RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/02/biden-white-house-wildly-misleads-public-on-covid-vaccines/

The Biden administration is playing up its role in combating the COVID-19 pandemic, big time.

“Help is here,” shouts a headline at the top of the WhiteHouse.gov website, referring to the $1.9 trillion spending extravaganza President Joe Biden signed a few weeks ago.

There’s no mention of the $3 trillion in help that was delivered last year by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump — in record time — to help small businesses stay afloat, workers stay attached to their jobs, customers to keep spending, and that has led to an economic recovery faster than the “experts” predicted.

But where the White House is really being deceptive is when it comes to vaccination progress.

On the front page of WhiteHouse.gov is a bar chart showing how many shots have been delivered relative to Biden’s new goal of 200 million shots by April 29. (See chart below.)

There’s a curious feature about this chart, however. Based on the scale, there were zero shots administered on Day 1 of the Biden administration. The chart is divided up into equal 50 million shot increments. So, it appears that on Biden’s “Day 1” there’d been none, when in there had already been more than 21 million shots administered.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/theres-no-place-in-americas-military-for-racist-training/

Critical race theory threatens the U.S. military’s mission of defending in combat the Constitution and our way of life from enemies who would destroy and subjugate us.

When President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the military in 1948, he invoked the United States’ commitment to “equality of treatment and opportunity for all” as his reason for doing so.

Unfortunately, more than 70 years after Truman’s executive order, racist and un-American ideas of unequal treatment are creeping back into the Armed Forces under the guise of so-called critical race theory.

Critical race theory repudiates the principle of equality under the law that is articulated in the Declaration of Independence and that has motivated civil-rights reformers for generations. It claims that this American ideal is a sham used by the white majority to oppress racial minorities, and consequently that America is racist to its core. The theory concludes that the only way to end perceived discrimination against racial minorities is to systematically discriminate on their behalf — to fight fire with fire, so to speak. As Ibram X. Kendi, a leading agitator for critical race theory, wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Kendi’s belief in unequal treatment and discrimination has been embraced in fashionable left-wing circles. Increasingly, this ideology is institutionalized in corporate America, higher education, and other elite sectors in the form of “implicit bias training” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” offices. Sadly, now these racist ideas are even being taught to our troops.

Last month, the Navy released a recommended reading list to facilitate the “growth and development” of sailors. One of the books on this list is How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi’s bestseller advocating critical race theory. Separately, the Navy’s Second Fleet created a book club for sailors to read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, a book that claims white people are inherently racist, whether consciously or subconsciously, and that race is the insidious subtext for virtually all human interactions.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/01/bidens_bait-and-switch_presidency_145512.html

Joe Biden was elected as a moderate-left Democrat, but he is not governing as one. He pledged repeatedly to work across party lines, but he is ramming through the biggest, most expensive progressive agenda in American history without any Republican votes. He is almost certain to try it again with his next two spending proposals, the largest since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. As the White House pushes these mammoth bills with only Democratic votes, Americans are realizing they got a very different president from the one they bargained for, the one they were promised during the campaign. What’s unclear is whether they will recoil from this new reality.

Throughout the summer and fall, Biden ran as a unifier who could work across party lines. He wanted to do so, he said, and he reiterated that comforting message as late as his inaugural address. It was probably his most important policy message, and Americans believed it. They remembered his years in the Senate and his primary victory over socialist Bernie Sanders.

The reality has been very different from the promises. Biden’s pledge of bipartisanship and unity turned out to be a cynical sleight-of-hand, raw partisanship masquerading as comity. In the general election, it worked well enough to defeat a divisive incumbent, whose impulsiveness, rancor, and personal attacks repulsed many Americans. Now that the election is over, so is the message. Despite razor-thin Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, Biden is determined to pass an ambitious agenda with no support from Republicans.

The clearest indication of Biden’s bait and switch came with the stimulus bill. Before signaling his final position, the president reached out to Republicans, who proposed a $600 billion package, focused on immediate needs plus some fiscal stimulus.

The bipartisan meeting was all for show. Biden quickly rejected the Republicans’ proposal, made no effort to meet with them again or negotiate any compromise, and chose instead to push for a bill three times as large, much of it to be spent long after the COVID crisis has passed. The extra $1.3 trillion did not include the infrastructure and other programs he now considers essential. Those are coming in additional bills with huge price tags and associated tax hikes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/powerful-evidence-that-george-floy

The case is more complicated than prosecutors would have it.

G eorge Floyd forcibly resisted arrest. He did not verbally threaten the arresting officers, but he used significant force against them to try to prevent being taken into custody. He did not merely refuse to comply with their directives.

That was the upshot of Wednesday, the third day of the Derek Chauvin trial, in which the fired officer is charged with two counts of murdering Floyd, as well as with a count of negligently causing his death (manslaughter).

Though prosecutors tried some misdirection, the video and audio recordings are clear: Floyd, at six-foot, four-inches and 223 pounds (according to the autopsy report), was so determined not to be placed in the back of the squad car that, even though he was handcuffed, four grown men — police officers trained in the use of force, and pushing and pulling for all they were worth — could not get him to take a seated position.

This does not mean the officers’ prolonged restraint of Floyd later on, as his life faded, was justified. That is the central issue the jury will have to resolve. But the latest evidence helps better explain what preceded the infamous and grim video footage of Floyd under Chauvin’s knee.

Notably, Floyd’s now-famous statements that he could not breathe and that police were killing him, as well as his cries for his mother, were not just reactions — as prosecutors and political activists have framed it — to his being placed in a neck hold by Chauvin after police put him in a dangerous prone position on the street. In reality, Floyd began calling for his mother, and crying out that he could not breathe and was going to die, while police were trying to get him to sit in the back of the squad car. Those claims may have been sincere, but if so, they were spurred by what Floyd maintained were his “claustrophobia” and anxiety over being taken into custody, not by the neck hold in which Chauvin subsequently placed him.

What’s more, it was not the idea of the arresting officers to place Floyd in a prone position on the street. Rather, after propelling his way out of the squad-car rear seat that four cops unsuccessfully struggled to place him in, Floyd insisted that he preferred to lie down on the street. The police restrained him in the position in which he put himself, which was not the position they wanted him in (they wanted him in the car). Reasonably convinced that Floyd was high on drugs (a conclusion supported by his erratic behavior, the accounts of witnesses, and later toxicology tests), the police called for paramedics to take him to a hospital, rather than continuing to try to thrust him in the squad car and take him into police custody.

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-times-turns-blind-eye-to-violence-in-miami

As the trial of officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd begins, downtown Minneapolis has already boarded itself up, though the verdict is months away.

Unlike the fencing that arose around Washington following the January 6 Capitol riot, the Minneapolis precautions are fully justified. Indeed, the bollards and barricades will grow denser as the verdict nears but will still prove inadequate if Chauvin is not convicted of murder.

A firestorm would engulf the city and the nation that will dwarf the riotous destruction of 2020. No trial of a police officer to date has been preceded by the anti-police sentiment and admonitory violence seen over the last year. It is improbable, therefore, that the Chauvin jury will vote to acquit, whatever evidence the defense presents.

In the unlikely event that Chauvin is acquitted, however, the New York Times recently provided a preview of how it and the rest of the mainstream media will cover the ensuing riots. Earlier this month, Miami Beach endured anarchic behavior from an influx of spring break tourists.

Shootings and street brawls triggered stampedes. People hit one another with bar glasses and chairs. More than 100 guns have been confiscated. Officers trying to disperse large, illegally gathering crowds were assaulted with rocks and bottles. Commercial property was destroyed. Restaurant customers walked away from their meals without paying. At least one hotel shut down its food service, unable to protect its employees and patrons. Police made over 350 felony arrests and twice as many misdemeanor arrests.

And in the most serious crime, two spring breakers from North Carolina drugged a 24-year-old woman from Pennsylvania and raped her while she was passed out, according to the confession of one. The two assailants left her semi-nude and unconscious in her hotel room, stealing her phone and wallet for good measure. Apparently confident in their immunity from the law, they used her credit cards throughout Miami Beach for subsequent purchases. A few hours after the two rapists walked out of her hotel room, hotel staff found her dead there.

It is a virtually inviolate rule that if police crack down on disorder involving black people, the New York Times will accuse the police of racism. This rule held regarding the Miami Beach festivities. The Times covered the chaos only to criticize Miami officials’ anti-black bias.

Faced with rising mob mayhem, Miami’s mayor declared an 8:00 p.m. curfew for Saturday, March 19. It was universally ignored. The streets were impassable; thousands of people stuck around. The city declared a state of emergency. Police officers in riot gear tried to disperse the crowd with pepper balls, to minimal effect.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-americas-big-lie-11617315583?st=sahl3jgmexpu4nw&reflink=article_email_share

Corporate chieftains last year criticized Donald Trump for denying his re-election defeat. So it’s quite a spectacle to see them actively spreading the left’s own big lie about elections.

According to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, there is only one reason Georgia passed a voting reform: to suppress the votes of black Americans and other minorities. Georgia’s Republican Legislature used the “excuse” of voter fraud to “make it harder for many underrepresented voters” to “exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” Mr. Bastian wrote this week in a memo to employees.

Mr. Bastian has plenty of company in the C-suites. Some 72 black executives, including the CEO of Merck and a former CEO of American Express, signed an open letter calling on corporate colleagues to fight “undemocratic” and “un-American” GOP efforts across the states to “assault” the “fundamental tenets of our democracy.” Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Apple chimed in, and dozens more are readying outraged press releases.

Nancy Pelosi couldn’t be more thrilled. Democrats and the activist left have long honed their techniques for intimidating corporations. They successfully pressured companies into withdrawing contributions from free-market groups, into embracing a climate-change agenda, into refraining from political contributions, into adopting new “social” investment criteria.

Enlisting corporate America to help peddle a patently false narrative is their biggest success by far. The left spent last year using litigation and political pressure to alter and weaken election standards across the country. Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration moved swiftly to cement this effort with a federal takeover of state election law, the bill known as H.R.1.

Its enactment is still no sure thing, so the left is trying to block election-reform efforts at the state level. Central to this campaign is the dishonest claim that Republicans are launching these efforts only because they lost the White House and because they want to cripple the minority vote. Activists have spent weeks threatening companies that didn’t join them with boycotts, protests and the label of “Jim Crow racists,” and companies have complied.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/biden_left_with_egg_on_his_face_as_facts_of_capitol_riot_wind_through_courts.html

Democrats have been bloviating for months now about an “insurrection” and a ‘threat to democracy’ in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. They’ve razor-wired up the Capitol and deployed tens of thousands of unsmiling National Guard troops, making the capital of the free world look more like Kinshasa, Yamoussoukro, Damascus, or Cairo. Joe Biden called it an “existential” threat to the U.S., trying to go Sartre on us. Democrat narrative-maker (and creative writing major) Ben Rhodes, according to MSNBC claimed:  “The Jan 6th insurrection was a ‘terrorist attack on the heart of American democracy.’”

Which presumably should have offered some pitched battles, explosions, blood in the streets, heads on pikes, mobs with torches, and lots and lots of guns, the way other people’s insurrections do.

Nope, the miserable event was nothing but a pumped-up crowd upset about election fraud, with a few bounders, and a situation that got out of control with an inadequate Capitol police guard allowing, or even inviting them, to come in to the Capitol to yell about it.

This occurred as Congress formalized the presidential vote for Joe Biden, in an election where all signs point to a lot of ballot fraud.

The rest was just protest theatre, plenty of arrests, lot of trespassing, some vandalism, lots of selfies posted conveniently for prosecutors on social media, lots of tattling, and no question as to how the outcome was going to turn out. There were five deaths, four of unarmed protestors, including one who was shot at close range in the neck by an unnamed Capitol police officer, and one of a police officer who was quickly cremated amid shifting stories, and a mendacious New York Times report, with inflammatory claims about the circumstances of how he died. That’s since been discredited, leaving them with egg all over their faces.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/31/radical-new-rules-for-post-america/

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.

Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions, and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law.

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the Left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer.

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of “good” racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws.

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the “founders” than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable.

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves.

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing, and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating, and air conditioning.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/04/01/the-morning-briefing-lol-words-dont-mean-anything-and-everything-is-racist-now-n1436586

There is so much to learn about ourselves, society, and history if we just put aside our privilege and pay attention to the ongoing, probably drug-induced, fictional account of reality that leftists are writing these days.

Everything in their telling of the story is different than what most have learned, feel, or see in front of us. I occasionally think that the progs are visiting from a parallel dimension and sharing accounts of what things are like in their worlds. Turns out they are all living here. They’re just experiencing things differently.

Miserably, mostly.

We’ve known for a while now that the Left rejects absolute truth and objective reality. They probably hate apple pie too, but that’s going to require further research.

The current state of the leftist collective fever focuses on creating permanent divisions among people that go above and beyond the ones that already exist. Yes, we’re often a terrible species, but they’d like us to find new reasons to hate each other and ourselves.

A great way to do that is to just start making stuff up.

Matt had a couple of posts yesterday that perfectly illustrated how the Left is working overtime to convince people that white supremacy and racism permeate, well, everything.

The first one had to do with a dictionary arbitrarily redefining words to mean something other than what they actually mean:

Merriam-Webster has recently updated its definition of what it means to be racially color-blind. And, in a nutshell, it means it’s impossible to not be racist.