RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/manhattans-new-anti-prosecution-district-attorney-alvin-bragg

Less than a week ago, New Yorkers closed the book on a year that saw 485 murders—a slight rise over 2020, which saw a massive increase over 2019. Along with marking the end of Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor, 2021 also became the fourth consecutive year in which Big Apple homicides increased. Four straight years of homicide increases: that has never happened in my lifetime. Depressing as the crime data have been as of late, many Gothamites rang in the New Year with optimism about new mayor Eric Adams, a former cop who ran on an explicitly anti-crime platform. But New Yorkers are quickly learning that last year’s election outcomes weren’t universally anti-crime.

On January 3, newly minted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg distributed a memo setting out a number of radical changes to the office’s approach to law enforcement. For starters, he was doing away with the whole “enforcement” thing for a host of offenses: fare evasion, trespass, traffic infractions, resisting arrest, prostitution . . . the list goes on. With some exceptions, these offenses (among others) will no longer be prosecuted in Manhattan. Many other misdemeanors will now be met with diversion into “programs,” completion of which will also trigger non-prosecution.

More serious charges, like robbery and burglary, will be downgraded in many cases, according to the memo. If someone robs a convenience store with an empty gun, a Manhattan prosecutor must now charge the offender with petit larceny (a Class A misdemeanor) instead of robbery in the first degree (a Class B felony). Never mind that in a situation like that, the clerk, if armed, would be well within her rights to shoot the crook dead—such conduct is no longer deemed serious enough to warrant the kind of prison sentence that would normally accompany a robbery conviction.

https://www.city-journal.org/racial-essentialism-corrupts-medicine

The progressive Left is openly attempting to codify racial categories into education, culture, law—and now medicine. New York State has authorized health-care providers to include race in a set of risk factors to determine who qualifies for the limited quantity of life-saving Covid-19 treatments. New York City’s official guidance to providers also reads: “Longstanding systemic health and social inequities may contribute to an increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.” As a result, health-care providers in the city will now “consider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk,” prioritizing nonwhite patients over their white counterparts.

Skin color is far too broad a category to offer any meaningful insight at the individual level. Using race as a proxy to assess an individual’s risk would make sense only if there were evidence that it genetically puts one at higher risk of severe Covid. No such evidence exists. The virus does not appear to selectively target those of African descent, for example. African countries generally have far lower Covid death rates than Western ones.

Of course, the New York Health Department is not claiming otherwise. Under the influence of woke ideology, it is using oversimplified racial categories to correct for alleged systemic inequities that fall along racial lines. On progressive thinking, this compromising of medical practice allegedly achieves a greater social good. Racial prioritization is not perfect, say progressives, but it is justified on a group level since whites have better outcomes than “people of color” in the aggregate.

But even this rationale doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Not all nonwhite groups suffer more than whites on average from Covid. According to CDC data last updated on November 22, Asian-Americans have a 20 percent lower rate of Covid hospitalizations and a 10 percent lower rate of Covid deaths. There is no justification for prioritizing Asians over whites for Covid therapeutics.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/01/24/the-1619-false-history-project/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

What Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times left out

Imagine a Native American history curriculum that focused entirely on four massacres of Natives by whites — beginning with the first encounter between Spanish conquistadores and the Inca emperor Atahualpa and culminating with Wounded Knee — and never touched on American Indian life before 1491, the many Native military victories, or the roughly 5.2 million Natives alive in the U.S. today. Would anyone see this as truly representative, or useful to students of any race, or worth teaching in the schools?

The 1619 Project, from the New York Times, must face the same questions. The project focuses on casting the era of historical slavery as an alternative founding for the United States, with its authors arguing that slavery was responsible for nearly everything that “truly made America exceptional.” Slavery, they write, was the primary reason for the Revolu­tionary War and was responsible for much or most of early American wealth, building “vast fortunes for white people North and South” and making “New York City the financial capital of the world.” Multiple 1619 essays, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others, attribute to historical slavery and racism everything from the competitive capitalism of the U.S. to contemporary patterns of traffic. Slavery, in this narrative, is both the American original sin and the source of all our baraka — everything that makes this a unique and desirable country.

Honorable, non-racist centrists and conservatives face a serious question as we confront this material. How would a nuanced but thorough telling of American history, one that did not seek to minimize slavery, differ from 1619’s? Aren’t these journalists and radical academics — progressive friends often ask, in something approaching anguish — just telling hard truths? The short answer is a clear no.

The 1619 essays almost universally ignore or minimize four critical pieces of context that any unbiased school curriculum would include. These are the truly global prevalence of slavery and similar barbaric practices until quite recently; the detrimental economic impact of the Peculiar Institution on the South and on the American national economy; the nuanced but deeply patriotic perspectives on the United States expressed by the black and white leaders of the victorious anti-slavery movement that existed alongside slavery; and the reality that much of American history in fact had nothing to do with this particular issue. Not teaching about slavery or Jim Crow segregation in schools would be a deeply immoral act of omission, but it is almost equally bizarre to define these decades-past regional sins as the main through-line of American history.

Last week, we broke the story that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s annual retirement pension and benefits would exceed $350,000 — the most ever at the federal level.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks estimated that Dr. Fauci’s pension will be nearly $1,000 per day and exceed $1 million over the first three-years.
 
(Though, at 81, after 55 years of federal service, Dr. Fauci isn’t retiring yet.)
 
Our investigation initially published here at Forbes and has since been showcased in interviews on:

Fox Business’ Varney & Co. show

Wake Up America morning show, Newsmax TV
and 75 other national and international news platforms including: The New York Post, Yahoo!, Fox News, The Daily Mail, The Washington Examiner, Epoch Times, and more. 

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/cdc-has-played-fast-and-loose-covid-data-and-research-yale-public

President Biden can claim that COVID-19 remains a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” partly because “the CDC has played fast and loose with a lot of studies and data,” Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Harvey Risch says.

“We have not been careful or objective with our data,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast Friday. “We don’t even know, for example, the mortality from COVID,” which the CDC pegs at more than 800,000.

Risch noted the agency told physicians to put COVID on death certificates regardless of whether they think the infection played a role. Hospitalizations have also conflated admissions “with” and “from” COVID, he said.

As a member of a committee advising Connecticut early in the pandemic, Risch urged ignoring case counts and focusing on hospitalizations and deaths. That advice was largely ignored until the current “sky-high” yet mild Omicron variant wave, but now “finally people are waking up to say that the cases don’t matter,” he said.

The U.K. is among countries that more carefully track COVID, according to Risch. Its data show vaccinated adults constitute the majority of cases, “and it’s not a hospitalization of the unvaccinated” either.

While vaccines are a “potential and reasonable component” of COVID mitigation, those developed are “somewhat ineffective” and their large-scale deployment has driven an unexpected number of “mutant strains” extending the pandemic and causing higher mortality, Risch said.

President Biden’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not only isn’t trained in public health but “has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States,” Risch argued. 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-authoritarians

Former Vice President Dick Cheney visited the House of Representatives yesterday. He and his daughter Liz were the only two Republicans present at a moment of silence commemorating the events of last January 6th. It was a touching scene, which perfectly described why the surviving anti-Trump Uniparty of the political mainstream is at least as much of a threat to democracy as the “insurrectionists” they never stop wailing about.

In a story entitled “Dick Cheney returns to the House and receives a warm welcome . . . from Democrats,” the Washington Post wrote that “Democrats put aside their fierce and lasting policy divides with the Cheneys to thank them for condemning the attack and Trump’s continued effort to undermine the 2020 presidential election results with his false claims of fraud.”

(News writing has become a pre-fab profession, like assembling IKEA furniture. All you need is an Allen wrench and a list of the latest clichés. “Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election” has replaced “Trump’s efforts to coordinate with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and “Trump’s false claims of fraud” has replaced “Trump’s false claims of ‘fake news.’” Part of the significance of January 6th is that it updated popular propaganda stock, which had grown stale.)

I don’t mean to understate the seriousness of January 6th, even though it’s been absurdly misreported for over a year now. No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it:

The endless hyperventilating efforts to describe January 6th as a disaster on the order of Pearl Harbor or even 9/11 has been awesome to behold. Huffington Post nitwit S.V. Date even called it “1,000 percent worse” than 9/11, moving the decimal point over on the famous Team America joke*:

The panic inspired convulsions across politics and the media. Ted Cruz made a plea for mainstream recognition by denouncing 1/6 as a “violent terrorist attack” before cowering in retreat on Tucker Carlson Tonight, in the process pantsing himself with audiences in all directions. Meanwhile, podcaster Eric Lendrum, on the pro-Trump site American Greatness, devised the impressively crazy syllogism that because the mainstream caricature of Trump supporters is so incorrect, conservatives should therefore embrace it: “If their aim is to make January 6 their Reichstag Fire, then we should go forward celebrating the events of that day as our Storming of the Bastille.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/american-oligarchy/

To observe that the Left and its cheerleading media have treated the one-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a solemn occasion would be to understate the point. For the Left, the (actually) mostly peaceful demonstrations of that day, which for a small percentage of demonstrators did entail illegal trespassing of the Capitol, represented a watershed moment in the history of our “democracy.” January 6 was the day, the narrative goes, where “deplorable” Trumpians attempted to effectuate an “insurrection” and a “coup,” seeking to “overturn” the results of the perfect and pristine 2020 presidential election.

The lead-up to the one-year January 6 anniversary was endlessly promoted by our insular and self-congratulatory Washington press corps as something akin to the one-year anniversary of September 11, 2001. The imbecilic and senile dolt who is our commander-in-chief dedicated his January 6, 2022, remarks to excoriating his predecessor for that predecessor’s alleged incitement of an “insurrection.” Defying parody, a candlelight vigil was held at the National Mall—”in remembrance of the attack on our democracy that occurred on January 6, 2021.”

In fairness, it is true that modern America no longer meets a threshold definition of “democracy.” But the Left is wrong as to why. America in the year 2022 is not a nation bedeviled by a great scourge of right-wing political violence, but it is a nation bedeviled by a monolithic and intellectually homogenous oligarchy that seeks to subjugate dissenting “deplorables” by any means necessary. Consider some examples.

American oligarchy is when a duly elected president of the United States is stymied from day one by cynical ruling class fabulists concocting a false story about that president’s alleged collusion with a foreign power, based on the primary “evidence” of a salacious and unverified “dossier” created in conjunction with the defeated opponent’s presidential campaign. American oligarchy is when the institutional media cheers on not one but two baseless and mind-numbing presidential impeachments based on nothing more than frothing partisan fealty to the oligarchs’ preferred political tribe, the Democratic Party.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/12-questions-the-justice-department-and-fbi-need-to-answer-about-january-6/

There is a good chance Republicans can take control of both houses of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. There is an even better chance they will wimp out and betray their supporters . . . again. This open letter is addressed to one especially disappointing group. 

—The Editors

Dear Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans:

Happy New Year! Hope you are ready and rested for the big political fights ahead in 2022. Republicans across the country are counting on you to stand tough against the Biden regime and your Democratic counterparts in advance of a potentially power-shifting election this November.

Just kidding.

Alas, informed Republicans know that even with all the uncertainties in the world, we can be certain that the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will always disappoint us. Even when you controlled this important committee for four years under a Republican president, you failed to fulfill one empty promise after another.

Remember all the promises to “get to the bottom” of Russiagate, the biggest political scandal and abuse of government power in history? (Well, until January 6.) 

Remember how you let Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Democratic activists hijack the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, which led to a humiliating and divisive showdown between the Supreme Court nominee and his half-baked accuser? 

Oh, and remember that lengthy investigative report you issued a few months later that accused people of lying to Congress and referred them to the Justice Department (which you purportedly oversee) on criminal charges but nothing ever happened?

Good times.

During the first year of the Biden Administration, you made nary a peep as Biden filled his cabinet with Obama loyalists and left-wing radicals. My favorite moment was when every member of the committee voted to advance the nomination of Lisa Monaco—Barack Obama’s hyperpartisan homeland security advisor, Russiagate architect, and former chief of staff to FBI Director Robert Mueller—to serve as deputy attorney general. She is what Andrew Weissmann was to Mueller when he was special counsel; the vengeful, Republican-hating prosecutor calling the shots behind the grandfatherly veneer of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

But don’t feel bad. Every Republican senator, except two, voted to confirm Monaco last April. As I wrote after her confirmation, “rather than act as any sort of barrier to protect America from the arsonist-in-chief hellbent on burning down every tradition, constitutional guardrail, and notion of common decency owed to fellow Americans, Senate Republicans are handing Joe Biden the matches.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/winsome-sears-education-key-black-success-virginia-governor-charter-school-choice-crt-critical-race-theory-11641574129?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

You don’t need a doctorate in futurology to be convinced that when Republican Glenn Youngkin is sworn in as governor of Virginia next Saturday, he’ll take his oath alongside someone who could likely be, four years hence, the first black woman elected chief executive of an American state.

The woman in question is Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect and Mr. Youngkin’s running mate in the Republican sweep of the state’s highest offices in November. (A third Republican, Jason Miyares, won election as attorney general.) Virginia’s Constitution bars consecutive gubernatorial terms, and should Mr. Youngkin prove a success in office, Ms. Sears would be nearly certain to secure the Republican nomination for 2025. Mr. Miyares would also be a contender to succeed Mr. Youngkin as governor, but he’s a decade younger than Ms. Sears and will likely have to wait his turn.

Born in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, some months after her father emigrated to New York in 1963, Ms. Sears is quick to acknowledge a political debt to her native island, from which she, too, emigrated as a child. She claims descent from Nanny of the Maroons, an 18th-century leader of runaway slaves who fought Jamaica’s British rulers in a guerrilla war. “Nanny was an African princess, and my mother comes from those people,” Ms. Sears tells me from her home outside Winchester, Va. Less dramatically, she ascribes her own political confidence—and her belief that there are “no limits to what black people can achieve”—to her quotidian experience of Jamaica, where “the generals are black, the lawyers are black, the doctors are black, the Rhodes scholars are black.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-race-based-covid-treatment-white-hispanic-inequity-monoclonal-antibodies-antiviral-pfizer-omicron-11641573991?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New York state recently published guidelines for dispensing potentially life-saving monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals like Paxlovid to people suffering from mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. These treatments are in short supply, and they must be allocated to those most in need.

According to these guidelines, sick people who have tested positive for Covid should be eligible to receive these drugs if they have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.” These include standard criteria like age and comorbidities like cancer, diabetes and heart disease—but, startlingly, they also include simply being of “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity,” which “should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”

Consider the following cases: A middle-aged investment banker born in Colombia shows up at a physician’s office in Manhattan; a laid-off middle-aged worker of Italian ancestry shows up at a doctor’s office in Rochester, N.Y. Neither has medical risk factors, but both have mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. The wealthy Colombian-American could be given Paxlovid; the laid-off auto worker would be turned away. You can construct thousands of these comparative cases using well-off Hispanics, Asians or blacks and working-class whites.

This is unfair and possibly illegal. With these kinds of regulations, the Democrats who control New York reinforce the racial and ethnic divisions that grew during Donald Trump’s presidency. These state officials have been abetted by social scientists who collect survey data in a manner that, intentionally or not, confirms their presuppositions.