RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/29/our-nation-of-effete-status-seekers/

Bill Clinton spoke of “the right side of history” almost two dozen times while president. Some say the phrase can be traced to 1984, when race baiter and Democrat Jesse Jackson used it to describe the rise of the Marxist Sandinistas, who were destroying Nicaragua. But the expression was supercharged by Barack Obama. Since, we’ve had a deluge of status seekers eager to align themselves with The One to show they’re on “the right side of history.”

Except they’re not. But they are on the right side of inconsequence.

Americans have advanced far beyond the subsistence lives so many lived a century ago. We have become so prosperous that millions are able to spend hours on social media and taking part in marches hoping to convince as many as possible of their moral goodness.

For instance, in what other nation and at what other time could a meathead such as Rob Reiner have time to tweet a maniacal string of inanities? He’s known to reverentially reference “our democracy,” which is a factually impaired assertion and a dog whistle for progressives who’ve made a mockery of constitutional restraints; has irresponsibly accused Donald Trump of mass murder; claimed with a baseless certitude the country will survive only if “Trump, and the corrupt party he leads, is decisively defeated in 2024”; and huffed over the possibility that Elon Musk was going to reinstate Trump on Twitter, where he would “lie and spread disinformation to try to overthrow the U.S. Government to return and continue his criminal activity.”

His “signature” closing is “That’s it. That’s the tweet,” as if that somehow makes his sophomoric rants even more profound.

https://www.aol.com/news/american-museum-natural-history-closes-151912003.html

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has closed certain Native American exhibits in accordance with new federal regulations. Credit – Richard Drew–AP

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is the latest institution across the country to close access to Native American exhibits as authorities return or seek permission from tribes to display artifacts in accordance with a new Biden Administration rule.

The museum’s president Sean Decatur informed staff in a letter Friday of the closure of two of its halls filled with Native American objects, as well as the covering of cases in or just outside three other halls, starting Saturday. The museum will also suspend school field trips to one hall, but said it remains committed to supporting education about Indigenous peoples. Another exhibit developed with Indigenous communities remains open.

“While the actions we are taking this week may seem sudden, they reflect a growing urgency among all museums to change their relationships to, and representation of, Indigenous cultures,” Decatur wrote. “The Halls we are closing are vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples. Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”

The Administration’s new rule, an update to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that regulates the return of Native American human remains and sacred, cultural or funeral objects to descendants of those communities, came into effect on Jan. 12. The Natural History Museum already pulled all human remains, many of Native American or Black enslaved people, from display in October.

In April 2023, my organization at OpenTheBooks.com partnered with U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) to quantify $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds flowing into the adversarial nations of Russia and China.

Now, the research has informed a new law. Senator Ernst inserted language into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which was signed by President Joe Biden on December 22, 2023.

The new law mandates an audit of China, its virology labs, and other dangerous labs from around the world. The study and report to Congress must be completed within 180 days.

The law now directs the Pentagon to go back ten years and count all taxpayer money that flowed into the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party of China (CCP), EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, any labs similar to Wuhan that are run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and any other entities owned or controlled – officially or unofficially – by these groups.

Then, the law goes a step further. 

The NDAA directs the Pentagon to quantify the dollars spent doing research on other dangerous viruses that have pandemic potential – not only in China, but also around the world. The result should be a list of viruses – think Ebola, Nipah, or influenza – and the countries we’re paying for dangerous research.

Victory

Following the endless controversy over the origins of the Covid pandemic, the new law is a dramatic victory.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-ordered-to-pay-83-million-in-e-jean-carroll-defamation-case/

Former president Donald Trump has been ordered to pay journalist E. Jean Carroll $83 million in her civil defamation case against him, a Manhattan federal jury decided Friday afternoon.

Jurors reached a verdict in under three hours, taking into account compensatory and punitive damages for Trump’s allegedly malicious defamation of the columnist. The jury began deliberating around 1:40 p.m. over their lunch break, as told by U.S. district judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial.

If a decision was not made by 4:30 p.m., the judge told the jury to send him a note either asking to break for the weekend or to deliberate further into Friday evening.

Trump must now pay $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages, adding to a total of $83.3 million. The final amount was nearly $60 million more than what Carroll’s side was seeking, which was $24 million.

In a statement, Trump called the second verdict in the case “absolutely ridiculous” and said he would appeal the decision. He was not present in the courthouse when the verdict was announced.

In May, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in combined damages after a separate jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming his accuser. At the time, jurors were asked to determine whether there was more than a 50 percent chance that Trump assaulted Carroll in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan in the mid 1990s, as she has claimed.

The previous jury found that Trump most likely sexually assaulted Carroll but rejected the allegation that he raped her. The jury also decided that Trump’s Truth Social post from October 2022 calling her allegations a “hoax” did defame Carroll.

Considering liability had already been determined, the current jury was only tasked with deciding how much Trump should pay Carroll on top of the $5 million that was awarded last year. Carroll was originally seeking $10 million in damages, but her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, increased the amount to at least $24 million during the trial’s closing arguments earlier Friday.

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2024/01/the-domestic-terrorists-of-tomorrow-are.html

After Hamas supporters were caught screaming “shame on you” at children receiving cancer treatment at a Manhattan hospital (“make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows”) some people wondered what they were trying to accomplish.

Questions like that only reveal the vast gap between the pro-Hamas mob and everyone else.

The pro-Hamas protests, allegedly in pursuit of a ceasefire, but in reality celebrating Hamas and now Houthi terrorism, have picked random fights with Starbucks, Christmas Tree lightings and Alec Baldwin to name a few. They are not so much for anything as they are against things.

Reasonable people, usually old school liberals, still don’t understand the Left. And so they also don’t understand what happened to their movement, their party and their country.

Normal people think that protests are about spreading awareness and winning over others, and they don’t grasp why the rioters are spewing hate at them instead of trying to win them over.

The mobs aren’t there to persuade them but to express their hatred for them. The common denominator of all of these riots is a burning desire to destroy everything around them. They’re not shutting down airports or smashing store windows to bring attention to a cause.

Smashing windows and shutting down airports is their cause.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/defame-and-punish

How left-wing NGOs mobilize private and public assets to silence critics

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project recently procured a cache of government documents that expose a disturbing pattern: left-wing NGOs seeking to mobilize the state against political opponents on specious accusations of “violent extremism.”

According to the report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urged Washington State’s “unified counterterrorism” center to investigate me, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, and social-media influencer Libs of TikTok, under the false pretext that our reporting on gender theory in schools and transgender medical interventions constitutes “hate,” “extremism,” and “violence.”

The campaign to mobilize law enforcement against critics of gender ideology or critical race theory is not a limited affair. The ADL and a related organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have developed it as a scalable, repeatable tactic to silence political opponents.

The playbook is simple. The SPLC and ADL paint a target on an individual critic, then mobilize a decentralized network of private and public assets to degrade, censor, and punish that target. On the private side, the groups activate left-wing journalists to smear the target in the press, demand that social media companies censor the target’s online speech, and encourage left-wing editors to denigrate the target on his Wikipedia page. On the public side, the groups send notices to state and federal law enforcement, hoping to mobilize the government to open investigations and intimidate critics with the threat of state repression, even incarceration.

Sometimes it works. The SPLC and ADL have damaged the reputations of innocent journalists, driven negative media coverage against mainstream conservative groups, and influenced social media firms’ censorship policies. Seeing the success of this model, other left-wing pressure groups have followed suit, demanding full-scale state repression. The National School Boards Association, for example, persuaded the Biden administration to mobilize the FBI’s counterterrorism division against parents who opposed critical race theory.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-two-americas-2/

This just in: the ruling class hates your freedoms.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CUP), a D.C.-based nonprofit advocacy group led by Steve Forbes and economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, released a report this month announcing the findings of a Rasmussen poll which confirms what the “average” American already knew: the elites, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different. What the average American may not already know is just how much of an existential threat to freedom the ruling class is.

CUP calls the report, titled “The Two Americas and How the Nation’s Elite is Out of Touch with Average Americans,” a “first-of-its-kind look at the views of the American Elite.” This report is based upon two separate Rasmussen surveys of 1,000 members of the elite class conducted last September. It defined the elites as people having at least one post-graduate degree, earning at least $150,000 annually, and living in high-population density areas (more than 10,000 people per square mile in their zip code). They represent a mere 1% of the U.S. population, but of course they have a disproportionate degree of power and influence, not least in terms of the topics and views that dominate public policy and the national conversation.

“These results confirm what people have long suspected,” the report states. “Today, there are two Americas.” As the authors write in their executive summary,

The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves from everyday America’s realities to such a degree their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American’s.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/26/google-sharpens-its-censorship-knives-labels-trump-praise-as-dangerous/

We recently discovered that Google’s ad-serving network is blocking its ads from appearing on a story we published almost exactly three years ago.

Google declared that the article violated its terms of service because it contained “Dangerous or derogatory content,” which it defines as anything that:

incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.
harasses, intimidates, or bullies an individual or group of individuals.
threatens or advocates for harm to oneself or others.
relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative, scientific consensus.
exploits others through extortion.

Pretty raunchy stuff, in other words.

So what was the article that it flagged? “Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs: A Last Look At A Remarkable Presidency.”

We are not kidding.

Rep. Ritchie Torres Gives Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon at Central Synagogue NYC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u3B_feOUUU&t=2s

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ted-fellows-resign-after-bill-ackman-bari-weiss-invited-to-speak-at-conference/

Five participants in the TED fellows program, which supports and promotes emerging voices in a variety of fields across the globe, resigned Wednesday after the public-speaking organization invited hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman and journalist Bari Weiss to speak at its 2024 flagship conference in Vancouver. The five fellows — self-described inventor Ayah Bdeir, filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky, cosmologist Renée Hlozek, artist Sarah Sandman, and astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz — sent a letter to TED leader Chris Anderson and fellows program director Lily James Olds. Titled “TED Fellows refuse to be associated with genocide apologists,” the letter accused TED of choosing “not only to align itself with enablers and supporters of genocide, but to amplify their racist propaganda.”

The authors of the letter wrote that Ackman “has defended Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and has cynically weaponised antisemitism in his programme to purge American universities of Pro-Palestinian freedom of speech.”

The five former fellows also named the invitation of Free Press founder and editor Bari Weiss to the conference as a reason that they cut ties with TED. Weiss, they wrote, “has a long, sordid, and well-documented history of anti-Palestinian speech.” And, supposedly like Ackman, she has “weaponised antisemitism to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has a track record of transphobic extremism.”

Ackman — not known, before the Hamas attack on Israel, as a commentator on current events — has become one of the most outspoken critics of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education. Since October 7, he has become one of the loudest voices on X discussing the rise in antisemitism in the United States, particularly on college campuses. He was also one of the bigger names calling for Claudine Gay’s removal, first after the former Harvard president’s testimony in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee and then during the plagiarism scandal that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation on January 2.

Weiss, whose outlet has extensively covered the Hamas attack, the ensuing Israeli response, and the conflict’s reverberations in the West, is the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, from 2019. She has become known as a defender of the Jewish state.