RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/when-tony-met-kary-lloyd-billingsley/

“As we get into the end of the summer, the beginning of the fall of 2021, we can start to approach some degree of normality,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci as he rang in the new year. People might wonder if it was 2022 that Fauci really had in mind for “the approach of some degree of normality.”

For most of 2020, Dr. Fauci claimed that to reach herd immunity about 60 to 70 percent of the nation would need a vaccine. Then in a December 24 interview with the New York Times, Fauci said he had been looking at “polls” showing that only half of all Americans would take a vaccine. Fauci thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” and boosted the number for herd immunity to 80-85 percent. That caught the attention of Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican. 

Fauci “made the decision to mislead with nothing but good intentions,” said Rubio in December 30 Fox News opinion piece. “However, let’s be clear about what he was doing: lying to the American people in order to manipulate their behavior.”

Fauci is an “unelected technocrat,” Rubio wrote, and “if he wants to lead the nation, he should run for office.” If not, “he should give us an honest and transparent reading of the science, not polling data, and let the rest of us —policymakers and the American people who have elected them — do our jobs.”

That long overdue smackdown was hardly the first Fauci had received. Back in the 1990s, one of the world’s leading scientists held doubts that Fauci  should even be an unelected bureaucrat.

“This man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you will know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/new-york-city-back-daniel-greenfield/

New York is back! No, I don’t mean Rudy Giuliani’s revived New York City. I mean the nightmarish New York City of Dinkins, Beame and Lindsay.

I mean the Death Wish and Warriors city.

And now Bill de Blasio’s New York City before it’s passed on to some even more nightmarishly incompetent and corrupt leftist whose only agenda is identity politics.

New York City is back, baby.

Bat-wielding man injures multiple people in NYC during crazy crime spree – New York Post

Violence adds to NYC’s 2020 death toll, with 97% jump in shootings and 45% increase in murders — criminal carnage not seen in 14 years – New York Daily News

NYPD: 8 People Shot In 6 Different Shootings Not Even 2 Hours Into 2021 – CBS 2

NYPD: Man Shot, Killed on Eve of His 21st Birthday – NBC 4

NYPD searching for suspect who shot into parked car in Brooklyn – ABC 7

‘Everybody is in shock’: New York City Christmas concert ends with police shooting gunman on cathedral steps – USA Today

Nearly 70 percent of 2020 shootings in NYC are unsolved: NYPD – New York Post

Start spreading the news. These vagabond bullets. Are yearning to stray. I’m leaving today. I don’t want to be a part of it. New York, New York.

“The fact that this bill was even drafted and introduced gives you an incredible insight into the totalitarian, socialist mentality of New York Democrats” 

Albany, New York–January 4th…New York Republican Chairman Nick Langworthy today blasted New York Democrats for their deeply disturbing and unconstitutional legislation that would allow the governor or his surrogates the power to detain individuals whom they deem to pose a ‘threat to public health.’ 

Chairman Langworthy is calling for an immediate withdrawal of the legislation for the 2021 session and blasted Governor Cuomo for refusing to outright condemn the bill’s objective or pledge a veto if it were to pass. 

After the bill was discovered and a backlash ensued, Cuomo and other Democrats tried to downplay the bill’s chances of passage, but not a single one condemned the objective of the legislation or assured New Yorkers that they would not vote for it. 

“The fact that this bill was even drafted and introduced gives you an incredible insight into the totalitarian, socialist mentality of New York Democrats,” fumed Chairman Langworthy. “King Cuomo and his lemmings in the legislature who have abdicated their power to him have already trampled over our constitutional rights with this virus. There isn’t a chance in hell New Yorkers should trust that this couldn’t become a reality.” 

He continued, “Since the day he was elected, Andrew Cuomo has shown an utter disregard for the rule of law, and thanks to his feckless, rubber-stamp legislature, for nearly a year he has been allowed to rule like the dictator he’s always wanted to be. New Yorkers need to wake up–we cannot be complacent about the very real and present danger of our rights being taken from us under one-Party Democrat rule.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/shifting_goalposts__covid_deaths_versus_vaccine_deaths.html

Imagine changing the rules in the middle of a football game. The halftime score is 14-12, the Raiders scoring two touchdowns while the Broncos kicked four field goals. In the second half the rules change with field goals worth seven points and touchdowns only three points. Suddenly the Broncos are ahead 28-6. Absurd isn’t it?

That’s what is happening with the reporting of COVID deaths versus vaccine deaths, the media and medical establishment now defining deaths far differently in order to push their agenda of COVID bad, vaccine good.

COVID deaths don’t distinguish between death with COVID versus death from COVID. Early in the pandemic, Dr Deborah Birx said as much:

So, I think in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality. There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem some countries are recording as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now…if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.

Perhaps that is why the US has more COVID deaths compared to many other countries, although in a world ranking, the US is in tenth place in deaths per million, behind Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Preexisting conditions are certainly important and death is often multifactorial. According to the CDC, only 6 percent of COVID deaths were due to COVID only, meaning no preexisting conditions. But what about the other 94 percent?

Suppose coroners ask the question, “If not for COVID, would this patient be alive today?” If the answer is yes, it will be recorded as a COVID death. But one could easily ask the question differently. “If not for diabetes (or COPD, heart disease, obesity, etc) would this COVID patient be alive today?” in which case any of those other comorbidities could just as easily be listed as the cause of death, rather than COVID.

In other words, the diabetic patient may not have died if they didn’t have COVID but may not have died either if they didn’t have diabetes. It seems COVID trumps everything else in death attribution.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/03/defenders-of-civilization/

The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.

What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.

Demonizing Our Past

In just a year, thousands of memorials and icons have vanished. Names have changed, words are banned. Careers were ruined. As new totalitarian rules were enshrined, old freedoms became despised.

Yet most of the country sat in lockdown quiet, as it was told that it, and its history, were toxic and culpable—and by whom exactly? Moralists like Labron James? Steve Kerr? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Were Americans in their 244th year suddenly to write checks, apologize, and pay penance to their angry self-described moral superiors?

A few schools apparently are no longer to be named after Abraham Lincoln, the president who saved the Union, destroyed the slave-holding Confederacy, and freed the slaves at a cost of nearly 700,000 American lives. Now 155 years after his assassination, the present generation—the most leisured, entitled, and wealthiest cohort in civilization’s history—deems him unworthy and unfit for any commemoration. Do any of the street-brawling Antifa radicals seem tough guys in comparison to the Union troops at Gettysburg or those who marched with Sherman?

Who or what does the Left offer in place in Lincoln—Che? Fidel? Malcolm X? Cesar Chavez? Margaret Sanger? Xi Jinping? FDR? Barack Obama? All would fall well short of the alleged standards applied by cancel culture. So what are we left with other than nothing? Diversity Academy A? Equity High School No. 3? Inclusion College IV? Campus 1619?

What happens if one principal, just a single superintendent, a few parents, three board members say, “Nope, we are not erasing Lincoln’s name, no way, no how”?

Little need be said of increasing tense racial relations, given that the collective optimism of a year ago during the booming 2019 economy—record low minority unemployment and the undepreciated powers of assimilation and integration were beginning to make race more incidental than essential—has dissipated. That was then, and this is now after pandemic, lockdown, recession, George Floyd’s tragic death, riot and looting, a bitter election, and an ongoing cultural revolution.

Cornell University is now mandating flu shots for its on-campus students, but with allowances for nonwhites to petition for exemptions, in the manner of those pedigreed epidemiologists who all but said science should be ignored in ranking those to be vaccinated by their race. Had someone in 1980, 1990, or 2005 predicted such things, he would have been written off as a dystopian crackpot.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/2020-project-daniel-greenfield/

In just one month, Obama’s former acting solicitor general argued in defense of Nestle in a child slave labor case before the Supreme Court, Apple and Nike lobbied against a slave labor bill, Apple and Amazon were caught using slave labor, and Nestle, Pepsi, Unilever, and even the Girl Scouts were discovered to be using palm oil harvested by children as young as 10 years old in Indonesia.

Outsourcing American jobs saves money, not just because the cost of living in lower in Third World countries, but because the use of slave labor and child labor is routine in those parts of the world. The ‘wokest’ companies and conglomerates cheer Black Lives Matter while edging out their competitors by using Third World resources harvested by children, by slaves, and, in some cases, by child slaves.

The ‘woke’ mobs are toppling statues of Washington and Jefferson, and then taking videos of their exploits with phones whose components are produced by slave labor, before binging on snacks produced by child labor, while fiercely denouncing 18th century slavery in the 21st century.

That’s the hypocrisy of the 2021 Project.

The ‘woke’ scrutinize 18th century slavery while paying little attention to 21st century slavery. If they want to understand slavery, they don’t need to waste their time with the revisionist history of the 1619 Project, or the ravings of critical race theory, when all they have to do is check their pockets. Literally.

Clothing made in the Third World is usually made in sweatshops. Even if it’s not, the cotton for it is harvested by child and slave labor in China, which doesn’t see the need to invest in expensive farming equipment when it has a surplus of cheap labor, including its own minority population.

The 1619 Project recirculated the old false claims that slavery was America’s original sin. There was nothing original or American about slavery. And the easiest way to understand that is not just to look at slavery thousands of years ago, but to examine the evil persistence of slavery in the present day.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/our-racialist-follies-bruce-thornton/

The latest act in our racialist follies featured Hilaria, née Hillary, Baldwin, the wife of boorish B-movie star Alec Baldwin, being outed for allegedly pretending to be a Spaniard. It seems her Spanish accent and claims to be from Mallorca are fabrications. In fact, according to prep school and university colleagues, she’s an “archetypal northeastern prep schooler,” which is about as “white” as one can get. Twitter rants from Alec Baldwin in his usual semi-literate blustering style ensued, and professional race-hacks leveled the “cultural appropriation” charge.

As usual, what is significant about this charge, whether true or not, is what it tells us about our dysfunctional, incoherent racialist sensibilities, which would be amusing if not for the malign effects on our political and social institutions.

Indeed, in a society claimed to be saturated with “white privilege,” it’s curious that so many “white” people try to link themselves to some ethnic minority or other. Citizens with European roots understand that a touch of the exotic, particularly the varieties designated as “protected classes” like black or “Hispanic,” to be more useful for one’s career than the taint of oppression and privilege that comes from being “white.”

Similarly, mixed-race, light-skinned blacks who once tried to cross the “color-line” by self-identifying as “white”–– especially those today who have been raised in middle-class comfort or upper-class affluence–– now are anxious to affirm their black bona fides no matter how far removed they are from the actual lives of working-class or ghetto-dwelling blacks whose dysfunctions and misery can be appropriated and exploited for political and social leverage.

Even more incoherent are the labels we’re accustomed to use when speaking of ethnic diversity. Overbroad terms like “white” or “black” are holdovers from the age of “scientific racism,” the misguided attempt to impose the Darwinian theory of the “survival of the fittest” on the astonishing diversity, complexity, and variety of human beings across the globe. These categories keep alive the dubious notion that “race,” a pseudo-scientific concept founded on superficial physical differences, tells us more about human identities than do culture, language, customs, class, mores, and religion. As such, racial identity, the rationale for slavery and segregation, is kept alive at the expense of the actual, complex diversity of unique individuals.