RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-1-us-to-go-full-venezuela-on-economic-policy

It was in 1998 — a mere 23 years ago — that Hugo Chavez first got elected President of Venezuela. From the start, his program was explicitly one of vastly increased government spending, which was supposed to make the economy grow, reduce income inequality, eliminate poverty and bring about social justice. Chavez called the social programs his “Bolivarian missions.” Among some 30 or so such “missions,” big ones included blowout spending on education, subsidized food, subsidized housing and healthcare.

In the early years, things seemed to be going swimmingly, at least if you believed the official statistics put out by Chavez’s government. Not only was there supposedly steady and mostly rapid economic growth (often over 5% per year, particularly 2004-10), but they also regularly crowed about how the redistributionist spending had greatly reduced the rate of poverty. Then, starting around 2013, it all started to fall apart. Today, eight years later, it continues to fall apart. More details on that later.

Yesterday, the Biden White House put out what they call the “American Jobs Plan.” It’s $2.3 trillion of new government spending, on top of the $1.9 trillion just passed, and several trillion more to come, all on top of a $4 trillion or so annual level of baseline federal spending. Yes, it’s blowout government spending, on the usual issues pushed by advocacy groups, which supposedly will shortly achieve all the usual promises of the left: economic growth, increased economic fairness, and social justice. In other words, it’s the Venezuela economic program, blown up to U.S. scale and then tweaked a little here and there to buy off the squeaky wheels of the moment.

As I pointed out in a post on March 8 addressing the previous $1.9 trillion (“Could This Be The Very Worst Piece Of Legislation Ever?”), that bill was touted as “Covid-19 Relief,” but in fact only about 5% of the spending was for anything that could be called actual public health measures related to the pandemic. The rest was “a grand orgy of vote buying and giveaways to left-wing interest groups.” Following the same playbook, this $2.3 trillion monster calls itself an “infrastructure” plan:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/01/the-coalition-of-the-un-woke/

The metastasis of the “woke” ideology is the most comprehensive threat facing the American republic. It is appallingly totalitarian, insofar as the woke wield the levers of cancel culture to suppress all dissident speech, root out all wrongthink and achieve by sheer force an intellectual homogeneity. It is outright racist, insofar as intersectionality and identity politics, to say nothing of vogue concepts such as “critical race theory” and “racial equity,” overtly discriminate on the basis of race and thus undermine the preeminent American ethos of equal protection under the law.

As if out of a dystopian novel, though, the woke ideology has nonetheless become the unifying creed of the American ruling class. That ruling class, which extends from public sector bureaucracies to the Fortune 500 to Hollywood to Silicon Valley and sundry others in between, has in recent years universally come to imbibe, promulgate and disseminate the core tenets of wokeness.

What’s more, that universality often takes the more insidious form of cross-institutional collusion. As Matthew Schmitz put it in a Tablet essay in September, “Governmental authorities and corporations now coordinate in enforcing the dictates of the new secular progressive faith.”

Thus has the woke ideology completed, à la the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, its long march through the institutions. And let’s not mince words: This is Marxism. As Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony carefully outlined in a Quillette essay in August, “The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists,” but “their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/01/when-will-big-tech-face-a-reckoning-for-january-6/

Nearly 300 Americans face a slew of charges related to the melee on Capitol Hill last January. As I’ve reported over the past few months, offenses range from assaulting a police officer to destroying government property to trespassing.

More than 70 protestors stand accused of “aiding and abetting” various crimes; even people who didn’t vandalize the Capitol or even enter the building have been charged with helping others do damage and interrupt Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results.

Nonviolent offenders languish behind bars for months, denied bail, and transported to Washington, D.C. to await delayed trials. Federal prosecutors suggest President Trump could be indicted for fueling the chaos that day. Democratic congressmen want their Republican colleagues held accountable for their alleged role, too.

One entity, however, appears to be off the hook so far: Big Tech. Social media platforms were instrumental in communicating and organizing the so-called “insurrection” to destroy our democracy, as it’s hyperbolically described by the Left and plenty of Republicans. If random Americans can be held legally responsible for others who commit crimes, then why are Silicon Valley tycoons with immense power and loads of money not similarly liable?

Facebook As Conduit

I’ve reviewed thousands of pages of charging documents and can confirm much of the evidence collected by investigators was found on the defendants’ own social media accounts. Facebook accounts posted the most incriminating content by far. 

For example, in the Justice Department’s conspiracy case against the Oath Keepers, the defendants are accused of “[u]sing websites, social media, text messaging, and messaging applications to recruit other individuals to travel to Washington, D.C., to support the January 6 operation.”

In addition to a conspiracy charge, all 10 Oath Keepers face one count of “aiding and abetting” the obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

But the Oath Keepers’ alleged conspiracy very likely would not have been possible without Facebook. As early as mid-December, according to the indictment, Oath Keepers were using Facebook to post information and direct message others about the January 6 protest. “Trump said It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!! It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!!” Kelly Meggs wrote on Facebook on December 22. “He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!! Gentlemen we are heading to D C (sic) pack your shit!!”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/to_understand_2021_watch_a_kgb_defectors_mid1980s_interview.html

On Thursday, Dan Bongino urged his audience to watch or just listen to a video of Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector to Canada, who came to love America and tried to warn Americans about the KGB’s plans. Listen to him is eerie because he spelled out in detail exactly what the Soviet Union was doing – it wasn’t planning to take America done through the military. Instead, it intended to destroy America from within by infiltrating the education system, three generations of young people to hate this country and each other and then watching them go forth and plan the seeds of self-loathing throughout the nation.

When it came to understanding how the Soviet Union operated, Bezmenov was the real deal. His father was a high-ranking army officer, so Bezmenov was raised inside the system. He went to KGB schools and worked for the KGB for a decade until he defected to the West, eventually landing in Canada.

In the 1980s, Bezmenov was able to move to Los Angeles, where he lived for five years. It was in L.A., in 1984 or 1985, that he gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin, a conservative writer and thinker. During the interview, Bezmenov explained that the Soviet Union was not interested in fighting America. It was interested, instead, in coopting it through psychological warfare. It is that interview that you’ll see below.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-builds-government-back-bigger-11617231190?mod=opinion_major_pos1

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination, but you wouldn’t know from President Biden’s first two months in office. First came $1.9 trillion in social spending under the cover of Covid-19, and now comes $2.3 trillion more for climate and political spending dressed as “infrastructure.”

Most Americans think of infrastructure as roads, highways, bridges and other traditional public works. That’s why it polls well, and every President has supported more of it.

Yet this accounts for a mere $115 billion of Mr. Biden’s proposal. There’s another $25 billion for airports and $17 billion for ports and waterways that also fill a public purpose. The rest of the $620 billion earmarked for “transportation” are subsidies for green energy and payouts to unions for the jobs his climate regulation will kill. This is really a plan to build government back bigger than it has ever been.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/vaccination-passports-cornerstone-totalitarian-matthew-vadum/

“Illegal aliens may not need a real passport to get into America, but actual Americans may soon need a vaccination passport to travel inside America if they don’t take action.America needs to get back to being America, not this nightmarish dystopia we are rapidly becoming.”

Vaccination passports, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want everyone to be forced to carry, are profoundly un-American.

This data-driven authoritarianism, if it comes to pass, will wash away what remains of the rule of law and the Constitution, and annihilate the American way of life.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) inflicted their possibly lab-designed Wuhan Virus on America, and now we get their Social Credit System, their totalitarian digital architecture for society as well.

America’s placeholder president, the Communist Chinese ventriloquist’s dummy who fantasizes about becoming the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wants these vaccination passports badly.

POTUS 46* signed Executive Order 13998 on January 21 directing government agencies to “assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.”

The Biden-Harris administration is now working on a “vaccine passport” for Americans to carry to prove they have received a vaccination against the novel coronavirus, according to the Washington Post.

“The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” the Jeff Bezos mouthpiece reports. “Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.”

Five administration sources supposedly told the “Democracy dies in darkness” fabulists that COVID Czar Jeff Zients is working with unidentified private entities to institute the program. A reported 30 international airlines are said to be demanding vaccine passports.

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.