RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/death_to_the_suburbs.html

The indomitable Betsy McCaughey has called out the latest ugly manifestation of “diversity, inclusion, and equity” the drive to destroy the suburbs.  The Biden administration and Democrat-controlled legislatures in several states have taken the lead in this effort.  In New York State, Governor Kathy Hochul, as part of the state budget, has advanced a so-called Housing Compact that would eliminate local control and single family zoning. 

Hochul’s plan would require that high-rise “affordable” (read: low-income, taxpayer-subsidized) housing be constructed close to each sleepy village train station — mostly a few miles apart — on Metro North and the Long Island Railroad.  If the affected communities fail to do so “voluntarily,” the state will have the power to override local zoning.  Those who fail to applaud this combined coup by warriors for social justice and real estate interests are, you guessed it, racist.

Suburban homeowners, Democrats as well as Republicans, are beginning to awaken to the deadly threat these proposals pose to their way of life.  What is largely overlooked is that this is a repeat of a similar effort in 1972 about which I wrote at the time (“Housing Controversy in Westchester,” Congress Biweekly, November 10, 1972 and December 22, 1972).  Believe it or not, the effort to overthrow zoning was then spearheaded by Republicans — with New York’s Westchester County selected to pioneer the program.

On June 20, 1972, the New York State Urban Development Corporation announced that it was overriding local zoning to create a variety of low- and moderate-income housing developments in nine, for the most part rural, Westchester communities.  Reminiscent of the emotional reaction to the death of George Floyd, the UDC had been given zoning override power by a hitherto balky state Legislature the day after the murder of Martin Luther King.  Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller, in a burst of virtue-signaling, argued that this was the best tribute the Legislature could give the slain civil rights leader.  When rationality returned, efforts by the state Legislature to take away the override power were vetoed by Rockefeller.

https://lidblog.com/biggest-population-loss-in-us/

Democrat residents are fleeing two of the nation’s largest counties — Cook County, home to Chicago, Illinois, and L.A. County, home to Los Angeles, California — in record numbers. Last year, those locals led the nation in population shrinkage.

Of the two, Los Angeles County led the nation by losing the most citizens to outbound migration by losing a whopping 90,704 citizens, according to U.S. Census Bureau records.

Right behind LA  was Cook County, the home of the Windy City, which lost 68,314 people from July 2021 to July of last year.

Despite the loss, the two counties were still the most populous in America, according to Just the News:

Los Angeles County was still the most populous county in the U.S. That was followed by Cook County in Illinois at 5,109,292, which declined by 68,314 from the prior year. Rounding out the top five were Harris County, Texas (4,780,913); Maricopa County, Arizona (4,551,524); and San Diego County, California (3,276,208).

Eight of the top 10 most populous counties in the U.S. were located in the South and West. The two exceptions were Cook County in Illinois and Kings County [Brooklyn] in New York.

“Reflecting longstanding regional population shifts, the nation’s most populous counties are increasingly located in the South and West,” the bureau reported. “In 2022, 63 of the country’s 100 most populous counties were located in the South and West, up from 61 in the prior year.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/13/millions-have-voted-for-trump-since-2020-with-their-feet/

Over the past two years, vast numbers of Americans picked up and moved. In a mobile society like ours, that’s not news. What is news is where they are moving from, and where they are going to.

Turns out, there’s a mass exodus underway, with people leaving Biden strongholds and heading to MAGA country.

New Census data show that, from 2021 to 2022, more than 2 million people moved out of urban areas that are largely controlled by Democrats and relocated to exurbs and more rural areas that largely voted for Donald Trump.

Los Angeles County, for example, had a net ex-migration of more than 363,000 over the past two years. Cook County, Illinois, lost 200,000. In New York, New York County lost 109,000, Queens County, 158,000, and Kings County, 187,000. Philadelphia County sank 52,000.

In Texas, a state where Trump beat Joe Biden 52%-46%, the two counties that saw the largest ex-migration – Dallas and Harris – both went heavily for Biden. Combined they had a net loss of 130,000 people.

The two biggest gainers in Texas – Collin and Denton counties – went for Trump. They had a net gain of 120,000. Another big gainer – Montgomery County – voted 71% for Trump.

Salt Lake County, Utah, (which went for Biden 58%-39% in a state Trump carried 58%-38%), lost 20,000 people.

The counties in Virginia that saw the biggest outflow of people are all ones that went heavily for Biden.

Still not convinced? Take a look at these two maps in the gallery below. One, produced by the Census Department, shows net migration from 2021 to 2022. The other (click on the arrow) shows the 2020 election results by county. Notice how, across the country, the places losing population almost all voted for Biden, and the ones gaining are almost all Trump counties.

https://reason.com/2023/04/11/why-america-needs-to-be-open-to-debate/

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that,” John Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty” (1859), laying out the essential case for open, robust, and systematic debate. If you don’t test your beliefs by engaging with people who disagree with you, you’re more likely to make weak, incomplete, self-serving, or irrelevant arguments, leading to ruinous outcomes in policy matters or acrimonious misunderstandings in social life.

That’s where the group Open to Debate comes in. Founded in 2006 as Intelligence Squared U.S., Open to Debate has hosted hundreds of debates with the goal of “restor[ing] critical thinking, facts, reason, and civility to American public discourse.” Through a mix of online and in-person events, Open to Debate brings together artists, officials, public intellectuals, scientists, and entrepreneurs from across the ideological spectrum to work through contentious, heated, and seemingly irresolvable issues of the day.

Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward, for instance, was part of a debate that asked, “Is Capitalism a Blessing?” and Reason’s Nick Gillespie has argued for legalizing all drugs and against Medicare for All, net neutrality, and forgiving student loan debt. Open to Debate invites audience participation, and it airs all its programming on NPR, YouTube, and the group’s own website, where it provides voluminous notes and materials, all designed to help audience members reach an independent and informed conclusion.

In February, Gillespie talked with Open to Debate CEO Clea Conner about her group’s mission, its name change, and its push to host actual presidential debates rather than “joint press conferences with really rehearsed talking points.”

Reason: What is Open to Debate? What are the goals of the organization?

Conner: Open to Debate is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. We consider ourselves a debate-driven media company. So we are curating conversations and experiences where people can engage with opposing views on complex issues in a respectful and thought-provoking way.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/04/10/the-depopulation-bomb/

Today, the spectre haunting the global order is not communism, as Marx predicted, but seemingly relentless demographic decline. We can already see its consequences in everything from the fight over pensions in France to the persistent labour shortages across almost all the high-income world. In the future, a lack of human labour is also likely to accelerate a shift towards automation, reshaping economic and political conflict for decades to come.

The world’s population has long been growing on an upward curve. About 75 per cent of the world’s population growth has occurred over the past 100 years, more than 50 per cent of it since 1970. But now, according to the United Nations, population growth is on course to drop to near zero, especially in more developed nations. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in half a century. By 2050 it is estimated that some 61 countries are expected to experience population declines.

A majority of the world already lives in countries with fertility rates well below the replacement level (2.1 births per woman) – the level, that is, at which a country’s population would remain steady. By 2050, UN data suggests 75 per cent of countries will have fertility rates below replacement level. Some UN demographic projections now contemplate that world population could peak in 2086, with the global population about one billion below today’s level by 2100. Ours will become a rapidly ageing planet. In 1970, the median world age was 20.3 years. By 2020, it had increased to 29.7 years, and it is expected to be 42.3 years in 2100.

It’s no longer a question of if, but when global populations will start to decline. We are entering a new epoch, defined by the first large population declines since medieval times. A series of plagues halved Europe’s population between 1346 and 1460. The primary causes today are not war or disease, however, but social evolution, including the decline of the family and religion, as well as diminished economic opportunity and a soaring cost of living. Most rich countries have to contend with birth rates well below the replacement rate. Japan, which has a fertility rate consistently 50 per cent below replacement, is likely to see its population drop from 126million in 2021 to under 90million by 2065. Indeed, last year, Japan recorded twice as many deaths as births.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2023/04/when-the-mad-fringe-becomes-the-centre/

‘I got turned on today watching the fear in Posie Parker’s eyes. She actually was fearing for her life’.

These are the words of a ‘transwoman’ (a biological man who identifies as a woman) commenting on the violence directed against the Let Women Speak event in Auckland. The first thought of any civilised person reading that disgraceful comment might well be that all ideologies have zealots, and that the man does not represent the mainstream of the cause he supports. This is unequivocally not the case with transgender ideology. The fringe, to be precise, is the centre. This is something that critics of transgenderism have tried to highlight since the ideology became the Left’s cause du jour.

At the heart of transgender ideology lies an impulse, a psychology, a drive, which, due to biological reality, cannot be sated.  The twin delusions that your real self is unrelated to biology and that one can be ‘born in the wrong body’ expresses itself psychologically as a desperate desire to be recognised as something the trans person is not and can never be. This is the core of the profound irrationalism that characterises transgenderism and it is the source of the relentlessly extreme behaviour that manifests as an animosity towards anyone who, even in the most insignificant way, fails to affirm the fantasy of the trans person’s self-identity.

The inability of trans activists to accept the tangible, corporeal reality of their bodies while rejecting others’ entirely rational belief in biological reality are the drivers of an inchoate rage that brooks no argument, and which creates a mindset that rejects traditional concepts of decent behaviour and tolerance towards other human beings. To do so would allow the possibility that someone may not affirm the idea that the trans person is the opposite sex or, in modern parlance, the ‘gender’ they claim to be. Anything, then, that advances the trans agenda of forcing people to affirm their self-identification is allowed, no matter how ugly the behaviour or destructive the consequences. This is not true of all trans people, many of whom just want the same rights as everyone else, but it is true of the majority of transgender activists.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/11/reversing-the-destruction-of-a-generation/

The March 14 issue of New York magazine featured an article with the catchy title, “Tate-Pilled: What a generation of boys have found in Andrew Tate’s extreme male gospel.” For anyone who enjoys the theater of forbidden, poke-the-woke content, much of the article is wildly entertaining. For example, describing Tate’s online fans, the author writes:

 But they stayed for the ostentatious, outrageous masculine display: the machetes and cigars, the diamond watches, the Bugattis and Lamborghinis, the obscene piles of banded cash like a scene out of Scarface.

This is genuinely funny. The nerve of this man, not only to be a man but an exaggerated caricature of a man. Moreover, and unlike, say, Howard Stern back when he was funny, Tate can presumably back up his hyper-male braggadocio, given that he twice became kickboxing champion of the world.

It should surprise no one that Andrew Tate has attracted millions of young male fans. He is the antidote to the politically correct, vapid absurdities they are force fed by every institution in the Western world. A generation of American men are being systematically marginalized, demoralized, demotivated, abused and destroyed. The Tate phenomenon is an extreme reaction to an extreme problem.

In America today, if someone is a white, straight, biological male who “identifies as male,” he is condemned for his ethnicity, his masculinity, his “othering” cisgender normality, his heteronormativity, and for all of these undesirable “oppressor” traits, his privilege. If he’s not white but possesses any of these other so-called toxic traits, he is still a candidate to get on board the Tate train, where he will be welcome.

All of this vitriol directed at “heteronormative cisgender males” is concocted, hostile garbage. It is a lucrative, divisive hustle, peddled by mediocrities, adopted as the new marketing gospel by corporations, and pushed by politicians, the media, and every educational instructor and bureaucrat from kindergarten through graduate school. Anyone who speaks out against it is stigmatized as a Nazi, at the same time as anyone who falls for this garbage is indoctrinated to believe any sort of violence is justified, up to and including murder, if their motivation is to eliminate Nazis.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-the-experiment-in-political-freedom-end-in-failure/

Napoleon supposedly said that from the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. This truth applies to great nations as well as great men like Napoleon. The decay of a nation often manifests itself in the trivial and inane, as well as the tragic and existential.

Our current political, cultural, and social dysfunctions have clearly taken that step over the last few decades, and now is putting at risk our country’s successful 247 years of achieving political freedom and equality for all.

Clearly, we Americans are living through attacks on that success no one could have predicted even 20 years ago. And this civilizational failure of nerve and moral exhaustion is leaving us vulnerable to our global enemies. If and when we go, the long great political experiment––freedom and equality and self-rule for all regardless of birth, wealth, or education–– will finally end in failure and despotism.

The bad omens abound. Faith is moribund, banished to the realm of subjective preferences. Love of country and one’s fellow countrymen has been displaced by a specious, “citizen-of-the-world” globalism devoted to power and money. Government, always vulnerable to corruption, is now completely debauched, and justice is sacrificed to political expediency. We are so selfish and short-sighted that we continue to ignore the looming bankruptcy brought on by feckless debt, deficits, and profligate entitlement spending that is morally, as well as fiscally, bankrupting us. And our political factions, especially the “woke,” are conducting our most important policy debates with temper tantrums, violence, censorship, and socio-political “cancellation,” our modern equivalent of Orwell’s “memory hole.”

Indeed, we’ve become so juvenile and surreally silly that even the most obvious facts of science like biological sex are reduced to subjective options, when not promoted as mandatory. More immediately dangerous for many citizens, a “war on cops” as well as “catch and release” prosecutors have turned our largest urban landscapes into dystopian nightmares of violence and squalor.

Most fundamentally, purpose and meaning in our lives come not from faith, country, and family, but from preposterous cults like “transgenderism,” “systemic racism,” and apocalyptic “climate change,” which are preached with myopic hysteria and intolerant fervor.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2023/04/11/university-of-florida-students-chant-f-desantis-during-inject-in-protest-n1686471

On Friday, the University of Florida was the scene of a trans protest. I know, at this point, a day without a protest is a like a day without gravity. But this particular demonstration took a new tack. At issue were recent moves by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the legislature that could curtail or place regulations on gender treatments  Of course, there was the usual marching, and the crowd of demonstrators participating in the “Inject-In @ SHCC” yelled “F*** DeSantis” as they passed the University’s Chick-fil-A.

Nothing particularly unusual about that. Although someone could have shouted, “Trans chickens are chickens!” Which would have at least put an interesting accent on the day and would have been a nice change of pace. The College Fix provided an account of the affair along with a link, which propriety dictates I not post here. Yes, the “F” word again. Forget surgery, somebody needs to get these people some dictionaries so they can expand their vocabularies. Although to be fair, the decline and fall of civilization may be tied to the use of the “F” word. I have to admit that there are those on the right who could not recite the Preamble to the Constitution, the Pledge of Allegiance or The Lord’s Prayer without dropping the “F-bomb.”  So that may be a systemic problem.

When the crowd reached its destination, everyone fell silent as people began to inject the hormone of their choice. Once that was complete, the crowd broke into cheers.