RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/learning-about-racism-smithsonian-bruce-bawer/

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

That’s George Orwell in 1984, of course. But the picture those words conjure up seems unpleasantly familiar in 2020.

In 2020, everything’s upside-down. The inmates are running the asylum. The animals are running the zoo. The children are giving orders to the adults.

A group called Antifa (“Anti-Fascist”) is fascist. A group called “Black Lives Matter” is utterly indifferent to all but a minuscule percentage of black lives.

In 1976, Time Magazine reported on a comment made by Secretary of Education Earl Butz on a plane trip in reply to a question by Republican singer Pat Boone. Boone asked Butz why the party of Lincoln couldn’t attract more black voters. Butz said something that I will he have to redact heavily: “I’ll tell you what the [black people] want. It’s three things: first, a tight [female body part]; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to [defecate].”

Butz lost his job. And with good reason. His remark to Boone was a perfect example of what used to be called racism.

In 2020, however, racism is different. Today we’re told that all non-blacks, or at least all whites, are racists. Some of us, indeed, are racist without even knowing it. If you claim to be colorblind, you’re definitely racist. Ditto if you claim to care about the content of someone’s character rather than the color of his skin. Even if you’ve got a black spouse or a black child, you almost certainly harbor unexamined assumptions and exhibit behaviors that peg you as a racist.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-is-outrage-anti-semitism-sports-hollywood-1303210

Recent incidents of anti-Semitic tweets and posts from sports and entertainment celebrities are a very troubling omen for the future of the Black Lives Matter movement, but so too is the shocking lack of massive indignation. Given the New Woke-fulness in Hollywood and the sports world, we expected more passionate public outrage. What we got was a shrug of meh-rage.

When reading the dark squishy entrails of popular culture, meh-rage in the face of sustained prejudice is an indisputable sign of the coming Apatholypse: apathy to all forms of social justice. After all, if it’s OK to discriminate against one group of people by hauling out cultural stereotypes without much pushback, it must be OK to do the same to others. Illogic begets illogic.

Ice Cube’s June 10 daylong series of tweets, which involved some creepy symbols and images, in general implied that Jews were responsible for the oppression of blacks. NFL player DeSean Jackson tweeted out several anti-Semitic messages, including a quote he incorrectly thought was from Hitler (not your go-to guy for why-can’t-we-all-get-along quotes) stating that Jews had a plan to “extort America” and achieve “world domination.” Isn’t that SPECTRE’s job in James Bond movies?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/nfl-football-politics-risks-alienating-fans/

If the multibillion-dollar NFL decides that multimillionaire players have no obligation to stand to honor a collective national anthem, and that there will be separate anthems and politicized uniforms, then millions of Americans will quietly shrug and change the channel

The league survived all sorts of crises in the past, yet they are in deep trouble like never before.

The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States.

The NFL’s megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America’s national sports event.

The league survived all sorts of crises in the past. It was one of the first professional sports to integrate its teams, doing so in the 1920s. But the integration unfortunately ceased, and the NFL didn’t reintegrate until the mid ’40s, becoming one of the last sports leagues to embrace fully a racially blind meritocracy.

The NFL successfully absorbed the rival American Football League in 1966. So far the NFL has avoided federal safety regulations that could curb the incidence of physical trauma inherent in the sport.

The league’s owners are a cross-section of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and old-money families — many of them politically well-connected.

Yet the NFL is in deep trouble like never before.

In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem. He claimed he was protesting the treatment of African Americans.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/andrew-cuomo-is-not-a-covid-hero/

The media have decided to play along with New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s bizarre effort to reinvent himself as the hero of the fight against COVID-19. Cuomo’s motivation is transparent enough, and we are duly impressed at the chutzpah required to even attempt such a thing. But there is no excuse for anyone else enabling him.

You would never know from listening to Cuomo’s glowing press notices (with the honorable exception of CNN’s Jake Tapper) that more than 32,000 New Yorkers have died from the coronavirus — over twice as many as in any other state. Brooklyn and Queens each lost more than 5,500 people, compared with 4,521 thus far in the entire state of Florida. On a per capita basis, New York’s COVID-19 death rate has been a third higher than any nation on earth, and higher than that of any state besides neighboring New Jersey. Italy, an early epicenter of the pandemic, lost 561 people per million; New York lost 1,667.

This is not just a random occurrence. New York’s authorities were reassuring the public to go on as normal until well past the point where the coronavirus had spread pervasively throughout the community. They had let languish the city and state stockpiles of emergency equipment. Most disastrously, Cuomo and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy both ordered nursing homes to take back patients who tested positive for the virus, unleashing catastrophic death tolls in both states’ nursing-home populations.

Cuomo’s claim for success is that the state’s infection, hospitalization, and death rates have come down, which is rather like if New Orleans had celebrated the water level coming down after Katrina. And just this week, it was reported that infection rates are rising again among young adults and in affluent neighborhoods; New York may not be entirely out of the woods.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/16/locking-america-down-again-is-exactly-what-china-wants-because-it-will-ruin-us/
Stop trying to make lockdowns happen again. The world can’t afford it.

The governors of Texas and California, the nation’s two most populous states, recently reimposed coronavirus lockdowns despite falling death rates and health-care capacity far beyond hospitalization rates. Numerous other governors have delayed reopenings or reversed them in similar situations.

Lockdowns are not necessary to prevent coronavirus deaths, since the current capacity for treating cases is far above what is needed and people are going to get this disease until there’s a cure. Further, lockdowns accelerate systemic weaknesses such as our national debt, poor education, large numbers of working-age men who do not work, failure to pay for decades of overspending at both the national and state levels, tendency to bail out corrupt institutions such as schools, big business, and hospitals, and bloated health care system.

The Chinese Communist Party knows of all this. That is why it has expertly manipulated American corporate media’s anti-American biases to undermine their biggest competitor for control of the world.

Lockdowns of Western nations, and chiefly of the United States, are China’s only hope for achieving this long-term plan in its coronavirus-weakened state. Thus, continuing to play into this mass-murdering regime’s hands through cuckolded American leadership will have far more deadly consequences than coronavirus. This is why the lockdowns need to end now, and never come back again.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/15/woke-wolves-and-the-cowardly-leaders-of-liberal-america/

It isn’t really about Bari Weiss.

The mob inside The New York Times didn’t target Weiss, an opinion editor and writer there since 2017, for cancellation to get her specifically — though her smart writing and editing surely didn’t endear her to some of the third-rate digital-media hacks and ­talentless millennials who ­enjoyed the pursuit of this journalistic star on the rise due to their loathsome envy.

As Weiss detailed in a widely read public resignation letter on Tuesday, she left her job after constant bullying by more left-wing colleagues (the vast majority) that included underhanded gossip, anti-Semitic innuendo and public attacks against her that would never have been tolerated had she been the one meting them out.

She also described an atmosphere of pervasive ideological intimidation and conformity that finally made commissioning diverse viewpoints and writing and thinking freely — essential to opinion journalism — all but impossible.

So Weiss left. But again, it wasn’t ultimately about her. The mob’s real targets are twofold.

First, the mob yearns to scare into submission everyone in a position of authority at the Times and any other liberal institution in America who might think it wise to hire someone like Bari Weiss — someone who draws outside the ideological lines and brings a fresh perspective.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/07/blm-enemy-of-mind.html

Now that we’ve seen all the expensive, designer face masks on the Internet, it’s time to get to serious business. Speaker of hr House Nancy Pelosi wants all Americans to wear face masks, to better fight the Codiv-19 virus.  Rather, it’s to expand her power and turn the U.S into a dimmified republic.

The U.S. does not have a monopoly on racist loons. Canada has its share. Yusra Khogali, a Toronto Black Lives Matter chapter co-founder, argues that “white skin is sub-humxn” and says she prays to Allah for the “strength” not to “kill” or harm “white folks.”

In social media posts, Khogali mulled over how the white race could be “wiped out” by black people. All the while praying to Allah?

In the meantime, BLM has published a screed about how white “supremacy” has oppressed blacks by imposing its ethics on them. The ethics include:

These ethics include;

– Rugged individualism
– Self-reliance
– The nuclear family, with a mother and a father and 2.3 children
– Objective, rational, linear thinking
– Hard work
– Delayed gratification
– Respect for authority
– Following time schedules
– Christianity as the norm
– Planning for the future
– English common law justice
– Property rights
– Being polite

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/nigerian_privilege.html

The war on white privilege is permeating the entire world. As a white person, I am anxiously aggrieved by the obsessive persecution of my fellow whites and I’m feverishly in fear that my white privilege will be looted from me like a loaf of bread taken from a New York deli. How will I survive without the constant assistance that this white supremacist system provides me? Out of pure self-preservation, we need to shift the focus of the mob towards another group that has been stealthily benefitting from their privilege unscathed… the Nigerians.   

Perhaps you are unaware, but Nigerians are one of the most successful demographics in the United States. While the average household income in the United States is $61,937, the median income for households of Nigerian ancestry is $68,658.

In fact, 10% of Nigerian headed households earn over $140,000 annually and 25% earn over $90,000 annually.

Nigerian immigrants rank in the top ten for both the percentage of persons 16 and older that are employed and the percentage with college degrees.

Nigerians are also one of the most educated demographics in the country. Of people over the age of 25, 37% of Nigerians hold a bachelor’s degree and 29% hold an advanced degree, compared to 20% and 11% of the total U.S. population respectively.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-funds-the-lincoln-project-exactly-whom-you-expect/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

If The Lincoln Project was exclusively campaigning against Donald Trump, one might be tempted to believe it wasn’t merely an arm of the Democratic Party. If one of its co-founders, John Weaver, hadn’t been registered as a foreign agent lobbying for a Russia-owned nuclear-energy company against U.S. sanctions not long ago, one might accept that the group believed the conspiracy theories it spreads. If the group wasn’t working against the moderate Republicans senators for the sin of supporting originalist Supreme Court justices, who will transcend the Trump presidency and help preserve the traditional constitutional order, one might believe that its mission was to preserve the system. If you target moderates like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner — politicians who not only parted with Trump on issues but have quite un-Trumpian dispositions — you’re not working against Trumpism, you’re working against the GOP.

The media can keep calling you “Republicans,” but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat. That’s fine. You should embrace it.

I’m not really a fan of making a big deal over a group’s funding. Your arguments should stand on their own. I don’t care who pays you. But if you advertise your cause as something it’s not, you’re a fraud. And the biggest funders of The Lincoln Project aren’t distraught Republicans but long-time Democratic Party operatives.

By far the biggest donor has been Stephen Mandel, who gave The Lincoln Project — which, as far as I can tell, produces cheap b-roll-laden ads and takes nearly 90 percent of its budget in “operating expenditures” — a million dollars. His company Lone Pine Capital, it seems, has given the Democratic Party Senate committee $497,000 this year, $248,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, and a bunch of money to other left-wing candidates. During the 2018 cycle, Lone Pine Capital doled out $5,893,300 to Democrats. It gave $1,333,333 to Planned Parenthood.

42