RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-manchin-may-have-just-killed-transformational-liberalism-for-a-decade/

Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) says he’s done with President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. And if saying so on Fox News wasn’t enough, he added an explanation point in a statement released shortly after his appearance, in which he declared: “My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face. I cannot take that risk.”

It is, of course, possible that once they stare into the abyss of defeat, Biden and Democrats may decide to finally cave and give Manchin everything he wants. For instance, he has indicated a willingness to vote for up to $1.75 trillion in spending, and said that he’s more open to picking one priority and fully funding it for a decade rather than starting lots of new programs, funding them for a few years, and hoping they get renewed. So there’s some reason for conservatives to keep the champagne on ice.

But realistically, this approach would require blowing up the bill that had been carefully negotiated for months just to squeak through the House, and getting progressives to swallow whatever Manchin wants whole. The expanded child tax credit that has resulted in monthly payments to families will expire at the end of the year. So trying to pass it next year — which would require every penny of the bill if fully paid for over a decade — would essentially mean creating a new program rather than extending one that’s already on the books.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/david-solway-2/2021/12/17/what-is-evil-n1542472

Everywhere we turn these days we see evil in action. It was always thus, but in the current social, political, and medical environment it seems especially prominent. We observe a pandemic that has caused global and historically immense damage and devastation, a cataclysm of biblical proportions. We see governments, official agencies, and corporate consortiums that have fed the public with lies and misinformation as to the origins, causes, and cures of the plague. We witness elections that have been rigged and stolen and note corruption in high places that seems unprecedented. We see wars that have been fought for no useful purposes and thoughtless surrenders that only accentuated their stupidity. We experience legislation in democratic countries that remind one of the practices of totalitarian regimes. We see honest people and reputable professionals censored by monopoly media and digital platforms and deprived of their livelihoods. We face mobs of co-opted citizens, fearful and manic, who resemble the brainwashed masses in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Every day there are a plethora of new reports of dissimulation, atrocity, depravity, crime, and social breakdown that have become standard fare. The News changes from day to day and even within the same day, and yet it is almost always the same. “Hot button” is cold coffee and “topical” differs only in particulars, remaining generic and fundamentally indistinguishable, part of a ditto realm. We are captive, as Canada’s premier columnist Rex Murphy writes, to “the morbid isms of our time” of “confected scandal and demonstrations” that characterize “the imperial reach of this timid and repressive age.”

In a world torn asunder by violence, cruelty, and corruption, the question of evil, addressed by philosophers and theologians for millennia, is unavoidable. We tend to use the word indiscriminately, as a catch-all phrase and verbal convenience devoid of substantive content and analytic rigor. Is what we call “evil” a concept of the human mind, a descriptive term that applies to impulses, acts, and events that issue in various forms of suffering in both the world of man and the world of nature? Life in nature, including predatory disease, is essentially predicated on the digestive tract—“this munching universe,” as Lawrence Durrell called it. Death is the operative principle. Life in the human world is a theater of greed, deception, hatred, and murder recognized by the Ten Commandments, a list of axioms that have proven largely unable to counteract the bloodbath of history and the pathological compulsions of the individual psyche.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-p-goldman/2021/12/18/trumps-alleged-anti-semitism-n1542666

“There’s people in this country that are Jewish [who] no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews of this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress, and today I think it’s the exact opposite. And I think [former President Barack] Obama and [President Joe] Biden did that.

“And yet in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people, which tells you that the Jewish people—and I’ve said this for a long time—the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel. I mean, you look at The New York Times, The New York Times hates Israel. Hates them. And they’re Jewish people who run The New York Times, I mean the Sulzberger family.”

The line about “absolute power over Congress” is cringeworthy. Yes, it is an anti-Semitic trope. Trump fits the canonical definition of a philo-Semite (an anti-Semite who likes Jews). He harbors some anti-Semitic prejudices about the extent of Jewish power. But he’s still a friend of the Jewish people and of the State of Israel. Before the 2016 election, an Israeli politician asked me what I thought of Trump (full disclosure: I worked for Ted Cruz in 2016). I said, “Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews!” I published that malicious remark. Nonetheless, I voted for Trump twice and defended him against the Deep State conspiracy to unseat him. There are anti-Semites and anti-Semites, but I’ll get to that.

As my friend Caroline Glick writes in Israel Hayom:

Trump was the most pro-Israel president in history. None of his predecessors, (and certainly not his successor President Joe Biden), come close….[he]stopped US financial support for the Palestinian Authority and shut down the PLO’s representative office in Washington, DC because Abbas funds and incites terrorism.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/19/breaking-joe-manchin-just-killed-the-build-back-better-act-n1542721

After months of negotiations failed to achieve an adequate compromise, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) declared on Sunday that there’s no way he can support Joe Biden’s big government socialist agenda, known as the Build Back Better Act.

Manchin said on Fox News Sunday that he worked hard to reach an acceptable compromise.

According to Manchin, the legislation being pursued by Democrats was just too much on top of historic inflation, the national debt, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’ve done everything humanly possible,” he said. “When you have these things coming at you the way they are right now … I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation.”

“This is a no,” he added. “I have tried everything I know to do.”

With the U.S. Senate split 50-50, Joe Biden needed every single Democrat to back the legislation. With Joe Manchin officially declaring he cannot support the bill, The Build Back Better Act is, at least for now, dead.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/19/fauci-orchestrated-quick-and-devastating-takedown-of-anti-lockdown-experts-n1542717

New emails released by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that last year, outgoing National Institutes of Health Dir. Dr. Francis Collins instructed Dr. Anthony Fauci to carry out a “quick and devastating” takedown of The Great Barrington Declaration, a document authored by experts who advocated for herd immunity to stop the pandemic, and “focused protection” for the most vulnerable populations over universal lockdowns.

According to the declaration, “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health” that will lead to “greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. ”

“Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed,” states the declaration.

“As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls,” the declaration continues. “We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity … Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”

This, it seems, was unacceptable to Collins and Fauci.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/18/what-happened-to-the-riots/

In the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, the country was beset by protests that turned into riots. Major cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. were in flames, with Black Lives Matter and Antifa shock troops leading the way. Then, after the tense period between the election and inauguration, the riots mostly stopped, as if someone had flipped a switch.  

Of course, violence still exists. Violent crime is up significantly nationwide, just as it rose after the often-violent anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. And, in Portland, riots and the Antifa culture of violent resistance to authority have become somewhat institutionalized. 

But, for the rest of the country, the riots have stopped. This, even though police still occasionally shoot suspects, and sometimes those shootings are controversial. And there is also still a great deal of political division nationwide. Even so, the end to the riots has been a bit surprising.

The disappearance of the Left’s riots confirms what many have suspected: that they were centrally planned. On the surface, this was hard to believe. Antifa looked like Darwin’s waiting room, a gaggle of meth-mouthed degenerates, many with criminal records and obvious mental health problems. They were augmented by ordinary street thugs, amped up by the anti-police rhetoric of Black Lives Matter. 

But it turns out both groups had a lot of support and included prominent, professional members. They also had internal organization, including encrypted communications channels, supply trucks, and extensive training for their cadres. This is all well documented in Andy Ngo’s exposé, Unmasked.

They also benefited from friendly media. The media willingly repeated their disinformation about how minor the riots were, with CNN’s use of the phrase “fiery, but mostly peaceful protests” revealing the extent of the agitprop. Antifa and BLM occupied a Seattle neighborhood for weeks, during which several people were robbed, beaten, and killed. Nonetheless, the mayor described it as having a street festival atmosphere. The media and officials downplayed the millions of dollars in damage, assaults, and murders.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/18/the-freedom-facade/

I have been looking back over Alexis de Tocqueville’s unfinished masterpiece, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. It is full of piquant observations, for example this from the end of the preface: “a man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” How much contempt do you suppose emanates from the apparatchiks who inhabit the D.C. swamp and control our lives? How slavish is their devotion to the unfettered prerogatives of the idol they serve, the state? 

That dialectic between adulation of the sources of power and contempt for those subject to it may in one sense be perennial, a sentiment captured by the old Latin tag: Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris: “it is part of human nature to hate those whom you have injured.” But Tocqueville translated that psychological characteristic into the realm of politics in which the question of liberty is paramount. Like Edmund Burke, Tocqueville was a supreme anatomist of the ways in which power co-opts the passion for liberty in order to counterfeit liberty’s essence. Describing the habit of “governmental paternalism,” Tocqueville notes that “Almost all the rulers who have tried to destroy freedom have at first attempted to preserve its forms.”

This has been seen from Augustus down to our own day. Rulers flatter themselves that they can combine the moral strength given by public consent with the advantages that only absolute power can give. Almost all have failed in the enterprise, and have soon discovered that it is impossible to make the appearance of freedom last where it is no longer a reality.

I think that is more or less where we are now. You still hear people talk about the importance of individual liberty, the rule of law, limited government, and so on, but increasingly, I believe, the slogans are shot through with a brittle cynicism. 

One sign of that decadence is the resignation that now greets every fresh assault on the impartiality upon which the rule of law, and hence liberty, depend. In a recent column for the Daily Signal, Larry Elder asks “Why hasn’t Jussie Smollett been charged with perjury?” It’s a good question, and it’s one everyone knows the answer to. Smollett belongs to a protected class (actually, he belongs to several protected classes). As a black, gay, celebrity (“celebrity” for some: like Larry Elder, I had never heard of him until he ran afoul of the law), Smollett is more or less untouchable. True, he was just convicted of 5 out 6 felony counts for staging his own assault, but many commentators are speculating that he will serve no jail time for committing what can only be described as a racially motivated hate crime.