RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/institutional-hostage-crisis

American institutions are in the midst of a hostage crisis. But the new hostage-takers don’t use tape, wire, or cuffs. Instead, they wield the even more powerful restraints of guilt, shame, and identity, which have allowed a small minority of left-wing activists to establish their ideology—notably, critical race theory—at the highest levels of institutional life.

For the past two years, I have explored the dynamics of ideological capture in a series of articles for City Journal that document the rise of critical race theory and coercive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs in America’s schools, corporations, and government agencies. Now, I’m observing the same phenomenon from the inside, as a participant in Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s recently announced initiative to recapture the Sunshine State’s smallest public university: New College of Florida.

Since signing my oath as one of the newly appointed trustees, I have spent many hours in communication with administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. Many of these people have whispered to me about the “culture problem” at New College. They have described something resembling a hostage situation on campus, in which left-wing activist students have mobilized a grievance narrative and exploited the DEI-style bureaucracy in order to isolate, shame, intimidate, and expel anyone who dissents from the politics of social justice.

As an institution, New College has long known about the problem. A consulting firm hired by the previous university president pointed out that the campus had become an “echo chamber,” with left-wing students creating a hostile political atmosphere and using the college’s online forum to launch polemics against conservative and religious students.

And yet, little has been done. The adults have effectively ceded authority to the most aggressive, intolerant, and ideological members of the community, who wield the language of “trauma” and “diversity” in pursuit of a suffocating left-wing orthodoxy, which they use to justify a perpetual campaign to silence and exclude anyone on the wrong political end of the intersectional hierarchy.

The hostage dynamic is notable, and perhaps even more powerful, because it is unspoken. All of the New College employees with whom I have spoken acknowledge the “culture problem” in private—but none has been willing to raise the issue in public. They are afraid.

https://www.city-journal.org/predators-paradise

On a Saturday night in South Los Angeles, cars pull up and idle along the side streets of Figueroa, high beams ablaze, so that the drivers can get a good look at “the girls.” The women stand three astride in the middle of the street, in pasties and G-string bikinis under fishnet dresses. Draped over their shoulders are unzipped coats; even in temperate L.A., the night’s January chill is biting. In seven-inch Lucite heels, they teeter toward the driver of each car the way you might walk barefoot across gravel. Less than a block away, their pimps keep company on a sidewalk corner, in hoodies and loose jeans, watching their quarry, awaiting the payout. Absent is the one thing that might typically break up the party: a police car.

In early January, I joined Erin Wilson and Stephany Powell on a tour of “the track” on Figueroa, one of California’s busiest prostitution areas. For decades, Wilson, who volunteers for the anti-trafficking organization Journey Out, and her mother, Powell, have worked to combat human trafficking in Los Angeles and to help women and child victims escape this brutal world.

In our postfeminist era, prostitution is so often idealized—“sex work is work”—that it’s easy to overlook the gruesome reality of what it means to have a pimp, an arrangement closer to slavery than to any legitimate job. “The horror stories I could tell you about [prostitutes] being beaten and being choked and being burned and being gang raped,” said Vanessa Russell of Love Never Fails, an anti-trafficking nonprofit based near Oakland. “And the PTSD and all the mental health, the trauma bonding, the psychotic breaks. Maybe you’re somebody who likes to have sex more than once a day. But nine to 21 times with different guys, some that are like 90 years old that smell?”

“Nine to 21 times over what period?” I ask.

“One day,” she said. “That’s healthy living? I don’t think so. The body is not even made for that. Like the pelvic inflammatory disease that you see.” She ticks off the ways a woman’s body is subjected to microbial assault: the STDs, yeast infections, and UTIs that are frequent among the women she sees. Their hospital records prove, she says, that the human body is “not meant to have that much activity going on. And then the girls that are out there—where they’re being sold—they don’t even get to take showers in between.”

http://Don’t be fooled into thinking this is the first time Biden has sacrificed U.S. national security to protect his personal interests.

Long before classified and potentially compromising documents were discovered in President Joe Biden’s “think tank” office and Wilmington home and garage, the Democrat’s actions posed a threat to U.S. national security.

The discovery of even more top secret documents dating back to Biden’s time as vice president and senator sparked widespread concerns that the current president hid material that put U.S. national security at risk, potentially for decades.

Republicans worried — and even partisan hacks such as Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff conceded — that Biden’s harboring of classified documents in high-traffic, unsecured areas could have put Americans or the U.S. government at risk.

“Is it possible that national security was jeopardized here as many, including you, raised that possibility with the Mar-a-Lago documents?” ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked.

“I don’t think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts,” the disgraced former chair of the House Intelligence Committee replied.

It seems logical to investigate Biden’s recent scandal to ensure he didn’t compromise any sensitive material. But the truth is, he opened up the U.S. to a myriad of national security crises, abuses, and disasters long before news broke of his document scandal.

Since taking office, Biden, who is charged with ensuring the national security of the U.S., has put Americans and their security at risk countless times.

By openly pursuing a policy of escalation in the U.S.-funded proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Biden and his administration have significantly increased the threat of nuclear war. A conflict that only ends on Ukraine’s terms and might result in a radioactive third world war compromises Americans’ safety and tax dollars.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/us-senate-democrats-refuse-to-meet-with-right-wing-members-of-netanyahu-government/

According to the Times of Israel, a delegation of Senate US Democrats arrived in Israel on January 17, and asked not to meet with MK Ministers Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir or any members of their Otzma Yehudit party. The request was made by the office of Democrat Senator Jacky Rosen, to whom Haaretz refers as “pro-Israel.“ Yet in November 2021, Rosen visited the repressive, Muslim Brotherhood-supporting regime of Qatar. She had no problems meeting with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani on her visit, despite the fact that he collaborated with the Chief of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, as recently as 2021. Haniyeh thanked Al Thani “for his continuous support for Palestine and the Palestinian people.” Al Thani has also stressed at the UN that Israel must “end its occupation,” and advocated for full solidarity “with the brotherly Palestinian people in their aspiration to achieve justice.” Yet the cowardly Jacky Rosen met with Al Thani while refusing even to dialogue with members of the Otzma Yehudit party within the Netanyahu coalition.

Otzma Yehudit means Jewish strength or Jewish power. The party platform “calls for the annexation of the West Bank, and for complete Israeli rule between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” This platform is in direct opposition to the Palestinian goal of obliterating Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, as often chanted in “free Palestine”rallies. After the manifest failure of the arrangements set forth in the Oslo Accords, the Otzma Yehudit platform should be applauded, not condemned by anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist and defend itself from those who would destroy it.

Far too many media outlets continue to reference the Otzma Yehudit as “far right” and “extreme” instead of simply by its name, thus editorializing on every news story. Most of these same media outlets did not refer to the Ra’am Party, a member of Israel’s last governing coalition, as an “extremist party,” despite its support for releasing Palestinian jihadi prisoners.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/24/chase-bank-closes-multiple-nyc-atms-early-due-to-crime-wave/

With crime on the rise in New York City, Chase Bank has announced that it will be shutting down numerous ATMs throughout the city earlier than usual.

CNN reports that the ATMs in question, which previously operated 24/7, will now close between 5 and 6 PM, in alignment with the hours when actual banks usually close on weekdays. A JPMorgan Chase spokesman added that some ATMs will close as late as 10 PM.

The bank said that the new policy will only affect a “small number” of machines throughout the city, but did not specify which locations or how many. The company cited “rising crime and vagrancy” as a primary motivation for the decision.

“We review our ATM hours on a case-by-case basis,” Chase said in a statement, “and for a variety of reasons may decide to temporarily close some overnight.”

At a press conference on Monday, Mayor Eric Adams (D-N.Y.) reacted to Chase’s decision by saying that “people don’t want to walk into the ATM and see someone urinating” or see someone screaming and yelling.”

“And that is what I’m saying I need to stop, because I don’t want my ATMs closing down. I don’t want people leaving our city. We have to create an environment that people are safe and feel safe.”

“Ensuring the safety and security of customers and employees has always been a top priority of the banking industry,” said the New York Bankers Association in its own statement. “As issues arise, NYBA and our members evaluate possible trends with the intention of working with banks, law enforcement and the local community toward solutions.”

New York City has been the epicenter of a rising crime wave that can be seen all across the country since the violent race riots in 2020. Overall crime in the nation’s largest city increased by 23.5 percent in 2022.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/divisive-and-diverse-you-cant-have-one-without-the-other/

“Diversity” and “Divisiveness” are perhaps our most important cant-words in both meanings of the word: “sanctimonious and hypocritical talk,” and “language peculiar to a specified group or profession and regarded with disparagement,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. That certainly fits the political and media industries, which trade in duplicitous language that distorts the meanings of words in order to construct narratives that serve their ideological preferences and gain leverage over their political rivals.

For the “woke” Left, there are few goods greater than “diversity,” and not many worse crimes than being “divisive,” an offense limited to Republicans. But the abuse of these words reflects a misunderstanding of our political order, which is founded on the assumption that the young country’s complex diversity meant that diverse “passions and interests,” and a corruptible human nature would generate divisive factional struggles for power, the necessary corollary to genuine diversity.

Moreover, the “diversity” that progressives trade in is not real diversity, which comprises much more than superficial appearance. The American colonies were very diverse in ethnicities, religions, dialects, languages, folkways, cultures, and mores, the pluribus from which the American unum was comprised.

But this genuine diversity, which still characterizes the United States, is not what our “woke” institutions and ideologies mean by diversity. As David E. Bernstein writes in Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America,

“Modern America’s racial and ethnic classifications do not reflect biology, genetics, or any other biological source. Classifications such as Hispanic, Asian American, and white combine extremely internally diverse groups in terms of appearance, culture, religion, and more under a single, arbitrary heading. The government developed its classification scheme via a combination  of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance.”

The purpose of these classifications was to determine which political clients would be eligible for set-asides in government contracts and later, admissions to colleges, universities, and professional schools. This expansion came by dint of the 1978 Bakke decision, which papered over affirmative action programs’ blatant violations of the Civil Rights Act by creating “diversity” as a “compelling state interest” that justified ignoring the illegality of racial discrimination in the Civil Rights act. In the following decades, nobody, including subsequent Supreme Court decisions, has been able to provide a believable definition of “diversity,” or any empirical evidence of its contribution to improving desired educational outcomes or inter-ethnic relations. Yet this simplistic, vague, concept has become part of federal law and enjoys its enforcement powers.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/01/24/insanity-wrap-we-need-to-talk-about-the-real-insurrection-n1664443

There’s an actual insurrection going on and the January 6-obsessed left won’t talk about it. That’s the big crazy on today’s Insanity Wrap — an entire week’s worth of lefty nuttiness wrapped up in one easy-to-swallow medicated news capsule.

The last time Atlanta (and the rest of Georgia) tried to leave the Union, the Army eventually marched in and burned the place down. But now that Atlanta has been invaded by secessionist Yankees (more on that in a sec), we’re not supposed to talk about it.

Because of white supremacy and January 6 or something.

PJ Media’s own Victoria Taft wrote decisively on Monday for our VIP subscribers about the January 6 insurrection that wasn’t, but what about the very real Atlanta insurrection?

This has been going on for months, with little note from the mainstream media, but communist Antifa members — nearly all from other states — converged on Atlanta to form an “autonomous zone.” They reject federal, state, and local authority.

“You are now leaving the USA,” says a sign leading into the Atlanta zone.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/25/elected-officials-no-longer-reflect-views-values-of-average-voters-ii-tipp-poll/

Washington, you have a problem, and elected officials should take note: Regardless of party affiliation, those who elected you no longer have faith in the idea that you actually represent them, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

It’s no surprise that many voters are turned off by the political class these days. As repeated polls show, voters from both parties agree that the results of recent years from Washington have been less than stellar. And the voters feel Washington is divorced from their everyday concerns.

In the most recent online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken Jan. 4-6 from 1,107 registered voters across the country, we asked voters two questions about their elected officials in Washington.

In the first we asked simply: “In general, do you believe that elected officials in Washington represent MOSTLY the views and values of … ” with the choices being “their constituents,” “Big Donors,” or “not sure.”

The answer was overwhelming and doesn’t bode well for official Washington. Two-thirds (66%) said elected officials represent mostly the views and values of their big donors, not average Americans. Just 16% said they felt their elected officials represented their constituents. Another 18% said they weren’t sure.

When it comes to the politics of those who took the poll, which has a margin of error of +/-3.0 percentage points, this was one of the most uniform responses in I&I/TIPP Poll history.

Among Democrats, 61% said “Big donors,” compared to 68% of Republicans and 73% of independents. “Constituents” garnered 20% of Democrats, 16% of Republicans and just 9% of independents.