RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/kendis_troubles_threaten_the_whole_antiracist_biz.html

As blue-collar philosopher Eric Hoffer reportedly observed some years back, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Ibram X. Kendi’s brand of antiracism skipped the first two phases. It was conceived as a racket.

Like most rackets, Kendi’s depended for its success on finding suckers to support it. Kendi found his at Boston University. In a perverse effort to atone for imagined sins, the BU administration funded a Kendi brainchild, the Center for Antiracist Research. Hysteria over the death of George Floyd inspired the center, but hysteria alone cannot sustain it.

 “After suddenly laying off over half his employees last week and with his center producing almost nothing since its founding,” writes David Decosimo in the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Kendi is now facing an investigation and harsh criticism from numerous colleagues complaining of financial mismanagement, dysfunctional leadership, and failure to honor obligations attached to its millions in grant money.”

No surprises here. Kendi is just one racial bunco artist out of many. Doing research for my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, I reviewed the work of four of the leading lights in this movement, specifically on the subject of white flight.

Two, Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are Black; two, Robin DiAngelo and Tim Wise, are White. What they have in common is that none of them gives any evidence of ever having spoken to a White person who fled. Evidence only spoils the con.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/david-solway-2/2023/09/25/the-decline-and-fall-of-home-part-one-n1729442

The similarities between the current American decline as a world power and the collapse of the Roman Empire have often been remarked. (After the western part of the Roman Empire fell, the eastern half continued to exist as the Byzantine Empire for hundreds of years. Therefore, the “fall of Rome” really refers only to the fall of the western half of the Empire.) The analogy has become a staple cliché of popular opinion and historical scholarship. The correspondences between Rome and America are compelling and, when the issue is regarded with fresh eyes and attention to taxonomic detail, will strike us with a sense of genuine foreboding.

The factors leading to the fall of the Roman Empire, conventionally dated 476 AD, following the attack of the barbarian chieftain Odoacer, are eerily reminiscent of the nodal “single point failures” observable in 2023 America. Briefly:

The Welfare State

Starting in 123 BC, the powerful reformist Tribune Gaius Gracchus installed a monthly free dole of grain and provided for the entertainment of a decadent citizenry —  in poet Juvenal’s phrase from “The Satires” (Satire 10), circa 127 AD: “They shed their sense of responsibility/…and reveal their desire for two things only/bread and circuses.” The practice continued well into the later years of the Empire. The analogy with the American panoply of food stamps, “Great Society” amenities, payment to single mothers, provision of flat-screen TVs and other luxury items, and the contribution of welfare expansion to family breakdown, is stunning.

Debt

Under the Emperor Diocletian, personal debt led to the abandonment of mortgaged property — in our terms, the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Enormous public debt crippled Rome’s economy. America’s debt, both funded and unfunded, hovers in the unimaginable trillions. As Will and Ariel Durant wrote of Rome in “The Lessons of History,” “Huge bureaucratic machinery was unable to govern the empire effectively with the enormous, out-of-control debt.”

We are seeing the same disaster unfolding before our very eyes. Michael E. Newton warns in “The Path to Tyranny,” “By 2035, the debt is projected to be between 79 and 181 percent of GDP…The United States is clearly on the road to bankruptcy.”

https://pjmedia.com/culture/david-solway-2/2023/10/01/the-decline-and-fall-of-home-part-two-n1729757

When one considers the full extent of the Roman cataclysm leading to the inevitable fall — the plethora of corrupt and self-promoting politicians, the exposure of unwanted infants (open-air abortion) and the consequent decline in the reproductive ratio, the deterioration of road systems and infrastructure, the degrading of a once-mighty military, and the evident degeneration of sexual morality (as the fifth-century Christian historian Salvian declaimed, “Be ashamed of your lives, no cities are free of impurities”) — one cannot help but note the affinities and correlations between the Roman Empire and the American Republic.

Both have suffered what has come to be known as the Polybius trap, named after the second-century Greek-Roman historian Polybius, who expounded the notion in his “Histories.” The idea is that once the political equilibrium between the three branches of government — in Rome, the Consulship, Senate, and Tribunate; in America, the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial — is shattered, decline is inevitable. It is as if the various units of the political engine have seized with improperly distributed or stranded energy. The concept of a malign disequilibrium also applies more generally to the entire complex system of social, political, and economic organization of state or empire. Rome and America may be historically distant from one another but there is little doubt that they are ideologically intimate and civilizationally aligned.

The old question unavoidably arises: What is to be done? In The Path to Tyranny, Michael Newton suggests the only possible (if fanciful) answer, the response of a desperate optimist: “How do we fight and oppose the approaching tyranny? Obviously, we must vote in elections and support those in politics who defend our liberty and Constitution… Most important of all, each of us must act as a modern-day Samuel, Solon, Socrates, Cicero, Cato, James Madison… persuading people of the advantages of liberty and informing them of the evils of big government.” A pretty tall order. Newton wrote in 2010, before the plummet in snowflake literacy, the censoring monopoly of the digital platforms, the oppressive COVID mandates of an autocratic government, the advent of Wokeism, the complete DEI annihilation of the University, and the advanced machinery of electoral fraud.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/03/as-stagflation-fears-mount-dems-urge-biden-to-stop-bragging-about-bidenomics/

In the three months since President Joe Biden decided to campaign on the glories of “Bidenomics,” inflation started creeping back up, the unemployment rate rose, and his approval ratings on the economy have steadily dropped. Now, stagflation is back in the news. All of it is leading Democrats to urge Biden to … shift his messaging.

Stagflation – the combination of rising inflation, high unemployment, and a stagnant economy not seen since the disastrous Jimmy Carter years – is suddenly in the headlines.

On Friday, for example, CNBC ran a story: “Stagflation is ‘the big bogeyman out there’ — and many increasingly fear its return.”

The story pointed out that climbing oil prices and “the specter of higher-for-longer inflation have reignited concern about stagflation risks.”

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is also ringing stagflation alarm bells, saying the Fed could have to raise interest rates to 7% to tame ongoing inflationary pressures.

“I am not sure if the world is prepared for 7%,” he told the Times of India. “I ask people in business, ‘Are you prepared for something like 7%?’ The worst case is 7% with stagflation. If they are going to have lower volumes and higher rates, there will be stress in the system. We urge our clients to be prepared for that kind of stress.”

Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at stockbroker CMC Markets, told CNN that the U.S. could “well be heading for a prolonged period of stagflation.”