RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/09/22/dr_jay_bhattacharya_accepts_rcps_samizdat_prize_government_should_not_censor_and_smear_scientists.html

Real Clear Foundation president David DesRosiers explains: “What does Samizdat mean? It translates as ‘self-published’ in Russian. Samizdat was the underground literary network in the Soviet Union that distributed Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Are we suggesting the American mind and society are closing and becoming more Orwellian and Soviet? Yes, we are. This is why we inaugurated the Samizdat prize, to celebrate those great few who stand for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of science, even at great personal cost.”

Read Dr. Bhattacharya’s remarks:

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, HEALTH POLICY PROFESSOR AT STANDFORD UNIVERSITY: I’m overwhelmed, you guys, thank you… In 1970, I looked this up before I got here, the New York Times Albert Parry published an article about the Soviet dissident intellectuals who would covertly pass around ideas to each other in the form of handcrafted, typed written documents called Samizdat. There are people in this room, scientists in this room, that I passed Samizdat to. David mentioned one, Scott Atlas. From the earliest days of the pandemic, we would pass papers to each other. My colleague Yaron Ben David, we’d secretly talk to each other in whispers in the corridors of Stanford…

We would tell each other, “Here’s what the data are showing,” “Why aren’t people seeing this?” And if you tried to share it, God forbid that happened.

Let me read to you from this New York Times piece:

“Censorship existed even before literature, says the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat.

Samizdat – translates as: “We publish ourselves” – that is, not the state, but we, the people.

https://thespectator.com/topic/in-representative-victoria-spartz-a-star-is-born/

“No one, Spartz concluded, is being held accountable. It is “egregious.” Indeed. “I couldn’t believe that it happened in the United States of America,” she said. But that’s because she still believes the country she adopted still exists. It doesn’t. Disgusting deep-state operatives like Merrick Garland killed it. ”

Merrick Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was a spectacular, if depressing, confirmation of something any sentient observer had noticed long ago: that the Department of Justice, and its head, Attorney General Garland, are horribly, egregiously compromised. 

The outcome or upshot? That Garland should be impeached and removed from office and the DOJ itself should be put into the political equivalent of Chapter 11 so that its management can be replaced and its activities reorganized.

As I say, this has long been obvious to any sentient observer. But Wednesday’s testimony put meat on the bones of this impending repudiation. Several Republicans put hard questions to the attorney general. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky deserves special mention for his exchange with the ghoulish AG. 

Massie played a video of the back-and-forth he had with Garland two years before. Were there, Massie wanted to know, any government agents in the crowd at the Capitol on January 6? Oh, there is an “ongoing investigation,” quoth Garland, so of course I cannot answer. 

Well, that was then, said Massie. How about now? Can you now tell Congress whether there were any government agents in the crowd on January 6? “I don’t know the answer to that question,” said Garland. “If there were any, I don’t know how many. I don’t know whether there are any.”

“I think you may have just perjured yourself, that you don’t know that there were any,” replied Massie. “You want to say that again, that you don’t know if there were any?”

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/can-conservatives-still-win

Editors’ note: The following essay forms part of “The new conservative dilemma: a symposium,” a special section on the challenges facing conservatism today.

On translating popularity into policy.

Conservatives enjoy popular support on the vast majority of current issues. But that does not necessarily translate into winning presidential elections, which is of course the only sure way of enacting conservative political agendas. Yet victory is possible for conservatives, as long as they learn from the past.

Take the potpourri of current controversies over illegal immigration, rising crime, fossil-fuel independence, the economy in general, and an array of cultural concerns—from the indoctrination of the dogma of diversity, equity, and inclusion to the fact of transgendered men participating in women’s sports. In these hot-button-issue debates, the conservative side usually wins the support of the American people, at least in opinion polls.

Surveys do not translate into presidential votes.

Even in these culturally liberal times, a recent Gallup poll noted that more Americans (38 percent) voiced that they were very conservative or more conservative on social issues than at any time since 2012. In contrast, those identifying as having liberal social views dipped to just 29 percent—fewer even than those describing themselves as moderates (31 percent). Moderates and independents have become terrified of the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the neo-socialist agenda that ensued, which has altered their very way of life.

Of course, surveys do not translate into presidential votes. Events can transcend current ideological controversies and disrupt political debates. They often alter national congressional and presidential elections, prompting both forced and unforced errors from once-popular conservative presidents. Recent examples of these unforeseen crises include the 2008 financial meltdown, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the covid epidemic and subsequent lockdowns, and the George Floyd–related riots. All wrecked the reputations of formerly successful administrations.

George H. W. Bush’s convincing win in 1988 (53.4 percent of the popular vote) was in a mere four years reduced to a losing 37.5 percent of the vote, in part due to the unexpected third-party candidacy of Ross Perot and an overhyped recession. George W. Bush’s popularity after September 11 reached the highest on record at 85 percent approval—only to crash to a record 22 percent low after the September 2008 financial-system meltdown and the continuing violence in Iraq. The trifecta of the covid pandemic, national lockdown, and George Floyd riots sank what likely would have been a Trump 2020 popular-vote win.

But even granting the role of scandal, foreign misadventures, and economic downturns that sink presidencies, conservative presidential candidates should have been able to react to these unexpected calamities just as well as liberals—despite the partisan nature of the mainstream media. Yet in recent times they have not. The Republican Party, remember, has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections: 1992 (37.5 percent), 1996 (40.7 percent), 2000 (47.9 percent), 2008 (45.7 percent), 2012 (47.2 percent), 2016 (46.1 percent), and 2020 (46.8 percent), after winning it in five of the prior six elections: 1968 (43.4 percent), 1972 (60.7 percent), 1980 (50.7 percent), 1984 (58.8 percent), and 1988 (53.4 percent).

In sum, Republican candidates have not garnered 51 percent of the popular vote since George H. W. Bush’s 53.4 percent 1988 victory over Michael Dukakis—engineered by the late Lee Atwater. He, remember, was severely criticized ex post facto for running a campaign that did not follow the usual Republican adherence to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules of campaigning etiquette.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/21/the-abnormal-as-the-new-normal/

For many decades now, conservatives in the United States and elsewhere have faced a dilemma. By disposition, conservatives are inclined to endorse precedent. But since the dominant culture is liberal, conservatives must make their peace with progressive policies or find themselves accused of abandoning the central conservative principle of supporting established precedent.

As James Piereson noted in these pages in 2009, “conservatives, if they wished to maintain that designation, . . . were obliged to endorse all manner of liberal reforms once they were established as part of the new status quo.”

For example, it was said that “conservatives who attacked the New Deal were not acting like conservatives because they were in effect attacking the established order—and, of course, ‘real’ conservatives would never do that.” This embarrassing gambit was applied all down the line. If you opposed a liberal or progressive policy that had become established, you were not acting in a conservative manner but in an extreme or radical manner. “Conservatives, moreover,” Piereson pointed out,

could have no program of their own or, at any rate, any program that had any reasonable chance of succeeding, because any successful appeal to the wider public would turn them into populists and, through that process, into extremists and radicals. Not surprisingly, they viewed a popular conservatism as a contradiction in terms. Conservatives, in short, could only win power and influence by betraying their principles, and could only maintain those principles by accepting their subordinate status. Thus, in the eyes of the liberal historians, conservatism could never prosper in America because, if it did, it could no longer be called conservatism.

This last formulation recalls an observation by the Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?/ For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Mutatis mutandis, conservatism doth never prosper, for if it does, none dare call it conservatism.

This surreal situation was the result of an inexorable process of one-way ratcheting. Progressive ideology makes continuous inroads, gobbling up one institution and one consensus after the next. Any occasional pushback is weathered as a temporary squall, after which the work of expanding the progressive envelope proceeds apace. Last year’s extreme outlier becomes this year’s settled opinion. To oppose that is evidence not of conservative principle but reactionary, even (as we have lately been told) insurrectionary, stubbornness.

The fate of this dialectic has depended upon a certain friction in which conservative conviction appealed to a fund of traditionalist sentiment even as it acceded to ever more extreme moral and political positions. Over the past several decades, however, this dialectic has lost its ballast as the entire apparatus of government has been colonized by an extreme progressive agenda.

In the past, conservatives had been able to regard the fundamental institutions of society—the family, the churches, the military, the corporate world—as natural allies. This is no longer the case.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-new-front-in-the-war-on-merit

Millions of academic studies are published each year. Some fundamentally alter the course of history, while others never even get cited. Those curious about the effect of specific researchers, papers, or journals often turn to a metric called “impact factor.” This metric counts the number of citations accrued by a researcher or research paper, or the average number of citations for studies in a specific journal. It’s a sensible and simple method for measuring influence.

According to a new “study,” it’s also an exercise in racism and sexism.

The paper, “A new tool for evaluating health equity in academic journals; the Diversity Factor,” published in PLOS Global Public Health, correctly points out that impact factor is an imperfect measure of cultural and scientific reach. Among the problems: researchers game the stats through self-citation, and journal-impact factors are skewed by studies that pick up extremely high numbers of citations. Still, impact factor represents a reasonably good proxy of the thing it purports to measure. While sensible researchers know not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, activists instead see imperfection as opportunity. Enter: the “diversity factor.” 

The authors propose that henceforth studies should be scored according to both impact factor and their new diversity metric. Though they admit that the diversity factor is still in development, they suggest it should award points on the basis of diversity within the dataset (for example, representation of ethnic minorities), representation of authors from multiple countries, greater female representation within the authorship group, and affiliation with non-prestigious universities. These recommendations, the authors contend, will offer “a more complete perspective on factors aligned with scientific excellence based on contribution to advancing diversity and inclusion, improving health outcomes, and achieving equity.”

These exhortations represent a solution in search of a problem. It’s true that the predominance of men in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge was for a time propagated by racial and ethnic bigotry and sexism. But the goal of impact factor is to offer a snapshot measure of scientific influence, not to referee the ethics of the social and political environment in which a discovery was made. Jonas Salk’s scientific legacy ought to be defined by the development of the polio vaccine, not the absence of Aboriginal trans men on the research team that developed it.

https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-cluster-b-society

You’re not imagining that the world has gone mad.

Healthy debate has been replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence, while violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as regressive, while men in skirts and heels are celebrated in the public square.

It’s easy to laugh at these outbursts as the ravings of a small but vocal minority, but the compromised health of our body politic is not a trivial concern. A strange, new pattern of psychological dysfunction has infiltrated our most prestigious institutions, our corporate bureaucracies, and the highest offices in the land.

In short, we’re sick. Our society is out of balance. We’ve been consumed by a cluster of disorder that appeals to our worst instincts and deranges our most important social functions.

We need to recover our sanity. But to do so, we must first know exactly what we’re dealing with: the emergence of a Cluster B Society.

https://thespectator.com/politics/its-time-for-president-biden-to-robert-f-kennedy-jr-secret-service-protection/

Presidential candidates don’t normally receive Secret Service protection until the summer before the election. But these are not normal times. They are dangerous ones — for candidates, elected officials and federal judges. When candidates face lethal threats, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did last week, it’s time to give them protection.

The decision is up to President Biden. If he orders the Secret Service to protect Kennedy, it’s done. If not, not. And “not” is Biden’s current decision. It’s a dangerous, mean-spirited political calculation. Political? Yes, surrounding Kennedy with a Secret Service detail elevates his status as a serious candidate. That doesn’t help Biden’s own candidacy.

The president’s willingness to leave a political opponent in danger ranks right up there with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to withhold protection from Supreme Court justices, who were being intimidated and threatened at their homes. Garland’s failure ignored a clear-cut statute and a concrete danger to federal jurists.

You don’t have to favor those justices or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to demand our government do its best to ensure their safety. The government has that general responsibility for all citizens, but the responsibility is much greater when those citizens are running for office, serving as elected officials or sitting as judges. The responsibility is acute when the threat is tangible.

For both Kennedy and the Supreme Court justices, the lethal threat is not imaginary. In the justices’ case, a man traveled across state lines with guns, ammunition, duct tape and zip ties, intending to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh and perhaps others on the High Court. He told the arresting officers he had purchased the gun to kill Kavanaugh.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-month-set-aside-for-politicized-history/

Last week began yet another month set aside for celebrating the history of victims of  “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, to name a few of the historic crimes perpetrated by “whites.” What started as a correction of historical writing vitiated by partiality and prejudice, today has degenerated into rank politicization that provides leverage to some political factions––mostly progressive Democrat clients–– at the cost of historical truth.

The first problem with “Hispanic Heritage Month” is the name. The only meaningful definition of that imprecise word “Hispanic” is something like “Hispanophone,” those who speak Spanish. Such a category includes nearly half a billion people comprising a vast diversity of ethnicities, nations, religions, customs, cultures, mores, cuisines, folkways, and histories. So which of those thousands and thousands of “heritages” will we be celebrating all month?

We can be sure that the lion’s share of these “heritages” will be Mexican. There’s a good reason for that: until recently, most of the legal or illegal immigrants have come from Mexico. The American Southwest, after all, was conquered and settled by Spaniards, and became part of Mexico after the 1821 revolution. This history, including the Mexican War of 1846-48 which ended with Mexico ceding the Southwest to the U.S., is part of American history, and should be taught as such, warts and all.

But in fact, what is generally taught from grade school to university is a politicized history that serves the leftist, Howard Zinn melodrama of racist “white” Euro-American invaders and colonizers who destroyed the indigenous peoples and their idyllic cultures in order to monetize their stolen lands with oppressive capitalists and their Christian flunkeys.

Every Columbus Day, for example, we are regaled with such simplistic, often cartoonish narratives that leave out all the complexities and nuances of real history. Typical of this ahistorical mentality is the “Wanted Poster” promulgated in 1992 by a South American indigenous organization, which lists Columbus’s crimes as “grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a culture, rape, torture, and instigating the big lie.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/fetterman-dress-code-fail-begs-question-americas-steep-decline

Democrat John Fetterman is not just a prime example of arrested development; he is a symbol of the dumbing down of standards and expectations that is undermining our great nation.

Fetterman, the overgrown man/child elected to the senate last year, is mainly known for wearing hoodies and gym shorts, a look that he thinks is cool and which also serves as a middle finger to the establishment. The Pennsylvania legislator is so uncomfortable wearing the normal garb of successful people occupying important roles in our society – a suit and tie, for instance – that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has relaxed the senate’s dress code, apparently to accommodate this slovenly member of that august body.

Historically, there was no written dress code of the Senate; all members were adults, and they did not need to be told that respect for the institution required them to dress as such. No longer.

The elimination of the senate’s dress code is the least of our problems. Much more worrisome for our country is that the same lowering of standards is taking place everywhere, often in the name of “equity” or “racial justice.”  

Educators across the nation are ditching tests and grades, prompted by declining performance and self-serving teachers’ unions complicit in that decline. In Portland, Oregon, authorities are considering new “equitable grading practices,” which would no longer penalize kids who cheat or who skip their homework, because “historical data shows racial disparities in students’ pass/fail rate.” The new approach is meant to be more “fair.” Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.   

Degrading traditional assessments does not help the kid who gets away with cheating and falls into life-long bad habits or who may need extra help in the classroom. It certainly does not help children who behave and who work hard; they deserve recognition and reward.  

Even in higher ed the push for “equity” is lowering the bar. The Metropolitan State University of Denver no longer requires that students use “Standard American English (SAE)” because it is “a social construct that privileges white communities and maintains social and racial hierarchies.”