RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17288/social-media-apogee

Most famously, of course, is the banning of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. But there are many, many others.

Journalist friends from center-right outlets saw tens of thousands evaporate. Colleagues were suspended for reposting something they had said on multiple occasions for a year.

The social media giants are still flush with cash, convinced they are righteous and enlightened, and, most of all, are exceedingly arrogant. They believe they will continue to define and influence society – and they may – but only half.

The nearly consistent claim from established social media companies against their start-up competitors is that they are guilty of some “ism.” Take your pick: racial, ethnic, political, religious, sexual, whatever. Some crime, syndrome, or deplorable belief – some “ism” – is usually attached to any platform other than themselves.

This is not the stuff of right-wing conspiracy theorists. It touches on press freedoms and landmark legal cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan. In that 1964 case, the Supreme Court established that a plaintiff in a defamation case concerning a public figure must prove “actual malice” in reporting false information. Actual malice is the publication of a false statement with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.

When a business turns on roughly half of its customers, treats them like criminal suspects or seeks to deprive them of their services, can they prosper? The answer is “No.”

Social media is dying, they just don’t know it yet. All the so-called “giants” of Silicon Valley: Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk cannot continue successfully “as is.” In the lead-up to the 2020 election, and certainly in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot, persons and organizations not subscribing to the new orthodox socialist ideology of the American Left have found themselves “de-platformed,” suspended, erased, minimized and banned.

Most famously, of course, is the banning of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. But there are many, many others. A policy analyst colleague with a few hundred Twitter followers watched an unexplained and precipitous 20% reduction overnight. They had not posted anything “controversial,” or anything at all in several weeks, but clearly some algorithm had identified the analyst as “one of those people.” Journalist friends from center-right outlets saw tens of thousands evaporate. Colleagues were suspended for reposting something they had said on multiple occasions for a year. No explanations, no remedy, no recourse. Another symptom of the cancel culture syndrome.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/16/on-the-backs-of-poor-whites/

The country is fast descending into a Dantean hell. 

The circles of hell into which we’ve been signed, sealed, and delivered are mass migration, diversity, multiculturalism, and zealous, institutionalized anti-whiteness, with its attendant de-civilization and inversion of long-held societal morals and mores.

The guiding ghost of Virgil is nowhere to be found. To ostensibly shepherd us out of hell, however, assorted serpents have slithered forth. 

Beware! All the more so when they speak to you from bastions of the establishment—Newsweek is one—as J. D. Vance does in, “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration.” 

His is the typically conciliatory, “conservative” argument we’ve come to expect from the gilded elite, regarding America’s promiscuous immigration policy, under Republicans and Democrats alike.

Vance is the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which is a culturally compliant—namely, unflattering—account of poor, white America. 

Provided your thesis allows for a cozy convergence of agreeable storylines—you are well-positioned to peddle a national bestseller to the approving Left, libertarian, neoconservative, and pseudo-conservative smart set.

Yes, Vance is a sellout. Not that they were asked for their take, but the archetypical folks depicted in Hillbilly Elegy contend, justifiably, that “Vance [is] not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/medias-racial-narrative-targets-whites-harms-blacks-11618597161?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Mr. Woodson is founder and president of the Woodson Center and author, most recently, of “Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles.”

Are only white people capable of hate crimes? If you get all your news from mainstream media sources, that’s what you’d think. A 51-year-old black man allegedly stabbing a 12-year-old white boy in Pittsburgh while shouting racial epithets barely made national news. The same was true when a black man was arrested for savagely beating a 65-year-old Asian woman in Midtown Manhattan. We saw endless coverage of the despicable assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, but when a 25-year-old black male allegedly killed a Capitol police officer last week, MSNBC erroneously reported the suspect was white.

Throughout 2020 there was a rise in violence against Asian-Americans, but the race of the perpetrators was typically mentioned only when they were white. Media and other elites obsessively push the narrative that the greatest threat in this country is coming from “white supremacists.” This gross oversimplification has dire consequences for the most vulnerable in our society—those living in the poorest neighborhoods—and for the nation as a whole.

A media environment in which the only acceptable villains are white creates a more dangerous world for all of us. The rush to judgment based on skin color is familiar to those of us who lived through segregation. In those days, some in law enforcement couldn’t care less about crimes committed by blacks against other blacks, but there were severe penalties for offenses against whites. We marched and demanded fair and equal treatment under the law. As far as the application of criminal law, much of what is happening today is a retreat to the pre-Civil Rights South.

Every tragic police killing of a black person is amplified by radical progressives to accuse police of white supremacy and to push for defunding and anarchy. The more law-enforcement officers we lose to defunding, early retirements and drastic drops in recruitment, the fewer we have to patrol lower-income neighborhoods.

Mark Bauerlein is an emeritus professor of English at Emory University.

Given the irked and fearful state of the liberal temper at the present time, many people might find it hard to believe that liberalism used to be fun.

During the four years of President Donald Trump, liberals were miserable, sinking ever further into resentment and incredulity, a sense of history and America robbing them of their rightful place in control of the country. Unfortunately, the ascent of Joe Biden hasn’t much improved the mood, either. They have to spend too much time pretending that the bumbling mediocrity who now occupies the White House has statesmanlike stature for them to feel comfortable and secure.

Go back to the ’90s, however, and a whole different attitude ran through the liberal ranks. Do you remember? The Reagan-Bush Era was over, Bill Clinton was popular, and Newt Gingrich’s Congress had some off-putting characters who signified to liberals that the last gasp of conservatism was at hand. The left could be an irritant, yes, but trouble-makers such as Al Sharpton had but a minor influence on national affairs and required only the occasional appeasement to be kept in check. Meanwhile, NAFTA and other globalist moves promised even greater prosperity, and the Internet, too, seemed just the kind of instrument of individual expression and universal access that tallied the liberal dream of empowerment and equity.

It gave liberals daily confirmation of … themselves. They saw that the world was moving in a liberalizing direction, and they knew that it was good. How could they not congratulate themselves when all of this ’90s advent came on top of a long historical advance that set liberals up on a solid moral pedestal forever (so they believed)? Apart from the Reagan interruption, they could look back at a half-century of righteous progress that gave no credit to their opponents. Liberals could claim as their own the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-War protests, Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, and the steady diversification of the U.S. population, all of them virtuous and overdue crusades that ennobled the ones who led them.