RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/25/which-is-the-real-party-of-racism/

The blasé response to the revelation that Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse belonged to a private “whites only” club and even owned a stake in it, should come as no surprise. In the Democrats’ race-obsessed world, only Republicans are racist.

Whitehouse confused the issue last week when asked about his membership in Bailey’s Beach Club and its alleged all-white membership, saying: “I think the people who are running the place are still working on that and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet.”

Well, it turns out, his family is among the “people who are running the place.”

As GoLocalProvidence online TV, which broke the story, noted:

“Both Whitehouse and his wife Sandra as well as their families have been members of the club for decades. Whitehouse did transfer his (ownership) shares in the club to his wife years ago, and she is now one of the largest shareholders in the all-white club. The club’s membership is a who’s who Newport, Palm Beach, and New York wealth.”

And on Monday, Whitehouse appeared to defend his membership, calling such clubs “a long tradition in Rhode Island.”

However, after those remarks raised even more questions, Whitehouse denied that the beach club was whites-only, and said that he “was assured that … the assertion was wrong, there is diversity in the membership and there are non-white club members.”

An honest mistake then? Nope. Whitehouse had been asked about his membership in the club dating back to 2006. But, as a Democrat, he could conveniently count on the media not letting such inconvenient facts intrude on his political career, and on his colleagues saying nothing.

Moreover, the club itself issued a statement saying that it had “people of many racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds” as members, but refused to elaborate.

But Whitehouse did clarify that he belongs to a yacht club that, by his own admission, has only white members.

So, to ask the by-now-cliched question, if Whitehouse were a Republican would he get a pass from the Democrats? Of course not.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/25/as-biden-bumbles-abroad-inflation-roars-at-home/

While President Joe Biden was focused on being his best European/Russia-pleasing preener at the G-7 and Vice President Kamala Harris embarrassed herself in Central America, here at home Americans are suffering the beginning of wild inflationary conditions not seen since the 1970s.

Our country is in crisis. Adding to a dangerous rise in criminal behavior across the nation and especially at our southern border, our economy is adrift. As we move out from under the destructive lockdowns owed to the pandemic, this should be a time of optimism and hopefulness. Instead, many industries are sputtering to re-open as inflation is “stealing” from returning working American’s paychecks, trading economic joy for malaise. Even the stock markets are recognizing the dangers and are beginning to readjust the prices of assets.

Super-charged inflationary pressures continued to gain momentum according to a survey by the Philadelphia Fed this month, adding to alarming price jumps recorded in April.  Eighty-two percent of manufacturing companies in the recent Philly Fed’s survey reported paying higher prices for the inputs of their products, while just one percent said costs had fallen. As a result, the diffusion index (a metric of manufacturing activity and costs) moved up four points to 80.7, the highest reading since June 1979. 

But what if the Fed continues to incorrectly apply misguided inflationary policies at this critical moment? They typically get inflation “wrong” because they misdiagnose the cause for alarming increases in prices: printing too much money. The danger is revealed in the Fed’s policies to date which will exacerbate, not retard, inflation for the immediate and longer-range future.

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon and that even without the gold standard there were inherent limits to printing more money. The fundamental rule is the supply of money must be equal to the demand for money. But the demand for money is a slippery concept: it’s natural but dangerous to operate under the notion that the demand for money is endless. It’s anything but.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/has-the-military-gone-woke-11624660049?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Army Gen. Mark Milley is getting kudos from the media for telling Congress that the military hasn’t become “woke,” even as its leadership urges soldiers and sailors to absorb woke ideas. The brass is trying to have it both ways on this issue, and that may ultimately undermine its core mission.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that he “personally” found it “offensive” that Republicans have accused general officers of being “woke.” A pair of Florida Congressmen had been criticizing Gen. Milley over seminars at West Point about “white rage.” The Chief of Naval Operations has recommended “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book that proposes “future discrimination,” ostensibly against white people, on his professional reading list for sailors.

Gen. Milley has to be sensitive to the political realities in the White House, but he was clearly exercised about the criticism, saying it’s “important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.” He later added: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.” So, he asked, “what is wrong” with “having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”

Of course sailors and Marines should read widely. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday said similarly last week that he was merely exposing sailors to new ideas. But one can still wonder why “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book promoting sectarian racism, is on the reading list as “foundational” material on par with Jim Hornfischer’s classic naval histories.

The Navy’s reading list for sailors also includes “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” and “Sexual Minorities and Politics.” Contrary to Gen. Milley and the Navy brass, it is not an assault on open-mindedness to ask whether an institution that requires esprit de corps and a common purpose can function if sailors are primed to view white shipmates as potential “oppressors.”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

In a 2006 report, Jonathon R.T. Davidson, Professor (now Emeritus) of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University, utilizing biographical sources, wrote about the first thirty-seven U.S. Presidents (Washington through Nixon). His conclusion: eighteen of them had some form of mental illness, from depression and anxiety to bipolar disorders and alcohol abuse/dependence. Given the pressure under which Presidents operate, perhaps such findings are not surprising.

In 1964, in response to a group of psychiatrists claiming Barry Goldwater unfit for office the American Psychiatric Association issued a statement, which said in part: “…it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” That caveat has not stopped “armchair psychiatrists” from offering unfavorable opinions about Presidents, especially Republican ones, including Ronald Reagan who was called an “idiot savant” and who some said showed signs of early onset Alzheimer’s, and George W. Bush who was called a “puppet of Dick Cheney” and who others said exhibited “deep feelings of inadequacy.”

But no President was ever mentally scrutinized as closely as was Donald Trump. Even before the election Representative Karen Bass (D-CA and without a medical degree) launched a petition to have Mr. Trump psychologically examined, claiming he exhibited signs of narcissistic personality disorder. In December 2017, more than a dozen members of Congress invited a Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to evaluate Trump’s behavior. Without ever meeting him, and in contravention of the 1964 statement issued by the American Psychiatric Association, she was quoted by Politico: “He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs…Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressure of the presidency” In response to non-stop attacks on his fitness for office, Donald Trump, in 2020, took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a brief test of about thirty questions. He claimed he “aced” it, though Canadian inventor of the test, Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, said Mr. Trump’s score showed “normal performance.”

http://Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catch

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching.

Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy.

To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first. Except for seeing what the building looked like and watching the interviews (if you like that sort of thing), the TV coverage is a waste of time.

Here is how the coverage will unfold.

The building-collapse story will lead every cable news hour for the next two days. Initially, it will fill most of the hour. The reporters’ basic message will be, ‘There is so much we still don’t know.’ Video of the building will play in the background. This commentary will be repeated endlessly, along with updated figures on the numbers of dead, hospitalized and missing. If anybody has cell phone video, we’ll see it. Footage from near street cameras is already being shown.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/what-is-behind-gen-mark-milleys-righteous?token=e

The overarching ideology of Pentagon officials is larger military budgets and ongoing permanent war posture. Their new war target, explicitly, is domestic “white rage.”

For two hundred forty years, American generals have not exactly been defined by adamant public advocacy for left-wing cultural dogma. Yet there appeared to be a great awakening at the Pentagon on Wednesday when Gen. Mark Milley, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified at a House hearing. The Chairman vehemently defended the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and, referencing the January 6 Capitol riot, said, “it is important that we train and we understand … and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white.”

In response to conservative criticisms that top military officials should not be weighing in on inflammatory and polarizing cultural debates, liberals were ecstatic to have found such an empathetic, racially aware, and humanitarian general sitting atop the U.S. imperial war machine. Overnight, Gen. Milley became a new hero for U.S. liberalism, a noble military leader which — like former FBI Director Robert Mueller before him — no patriotic, decent American would question let alone mock. Some prominent liberal commentators warned that conservatives are now anti-military and even seek to defund the Pentagon.

It is, of course, possible that the top brass of the U.S. military has suddenly become supremely enlightened on questions of racial strife and racial identity in the U.S., and thus genuinely embraced theories that, until very recently, were the exclusive province of left-wing scholars at elite academic institutions. Given that all U.S. wars in the post-World War II era have been directed at predominantly non-white countries, which — like all wars — required a sustained demonization campaign of those enemy populations, having top Pentagon officials become leading anti-racism warriors would be quite a remarkable transformation indeed. But stranger things have happened, I suppose.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/23/deprogramming-of-january-6-defendants-is-underway/

“My lawyer has given me names of books and movies to help me see what life is like for others in our country. I’ve learned that even though we live in a wonderful country things still need to improve. People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street.”

That passage is part book report, part white privilege mea culpa submitted to a federal court this month by Anna Morgan-Lloyd, one of the more than 500 Americans arrested for her involvement in the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The 49-year-old grandmother of five from southern Indiana was charged with four counts of trespassing and disorderly conduct even though she walked through an open door and was inside the building for about five minutes. She was ratted out to the FBI by a county worker who saw her January 6 posts on Facebook.

On Wednesday, Lloyd, who has a clean criminal record, pleaded guilty to one count of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building”—but not before she consented to undergo a reeducation exercise at the urging of her court-appointed lawyer. (Like many January 6 defendants, Lloyd does not have the means to hire a private attorney.)

It’s safe to say Heather Shaner, a D.C.-based criminal defense attorney representing a handful of January 6 protesters, does not share the political beliefs of her Capitol clients, which is why she’s forcing them to read books and watch movies highlighting dark chapters in U.S. history.

In an interview with Huffington Post, Shaner explained her belief that “this is the most wonderful country in the world, it’s been great for all kinds of immigrant groups, except for the fact that it was born of genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of people.” 

Shaner’s legal captives are learning the hard way what the government will do when one resists their commands to comply. Not only have their personal lives been shattered, finances depleted, and reputations destroyed by an abusive Justice Department investigation, Shaner’s clients must be indoctrinated with leftist propaganda about America’s alleged systemic racism.

The purge of the populist mindset is underway, courtesy of the fetid Beltway judicial system and the Joe Biden regime. Judges routinely lecture January 6 defendants about the wrongthink of a “stolen election” while prosecutors openly mock their political beliefs, including home schooling and gun ownership.

“I have had many political and ethical discussions with Anna Lloyd,” Shaner wrote in her motion agreeing to the plea and probation for Lloyd. “I tendered a booklist to her. She has read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Just Mercy, and Schindler’s List to educate herself about ‘government policy’ toward Native Americans, African Americans and European Jews. We have discussed the books and also about the responsibility of an individual when confronting ‘wrong.’”

Shaner also told the court that Lloyd watched the “Burning Tulsa” documentary on the History Channel as well as “Mudbound,” a story of two families, one black and one white, living on the same property after World War II.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/23/why-are-they-woke/

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020. 

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. 

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

Is it the case that the more Cullors professes Marxist ideology and damns toxic whiteness, so all the more she feels at home living in a $1.4 million Topanga Canyon home, in an almost exclusively ritzy white neighborhood?

Consider outspoken liberal icon Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). He’s one of the Senate’s most woke. Yet Whitehouse turns out to be a mostly unapologetic member of a de facto all-white prestigious “beach club” of elites in Newport, Rhode Island. Is Whitehouse committed in the abstract to rooting out white privilege so he can concretely relax amid it with fellow bluebloods?

Barack and Michelle Obama occasionally venture out of either their multimillion-dollar Washington, D.C. mansion or their Martha’s Vineyard estate to lecture the country on its systemic racism. They express worry over the dangers that apparently white people pose to the very safety of their own daughters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/its_outright_war_on_conservatives.html

Last November, the now-defunct Trump Accountability Project, linked to former Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan, bruited its plan to blacklist those who worked for the Trump administration.  Sevugan tweeted, “Employers considering them should know that there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.  Find out how at the Trump Accountability Project.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Dem-NY) too called for devising lists of Trump supporters for punishment and ostracism. The rhetoric reeked of a witch-hunt to name and shame anyone linked to the former president.

Now that the Biden administration is securely ensconced in the White House, the blatant malice has been toned down with disingenuous calls for unity. But there’s persistent targeting of “unwoke” conservatives — in fact, of anyone not aligned with the hate America script of social justice warriors. In this the Biden administration has been active. There are several recent instances that highlight a hypocritical progressive agenda to enforce groupthink and extinguish critical and independent thinking.

In May, the IRS denied 501(c)(3) status to Christians Engaged, a Texas-based prayer group that encourages members to pray for the country and its elected officials, motivates citizens to vote for cultural impact, and campaigns for preserving our constitutional republic. The group endeavors to integrate civic involvement as part of religious practice but does not promote any party or candidate. However, in his official letter denying tax-exemption, Stephen A. Martin, the IRS’s director of exempt organizations, clearly implies that biblical values are exclusively Republican. He wrote: “While you educate voters on what the Bible says about issues, your educational activities are not neutral. The topics typically are affiliated with distinct candidates and specific political party [Republican] platforms.”

The First Liberty Institute, a Christian legal organization, is appealing the IRS decision as discriminatory. It argues that there is no requirement that organizations must be neutral on public policy issues, and that just because there is some overlap between the views of Christians Engaged and the Republican party, the IRS cannot conclude that the organization serves private interests. The IRS decision amounts to a violation of the free speech, free exercise, and free establishment clauses of the First Amendment. Declaring biblical teachings as exclusively Republican is the slippery slope that could lead to future discrimination against Christian organizations and even churches.