RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/will-policymakers-let-the-covid-crisis-end

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.

The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”

I am an admirer of John McWhorter who is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. His articles on race and education are excellent and run against cancel culture and prevalent bias.

Now, he has stopped publishing independently and has been snared by the New York times.

Here his letter to subscribers:

Many of you may know that I have been hired by The New York Times to write essays for them twice a week, as a subscriber newsletter. Yes, I’m surprised too — but I’m going to do it, and in fact have started.

However, understandably they will not allow me to continue doing this newsletter for Substack at the same time. Thus, with sincere regret — this has been a blast — I have to suspend my newsletter here.

I wish him well….sort of…..rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/23/feds-lower-expectations-for-january-6-probe/

The FBI continues to hunt down Americans even for minor involvement in the breach of the Capitol on January 6. Four Ohio residents were arrested last week and charged with common misdemeanors. It appears the group was inside the building for about 15 minutes and committed no violent crimes.

It’s the latest example of the absurdity of the Capitol breach probe; rather than pursue the handful of violent offenders, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is rounding up alleged trespassers. And it would be laughable if this eight-month manhunt to punish Trump supporters wasn’t destroying lives and tearing families apart in the process.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the insurrection gulag; the overwhelming number of cases consist only of low-level offenses. That is not what Michael Sherwin, the head prosecutor handling the first few months of the Capitol breach probe, promised one week after the protest. “The initial charges we’re filing, these misdemeanors, these are only the beginning,” Sherwin said at a January 12 press conference. “We’re looking at serious felony cases tied to sedition and conspiracy.”

Yet, in spite of Twitter’s best efforts, no one so far has been charged with insurrection or sedition; the best the government can do is file hard-to-prove charges of obstruction of an official proceeding or conspiracy, both felonies.

The Justice Department set expectations extremely high early on. Revenge against Americans who dared to protest the election of Joe Biden would come fast and fierce, the public was assured. Attorney General Merrick Garland promised the investigation into January 6, which he compares to the Oklahoma City bombing, would be his top priority. And when FBI Director Chris Wray designated January 6 an act of “domestic terrorism,” Trump haters smelled blood in the water.

No Evidence of Serious Plans

The Justice Department now seems to be prepping the ground for a major letdown. “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result,” Reuters reported August 20. Nearly all of the cases, four former and current law enforcement officials said, are “one-offs” while roughly five percent are associated with so-called militia groups.

“FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside,” the unnamed sources told Reuters.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17676/who-is-directing-american-policy

Biden was repeatedly told by military brass and intelligence officials that this was going to be the nightmare scenario if he unilaterally pulled American forces out at the end of this month.

How could he do this? For those who follow the grifters, pilot fish, and “consultants” who wallow behind the wake of this administration it should come as no surprise.

“All our efforts in Afghan have be uprooted by a complete disaster of an administration…. you can spin it all you want…. We Afghan/Iraq vets did not lose this…. our government did… our government lost it for us… but while most of America was at the mall, we were all in the mix shedding our time, effort and blood…. What broke me was the video of the mother throwing her newborn to the Marines on the wall…. but this is all squarely on who’s in office now…. even if he doesn’t know it.” — EMT worker on 9/11/2001 and later a US Marine.

That final observation from an individual I am proud to know reveals what many of us wonder. This president is making terribly flawed decisions for which history and the American people will hold him accountable. And if it is not Biden directing American domestic and foreign policy, then who is?

The images of our desperate Afghan allies begging for rescue as their nation falls into the darkness of the Taliban will become permanently etched in the legacy of the Biden Administration. So too will infants being handed by frantic parents into the arms of U.S. Marines, more than 800 people jammed into a departing C-17 cargo plane, and Taliban beating and whipping those seeking access to the Kabul airport.

Yet the Biden administration was repeatedly told by military brass and intelligence officials that this was going to be the nightmare scenario if they unilaterally pulled American forces out at the end of this month. President Joe Biden’s order that created heart-rending havoc ignored all professional advice, insight, and guidance. His Kabul chaos has made the disorderly evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II look like an act of military precision.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/where-are-feminists-jason-d-hill/

Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Bruce Bawer’s excellent Frontpage article “Where Are the Gays?” paints a chilling portrait of the imminent torture, execution and amputations that await gay men under Taliban rulership in Afghanistan. And, of course, western gays are silent. Many are too busy hooking up on multiple sex apps. Many have never been concerned with rights that extend beyond the erogenous zones of their genitalia, and several are too busy celebrating the pedophilia presented in the best-selling young adult pornographic novel, Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), as a moral victory over heteronormative patriarchy.

The majority of sex-addicted gay men live in a curated silo where drugs, hook-ups, flaunting open relationships, and chasing youth and beauty supersede condemning the horrific agenda of the Taliban — an agenda that will no doubt transport Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages.

A reader suggested that a better article would be named: “Where Are All The Feminists?” Given the plight of women under the Taliban when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, feminists should be concerned about the repression of the rights of individual women in that country. This concern should extend to the current resurgence of child marriage of young teenage girls to Taliban soldiers.

No, feminists in America will not be criticizing the Taliban, just as neither they nor gays in America have dared criticize the brutal treatment of women and gays under the governance of Hamas in Gaza. Feminists in this country are too consumed with another task: the destruction of the American male, who is seen as the producer of imperialism, “racist capitalism,” and systemic racial and gender oppression. This is their obsession. The destruction of the American male supersedes moral concern for the wanton annihilation of human lives in other countries. They will not speak out against the Taliban because they hate America and American men more than they care about the rights of any individual singled out as a target for discrimination based on membership in a demonized group.  

As we hurtle towards a possible post-American future, this new breed of feminists, a phalanx of zealots, has forged fourth-wave feminism, and it’s far more rabidly anti-male than previous iterations of the ideological movement. You’d think because of its petty maliciousness and deranged radicalism, its appeal would be narrowly limited to the faculty lounges of liberal arts colleges. Yet since the inception of the #MeToo movement, the crazed foot soldiers of fourth-wave feminism managed not only to take their worldview mainstream, but also to put a headlock on the commanding heights of American culture. This is as impressive as it is terrifying.

These new man-haters are seething with toxic feminism, and the further spread of their noxious sentiment could likely spell the death of our country as we know it. Increasingly prevalent is their practice of exploiting female agency and identity to make blanket attacks on men, to neuter manliness, and to advocate for the end of masculinity. These goals are being achieved while simultaneously promulgating the dual concepts that men are by nature nefarious and that female advancement can only come through the wholesale annihilation of heteronormative constructs of maleness. The destructive consequences for relationships at every level of society—from the simple couple to the community to the nation—will be vast and irreparable.