RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/columbus_changed_to_world_forever_and_for_the_better.html

Adam Smith is called the “father of modern economics.” His book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is one of history’s most influential books. In Chapter 1, Smith said that the discovery of the Americas was one of the “most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” Was he correct? Let’s review some history. 

Today it’s unpopular to support Columbus or to even recognize the significance of his achievements. Statutes of Columbus are being destroyed all over the Americas.

Was he the vile, murderous conquistador that “woke” 21st century, anti-history millennials portray him to be? Some of the atrocities that Columbus is accused of committing include: 

He/Europeans enslaved indigenous peoples;
He/Europeans tried to convert indigenous peoples to Christianity;
He/Europeans established brutal tribute systems; and
He failed to control subordinates who pillaged, plundered and killed the Natives.

So, was Columbus as evil as he’s accused or was he a “man of his time” who was doing what any other explorer would have done in his position?

In 1500, no European considered Native Americans to be their equal. Why? Because the Indians didn’t have the “one true religion.” That thinking is proven in Hernando Cortès’s 1519 Letter sent back to the Spanish Crown in which he described Aztec human sacrifice, and stated that God had sent the Spaniards to bring the Gospel to “these barbaric people.” This inequality among peoples and races was the accepted thinking the world over, by all people and all societies until recently. Name the time and era, and various peoples considered themselves to be the “chosen” or superior race, often because of religion. The Jews, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Vikings, Muslims and Christians all thought of themselves as being better than their neighbors, whom they conquered, often times slaughtered, and enslaved. Even today in 2021, many races and cultures still see themselves as such. Simply look at China for proof. Many Chinese openly are anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-anyone not Chinese.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/11/why-the-left-tells-lies-about-christopher-columbus/

For over a decade, Columbus has been painted as a mass murderer, committing all sorts of crimes in the New World, including genocide.

So far, though, he has not–at least, not yet–been accused of not providing transgender bathrooms in his ships.

Those accusations are complete fabrications, unsupported by even one shred of historical evidence. Let me repeat that because it is very important: there is no historical basis, no contemporary documents, nothing, that indicates that he engaged in all of the “crimes” that present-day activists have promulgated. None! Zip! Nada!

The “accusations” (which often sound more like insults than rational accusations) range from the gruesome (claiming he chopped off Indians’ hands for not bringing gold or carrying out genocide—total fabrications) to the infantile (ridiculing the fact that one of his ships sunk—he was not the captain of that particular ship and they were sailing in uncharted seas abounding in hidden reefs), to the stupid (Democrat politicians and Native Americans claiming that Columbus carried out genocide in North America, where he never set foot nor sail).

Nonetheless, we can expect the usual posturing and sloganeering on Columbus Day by historically illiterate leftists and “indigenous people,” some of the latter being about as Native American as Elizabeth Warren.

One should consult primary sources (preferably in the original Spanish and not in translations): his logbook, the “Capitulations” (legal documents, also known as the “Book of Privileges”), the contemporary biographies, and especially “Los Cuatro Viajes del Almirante y su Testamento,” and, “Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias,” both written by Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who as every schoolchild in Spain and the Caribbean knows, was the Apostle of the Indians for working indefatigably to protect the Indians from his fellow Spaniards.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/against-the-commodification-of-blackness?token=

Recently, Bari Weiss was kind enough to have me as a guest on her podcast, Honestly. We had a wide-ranging conversation that covers my path to academia, my personal struggles, my work as an economist, education, and of course, race in the US.

BARI WEISS: Glenn, if one really cared about black lives and one wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of black lives mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?

GLENN LOURY: I think self-determination and some sense of what we mean by taking responsibility for our lives. That’s in the Shelby Steele ballpark that we started this interview talking about. I’d say education. I’m sorry, and this is partisan, but the public school unions are poorly serving—on the whole, in the places where black students congregate—the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well. Opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of black life in this country.

And people are going to dismiss me. They are going to say I’m anti-union, and they’re going to say I’m a right-wing ideologue. I’m going to say I’m looking at failure. I’m looking at multigenerational failure and the public safety piece of this narrative that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it.

Patriotism, and by that I don’t mean blind loyalty to a flag salute. I mean seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don’t stand off from it. There is no United Nations where black claims will be negotiated. We must make our peace with our fellow citizens here. That has corollaries. Two national anthems is a terrible idea. Reparations for slavery is a mistake. It wrongly places the nature of the moral problem. It creates these parties as between which a negotiation and a deal is being cut. There are not two parties here. There’s only one party.

I have to say, on the last one, I feel very, very torn about the issue of reparations. Because I feel, in lieu of some kind of organized government-run reparations program—and let’s put aside the incompetence of the government and the rest—instead, what’s happening is a kind of piecemeal hand-to-hand patchwork reparations program that is actually stoking incredible contempt and suspicion and tension among racial groups right now.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vast-majority-of-incidents-cited-by-school-board-group-to-justify-federal-intervention-didnt-involve-threats/

In a memorandum issued this week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to collaborate with state U.S. attorneys and federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies to probe and potentially prosecute violent threats against teachers and administrators in school districts nationwide.

The notice comes after the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration, asking it to investigate and determine whether the increasing number of confrontations between angry parents and school boards qualify as domestic terrorism under the Patriot Act.

“Threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent — during public school board meetings, via documented threats transmitted through the U.S. Postal Service, through social media and other online platforms, and around personal properties,” the organization claims, citing what it considers egregious episodes in 23 school districts over the last several months.

However, the vast majority of incidents referenced by the NSBA don’t qualify as threats of physical violence, according to local news reports cited in the group’s letter — nor is it obvious what the federal government’s role would be in responding to them.

Out of 24 incidents cited by the NSBA, 16 consisted of tense verbal exchanges between parents and school-board members that did not escalate to threats of physical violence. In many of these cases, the aggravated parents disrupted school-board meetings by angrily objecting to their districts’ mandatory masking policies and/or embrace of critical-race-theory curricula.

In other cases, parents picketed outside school-board meetings, wielding signs and chanting politically charged slogans. In some instances, the angry parents shouted over school-board members or exceeded their allotted speaking time during the meeting’s public-comment period. In some of these incidents, the police intervened to eject parents who refused to wear masks or were being otherwise unruly. In none of these cases was a threat of physical violence issued.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/08/high_schoolers_say_they_are_afraid_to_speak_up_in_class__110645.html

Whether it’s climate change, criminal justice, immigration, the global pandemic, or government reform, there is often little agreement on how to manage the most pressing issues of our time. Though differences on these issues are often intense, we can create positive civic change only by discussing and debating them across multiple perspectives.

Unfortunately, this kind of broad-ranging dialogue too rarely happens in our high school classrooms. Viewpoint diversity is not alive and well, and students often lack the ability to speak openly and question freely without worrying about repercussions. Politically correct speech codes have had a chilling effect on open discourse in many high schools, public and private, in New York City, where the two of us live and work. 

As educators, we are very concerned about young people’s development and identities being stunted by the suppression of their ability to express ideas outside a narrow orthodoxy. While one of us identifies as liberal and the other as more conservative, we agree that narrowing of speech is harmful to everyone.

It was from this concern that Balaban worked with high school students to create Next Generation Politics (Next Gen Politics) in the spring of 2017, in the wake of a divisive presidential election and in recognition of the need for dialogue across political, socioeconomic, and cultural divides to strengthen a fraying social fabric. Next Gen focuses on high school, a time of peak identity formation when it is of vital importance to be exposed to the broadest possible range of ideas.

If we don’t want to replicate the polarization playing out among older adults today, putting teens in dialogue with peers whose points of view they might not otherwise share – and enabling them to listen to, argue with, and learn from one another – is of vital importance to creating the increase in civility we deeply need. 

As such, Next Gen Politics brings diverse high school youth together to grapple with complex civic issues and current events to help them become informed, engaged citizens. Participants focus on perspective-taking, critical thinking, and civil discourse, striving to build a cross-partisan movement of young people committed to building bridges through deliberative dialogue. 

https://johnkassnews.com/the-federal-hammer-parents-and-critical-race-theory/

Wasn’t it just yesterday that the corporate, legacy media was busy gaslighting parents about racist Critical Race Theory being taught in taxpayer funded government (public) schools?

Angry parents were told they were fools for objecting, that CRT was just a fever dream of the right. And, if CRT did exist, it was just some obscure, dusty stuff locked away in a few law schools and college graduate courses.

But this week President Joe Biden picked up that federal hammer of his named Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Garland’s  job? To use reports of threats at angry school board meetings as a means to silence those dissenting parents into silence. The parents were likened to domestic terrorists.

Parents had opened the rotten Trojan Horse in their children’s schools during the pandemic, when they looked inside the classrooms, at those laptop screens on the kitchen table, when their kids were engaged in at-home remote learning. They could see what was burrowing into young minds in schools they paid for.

Those who objected to their kids’ wearing those flimsy masks that don’t work, or to children being separated by race into groups of oppressors and oppressed,  brought their grievances to meetings of elected local school boards. They brought passion, because the minds of their children, and the nation, were at stake.

Naturally, given the stakes, some school board meetings became quite heated. For decades educators have been asking parents to become more involved.  So, they involved themselves on CRT and masks.

Parents who dared object publicly to their children being treated differently based on race or who dared complain about kids in masks—even those special needs children who, like all kids need to see faces to learn—now have a public response from the Biden White House:

They see their own federal agencies weaponized against them. To the White House, objecting parents are likened to violent actors, perhaps even Isis Terrorists, and as such, they are to be threatened into silence before the 2022 mid-term Congressional elections.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/07/man-accused-in-sicknick-case-weve-all-been-destroyed/

George Tanios’ fiancée encouraged him to go to Washington on January 6 to hear President Trump’s speech. “You’re gonna regret it if you don’t go,” she said, hoping he could take a break from working 100-hours-a-week to run his popular sandwich shop in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Tanios and I both laughed after he told me that during a two-hour interview this week. (I was in contact with his fiancée, Amanda, as she cared for their three young children while he was incarcerated for five months.)

But there is nothing funny about how Joe Biden’s Justice Department is trying to ruin Tanios’ life to maintain the myth that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died at the hands of Trump supporters on January 6. 

Tanios, 40, was arrested in front of his five-year-old son at home on Sunday, March 14 around 9 p.m. “I was about to get in the shower and had my robe on when I heard crazy banging on my front door,” he said. “Then I heard ‘put your fucking hands up!’” 

About 15 FBI agents and the acting head of the U.S. Capitol Police raided his home, interrogated Amanda, and took Tanios into custody.

“I had no idea what I was being arrested for,” Tanios said. “No one would answer me. Some of the agents seemed to feel bad about it. One [agent] said they had been arresting people all over but they had never arrested anyone without a criminal record like this.”

Tanios was held in jail for four days before his attorney arrived and informed him of the charges related to Sicknick, including one count of conspiracy to injure an officer and three counts of assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon—chemical spray.

“I almost had a heart attack,” Tanios said. “I begged them to take the handcuffs off me because my heart dropped. ‘I am not a cop killer,’ I said.” Tanios had heard an officer had been killed on January 6, but that’s all he knew.

What Tanios also did not know at the time was he and his friend, Julian Khater, would become the scapegoats for one of the biggest lies about the Capitol protest; the claim that Trump cultists killed a cop in cold blood on January 6.

Reports of Sicknick’s death in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol protest served two purposes: to bury the news that a Capitol Police officer had killed an unarmed female Trump supporter in the building on January 6, and to fuel more public outrage about a “deadly insurrection.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/10/07/leftism-is-the-true-pandemic-n1522282

We have suffered through a year and a half of a viral pandemic, which has become for a majority of us the Alpha and Omega of everyday life. We think of little else and organize our lives around media-inflamed anxiety, ever-changing medical reports, and government ordinances. We wear masks. We put distance between ourselves and our fellows. We isolate. We line up for what seems like a never-ending succession of jabs. We devour the News as if it were the truth. We are victims of what is called “fear appeal,” defined as “a persuasive message that attempts to arouse fear in order to divert behavior through the threat of impending danger or harm.”

Yet, in our addiction to the doctrine and apparatus of the COVID industry, far too many of us have missed the big picture. “Maybe there is something darker and more nefarious at work,” remarks Jeffrey Tucker in Liberty or Lockdown. For there is indeed a pandemic that has spread its pathogens across the world and afflicted the West with a disease from which it may not recover, a kind of viral contagion from which there may be no immediate or even long-term escape. We are confronting a curve that may not be flattened in the foreseeable future.

It is a political disease for which we have many names—progressivism, Wokeism, Agenda 2030, the Great Reset, etc.—but they are all subsumed under the aegis of the Left, which approaches in stages or “waves.” We recall Israel’s official virologist Salman Zarka informing us that “[t]his is our life from now on, in waves.” We might say that the Welfare State is the first wave; “Democratic Socialism” is the second wave; full, undisguised socialism is the third; and the absolute tyranny of Communism is the fourth. 

Admittedly, the analogy with the COVID regime partially breaks down since, in the transposition I’m proposing, the disease itself is the object and booster shots cannot be regarded as preventative. (Many will argue that this is the case with the medical pandemic as well, but the question is moot.) In the correlate scenario, however, the “boosters” should be thought of as social and cultural “injections” whose ulterior purpose is to prolong the virulence of the political pandemic. For example, “health and safety” mandates—that is, official rhetoric—are designed to convince the people that they are being cared for, thus rendering them obedient and docile; or “vaccine passports”—that is, identity papers—are intended to fracture social unity by creating a compliant class of propagandized citizens and an outcast class subject to harsh measures of repression and exclusion.