RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/27/the-cruel-progressive-creed-undoing-civilization/

Debt is suffocating us. Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized. 

Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both. The law is optional,  and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology. The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.

The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military. 

There is no U.S. border; it is an abstract construct that millions will illegally cross in the next few years, ostensibly because they will become future soldiers in the progressive wars for America to come. The idea of merit that built America is a dirty word, replaced by medieval tribalism of hiring and promotion by superficial appearance. 

In just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

Progressivism is billed as many things. But its foundational brand is devotion to supposedly “scientific” principles to improve the human condition. That Enlightenment project demands greater social welfare expenditure and therapeutic education to “improve” human nature itself. And all this can sometimes require necessary force.

Such utopian dreams of mandated equity attract all sorts to the cause. There are the naïve who feel socialist redistribution, if at last done right just this once, can really, really create social equity and inclusion. Many of the sympathetic rich assume they will be exempt from the tough medicine that follows from their own guilt or sense of civic duty. Some are opportunistic and parasitical careerists piggy-backing on the chaos. Others are social and psychological zealots who find meaning and relevance as wannabe soldiers marching to utopia.

But inherent in such 20th-century hubris is the concession that there will be lots of collateral damage in reordering society. When imposing abstract, but uncompromising theories onto the otherwise unenlightened people, eggs will have to be broken to bake the new omelet. And from what we have seen in the last few months, the progressive toll is becoming every bit as excruciating as our woke custodians are indifferent to it. 

As a general rule, anytime anyone anywhere announces that he has a master plan to reorder society and “fundamentally transform” or “reset” it by creating larger government, more rules, and an elite hierarchy to oversee compliance for the recalcitrant, then run. You can rest assured ultimately the architect will change the language, demonize and marginalize new opponents, given the omelette always needs more eggs. They will subvert institutions, and, if need be, resort to violence to ensure change.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17505/supreme-court-first-amendment

[The decision] sends a powerful message that the Supreme Court is still in the business of protecting offensive speech, even as big tech, universities and many progressives have tried to justify pervasive censorship of speech with which they disagree.

[T]he most dangerous form of contemporary censorship comes not from the government, but rather from private parties who themselves have the First Amendment right to censor speech with which they disagree. In other words, what we are experiencing is an attack not on the First Amendment itself, but rather on the culture of free speech that the First Amendment is designed to protect.

Today many such institutions punish students and applicants for social media statements they may have posted when they were the same youthful age as the cheerleader. Nor is the punishment always based on neutral or objective standards. It tends to be imposed far more on conservative students who have violated political correctness norms of the left. It is rarely, if ever, imposed on left-wing students, especially students of color, who make statements that are deeply offensive to conservatives and/or white heterosexual men. The constitutional reach of the First Amendment permits such selective punishment by private institutions, but the culture of freedom of expression does not.

In an 8-1 decision, the United States Supreme Court reminded a nation that seems to have forgotten freedom of speech about the importance of the First Amendment.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a thoughtful decision denying public schools the power to discipline high school students for talking the way high school students tend to talk among themselves outside of school. A 14-year-old cheerleader had made the mistake of sending a rant to a few friends, one of whose mothers was a coach.

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

Everywhere other than in Big Media newsrooms, Americans speak openly of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and wonder whether he can last out his four-year term.  If he cannot last, there are certain things we can be confident will happen and other things about which we can only speculate.  The latter will be much more intriguing.

Should Biden leave office, willingly or otherwise, Kamala Harris will become president.  This is a given.  Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution makes clear that in “case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President.”

The Constitution, as written, did not address what happens next.  The 25th Amendment, adopted after the assassination of President Kennedy, answered that question, at least in principle.  It reads, “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

In recent memory, there have been two precedents, both involving Richard Nixon.  On October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion and money-laundering and resigned.  Despite Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, Democrats retained firm control of Congress, with a 50-seat majority in the House and a 14-seat majority in the Senate.  This mattered.  The Democrats all but dictated Nixon’s choice of the congenial, moderate House minority leader, Gerald Ford, to assume the vice presidency.  Ford was nominated two days after Agnew stepped down and confirmed by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress.

 At the time of Ford’s confirmation, Democrats had good reason to suspect that Nixon would soon be forced out himself.  The coordinated Democratic-media plot to oust Nixon as a result of his presumed involvement in the Watergate affair was well underway.  The plot climaxed on August 9, 1974 with Nixon’s resignation.  Ford was sworn in later that same day.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bidens-press-conference-whispers-joseph-klein/

“Creepy Joe” started trending on Twitter last week after a bizarre June 24th press conference during which President Biden started answering reporters’ questions in a whisper. Think of Biden as the donkey whisperer to the left-wing progressive base of his party and to his adoring fans in the mainstream media.

Biden weirdly leaned forward during the press conference and whispered to reporters that he “wrote the bill on the environment” (not clear what bill he was talking about). And then, presumably referring to the enhanced unemployment benefits that are incentivizing unemployed people to stay at home rather than fill the millions of current job openings, Biden whispered: “Pay them more. This is an employee’s — employee’s bargaining chip now what’s happening.”

Biden thought he was being clever. But all he showed was that he is a puppet of unions and of far-left progressives who want to pay people not to work.

In New York, for example, the average weekly unemployment benefit including the $300 federal boost has been calculated at $653. The weekly pay for a 40-hour week, using a $15 per hour minimum wage, would be $600. It doesn’t take an economist to see why unemployed residents of New York City, where the general hourly minimum wage is $15, would prefer to stay home and collect higher unemployment benefits than the wages they would earn if they went to work.

Government unemployment benefits were designed as a temporary safety net, not to serve as an employee bargaining chip. Due to the economic devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government has temporarily supplemented the unemployment benefit payments that states are providing to workers whose employment was terminated through no fault of their own. But these individuals are supposed to be looking for new jobs at least equivalent to the ones they lost. They are not supposed to just lie around on their couches and wait for the benefits paid for by hard-working Americans to keep rolling in.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/26/crenshaw-releasing-crt-complaints-servicemembers/

Rep. Dan Crenshaw has begun publicly releasing whistleblower complaints from service members who object to recent military training initiatives which they say incorporate critical race theory instruction.

The Texas Republican and former Navy SEAL officer received the complaints through a whistleblower site he launched in late May in partnership with Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican and former Army infantry officer.

“Make no mistake about it, our military is still the strongest in the world,” Mr. Crenshaw said in a video posted on Instagram Friday. “But wokeism, identity politics, critical race theory, and blatant political activism have indeed seeped into this critical institution.”

Friday’s video is part of a series he calls “The Whistleblower Files,” through which he said he plans to release a portion of more than 400 complaints he received and determined to be credible over the following weeks.

The complaint released Friday details required training in which members of an Air Force squadron were separated physically by “points of privilege” such as race and sex in an exercise known as a “privilege walk.”

“So let’s point out the obvious: this is meant to shame people,” Mr. Crenshaw said in the video. “And shame people for something they have no control over. It also literally creates manufactured divisions in an environment that requires camaraderie, and puts down certain service members over others not on merit, but on skin color or gender.”

The complaints follow Pentagon efforts to stamp out extremism in the ranks after current and former troops were identified in the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. In February, the Pentagon directed military units to hold a one-day “stand-down” to address extremism within the ranks.

“We want to have a reasonable discussion over these issues so we can keep these problems from compounding,” Mr. Crenshaw said in the video, and said all of the complaints released will preserve the confidentiality of the service member.

Mr. Crenshaw said the complaints point to growing politicization within the ranks of a notoriously apolitical institution.

“We’ve seen what it’s done to our college campuses,” Mr. Crenshaw told The Washington Times. “We’ve seen what it’s done to corporations, where people are walking on eggshells constantly, always worried about some kind of complaint being levied against them, always worried about what’s the next insane anti-racism training they’re going to have to go through. And the military is taking that on.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-covid-commission-americans-can-trust-11624823367?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mr. Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, is a professor at Stanford Medical School.

The pandemic is on its way out, but how many Americans think the U.S. approach succeeded? More than 600,000 Americans died from Covid, and lockdowns have left extensive collateral damage. Trust in science has eroded, and the damage won’t be limited to epidemiology, virology and public health. Scientists in other fields will unfortunately also have to deal with the fallout, including oncologists, physicists, computer scientists, environmental engineers and even economists.

The first step to restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts is an honest and comprehensive evaluation of the nation’s pandemic response. Sens. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) have introduced a bill that would establish a Covid commission to examine the origins of the virus, the early response to the epidemic, and equity issues in the disease’s impact. Private foundations are also in the process of planning such a commission.

For a commission to be credible, it needs to be broad in both scope and membership. Members can’t have conflicts of interest. If the public perceives the commission is a whitewash, distrust in the scientific community will erode further. A commission must consider four major areas of the U.S. pandemic strategy:

• Public-health measures, including the closing of schools, businesses, sports, religious services and cultural events; other forms of physical distancing; protection of nursing homes; masks; testing; contact tracing; case counts; cause-of-death audits; decreased medical care; Cares Act payments to hospitals, and much more.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/battle-over-critical-race-theory-11624810791?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. Since the murder of George Floyd last year, critical race theory’s key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such as minorities-only income programs and racially segregated vaccine distribution.

The ideology has sparked an immense backlash. As Americans have sought to understand critical race theory, they have discovered that it has divided Americans into racial categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed” and promotes radical concepts such as “spirit murder” (what public schools supposedly do to black children) and “abolishing whiteness” (a purported precondition for social justice). In the classroom, critical race theory-inspired lessons have often devolved into race-based struggle sessions, with public schools forcing children to rank themselves according to a racial hierarchy, subjecting white teachers to “antiracist therapy,” and encouraging parents to become “white traitors.”

Alarmed state legislators have pushed back. In recent months, lawmakers in 24 states have introduced, and six have enacted, legislation banning public schools from promoting critical race theory’s core concepts, including race essentialism, collective guilt and racial superiority. Parent groups around the country have mobilized to oppose critical race theory in the classroom, arguing that it cultivates shame in white students and fatalism in minority students. According to a recent YouGov survey, of the 64% of Americans who have heard about critical race theory, 58% view it unfavorably, including 72% of political independents.

That’s a major liability for the political left. Sensing that they are losing control of the narrative on race, left-leaning media outlets have launched a furious counterattack. Liberal pundits at the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC and elsewhere have begun spinning a new mythology that presents critical race theory as a benign academic concept, casts its detractors as right-wing extremists driven by racial resentment, and portrays legislation against critical race theory as an attempt to ban teaching about the history of slavery and racism. All three charges are false.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/06/27/boston-pro-palestinian-thugs-spit-at-and-curse-pro-israel-activist-n1457621

On Thursday, a group of pro-Palestinian activists surrounded Dexter Van Zile of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) at a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) rally at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The pro-jihad protesters tried to intimidate Van Zile physically, poking their fingers in his face, shouting at him, shoving him, spitting at him, and calling him a “bitch,” “Nazi,” and “f**king pig.” Then they no doubt went away believing themselves to be on the side of righteousness. It was a small incident that reveals many of the big problems facing America today, thanks to the American Left.

Just before Van Zile was surrounded and menaced, a speaker at the pro-Palestinian rally told the crowd: “Uh, Dexter Van Zile over here is in the crowd, he’s a rabid Zionist with this group called CAMERA.” After the crowd booed and hooted, the speaker went on to explain how “Zionist racist fascists… under the guise of journalism, write only to smear and muckrake on our righteous movement.” He called upon the crowd to start chanting “Zionists, go home,” which they dutifully did, turning toward Van Zile to do so. Van Zile was surrounded, abused, and reviled shortly thereafter, even as one of the pro-jihad activists repeatedly tried to convince his companions not to do so, saying over and over again: “They will use this against us. They will use this against us. They will use this against us.”

Well, yes. And here we are. Because in the first place, no one in the crowd was saying that Van Zile should be left alone for any reason other than that surrounding him, yelling at him, and spitting on him would make the demonstrators look bad. No one reminded them of the American tradition of free discourse and Voltaire’s old adage, now completely forgotten, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The American Left has now replaced that idea, which is at the foundation of any free society, with “If I disapprove of what you say, I will revile you, slander you, and physically menace until you are too afraid to stand up against me.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/06/from-plato-to-black-lives-matter-rafe-champion/

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous—from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.    —Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

The equal opportunity movement of modern times is valuable, but the shift from equal opportunity to affirmative action is practically irresistible for people who are impatient to better the lot of their fellows. The shift may appear to be modest, but it has converted the equal opportunity and anti-racist movement into a vehicle of racism, intolerance, division and destruction.

I suggest that some aspects of Plato’s thought have poisoned the well of Western thought, and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement can be seen as one of the consequences. How do we get from the works of the greatest philosopher of all time, the Divine Philosopher, to a movement that has triggered a deadly rampage of looting and arson with almost overwhelming approval among progressive left-wing people around the world?

This essay appears in June’s Quadrant.
Subscribers read it weeks ago

Western philosophy has been described as footnotes to Plato, and among the footnotes is The Open Society and Its Enemies, with Karl Popper’s critique of Plato’s later works, especially Republic and Laws. Popper found at last four elements of totalitarian thought in Plato. First is “racialism”, or “race thinking” as Jacques Barzun called it. Second is the concept of collective justice that Plato proposed to replace individual justice. Third is revolutionary canvas-cleaning to sweep away everything old and start again. Fourth is fake news, which Plato dignified with the title of noble lies.

Noble lies

Starting with the last of the four, a noble lie can be defined as a myth or untruth knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. 

What is the empirical basis for BLM, the evidence that the deaths of blacks at the hands of the police are symptoms of racism?