RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2022/12/06/brute-physical-facts-and-social-construction/

According to the former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, and it’s not even a close call. “If you ask, ‘who’s the most likely to take this Republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they are teaching our kids,” he told Semafor in a recent interview. This statement is startling given that Pompeo is a graduate of Harvard Law and West Point, until you realize that he is probably positioning himself for a 2024 Republican presidential run, where the primary electability criterion is one’s stand on certain cultural issues.

Pompeo and other Republican hopefuls are addressing the Republican base, like my friends and neighbors in Florida. While some of us may struggle to understand their hyperbolic invective, my MAGA neighbors understand it, and it resonates with their own concerns. They have impassioned and unalterable beliefs about many social/cultural issues such as gender, race, territoriality, abortion, and equality. They are certain that “men are men and women are women”; that race is a real phenomenon; that equality is not inevitable; that life begins at conception, and that America’s borders must be defended from foreigners.

These beliefs are intuitively plausible, often embedded in instinctual biases, and culturally reinforced. They not only form the bedrock of their adherents’ own social order, they are also attributed to the Founding Fathers and implicated in the success of Pax Americana. To question these beliefs and cultural norms is to threaten America and their way of life. In this context—and in the absence of a credible external threat—it is not surprising that the greatest threat to the Republic is perceived to be the university-educated “liberal progressives” who question and disavow these traditional norms and try to replace them with their own.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/07/civil-disobedience-starts-here/

As COVID-19 cases increase, the Los Angeles County public health director is threatening – yes, that’s the right word – another indoor mask mandate. It’s a hob-nailed boot on the neck. Angelenos need to resist, for themselves and the rest of the country.

“As COVID cases and other viruses continue to rise, the Southland is inching closer to a mask mandate,” the Los Angeles CBS affiliate reported Sunday. Barbara Ferrer, the county director of public health, who is not a physician, not a nurse, not even a paper shuffler at a doctor’s office, but a social welfarist, said last week that “masking” is one of several “commonsense mitigation strategies” that “remains a very sensible approach.”

Don’t mistake mask mandates as harmless cases of officials acting in an abundance of caution or just covering their backsides, as government always does. Mask mandates are open displays of outright meanness, a manifestation of authoritarian urges to control others. There is no data, no reputable research that tells us mask mandates works.

In fact, the data tells the opposite. Yet officials such as Ferrer and the Sacramento schools chamberlains are insisting that masks must go back on. It’s no coincidence that the madness is starting in a state where personal freedoms are routinely tread upon as if they’re gifts that can be handed down by the government rather than God-given.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-clarification-from-the-capitol-riot-committee-11670362454?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D., Miss.), who defied the U.S. Constitution in 2005 by seeking to block certification of the re-election of President George W. Bush, is back in the news. No, Mr. Thompson is not denying legitimate election results again. But his Tuesday comments appear to represent yet another affront to constitutional governance.

Luke Broadwater reports for the New York Times:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department based on its inquiry, the panel’s chairman said on Tuesday, but has made no decision on who it will recommend charging or what offenses it will cite.
Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the Democratic chairman of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill that the panel had agreed to take the step and would meet later Tuesday to discuss the specifics. But within moments, he and his staff rushed to clarify his statement, reflecting a debate that is still underway within the panel about whether to call for charges against former President Donald J. Trump and some of his top allies.