RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/04/here-comes-the-desantis-is-worse-than-trump-narrative/

It’s finally here. We all knew this moment would arrive, it was just a matter of time. The same people who compared Trump to Hitler and called him a threat to democracy, will now tell us that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is even worse than Trump.

It won’t matter if DeSantis runs for president in 2024 or 2028, this will be something you’ll hear repeatedly.

Gabriel Hays of FOX News made the catch:

NBC News column: DeSantis is a ‘clearer danger than Trump,’ pushing ‘thought control’ like ‘Nazi Germany’

An NBC News opinion column asserted Wednesday that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to ban CRT and protect young children from being taught about gender and sexuality in inappropriate ways in public schools, represents “thought control that has happened” in “Nazi Germany” or “today’s China.”

Written by former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, the opinion piece, titled “Ron DeSantis has taken Trump’s playbook — and made it much more dangerous,” discussed how the Florida Republican has turned Trump’s “divisive talk into real (and really harmful) action” that mirrors action done in “totalitarian societies.”

Aftergut’s reasoning included a variety of DeSantis’ recent policy decisions including the enactment of the Parental Rights in Education Bill, but he was really focused on the governor’s latest initiative, which Aftergut described as, “censoring math books.”

Of course, what liberal analysis of a Republican politician would be complete without a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis?

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/wrestling-with-cognitive-inequality?token=e

When we speak of inequality in the United States, we’re typically talking about economic inequality, whether it be disparities in wealth or differences among individuals in the opportunity to acquire wealth. People have various theories about how to ameliorate economic inequality, from taxing the rich and redistributing wealth to designing programs with the right incentives that give people the opportunity and the motivation to earn more money for themselves. Whatever one’s preferred policy, there will always be some inequality in any free society. But allowing it to run rampant poses a great risk to political and social stability. So, there will always be a need to address the problem in some way.

Still, there are certain kinds of inequality that no tax, program, or social policy will eliminate. For instance, what should we do about people who simply lack the cognitive ability to compete in our economy? What do we do with people whose intellectual abilities are so limited that employers are reluctant to hire them, so finding them any steady work is all but impossible? The sad fact of the matter is that such people exist in any society. So, you would think this problem would fall under the remit of a liberal politics that views (or claims to view) helping the disadvantaged as a moral imperative. But, when the issue has to do with human intelligence—with IQ—we hear very little from anyone, left or right, about how best to help those with cognitive disadvantages find a dignified way to live and work.

That’s because IQ has become so taboo that even admitting to the reality of innate and meaningful differences in intellectual capacity among human beings can get one in trouble. (Note well: I am not talking here about racial differences or about genetics. I am talking about the differences that clearly exist among individuals in mental ability.) Luckily, not everyone is afraid of trouble. In the following excerpt from my recent appearance on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, Jordan outlines this difficult problem with remarkable empathy. The first step to finding a solution to the problem is talking about it, which we do below.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In a letter to a friend in late 1777, after General Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga, Adam Smith wrote: “There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.” His point was that great nations can withstand defeats – that it takes a great deal of bungling to bring down a powerful and prosperous state. But he did not deny that nations, like empires, can and do collapse.

We face challenges, but is the United States confronting ruin that could imperil our way of life? In the April 11, 2022 issue of The Atlantic, Jonathon Haidt wrote an article titled “After Babel: How Social Media Dissolved the Mortar of Society and Made America Stupid.” “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We were disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Mr. Haidt warned of abuses from social media, which he blamed for the lack of cohesiveness, civility and trust in society and in government, as well as being a risk to democracy. The answer, he believes, lies in three parts: “hardening” democratic institutions against extremist elements; providing more intense regulation of social media, and helping the next generation by letting children be children, encouraging more time for fun and less time on smart phones. While I agree with his suggestions about children, I have doubts as to the wisdom of “hardening” democratic institutions, and I am not a fan of more regulation. In addition, I was disappointed he did not spend more time on how social media impedes free speech, in legacy media, schools, universities and in board rooms.

A world in a whirlwind needs an anchor to windward. For most of man’s history that was religion. Today, in the United States, just over 40% of Americans say religion plays an important role in their lives. In the past two hundred years, since the onset of Industrial Revolution, there have been unprecedented changes in the lives of our species.

https://robertspencer.org/2022/04/ilhan-omars-foreign-policy

While the entire Western world is reeling at the spectacle of Russian atrocities in the Ukraine – the razed-to-the-ground cities, the mass graves full of murdered Ukrainians, the deliberate targeting of civilians with missiles let loose at railroad stations, schools, hospitals, theatres — Ilhan Omar has demonstrated her fealty to Vladimir Putin. She was one of only two House Democrats to vote against sanctioning Russia’s oil industry, while her fellow Muslim member of the Squad, the Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), in the run-up to the invasion argued against providing Ukraine with aid.

Omar has family ties, of an unusual sort, to Russia. Her brother-in-law, Mohamed Keynan, was the chief of staff for former Somalian Prime Minister Hassan Khaire, known for “all but giving” his country’s oil reserves to the energy company Soma Oil & Gas, which is controlled by a Russian oligarch and Putin ally Alexander Djaparidze. Omar’s father was a Soviet-educated colonel in the Somali army during the ’80s under the Russian-backed regime of Siad Barre.

Omar and Tlaib are the two most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian members of Congress. As such, their defense of Russia is unsurprising. The Palestinians themselves have been among the very few supporters of Russia internationally. PA President Mahmoud Abbas had a warm telephone call with Putin on April 18, in which he declared his firm support for Russia, and Putin, in turn, declared his support for the Palestinians. Hamas, too, has just thanked Putin for his “principled stand” against Israel. In the middle of the Ukrainian conflict, when Putin has been shunned by the civilized world for his war crimes, “Palestine” – both the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza — stood with Putin. Don’t let that be forgotten.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/04/23/black-clergy-call-on-corporations-to-distance-themselves-from-black-lives-matter-n1592140

Since the advent of Black Lives Matter in the mid-2010s and especially since the organization went front and center in 2020, corporations have fallen head over heels for BLM.

It’s an easy way for corporations to virtue-signal, and there’s plenty of pressure on companies to show their support or face accusations of racism, true or not.

Corporations have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, but there’s a movement afoot to call on companies to back away from Black Lives Matter. A group of black clergy leaders approached some corporate headquarters in Atlanta this week, urging them to distance themselves from BLM.

“Concerned Communities for America, a non-profit led by Black clergy, delivered a pledge for signing to the headquarters of Papa John’s Pizza and Coca Cola in Atlanta on Wednesday to renounce BLM’s charity operation and the movement’s push to defund police,” reports ADN America. “The pledge asks the corporations to renounce their past support and donations to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which has been embroiled in scandals over the use of donations for lavish personal expenses.”

Leaders of this non-profit seek to make corporations aware of the difference between the sentiment that “black lives matter,” which everyone except ardent racists can get behind, and the organization Black Lives Matter, which promotes Marxism while its leaders live high on the hog and waste donors’ money.

“Woke corporations in their misguided financial support for BLMGNF have failed Black America and the movement but supporting Marxism, and anarchy on the streets and in our communities,” said DaQuawn Bruce, CCA’s executive director. “Our hope is to educate them on how they might support the communities in which they operate while uplifting those who swear to serve and protect.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/23/who-is-running-this-show-anyway/

Some people, including me, are inclined to disparage social media as an insidious and anencephalic force. Insidious it may be, but it is not entirely brainless. As proof, I offer the fact that I just learned the valuable word “quockerwodger” from a Tweet proffered by a friend. Who or what is a quockerwodger? It is, my friend observed, the perfect word to describe the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, to wit, “a puppet figure or individual whose strings are pulled entirely by someone else.”

Everyone knows this. Who or what that “someone else” is remains something of a mystery. As I have had occasion to observe in this space and elsewhere, I am wont to refer to this puppet magisterium as “The Committee.” I do not know who populates this agency or even whether it is a deliberate body or merely an anonymous aggregation of shared sentiment. 

It could certainly be more expert. If it were, Joe Biden’s verbal emissions would be less incontinent and more truthful. He would not, for example, say that he had “flown over every major wildfire” in the country. The puppeteer would have pulled up on the mouth string when Biden claimed to have traveled 17,000 miles in the “foothills of the Himalayas” with Xi Jinping. 

The puppeteer could be more adroit, but no one can doubt his presence, whoever or whatever he is. 

The late political commentator Joe Sobran called this locationless body “the Hive.” Just as in a beehive, Sobran observed, members of the coven feel they are free, yet their attitudes and behavior are utterly predictable. “Liberals laugh at conspiracy theories that assume that because there is a pattern there must be some central control; but the fact that there is no central control doesn’t mean that there is no pattern.”

Sobran is especially good on the honey that coats the Hive’s often unspoken program. “By using pragmatic language for its agenda,” he notes, “the Hive misleads the general public about its ultimate goals.”

It gains power as ordinary people adopt its language without grasping the implications. After all, who could oppose such worthy causes as ‘civil rights,’ ‘a woman’s right to choose,’ ‘protecting our children’ and ‘saving the environment’? The news media use the buzzwords of the Hive so habitually that they have become virtual organs of the Hive.

Last December, I traveled to Florida to help introduce the Stop W.O.K.E. Act with Governor Ron DeSantis. Yesterday, I traveled back to the Sunshine State to celebrate the signing of that historic legislation, which bans schools, corporations, and government agencies from promoting race essentialism, collective guilt, and racialist abuse.

During the event in Hialeah, I delivered a speech outlining the threat of critical race theory in education and business, explaining to the predominantly Cuban audience that replacing “equality” with “equity” will lead to disaster, as many of their families had experienced in communist Latin America. Governor DeSantis praised my work, telling the audience that nobody has done more to “raise the alarm,” “educate people,” and “ make an impact” on public policy.

The Stop W.O.K.E. Act is a huge step forward in our campaign to defeat critical race theory. Governor DeSantis has proven himself to be the most effective political leader in the country and I was proud to stand beside him during yesterday’s historic events.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/how-the-boomers-robbed-the-young-of-all-hope/

Young people do not degenerate; this occurs only after grown men have already become corrupt.” — Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1748.

The great test of a generation is whether it leaves better prospects for its descendants. Yet by virtually every indication, the baby boomers, and even the Gen Xers, are leaving a heritage of economic carnage — as well as a growing social and cultural dissipation that could shape our future and the fate of democratic self-rule, and not for the better. This legacy comes not from outside forces, but the investment bankers, tech oligarchs and their partners in the clerisy who have weakened their national economies and undermined the chances of upward mobility for most young people.

About 90 percent of those born in 1940 grew up to earn higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights project. The same is true for only half of those born in the 1980s. In contrast to baby boomers’ massive rise into the property-owning middle class, millennials inherit a world in which the middle ranks are struggling almost everywhere, notes the OECD. According to a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, American millennials are in danger of becoming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation.

It is no surprise that recent college graduates report the highest levels of anxiety in the country; suicides, particularly among young girls, have soared to record levels according to the Centers for Disease Control. By one measurement, one in five teenage girls suffered “a major depressive episode” in the years before the coronavirus pandemic, and two in three college students reported problems with loneliness. This pattern appears in virtually every advanced country. In 2017 the Pew Research Center found that poll respondents in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany are even more pessimistic about the next generation than those in the United States. Concern for the next generation’s prospects is also widespread in such important developing countries as India, South Africa and Nigeria. The Japanese are even more discouraged: three-quarters of those polled there believe that things will be worse for the next generation.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/durham-springs-the-trap-on-hillary-clintons-lawyer/

The month of May won’t be a merry one for Michael Sussmann, one of Hillary Clinton’s top lawyers at her favorite election law firm Perkins Coie, who is facing a criminal charge of lying to the FBI when he passed information to the Bureau’s general counsel, James Baker. Sussman stated explicitly that he was acting as a “good citizen,” not as a lawyer for Trump’s election opponents.

Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

The tip was false. It described a secret, traitorous back-channel connection between candidate Trump and the Kremlin and included some “white papers” as “proof.” But that deceit is not part of this criminal charge. Nor is Sussmann’s follow-up meeting with the CIA, where he also claimed to be a “good citizen” not representing anyone, and passed on the same false information, amplifying it with still more data about a secret Russian phone that was always near Trump. The CIA quickly determined the internet data was bogus and perhaps created by Hillary’s anti-Trump group. It also recognized that crucial data had been omitted to create a false impression and perhaps that some of the data had been made up or spoofed.

But again, Sussmann is not being charged with that, at least not yet. Nor is he being charged with participating in a broader criminal conspiracy. Some filings by Special Counsel John Durham suggest he may be preparing such charges against Clinton’s larger network of hoaxers, but he hasn’t leveled those charges yet. He’s going after Sussmann first.

Although a single count of lying to the FBI might seem like a relatively minor charge, Durham is pursuing it for three important reasons. First, a false statement to the FBI is a felony in its own right, or, rather, it is if the statement “materially affected” a federal investigation. Second, Durham seems to have rock-solid evidence. More on that in a minute. Third, if Sussmann goes down, he will have powerful incentives to help Durham nail even bigger players and perhaps help take down the conspiracy in which they jointly participated. After all, Sussmann was close to the epicenter of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. He must know a lot about how it was planned and executed, who was directly involved, who knew about it, who paid for it, and how it all worked.