RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.persuasion.community/p/mcwhorter

John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss whether “wokeness” is a religion and how it affects black Americans.

John McWhorter is an author, a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors, a Columbia University linguist, and a columnist for The New York Times. His latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, argues that we must understand wokeness, quite literally, as a religion.

In this week’s conversation, John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss the nature of today’s social progressivism, whether it constitutes a religion, and how we can actually help to reduce racial disparities in the United States.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: What is the unifying principle of the body of thought that is, for lack of a better word, called “woke”?

John McWhorter: There’s a certain kind of person who feels that we should focus our intellectual, moral and artistic endeavors on battling power differentials, especially where white people are the ones in power. To the extent that you are not on board with that being the very center of things, you deserve to be hounded out of polite society, you should lose your job, you should be excoriated in public, you should be treated in an uncivil way in the same way as someone who was an advocate for say, pedophilia would be. These are people who are putting forth a very interesting but fragile proposition that battling power differentials should be the center of everything, rather than, say, one of ten things that should concern you.

The idea is that there is something called “whiteness”, for one, and that we’re talking about white power over people who aren’t. There’s also an idea that being a cis straight person is a kind of power that’s constantly misused. And you could argue that that’s definitely true. I think that in terms of our reckoning, though, since roughly May of 2020, an awful lot of it has been the whiteness issue. And the idea is that whites have always been in power and have abused it, and that our focus must be on decentering that power by any means necessary.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Ambrose Bierce, in his 1906 The Devil’s Dictionary, provided two definition of the transitive verb “Defame:” 1) “To lie about another.” 2) “To tell the truth about another.” People of myriad cultural backgrounds have long had difficulty communicating, as Rudyard Kipling expressed in the first two lines of his 1889 poem “The Ballad of the East and West:”“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgement Seat;”

Most politicians do not communicate honestly. They promise one thing while campaigning and promote another when governing. Speaking before the 2004 Democratic National Committee, Barack Obama embraced unity: “There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” But four years later when he became President, he chose discord over unity. In the words of Jason Riley, writing in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal: “…he started talking about racist policing and black voter suppression, and he embraced divisive racial provocateurs… All the colorblind talk went out the window.” Mr. Obama is not alone. Politicians on both sides have long campaigned on the promise of unity and then ruled with a “divide to conquer” strategy.

We are sorted by identity into “hot issue” buckets, like race, gender, immigration, climate and abortion. For example, if one does not agree with the preferred woke policy prescriptions of President Biden, one is a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a denier or a sexist. Case closed, no room or time for debate. Social media companies, instead of being impartial arbiters permitting the free exchange of ideas have closed Twitter accounts of conservative “deplorables” and declared opinions contrary to what is currently “woke” to be “harmful” or “hurtful.” Given their political leanings, this has meant that conservative speech is shut down. The same thing is true on college campuses where speeches by conservatives are cancelled.

https://mailchi.mp/dd688b95db60/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-58677?e=0c8ccf8e98

We can’t make America great again until we make America accountable again.

This week, in San Diego, at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) convention, our CEO, Adam Andrzejewski, challenged elected officials from across the country to embrace the Transparency Revolution.

The three-day conference was packed with hundreds of America’s state legislators, including new members and recently elected officials.

During a 20-minute presentation Andrzejewski laid out the blueprint to establish a new era in governance.

As outlined in the speech, here are three easy steps any public official can take to embrace the Transparency Revolution:  
Open The Books – Show citizens the money! Proactively post all financial line-by-line transactions online. Don’t be like California (we are suing the state as they refuse to open up their checkbook!).
Declare War On Waste – Identify. Cap. Cut. Dig deep! It’s a target rich environment.
Read The Bill – Do we have a representative republic if our representatives don’t even read the bills they are voting on?

WATCH ON YOUTUBE:
THE TRANSPARENCY REVOLUTION & OUR WAR ON WASTE

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/president-donald-j-biden/91791/

For someone who ran for office as the anti-Trump, President Biden has lately taken on something of an orangish hue. When the Covid variant known as Omicron popped up, Mr. Biden rushed through a travel ban for South Africa and seven other sub-equatorial states. Yet candidate Biden had called it a “disgrace” when, in February 2020, Mr. Trump imposed a similar “African ban.” Mr. Biden reckoned it was “designed to make it harder for black and brown people” to come here.

It seems to make sense to Mr. Biden now. Then again, too, when Mr. Biden took office he ended the Trump administration’s successful “Remain in Mexico” immigration program. He stoked the controversy by calling it inhumane. Since then, the border situation has become so dire that it is again emerging as a political issue. Now the administration, under court pressure, has agreed to revive Mr. Trump’s policy, with — in typical Biden fashion — “humanitarian improvements.”

Mr. Biden campaigned on returning America to the articles of appeasement with Iran. He harshly criticized the Trump administration for pulling out. In the White House, though, Mr. Biden somehow discovered that Iran is resistant to American diplomacy, and is determined to pursue its nuclear program regardless. Nor will the ayatollahs permit negotiations on ballistic missiles, drones, human rights and support for terrorism — all issues Mr. Trump pushed. Now the Vienna talks are collapsing.

On the hustings, Mr. Biden pledged to “repair” American relations with Communist China. He vowed especially to end the “trade war” over tariffs levied by President Trump. Yet the tariffs have remained in place. Mr. Biden is also continuing the effort begun under the Trump administration to crack down on Communist Chinese espionage in the United States, to oppose Beijing’s intrusive and destabilizing Belt and Road Initiative, and to remain firm in relations with Taiwan.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/bidens-travel-restrictions-dont-follow-the-science/

The rules should apply to everyone, regardless of citizenship or residency status, and use all the scientific tools available.

 J oe Biden never tires of saying his COVID-19 policies follow “the science.” He recently pontificated that he would battle the emerging Omicron coronavirus variant “with science and speed, not chaos and confusion.” So why is he relying on policies that he earlier criticized as xenophobic and ineffective and that are being condemned around the world as racist?

Back in January 2020, little was known about the emerging disease COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2. Tests, vaccines, and treatments were unavailable. All that anyone knew for sure was that the disease seemed to have started in Wuhan, China, and that is where nearly all the known cases were. The Trump administration announced on January 31, 2020, that the United States would temporarily suspend the entry of foreign nationals who had been in China during the prior 14-day period.

Later that day, Biden accused Trump of “xenophobia” and “fear mongering.” So-called “fact checkers” labored mightily to claim that Biden wasn’t specifically referring to the China travel ban when he made his remarks because he might not have been aware of the travel restrictions. But he certainly was aware of the ban when he tweeted the next day, “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.” On March 12, 2020, after Trump expanded the travel ban to include Europe, Biden tweeted, “Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.”

Biden campaign adviser and now White House chief of staff Ron Klain was certainly aware of the travel restrictions when he testified to Congress on February 5, five days after they were announced. Klain labeled the restrictions an ineffective “Band-Aid” because they did not cover American citizens traveling from China and were based on “the color of the passport someone carries.”