RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/peaceful-riots-and-lefts-reality-avoidance-don-feder/

People ask how Democrats can look at what’s going on in Portland and other urban combat zones and call it “peaceful protest” when on the nightly news they can see fires raging, hear mobs howling, and watch police being assaulted. Are they nuts?

In a way, they are.

It’s not just the anarchy in the streets. The entire progressive worldview is based on a far-reaching denial of reality.

Since at least the Enlightenment, those who embraced objective truth believed it was their responsibility to use empirical evidence and reason to understand the world, so that they didn’t end up getting eaten by tigers they mistook for tangerines.

Leftists work overtime to reshape the public perception of the world around them to conform with their ideology – even when it means denying the obvious. The novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called it “whim-worship.” In other words, this is the way it is because this is the way I want it to be. Because I hate America, I want it to be an inherently racist country, based on oppression and exploitation – and thus it is.

Here are a few examples of reality-avoidance ripped from the headlines: 

Guns cause crime. My city is a shooting gallery because of guns brought here from places with loose controls.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/obama-still-110-percent-trump-who-not-fake-lloyd-billingsley/

“What I saw was he was the kind of person that wants people to worship him. He needs to be worshiped and I don’t do that.”

That was Malik Obama in an August 1 interview with the New York Post. Obama, 62, was promoting his new book, Big Bad Brother from Kenya, and his interview proved enlightening on several fronts.

Malik managed a foundation named after his father, the Kenyan Barak H. Obama. In a telephone call shortly before the 2009 inauguration, the American president-elect “insisted I shut down the website and not continue with the foundation.” If Malik continued with the idea, the president threatened “to cut me off.”

In 2015, Malik Obama made an appeal on behalf of Aunt Hawa, living in poverty and working as a charcoal seller. The president told Malik he was “broke.” Aunt Zeituni Onyango died penniless in 2014 and Malik Obama appealed for $20,000 to transport her remains back to Kenya. The president said that was “too much” and ponied up only $5,000.

As Malik Obama explains,  “I don’t understand how somebody who claimed to be a relative or a brother can behave the way that he’s behaving, be so cold and ruthless, and just turn his back on the people he said were his family.”

Malik Obama also charged that Dreams from My Father, was inaccurate and freighted with “embellishments.”

https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/michelle-obama-blames-trump-for-her-low-grade-depression/?utm_campaign=ipad_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

Former first lady Michelle Obama says she’s suffering from “low-grade depression” in part because of President Trump.

“I’m dealing with some form of low-grade depression. Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife and just seeing this administration. Watching the hypocrisy of it day in and day out is dispiriting,” Obama said in her new podcast.

The Obamas still live in DC. Their home is less than two miles from the White House in a quiet neighborhood of mansions. First daughter Ivanka Trump lives around the corner.

The former first lady remains revered by Democrats and said she tries to keep up routines such as working out to feel better.Last week former President Obama delivered a eulogy in Atlanta at the funeral of former Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and encouraged Senate Democrats to repeal the filibuster if they regain control, so they can pass initiatives such as DC statehood. He also has sought to boost the presidential campaign of his former vice president, Joe Biden.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/05/covid-19_lies_go_viral_143878.html

Beware of three widely circulating COVID-19-related lies and the partisan motives behind them. These lies are dangerous to your children and how you cope with this virus.

Lie No. 1: “The United States’ response stands out as among the worst of any country.” House Majority Whip James Clyburn leveled that charge, as he kicked off a hearing Friday into the virus.

Don’t buy it. A staggering 183,639 Europeans have died from the virus as of Monday. Deaths per capita have been far higher in the U.K., Spain and Italy than in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins. After a lull, cases are spiking in several European countries.

That hasn’t stopped New York Times columnist Paul Krugman from asking, “Why Can’t Trump’s America be like Italy?” Is he crazy? A patient with the coronavirus has faced three times the risk of dying from it in Italy as in the U.S., Johns Hopkins data indicate.

Lie No. 2: Clyburn accused the administration of “rushing into reopening the schools” against the ” advice of public health experts.” Sorry, but experts want schools to reopen.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-most-black-americans-want-police-to-remain-in-their-areas/

Most black Americans say they want police to continue their current presence in local areas, even as protests against racism and police brutality sweep the nation, and calls to reform and even defund police departments persist.

Close to two-thirds, 61 percent, of black Americans said they want the police presence in their area to remain the same, while 20 percent said they would like to see police spend more time in their neighborhood, according to a new Gallup poll. Another 19 percent said they would like to see the police presence in their area decrease.

Among the general population, 67 percent of Americans say they want the police presence near them to remain the same, with 71 percent of white Americans saying so. A majority of other minority communities also said they do not want to see fewer police officers patrolling their neighborhoods, with 59 percent of Hispanics preferring the current police presence.

Black Americans said they observe police in their neighborhoods slightly more than other groups, 32 percent saying they see police officers often or very often in their area, above the national average of 24 percent of all Americans who say the same. About 27 percent said they rarely or never see police in their neighborhoods. Only 22 percent of white Americans said they see police often or very often around where they live.

Of black Americans who see police frequently in their areas, only about a third say they think police should curtail their time in the neighborhood, similar to the overall percentage who say so.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/what-to-make-of-sally-yatess-senate-testimony/

The Justice Department has portrayed Yates as something of a dupe. I am not convinced.

Former Obama administration deputy attorney general Sally Yates will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning. The Committee chairman, Senator Lindsey Graham, has said her appearance might provide insight into the Russiagate probe — i.e., the Obama administration’s monitoring of Donald Trump and his campaign — as well as into the abuse of FISA-surveillance powers. I suspect the testimony will be a dud, although there is some intrigue to it.

Yates became acting attorney general when AG Loretta Lynch stepped down toward the end of the Obama administration. She was thus present at the important January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, when she and the FBI’s then-director, James Comey, met with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser. The meeting centered around a scheme to withhold from the incoming Trump administration information about the Trump-Russia investigation — what’s now often called “Russiagate” because of its similarity to Watergate-era domestic spying, part of what led to President Nixon’s resignation to stave off impeachment.

Yates stayed on as acting AG in the early days of the Trump administration, but she was quickly fired for insubordination when she declined to enforce the new president’s travel-restriction order. Prior to that, it was she who informed Trump’s then-White House counsel, Don McGahn, that, on January 24, the FBI had interviewed retired Army general Michael Flynn, then Trump’s national-security adviser, in connection with Flynn’s late December 2016 conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16307/returning-to-schools

Year after year, the career officials who run the bureaucracy in Health and Human Services (HHS), the permanent bureaucracy, who are globalists… preferred to spend money on building labs in Africa, fighting disease in Afghanistan, training scientists in China, instead of preparing our own American stockpile.

The CDC should also be advising schools and workplaces, like businesses, about the antimicrobial coatings that could be put on desks, chairs, and doorknobs to prevent the virus traces from being transferred from one person to another on their hands.

There are now several different technologies, most notably diluted hydrogen peroxide, that can be installed in buildings to automatically continuously destroy bacterial and viral traces on surfaces, and also deactivate viruses in the air. Just what we need. Yet in the CDC guidelines there is no discussion of them. They are non‑toxic. They can work automatically and continuously. They are already in use by major commercial places such as Walmart, Pepsi bottling plants, computer companies that need clean rooms to construct computers. They all know about this.

The CDC also did not mention anything about public restrooms… We know that this virus, like many hospital pathogens… is found in fecal matter. When the toilet flushes… that can take traces of the virus into the air…. The simplest solution is to put a lid on each of those toilets and a sign, “Please close the lid before flushing.”

I want to go on to two other things. One is the danger that we are losing respect for science. It is because we have seen our scientists get too involved in politics…. “Lancet” and “The New England Journal of Medicine”….attempt[ed] to debunk the use of hydroxychloroquine. They wanted to discredit President Trump because it is among his favorite drugs, but they ended up making fools of themselves because they put aside their usually rigorous standards of peer review and data examination and published two garbage articles with bogus data in order to accomplish a political goal.

Here is the most interesting. Three vaccine developers from Britain and Norway report that they see in the genetic makeup of this virus… a segment that they believe was lab engineered rather than evolving in nature. As soon as they proposed this, a bevy of prestigious American scientists… were outraged and signed an open letter… declaring their solidarity with the Chinese scientists, health researchers, and the World Health Organization against people who might be investigating other sources of COVID‑19 that diverge from the Chinese official story. Can you imagine? There they are trying to censor the research. They are claiming it is a conspiracy theory. ABC News comes on and says it has been debunked. It has not been debunked. I am not saying it is true, but I am saying, at this point, what we need to battle this virus is the truth, not censored research. Scientists need to be scientists. They do not need to be censoring politicians.

I think we have to recognize, as our current president does, that China is an enemy.

Again, I have to say it is the president who has been very dynamic on this issue. Never mind the career bureaucrats in any of these agencies. He is the one who went to Virginia himself and made sure that we started contracts to build a domestic supply chain.

“The Next Pandemic” (McCaughey’s new book) is out from Encounter Books. It is really quite short, more like a broadside. I list a lot of these new technologies that should be employed to make our workplaces, schools, and mass transit safer.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/04/why-isnt-cancel-culture-canceling-corporations/

By their actions, multinational corporations such as Apple and Nike show they are fine with slave labor and racism just so long as it doesn’t happen in America.

If you haven’t gotten your fill of “cancel culture” yet, tell you what: I have over 80 companies you can cancel right now. Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google among others should be facing the wrath of the social justice warriors, but I’ve barely heard a peep from them about these corporations. 

Apparently, these companies forgot that the 13th Amendment removed slavery from our country over 150 years ago and that we felt so strongly about the issue that we passed the Tariff Act of 1930. Section 307 of the law prohibits “the importation of merchandise mined, produced or manufactured, wholly or in part, in any foreign country by forced or indentured labor—including forced child labor.” Furthermore, “such merchandise is subject to exclusion and/or seizure, and may lead to criminal investigation of the importer(s).” But corporations have skirted this legislation via a “consumptive demand” loophole. 

So here we are in the absurd situation where “woke” corporations, which absolutely are making revenue from forced labor (read: slave labor), are using their ill-gotten profits to fund Black Lives Matter social justice global networks. They are giving generous donations totaling in the billions, buying indulgences with politicized racial payoffs so that they don’t have to talk about profiting from slave labor. Of course, their actions directly contradict everything they claim to support. 

These companies don’t love America. They don’t even view themselves as American companies per se. They love the money Americans pay for their products and which finances their salaries, but they would rather use the slave labor of subjugated peoples in foreign countries than undercut the bottom line by paying American workers reasonable wages. Don’t believe me? Ask the 600 or so Uyghur women working in a forced labor camp to produce 7-8 million Nike shoes every year. I’m sure they’d be happy to talk about it all.