RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We must reject the idea that every time a law is broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

                                                                                                                                Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA)  July 31, 1968

Identity politics has divided us into categories, convenient for politicians to address perceived concerns and, more dangerously, to exert control, turning us into a nation of oppressed and oppressors, so that Washington’s “progressives” can ride in as savior. Identity politics places the group above the individual, while those who think independently – outside the box – are slighted, demeaned, or cancelled. One consequence is rising distrust and hatred; a second is that the group, not the individual, defines who we are; and a third is a loss of faith in America, its history and in its accomplishments.

Issues of identity have a long history. Women’s rights date back before the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. My paternal grandmother, a well-educated woman, was forty-five when the 19th Amendment was passed, allowing her to vote in 1920. It was in 1965, a hundred years after the civil War, that the Voting Rights Act directed the Attorney General to enforce the right of Blacks to vote. However, even as we made progress – slow as it has been – self-manufactured divisional bitterness increased.

It is important to step back, not to rest on laurels, but to gain perspective and celebrate what our nation has achieved over more than two centuries. Winston Churchill, in a back-handed compliment, is alleged to have observed: “The Americans will always do the right thing…after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” America continues to evolve, too fast for some and too slowly for others. We are best off when momentum is deliberate, when we individually, as Governor Reagan is quoted in the rubric, accept responsibility for our actions.  Our country is unique in the annals of human history. It is based on the rule of law, and on the individual, his sovereignty and his uniqueness – “…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” Those words have evolved over time to include more of our citizens. We have further to go, but we have come a long way. We do not want to return to a time where some groups are favored, and others excluded, as identity politics would have us do.
It is true that as social animals we seek out those with common interests, which explains why there are myriad groups devoted to such pursuits as fishing, bridge, antique cars, golf, and P.G. Wodehouse. It is why sororities and fraternities exist on college campuses, why there are different religious denominations, and why civic organizations, like Rotary, Elks, American Legion, and the Knights of Columbus, exist in communities across America. Fifty and sixty years ago, some of these organizations were restrictive, based on race, gender, and/or religion, but such restrictions lessened in the wake of the passage of civil rights legislation and as tolerance became more common. Man’s social progress has always been evolutionary. We live today in a nation more accepting and tolerant than that known to our grandparents. We have further to go, but we have been moving in the right direction.

https://victorhanson.com/what-game-is-hunter-biden-playing/

What shameless act or felonious activity was not evidenced on Hunter Biden’s laptop? Racist attitudes toward Asians? Soliciting prostitution? Felonious use of drugs? Photographed nudity and perverse sex? Admissions to illicit foreign shakedowns?

Hunter all but accused his own father President Joe Biden of also being on the foreign take: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family… Unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

Hunter’s alleged felonies range from bribery to tax evasion. That he has not yet been prosecuted for anything is scandalous. His exemption is attributable only to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s likely weaponized directives to federal prosecutors to downgrade or forget altogether felony charges against Hunter.

So given such wild behavior, why would not Hunter tone it down, stop the global grifting, cease the reckless behavior—and quit redirecting attention to the likely illegal acts of his father, the President?

Why did not Hunter early on just settle the child support suit filed by his paramour Lundeen Roberts? Why haggle over money for his own daughter?

Hunter instead outrageously claimed near poverty. That excuse was hilarious given he flies on private jets and pays nearly $16,000 a month to rent a house in tony, celebrity-ridden Malibu.

Why did Hunter ever get involved with a performance stripper in the first place after his past widely publicized liaisons with prostitutes? Why also with his own widowed sister-in-law?

Given Hunter has little or no experience or training in high-stakes international finance and investment—and thus has no market value as an investor or broker. But he was infamous for translating that nothingness into millions in lucre due solely to his ability to monetize the influence of then Vice President Joe Biden.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/georgia-attorney-general-indicts-61-antifa-members-on-rico-charges/

Chris Carr, the Republican attorney general of Georgia, announced on Tuesday the indictment of 61 individuals allegedly involved in Antifa efforts to prevent the construction of a police training facility outside of Atlanta.

These activists, most of whom don’t live in Georgia, are accused of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a U.S. federal law that allows for the criminal prosecution of organized crime. Of the 61 defendants, some faced additional charges of domestic terrorism, attempted arson, and money laundering.

Carr said in a press release his office is primarily concerned with prosecuting violent acts in the state’s case.

“As this indictment shows, looking the other way when violence occurs is not an option in Georgia,” said Carr. “If you come to our state and shoot a police officer, throw Molotov cocktails at law enforcement, set fire to police vehicles, damage construction equipment, vandalize private homes and businesses, and terrorize their occupants, you can and will be held accountable.”

The indictment focuses on Defend the Atlanta Forest, an environmental group described by the attorney general’s office as an “anarchist, anti-police, and anti-business extremist organization.”

The indictment says the group’s purpose “is to occupy of parts or all of 381 forested acres in DeKalb County, Georgia,” land that is owned by the Atlanta Police Foundation and leased by the Atlanta government. By doing this, they would halt the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.

The Defend the Atlanta Forest movement started organizing in 2020 following the police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. Both incidents occurred months before the training center was announced.

The Cop City Vote Coalition, which is trying to force a public vote on the public center, objected to the recent indictment. The group of organizers condemned the “blatantly authoritarian RICO charges” brought forward by Carr following his announcement.

The indictment alleged a total of 225 “overt acts” took place in the city, from July 5, 2020, up to about two weeks ago.

Instances of the reported violence during that time included throwing rocks, bricks, and Molotov cocktails at police vehicles, vandalizing private property, attacking private citizens and utility workers, and shooting state troopers. Police responded to the criminal actions by arresting protesters, and in one case, killed an Antifa member who shot at the cops.

https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/im-being-professionally-canceled-for-my-moral-stance-on-trans-butchery/

Recently, the College of Psychologists in Ontario ordered Jordan B. Peterson — a clinical psychologist, professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and best-selling author — to undergo “professional coaching.” His sin? Tweeting opinions the college deemed “unbecoming of a psychologist.” Here, Peterson explains to The Post what he said, why he was right — and why it was imperative he speak out.

I am likely to soon lose my license to practice as a clinical psychologist in my home province of Ontario, in the Canada whose historically prosaic internal politics should by all reasonable standards still be off the international radar.

Why? A variety of charges have been brought against me by the administrative board granted government mandate to protect the public from misbehavior on the part of the practitioners of my profession.

What are those charges — pertaining to attitudes and actions that have caused unproven harm to others and brought hypothetical disgrace upon the practice of psychotherapy itself — all brought forward, by the way, by individuals who were never my clients?

Two stem from criticisms I levied directly against the current leader of Canada, one Justin Trudeau, now recognized by a majority of the inhabitants of this frigid and sparsely inhabited land as the worst Prime Minister in this country’s history.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson was ordered to undergo “professional coaching” by the College of Psychologists in Ontario due to public statements that he has made.
Photo by Chris Williamson/Getty Images
The complaints against Peterson include tweets he wrote criticizing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Elliot Page’s “gender affirmation” surgery.
Photo by Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Four were a consequence of other arguably political opinions: a judgemental comment I directed toward Trudeau’s former chief of staff, who resigned under a cloud of controversy some years ago; an ironic comment about the diverse “identity” claimed by an Ottawa city councillor whose attitude toward the Canadian Trucker Convoy raised my hackles; and the entire transcript (I kid you not) of a three-hour public discussion with podcaster Joe Rogan, where I criticized the unreliable climate and economic “models” upon which we are now predicating our increasingly tyrannical international order.

One indicated my refusal to accede to the hypocritical woke insistence that an obese cover model was in fact a fit and beautiful athlete.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/actually_joe_biden_has_doubled_the_deficit.html

Over the past two years, President Joe Biden has made numerous statements suggesting that he is a deficit hawk on par with past presidents such as Calvin Coolidge or Andrew Jackson. For instance, earlier this year, Biden claimed, “In my first two years, I reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion. No President has ever done that.”

In reality, Biden was half right. No president, including Biden, has ever done anything close to reducing the national debt by such a gigantic amount in his first two years or any two-year period, for that matter.

Here are the facts. When Biden entered the White House, the national debt stood at $27.7 trillion. Two years later, the national debt stands at $32.9 trillion. Using simple arithmetic, the national debt has increased by $5.2 trillion under Biden. That is a big difference from a $1.7 trillion reduction.

However, I’ll do Joe a favor and give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was referring to the deficit, not the debt.

So, let’s take a peek at annual deficits under the Biden administration. In fiscal year 2021, the federal deficit registered at $2.8 trillion. In fiscal year 2022, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. And, in fiscal year 2023, the deficit is expected to surpass the $2 trillion threshold, again.

Before analyzing these figures, I must mention that fiscal years (FY) are different from calendar years because fiscal years encompass the period from October 1 through September 30. This matters quite a bit because fiscal year 2021 included a $920 billion COVID-19 relief package signed into law by President Donald Trump in late December of 2020. In other words, days before Biden entered the Oval Office, another $1 trillion was added to the deficit under the Trump administration, which basically accounts for the deficit reduction from FY 2021 to FY 2022 that Biden takes credit for.

Interestingly, as Biden takes victory laps for the deficit reduction that occurred from FY 2021 to FY 2022, we must not forget that this hollow triumph took place despite Biden, not because of him. By this, I am referring to the fact that immediately upon taking office, Biden signed into law the massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which completely obliterated any deficit reduction that would have come to fruition once the previous COVID-19 spending bills came off the books.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/06/california-bills-would-remove-visitation-rights-for-parents-who-dont-affirm-childs-gender-identity/

Democrats in the state of California continue to double down on their support for transgenderism, and have now introduced legislation that would forbid parents from even seeing their child if they do not support the child’s “gender identity.”

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Democrats in the state legislature have introduced two new bills, both of which would change California family law by making “gender affirmation” a part of children’s health, safety, and welfare. The first bill would grant judges the authority to take away custody from parents who do not “affirm” their child’s gender identity, while the second bill would force judges who are considering granting custody rights to take into consideration “a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression.”

Neither bill provides any clear definition for the term “affirmation,” nor do they give a specific age by which a child’s identity should be “affirmed” by their parents. Both pieces of legislation will be up for approval by the State Assembly and State Senate by September 14th.

“In the unfortunate event that parents are negotiating visitation rights for their children in a custody dispute, it makes sense for a judge to consider if the children are in legitimate danger,” said Lance Christensen, a spokesman for the California Policy Center. “However, classifying a parent who does not affirm a child’s gender dysphoria should not be in the same category as an abuser.”

The bills were introduced by State Senator Anna Caballero (D-Calif.) and co-authored by State Senator Scott Wiener (D-Calif.), the latter of whom is notorious for introducing numerous pro-LGBT bills that have garnered widespread backlash; his legislation has included a bill that decriminalized the act of knowingly infecting someone with HIV, as well as a bill decriminalizing homosexual acts with minors.

Wiener has repeatedly defended his outlandish legislation, blaming the most recent backlash on “a pretty massive misinformation campaign about this bill by the right-wing media.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/07/is-biden-national-security-threat-majority-says-yes-ii-tipp-poll/

Across the globe, the U.S. faces a growing list of dangerous foreign policy challenges. But is the 80-year-old President Joe Biden, with growing signs of age-related mental issues, up to the task? A large majority of Americans, including Democrats, say no, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

Global dangers abound. China’s engaged in a massive military buildup and poised to attack Taiwan. Meanwhile, Russia wages a bloody war with U.S.-supported Ukraine. In the Mideast, Iran’s nuclear program nears completion, and the U.S.’ 2021 Afghanistan departure has left a power vacuum across the region. This is just a partial list of growing threats.

With these in mind and a looming presidential election, the online I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,351 adults around the country: “How concerned are you that Biden’s age and mental capacity pose a national security threat?” The poll, taken from Aug. 30-Sept. 1, has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

The response was clear: After rounding the data, 70% of all respondents said they were either “very concerned” (44%) or “somewhat concerned” (25%). Just 15% answered “not very concerned,” while 13% said “not at all concerned,” for a total of 28%.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/leftists_make_great_pets_but_lousy_leaders.html

It is striking just how much leftists enjoy being dominated by Big Government.  Please make us stand six feet apart!  Please monitor and police our speech!  Please punish us for skirting COVID lockdowns!  Please mandate new experimental goop for our veins!  Every time the oppressive authoritarians in positions of power abuse that power to make outrageous and unconstitutional demands of the American people, the leftists hop to and beg for even more obnoxious restrictions.  Politicians and bureaucrats are just people (often bad people), but to leftists, they’re celebrities, (needed) father figures, and the atheist’s empty-suited pantheon of false gods. 

As Sam J. wrote in a righteous, all-caps, truth-telling rant over at Twitchy, no matter how nonsensical or harmful the government’s often-illegal-but-always-idiotic commands, the masochistic left can be heard shrieking, “YEAH, THAT’S A GOOD IDEA.  GOVERN ME HARDER, DADDY!  MASK ME UP!  TAKE SCHOOL FROM MY KIDS!  YAAAAS!”  Nothing makes the left happier than a system that insists on ruling over leftists in perpetuity.  No group is more worthy of the left’s hero worship than an army of control freaks who take pleasure in inconveniencing, voyeuristically surveilling, and intimidating the masses.  Silence the vaccine skeptics!  Force the anti-maskers into hiding!  Imprison anyone who still attends church even after the State’s Marxist priests banned the unapproved exercise of religion!  In this brave new world, the cowards demand cowardice from everyone.

Or, as the Babylon Bee insightfully observes, the reason Democrats are so irrationally offended by the appearance of Revolutionary War–era Gadsden flags is because everything they have been brainwashed to believe screams out, “TREAD ON ME!”  Perhaps it is natural for those with crushed souls to plead for crushed spines, too.  If leftists didn’t snuggle up next to tyranny, after all, there would be little else to keep them warm at night.  It is as O’Brien — the enigmatic Inner Party inquisitor from Orwell’s 1984 — tells Winston Smith: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”  Leftists alive today crave that boot stamping on their collective face.  They need the threat of that boot’s punishment to find any sense of meaning in their otherwise empty, fruitless lives.  Receiving and inflicting pain is the only way for them to feel…something.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/for-wokism-to-live-free-speech-must-die/

“Wokism” is the “highest stage” of Marxism, to borrow Lenin’s phrase, the final descent of that malign, murderous ideology into intellectual degradation and absurd triviality. After all, “wokism” is, like communism, a mash-up of radical secularism, scientism, technocratic tyranny, and a ruthless “any means necessary” modus operandi. Hence like Marxism, for “wokism” to succeed, coherent arguments, empirical evidence, common sense, and truth itself must be discredited, distorted, and demonized, at the same time alternative authorities––God, the Constitution, real science–– subjected to tyrannical elimination or refashioning.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that for decades the left has targeted the First Amendment and silenced dissent. Especially after the collapse of Soviet communism, which its last president Mikhail Gorbachev facilitated with his policy of glasnost or greater freedom for public expression, the “new left” children of communism were not going to make the same mistake. Hence, they have for decades doubled-down on their intolerance for dissent manifested in “political correctness” and censorship.

And that means the First Amendment must die.

Leftism has two bad ideas that from its beginning have programmed it to be tyrannical. The first is to deny the reality available to common sense and experience. The natural world and human nature––the latter’s corruptibility empirically verified on every page of history––cannot be allowed to compromise the utopian outcomes promised by communist theory.

British historian Thomas Carlyle in 1857 identified this leftist sacrifice of reality to theory as it appeared among the radicals of the French Revolution, the precursors of the Bolsheviks: “Formulas, Philosophies, Respectabilities, what has been written in Books, and admitted by the Cultivated Classes: this inadequate Scheme of Nature’s working is all that Nature, let her work as she will, can reveal to these men. . . . [T]hey will do one thing: prove, to demonstration, that the Reality will not translate into their Formula; that they and their Formula are incompatible with the Reality: and, in its dark wrath, the Reality will extinguish it and them!”

Thus the truths of nature must be subordinated to the revolutionary’s fanciful imagination and will to power. For example, biological sex, an unchanging fact of nature, must be altered into “gender,” a mere preference from an endless catalogue of invented manifestations––no matter that this preposterous belief is obviously unscientific.

Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson points out this patent truth: “Trans is clearly identifiable as a fad, comparable to preceding fads, or ‘transmissible psychological diseases,’ like outbreaks of alleged multiple personality disorder, hysteria, self-mutilation, and anorexia. The typical victim is a young female with an underlying neurosis that seeks a socially acceptable form of expression. These forms of expression vary with the times.” But no matter the form, the facts of biology must be denied in order for an illiberal political ideology to undermine reality in order to aggrandize political power and control.

As for human nature, its tragic reality also is denied, and its inevitable improvement simply asserted as our birthright stolen by the wicked oppressors du jour. These villains profit from forbidding humanity the boons of the collectivist paradise it will enjoy once its good and noble nature is restored by the revolution. Achieving this impossible goal entails a rejection of the tragic nature of human existence, the permanence of suffering and misery that follows from our destructive passions and interests.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/06/the-nations-fiscal-crisis-just-got-real/

Over the weekend, the Washington Post let it slip that all is not well in Bidenomicsville. The deficit, it reports, could end up hitting $2 trillion when the current fiscal year ends in three weeks, which it describes as an “unexpected deficit surge.”

In other words, the deficit will nearly double this year, calling the lie on one of President Joe Biden’s favorite boasts about how he cut the deficit more than any president in history.

But while this apparently comes as a shock to the Post, as well as other liberal news sites that picked up on the Post report, anyone paying attention knew this was happening.

Back in February, for example, we pointed out that Biden’s reckless economic policies had added more than $5 trillion to projected deficits, even as he claimed he’d done more to cut the deficit than “any president in history.”

In early June, we noted that revenues had been plunging this year, despite all the boasts about a strong economy, and that “the projected deficit for the entire year is now close to $1.6 trillion, which is almost $300 billion higher than Treasury projected at the start of this fiscal year.”

In July, we pointed out that Bidenflation was pushing up the cost of federal entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and had resulted in a 37% increase in interest payments on the national debt in the first nine months of this fiscal year. That was the result of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, which were also a result of Bidenflation.