the culture wars recently saw a brief skirmish touched off by a New Yorker article about the last days of the English major. But such analyses are in fact obituaries. The “woke” purveyors of “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism have finished their march through the institutions and now occupy our universities. Liberal education, the passing on of the “best that is known and thought,” survives only in a few scattered outposts.

Most of the assaults have come from the political and cultural Left and its more recent guise in the “woke” tribunes who have rebranded the old multicultural, identity victim-politics founded on the Leninist principle, “who whom”–– who is the oppressor, who is the oppressed. We all know the answer: Western civilization and all its works, including its fine arts and “great books,” which are mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxiste village explainers put it, of the hegemonic ideologies, values, “truths,” “facts,” and “narratives,” all the “hidden persuaders” who exploit the “false consciousness” of the masses.

Onto this dubious and question-begging explanation for the success of capitalism and liberal democracies, Cultural Marxism grafted “identity politics,” the reduction of people’s complex, undetermined humanity, to the superficial characteristics of color and “race,” and to “culture,” one that, particularly in the case of Americans, is fabricated from fake history or crude stereotypes. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes,

“Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extreme, and in the name of the multiplicity of specific causes destroy any possibility of a natural or cultural community among peoples.”

It follows, then, that the cultural artifacts of one ethnicity are incompatible with those of another. Standards of excellence are inherently racist and oppressive, for they invidiously exclude those of the marginalized “other,” whose history of racist, sexist, and xenophobic oppression and exclusion is thus erased.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/house_oversight_

Documentary proof of an American president getting paid off by our greatest strategic rival, if not enemy, is no small matter.

James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, said some pretty important things yesterday, appearing on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News Channel.  Despite being stonewalled by Janet Yellen over release of Suspicious Activity Reports from banks about Hunter Biden’s transactions, he has gotten evidence about Biden family receipt of money from the CCP.

What encourages me about his revelation is that there now are key forces within the Democrat establishment (which includes the legacy media) that see Joe Biden as a problem to be removed.  His worsening dementia is becoming impossible to hide, and his (really Dr. Jill’s?) determination to run for re-election seems likely to doom not only the presidential prospects of the party, but its congressional prospects as well.

A wipeout, especially if either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis were to occupy the Oval Office with congressional majorities, could lead to doom for the party if it results in exposure of its mendacity.  Both men play for keeps with their opponents.

With this in mind, consider what he told Maria (text and videos via Vivek Saxena of Bizpac Review):

“We’ve had a very good two weeks. We are finally having people cooperate with us. I think we all know the Biden administration is stone-walling. Janet Yellen is stonewalling, not turning over the bank violations,” he replied.

“But fortunately, since we’ve last spoken, we actually have bank records in hand. We have individuals who are working with our community,” he added.

https://www.city-journal.org/silicon-valley-bank-who-is-to-blame

Last year, when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried lost control of the massive cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme he had allegedly created, he ran home to mom and dad. A federal judge granted him bail on the multiple criminal charges he faces after his professor parents promised to keep an eye on their mischievous boy in their Palo Alto house. Now, all of move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley is running home to mom and dad because the Valley actually broke something that it needed. The only thing keeping hundreds of start-ups, as well as some more established tech firms, afloat right now is the fact that the federal government has bailed out all large depositors in the West Coast tech industry’s favored financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). This state of affairs seems ironic, but it’s not. The trillions in easy money the federal government has pumped into the economy since the 2008 financial crisis in turn created the undisciplined tech sector.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last Friday isn’t particularly interesting. A financial institution created 40 years ago to serve the emerging California tech world, SVB failed for the same reason that failed banks typically fail: it borrowed short-term, taking in money from depositors, and lent long-term. This strategy works—all banks do it—but SVB took it too far, too fast, with zero room for error. The bank’s deposits had tripled in just four years, the Financial Times reported, to nearly $200 billion. The bank took advantage of its status as being just under the threshold for heightened federal regulation to take enormous risk. It invested its short-term deposits—that is, money that customers could withdraw at any time from their checking and savings accounts—in long-term Treasury bonds, at a time when doing so was dangerous. The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates, meaning that the value of older Treasury bonds issued at lower interest rates—the bonds that SVB held—was falling.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/16/theres-no-liar-like-a-biden/

How do we know when Joe Biden is lying? When he says he gives us his word as a Biden. But that’s not the only time he spins a whopper. He says something untrue quite regularly, the most recent instance a tall tale about his “epiphany” regarding gay marriage.

When asked about his “evolution on marriage equality” during an interview on Monday night’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, Biden radically revised his personal history so that he would appear to have been woke for more than a half century. Our president (how did such a thing ever happen?) said he “hadn’t thought much about” same-sex marriage until his “senior in high school.” But one day as his father was dropping him off, he saw “two well-dressed men in suits” kiss each other.

“I mean they give each other a kiss. … And I’ll never forget, I turned, looked at my dad, he said ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other. It’s simple.’ No, I’m not joking. ‘It’s simple. They love each other.’  … It doesn’t matter whether it’s, whether it’s same-sex, or heterosexual couples should be able to be married. What is the problem?”

Here, thanks to PJ Media’s Matt Margolis, is the truth behind another pathological lie from the “Big Guy”:

So Biden claimed he had his epiphany on same-sex marriage as a teenager, yet, in 1973, during his first year in the U.S. Senate, Joe Biden opposed homosexuals working in the federal government, insisting they were a security risk. ‘My gut reaction is that they [homosexuals] are security risks,’ he said, ‘but I must admit I haven’t given this much thought … I’ll be darned!’ He would later support Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy concerning gays in the military, in 1993, and voted in favor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. In fact, Biden defended his vote on DOMA years later and argued that the issue of same-sex marriage should be left to the states. … As vice president, he even opposed civil unions for same-sex couples.