RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it also describes domestic terrorism as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/15/ilhan_omar_and_contempt_f

“We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted last week to her 1.2 million followers. They responded with warm support. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was cooler. Although the speaker lives in San Francisco’s progressive echo chamber, she heads a national party and understands that most voters do not think our country is similar to the Taliban or Hamas. They have noticed a few small differences. Nor do they see a moral equivalence between Israel, which tries to avoid civilian casualties, and terrorist organizations, which use human shields and bomb pizza parlors. They wonder if a representative who thinks America is so evil should sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as Omar does.

Pelosi pressed Rep. Omar for a “clarification” and received a half-hearted one. That was good enough for the speaker, who stressed that she was not rebuking Omar, whom she called a “valued member of our caucus.”

Pelosi walked gingerly because she has only a tiny House majority and relies on several hard-left members and dozens of very progressive ones. She doesn’t want to lose them, but she doesn’t want to endanger her more centrist members, either. Omar’s tweet put her between the dog and the hydrant. Jewish members issued an outraged statement denouncing the tweet, while Omar’s left-wing colleagues, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, criticized Pelosi’s tepid request for clarification.

Another member of the Squad, Rashida Tlaib, chose to portray Pelosi’s request as an attack on all Muslims — on all women of color in Congress: “Freedom of speech doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. House Democratic leadership should be ashamed of its relentless, exclusive tone policing of Congresswomen of color.” Tlaib’s claim that she and Omar are being silenced was sent to 1.4 million Twitter followers.  Apparently, Tlaib has been fully inoculated against irony. Pelosi responded by saying that she had never meant anything as a rebuke. Not in the slightest.

The problem here goes well beyond Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who was welcomed to American and now sits in Congress, seething with contempt for her adopted country, its tolerant values, and those of its allies. The Democrats are stuck with a whole Squad of like-minded representatives and thousands, perhaps millions, of young supporters eager to promote these socialist attacks on America. That’s not just a problem for the Democrats. That’s a problem for the country.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/15/chilling-bidens-domestic-terror-agenda-confirms-conservatives-worst-fears-n1454729

The Biden administration is using the awesome might of the U.S. government to demonize conservative critics as abettors of extremist ideology, if not enemies of the state.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden released a blueprint for his New War on Terror. In the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” the Biden White House pledges that the administration will combat domestic terrorism “while vigilantly safeguarding peaceful expression of a wide range of views and freedom of political association.” Yet the administration’s biases give conservatives good reason to doubt this pledge.

The White House claims that the “two most lethal elements” of domestic terrorism are “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race” and “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, such as militia violent extremists.”

The document lays out four elements of a strategy to fight domestic terrorism: sharing domestic terrorism analyses at all levels of government and occasionally with the private sector; preventing domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence; disrupting and deterring domestic terrorism activity; and confronting “long-term contributors to domestic terrorism.”

Each element should raise alarms for conservatives and Republicans, given the Biden administration’s hyperbolic rhetoric on racism and the Capitol riot. Biden has condemned commonsense election reform as “Jim Crow on steroids” and said the Capitol riot was worse than the Lincoln assassination, the John F. Kennedy assassination, and multiple violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/14/exposing-bidens-exploitive-record-on-race/

For decades, President Joe Biden exploited race to advance his political career. 

Mr. Biden’s long history in public life provides ample evidence in both words and deeds of the now president playing both sides of the race card for political gain.

So in Mr. Biden’s own words, “Look at my record, man.”

Here we go.

Early in his political career, Mr. Biden befriended Democratic segregationists to capitalize on their power to advance in the Senate chamber and his political goals. For example, Mississippi Sen. James Eastland, who offered his assistance to help Mr. Biden with his re-election in 1978, said Blacks were “an inferior race.” 

Mr. Eastland also called the Brown vs. Board of Education decision a “monstrous crime,” and together, Mr. Eastland and Mr. Biden worked on an anti-busing bill to prevent desegregation in schools. 

Mr. Eastland mentored Mr. Biden during his early Senate career and Mr. Biden maintained a fondness for him. 

When commenting about his past relationships with segregationists, Mr. Biden often recalled favorable memories of his emotional connection to racist Democrats. 

While running for president for the third time, Mr. Biden said before his donors referring to Mr. Eastland, “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

Mr. Biden siding with segregationists in his early career is such an obvious political liability that then-Senator Kamala Harris drove an 18 wheeler truck through it during a Democratic debate. 

There is also Mr. Biden’s relationship with the late former Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Mr. Byrd was a former recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan and even with this backdrop, Mr. Byrd was elevated to the highest role in the Senate.

Mr. Byrd, by the way, filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for over 14 hours. Let that sink in for a moment.

But none of this mattered to Mr. Biden. During the eulogy at Mr. Byrd’s funeral in 2010, then-Vice President Biden said, “He was a friend, he was a mentor and he was a guide.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/14/who-let-capitol-protesters-into-the-building-on-january-6/

Judge Amit Mehta thinks no one let protesters into the Capitol building on January 6.

During a pre-trial detention hearing on Friday—Joe Biden’s Justice Department continues to demand jail time for nonviolent offenders before their trials even begin—the D.C. District Court judge made that false claim. “No one was let in,” the Obama appointee told the lawyer representing Jason Dolan, an alleged Oath Keeper and former U.S. Marine with no criminal record. (Mehta denied the government’s motion for detention but admitted it was a “close call.”)

Mehta, of course, is flat wrong. Videos taken by people at the Capitol not only show some U.S. Capitol Police officers ushering protesters toward the building and allowing them to enter but, as American Greatness exclusively reported last month, USCP officers also cautioned several protesters how they should behave.

In fact, in an anonymous interview with the Gateway Pundit in May, Dolan himself described how someone inside the Capitol opened the doors. (Dolan was arrested three days after the interview was posted.) The Justice Department, in a motion to keep Dolan incarcerated awaiting trial, called his story a “conspiracy theory.”

Thousands of Hours of Video Unseen

In Mehta’s defense, he only has access to cherry-picked video evidence provided by the Justice Department, which is keeping more than 14,000 hours of surveillance footage captured by the USCP security system under seal by insisting the recordings are “highly sensitive” government material. Judges, defense attorneys, and Capitol defendants are at the mercy of whatever damning clips federal prosecutors produce for any given case.

A select group of lawmakers, however, is authorized to view the raw footage: Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is one of them. As ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson has directed his staff to closely examine the recordings to get a detailed account of what happened that day. 

“We’re going to look at relevant sections, trying to identify points of conflict and egress,” Johnson told me by phone on Friday. “I want a general, overall sense of the full spectrum of behavior in and around the Capitol.”

Johnson’s office already has flagged a slice of footage that may seriously undermine the accepted narrative—perpetuated by federal judges in court hearings and nearly everyone else—that “insurrectionists” broke into the building without permission.

In a letter to acting U.S. Capitol Police chief Yogananda Pittman last week, Johnson zeroed in on the suspicious activity of several individuals around 2:30 p.m.—right before more than 300 protesters entered the building through doors on the upper west terrace. Moments before, according to Johnson’s letter, an “unauthorized” person tried unsuccessfully to open a set of double doors.

Five people returned to the double doors shortly thereafter and walked past a USCP officer. “The security footage, which did not include audio, appeared to show the police officer gesturing toward the doors as these individuals walked past him. Once at the double doors, one of the five individuals pushed the left door’s crash bar and this time, it opened. All five individuals exited the building at approximately 2:33 p.m.”

But the last person to leave left the door ajar, “allowing people from the outside of the building to gain entry into the Capitol. At 2:34 p.m., as people began to enter through this door, the police officer who was in the vicinity of this door one minute earlier, walked into another hallway away from this door and out of the view of the security camera.” For nearly 15 minutes, Johnson estimates, 309 people entered the Capitol building while law enforcement did little to stop them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/kamala-harris-just-keeps-getting-worse-david-limbaugh/

No matter how mentally diminished President Joe Biden is, you have to be horrified by who waits in the wings should he leave office before the expiration of his term.

Unfortunately, one of the many consequences of Biden’s mental decline is an impairment of judgment that manifests itself in such reckless decisions as putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the border. It is like making a colicky infant the goalie of a professional hockey team. If Biden were more alert, I would suspect it was his way of seeking revenge against Harris and those who foisted her on to his presidential ticket.

Harris has neither a clue nor a rudder on this critically important issue, which by any fair measure, now must be considered a crisis. She is a dedicated progressive, and progressives are flagrantly open borders-oriented. But even more, she is a political opportunist and will say anything to salvage her hemorrhaging reputation.

Thus, after all the root-causes rhetoric and the castigation of anyone who properly advocates even a modest level of border enforcement, she told migrants during a press conference Monday, “Don’t come here.” “As one of our priorities, we will discourage illegal migration,” she said. “And I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back. Do not come. Do not come,” she continued. “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.”

Perhaps we should be grateful for the whiplash if it means we’ll begin to see a saner border policy, but how can we possibly rely on the White House to enforce the border when it’s signaled in every imaginable way that it is ideologically opposed to protecting our sovereignty?

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/14/flashback-dc-mayor-honored-at-dnc-for-riot-response-new-reports-reveal-she-not-trump-teargassed-protesters/

The first speaker former actress Eva Longoria introduced at the Democratic National Convention in August 2020 was Muriel Bowser, the Democrat mayor of Washington, D.C. Longoria referenced the clearing of a street in front of the White House earlier that summer, an operation the media had repeatedly falsely characterized as the violent removal of peaceful protesters with tear gas for the sole purpose of a photo opportunity for President Donald Trump.

“When peaceful protesters were teargassed across from the White House, our next speaker stood up, stood strong and turned that place into the Black Lives Matter Plaza in their honor. Please welcome Mayor Muriel Bowser,” Longoria said.

Amazingly, new reports confirm it was Bowser — not Trump — who teargassed the protesters a few blocks away from the White House on the evening in question, that the protests had repeatedly devolved into violence and arson, and that the clearing was done for major security concerns and not a photo opportunity. For more than a year, Bowser allowed Trump to take the blame for what her police forces had done.

In her nationally broadcast speech, Bowser inaccurately called the violent riots — marked by widespread looting, arson of historic buildings, arson of White House buildings, and assaults on scores of police officers — safe and peaceful. Then she blamed Trump for her own police force’s teargassing of protesters.

“[W]hile we were peacefully protesting, Donald Trump was plotting. He stood in front of one of our most treasured houses of worship and held a Bible for a photo op. He sent troops in camouflage into our streets. He sent tear gas into the air and federal helicopters too. I knew if he did this to DC, he would do it to your city or your town, and that’s when I said enough,” she said.

But it was Bowser who “did this to DC,” not Trump.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/14/inflations-here-getting-worse-and-may-even-last-longer-than-covid-19-pandemic/

Both the out-of-touch Biden administration and our betters at the Federal Reserve Board continue to assert that inflation’s no big thing. They’re right. It’s not, unless you work for a living. Then it’s a very big thing indeed.

We were told by all the best “experts” that inflation is ephemeral, a mere blip. The Fed keeps telling us the recent jump in prices is “transient.” Democrats and many of their media friends continue to insist it’s not an issue. Just keep spending, they say. Stimulus!

But calling the recent burst in inflation “transient” or any other such euphemism to suggest it’s like a brief summer cold is not exactly accurate. In fact, it’s wrong.

The recent surge in inflation isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. Indeed, it’s even worse than the numbers now indicate.

In the most recent Consumer Price Index data, year-over-year inflation hit a tad above 5%. That’s the biggest spurt since 2008. In April, it hit 3.6%, nearly twice the recent average. Meanwhile, core prices (excluding volatile food and energy) are rising at their highest pace since 1992, when then-Fed chief Alan Greenspan was forced to nearly double interest rates to kill what many feared would be a bad bout of inflation.

This is no coincidence. In May, real average hourly earnings fell 2.8%, even as employees worked more hours. Let that sink in: Those earning an hourly wage actually took home less pay for working more.

As inflation rises, real wages — that is, earnings adjusted for inflation — inevitably go down. Just as in the 1970s, low-skilled, less-trained and less-schooled workers can’t keep up. Their wages fall behind. That’s the real danger here.