RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/04/biden-then-trump-is-rushing-covid-vaccine-biden-now-trump-is-going-to-slow/

Joe Biden has started attacking the Trump administration for not getting the COVID vaccines distributed fast enough. It’s the exact opposite of what Biden was saying before the election.

“As I long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” Biden said last week.

As he “long feared and warned”? Who is he kidding?

Before the election, the only fear Biden expressed was that Trump was making wildly unrealistic claims about how quickly a vaccine could be developed, and that Trump was putting pressure on regulators to rush approval. “I trust scientists,” Biden said in September, “But I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either.”  He added that “The idea that there’s going to be a vaccine and everything’s gonna be fine tomorrow – it’s just not rational.”

Biden also said that even if a vaccine did miraculously emerge by Election Day, it wouldn’t be available to most Americans until “well into 2021.”

Meanwhile, the only warning Biden issued was that the country faced “a dark winter ahead.”

So what actually happened? Two vaccines were developed by Election Day, and both were quickly approved by federal regulators on an emergency basis.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/covid-hospitalizations-reach-new-highs-states-failing-distinguish

States throughout the U.S. are failing to distinguish between patients hospitalized because of COVID-19 and patients who merely test positive for the disease while being hospitalized for other reasons.

Hospitalizations have for months been viewed as one of the critical indicators of the coronavirus pandemic: Countries worldwide have relied heavily on the number of patients sent to hospitals because of the virus as a way of measuring how severe a region or a nation’s outbreak really is. 

In the United States, as in most other countries, one of the chief concerns of the pandemic has been whether or not hospitals have enough capacity to treat surges in COVID patients in addition to more routine procedures and emergency issues. The most recent surge in positive COVID-19 tests, which began in early October, has led to record highs of hospitalized COVID-positive patients.

The COVID Tracking Project, a group of public health experts and journalists who have been collecting COVID-19 data from state health departments since early 2020, currently lists over 125,000 hospitalized COVID patients nationwide, roughly double the earlier peaks seen in the spring and summer. 

Differentiating between ‘with’ and ‘due to’

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16909/new-year-better

To start with, it made most of us understand that as members of the human species, we are all in the same leaking boat. The pandemic was like a general amnesty or a conflagration that transcends boundaries and includes everyone, high or low, rich or poor, young or old.

One other important feature of the crisis may have been the reassertion of capitalism as the surest means of coping with a disaster hitting us out of the blue. The huge mass of available capital with historically low interest rates…. and virtually inexhaustible productive capacities across the globe, provided many nations with a shield against potentially fatal economic and social shocks.

The year just ending taught us not take things for granted and to value even the most pedestrian joys that existence allows us, such a walk in a park….

As 2021 begins, one is reminded of the verse by Persian poet Masud Saad Salman, hoping that the new year would not resemble the old one.

Masud, of course, was expressing that hope from the Nay Fortress where, having fallen from the grace in the court of a local despot, he had been imprisoned for a year, and was to remain there for the rest of his life. He lamented the fact that Saturday was like Friday and April like March and his share of sunshine reduced to a sickly ray from a hole in the roof of his cell. In other words, he wasn’t doing any better than many us did in the year just ended.

But, let us be provocative, didn’t 2020 have any redeeming feature?

I think it did.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/02/calling-out-the-fauci-administration/

“If he wants to lead the nation, he should run for office.” 

That sounds like Nancy Pelosi discussing the prospects of a Gavin Newsom presidency, but it’s really Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) calling out Dr. Anthony Fauci in a December 30 Fox News opinion piece. 

For most of 2020, Fauci had been telling Americans that to reach herd immunity and make the coronavirus a non-issue, 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 to 80-85 percent for herd immunity. So by “the beginning of the fall of 2021, we can start to approach some degree of normality.” If embattled Americans thought Fauci really had 2022 in mind it would be hard to blame them. 

Rubio granted Fauci’s good intentions but “let’s be clear about what he was doing: lying to the American people in order to manipulate their behavior.” That was a long overdue spanking but Rubio was not the first to give Fauci the smackdown he deserves. 

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/stacey-lennox/2021/01/02/who-would-give-a-tyrant-like-andrew-cuomo-more-power-the-new-york-state-assembly-n1300865

A new bill in the New York State Assembly seeks to give one of the nation’s worst governors, Andrew Cuomo, even more power. It is currently sitting in committee, and hopefully, New Yorkers will see it die there. Assembly Bill A416 is scheduled for the 2021-22 legislative session. It amends the public health law to give the governor additional powers after they declare a state of health emergency due to an epidemic. I guess that means now.

The additions to the law allow the governor, after consulting with the health commissioner, to order the removal or detention of groups or individuals deemed to be a suspected or actual case, contact, or carrier of a contagious disease that, in the governor’s opinion, poses a significant threat to public health. The governor or his delegees in the state’s public health apparatus may order the removal or detention. They only need to identify individuals and groups by a reasonably specific description.

Individuals could be detained until the health department determines they are no longer contagious or not infected. The good news is you can only be detained for three business days before having an opportunity to be heard. In other words, the Assembly is about to make it easier to detain someone suspected of having COVID-19 than someone who is having an obvious mental health crisis.

The good news is that the bill requires an individual’s medical needs and condition to be assessed regularly and they must be detained in a manner that includes isolation and infection control procedures. So that you know, prisons fit that bill. Yet New York has released thousands of inmates under the pretext of COVID-19. So detaining a few contrary citizens makes complete sense in this environment. Nothing to see here, right? Let’s look at the groups that are suing Governor Cuomo and the tactics he has used to quell dissent against his decrees.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/black-lives-matter-vandalizes-st-patricks-daniel-greenfield/

During the original wave of mostly violent Black Lives Matter race riots, St. Patrick’s Cathedral was one of their targets and was hit with BLM graffiti. 

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance however decided to give BLM race rioters a pass while trying to prosecute a woman who called the police in Central Park.

The Manhattan district attorney’s poor relationship with the police had cratered when he announced that he was giving Black Lives Matter rioters a pass. That included the BLM racist who had scrawled obscene and hateful graffiti on the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

he Queens man arrested for scarring the landmarked façade of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during a George Floyd protest is now free — because the Manhattan District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute him.

Yadir Avila Rosas, 26, was taken into custody at 5:30 a.m. Saturday, an NYPD spokeswoman told The Post.

Police charged Rosas with criminal mischief in the third degree and making graffiti, alleging that he was the “getaway driver” for two women who tagged the famous house of worship with spray-painted slogans on May 30.

But an expected Saturday afternoon arraignment never happened, at the DA office’s discretion.

Now here we go again.

Vandals tagged St. Patrick’s Cathedral with anti-police graffiti early on New Year’s Day, according to the NYPD.

https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/

I. The collapse of institutional liberalism

For a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most Americans and Europeans regarded Marxism as an enemy that had been defeated once and for all. But they were wrong. A mere 30 years later, Marxism is back, and making an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the most important American media companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches. As American cities succumb to rioting, arson, and looting, it appears as though the liberal custodians of many of these institutions—from the New York Times to Princeton University—have despaired of regaining control of them, and are instead adopting a policy of accommodation. That is, they are attempting to appease their Marxist employees by giving in to some of their demands in the hope of not being swept away entirely.

We don’t know what will happen for certain. But based on the experience of recent years, we can venture a pretty good guess. Institutional liberalism lacks the resources to contend with this threat. Liberalism is being expelled from its former strongholds, and the hegemony of liberal ideas, as we have known it since the 1960s, will end. Anti-Marxist liberals are about to find themselves in much the same situation that has characterized conservatives, nationalists, and Christians for some time now: They are about to find themselves in the opposition.

This means that some brave liberals will soon be waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled. They will try to build up alternative educational and media platforms in the shadow of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost. Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals.

This is the new reality that is emerging. There is blood in the water and the new Marxists will not rest content with their recent victories. In America, they will press their advantage and try to seize the Democratic Party. They will seek to reduce the Republican Party to a weak imitation of their own new ideology, or to ban it outright as a racist organization. And in other democratic countries, they will attempt to imitate their successes in America. No free nation will be spared this trial. So let us not avert our eyes and tell ourselves that this curse isn’t coming for us. Because it is coming for us.

In this essay, I would like to offer some initial remarks about the new Marxist victories in America—about what has happened and what’s likely to happen next.