RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_beginning_of_the_end_of_dei_in_the_private_sector_and_our_universities.html

Ferraris are priced between $250,000 and $600,000, but it’s not enough to have the money to buy these pricey Italian sports cars.  The company’s Diversity and Inclusion Charter demands that buyers and their families pass “social status” background checks to “ensure they fit the mold of the brand and its desired image.” 

Talk about cultivating “inclusivity!”

In a similar charade of ‘woke’ virtue signaling, luxury car maker Jaguar unleashed a futuristic ad in a pinkish palette featuring men posing as women. There are no cars in it, so it’s no surprise that it landed like a lead balloon and joined the pantheon of duds like the Bud Light ad featuring trans activist Dylan Mulvaney in a bubble bath.

The Bud Light ad sparked a consumer backlash on social media, including calls for boycotting the beer brand.

In Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America, Charles Gasparino called the Bud Light fiasco the “desecration of a great American brand.”  The book—which opens with an account of an incredibly farcical discussion at Goldman Sachs over whether ordering Chick-fil-A sandwiches is sufficiently woke—exposes many such woke/DEI debacles and the brand destruction they wreaked.

Fortunately, the efforts of people like Gasparino (a seasoned business reporter who knows what makes companies succeed or fail) and anti-DEI campaigner Robby Starbuck are paying off. Moreover, the resounding victory of President-elect Donald Trump—who made a campaign pledge to dismantle “divisive,” “un-American” DEI programs—has catalyzed a corporate retreat from leftist “wokeness.”

After Starbuck told Walmart he was investigating their DEI practices, the retail chain – America’s largest private sector employer, with over 4,600 units in the U.S. – announced plans to end its DEI initiatives.  It has agreed to drop the term ‘DEI’ and instead focus on “Belonging for All.”  Not only that, it will stop financing events aimed at influencing children sexually; scrap the Corporate Equality Index, a benchmark created by the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) to monitor LGBTQ+ policies; remove gender-neutral terms such as Latinx from documents; end a program incentivizing suppliers who hire LGBTQ+, racial minorities, and women; discontinue racial equity training; and stop funding the Center for Racial Equity.  Walmart will no longer sell products such as chest binders marketed, among others, to “transitioning” children.

https://www.thefp.com/p/assads-fall-humiliates-washington-biden-obama-trump-iran-syria?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

According to President Joe Biden, the end of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny in Syria was made possible by his administration’s foreign policy. Speaking from the White House on Sunday in a televised address, he said, “For years the main backers of Assad have been Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, but over the last week their support collapsed, all three of them, because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office.”

Try not to laugh.

Biden attributes the woes that have befallen this alleged “Axis of Resistance” to “the blows Ukraine [and] Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.”

This isn’t just a deceptive telling of recent history. Biden has it backward. While it’s true that Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia are weaker today than they were when Biden was inaugurated as president, it’s not because Biden had the foresight to unleash the Jewish state against America’s enemies in the Middle East. It’s because Israel defied Biden’s efforts to restrain it. Syria has toppled its tyrant in spite of the Biden administration, not because of it.

When Israel took the very steps that have weakened Iran and its proxies, it was greeted by threats and disapproval from Washington. On September 24, at the UN General Assembly, Biden pleaded for Israel to accept a diplomatic solution. “Since October 7, we have also been determined to prevent a wider war that engulfs the entire region,” he said. This was three days before Israeli air strikes killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-yorks-government-is-the-real-villain-in-the-daniel-penny-trial

Now that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of the absurd homicide charges against him, perhaps New York City and State officials can be put on trial. They are responsible not only for the death of Jordan Neely, the drug-addicted schizophrenic whom Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Penny of recklessly killing, but for the assaults on and killings of hundreds of New Yorkers by mentally ill vagrants whom politicians allow to roam the streets. Yet according to Bragg and his office, it was Penny who needed to be imprisoned, for the safety of city residents, for having protected his fellow citizens from a potential murderer.

For now, the heroic male virtues of chivalry, self-reliance, and initiative have been vindicated, in the face of government’s effort to snuff those values out. How much longer those traits will survive under elite pressure remains to be seen. New York officials should take the Penny acquittal as a wakeup call, however. Their authority may be slipping away, a development adumbrated by last month’s national election results.

The Daniel Penny homicide trial was a travesty of justice. On May 1, 2023, a psychotic, wildly gesticulating vagrant burst into a New York subway car as it travelled beneath Manhattan’s SoHo district. The new arrival, Jordan Neely, started screaming that he wanted to return to jail and was ready to die. Some eyewitnesses recalled that the 30-year-old Neely threatened to kill the straphangers.

The passengers were terrified, and rightly so. New York’s seriously mentally ill residents are time bombs who regularly explode. They push subway riders in front of moving trains; above ground, they club, shoot, and stab their victims. Three weeks after the May 1, 2023, subway incident, another street denizen slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, paralyzing her for life. This November 18, a 51-year-old vagrant with the inevitable long rap sheet and seeming immunity from extended incarceration went on a stabbing rampage throughout Manhattan, slashing to death a 36-year-old construction worker, a 67-year-old man fishing in the East River, and a 36-year-old woman sitting on a park bench. As recently as December 1, a screaming female pushed a 43-year-old man onto the subway tracks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She has not been apprehended, but it is a virtual certainty that she, too, has had numerous run-ins with outreach workers and the police that resulted in no long-term confinement.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/10/bidens-pardon-a-smokescreen-for-corruption/

Joe Biden has carefully cultivated his image as an empathetic man of the people. In reality, his career has been marked by a relentless pursuit of wealth for himself and his family. His son Hunter Biden was central to these schemes, operating as the family “bag man” for various influence-peddling operations overseas.

As such, Joe Biden’s decision to pardon Hunter is not an act of mercy or justice or even paternal loyalty but a cynical maneuver to shield both Hunter and Joe Biden from responsibility.

Its brazenness has moved even Joe Biden’s most ardent defenders to condemnation.

Double Standards and the “Rule of Law”

After all the pious talk invoking the “rule of law” during the years-long prosecutions of Donald Trump, Hunter’s pardon shows that there has always been a parallel set of rules, through which the powerful and politically favored can escape scrutiny. This case is also a reminder of how the rule of law can be perverted not only by being too harsh but also by being too solicitous.

The media have feigned shock at his pardon, but they should have known better. Even before he was facing charges, Hunter’s job as a highly paid board member of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, was absurd on its face. He had no relevant skills or qualifications justifying a $50,000 monthly salary—except, of course, his last name.

Similarly, the revelation that Hunter involved his father in business meetings with individuals from Kazakhstan and other foreign nations gained little traction among the media or official Washington. The media even dismissed the infamous “10% for the big guy” email found on Hunter’s laptop, which strongly implies a quid pro quo arrangement between Hunter and his dad.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/09/bidens-paranoid-pardons-and-leftist-morality/

Pardoner-in-Chief

Joe Biden has now established two precedents in presidential history.

First, he “pardoned” his own son Hunter.

No prior president has ever tried that shameless act, which is an affront to the entire hallowed notion of “equality under the law.”.

Second, he did so in a way that no president has rarely, if ever, pardoned anyone.

Hunter, a convicted federal felon awaiting sentencing, was gifted by his father a blanket exemption from federal prosecution over the entire past decade (2014-2024).

Biden thus exempted Hunter from a series of much-discussed past criminal activities and provided further pardons for any federal criminal exposure occurring over the last ten years—yet to turn up.

Given the Biden suppression of the justice system and the media’s complicity in hiding the Biden family’s criminality, it is quite possible that in the next few years, disinterested prosecutors might finally expose Hunter Biden’s long-suppressed, sordid career. And that could mean possible criminal exposure for three generations of Bidens.

Third, in the remaining waning 40 days of his now nonperforming presidency, Biden threatens to establish yet another presidential precedent. He contemplates issuing pardons to a variety of controversial cronies, bureaucrats, and officers—even though none of them have yet been indicted or even are under federal investigation.

Worse, Biden completed his shameless trifecta by breaking his serial pledge, voiced at least six times, and most prominently as a 2024 campaign plug, unequivocally not to pardon Hunter Biden.

That performance-art braggadocio was serially greeted—by design—with glee in the media.

On spec, the vow supposedly contrasted Biden’s “reverence for the rule of law” with a purportedly legally insubordinate Trump.

Biden would put the law above family. Trump, in contrast, was supposedly chronically questioning the morality, fairness, and legality of his own five criminal and civil indictments over the campaign cycle—some of them (i.e., Bragg, Smith, Willis) demonstrably with the full knowledge of, if not coordinated by, the Biden White House.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/08/312542/

I always found the literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019) distinctly curate’s-eggish. You ask, “How is your egg this morning, curate?” “Good in parts,” comes the reply. But Bloom made one observation that stuck with me. Lots of literature, Bloom wrote somewhere, deals with the phenomenon of falling in love. But equally poignant is the story of falling out of love.

Bloom was thinking primarily of personal romance. However, the emotional dialectic he limned works itself out on the larger stage of political life as well. There is a certain mystery about both sides of the process. The public’s enthusiasms are as fickle as they are extravagant. What explains the infatuation with figures like Barack Obama? In retrospect, it is possible to offer more or less plausible explanations. Obama’s race, his smooth, non-confrontational manner, and his ability to dress up radical policy proposals in an emollient jelly of seeming common sense all help explain his political success.

Obama has occupied an enviable place in the magic circle of celebrity since his first election in 2008. It persisted through Donald Trump’s first term and for most of Joe Biden’s. There were signs that Obama’s star was fading during the later stages of Kamala Harris’s disastrous campaign. Trump’s resounding victory on November 5 crystallized the eclipse. Speaking at a “Democracy Forum” last week, Obama attempted to wheel out his old standby: that Republicans were in the habit of “weaponizing” the DOJ and other institutions in order to steal elections and cement their hold on political power. “One side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power,” he said, “ either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

There was a time when Obama might have gotten away with such antics. Not anymore. His blatant act of projection was instantly called out and ridiculed. Quoting the remark, Miranda Divine spoke for the Zeitgeist when she observed that “It’s over for Obama. The spell is broken. Donald Trump vanquished him, Biden, Harris, the Bushes, and the Cheneys. All of them, with a spring in his step.” The commentator John Gibson offered a pithier précis of Obama’s comment: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did, and they must be stopped.”

https://www.startribune.com/100-year-old-pearl-harbor-survivor-recalls-confusion-and-chaos-during-japanese-bombing-83-years-ago/601192005

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Ira “Ike” Schab, a 104-year-old Pearl Harbor attack survivor, was so determined to stand and salute during a remembrance ceremony honoring those killed in the Japanese bombing that thrust the U.S. into World War II some 83 years ago that he spent six weeks in physical therapy to build the strength to do so.

On Saturday, Schab gingerly rose from his wheelchair and raised his right hand, returning a salute delivered by sailors on a destroyer and a submarine passing by in the harbor. His son and a daughter supported him from either side.

“I was honored to do it. I’m glad I was capable of standing up,” he said afterward. “I’m getting old, you know.”

Schab is one of only two servicemen who lived through the attack who made it to an annual observance hosted by the U.S. Navy and National Park Service on a grass field overlooking the harbor. A third survivor had been planning to join them but had to cancel because of health issues.

The Dec. 7, 1941, bombing killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen. Nearly half, or 1,177, were sailors and Marines on board the USS Arizona, which sank during the battle. The remains of more than 900 Arizona crew members are still entombed on the submerged vessel.

Dozens of survivors once joined the event but their attendance has declined as survivors have aged. Today there are only 16 still living, according to a list maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. Military historian J. Michael Wenger has estimated there were some 87,000 military personnel on Oahu on the day of the attack.

Schab agreed when ceremony organizers asked him earlier this year to salute on behalf of all survivors and World War II veterans.

“He’s been working hard, because this is his goal,” said his daughter Kimberlee Heinrichs, who traveled to Hawaii with Schab from their Beaverton, Oregon, home. “He wanted to be able to stand for that.”

Schab was a sailor on the USS Dobbin at the time of the attack, serving as the tuba player in the ship’s band. He had showered and put on a clean uniform when he heard the call for a fire rescue party.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-extremely-gleeful-extremely-dark?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Brian Thompson, the fifty-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down on the street in New York Wednesday, in what appears to be a carefully planned and utterly cold-blooded assassination. I say appears because the shooting was captured on video: The killer, masked and dressed in black, steps out from behind a parked car as Thompson passes. A moment later, Thompson stumbles, falls, and doesn’t get up.

It is terrible to watch—and yet, even this literal snuff film is less disturbing than the various critics and commentators, many of them self-described progressive empaths who preach compassion for the marginalized and hashtag their posts with “#BeKind,” who are treating this real murder of a real person as though it were the emotionally cathartic climax of a John Wick movie—the part where the archetypal villain gets his just deserts. The police later revealed that the bullets fired at Thompson had the industry terms deny, defend, and depose written on them—a cinematic detail that only further encouraged the notion that he was killed as vengeance for UnitedHealthcare’s misdeeds.

The online reaction has been extremely gleeful and extremely dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder. Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a cheeky suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs).

In a viral X post, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus—whose profile describes him as an “anti-violence” “trauma expert”—quipped, “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down. . . wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/05/scoop-biden-regime-quietly-revokes-veterans-hiring-preference-for-civil-service-jobs/

“A source from the U.S. Air Force told American Greatness: “This is government-wide hiring ramped up like never before seen. They are literally packing the federal workforce with as many loyalists and subversives as they can. Worst of all, they think it is their duty to do so.”He added: “Since DEI is getting pettifogged rather harshly (and rightly so) this is yet another way they can worm into the bureaucracy—at the expense of veterans.”The source told American Greatness that “veterans are being cast aside for this new workforce (wokeforce).”

The Biden regime has quietly revoked the veterans hiring preference for civil service jobs and promotions, which since the 1944 Veterans Act gave eligible veterans preference over others for appointments in federal civil service selection, a memorandum obtained by American Greatness shows.

The goal of the veterans’ preference law was to “provide a uniform method by which qualified veterans [could] receive special consideration for federal employment,” according to Military.com.

By law, veterans who are disabled or who served on active duty during certain specified time periods or in military campaigns are entitled to preference over non-veterans both in hiring from competitive lists and in retention during reductions in force.

New guidelines from the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service (DCPAS) now stipulate that “veterans’ preference should be considered on an equal basis as other qualified candidates.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21179/trump-punish-woke-universities

A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that Donald Trump will make good on his vow to defund educational institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.

That is why Trump’s scorched-earth approach is so necessary, even as it is being denounced by the same people who are responsible for creating or perpetuating the current mess as too extreme or even needed at all.

More to the point, it will mean that policing antisemitism on campus will be shifted away from the ineffectual Title VI complaints overseen federal education bureaucrats, to a campaign of lawsuits conducted not just by groups like the Deborah Project (valuable though they may be) but by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with all of the vast resources at its command. In this manner, a message can be sent that will likely motivate the vast majority of college administrations to discard DEI and the tolerance of hate for Jews that accompanies it.

Instead of expressing horror at his determination to enact real change, fair-minded Americans of all faiths and in both major political parties should be rooting for him to keep his word and to do everything he promised to punish colleges and universities, in addition to any other entity that promotes the sort of woke hate that has made life for Jewish students and anyone else who dissents against the new secular orthodoxy so difficult.

A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that Donald Trump will make good on his vow to defund educational institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.

Occidental College seemingly waved the white flag last week in its efforts to defend itself against charges of tolerating antisemitism on its Los Angeles campus. The school agreed to a “sweeping settlement” with the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that acknowledged the ongoing hardships, harassment and discrimination faced by Jewish students since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Occidental’s apathy to all this, which was little different from what has been happening at dozens if not hundreds of other American institutions of higher learning, violated its obligations to prohibit such discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.