RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2021/02/20/environmentalism-trumpism-and-the-working-class/

The inauguration of President Biden as the 46th US President hasn’t produced quite the catharsis that Democrats (and others) had hoped for. After only a few months of one-party rule in Washington, DC—and the sputtering finale of impeachment—there should be fear among Democrats that attention will return to the signs of real damage done to the progressive/liberal project in the wake of its collision with the Trump train.

The shifting of both American political parties into one another’s former political spaces has been head-spinning. The trend of Republicans turning into the party of labor and Democrats becoming a party of capital looks to continue in the 2020s—something few people outside of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot would have guessed 30 years ago. And it turns out that the promise of a Democrat-voting bloc made up of well-educated whites, blacks, and the growing Hispanic population delivering a decades-long progressive era in American politics is not coming to pass.

For nearly 20 years, this promised “coalition of the ascendant” has coalesced but failed to ascend. In 2009, with the inauguration of Barack Obama, Democrats in the House of Representatives controlled 256 seats and 58 seats in the Senate. In 2021, Democrats under Biden/Harris hold 221 seats in the House, while the Senate is split 50/50.

To be fair, a major caveat to the “coalition” argument involved keeping white working-class voters in the Democrat column while the promised growing populations of Hispanic and urban singleton voters delivered on its demographic determinism. Instead, the raw numbers from the 2020 general election suggest that Trump’s class rhetoric captured parts of the working classes that the Democratic Party had previously thought were untouchable.

So, what changed in America’s politics that would cause working class Hispanics and black voters to move toward Trump?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-model-minority-myth-11614035596?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The North Thurston Public Schools in Lacey, Wash., made headlines in November when their “equity report” classified Asian-Americans along with whites instead of as “students of color.” Apparently the Asian-Americans were doing too well academically to be students of color. After what the district said was “an overwhelming public response,” it admitted its “category choices” had “racist implications” and dropped the equity report from its website.

To normal Americans, it makes no sense. How are Asian-Americans not “people of color”? But give the North Thurston folks credit for following progressive logic to its conclusion. Modern progressive theory more or less divides the nation between the oppressors, defined as whites, and the oppressed, defined as everyone else. In this framework, achieving success puts you on the side of the oppressors and thus makes you white or “white-adjacent”—even if your family came from China or India.

Calling it progressive to send children of color the message that achievement is white is an irony lost on the woke. Bigoted laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or actions such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II were once thought among the worst stains on American history left by anti-Asian racism. But these days the characterization of Asian-Americans as the “model minority” triggers the woke.

https://www.nysun.com/national/justice-thomas-in-a-fiery-dissent-illuminates/91427/

The refusal of the Supreme Court to take up a challenge to Pennsylvania’s last minute changes to its ballot deadlines in the 2020 election was done without explanation by the majority. All the more clear is the case for reforming our national law on Election Day — the need for it to be a single date with results that can be announced after the polls close. It’s not election week, month, or season. It’s Election Day.

In 2020, six states failed to meet this standard. These states unfairly threw the process of counting the electoral college and popular vote into chaos. Forty-four states managed, despite the pandemic. In 1845, Congress enacted the Presidential Election Day Act to establish a “uniform time for holding elections for electors.” It declared that “the Tuesday after the first Monday in November” is the day on which all states must appoint electors.

Since the 1848 election, states have been able to meet this deadline despite the 1918 pandemic, World Wars I and II, and hurricanes. A single election day and prompt reporting is part of the peaceful transfer of power. The idea is that voters should not have to wait days or weeks to hear election results. The longer the vote-counting takes, the more exceptions made during the counting process, the less confidence voters have in the outcome.

This was certainly the case in 2020. And the press was complicit in the disruption by refusing to call election results due to the “red mirage.” This was an idea first pushed by a Democratic consulting firm funded by Mayor Bloomberg saying that on election night it was highly likely that President Trump would appear to have won in a landslide, but would ultimately lose when all the mail-in ballots were counted over the next week.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/clarence-thomas-blasts-the-supreme-court-for-ducking-the-pennsylvania-election-challenge/

EXCERPT;

The Court this morning turned away the remaining challenges to the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan. Some of these challenges were legally meritless, and none of them offered any legitimate grounds to change the outcome of the presidential election, but the Pennsylvania case in particular raised a serious, recurring issue of election law: whether state courts or state executive officials can use the general, open-ended terms of state constitutional provisions to throw out specific rules passed by state legislatures governing federal elections. Articles I and II of the Constitution reserve to state legislatures the power to set rules for federal elections.

That’s exactly what happened in Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania supreme court used the Pennsylvania Constitution’s general guarantees of “free and equal” elections and “free exercise of the right of suffrage” as an excuse to invalidate the state legislature’s explicit deadline for mail-in ballots to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day — the same time the in-person polls close. That deadline was enacted in 2019 and left untouched in revisions to the mail-in ballot rules during the pandemic in 2020. The Court should have heard the case before Election Day, in order t0 ensure that the rules of the road were set in advance. Refusing to hear the case either before the election or after the election guarantees that the issue remains unsettled for the next election.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a dissent blasting the Court for repeatedly ducking this issue (Alito added his own dissent).

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/02/22/conspiracy-theo

Today’s conspiracy theories, like their predecessors, frequently target Jews. This age-old hatred was on shameless display during the Capitol riots, where one thug wore a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt. He was not alone. A Rutgers University report found that at least half a dozen neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups were involved in the riot. Still more extremists without any formal affiliation joined them, according to research by Robert Pape and Keven Ruby.

Among right-wing groups like the Proud Boys, anti-Semitic tropes are commonplace. They are staple features of QAnon conspiracy theories, which mark Jewish names with triple parentheses to label them as usurpers and predators. Some groups borrow from Nazi propaganda and denounce Jews as “not members of the white race.”

Anti-Semitic vitriol like this is not new. What’s new is its rationale, which is now divorced from medieval and early modern religious doctrines. Indeed, anti-Semitism is now part of a broader ideology of illiberalism that endangers America’s long-standing principles of individual rights and tolerance.

Historical Anti-Semitism

In the Middle Ages and the early modern era, anti-Semitism was largely a product of religious tensions coming from an overwhelmingly Christian society and directed by the Catholic Church, not only at Jews but at Christians they deemed heretics. That’s changed dramatically as the West has become more secular. The old curse of “Jews as Christ killers” has waned. So has the bizarre “blood libel” that Jews kill Christian children to drain their blood and mix it into unleavened bread for Passover.

These ideas weren’t just noxious; they were deadly. They not only excluded Jews from an overwhelmingly Christian society, but they justified lethal attacks. Among the most prominent were those that accompanied the First Crusade (1096–1097). As Christian warriors left for Jerusalem, they massacred whole Jewish villages in the Rhineland. Their compatriots in France did the same.