RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/26/race-huckstering-in-america/

…….One of the hustlers who works the tourists near my Madison Avenue office harangues reluctant donors by loudly declaiming. “Is it because I’m black? Is it because I’m black?” A fellow loafer with a more cheerful mien and a gentler line (“One dollar for the homeless. Just one dollar.”) rolls his eyes. Playing the white guilt card so clumsily embarrasses the better class of hustlers. 

These fellows, of course, are the smallest of small-time operators in the race industry. The career ladder extends upward to diversity trainers, corporate equity officers, supernumerary staff hired to fill BIPOC quotas, small-time politicians, big-city mayors, and, perched atop the highest pinnacle of Mount Hustle, Patrisse Cullors. She is one of the founders of Black Lives Matter who converted the charitable dollars given to her organization into a lavish lifestyle involving mansions, jets, and family members whose “services” gained them astonishing paydays. 

Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ child, reportedly was paid $970,000 for “creative services.” These included “producing live events.” I am not sure what creative services Mr. Turner provided apart from procreative services. But that is a very high price for that kind of donation. The Daily Mail, among other publications, has been keeping track of Cullors’ generous treatment of her assistants. Her brother Paul was paid $840,000 for “security services.” For comparison, the average salary of an FBI executive is currently $235,143. 

The details of how Cullors and her cohort enriched themselves are head-turning, but it is best not to lose sight of all the good things that Cullors and Black Lives Matter have accomplished in a few short years. It was only nine years ago—July 13, 2013—that Cullors and Alicia Garza tweeted their way into history. Garza: “black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Cullors: “declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. i am done. i am so done. trayvon, you are loved infinitely #blacklivesmatter” 

After which we had exciting festivities in many American cities, and a growing spirit of philanthropy, which culminated in 2020 when Americans (mostly) donated some $90 million to BLM. The organization has used those funds to spread the message of “love” in many directions (see above) and has become a force to reckon with in American politics and social life. 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/05/26/wh-denies-biden-is-talking-about-the-second-amendment-one-day-after-he-said-it-i-n2607868

In Thursday’s White House press briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre was asked multiple questions about federal legislation being bandied about in Congress ahead of the President and First Lady’s recently announced visit to Uvalde on Sunday. 

After refusing to comment on Thursday’s latest updates from Texas DPS officials — she said the White House would not “prejudge” local law enforcement’s response to the shooting — and repeating many of the anti-gun left’s talking points lamenting the fact that “America has more guns than people,” Joe Biden’s press secretary faced a question from Real Clear Politics’ Philip Wegmann. 

What does the president believe, at this point, is the purpose of the Second Amendment?” he asked as Michael Moore and other leftists renew their calls for a repeal of the right to keep and bear arms. 

Unsurprisingly, Jean-Pierre couldn’t offer a specific answer as to what President Biden — sworn to uphold the Constitution — believed the purpose of the 27-word Second Amendment to be.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/how-joe-biden-and-irs-are-performing

In an earlier article about Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to fix the 2020 presidential election, we observed that the root cause of America’s current problems, beginning with broken borders and off-the charts urban violence – is lawlessness.[1] We also observed that this lawlessness originates in the White House, and includes the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Executive Branch generally.

Discussions of the border problem often touch on the criminal element that violates our unenforced border laws beginning with drug dealers, sex traffickers, and migrant smugglers. But the crime problem is vastly understated in these references which give the impression that it is largely confined to the countries they have left, and has no impact on the country they have invaded. In July 2018, the Government Accountability Office issued a report containing “Criminal Alien Statistics,”[2] which serves to correct this false impression.  Among its conclusions, the report states that one in five federal prisoners in the United States is a criminal alien. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The G.A.O. report covered the period between 2011 and 2016. During that time frame, approximately 2 million foreigners crossed the border into the United States illegally – which is just about the number of unvetted foreigners whom border officials predict will cross the border illegally this year alone. In that same time frame there were more than 730,000 criminal aliens in U.S. prisons, federal and state, and local jails. Criminals are not usually arrested the first time they commit a crime, and are often released with minimal time served when they are. So while there were 730,000 criminal aliens in U.S. prisons, they accounted for 4.9 million arrests and 7.5 million offenses – which would translate into a 10 times greater number of victims than offenders. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/27/militarizing-the-baby-formula-crisis-is

A military cargo plane lands filled with vitally needed baby formula to be greeted by a top government official. A relief flight to a developing world country? A ray of hope for a war-ravaged Ukraine? A blockade broken? No, America in the year 2022.

Simultaneously, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to force American companies to produce more baby formula. Our response to a problem caused by domestic regulation and protectionism has been to militarize it.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, but this solution is infantile.

America is unique in having this problem because its regulatory state caused it. The proximate cause of the shortage was the February recall of products made at America’s largest manufacturer of baby formula, Abbott Labs’ facility in Michigan. The Food and Drug Administration was concerned about outbreaks of death and illness among infants fed with the formula but was slow to inspect the facility. Abbott has indeed announced that it will reopen the facility, as the FDA found no evidence of contamination. As 40% of America’s supply comes from that facility, the shortfall hit supplies hard.

Ordinarily, however, the market would respond to such a shock by two means – raising prices to signal a shortage and importing substitutes from abroad. However, regulation precludes those two responses. Much of the American market depends on price agreements with the country’s welfare agencies, which are there to stop poor mothers from having to face difficult choices for their pocketbooks. Higher prices could lead to mothers choosing to limit formula use, with nutritional detriments to the baby.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/25/please-dont-go-to-college/

“If learning were profaned by being made available to all and sundry,” Cardinal Richelieu predicted in 1625, “it would be found that there were more people capable of creating doubts than of resolving them, and many would show themselves more apt in opposing truth than in defending it.”

Passing by, only for a moment, the shocking elitism, so appalling to our modern ears, how did the Red Eminence fare?

The answer is obvious, as is the answer to the growing madness which surrounds us: Less, not more, education. And more elitism.

You’ve heard the slogan: “We want our college to look like America.” They say it about college, about Congress, the bureaucracy, the bar, the professoriate, almost anything. The reply should be: “No, we don’t.” I don’t want my pilot looking “like America.” America looks like the furtive guy at the end of the bar who should have been arrested years ago. Or America looks like that nice old lady we just helped load groceries into her trunk. Pilots look nothing like that. I want my pilot looking like he has the skills, and the intelligence, to fly the marvel of engineering that is a jet aircraft. I also do not want those aeronautical engineers to look like America. I’m keen on them understanding differential equations, and what stress does to aluminum welds.

The exceptions to that “almost anything” were, until recently, things like combat soldiering and professional sports. Alas, even in those sanctuaries of reality, the cry of looking like America has taken hold. Because of a false understanding of equality.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/05/if-only-we-were-more-reasonable/

With the best will in the world there are times when one wonders about the sanity of many people. This is one of them.

We have just handed over control of our country, in dangerous and uncharted times, to a fractious horde of mathematical illiterates with no idea how to run an economy, lockdown-loving fascists scheming to control our lives by any means possible and now with all the apparatus in place, mad Greens with apocalyptic visions of planetary doom, obscurantist “teachers” who have turned the wide horizons of education into a crucible of noxious mendacity and sexual fantasists wanting to manipulate the self-understanding of children, all lumped in with an assortment of monomaniacs squeaking out their solipsistic obsessions in, to borrow a phrase from Browning, fifty different sharps and flats.

Then there’s the avalanche of hysterical panic that followed the suggestion that abortion in America might – might – become more restricted. We’ll be hearing much more of it any day now, shriller and louder – inarticulate rage, pure and simple. Where’s the rationality, the reasoned arguments amid the churning torrent of abuse and invective?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/florida-ig-rejects-conspiracist-rebekah-joness-unsubstantiated-covid-cover-up-claims/

A former dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health made “unsubstantiated” claims that Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration fired her because she refused to obey her superiors’ instructions to fudge the state’s Covid-19 data, a new investigation has found.

The extensive report from the Health Department’s Office of Inspector General found “insufficient evidence” that Rebekah Jones was ordered to falsify, alter, or misrepresent Covid positivity rates on the state COVID-19 Data and Surveillance dashboard that she helped build.

In December 2020, Jones alleged that former Florida deputy secretary of health Dr. Shamarial Roberson, a reputable chronic-disease epidemiologist, pressured her to “delete cases and deaths” to sugarcoat the state’s handling of the Covid crisis. Jones later backtracked, arguing instead on her now-suspended Twitter account that Roberson “asked me to go into the raw data and manually alter figures.”

The report addressed Jones’s accusations that Roberson, as well as two other state health officials, directed her to restrict access to underlying data that supported what was presented on the dashboard, finding them “exonerated.” The three confirmed that they told Jones to temporarily remove the “data hub” before reactivating it after it was reviewed for accuracy, which the report determined “does not appear to violate law, rule, or policy since the ‘data hub’ was not required to be made available,” and since it was quickly restored unchanged. Another reason the officials took down the section was to prevent private individual health information prohibited from public disclosure from being released.

The nation is paying a price for President Biden’s divisive leadership.

At a moment of national outrage, with every American sickened by the horrific killing of 19 school children in Texas, our country looks to our president for answers. These terrible events must stop; sick, isolated hostile young men like the alleged shooter, Salvador Ramos, must not be allowed to buy guns. Their bizarre, threatening behavior must trigger responses that keep our communities safe. Our schools must be protected.

Biden has no answers. His default response to such tragedies is to lambast Republicans for protecting the gun lobby, doubling down on the divide he has widened in our country. And, worse, foregoing any chance of “working across the aisle,” as he famously promised to do when campaigning for the Oval Office.

The tragedy is that there is room for compromise on gun restrictions, but Biden has so poisoned relations between our nation’s two political parties that he has no chance of bringing Republicans and Democrats together. According to the Washington Post, he isn’t even trying.

In the wake of the recent Buffalo shootings, where 10 people were killed, some expected the president to try to restart negotiations on a long-shelved gun control bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). The bipartisan legislation, which was modest but at least broke a decade-long stalemate, had been crafted after the Sandy Hook school massacre of 20 children and 6 adults.

At that time, President Obama had tasked his vice president with creating a plan to combat mass shootings; in 2013, after scores of meetings and conversations, Biden revealed his roadmap, which included mostly meaningless initiatives such as requiring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research the causes of gun violence and proposing a national conversation about mental health.

More promising was the independent Manchin-Toomey bill, created soon thereafter, which would have expanded background checks to most gun sales and which also offered some concessions to the National Rifle Association (NRA) in order to win Republican support. People close to the negotiations claim that Biden had little to do with creating the legislation or selling it to members of his own party.

The Washington Post quotes a former Democratic senate aide saying, “The Biden role was a joke. He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Biden did not move one single person.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/25/a-cabinency-of-dunces/

As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success. 

A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Joe Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges. 

But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance. 

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. Over 2 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit—and without COVID vaccinations and tests during a pandemic. 

Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law. 

But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz—an arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes. 

While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises that his board will carry on.

In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools. 

In reaction and under prompts from teachers’ unions, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats” from parents against school board members. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beto-orourke-goes-for-broke-texas-greg-abbott-gubernatorial-race-uvalde-shooting-robb-elementary-11653516141?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It isn’t easy for a Democrat to win statewide in Texas these days, and Beto O’Rourke already lost once to Sen. Ted Cruz. Now he’s running for Governor against incumbent Greg Abbott, and on Wednesday he gambled on a stunt that could make or break his campaign.

Gov. Abbott and a variety of state and local officials were holding a press conference to update the public on the Uvalde massacre at Robb Elementary School. It was a governing, not a campaign, event.

After Mr. Abbott had spoken for several minutes, Mr. O’Rourke interrupted to point a finger at the Governor and declare, “This is on you,” referring to the murder of 19 children and two teachers by 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. “You said this was not predictable. This is totally predictable when you choose not to do anything,” Mr. O’Rourke added. The Democrat was then asked to leave by other officials on the stage, with at least one uttering an epithet.

Trailing in the polls, Mr. O’Rourke must figure he had to take a risk on politicizing the murders even as emotions are raw and officials are still trying to figure out Ramos’s motivation. Mr. O’Rourke famously said during his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign that he wanted to ban AR-15 rifles. On Wednesday he got his sound bite. We’ll see if Texans agree that this mass murder was all about gun control.