RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/28/americas-lab-rats/

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?

A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?

Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?

In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.

We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.

By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/girling-the-boy-scouts

The Boy Scouts of America has a Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. The organization requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion. It admitted girls to its program for 11- to 17-year-old boys in 2019 and changed the name of that program from the Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA. The word “boy” has been routed from the organization’s promotional materials and replaced with “youth,” as in: “For more than 100 years, Scouting programs have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath.”

Does it matter, then, that the Boy Scouts of America has now extirpated the last use of “boy” found in its entire portfolio—the “boy” in “Boy Scouts of America,” the name of the parent organization? It does. That the Boy Scouts cannot tolerate even an atavistic use of “boy” reveals how powerful the impulse is to efface males from our culture. The transformation of the Boy Scouts of America into Scouting America is an object lesson in the incapacity of traditional institutions to withstand progressive takeover.

The need for an entity that valorizes males, or that merely acknowledges their existence, is greater today than when the Boy Scouts was founded in the early twentieth century. The British war veteran Robert Baden-Powell despaired at the lost boys he saw in London’s slums, seemingly deficient in the Victorian virtues of honesty, hardiness, and self-reliance. Baden-Powell envisioned an organization that would combine boys’ craving for heroism with a code of chivalry, wrapped in the lure of the outdoors. He and his North American counterparts understood masculinity as self-sacrificing and ennobling. Chief Scout Citizen Theodore Roosevelt reminded the American Boy Scouts in 1915 that “manliness in its most rigorous form can be and ought to be accompanied by unselfish consideration for the rights and interests of others.” Baden-Powell wrote that the Scout must ask himself, when forced to choose between two courses of action: “ ‘Which is my duty?’ that is, ‘Which is best for other people?’ ”

The value of an all-boys organization was self-evident to the Boy Scouts’ founders and to the Scout leaders who followed them. Masculine comradeship underlies males’ willingness to undertake military and civic sacrifice. Boys compete with one another, torment one another, but also sometimes elevate one another. They seek adult males to emulate—ideally their fathers but, in the absence of their own father, a father figure embodying masculine virtue. That father figure can even be imaginary; boys’ aspirations are fired by tales of male courage and the accomplishment of great feats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/as-a-jew-jews-are-nothing-new/

“As-a-Jew” has become a widely used term for Jews who publicly denounce Israel and even call for its dissolution but commonly preface their condemning the Jewish state with assertions that they speak “as Jews.” The intent is typically to convey that their anti-Israel stance is consistent with Jewish morality and sensitivity, which their pro-Israel co-religionists are supposedly betraying.

Among the more well-known examples of as-a-Jew Jews who directly or indirectly promote Israel’s demise are members of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which ally themselves with Hamas-affiliated organizations in their militating for dissolution of the Jewish state. Numerous individuals, including Peter Beinart and Judith Butler, have virtually made careers of plowing the same field.

Since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza to dismantle Hamas and prevent its promised endless repetition of that slaughter, as-a-Jew Jews have parroted Hamas in its claims of an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. They have done so even though the ratio of civilian to terrorist casualties in Gaza is the lowest ever recorded in a conflict in which one party has – in violation of international law – imbedded itself in urban populations and used those populations as human shields. As-a-Jew Jews cast this embrace of Hamas propaganda as an expression of their more profound Jewish morality.

But the superior morality as-a-Jew Jews ascribe to themselves predates, of course, October 7. Its foundational thesis is that Jews are uniquely disqualified from any right of national self-determination and are remiss in asserting and clinging to such a right. Proper, moral Jewish behavior dictates, according to these people, that Israeli Jews accept becoming a minority in an Arab-dominated state. It dictates allowing the descendants of those Palestinians who fled the 1947-48 war – a war which they and their Arab allies initiated to quash creation of a Jewish state in a small part of Mandate Palestine – to return to what is now Israel and to transform the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean into the twenty-third Arab state “from the river to the sea.” The as-a-Jew proponents of this course characterize their envisioned entity as a “binational state,” but it would inevitably be an Arab majority state. These righteous as-a-Jews are no doubt cognizant of how well religious and ethnic minorities – whether Christians or Yazidi or Druze or Muslim Kurds – are treated in the great majority of the twenty-two current Arab states. Yet they have no qualms in subjecting the seven million Jews of Israel to similar treatment.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/29/want-more-unity-and-freedom-try-returning-to-constitutional-federalism/

The current electoral cycle has featured a political culture in which candidates and their partisans claim to be advancing unity, but the primary form of the unity advanced is agreement among some that they want what does not belong to them or to dictate what others can do, and that they want government to “make it happen.” Unfortunately, that is not the kind of widespread unity that benefits “we the people.”

That is what recent events, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s argument for why he was staying in, then getting out, or the race, to Harris’s promises to unify people by giving them even more federal “something for nothing” have only turbocharged.

But as long as the dominant political culture remains unchanged, and even more so if it intensifies, all those self-depictions of being unifiers will remain empty promises. If we really wanted more unity in the sense used outside current politics — general agreement, rather than some who agree to harm others for their purposes — we would be well advised to revisit the federalism designed in our Constitution, because of the limits that places on the latter usage.

At America’s creation, a decentralization of power — a federal system, rather than a national system, (more accurately termed “The States, United solely for specified joint purposes,” than “The United States”) — played a key role in protecting Americans’ liberties from infringement. That also allowed more unity at the federal level by eliminating many fights over who could exercise federal power to over-ride the choices of citizens and their governments that were closer to home.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/american-life-under-liberal-conformism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

News organizations are actively engaging in exactly the practice carried out by Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, memory-holing their previous publications to fit the new party line. Kamala Harris was never a border czar; that’s right-wing disinformation now. All previous references to her being the border czar, an unofficial title and real role given to her by Biden and his close advisers to humiliate and embarrass her, have been duly erased. And while we’re at it, how about a round of applause for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the astounding unity of the Democratic Party! We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Liberal groupthink is the most important factor in the general-opinion environment and has been for all my life. But now, because liberal groupthink is subject to sudden eruptive enthusiasms and insanity-inducing reversals, American life proceeds with a sense that the laws of physics don’t really apply. There’s a creepy unsettledness to life in America. And it’s because journalists are lobotomizing themselves in the name of their favorite cause, the Democratic Party.

If you were a faithful believer in what the New York Times says and fell into a coma just one month ago, you went unconscious thinking that Joe Biden’s incapacity was a right-wing psyop inflicted on the gullible by unscrupulous conservatives using deceptively edited videos. One of the reasons you knew you had to believe this is because Kamala Harris is a political joke who “has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls” and “the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president” since such measures had been taken. That was the party line: Biden’s just fine, Kamala’s terrible. Believing anything else is stupid. Less than four weeks later: Biden’s terrible. Kamala’s amazing! And if you say different, you’re a dummy.

We’ve been investigating the Office of Vice President under Kamala Harris for the last two years…

And today our findings were positively cited in the New York Times by columnist David Brooks, who gave Harris a poor grade on the administration and management of her office.

MEDIA COVERAGE

Our findings have been seen at: FOX News in primetime: The Ingraham Angle, Hannity!, Jesse Waters Primetime, and on Varney and Co. National Review, Real Clear Policy, Real Clear Investigations, Breitbart, Just The News, The Federalist, Instapundit, and many other online major news platforms.

Major television coverage at The National Desk at Sinclair Broadcast Group, The Tomi Lahren Show on Outkick, Newsline with Bianca Del Garcia at Newsmax TV, The Weekly Briefing with John Hines at One American News, Chanel Rion’s Fine Point on One American News, and soon to air the Eric Metaxas podcast.

OUR INVESTIGATION

Under Harris the Office of Vice President has had a stunning 91.5% staff turnover rate since her first year in January 2021.

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=

Former president Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio senator J. D. Vance as his running mate has generated much commentary. The mainstream media has tried to frame Vance as a postliberal “threat to democracy,” while Trump’s supporters have celebrated him as a bridge to a new generation.

But there is a deeper story here. The Vance selection is not a gambit to secure a particular demographic or region—white men are Trump’s base; Ohio is a safe red state—but an effort to cultivate an emerging counter-elite that could make the second Trump administration substantially more effective than the first.

This story is built into J. D. Vance’s biographical arc. He was the all-American kid who rose from humble beginnings to make his way in the world: the Marines; Yale Law; venture capital; a best-selling book. He learned the language of the prestige institutions, cultivated powerful patrons, and quickly climbed the ladder in academia, finance, and business. He had made it.

Then, his story takes a turn. Having entered the ranks of America’s elite, Vance became disillusioned and disenchanted with it, correctly identifying it as a force of hypocrisy and corruption. He defected—first, by parting ways with the respectable conservatism of the Beltway, and then by embracing Donald Trump.

https://www.thefp.com/p/kamala-harris-netanyahu-washington-dc-july-24

When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, his fourth such speech, the new leader of the Democratic Party was missing. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was busy delivering an address to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority’s Grand Boulé in Indianapolis. 

In normal times, Harris’s snub of Bibi would be expected. Democrats still sting from Netanyahu’s campaign in 2015 against former president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. When Netanyahu spoke before a joint session that year to make his case, many Democrats boycotted. Things have only gone downhill since then: Bibi’s relationship with President Joe Biden has been strained in recent months; Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Bibi from the House floor in March; the Squad, along with lots of left-wing activists and many Arab American groups, have decried Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide.” 

But Harris effectively won her party’s nomination within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement Sunday that he would not seek reelection. In other words: she does not need to please the anti-Israel base of her party in order to win a primary.

Instead, what Harris needs to do is spend the precious 100 days before the election defining herself before the nation. Simply sitting behind the rostrum as the leader of the Jewish state delivered a stirring address about how his country’s enemies were also America’s would have neutralized the Trump campaign’s efforts to paint the vice president as a San Francisco socialist who is out of touch with everyday people. 

“Nobody knows where Kamala Harris stands on Israel,” former GOP foreign policy adviser Dan Senor told The Free Press. “She’s a blank slate. This was a high-profile opportunity to define herself on this issue, and she took a pass.” 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/analysis-of-kamala-harris-economic-record

While Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, he has governed as one of the most progressive presidents in modern American history. In 2020, Biden sought to distance himself from self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders; after Biden as president pursued massive stimulus and spending programs, Sanders became one of his biggest supporters.

Now that Biden has announced that he will not pursue reelection, the Democratic nomination will likely fall to his vice president, Kamala Harris. While Harris may campaign as a moderate, analysis of her economic record does not support that label.

In her time in the Senate, Harris positioned herself on the far left of a Democratic Party already moving sharply to the left. According to DW-NOMINATE, a measure that compares the votes of senators and representatives and ranks members from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative) Harris was the second-most liberal member of the Senate when she served from 2017 to 2021, behind only Elizabeth Warren. In fact, her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders. Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris’s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.

Harris’s senatorial record differs starkly from that of her boss. While Biden shifted left on entering the White House, he remained a moderate across his nearly four-decade Senate career. His approximate -0.3 DW-NOMINATE score put him close to the middle of his party throughout his time in the upper chamber.

https://www.declassified.live/p/no-j6-treatment-for-pro-hamas-rioters

As expected, House Democrats used Wednesday’s appearance by FBI Director Christopher Wray as an opportunity not to denounce the attempted assassination of Donald Trump but to exaggerate the threat of “political violence” in America.

“Political violence of any kind is dangerous, unlawful, and unacceptable,” Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash) lectured during the House Judiciary Committee hearing intended to press Wray for details about the events of July 13. “I understand the increased tenor of political violence that is racking the country. It has been on the rise, fomented by dehumanizing rhetoric by top officials including the former president.” (In some circles, that is known as “blaming the victim.”)

Wray himself said he has observed an “alarming phenomenon” in recent years of political passions turning to violence. We don’t care what an individual is mad about, Wray warned, “when it turns to violence, that’s when we draw the line, that’s when we get engaged.”

This is part of the “both sides” blarney Joe Biden and the media have attempted to promote since the shooting on July 13. In other words, neither side is more responsible that the other for random incidents of political violence.

Which, of course, is a lie.