RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/02/president_jim_eagle_145519.html

EXCERPT

Joe Biden ran for president promising to end the ugliness, and to work at uniting the country. He vowed repeatedly that, as president, he’d work as hard for those who voted against him as for those who supported him. In his inaugural address, he spoke evocatively about Americans not demonizing one another. Think of those who disagree with you politically as neighbors, he said, not enemies. As for his policies, unlike Trump, Biden embraced the mainstream thinking in his political party. But that positioning is proving incompatible with his desire for national “unity.” Americans are witnessing the flip side of the Trump dynamic. Biden isn’t leading, he’s following. And the Democratic Party is taking Biden to places he shouldn’t want to go.

In his first presidential news conference, Joe Biden attacked Republicans over voting rights. Democrats say they want to make it easier for all Americans to vote. God bless them for that. Republicans respond that they want to ensure that new voting procedures don’t lead to voter fraud. In a sane and civil political environment — the kind candidate Biden said he wants to restore — the nation’s two major political parties would seek the middle ground: obliterating barriers to voting, but with safeguards.

But that is neither the environment Biden inherited nor the one he is fostering. Instead, he attacked the GOP position in Georgia and other states as “pernicious,” “sick,” “un-American” — and utterly racist. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” Biden said. “I mean, this is gigantic, what they’re trying to do.”

Speaking specifically of Georgia, Biden added in an official statement the next day, “Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” This is a falsehood: Although the new Georgia statute does contain a goofy provision barring partisan activists from furnishing water or food to those waiting in line to vote, it neither closes the polls early nor restricts early voting. It expands early voting.

Although invoking Jim Crow was insidious, it didn’t spring from Biden’s brow: It’s a Democratic Party talking point.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/never-let-truth-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-woke-story

Last month’s Atlanta shooting spree that killed eight people helped out the left-wing media. Six victims were Asian, which let news organizations stoke alarm about white racism. If you squint hard enough, set aside the two victims who weren’t Asian, and ignore the perpetrator’s psychosis about sexual addiction, you can resell the shopworn trope about simple Trumpian intolerance.

This had been tricky when anti-Asian violence rose up the news agenda after New Year and videos repeatedly showed black thugs assaulting frail and elderly Asian victims. Keeping this key fact from viewers was straining the ingenuity of reporters, whose training is to assume that victims of racism are darker-skinned than their persecutors, not the other way around.

We reached a tragi-comic point in mid-February when ABC News reported a string of incidents, backed by video, yet left actor-producer Daniel Dae Kim unchallenged when he opined, “It is not one community against another, it’s everyone versus racism.”

But as everyone knows and honest people acknowledge, racism is not the preserve of only one race, however forcefully woke warriors squeak their countervailing prejudice. Some of them, when reluctantly acknowledging preponderantly black violence against Asians, claim that even this is really about white supremacy.

https://carolineglick.com/the-threats-american-jewry-refuses-to-face/

After being forced by Covid-19 restrictions to celebrate Passover alone last year, like their Israeli brethren, American Jews were by and large able to celebrate the Passover seder with their friends and families this year. And as in Israel, American Jewish families reveled in their deliverance from loneliness on the Jewish festival of deliverance.

But even the joy of Passover couldn’t dispel the twin storm clouds rising around the largest Jewish diaspora.

The first threat is growing Jew-hatred. American Jewish groups are good at fighting white supremacism. Unfortunately, the most dangerous external threat to Jewish life in America doesn’t come from neo-Nazis. It comes from their home base.

Along with Hindus, Jewish Americans are the most highly educated religious group in America. American Jews have long assumed that the primary source of anti-Semitism in America is ignorance and that as education levels rise, levels of anti-Semitism would decrease. Given the prevalence of anti-Semitism on university campuses, researchers at the University of Arkansas decided to check this assumption.

Publishing their findings this week in Tablet magazine, they demonstrated just how wrong this assumption has become. Contrary to what Jewish organizations have long claimed, it turns out that the more educated Americans are, the more anti-Semitic they are.

College graduates are five percent more likely to apply anti-Semitic double standards to Jews than Americans who haven’t gone to college. Holders of advanced degrees used double standards against Jews 15% more often than respondents without higher educations.

The implications are dire. Academia, American Jewry’s home turf for a century and the key to their entry into the American elite – is now hostile territory.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-1-us-to-go-full-venezuela-on-economic-policy

It was in 1998 — a mere 23 years ago — that Hugo Chavez first got elected President of Venezuela. From the start, his program was explicitly one of vastly increased government spending, which was supposed to make the economy grow, reduce income inequality, eliminate poverty and bring about social justice. Chavez called the social programs his “Bolivarian missions.” Among some 30 or so such “missions,” big ones included blowout spending on education, subsidized food, subsidized housing and healthcare.

In the early years, things seemed to be going swimmingly, at least if you believed the official statistics put out by Chavez’s government. Not only was there supposedly steady and mostly rapid economic growth (often over 5% per year, particularly 2004-10), but they also regularly crowed about how the redistributionist spending had greatly reduced the rate of poverty. Then, starting around 2013, it all started to fall apart. Today, eight years later, it continues to fall apart. More details on that later.

Yesterday, the Biden White House put out what they call the “American Jobs Plan.” It’s $2.3 trillion of new government spending, on top of the $1.9 trillion just passed, and several trillion more to come, all on top of a $4 trillion or so annual level of baseline federal spending. Yes, it’s blowout government spending, on the usual issues pushed by advocacy groups, which supposedly will shortly achieve all the usual promises of the left: economic growth, increased economic fairness, and social justice. In other words, it’s the Venezuela economic program, blown up to U.S. scale and then tweaked a little here and there to buy off the squeaky wheels of the moment.

As I pointed out in a post on March 8 addressing the previous $1.9 trillion (“Could This Be The Very Worst Piece Of Legislation Ever?”), that bill was touted as “Covid-19 Relief,” but in fact only about 5% of the spending was for anything that could be called actual public health measures related to the pandemic. The rest was “a grand orgy of vote buying and giveaways to left-wing interest groups.” Following the same playbook, this $2.3 trillion monster calls itself an “infrastructure” plan:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/01/the-coalition-of-the-un-woke/

The metastasis of the “woke” ideology is the most comprehensive threat facing the American republic. It is appallingly totalitarian, insofar as the woke wield the levers of cancel culture to suppress all dissident speech, root out all wrongthink and achieve by sheer force an intellectual homogeneity. It is outright racist, insofar as intersectionality and identity politics, to say nothing of vogue concepts such as “critical race theory” and “racial equity,” overtly discriminate on the basis of race and thus undermine the preeminent American ethos of equal protection under the law.

As if out of a dystopian novel, though, the woke ideology has nonetheless become the unifying creed of the American ruling class. That ruling class, which extends from public sector bureaucracies to the Fortune 500 to Hollywood to Silicon Valley and sundry others in between, has in recent years universally come to imbibe, promulgate and disseminate the core tenets of wokeness.

What’s more, that universality often takes the more insidious form of cross-institutional collusion. As Matthew Schmitz put it in a Tablet essay in September, “Governmental authorities and corporations now coordinate in enforcing the dictates of the new secular progressive faith.”

Thus has the woke ideology completed, à la the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, its long march through the institutions. And let’s not mince words: This is Marxism. As Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony carefully outlined in a Quillette essay in August, “The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists,” but “their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism.”