RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/16/what-is-to-be-done/

Over the course of several decades, the managerial ruling class has taken over. Republicans and Democrats each had their share of formal power, but the Left proceeded apace, regardless of who was technically in command, slowly capturing universities, large corporations, the media, and government bureaucracies. It now has power that is largely immune from elections.

My last essay explained why there has been so little resistance to a ruling class that has cruelly tightened the screws during the coronavirus pandemic and likely stolen a national election. As explained in that piece, economic insecurity and social isolation are the key structural foundations of the managerial class’ power. Insecurity and isolation are obstacles to an effective resistance by what is left of Middle America. 

In the comments section, some said, roughly, “OK, you explain why. But what should we do?” This is a reasonable question. Much of what follows is personal and economic, as the power of the system is personal and economic. 

To the extent political activity can succeed, it must be intertwined with these economic and personal reforms. Any purely political efforts should be local and issue-specific, rather than channeling our energies into a doomed bid for national power. 

Economic Independence

As so much of the system depends upon individuals’ embeddedness within it, separating oneself from that system is a large part of the answer. This requires a radical program of individual self-improvement. 

Various habits render one fragile and insecure, not least debt. Thus, avoiding debt and getting out of debt has to be one of the bedrock habits of any dissident. This is particularly true for young people, who are sold a siren song of credentials funded by student loans, when state colleges, learning a trade, or investing money in a business would earn a larger return.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-president-should-sign-the-bill-outlawing-female-genital-mutilation/

A rare worthwhile bipartisan bill has passed Congress that will outlaw female genital mutilation as a matter of federal law. From HR 6100, The STOP FGM Act of 2020”:

“(a) Except as provided in subsection (b), whoever, in any circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly—

“(1) performs, attempts to perform, or conspires to perform female genital mutilation on another person who has not attained the age of 18 years;

“(2) being the parent, guardian, or caretaker of a person who has not attained the age of 18 years facilitates or consents to the female genital mutilation of such person; or

“(3) transports a person who has not attained the age of 18 years for the purpose of the performance of female genital mutilation on such person,

shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.”

A word about religious freedom and FGM. The bill provides:

It shall not be a defense to a prosecution under this section that female genital mutilation is required as a matter of religion, custom, tradition, ritual, or standard practice.

That is right and good.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/omar-tlaib-and-aoc-demand-facebook-remove-100-anti-daniel-greenfield/

Two of the most notorious bigots in the House of Representatives signed a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that he “eradicate anti-Muslim bigotry from Facebook”.

The three-page letter signed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, as well as 28 other left-wing House members, spends a great deal of time demanding the removal of what it calls “anti-Muslim content” without ever specifically defining it. That’s convenient considering Omar and Tlaib’s own history of racism and antisemitism, and support for the sorts of Islamic bigotry and violence that groups like CAIR, which supports the letter, have become known for.

The letter spotlights one violent incident, but then goes on to call for a ban on “anti-Muslim content”, “anti-Muslim animus”, “anti-Muslim bigotry”, and finally, “anti-Muslim content and organizing” on the platform, without ever explaining what exactly they want to ban.

Considering the letter’s call for, “100 percent proactive detection and removal of anti-Muslim content”, the safe assumption would be that they want to ban everything critical of Islam.

That’s a disturbing attack on the First Amendment coming from 30 House members.

https://www.aier.org/article/the-rescue-from-madness

In his memoirs, written in the 1940s but not published until after his death, the great economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.” Most people contemplating the political and economic climate of 2020 can probably relate. 

Many of us, frustrated at the loss of liberty and overreach by governments in the single-minded battle to eradicate a virus they don’t understand, have reached for George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. In their novels, 1984 and Brave New World, they explored incredibly dystopian worlds. Real-world events that resemble anything in those books invite the fear that we’re destined for the same tyrannical lives. 

While literature captures something deeply real about what it means to be human ‒ particularly during the first half of the despicable 20th century in which these authors lived ‒ they ultimately depict something unreal. The superstate of 1984’s Oceania hasn’t quite emerged anywhere, except perhaps North Korea; the foolish quest for unstructured and uninhibited pleasure in the World State has so far restricted itself to communes and sections of woke university campuses. 

Instead, I find Mises, or his contemporary, the novelist and poet Stefan Zweig, much more revealing. Both came of age in fin de siècle Vienna with its coffee houses, intellectual advancements, literary achievements, famed circles and aura of learning for learning’s sake that posteriority much envied. Both witnessed the prolonged and enduring collapse of their civilizations. 

In contrast to Orwell and Huxley’s unreal worlds, the demise that Mises and Zweig discuss actually happened, and just a few generations ago. In our times, in our worlds, with roughly our civic institutions and social structures and values. 

We are watching, in real time, the destruction of our own civilization.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/jill-bidens-doctorate-is-garbage-because-her-dissertation-is-garbage/

Her dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge.

You can tell someone is smarting from an inferiority complex when he insists on being addressed as “Dr.” on the basis of holding an academic doctorate rather than being a physician. Ph.D. holders who have genuine accomplishments don’t make you call them “Doctor,” which is why you never hear about “Dr. Paul Krugman” and “Dr. George Will.” None of the professors I knew at Yale, even the ones who were eminent in their fields, insisted on the title, and I think most of them would have scoffed if someone had addressed them as “Dr.” The only reason you ever hear the phrase “Dr. Henry Kissinger” is that Kissy grew up in title-mad, airs-and-graces Germany, where people are awed rather than dismissive even if you insist on a triple-serving title (“Herr Professor Doktor”).

Insisting on being called “Doctor” when you don’t heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider “Dr.” Jill Biden, who doesn’t even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: “She said, “I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.” That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,’” Joe Biden has said.

Mrs. Biden wanted the credential for its own sake. As for its quality, well. She got it from the University of Delaware, whose ties to her husband, its most illustrious alumnus if you don’t count Joe Flacco, run so deep that it has a school of public policy named after him. That the University of Delaware would have rejected her 2006 dissertation as sloppy, poorly written, non-academic, and barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom (all of which it is) when her husband had been representing its state in the U.S. Senate for more than three decades was about as likely as Tom Hagen telling Vito Corleone that his wife is a fat sow on payday. The only risk to the University of Delaware was that it might strain its collective wrist in its rush to rubber-stamp her doctoral paper.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/andrew-cuomo-continues-his-assault-on-the-first-amendment/

If he had his way, New York governor Andrew Cuomo would do to the Constitution what he’s already done to the elderly of his state. This week, he signed a bill banning the sale of “hate symbols” such as the Confederate flag, swastikas, and “white supremacist” imagery on state property. Of course, neither Cuomo nor the state legislature is empowered to decide what constitutes “hate symbols,” much less selectively ban them — even if New Yorkers had any interested in selling these symbols on state property, which doesn’t seem to be the case. But all of this is just virtue-signaling, as the kids say: a way to get people who still believe in liberal values to sound like they’re defending ugly things like the Confederate flag rather than a neutral principle.

Then again, perhaps there’s familial confusion over the issue of speech rights among the Cuomos. You may remember Chris, who earned his law degree at Fordham, informing his followers that “hate speech is excluded from protection” in the Constitution. (It isn’t.) Now Andrew Cuomo, who earned his law degree at Albany Law School, argued that his ban would “safeguard New Yorkers from the fear-installing effects of these abhorrent symbols,” as if his bailiwick or anyone’s else’s in government is to protect you from seeing things you don’t like. If it were, nursing-home residents would be throwing copies of Cuomo’s book American Crisis into a raging bonfire.

“This country faces a pervasive, growing attitude of intolerance and hate — what I have referred to in the body politic as an American cancer,” Emmy-award winning Cuomo, quoting himself, says in his approval message. This is a wholly paranoid — or crassly cynical — view of American life, but also irrelevant. There is no “hate” exception to the Constitution just as there is no coronavirus exception.

Cuomo, whose great tolerance once led him to say that conservatives weren’t welcome in New York, was recently rebuffed by the Supreme Court for targeting the free religious expression of New York’s orthodox Catholics and Jews with his COVID diktats (the governor called the Supreme Court’s decision “irrelevant.”) Cuomo is a perfect illustration of why the state should never be empowered to adjudicate the limits of free expression. It is not difficult to imagine what an aspiring authoritarian like Cuomo, who regularly smears his political opponents as hatemongers, would do with such power.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/new-documents-show-hunter-biden-requesting-10-million-from-chinese-on-behalf-of-entire-biden-family/

New documents reported by Fox News Wednesday offer more details into a $10 million deal outlined between Hunter Biden and Chinese businessmen with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party, adding fuel to ongoing scandals plaguing President-elect Joe Biden, big tech, and big media.

According to correspondence obtained by Fox, Hunter Biden reportedly offered his “best wishes from the entire Biden family” to CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming in 2017 and urged the Chinese business partner with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party to wire over $10 million to “properly fund and operate” a joint Biden venture.

“I hope my letter finds you well. I regret missing you on your last visit to the United States,” Hunter Biden wrote in a June letter. “Please accept the best wishes from the entire Biden family as well as my partners.”

In the same letter, Biden continued to note Tony Bobulinski, a Biden business partner-turned whistleblower this year, requested the $10 million dollar transfer from Ye’s associates.

“I would appreciate if you will send that quickly,” Biden wrote, to fund the Biden-led firm Sinohawk in partnership with Bobulinski who would serve as CEO.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/joe-biden-doubles-down-on-hunters-innocence-as-new-reporting-emerges/

President-elect Joe Biden doubled down on his son’s innocence Wednesday as new reporting emerges with more insight into Hunter Biden’s overseas business ventures while also being the subject of two FBI probes examining the family finances.

“Are you confident that Hunter Biden did nothing wrong?” a Fox News reporter asked President-elect Joe Biden during a Wednesday press conference.

“I’m confident,” Biden said simply and moved on to the next question.

The show of certainty comes one week after the Biden-Harris transition team released a statement reiterating the president-elect’s support for his son along with a note from Hunter Biden himself acknowledging the existence of a Justice Department investigation examining Hunter’s taxes.

“President-elect Biden is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger,” the team said.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/florida-is-open-new-york-is-closed-and-the-latter-has-more-covid-deaths/

Despite larger populations, currently freer peoples, and a media narrative that screams otherwise, there are far, far fewer deaths in Texas and in Florida than in New York.

Thus far in Florida, approximately 20,000 people have died of COVID-19. In Texas, the number stands around 24,000, and in New York, about 35,000.

New York is the smallest of the three, with 19.54 million residents. Then comes Florida, with 21.67 million, before Texas, with 28.7 million residents.

COVID numbers are difficult to trust. Cases are often counted more than once as patients go in and out of the hospital, and some deaths are attributed to COVID that are barely related, if at all.

There’s a perverse incentive to write down “COVID” and get state and federal money, no doubt, but one thing rings clear through all the din: Despite larger populations, currently freer peoples, and a media narrative that screams otherwise, there are far, far fewer deaths in Texas and in Florida than in New York.

For months, American media consumers have been treated to news of Florida and Texas’s incoming death spirals. For months after, we were promised those death spirals were just around the bend. The funny thing with COVID, though, is unlike global warming doom science — always 3-12 years away and “too complex” to explain when it inevitably doesn’t happen — COVID doom predictions are checkable in just a few weeks. And COVID doom didn’t happen.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/292867

The death of Dr. Walter E. Williams (1936-2020) at age 84 in early December presents an opportunity to examine why so many Black conservatives in academia and media have supported Israel for decades compared to Israel-haters like Marc Lamont Hill.

Williams was Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist.
From 1973 to 1980 Williams was an economics professor at Temple University. He promoted free market ideas and in its December 2 obituary, the Wall Street Journal noted that “America has lost one of its greatest economists and public intellectuals.”

By contrast Lamont Hill, age 41, says he is “Present Assistant Professor of Urban Education & American Studies (at) Temple University (Affiliated Professor of Anthropology) (Affiliated Professor of American Studies)” on the CV on his website.

That is a stark reminder of what Temple and so much of academia has become. A change from Economics taught to understand the destructive nature of socialism has become to. “Urban Education & American Studies” taught to denigrate America at every turn.

But, there is more. Much more.