RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/what-are-the-paleoconservatives-conserving/

There is less dividing Paul Gottfried and me than I would have expected, which is good. For when the orc hordes—at Sauron’s urging—come for both of us, they aren’t going to discern, much less care about, any academic differences over this or that statement from the American founding era. They are going to see us identically as enemies to be exterminated. 

I also welcome this chance to reiterate some points that bear repeating. To those bored with the repetition, I can only say that what I learned in politics apparently applies to intellectual debates as well: if you want your message to break through, you can’t repeat it often enough. This exchange also gives me the opportunity to take a few more whacks at Cracker Jack Claremontism, which can’t be beaten often enough. 

The Claremont-Hillsdale School does indeed hold that all human beings “have inalienable rights to life and liberty.” Gottfried continues from here that this “did not mean that for the founders ‘all men’ were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right.” And he’s absolutely right. Only Cracker Jack Claremontism holds to that silly view. Anyone who’s actually studied the founders (and if we’ve done nothing else, we’ve certainly done that) knows that it’s false. 

A Separate and Equal Station
Among the Powers of the Earth

Let’s take these two issues separately. The first is membership in the political community. We may say that, for the American founders, their government’s exclusivity as a political community internationally mirrors the principle of freedom of association at the domestic level. Just government originates in the social compact—that is, a compact in which men freely choose to form a government for their mutual protection and benefit. At the founding of such a government, agreement on membership must be unanimous, and in both directions. That is, no one who doesn’t want to be in the compact can be forced to join, but also no one whom others don’t want to take in can be allowed to join either. The social compact is invitation only. 

It remains so in perpetuity for newcomers. Children born to members of the existing compact are automatically made members but may, if they later choose, renounce that membership via emigration. No one from outside the compact, however, may join it without the consent of its existing members. As Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the U.S. Constitution, put it: “every society, from a great nation down to a club, has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members shall be admitted.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-dojs-abusive-indictment-of-the-police-who-killed-george-floyd/

Federal prosecution of these defendants makes no sense — except as a political matter.

A t best, the Justice Department’s indictment of Derek Chauvin and the three other former Minneapolis cops involved in George Floyd’s killing nearly a year ago is overkill. At worst, it is an exercise in political zeal that could undermine the accountability being achieved by state prosecutions. In the meantime, it is abusive — ironically so given that the charges are brought under the guise of upholding civil rights, though it obviously has not dawned on the Civil Rights Division’s social-justice warriors that police have civil rights, too.

Chauvin, of course, has just been convicted by a Minnesota jury on two murder counts, as well as a manslaughter charge. He faces up to 40 years’ imprisonment — the maximum sentence on the most serious charge, second-degree felony murder — when he is sentenced, which is scheduled to happen on June 16. State prosecutors have asked Judge Peter Cahill to apply penal-law enhancements that would push Chauvin’s term close to the maximum. Even if the court does not apply all of them, Chauvin’s sentence is bound to be severe — probably 20 years or more, maybe a lot more.

And make no mistake: That will be a very tough stretch, assuming the 45-year-old survives it. Chauvin is a notorious ex-cop convicted in a case that is racially charged, notwithstanding the absence of racial-bias evidence. He will be a target for gangs and other violent inmates. Holding him in the general prison population would not be responsible in the short term, if ever. There is no harder time than time in isolation. That is not a defense of the excessive force that resulted in the jury’s verdict; it is simply a realistic observation of what lies ahead.

The other three former cops charged by the Justice Department are Chauvin’s partner, Tou Thao, a 35-year-old veteran of the force, and a pair of rookies, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, 38 and 27 respectively, who were brand new to the job when they encountered Floyd last Memorial Day. The three are scheduled to be tried jointly in state court, starting August 23, on charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter. Furthermore, prosecutors are pushing to add a third-degree “depraved indifference” murder charge, just as they controversially did in Chauvin’s case. In less than two weeks (May 20), a state appellate court will hear arguments on whether that should be permitted.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/07/cheney-the-caucus-and-the-crux/

As of this writing, there is considerable doubt as to whether U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) should continue in her House Republican leadership position as its conference chairman. One scenario has her losing a caucus vote; another portends she will walk away from this internecine GOP battle and leave the position rather than betray her principles, most notably her opposition to the past and continued role of Donald Trump within the party. In either scenario, Cheney’s expected departure will be hailed by the corporate leftist media as the latest Republican martyrdom in the noble cause of resisting the cult of the “bad orange man.”

Is it? Cheney is not being run out of Congress. That is solely a matter for her Wyoming constituents to decide next year. Nor is Cheney being removed from her committee assignments; and her congressional office budget is not being reduced. Cheney is on the cusp of being replaced as conference chairman. Nothing more, nothing less. It is decidedly not the end of our free republic or of the Republican Party.

The conference chairman of the House Republican caucus is responsible for the development and implementation of the party’s unified messaging. In many ways, it is as if the House GOP is hiring one of its own to act as its PR director. One cannot overestimate how critical this position is for the House GOP conference. Past individuals who have held this position include former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and former Vice President Mike Pence (R-Ind.). 

This position—like all other House leadership positions in both parties—requires the confidence of one’s colleagues that the peer they elect will prioritize and actually put the interests of the caucus above her own. 

As a result, the election to leadership does not elevate a representative above his or her colleagues. Just as a general election subordinates the winner to the sovereign citizenry (i.e., the voters), a leadership election subordinates the winner to the caucus (i.e., the voters in Congress who choose that member to lead), individually and collectively. If someone in the leadership of either party places—or is perceived to be placing—a personal agenda ahead of the good of the conference, that individual has broken the implicit agreement upon which her delegated authority rests.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/_the_disney_corp_has_taken_a_deep_dive_into_race_hatred.html

Going back to the late 1920s, every single child raised in America has intersected in some way with products from Walt Disney: We’ve watched the movies and TV shows, sung the songs, worn the clothes, and visited the theme parks. Through it all, Disney stood for wholesome family entertainment. That is no longer the case. Disney is a hardcore leftists corporation that is pushing its politics on children and training its employees to be white-hating racists or self-loathing white people. It’s time to give up Disney.

During Walt Disney’s tenure, his company also generated propaganda. Behind all the wonderful entertainment the company was pushing several themes: Heterosexual love is real, the nuclear family matters, American patriotism is important, and God is a beneficent presence in our lives.

Many parents and grandparents buying Disney videos for their children or taking family trips to the theme parks operate under the mistaken impression that this is still the case. They’re half right. Disney is still generating propaganda, but it’s about race and gender in ways many parents may not support.

Just the other day, we learned that Disney’s Pixar is planning to introduce a so-called “transgender” girl character for its next Toy Story movie. That means it is going to have a boy who thinks he’s a girl as a character in a movie aimed at little children. Disney’s also focused on gay characters in Onward and Out.

It turns out that these forays into pushing the cultural window further and further left are mere bagatelles compared to what’s going on behind the scenes. Journalist Christopher Rufo has become the go-to person for whistleblowers who want to expose their employers’ deep dives into Critical Race Theory. He received a doozy of a blown whistle about what’s happening in the Disney corporate offices, which are forcing employees to embrace CRT and gender madness.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-message-washington-needs-to-hear-right-now-stop/

The disastrous jobs report is a flashing red warning for President Biden’s check-writing spree.

T he lesson of today’s jobs report is that President Biden should be spending less time fantasizing about becoming Franklin Roosevelt, and more time trying to avoid becoming Herbert Hoover.

It all happened so fast. At 8 a.m., CNN was echoing the likes of Warren Buffett, Larry Summers, and Janet Yellen in sounding the alarm about inflation. By 8.30 a.m., it had broken away to report the news that the April jobs report was an unmitigated disaster. The consensus had been that the data would show a million new jobs; the real number was less than a quarter of that. That, Axios noted, represented “the biggest miss, relative to expectations, in the history of the payrolls report.”

A lot of people said they were “shocked.” But why, exactly? Did they believe that Joe Biden had rendered gravity optional? This is what you get when you pay people not to work. It’s what you get when you send check after check after check to people who, were they permitted to, would be perfectly capable of regaining employment. It’s what you get when you allow the teachers’ unions to shut down the schools ad nauseam, and put working parents in a long-term bind. There is nothing magical about 2021, or about Joe Biden, or about this set of legislators and appointees and special interests. The same rules apply to them that applied to their predecessors. You can’t spend what you don’t have. You can’t tax and spend your way to prosperity. And human beings cannot be programmed out of responding to clear incentives. Call your plans whatever you want — Build Back Better, Modern Monetary Theory, Fairness, the Left-Handed Teacup Initiative — it doesn’t matter. Reality doesn’t care about branding.

The pigheadedness is stunning. The Treasury is spending twice what it’s taking in, we have a national debt that has eclipsed annual GDP for the first time since World War II, and, despite the abundance of recovered jobs, we are having a real problem getting people into them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-fauci-and-the-origins-of-covid-11620419989?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Before Covid-19 ravaged the world, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded coronavirus research that included work at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The idea was to study the ability of such viruses to attack humans, but could a Fauci-funded experiment actually be the source of the deadly global infection? In an exhaustive account of the viral possibilities published this week by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nicholas Wade argues that the Chinese lab is the most likely source of the world-wide agony.

Left-leaning journalists who don’t like where this story is going may struggle to dismiss the author given his establishment credentials. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes him this way:

Nicholas Wade is a science writer, editor, and author who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science, and, for many years, the New York Times.

The former Timesman writes:

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped… it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.

Mr. Wade describes a key Chinese researcher whose work received support from Dr. Fauci’s institute via a U.S. group called EcoHealth Alliance:

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses…

https://www.city-journal.org/bidens-war-on-merit-puts-americas-scientific-edge-at-risk

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports. The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,” as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion. Her nomination requires Senate confirmation; if Berhe will not commit to hiring and grantmaking on the basis of scientific expertise alone, irrespective of race and sex, senators should vote her appointment down.

As head of the Office of Science, Berhe would be asked to choose strategic directions for DOE-funded science. Should the agency try to expand understanding of fundamental particle physics or of the physics of the universe? How much attention should be given to solid-state lighting, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence? With regard to energy conservation and clean energy, should DOE pursue geothermal or biomass, tackle storage issues, or seek greater energy efficiency through insulation and refrigeration? Each day, the Office of Science turns out dozens of “one-pager” descriptions of projects and proposals. It is unlikely that a soil geologist (with an M.S. in political ecology) will have the knowledge to evaluate proposals for, say, advanced scientific computing research or nuclear physics, or make the policy judgments that those “one-pagers” require.

It is fitting that Berhe teaches at the University of California, Merced. UC Merced was created as a diversity campus, in the hope of minting more Hispanic graduates with a UC degree. No one advocating for this new institution, located in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, made the case that California needed more university research capacity. Berhe herself benefited from UC’s obsessive diversity push, having received a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program for promoting “underrepresented minority” graduate students.

A physicist wonders if Berhe “can know merit when she sees it.” Preference beneficiaries “think that merit is a myth and hierarchies of achievement are arbitrary and based on power and oppression,” this professor observes, based on years of watching academic admissions and hiring. Berhe argues that the lack of race and sex diversity in STEM is due to exclusion, rather than to the absence of a proportional number of competitively qualified “diverse” candidates in the hiring pipeline. Her co-authored articles include: “Leaky Pipeline vs. Vicious Obstacle Course: metaphors for the persistent exclusion of minoritized scholars from STEM,” “A critical feminist approach to transforming workplace climate in the geosciences through community engagement and partnerships with societies,” and “Hostile climates are barriers to diversifying the geosciences.” She will undoubtedly further elevate the importance of race and sex as criteria for federal research awards.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/07/the-biden-economy-begins-and-it-doesnt-look-pretty/

The latest jobs report shows that President Joe Biden is already leaving his imprint on the economy. Job growth was “unexpectedly” slow, and unemployment climbed, despite a massive shortage of workers.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the jobs numbers for April, the press seemed stunned. Only 266,000 jobs were created, which is 800,000 below forecasts. The job creation number for March had to be revised down by 146,000. And unemployment ticked up for the first time since the lockdown.

The New York Times said that “Jobs Report Shows Surprising Slowdown in Hiring.” Another said “New Jobs Report Shocks Experts With Unexpected Hiring Lag.”

Biden himself felt the need to defend himself on Friday, saying that the economy is improving despite the lousy numbers, tried to convince the public that the recovery would be a slog (while also bragging about how great he’s doing), and said more government help is needed.

The fact that anyone is surprised by the jobs numbers, or that anyone thinks more government intervention is needed, would shock us if we weren’t so used to rampant economic illiteracy.

First, the economy didn’t need rescuing. It was recovering faster than anyone expected long before Biden got the keys to the White House. The GDP snapped back. The jobless rate fell quicker than expected. The cash payments included in the CARES Act and the follow-up that President Donald Trump signed were giving consumers plenty of money to spend.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/07/team_biden_flogs_russian_interference_in_us_vote_no_matter_what_its_intel_agencies_say_776083.html

In his big speech last week, President Biden complained about “Russia’s interference in our elections” but his intelligence community, led by his appointee Avril Haines, right, says there wasn’t any.

The Biden administration is misquoting its own intelligence findings on Russia in what some former U.S. intelligence officials say is a subtle but significant effort to continue to delegitimize the Trump presidency.

In his speech before a joint session of Congress last week, President Biden complained about “Russia’s interference in our elections,” even though his intelligence czar had released a report the previous month formally dismissing the idea Moscow had interfered in the 2020 election or the 2016 election.

In an “Intelligence Community Assessment” on foreign threats to U.S. elections released March 10, Biden’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, run by Democratic appointee Avril Haines, made a distinction between efforts to influence and efforts to interfere with American elections. Although this sounds like semantics, in the field of international norms, it represents a crucial difference.

The ICA defined “election influence” as “overt or covert efforts by foreign governments or actors” to indirectly affect an election through “candidates, political parties, voters or their preferences, or political processes.” In contrast, it defined “election interference” as the far more serious matter of foreign states targeting “the technical aspects of the election,” including “casting and counting ballots, or reporting results.”

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/antiracism-is-racist-on-its-own-terms?token=eyJ1

Perhaps the central animating principle underlying the Woke agenda is that equity in outcomes must supplant equality in rights, treatment under the law and general life opportunities.

The Woke ideal is for all to be represented in every aspect of society proportional to their group—the diversity of skills, abilities, interests and myriad other factors inherent to every individual be damned. All policies must revolve around this singularly preeminent goal.

At least this is what the Woke tell us.

So-called “antiracism” is at the core of the Wokeism that has overtaken much of the federal government, our corporate boardrooms and our schools. Antiracists suggest that one can judge a policy as antiracist by whether such policy contributes to achieving “equity”—and a person as antiracist by whether he actively supports such policy. Get with the Woke program, in other words, or you are “Jim Eagle.” In some ways, then, antiracism might be thought of more as a tactic to bully people into submission to racialist progressivism than it is a true philosophy or worldview.

But for the sake of argument, let’s entertain the antiracists’ stated views. Let’s also set aside that alongside Woke true believers are cynics who likely believe they can exploit Wokeism to accrue more power, narrow opportunists who think they can profit by aligning themselves with the Woke and cowards generally fearful of the vengeful Woke mob.

Antiracists believe it is wholly justifiable to engage in outright discrimination and bigotry—abrogating rights, treating us as unequal under the law and rigging opportunities—to the extent it advances the cause of “equity.” This experiment in social engineering is a recipe for disaster, eroding liberty and justice, fomenting societal rancor and division, and ultimately leaving us a poorer, less secure country.

But even setting these points aside, there is a fatal flaw among the antiracists that ought to be emphasized: Antiracists are racist on their own terms to the extent their favored policies contribute to inequity. In fact, many such policies seemingly will, and historically have.Consider policing, for example. Antiracists see the criminal justice system as systemically racist, in large part because minorities are incarcerated at disproportionate rates—rejecting or ignoring that those rates might reflect disproportionate underlying criminal activity. Therefore, antiracists argue that equity demands a raft of policies aimed at weakening the power of police forces, up to and sometimes including abolishing them outright. But it is only logical that if the authorities are to back off, if not disband altogether, then crime-ridden areas will get significantly worse.