RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/27/no-one-can-disagree-with-socialism/

“Black Widow” star David Harbour says he doesn’t know “that there’s anyone who could disagree with socialist ideology.” So does this mean he’ll be returning the part of his multimillion-dollar salary that is beyond his “needs”? Of course not. There is no logic in ideology. He is a believer. That is enough. 

The French revolutionaries believed in reason so deeply that if you disagreed with them they’d cut off your head. 

The French Revolution began, as do all modern Communist revolutions, with the abolition of Christianity. Not the abolition of religion, or even state religion, but Christianity. The French fully intended to have a state religion, complete with “Temples of Reason” (Notre Dame was turned into one). The crucifix was replaced with a symbolic “torch of truth.” 

Fascism, which Winston Churchill called the “shadow, or ugly child of Communism,” was identical in this respect: Nazi Germany was to replace its cathedrals with Hitler Kirche, in which Mein Kampf took the place place of the Bible and the crucifix was again removed, this time in favor of a sword. 

Marxism is not and has never been an atheist philosophy. When a Marxist tells you he’s an atheist, he’s lying. Marxism is the most aggressively dogmatic religion in the world. Its struggle for ascendancy is a holy war in which Islam is the only serious competitor and all other religions seem resigned to a defensive posture (i.e., losing). 

To fight the Left effectively, we need to stop thinking of Marxism as a philosophical alternative to capitalism and instead think of it as a religious alternative to Christianity. 

Marxism is not anti-Christianity because belief in God is a crutch or an opiate of the masses. It simply recognizes that you cannot believe in two gods at once. Marxism and Christianity are rival religions, and it’s no more possible to believe in both than it is to believe simultaneously in Judaism and Islam. 

In the Marxist religious structure, the supreme leader—Stalin, Mao, Castro, Xi—is God. Leftist intellectuals are priests. Government bureaucrats are Levites, making sure the ceremony runs smoothly and the sanctuary is guarded. There is a caste (“class”) system in which some are holy by virtue of their birth and others are damned for the same reason. Ordinary citizens in this religion have no role except to believe and to do as they are told: “Believe the science!” 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/07/27/johns-hopkins-doctor-shreds-cdc-and-faucis-narrative-on-covid-again-n2593195

Fear is contagious. It’s almost as bad as the Delta variant. Again, is the new variant more transmissible? Yes. Is it deadlier? No. Does it make you sicker? No. Are those being impacted primarily the unvaccinated? Most definitely. So, when you want to increase vaccination rates, the government did what it did best: screw things up. Fully vaccinated people now must wear masks again in high-case areas. What constitutes a highly infectious area? Well, that’s not clear yet, but I’m sure the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci will make up some science fiction to justify this new mask mandate. The mandates are coming too. Not nationwide, Biden can’t do that yet due to the midterms, but federal agencies are one-by-one mandating it for workers who risk the loss of pay or their jobs if they refuse. 

Get vaccinated but also continue to live in fear. Yeah, no wonder why hesitancy is through the roof. All this move does is make the vaccine-hesitant dig in further and give anti-vaxxers all the ammunition they need to chip away at the credibility of the vaccines. You can’t be mad at the latter group when those who want us to get vaccinated offer all the ammunition to shoot that narrative down or at the very least question it—heavily.  

Well, take a break from being mad and read what Johns Hopkins doctor Dr. Marty Makary wrote about new studies about natural immunity which if ignored by Fauci and company. He also rehashed an old Fauci statistic that shreds the current push for new mask protocols and possible lockdowns (via WSJ) [emphasis mine]:

The news about the U.S. Covid pandemic is even better than you’ve heard. Some 80% to 85% of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed.

Only around 10% of Americans have had confirmed positive Covid tests, but four to six times as many have likely had the infection. A February study in Nature used antibody screenings in late summer 2020 to estimate there had been seven times as many actual cases as confirmed cases. A similar study, by the University of Albany and New York State Department of Health, revealed that by the end of March 2020—the first month of New York’s pandemic—23% of the city’s population had antibodies. That share necessarily increased as the pandemic spread.

[…]

Natural immunity is durable. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis reported last month that 11 months after a mild infection immune cells were still capable of producing protective antibodies. The authors concluded that prior Covid infection induces a “robust” and “long-lived humoral immune response,” leading some scientists to suggest that natural immunity is probably lifelong. Because infection began months earlier than vaccination, we have more follow-up data on the duration of natural immunity than on vaccinated immunity.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/liberalism-stupid-liel-leibovitz

What exactly is wrong with America, and how do we fix it?

That, with slight variations, is the question constantly nipping at our heels these days, asked by friends and colleagues, entertained at dinner parties, floated around on podcasts and in opinion pages. Analyses of what precisely is broken vary, as do prescriptions for a cure, but a strong consensus remains solid among our best and brightest—the problem is that liberalism has come under attack, and the solution is to restore it to its old glory.

In this telling, the history of the past 30 or so years in America goes something like this: Once upon a time, back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, America was great, because Americans all observed a shared creed called liberalism. This relaxed civil religion nurtured our individual liberties and kept us honest, hardworking, and good. It gave us civil rights and gay marriage, Tom Hanks and Sesame Street, bipartisanship and Teach for America. And it would have bloomed eternal if the barbarians hadn’t shown up one day to sack our glittering Rome.

Who, exactly, are those modern-day wreckers of civilization? Again, many of our intellectual betters are certain they have the answer: The barbarians are Marxists, extreme leftist agitators here to replace our sacred liberal order with a pagan religion of their own, complete with a set of rituals (taking a knee) and articles of faith (gender is fluid). Our mission, therefore, is to resist these savages at every turn, and do whatever we can to turn the clock back and reinstall liberalism as our exclusive and infallible operating system

It’s a compelling story, complete with deliciously malicious bad guys and wonderfully virtuous sheriffs counting the minutes to High Noon. It’s also, alas, entirely wrong. Liberalism, to keep with the Hollywood imagery, isn’t the damsel in distress, hogtied and left on the train tracks; it’s the mustache-twirling villain whom we must defeat if we are to survive.

Take a moment and read that last sentence again. If you were raised in America and attended any school here in the last, say, 50 years, this sentence—liberalism is the source of our woes—makes about as much sense as saying that Mr. Rogers is a sadistic serial killer, or that bald eagles ought to be shot on sight. It sounds not only sacrilegious but outright stupid, a proposition so far-fetched and so far removed from everything we understand to be at America’s core as to merit not a second more of consideration.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological?token

Today we bring you another installment of Katie Herzog’s ongoing series about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. Her first story focused on the ideological purge at the top medical schools and teaching hospitals in the country. “Wokeness,” as one doctor put it, “feels like an existential threat.”

Katie’s latest reporting illustrates some of the most urgent elements of that threat. It focuses on how biological sex is being denied by professors fearful of being smeared by their students as transphobic. And it shows how the true victims of that denial are not sensitive medical students but patients, perhaps most importantly, transgender ones. 

Some of you may find Katie’s story shocking and disconcerting and perhaps even maddening. You might also ask yourself: How has it come to this? How has this radical ideology gone from the relatively obscure academic fringe to the mainstream in such a short time?

Those are among the questions that motivate this newsletter. We feel obligated to chronicle in detail and in primary accounts the takeover of our institutions by this ideology — and the consequences of it. 

So far, it has taken root in some of our leading medical schools. Some. Not all. But I’m left thinking: What state will American medicine — or any other American institution —  find itself in after being routed by this ideology?  

If you think reporting like Katie Herzog’s is important I hope you’ll support us by subscribing here.

— BW

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.” 

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.” 

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.” 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17602/disband-the-fbi

In the past few days alone, we have learned that the October 2020 Michigan governor kidnap plot was largely a creation of the FBI; a “senior FBI official” was on the take from media organizations; and another assistant director was in a “romantic relationship with a subordinate” and involved in “other misconduct.” The leadership failures documented by the Office of the Inspector General are now almost standard and part of a tiresome media drip-torture for the public to endure.

The FBI ran a coup against President Trump. It failed. The following got away: Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith, Pientka, Brower, Baker, et al. Any real consequences for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States? No.

Questions are now being raised as to whether the FBI had a role in the Capitol Hill protests of January 6, 2021. When one examines the FBI’s involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses; standing by idly while in possession of Hunter Biden’s Ukraine and Burisma-laden laptops, while President Trump endured a second phony impeachment; and the frame-up of Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn – it is not too difficult to imagine.

The FBI needs to go away. It should happen in an orderly and thoughtful process, over a period of months. Congress should authorize and create an investigative division in the U.S. Marshals Service and open applications for law enforcement officer seeking to be rigorously screened, vetted and then accessed into the new organization. Similar action was taken before in the very creation of the FBI. It is now time to clean house and restore the public’s trust in the “premier investigative agency” of federal law enforcement.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues its downward spiral into terminal corruption. Sadly, the scandals, criminality and ethical abuses of the organization are largely ignored by the American public and by the institutions of government charged with oversight and correction. Outrage after outrage is reported, hearings are held, Inspector General reports are issued — but the systemic corruption is never really tackled and dirty cops skate away virtually unscathed.

This situation is constitutionally unacceptable, corrosive to public trust in law enforcement, and a threat to the survival of the republic.

In the past few days alone, we have learned that the October 2020 Michigan governor kidnap plot was largely a creation of the FBI; a “senior FBI official” was on the take from media organizations; and another assistant director was in a “romantic relationship with a subordinate” and involved in “other misconduct.” The leadership failures documented by the Office of the Inspector General are now almost standard and part of a tiresome media drip-torture for the public to endure.

Meanwhile, the FBI had the audacity to issue a Stasi-like tweet urging “monitoring of ‘family members and peers’ for extremism.”

Remember: what we learn about the FBI in the press are only the stories that are SO outrageous that the FBI cannot keep a lid on them and is forced to make disclosures via a toothless Inspector General report — but never anything that results in a criminal indictment. Imagine what the ordinary day-to-day misconduct in FBI offices across the country could be. And these scandals don’t just amount to “bad press” – in several of these, federal courts scourge the FBI for lawbreaking. Additionally, Inspector General report after report details FBI abuses such as whistleblowers being retaliated against and ignoring “high-risk” employees who fail polygraph tests.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/26/five-years-later-the-spawn-of-crossfire-hurricane/

Five years ago this week, Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, boarded a train in Washington, D.C. bound for Philadelphia. The Democratic National Convention was in chaos after WikiLeaks released emails that showed party officials rigged the primary process in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders supporters were mutinous; Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then-head of the Democratic National Committee, resigned on July 25, 2016.

Simpson and his business partner hightailed it to the City of Brotherly Love to woo the media away from the escalating scandal. The well-connected pair met with top journalists and editors, including New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, to spin a dark tale about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia including rumors of prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

It worked like a charm.

“The WikiLeaks dump had forced every publication to devote multiple reporters to dig through the cache of emails,” Simpson wrote in his 2019 book, Crime in Progress. Simpson bragged of his success. “The Russia element was beginning to snap into focus.”

While Fusion spin masters were doing damage control in Philadelphia, their hired British source, Christopher Steele, was in Washington, D.C., meeting with a top Justice Department official. Steele was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign while working as an FBI source at the same time.

On July 30, 2016, Steele met with Bruce Ohr, the assistant deputy attorney general, to discuss his dirt-digging on Donald Trump. Also present at the breakfast: Nellie Ohr, Bruce’s wife, who also was working for Fusion GPS on the Trump hit job.

The next day, James Comey’s FBI opened a counterintelligence probe into Donald Trump’s campaign team. Steele’s unsubstantiated dossier on Team Trump’s ties to the Kremlin served as the pretext to infiltrate, spy on, and destabilize Trump’s presidential campaign.

That last week of July 2016 exposed the seamless and shameless web of paid political operatives, top news organizations, Democratic Party honchos, and the upper tier of the most powerful government agencies in the country. It culminated with the official launch of Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, an investigation ostensibly about four campaign associates’ collusion with Russia but which, in reality, targeted Trump himself.

For the past five years, Donald Trump and the country have been subjected to various iterations of Crossfire Hurricane: Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, numerous U.S. Senate and House inquiries, the first and second impeachment trials, and countless media microaggressions sought to achieve what Comey’s FBI ultimately did not—the personal and political destruction of Donald Trump.

The Capitol breach probe, the title of the Justice Department’s “unprecedented” investigation into the events of January 6, is the latest version of Crossfire Hurricane. Tuesday’s maiden meeting of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee on January 6 provides the stage where partisan actors will overdramatize what happened that day. Attention-seeking police officers will emote about the psychological trauma they suffer from the roughly four-hour disturbance, which, by the way, largely was stoked by police officers themselves. 

Trump, the public would be told over and over, incited it all.