RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/04/27/critical_race_theory_is_about_to_face_its_days_in_court_774290.html

As recently as last summer, few people outside academia had heard of critical race theory, whose central claim is that racism, not liberty, is the founding value and guiding vision of American society. Then, President Trump issued an executive order last September banning the teaching of this “malign ideology” to federal employees and federal contractors.

Trump’s ban was blocked by a federal judge in December and immediately revoked by Joe Biden upon occupying the White House in January. Since then, federal agencies and federal contractors have resumed staff training on unconscious bias, microaggressions, systemic racism and white privilege – some of the most common but also most disputed concepts associated with the four-decade-old academic theory.

Now critical race theory is about to face a major real-world test: a spate of lawsuits alleging that it encourages discrimination and other illegal policies targeting whites, males and Christians. But unlike Trump’s executive order, which ran into First Amendment problems by prohibiting controversial speech, the lawsuits name specific policies and practices that allegedly discriminate, harass, blame and humiliate people based on their race.

The common thread of these legal challenges is the inescapable logic that making accommodations for critical race theory will erode the nation’s anti-discrimination law as it has developed since the 1960s. This would mean replacing the colorblind ideal of treating all people equally, which has been widely viewed as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, with a contrary strategy: implementing race-based policies, which can range from affirmative action to reparations for compensating African Americans for the injustices of the past and for producing equitable outcomes in the future.

“Critical race theory is a Trojan horse of sorts,” said David Pivtorak, a Los Angeles lawyer representing two white men who are suing two California state environment agencies. “It disguises itself as the gold standard of fairness and justice but, in fact, relies on vilification and the idea of permanent oppressor and oppressed races. Its goal is not ensuring that all people play by the same rules, regardless of race, but equity, which is a euphemism for race-based outcomes.”

About a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018, with another wave planned this summer by conservative public interest law firms and private attorneys. Their goal is to draw attention to some of the more pronounced practices and win court judgments to slow down the spread of CRT in K-12 schools, government agencies other organizations.

https://www.city-journal.org/bigots-within-antiracist-ranks

Most Americans agree that racism in any form is abhorrent. But in recent weeks, far too many who call themselves “antiracists” have inflamed racial tensions with antiwhite bigotry that’s every bit as disgusting as what they claim to oppose. When will the antiracists start rooting out the bigots in their own ranks?

When Robert Long, a 21-year-old Georgia man, killed eight people, six of them Asian, at three spas on March 16, prominent figures on the left reflexively branded it an anti-Asian hate crime. In a piece for The Root titled, “Whiteness is a Pandemic,” Damon Young wrote after the Georgia killings, “Whiteness is a public health crisis. . . . It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air . . . it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars . . . and it kills people.”

There was a palpable sense of disappointment in the media when Georgia police threw cold water on the theory that Long was motivated by animus toward Asians. Many on the left stuck to this story against all evidence, pretending that statements by police and others who knew Long well must have been wrong. Days later, when early news leaked out of Boulder, Colorado that ten people were killed in a mass shooting, a CNN anchor rushed to assert that “another white male” appeared to be responsible. Meena Harris, a prominent lawyer and Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”

The Nation published a piece by a woman who wrote, “One of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life.” And how about the bizarre poem penned by the (Democratic) mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, who lambasted her city as a place “anchored in white supremacy” that “rapes you” and “suffocates your hopes and dreams.”

When the Boulder assailant turned out to be a Syrian immigrant, progressives pivoted to their second favorite obsession after race: gun control, because every tragedy must be exploited to advance preferred narratives. Police shootings aren’t noteworthy unless the cop is white and the victim is black. The Oregonian all but acknowledged this recently after Portland police killed a white man, tweeting that it was identifying his race “in light of social unrest prompted by police shootings of Black people.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/28/america-is-in-the-hands-of-its-most-foolish-rather-than-its-finest/

Mark Jan. 20, 2021, as the day the U.S. fell under the control of the lousiest presidential administration of our lifetimes, if not our history. Heaven help us to get past this bunch in Washington that is either so inept, or so blinded by its radical ideology, that it’s ushering the country into an era of decline.

Where to begin? How about with John Kerry? President Joe Biden’s climate envoy believes that “even if we get to net zero, we still have to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” So no CO2, get rid of it all? Was this a slip of the tongue? A misstatement that can happen to anyone? Or simply yet another politician on the left gone mad?

More likely the latter. As our friend Steve Milloy at junkscience.com pointed out, Kerry actually made the same nonsensical statement twice at last week’s virtual climate summit to emphasize his point.

Another friend, Anthony Watts of the world’s most widely read global warming website, reminds us Kerry “said essentially the same thing back in 2015” when arguing – correctly – that no matter what the West does, carbon emissions will still be pouring out of the developing world.

Whether or not Kerry was making this exact same point last week, or was absurdly suggesting a zero-CO2 Earth, matters little. The inanity, however, does. How did we allow ourselves to be saddled with such a character?

Likewise, Kerry’s behavior as secretary of state under Barack Obama indicates he’s a man who cannot be trusted. He reportedly warned Iran about hundreds of Israeli covert attacks on the terrorist regime’s interests in Syria while working for that administration. If reports are accurate – and given the history of Democrats in general and Kerry in particular, there’s good reason to believe they are – then he provided aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States. None from the America-after-all-others administration dare call it treason, though.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-post-trump-honeymoon-11619564017?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

When President Biden addresses Congress Wednesday evening, he won’t salute his predecessor but he should. Donald Trump’s raucous Presidency has let the Democrat sell a radical agenda in the soothing tones of a return to normal, while the vaccine project known as Operation Warp Speed has teed up the end of the pandemic and an economic revival. This is the main story of Mr. Biden’s first 100 days.

***

Mr. Biden won the White House as the anti-Trump, and he has continued to benefit from that persona in his first months. Half the country is relieved merely to have a President who isn’t constantly brawling on TV in their living rooms. Whether by design, or necessity due to his reduced capacities, the decision to husband Mr. Biden’s public appearances has been shrewd. He’s the calm after the four-year Trump storm.

The Democrat has also been lucky in timing, as he took the oath of office as the Covid-19 vaccines were coming online. The White House pretense that it inherited a Covid mess is nonsense. The vaccine production was pre-planned. While some state rollouts were bumpy when there was more vaccine demand than supply, the main job of the Administration was to accelerate the distribution that was already underway.

The same goes for the economy, which has been growing since last July, and its acceleration was inevitable as people returned to normal commercial and social life. As New York, Michigan and California have followed the leadership of Texas and Florida in lifting their lockdowns, the inevitable post-pandemic boom has arrived. The same would have happened if Mr. Trump had won.

https://dianebederman.com/what-is-malignant-normality-and-why-should-you-ca

Whoever thought it possible that one day an American theology professor, Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, whose mission is to serve as a catalyst for healing, justice, and reconciliation would write this prayer to God to help her:

“I want to stop caring about them (white people), individually and collectively. I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.”

This is possible because the Progressive left is shaming, shunning, cancelling, and silencing anyone who does not agree with their views on critical race theory, white privilege, their new definition of family.

We have been down this road, before.

The world watched as Germany  morphed from a country renowned for its Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, with authors like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe into one taken over by Hitler. Citizens of all classes followed the orders of Adolph Hitler, snitching on neighbours, turning in Jews, murdering Jews for being different as well as standing by while mentally and physically disabled people were taken away. How was this possible?

The answer may be malignant normality: the way average people—most of us—drift or slide or shuffle or stumble into moral corruption. Malignant normality thrives by silencing opposition and promoting submission to the new value system.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, most famous as the author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide  suggests we are socialized into “malignant normality.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-26-they-shouldnt-have-died-that

Two weeks ago, Daunte Wright’s death sparked another round of protests and calls to defund/abolish the police. A week later, Derek Chauvin’s trial resulting in a guilty verdict has given the U.S. a reprieve from another round of violent riots. Both of these outcomes could have been anticipated: every time a black civilian dies in an encounter with the police, the conversation immediately becomes about police brutality and police reform. I agree there are many things we could do to reform policing in this country — I have discussed a few possibilities here and here. But while excessive policing is a problem, there are two other aspects to the BLM conversation that are ignored by the mainstream: we will always need some policing and law enforcement to protect civilians from criminal behavior, and many of the recent victims who have been held up as martyrs of the BLM movement had been engaged in criminal behavior. 

Daunte Wright had a warrant out for his arrest for carrying an illegal firearm and attempted armed robbery. George Floyd had served several stints in prison. Both men had been accused of armed robbery, attempted in one case and executed in the other. Their final encounters with the police were for non-violent infractions, but their histories of criminal behavior tell a different story. Those histories also indicate that future run-ins with the police were not unlikely.

Ma’khia Bryant, a 16 year old girl shot dead by police in Columbus, Ohio, had been trying to stab another woman. 13 year old Adam Toledo had been firing a handgun in the middle of the night when police were called to the scene. Jacob Blake, left paralyzed from the waist down after an encounter with the police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was attempting to kidnap his children from their mother, who had been awarded custody. In these scenarios, police intervention was warranted.  

There is a difference between overcriminalization and excessive policing on the one hand, and situations where there is a threat of violence and the police are called to protect innocent civilians on the other. As a society, we need to be able to distinguish between the two. Instead we are creating a dichotomy in which the police are always wrong. Over time, this will result in more leeway for criminal behavior and less protection for law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, with the public poised to distrust the police, odds increase that people will be more likely to resist arrest, and that fraught encounters with the police are more likely to turn violent.