RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/22/ii-tipp-poll-48-of-americans-see-much-higher-inflation-on-the-way/

It’s often said that Americans agree on almost nothing these days, a sign of the times. But that’s not entirely true. There’s one topic on which there’s near-unanimous agreement: Inflation. Americans of all political persuasions expect prices to shoot up over the next year.

The data are unequivocal: In our November I&I/TIPP Poll, 84% said “over the next year prices for gasoline, food, and other household products” would be “much higher” or “somewhat higher” than today. Only 8% thought they’d be lower, while 5% weren’t sure.

The big surprise comes from those who expect “much higher” prices (48%), compared to those expecting only “somewhat higher” prices (36%). Clearly, many people are preparing themselves for a slog against ’70s-style inflation at least for the next year.

These numbers come from November’s I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,306 adults, which was conducted online from Oct. 27-29 by TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, I&I’s polling partner. The margin of error is +/-2.8 percentage points.

The I&I/TIPP data come during a raging policy debate among economists and pundits over whether current extreme gains in inflation mark the start of a long-term price rises, or just a “transitory” increase in response to recent government and Federal Reserve stimulus.

Inflation, as measured by the year-over-year monthly increase in consumer prices, has been surging since April of this year, when it jumped to 4.2% from the first quarter’s average rate of just 1.8%. At the time, many experts surmised it was “transient” or “temporary.”

However, since then, it’s move up sharply.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/23/when-will-america-reach-peak-insanity/

It seems roughly half of the country is suffering from mass delusions. Either that or there is a willful effort to ignore the truth and spread lies for political reasons. Neither scenario bodes well for the country.

Our American sensibilities are assaulted on a daily basis with claims that are widely accepted to be true and righteous even though they’re demonstrably false and malign. The falsehoods, exaggerations, and prevarications by omission are tearing at the fabric of the great American experiment in liberty. Which is exactly what they are designed to do.

Consider the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, acquitted (justly) last week of the homicide and reckless endangerment charges that should have never been brought against him. Not only was the prosecution malicious (for which the prosecutors should be sued), the web of lies that corrupted the entire case were in service of a nefarious political agenda.

Rittenhouse did not kill two black men and wound another, as some media outlets claimed. The men he shot in self-defense were white. Nor could it be said the men were mere protesters, as so many asserted.

Rittenhouse was also called a white supremacist, even by I’ll-bring-the-country-together candidate Jeo Biden, though there’s no evidence that he is. It simply fit the narrative and that was good enough.

These examples are but surface coverage of the untruths politicians, the media and half-wit celebrities spread about Rittenhouse, because they saw the episode, from the self-defense shootings to the trial, as an opportunity to further demonize firearms and to make the streets safe for the “right” kind of protesting, which to the sane and decent among us is known as rioting by the left.

Meanwhile, the global warming lunacy continues to run free. No longer are the green shirts satisfied with replacing gasoline and diesel automobiles with electric cars, they want to get rid of cars altogether.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/suspect-in-waukesha-christmas-parade-attack-identified/

A black male with a lengthy criminal rap sheet is in police custody in Waukesha, Wisconsin,  after an SUV plowed into Christmas parade on Sunday, resulting in multiple fatalities, and more than 20 people injured.

At least eleven adults and twelve children were transported to six area hospitals following the horrific vehicular attack.

According to Sandra Peterson, the communication director for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee,  a Catholic priest, multiple parishioners and Waukesha Catholic school children, were among the injured.

“Please join us in prayer for all those involved, their families, and those who are traumatized from witnessing the horrible scene,” Peterson said in a statement.

The suspect, Darrell E. Brooks, 39, is a registered sex offender, who was arrested several weeks ago for multiple felonies and misdemeanors, including domestic abuse, resisting or obstructing an officer, jumping bail, disorderly conduct, and battery, according to Wisconsin Circuit Court records.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/the-new-blue-confederacy/

Why are progressive regions of the country—especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)—institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through “proportional representation” based on “disparate impact”? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus “safe spaces” by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?

Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear? What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?

Isn’t it strange that there are entire states and regions wholly reliant on the money and power of “one-crop” Big Tech monopolies? And why, in the 21st century no less, are Democratic-controlled counties, cities, and entire states nullifying federal law?

In archetypical “states’ rights” fashion, blue-state “sanctuary cities” are as defiant of the federal government as the Old South was when it claimed immunity from federal jurisdiction—all the way from the nullification crisis of 1830-1833 to George Wallace in 1963 blocking the door at the University of Alabama.

Ask yourself: in the decades following the conclusion of the Civil War in April 1865, how might the reunited American public have answered the following hypothetical questions:

One-hundred-fifty-six years from now, in the year 2021, where in the United States will Americans most likely discriminate on the basis of race?

Where will citizens squabble over the racial percentages of ancestral bloodlines, and schools admit or reject students in part on the DNA of an applicant?

Where will free speech and expression become most endangered?

Where will states’ rights boosters deny federal officers the right to enforce federal law?

Where will the major cities be the most unsafe and the middle classes the most embattled? And from which regions of the country will people flee, and to which will they migrate?

Of course, in the century-and-a-half since the end of the Civil War, we have become in a certain sense a homogenizing country. Gender studies programs at, say, the University of Texas are not that much different from those at Yale. The same types of homeless are found in downtown Atlanta as well as in San Francisco.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/are-democrats-digging-their-own-grave-bruce-thornton/

President Biden’s approval numbers continue to drop. Republicans are up ten points in the generic ballot for the 2022 midterms. Blue Virginia elected a Republican governor, defeating a pillar of the party since the Clinton administration. Inflation is reaching record highs, as are gasoline prices. Meanwhile  Xi, Putin, and Khamenei are geopolitically partying like it’s 1979.

Yet the progressive Dems and their media PR flaks keep promoting policies and indulging in political antics guaranteed to alienate more and more voters. A year out from the midterm elections, a party with razor-thin margins of control in the House and Senate seem headed for a massive repudiation.

Their most recent example of political myopia is the grotesque lies and hysteria over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and acquittal. As the New York Post’s Miranda Devine writes, “Of all the willful lies and omissions in the media’s coverage of the Steele dossier, Brian Sicknick, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, the Wuhan lab, Hunter Biden’s laptop and so on, nothing beats the evil propaganda peddled about Kyle Rittenhouse.”

So it happened that a working-class teenager offering medical aid and protecting a business in his community during a riot, and who was attacked by three white men, including two convicted felons, was transformed into a “white supremacist” and a lawless, Trumpkin “vigilante” who “crossed state lines” with an illegal “assault rifle” in order to stalk and murder Black Live Matter activists “peacefully protesting” against extrajudicial police murders of black man (who’s still alive). A couple of “woke” journalists even turned the slain white thugs into innocent blacks.

As Mary McCarthy said of lefty Lillian Hellman’s memoirs, every word of the narrative is a lie, including “the” and “and.” It’s a textbook example of Hitler’s “big lie,” one so “colossal,” Hitler wrote, that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Over the last five years the Dems have had some success with this propaganda tactic. But the Biden administration’s serial failures, and the arrogant excesses of the “woke” racial tribunes, have soured voters who, as the Virginia gubernatorial race shows, are sick of the “systemic racism” and Critical Race Theory smears, which are genuine racist nonsense. And parents––approaching two years of unscientific, politicized, disruptive covid policies like remote teaching and masks imposed on their children––aren’t happy about a racist, divisive curriculum piled on to all that pedagogical malfeasance.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/11/21/dr_scott_atlas_the_birx-fauci_lockdowns_failed_to_stop_the_pandemic.html

Author of “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,” Dr. Scott Atlas, joined “Sunday Morning Futures” with FNC’s Maria Bartiromo to talk about how the government has politicized science about Covid-19.

DR. SCOTT ATLAS, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: The data is the data. And the data is being denied by the lockdowners. The data shows the following. Bjornskov’s study of 24 European countries, the lockdowns did not reduce the deaths during the pandemic. That was a spring 2021 study.

A January 2021 study from Stanford’s Bendavid and colleagues, lockdowns failed to stop the spread of the infection. In fact, Ioannidis, one of the authors, said it was — quote — “pro-contagion,” increasing infections.

And the most important study was National Bureau of Economic Research by RAND in June this year. Everyone should look at it, because they showed analysis of 43 countries and all the states that lockdowns increased the excess deaths during the pandemic. Earlier lockdowns increased the deaths during the pandemic.

And when lockdowns were instilled, deaths were coming down. And the deaths started increasing when the lockdowns were implemented. So the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, which was the advice of the task force the entire year, failed to stop the spread of the infection. They failed to stop the dying. And they destroyed millions and millions of people, particularly low-income families.

BARTIROMO: Yes, I want to ask you about the Birx-Fauci lockdown, because, today, we have the FDA authorizing now booster shots for everybody, all adults.

Pfizer and Moderna are going to make a combined $93 billion in sales on this in the coming years on vaccines. What is going on here? Is this about money? Your thoughts on the FDA asking a federal judge to give it 55 years to wait for all data, release final data on the Pfizer vaccine?

ATLAS: Yes, I mean, there are so many problems with this.

BARTIROMO: Fifty-five years.

ATLAS: And the science — yes. And on the science side alone, boosters to be indicated for people who are, for example, low-income groups like children, healthy children have extremely low risk from COVID, period. That’s been known for more than a year-and-a-half.

https://www.city-journal.org/how-progressives-enforce-ideological-conformity

Politics today seems to have crawled out of some Hobbesian muck. It is a nasty, brutish little runt wherever it appears, which is almost everywhere. Its act—for these days everything is performance art—is a tragic farce. On the streets, its watchword is riot; on the Internet, abuse; in the academy, the boardroom, and the media, a coordinated equalization of attitudes that borders on the totalitarian. At the highest levels of government, it is too lazy or stupid to persuade, preferring rather to manipulate, bully, spy, and punish.

Hobbesian man is moved by powerful passions of pride and fear. His vainglory and the joy he takes in standing above others give rise to war. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death make him seek peace. The ugly and ubiquitous politics of the Left is now channeling these passions into a massive project of social engineering: the construction of a new Tower of Babel.

Fear and pride raised the old Tower of Babel, built by anonymous wanderers who sought to “make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” Their anonymity is fitting, for there was then only “one language, one set of words. . . . one people” in the world. The Babylonians formed bricks out of the soil—adamah in Hebrew, the same stuff God breathed life into to make the first human being (ha’adam)—and began to “build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” These hard-baked bricks, all cut to the same measure, are images of human beings from whom the breath of individual life and particularity has somehow departed.

Modern attempts to construct the Tower have unfolded before, most notably in the Soviet Union and China. Today an inhumanly univocal tongue, asserting itself as the measure of all things, once again threatens to swallow the rich particularities and multiple languages of individual thought, speech, and creative expression.

The foundations of the new Tower have already been laid. In a recent interview, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was an authoritarian. He did not:

If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/22/fake_white_house_is_a_fitting_home_for_fake_president_146769.html

News last month that President Biden makes electronic appearances from a pretend White House brought to mind another president whose image was carefully crafted to assuage the American people that all was well even when things were at their most dire.

No, I’m not referring to Franklin Roosevelt, although his facade of the strong, virile man was as much of an invention as Biden’s carefully crafted persona as a reasonable moderate who would unite our country.

Instead, to fully comprehend the essence  of the invented Joe Biden, we must visit the paranoid fantasies of one of our greatest writers — Philip K. Dick, whose 1964 novel “The Penultimate Truth” imagined a future where the leader of the Western world was in fact nothing but a simulacrum programmed to reassure the masses that their sacrifice of toiling underground for decades was noble when in fact it was the equivalent of the turkey’s sacrifice on Thanksgiving. Given a choice, the turkey would have politely declined. 

I’m hardly the first columnist to suggest that Biden is parroting lines written for him in an effort to convince the American public of their need to sacrifice for the general good, but his banal bromides have an unmistakable Orwellian feel: “Lockdowns are freedom,” “inflation is wealth,” “moms and dads are domestic terrorists.” But when it was revealed that Biden got his COVID vaccine booster shot in a fake White House, it became easy to picture his presidency as some political variant of “The Truman Show,” or as I propose, a Philip K. Dick novel.

Dick was the mid-20th century’s answer to Kafka — an author in search of the ultimate truth who taught us that the truth mostly consisted of disappointment and deception. So too might we conclude about the puppet presidency of Joseph R. Biden. Even the majority of those who accept the legitimacy of his presidency can have a hard time believing in the legitimacy of his leadership.

According to Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, “The reason Biden uses this bizarre virtual set for televised meetings — and not an actual room like East Room, Cabinet, Oval, Roosevelt, Sit Room, etc. — is because it allows him to read from a script directly from a face-on monitor (& w/out teleprompter glass that can be seen on camera).”

That doesn’t in itself make Biden an ersatz president. Lots of politicians are nothing but empty reflections of what their handlers put in front of them, but in his case there is ample evidence aside from the fake White House that he is a product of the imagination of those around him, a figurehead whose policies and even his press conferences (“I’m not supposed to take any questions”) are scripted by others.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/20/the-right-outcome-for-rittenhouse-but/

I do not have much to add to the cataract of commentary about Friday’s Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. Like all sane people, I applaud the young man’s acquittal on all charges. 

There seem to be essentially three sorts of responses to the decision. One is “Hallelujah, justice was done, let us chalk up the victory, and move on. The System™ works.” 

A second response, about which I’ll say a bit more below, is the standard-issue, angry woke identity politics response. According to this narrative, Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist” who acted as a vigilante when Kenosha, Wisconsin exploded in violence in August 2020, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man. According to this script, Rittenhouse wantonly murdered two people in cold blood—Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26—and grievously injured a third, Gaige Grosskreutz, 27. This charge was the specialité de la maison of the so-called mainstream media and the Democratic establishment up to and including Joe Biden. 

In the aftermath of the verdict, the meme was supercharged by all the usual suspects. Rep. Jerry “the Waddler” Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was among the first to suggest the U.S. Justice Department bring federal charges against Rittenhouse since the state charges didn’t stick. I’m sure the ghoulish Merrick “the Moderate” Garland is considering it if only he can peel off enough agents from harassing parents attending school board meetings for the task. 

For his part, Biden, though acknowledging his disappointment that the 18-year old wasn’t going to be thrown in prison for the rest of his life, did at first say that the trial vindicated the judicial process and that “the jury system works.” Aides soon began walking that back, however, perhaps in preparation for the Nadler gambit of trying the boy twice.