RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/cancel_culture_and_identity_politics_are_the_road_to_a_oneparty_state.html

America is at war. This time the enemy isn’t on some distant battlefield or hiding in a barren cave thousands of miles away. Instead, the enemy is not only here, but it’s ruling over us.

That’s the powerful message of David Horowitz’s latest book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America. This isn’t just a warning, it’s the reality around us.

“Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War,” Horowitz writes. “In the course of the anti-Trump wars, we have become two nations with little shared ground on the core issues that previously defined us.” And it’s the Left that brought us to this state, not just in the last five years, but going all the way back to the fundamental strategy of its divisive politics.

In The Enemy Within, Horowitz exposes the Communist roots of identity politics that have been used to turn Americans against each other and reduce them to hostile warring tribes, rather than citizens of a common nation invested in its welfare, success, and prosperity.

Identity politics is the delegitimization of America and Americans. It’s a hate campaign that justifies any extremity, and any attack on the country and her people. “It is this regressive attack on America’s fundamental principles by the Left that is the source of the irreconcilable conflicts and ugly passions that are currently tearing the nation’s fabric apart,” Horowitz writes.

Class warfare, racial warfare, gender warfare, and the countless other forms of identity politics injected into schools, workplaces, government offices, and every area of life are aimed at forcing Americans to identify radically and tribally, rather than nationally. Divide and conquer.

David Horowitz, a veteran of the radical politics of the Left, has the knowledge, the experience, and the training to expose not just what the movement he was once a part of is doing, but the ideological origins of its tactics, and how they feed it into its dreadful vision for America.

America is delegitimized through revisionist history smears, like the 1619 Project, that rewrite the powerful force for equality and freedom that is the true history of the United States into the big lie of systemic racism, while Americans are accused of various forms of oppressive privilege so that, just by existing, they oppress everyone who does not fit into the same artificial category.

In The Enemy Within, Horowitz tackles the radical and racist roots of these ideas, from Karl Marx to Derrick Bell, a supporter of Farrakhan, and how they exploded into violence and tyranny in the streets of our cities and the halls of power as Black Lives Matter mobs used lies to unleash racist violence and Democrat officials used racist myths to build a one-party state.

But it’s not just BLM.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/10/do-vaccine-resisters-risk-being-wacod/

Because of the natural mutation the clever little RNA strand undergoes, it is clear to anyone with a critical mind that the COVID-19 vaccines will go the way of the flu vaccines: An annual affair if one chooses to make it so.

Choice, alas, is quickly becoming a quaint concept in COVID-compliant America.

Vaccine Passports 

The possibility of a vaccine passport, a “certification of vaccination that reduces public-health restrictions for their carriers,” has been floated. Without finesse, it amounts to, “Your papers, bitte!”

While Fox’s Tucker Carlson did term the idea an Orwellian one—it took civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald, the odd-man-out among the authoritarian Left, to place the concept of a vaccine passport in proper perspective.

The popular TV host (and perhaps the only good thing on Fox News) had asked Greenwald if he felt a vaccine passport “would work to convince more Americans to get vaccinated.”

But judging a policy by its positive outcomes for the collective, rather than by whether it violates individual rights is utilitarianism. It is the rule among politicians and pundits. 

“It doesn’t work”: How often have you heard those words used to describe grave violations of your rights? As if using coercion to decrease “vaccine hesitancy”—is ever a good reason for coercing vaccination! As if employing coercion to decrease “vaccine hesitancy” is ever an appropriate use of state or corporate power!

The Benthamite utilitarian calculus is thus rightly associated with a collectivist, central planner’s impetus.

America’s founders, conversely, held a Blackstonian view of the law as a bulwark against government abuses. Their take has since been supplanted by the notion of the law as an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the “greater good.”

To his great credit, later in the program, Carlson did advance a rights-based argument against the vaccine-passport outrage: the individual right to privacy.

It fell, however, to Greenwald to take note of the three different ways in which the passports constitute a draconian invasion: 

Number one, coercing citizens to put a substance into their body that they don’t want in their body, a pretty grave invasion of bodily autonomy, one of the most fundamental rights we have. Secondly, gathering a new database that can track people in terms of their health, that can easily be expanded as government programs often do into a whole variety of other uses, and then thirdly, . . . restricting people’s movement. Freedom of movement is one of the most fundamental rights we have. It’s actually guaranteed in the Constitution.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-should-be-done-to-curb-big-tech

Do your eyes gloss over when you see the words “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act”? Mine do.

Yet the subject of Big Tech’s might — Should Facebook have the power to ban a president? Should Amazon have the power to ban the sale of a controversial book? Should Twitter have the power to permanently bar a user over a single tweet? And if not, what should the government be doing about it? — is both fascinating and incredibly important.

I don’t think there is a group left in America who is happy about the power that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google have arrogated to themselves. According to a recent poll from Vox and Data for Progress, 59% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans think Big Tech’s economic power is a problem. It’s hard to think of another issue with that kind of bipartisan consensus.

The nature of your anger, of course, depends on where you sit. (Twitter’s decision to ban Trump in January found 87% approval from Democrats and a mere 28% of Republicans in the same poll.) But the point is that this subject touches everyone. 

So why is so much of the writing about tech so confusing? One of the reasons it confuses, I think, is that the loudest “progressive” and “conservative” arguments are the opposite of what you’d imagine.

Progressives are supposed to be against corporate power. And yet on this subject, they are the ones pushing for more of it. They are enraged that these companies don’t crack down harder on “disinformation,” arguing that the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of the world put profit above principle when they allow groups like QAnon to run wild on their platforms. Sure, President Trump was banned, but only after he lost the election. Why didn’t it happen earlier? Private companies are not hamstrung by the First Amendment, so why do they hesitate to ban dangerous people whose online words lead to real-world violence?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/when_a_jewish_teacher_union_b

Randi Weingarten, leader of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers union) has made a malicious smear against the Jewish community that would normally be characterized as anti-Semitic, but it may get a pass because she happens to be Jewish. 

She was asked a very appropriate question: “Why are the teachers across the nation in major cities still refusing to go back and teach children in the classroom in public schools?”  Instead of acknowledging the problem, she strangely shifted into a tirade against the Jewish community.  She castigated Jews by saying, “American Jews are part of the ownership class … who now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it.”  She took legitimate criticism of her union’s refusal to go back to work as a prompt to demonize the Jewish community.  Historically, this was labeled “scapegoating.”  Scapegoating is the practice of dodging and deflecting a legitimate concern by parlaying each issue against the Jewish people or the hard-work result of Jewish financial success and ownership.

Ms. Weingarten is tragically another example of someone denouncing her own people and inciting others against Jews in order to be the darling of the left, thereby climbing the ladder of political power.  She understands that today, power in leftist and minority circles is achieved by those who blame Jews.  This has become the left-wing formula.

If anything, those from the Jewish community, who have been critical of teachers being the last holdouts to return to work while still drawing their salary and full benefits, are acting as plaintiffs for the students in public school who will fall behind as a consequence of their school activities being shelved.  Indeed, they’ve been acting to keep the rungs of the ladder intact.  Thus, one would think there would be significant blowback from the “race police” against Weingarten’s obvious smear of Jews.

But it has not happened.  That is because the laws of “wokeness” on behalf all minorities do not include Jews.  Jews have been excluded from the victimization monopoly; they are not in the pecking order.  You can say anything you want against Jews, just as with whites and Christians, if the accusations can be parlayed into an indictment against those pre-perceived as oppressors of the intersectional officialdom. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/08/clarence-thomas-shows-the-path-forward-on-big-tech/

A realignment, as many have observed, is now unfolding in American politics. The Republican Party and its conservatism is now the home for the “Somewheres,” to borrow the term from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, which refers to the more traditionalist, hardscrabble patriots of the American heartland. The Democratic Party and its increasingly hard-left progressivism, by contrast, is the home for the “Anywheres”—those highly educated, mobile, “woke” elites comprising the bicoastal ruling class.

The Big Tech issue is the tip of the spear of the realignment. As has been made painfully obvious the last few years, with last October’s collusive Big Tech assault on the New York Post for its election-season reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas travails serving as an eye-opening pinnacle, Big Tech is now the ruling class’s catspaw. These modern-day robber barons are willing and able to lend their censorious assistance to the ruling class’s ruthless entrenchment of its ideological and political hegemony. Big Tech, in short, is the leading private-sector appendage with which the Anywheres cow into submission and subjugate the Somewheres.

This emergent reality has caused no shortage of heart palpitations among some of the more “liberal” elements of the American conservative firmament. Conservatives, many were taught, stand for unadulterated laissez-faire and a staunch commitment to deregulating corporate America. What to do, then, when those unshackled big corporations turn around and come after us?

The answer, for many, has been to carefully reassess what exactly it is we stand for as conservatives—especially as it pertains to unaccountable, concentrated corporate titans who control the 21st-century equivalents of the old public square. To wit, there is nothing particularly “conservative” about a zealous, dogmatic refusal to countenance state actions that might better channel the content curation and moderation decisions of a behemoth such as Amazon—which has at least an 80 percent market share in digital books—toward the common good of the American polity. Ditto Google, which has a nearly 90 percent market share in online search.

But the historical bromance between the GOP and chamber of commerce-style corporatism has been an obstinate hindrance to reform. Big Tech-skeptical, pro-realignment conservatives have all too often had their legal and policy arguments on such issues as antitrust enforcement and Section 230 reform thrown back in their faces by doctrinaire, limited-government enthusiasts who insist that True Conservatism is synonymous with hands-off private-sector fundamentalism. “Build your own Google!” the corporatists and libertarians have scowled.

On Monday, the most important conservative lawyer in the nation, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, came out swinging on the side of the reformers.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/08/january-6-is-the-new-russiagate-lie/

The Russiagate scandal, for lack of a better term, revealed to the general public the seamless compact between the Democratic Party, major news organizations, and powerful government agencies. 

Partisan operatives—be they ruthless DNC lawyers, paid spin masters, or former British spies—easily accessed the country’s influential decision makers to seed storylines targeting their political foes. Narratives were shaped with all the right terms, then dutifully recited by congressional leaders and media mouthpieces. Those on the other side taking incoming fire barely had a chance to see what was coming, let alone to respond with equal force.

Later, when the facts finally came out and the bad actors both behind the scenes and in front of the cameras were revealed as shameless frauds, no one was held accountable. And a sizable chunk of Americans continues to believe all the falsehoods because disowning them would vindicate people they unreasonably despise.

Which is why the overwhelming majority of Democrats still think Donald Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election.

The manufactured deception about the events of January 6 quickly is approaching Russiagate levels. The formula is familiar: Find a catchy phrase—in this case it’s “insurrection” instead of “collusion”—then fertilize the information ecosystem with the term and watch it grow like a weed.

Get political leaders including former presidents and top lawmakers of both parties to use the description, giving it immediate legitimacy. Issue dire warnings about the “threat to democracy” and “rule of law.” Identify the villain—Donald Trump, of course—and make solemn pledges to hunt down every perpetrator until justice is done.

Sympathy-inducing optics are helpful but not always necessary.

Critical cogs in this sort of performative outrage are government authorities who use their offices to convince the public the whole thing is on the square. This is precisely what happened with the now discredited trope that five people died as a result of the chaos on January 6. A brief report issued Wednesday by the office of the D.C. medical examiner confirmed only one person, Ashli Babbitt, was killed that day.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/fund-coronavirus-research-not-a-climate-change-musical

I’ve been a science nerd almost all my life. In graduate school, I was the co-discoverer of a bacterial enzyme essential to DNA replication and of a key enzyme in the influenza virus. I have written more than a thousand articles concerned with science and science policy. I’m convinced that America’s prosperity is based on post-WWII preeminence in science and technology, much of it financed by federal funding.

You might think, then, that I’d be thrilled to learn that the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives wants to more than double the budget of the National Science Foundation over the next five years. That’s a hike of $8.5 billion to $18.3 billion. The Senate is working on a companion bill. Unfortunately, at least as currently conceived by the Senate, this legislation will maintain NSF’s “unity of structure” and protect NSF’s existing programs. There’s the rub.

Research is the lifeblood of technological innovation, which, in turn, drives economic growth and keeps America prosperous. Government-funded scientific research runs the gamut from studies of basic physical and biological processes to the development of applications to meet immediate needs. Basic science, which elucidates the fundamental processes in fields such as aging, cancer biology, immunology, and virology, is also worthy of federal research funding. However, the definition of what constitutes “science” has gradually expanded to include sociology, economics, and “alternative medicine.” Much of the spending on these disciplines by the nation’s two major funders of non-military research, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, shortchange taxpayers. Considering their collective budgets amount to more than $50 billion, this is no small concern.

The NSF, whose mission is to ensure U.S. leadership in areas of science and technology that are essential to economic growth and national security, frequently funds politically correct but low-value research projects. This trend is likely to accelerate during the Biden administration.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/09/bidens-stalin-esque-5-year-plans/

In 1928, during his first year of what became known as the Stalin era, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin issued his first five-year plan, a centralized economic blueprint that focused on industrialization and collectivism. In 2021, during his first year as president of the United States, Joe Biden introduced a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan that both the White House and its cheerleaders have called “transformative.”

History tells us Stalin’s plans were transformative, too.

Before we go any further, we state here for the record that Biden is not Stalin. Not even close.

Yet we see policy parallels that should make Americans – at least those who still relish freedom from big government – mighty uncomfortable.

Biden is not unique in pitching an infrastructure plan. Donald Trump had an infrastructure plan. Most politicians, from president to members of the smallest city council in the country, like infrastructure projects. But Biden’s objectives are different. There’s more social engineering than civil engineering in his proposal.

Actually, there’s much more.

Of the $2.3 trillion Biden proposes to spend, only $921 billion would be dedicated to what most agree is infrastructure. As we noted earlier this week, the remainder “would go to pet Democrat projects, payoffs to unions and left-wing groups, squirrelly climate change projects, money for misgoverned and impecunious Blue States, and other waste.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-plan-for-economic-sclerosis-11617907075?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Biden has proposed a back-to-the-future tax plan. When President Trump took office, the U.S. had the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world and had experienced a decade of slow growth, low investment and stagnant employment and real wages. The Obama economy was especially toxic for low-earning and less-educated groups. The assault on business was so widespread that capital’s contribution to economic growth was lower during the Obama expansion than it had been during any other period of growth since World War II.

The academic literature on corporate taxation pointed to the problem. High corporate taxes, a regulatory assault and social programs that discourage work and advancement led many U.S. multinational companies to locate their activity and profits overseas. This reduced or eliminated their tax in the U.S. while also reducing their demand for American labor. Wages dropped and tax revenue dropped, a double hit.

The idea of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was to make America an attractive location for capital formation again, and to drive wages up by increasing productivity. Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated that wages for a typical family would grow about $4,000 over the first three to five years. Though the Obama administration proposed a corporate tax cut in 2015 for the same reasons, opponents of the bill ridiculed the Trump team’s numbers.

The economic data vindicated Mr. Trump. Actual gross domestic product by the end of 2019 was about $300 billion higher than the Congressional Budget Office had projected in July 2017. Business investment was about $100 billion higher and 2.8 million more workers were employed. U.S. firms repatriated $1.4 trillion in cash that was previously stuck overseas. And in the first two years after the tax cuts were passed, real median household income increased $4,900. Employment surged, especially among the long-term unemployed, the poor and minorities. Wealth for the bottom 50% of households advanced three times as fast as for the top 1%.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Jews comprise 13% of the population of New York and have been here since the 17th century. There are approximately 1.5 million Jews in New York City, the largest population of anywhere outside of Israel. To get some idea of what Jews have contributed to our city, look at the names carved on walls at colleges, hospitals, libraries and Lincoln Center – these represent just the charitable contributions Jews have made without mentioning their othercontributions to our lives – the most recent of which is development of the Pfizer vaccine by the son of a Holocaust survivor.
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So it is with surprise bordering on disbelief that neither the NYTimes nor the Wall Street Journal called attention to the April 8th commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Instead, the Journal had a front page article about Muslims giving up coffee for Ramadan, including a picture of Palestinians at a festive Gaza Market on p. 18. The NYTimes chose to cover Biden’s cancellation of Trump’s boycott of U.S. funds for Palestinian “refugees” while they supported and rewarded terrorists. Instead, we will now afford them $235 million dollars of assistance. It’s interesting that both papers chose to deal with Muslims whose population in New York is roughly half that of Jews.

438,500 Americans lost their lives in World War 2. When our G.I.’s liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, General Eisenhower insisted that members of Congress and journalists be summoned to see and report on the atrocities that were performed there. Eisenhower’s statement was: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against.”
Anti-semitism in America is on the rise and is part and parcel of Black Lives Matter. Local t.v. news has headlined the vicious attacks on Asian people but few channels covered the attack on a Chasidic family pushing a baby carriage in Brooklyn a few days ago. They were assaulted by a man who slashed the father, mother and year old baby on their faces. It would seem that we are in very desperate need of remembering what happened to six million Jews and nearly half a million Americans who lost their lives during the Holocaust. How shameful that the editors of New York’s most important newspapers chose to forget them.