RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_reality_of_racial_balancing_and_the_fight_for_equal_protection.html

In Don Lemon’s edgy interview with Elon Musk that ended his talk-show deal with X, Lemon baits the billionaire entrepreneur, asking: “Do you believe women and minority pilots are inherently less intelligent and less skilled than white male pilots?”

Without blinking, Musk hits home with: “No. I’m just saying we should not lower the standards for them.”

When Lemon pursues the point, claiming no evidence of standards being lowered, Musk retorts that there is cited evidence of “significant cases where standards are lowered.”  

Lemon then changes tack. He says Boeing had admitted that a faulty door panel was responsible for the incident being discussed. Musk, matter-of-factly, points out that a recently introduced DEI-related incentive structure at Boeing should have focused on passenger safety.

DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion.  As American institutions intensify their push for “DEI hires and appointments,” the three words threaten – and, in many cases, have become an excuse to violate — the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states: “No state can deny equal protection under the law to any person within its jurisdiction.”  

The reality of DEI is that diversity is being used to justify racial discrimination against majority whites and high-achieving minorities, equity is being used to achieve equal outcomes instead of providing equal opportunities, and inclusion is being used to exclude people who oppose the ideology du jour.  Merit, hard work, initiative, and innovation be damned.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_reality_of_racial_balancing_and_the_fight_for_equal_protection.html

In Don Lemon’s edgy interview with Elon Musk that ended his talk-show deal with X, Lemon baits the billionaire entrepreneur, asking: “Do you believe women and minority pilots are inherently less intelligent and less skilled than white male pilots?”

Without blinking, Musk hits home with: “No. I’m just saying we should not lower the standards for them.”

When Lemon pursues the point, claiming no evidence of standards being lowered, Musk retorts that there is cited evidence of “significant cases where standards are lowered.”  

Lemon then changes tack. He says Boeing had admitted that a faulty door panel was responsible for the incident being discussed. Musk, matter-of-factly, points out that a recently introduced DEI-related incentive structure at Boeing should have focused on passenger safety.

DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion.  As American institutions intensify their push for “DEI hires and appointments,” the three words threaten – and, in many cases, have become an excuse to violate — the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states: “No state can deny equal protection under the law to any person within its jurisdiction.”  

The reality of DEI is that diversity is being used to justify racial discrimination against majority whites and high-achieving minorities, equity is being used to achieve equal outcomes instead of providing equal opportunities, and inclusion is being used to exclude people who oppose the ideology du jour.  Merit, hard work, initiative, and innovation be damned.

A survey of one thousand hiring managers by Resume Builder found a shocking preponderance of “reverse discrimination” in the workplace: 52% of the respondents believe the practice is in place; one in six have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men; and 48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/26/how-identitarian-dogma-captured-scientific-american/

The re-election of Donald Trump earlier this month provoked predictable outrage from the usual Chicken Little celebrities, politicians and activists. Mainstream-media outlets, which long ago abandoned any objectivity in their reporting of Trump, have reacted with unbridled hysteria. What might have been more surprising to some, however, was the meltdown experienced by Laura Helmuth, who was, until recently, the editor of the once sober and august Scientific American magazine.

Shortly after Trump’s re-election, Helmuth, in a now-deleted post on Bluesky, took aim at the ‘racists’ and ‘sexists’ she grew up with in her Trump-voting state. She wrote:

‘Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself… Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back… I apologise to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.’

You might think Helmuth’s diatribe hardly fitting for the editor of an internationally recognised science journal. The post gained widespread attention and within days, it led to her stepping down as editor after four-and-a-half years in post. Strikingly, Helmuth’s parting shot was not a one-off. In recent years, the widely respected and nearly 200-year-old publication embraced a number of woke shibboleths, often jettisoning science in the process. Notably, Scientific American became a cheerleader for gender ideology, the Black Lives Matter movement and the establishment narrative around Covid-19. This trend even predates Helmuth’s arrival in the editor’s chair.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/25/jack-smith-files-to-drop-both-felony-cases-against-trump/

Special counsel Jack Smith filed motions Monday to drop all of his federal charges against President-elect Donald Trump, saying Justice Department policy prevents him from continuing the prosecutions after Trump’s inauguration.

“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” Smith’s office wrote in Monday’s filing.

The cases regarded Trump’s handling of classified documents and his actions following the rigged 2020 presidential election in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 riot on the U.S Capitol.

Trump said in a statement Monday that the cases against him represented a “political hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing could have happened.” The president-elect added that he “persevered, against all odds, and WON.”

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Smith’s motion to dismiss the Jan. 6-related indictment hours later, formally bringing the contentious case an end.

Smith first indicted Trump in June 2023 in a federal court in Miami on 37 felony counts related to his handling of classified documents. The case marked the first time in U.S. history a former president had faced criminal charges.   A Florida judge already dismissed the case, but Smith’s office had sought an appeal.

https://www.jns.org/sebastian-gorkas-welcome-return-to-the-white-house/

As soon as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Sebastian Gorka to the post of senior director for counter-terrorism in his new administration, the anti-“Make America Great Again” crowd dusted off an old smear campaign against the former West Wing staffer.

One enduring attack centers on his association with Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian merit organization established in 1920. Critics have sought to tie the group to Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross regime, despite the International Commission on Orders of Chivalry recognizing its modern incarnation.

Gorka has explained that his wearing of the Vitézi Rend medal at Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was a tribute to his father, Paul Gorka, a Hungarian resistance fighter against both fascist and communist regimes.

This controversy underscores the deeper ideological rift between Gorka—a naturalized American, born and raised in Britain, where his parents had fled to escape Communist Hungary—and his detractors. His robust defense of American and Israeli policies has made him a favorite target of those who oppose his unapologetic patriotism and harsh attitude toward Islamization.

https://www.thefp.com/p/lyndon-johnson-jfk-thanksgiving?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are fast approaching Thanksgiving, and many Americans, no doubt, are wondering what they have to be thankful for. 

There’s the skyrocketing cost of pretty much everything. Rising crime. Endless wars. And perhaps worst of all, this fear that we’re falling apart—that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together, that in the middle of the turkey and stuffing a brawl might break out between the “communists” and “fascists.” (There were no communists or fascists on the ballot this year, the partisan smears notwithstanding.)

Over the past year, there has been much talk about America being more divided than ever. It’s easy to forget, in the midst of all the emotion and politicking, that this is an exaggeration—to say the very least. There was the Civil War. And, of course, the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.

In the 1960s, political violence—including assassination—became an unavoidable fact of life in America. The first devastating and consequential assassination of the decade took place on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. 

That single act of violence has spawned countless conspiracy theories; fueled suspicion of the “military-industrial complex” (a suspicion that has morphed into antipathy toward the “deep state”); and driven what seems, at times, a permanent wedge between the government and the governed.

But, as always, events throw up remarkable people. And sometimes even people who do not seem all that remarkable become remarkable when history throws them into the fiercest fire.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was such a man. 

The Kennedy clan—aristocratic, with their Harvard pedigree and penchant for playing football at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts—despised him. Johnson—born into a poor family in Texas Hill Country—despised them right back. JFK had tapped Johnson to be his running mate in 1960, because he needed a Protestant and a good old boy to hold the Democratic coalition together. Johnson, a masterful politician first elected to Congress in 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, was mostly cut out of the very insular Kennedy inner circle. The relationship between the two men was purely transactional. 

On the day of the assassination, Johnson was with Kennedy in Dallas—riding two cars behind the president alongside his wife, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/24/inside-trumps-second-term-mission-to-dismantle-the-administrative-state/

For many years, and in many places, I have been railing against the rise of what people like me have called “the administrative state,” “the deep state,” “the Syndicate.” In an essay called “The Imperative of Freedom” for the June 2017 issue of The New Criterion, I drew upon the work of the political philosopher James Burnham to point out that at least since the 1940s, real legislative power had been increasingly concentrated in what Burnham called “administrative bureaus,” not parliaments or Congress.

“‘Laws’ today in the United States,” Burnham wrote in The Managerial Revolution (1941), “are not being made any longer by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’”

And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of the EPA, HUD, CFPB, FSOC, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative alphabet soup that governs us in the United States today. As the economist Charles Calomiris pointed out in his short but important book Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank (2017), we are increasingly governed not by laws but by ad hoc dictats emanating from semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force of law.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress, just as Article III vests all judicial authority in the Court. The administrative state is a mechanism for circumventing both. In The Administrative Threat, the legal scholar Philip Hamburger describes this shadowy Leviathan as “a state within a state,” a sort of parallel legal and political structure populated by unelected bureaucrats. Binding citizens not through Congressionally enacted statutes but through the edicts of the managerial bureaucracy, the administrative state, said Hamburger, is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.” Accordingly, he concludes, the encroaching activity of the administrative state represents “the nation’s preeminent threat to civil liberties.”

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/taxpayer-funded-censorship-how-government?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=775254&post_

Campaign season brought with it a steady stream of accusations that various parties and platforms were spreading misinformation and disinformation.

Most recently, the scandals at FEMA over avoiding homes with Trump signs was quickly slapped with a “misinformation” label…until FEMA itself admitted it had happened. MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki suggested “laws have to change” to combat the scourge.

With the misinformation category being weaponized across the political spectrum, we took a look at how invested government has become in studying and “combatting” it using your tax dollars. That research can provide the intellectual ammunition to censor people online.

Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has spent $267 million on research grants with the term “misinformation” in the proposal.

Of course, the Covid pandemic was the driving force behind so much of the misinformation debate. Sure enough, the feds have spent at least $127 million in grants specifically targeted to study the spread of “misinformation” — or to help people “overcome” it, so to speak — by persuading them to go along with Covid-related public health recommendations and mandates.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/25/day-1-pipe-and-drill/

Donald Trump has said that on the first day of his second term, he wants to “frack, frack, frack, and drill, drill, drill.” He needs to keep that promise – as well as reopen construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which the Biden administration blocked, just as the Obama White House did before Trump reversed the policy in 2017.

“Put us to work right now,” a laid-off worker who had been building the pipeline when it was shut down said earlier this year. “And you will see not only the fuel prices go down, but you will see the price of everything else go down with it.”

Showing that everyday Americans are more sensible about energy matters than at least half of our political ruling class, another worker said “we should be able to sustain ourselves and not depend on other nations raising their price and then affect us. That shouldn’t even be in the question.”

Those comments were made in March. November changed their outlook.

“It’s a breath of fresh air. We’re running on cloud nine,” said another former Keystone Pipeline worker.

“It will make a big difference as far as your energy cost, your food cost, your gas that you put in your cars. It is actually going to be the primary start of bringing everything … down for the American people that we have suffered so much in the last administration.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/23/the-rise-of-market-originalism/

Republicans have more than ample cause for celebration at the moment. Their victory in this month’s election was sweeping, and the new president and Congress will take office with a true mandate for change.

At the same time, President Trump finds himself in an awkward position, having promised to improve the nation’s economic trajectory while, at the same time, restraining sticky and discomfiting inflation. As I have noted elsewhere, in many ways, the president’s hands are tied. The condition of the nation’s fisc is perilous, and the reinvigorated Bond Vigilantes stand ready to ensure that the situation does not deteriorate further, exacerbated by either increased spending or reduced revenues. President Trump has promised to restore the nation’s economic vitality, but even his party’s largest donors have warned him that the traditional conservative policy to promote economic growth—income tax cuts—is economically risky under current conditions.

Given all of this, President Trump and his economic advisors will have to be resourceful and creative to find ways to nurture economic growth. They will have to think thoroughly about the existing barriers to widespread economic growth and will have to be thoughtful yet aggressive in dismantling those barriers to “make America great again.”

Fittingly, the answers Trump’s economic brain trust should seek are those that focus on the last of the four words in this longstanding catchphrase: again. In short, the formula for economic growth and prosperity can, in part, be found buried in the nation’s past. We, as a nation, can and should focus on making America economically great by employing that formula again.

At the risk of falling prey to “the Golden Age Myth,” I believe it’s important to understand that the nation’s greatest period of economic growth and expansion took place before the economic and political centralization that accompanied (and defined) the “modern era.” One of the keys to restoring the nation’s economic potential, therefore, is recognizing what originally made the American experiment so politically and economically potent.