RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/greenfield-video-incitement-insurrection-and-frontpagemagcom/

This new webinar features Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow with the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He researches Islamic terrorism, left-wing radicalism, and the decline of the free world.

Daniel discusses Incitement, Insurrection, and the Fascist Crackdown on Conservatives, unveiling how The Democrats and the media are launching an unprecedented campaign to eliminate the political opposition. 

Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/our-incoherent-and-dangerous-diversity-talk-bruce-thornton/

Ever since Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell midwifed “diversity” in the 1979 Bakke decision, this dubious notion has become ever more duplicitous and dangerous. By enshrining a superficial reduction of real-world diversity into the law, Bakke has given illiberal ideologies a tool for suppressing true diversity of minds and character to further their tyrannical power­­––which we’ve witnessed for decades, and is now culminating in today’s “cancel culture” and censorship by online oligarchs.

George Orwell’s dystopian future of Newspeak and “memory holes” is dangerously closer to becoming our tyrannical reality.

Like all tyrannies, today’s censorship and silencing of dissenting voices began with words being distorted to take on spurious meanings that serve factional political ideologies and interests. In 1978, Powell needed something to justify discrimination on the basis of race, proscribed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in order to salvage the affirmative action programs that had relied on illegal quotas to mitigate ethnic and racial disparities in hiring, contracting, and university admissions.

But the “diversity” that followed was the most superficial sort––physical appearance, the “yellow, red, and black and white” of the old Sunday School hymn “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” As such it echoed the same specious arguments made for legal segregation, which was justified by the “scientific racism” that was becoming popular among cognitive elites in the late 19th century. It too was legitimized by a Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which legalized unconstitutional segregation’s fig-leaf of “separate but equal.”

Over the following years, it became obvious there was no evidence to support the alleged benefits that could make “diversity” a  “state interest” compelling enough to justify the obvious discrimination practiced by programs based on racial, ethnic, sex, or sexual preference identities. The same weakness vitiates the later, equally vague, truly Orwellian concepts such as “inclusion” or “tolerance.” These empty verbal vessels have been filled with a political ideology that seeks exclusion and intolerance of those whose politics are different from leftist progressivism’s.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/04/dems-covid-19-bill-is-a-grab-bag-of-leftist-goodies-not-stimulus/

After a group of 10 Senate Republicans duly trudged to the White House on Monday to show their “bipartisanship” on yet another COVID-19 stimulus bill, President Joe Biden did the predictable: He looked at their outreached hand of political comity and spat on it. Just as well, since the only thing the Democrats’ plan will “stimulate” will be more debt.

Biden and his party were never really interested in bipartisanship at all, despite their claims to the contrary. The whole point of this choreographed Kabuki political theater was to humiliate the Republicans, who foolishly took Biden and the Democrats at their word.

Republicans had suggested a more-or-less stripped-down bill of “just” $600 billion, compared to the Democratic wish-list of $1.9 trillion, which includes such non-COVID-19-related items as a $15-an-hour national minimum wage, a $350 billion bailout for poorly run states and cities, $170 billion for K-12 schools and colleges, $25 billion for “rental assistance,” and so on. Democrats also want checks of $1,400 for most households.

Republicans seek checks of $1,000, but would exclude families with more than $50,000 in income from the handouts. Their spending on all other aid is roughly two-thirds what the Democrats seek.

In rejecting compromise, Biden gave Congress a green light to totally ignore Republican input by passing a stimulus package through reconciliation, not the normal budget process. That will require a simple majority of 51 senators, not a supermajority of 60, to pass.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/andrew-cuomo-was-a-villain-all-along/

A deep dive into New York AG Letitia James’ COVID report reveals disturbing truths about the celebrity governor’s pandemic deception.

F or much of the past year, the mainstream media and Democrats have largely blamed former president Donald Trump and his administration for most of America’s COVID-19 deaths. Trump did indeed fail in certain aspects of coordination, messaging, and inserting politics into the parts of the process where it didn’t belong. He deserves credit, however, for Operation Warp Speed, the initiative that (ultimately successfully) fostered the development of coronavirus vaccines, one of the most successful public-private ventures in modern history. But Trump’s overbearing personality tended to absorb all the attention, leaving little room for real debate on the successes and failures of other politicians, except when the media found time to criticize Republican governors. But serious criticism of Democrats in this period was rare.

Until now.

It is important not to dismiss a critical fact here: James herself is a longtime Cuomo political progeny. He supported her attorney general campaign. That someone who for years has been closely aligned with Cuomo released this report is damning in and of itself. Yet the evidence it contains is even worse than the report itself suggests. If anything, the media response to it has been an underreaction.

The 76-page report relates, in great detail, the state’s irresponsible reaction to COVID raging through extended-care centers, primarily nursing homes. James and her team went straight to nursing homes to obtain the data, bypassing the state’s own data-collection entities. They took a random data sampling from 62 nursing homes around the state and found that 1,914 of their residents had died from COVID, 56 percent more than the 1,229 the state reported. If that sample is truly representative of the total for New York, the state’s nursing-home deaths total more than 13,000, where the state tallies just 8,711. (Overall New York COVID deaths remain unchanged.)

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/why-we-still-need-a-militia-and-how-to-build-one/

In an obscure but important footnote to the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wonders what would have become of the Soviet terror if the citizens of Russia had armed themselves with hammers, axes, pokers—anything—so that arresting officers of the NKVD would have had to worry whether they would survive each night. The most powerful tyranny in the world could not have stood up against such action. Instead, tens of millions of Russians submitted meekly to the state, one by one. Why?

The same question came up in my elementary school unit on the Holocaust—why did the Jews get onto the trains? Did they fail to understand what was in store for them? In my childhood mind, I tried to unravel questions that seemed as bitter as the fact of the Holocaust itself: Why was there no effective resistance? Was submission so ingrained in these people, or individual courage so lacking?

The answer in both cases is that it was not courage that was lacking, but organization. This concept glimmers through Solzhenitsyn’s description like a fleck of gold in the pebbly shallows of a stream: He imagines a group of neighbors, a half-dozen perhaps, lying in ambush downstairs for the secret policemen. He specifies a group of neighbors. He specifies collective action. One courageous man resisting alone is a suicide. But one courageous man leading a few of his friends can put up a fight.

The wording of our Second Amendment—or, rather, the placement of a single comma—has engendered a raging debate that reached the Supreme Court and persists to this day: Is the second clause of this all-important sentence operative, or dependent? Is the right to bear arms absolute, or does it exist only because of the need for a militia?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/03/is-biden-blowing-his-covid-vaccine-rollout/

When not attacking the Trump administration for the pace of COVID-19 vaccine distribution, President Joe Biden said he’d dramatically accelerated the rate at which Americans got treated. What’s more, he was supposed to be ready on day one. At least, that’s what he and his team kept telling the public.

So why is the growth rate of daily vaccinations decelerating? And why is Biden now busy making excuses?

Before taking office,  Biden stated that he’d directed his team to prepare a “much more aggressive effort, with more federal involvement and leadership, to get things back on track.”

T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden’s transition, told CNN in early January that “the president-elect believes we must accelerate distribution of the vaccine while continuing to ensure the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible.”

The Boston Globe reported on Jan. 8 that “President-elect Joe Biden plans to order the distribution of almost all available doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, in a striking departure from the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back roughly half of the stock to ensure those who have been vaccinated would receive their second dose.”

So, what’s happened since Biden took office?