RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/the-hundred-year-road-to-crt/

While critical race theory has rightfully garnered much attention of late, it is simply the latest step in advancing what is known as cultural Marxism. Many people lay the origins of America’s left turn to the 1960s, but in fact, it actually dates back to the Progressive Era, a time of social and political reform that started over a hundred years ago. While eliminating some government corruption and granting suffrage for women were positive steps, the early 20th century movement ushered in an era of radical thought that has never left us. What follows are a few stand-out points of the far-left’s invasion into education.

“The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.” These radical words were uttered in 1909 by Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton, four years before he became the 28th president of the U.S. (When Wilson won his election in 2012, socialist Eugene Debs received 6 percent of the vote.)

In 1916, education reformer John Dewey began professing what we now call “social justice.” At the same time, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist came upon the scene. He believed that it was most effective to spread revolutionary ideology slowly and incrementally. By doing it gradually, he thought that enough people would eventually be won over to Marxist thought. His approach eventually became known as the “long march through the institutions.”

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School, came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—hated capitalism and traditional morals. (Marcuse’s dreary One-Dimensional Man was omnipresent when I went to college in the late 1960s.) The professors did not stay in their homeland long, however. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and unfortunately, they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

The 1940s saw the country involved with World War II, and we then focused on regaining domestic tranquility in the 1950s. But things became unhinged in the 1960s. Radicals ruled many college campuses and Saul Alinsky, the uber-leftist community organizer, was hired by the National Education Association as a trainer. John Lloyd, an NEA insider at the time, warned that to understand the union one must learn about Alinsky. Reading Rules for Radicals, will help one “understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else,” he said, because the organization was modeled on Alinsky’s precepts, which the union used to train its staff.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/american-armageddon/

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago. 

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life. 

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity. 

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not of illegal aliens? 

Joe Biden has also conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care. 

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has also never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism. 

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages, Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing. 

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed. 

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive. 

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/12/mask-mandates-a-product-of-the-cancel-culture/

Another “progressive” politician has ordered the people she believes are her subjects to wear masks indoors. For safety’s sake? Let’s not fool ourselves.

As if following the Petty Tyrants chapter from the Democratic Party playbook, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced Tuesday that Oregonians, vaccinated or not, will again have to cover their faces in all indoor public spaces. Because she’s smarter and just more sensible than those living under her rule.

The mask mandates (and lockdowns) are a direct outcome of the spread of our cancel culture. People aren’t “canceled” in an effort to civilize our society and de-coarsen language. They are canceled because it gives the “cancelers” power. It’s their perverted way of telling others “we can control what you say.” It allows them to feel important and powerful, to advertise their moral superiority, to pump their egos. They want others to fear them, and take a twisted pleasure in seeing their victims grovel and beg to be accepted back into their good graces. That this behavior is now widely accepted is deeply alarming.

Mask mandates are driven by a similar need to exercise authority over others, and to draw in the rarified air only the most brilliant and discerning among us are allowed to breathe. Those handing down the mandates, as well as the pundits, assorted nags, and tight-haired school marms who are demanding them, are convinced, and nothing will persuade them otherwise, that they are the master class, deserving of their place at the top.

The thinking behind lockdowns comes from the same place. The only reason we haven’t been sent into another round of detention is the fear some politicians have of an electorate fed up with rules limiting their movement.

For instance, were California Gov. Gavin Newsom, his self-granted pandemic emergency powers still in effect, not facing a recall election next month, he surely would have been reissuing diktats over the last four weeks. (And at the same being more surreptitious about breaking his own rules than he was last fall, when he was caught at Napa Valley’s French Laundry restaurant attending a crony’s barefaced birthday party indoors.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-wants-opec-to-drill-oil-fossil-fuels-11628715632?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

We thought we’d seen everything, but there it was Wednesday morning in black and white on the White House website: Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, imploring the cartel of oil exporting nations to pump more oil. Talk about a political climate change. This is the same Biden Administration that has spent six months doing everything it can to crush U.S. oil production.

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Sullivan’s statement said. “While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough.”

Someone pass the smelling salts to Tom Steyer, the climate crusader who surely fainted when he heard that one. Oil production is beneficial? Fossil fuels are essential to economic growth? The world needs more petroleum to be burned to release more CO2 into the atmosphere?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/our-under-incarceration-problem/

Contrary to what you will hear in the mainstream media or on college campuses, the United States does not have an “over-incarceration problem”; it has an under-incarceration problem. Ill-conceived anti-prison policies rooted in platitudes, lies, and misleading statistics have unleashed thousands of criminals onto the streets. As a result, our nation is grappling with a de-incarceration crisis that is costing lives and eroding the rule of law.

Any honest discussion of incarceration levels must start with the acknowledgement that the majority of crimes committed in America are never reported or solved. In 2019, only 41 percent of violent crimes, 34 percent of sexual assaults, and 32 percent of property crimes were reported to the police. Of the crimes that are reported, only 61 percent of murders, 46 percent of violent crimes, 33 percent of rapes, 24 percent of arsons, and 14 percent of burglaries and auto thefts result in an arrest. Such low reporting and clearance rates ensure that any incarceration number flowing from them will be definitionally too small.

Convicted criminals also rarely serve most of their sentences. On average, state-prison inmates (who comprise the vast majority of the U.S. prison population) serve only 44 percent of their sentences. Murderers serve 58 percent, burglars serve 42 percent, and drug-traffickers serve only 40 percent of their sentences. This rampant dishonesty-in-sentencing is an insult to crime victims. It’s even more outrageous because many criminals already have artificially low sentences, thanks to sweetheart plea deals.

At the federal level, mandatory-minimum sentences have resulted in stronger and more enduring prison sentences. Recently, however, even these sentences are being eroded by retroactive sentencing reductions and new avenues for judges to skirt the mandatory-minimum requirements. The 2018 First Step Act, in particular, delivered the greatest blow to our federal criminal-justice system in recent memory. This jailbreak law unleashed thousands of gang members and drug traffickers back onto the streets and helped many career criminals avoid tough sentences.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/john_murawski/

The national racial reckoning over reparations and critical race theory is taking over the world of medicine and health care. Prestigious medical journals, top medical schools and elite medical centers are adopting the language of social justice activism and vowing to confront “systemic racism,” dismantle “structural violence” and disrupt “white supremacy” in their institutional cultures.

Is U.S. health care against her? Lately medical journals,  drawing on critical race theory, implicate the profession in untold numbers of black and brown deaths.

Klaus Nielsen

Some activist physicians describe the present-day health care system with such ominous terms as a “medical caste system” or “medical apartheid,” the latter locution taken from the title of a 2007 book about America’s history of medical experimentation on enslaved blacks and freedmen.

“Modern American medicine has historical roots in scientific racism and eugenics movements,” according to a February article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities.” “Black communities became medical training grounds and a source of profit, reinforcing the American medical caste system that we have today.”

Rare is the doctor who is willing to publicly question claims of white privilege and implicit bias in the healthcare system, and already several doctors who have publicly pushed back have been demoted and have filed legal actions alleging retaliation. This year the medical profession received an unequivocal message when two editors of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association resigned under pressure over a podcast that aired opinions expressing skepticism that the United States is plagued by systemic racism.

While racialized politics has infused every corner of American life, the moral stakes in the health care arena go far beyond, say, the perceived slights called microaggressions. The medical literature, lately drawing on critical race theory, depicts the health care industry itself as a historical source of illness in — and even killing of — black and brown bodies. That would make medicine analogous to policing and criminal justice, the other social institutions directly blamed for maiming and murdering black people.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/ny-lt-governor-kathy-hochul-to-replace-cuomo-after-he-resigns-in-disgrace/

New York’s lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, is set to replace disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo after he steps down over multiple sexual harassment allegations.

Hochul is considered to be a “moderate” Democrat, and will be the first female governor of New York.

Cuomo announced his resignation one week after New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced in a 168-page report that “the governor engaged in conduct constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York State law.”

The governor said on Tuesday that his resignation will be effective in 14 days.

The AG’s report came after a five month investigation into sexual harassment allegations from eleven women, including former staffers and one current staffer.

“I take full responsibility for my actions. I have been too familiar with people. My sense of humor can be insensitive and off-putting. I do hug and kiss people casually — women and men. I have done it all my life,” Cuomo said.

“In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone. But I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” he added. “And I should have. No excuses.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/how-states-could-constitutionally-assume-abandoned-responsibilities-of-the-national-government/

The COVID pandemic has witnessed the exercise of state “police powers” on a scale and scope unprecedented in America’s peacetime history. Out of fear of contagion, massive amounts of private property in the form of shops, restaurants, bars, and other businesses were peremptorily seized and shuttered. The rights of landlords to collect rents and evict tenants were suspended. The ability of people to cross from one state to another was hobbled by regulations, quarantines, and delays. And most of this was accomplished by governors and mayors acting by decree, with only the most tenuous of statutory authorizations. 

Initially implemented for what was to have been a brief period of medical unreadiness, the restrictions and impositions were extended month after month in the name of protecting Americans from a threat the specific magnitude of which was never clearly defined. Although some raised concerns about the legality of and need for these coercions, most Americans obediently submitted to them.

The purpose here is not to justify the particulars of what seems to us to have been a huge and clumsy overreach. It is instead to point out what such robust assertions of police powers could achieve, constitutionally and politically, if put to different and more legitimate ends—protecting Americans’ health and safety against what predictably ensues when the federal government abandons one of its primary charges. It is a road which, if taken, could not only repair the harms of gross federal nonfeasance but usefully up the ante in the struggle to thwart the Left’s accelerating efforts to unmake America. In other words, a course of action that could materially improve public health, safety, and welfare while also firing a powerful salvo across revolution’s bow. 

We propose calling this the doctrine of “protective resumption” whereby, finding that the national government through negligence, inability, or malice had ceased to meaningly perform one or more of its core functions—thus endangering the health, safety, and welfare of a state’s citizens—the states either severally or acting in concert among themselves, could resume their core police power functions without being preempted by federal law. The states, it should be stressed, would not thereby be taking over national government functions, they would only be shielding, via recognized police powers, their citizens from the effects of these functions’ abandonment. This distinction is important since it would place limits both on what the states could do and how long they could do it. Moreover, it would not allow them to exercise any powers specifically denied the states by the U.S. Constitution. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/legally-flawed-eviction-moratorium-richard-l-cravatts/

When queried last week about the CDC’s controversial eviction ban, President Biden seemed intransigent concerning ending the moratorium protecting the nation’s renters. Even though, as he admitted, “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” the administration was going to leave the onerous regulations in place, since, as the President put it, “by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”

At issue is a moratorium on evictions put into place in 2020 by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, with the intention of limiting the spread of COVID-19 by helping renters stay in their homes. Although the CDC’s order contended that “The ability of these settings to adhere to best practices, such as social distancing and other infection control measures, decreases as populations increase,” critics of the order—including the Supreme Court—have contended that the CDC lacked the authority to impose regulations affecting intra-state relationships between landlords and tenants—commerce overseen by states, not the federal government, and that the order was not only an overreach by the CDC but was unconstitutional as well by violating Fifth Amendment protections. By compelling owners of private property to forgo the collection of rents and lawful evictions, the CDC, as an agent of the government, was implementing what is deemed to be an unlawful “taking.”

The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment specifically states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation,” and while takings are generally of the type when the government takes physical possession of the property (for instance, through eminent domain for a public works project), unconstitutional takings also apply to regulatory takings, as well. In these cases, even though the government does not take physical possession of a private property, the property owner is denied his legal rights of ownership, even if the taking is temporary—as in the case of the eviction moratorium here.

Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh seems to have acknowledged that the moratorium should not, and will not, prevail after legal challenges when he wrote in his decision that, while the moratorium could be extended long enough for all stakeholders to get their affairs in order prior to its expiration, any further regulation had to come from Congress and from individuals states, not from a federal agency like the CDC without authority for such broad national policies affecting landlords and renters nationwide.  “In my view,” Kavanaugh wrote in June, “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.”