RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/law-enforcement-cracks-down-on-street-takeovers

Rising social disorder in a post-Covid, defund-the-police America has forced cities and states to address new kinds of criminal outbreaks—from mass retail theft to squatting. Authorities have increasingly formed special police and prosecution units and toughened penalties in places as varied as New York City, Tampa, and Las Vegas to deal with these eruptions. Now added to the growing ranks of policing challenges is the latest lawless craze: street takeovers. In recent months, authorities in Texas, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Ohio, to name just a few places, have had to reorganize their increasingly undermanned police resources to confront these social media-fueled mass street demonstrations, which threaten other drivers and pedestrians and occasionally metamorphose into violent looting mobs. Localities are also rushing through new legislation aimed at discouraging mass vehicle gatherings. It’s the latest struggle to seize back streets that communities yielded to the lawless in the past few years.

While drag racing and biker rallies on local streets are nothing new, something larger and more dangerous formed during the tail end of Covid. The trend began when hot rodders took advantage of streets largely empty because of lockdowns to burn rubber, race against one another, or perform dangerous maneuvers like “doughnuts.” Sometimes, a group of drivers would assemble and ride in unison slowly down a street, effectively taking it over. Videos of these exhibitions on social media garnered huge audiences, and soon people were using Twitter and Instagram to advertise what became known as street takeovers. The events grew in number and intensity even as roads got busier once Covid restrictions faded.

These mass demonstrations emerged as police departments were being weakened by budget cuts and recruiting problems in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020. As a result, police were often overwhelmed and forced merely to observe these giant gatherings. In the Connecticut town of Milford, a single cop in a police car watched as a four-mile line of cars, motorcycles, and all-terrain vehicles passed by. Some of the cyclists popped wheelies in front of the cop, while others crossed the median and drove on the wrong side of the road to taunt him. In nearby Tolland, residents were outraged when state police stood by and allowed participants in a street takeover to attack a couple in a car who tried to maneuver around the congestion—stomping on the vehicle and smashing it until they totaled the car.

https://erickaufmann.substack.com/p/junk-science-is-being-used-to-prop

Don’t get fooled again by experts claiming that DEI rests on scientific evidence.

What follows is an updated and expanded version of the short piece I published at Unherd four days ago. Whereas I had thought the authors of a paper claiming discrimination against minority scholars in academia were only guilty of burying their key findings while touting weak results, it now looks like their results are garbage: a result of sloppiness, mendacity, or both. This tells us a great deal about the knowledge production system in the social sciences, and how it systematically skews what experts consider to be the ‘truth’ and ‘settled science’.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is on the ropes these days. This is a big problem for institutions, such as most elite universities or Science magazine, that have invested deeply in this belief system. One way to rescue the enterprise is to tout new scientific results that buttress the claim that minorities and women are discriminated against in academia. Ergo the need for affirmative action.

Now the woke popular science magazine Science is trumpeting a new academic paper in the equally woke Nature Human Behaviour as a riposte to the naysayers. ‘Racial bias can taint the academic tenure process,’ screams the headline.

The paper’s authors claim Black and Hispanic academics with the same track record are discriminated against when they come up for tenure and promotion. But their data, if anything, points to anti-White/Asian bias, propping up weak results while covering up inconvenient but powerful findings.

The authors briefly admit that disadvantaged minorities are advantaged over Whites and Asians when it comes to being promoted to full professor. But, at an earlier career stage, when moving from a relatively insecure non-tenured professorship to a secure tenured professorship, they are discriminated against. This helps explain minority underrepresentation in academia.

I was curious so I downloaded and crunched their data.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/16/progressive-california-at-war-with-progress/

Much has been made, as it should have been, about the stark differences with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the once-great NASA’s pathetic woke-DEI-politically correct existence. Musk wins on merit, but in California, that’s not what counts. So Musk has been vilified because he dared to leave the progressive plantation.

SpaceX has been launching rockets from the Vandenberg Air Force base in Santa Barbara County for more than a decade. It wants to increase the number of annual launches from six to 36, and maybe even more. The Air Force has no problem with the plans. The California Coastal Commission does. It voted 6-4 last week to block the increase.

As one would expect, the opposition was based on Musk’s political transformation. He also has the temerity to be successful in a society that has increasingly come to devalue success and deem failure and the amenability to be offended to be virtues. That will get him nowhere in California.

“​​We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race,” said Commissioner Chair Caryl Hart.
“​​Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” said Alternate Commissioner Gretchen Newsom.
“This company is owned by the richest person in the world with direct control of what could be the most expansive communications system in the planet,” Commissioner Mike Wilson said. “Just last week that person was talking about political retribution.”

The “official” reason for the commission’s decision is due “concerns that all SpaceX launches would be considered military activity, shielding the company from having to acquire its own permits, even if military payloads aren’t being carried,” reports Politico.

But it’s obvious that was concocted for public consumption.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/nobody_fights_for_a_world_economic_forum_flag.html

Good luck finding anyone willing to go to war for globalism.

One of the peculiar things about our stark civil divide is that Americans who are extremely unhappy with the direction of our country are more likely to wave the U.S. flag than those actually steering the country on its current course.  Consider how strange that is!  When the civil rights movement and anti-war protests reached their peak over half a century ago, hippies, peaceniks, revolutionaries, agitators, and anarchists burned the American flag whenever they got the chance.  They bought in to the revisionist narratives of Marxist historians, who taught an entire generation of young people that America is an evil, imperialist, exploitative, genocidal, fascist, slaveholding nation that can never be redeemed.  

These students, in turn, grew up to become the current custodians of the federal government.  One of Barack Obama’s first initiatives as president was to undertake an “apology tour” around the world so that he could rub salt in old wounds and provide America’s enemies with planeloads of rhetorical ammunition (and pallets of cash).  In deriding President Trump’s MAGA movement, Joe Biden has repeatedly insisted that America was never that great and never lived up to its promise.  Globalist mosquito John Kerry flies around the world to praise the virtues of one-world government and bemoan America’s stubborn constitutional safeguards for individual rights such as free speech.  Having bought in to the gospel of Howard Zinn, those who hold the reins of power in Washington, D.C. are some of the most anti-American zealots on the planet!

That contradiction has produced this odd historical moment, in which people who largely dislike America run the U.S. government and people who love America largely despise the U.S. government.  If you travel through patriotic regions of the country filled with Americans who either served in the armed forces or have family members who currently do, you will find U.S. flags flying from almost every home.  Not only is Old Glory ubiquitous in neighborhoods, cemeteries, and town halls, but also other patriotic flags — including the Gadsden and Bunker Hill flags — are draped prominently from porches, barns, storefronts, and trucks.

Once you head to a coastal city, however, not only does the sea of patriotism abruptly disappear, but also out-of-town visitors are much more likely to discover newspaper editorials arguing for perplexing things — such as the idea that it is “racist” for schoolkids to dress in Americana clothing or that it is psychologically “triggering” for unsuspecting bystanders to be “accosted” by images of the U.S. flag.  When townsfolk visit big cities, the strain of anti-Americanism is downright jolting.

There are questions that hover over the United States today, much like toxic plumes in windless skies.  Are the divisions in our country too great for the Union to overcome?  Can the federation of fifty states persevere while prominent politicians call for an end to the Electoral College (an essential constitutional check against the power of big, wealthy states) and the further diminishment of the states’ sovereign authority?  Can we talk about an “American nation” united by common principles and shared history when the foreign-born population has steadily risen to over fifty million residents today?  Are we still bound together by a love for freedom and a commitment to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or has Marxist-socialism’s takeover of America’s educational institutions combined with a half-century of immigration from communist nations created a majority who wholly reject the structure and character of the American Republic as founded?  These are questions that weigh heavily on Americans’ minds as they increasingly see those within driving distance not as neighbors, but rather as strangers from indecipherable cultures.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21016/america-technological-leadership

There is no small irony that Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to mock the Biden Administration’s “green energy” policies and its flawed decision to rely on wind and solar as our nation’s future sources of essential electricity.

Consider: The exponential growth of AI is now powering the next generation of innovations that range from spacecraft to speech, and it is creating an enormous demand for energy to run the servers that drive this technology. Fortune believes that AI electricity requirements could consume as much as a quarter of all electrical power in the United States within six years. That is a mind-boggling amount of electricity, and it comes at the expense of every other industrial sector as well as our residential requirements. There is just so much electrical power generated in the United States to go around.

The opposite side of that coin is if American AI innovators cannot access the needed power to operate their data centers, we will have no choice but to cede our nation’s AI leadership to those countries fully prepared to do what they must to dominate this field.

Like China.

To be clear, the competition to take the lead in AI will make the Cold War space race competition look like a JV touch football game.

All of this comes at a time when the White House will have us believe that the pathway to the future lies in electricity generated by wind and solar. Even the most optimistic estimates say that those sources cannot meet America’s immediate or long-term energy requirements, despite billions in federal subsidies.

One response comes from an AI leader that wants to ensure it can be in the vanguard of innovation in this crucial area: Microsoft.

In a decision that must be driving Progressive “greens” to distraction, a reactor unit in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania is now scheduled, pending regulatory review, to reopen by the end of this decade.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-10-12-more-doj-and-fbi-corruption

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question of whether the recently-initiated federal prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams is legitimate, or whether it is yet another instance of abject corruption by our Department of Justice and FBI, in this instance pay-back by the prosecutors for Adams’s criticism of the regime’s immigration policies. To help you as you ponder that question, it might be useful to look at a few other things that the DOJ and FBI are recently up to.

As Item Number 1, Justice “Special Counsel” Jack Smith chose the date of October 2 — 34 days before the upcoming election — to file his brief laying out his reasons why ex-President Trump does not qualify for immunity from prosecution under the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States. Smith’s brief, which is 165 pages long, was then promptly unsealed by the District Judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan. I am not going to quote from it here, but it is fair to say that the brief goes out of its way to be as inflammatory as possible against the former President.

In a New York Times op-ed on October 9, Professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School raises completely legitimate questions about the timing of the filing. Note that Goldsmith is no fan of Trump. From the op-ed:

[T]he timing of the release should receive more scrutiny, because the Department of Justice should not have allowed the information to be disclosed so close to Election Day. This event is the latest of many examples of Biden administration officials paying insufficient public attention to executive branch rules that are designed to ensure that prosecutions are, in appearance and reality, conducted fairly and apolitically. . . . It is . . . vital . . . for the executive branch to take scrupulous care to assure the public that the prosecutions are conducted in compliance with pertinent rules. On this score, Mr. Smith has failed. . . . The filing is in clear tension with the Justice Department’s 60-day rule, which the department inspector general has described as a “longstanding department practice of delaying overt investigative steps or disclosures that could impact an election” within 60 days of an election.

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/sheriff-coachella-checkpoint/2024/10/13/id/1183910/

Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, said he may have prevented a third assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump after stopping a man at a road checkpoint who was allegedly in possession of an illegal firearm, or firearms, and fake rally passes.

On Saturday, just before 5 p.m, deputies assigned to Trump’s security detail for his Coachella Valley rally stopped the driver of a black SUV, Vem Miller, 49, half a mile from the rally entrance, according to a press release from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. Miller “was found to be illegally in possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun, and a high-capacity magazine,” as well as fake press and VIP passes.

“We probably stopped another assassination attempt,” Bianco said, according to the New York Post.

The sheriff’s office said that Miller was taken into custody “without incident” and booked at the John J. Benoit Detention Center for “possession of a loaded firearm and possession of a high-capacity magazine.”

He was released Saturday on $5,000 bail and is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson Justice Center on Jan. 2, 2025.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/lying-by-omission

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent appearance on CBS News has ignited yet another round of controversy. This time, the firestorm surrounded the network’s Tony Dokoupil, who dared to ask Coates challenging, if obvious, questions. Those who treat Coates as a modern-day prophet claimed that the anchor’s behavior crossed the line into insensitivity, and even racism.

What followed was ritual humiliation. CBS subjected Dokoupil to what can only be described as a struggle session, bringing in DEI consultants to “educate” him on the acceptable bounds of discourse and the proper body language to maintain when talking to an exalted minority guest. This is the state of modern journalism: the slightest challenge to the progressive narrative results in swift reeducation efforts.

A review of the substance of the underlying exchange, and the baffling explanation Coates offered in defense of his unfairness toward Israel, illuminates why there has been such a rush to reframe his CBS appearance as a hostile confrontation.

Dokoupil’s first comments and question challenged the broadside against Israel contained in Coates’s new book, The Message. “The content of that section” on Israel, noted Dokoupil, “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” “Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates . . . a very talented, smart guy, leave out so much?” Dokoupil asked. In a book largely about Israel’s security practices and their supposed excesses, the anchor pressed, “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it?” These are crucial questions that Coates must have anticipated receiving from even a friendly interlocutor. Dokoupil offers one more natural follow-up for the author, who cannot find the slightest justification for Israel’s security measures: “Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”

Coates’s response was puzzling, but revelatory:

I would say the perspective that you just outlined—there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. . . . I am most concerned, always, with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly, in my interviews, whether there is a single network [or] mainstream organization in America with a Palestinian-American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world. . . . The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine . . . those were the stories that I have not heard.

In these few lines, Coates channels rhetoric that he has employed throughout his career—a nebulous invocation of marginalized peoples (here, Palestinians) and a claim that their members are denied a platform in the American public sphere.