RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.racket.news/p/why-the-tiktok-ban-is-so-dangerous

It’s funny how things work.

Last year at this time, Americans overwhelmingly supported a ban on TikTok. Polls showed a 50-22% overall margin in support of a ban and 70-14% among conservatives. But Congress couldn’t get the RESTRICT Act passed.

As the public learned more about provisions in the bill, and particularly since the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, the legislative plan grew less popular. Polls dropped to 38-27% in favor by December, and they’re at 35-31% against now.

Yet the House just passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” by a ridiculous 352-64 margin, with an even more absurd 50-0 unanimous push from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. What gives?

As discussed on the new America This Week, passage of the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.

“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-two/

Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts.

The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all.

Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective.

“Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel.

Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt.

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-one/

Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—have either been doubling the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse.

So our presidents, in the manner individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat.

It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary.

So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly?

https://thespectator.com/topic/thirty-two-hour-work-week-bernie-sanders-bad-ideas/

Bernie Sanders is the bottomless cup of bad ideas. He keeps refilling it. Take his latest venti, a law that says everybody gets to work thirty-two hours for forty hours pay. That’s a magical 25 percent pay increase. His next trick is to pull free steak dinners out of a hat.

What do you think would actually happen if such Bernie’s law were passed, enforced and found constitutional? (None of those would actually happen, of course.) The immediate effects would be another 25 percent price increase for labor-intensive products, a huge burden on low-income consumers and an additional incentive to replace more expensive workers with machines and computers.

The substitution of capital for labor is an on-going process, but Bernie would supercharge the effort and create incentives for innovators to come up with products, machines and computer programs that performed those tasks at lower costs. The more expensive the tasks, the greater incentive to figure out ways to save money on them.

Bernie’s Magic Pay Raise would create a major incentive to hire people off-the-books (for the true market price) or to have them work extra hours that way. It would create new incentives for employers to hire workers as individual subcontractors, rather than wage workers. And, of course, it would lead to tens of thousands of court cases where employees were sued for violating the new wage rules. Since the wages would be above market rates (otherwise there would be no need for a mandate), the yearly increases would lag inflation so that real wages would gradually return to market rates.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/west_point_announces_change_to_mission_statement_schools_official_duty_honor_country_motto_has_been_eliminated.html

On Sunday, the Armed Forces Press reported that West Point brass had made a recent decision to “update” the academy’s Mission Statement, which until that point, read as such:

To educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army.

With the approved revisions, West Point’s official mission now reads:

To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corp of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army Values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and Nation.

As you can see, the sacred and “hallowed” words, recognized as the official motto of the school since before even Douglas MacArthur graduated in 1903, have been jettisoned—into the Memory Hole “Duty Honor Country” goes!

John A. Lucas is a former special operations military member with more than 45 years experience as an attorney who now runs the Bravo Blue blog; and yesterday, Lucas reported that an officer to whom he spoke “emphasized that the change was the result of a regular review … to see if any changes were needed to ‘modernize’ the statement.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/our_fake_fake_fake_world.html

Will our historical era be remembered as the “Age of Fakes”?  We have fake news, fake meat, fake elections, fake genders, fake vaccines, fake budgets, fake democracy, fake truths, fake hate, fake Russian collusion, fake insurrections, fake climate emergencies, fake freedoms, fake outrage, fake speech crimes, fake money, fake justice, fake intellects, fake women, fake borders, fake wars, and even a fake president.  In some ways, it is a very silly time to be alive.  

So much of our fake world has been built on two monstrously fake foundations: fake progress and fake liberalism.  Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson redefined progress as something that only Big Government can provide.  Instead of celebrating human innovation, artistic achievement, work ethic, and private entrepreneurship as the essential ingredients for any prosperous future, progressivism insists that nothing of value can be achieved without a strong centralized government and a bloated administrative Deep State.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt then picked up the Big Government cudgel by redefining liberalism as a collection of freedoms that only government can provide.  Instead of recognizing human liberty as diametrically opposed to coercive State power, FDR’s “New Deal” style of liberalism insists that only new laws, new social programs, new regulatory agencies, and newly discovered rights can ever make people free.  In the last century of perverse word games, progressivism and liberalism promised progress and liberty and instead burdened Americans with the heavy weight of the government’s chains.  

America’s commitment to individual liberty, private property, and free speech once distinguished it from all other countries in the world.  When it began betraying those commitments and exporting a brand of “rules-based international order” scarcely different from those devised under monarchical empires of the past, it became a global ambassador for fake freedom.  And in a world where freedom is fake everywhere, happiness appears to be fake, too.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/14/elite-heaven-or-real-hell-on-earth/

he horrific murder of Laken Riley by a repeated felony offender and illegal alien Jose Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan citizen, was preventable—had federal immigration laws simply been enforced by the Biden administration.

When called out in his recent State of the Union address, President Biden referenced the deceased Ms. Riley. But Biden misidentified her as “Lincoln Riley”—the USC football coach!

Biden only accurately noted that she “was killed by an “illegal.””

True—but almost immediately the left was infuriated over Biden’s accurate use of the supposedly insensitive “illegal” for the murderer Ibarra.

Biden soon apologized for correctly identifying her killer as an illegal alien—but not for misidentifying the victim.

He left the callous impression that he was more upset about offending his open-borders base than about the savage beating of a young 22-year-old American nursing student.

Biden’s woke open-borders agenda supersedes any worry over the subsequent mounting number of Americans who have fallen victim to foreign gangs and criminals. He seems oblivious to the nearly 100,000 Americans who die from fentanyl imported across open borders.

The same idea of abstract humanity juxtaposed with concrete callousness towards humans characterizes much of the current leftist agenda.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/leftist_language_lies.html

“If you doubt me, consider B4U-ACT, a non-profit defined as therapists, researchers, and “MAPs” who “promote a science-informed understanding about people… with an attraction to children or adolescents.” What are MAPs? Minor-Attracted Persons, AKA child molesters. ”

For those on the Left, words aren’t simply a way to communicate, they’re a means to an end. The liberal agenda is to use language to manipulate and obfuscate, and they are very good at it. The result? Nothing is concrete. Even “truth” is relative. It no longer points to facts but opinion.

Leftists dislike black and white. It’s all about gray. They call conservatives and Christians intolerant, saying their moral beliefs aren’t “inclusive.” Last month 26 House Democrats sent an angry letter to Speaker Mike Johnson about pastor Jack Hibbs’ Jan. 30th prayer to Congress. In the letter, Hibbs was called a “racist Christian nationalist” with “a long record of spewing hateful vitriol toward non-Christians, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community.”

Liberals are for tolerance except for those on the right, who aren’t allowed to speak. There is no such thing as “let’s agree to disagree.” Tell a liberal you don’t support gay marriage, the LGBT or abortion rights and their heads will explode. Why? Because to them there is one truth — theirs — and to prove it, they will even change language.

It has been going on for years: Illegal alien to illegal immigrant to undocumented worker to migrant. Gay pride to pride. Sexual preference to sexual orientation. Transexual to transgender. Liberal to progressive.