RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-many-inflation-warnings-did-biden-ignore-11651522620?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

New York Times readers may be puzzled by a headline on the newspaper’s website this week: “Biden Received Early Warnings That Immigration and Inflation Could Erode His Support”. Is this news? Especially on inflation, in 2021 it was striking that some prominent members of the Obama economic team were joining conservatives in urging the President not to ignite his desired bonfire of federal spending. But this week’s Times dispatch is nevertheless useful in attempting to understand the failures that haunt the Biden presidency.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns report in the Times:

President Biden enjoyed high approval among Americans in the early months of his presidency . . .  But privately Mr. Biden’s lead pollster was already sounding the alarm that even with the early successes, certain gathering threats could sink support for the president and his party.
“Immigration is a growing vulnerability for the president,” John Anzalone and his team warned in a package of confidential polling, voter surveys and recommendations compiled for the White House. “Voters do not feel he has a plan to address the situation on the border, and it is starting to take a toll.”
Within a month, there was another stark warning. “Nearly nine in 10 registered voters are also concerned about increasing inflation,” said another memo obtained by The New York Times.

Since we’re talking about the Times, this column must issue the standard cautions against believing reports based on anonymous sources.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaked-draft-of-supreme-court-opinion-indicates-roe-v-wade-may-be-overturned-11651554510

WASHINGTON—A leaked Supreme Court draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and published late Monday by Politico indicated the court may be preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent that established a constitutional right to an abortion.

The draft, dated from February, couldn’t be independently confirmed, but legal observers said it appeared authentic. The Supreme Court’s spokeswoman declined to comment.

The 67-page opinion, marked as a first draft, declared that Roe was “egregiously wrong and deeply damaging,” and that Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 decision that limited but didn’t eliminate abortion rights, prolonged the court’s error.

“Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” the draft opinion said. “Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The draft, written in February, doesn’t necessarily represent the court’s ultimate decision in the case or even the majority’s current thinking. But it is consistent with the tenor of December’s oral arguments in the case challenging Roe, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, concerning Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. The draft was labeled the opinion of the court, implying a majority of justices had agreed with it.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-state-departments-diversity-surrender/

America’s diplomatic corps is the latest victim of diversity uber alles. Choosing diplomats for the 21st century is now about the same process as choosing which gummy bear to eat next. But fear not, because the State Department assures us that America will have “an inclusive workforce that… represents America’s rich diversity.”

At issue is the rigorous entrance exam, which once established a color-blind baseline of knowledge among all applicants and was originally instituted to create a merit-based entrance system. Until now, becoming an American diplomat started with passing this written test of geography, history, basic economics and political science, the idea being it was probably good for our diplomats to know something about all that.

The problem was that, racially, things never quite added up. No matter what changes were made to the test, or even if it was administered after an applicant had served two internships with State (below), blacks and people of color could not pass in the right magic numbers to satisfy the diversity police. The answer? State has now simply done away with the requirement to pass the test in favor of a “whole person” evaluation, similar to how many universities and the dead SAT gateway currently work.

The irony is that the test was instituted to avoid backroom decisions on color (and religion, education and peerage). When America first found itself in need of a real diplomatic corps during the nineteenth century, there were three qualifications for State: male, pale and Yale. The Rogers Act of 1924 was the first attempt to even out the playing field, first instituting a difficult written examination everyone had to pass. The Rogers Act also created the Board of the Foreign Service and the Board of Examiners to choose candidates in lieu of smoky backroom conferences at Skull and Bones HQ.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18486/twitter-elon-musk

Imagine if George Soros had bought Twitter? [Former Secretary of Labor Robert] Reich would be jumping up and down with joy, as would Musk’s other critics. I don’t recall the outcry when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, the most influential newspaper in our nation’s capital. To the contrary, Bezos was applauded for bringing a more liberal perspective to that newspaper.

The real reason, of course, is the fear by the hard left of losing their control over social media…. Indeed the greatest fear expressed by these pretextual defenders of free speech is that — God forbid — Donald Trump would be allowed back on Twitter so that the public might be able to read and evaluate his tweets. I don’t like a great many of Trump’s views…. Yet I don’t want some anonymous platonic guardians deciding whether or not I can read tweets of Trump or others with whom I may disagree.

What Robert Reich and his ilk are really afraid of is actual freedom of speech…. But Democracy and free speech require that all views be available in the marketplace of ideas. The answer to bad speech is not censorship by social media, but rather open platforms that permit responses. Donald Trump should be answered, not suppressed.

Elon Musk is a private citizen who is not bound by the First Amendment…. He can apply to Twitter what Chief Justice Rehnquist once said about our Constitution: “Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea.”

This would not mean no censorship at all: even the First Amendment allows censorship of narrow categories of expression, such as, direct incitement to violence, child pornography and malicious defamation. But that is not what the hard left fears. What people like Reich and Jackson are afraid of are ideas they don’t like, information that differs from their narrative, and hate speech, as defined by them alone?

I welcome Musk’s purchase of Twitter and fervently hope that he runs it in the spirit of our great experiment in liberty, namely the First Amendment.

The hard left is going absolutely crazy over Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter. One of their arguments, made loudly by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, is that no one person should own and control such an important media platform. But that argument, repeated by others, is totally phony and hypocritical. Imagine if George Soros had bought Twitter? Reich would be jumping up and down with joy, as would Musk’s other critics. I don’t recall the outcry when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, the most influential newspaper in our nation’s capital. To the contrary, Bezos was applauded for bringing a more liberal perspective to that newspaper.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/05/some-harsh-words-about-the-cult-of-kindness/

“We’ve established that kindness per se is not a sufficient condition for decent behaviour because political ideologies determine who can be treated with kindness and who can be treated with cruelty. This gets to the crux of the present situation because underpinning the current notion of kindness is the contemporary moral and ethical system of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), which has been introduced into almost every institution in Western liberal democracies. The HR department in your workplace, and workers’ rights legislation in your state or country, will almost certainly be infused with this ideology.”

One of the most witless, inane and paradoxically evil ideas to contaminate contemporary culture in recent years is kindness, or, as what amounts to a campaign slogan says, ‘Be Kind’. On the surface, what could possibly be wrong with being kind to each other? Only brutes and criminals would find something wrong with such an obviously decent notion. The problem, though, is that beneath its beautiful and superficially moral surface, kindness, in its contemporary iteration, is surreptitiously ideological and smuggles into everyday life entirely new ideas of metaphysics, logic and epistemology, ones that have profoundly negative consequences for liberal democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

The photo featured atop this article is of workers — colleagues, in fact — who are being respectful, courteous, and, yes, kind to each other. The scene is Central Europe in the summer of 1944. Apart from the uniforms, nothing is unusual; the photos could have been taken at any off-site staff training session anywhere in the world. What most people who view the photos won’t know, though, is that the happy, collegiate staff were taking a break from murdering 600,000 Hungarian Jews in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. They are members of the Schutzstaffel, abbreviated as SS or, in more simple terms, Nazis.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/01/the-new-disinformationists/

The Biden Administration feels that it must now use federal resources to attack “disinformation.” So the Department of Homeland Security recently announced the creation of a “disinformation governance board.”

The board’s executive director, Nina Jankowicz, at least has clear qualifications for the post. She previously had spread false rumors on social media that Donald Trump voters would show up at the polls in 2020 armed, and joined the mob’s chorus that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Perhaps the idea behind her hiring was “it takes one to know one.”

Although the new board’s mandate is unclear, the idea seems to be that Jankowicz and her colleagues will use the federal government’s powers to adjudicate what Americans say as either true or false—and to suppress as “disinformation” anything it doesn’t find useful.

The new war against “disinformation” follows the narratives of the “insurrection” on January 6, the “democracy dies in darkness” return of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin as a mastermind gasoline price-spiker. Such narratives are intended to distract us from the Biden disaster and the ongoing assault against constitutional freedom. 

When things turn south for the administration, Barack Obama—a sagging Netflix’s $50-million “idea man”—usually emerges from one of his three mansions in Hawaii, Martha’s Vineyard, or Kalorama to lecture clingers and deplorables on various threats they pose to the anointed. 

His sermons usually project his own transgressions. Recently, Obama went to Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to admonish us that new free speech platforms might tolerate incorrect expression that he and the Left smear as “hate speech.” 

But is not Barack Obama ill-suited to lecture anyone on disinformation? Do we remember his Obamacare version of disinformation: “You can keep your doctor; you can keep your plan”? Do we recall “shovel-ready jobs”?

Obama was caught secretly promising Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev that the United States would deal away missile defense in Eastern Europe for Vladimir Putin’s good behavior (“but it’s important for him to give me space”) during his 2012 reelection bid. Was this transparency or another example of how, but for a hot mic, “democracy dies in darkness”? Could Eastern Europeans have used such a discarded anti-missile system today?

Who employed the misinformationist Christopher Steele to slander presidential candidate Donald Trump? Was it James Comey’s FBI? Or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Or the Democratic National Committee? Or the Perkins Coie legal firm? Or Fusion GPS? Or all combined? And which president was briefed regularly on his administration’s disinformation war against Trump?