RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/04/looks-like-trump-was-right-about-fauci-after-all/

“I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances.” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, July 28, 2020.

That, we now know, thanks in part to the release of thousands of pages of Fauci emails, was a lie, and Fauci is starting to look a lot more like the person former President Donald Trump described: the “king of flip-flops,” who “got a lot wrong,” a “self-promoter” and a “disaster.”

Of course, the press had long ago decided that Fauci was a “national treasure,” and just as it treated the lab-leak theory as a Trump-fueled conspiracy, it called Trump’s attacks “unbelievably idiotic.” But Fauci’s lies and misinformation are starting to pile up, calls are mounting for him to be fired. Was he also involved in a cover-up?

Let’s review.

Fauci had already admitted that he’d lied to the public about masks and vaccinations. He told The Street last June he downplayed the use of masks because he was worried about shortages. But an email shows that he believed them to be pretty ineffective. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out (the) virus, which is small enough to pass through material.”

Later, however, he insisted on wearing a mask even though he was fully vaccinated, telling a Senate hearing that “Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater, masks are protective.” Sen. Rand Paul confronted Fauci, saying “If you have immunity they’re theater. If you already have immunity you’re wearing a mask to give comfort to others.”

Fauci responded: “I totally disagree with you.”

Later, Fauci admitted on “Good Morning America” that it was political theater.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/06/14/joe-bidens-imaginary-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

His policies seem designed for coastal enclaves that do not represent most of the country

After two painful recessions and ever greater national discord, there is considerable support for a new beginning, even if it takes massive federal spending. The question we must ask now is what kind of spending makes sense given the character of the country, its geography, and its economic challenges. America remains a vast and diverse place, and decisions that make sense for one locale do not necessarily make any sense in others. A dispersed country needs dispersed decision-making, not edicts issued from on high by the D.C. nomenklatura.

Unfortunately, Joe Biden’s ballyhooed “infrastructure” plan, coupled with unprecedented stimulus spending, is cast by the obliging media as being about the middle class but seems oddly detached from how the overwhelming majority of the middle class lives, which is in lower-density, automobile-dependent neighborhoods. This dynamic was intensifying even before the pandemic. But Biden’s plan seems mostly about serving the relatively small sliver of transit-riding apartment dwellers living in denser neighborhoods. Overall, dense residential areas accommodate no more than 10 percent of the nation’s population.

Rather than emulate Roosevelt’s New Deal, as Biden’s handlers insist, the plan renounces much of what drove it. The New Deal, whatever one thinks of it, was about improving the material quality of life for most Americans, such as by spreading the benefits of homeownership to an ever-broader part of the population. In contrast, the Biden plan focuses on permanent redistribution through ever more entitlements and dependency — something Roosevelt opposed. It is likely to reduce our competitiveness by boosting energy and regulatory costs as well as taxes.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s myopic sense of geography than its transportation priorities. Take urban transit. Biden has proposed a policy that, by some estimates, would allocate $165 billion for public transit (including urban rail — subways, light rail, and commuter rail) against only $115 billion to fix and modernize roads and bridges. Transit, which accounts for about 1 percent of overall urban and rural ground transportation, would receive nearly 60 percent of the money.

https://www.city-journal.org/corporate-world-politicization-not-sustainable

As the definition of “social responsibility” continues to expand, the corporate world is undergoing an identity crisis. Executives regularly come under fire from subordinates or vocal activists who demand that their companies wade into politics. More often than not, these accusations come from well-organized but small-in-number political activists, rather than regular customers or the highest-performing employees. While virtue-signaling strategies might create some short-term benefits—attracting activist-minded workers, appeasing social media mobs—these decisions come at a cost. As the media have politicized more content, polarization has increased nationally. Meantime, companies that deviate from their central purpose run the risk of simultaneously overstepping and failing to deliver on their core responsibility: meeting marketplace demand. Politicization threatens not only society but also the long-term future of organizations involved in it.

New research that I coauthored investigates how the politicization of scientific issues, for example, affects user engagement in journalism. Drawing on over a decade of articles in the Guardian, we find that increasing the political content of articles about climate change leads to a decline in the number of readers, comments, and recommendations in those articles. While political articles receive greater engagement than non-political ones, politicizing otherwise neutral topics appears to backfire, in the form of sizably lower user engagement—about one-fifth of the increase that a political article normally would produce. We also find that the most politicized articles are those pertaining to topics that have previously been politicized—like throwing fuel on a fire.

Our paper is one among a number of findings suggesting that virtue signaling is ineffective. For example, some research shows that companies boosting their corporate giving to charities that advance the CEO’s interests end up reducing the firm’s value through reductions in the shareholder valuation of firm cash holdings. Other research shows that low-performing CEOs can defer getting replaced by donating to charities affiliated with a large fraction of the firm’s board members. How many executives have issued virtue-signaling statements to distract from their own poor management?

https://freebeacon.com/columns/bidens-long-hot-summer/

Sometime in the last week, Democrats looked at the calendar and realized that President Biden is in trouble.

My theory is that the moment of truth arrived on May 27. That was when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to scramble to save one of his priorities, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, from falling apart. Then, on May 28, the proposed commission into the January 6 riot at the Capitol failed to clear the filibuster.

The panic started. You began seeing articles about the “summer slump” that afflicts presidencies. You started hearing that Biden can’t let negotiations with Republicans drag on. Before leaving for Memorial Day recess, Schumer told reporters that when the Senate returns he plans to hold votes not only on the constitutionally dubious “For the People Act,” but also on the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Equality Act, and two gun-control bills.

And that’s just what the House has passed already. The president’s $4 trillion American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan haven’t come to a vote in either chamber of Congress. They haven’t been put into legislation. The fate of these projects depends in large part on Biden’s ability to strike a deal on infrastructure with Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. The likelihood of a bargain? Not great.

For Democrats, the Biden presidency is an hourglass and the sand is running out. They have two years to enact the “transformational” agenda that, presto change-o, will turn Biden into the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And since they have incredibly narrow margins in the Congress—four votes in the House, a tied Senate—they have to remain unified. “That is a problem with the Democratic Party,” the activist Rev. William J. Barber II told the Washington Post. “What you see with Republicans—they stick together no matter what.” He must not see many Republicans.

It is still a problem with the Democratic Party, though, because Democrats agree on one thing alone: They oppose Donald Trump. They’re happy he’s not president. They don’t want him to be president again. Beyond Trump, however, Democrats are all over the place. They have Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on one side of the caucus and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other.

The coalition that elected Biden is even broader, stretching from Cindy McCain to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. An alliance formed on the basis of opposition to one personality is never going to be ideologically uniform. Nor is it going to be stable. The Democrats face a similar problem as the coalition government that was agreed to in Israel this week: What do you do after the boogeyman is gone?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/03/covid-19-has-forever-destroyed-americans-trust-in-experts/

As even many casual observers of America’s fractious politics are aware, the overwhelming majority of lawmaking at the federal level no longer takes place in Congress as the Constitution’s framers intended. Instead, the vast majority of the “rulemaking” governing Americans’ day-to-day lives now takes place behind closed doors, deep in the bowels of the administrative state’s sprawling bureaucracy. The brainchild of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, arguments on behalf of the modern administrative state are ultimately rooted in, among other factors, a disdain for the messy give-and-take of republican politics and an epistemological preference for rule by enlightened clerisy.

Put more simply, the most straightforward version of the argument offered by partisans of the administrative state amounts to, “Trust the experts.” And over the century-plus since Wilson’s presidency, the “trust the experts” leitmotif has moved well beyond the realm of prevailing dogma for mandarins in such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather, for large swaths of the citizenry and the elected official class, “trust the experts” now reigns supreme for everything from the military (“Trust the generals!”) to public health (“Trust the epidemiologists!”).

And therein lies the rub.

The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of America’s ruling class and the ruling class’s implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation’s leading immunology and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History, Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what the “science” demands at any given moment while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/03/government-seeks-retribution-for-the-biden-resistance/

The U.S. government’s vengeance case against the Oath Keepers, a group that publicly declared its opposition to Joe Biden’s presidency, is now in its fourth iteration with no end in sight.

Biden’s Justice Department, led by a man denied a seat on the Supreme Court in 2016 by Senate Republicans and a woman loyal to both Barack Obama and Robert Mueller, is sparing no resource to destroy the lives of Americans tied to the group that allegedly “stormed” the Capitol on January 6.

Last week, Channing Phillips, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia overseeing the sprawling investigation into the events of January 6, filed another superseding indictment against the Oath Keepers while adding new defendants. Four men have been arrested since May 27; the total number of defendants is 16 and counting.

The Oath Keepers, as the media reminds us daily, pose a mortal threat to the country. As NPR recently warned, it is “one of the largest anti-government extremist groups in the far-right patriot militia movement.”  The group’s real crime, of course, is opposing Joe Biden; after the election, a founder of the Oath Keepers said the group would “resist” Biden’s presidency, an act of defiance considered mandatory in many quarters when it was directed at the Trump Administration from the Left.

Indispensible to the Narrative

So, retaliation is underway. The first grand jury indictment was filed one week after Inauguration Day; three alleged Oath Keepers—Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins, and Donovan Crowl—were charged with four trespassing and disorderly conduct offenses. 

“The Oath Keepers are a large but loosely organized collection of militia who believe that the federal government has been co-opted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their rights,” Michael Sherwin, the prosecutor in charge of the early stage of the investigation who bragged about a “shock and awe” manhunt leading up to Biden’s inauguration, wrote in the original charging document. “The organization’s name alludes to the oath sworn by members of the military and police to defend the Constitution ‘from all enemies, foreign and domestic.’”

Since then, the Justice Department has tacked on a total of 13 counts and 13 more defendants with warnings of more to come. The prosecution of the Oath Keepers is critical in fueling the notion that groups of armed, pro-Trump vigilantes organized an assault on the seat of American democracy.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-limbaugh/2021/06/04/bidens-disgraceful-exploitation-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre-n1452009

This may shock and amaze you if your blinders are on, but President Biden is not only not a uniter; he is actively trying to divide Americans on race — and other issues — purely for raw political power. There is no other plausible explanation.

During former President Trump’s entire presidency and ever since, we’ve been bombarded daily with the narrative that he is divisive and a racist. His political opponents and the media distorted his words, such as those he said in the aftermath of the Charlottesville attacks, to paint him as sympathetic to white supremacists. That was always absurd, but it is now largely accepted as conventional wisdom.

Of course, the real ploy was to demonize and marginalize all Trump supporters, not just Trump. The implication was that anyone who would support such a bigot must be a bigot. Truth be told, this nicely fit the left’s decades-long smear of Republicans as racist as evidenced by their ideology.

Before you scoff at this as wanton hyperbole, consider that I’m not alone in my thoughts. A Rasmussen Reports poll released June 1 revealed that 39% of likely voters believe race relations have deteriorated since Biden’s election.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/cair-organizes-anti-israel-rallies-convicted-joe-kaufman/

The mainstream media likes to paint CAIR as a mainstream Muslim group interested in protecting the civil rights of the Muslim community. The reality, though, is that CAIR is a support network for terror with both foundational and financial links to Hamas. This past month, CAIR’s true nature showed itself, as the group partnered with a convicted member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hatem Fariz, to run a series of Tampa, Florida rallies meant to curse Israel and excuse Hamas violence. The events were proof of why the media must end its cozy relationship with CAIR. To continue to promote this group only legitimizes hate and terror.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was established in June 1994 as a part of the US chapter of the global Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, which at the time was headed by then-Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Mousa Abu Marzook. Officials from CAIR have been convicted of terror-related crimes, and the US government named CAIR a co-conspirator to the financing of Hamas. The Florida chapter of CAIR has not strayed much from its national parent. In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers repeatedly shouted, “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.”

The Islamic Community of Tampa (ICT), a.k.a. Masjid al-Qassam, was founded by Sami al-Arian, a convicted terrorist who set up a Southwest Florida PIJ terror network, over three decades ago. ICT was a big part of the network. At a 2017 CAIR media brunch, then-CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly said that the group depends on ICT for “programs, fundraising” and more. He said, “Really, we couldn’t do the work without the tremendous support we get from the mosque.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/woke_medicine_is_coming_to_a_hospital_near_you.html

Following the Civil Rights movement, physicians took seriously their obligation to treat all patients. This principle separated them from the federal government’s grotesque 40-year-long Tuskegee Experiment that saw doctors refrain from treating syphilitic Black men in Alabama. Racist physicians were driven out of practice and all physicians were expected to treat racist patients. It’s different now. According to Katie Herzog, writing at Bari Weiss’s Substack blog, Critical Race Theory is aggressively intruding on physicians’ ability to treat patients, do research, or train the next generation of doctors.

Katie Herzog’s “What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?” examines a world in which doctors are silenced for fear that they will be destroyed professionally should they run afoul of the Critical Race Theory infecting medical care across America and in which young doctors, imbued with “anti-racist” zeal have the whip hand. Herzog begins her article by describing a super-secret Zoom group of a dozen physicians across America, who serve as a support group for each other as they navigate the totalitarian world of woke medicine:

This dogma goes by many imperfect names — wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it’s called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress. They say that it’s turning students against their teachers and patients and racializing even the smallest interpersonal interactions. Most concerning, they insist that it is threatening the foundations of patient care, of research, and of medicine itself.

The article acknowledges that some traditional healthcare protocols have not served minority patients well. However, that’s a small problem compared to the chilling effect wokeness is having on physician’s ability to provide good medical care and, just as importantly, to train rigorously the next generation of doctors:

I’ve heard from doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism.) I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/journalist-andy-ngo-recounts-brutal-beating-at-the-hands-of-portland-antifa/

Independent journalist Andy Ngo was brutally beaten late last month while reporting on an Antifa riot in Portland that was organized to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the group’s months-long courthouse siege. He described the incident in an exclusive interview with National Review.

The Friday demonstration organized by Antifa marked the one-year anniversary of the first outbreak of post-George Floyd violence in Portland, when activists stormed the local courthouse and set it on fire. After that first instance of violence, rioters dressed in Antifa’s tell-tale black bloc gear laid siege to the courthouse for more than 100 consecutive nights last spring, causing millions in property damage and hospitalizing dozens of police officers and federal agents dispatched to protect the property.

Ngo, who initially described the assault in a series of Tweets posted Thursday morning, has developed a reputation for going undercover to film leftist violence in the Antifa stronghold of Portland. He returned to the area the night he was assaulted to report on the commemorative chaos for a new chapter of his previously released book, “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.”

Masked and dressed head to toe in black, Ngo marched with the protestors for several hours to observe the destruction he was sure they would unleash. He wasn’t wrong; they hurled projectiles at law enforcement and the police station and committed other acts of violence. After some time, Antifa grew suspicious of Ngo, who wasn’t engaging in criminal activities alongside them, and turned on him.

Ngo said that four other journalists were standing by, but only started photographing when police arrived at the scene and never recorded any evidence of Antifa wrongdoing. He argued that there’s a small cabal of journalists who comply with Antifa rules to avoid the repercussions, such as assault or property theft. Ngo himself knows first hand the consequences meted out to journalists who report on the group’s wanton destruction; he was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage in 2019 after being attacked by an Antifa mob while reporting in Portland.