RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://The ‘Anti-Racist’ Who Wasn’t By Charles C. W. Cooke

A trendy progressive ideology buckles under the weight of its own paradoxes.

T oday’s edition of the Washington Post comes with the comforting news that the psychiatrist who told an audience at Yale’s medical school that “she fantasized about killing White people” was, in fact, simply expressing to the world how deeply she cares. In an April 6 lecture, prosaically titled “Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” Aruna Khilanani explained that she dreamed of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fu**ing favor.” Perhaps because they lacked the tools to interrogate and educate themselves, some observers responded rather negatively to these ideas. But, as Khilanani clarifies today, they have got her completely wrong: What she said was not the product of a demented, bigoted, Charles Manson–esque mind, but of a legitimate “frustration about minority mental health,” a desire to “have more serious conversations about race,” and, ultimately, love. Khilanani does what she does, she told the Post, “because I care.”

Well, that’s a relief.

It does not take an exquisitely trained mind to understand why the oft-trailed and much-coveted “Conversation about Race in America” never actually happens in earnest — and, indeed, why it is unlikely ever to happen in earnest. Thanks to the ever-shifting pseudo-scientific nonsense that underpins almost every contemporary “academic” framework, the plain words a given person uses when discussing race do not tend to matter much these days. What matters, instead, is how our self-appointed arbiters of taste wish those words to be perceived. Thus it is that any self-evidently racist comment made by a favored player is immediately justified in terms that would typically be reserved for an especially pretentious exhibit of modern art — “the intermittently blank canvas explores the tension between sound and electricity in an era of existential dread” — while the jokes, mainstream political opinions, unfortunate coincidences, and childhood indiscretions of the disfavored become crystallized into the permanent mark of the Klan. Who, in his right mind, would consent to talk on the record under these rules?

The erosion of public trust in the FBI is a big problem for the country — for both the rule of law and national security.

S tories such as the one Isaac Schorr reported Wednesday are a big part of why the FBI has lost so much of its good will on Capitol Hill and among the public.

It is not like some barroom blabbermouth called for the prosecution of former Trump officials and a number of congressional Republicans on the theory that they constitute the “command and control element” of a “terrorist group” that attacked the Capitol. Frank Figliuzzi was, for some of the Obama years, the FBI’s top counterintelligence official. And that was after he held other major supervisory positions, managing the work of hundreds of agents, particularly in Cleveland and Miami.

Figliuzzi knows he is mouthing Democratic Party political messaging that has no grounding in a rigorous analysis of evidence and applicable law — the kind of analysis the FBI wants Americans to believe it performs without grinding political axes. Yet he also knows that people who care what Frank Figliuzzi says care only because of his perceived authority as a former high-ranking FBI national-security official. His audience figures that Figliuzzi is an insider, publicly saying what the bureau is quietly thinking.

In reality, what he’s saying is bunk.

Federal prosecutors are a notoriously ambitious bunch. They well know that making cases against the former president, his aides, and pro-Trump congressional Republicans, especially terrorism cases, would thrill the Biden Justice Department. It would also please the FBI — not just the top echelon but rank-and-file agents who are not partisans, but who are well aware that over 100 cops were injured in the lawless melee at the Capitol. A prosecutor who could make such a case would be a star for life: invited to hold forth on the NBC news circuit even more often than Figliuzzi.

Figliuzzi is echoing Attorney General Merrick Garland, who told the Senate that the Capitol riot was the most “dangerous threat to democracy” he’s ever seen. For context, President Biden’s AG made that absurd claim in the course of decrying white supremacism as the nation’s “top domestic violent extremist threat.” (In Obama/Biden-speak, “violent extremist” means terrorism.) We are to believe that Trump supporters are neo-Nazis, more dangerous than Hamas, more dangerous than the Taliban, and — applying the standards of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar — even more dangerous than the United States itself.

Prosecutors hear this stuff. They want nothing more than to make the case. If it were makable.

Government lawyers are also well aware that Democratic lawmakers, egged on by progressive legal scholars, larded their “Incitement of Insurrection” impeachment article with an allusion to the 14th Amendment — specifically, to Section 3, which potentially bars from holding federal office people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. The transparent point of this was to lay the groundwork for legal efforts to disqualify the 147 Republicans who supported the untenable Trump gambit to pressure Vice President Pence and Congress into rejecting the certified electoral votes of states whose election results Trump was contesting.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/09/this-isnt-your-fathers-left-wing-revolution/

Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either were going to take over America or destroy it. 

One of their favorite psychodramatic mottos was “Change it or Lose it,” even as protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion—and almost anything and everything. 

Sixties radicals tutored America on long hair, wire-rim eyeglasses, and who was a drag, a square, a bummer, and who was hip, cool, groovy, mellow, and far out. Most of these silly revolutionaries were not unhinged Weathermen killers or SDS would-be Communists, but just adolescents along for the good-time ride.

With the end of the draft in 1972, the winding down of the Vietnam War, the oil embargoes, and the worsening economy, the ’60s revolution withered away. Cynics claimed the “revolution” was always mostly about middle-class students with long hair, kicking back during the peak of the postwar boom, indulging their appetites, and ensuring they would not end up in Vietnam. 

It is not even true that the ’60s at least ensured needed reform. The civil rights movement and equal rights for women and gays were already birthed before the hippies, as were folk songs, and early rock music. 

Instead, what the ’60s revolution did was accelerate these trends—but also radicalize, manipulate, and coarsen them. 

The grasping “yuppies” of the 1980s were the natural successors to let-it-all-hang-out hippies. The ’60s were at heart a narcissistic free-for-all when “freedom” often entailed self-indulgence and avoiding responsibility. 

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

Critical Race Theory reared its ugly head in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association when Donald Ross, a San Francisco-based psychoanalyst (and teacher) shared with the world the fact that “whiteness” is a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” One of his colleagues was also good enough to offer an approving review in the same issue.

The American Psychoanalytic Association is a real organization, founded in 1911 and has over 3,000 members. It also publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (“JAPA”).

In its most recent edition, JAPA published a peer-reviewed article by Donald Moss, who is White. In 2017, Moss received the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl award for work against prejudice.

Moss is currently a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He works to “understand and dismantle structured forms of hatred– ‘hating in the first person plural’–racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia.” (And yes, that quoted sentence is gibberish.)

You’ll find more gibberish in Moss’s JAPA article, entitled “On Having Whiteness.” However, gibberish or not, anyone can grasp the racial hatred. According to the abstract:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure

To appreciate how utterly vile and insane this is, substitute the words “Black” or “Jew” in place of White, and you’ll be reading something that would be perfectly at home in the Journal of the American Nazi Society or the Annals of the KKK. Moss’s affiliation happens to be with the “Green Gang,” which targets “hatred” toward the “natural world.” (Whites apparently aren’t natural.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/10/fauci-is-starting-to-look-guilty-guilty-guilty-on-gain-of-function/

As the “lab-leak” theory for COVID-19 gains increasing credibility, Dr. Anthony Fauci must answer for whether he had any role in supporting Chinese researchers who created this monster. So far, his answers aren’t exactly helping his case.

For those not following this story closely, it now appears likely that COVID-19 didn’t just happen in nature, but was the result of so-called “gain of function” research in a Wuhan lab, where scientists “spiked” a virus found in animals so it could infect humans. If true, the Chinese are directly responsible for the resulting pandemic’s massive economic and human cost.

Until just recently, the press and the “experts” – including Fauci – dismissed the lab-leak theory as a Trump-concocted conspiracy. Not anymore, and now there’s the question of Fauci’s involvement. What have we learned since? Nothing that exonerates him, that’s for sure. Here are the highlights:

Fauci’s Ever-Changing Story

Over the course of three weeks, Fauci has changed his tune three times when it comes to the question of whether he helped funnel taxpayer money to gain-of-function research.

When Sen. Rand Paul pressed Fauci on the question on May 11, he categorically denied it.

“The NIH has not ever, and does not now, fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci said.

Two weeks later, he told Sen. John Kennedy that he had no way of knowing whether the Chinese used grant money from the NIH for such studies.

Then last week Fauci dismissed the grant – which he said totaled $600,000 over five years – as insignificant.

“The Wuhan lab is a very large lab to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The grant that we’re talking about was … an average of about $125,000 to $140,000 a year.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deadly-results-of-defunding-the-police-11623259226?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Woodson Center family lost one of our own on Memorial Day. Makhi Buckly, the 19-year-old grandson of Carl Hardrick, one of our most faithful leaders in youth violence prevention, was fatally shot in Hartford, Conn. Makhi was a student athlete in his freshman year at American International College in Springfield, Mass. When Carl called to tell me the terrible news, his words broke my heart: “It’s my job to keep kids safe, but I can’t even protect my own grandson.”

Our grief is shared by hundreds of minority families that have lost children to senseless violence over the past year. In June 2020, 3-year-old Mekhi James was killed on his way home from a haircut, riding in the back seat of a car in Chicago. A week later, 10-year-old Lena Marie Nunez-Anaya was killed after a stray bullet came through the window of her Chicago apartment. In July 2020, 7-year-old Natalia Wallace was shot in the forehead as she played outside, also in Chicago. Eleven-year-old Davon McNeal was struck by a stray bullet shortly after a Fourth of July peace cookout organized by his mother in Washington. In April, 11-month-old Dior Harris was shot and killed in the back seat of a car in Syracuse, N.Y. Two other children who were riding in the same car were also wounded.

Over the past few years, the deaths of unarmed black people at police hands—including the murder of George Floyd —have rightly generated national outrage. But the number of unarmed blacks killed by police represents a fraction of those who are killed each day in our neighborhoods. Many of these victims are children. In 2020 nearly four children and teens were shot and killed each day in America on average. Yet the national press habitually ignores any victim who isn’t killed by the police, distorting our understanding of what is really going on.

The movement to “defund the police,” which rose to prominence after Floyd’s death, has actually gotten innocent black people killed. As police have pulled back, our neighborhoods have been left unprotected. Crime has skyrocketed. Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country. Preliminary Federal Bureau of Investigation data show that the U.S. murder rate increased by 25% in 2020. Between Dec. 11, 2020, and March 28, 2021 (after the Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a budget that shifted $8 million from the police department to other programs), murders in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, rose 46% compared with the same period the year before.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/woke-inquisitors-in-the-medical-world/

A recent ‘controversy’ reveals how politically correct ideology is harming health care.

Four hundred years ago, Italian astronomer Galileo was persecuted for advancing Copernicus’s theory that the earth and other planets rotate around the sun. This heliocentric theory violated the prevailing belief dating back to Aristotle and engrained in Christian theology that the sun and planets rotate around a stationary earth. Galileo was tried for heresy and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Science would eventually vindicate Galileo.

Today’s scientists and physicians face a different orthodoxy that explains all disparate health outcomes as the result of structural or systemic racism. Doubters and those who investigate genetic and scientific alternative explanations face their own latter-day inquisition. Just ask Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of JAMA — the Journal of the American Medical Association — who was recently forced to resign. While the remaining JAMA editors offered fulsome praise in a farewell editorial citing his accomplishments, including a commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, make no mistake: He was purged for a thoughtcrime.

Dr. Bauchner’s offense was that he presided over JAMA when it aired a podcast titled “Structural Racism for Doctors — What Is It?” in late February. The podcast featured two white physicians — JAMA deputy editor Ed Livingston and Mitchell Katz, an editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, president and CEO of New York City’s public-hospital system NYC Health + Hospitals, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Katz described structural racism as societal policies or practices that perpetuate racial inequality, as opposed to individuals’ racist beliefs. Dr. Livingston wondered if “structural racism is an unfortunate term to describe a very real problem.” (emphasis added) He worried that people offended by being labeled racist would not address the societal barriers to equal opportunity. JAMA’s tweet promoting the podcast stated, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors. . . .”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/08/who_loses_when_the_china_bat_cave_implodes.html

The story about Wuhan’s “wet market” is taking on water. We’ve moved well past the “trust but verify” stage. We’re now in the “don’t trust a damn thing they say” stage. In this case, “they” refers mostly to the Chinese Communist Party. But the public’s mistrust has spread to our own government’s public health experts, and to much of the Western media, as well.

We still don’t know where the COVID-19 pandemic originated, but the more we learn, the less China’s official story sounds right. The World Health Organization’s year-long endorsement of Beijing means nothing. At this point, even the WHO is starting to say we need a more thorough investigation. Good luck with that. China has prevented independent scientists from conducting any serious, open inquiry of the pandemic’s origins. That won’t change.

China’s secrecy tells us sometimes, but we can’t be sure what. Remember, U.S. intelligence agencies and the George W. Bush administration made the wrong inference from Saddam Hussein’s secrecy about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam impeded international inspectors to search freely for WMDs, which he possessed previously. There was no proof he had destroyed them. Yet he blocked unannounced international inspections of Iraqi sites that might contain WMDs. The natural inference was that he still had those weapons and was hiding them. American and British intelligence researched that conclusion. The CIA director famously told President Bush it was a “slam dunk.”

It wasn’t. What Saddam was actually hiding was that he didn’t have WMDs. He was hiding that less from his Western enemies and more from his dangerous neighbor, Iran, and possibly from internal enemies in Iraq itself. That mistaken inference is worth remembering as we ponder the still-murky origins of the Wuhan virus. We know China is hiding something. What we don’t know is what it is hiding and why.

Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.
Beijing could be hiding that the escaped virus was artificially enhanced, made more contagious and lethal (called “gain of function”).
Beijing could be hiding the fact that China’s military was involved in this gain-of-function project, or at least in some aspects of the lab’s research.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese political leaders knew, early on, that the virus spread from human to human and that it kept this crucial finding secret for months. During that period, Beijing and the WHO were falsely telling the world that the virus could not spread from human to human.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese leaders not only knew the virus was contagious, but that they acted on that knowledge by allowing Chinese nationals to travel freely around the world, spreading the disease, while sharply restricting travel within China from Wuhan. And, finally,
Beijing could be hiding anything and everything simply because that’s how totalitarian regimes operate. They always hide information, control the flow, and prevent outside inspections.

Whatever they’re hiding, they have powerful reasons. The Chinese Communist Party knows how high the stakes are if it is found responsible for a deadly lab leak and for keeping that information secret when others could have acted promptly and saved countless lives. Americans will be outraged, as they should be, and Washington will be forced to take serious action.

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

Many majority Democrat cities have fallen victim to progressive prosecutors. Rather than drive down crime, improve public safety, and promote common sense tough-on-crime policies, these zealots campaign on platforms of structural racism, outcome equity, and restorative justice. In these cities, such performances have in fact become a requirement for the office of district attorney (DA). Aspiring DAs must protest the disproportionate prosecution of minorities without examining the underlying causes; they must clamor for the elimination of cash bail in the name of racial fairness; and they must recommend sentence reduction or alternatives to incarceration to mitigate “past injustices.”

Committed to “reimagining” the criminal justice system in the service of “woke” rhetoric, these DAs are neither acting in the public interest to enforce the law nor honoring their oath of office. They forget that their principal duty is to uphold the law, not crusade for changes driven by their political agenda. In the process, they are emboldening offenders, fostering disrespect for the law, unleashing dangerous criminals on society, and – worst of all – robbing victims of due justice. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who wears his ideological lineage on his sleeve and currently faces a recall campaign, arrogantly claims that a DA can “challenge the legitimacy of a law by declining to bring charges in certain cases.”

Progressive policies have time and again been proven to be misguided, even inimical to public safety.

A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) found that in six jurisdictions with “social justice” prosecutors, reduced conviction rates and fewer guilty outcomes for serious felonies accompanied rising crime rates. It questioned the supplanting of the standard requirement of “competency and experience” for DAs with “ideological zeal.” In his foreword to the study, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III wrote that elected leaders, law enforcement and the media should realize that “leftist ideas of social justice and true criminal justice are not compatible.”

The radicalization of DA offices and the clamor for defunding the police comes as crime rates are skyrocketing and Americans are worried. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 49% of respondents said that violent crime was their top concern, ahead of the pandemic, the economy, political correctness, and race relations.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/06/the-lethal-wages-of-trump-derangement-madness/

Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.

 Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family. 

 Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.

 Most Americans did not care much when the apparently sane went completely insane in their irrational hatred of Trump. Few cared whether Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) wished to destroy his career in trying to predicate his crackpot policies in opposition to Trump. Who worried that Anthony Fauci seemed to have tarnished his distinguished career by his anti-Trump triangulations? Did it matter to anyone that the obsessed Lincoln Project grifters were rendered utterly disgraced, or that the NeverTrumpers were left irrelevant and inert by their irrational and uncontrollable venom?

 Yet, existentially hating everything Trump said or did—as opposed to expressing political opposition to him and his policies—did not just implode elite careers. It also turned deadly. The result of such knee-jerk revulsion was a great deal of damage to the country in general and unnecessary deaths of Americans in particular. 

 For over a year, anyone who questioned the official NIH/NIAID/Fauci narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a new viral mutation that had jumped to humans from bats (or pangolins)—perhaps carved up in the Wuhan wet market—was attacked both personally and professionally. Why? Mostly because Trump himself had questioned just that improbable hypothesis. And Trump certainly could not be right. But even if he were, it was still the moral thing to say he was not.