RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-antitrust-bait-and-switch-11623883196?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The Senate on Tuesday voted 69-28 to confirm progressive Columbia University law professor Lina Khan as a Federal Trade Commissioner. But some Republicans who voted for her may have regrets after President Biden broke political norms and quickly named her as the new chair.

Ms. Khan is a leader in the “hipster” or neo-Brandeis school of antitrust. These progressives want to scrap the consumer-welfare standard that Robert Bork helped develop in the 1970s. They believe antitrust law should focus on business size rather than how its conduct or acquisitions affect consumers.

In a 2017 Yale Law Journal article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Ms. Khan argued that the “consumer welfare” standard is “unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy.” Amazon, she said, increased its dominance by charging lower prices and growing its business, thereby undercutting competitors.

Amazon and other tech giants deserve antitrust scrutiny for some of their business practices, such as Amazon’s dominance in e-books. But that e-book dominance was abetted by a Justice antitrust suit that undermined competition from Apple. Killing the consumer-welfare standard would punish companies for reducing prices and innovating.

Some Republicans, frustrated by how companies have silenced conservatives, voted to confirm Ms. Khan to send a message. Yet they may not have done so had they known Ms. Khan would lead the agency. It’s de rigueur for a President when nominating members to independent agencies to announce at the same time if someone will serve as chair.

Mr. Biden didn’t, probably because he was worried it would jeopardize Ms. Khan’s confirmation.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/17/bidens-creeping-police-state/

Most Americans believe in law and order. But they don’t believe that the federal government should suppress their entirely legitimate political beliefs. Which is exactly what the Biden administration’s now doing.

We all count on robust public safety. Every one of us. Unfortunately, taking a page from Critical Race Theory, President Joe Biden seems to think – or, his far-left aides do, anyway – that the only people who need to be watched are non-Democrats and those on the right.

How else to explain his recently released “strategy” for fighting domestic terrorism? In March, Biden’s National Security Council determined “that domestic violent extremism posed a ‘heightened threat’ in 2021.”

“Today’s domestic terrorists espouse a range of violent ideological motivations, including racial or ethnic bigotry and hatred as well as anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” the document said.

Go through it and you’ll see all of the examples are so-called right-wing militias and even the misguided Jan. 6 demonstrators at our nation’s Capitol.

There are no mentions or even allusions in Biden’s “National Strategy” to the literally hundreds of riots and dozens of killings that accompanied the far-left uprisings in more than 140 cities across our nation over the the last year, perpetrated by Black Lives Matter and Antifa and heartily supported by leftist Democrats.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/16/critical-race-theory-will-destroy-our-military/

Dakota Wood, senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense and the editor of Heritage’s “Index of U.S. Military Strength. Previously, he served for two decades in the U.S. Marine Corp.

As a young Marine Corps first lieutenant assigned to an infantry battalion in the late 1980s, I had charge of the unit transport section of operators, mechanics, and supervisors tasked with taking care of our fleet of combat vehicles.

This group of Marines, like all with whom I served over a 20-year military career, was a wonderful cross section of America representing all walks of life.

My maintenance and operations chiefs were American Samoan and an African American, respectively. Our collection of more junior Marines included blacks, whites, and Latinos, young men from Texas, New Jersey, California, and West Virginia, among others.

They came from the city and the country, from poor and middle-class families. Some were Catholic, others Protestant, and some had no strong affiliation with any organized religion.

In the maintenance bay, on the equipment lot, or in the field we would hear a musical mix of country, rock and roll, heavy metal, and rap.

Everyone pitched in to accomplish the mission during unit fitness runs, shop clean-up, preparing for inspections, embarking equipment for deployments to Japan and South Korea, and supporting battalion operations during training and exercise events.

Everything just worked and worked well. Why?

Because they were all Marines, wearing the same uniform, supporting the same combat organization, serving the same country. They all had been through the same training. They had to measure up to the same standards. They had to make the same cutoff scores for promotion.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-6-15-distinguishing-respect-from-patronizing-condescension-in-matters-of-race

In our current national moment, distinguishing respectful conduct or language toward others from patronizing condescension in matters of race is of great importance. You might think that making this distinction would be easy, but I suggest that in many circumstances it is not easy at all.

Recently, many things that have become the latest fashion in what practitioners think is heightened respect appear to me to be exactly the opposite — condescension. That can be the case even where the respect-that-is-really-condescension is demanded by the recipient. And I am not the only one noticing this phenomenon.

Let’s consider a few examples.

Several weeks ago Princeton University announced that an intermediate knowledge of Greek or Latin would no longer be required for a major in Classics. John McWhorter discusses that decision in a June 10 essay at Substack with the title “Revisiting Classics at Princeton: Exempting Black Kids From Challenge Is Lousy Antiracism.”

McWhorter opens by quoting Princeton’s own statement about the change to show that “of especial interest to black students . . . today’s racial reckoning, . . . the department openly acknowledges, was the primary spur for this change.” It seems that, with the Greek and Latin language requirement, the Princeton Classics Department had difficulty attracting black students to the major. McWhorter comments:

The tacit idea is people guilty about their white privilege saying over a Zoom meeting “If we want to have more black students, we can’t be making people learn Greek and Latin anymore.” Ugh – see how that reads when exposed to the sunlight? . . . Anything but that patronizing condescension. . . . [A]ny public discussion that both reviles the idea that black people are less intelligent than others while also lustily demanding that it’s “racist” to submit black people to cognitive challenges is hopelessly incoherent. . . . [T]his exemption culture is premised on a basic assumption that it’s unsavory to require serious challenge of black students Because Racism. No. You don’t get past racism by creating new forms of it. Scrapping traditional challenges should only be on the table after black kids have mastered the challenge anyway.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/putin-must-watch-a-lot-of-cable-news/

After his meeting with Joe Biden in Geneva, Vladimir Putin held a presser where he adeptly aped some of our partisan hyperbole to deflect attention from his own authoritarianism.

“People are shot and killed every day [in the U.S.],” Putin told reporters when asked about his crackdown on domestic political opposition. “You don’t have a chance to open your mouth and you’re shot dead.” Shooting a person for any reason other than genuine self-defense, despite what gun-controllers might have us think, isn’t sanctioned by the state or supported by any organization in America. Though people are also murdered every day in Russia, which has a substantively higher homicide rate than the United States.

Putin had also preposterously suggested that Ashli Babbitt, shot when she joined a mob that stormed the Capitol, was a victim of “assassination” by the police — which, I suppose, is also a tacit admission that he was behind the attack on the now-imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny and numerous journalists.

“America just recently had very severe events, well-known events, after the killing of an African American,” Putin explained. “And the entire movement developed known as Black Lives Matter. I’m not going to comment on that but here’s what I do want to say. What we saw was disorder, destruction, violations of the law, etc.” Russia has been using racial tensions in the United States to deflect attention from its widespread, sometimes genocidal, actions since the 1930s. Riots do break out from time to time in the United States. Riots, though, rarely break out in police states. Not long ago, Russian police arrested 3,000 people and shut down thousands more for peacefully attending “unauthorized” events.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/petition-remove-secretary-defense-lloyd-austin-frontpage-editors/

No institution in America – from government offices to schoolrooms to corporate boardrooms and beyond – is safe today from the divisive racism of Critical Race Theory and the “1619 Project.” both of which posit that United States history is rooted in slavery and white supremacy, and that “whiteness” is an incurable disease. The institution whose subversion poses the greatest threat to our national security is the U.S. military, whose head is Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. General Austin is a determined advocate of these repulsive anti-American views.

As Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin has incorporated both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project as core elements of the Pentagon’s military training programs, under the guise of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” He has further ordered a purging of the military ranks of what he calls “extremists,” defined as opponents of these noxious views and supporters of former president Donald Trump.

The consequence of dividing our troops by race and gender, and regarding one community of Americans as oppressors and beneficiaries of race and gender-based privileges is a direct threat to unit cohesion and military morale, the core elements of an effective military force.

That’s why I hope you’ll join me, and demand the Removal of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bidens-racist-farm-reparations-matthew-vadum/

The Biden-Harris administration is promising to press on with a blatantly unconstitutional $4 billion farm relief program that deliberately excludes white people even after a federal judge ruled it was racially discriminatory and temporarily blocked it.

Democrats view the explicitly racist government program as a down payment on the slavery reparations package they want to force on Americans a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans took Democrats’ slaves away from them.

Twelve plaintiffs in nine states sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a case called Faust v. Vilsack to enjoin officials from implementing a loan-forgiveness program for farmers and ranchers under Section 1005 of the grotesque $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), the recent so-called pandemic-related stimulus legislation. The plaintiffs say Section 1005 denies them equal protection of the law because eligibility to participate in the program is based solely on racial classifications.

“The Court recognized that the federal government’s plan to condition and allocate benefits on the basis of race raises grave constitutional concerns and threatens our clients with irreparable harm,” said Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).

“The Biden administration is radically undermining bedrock principles of equality under the law. We look forward to continuing this litigation but urge the administration to change course now.”

WILL represents the 12 farmers and ranchers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Oregon, and Kentucky. Each plaintiff would be eligible for the federal loan forgiveness program, but for their race.

U.S. District Judge William Griesbach of Green Bay, Wisconsin, cut through the woke nonsense argued by placeholder president Joe Biden’s legal team and issued a temporary restraining order against the program June 10.

“Plaintiffs are excluded from the program based on their race and are thus experiencing discrimination at the hands of their government,” Griesbach wrote.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/15/welcome_to_wokespeak_its_logic-defying_rhetoric_is_making_heads_spin_780731.html

In the midst of the nation’s racial upheaval last year, media outlets including the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Washington Post rushed to start capitalizing the word “Black” in reference to African Americans, some announcing the move as a long-overdue gesture of respect. While RealClear has not changed its style, the change elsewhere prompted newsroom soul-searching on whether to write “white” or “White” in reference to people of European descent.

Capitalizing the term made sense as a simple matter of consistency. But the argument for lower-casing “white” staked its own moral claims. One was that capitalizing it would legitimize white supremacy. Another was that “white” in lower case is an apolitical description of a skin color; it doesn’t merit capitalization because whites don’t represent a shared culture.

News organizations adopted inconsistent policies on the question – the AP, Times and others voted for “w”; the Washington Post and National Association of Black Journalists chose “W.” But the notion that there is no white culture drew jeers of derision from some quarters. It was virtually impossible to pretend not to see that white culture is routinely cited to refer to white supremacy and white privilege as a shorthand for the cultural biases, prejudices and values that prop up systemic racism.

Both ideas – that white culture is omnipresent and nonexistent – can’t be true. Or can they?

The white culture conundrum is one of many such paradoxes in today’s topsy-turvy woke culture, where colorblindness once represented the ideal of being unprejudiced, but now marks the epitome of racism.

These apparent contradictions can cause confusion, frustration and moral whiplash in a swiftly changing society where many people fear that one wayward move can result in a public flogging or a pink slip. Yet as the public seeks guidance, the fractured market of ideas seems unable to provide clarity on which rules apply in which situation.

“These contradictions and conundrums have hit like an avalanche,” said Jason Hill, a native of Jamaica and author of the 2018 book, “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/16/does-biden-know-he-just-labeled-antifa-and-blm-as-domestic-terrorists/

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden released his plan to tackle domestic terrorism, which he calls a “serious and growing threat.” His clear intent is to target right-wing groups, but his definition of domestic terrorists perfectly describes Antifa and the Black Lives Matter radicals.

The “fact sheet” accompanying Biden’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” lists only two types of domestic terrorists: violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race, and anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists.

But it also describes domestic terrorism as:

‘Activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.’

Now, who do you think fits into these categories? Which groups have acted in ways that are “dangerous to human life,” want to “intimidate or coerce” as a means to “influence the policy of a government,” and use “mass destruction” to get their ways?

Would it be QAnon and other right-wing groups, about whom the best team Biden can seem to come up with is that “they may be on the verge of carrying out more violence in real life on Democrats and others that they perceive, however falsely, to be threats”?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/threats-rise-u-s-defense-falls-11623798082?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden is telling the world in Europe this week that “America is back” as the leader of global democracies. Sounds good. But China, Iran and Vladimir Putin would be more impressed if Mr. Biden wasn’t cutting America’s defense even as he rightly stresses the challenge from the world’s authoritarians.

Unremarked in the White House spending deluge is that its trillions for “infrastructure” include little new for defense. Mr. Biden’s $715 billion Pentagon budget for fiscal 2022 is a 1.6% increase over last year. Adjusted for inflation, this is a cut. The bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission and other experts say the Pentagon needs steady 3% to 5% real increases annually to address threats from “near peers” such as China and Russia.

President Trump increased defense spending modestly, but that fillip has passed and spending is still at its modern norm of about 3% of GDP. America is rapidly piling up debt past 100% of GDP while shrinking its defenses.

***

The brightest budget spots are places where the Administration declined to make matters worse: The Administration didn’t slash the Army; active-duty end strength holds at about 485,000. But the service requested about $3.5 billion less than last year’s enacted budget, in part due to a drawdown in Afghanistan.