RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/four-biden-proposals-would-dole-out-taxpayer-money-based-on-critical-race-theory

What happens when you mix toxic critical race theory with progressive economics? Thanks to President Joe Biden, we may soon find out.

Under Democratic leadership, the federal government is rolling out numerous race-based economic initiatives that explicitly dole out taxpayer money along racially discriminatory lines. Here are four examples, as identified by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty attorney Dan Lennington.

A nearly $10 billion Treasury Department mortgage-assistance initiative plans explicitly to favor “socially disadvantaged individuals,” essentially defined as nonwhite people, in assigning the funds.
A $1 billion Department of Agriculture initiative targeting “socially disadvantaged farmers” would specifically dole out taxpayer money “based on race and ethnicity.”
Another USDA program would spend up to $400 million to buy food from “local, regional, and socially disadvantaged farmers,” with “socially disadvantaged” once again basically standing in for “non-white.”
A $10 billion Small Business Administration credit program intends to emphasize funding businesses with nonwhite ownership.

There are too many problems with this race-based approach to federal spending to count.

For one, the legality and constitutionality of these openly discriminatory government schemes are highly dubious. Some race-based government programs such as affirmative action have, unfortunately, been upheld by courts in the past. However, a federal appeals court ordered a halt to a similar Biden administration initiative that allocated COVID-19 relief funds based on race.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/29/the-left-is-now-scaremongering-the-covid-delta-variant/

COVID-19 infection rates are down. Deaths are down. Vaccinations are up. So what’s the response from the left? It continues a desperate attempt to scare the public and blame Republicans.

The left’s bellwether outlet, the New York Times, perfectly sums up this agenda with a story headlined “Red America’s COVID Problem,” in which the Times writes that “COVID remains a serious threat to unvaccinated adults, especially those middle-aged or older” and that it’s rising in Trump-supporting areas of the country where vaccination rates, they say, are lower.

“No wonder, then, that the number of new cases keeps falling in Biden counties, while it has begun to rise in Trump counties,” the Times goes on.

The Washington Post’s increasingly leftist “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin declares that “Red states are dangerous to America’s health.”

President Joe Biden is doing his level best to keep the country in a state of panic, warning that the new “Delta variant” is more easily transmissible and potentially deadlier and, he claims, is “especially dangerous for young people.”

The congenital liar Anthony Fauci chimed in as well, saying that “the Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19.”

Fauci, you may have noticed, has changed the goalposts again, from “flattening the curve” to eliminating COVID-19 entirely – which is an impossibility, but would let him play dictator for years to come.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-plan-for-an-entitlement-society-11624918494?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

For the first time in U.S. history—except possibly for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, for which we don’t yet have data—more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. Contrary to Mr. Biden’s assertion that his plan “doesn’t add a single penny to our deficits,” his plan would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The American Families Plan proposes several new entitlement programs. One promises students the government will pick up the entire cost of community-college tuition; another promises families earning 1.5 times their state’s median income that Washington will cover all daycare expenses above 7% of family income for children under 5; still another promises workers up to 12 weeks of federally financed wage subsidies to take time off to care for newborns or sick family members.

The American Families Plan would follow longstanding government practice and make temporary emergency programs permanent. In March, Congress enacted the American Rescue Plan, which expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies and refundable tax credits for child care and low-wage workers. The expansions were sold as temporary measures to combat the effects of pandemic lockdowns. A month later, Mr. Biden asked Congress to make them permanent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-the-entitlements-stupid-11624920486?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Sen. Joe Manchin’s public support Sunday for at least $2 trillion in new spending in a partisan budget bill is a huge win for the political left. This means a giant tax-and-spend bill this year is likely, and the biggest expansion of the entitlement state since the 1960s is now possible.

The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. Tax increases can be repealed by a future Congress. Spending on infrastructure will slow as funding falls. The courts may block his racial preferences. But entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future.

The media won’t talk about this, and Republicans are so far missing in action. But Americans need to understand the stakes.

***

Hoover Institution scholars John Cogan and Daniel Heil document nearby the entitlement expansions of the Biden Families Plan. It’s an important piece that lists how far the progressive left wants to go in expanding government’s reach into American family life. Federal child care, government paid family leave, free community college, a $3,600 tax credit per child, a permanent expansion of ObamaCare premium subsidies, universal pre-K, permanent expansion of the earned-income tax credit to workers without children, and more.

We’d highlight two points. First is the dishonesty about costs. Entitlements always start small but then soar. The Biden Families Plan is even more dishonest than usual.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/amazons-woke-smokescreen?token=eyJ1c2VyX2l

A few years ago, my friend Dan Ahdoot was auditioning for a sitcom on Fox. And things were looking good; he’d heard from his agent that he made it to the last round. Then, he got a call from one of the creators of the show, a friend of his who was calling to say sorry: Dan wasn’t going to get the part. The reason, he said, was that he wasn’t “diverse.”  

Dan is Iranian. He has photos of his parents in Tehran before the revolution and the eyebrows to prove it. (Don’t worry, I asked Dan if I could objectify him.) But Fox apparently didn’t see Iran as “diverse.” 

Given that Dan is not just Jewish but also Persian and therefore in possession of more than the usual amount of chutzpah, he then thought to ask: What about Afghanistan? Was Iran’s neighbor sufficiently diverse?

The showrunner said he’d find out and give him a call back. 

In the meantime, Dan says he hopped onto his Wikipedia page and inserted a little edit: He was now an “Iranian Afghan Jew,” despite the fact that nobody in Dan’s lineage is from, nor has ever visited, Afghanistan.

The showrunner called back and pronounced that, according to the poobahs over at Fox, Afghanistan was indeed diverse. 

I thought of this story when I read Amazon Studios’ new inclusion policy, vaunted by stenographers in the mainstream media. It announces a goal, by 2024, of having 50% of creative roles in its movies and shows filled by women or people of color.

https://spectator.org/science-progress-publishing-journals/

“We must choose between science and science fiction.”

When you hear “Science says … ,” there’s no such thing. It’s bullying rhetoric, like “Everyone knows … ” or “It’s common wisdom that … ” Sometimes we can turn to authorities like the CDC or the WHO, but they are hardly omnipotent nor without political agendas. At one time they were at least essentially apolitical, but no more. Likewise for smaller institutions like colleges or universities, or for individuals. Of late, Anthony Fauci has come to mind.

Fact is, there’s strong evidence the progress of science is slowing — masked by relatively few high-profile advances (such as cell phones) and click-bait journalism with “breakthroughs” that never materialize. And there’s evidence of a decline in the quality of the scientific literature, even as it’s accompanied by an explosion in quantity. Publication seems to be doubling every nine years. Yet as I’ve noted previously here, the Alzheimer’s arsenal is effectively empty. Cancer progress has been achingly slow — the “War on Cancer” goal was to cure all types by 1976. And now over 50 years since Apollo 11, we actually don’t have the ability to return people to the moon.

The standard in observable advances is supposed to be published, peer-reviewed literature. But never mind that sometimes, as with COVID-19, it can take a long time for that to appear. Further, a recent study indicates that there may be a bias that makes publications in prestigious journals less reliable precisely because of what it takes to get in one, plus the desire of those publications to print the most cutting-edge or simply exciting material.

We have long known that the vast majority of published studies are never replicated because of such culprits as fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. In 2005, Stanford Professor John Ioannidis published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” the most downloaded paper ever in the Public Library of Science, better known as PLOS. Not incidentally, he has also become notorious for his minority views on COVID, including criticisms of case prediction models and the efficacy of lockdowns. Insisting on empiricism can make you very unpopular.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/28/worlds-leading-childrens-book-authors-group-apologizes-over-condemnation-of-antisemitism/

The only worldwide professional organization for children’s book authors and illustrators issued a fervent apology on Sunday to Muslim and Palestinian members over a recent condemnation of antisemitism that did not discuss Islamophobia, and announced the resignation of the diversity officer who had posted the messaged.

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has over 22,000 members in the US and around the world. Its members include such prominent writers as Judy Blume, who serves on its board of advisors.

The original SCBWI statement on antisemitism, published on June 10 acknowledged that Jews “have the right to life, safety, and freedom from scapegoating and fear.”

Noting the recent precipitous rise in antisemitism and antisemitic violence, the statement said, “Silence is often mistaken for acceptance and results in the perpetration of more hatred and violence against different types of people.”

“As proof, it saddens us that for the fourth time this year we are compelled to invite you to join us in not looking away and in speaking out against all forms of hate, including antisemitism,” it stated.

“As writers, illustrators, and translators of children’s literature, we are responsible for promoting equity and humanizing people in our work — all children and all families,” the group said.

On Sunday, SCBWI executive director Lin Oliver issued an apology, saying, “I would like to apologize to everyone in the Palestinian community who felt unrepresented, silenced, or marginalized. SCBWI acknowledges the pain our actions have caused to our Muslim and Palestinian members and hope that we can heal from this moment.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/wheres-the-equity-for-black-murder-victims/

That their disproportionate numbers don’t exercise progressives more remains one of the paradoxes of our time.

T he idea of equity, as everyone knows, is all the rage.

It holds that any racial disparity is evidence of racism and also a stinging indictment of American society.

What, then, of the yawning disparity between black victims of homicide and everyone else? Why isn’t this at the top of the nation’s agenda, treated with the same urgency as the alleged crisis of racist policing?

It’s been the focus of studies — usually from gun-control outfits, several of which I cite in this piece — and local activists and journalists. But it hasn’t achieved anything like the liftoff of Black Lives Matters, or the opposition to voting reforms in Republican states, or the pervasive effort to snuff out microaggressions and the like from universities, corporate America, and every other corner of American society.

No, it just doesn’t rate.

And we are talking about a disparity that couldn’t be any more stark — black men are killed, usually gunned down, in cold blood at vastly higher rates than any other group in society (albeit overwhelmingly at the hands of other black men). If you are a progressive who believes that any racial disparity is a function of institutional racism, this is a devastating commentary on racial discrimination in America, but it is met with a relative shrug and certainly none of the passion of, say, the resistance to the Georgia voting law.

Of course, it’s worse than that. Progressives have made this disparity worse. It is their narratives, their policies, and their elected officials who have enabled the current surge in murder, making a long-standing phenomenon even more pronounced.