RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/our-dysfunctional-race-relations-bruce-thornton/

Commentator and radio host Larry Elder recently posted an insightful tweet: “It is a sign of progress that today in America ‘race relations’ pretty much comes down to just one thing: how black people feel about white people––and how white people feel about how black people feel about white people.”

Unpacking this comment will reveal how dysfunctional “race relations” and racial discourse have been for half a century since legal segregation was ended.

First, I suspect the word “progress” carries a double edge. Of course, the condescending and patronizing sensibility that underlies “white” America’s obsession with black people’s opinions of them is a tremendous improvement over the indifference and neglect at best, and at worst the daily demeaning humiliations and physical violence of the past.

But the goal of the Civil Rights Movement that brought down legal segregation wasn’t for blacks to become “mascots,” to use Thomas Sowell’s metaphor, of enlightened white people’s moral preening, or superficial compassion, or need for racial redemption and absolution. Rather, it was for black people to be in full possession of the unalienable rights upon which the country and the Constitution were founded, and hence to be politically and legally equal to other Americans. The color of their skin, then, would be irrelevant to their political and national identities and the “content of their character.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-left-politicizes-covid-irony-abounds/

The ‘follow the science’ Democrats care more about politics than science.

Where has the coronavirus gone?

Nowhere. The pandemic has gained a second wind, even as it is mysteriously scarcer in post-election headlines. If anything, COVID-19 seems more contagious as cold temperatures arrive, people stay in indoors, and perhaps their vitamin D levels taper off.

Whatever one’s views on the virus — whether it remains an existential threat or, contrarily, prompts overreactive lockdowns that are more harmful and maybe even deadlier than the virus itself — nothing much has changed since Election Day.

Or did viral perceptions suddenly change? The pandemic certainly no longer serves as an election lever to demagogue President Trump as a veritable killer.States such as California are under a nearly complete lockdown. Draconian measures will abbreviate Thanksgiving gatherings in a way unprecedented in U.S. history. Yet elites such as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) have violated the quarantines they themselves have endorsed.

Following the media announcement that Joe Biden would likely become president, crowds swarmed into the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. They violated every state mandate requiring masks and social distancing. Authorities did nothing — just as they had done nothing during the summer-long protesting and rioting. Apparently, some outdoor gatherings were correct; others, not so much.

A similar warping of science accompanied news about the possible rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Julie Kelly of the conservative website American Greatness has documented the changing narratives about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer is one of five companies in line to receive massive federal funding under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to hasten mass vaccinations. Such an ambitious program is unmatched in the history of viral epidemiology. On November 16, another company in the program, Moderna, announced promising results from a clinical trial.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla predicted in early September that by the end of October, his company would offer a preliminary announcement concerning the safety and effectiveness of his company’s vaccine. His forecast was met with apprehension on the left. Any positive assessment was seen by the Left as political, validating, shortly before the election, the Trump administration’s rapid response to the virus.

Yet on October 27, a week before the election, Pfizer corrected Bourla’s earlier estimate. The company claimed any such declaration would follow rather than precede the election.

https://dianebederman.com/you-racist-karen-the-devolution-of-civility-and-the-declin

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Without ideas held in common there is no common action and without common action there may still be men but there is no social body in order that society should exist and a fortiori that a society should prosper it is necessary that the minds of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas.”

Grandiose infantile delusions of entitlement; what a spectacular expression. I first learned it in the 1990s when I took my 2000 hour residency in clinical pastoral education to be a hospital chaplain. And here we are in the 2020’s and the entitlement has expanded. Now it includes calls for the right to free stuff: education, healthcare, housing, food and a get out of jail free card. My, my, aren’t we so entitled.

But this entitlement has taken on a more sinister meaning because of critical race theory and diversity politics. “Critical race theory (CRT), the view that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of colour. According to critical race theory (CRT), racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interests in labour markets and politics, giving rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. The CRT movement officially organized itself in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much further, to the 1960s and ’70s.”