RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/01/faucists-weaponize-the-delta-variant/

The Delta variant of the novel coronavirus has been artificially mutated by man. First altered to be a tool to leverage political gain for the left, it’s now becoming a mechanism used to justify the return to lockdowns and mask-wearing mandates. If we don’t emphatically say no this time, we might not ever be able to again.

Earlier this week, we laid out the case that the political left was using the Delta variant to whip up more fear. With infections and deaths sharply down from their winter peaks, and vaccinations up, the scaremongers and political operatives in the Democratic Party found a way to turn up the panic knob and at the same time malign red states and Republicans.

Reports and politicians’ comments were filled with words such as “alarming,” “serious threat,” “greatest threat,” “dangerous for young people.” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, at one time a right-of-center voice, even went so far as to declare that “red states are dangerous to America’s health.”

But within hours, things became even uglier.

On Tuesday, the Post reported the spread of the Delta variant had prompted “new restrictions worldwide,” explaining that its “rapid spread” had “forced a growing number of countries to reimpose lockdowns and other public health restrictions.”

(Forced? That’s a funny way to describe officials reimposing lockdowns by choice that was theirs alone.)

The Post continued:

The new curbs on travel and daily life stretched from Australia and Bangladesh to South Africa and Germany, where authorities over the weekend set new limits on travelers from ‘virus-variant zones’ such as Portugal and Russia.

Though he hasn’t called for more lockdowns or advised the immunized to go back to masks, the behavior over the last 16 months of Anthony Fauci, who isn’t America’s doctor, just a bureaucrat, as well as his public panic over the Delta variant, is sure to inspire efforts to reinstate lockdowns and mask mandates in Blue states and Blue cities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-would-we-do-without-experts-11625092784?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

It’s getting harder to believe Dr. Anthony Fauci’s claim that his government agency never funded “gain-of-function” research to engineer new viruses at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Meanwhile, Thursday brings a timely reminder of who ultimately oversees that lab in Wuhan.

It’s the Chinese Communist Party, which this week celebrates its 100th anniversary. Lowlights along the way include the killing of tens of millions of Chinese citizens in the 1950s and ’60s. The party’s current governance is also not without its flaws.

The Journal’s James Areddy writes:

A former Chinese Communist Party academic, now a critic of the regime, is urging the U.S. to abandon “naive” hopes to engage with Beijing, while warning that the country’s leadership is more fragile than it appears.
In a forthcoming paper timed to the party’s centennial Thursday, Cai Xia, a former professor at Beijing’s Central Party School, says that four decades of U.S. bridge-building has merely entrenched a Chinese leadership inherently hostile to the U.S. And under President Xi Jinping, China no longer finds engagement useful, Ms. Cai wrote.
“Wishful thinking about ‘engagement’ must be replaced by hardheaded defensive measures to protect the United States from the CCP’s aggression—while bringing offensive pressures to bear on it, as the Chinese Communist Party is much more fragile than Americans assume,” Ms. Cai wrote. Her 28-page paper is slated for publication this week by the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank at Stanford University.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nihs-diversity-obsession-subverts-science-11625090811?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The National Institutes of Health supports a multidisciplinary neuroscience initiative to expand understanding of the brain. Research applications include treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and depression. On June 10, NIH director Francis Collins announced a new requirement for participating in the brain initiative. Neurologists, molecular biologists and nanophysicists seeking NIH funding must now submit a plan showing how they will “enhance diverse perspectives” throughout their research. Scores on the “plan for enhancing diverse perspectives” will inform funding decisions.

This new requirement is part of Dr. Collins’s continuing effort to atone for what he calls biomedical science’s “stain” of “structural racism.” The NIH already supports more than 60 “diversity and inclusion initiatives,” but those have apparently failed to eradicate NIH’s own “systemic and structural racism.”

Each “plan for enhancing diverse perspectives” must show how the principal investigator will “empower” individuals from groups “traditionally underrepresented” in biomedical research, such as blacks, the disabled, women and the poor. Institutions are also covered by the diversity mandate. Researchers working on an NIH neuroscience grant should be drawn from institutions that are traditionally underrepresented in biomedical research, including “community-based” organizations.

Dr. Collins provided no evidence for “structural racism” other than demographic data on NIH’s grant applicants and recipients. Black applicants are “present in far fewer numbers compared with their representation in the US population, 13.4%,” according to Dr. Collins’s announcement. In 2020 black scientists made up 2.3% of the 30,061 funding applications the NIH received. Less than 2% of NIH grants go to black principal investigators.

To Dr. Collins and his academic peers, such disparities are virtually irrefutable evidence of discrimination, though grant reviewers don’t see an applicant’s race. But the use of population data as a benchmark for assessing institutional racism ignores racial disparities in academic skills, achievement and study practices that the NIH didn’t cause and couldn’t possibly do anything to remedy.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/06/30/is_the_cdc_still_relevant_783507.html

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the premier federal agency in charge of scientific public health research and information dispersal. It is a large, bureaucratic organization with a budget last year of $11.1 billion. For more than a year it has been the leading voice for COVID-19 recommendations and requirements for Americans.

The CDC is supposed to base those recommendations on scientific research, yet over the past 15 months it has been extremely slow in updating those recommendations as the science about COVID-19 advances. As a result, the agency is losing its credibility with the American public.

When the pandemic broke out in the United States, the CDC focused on the potential of surface contact transmission. It said hand sanitizers were the primary weapons to combat the viral spread. In March, 2020, the CDC said masks were not recommended for the general public. One month later, the CDC reversed course completely and virtually required masks for any activity outside the home. It wasn’t until May 2021 that the CDC actually admitted that the virus was spread by aerosolized particles and that surface spread was negligible.

The CDC also forced Americans to eliminate nearly all social and economic activities and quarantine at home. Businesses shut down, schools closed, teaching went virtual, and all “non-essential” interactions were banned. This was in spite of the real science data that showed by the summer of 2020 that there were categories of people who were at high risk for catching the virus and dying and that large segments of society are at very low risk. It became very clear that the elderly and those people with medical conditions such as high blood pressure and obesity were most susceptible to the virus. Yet the CDC did not differentiate between those people at high risk and those who had a very low probability of a serious illness. All Americans were essentially treated the same by the agency.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/30/incremental_outrageousness_is_killing_america_146008.html

Critical race theory has exploded into public consciousness. Millions of American parents are just coming to realize that our schools have become woke indoctrination centers preaching divisiveness, bigotry, discrimination, and disdain for American history. Most of them are wondering how we got here.

The answer is simple: Slowly. Incrementally. One step after another, over the course of decades. It’s hardly just K-12 education. An incentive system of “incremental outrageousness” has taken every aspect of American culture dangerously far from reality into the orgy of radical leftist hatred known as progressivism.

How did it happen without anyone noticing?

Turns out, we’ve reached the endgame of a strategy the radical left put in play in the 1960s: the long march through the institutions. The onslaught began in higher education—an institution particularly well suited for a takeover because it functions without external market signals. Success in academia hinges entirely on peer approval. Faculty members make all decisions concerning the hiring, firing, and promotion of junior colleagues, curriculum design, publication in prestigious journals, the appropriate paths for research, and the availability of public and private research funding.

The surest way to succeed as an academic is thus to flatter the senior folks charged with making decisions about your career. The best way to do that (within the bounds of legality and propriety) is to “build upon” their work—that is, by taking it one step further in the recommended direction. Senior academics select the direction. Junior academics bolster the prestige of their seniors whenever they make a new “scientific discovery” along the designated path. In one fell swoop these junior academics show how important past work has been and tie their own egos, prestige, and careers to those of their seniors.

This process calcifies conventional wisdom while divorcing each new “discovery” from everything other than the step that immediately preceded it. Each small step in the approved direction represents a small step away from the reality that originally grounded it.

Incremental outrageousness. Consider, for example, the well-grounded observation that it might be worthwhile to study history from the perspective of the peasants and/or the conquered rather than of royalty and/or the victorious.  Fast-forward a few decades and many incremental steps. Now, perspective implies sympathy; those who study the oppressed are compassionate, while those who study the oppressors are cruel. Fast-forward a few more decades. Critical theory reduces all human interactions into conflicts between oppressors and oppressed.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/29/zampolits-of-wokeness/

Wokeness might do to the American military what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world’s greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls.

Wokeness—extreme ideological intolerance of opposing views and the imposition of life-destroying punishments for the insufficiently woke—is organized fratricide. 

The fratricide has a higher purpose: A political purge of a targeted institution or culture through mass action, the destructive power of which will create a new utopian status quo. 

The Soviets tried this. Their armed forces had a dual command structure, one military and one political, throughout the ranks. The purpose, amid purge after woke purge, was to purify the military along ideological lines. 

Wokeness itself isn’t an ideology, however. It isn’t critical race theory. It’s a behavioral system of dictatorial political and cultural control. 

The wokeness that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denies he is imposing throughout our armed forces, is nothing new. Robespierre of the French Revolution was woke. So were the Bolsheviks. The Wehrmacht was woke, as was the National Socialism it served. In America, the Ku Klux Klan, Weather Underground, and the Black Liberation Army were woke. The latter two groups from the 1970s became incubators of the critical race theory that has flowered into controversy today.

Once implemented, wokeness swarms upon people to pit them against one another. It destroys national, cultural, and professional identity and unity. It decays mutual respect and trust. It rots our institutions and our spirits from the inside.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/generals_veterans_

The Committee to Support and Defend has initiated a petition to the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to “honor his oath” to “support and defend” the Constitution of the United States. The petition “respectfully insists” that Austin immediately countermand orders he has issued since taking office that have eroded military cohesion and readiness. The petition argues that Critical Race Theory is a toxic Marxist ideology with anti-Constitutional objectives. Ordering its teaching in the military endangers America’s national security, in contravention to Austin’s oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the United States from all enemies.

The petition is the third scathing criticism of the Biden administration’s policies which retired generals and admirals and other military veterans have issued in recent weeks, citing concerns over national security and the dangers to our liberties.  In an unprecedented action, over 200 retired generals and admirals issued a letter in May which stated that the United States was facing the “greatest danger to our constitutional Republic since 1776”. The letter stated that our nation is in “deep peril” as we fight the supporters of Marxism who are opposed to our constitutional freedoms and liberties.

Last week, the Committee to Support and Defend led by LTC Allen West (ret) issued a letter signed by over 1000 military veterans which stated that as veterans they were still morally and ethically bound to protect our Constitution and country. They wrote:

“As such, we put our nation’s leadership on notice. We believe that the hard left turn toward Socialism and Marxism endangers our citizens and the future of this great nation…We are disgusted by the dismantling of the rule of law in our great country. We never thought we would see the return to Vietnam style disdain for public service. Unfortunately, this disregard and disrespect is corrosive and will lead to dangerous situations for citizens and law enforcement.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/30/our-woke-pentagon-leaders-are-weakening-americas-defense/

One of the most disturbing developments to emerge from the Biden administration has been the Defense Department’s sudden embrace of Marxist Critical Race Theory – so-called ‘Woke’ ideology. It’s a clear and present danger to our national security and should be halted immediately.

Even West Point, the Army’s elite university where tomorrow’s generals are educated, isn’t immune to the Woke disease. Soon-to-be Army second lieutenants are being indoctrinated with Marxist-based Woke ideology.

You can thank Commander in Chief Joe Biden and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley for this. Milley, an Ivy League grad, has aggressively shifted the military toward the political left by compelling officers to push racist CRT ideas down conscripts’ and officers’ throats.

“The United States Military Academy is a university. And it is important that we train, and we understand – and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white, and I want to understand it,” Milley said in recent remarks before Congress. “So, what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”

He added: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read – I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin – that doesn’t make me a communist.”

He’s right about that. But embracing their ideas and putting them into practice, and CRT is definitely Marxist, does make you a communist or a Marxist ― or, at the very least, a willing tool of the same.