RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/30/vice-president-kamikaze-harris/

After more than 11 months in office, with inflation skyrocketing and the country’s superpower status plummeting, Americans can’t stand either President Joe Biden or his vice-presidential-beneficiary of-affirmative-action, Kamala Harris.

Every time Harris tries to help herself, she hurts herself. As border czar who for three months avoided visiting the Mexican border, Harris relented only after plans were made known of former President Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott traveling to the frontier – and then she briefly visited only a border patrol station about nine miles from the actual border, far removed from where masses of illegal migrants have been crossing.

To humanize her disastrous public image and connect with ordinary people, she staged a ludicrous fake meeting with child actors to tout space exploration. She chose to own Biden’s catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal by telling the world she was the “last person in the room” when he formulated his policy. And her office has been hemorrhaging senior staff.

But on Sunday, the vice president outdid herself in self-destructive stupidity, and made it crystal clear she is unqualified to assume the presidency should the ever-more-enfeebled Biden become incapacitated or, God forbid, pass on to his eternal reward.

Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” she began by sounding, more even than Joe, like big, dumb, dangerous government personified. “Everyone has to get vaccinated,” Harris insisted at a time when the federal government’s approach to COVID is more discredited than ever, both among the populace and within the medical community, adding that “they’ll save your life.”

https://www.city-journal.org/eric-adams-and-the-promise-of-pragmatism?skip=1

In his victory night speech in New York City, an electrified Mayor-elect Eric Adams reserved his most scathing criticism not for his Republican opponent but for outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio. “This city betrays New Yorkers every day, especially the ones who rely on it the most,” said the incoming 110th mayor. Such pointed criticism might be expected when a candidate from one party succeeds an officeholder from the other party, but it sounds strange coming from one Democrat following another. After eight years of governance that placed ineffective progressivism over pragmatism, could the Adams administration represent the possible emergence of a moderate, results-oriented faction in New York’s nearly hegemonic Democratic Party?

November’s inflection point was reminiscent of others in Gotham’s more recent past. Following Rudy Giuliani’s winning reelection bid in 1997, the New York Times opined that his success signified “a triumph of nuts-and-bolts pragmatism over the ideology and party loyalty that once ruled elections in New York.” But Bill de Blasio’s 2013 victory saw the pendulum swing back. The Times suggested that this election marked a “forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis.”

Unlike the 1990s and 2000s, when Republican candidates could win major mayoral elections, Democrats today possess almost unilateral control over most large American cities. New York is chief among them. That may change someday, but in the meantime it’s important to recognize the influx of some 1.5 million more residents since the Giuliani days, many of them educated and motivated professionals who tend to identify as liberal and dislike the national Republican brand. Buoyed by these voters, New York’s Democratic Party sanctioned measures to close Rikers Island, end pretrial detention for many defendants, shift $1 billion of the NYPD’s budget to other services, and impose higher taxes on wealthier citizens.

One might conclude that New Yorkers’ everyday priorities are tilting ever leftward, but that would be mistaken. A closed primary erodes the benefits of remaining Republican or Independent, leading many moderates to break ranks. Last year, 67,965 unaffiliated voters and 20,528 Republicans switched allegiances in the Empire State to become newly minted Democrats and thereby participate in the now all-important primary. The vastly lopsided ratio of Democratic to GOP voters doesn’t necessarily reflect the shared ground that underlies most urban voters’ preferences and concerns.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/29/the-left-doesnt-own-minority-voters/

Demographic transitions present political opportunities, but do not protect politicians from their own folly. The shift in most Western countries to a more racially and ethnically diverse demographic has been widely seen by left-wingers as an opportunity to cement their ascendancy.

Yet after early successes with this strategy, the parties of the left have witnessed the departure of some minority voters – Hindus in Britain, Asians in Australia, and Asians and Hispanics in the United States. In some cases, minorities are opting out of the intersectional bandwagon, which includes certain cultural attitudes, imposed progressivism in schools, and an increasing tolerance of crime.

Sadly, racialism and constant campaigns to address ‘systemic racism’ have driven a certain element of working-class whites not only in Trumpian America, but also in France, Britain, Germany and even Scandinavia, towards nativist, even openly racist, politics. As Michael Lind among others suggest, the fashionable focus on ‘white privilege’ and assigning original sin based on someone sharing DNA with settlers and slave owners also doesn’t work with the majority of Americans, who come from families who came to America after the Civil War. Meanwhile, crowing about ‘the end of white America’ might be popular in ethnic-studies departments, but it does not translate into a better life for most minorities.

Racial minorities’ shift to the centre and the right represents a healthy step, as it undermines the racialist, us-versus-them rhetoric shared both by the nationalist right and the intersectional left. Once politicians begin addressing people as people, with their own interests, and not as artefacts of their own heritage, we can look to employ diversity not as a weapon, but as an asset.

When you ask them, most people of colour do not generally share the politics of the faculty-lounge racialists. Nor do most Americans. The overall PC agenda, built around identity politics, is rejected by 52 per cent of Americans, according to a recent NPR poll. Opposition to PC is even greater among Latinos. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the woke anti-racist meme, even as it is widely adopted by the billionaire class and corporate HR departments.