RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/06/how-about-a-kill-switch-to-shut-down-washington/

Kris Kristofferson said that “freedom” is “just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” To the political left, freedom is an abomination that must be defined and controlled by the ruling class elites. And what better way to do that than to crack down on automobile travel?

Cars are a favorite target of all progressives and most Democrats. No human invention has increased freedom as much as the automobile. That’s why they have chosen to go to war on cars. It’s a long-term campaign that will take decades to finish. But there are victories along the way, and one of them was won in Washington with the help of Republicans.

According to Bob Barr, a former federal prosecutor and congressman from Georgia, the infrastructure bill the president signed a little more than a year ago includes “​​​​a little-noticed ‘safety’ measure that will take effect in five years.” It “amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch,’” Barr wrote in the Daily Caller, and every car built after 2026 has to have one.

Of course, the mandate was characterized “as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving.” But safety is always a pretense for further government intervention and the erosion of liberty. Prime example: The COVID-19 lockdowns we just went through. 

Writing in Motorius, automotive journalist Steven Symes notes that, ​to many, a mandatory kill switch “might sound like a wonderful idea.”

“After all, we’ve seen wanted criminals who have fled from police only to crash into a car with a family inside, killing innocents as they try to avoid capture. Being able to stop the pursuit early and almost instantaneously seems like a wonderful thing, a potential lifesaver any law-abiding citizen would enthusiastically embrace.”

https://www.city-journal.org/the-quiet-right-movement

The idea of a conservative counterculture might seem like an oxymoron. The term itself has been colored by the 1960s, when left-wing intellectuals, revolutionaries, and artists captured the spirit of revolt against a supposedly homogenous, oppressive, conformist America. That old counterculture has become the dominant culture, having been absorbed into the bureaucracies of universities, schools, government, and now major corporations. The left-wing culture no longer carries a critique; it is the status quo.

This reversal has created an opening for a new counterculture that challenges the orthodoxy of the “successor ideology” and reveals the hollowness of left-wing institutional management. Though many conservatives have seen the opportunity, they have been pessimistic about its prospects. Conservative critics have long lamented the lack of right-wing pop-culture production; some have rallied to such troubled figures as Kanye West, hoping that dissident celebrities could break through the stranglehold of left-wing ideological control.

But this pessimism is misplaced. The solution to left-wing cultural dominance is neither to embrace any celebrity who casts a glance rightward nor to mimic the artistic production of the cultural Left. It is to go deeper—to rebuild the structures that provide the basis for healthy, integrated human development: families, schools, churches, neighborhoods.

Though few have noticed, this is already happening. A “Quiet Right” is patiently, and nearly invisibly, building a viable counterculture.

The main locus of this movement is in education, where conservative families have created robust alternatives to the secular and predominantly left-wing public education system. Many have turned to homeschooling, which has seen double-digit growth in recent years. Others have enrolled their children in a fast-growing network of “classical schools,” which have returned to the traditional liberal arts curriculum of logic, rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, Latin, and music. And the small but influential network of traditional, faith-based colleges, such as Hillsdale, Benedictine, Thomas Aquinas, and University of Dallas, have seen record-breaking enrollment.

https://victorhanson.com/living-in-the-land-of-lies-part-one/

In reading and listening this holiday week I encountered nothing really other than outright lies.

I was sitting on a farm buffeted before Christmas by near record cold temperatures and after Christmas by near record precipitation. Yet almost weekly we receive stories about California’s “permanent drought” of hot/dry weather and an environmental Armageddon that only precivilizational scarcity can avert.

This fated doom means we in California have been outlawing gasoline-powered yard tools and new natural gas ovens and heating systems, and must always suffer fuel prices 30-40 percent above those in the rest of the nation—due to special green blends and restrictions on refinery operations and new gas and oil leasing.

So, no matter: all of these recent stories of near-record cold and precipitation, as well as fated new cutbacks are followed by warnings of imminent global warming catastrophes. Apparently, if Californians do not use fossil fuels at all, but, as the largest state importer of electricity in the nation, buy out-of-state electricity (much of it generated by coal or natural gas) then we at least can feel better about ourselves.

But more to the point, before the recent week of intense cold storms, giving ample rain and snowfall, California was already experiencing in most places a 100 percent-plus December precipitation rate. By New Year’s Day we may well have 100 percent-plus of the season’s entire average annual precipitation. Apparently, the harder the rain falls, the colder the days become, the more Governor Newsom and the Bay Area “scientific” community insist we need to return to a premodern lifestyle of mass transit transportation, unaffordable gas and diesel, and wind and solar generated, sky-high electricity rates.

We are told yet again by President Biden, by Vice President Harris, by their Pravda megaphone, Karine Jean-Pierre, and perhaps by soon-to-be-impeached Alejandro Mayorkas that the border is “secure.” And any who object that 5-million entries since January 2021 prove that it is not, is well a Great Replacement Theory racist.

Yet, living the lie proves otherwise. Here in Central California, I’ve noticed a substantial new surge and influx of illegal aliens. On my avenue a recent sheriff’s raid surrounded a nearby house, where neighbors long suspected gang chop shops, drug dealing, and other unmentionable trafficking.

The amount of trash on the farm is greater than usual, and the paper/trash is of exclusively Spanish language matter (but, alas, carefully sifted to exclude any address or names on envelopes).

The number of parked cars in the orchard of occupants variously shooting drugs, scouting out copper wire thievery, fornicating, or engaging in illegal shooting (e.g., red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, anything that moves), and those walking cross-country, through the vineyards and orchards, who do not speak English is on the rise as well.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2023/01/05/did-someone-or-something-seize-control-of-the-united-states-n1658786

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did President Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas – furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d–s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/05/twitter-files-prove-evans-law-of-inadequate-paranoia/

“No matter how bad you think things are, if you look closer, you’ll inevitably find it’s worse.” — M. Stanton Evans

For years Twitter denied that it targeted conservatives, despite piles of evidence to the contrary. But who could have imagined that Twitter had been working hand-in-glove with leftist officials in the federal government to silence speech they didn’t like. If Twitter was this bad, imagine what true tech giants like Facebook and Google have been up to.

As conservative paragon M. Stanton Evans rightly observed, whatever you think, it will likely turn out to be far worse.

The revelations that have been emerging over the past month from Twitter’s once-hidden corners – courtesy of Elon Musk – are being greeted with shrugs by reporters and editors who used to care about free speech. For everyone else, each layer uncovered by the Twitter files is worse than even its fiercest critics on the right had imagined.

Matt Taibbi, who is one of the few honest journalists left, has been on top of this from day one, and recently put together a compendium of what we’ve learned about a company that claimed its mission was to give people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

The first batch exposed the internal machinations over Twitter’s decision to blacklist the New York Post’s explosive Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 elections. Much of that was already known.

The second batch showed that Twitter was in fact shadowbanning people – despite repeated claims to the contrary. “Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” Taibbi notes, including a “Search Blacklist,” a “Trends Blacklist,” and a “Do Not Amplify” setting.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/03/the-equity-paradox/

If a society strives to achieve “equity” for every citizen merely by providing equal opportunity, it would need to accept unequal outcomes. If a society does not accept unequal outcomes, it would need to provide unequal opportunities. That is a circle that cannot be squared. Societies must choose one or the other.

Every major institution in America denies this paradox. Implicit in that denial is the fantasy that designing a society to favor certain groups in order to achieve equality of outcome will not fatally undermine the cohesion and vitality of the overall society. Theoretically, it might have worked several decades ago when “disadvantaged” groups constituted a minute percentage of the American population. Offering special benefits and privileges to a small fraction of the population might have been a manageable burden. But today, the vast majority of Americans belong to a “protected status group.”

The magnitude of this shift in just six decades bears enumeration. In 1960, at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, the population of the United States was 89 percent white. The social justice programs that were launched at that time, affirmative action and the war on poverty, had a limited impact. If affirmative action released unqualified students into elite universities or unqualified engineers and executives into upper management, it only represented at most a 10 percent displacement. If welfare and other programs initiated by the war on poverty destroyed the work ethic and broke up the families of the so-called beneficiaries, at least only 10 percent of the U.S. population was so victimized.

Today, almost everyone belongs to a protected status group. Social justice advocates now demand proportional representation be extended to include not only blacks but all nonwhites, as well as all women. They demand this “equity” be applied to all university admissions, all hiring and promotions, all government contracts, and even in the number of criminal prosecutions and prison populations. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-falsehood-of-white-privilege/

One of the Left’s favorite ways of attacking Whites in general and men in particular is to accuse them of benefiting from white privilege. Their only goal in doing so is the attainment of more power for themselves.

During the past few years, the concept of “white privilege” has taken hold of the Democratic Party and those on the Left. The idea is that all White people have enjoyed and still enjoy privileges and advantages by virtue of their being white, and this state of affairs leaves “people of color” at a structural disadvantage in almost all human endeavors—bringing up a family, getting into college, succeeding in work or business, buying a home and more. The concept of white privilege is used as a cudgel against the Left’s opponents, not to help Black people or others but rather to concentrate power in the hands of politicians, college administrators, woke corporate professionals, entertainers and the like. White privilege is a falsehood in more ways than one.

At the most basic level, the United States has such a mixed and diverse population that there is unfortunately no shortage of poor Whites, whether in Appalachia or in towns where the jobs moved out and fentanyl moved in. Additionally, there are many “people of color” who are wealthy or super-wealthy. Who has privilege—a millionaire Black businessman who grew up in a middle class family or a poor White man whose family has been barely getting by in coal country for generations? Beyond the fact that there are many Americans who do not fit into the patently false narrative of specifically white privilege, the concept itself is based on a falsehood antithetical to the “American Way.”

In the past, when America was a more religious country, one realized that his or her task in this world was to take whatever was given and make the most out of it in a lifetime. If one was born into wealth, then more was expected by society as well as by the person himself.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/outgoing_speaker_pelosi_hails_her_democrats_as_the_greatest_collection_of_intellect_integrity_and_imagination_assembled.html

Who needs nausea when we’ve got Nancy Pelosi?

The outgoing House speaker wrote a farewell letter to her fellow Democrats, with this load of pearl of Pelosi wisdom:

 One final thought that I wanted to leave with you is my belief that the House Democratic Caucus is the greatest collection of intellect, integrity and imagination assembled for the good of the American people.

Breitbart News first spotted that letter and noted it here.

Which is a rather surreal thing to say, given the animal farm menagerie the Democrats have become on her watch, going from a party of moderates and ward heel politicians, to a woke socialist echo chamber where dissent is not permitted.

Is Pelosi really saying that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who condemned cauliflower as racist, expressed amazement about garbage disposals, got caught with her hand in the till on accepting gifts, deceiving voters on a fundraiser, and paying her boyfriend as staff, was a paragon of intelligence and integrity? The woman does her makeup on Instagram. She claimed that “facts don’t matter” when you’re “morally right” when she was caught making up some of them. Is she the best the Democrats can do? That’s what counts as intellect and integrity?

How about Rep Ilhan Omar, who, evidence suggests, married her brother for immigration purposes and has repeatedly been caught spewing anti-Semitic statements?

Let’s move on to some other of these paragons of integrity cited by Pelosi, such as Rep. Adam Schiff who repeatedly lied about the evidence he had regarding his grand show trial of President Trump called impeachment — which ended up amounting to nothing? Let’s also not forget that Mr. Integrity has yet to return those campaign donations he got from convicted pervert and Democrat donor Ed Buck. That’s some intelligence and integrity.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2023/01/03/ron-desantis-inauguration-ceremony-unlike-anything-in-recent-florida-history-n1658348

On Tuesday, Jan. 3, Republican Ron DeSantis was sworn in for the second time as Florida Governor. The inauguration, which also included swearing-in ceremonies for Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, CFO, and Commissioner of Agriculture, had the feel of something much bigger. The ceremony included the 13th Army Band of the Florida National Guard, an artillery salute, and a fighter jet flyover. First Lady Casey DeSantis wore a gown with a cape and gloves, and gave off a Jackie O vibe. DeSantis delivered a speech that highlighted his first-term record of policy achievements, while laying out an aggressive second-term agenda that touched on everything from ending wokeness at public universities to fighting back against overreach from the federal government to calling out the Davos crowd.

“Florida is where woke goes to die!” DeSantis roared. The crowd roared back.

Several insiders in the press corral said they had never seen anything like it, likening it more to a presidential inauguration than a gubernatorial ceremony.

Bleachers on both sides of the steps of the historic Capitol Building in Tallahassee contained a crowd of what looked like a couple of thousand attendees. U.S. and Florida flags were everywhere. The production value of the ceremony was evident in the tight security, the numerous satellite trucks, and the professional camera work; fixed cameras, crane shots, even drones were deployed.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2023/01/03/new_york_lawmakers_silent_on_crime_migrants_give_themselves_29_raise_872723.html

The New York State Senate and Assembly recently returned to Albany for a special session, not to rethink the “bail reform” that allows violent criminals to be released immediately after getting arrested, or to do something about the migrant crisis that is seeing thousands of illegal immigrants overwhelm New York City.

No, they ended their session then reconvened for a special session to give themselves a 29% raise, from $110,000 to $142,000, making them the highest paid state lawmakers in the country, The New York Post reported.

The Senate voted 32-23 in favor of the raise, and the Assembly later approved it 81-52, with opposition mostly from Republicans. With a veto-proof supermajority, however, it doesn’t matter how Republicans nor Gov. Kathy Hochul feel about the raise.

Hochul initially tried to tie the proposed pay raise to lawmakers passing tougher bail rules for people charged with violent felonies, domestic offenses, and hate crimes. But she changed her tune once Sen. John Mannion (D-Syracuse) won reelection following a recount of his tight race with Republican Rebecca Shiroff.

Mannion’s return to another term makes the Democrats’ veto-proof supermajorities in both the Senate and Assembly even stronger, so Republicans have nowhere near any power in Albany. Why negotiate a pay raise?

The pay hike comes after lawmakers got a 38% raise in 2018 from $79,500. That was after they got another 38% raise in 1998 when their salaries rose from $57,500 a year.

One Democrat, an outgoing state senator who lost reelection, broke ranks to vote against the raises.

“Inflation has hit everyone, and legislators increasing their pay at a time when people are feeling the pain of economic pressure doesn’t feel right,” Sen. Elijah Reichlin-Melnick (D-Nanuet) said, The Post reported. “If this were the right thing to do, we could have handled it during the regular session.”

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