RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/who-bears-the-costs-of-progressive

One of the ironies of progressive criminal justice and education policies is that their costs are often borne by the very people they claim to help. And I don’t mean the financial costs. What I’m talking about is, I think, more consequential than money. Living in an under-policed high-crime area could cost you your life. Living in a school district full of dysfunctional schools could set your child behind in ways they may never recover from. And yet progressives who wave the banner of equity and inclusion continue to defund the police, to decline to prosecute potentially dangerous criminal offenders, and to stand in the way of school choice.

Of course, progressive politicians rarely bear those costs themselves. They often live in safe neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools their constituents could never afford. In this excerpt from my recent conversation with the great Robert Woodson, we discuss the ironies (maybe “hypocrisies” is a better word) and costs of progressive policies that continue to disadvantage the already disadvantaged while giving a boost to the careers of the politicians that advocate for them. These are perennial concerns here at The Glenn Show, and I’m pleased to add Bob’s on-the-ground experience to the mix.

GLENN LOURY: As I’m sure you are aware, Bob, Philadelphia is a basket case now, in terms of crime. They’ve exceeded 500 homicides in a year for the first time in, I don’t know, 35 years. You’ve got this open argument between former mayor Michael Nutter and District Attorney Krasner, self-consciously progressive D.A. who’s been elected as a Democrat in Philadelphia to transform policing—not policing. He’s not chief of police, he’s the D.A. But to transform criminal justice policy in the city, get rid of cash bail, not bring all of these cases for low-level property crimes.

And Philadelphia is only one of a dozen cities about which a similar story could be told. Baltimore, close to you in D.C., also having trouble with the mayor and the police commissioner and the district attorney, all self-consciously progressive black women, if I’m not mistaken, who are presiding over a disaster. Chicago, my hometown, carjackings are through the roof, homicides are through the roof, assaults are through the roof, guns are everywhere, et cetera. St. Louis. I mean, we could go on for a long time,

ROBERT WOODSON: But it makes the class issue. But let me tell you what, it’s even gotten worse. And I just read that in Seattle there is a ballot initiative that will reduce the enhancements of people who engage in drive-by shootings, because of racial equity, because a higher number of black gang members are guilty of drive-by shootings. And therefore, since it adversely affects them, they’re going to try to reduce the penalties in the name of racial equity.

Yeah.

But trust me, the people advocating this do not live in those neighborhoods suffering the problem. That’s the point. 80 percent of blacks living in those communities are against defund the police. And so that makes my class argument.

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/01/07/preserve-the-narrative-the-public-rejects-the-insurrection-claim-in-new-polling/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

In the day long events commemorating January 6th, Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a telling statement to her fellow members and the public at large. Pelosi declared “It is essential that we preserve the narrative of January 6th.” Part of that narrative is that this was not a riot but an “insurrection,” an actual “rebellion” against our country. Pelosi’s concern over the viability of that narrative is well-based as shown by a recent CBS News poll. The majority of the public does not believe that this was an “insurrection” despite the mantra-like repetition of members of Congress and the media. The public saw that terrible day unfold a year ago and saw it for what it was: a protest that became a riot. (For full disclosure, I previously worked as a legal analyst for CBS News).

Not surprisingly, the poll received little comparative coverage on a day when reporters and commentators spoke of “the insurrection” as an undeniable fact. Yet, when CBS asked Americans, they received an answer that likely did not please many. Indeed, CBS did not highlight the answer to the question of whether the day was really a “protest that went too far.”   The answer was overwhelming and nonpartisan.  Some 76% believe that this was a protest that went too far.

That, however, was not one of the four options to the matinee question featured by CBS. It did not allow the public to call this a riot when it asked them to describe “What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021?” Why? There was the ever present “insurrection” and “trying to overthrow government.” However, the other two options were “patriotism” or “defending freedom.” That is perfectly bizarre. The most obvious alternatives to an actual rebellion in a violent clash would be a protest or a riot. However, the public was simply not given those options.

The result was predictable. Some 85% of Democrats dutifully checked “an insurrection” or “trying to overthrow government” while only 21% and 18% of Republicans agreed respectively.  For those who did not see the riot as an act of patriotism or defending freedom, they were simply left without a choice.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/01/07/another-disastrous-jobs-report-lands-on-bidens-desk-n2601550

Another disastrous job report dropped on Friday morning with predictions of new growth missing by hundreds of thousands. Economists predicted 442,000 positions would be created. The number came in at just 199,000. 

“Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 199,000 in December, and the unemployment rate declined to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in leisure and hospitality, in professional and business services, in manufacturing, in construction, and in transportation and warehousing,” the Department of Labor released Friday morning. “The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.9 percent in December but remains 1.5 percentage points lower than in February 2020. The employment-population ratio increased by 0.2 percentage point to 59.5 percent in December but is 1.7 percentage points below its February 2020 level. Over the year, these measures have increased by 0.4  percentage point and 2.1 percentage points, respectively.” 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-potemkin-presidency-january-6-kamala-harris/

The one-year anniversary of the January 6 riots unfolded in a manner as dramatic as it was predictable. The Pearl Harbor and 9/11 comparisons were uttered before noon — not by some media hack on MSNBC, but by our own vice president. Democrats, led by Speaker Pelosi, stood on the steps of the Capitol adorned with face masks and holding fake candles to hold a prayer vigil. At one particularly bizarre point during the day’s ceremonies, Pelosi introduced playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who in turn introduced cast members from his hit musical Hamilton to sing a virtual rendition of “Dear Theodosia.” If that last sentence confuses you, don’t worry: I’m also not sure exactly what I just wrote. Not to be forgotten in all of this theater was President Joe Biden, a man far more interested in panic pageantry than governing.

It’s not hard to work out why the normally hard-to-reach Joe and Kamala were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to take to the podium on Thursday morning. After all, they were eager to be their old selves again. Remember pre-election Joe and Kamala? They were so popular and fearless.

Times have changed. The Biden-Harris administration is saddled with inflation issues, border crises and at-home testing failures. But on January 6, 2022, Biden was able to put aside his shortcomings and remind the world of his greatest asset: that he isn’t Donald Trump. That’s why the Potemkin president spent his entire speech incessantly talking about the “former guy.” If Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s theory on political criticism is true, it would appear as though Biden is sweet on 45.

Beyond fixating on the former president, Biden also made a point of insulting all of Trump’s supporters. The unifier-in-chief had no qualms about depicting the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 as akin to the deranged rioters who breached the Capitol.

“Instead of looking at election results from 2020 and saying they need new ideas or better ideas to win more votes, the former president and his supporters have decided the only way for them to win is to suppress your vote and subvert our elections,” he said.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/06/desantis-calls-medias-jan-6-coverage-nauseating-and-a-politicized-charlie-foxtrot/

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis mocked the corporate media’s “nauseating” coverage of the Jan. 6 Commemoration at the Capitol Thursday, calling it “Christmas” for Democrats, and a “politicized Charlie Foxtrot,” using  military slang for a poorly-managed operation, or “clusterf-ck.”

​”This is their Christmas,” ​DeSantis said, meaning Washington and New York-based media outlets. “They are going to take this and milk this for anything they can to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump​,” he added. DeSantis made the remarks during a news conference about COVID-19 testing in West Palm Beach. The governor took a number of questions from reporters on COVID-related issues. The last question related to the Jan. 6 anniversary of the Capitol Hill riot.

The likely 2024 presidential contender told reporters that “obviously” he would not be watching any of the media’s histrionic coverage.

“I don’t expect anything good to come out of anything that [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the gang are doing,” he said. “I don’t expect anything from the corporate press to be enlightening. I think it’s going to be nauseating, quite frankly, and I’m not going to do it.”

DeSantis compared the media’s obsessive nonstop coverage of the Jan. 6 riot to their light coverage of the congressional baseball shooting in 2017, when a left-wing activist opened fire on Republican lawmakers as they were practicing for the next day’s Congressional Baseball Game for Charity.

On June 14, 2017, Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson came to the park with a GOP kill list, and shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/06/lia-thomas-is-guilty-of-institutional-cheating-and-gender-eugenics/

You were born a biological male. You have XY chromosomes that irrevocably designate your sex as male. You began to identify as either non-binary or female around two years ago. You are currently a member of the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team where you recently were victorious against Cornell University women’s team. As a transwoman with the physical advantages of still being a biological male, you have broken several of the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim records. In your 1,650-meter freestyle win, you beat second-place finisher and teammate Anna Kalandadze by 38 seconds. 

Because of you, women such as Kalandadze who held records no longer hold them. You, as a biological male, have unfairly stripped them of their hard-fought honors. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), it is permissible for biological men to compete in women’s sports. A man simply has to announce that he is a woman and take testosterone suppressors for a year. 

Here are some facts, Lia. One of the advantages you still carry—regardless of your testosterone levels—is that as a person who was born male you have certain innate physical advantages over women. You are stronger. You are faster. You have larger lungs, a larger heart, and larger skeletal size. You enjoy greater circulation, and you possess less fat than biological women. 

I cannot understand the deeply misogynistic attitude evinced by the NCAA, nor can I fathom the way our nation, for the most part, stands by and watches while mass psychosis subsumes reality. 

As a professionally trained ethicist who is also a cisgendered gay man, I respect your individual right to self-identify and to cull a conception of the good life for yourself around your gender identity. You have a right to be treated with dignity and respect. No one should ever violate your bodily identity. Your decision to view yourself as a woman should never permit others to eviscerate you of your individual rights as a human being. But I also advocate the individual rights of women.

Your freedom to cull such a life stops when you foist that identity as an unassailable truth onto others and force them to adopt it as a normative mandate. You and the cowardly NCAA are guilty of wholesale cheating on a massive scale. Biological men competing with women is a form of massive cheating. There are rules that create different sporting categories for men and women based on objective criteria found in nature and reality. You swam on a men’s team, and you competed with men. You know very well what those differences are. 

My sense is that even though you came out as transgendered, that disclosure gave you no right to decide, as a biological man, to compete with real biological women. You are not a biological woman, and you will never be one. That is an objective reality. There is one first, irreducible, and fundamental criterion for determining membership on college athletic teams: It is biological sex—not gender identity. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/strategic-defense-initiative-against-white-coat-lloyd-billingsley/

As 2022 dawns, white coat supremacy (WCS), rule over the people by unelected medical bureaucrats, is surging on several fronts. Dr. Anthony Fauci called on Americans to disinvite unvaccinated relatives from Christmas gatherings. Based on advice from Fauci, Joe Biden prophesied “a winter of severe illness and death” for the unvaccinated. Biden also pushes vaccine mandates that divide the people and steal workers’ jobs. As the WCS surge continues, a group of distinguished medical scientists offers a way to roll it back.  

On October 4, 2020, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford University), and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University) released the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) to “express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world.”

The authors proposed an alternative strategy “focused on the most vulnerable,” that would let those at little risk, particularly the young, live normal lives. The GBD was signed by more than 50,000 scientists and medical professionals and 800,000 members of the public. That set off alarms at the National Institutes of Health.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_democrats_january_6_observances_were_like_a_bad_academy_awards_show.html

Yesterday, Democrats in D.C. and the mainstream media, gave themselves over completely to a look back at January 2021 and the extraordinary horrors of a riot that lasted a few hours, involved rioters people weapons, had no looting, fires, community destruction, or police deaths, and saw only one death (at police hands). The whole event was like the Academy Awards. Not the long-distant Academy Awards of beautiful people celebrating movies America loved, of course. Instead, it was the modern Academy Awards, with hate-filled people ranting against Americans, making boring, stupid speeches, and getting interrupted by badly staged musical numbers.

When the Academy Awards began in 1927, it was a private dinner party for a small Hollywood crowd. Eventually, of course, because our entertainment infrastructure is now and always has been ultimately about self-promotion to sell its products, the brains in Hollywood figured out that Americans would like to watch stars dress up and get awards for the movies that Americans had enjoyed the previous year. The system functioned very well for a long time, with families gathering to watch glamor, hear the emcee’s jokes, and lively musical acts.

Slowly, though, as Hollywood went woke, the Awards became boring as the Academy celebrated preachy, anti-American movies that no Americans wanted to see. And then Trump became president and the Academy Awards developed into a Trump hate-fest. The clothes got uglier, the people weirder and angrier, and the whole thing was a parody of Hollywood’s once exuberant celebration of self.

One could say that the zeitgeist of the modern Academy Awards culminated in today’s January 6 observations. It was all there: The angry people, the ugly clothes, the hatred for ordinary Americans, the boring, bizarre speeches, and the weird musical entertainment.

The Award for Most Ridiculous Speech went to Kamala Harris for comparing events on January 6 to Pearl Harbor and 9/11: