RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-cdc-shouldnt-treat-racism-as-a-public-health-crisis/

For COVID-19, the numbers don’t bear out the assumption, which distracts from the agency’s core mission.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was founded in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center, with a simple goal: prevent the spread of malaria. The mission soon expanded to all communicable diseases and, more recently, to areas — such as domestic violence, gun control, and vaping — that, while related to health, seem far afield from the agency’s primary purpose. Today the CDC describes its mission as protecting the nation from health threats both foreign and domestic. Now the agency appears to have expanded its mandate into progressive politics.

In a recent statement, CDC director Rochelle Walensky asserts that there have been disproportionate numbers of COVD-19 cases and deaths in communities of color. She claims that the disparities were the result not of COVID-19 but rather of racism, which she labels a public-health crisis. Her statement echoes an American Medical Association policy recognizing racism as a public-health threat and similar declarations from 194 state and local government entities.

But the director’s statement is inconsistent with the CDC’s current data that show little or no increased incidence of black COVID-19 deaths. At best it reflects outdated data documenting disparities that no longer exist. At worst, it reflects a political agenda in search of a justification. Whichever it is, it suggests that public-health officials, in this case the CDC, have become distracted from their core job.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/where_have_you_gone_atticus_finch.html

In the archives of legal fiction, two characters best embody historic liberal self-perception. One is attorney Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. The other is Juror #8 in the 1957 film, 12 Angry Men. Today, each is an endangered species.

In his defense of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, Atticus ignored public opinion. He stared down the mobs intent on extra-legal justice and protected his ”mockingbird” as best he could. The unlikely mockingbird today is former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. As Chauvin learned quickly, if he did not know it beforehand, today’s vestigial liberals identify not with Atticus but with the mob.

Hell, as even Snopes had to concede Vice President Kamala Harris “encouraged her supporters to donate” to a nonprofit called the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) that was bailing out members of the mob arrested for rioting after George Floyd’s death.

Chauvin’s crime, like Robinson’s, was being of a certain race in a society that increasingly sees justice only through the prism of race. Like the fictional Robinson, the real-life Chauvin represents one of a long and growing line of sacrificial lambs offered on the altar of racial “justice” to expiate the nation’s imagined sins.

Ever impatient, the mobs from the very same liberal metro could not wait for Chauvin’s official immolation to demand the sacrifice of a new lamb. This time, the mobs have shown no scruple about sating themselves on a female officer. To them, it mattered not a whit that veteran Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, officer Kim Potter clearly showed no racial malice in her accidental shooting of Duante Wright, a troubled archetype from a subculture slowly being crushed under the weight of rigidly enforced dishonesty.

To his good fortune, Chauvin has found his Atticus in defense attorney Eric Nelson. Although he has backstage help from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, Nelson has been arguing solo against the snarky Mod Squad of a prosecution team. Calm and dispassionate, the forty-something Nelson has been quietly picking the prosecution case apart these last three weeks.  Viewed from another planet, the unknowing alien might wonder why Chauvin is even on trial. For details, please see the work done by Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection.  Those who have not followed the case closely would be wise to ignore Big Media and watch the closing arguments, likely on Monday, before forming an opinion.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/15/biden-intelligence-community-breaches-authority-to-target-the-right/

Instead of prioritizing resources to confront the menace posed by America’s foreign adversaries the IC is devoting most of its time to pursuing Americans on the political Right.

The freshly reelected Republican senator from Nebraska had kind words this week for Joe Biden’s intelligence chiefs. “The American people are blessed to have an [intelligence community] as serious as ours,” Senator Ben Sasse said during Wednesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. He called the group, which included FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director William Burns, “heroes” and wanted a chance to “say thank you” in front of the American people.

Sasse, who is supposed to act as a fierce skeptic not a fawning cheerleader of the world’s most powerful intelligence apparatus, singled out Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines for praise. “Your opening statement . . . was incredibly strong,” Sasse swooned. 

Haines, the top deputy to former CIA Director John Brennan during the Obama Administration, undoubtedly marveled at winning such a groveling endorsement from a sitting Republican senator—or perhaps she internally laughed at winning over yet another reliable GOP dupe. (In fairness, most Republicans on the committee joined in Sasse’s praise for Haines.)

But Senate Republicans should have been outraged rather than starry-eyed over Haines’ opening statement as well as her conduct in office since taking the reins of the intelligence community the day after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Haines is wasting no time accelerating the weaponization of a sprawling organization that is supposed to identify threats to the homeland by foreign actors, not target Americans with the wrong political views.