RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/a_virginia_delegates_speech_shows_republicans_are_learning_courage.html

Barack Obama broke most Republican politicians. It wasn’t anything he did. It was his skin color. No matter what Obama did, and no matter the substantive objections conservatives had to his policies and actions, the Democrat response was always the same: Racist. Ordinary people began to treat that mindless insult with the disdain it deserved. Politicians, however, grew cowed. That seems to be changing, perhaps because Democrat policies are proving so disastrous that calling critics is inadequate. Be that as it may, politicians are refusing to be silenced. Nick Freitas, a Virginia GOP member of the Virginia House of Delegates exemplifies this trend.

On Wednesday, Freitas, a former Green Beret, stood before the House of Delegates and, using a friendly tone and remarkably polite language, announced that he was no longer going to tolerate being called a bigot simply because he espoused different policies from Democrats. He tweeted a video of his statement which has been viewed over 553,000 times, which is pretty good if you’re not a Kardashian:

Freitas opens by noting that he has never personally attacked a member of the opposing party for policy differences. It’s quite different, though, when you’re on the Democrat side of the aisle:

I’m keeping a running tally so far of this session. We’re not very far into and almost every day, almost every day, someone on the other side of the aisle either gets up and either subtly, or comes right out and suggests, that if you don’t agree with them on policy, then you’re not a Christian, you’re a sexist, you’re a bigot, you’re a racist.

Indeed, right before Freitas stood up, Don Scott, a Democrat, gave a perfect example of that kind of personal attack over policy beliefs:

Freitas wrapped up his statement by making his position very clear:

Will I be nice this session? I’d certainly like to be. But I’m not about to sit here and listen to that [personal insults], Mr. Speaker, and then go home to my constituents and have them ask me, “Why didn’t you stand up and defend us?” So let’s have a robust policy discussion but, if you’re going to question the faith or the intentions of anybody that happens to disagree with you on policy, then you don’t get to lecture us on compassion, tolerance, or an open debate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/californias-diversity-psychosis-matthew-vadum/

A new California law known as AB 979 now forces the more than 600 publicly held corporations headquartered in the state to appoint board members based solely on their race and sexual orientation, whether real or imagined.

This law takes woke thinking to a whole new level by – for lack of a better way of putting it – perverting the already-perverse idea of identity politics. It does this by taking identity politics, which is already bad, and untethers it from actual group identities.

If wokeness is the flu, then this new, uniquely Californian approach to hyper-balkanizing America is flesh-eating disease.

Another state law, SB 826, already required that corporations meet a quota of female board members or face financial penalties. Existing law requires that by the end of 2019, a corporation with its principal executive office in the state had to have at least one female on its board. By the end of 2021, a corporation with 5 directors had to have a minimum of 2 female directors, and one with 6 or more directors had to have a least 3 female directors.

But as of this past December 31, the new law, known as AB 979, has required corporations to uphold an additional quota for board members based on race and sexual orientation, real or imagined. By the end of 2021, a corporation headquartered in the state was required to have at least one director from “an underrepresented community.” By the end of 2022, such a corporation with 5 to 8 directors had to have at least 2 directors from underserved communities; a corporation with 9 or more directors had to have a minimum of 3 directors from those communities on its board.

The statute codifies make-believe and guarantees legal uncertainty by not requiring the “director from an underrepresented community” to actually belong to that community.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/george-soros-funded-da-rationalizes-crime-wave-bruce-thornton/

Like other cities run by Democrats, Los Angeles is going through an epidemic of violent crime. Its Soros-funded DA George Gascón has a lot of blood on his hands for increasing the mayhem. When he was sworn in, he said his office would not prosecute a host of misdemeanor crimes, or seek the death penalty for even the most heinous murders. No surprise that, as Broken Windows policing confirmed nearly two decades ago, tolerating “non-violent” crimes has increased violent ones.

“The data,” as City Journal’s Soledad Ursúa, reports on LA, “show staggering surges of homicides, gun violence, and sexual assaults, and one can see with one’s own eyes the open-air drug scenes, rampant homelessness, streets lined with human excrement and needles, prostitution, filth, and squalor. Last year saw 52 percent more homicides than in 2019; shooting incidents were up 59 percent over the same period, according to the LAPD.” Much of this violence has come at the hands of street-bums and addicts.

In response to this carnage, Ursúa continues, Gascón has fallen back on old sociological nostrums about crime that blame everybody and everything except the criminal: “In many ways we cannot prosecute our way out of social inequalities, income inequalities, the unhoused, the desperation that we have.”

When it comes to crime, progressives who fancy themselves “brights” who just “follow the science,” are in fact slaves of some defunct sociologist.

But even before sociology and criminology became full-fledged “scientific” disciplines, this idea that crime was a response to an unjust social order could be found in popular novels in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A common theme of these thrillers was the role injustice played in driving the protagonist to crime.  Later, the new “science” of sociology turned this literary motif into a “scientific” explanation for crime, one that, as we are witnessing today, worsens the problem by distorting their causes, and abandoning both common sense and the moral imperative in a free society to hold people responsible for their actions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/its-not-governments-job-to-root-out-misinformation/

After being asked by MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski about the alleged misinformation spread by the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and Facebook users, U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy responded with a homily about how “we” must “root out” misleading speech.

“We” don’t. Government officials have no role in dictating speech. In fact, they have a duty not to. Murthy’s comments wouldn’t be as grating if it weren’t so obvious that the Biden administration has been pressuring Big Tech companies, who oversee huge swaths of our daily digital interactions, to limit speech. Last summer, Jen Psaki causally informed the press that the White House was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Can you imagine the reaction from the press if it learned that the Trump White House had been keeping a list of speech crimes? White House communications director Kate Bedingfield also argued that social-media companies “should be held accountable” for ideas on their platforms. Joe Biden, who previously accused Facebook of “killing people,” this week made a “special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: Please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that is on your shows. It has to stop.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-pandemic-censorship

Earlier this week, in the latest in a series of scolding campaigns, a Britain-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a sneak peek at a research report on Substack to The Guardian and The Washington Post. Both outlets came out with their scare pieces this morning. From The Guardian:

A group of vaccine-skeptic writers are generating revenues of at least $2.5m (£1.85m) a year from publishing newsletters for tens of thousands of followers on the online publishing platform Substack, according to new research…

Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said companies like Substack were under “no obligation” to amplify vaccine skepticism and make money from it. “They could just say no…”

The Post, citing “some misinformation experts” — the pandemic version of “people familiar with the matter” — added:

These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific content that accommodates their viewpoints — potentially making the services less responsible for spreading harmful views, some misinformation experts say.