RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/attacking-reparations-from-the-left/

The push for reparations may be upon us once again. While outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voted last year for a bill that would create a commission to study the issue, incoming Democrat House leader Hakeem Jeffries is far more energized about it, being one of the bill’s earliest supporters and having testified at a related congressional hearing that white reconciliation has “a long way to go” and that reparations will help the country “march[] to a more perfect union.”

Meanwhile, according to the press release of a reparations symposium held a couple weeks back—an insiders’ event attended by the bill’s lead sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee as well as CNN Legal Analyst Areva Martin, among 60 others—there is a “tremendous number of local reparations initiatives that are springing up nationally.” Topping the day of talks was likely last week’s recommendation from California’s reparations task force to pay out to black slave descendants in the state a total of $569 billion or $223,200 apiece. Following that news, New York Democrats announced they will be pushing for something similar.

My, has the left changed. According to the “old school” World Socialist Website (WSW), reparations for black slavery has the odor of a “financial” and “political scam”; one utilized by the uber-cynical Democratic Party to divide the working class in order to win corporate support and electoral gain. While hard socialists, WSW are pre-woke leftists, and their critiques of the performative, racial politics of today’s Democrats is about as biting as anything conservatives can produce. They do deserve attention.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-mandate-for-2023-and-118th-u-s-congress/

The pre-Christmas vote by the U.S. House and Senate to pass the $1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill at a time when America’s balance sheet is in its worst condition ever is a sign post that financial collapse cannot be far away. Our nation is now technically bankrupt with liabilities significantly exceeding assets. And it gets worse every year with national debt now growing on a long-term annual basis at 8% or more, while assets (GDP) are growing on average at only 2.5 to 3% annually. Politically, our federal government is operating at ever new levels of dysfunction and corruption with diminishing accountability to the Constitution in either the spirit or the letter of the law.

Consider: the widespread failure of elected officials to uphold their oath of office; the political weaponization of the Justice Department and the FBI; the unequal two-tiered practice of justice and law enforcement; the flood of illegal immigrants and criminal enterprises into the United States as a direct result of willful federal government policy; and the violation of the First Amendment by federal agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, DHS, the CDC and DOD, who have engaged in covert operations against American citizens that include media manipulation and psy-ops.

With a new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives it is time for action and results.

There are two priorities for the new Congress. First, it needs to write and pass bills that fix the biggest problems—like crime and the southern border—that will improve the lives of all Americans. Second, Congress needs to hold public hearings for discovery of causes of our nation’s dysfunction and corruption. The House of Representatives is well suited for this because of the breadth of its committee structure and because it holds the purse strings that can withhold funding for government agencies who fail to be transparent and cooperate. Simultaneous and separate hearings on different areas of failure and corruption, can produce findings, deliver policy solutions and personnel recommendations and prosecutions well before the 2024 election.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/03/the-war-on-trucks-trucking-and-truckers-and-other-modern-conveniences/

In the same way our “superiors” think that their food comes from the grocery store rather than a farm or ranch, they must believe that those items magically appear on the shelves. Otherwise, why would the ruling class, made up of and zealously backed by elites, go to war against trucks?

Just before Christmas, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that it calls a “key step toward accelerating zero-emissions future,” and part of “​​the historic Clean Truck Plan, which is moving America’s highly polluting heavy-duty trucking fleet towards low-carbon and electric technologies.”

Enforcement of course will mean fewer trucks on the road. For many drivers, the cost of working under the new regime will be too high.

“Truckers and manufacturers warn that the rule is too stringent and costly, and that compliance could send higher prices through the economy that is already suffering from high energy costs and high inflation,” says the Institute for Energy Research.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association warns that “if small business truckers can’t afford the new, compliant trucks,” they will keep their older, less-efficient trucks, or simply “leave the industry entirely.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/01/its-time-to-give-the-diversitycrats-their-marching-orders/

Have we reached peak woke – or will the cult of intersectionality grow even bigger in 2023?

If you think of the woke movement as fundamentally religious in nature, one way of answering that question is to see what the duration was of comparable outbreaks of religious fervour in our recent history. According to Wikipedia, there have been four ‘Great Awakenings’ in the past 300 years, the first lasting about 25 years, the second and third 50 or more, and the fourth in the 1960s and 1970s lasting about 20.

Most people trace the origins of the current ‘Great Awokening’ to roughly around 2013, meaning we’ll be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. One reason for thinking it might be peaking is that its growth has been accelerated by social media and – presumably – its decline will be, too. Twitter, in particular, has been one of the chief platforms for promoting woke ideology, as well as for punishing those who dissent from it, and that is bound to change now that Rocket Man Elon Musk is in charge.

The woke cult’s appeal is partly rooted in the idea that it is of a piece with the Zeitgeist, that the woke are ‘on the right side of history’, and that those resisting it will inevitably end up looking foolish and out of date.

Fortunately, there were signs in 2022 that being woke is no longer as ‘on trend’ as it was, and that could be a serious blow to its authority. Take, for instance, the fact that the unashamedly patriotic Top Gun: Maverick was the highest-grossing film of the year, beating out an endless stream of woke offerings. Once the victory of the social-justice warriors ceases to look historically inevitable, many of the less committed will fall by the wayside.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/12/acknowledge-the-good-limit-the-damage/

Excerpts:

The Calvinist urge to virtue-signal membership in the elect can make life nigh-unliveable for the independent thinker. Let me offer a quote:

In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves … [people] do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair-play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine?

That was John Stuart Mill, writing in 1859, at the height of a previous wave of Calvinist revival remembered as the Great Awakening. Our present-day Great Awokening has nothing on that era, except perhaps an even greater speed of communication. The Big Three causes in the 1850s were the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and temperance. And the Calvinists of the Great Awakening did pretty well. I won’t preach temperance to the members of the Union, University & Schools Club, but two out of three ain’t bad. Like statue-tumblers today, the social Calvinists of the Great Awakening pursued their causes with a religious fervour, and like statue-tumblers today, they wanted someone else to foot the bill. The abolitionists wanted slave-owners to bear the costs of the unravelling of the slave economy; in the UK they failed, while in the US they succeeded. The suffragists wanted women to get the vote while the men went to war (and it might be remembered that, from ancient times, the prerogative of voting was tied to bearing mortal responsibility for the actions voted). The prohibitionists wanted an instantaneous end to alcohol, without making any provisions for the people whose businesses and jobs would be lost through its prohibition; it was perhaps this failure to plan any transition that doomed America’s fourteen-year experiment with temperance.

Abolition, suffrage, temperance, acknowledgment of country, LGBTQIA+ rights, climate catastrophism—obviously, these are not to be found in the theology of John Calvin. They are our society’s virtue signals; our society’s indications of membership in the elect, not his. They are the tenets of our specifically Anglo-American liberal religion.