RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-smart-party-never-learns-democrats-self-reflection-elite-culture-media-universities-covid-inflation-election-excuses-11670592902?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class. The dispute is over suburban and minority voters. The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP. Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.

That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves. Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism. Which on its face makes sense. If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb. Who needs self-reflection?

We can start to understand the Democrats’ predicament by ridding ourselves of a set of metaphors. For a decade or more, we’ve been told that left and right live in “silos” or “bubbles” or “echo chambers” or “information cocoons.” The left watch MSNBC and read the New York Times, and the right watch Fox News and listen to talk radio.

Exacerbating this state of affairs, we’re told, are social-media platforms whose algorithms give politically attuned users only content they’re likely to agree with. Facile claims to the contrary, Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms don’t have this effect. A 2019 study, “Are Filter Bubbles Real?” by Axel Bruns of Queensland University Technology in Australia surveys a wide array of evidence and finds that social-media users on all sides get plenty of exposure to content with which they disagree. “Ironically,” Mr. Bruns writes in an aside, “echo chamber and filter bubble concepts may have become so popular with some journalists, media critics, and politicians because members of these professional classes are genuinely more likely to inhabit an information cocoon of sorts.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/09/wholesale-prices-rose-0point3percent-in-november-more-than-expected-despite-hopes-that-inflation-is-cooling.html

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago.
A 38% surge in wholesale vegetable prices helped push the food index up by 3.3%, offsetting an identical 3.3% decline in energy costs.

Wholesale prices rose more than expected in November as food prices surged, dampening hopes that inflation could be headed lower, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago, which was the slowest 12-month pace since May 2021. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 0.2% gain.

Excluding food and energy, core PPI was up 0.4%, also against a 0.2% estimate. Core PPI was up 6.2% from a year ago, compared with 6.6% in October.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kyrsten-sinema-leaves-democratic-party-registers-as-independent-cuts-fragile-margin-in-us-senate/ar-AA155dHr

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said Friday she is leaving the Democratic Party and will formally become an independent in a move that more fully places her at the center of a narrowly divided chamber.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” she wrote.

Sinema maintained she doesn’t plan to change her voting habits: often aligning with Democrats but backing Republicans on certain issues. And she won’t dispense with the legislative filibuster that has led many Democrats to call for her to face a primary challenge in 2024.

Sinema’s move will jar Democrats who had hoped Sen. Raphael Warnock’s runoff victory in Georgia on Tuesday would provide the party a measure of breathing room on difficult votes that often hinged on Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

“We’ve seen in recent years that the parties have pulled folks to the political edges,” Sinema said during a 45-minute interview with The Republic. “There’s an increasing demand that you kind of fit in with one political orthodoxy or the other. … I’ve never fit that.”

https://www.city-journal.org/georgia-senate-race-demolishes-voter-suppression-myth

“The voter suppression we’re seeing in Georgia and across the country is Jim Crow in new clothes,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia wrote on Facebook last year while campaigning for reelection. Such rhetoric has become commonplace on the political left, even while it has never been more divorced from reality.

In January, President Biden traveled to Atlanta and used similarly charged language to describe voting rules supported by Republican lawmakers in Georgia and other states. “Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion,” Biden said. “It’s no longer about who gets to vote. It’s about making it harder to vote.” Vice President Kamala Harris added that she would “not stop fighting against the anti-voter legislation that Republican legislatures continue to push at the state level.” Anti-voter legislation?

Democrats insist that Republicans have made it harder to cast a ballot by passing voter ID laws, limiting the timeframe for early voting, and reverting to pre-Covid voting protocols now that the pandemic has subsided. But if that’s true, why has voter participation been rising, including among the minority groups that Democrats claim are being targeted for disenfranchisement?

Warnock defeated his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, in a runoff election on Tuesday that saw voter turnout exceed what it was on Election Day last month. It “surpassed expectations of election officials, who expected fewer voters to show up for the second round of voting,” reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Instead, turnout “increased by 200,000 voters from the 1.4 million people who cast ballots in Nov. 8 in the general election.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-twitter-files-are-damning-to-government-and-the-media/

There are two pieces of deeply disturbing news to emerge from the “Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk. The first is that Twitter, under its old management, was not the open, politically neutral platform it pretended to be. Journalist Bari Weiss has shown that Twitter had secret “blacklists” and related methods specifically designed to limit the reach of conservative commentators. When Twitter’s old management denied that bias, as it did repeatedly, it was lying.

Second, we are learning that Twitter worked closely with like-minded government bureaucrats to squelch legitimate news, information, and discussion. They did so to protect favored candidates (Democrats) and political positions (progressive). We will undoubtedly learn that Facebook, Google and other media giants had similar ties to Washington. We certainly need to know.

The government’s role here is damning. Its primary job under the First Amendment is to protect free speech, not to kill it. It botched that vital job, and it did so deliberately to increase its own control over private speech in public fora and, apparently, to promote certain political views.

The only good news here is that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is exposing the old management’s efforts to suppress speech and promote political bias on its platform. To expose those malign efforts, he ordered some of Twitter’s internal documents be given to two journalists: Matt Taibbi (who quickly published some of his findings as tweets) and Bari Weiss (who is beginning to publish some findings and promises to publish a longer analysis).