RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

President Biden’s two immediate predecessors fractured the nation with divisive talk. In his campaign, Mr. Biden promised unification. Instead, he has increased dissension, focusing on identity politics, federalizing voting laws and diminishing the role of the traditional family, all the while calling his political opponents misogynists, racists, xenophobes, bigots and domestic terrorists who want to destroy democracy. Such intemperate language does little to bridge legitimate differences between Democrats and Republicans – progressives and conservatives. He has wasted political capital, personally denigrating those with whom he disagrees, which has meant less time on issues that affect all Americans, regardless of Party – from the economy, inflation, education and illegal immigration at home to the consequences for the United States as to what is happening in the Middle East, Central Asia, China and Russia.

The calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan sent a message to its allies that the United States’ commitment means little, and to its enemies that America need not be feared. The Abraham Accords, one of the Trump Administration’s finest achievements, has been stalled by the anti-Israel stand of the Biden Administration, and by a desire to reinstitute the Iranian nuclear deal. While Western imperialism of an earlier time is, perhaps justifiably, denigrated, its reincarnation in the East – in China and Russia – is ignored by the same pundits who criticize the West. Recent riots in Kazakhstan and the plight of the Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang Province are examples of unrest that are being dealt with harshly by Russia and China, while the West turns a blind eye.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/being-jewish-in-an-unraveling-america?token=

Last week, I met a rabbi in Los Angeles. We talked about surfing where to get the best pizza in the city and her kids and politics. At the end of the evening, she was making plans with a colleague, and they extended an invitation. Would I want to go to the shooting range with them next weekend?

I thought about the rabbi with her guns a lot over this Shabbat, as Jews who had gathered for services at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, were taken hostage by a man named Malik Faisal Akram. After nearly 11 hours, thanks to earthly miracles of law enforcement and perhaps heavenly ones as well, they were freed unharmed. Akram, who had predicted his own death in his rantings captured on Facebook livestream, was dead. 

The bad guy was killed. The good guys were saved. It doesn’t often turn out that way. All the Jews I know—even the atheists—are thanking God. 

But why, despite my gratitude, do I feel so much rage? Why does it feel like there is so little comfort to be found? What has changed?

I did not feel this way in the horrific aftermath of the Tree of Life massacre—the most lethal in all of American Jewish history.

Back then, in October 2018, it felt like the whole country grasped that a wound to the Tree of Life was a wound to the Tree of Liberty itself. That the monstrous attack in my hometown was not simply an attack on Jews, but an attack on our collective home. And that what was at stake in standing up against the deranged, conspiratorial mindset that led a neo-Nazi to the synagogue that morning was nothing less than America itself. 

What I now see is this: In America captured by tribalism and dehumanization, in an America swept up by ideologies that pit us against one another in a zero-sum game, in an America enthralled with the poisonous idea that some groups matter more than others, not all Jews—and not all Jewish victims—are treated equally. What seems to matter most to media pundits and politicians is not the Jews themselves, but the identities of their attackers.

And it scares me.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/16/conspiracies-as-realities-realities-as-conspiracies/

American politics over the last half decade has become immersed in a series of conspiracy charges leveled by Democrats against their opponents that, in fact, are happening because of them and through them. The consequences of these conspiracies becoming reality and reality revealing itself as conspiracy have been costly to American prestige, honor, and security. As we move away from denouncing realists as conspiracists, and self-pronounced “realists” are revealed as the true conspirators, let’s review a few of the more damaging of these events. 

Russians on the Brain 

Consider that the Trump election of 2016, the transition, and the first two years of the Trump presidency were undermined by a media-progressive generated hoax of “Russian collusion.” 

The “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” mythologies dominated the network news and cable outlets. It took five years to expose them as rank agit-prop. 

Robert Mueller and his “dream team” consumed $40 million of Americans’ money and 22 months of our time—to find the nothingburger that most of the country already knew was nothing. Yet the subtext of the 2018 Democratic takeover of the House was the media narrative that Trump, as Hillary Clinton put it, was an “illegitimate” president, due to Russian collusion. 

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claimed on national television that Trump was a “Russian asset.” Former CIA head John Brennan assured the nation that the president was “treasonous,” due to his supposed “lies to the American people.”  

All sorts of politicians, retired military, and news anchors echoed the charges. The lies and myths of has-been British spy Christopher Steele made him a leftist hero. They were repeated ad nauseam as truth.  

FBI grandees like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, and others destroyed their careers in their obsessions over Trump. In the process of destroying themselves, they also nearly wrecked the reputation of the FBI. The Pentagon has the lowest popular support in modern memory. The CIA is more feared by millions of Americans than by our enemies. 

Steele could not produce any evidence to back up his scurrilous charges. The inspector general of the Department of Justice found little evidence to substantiate any of the charges. James Comey and Robert Mueller under oath both pleaded either memory problems or denied any knowledge about the FBI’s use of Steele and the role his fake dossier played.  

Most of the televised accusers, when under oath before Congress, admitted they had no evidence for their flamboyant charges. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who claimed the dossier was authentic and that Trump was compromised, has repeatedly been revealed as a liar. In various televised House hearings, he kept getting caught either fabricating, misrepresenting, or warping evidence before his own committee. 

No matter. Hillary Clinton and the Left kept pounding “collusion.” The more it was proven false, the more they shouted the lie.  

Finally, special counsel John Durham’s investigations, some authentic media investigative reporting, and the preponderance of evidence showed not only that Trump did not collude with the Russians, but that the entire charge was a sick sort of projection on the part of Hillary Clinton and her vassals.  

Steele concocted the election-cycle fantasy using a former Clintonite totem in Moscow. Another source was the now indicted Igor Danchenko ( a “primary sub-source”), who was working at the leftist Brookings Institution while feeding Steele.  

A cynic might look at this sad chapter and conclude that Hillary Clinton sought to destroy her opponent by paying Christopher Steele to manufacture fantasies fabricated from left-wing and former Clinton associates. Then she used the media, the FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department to seed the farce while hiding her own role behind three firewalls including the DNC, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS.  

The ultimate irony?  

Hillary Clinton did collude with those claiming to have Russian connections to warp an election, and she projected her likely illegal activity onto the target of her attacks. No conspiracist could trump such reality. Will Merrick Garland look at her role in this episode as he conducts his insurrectionist investigations concerning efforts to undermine an election? 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-part-ii-jack-kerwick/

“In this house, we believe in…science.” 

“The science is settled.” 

“Science says….” 

As I began demonstrating in a previous essay, anyone who espouses such clichés is scientifically illiterate. Science is not some ahistorical abstraction embodying the proverbial God’s eye view of the cosmos. It has a particularly colorful past extending back centuries, a history replete with all of the nit and grit, all of the contingencies and relativities, characteristic of all cultural phenomena. And the history of science includes, of course, rival philosophies of science. 

It was also mentioned that the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant revolutionized Western philosophy when he argued that it is not, as had always been assumed, the mind that passively and impartially mirrors the world. Rather, it is the world that is made to comport with the mind. The only world that human beings can meaningfully speak of is the world that has been constructed in terms of the mind’s own internal structures. These structures are comprised of the “pure intuitions” of space and time and a dozen “categories,” including the categories of “causality” and what philosophers have traditionally called “substance.” 

Space, time, universal causation, and the existence of entities that endure over time are not necessarily objective features of the universe to be discovered by scientific inquiry but, quite the contrary, the very pre-conditions of all inquiry. They are features of the human mind supplied in advance of all experience and in the absence of which we can experience nothing. 

Kant was provoked to develop his “Copernican revolution” after he was awakened by his “dogmatic slumbers” by his predecessor, David Hume. To Kant’s legacy we will return. Not everyone, it is critical to note here, was persuaded by him to abandon Hume. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_american_medical_association_falls_to_crt.html

Cultural Marxism has found its way into the medical profession.
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” This well-known quote is a liberal translation of Antonio Gramsci popularized by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which renders “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” as “Now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader and theoretician who is considered the forefather of Critical Race Theory, had probably no idea that, a century later, such an accurate insight into his time would prove to be incredibly prophetic of our own here and now. Today the monsters — or morbid symptoms — are among us as neighbors, colleagues, and friends accept and embrace the Critical Race Theory and its ramifications in the many fields of human life and scientific research.

One of these fields — perhaps the most unthinkable — is that of medical science and practice. Things have meaningfully changed since on June 25, 2021, White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL), a national organization led by medical students, published its statement of “vision and values.” The organization, which boasts 75 chapters at medical schools across the country and was called to action by the Black Lives Matter movement, “aims to dismantle racism in medicine and fight for the health of Black people and other people of color […]. Our job is two-fold: 1) dismantling dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism; and 2) rebuilding a future that supports the health and well-being of marginalized communities.” WC4BL also focuses on “dismantling fatphobia,” embracing “Black queer feminist praxis (theory and practice),” “unlearning toxic medical knowledge and relearning medical care that centers the needs of Black people and communities.”

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

There is no way to recover national political standing once a politician becomes a popular butt of humor, a punchline in a degrading joke. Ask Dan Quayle, who has disappeared from the scene so completely that nobody has even gotten him on the record about the vice presidency of Kamala Harris. My guess is that he is enjoying bitter laughter.

Last Thursday’s interview with Craig Melvin of Democrat-friendly NBC sealed her fate. The Zen koan-like statement, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day,” closes the case, a brilliantly meaningless platitude that seems to demand meditation, as if there must be some enlightenment lurking in the vast mental emptiness.

But of course, there isn’t. More and more people are reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the woman who is a heartbeat away from the presidency, whose incumbent is elderly and afflicted by dementia, is a dummy. I resisted that conclusion in part because, after all, she was elected California’s attorney general and senator and she is the daughter of two professors, but mostly out of fear for our nation. But as her ex-staffers multiply in number, reports are proliferating of those who know her up close privately saying that, yeah, she is that stupid.

The sole plausible explanation for her rise is disgraceful. When she was younger and prettier, she had a sexual relationship with a powerful married man decades older than she, and thanks to his influence in a corrupt one-party state whose media would never question a Democrat politician on the rise, she had high political office handed to her, ratified by voters dutifully accepting party dictates.

This, too, is utterly mockable, and now that the dam is breaking, will be mentioned more often as she becomes an embarrassment to the party.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/patriotism-unity/youngkin-signs-executive-orders-banning-critical-race-theory-and-mask-mandates-on-first-day-as-governor

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin started his term with a slew of executive orders Saturday to address key campaign issues.

After being sworn in as the 74th governor of Virginia, Youngkin signed 11 executive orders, a handful of which were aimed at allowing parents to exert control over their children’s education by ordering schools to stop teaching critical race theory and implementing mask mandates in public schools.

“Parents should have a say in what is taught in school because, in Virginia, parents have a fundamental right to make decisions with regards to their child’s upbringing, education, and care,” Youngkin said in his inauguration speech Saturday. “To parents, I say we respect you. And we will empower you in the education of your children.”

Youngkin, who made education a focal point of his campaign, also issued an executive order directing officials to “investigate wrongdoing in Loudoun County.” This alluded to the scandal in which the school board was accused of covering up or failing to address multiple sexual assault allegations, one of which resulted in the conviction of a male student who identified as gender fluid.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/vaccine-aristocrats-strike-again

Jimmy Kimmel Live, fast becoming Leonid Brezhnev’s never-realized dream of a Soviet Tonight Show, just put out a high-effort gag called “Anti-Vax Barbie.” It’s impressively on-message:

The skit begins with jazzy VO: “There’s a new doll in town and the fun is contagious. It’s Anti-Vax Barbie! She’s STRONG. She’s INDEPENDENT. She doesn’t trust SCIENCE!”

In a shirt reading, I CALL MY OWN SHOTS, Barbie drawls, “Bill Gates is the Antichrist!” The doll even “comes with a computer so she can do her own research!” (We see Barbie typing and twanging, “Sez here Moderna turns yer teeth Jewish!”). When you take Anti-Vax Barbie shopping, she attacks the cashier who demands she wear a mask, while another Barbie in a shirt reading PFIZER TELLS LIEZERS films the besieged worker and yells, “I’m reporting you, bitch, you’re going to jail!”

You can also take Barbie “to the stables,” where she’ll chug ivermectin! Moreover, the only “man-date” this Barbie cares about is “with her proud boyfriend Ken,” who wears a “Let’s Go Brandon” tee and can’t hear his Barbie-pal — the one dressed in JOHNSON AND JOHNSON IS SATAN AND SATAN shirt — because he’s listening to Alex Jones tell him the truth about monoclonal antibodies. The kicker is a hoot:

Exclusively sold in Florida and Kentucky! Barbie dream ventilator sold separately!

Mocking the hayseeds is always fun, but what a bonus, when you can jack off some of TV’s biggest advertisers at the same time!

https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4413/Hiding-the-Bodies.aspx

Thank you, Art Moore of World Net Daily, for reporting on the tag-team treachery of Fauci and Walensky after a US Senator finally, if inadequately, confronted them both with the VAERS covid “vaccine” body count in “Fauci, Walensky dodge when asked about number of vaccine deaths.”

Before I discuss the substance of Moore’s story, I’d like to point out why it is likely to remain a news media exclusive forever: The lethality of the covid “vaccine” is the last thing media and political and money elites want us “useless eaters” to understand. The mantra they have pressed on us is “safe and effective,” which I think of as the new “Sieg Heil.” We’re supposed to repeat after them, while sucking on the same old puff-blah, “Fauci, Walensky testify while omicron prompts many possible changes” (Associated Press); or the same old melodrama, “Criticized by Senators, U.S. Health Officials Defend Omicron Response” (NYT); or, worst of all, the “battle” of Fauci vs. Paul, those fake gladiators in the arena fighting over nothing. (I’ll get back to that.) Among others, CNBC pushed the latter (“Fauci says Sen. Rand Paul’s false accusations ‘kindles the crazies’ and have incited death threats”), as did Fox, only the other way around (“Rand Paul rips Fauci following latest hearing fireworks: He doesn’t want debate because he ‘is science’).

Whatever Fauci and Rand Paul lob at each other in these recurring “showdowns,” their dispute over virus research in Wuhan has nothing, zip, nada, to do with the agony of our nation. We are not dying over the origins of a virus which may not exist, or even over the virus itself (plus “variants”) with its 99+ percent survival rate, and whose average age of death approximates the average age of death.

We are dying from the tyrannical “cure”: each and every act of oppression imposed on us by our very own governments and institutions, all in the name of a fake plague called “covid.” From “flattening the curve (15 days), to “lockdowns” forever, to “social distancing” and other totalitarian measures including incessant “testing” (with a fake test), we find ourselves not on the road to something they mockingly call “public health,” but rather to a state of perpetual fear, vaxx apartheid, “green passes,” concentration camps (happening), digital currency (to come), a vaxx-caused die-off and overall sickening of the world’s peoples, and, I am increasingly persuaded, the goal of ending the human species itself in gene-engineered and nano-wired “transhumanism.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/little-president-falsely-cried-racism-biden-atlanta/

President Biden’s wisdom and penetrating intelligence sometimes escape him. So far, they have stayed away for fifty years and show no signs of returning. They are often accompanied by wild exaggerations, invented personal stories and hyperbolic attacks on opponents.

Examples are not hard to find, and the public is catching on. The latest fulmination came during a campaign-style rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, aimed at supporting his bill to nationalize election laws. Since that bill contravenes America’s long, constitutionally enshrined tradition that state legislatures control voting rules (as long as they don’t violate individual civil rights), the bill will fail in the Senate, blocked by the filibuster.

Biden, once a man of the Senate, has long supported the filibuster. That’s now changed. In the Atlanta speech, he urged the Senate to junk it. Other Democratic senators, who strongly supported the filibuster when they were in the minority, have flip-flopped, too. New York’s Chuck Schumer once told the Senate that eliminating the filibuster would turn the United States into a “banana republic.” Now, he wears a Chiquita sticker on his lapel.

Despite Biden and Schumer’s efforts, the filibuster will remain. What prevents a change? The votes of all fifty Republicans plus two Democrats: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The other Democrats have attacked them without mercy.