RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-disagreement-became-disinformation-misinformation-nina-jankowicz-governance-board-czar-11652450632?mod=trending_now_opn_2

The preoccupation with “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the part of America’s enlightened influencers last month reached the level of comedy. The Department of Homeland Security chose a partisan scold, Nina Jankowicz, to head its new Disinformation Governance Board despite her history of promoting false stories and repudiating valid ones—the sort of scenario only a team of bumblers or a gifted satirist could produce.

Less funny but similarly paradoxical was Barack Obama’s April 21 address lamenting online disinformation, in which he propounded at least one easily disprovable assertion. Tech companies, the former president said, “should be working with, not always contrary to, those groups that are trying to prevent voter suppression [that] specifically has targeted black and brown communities.” There is no evidence of voter suppression in “black and brown communities” and plenty of evidence of the contrary, inasmuch as black and Latino voter participation reached record levels in the 2020 election.

One of the great ironies of American political life in the 2020s is that the people most exercised about the spread of false information are frequently peddlers of it. Their lack of self-understanding arises from the belief that the primary factor separating their side from the other side isn’t ideology, principle or moral vision but information—raw data requiring no interpretation and no argument over its importance. It is a hopelessly simpleminded worldview—no one apprehends reality without the aid of interpretive lenses. And it is a dangerous one.

The roots of this self-deceiving outlook are complicated but worth a brief look.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/05/13/teleworking_members_of_congress_cost_taxpayers_70_million_since_start_of_pandemic_830922.html

While President Joe Biden urged “Americans to get back to work” and said “people working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office” Democratic members of Congress think that doesn’t apply to them, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The news outlet reveals how a large number of Congressional offices continue to sit empty in Washington D.C., ostensibly because of Covid-19. We estimate that these closed offices cost American taxpayers $139,548 each day.

The Free Beacon reports that “dozens” of House offices sat vacant on the day of their visit in March, with signs informing visitors that staff was teleworking. They also reported 12 vacant Senate offices.

Each House office is given about $944,671 per year to cover administrative expenses and pay its’ staff’s salaries. The Senate’s allocation is based on the size of the Senator’s state, but the average allocation is roughly $3.3 million.

That comes out to $2,588 per day per House office, and $9,041 per day per Senate office. That totals $31,056 per day, with a very conservative estimate of 12 House offices working from home, and $108,492 for the 12 Senate offices working virtually.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/midge-the-magnificent/

I first met Midge Decter during the mid-1980s through neoconservative publishing circles in New York, a world as distant from today’s as it was, in turn, from the time of the Second World War. Though no one back then knew it, those years would turn out to be the sunset of the so-called small magazines, and with it, the end of the New York intellectuals—whose ranks, ironically, we had all moved there to join. “We” were a tight band of interns and journeymen, orbiting around small but influential journals like The Public Interest and Commentary, the American Spectator and The New Criterion, wider venues like the Wall Street Journal, Time, and book publishing houses, and other places where thinking and scribbling helped to pay the rent.

Back then, before the internet ushered in the Götterdämmerung of many things literary, those felt like glory days. This was true above all for the young men and women who had landed in these places by dint of political contrarianism—especially those recently graduated from elite campuses, where political conformity had pushed them out of stifling academia, and into the freer intellectual life of Manhattan. “In New York you can be a new man,” goes a rap in Hamilton, and that’s exactly what young, lower-case new-right types felt in the city during the mid-1980s. At that moment, Reaganism had surpassed punk for cool, and neoconservatism in its classic sense—meliorative, questioning, bookish—was ascendant, and spreading.

Beyond politics, our band also enjoyed a personal network tighter and more welcoming than most young writers today can imagine. We had access to influential thinkers and doers. We enjoyed entrée to magazines and journals in which we could stretch out our thoughts at muscle-building length—not in “750 words or under,” as is depressingly usual now. We had freedom to voice opinions that had been scolded or forbidden on the quad. We had mentors like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and Gertrude Himmelfarb. And we were graced by something else just as rare: indomitable, luminous, rascally Midge Decter.