RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-gatekeepers-woke-michael-lind

“On or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed. Within a few years, what had been obscure concepts in politicized university departments like gender studies and ethnic studies became orthodoxy not only in the academy, media, and the nonprofit sector, but also in the boardrooms of national and global corporations, banks, and in professional associations like the American Bar and Medical associations.

In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about. Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. By the time it rescinded the law, HB 2, in 2017, the state of North Carolina had lost billions of dollars thanks to simultaneous boycotts by the National Basketball Association, the National College Athletic Association, Deutsche Bank, PayPal, and other corporations and financial institutions.

In isolation, the transgender controversy might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century. But the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions was only the beginning. It was followed by the march through the institutions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) based on “critical race theory” (CRT), a sectarian ideology that holds that all whites and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, no matter how poor and powerless, are “privileged,” while all Black and Hispanic Americans, no matter how rich and powerful, are “marginalized” members of “underserved communities.”

By the 2020s, at one university after another, applicants for faculty positions were required to submit “DEI statements,” listing the ways that they would personally advance this particular ideology through their work as teachers and researchers. Campus commissars were appointed to ensure that faculty reading lists and guest speaker panels had the appropriate race and gender makeup. In corporations, banks, universities, and government agencies, the relatively anodyne “diversity training” of the late 20th century, designed to minimize the possibility of racial or sexual discrimination lawsuits, gave way to DEI trainings. The goal of such exercises was not to promulgate knowledge of specific anti-discrimination rules and procedures, but to engage staff in Maoist-style struggle sessions designed to break down the personalities and identities of non-Hispanic white Americans and Asian Americans through confession of “microaggressions” and “racial privilege.”

https://victorhanson.com/january-6th-versus-the-durham-revelations-part-one/

There are now two concurrent Washington, D.C.-area dramas.

One is the last gasp of the politically motivated January 6th Committee hearings.

The proceedings have been restarted to coincide with the final stretch of the midterms and to give Rep. Lynn Cheney a last appearance of political legitimacy, before in defeat she loses public attention.

She will be soon orphaned from her current leftwing aficionados who (only) temporarily appreciate her useful idiocy. And her former conservative loyalists see her apostasy as self-obsessed narcissism and teeth-gnashing for naively betting on the complete and lasting disgrace of Donald Trump, the supposedly successful, bipartisan “healing” administration of Joe Biden, and the “return of sanity” of the Republican Party to presentable and nobly losing Washington-centric Romneyism and McCainism. She lost in a landslide in Wyoming, but had she been running for a national office, she would have lost any such effort by a comparable margin.

For all its pathetic virtue signaling, the committee could never get around the fact that Speaker Pelosi, by vetoing Republican appointees, had turned the proceedings into a Soviet-style show trial.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19036/political-mislabeling

Buried within the volumes of federal statues is a regulation that allows the Department of Justice to pursue those who mislabel a food product with a penalty provision that warns the guilty party “shall be imprisoned for not more than one year or fined not more than $1,000, or both.”

Federal prosecutors will surely go after you if you mislabel fruit as organic when it is not.

In fact, state and federal law enforcement agencies have a blizzard of regulations they can harness when a manufacturer, company or individual engages in what can be described as deceptive consumer practices.

It would appear, however, that the one area not particularly well policed is Washington’s fondness for labeling things as they would like you to believe as opposed to what they are.

Take the president’s “Inflation Reduction Act.”

His plan allocates approximately $300 billion in “Deficit Reduction” and $369 billion in “Energy Security and Climate Change” programs over the next decade. It is a plan that will inundate the economy, already wracked with record inflation, with money still wet from federal printing presses. It is a plan that has no more connection to reducing inflation than the oil companies have in reducing their pump profits. It is a not so polite fiction and it begs the question: If we can go after someone who mislabels organic carrots, why can’t we pursue the type of political mislabeling that puts the nation’s economy at risk?

Equally questionable is how, where and by whom the billions inside the “Energy Security and Climate Change” program will be administered. Consider the credentials of President Joe Biden’s pick to direct this program, John Podesta.

If honesty in labeling was applied to Podesta’s resumé, it would be noted that he was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and founder of what The New York Times describes as a left-wing think tank. How is this political operative America’s choice to distribute what a cynic might describe as, potentially, one of the nation’s largest political slush funds in history? Were that the case, the idea of labeling it as a “climate change” fund would certainly be reason to open a file to investigate the suggestion of “consumer fraud.”