RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/07/24/the-frankfurt-school-and-excellent-foolishness-how-the-left-infects-impressionable-minds-n696846

It has long struck me how the Frankfurt School, a collection of Leftist émigrés from Nazi Germany, could have been so successful in dominating the curriculum of the American university and wielding so massive an influence over following generations of students. Its major figures, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, were the main authors of the political revolution of the 1960s which gradually filtered into the culture to produce the revisionist “narrative” and physical violence we observe all around us today.

The most publically significant spokesperson was Herbert Marcuse, whose One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization and his influential, totalitarian-inspired essay “Repressive Tolerance” planted the seeds of political and epistemic subversion in the fertile soil of American academia and, ultimately, in the marl of the cultural and institutional life. Marcuse argued in the essay that we must be “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” By “status quo,” he meant classical liberal thought with its emphasis on tradition, individual autonomy, civic responsibility, and limited government, which he thought were responsible for deep-rooted social injustice. The narrative he developed was irresistible to his legion of acolytes.

The Frankfurters were the red brigades of the university Left, striving to fill their students’ minds with the doctrine of human and social perfectibility according to the egalitarian principles of their Marxist forbears, in particular the theories and ruminations of the Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács. The Woke generation now rioting in the streets of Portland, Seattle, and other cities are their unwitting progeny, the shock troops of Antifa and BLM who never read Marcuse, let alone Horkheimer, Adorno, Gramsci or Lukács—and surely would be incapable of doing so with any comprehension. They have succumbed to a political virus of which they are unaware, fallen prey to a toxic narrative developed by the luminaries of the intellectual Left. This is what I would dub trickle-down intellectonomics, how complex thought (however specious) gradually leaks away into howls, bellows, and yawps.

There is no doubt that the crucial figures of the “Western Marxist” movement were brilliant men and erudite scholars, eloquent to a fault. They were right about some things, in particular about the rise of anti-Semitism as a function of a world sinking into barbarism. But how could they have been so wrong about America, working to transform the American Dream into the American Nightmare?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/protests-chicago-portland-andrew-mccarthy

Demagogues aligning themselves with subversives against federal agents are wrong

“Unidentified stormtroopers” is what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the law enforcement agents of the Department of Homeland Security struggling to protect the federal courthouse that Portland, Ore., rioters have been firebombing.

“The president’s personal militia,” chimed in Tom Ridge, the nation’s first Homeland Security secretary.

It’s shameful.

Never is it more critical for the nation’s senior officials and elder statesmen to present a united American front than in times of insurrection. No matter how we may feel about the underlying political grievances, when peaceful protest descends into violent subversion, or — more accurately — when essentially violent subversion is allowed to masquerade as peaceful protest, there needs to be ringing condemnation and support for law enforcement.

Yet, Democrats and Trump-abhorring Republicans cannot get past their petty political score-settling, even for the purpose of supporting law enforcement against violent anti-American radicals.

This is not one of those times for “But Trump …” bleating. Yes, the president is abrasive and prone to say inexcusable things. On this one, though, there is only one right and one wrong side. The demagogues aligning themselves with subversives against federal agents are wrong. Say what you will about the president, he’s made it very clear he’s with our agents.

Pelosi is a professional political partisan, among the most powerful members of a party that, like Middle Eastern governments, thinks it can make common cause with violent radicals, even use them as political attack dogs, and not get bitten in the end. Sadly, then, her slander against law enforcement comes as no surprise.

Ridge’s remarks, on the other hand, are worth pausing over. First, there was the revisionist history: DHS, he says, “was established to protect America from the ever-present threat of global terrorism.”

https://www.city-journal.org/science-of-covid-19-policy-choices

When doctors meet a patient for a new complaint, we make a list of different possible explanations for the problem—a differential diagnosis—and try to determine the correct diagnosis, while starting treatment for the most likely one. After this initial assessment, as test and imaging results come in, we may alter the differential diagnosis and treatments.

Public-health officials dealing with a new pathogen, like the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, go through a similar process. They must recommend policies with incomplete information and adjust them over time. But unlike physicians, they do so in public, and sometimes under intense scrutiny.

Dr. Anthony Fauci—and this is not meant as criticism—has epitomized the public-health diagnostic process with multiple, incorrect, early pronouncements: In January and February, he downplayed the risk of person-to-person spread; he expressed doubt that asymptomatic people could transmit the virus; in late February, he reassured the public that, “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis”; and in March, like many other public-health officials here and abroad, he said that, outside of health-care personnel, ordinary people should not wear masks. In fact, both Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams suggested that mask-wearing could increase a person’s risk of being infected. All these assertions proved wrong.

We know a lot more about the virus—how it’s transmitted and how to treat it—than we did a few months ago. For instance, the coronavirus can spread person-to-person from both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Dr. Fauci now espouses the opposite of each of his earlier statements, but there is nothing wrong with that. As economist John Maynard Keynes purportedly said, “When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?”

https://www.wnd.com/2020/07/yale-epidemiologist-trump-drug-save-100000-lives/

The highly politicized anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine could save up to 100,000 lives, according to a Yale epidemiologist, yet access to it continues to be restricted.

“If a drug could save 100,000 lives, then government agencies that block its use are responsible for 100,000 needless deaths,” charges Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons.

AAPS has filed for an injunction to force the Food and Drug Administration to stop obstructing use of the drug, she pointed out, “while it hoards and wastes the millions of doses that manufacturers donated to the Strategic National Stockpile.”

Hydroxychloroquine was approved by the FDA in 1955 and has been taken safely by hundreds of millions of people, noted Orient.

“High government officials who are determining federal policy insist in private that doctors have the legal authority to prescribe HCQ or other FDA-approved drugs for ‘off-label’ uses,” she said. “However, the FDA has refused to reverse statements that state and local authorities cite to threaten doctors or pharmacists who provide you with this cheap remedy.”

She pointed to studies showing poor countries that allow free use of hydroxychloroquine have far lower death rates than rich countries that hinder itA summary of the evidence for the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 is here.

The Yale epidemiologist, Harvey Risch, said Tuesday in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham he thinks hydroxychloroquine could save 75,000 to 100,000 lives if the drug was widely used to treat coronavirus.

“There are many doctors that I’ve gotten hostile remarks about saying that all the evidence is bad for it and, in fact, that is not true at all,” he said.

He believes the drug can be used as a “prophylactic,” or preventative, for front-line workers, as other countries such as India have done.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/23/brookings-institution-a-key-collusion-collaborator/

In December 2018, a well-regarded left-leaning think tank published a 4,500-word defense of the Steele dossier, the document central to the government’s charge that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

Lawfare, a project of the Brookings Institution, defended the dossier as “a collection of raw intelligence” that was similar to forms used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to transcribe information obtained by witnesses. 

“The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven,” wrote Chuck Rosenberg and Sarah Grant in a judgement that did not hold up well over time. “The Mueller investigation has clearly produced public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele’s reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.”

That column was just one of hundreds of collusion propaganda articles disguised as think pieces from a respectable Washington, D.C. public policy center. With the distinguished imprimatur of the Brookings Institution, articles would quickly permeate the media—both social and traditional—to legitimize the concocted Russian collusion storyline. 

For example, prior to the April 2019 release of the Mueller report, Lawfare published a lengthy primer advising the press on how to handle the long-awaited document. The column, authored by Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare’s editor-in-chief, implored the media “not to screw up” its coverage.

Wittes also is a BFF of James Comey, the disgraced former FBI director and chief architect of the collusion hoax. (Comey is a contributor to Lawfare.) Wittes was the anonymous source for a May 2017 New York Times article that disclosed details of Comey’s private dinners with the president prior to his firing. It was part of the Beltway spin to buttress Mueller’s appointment and subsequent two-year persecution of Team Trump; Mueller’s gang of partisan prosecutors, however, could not find evidence of collusion despite Lawfare’s nonstop assurances that such proof existed.