RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/02/10/democratic_impeachment_

In their second impeachment of the man who is now no longer president, the Democrats fixed Donald Trump’s orange political head upon their rattle.

They waved it before a deeply divided nation and pronounced him a demon. On one level, it reminds me of the Native American sorcerer in the movie “Black Robe,” who castigates his rival as a michimindo, a demon.

On another, it fills me with foreboding. Not for Trump. I don’t care about Trump or the posturing of Republicans or Democrats. But I do care about our republic. And I see terrible pain ahead of us.

As Democrats shake the orange rattle, emotions and outrage are re-stoked over the disgusting events of Jan. 6 and the deadly attack on the Capitol by several hundred Trump voters, egged on by Trump himself, filled as he was with his absurd fantasies of a stolen election.

What we need is to take a breath and consider the implications of all this.

Trump is gone. Many Americans want to move on. The people are worried about their jobs, whether they can get the vaccine, whether their children’s schools will open.

The Democrats don’t have the votes to convict him. Chief Justice John Roberts is not even presiding, as required by the Constitution for impeachments of sitting presidents. The job should fall to Vice President Kamala Harris as president of the Senate. But the Biden White House doesn’t want her fingerprints on this, lest it backfire, so she steps back to allow Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont to preside.

The Democrats want to keep Trump politically alive for their political reasons. But what are they?

https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists

John McWhorter, contributing writer at The Atlantic and professor of linguistics at Columbia University, is a member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors. His new book, The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and their Threat to a Progressive America, is being published in serial at It Bears Mentioning.

A new religion is preached across America. It’s nonsense posing as wisdom.

One can divide antiracism into three waves. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and 1980s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist was a flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, so whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.

Third Wave Antiracist tenets, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing whatsoever:

When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. But don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.

Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms because black people have a culture of their own.

Silence about racism is violence. But elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.

You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. But you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/atlas-mugged/?itm_campaign=headline-testing-atlas-mugged&itm_medium=headline&itm_

Institutions and journals are coming after Dr. Scott Atlas for the sins of having served in the Trump administration and questioning public-health orthodoxy.

S tanford’s campaign against Dr. Scott Atlas for the sins of working for former president Donald Trump and advocating for balancing the costs and benefits of COVID-19-mitigation measures has taken a new and ugly turn. In September, 105 Stanford medical and health-policy faculty members published an open letter accusing Atlas, their former Stanford medical-school colleague and then White House coronavirus-task-force member, of deliberate misrepresentations of the “established science” surrounding COVID-19 that “will lead to immense avoidable harm.” The letter writers did not cite any publications or statements by Atlas to support their claims. Now two of the letter writers, joined by psychiatrist David Spiegel, a third Stanford colleague who did not sign the original letter, have doubled down. In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they repeat the allegations and suggest that miscreants such as Atlas should be censured by professional medical societies, medical-licensing boards, and universities where they are faculty members. This vendetta has to stop.

Like the earlier letter, the JAMA article provides little evidence of Atlas’s alleged misrepresentations. Indeed, the sole source cited is a New York Times article that misstates Atlas’s positions. Moreover, some of Atlas’s alleged misstatements of science are not misstatements at all. None of this stops the three JAMA authors from insinuating that Atlas is comparable to physicians who promoted eugenics, conducted the racist Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and fraudulently linked vaccines to autism.

The JAMA authors and the Times article they cite claim Atlas questioned the efficacy of mask wearing and social distancing. But that article inaccurately cited an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News in which Atlas said people need not wear masks when they are alone but should wear masks if they can’t socially distance around others. Similarly, the Times article cited a different Times piece to claim, as the JAMA authors do, that Atlas pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change its guidance so that exposed, asymptomatic people would not be tested. But the second article acknowledged “conflicting reports on who was responsible” for the policy change and never suggested it was exclusively Atlas. It reported that Dr. Brett Giroir, the coronavirus-testing director, stated the new guidance was made with input from the CDC director and approved by all the task-force doctors.