RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2022/05/31/another-historic-biden-first-black-staffers-leaving-white-house-in-droves-n1602221

The Most Diverse White House EVER™ has a big problem: There’s been a mass exodus of black staffers, with some complaining about a lack of opportunity and mentoring for minority employees.

According to Politico, “At least 21 Black staffers have left the White House since late last year or are planning to leave soon. Some of those who remain say it’s no wonder why: They describe a work environment with little support from their superiors and fewer chances for promotion.”

They’re calling it “Blaxit”—not to be confused with Blexit, an exit of black people from the Democrat party, headed by conservative commentator Candace Owens.

Black staffers leaving the White House include:

Kamala Harris’ senior adviser and chief spokesperson Symone Sanders
Harris senior aides Tina Flournoy, Ashley Etienne, and Vincent Evans
Public engagement head Cedric Richmond
Public engagement aide Carissa Smith
Gender policy aide Kalisha Dessources Figures
National Security Council senior director Linda Etim
Digital engagement director Cameron Trimble
Associate counsel Funmi Olorunnipa Badejo
Chief of staff Ron Klain advisers Elizabeth Wilkins and Niyat Mulugheta
Press assistant Natalie Austin
National Economic Council aides Joelle Gamble and Connor Maxwell
Presidential personnel aides Danielle Okai, Reggie Greer, and Rayshawn Dyson

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/jury-sussmann-trial-continues-deliberations

The jury in the trial of 2016 Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann on Tuesday found the defendant not guilty on a charge of providing a false statement to the FBI, after deliberating in the morning and on Friday.

Special Counsel John Durham last year charged Sussmann with lying to the FBI, while working as a private attorney, for allegedly telling then-bureau General Counsel James Baker that he was not working on behalf of any client while providing him with data he said substantiated an alleged secret communications channel between the Russian Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.

Durham argued Sussmann was working on behalf of two clients, the Clinton campaign and former tech firm executive Rodney Joffe, when he presented Baker with two computer thumb drives of data and white papers.

The connection was allegedly a back channel to the Kremlin.

The Sussmann-Baker meeting took place Sept. 19, 2016, just weeks before Election Day.

The trial is the first in Durham’s investigation into the origins of the now-debunked Russia collusion narrative.

“While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service,” Durham said after the verdict. “I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”

The next trial will be in October in Virginia for Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst accused of lying to the FBI in connection with the collusion plot.

https://www.city-journal.org/realities-about-race-and-equality-in-america

Editor’s note: The following is an edited version of a speech delivered at the 18th annual Bradley Prizes ceremony on May 17, 2022.

Pundits tell us that we’re living in a period of “racial reckoning” in America. Racial dispute suffuses our public life—from school board elections to presidential campaigns. This estrangement of intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and activists derives, in turn, from the fact of persisting black disadvantage across so many fronts in our country’s economic and social life. The reality here is too familiar to require elaborate recitation. Whether talking about health or wealth, education or income, imprisonment or criminal victimization, the relatively disadvantaged status of those Americans who descend from slaves, more than 150 years after emancipation, is palpable.

What are we to make of this? That question has bedeviled me for decades—indeed, ever since I began graduate studies in economics at MIT a half-century ago. I am a black American economist in this era of racial discontent in my country; an Ivy League professor and a descendant of slaves; a beneficiary of a civil rights revolution, now over two generations in the past, which has made possible for me a life that my ancestors could only have dreamed of. More than all of these things, I am a patriot who loves his country. I am a man of the West, an inheritor of its great traditions. As such, I feel compelled to represent the interests of “my people.” But that reference is not unambiguous, invoking, as it does, both communal and civic antecedents.

Racial disparities are real, of course, but, at the end of the day, just how important is race, as such? Inequality in America is not mainly a racial issue. Many poor and marginalized white people deserve our concern, too. Is “race” an undeniable difference between people, or is it a social construct? Interracial marriage has grown dramatically, as has the number of people viewing themselves as “multiracial,” including the first black president and vice president of this country. We talk incessantly about racial identity. But what about culture and values—aspects of our humanity that transcend race? I have become convinced that the alienation that afflicts so many prosperous black Americans is the result of false narratives told by demagogues and ideologues about how “white supremacy” threatens them, or how we have, in effect, reverted to the era of Jim Crow.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/top-paid-la-lifeguards-earned-up?s=w

Who knew that LA lifeguards—who work in the sun, ocean surf, and golden sands of California— could reap such unbelievable financial reward?

It’s time we put Baywatch on pay watch. In 2019, we found top-paid lifeguards made up to $392,000.

Unfortunately, today, the pay and benefits are even more lucrative.

Daniel Douglas was the most highly paid and earned $510,283, an increase from $442,712 in 2020. As the “lifeguard captain,” he out-earned 1,000 of his peers: salary ($150,054), perks ($28,661), benefits ($85,508), and a whopping $246,060 in overtime pay.

The second highest paid, lifeguard chief Fernando Boiteux, pulled down $463,517 – up from $393,137 last year.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found 98 LA lifeguards earned at least $200,000 including benefits last year, and 20 made between $300,000 and $510,283. Thirty-seven lifeguards made between $50,000 and $247,000 in overtime alone.

And it’s not only about the cash compensation. After 30 years of service, LA lifeguards can retire as young as 55 on 79-percent of their pay.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/05/the-divided-brain-and-the-divided-culture/

“The general culture is suffering from highly-focused, over-specialised idiocy — and along with this is the cringe-worthy loss of its sense of humour, in particular a sense of the ridiculous. This is understandable, as its luminaries regularly retail the most ludicrous propositions with a straight face and the admonishment of a wagging finger.”

Everything has a backstory. When I was gearing up to write this essay, the spat between the comedian and podcast interviewer Joe Rogan and the septuagenarian rock star Neil Young broke out. Young demanded that Spotify de-platform the immensely popular Rogan for having the gall to interview a couple of critics of Covid vaccinations. If Spotify did not comply then in protest “he”—meaning his record company—would withdraw his work from the streaming platform.

Rogan is an affable, untutored seeker after knowledge; a rough diamond who is occasionally tasteless and profane and has a very large audience—all things that contemporary elites despise. I watch the occasional Rogan clip on YouTube. I’m not a Spotify subscriber. While I am a big consumer of classic rock music including Mr Young’s music, I still buy CDs. As for controversies, I spend the absolute minimum time on them—enough time to work out what the kerfuffle is about so I can hopefully then ignore it. I had watched the YouTube clips of Rogan’s December interviews with mRNA technology pioneer Robert Malone and research cardiologist Peter McCullough.1 I didn’t spend much time on them. I was familiar with their arguments from various forums.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/30/no-senate-republicans-the-fbi-does-not-deserve

The day before FBI Director Christopher Wray explained to a Senate appropriations subcommittee why his department deserves a $527.8 million raise in 2023, his agents were credited with foiling an ISIS-linked plot to assassinate George W. Bush. An Iraqi national was arrested on May 25 and charged with attempting to smuggle four other Iraqis into the United States then “murder” the former president in retaliation for the war in Iraq. (I will address the sketchiness of this story in a separate column.)

The timing for Wray was suspiciously fortuitous; appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 to lead the scandal-ridden agency, Wray continues to promote the unsubstantiated notion that domestic terrorists, i.e., Trump voters, pose a lethal threat to national security. For nearly a year and a half, armed FBI agents across the country have raided, interrogated, and arrested more than 800 Americans on mostly nonviolent offenses related to January 6, 2021, a four-hour protest that Wray considers an “act of domestic terror.”

Then right before Wray went hat-in-hand to Congress to ask for a budget boost, headlines blared the news that his department thwarted a plan tied to a legitimate terrorist organization overseas?

Color me skeptical.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/shouldnt-hillary-clinton-be-banned?s=r

“Hillary Clinton was falsely accused many times earlier in her career. This time she’s guilty. It’s not society’s fault there’s no legal name for the offense she and her campaign committed. It was serious, and there should be serious consequences.”

Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/13/blue-dog-democrat-endangered-species/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

It is easy to find Democrats who believe that their party’s problem is not runaway inflation, poor communication, or flawed candidates. The real problem, they contend, is that the structure of the U.S. government is biased against the Democratic Party and that the only solution is a sweeping, Constitution-busting rebuild from the ground up.

A certain kind of wonky Democrat will whine that it is just so unfair that Alaska gets as many Senate seats as California, or that Wyoming gets three Electoral College votes when it has only 576,000 people. (You rarely hear them making similar complaints about the District of Columbia, Vermont, or Delaware.)

The subtext is often that it is unfair that so many Senate seats and electoral votes are in the South and the Midwest — broad swaths of the country with majorities of white, culturally conservative voters. Never mind that recent history shows that a Democrat who deviates from party orthodoxy on abortion and guns gets a lot of leeway from culturally conservative voters on other issues. 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/flag-under-foot-memorial-day-crime-anger/

On my way to work in Midtown Manhattan each day, I pass down 50th Street. Near the corner of Broadway, not long ago someone glued an American flag to the sidewalk and set fire to it. The scorched remnants cry out in resistance to the attempted insult and erasure.

I have no idea what protest prompted this indignity, or whether the person who sealed the flag to where pedestrians would trample it was the same who decided to set it on fire. I haven’t noticed any passersby taking special note of Old Glory reduced to such an inglorious state, surrounded by cigarette butts and other debris.

This isn’t New York City’s fault. We are amid more pressing crises. The subway entrance nearby — one of the main points of access to Midtown — reeks of urine and sometimes worse. We ride it knowing that at any moment some homeless turnstile jumper may try to push someone in front of a train, knife a stranger or, as happened last weekend, shoot a man dead for looking at his cell phone.

Most, but not all the perpetrators are young black men, but older black men and black women have gotten into the game as well. But we can’t talk about this except as a “mental health” crisis. Truth be told, it is an anger crisis.