RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2024-year-dei-climate-craziness-open-border-policies-lose-mojo

Welcome to 2024 – the year that Americans will reject the woke and dysfunctional policies of the progressive left. The year in which the pendulum, thank heavens, will continue to swing towards common sense and sanity.

How do we know? Because Joe Biden’s approval ratings are in the gutter and EVs are piling up on dealer lots. Because Taylor Swift breaks every conceivable record performing family-friendly shows while Disney’s woke confections fail to find an audience. Because Claudine Gay is forced to resign from Harvard and the country views the Democratic Party more negatively than at any time during the past three decades. 

It’s a start. The silent majority has not gone away; it has simply been asleep. 

Reflecting an overdue awakening, some of the most offensive assaults on our nation’s values and protections are being tossed overboard. DEI hiring is down and companies are abandoning race-based programs. 

Last year, DEI-related job posts dropped 44% as companies backed off their over-the-top response to the murder of George Floyd and demands from Black Lives Matter protesters. Tech companies like Google and Meta, vanguards of social activism, drastically cut DEI programs and laid off employees engaged in Black employee resource groups, according to CNBC.  Charges that DEI programs promoted illegal racial discrimination and shareholder blowback took a toll. 

President Biden, a big promoter of DEI, is defending the indefensible and possibly illegal. He recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post recalling the teachings of Martin Luther King, but equality-embracing King would be appalled – as are millions of Americans — by the racist policies of the Biden White House. The policies that Biden brags about are probably unconstitutional, like awarding “a record $69.9 billion in federal contracts to small, disadvantaged businesses in fiscal 2022,” meaning mostly Black-owned. Dr. King advocated equal opportunity and racial blindness, not stacking the deck in a cynical play for votes.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/its-time-to-make-some-examples/

As anti-Israel protests grow menacingly violent, Biden and his party can separate themselves from the extremists or face the consequences of their inaction.

It’s easier to itemize the conditions that aren’t contributing to a general sense of apprehension among American voters than to list the many sources of our national malaise.

Americans are beset by a “crisis of confidence” in their governing institutions. Economic anxiety abounds. Crises overseas and on the country’s southern border have made geopolitics into a kitchen-table issue in American households. And millions of Americans are increasingly convinced that the country is on the precipice of an outbreak of political violence. Recent events suggest those fears are amply justified. A multiweek campaign of unabated criminal unrest prosecuted by opponents of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas could be nearing a deadly crescendo.

Anti-Israel demonstrators mounted a coordinated effort to block access to two of America’s busiest transportation hubs over the Christmas holiday: New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport. The attempt to tie up airport traffic is already responsible for violent interactions between protesters and the targets of their harassment. Over the weekend, demonstrators temporarily shuttered JFK’s Terminal 4 as videos taken from the scene showed them releasing balloons near the airport runways — an exercise designed to ground commercial aircraft by imperiling travelers’ lives.

When the protests against the exercise of Israel’s right to its own defense aren’t menacingly violent, they’re a nuisance designed to irritate as many Americans as possible. The protesters are as likely to be found gumming up the works of holiday celebrations — ruining parades, terrorizing tourists, and generally ensuring that “joy is canceled” for most Americans — as besieging the Democratic Party’s political headquarters or even killing their opponents.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/2024_do_we_hit_the_iceberg_or_finally_change_course.html

It is difficult for any American who loves this country to watch its political, economic, and military “leaders” destroy it.  Part of the political theater propping up the illusion of electoral choice in this Kabuki dance that the State-controlled press calls “democracy” is the lie that officeholders from different parties are at each other’s throats.  More Americans than ever finally see through this convenient fiction and understand that a single Uniparty acts as a guild of political thespians who are the face of a permanently entrenched national security Deep State that runs the show.  

Furthermore, more Americans than ever finally recognize that the United States is not a country that supports free markets but rather a central bank-directed financial cartel that regulates labor, commodities, and transactions so stringently that there is nothing outside of the government’s (or Wall Street’s) economic control.  Taxing Americans’ labor, forcing them to use an inflation-driven paper currency, and encumbering their ownership of real property are not policies for encouraging middle class prosperity; they are chains meant to create debt-anchored, government-dependent slaves.

For many decades, it seemed as if a vanguard of American communists were pushing these destructive policies and operating as a kind of fifth column from within an otherwise pro-America governing class.  Whether that fifth column was always much larger than it appeared or whether it simply succeeded, through strategic patience, in conquering America’s political and economic institutions and converting them to its advantage, there is no question that America’s internal demolition is now an all-of-government operation.

You do not hand a private central bank the power to print dollar bills, unless you expect those dollars to become untethered from any gold standard.  You do not print and spend money without budgetary constraints, unless you never intend to pay down those debts.  You do not engage in such a monetary Ponzi scheme that artificially raises the prices of stocks and real properties while depreciating the common person’s meager savings, unless you plan on precipitating the mother of all economic crashes in the future.  You do not start seeding the idea of a new central bank digital currency, unless you intend to take advantage of that economic crash and transition the whole population onto a mandatory system of government welfare.  

https://johnhabelesmd.substack.com/p/an-essay-on-scientist?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=413102&post_id=140309584&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8t06w&utm_medium=email

One of the greatest challenges each society faces is deciding what constitutes “truth.” Whoever holds that power wields enormous influence and steers the direction of the society for better or for worse.

For centuries, “truth” was delegated to the ruling institutions of the time, and hence truth was simply the narrative which conformed to their interests. Then, during the enlightenment period a new idea emerged—that truth could be determined empirically through experimentation and data.

This in turn gave birth to the scientific revolution, and while not perfect (as vested interests would still try to make their “narrative” be truth irrespective of what the scientific data showed), scientific inquiry began shaping the direction of Western Culture, and in a rocky fashion gradually moved society forward, giving us many of the benefits we take for granted today.

Sadly however, the tendency of ruling interests to want to monopolize the truth never went away and we’ve watched a curious phenomenon emerge where science, riding on the social credit earned by the success of its revolutionary discoveries, has gradually transformed into something not that different from a state religion. Given that science was originally meant to be a way to move beyond truth being monopolized by the dogmatic institutions which ran society, it is quite tragic that science has become one as well.

As a result, science has more and more become the practice of “trusting scientific experts” and not being allowed to question their interpretations of the data—or even see it. This is very different from what science was originally intended to be—the collective endeavor of scientists around the world to put forth ideas and have the ones that stand up to scrutiny become the generally accepted standard.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/education/claudine-gay-personal-attacks-racial-animus-harvard

Claudine Gay, the embattled now-former president of Harvard University, blamed “personal attacks” and “racial animus” in her resignation letter to the university community.

Gay resigned her position Tuesday after facing mounting accusations of plagiarism, but in her resignation letter, she turned the focus to race in a move critics highlighted as an example of her commitment to controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology.

“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Gay, whose tenure atop the university is now the shortest in Harvard history, wrote in her letter.

Gay, who saw a last-ditch effort from former President Barack Obama to save her job, added that the future of Harvard will require a commitment to “combat bias and hate in all its forms” and to “create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion.”

“When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education,” she concluded.

Calls for Gay’s resignation have been growing as more allegations of plagiarism in her past published works have surfaced. The latest plagiarism claims emerged Monday in a report from the Washington Free Beacon, bringing the total number of allegations close to 50.

Gay was also one of several university presidents accused of allowing antisemitism on campus following their recent congressional testimonies, during which Gay and others refused to specify whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate their universities’ codes of conduct.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/01/02/aclu-nra-supreme-court-free-speech-case/72047487007/

Biden administration tries to censor free speech

Under the Biden administration, there has been a consistent attack on free speech through the censorship and blacklisting of opposing groups. Even facts are now deemed dangerous “malinformation,” if used in a way that the administration deems misleading or harmful. 

For example, according to an investigation by the Washington Examiner, the federal government helped to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which discourages advertisers from supporting sites accused of promoting disinformation.

All 10 of the sites that GDI claimed were the riskiest are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. GDI warned advertisers that they were accepting “reputational and brand risk” by “financially supporting disinformation online.”

The “risky” sites included Reason, a libertarian-oriented source of news and commentary about the government. Conversely, HuffPost, a far left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation. (GDI included USA TODAY in this group.)

A triumvirate of government, corporate and academic institutions are involved in efforts to control free speech by throttling the funding for its exercise. If you want to be heard in a large context, you either stay within the lines set by these groups or face pariah status. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/2024-freedom-or-tyranny/

Ever since consensual governments were invented in Greece 2700 years ago, one question has been repeatedly debated: Are citizens, no matter their birth, wealth, or brains, capable of managing the political community? Or must we rely on “managerial elites,” whether aristocrats, plutocrats, or technocrats, to control collective power and determined the actions and purposes of the state?

But this question has always had a corollary one: Freedom or Tyranny?

This debate has been going on since ancient Athens, and ultimately influenced the creation of the  United States. The Founders created the unprecedented structure of our Constitutional order to avoid the various excesses of the old regimes, especially those ruled by elites, which typically degenerated into tyrannies. The ultimate goal of the Founders was to avoid both the tyranny of the elite few, and the tyranny of the volatile many, both of which are toxic for freedom.

The rise of the leviathan federal government and its technocratic agencies, and its expansion under Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and subsequent presidents from both parties, has now under Joe Biden’s Potemkin Administration reached a level of intrusive power that if left unchecked much longer, will end up in full-blown tyranny.

On November 5, 2024, we the people will have a chance to impose a reckoning on the Biden regime that, in addition to egregious policy failures both at home and abroad, has brought us dangerously close to tyranny.

The struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to the question of authority, or as Lewis Carroll’s Humpy Dumpty put it, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Hence all aspiring tyrannies seek to aggrandize authority and neutralize or demonize alternative sources. That’s why the progressives at the turn of the 20th century started targeting the Constitution, our supreme political authority.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/31/the-pitfalls-of-benevolence-unpacking-the-toxic-mix-of-universal-good-intentions-and-political-correctness-in-the-new-year/

New Year’s is traditionally a time for reassessment and meditation. Wise sayings and saws are dredged up for reconsideration even as the chorus is getting ready to reprise “Auld Lang Syne.” It is easy to dismiss such scraps of wisdom, especially as they tend to come glazed with an unpalatable frosting of sentimentality, not to mention familiarity.

But it is important to note that many clichés are clichés precisely because they articulate important truths.  Consider, for example, the admonition, which you probably first heard from your mother or father, that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Why should that be the case? Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I believe a large part of the answer involves the metabolism of benevolence.

Benevolence is a curious creature. Its operation tends to be more beneficent the more specific it is. This was a point that James Fitzjames Stephen, the great nineteenth-century critic of John Stuart Mill, made in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. “The man who works from himself outwards,” Stephen wrote,

“whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things much more happiness to others… than a moral Don Quixote who is always liable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors. On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love of the human race—that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind—is an unaccountable person . . . who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.”

“A moral Don Quixote”: that is a line worth remembering. Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole as its object, with rigid moralism. It is a toxic, misery-producing brew.

The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/02/americans-overwhelmingly-frustrated-angry-with-federal-government-ii-tipp-poll/

As nearly all parts of the political spectrum agree, average Americans are extremely unhappy these days. The latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows that a hefty majority sees the federal government’s recent performance as the cause of their disgruntlement.

With news stories regularly highlighting widespread anger among voters, we asked the following question for our December national online poll, taken from Nov. 29-Dec. 1 by 1,464 adult registered voters: “Which of the following best describes how you feel about the federal government?”

Respondents were then given four possible responses: “satisfied,” “frustrated,” “angry,” and “not sure.”

“Satisfied” never had a chance. Overall, just 14% said they were satisfied with Washington. A shocking 55% called themselves frustrated, and another 23% said they were angry, for a total of 78% of all responses. 

Another 9% responded that they were not sure. The poll has a +/-2.6 percentage-point margin of error.