RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/13/ii-tipp-poll-the-distrust-of-scientists-is-widespread-including-on-covid-vaccines/

From coronavirus vaccines and the virus’ origin to climate change, a substantial portion of the country distrusts scientists to do their jobs honestly and capably. The latest data from the September Issues & Insights/TIPP Poll also found significant differences among Americans of different political views, reflecting a growing politicization of science in America.

The I&I/TIPP poll asked Americans “how much trust do you place in scientists” in three areas of science prominent in today’s headlines: “vaccine safety,” “climate change,” and “coronavirus origin.”

Overall, among the three, vaccine safety was tops in scientist trust, at 61%. Perhaps not surprisingly, that almost perfectly matches the share of the U.S. population currently vaccinated: 63%.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/12/wokeness-an-evil-of-our-age/

History is replete with examples of nations, successful and not-so-successful alike, that abruptly committed suicide. 

The ancient polis of Corcyra devoured itself in a bloody conflict as a collective madness took hold of the island city-state during the Peloponnesian War. 

The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed. 

The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese. 

French, Russian, and Chinese wokists all toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, wiped away history, tore down monuments, and declared themselves the purest of all generations in their year zero—before getting down to the business of dividing up the spoils and settling scores.

Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral. We should be just as worried about our own woke pandemic.

Mythological

Start with the idea that “wokeness” is an ideology divorced from reality. Nearly all of its premises are complete distortions.

Between 2017 and 2020, minorities had made the greatest gains in employment in U.S. history. Women currently represent about 60 percent of all college students. 

Recent wage gains for minority middle-class Americans outpaced those of the white working- and middle class. The latter were underrepresented in college enrollments and as graduates—but vastly overrepresented (at twice their percentage of the general population) in the toll of combat dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asian-Americans and a dozen other ethnic groups outpace so-called whites in per capita and household income. “White privilege” is usually a sloppy term that applies mostly to the white elites who use it to smear others.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/12/medical-mandates-a-hideous-strength-n1477878

One recalls C.S. Lewis’ dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a longtime favorite of mine, where he speaks of “false writings” and “men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries.” Lewis held to an apocalyptic vision of moral and intellectual surrender to the idols of mere self-sufficiency and hedonistic indulgence, of a time characterized by the death of meaning and the weakening of belief in a just and merciful God. “The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus,” the human spirit is being progressively “enclosed,” as he describes it. There is not much of the Rapture here, little indication of the new Jerusalem prophesied in Revelation.

David Marshall, also a devoted reader of Lewis, regards the novel as “a profound and prescient vision of institutional evil, of a sort that is all too recognizable in our time…fus[ing] political power, technology, and the occult.” Of course, Lewis was not thinking of a biovirus closing down the planet but of the relentless slide toward totalitarian governance everywhere he looked, especially in the democratic West, much as Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and José Saramago forecast in their signature works. Lewis was more preoccupied with the eclipse of faith, which he saw as undermining the integrity and cohesion of the great Judeo-Christian experiment to establish a system of individual liberty and rule of law, grounded in natural and divine justice. 

The belief in such principles ensured and sustained a viable culture, which was inevitably fragile and always susceptible to the incursion of the “demonic” in one form or another. He would not have been surprised at the current pandemic of lies, political demagoguery, and the recruitment of a public devoid of the moral strength to resist an orthodoxy of deception—the sway of the sons and daughters of the Father of Lies.

For COVID has provided the pretext to inaugurate precisely such a declension as Lewis feared. Our public institutions are engaged in establishing a virtual medical dictatorship mandating masks, lockdowns, contact tracing, curfews, business closures, excessive police powers, and more. And now we have the vaccine passports, predicated on a quasi-theological division between the saved and the damned, or in current terms, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/greatest-existential-threat-america-david-horowitz/

Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin – a leader who presided over the worst, most incompetent, most humilitating military defeat in the history of our nation – is black. Of course, he’s black. He was appointed by Biden to display the wonderful diversity of the most progressive president in history. He wasn’t chosen because he was a brilliant military leader (obviously). He was chosen because he was a political hack ready and willing to embrace even the most suicidal left-wing policies. (Note: Left-wing policies are by their very nature suicidal because the defining characteristic of the left is that it hates America and wants to “dismantle” it and replace it with the left-wing fantasy of a socially just future.)

In February 2021 – with the deadline for withdrawal in Afghanistan a bare three months away – General Austin was not ordering a military alert to prepare for what was going to be a major humanitarian and military reckoning. Instead, he was ordering a military “stand down” to indoctrinate all America’s troops in Black Lives Matter hate white people and hate America propaganda.

In passing may I note that 85% of the troops who gave their lives in Afghanistan to protect the American homeland and to give the Afghan people and especially women the right to breathe free – were white. So much for real diversity.

Diversity Training as it is practiced, is a racist scam whose promoters have the hateful mentality and low I.Q. level of the Jim Crow bubbas of the past. Their goal is to demonize white Americans and (white) America, and to promote an anti-American agenda that strikes at the heart of a soldier’s military oath to defend the Constitution and the nation it created.

Here is a dose of the beliefs that our soldiers were being indoctrinated in during the two-month stand down during the run-up to the Afghanistan debacle:

“that the country was founded by racists, that the country has always been racist,

“that the Constitution’s ratification codified white supremacy as the law of the land,

“that whites are inherently racists (whether they realize it or not), and that the country must transform and become something altogether different than what it was and is.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/americans-and-jews-are-fighting-world-war-iii-don-feder/

Before Rosh Hashanah, I was re-watching “Band of Brothers,” the docudrama on the 101 Airborne in World War II, based on the book of the same title by Stephen Ambrose.

The episode I saw just before Erev Rosh-Hashanah (“Why We Fight”) was about the men of Easy Company stumbling across a camp where Jews were literally worked and starved to death.

These paratroopers were the toughest of the tough. They fought from Normandy to Bastogne to the Ardennes and into Germany. When the episode begins, the war is all but over. Hitler will commit suicide three days later. Shortly thereafter, the German Army will surrender.

At first, the men of Easy Company couldn’t understand what they were looking at behind the barbed wire. The GIs who discovered the camp couldn’t find the words to describe it to their officers.

Easy Company had taken everything the Germans could throw at them. They’d seen buddies blown apart and others with severed limbs, gushing blood. They’d frozen in stinking foxholes and had food that barely kept them alive.

Now that the fighting is all but over, they’ve become cynical. “What the hell were we fighting for?” they ask. (Capt. Nixon, the Company XO, sings “Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!”) Then came Kaufering Lager IV.

The prisoners who can still stand are walking skeletons. The soldiers can only stare in dumb disbelief. They’re told that the retreating SS guards set several buildings on fire. Prisoners too weak to flee were burned alive. When asked why they were there, the prisoners replied: “Juden,” “Juden” (Jew, Jew).

In a poignant scene, a middle-aged man falls into the arms of a paratrooper. He hugs the soldier, caresses his face, kisses his cheek reverently and collapses in tears.

It was an encounter between two peoples bound by eternity. America was at its highpoint. We had just saved humanity from the twin horrors of Nazism and Japanese imperialism.

The Jewish people were at their low point. In the space of a few years, one out of every three Jews on earth was murdered.

The liberation of the death camps was the latest chapter in a story that went back to America’s beginnings as a nation. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/6-problems-bidens-covid-address-frontpagemagcom/

I found Biden’s six-point Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate address to be highly concerning in six respects:
 

1) He completely ignores the science demonstrating that natural immunity gained by having recovered from Covid is far superior to the immunity gained from the vaccines.  How many of the 80 million unvaccinated Americans have already recovered from Covid?  

2)  His analysis makes no sense.  He says, “We need to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.” If the vaccine works, if it provides protection, then why do the vaccinated need to be protected from the unvaccinated?

3)  His address employs the language of vaccine shaming: “I am frustrated with the 80 million Americans who refuse to be vaccinated . . . those blocking public health . . . We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin . . .”  Many people have valid reasons not to be vaccinated and do not deserve to be demonized in this way.  

4)  I am perplexed by Biden’s statement that he has authorized the deployment of “Surge Response Teams”made up of “experts” in part from the Defense Department.  He will also double the number of “Military Health Teams.” What exactly are “Surge Response Teams” and “Military Response Teams”?  I thought “surge” strategies were supposed to be deployed by our military against our enemies, not against Americans who have chosen not to be vaccinated.  Why does the Defense Department and the military have to be deployed on U.S. soil to “help” people with a virus?  Why do “Surge Response Teams” and “Military Response Teams” remind me of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Strike Hard” campaigns and “Family Planning Police”?  Biden needs to define clearly the powers and limitations of these “Teams.”

5)  Biden says nothing about exemptions.  What about people who have legitimate religious or medical reasons for not taking the vaccine? 

6)  Finally, Biden completely sidesteps the critical issue of how these sweeping vaccine mandates will be enforced.  What will his next step be:  mandating digital vaccine passports?   These passports can incorporate the same functionality as China’s Social Credit System, and in the wrong hands, can be used as tools of mass surveillance and totalitarian control.  

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/from-trust-the-science-to-trust-the-tyrants

President Joe Biden announced a national vaccine mandate Thursday that will affect approximately 100 million workers. It will require all federal workers and contractors to get vaccinated. It will also necessitate large companies to require their employees either to participate in weekly testing or else be vaccinated.

“My job as president is to protect all Americans,” Biden said. “So, tonight, I’m announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”

In other words, we’ve gone from “trust the science” to “trust the tyrants.”

For the duration of the pandemic, most Democrats have used the phrase “trust the science.” So, it is odd that Biden should order a national vaccine mandate when Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said, “There will be no nationwide mandate.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/the_curious_case_of_the_missing_resignations.html

One of the strangest things about the Afghanistan debacle is that in spite of extraordinarily harsh criticism world-wide, nobody has resigned and nobody has been fired.  Many assume that this is so because the failure is President Biden’s, but in thinking this they are simply wrong.

Consciousness of failure is only one of many reasons for resignations from high government positions. Some resign in protest at what is being done, or to publicly dissociate themselves from it, as Cyrus Vance did in 1980 when President Carter tried to rescue the American hostages in Iran by military force.

Others resign to restore public confidence in their office — as British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington did in 1982 when he failed to foresee Argentina’s attack on the Falklands.

Some resign because they don’t feel able to advocate for a president’s policy as a key member of his team ought to be able to.

Some use the threat of resignation as leverage against a proposed action they think would be a major mistake, which puts the question to the President: can he risk the political fallout?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/13/thus-begins-tyranny/

When the Babylon Bee posted a story with the headline “Joe Biden Announces Civil War,” it was intended to be parody. But like much the Bee publishes, it’s painfully close to the truth.

“In a stirring address to the country today, Biden has announced a new Civil War,” the Bee “reported” last week. The site’s masters of lampoon then “quoted” the president saying “we’re gonna force millions of people to get vaccinated against their will,” and in order “to enforce this, we’re just gonna have ourselves a little Civil War.”

Biting humor aside, what Biden actually said when he announced last Thursday that his administration is going to require every employer in the country with 100 or more employees to force their workers to be fully vaccinated “or show a negative test at least once a week” was disturbing. He indicated that he’s going to go beyond the autocratic pen-and-phone methods of the previous Democrat in the White House.

“If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my powers as president to get them out of the way,” he said, primarily referring to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who have refused to be bullied by federal pandemic orders.

Later in the day, senior White House adviser Cedric Richmond reiterated the threat, declaring that Biden “will run over” the “governors who stand in the way.” Obviously his handlers, much of his party, and nearly all of the media are in full support of him seizing powers he was never meant to have. 

Both DeSantis and Abbott were duly elected by the voters of their states, as were the other Republican governors who have resisted the White House (an act that not so long ago the Democrats and media said was both virtuous and necessary). No president under our constitutional system of federalism has the authority to move governors “out of the way.” Why would attempting to do so not be a high crime against this nation?

Of course Biden’s words are subject to interpretation. Still, there’s not wide latitude there. He clearly means to at least bypass our federalist system by expanding the powers limited to presidents by the Constitution. This president, again, like the Democrat before him, doesn’t feel constrained by our laws. He doesn’t want to govern within the boundaries, he wants to rule without restraint, and if that means eliminating political rivals, then it has to be done.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/stream/?topic=wasteoftheday

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