RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/17/the-1619-project-books-goal-is-to-keep-slandering-america/

New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein recently introduced the forthcoming book version of the 1619 Project in a long essay that attempts to head off well-deserved criticism of the original project and the new book. Silverstein’s motive is to explain in advance that the nay-sayers have it all wrong. I don’t yet have the book, so it is possible that Silverstein is right, but judging from his preamble it looks like the new, expanded version of The 1619 Project is woven of the same wish fulfillment as the original.

Silverstein’s essay is meant to clear a path for readers who have heard some of the criticisms of that original and want to be reassured that the critics can safely be ignored. His approach, however, is not so much to refute the critics as it is to draw a map showing 1619 supporters how to evade them.

Think of the editor strapping on his silver skates to glide past a lot of the awkwardness that accompanied the 1619 Project’s early days. In the interests of keeping the record straight, let’s revisit 2019 and 2020.

At the Start

I covered this era pretty thoroughly in my book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. But there are other good sources, including Phillip Magness’s The 1619 Project: A Critique; Mary Grabar’s Debunking the 1619 Project; and David North and Thomas Mackaman’s edited volume, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and Racialist Falsification of History.

The 1619 Project has never faded from public view since The New York Times published it on August 18, 2019. On the opening page, Silverstein wrote it was an effort “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” “Doing so,” he added, “requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a county.”

Several statements by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s lead author and architect, jumped out as contrary to established facts. The six biggest errors are (1) that slavery was somehow new to America in 1619; (2) that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery from the threat of emancipation; (3) that Abraham Lincoln was a racist intent on separating blacks and whites; (4) that blacks “fought back alone” to secure their rights; (5) that plantation slavery was the foundation of American capitalism; (6) and that the nation’s entire history is best seen as a struggle by blacks against white supremacy.

Dig into The 1619 Project and you will find an abundance of other errors, but these are the tent poles that hold up the entire circus tent of falsehoods.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/white_house_messaging_chaos_inadvertently_reveals_the_sinister_intentions_of_bidens_puppet_masters.html

With Democrats quaking in their boots over the plunging public support for Joe Biden and the political party that sold him as a moderate and as physically and mentally capable of doing the job, the White House messaging team and their media supporters face an enormous challenge.  And they are bungling it as badly as the rest of the administration is bungling economic policy, diplomacy, and national security.  The gist of the messaging lately is:

Things are really going well; don’t believe your lying eyes or empty pocketbook
It’s your fault.
All this suffering is in a good cause, forcing you to go along with green new deal policies. You’re going to learn to like having less stuff.

First point: White House chief of staff Ron Klain, claimed by some to be the de facto real president, actually went gaslighting on CNN yesterday claiming that things are better now than a year ago.

“Well, look, I do think, as I said Jake, things are a lot better in this country than they were a year ago, with regard to COVID, with regard to the economy, but we have a lot of work left to do,” Klain stated.  “And I think voters are in show me don’t tell me mode, I don’t think they really care as much about what I’m saying on TV, or what you’re saying on TV as much as putting results into their lives.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/18/merrick-garland-must-go/

A new memo shows that Attorney General Merrick Garland lied to Congress about the FBI snooping on parent groups upset with local school boards for their use of Critical Race Theory in the classroom. If so, it doesn’t warrant a slap on the hand, but swift removal from office.

Presidents deserve to have the people they nominate serve their entire term. But that’s not the case when that person lies under oath to Congress and, by extension, the American people. That’s a criminal offense.

This allegation comes from an official letter sent to the Justice Department by Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee, in response to an email from a whistleblower.

If you’ll recall, on Oct. 21, Garland appeared before Congress and said he couldn’t “imagine any circumstances in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor … a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorists.”  

He went on to say, “I do not think that parents getting angry at school boards for whatever reason constitute domestic terrorism. It’s not even a close question.”

The only problem is, neither statement is true.

Garland in fact proposed using the FBI to investigate parents indignant over schools subjecting their children to the Marxist, anti-American ideological propaganda of Critical Race Theory. For all we know, he’s still doing it.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/16/morning-greatness-the-knives-are-out-for-kamala/

The political scandal sheets are reporting a kerfuffle between VP Kamala and the Biden clan. Spinmaster Jen Psaki commented about the rumors at the daily White House propaganda trough on Monday. “The president relies on the vice president for her advice, for her counsel,” Psaki said when asked if Biden has confidence in Harris. Let’s remember how very unpopular Kamala was during her short run as a presidential candidate. She’s there because she checks boxes as a woman and as someone who is not white. Biden promised that he would chose a running mate who met superficial requirements, not ability, merit or skill. Is it any surprise she is treated like a trinket or show pony now?

CNN, one of the corporate propaganda arms of the Democrats described “exasperation and dysfunction” in the VP’s office. On Sunday, corporate propagandist Politico wrote about who Biden’s replacement might be in 2024. Politico writes, “Typically, the person at the other side of that bridge would be the vice president. But less than a year into her time in the executive branch, more than a dozen Democratic officials — some affiliated with potential candidates — say that Harris is currently not scaring any prospective opponents.”

A New Hampshire political operative told Politico, “She’s definitely not going to clear the f—ing field.”

Kamala’s people argue she’s been set up to fail based on the portfolios she’s been assigned: voting rights and illegal immigration. Well boohoo, are you ready for prime time or not? These are both serious and legitimate issues, why can’t she handle them? Psaki told the WH press corp yesterday that Kamala is “not looking for a cushy role” as vice president. It sure sounds like she is. Kamala’s office fired back against the bad press by leaking that Biden’s office is racist. One former aide to Harris explained the “specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking lots of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves.” That white man, is none other than Secretary Mayor Pete.

The icing on the cake is that Kamala is less popular than Biden with only 28 percent job approval compared to a dismal 38 percent for Biden. Good luck in 2024 Kamala!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/coming-defense-nikole-hannah-jones-woody-holton-mary-grabar/

Nikole Hannah-Jones has a new defender of her 1619 Project, the hundred-page mishmash of essays, surreal “literary” contemplations on historical “moments,” and profiles, published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine to “reframe” the American founding in 1619 as a “slavocracy”—pushed with prepackaged lessons to over 4,500 schools, as history—until lawmakers in some states started taking actions.   

He does not merely echo Hannah-Jones’s claims about white nationalism and January 6, as David Blight and Ron Chernow did on MSNBC. He is doing battle for the damsel who cries she is being attacked by “right-wingers,” white people who want to “censor” her truthful history because it makes their children “uncomfortable” as they are forced to read (falsehoods) about how their European ancestors kidnapped families from the interior of Africa and how Thomas Jefferson ran “forced-labor camps” for the enslaved whom he viewed as “subhuman,” the “one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggl[ing] under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before.”

To Hannah-Jones, only a racist would object to their third-grader reading, about post-Civil War America, “In response to black demands for [their] rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.”

This historian has been tweeting images of very old newspaper articles—from the eighteenth century—day by day. And he has vowed to do it till day 76. This is Woody Holton who is fighting Gordon Wood who had the temerity to, with four of his colleagues, write an open letter to the New York Times objecting to the statement by Hannah-Jones: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/culture-wars-and-degradation-language-bruce-thornton/

From Thucydides to George Orwell, the degradation of language during war and political conflict has been recognized. As Thucydides wrote of the brutal and violent civil war in Corcyra, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Like truth, the integrity of language is also a first casualties in culture wars.

The culture war that has been waged for over half a century––and is now reaching a destructive absurdity in “wokism,” “cancel culture,” and blatant censorship and suppression of free speech––has made debased language one of its most important weapons. So insidious has been this process that even conservatives opposed to the progressive left’s illiberal and unconstitutional excesses legitimize these transformations of language by using that ideologically corrupted vocabulary.

Take, for example, using the word “gender” instead of “sex.” First introduced in the Fifties by sexologist and suspected pedophile John Money, this change in usage was popularized in the Sixties to reinforce the dubious idea that sex-identity is not binary by nature, but comprises multiple variations, just as linguistic gender is not restricted to masculine or feminine, but can classify nouns by other qualities such as “animate” or “inanimate.” Male and female, masculine and feminine thus are not facts of nature, but social, cultural, and political “constructs” that serve the interests of the prevailing regime of power.

In other words, using the word “gender” to mean “sex” insidiously reinforces the constructivist ideology underlying as well Marxist theory and its antihumanist economic and political determinism. It also gratifies modernity’s fatal hubristic conceit: that human reality can be manipulated, changed, and reinvented at will by “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin called the self-proclaimed improvers of human nature.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/16/illegal_immigrants_would_get_105_billion_from_reconciliation_bill_146739.html

The budget reconciliation package pushed by Democrats creates a new expanded child tax credit (CTC) that would pay illegal immigrants some $10.5 billion next year. All immigrants with children are eligible, regardless of how they got here and whether their children are U.S.-born. This includes the roughly 600,000 unaccompanied minors and persons in family units stopped at the border in FY2021 and released into the country pending a hearing. Cash welfare to illegal immigrants is not just costly; it also encourages more illegal immigration. 

Although it is referred to as a “refundable credit,” the new CTC, like the old additional child tax credit (ACTC) it replaces, pays cash to low-income families who do not pay any federal income tax. The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment from $1,400 per child to $3,600 for children under 6, and to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17. After 2022, the maximum payment would be $2,000 per child, but advocates hope the much larger payments will be extended. 

In an analysis conducted in October, my colleague Karen Zeigler and I estimated that illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children would receive $8.2 billion from the new CTC. However, we had assumed that the new program, like the old ACTC, would require children claimed as dependents to have Social Security numbers (SSNs).  But reconciliation (page 1452, line 14) would permanently repeal this requirement. 

Illegal immigrants are able to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. In the case of the old ACTC, they simply acquired an individual taxpayer identification number, which is not hard, and then claimed their payment. In practice, only illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children could receive payments under the old system, since as American citizens those U.S.-born children receive SSNs. The permanent elimination of the SSN requirement means that even illegal immigrants whose children are also illegally in the country can receive the new expanded credit.  

https://www.lucianne.com/2021/11/17/biden_admin_looking_to_dump_kamala_harris_

Fox News Congressional reporter Chad Pergram reported Tuesday evening that he had been given a tip about Kamala Harris several weeks ago that said he should familiarize himself with the nomination process for a vice president in the House and the Senate. Pergram’s report comes after a bombshell CNN report Sunday that the White House was rife with rumors about Joe Biden contemplating nominating the flailing Harris to the Supreme Court to get her out of his administration and out of the line of succession. Jill Biden was asking about using the 25th Amendment to sideline Harris.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/supply-chain-for-dummies-a-fairy-tale/

Joe Biden cheerfully told Americans that most of them are too thick to understand what a “supply chain” is. Naturally, he understands it thoroughly. You can see with your very own eyes how well he has handled it. Since, as Joe said, you must be wondering why so many shelves are empty, I’m here to explain. Following the president’s wise advice, I will use small words and a simple story.

Let’s begin in the good ol’ days, not too long ago, when the shelves were magically full.

The story begins in a land ever so far away, where happy people worked and worked to make Christmas toys for children in Kansas.

When they finished making the toys, they placed each one in a little box and then placed lots of them in a great big box. They took that big box and many others like it to a good and sturdy ship to sail to America. Finally, after weeks at sea, the ship came close to the golden shore of California.

High up on the mast, a ship’s mate cried, “Eureka! I spy land ahoy!” and the ship sailed into a big dock near the City of Angels. But even the tallest, strongest men could not move the big boxes off the ship.

“Oh, my,” said someone on the dock. “Let’s get a hundred people together and see if we can move the boxes.” They tried and tried but the boxes still wouldn’t move. Finally, a very, very smart person came up with a good idea. “Let’s use a big crane and see if that works.”

And it did work. The big crane lifted the big boxes lift off the ship and lowered them very carefully onto the dock.

“But this is still a long way from Kansas,” sniffed one grumpy man. “The crane won’t reach that far.”

A very smart little girl said, “What about putting the boxes on top of train cars? The engineer and the conductor could take them to Kansas?”

“Oh yes,” said her friend. “Some of the other boxes could go on big trucks, too.”