RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/cancel-culture-is-no-laughing-matter/

 Comedian Dave Chappell’s latest Netflix special, “The Closer,” is making the rounds but not for its hilarity. No, its high ratings can be attributed to the venom that it has elicited from the mainstream press and social media.

Nothing piques curiosity more than public outrage, after all. There’s no doubt, then, that a huge portion of viewers tuned in just to see what all the fuss was about.
As a longtime fan of the irreverent performer’s, I would have watched the show anyway. But many of my peers hadn’t paid the slightest attention to Chappelle until the scandal erupted. Once it did, they rushed to join in the conversation by seeing the program for themselves.

Chappelle was already Enemy No. 1 in LBGTQ circles for his “transphobia.” He’s been raked over the coals by feminists for his ostensible disdain for women. Some whites, as well, don’t take kindly to the veteran black comic’s persistent mockery of them.

But this time, his jokes about Jews have aroused serious ire. The anger stems from two main passages of the hour-and-a-quarter-long act.
He leads in to the first anti-Semitic sequence by talking about the COVID-19 pandemic by insulting other groups.
“I don’t want you to worry about me,” he begins. “I’m vaccinated; I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I’ve got to admit, that’s probably the most n**gerish decision I’ve made in a long time. … I walk in to the doc like, ‘Give me the third best option; I’ll have what the homeless people are having.’”
He goes on to say that he actually contracted the virus, which made him feel “gross.”
“I haven’t felt dirty like that in a long time,” he says. “Last time I can remember feeling dirty like that, man, I must have been a little boy … being molested by a preacher. But don’t feel bad for me; I liked it.”
He then recounts having had to quarantine for 10 days. Left alone in his room, he says, he watched videos, many of which, “sadly, were of black people beating up Asians for no reason.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/josephbowman/2021/10/11/sympathy-for-the-devil-columbus-day-and-why-it-matters-n2597185

Today is the second Monday of October and thus is Columbus Day. For many of us, this is little more than a three-day weekend. However, it is seen as an unjust celebration of “whiteness” and imperialism for an increasing number of Americans and signifies how uniquely evil America is. This hatred for Columbus and the misunderstanding of what it is he did is nothing new. In fact, the earliest criticisms of Columbus were made about a century ago by the old Democratic party institution, The Ku Klux Klan. The Klan did not want Americans celebrating a southern European Catholic like Columbus. They argued America was a protestant country founded by Northern Europeans. Anti-Columbus sentiment has festered and grown because of the broader apathy of many Americans who see today as a mere excuse for a three-day weekend. Even Columbus himself did not quite understand the magnitude of his voyages. He went to his grave thinking he had discovered the West Indies and not an entirely new pair of continents. Columbus and his explorations matter, though, and not just for people from the United States.

One of the common dismissals of Columbus is that he never even set foot in America. Instead, he landed in the Bahamas. So why should we care about him? What sense does it make for Americans to celebrate an Italian explorer in the employ of Spain, landing in the Bahamas while searching for the Indies?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/10/the-left-got-what-it-wanted-so-now-what/

What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?

Then

No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.

Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a military coup. 

The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40 million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own investigation. 

Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate. 

No one worried about the weaponization of government. So, we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok (about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments. 

Two of them followed. Neither was conducted by a special counsel. There was no array of witnesses, no prosecutorial report. Much less were there formal charges of a specific high crime or misdemeanor, or bribery or treason, as specified by the Constitution. 

In the end, both farces ended in trials—but not before the Left had established lots of baleful precedents. Impeachment is now simply a tool to embarrass a president in his first term when he has lost the House. A Senate trial could hound an innocent president, even as a private citizen out of office. And a chief justice need not preside over the Senate trial. If and when Joe Biden loses the House, the Left should applaud any attempt to impeach him—given it established the new model of opposition.

Of the January 6 debacle, we were not told that it was a riot involving lawbreakers who would be punished. Instead, we were lied to that it was an “armed insurrection,” a “coup,” and “a rebellion” of massive proportions. 

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. In Animal Farm fashion, there were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

It mattered nothing that “armed” in the case of January 6 meant that no firearms were used or even found among the protestors. No one was charged with conspiracy, insurrection, or racketeering. But many were placed in solitary confinement without specific charges being filed—to the utter delight of liberal groups like the ACLU and human rights organizations.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/10/10/the-clock-is-ticking-on-bidens-presidency-n1522886

Joe Biden’s massive $4 trillion spending bills are in mortal danger of collapsing under their own weight as the gap between what the radicals want and what less-radical Democrats will vote for widens.

To make matters worse for ordinary Americans, Biden has come down decisively on the side of the radicals, leaving party moderates to wonder where the sanity went.

The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, already passed by the Senate, is languishing in political purgatory with radical Democrats in the House threatening to kill it unless their $3.5 trillion social safety net bill is approved first. Resentful moderates feel they’ve been lied to by the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who promised an up-or-down vote on the bipartisan bill before the end of September.

Here we are a third of the way through October and the House still isn’t ready to consider infrastructure legislation or the safety net bill. Why is that?

Part of the problem is that radicals will be radicals and despite sweet-talking and compromising from Biden, Bernie Sanders and his radical allies have announced they have “compromised enough” and have declared all-out war to get what they want.

Washington Post:

This upcoming stretch may be Biden’s last chance to revive a presidency that has suffered major blows in recent months. Since being rocked by the Afghan withdrawal and the surging delta variant over the summer, Biden’s approval rating has fallen steadily, hitting a low of 38 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll. Some of the campaign pledges that inspired Biden’s supporters, from voting rights to immigration reform, have fallen by the wayside. A jobs report Friday suggested the economy has been slowed down by the delta variant.

The dust-up between Sanders and moderate West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is illustrative of Biden’s problems. Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin might live on the same planet but that’s about the extent of their similarities. Both men inhabit different realities. Both men talk past each other because neither man understands the language being spoken.

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.