RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/09/reparations-derangement-syndrome/

A panel in California, where rotten public policy ideas metastasize like a fungus growing in dark, slimy conditions, has approved paying reparations to descendants of slaves. It is impossible to overstate just how insane this is.

The reparations task force, appointed by Boy Gov. Gavin Newsom, voted Saturday to recommend the state pay out as much as $800 billion to the descendants of enslaved or free black people who were in the U.S. by the end of the 19th century. That’s 2.5 times the size of California’s annual budget. Recipients could rake in as much as $1.2 million each.

Or more. Much more. Because San Francisco’s reparations advisory committee has recommended the city’s qualified African American residents be given a $5 million lump sum.

The committee also proposed “the elimination of credit card debt, car and student loans; a string of tax breaks; and 250 years of special benefits for African Americans such as a  guaranteed income of $97,000 a year (adjusted for inflation); and the ability to buy homes for $1,” says Rowena Itchon of the Pacific Research Institute.

The cost of this largess, says the Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian, will be “​​on a per-household basis … nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.”

Let’s not pretend this is about justice, fairness and decency. It’s a shakedown – aided and abetted by rich, white, guilt-ridden, virtue-signaling progressives – that not even Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton could have envisioned a decade ago.

The case against reparations is irrefutable. Or would be in a sane world, which we no longer live in.

Despite the lunacy that has a grip on our politics, we will lay out the arguments.

First, no taxpayer in California or the U.S. was alive when slavery was allowed in this country, and none of those who were enslaved are alive either. Anyone who doesn’t think this is irrelevant is neither a clear nor honest thinker.

Second, we go to Andreas Koureas of The Spectator, who brings up an unpopular but salient point: “Ultimately, the great evil of slavery was practiced by all inhabited continents and all races.” Consequently, nearly every human on the planet has “an ancestral link to the slave trade.” 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19638/veterans-benefits

There is something uniquely despicable about a Democratic strategy in Congress that would turn the urgent need to cut waste in President Joe Biden’s proposed $6 trillion dollar budget into a political weapon by accusing the Republicans — falsely — of seeking to cut veterans’ benefits.

Let us start with the premise that the federal budget has considerable pork — billions, in fact. Let us also assume that the creeping inflation currently harming the hard-working middle class of America lies at the feet of those massive federal programs that printed billions of dollars in an ill-advised strategy to prop up the economy. As more dollars are printed, their buying power goes down – so you will need to keep paying out more dollars to buy the same item – as with food or to gas up the car.

Accordingly, House Republicans are rightly insisting that before we address the debt ceiling by its June 1st deadline, it is urgent to tackle the hard issue of where and how to contain out-of-control federal spending. The GOP leadership recognizes that, as at home, massive spending, unsupported by a balanced budget, can literally put a nation’s future at risk. Other nations have failed when they mismanaged their books — and America is not immune from economic collapse due to an unsupportable national debt with an unsustainable mushrooming service on the debt.

However, in a shameless display of partisan baiting, Democrats say that the Republicans’ “Limit, Save, Grow Act to Rein in Wasteful Spending and Grow the Economy,” which passed the House last week, will harm key programs and services at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), a department that barely serves our veterans even now.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/states_fight_back_against_the_trans_conspiracy_to_erase_women.html

What is a Woman?  You can no longer answer the question with alacrity.  In a 2022 documentary of the same name, when Matt Walsh poses that question to someone identifying as a gay male, he is told, “You should be asking a woman.  I don’t know; I’m not a woman.  Only women can define what a woman is.”  Not missing a beat, and putting the absurdity into sharp relief, Walsh rejoins by asking, “Are you a cat?” and following up the “No” with “Do you know what a cat is?”  The interviewee flees.

The dangerous trend to promote gender fluidity is concurrent with a movement to allow anyone to arrogate female status to himself.  Gender confusion often leads to tragic, lifelong, and irreversible consequences.  It must be noted, however, that the male-to-female transition by self-declaration has far greater societal impact than the reverse.  Males identifying as females hijack women’s sports and appropriate women’s spaces, often opportunistically or predatorily.  Radical ideology aims to eliminate sex distinctions under the guise of civil rights.  Its most egregious part is the targeting of minors, preying on their developing and fragile sense of identity.  For this reason, many states have passed or are considering legislation to safeguard minors and women.

The fightback is on four fronts: a) banning gender-transitioning surgeries and treatments for minors; b) banning age-inappropriate curricula, transition coaching, and events like drag queen story hour, often thrust on minors without parental consent; c) preventing males from using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms; and d) ending the invasion of girls’ and women’s sports by males identifying as females.

At least 16 states have passed or are developing laws to stop the targeting of children for transitioning.  This is important because many so-called progressive states have aggressive indoctrination and transitioning programs that do not spare minors.  Cases abound of individuals regretting transition once gender dysphoria is resolved; they often end up with lifelong infertility and disfigurement and may need multiple remedial interventions.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/07/the-impending-thermidor-reaction-in-jacobin-america/

The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became antithetical to the earlier American precedent. American notions of liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force “fraternity” among its subjects.

Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical ends of violent absurdity.

Originally, the idea of curbing the power of a Bourbon king through a parliamentary republic became lethally counter-revolutionary.

Soon even attacks on the Catholic Church and the abolition of the monarchy entirely were deemed insufficient. The king himself and his consorts had to be beheaded. Monasteries and churches were to be ransacked, and priests exiled or lynched.

The sometimes moderate Girondins, who favored constitutional government, were mostly executed by their former friends among the Montagnards. In turn, the latter were soon deemed too conservative for the emerging crazy Jacobins. So they, too, had to be decapitated. The ensuing year-long reign of terror guillotined thousands of innocents, deemed guilty of being guilty of something.

By 1793, the revolution had turned nihilist and suicidal. The foundational date of France was recalibrated (not as 1619 but) as 1789—or “year one.”

Jacobins sought to wipe out religion, both materially and spiritually. They replaced God, first, with the atheistic “Cult of Reason” and then a stranger still “Cult of the Supreme Being”—a dreamed-up, living, humanistic god that only the murderous Robespierre could fully envision, but eerily similar to our own Green New Deal deity.

The months of the year themselves were renamed, the days of the week renumbered and relabeled. Statues were toppled, first at night, later in shameless daylight. Place names were erased and renamed. The original revolutionary heroes were not to be mentioned; their uncouth successors deified. Money was printed to “spread the wealth”—until it was worthless.

Murderous cancel culture ran unchecked. Yesterday’s French revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary—and tomorrow’s decapitated.

Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.