RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/21/the-tyranny-of-public-health/

Public health dominates political discussion today. Masks, vaccines, social distancing – these are the issues about which we now argue daily. Not economics or the increasingly volatile geopolitical situation, but public health.

And I’m not just talking about the Covid pandemic. Indeed, virtually all aspects of social and political life today are now framed through the idiom of public health. Problems we used to treat as political and social questions are now often presented as medical issues.

So critics of prime minister Boris Johnson do not simply question his political record – they also brand him a public-health problem. As one article puts it, ‘Boris Johnson’s dwindling authority [is] becoming a “public-health issue”’. Likewise, Donald Trump was labelled a ‘public-health threat’ by his opponents while in office.

Public health has become a principal means to attack a political opponent or a set of political ideas. In 2019, a group of medics even wrote a letter to the Guardian calling a No Deal Brexit a ‘threat to public health’. Other critics of Brexit called it a ‘confused concept that threatens public health’. As public health has become politicised, politics has become medicalised.

The pandemic has intensified this medicalisation of politics. There is now virtually nothing that cannot be conceived of as a public-health issue. Take racism. Writing in the Lancet earlier this year, identitarian academic Kehinde Andrews insisted that ‘racism is a public-health crisis’. In the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, made a similar claim earlier this year. ‘Racism is a serious public-health threat that directly affects the wellbeing of millions of Americans’, she said. The CDC has since launched a new ‘Racism and Health’ web portal.

All this changes the very meaning of racism. Racial oppression used to be understood in terms of political, social and economic domination. Now it is understood in terms of ill-health. The racially oppressed are now as likely to be seen as patients in need of medical intervention as they are victims of political injustice. ‘Racism isn’t just unfair. It’s making us ill’, complains a Guardian contributor.

Likewise, anti-racist campaigners portray racism as a mental-health problem. Student supporters of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University have claimed that they feel traumatised by the presence of the Cecil Rhodes statue.

Increasingly, the presentation of a social problem as a supposed threat to public health is a means to draw attention to it. That is why President Biden recently chose to condemn gun violence as a public-health epidemic. Unable to present a critique of violence and crime in moral terms, he decided to offer one through the language of medicine.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/kamala-harris-bad-press-racist-sexist/

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats.

It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.) She refuses to visit the US-Mexican border, aside from one brief stop a thousand miles from the crisis. When she was asked about it, she noted that she hadn’t been to Europe, either. That PR blunder was widely noted but she soon corrected it: she visited Europe.

Why was this clunker picked for such an important office? We still don’t know the full answer. Part of the answer surely lies in Trump’s weakness with women voters and the Democrats’ goal of motivating high turnout among them and among African Americans, who are crucial to any Democratic victory. Candidate Biden first promised to pick a woman for his ticket and then faced intense pressure to pick an African American. The list wasn’t a long one.

https://www.city-journal.org/police-forces-stretched-thin

One night, when I was still a big-city cop, I was called to a business where a young woman, heavily intoxicated, had been caught drawing graffiti with a Sharpie. The business owner was irate because of the pervasive graffiti problem in the area, but the woman had no criminal record. The graffiti in question amounted to about $20 worth of damage. I spoke to the woman and the business owner, and we came to an arrangement. We would trade contact information, and she would return tomorrow to clean up the graffiti. If she did not, the business owner would contact me, and I would ask prosecutors to file a misdemeanor charge against her.

As far as I know, this agreement worked, and it was a win for everyone. The business owner got some justice, and his property got cleaned up. The young woman avoided an arrest and criminal record. And taxpayers didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars prosecuting a drunk, first-time offender over $20 in graffiti. I think the median criminal justice “reformer” would say that this is the kind of thing they would like police to do more often.

Here’s the catch: this “diversion agreement” (which I made up on the spot) took time. My back-up officer and I had to detain the woman, check her criminal history, and identify everyone. We had to complete a criminal investigation that would hold up in court, if necessary. We had to speak to the parties and find a mutually acceptable arrangement. We had to document everything in the appropriate required reports. And I had to take the time to follow up with the business owner, in case the woman failed to hold up her end of the agreement. Booking her into jail and forgetting about the whole thing probably would have been faster.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/23/lump-of-coal-awards-2021-january-6-edition/

Aside from the pandemic, no other issue has dominated the daily news cycle and collective fixation of the ruling class more than the alleged “insurrection” on January 6, 2021.

The events of that day were a gift to the Biden regime and the Democratic Party—which should instantly disabuse anyone of the notion that the Capitol protest was legitimately an organic uprising instead of an inside job orchestrated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the FBI to name just a few accomplices.

Since then, every lever of government power in Washington, D.C. has been wielded in a vengeful way against American citizens who dared to protest the rigged 2020 presidential election. The conduct of those in charge has exposed the moral depravity of the people who populate the power center of the world’s greatest country, showing a stark chasm between the inherent goodness and decency of the American people and the sadistic ghouls who call the shots from the Beltway.

The people on this list deserve a far greater punishment than a lump of coal. And this list could be much longer. But since it’s the Christmas season and all, I’ll be charitable.

This year’s naughty list, January 6 version:

Attorney General Merrick Garland: It’s hard to see how Garland could do more damage as a Supreme Court justice than what he’s doing now as the nation’s top lawyer. In all honesty, Garland is more like Biden or Robert Mueller—a grandfatherly disguise to conceal the sinister actors behind the scenes—and it’s actually Lisa Monaco, his deputy, who’s in charge.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_collinsfauci_axis_against_antilockdown_scientists.html

Francis Collins, the first appointed National Institutes of Health director to serve more than one president, stepped down on December 19, leaving behind a record open to question. For example, in an October 8, 2020 email, Collins told Dr. Anthony Fauci, “there needs to be a quick and devastating public takedown of its premises. I don’t see that on line yet. Is it underway?” 

Collins’ target was the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by more than 900,000 epidemiologists and public health scientists to show concern about the damaging physical and mental health impact of government COVID policies. Those policies, the signers contend, should focus on the most vulnerable while letting others continue normal lives. 

The Barrington signatories included biophysicist Mike Leavitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford and the 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Stanford Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya also signed on, joined by Dr. Martin Kulldorf, professor of medicine at Harvard. 

These experts are every bit as qualified, or more so, than Collins. Even so, the NIH boss called them “fringe epidemiologists” and wanted Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to deliver a hit piece. 

On October 19, 2020, MedPage Today posted a piece headlined “Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?” As the article noted, “All three have advocated against lockdown measures since the start of the pandemic.” This assumed that lockdowns were an unalloyed benefit for the people.