RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/03/22/diversity-training-disaster-n1680355

All big American companies now require DEI training: diversity, equity and inclusion. All big companies!

Really.

It sounds responsible. But it turns out DEI courses are often useless and sometimes racist.First comes groveling.

My new video about DEI shows a conference that begins with a “land acknowledgement.” A Microsoft employee apologizes for taking land from “the Sammamish, the Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, Muckleshoot” and more.

I guess it’s a nice gesture. But they aren’t giving the land back!

Companies go through the motions.

“They feel like they have to,” says York College professor Erec Smith. “They have to signal to the world that they’re doing something.”

They hope it will protect them from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and lawsuits.

Smith was once a diversity officer. He left the position because he thought it was “useless.”

Or worse. “It makes people less likely to interact with people unlike them,” he says. “It’s a minefield now.”

At diversity trainings, employees learn about “microaggressions,” speech that’s subtly biased.

“If you ask somebody what they do for a living, somehow that’s racist,” says Smith. “If you learn that, then why would you take a chance? … ‘I’m going to silence myself’ … not talk to Black people.”

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2023/03/21/biden-executive-race-order-on-race-rhymes-with-jim-crow-n1680276

President Biden recently issued an executive order entitled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Make no mistake: this executive order has the effect of pushing us backward toward a racially divided nation, just like the good old days.

What a shame. Not thirty years ago, a very different spirit animated civil rights. Call it the Martin Luther King vision. Dr. King’s vision was fundamentally the Christian one, where every person has dignity, where racism is a sin, where race matters not at all compared to character.

Dr. King held the moral high ground here. His vision ushered in a few short decades of getting it right.

America had just emerged from two centuries as a nation embracing the opposite of Dr. King’s vision. First human slavery, then violent, racially motivated lawlessness ruled the night. This was followed by segregation in housing and transportation, separate and unequal schools, and bar-b-que only by takeout for blacks.

At the heart of all this wickedness was treating fellow Americans based on their race, not on what matters.

I fear America has lost the moral high ground. Instead of equality and dignity, new generations are schooled in racial division and the fundamental building blocks of the segregationist policies the nation fought so hard to end.

The foundation of segregation, simply, was treating people differently based on their race.  This immoral foundation supported all the structures of Jim Crow, from dilapidated schools to separate water fountains.

So why does the new executive order push us back toward that wretched past?  Why does it elevate race like the segregationists of old?

The executive order establishes offices throughout the federal government with legions of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” bureaucrats at the highest levels. All bureaucrats pushing race consciousness will be coordinated out of the White House.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-was-on-federal-reserves-radar-for-more-than-a-year-fed-reserve-of-san-francisco-issued-six-citations-and-flagged-bank-as-ticking-time-bomb/

Silicon Valley Bank was on the Federal Reserve’s radar for more than a year before it collapsed.

SVB’s balance sheet was a ticking time bomb but somehow the bank regulators ‘missed it’ and the bank ultimately collapsed.

Silicon Valley Bank reportedly held $173 billion in deposits – $117 billion of its deposits were in mortgage-backed securities.

The so-called bank regulators somehow ‘failed’ to notice Silicon Valley Bank was a ticking time bomb when more than two-thirds of its deposits were invested in mortgage-backed securities that yielded 1.5% as the Fed raised rates 450 basis points last year, according to its balance sheets.

The Federal Reserve of San Francisco issued six citations and flagged Silicon Valley Bank.

By July of 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was under a “full supervisory review” and “placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions,” according to the New York Times.

The regulators knew Silicon Valley Bank was in trouble and did not have enough cash to cover depositors.

But they were bailed out anyway.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/economy-tank-banks-reeling-inflation-sky-high-biden-telling

Are you angry yet? You should be. Our economy is slowing, banks are reeling, inflation remains scorching-high, real incomes are dropping, home prices are falling and Americans everywhere are becoming poorer by the minute.

On top of everything else, now we have the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, infuriating bailouts and the resulting panic over banks. As with nearly everything that has gone wrong on their watch, including the inexcusable border chaos, the catastrophic pullout from Afghanistan and harmful inflation, the go-to response by the White House has been to blame President Trump.

Specifically, to blame Trump for signing legislation that loosened regulations on regional banks in 2018.That was Joe Biden’s message in the pitiful 5-minute address in which he tried but utterly failed to reassure the nation that our banking system is sound.

Here’s what Biden didn’t say: they knew. Regulators knew that Silicon Valley Bank was on the brink of failure. Supervisors spotted fatal weaknesses at the tech lender last summer, including some deemed “matters requiring immediate attention”; they told SVB management last fall that its model was flawed and could result in a run on deposits. 

Despite the grave warning, the New York Times reports, management failed to change course and supervisors failed to act. By early this spring, SVB was in yet another review, this one on its risk management practices. Bottom line: there were none.

In other words, there were plenty of regulations and processes in place to prevent the catastrophe that occurred at SVB. Critics have assailed the San Francisco Fed, the supervisory authority, and its chief Mary Daly, for negligence. Some have rightly said that having SVB CEO Greg Becker on the overseer Fed board posed an obvious and dangerous conflict of interest.

It is hard to dismiss those who assert that the eagerness with which the Fed, the Treasury and the White House stepped in to bail out SVB and Signature Bank, caught in SVB’s backdraft, stemmed from the cozy relationships and giant political donations that Democrats receive from the tech community. It is, indeed, one big Happy Valley. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/20/the-lingering-malady-of-trump-derangement-syndrome/

There’s a whiff of the banana republic to the reports that Donald Trump will be arrested this week over the Stormy Daniels affair. Trump said on Truth Social that he expects to have his collar felt by the cops tomorrow. It would be related to the 2016 investigation of the hush money Trump gave to porn star Daniels after he caught wind of the fact that she was trying to hawk the story of their extramarital affair. Trump gave her $130,000, which is perfectly legal, but he registered the hush cash as ‘legal fees’, which is not legal – that’s the falsification of business records, prosecutors say, which is a misdemeanour in New York. NYC district attorney Alvin Bragg set up a grand jury on this rather minor matter, and it’s possible an indictment will be announced this week.

You don’t have to be a Team Trump, ‘January 6’ hothead to know that such an indictment would be a brazenly political act, motivated more by coastal-elite animus towards the Bad Orange Man than by concern about a little white lie in Trump’s business accounts. Bragg is a radical Democrat. His loathing of Trump is well known. He’s also notoriously soft on crime, to the fury of many New Yorkers. As the National Review put it, ‘crime is rampant in New York’, in part because ‘Bragg’s default position is leniency and often non-prosecution when it comes to hardened criminals’. The idea that he’s now having sleepless nights over a fib told by Trump seven years ago is preposterous. No, this is ‘bare-naked politics’, in NR’s words.

What we have here, boiled down, is the ruling party using a trumped-up charge to punish the leader they pushed out of power. That’s what happens in banana republics. Republican senator Eric Schmitt was surely right when he said that ‘if this same behaviour occurred in an authoritarian state, our own US State Department would condemn it’. In liberal, woke New York City, however, it’s seen as perfectly okay. The shamelessly political nature of this legal act can be seen in the social-media crowing over it, too. Every detail of the possible indictment is being relished by Trump-haters. Memes abound showing Trump in cuffs. CNN and others can barely contain their glee that Trump would have to be ‘processed and arraigned at the courthouse, which includes fingerprinting and mug shot’. That mug shot would be everyone’s Twitter pic by Wednesday morning.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/keep_nine_and_ban_courtpacking.html

The independence of the Judiciary — enshrined in the Constitution and essential to both the rule of law and democracy itself — has not been immune to attack.  Acting through Congress, the federal government has on seven occasions changed the number of justices on the Supreme Court, chiefly for political gain.  Such court-packing reflects badly on the American judicial system as a whole, since the perception of judicial independence or its absence permeates all levels of the courts.

To end the pernicious practice, a group of 15 former state attorneys general — eight Democrats and seven Republicans — got together in 2019 to found the Coalition to Preserve the Independence of the United States Supreme Court.  They proposed a constitutional amendment to permanently ban court-packing — the one-sentence Keep Nine Amendment — which says: “The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine Justices.”

It now has the support of over 200 members of Congress, 19 state legislatures, attorneys general, governors, and other government officials.  Voters support the amendment, 62% for versus 18% against.  Many justices, including Stephen Breyer and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, agreed that nine is “a very good number,” large enough to represent some diversity of views, small enough to allow the Court to be sufficiently deliberative.  Nine is also the number of justices the Court has had since 1869. 

In September 2020, U.S. rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) introduced the amendment in the House of Representatives as House Joint Resolution 53; he reintroduced it in 2021 (H.J.Res. 11) and again in January 2023 (H.J.Res. 8).  In October 2020, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced it in the Senate as Joint Resolution 76.  Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), too, proposed an amendment in 2021 that the Supreme Court bench shall constitute “not more than nine judges.”

According to Article V, there are two ways to amend the Constitution: by a two-thirds vote on a proposed congressional resolution or by a convention called by Congress in response to applications from two thirds of the state legislatures.  According to Paul Summers, former attorney general of Tennessee and current chair of the Keep Nine coalition, this is an opportunity for American leaders to come together despite their deep differences to protect the independence of one of the key institutions that protects our republic.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/ron_desantis_finally_speaks_up_about_the_probable_trump_indictment.html

Ron DeSantis finally had his say about the news, and he hit it out of the park.

In three minutes, DeSantis addressed the malevolence of Soros prosecutors, the legal principles at issue, and his own admirable record. He also threw in an attack against Trump that succeeded in triggering one of Trump’s famously self-harming counterattacks.

If you don’t want to watch the video, here are the key points DeSantis made:

He was limiting his comments because there are no concrete facts available.
Alvin Bragg is a “Soros-funded prosecutor” and, therefore, is “like other Soros-funded prosecutors—they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety.”
Even as Bragg is weaponizing his office, he’s making it impossible to put real criminals in jail, causing crime in Manhattan to go up, while “citizens become less safe.”
He reminded his audience that he is the only governor to date to have rid his state of a Soros-funded prosecutor.
He has no interest in getting involved in a Soros-prosecutor’s “circus,” which is to “virtue signal” to his base because he has to take care of his own state, which has real and immediate needs that are his responsibility.
And in a small, but vicious attack against Trump, DeSantis slipped in that “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. I just I can’t speak to that.”

Trump, the counterpuncher, did what he always did: He went on the attack against DeSantis. It was a foolish attack because it showed that DeSantis is living in his head, just as Trump has lived in leftist heads. It shows fear.

He began with a post implying that DeSantis has a secret gay love life:

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/20/donald-trump-regime-foe/

The funniest thing I have read in, well, at least the last several hours, comes from Manhattan’s George Soros-funded affirmative-action district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Responding to the uproar that greeted Donald Trump’s all-caps Truth Social warning that he would be “arrested” on Tuesday, Bragg sent ’round a memo to his staff informing them, and the world, that “This office is full of the finest public servants in the country.” 

The comedy didn’t end there, however. 

“I am committed to maintaining a safe work environment where everyone is able to continue to serve the public with the same diligence and professionalism [!] that make this institution so renowned. In the meantime, as with all of our investigations, we will continue to apply the law evenly and fairly . . .” 

What a card! And, yes, that’s my emphasis but his credulity-breaking bluster. 

“Evenly and fairly,” forsooth. Everyone knows that Alvin Bragg does not apply the law at all evenly or fairly. Favoring and disfavoring certain groups is what he is famous for doing. It’s his standard operating procedure. When it comes to your common or garden variety violent thug, especially those of a swarthy disposition, Bragg is the Angel of Mercy. 

Last year, Bragg reduced the majority of felony charges that were brought before him to misdemeanors while at the same time targeting people like the bodega employee who fought back to protect himself after being assaulted by one of those common or garden variety thugs. 

Will Donald Trump be “arrested” this week? I wouldn’t be surprised. Minions of the state at every level have been working overtime to neutralize Trump for years.