RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/when_a_jewish_teacher_union_b

Randi Weingarten, leader of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers union) has made a malicious smear against the Jewish community that would normally be characterized as anti-Semitic, but it may get a pass because she happens to be Jewish. 

She was asked a very appropriate question: “Why are the teachers across the nation in major cities still refusing to go back and teach children in the classroom in public schools?”  Instead of acknowledging the problem, she strangely shifted into a tirade against the Jewish community.  She castigated Jews by saying, “American Jews are part of the ownership class … who now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it.”  She took legitimate criticism of her union’s refusal to go back to work as a prompt to demonize the Jewish community.  Historically, this was labeled “scapegoating.”  Scapegoating is the practice of dodging and deflecting a legitimate concern by parlaying each issue against the Jewish people or the hard-work result of Jewish financial success and ownership.

Ms. Weingarten is tragically another example of someone denouncing her own people and inciting others against Jews in order to be the darling of the left, thereby climbing the ladder of political power.  She understands that today, power in leftist and minority circles is achieved by those who blame Jews.  This has become the left-wing formula.

If anything, those from the Jewish community, who have been critical of teachers being the last holdouts to return to work while still drawing their salary and full benefits, are acting as plaintiffs for the students in public school who will fall behind as a consequence of their school activities being shelved.  Indeed, they’ve been acting to keep the rungs of the ladder intact.  Thus, one would think there would be significant blowback from the “race police” against Weingarten’s obvious smear of Jews.

But it has not happened.  That is because the laws of “wokeness” on behalf all minorities do not include Jews.  Jews have been excluded from the victimization monopoly; they are not in the pecking order.  You can say anything you want against Jews, just as with whites and Christians, if the accusations can be parlayed into an indictment against those pre-perceived as oppressors of the intersectional officialdom. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/08/clarence-thomas-shows-the-path-forward-on-big-tech/

A realignment, as many have observed, is now unfolding in American politics. The Republican Party and its conservatism is now the home for the “Somewheres,” to borrow the term from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, which refers to the more traditionalist, hardscrabble patriots of the American heartland. The Democratic Party and its increasingly hard-left progressivism, by contrast, is the home for the “Anywheres”—those highly educated, mobile, “woke” elites comprising the bicoastal ruling class.

The Big Tech issue is the tip of the spear of the realignment. As has been made painfully obvious the last few years, with last October’s collusive Big Tech assault on the New York Post for its election-season reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas travails serving as an eye-opening pinnacle, Big Tech is now the ruling class’s catspaw. These modern-day robber barons are willing and able to lend their censorious assistance to the ruling class’s ruthless entrenchment of its ideological and political hegemony. Big Tech, in short, is the leading private-sector appendage with which the Anywheres cow into submission and subjugate the Somewheres.

This emergent reality has caused no shortage of heart palpitations among some of the more “liberal” elements of the American conservative firmament. Conservatives, many were taught, stand for unadulterated laissez-faire and a staunch commitment to deregulating corporate America. What to do, then, when those unshackled big corporations turn around and come after us?

The answer, for many, has been to carefully reassess what exactly it is we stand for as conservatives—especially as it pertains to unaccountable, concentrated corporate titans who control the 21st-century equivalents of the old public square. To wit, there is nothing particularly “conservative” about a zealous, dogmatic refusal to countenance state actions that might better channel the content curation and moderation decisions of a behemoth such as Amazon—which has at least an 80 percent market share in digital books—toward the common good of the American polity. Ditto Google, which has a nearly 90 percent market share in online search.

But the historical bromance between the GOP and chamber of commerce-style corporatism has been an obstinate hindrance to reform. Big Tech-skeptical, pro-realignment conservatives have all too often had their legal and policy arguments on such issues as antitrust enforcement and Section 230 reform thrown back in their faces by doctrinaire, limited-government enthusiasts who insist that True Conservatism is synonymous with hands-off private-sector fundamentalism. “Build your own Google!” the corporatists and libertarians have scowled.

On Monday, the most important conservative lawyer in the nation, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, came out swinging on the side of the reformers.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/08/january-6-is-the-new-russiagate-lie/

The Russiagate scandal, for lack of a better term, revealed to the general public the seamless compact between the Democratic Party, major news organizations, and powerful government agencies. 

Partisan operatives—be they ruthless DNC lawyers, paid spin masters, or former British spies—easily accessed the country’s influential decision makers to seed storylines targeting their political foes. Narratives were shaped with all the right terms, then dutifully recited by congressional leaders and media mouthpieces. Those on the other side taking incoming fire barely had a chance to see what was coming, let alone to respond with equal force.

Later, when the facts finally came out and the bad actors both behind the scenes and in front of the cameras were revealed as shameless frauds, no one was held accountable. And a sizable chunk of Americans continues to believe all the falsehoods because disowning them would vindicate people they unreasonably despise.

Which is why the overwhelming majority of Democrats still think Donald Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election.

The manufactured deception about the events of January 6 quickly is approaching Russiagate levels. The formula is familiar: Find a catchy phrase—in this case it’s “insurrection” instead of “collusion”—then fertilize the information ecosystem with the term and watch it grow like a weed.

Get political leaders including former presidents and top lawmakers of both parties to use the description, giving it immediate legitimacy. Issue dire warnings about the “threat to democracy” and “rule of law.” Identify the villain—Donald Trump, of course—and make solemn pledges to hunt down every perpetrator until justice is done.

Sympathy-inducing optics are helpful but not always necessary.

Critical cogs in this sort of performative outrage are government authorities who use their offices to convince the public the whole thing is on the square. This is precisely what happened with the now discredited trope that five people died as a result of the chaos on January 6. A brief report issued Wednesday by the office of the D.C. medical examiner confirmed only one person, Ashli Babbitt, was killed that day.