RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/03/biden-attacks-alarmist-covid-news-stories-even-as-he-stokes-them/

CNN might be a horribly biased and woefully unreliable news organization these days, but its reporters do know how to convey the White House propaganda well. Case in point is the story posted on CNN’s website over the weekend about how the Biden administration is desperately trying to get the news media to stop playing up the risk of the Delta variant.

“The White House is frustrated with what it views as alarmist, and in some instances flat-out misleading, news coverage about the Delta variant,”  reported Oliver Darcy over the weekend. “That’s according to two senior Biden administration officials I spoke with Friday, both of whom requested anonymity to candidly offer their opinion on coverage of the CDC data released that suggests vaccinated Americans who become infected with the Delta coronavirus variant can infect others as easily as those who are unvaccinated.”

Darcy goes on to provide a multitude of examples of how the White House berated various news agencies for their coverage of the CDC report that prompted its mask-wearing mandate for vaccinated people.

After the New York Times tweeted that “The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal C.D.C. report said,” a White House staffer responded:

CNN’s Brian Stelter also parrotted the White House talking points on his weekend show.

“It is time for a reset. A reset in how COVID-19 is covered by the media,” Stelter said. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/01/incompetence-arrogance-woke/

We know the nature of mass hysterias in history, and how they can overwhelm and paralyze what seem to be stable societies.  

We know the roots and origins of the cult of wokeness.  

And we know, too, how such insanity—from the Salem witch trials to Jacobinism to McCarthyism—can spread, despite alienating most of the population, through fear and the threat of personal ruin or worse. These are the dark sides of the tulip, hula-hoop, and pet-rock fads, the mass obsessions so suited to past affluent Western societies.  

But does wokeism serve another purpose as well? Specifically, does it either hide preexisting incompetence or fuel it?  

In the last 18 months, we have seen most of our major institutions go woke and spend considerable amounts of time, capital, and labor on what might be called “commissarism.” Yet in their zeal to rectify society in general and sermonize, virtue signal, pontificate, and perform to the public, many institutions are increasingly failing at what they were established to do. 

Of course, public servants have long suffered the “Bloomberg effect”—focusing on misdemeanors to virtue signal competence as penance for failing to solve the existential crises. If you cannot clear New York City of snow in a timely manner, then lecture the trapped on everything from global warming to the dangers of super-sized soft drinks. Yet wokeism is a bit different since it now pervades our societies as a pandemic of its own. 

Take Delta Airline CEO Ed Bastian. He earns $17 million in annual compensation, and lectures the state of Georgia and the nation at large on our supposedly racist voting laws. The issue at hand is mostly a requirement to show a valid ID to vote—in the manner one must present identification to enter the boarding area of Bastian’s planes. Surely if one should vote without an ID, why not then be allowed to board a Delta flight?

I also suggest the public try to call Delta’s consumer helplines to fix the airline’s post-quarantine screw-ups with credits, refunds, rebooking, and recalibrating charges. Just try it—but expect several hours of wait time on the phone. We know now Delta is woke, but what we don’t know is whether one’s past purchase of a ticket will ensure a spot on a Delta flight, or whether prior money or mileage credited will ever be returned or applied to future travel.  

A cynical observer might suggest that if Ed Bastian cannot ensure adequate consumer service, it won’t matter since he weighs in on voting laws. (Or is it worse than that? Because he pontificates on voting laws and other assorted woke issues, he thinks he can simply worry less about his own consumer services?) 

American Airlines CEO Doug Parker is woke, too. He has denounced a new Texas voting law likewise requiring tougher ID usage—although he later  admitted that he had never read the new statute before virtue signaling its illiberality.  

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-the-no-buy-list?token=

By any standard, David Sacks is a super successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He’s invested in companies including Airbnb, Bird, Eventbrite, Facebook, Houzz, Lyft, Palantir, Postmates, Reddit, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, and Uber. Now he’s a general partner at Craft Ventures.

But that’s not the reason to listen to him. It’s because he’s deeply insightful and consistently ahead of the curve on issues including free speech and Big Tech, how to amend Section 230, San Francisco’s meltdown, and more. You might remember his name from this column I wrote a few months back. 

I don’t typically recommend Twitter to anyone I like. But if you’re already there, I strongly suggest following David.

—BW

When I helped create PayPal in 1999, it was in furtherance of a revolutionary idea. No longer would ordinary people be dependent on large financial institutions to start a business. 

Our democratized payment system caught fire and grew exponentially with millions of users who appreciated its ease and simplicity. Traditional banks were too slow and bureaucratic to adapt. Instead, the revolution we spawned two decades ago inspired new startups like Ally, Chime, Square, and Stripe, which have further expanded participation in the financial system. 

But now PayPal is turning its back on its original mission. It is now leading the charge to restrict participation by those it deems unworthy.

First, in January, PayPal blocked a Christian crowdfunding site that raised money to bring demonstrators to Washington on January 6. Then, in February, PayPal announced that it was working with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to ban users from the platform. This week the company announced it is partnering with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate and shut down accounts that the ADL considers too extreme. 

Why is this a problem? Isn’t it perfectly reasonable to make sure bad actors don’t fund hate through these platforms?

I’m a Jewish American who has special appreciation for the ADL’s historical role as a watchdog against antisemitism. Whether it came from the Aryan Nation or the Nation of Islam, the ADL did admirable work in combatting it. But the ADL has changed. Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization has broadened its portfolio from antisemitism (or racism in the SPLC’s case) to cover what it considers to be “hate” or “extremism” in general. 

The new ADL opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because of his “hostility to reproductive freedom.” It partnered with such beacons of philosemitism as Al Sharpton (you read that right) to boycott Facebook for allowing “hate speech on their platform.” It opposed Trump’s executive order banning Critical Race Theory in federal government training. And it called for Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson for his comments on immigration.

Whether one agrees with any of these positions is beside the point. The point is that the ADL, like the SPLC, now weighs in on issues far beyond its original purview. 

Just as there is no set definition of “hate speech” that everyone agrees upon, the definition of a “hate group” is nebulous and ripe for overuse by those with an agenda. So it should come as no surprise that the ever-increasing list of suspects has grown from unquestionable hate groups, like neo-nazis and the KKK, to organizations who espouse socially conservative views, like the Family Research Council, religious liberty advocates, and even groups concerned with election integrity.

Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Chapter 9

Are we or are we not, in the early stages of an inflation surge? The question is important because the answer has consequences that affect us all – from the daily cost of bread and energy to investment and retirement accounts.

The President and the Federal Reserve claim inflation is not a problem. On July 19, Mr. Biden spoke at the White House: “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are – were – expected and expected to be temporary.” In February, in testimony to Congress, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said that the growth in money supply, specifically M2, “doesn’t really have important implications.” Upticks in inflation are “anomalous and transitory.” Nevertheless, one wonders. In a July 21 Wall Street Journal op-ed, John Greenwood, chief economist of Invesco and Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins, wrote: “Since March 2020, M2 has been growing at an average annualized rate of 23.9% – the fastest rate since World War II.” The Fed’s target rate for inflation is two percent; however, for April, the CPI was 4.2%; for May, 5% and for June, 5.4%. The PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures) price index – the index the Fed uses as their primary source for inflation – rose 6.4% in the second quarter versus 3.8% in the first quarter. If inflation is nothing to worry about, try telling that to families living on a median wage or to retirees on fixed incomes. Energy prices were up over 40% between December 31 and June 30, while food commodity prices were up close to 20 percent.

Since the start of the recession in February 2020 (which lasted only two months according to the National Bureau of Economic Research!), the Federal Reserve has retained a policy of near-zero interest rates and $120 billion in monthly bond purchases. When the Fed purchases Treasury’s they add to the money supply. Federal debt now amounts to 119% of GDP. The last time federal debt exceeded GDP was in 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, when it stood at 106% of GDP. The federal deficit for fiscal 2021 is expected to be $3 trillion, much of which will be financed by the Federal Reserve. As the Wall Street Journal noted in their lead editorial on July 29: “You don’t have to be a cynic to wonder if the Fed privately now wants more inflation to ease that rising debt burden.” Paying back borrowed dollars with cheaper ones is a policy decision. Five percent inflation means that $100.00 invested in a Thirty-Year Treasury would be worth $23.00 at maturity, while the interest payments (currently 1.93%) would amount to less than $60.00 (before reinvestment) of a depreciating currency – attractive to the borrower but not for the investor. In 1919 John Maynard Keynes, in an essay entitled “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” wrote: “By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” Inflation is a tax that falls most heavily on retirees and the low income.

Fifty years ago (August 15, 1971), President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods Agreement, which called for the U.S. to redeem dollars presented by foreign governments at 1/35th of an ounce of gold. Ending the agreement made it easier for the U.S. Government to finance social programs, without raising the necessary taxes, but making inflation more likely. The Dollar, thus, became a fiat currency, meaning it was backed by the credit worthiness of the issuing government, not a physical commodity, like gold or silver. Fiat currencies lose value during times of economic and political uncertainty. Their numbers can be increased, ad hoc, at the will of the government

In a 1963 talk in India, Milton Friedman observed: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in that it can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” His hypothesis is expressed in the equation MV = Py, where M is the supply of money, V is its velocity (the rate at which money is exchanged), P is the price level (using either PCE or CPI) and y is real gross domestic product (GDP). Thus, when V and y are constant, an increase in M means an increase in P. On the other hand, increased GDP growth may warrant an increase in the money supply, as well as its velocity. If price stability is the desired outcome, the Fed must carefully monitor the relationship between the supply of money, its velocity and GDP.

But are they, and will they? Over the past several years, the Fed has become politicized and less independent. Today, a former Fed Chairperson, Janet Yellen, serves as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Since the end of the last recession in 2009, the Fed, pressured by the Obama and Trump White Houses, kept interest rates at historically low levels. In the past two years, since the onset of the pandemic, the growth in money supply has been high, driven by increased government spending, much of which has been funded by the Federal Reserve’s bond purchases. However, velocity of M2 fell by 21% during 2020, reflecting declines in consumer and business spending caused by COVID. So, inflation was not a concern in 2020. However, with the economy picking up speed, the velocity of money has accelerated, and the money supply continues to expand, creating inflationary pressures. Will that trend continue?

The Federal Government’s proposed spending plans, especially the $3.5 trillion budget plan, will require the issuance of new bonds, along with new taxes that act as a retardant on GDP growth. While GDP is now above pre-pandemic levels, economic growth in second quarter was below expectations, perhaps a warning sign. Higher debt loads have a natural tendency to increase interest rates, something Washington does not want, so there will be pressure for the Fed to continue bond purchases. Using Friedman’s formula, can GDP growth equal the increase in money supply and velocity, without an increase in price (inflation)? The truth is we don’t know, or, at least, I don’t. But I worry.

Debt to GDP is at record levels for a peace time economy. Budget deficits are the highest since World War II. The fiscal 2021 federal budget outlays will represent about 29% of GDP, five percentage points higher than a year ago. Will higher government spending boost GDP growth, or will it impede the private economy? Near the conclusion of his lecture quoted in the rubric, Ludwig von Mises said, “One of the privileges of a rich man is that he can afford to be foolish much longer than a poor one.” The Federal Reserve has a challenge. It must navigate between the Charybdis of inflation and the Scylla of excessive federal spending and debt. Can they do that without debauching the currency? Let us hope so. In his 1919 speech quoted above, Keynes began: “Lenin is said to have declared the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.” Is that what we are doing?

I am not predicting a return to the 1970s inflation or something worse. But I worry. As a country, we are that rich man to whom von Mises referred. Let us pray we will not be more foolish than we have been.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/27/no-one-can-disagree-with-socialism/

“Black Widow” star David Harbour says he doesn’t know “that there’s anyone who could disagree with socialist ideology.” So does this mean he’ll be returning the part of his multimillion-dollar salary that is beyond his “needs”? Of course not. There is no logic in ideology. He is a believer. That is enough. 

The French revolutionaries believed in reason so deeply that if you disagreed with them they’d cut off your head. 

The French Revolution began, as do all modern Communist revolutions, with the abolition of Christianity. Not the abolition of religion, or even state religion, but Christianity. The French fully intended to have a state religion, complete with “Temples of Reason” (Notre Dame was turned into one). The crucifix was replaced with a symbolic “torch of truth.” 

Fascism, which Winston Churchill called the “shadow, or ugly child of Communism,” was identical in this respect: Nazi Germany was to replace its cathedrals with Hitler Kirche, in which Mein Kampf took the place place of the Bible and the crucifix was again removed, this time in favor of a sword. 

Marxism is not and has never been an atheist philosophy. When a Marxist tells you he’s an atheist, he’s lying. Marxism is the most aggressively dogmatic religion in the world. Its struggle for ascendancy is a holy war in which Islam is the only serious competitor and all other religions seem resigned to a defensive posture (i.e., losing). 

To fight the Left effectively, we need to stop thinking of Marxism as a philosophical alternative to capitalism and instead think of it as a religious alternative to Christianity. 

Marxism is not anti-Christianity because belief in God is a crutch or an opiate of the masses. It simply recognizes that you cannot believe in two gods at once. Marxism and Christianity are rival religions, and it’s no more possible to believe in both than it is to believe simultaneously in Judaism and Islam. 

In the Marxist religious structure, the supreme leader—Stalin, Mao, Castro, Xi—is God. Leftist intellectuals are priests. Government bureaucrats are Levites, making sure the ceremony runs smoothly and the sanctuary is guarded. There is a caste (“class”) system in which some are holy by virtue of their birth and others are damned for the same reason. Ordinary citizens in this religion have no role except to believe and to do as they are told: “Believe the science!” 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/07/27/johns-hopkins-doctor-shreds-cdc-and-faucis-narrative-on-covid-again-n2593195

Fear is contagious. It’s almost as bad as the Delta variant. Again, is the new variant more transmissible? Yes. Is it deadlier? No. Does it make you sicker? No. Are those being impacted primarily the unvaccinated? Most definitely. So, when you want to increase vaccination rates, the government did what it did best: screw things up. Fully vaccinated people now must wear masks again in high-case areas. What constitutes a highly infectious area? Well, that’s not clear yet, but I’m sure the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci will make up some science fiction to justify this new mask mandate. The mandates are coming too. Not nationwide, Biden can’t do that yet due to the midterms, but federal agencies are one-by-one mandating it for workers who risk the loss of pay or their jobs if they refuse. 

Get vaccinated but also continue to live in fear. Yeah, no wonder why hesitancy is through the roof. All this move does is make the vaccine-hesitant dig in further and give anti-vaxxers all the ammunition they need to chip away at the credibility of the vaccines. You can’t be mad at the latter group when those who want us to get vaccinated offer all the ammunition to shoot that narrative down or at the very least question it—heavily.  

Well, take a break from being mad and read what Johns Hopkins doctor Dr. Marty Makary wrote about new studies about natural immunity which if ignored by Fauci and company. He also rehashed an old Fauci statistic that shreds the current push for new mask protocols and possible lockdowns (via WSJ) [emphasis mine]:

The news about the U.S. Covid pandemic is even better than you’ve heard. Some 80% to 85% of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed.

Only around 10% of Americans have had confirmed positive Covid tests, but four to six times as many have likely had the infection. A February study in Nature used antibody screenings in late summer 2020 to estimate there had been seven times as many actual cases as confirmed cases. A similar study, by the University of Albany and New York State Department of Health, revealed that by the end of March 2020—the first month of New York’s pandemic—23% of the city’s population had antibodies. That share necessarily increased as the pandemic spread.

[…]

Natural immunity is durable. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis reported last month that 11 months after a mild infection immune cells were still capable of producing protective antibodies. The authors concluded that prior Covid infection induces a “robust” and “long-lived humoral immune response,” leading some scientists to suggest that natural immunity is probably lifelong. Because infection began months earlier than vaccination, we have more follow-up data on the duration of natural immunity than on vaccinated immunity.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/liberalism-stupid-liel-leibovitz

What exactly is wrong with America, and how do we fix it?

That, with slight variations, is the question constantly nipping at our heels these days, asked by friends and colleagues, entertained at dinner parties, floated around on podcasts and in opinion pages. Analyses of what precisely is broken vary, as do prescriptions for a cure, but a strong consensus remains solid among our best and brightest—the problem is that liberalism has come under attack, and the solution is to restore it to its old glory.

In this telling, the history of the past 30 or so years in America goes something like this: Once upon a time, back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, America was great, because Americans all observed a shared creed called liberalism. This relaxed civil religion nurtured our individual liberties and kept us honest, hardworking, and good. It gave us civil rights and gay marriage, Tom Hanks and Sesame Street, bipartisanship and Teach for America. And it would have bloomed eternal if the barbarians hadn’t shown up one day to sack our glittering Rome.

Who, exactly, are those modern-day wreckers of civilization? Again, many of our intellectual betters are certain they have the answer: The barbarians are Marxists, extreme leftist agitators here to replace our sacred liberal order with a pagan religion of their own, complete with a set of rituals (taking a knee) and articles of faith (gender is fluid). Our mission, therefore, is to resist these savages at every turn, and do whatever we can to turn the clock back and reinstall liberalism as our exclusive and infallible operating system

It’s a compelling story, complete with deliciously malicious bad guys and wonderfully virtuous sheriffs counting the minutes to High Noon. It’s also, alas, entirely wrong. Liberalism, to keep with the Hollywood imagery, isn’t the damsel in distress, hogtied and left on the train tracks; it’s the mustache-twirling villain whom we must defeat if we are to survive.

Take a moment and read that last sentence again. If you were raised in America and attended any school here in the last, say, 50 years, this sentence—liberalism is the source of our woes—makes about as much sense as saying that Mr. Rogers is a sadistic serial killer, or that bald eagles ought to be shot on sight. It sounds not only sacrilegious but outright stupid, a proposition so far-fetched and so far removed from everything we understand to be at America’s core as to merit not a second more of consideration.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological?token

Today we bring you another installment of Katie Herzog’s ongoing series about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. Her first story focused on the ideological purge at the top medical schools and teaching hospitals in the country. “Wokeness,” as one doctor put it, “feels like an existential threat.”

Katie’s latest reporting illustrates some of the most urgent elements of that threat. It focuses on how biological sex is being denied by professors fearful of being smeared by their students as transphobic. And it shows how the true victims of that denial are not sensitive medical students but patients, perhaps most importantly, transgender ones. 

Some of you may find Katie’s story shocking and disconcerting and perhaps even maddening. You might also ask yourself: How has it come to this? How has this radical ideology gone from the relatively obscure academic fringe to the mainstream in such a short time?

Those are among the questions that motivate this newsletter. We feel obligated to chronicle in detail and in primary accounts the takeover of our institutions by this ideology — and the consequences of it. 

So far, it has taken root in some of our leading medical schools. Some. Not all. But I’m left thinking: What state will American medicine — or any other American institution —  find itself in after being routed by this ideology?  

If you think reporting like Katie Herzog’s is important I hope you’ll support us by subscribing here.

— BW

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.” 

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.” 

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”