RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/crossing-omicron-rubicon-covid/

We volunteered to serve in the biggest medical experiment in human history. We accepted the biggest peacetime suspension of civil liberties in American history. And we agreed not to ask difficult questions about the origins of the virus.

Now it’s time we recovered our freedom — and exercised the responsibility that sustains it.

The Omicron variant isn’t the end of the world. It looks more like the beginning of the end. The case numbers are rising even faster than the rate of inflation, but the ICUs aren’t overflowing and the death rate remains low. Covid-19 seems to be becoming endemic, like all the other bugs we might catch in a normal winter. If you’re elderly or obese, or if you have another co-morbidity, then you have a way to go yet. But if you’re not, then it’s time to boldly go into the new reality.

We are crossing the Omicron Rubicon. The president, having ridden Covid outrage into office, has now washed his hands and left Covid policy to the states. Or, rather, half the states, because the red states never got onboard with his dubious mandates anyway. And now the Supreme Court has dismissed his mandatory vaccination order too.

Even the other two branches of government, the CNN and the CDC, have finally got it right. After all the CDC’s faux-scientific injunctions to “follow the science,” its director Rochelle Walensky has reduced its recommendations to the Covid-positive to “You should probably not visit grandma.”

It’s time for the teachers’ union to send their members back to work. It’s time to stop the mask theater in bars and restaurants and schools and planes. If you feel you should wear a mask, or if you don’t feel comfortable eating indoors — and I’ll admit, I’m not yet comfortable with it — then take responsibility for your own risk. Wear a mask if you feel you need to. Avoid the situations you don’t feel safe in. Pull the kids from school if you think it best. But take responsibility for yourself.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/how-eric-adams-can-make-nyc-great-again

The honeymoon period for Eric Adams, New York City’s newly elected mayor, is an opportunity to propose a transformational economic growth plan in his February budget. During the campaign, Adams made remarks such as “New York will no longer be anti-business” — an about-face from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s eight-year record.

Mayor Adams’s remarks are welcome, and he has already proposed cutting red tape, cutting waste, and increasing worker training. These are good first steps, but New York is at one of its lowest economic points ever — as shown by the 9% unemployment rate.  The mayor needs more specifics if he is to restore the city’s national economic leadership and create jobs. 

Some of this can be achieved by being vocally pro-business. Tone matters. The upbeat mayor is a natural cheerleader who wants to be known as the “GSD mayor,” one who will “get stuff done.”  Ambitious targets help amplify the message.  A worthy goal would be to bring back 400,000 jobs to regain the pre-pandemic level and begin a cycle of bond rating upgrades, not downgrades.

The city lost nearly 615,000 jobs over the course of the pandemic and has brought back only 213,000 of these jobs, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. Why the sluggish recovery? For decades, New York has been at the bottom of rankings for having the worst tax, regulatory, and business environment in the country.  Businesses are leaving in record numbers for low-tax states such as Florida and Texas and taking their tax revenue and workers with them. Making all these problems more complex is that economic growth is closely linked with quality-of-life concerns such as crime and sanitation, which also need turning around.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/18/the-nazi-next-door/

 Your Democratic neighbors won’t be ordered to vote for laws that ostracize you from society, steal your property, or send you away to a concentration camp. They will do it burning with pride.

Almost half of Democratic voters—48 percent—think the government should be able to fine or imprison individuals “who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.” 

This is not the most astonishing finding of a poll just released by Rasmussen. Let’s go through the relevant points: Nearly the same percentage of Democratic voters—47 percent—think the government should be able to put a tracking system, like an ankle monitor or a locked collar, on people who refuse the vaccine. And 45 percent favor putting the unvaccinated in camps. Camps.  

More than half of Democratic voters—55 percent—think people who refuse the vaccine should be fined. Fifty-nine percent favor confining all unvaccinated people to their homes. More than a quarter of Democratic voters—29 percent—think that the government should be able to confiscate the children of unvaccinated parents . . . 

Is any of this Nazi enough for you yet? You are living next door to the people who would have turned you over to the Comité de salut public for opposing the “Law of Suspects”—the law that authorized the arrest of all suspected enemies of the Revolution and ushered in the Reign of Terror. You are living next door to the people who would have turned you over to the NKVD for “moral sabotage of the Soviet Union.” You are living next door to the people who would have called up the Gestapo and said, “My neighbor is hiding a Jew.” 

Examine these historical personages from Revolutionary France or Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany (or Nazi France): It’s not just that they were following orders. On the contrary, they thought they were doing a positive good for society. They were eager to help rid their community of dangerous elements. They were proud of what they did. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/18/the-civil-war-psy-op/

Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.” 

This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right. 

Really? With what? In one of his more lucid moments, Joe Biden himself noted that the disaffected on the Right have no chance of taking on the United States government without F-15s and nukes. Like the blind squirrel finding a nut, the old man was onto something. The government’s overwhelming advantages in technology, firepower, manpower, money, transportation, supply networks, surveillance tools and much else would be so lopsided as to make the military buzzword “asymmetric” a grim joke. Think, instead, Bambi versus Godzilla. 

To fight a civil war, you have to organize. But organizing is all but impossible for those who genuinely dream of taking on the state. The U.S. government is incompetent at many (most?) of its assigned responsibilities. But it’s quite good at keeping tabs on any hint of “right-wing” “insurrectionary” impulses. That task is made much easier by the fact that there is so little such activity to monitor—so little, in fact, that the feds increasingly feel compelled to incite it. 

It would be hard to hide a mass movement of people gearing up to fight a civil war. Do you see one anywhere? I don’t. If there were one, don’t you think the feds would be all over it? Of course they would. And don’t you think regime media would be blaring about it 24/7? Again—of course. This is a classic case of a dog not barking. Silence is confirmation that nothing is happening. 

Organization, like civil war, requires elites. Indeed civil wars, like all wars, are fought between two opposing factions of elites. Even backwoods insurgencies have leaders. Where are the elites poised to lead red America in a civil war? Who are they? There is Trump to be sure, and regime propaganda insists that he’s a modern-day Jeff Davis-Robert E. Lee hybrid. But this is the same Trump who spent January 6 tweeting. The real elites made sure that was his last day on that platform—and then impeached him for the second time. The real elites—Republican and Democrat alike—wish he would crawl into a hole and die. Trump may have tens of millions of committed followers. But a real civil war requires generals and colonels and captains and lieutenants and sergeants. Go ahead—name some. I’ll wait.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/why-was-texas-synagogue-jihadist-akram-allowed-to-enter-u-s/

When it comes to Western governments and jihadism, willful blindness is never fully cured.

EXCERPTS

Americans, particularly Jewish Americans, were justifiably nettled by agent Matthew DeSarno, who heads the FBI’s Dallas field office and who ridiculously claimed that Akram’s plot was “not specifically related to the Jewish community.” In his tin-eared way, however, DeSarno appeared to be conveying that Akram’s main objective was to extort our government into releasing convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui from custody, and reassuring Jewish communities across the country that the bureau does not believe that there’s a broader ongoing conspiracy to attack synagogues.

We should be understanding of officials who make good-faith errors in communicating facts about what otherwise seems to be a competent performance by government agencies. Nevertheless, we should also demand a complete, accurate accounting. The FBI and other agencies should not get to take a victory lap in which we are spun with information that casts them in a favorable light, while less-flattering facts are omitted and possibly concealed.

Which is to say, we need a lot more information about what happened here — in particular, about (a) the circumstances of Akram’s demise in the synagogue, and more important (b) how this jihadist managed to obtain a tourist visa allowing him to enter the United States.

Then there is the matter of how Akram managed to get a tourist visa. It raises questions that need to be addressed by both American and British authorities, whose close partnership in the lavishly funded counterterrorism field is said to set the first-world standard for international cooperation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/never-forget-al-sharptons-history/

In response to Al Sharpton: MSNBC’S Hands-On Antisemitism Expert

As Isaac notes, on Monday, MSNBC included Al Sharpton on a panel of pundits to discuss the hostage-taking situation in a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. Of all the nearly 8 billion human beings available to chime in on an antisemitic incident, Nicolle Wallace thought that Sharpton was the best choice available. This would be akin to bringing David Duke on after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery to discuss how Americans could do a better job protecting African-American lives.

It will never cease to amaze me how Sharpton, one of the most pernicious characters in New York history, is constantly being trotted out by MSNBC as if he has the moral high ground on issues of tolerance. I’m old enough to remember one-time conservative congressman Joe Scarborough authoring the resolution, “Condemning the racist and anti-Semitic views of the Reverend Al Sharpton.” These days, the two are buddies.

It can never be repeated enough that before he was a kingmaker, sought out by national candidates and presidents, Sharpton infamously used a tragic 1991 car accident to incite a three-day race riot in Crown Heights. Sharpton took advantage of the accidental death of a boy named Gavin Cato to spread conspiracies about a Jewish “nexus” between “Tel Aviv” and “South Africa” (then still an apartheid state) and the “diamond merchants” of Crown Heights. “All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’,” went the eulogy from the Baptist minister.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/glazov-gang-dr-peter-mccullough-fauci-really-frontpagemagcom/

Leading Covid-19 physician sheds disturbing light on Dr. Fauci’s “expertise” and intentions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/soros-general-demands-purge-military-daniel-greenfield/

The United States has Soros prosecutors who have turned our cities into violent hellholes where criminals run loose, Soros politicians who wage war on this nation from the ramparts of their offices, and Soros generals who advocate for political purges of the nation’s military.

Recently the Washington Post ran an op-ed from three retired generals, Antonio Taguba, an immigrant who had accused America of war crimes during the fight against Islamic terrorists in Iraq, Steven Anderson, a board member of the left-wing VoteVets, and Paul Eaton, a senior VoteVets adviser, urging that the military prepare for a “2024 insurrection” in proper Soviet style.

The three left-wing ex-generals called for “intensive intelligence work” to “identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers” and “guard against efforts by propagandists.”

A Commie commissar couldn’t have said it any better than Taguba, Anderson, and Eaton.

These “propagandists” and “mutineers” are not the members of the pro-Hillary “Resistance” who pledged to undermine and sabotage the Trump administration in 2016. Nor are they the Democrats who insisted that President George W. Bush was illegitimately elected.

Only conservatives are up for the purge.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/18/cuomos-many-abuses-show-why-the-separation-of-powers-matter/

During the COVID-19 pandemic, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was breathlessly heralded as “the politician of the moment” and the “authoritative voice in the crisis.” His press briefings were carried live on all major news networks and even won him an Emmy. He was seen as decisive and in charge, and he even wrote a bestselling book highlighting his pandemic “leadership.” 

It later came to light that Cuomo deliberately obscured data showing the scale of nursing home deaths. His catastrophic policies requiring nursing homes to take infected patients likely resulted in more fatalities.

But a recent POLITICO story paints perhaps an even more disturbing and damning picture of Cuomo’s one-man rule during the pandemic. Cuomo routinely ignored the advice of department of health experts on questions such as whether to send protective equipment. He also consistently ignored the metrics set by his own department to determine when businesses would be allowed to reopen. 

His announcements, made without notice or consultation, left his advisors scrambling. One member of his COVID-19 task force noted that Cuomo “was managing by press release, by press conference” rather than responding to evidence.  

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/19/its-official-biden-now-leads-trump-in-the-covid-death-count/

According to the latest numbers from the CDC, more Americans have died with COVID since President Joe Biden took office than did in the year before under Donald Trump.

CDC data show that, as of January 17, there have been a total of 850,575 deaths in the U.S. related to COVID. On Trump’s last day in office, that number was 424,409. That means 426,166 COVID deaths have occurred — so far — since Biden took office, with the number currently trending well above a thousand a day.

This is a stunning rebuke not just of Biden, but of everyone who went around blaming Trump for every single COVID death that occurred on his watch.

Biden and others repeatedly insisted that if Trump had only done things such as accelerated testing and contract tracing, responded faster to the pandemic, pushed mask mandates, the country would have avoided the calamities of 2020.