RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/04/19/the_buck_stops__somewhere_else_147488.html

When my kids were little and something went wrong, they always pinned the blame on an absent friend. If there was a crayon drawing scrawled on the bedroom wall, they pointed to their buddy, Michael S. When an avalanche of toys came tumbling down the stairs, it must have been Michael’s fault. My boys seemed oblivious to the fact that Michael and his parents had been living in France for over a year.

Joe Biden’s explanation for America’s troubles is about as convincing as my 4-year-old twins’. Let’s consider a few of these self-inflicted troubles, beginning with the surge of illegal immigration.

Not that the administration dares call it illegal. They call it “irregular immigration” and, like all progressives, use the term “undocumented.” They simply forgot their documents. That Orwellian doublespeak is commonplace in the media, universities, and Washington.

The plain truth is that the Biden administration has exacerbated illegal immigration by overturning a series of successful, Trump-era policies on the southern border. The administration opened the door to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants, leaving the Border Patrol overwhelmed and the Biden team without answers. The numbers are reaching historic highs. To make matters worse, the administration has just announced it will jettison Title 42, a public health policy used to curb mass immigration during the early days of the pandemic. So, even worse days are ahead.

Since the administration can’t find anyone to blame for this catastrophe, they simply ignore it. The mainstream media follows suit.

https://www.city-journal.org/another-wave-of-progressive-prosecutors-may-be-coming

A growing number of San Francisco voters have decided that they’ve had enough of Chesa Boudin as their city’s top prosecutor. But across the country, inexperienced, progressive-minded attorneys are following the same playbook, deciding, like Boudin, who had not been a prosecutor before taking office as district attorney, that they’re qualified to operate the complex machinery of a prosecutor’s office. Their efforts threaten to destabilize even further the nation’s tottering criminal-justice system.

In 2019, Boudin replaced George Gascón, another progressive prosecutor, who had decamped to Los Angeles and now serves as district attorney there. The child of convicted murderers from the radical Weather Underground, Boudin had never served as a prosecutor, much less the chief prosecutor for a major city. Instead, he had worked as a translator for the Hugo Chavez administration in Venezuela before attending law school, clerking for a federal judge, and working as a public defender. Upon running for district attorney, Boudin told voters that he intended to stop prosecuting crimes and empty out the jails, respectable goals for a public defender but dubious policies for a DA. Once elected, Boudin delivered on his promises—and crime, homelessness, and disorder have exploded in San Francisco. Boudin now faces a recall election, funded by disgusted citizens and businesses.

Boudin’s tenure should have served as a warning to others that running a district attorney’s office might not be as simple as it looks. A chief prosecutor must be skilled at evaluating cases, reassuring citizens about public safety, coordinating with law enforcement, recruiting and training new prosecutors, handling a budget, interacting with judges, and a million-and-one other actions that affect urban crime. These skills take time to learn and refine.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/18/mom-of-j6-political-prisoner-we-are-half-alive/

Ethan Nordean is entering his 13th month of captivity as a political prisoner in the United States of America.

Arrested in his home state of Washington last February on nonviolent charges related to the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, Nordean, 31, has spent the past year in jail, mostly in solitary confinement. He hasn’t held his young daughter or hugged his wife and parents for months.

In the eyes of the Biden regime—on a destructive crusade to exact revenge against supporters of Donald Trump—Nordean is a threat to the country, an alleged “domestic violent extremist,” i.e., terrorist, as a member of the Proud Boys. That, of course, is not the group that burned, looted, and actually terrorized thousands of American communities throughout 2020, responsible for at least two dozen deaths and $2 billion in property damages.

Nordean’s real crime in Joe Biden’s America was to support Donald Trump in the 2020 election. During an exchange last year at a congressional hearing between FBI Director Christopher Wray and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Wray suggested Nordean was among the “most dangerous, most serious” January 6 criminal cases.

So, what exactly did Nordean do that so alarmed Wray? Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, he made plans to travel to Washington, D.C. to participate in a political protest—something that was not considered a crime before January 6, 2021. Nordean and other members of the Proud Boys peacefully assembled near the Washington Monument in the morning and then walked toward Capitol Hill.

When some members of the Proud Boys and at least two FBI informants with the group physically breached a police line around 1 p.m. on January 6, Nordean was not among them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_national_fight_for_survival_is_not_over.html

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an essay for American Thinker: They escaped totalitarianism twice, only to see it again in America. I described how badly our Leftist neighbors responded to my father-in-law’s support for President Trump in the 2020 election. I described how vandals stole his political signs several times but the gist of the article was about two main points.

First, I told how my father-in-law had survived both the Nazis and the Soviets in Poland during WW2, emigrated to Argentina as a kid, and then survived the dictatorship in that country. In Argentina, he had been forced to hide his college textbooks in the backyard for fear of government agents. My wife recalls the young next-door neighbors being dragged out of the house and shot in the street, ostensibly for being socialist, but it was just as likely that they simply did not want to live in a dictatorship.

The second point was that Carmel, Indiana, a wealthy bedroom community of Indianapolis, and a thriving community in its own right, was beginning to show the same initial signs of social intolerance fomented by the Nazis, the Soviets, and Argentina’s dictators. Gina Carano warned about letting this happen in the US on her social media and was fired from Disney for her trouble.

Currently, my 82-year-old father-in-law displays in his front yard a pro-life sign and a “Facts Are Facts” sign (that I created). He also flies his US Flag upside down as a sign that he believes that the “greatest country on Earth” is in serious distress. Because we have cleverly hidden cameras (and some not so hidden), the signs have not yet been molested.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/watson-video-brooklyn-subway-attack-paul-joseph-watson/

Video commentator Paul Joseph Watson is back exploring the media discomfort over the inconvenient fact that the suspect in the recent NYC subway shooting is a — wait for it — black supremacist.

Check out the must-see video below:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/lefts-estrangement-reality-and-common-sense-bruce-thornton/

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has triggered a hysterical outburst among the “woke” progressive Twitterati after he tendered an offer to buy Twitter and turn it into a private company. For years Twitter has been the “woke” Dems most important enforcer of ideological orthodoxy and “cancel culture.” No wonder, then, that Musk’s offer, coming after his frequent criticisms of Twitter’s one-sided censorship of conservatives and defense of free speech, has induced such panic.

The content of this reaction, moreover, shows just how detached from everyday reality Leftists are, and how little common sense they possess.  Their blatant contradictions of fact, and shameless display of ridiculous begged questions and double standards bespeak a hermetically sealed mental world impenetrable to reason, common sense, and reality itself.

Take the old Clinton functionary Robert Reich. He was Secretary of Labor in an administration that campaigned and governed on “Third Way” principles: Rejecting the hard-left drift of the Democrat Party that had alienated old-school working-class Democrats and helped create Ronald Reagan’s success. Clinton announced that the “era of big government is over,” and followed up with tough reforms of lax criminal penalties for violent crime, and requirements that welfare recipients work. He also rejected the racial grievance-industry’s hold on the party when he publicly chastised the race-monger Sista Soulja.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/17/trickle-down-racist-antiracism/

Elected governments were rare in the past. They did not appear until over four millennia after civilization first emerged in the Near East. Constitutional systems were fragile at birth. And they are on the wane today. Nation after nation seems to be devolving into autocracy. Multiethnic, multiracial consensual governments have been even more brittle and sporadic in history.

The Roman, Ottoman, and Soviet empires were multiracial. But they were not consensual. Instead, they required a degree of force to ensure calm among rival tribes and warring peoples—violence that we would find incompatible with our notions of modern democracy.

Today, India and Brazil are large multicultural and multiethnic democracies. But neither, so far, has guaranteed their citizens either prosperity or security.

So present-day multiracial America is a great experiment in the unknown. Can its various tribes, and races unite around the Constitution? Or will they inevitably revert to form and give their first loyalties to those of shared superficial racial or ethnic affinities?

Regressing to the Color of Our Skin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/08/why-the-experts-keep-getting-it-wrong/

One of the most intimidating things about being a ‘heterodox’ thinker is having to constantly say that ‘the experts’ are wrong.

If, online or at a cocktail party, you point out something as obvious as the fact that very few black Americans are fatally shot by police, you can expect to be deluged with citations to articles bearing titles like ‘Know their names: black people killed by police in the US’ and ‘How unjust police killings damage the mental health of black Americans’. Best-selling and critically acclaimed books on race in America have titles like Open Season: The Legalised Genocide of Coloured People.

More broadly, if you express doubt about the idea of ‘systemic racism’ – perhaps because six or seven of the 10 most financially successful ethnic groups in present-day America are not white – you will no doubt be reminded to read famous books arguing that severe racial oppression is everywhere, like Ibram X Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist or Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

Similarly, should you criticise modern gender theory or the bizarre idea that human biological sex is complex and hard to define, you will inevitably be referred to an authoritative-sounding article, packed with data and infographics, like this one in Scientific American.

While I write from the centre-right, the same fate awaits those who ask difficult questions from the left.

This phenomenon has no doubt existed for millennia: the entire priestly class of Christendom cruelly mocked doubters of the existence of God during the Medieval and Renaissance eras – and gleefully enforced penalties against them that were far more intense than any ‘cancellation’ today. Worries about self-preservation aside, novel thinkers face a tough question whenever confronted with what the experts say: how can all of these very intelligent people be wrong? Surely it must be me who is wrong instead?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/18/the-working-classes-are-a-volcano-waiting-to-erupt/

“What is clear is that neoliberalism, which once promised gains for all classes, now means for most people an inevitable diminishment of living standards in ways not widely seen since the 1940s. We do not know when or if the volcano will erupt, but the prospect of it erupting will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from genderfluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.

The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class. The small-business class generally tends to favour the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government out of their business and to be left alone. Meanwhile, workers tend towards the populist left, which promises to relieve their economic pain.

The common feature is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French elections, a majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other rightist candidates, or for the old Trotskyist warhorse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other candidates of the hard left. The establishment parties, like the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Gaullist Républicains, were left way behind. The ultra-green Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a pathetic performance from the onetime ruling party. Intriguingly, voters under 35 went first for Mélenchon and then Le Pen, leaving the technocrat Macron in dismal third place among the young. Macron only won decisively among voters over 60.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_democrats_big_lie_about_puberty_blockers_being_harmless_and_helpful.html

From the moment we’re born, our bodies are constantly changing. The initial changes, from baby to toddler to child, occur when we lack the self-awareness to be taken aback by the process. Indeed, there are only two times in life when we are intensely aware of the changes—and, often, find them disturbing. The first is when we go through puberty and the second is when age finally catches up with us.

In both cases, people may fight back against those changes. We know all about Hollywood stars and the fight against aging. It’s the adolescent changes that matter. The changes can be disturbing and even dismaying. Boys’ voices can squeak embarrassingly and they like to hold a notebook in front of their crotch. Girls get boobs (which boys stare at), hips, and painful, messy, inconvenient periods.

We used to sympathize with adolescents and assure them that this was normal and they’d outgrow it. Nowadays, though, as often as not, they’re told that they’re probably transgender. And no, that’s not me saying that. It’s being said in a video from a company called AMAZE Org, which claims to provide age-appropriate sex education for children: