RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/antony-blinken-continues-to-lecture?token=eyJ1c

How can you feign anger over others’ attacks on a free press when you imprison Assange as punishment for his vital revelations about U.S. officials?

Continuing his world tour doling out righteous lectures to the world, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday proclaimed — in a sermon you have to hear to believe — that few things are more sacred in a democracy than “independent journalism.” Speaking to Radio Free Europe, Blinken paid homage to “World Press Freedom Day”; claimed that “the United States stands strongly with independent journalism”; explained that “the foundation of any democratic system” entails “holding leaders accountable” and “informing citizens”; and warned that “countries that deny freedom of the press are countries that don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves or in their systems.”

The rhetorical cherry on top of that cake came when he posed this question: “What is to be afraid of in informing the people and holding leaders accountable?” The Secretary of State then issued this vow: “Everywhere journalism and freedom of the press is challenged, we will stand with journalists and with that freedom.” Since I know that I would be extremely skeptical if someone told me that those words had just come out Blinken’s mouth, I present you here with the unedited one-minute-fifty-two-second video clip of him saying exactly this:

That the Biden administration is such a stalwart believer in the sanctity of independent journalism and is devoted to defending it wherever it is threatened would come as a great surprise to many, many people. Among them would be Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and the person responsible for breaking more major stories about the actions of top U.S. officials than virtually all U.S. journalists employed in the corporate press combined.

https://sapirjournal.org/social-justice/2021/05/critical-race-theory-and-the-hyper-white-jew/

Imagine you’ve just been accepted to college. You open your welcome packet. It contains the bestseller all first-year students are expected to read: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. You flip to a random page and read, “Only whites can be racist.” You flip to another page where you read that to deny being racist is itself evidence of “white fragility.” You wonder what you’re supposed to do in order to not have “white fragility.” 

You dutifully read the book.

Your first day arrives. You decorate your room with pictures. Your favorite is the one of you and your extended family in Israel when you were little. Your cousins live in Tel Aviv and you love visiting them. You hang a hamsa above your desk. Your roommate seems nice. 

The theme of orientation is “Campus Inclusion.” The first thing you learn about is “microaggressions.” The associate dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion explains that perpetrators of microaggressions are often unaware of the harm they’re causing. They can even have good intentions. But as the handout says, “almost all interracial encounters are prone to microaggressions.”

You were looking forward to meeting people from different backgrounds. You didn’t realize it would be so fraught — you don’t want to perpetrate anything. It never would have occurred to you that asking someone where he’s from could be a microaggression. Or that saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” is. Even saying “America is a melting pot” is on the list.

You cringe when you read that it’s a microaggression to say “there is only one race, the human race.” That’s something your grandmother always says. Her father, who survived several concentration camps, used to say that, too. They aren’t racist. But according to the list, it’s also a microaggression to deny being racist. 

You wonder whether it’s a microaggression to deny being antisemitic. You look on the list for examples of microaggressions against Jews. There aren’t any.

In your second year, you attend a campus protest against systemic racism. You hear from the Asian American and Pacific Islander Student Union, the Latinx Student Union, the LGBTQIA+ Alliance, the Black Student Union, and the leaders of student government. All of them reiterate in various ways that any system with unequal outcomes is a “white supremacist” system. “We’re either racist or antiracist,” says Sandra, the president of the student government. She adds, quoting this year’s summer reading for all students, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist: “The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/the-partisan-exaggeration-of-right-wing-terrorism/

Terrorist incidents in the West peaked in 2017, and have fallen dramatically since, mainly due to the defeat of the Islamic State. Yet the politics of fear demands a substitute: right-wing terrorism. “Right-wing” is stretched so broadly today that it conflates ethnic and religious identities, i.e., whites and Christians. Identity politics is fashionable but makes for terrible analysis.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with a rarefied left-wing news site (Quartz, then under the same ownership as The Atlantic magazine) to claim that two-thirds of American terrorism in 2017 was right-wing. Their “right-wing” categories were slippery, including “alt-light,” as a gateway to “alt-right.” Worse, they categorized both anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism as right-wing. Extremist Muslims and Jews hate each other. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center put them together as right-wing allies. Such an equation prevents admission of the fact that anti-Semitism is the bigger problem, and largely jihadi. 

United States official data for 2019 shows that more than 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed against Jews, while 13 percent are directed against Muslims (about the same as all Christians).

The Anti-Defamation League jumped on the bandwagon of fearmongering over “right-wing” terrorism, by launching its own study of American “extremist violence.” In January 2019, the ADL reported right-wing extremists as the “biggest threat” by the “numbers.” The report uses the term “white supremacist” interchangeably with “right-wing.” Here, critical race theory meets left-wing partisanship. 

But the ADL does not fully reveal its data or methods. By contrast, official statistics show that whites (72 percent of Americans) are underrepresented in hate crimes (52.5 percent of perpetrators of hate crimes in 2019 were white). And there is no upward trend in white perps.

Trends tend to get pushed behind unrepresentative events. In the deadliest attack of 2018, a white male shot 11 people to death at synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was officially categorized as white supremacist (although all the victims were white). The ADL effectively treated that single event as evidence for a multi-year trend.

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.