RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/biden-has-shown-us-that-his-promises-are-worthless/

Democrats who continue to hitch their wagon to the president going forward cannot say that they were not warned.

A few weeks from now, Joe Biden will stand before the American people and make his case for adding another $3.5 trillion in spending to the $1.9 trillion the federal government spent in March and the $550 billion more it hopes to spend by the end of the summer. As is now customary, the president’s presentation will be chock-full of performatively dropped g’s, of sigh-laden appeals to the “folks,” of labored, down-home clichés, of emphatically whispered entreaties, of absurd straw men, and — if he encounters even the slightest resistance — of brash assurances that none of the objections that have been raised could possibly come to fruition.

Those of us who have lived through the last two weeks should refuse to be fooled again.

Joe Biden ran for president promising, “I’ll always tell you the truth.” But the debacle in Afghanistan has put an end to all that. In July, Biden broke out his usual “Are you stupid?” mien to insist that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable”; he swore that there was “zero” chance that Americans would “see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan”; and he assured the nation that the Taliban was “not even close in terms of their capacity” to “the training and capacity of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and the training of the [Afghan] federal police.” Given what we now know, there are only two possible explanations for why Biden said all of this. The first is that he was lying. The second is that he’s a fool.

https://spectator.org/everything-woke-turns-to-shit/

‘Everything Woke Turns To S**t’

Aside from Ronald Reagan, who was a fountain of witticisms and profound truths in his nearly three decades as a political figure, Donald Trump is probably our most quotable modern president.

But it was something he said on Saturday which might well be the single best distillation of truth Trump has ever offered.

In front of a Cullman, Alabama, rally crowd which might have numbered as many as 50,000 people, Trump drove home something everybody now knows.

“You know what woke means,” he said. “It means you’re a loser. Everything woke turns to s**t. It’s true.”

Yes, Mr. President, it is.

The word “woke” hasn’t been around all that long in mainstream American life. It’s only the last few years since it’s been inflicted on us. Prior to that, we were stuck with political correctness as a term to describe the effort to deny us our freedom of expression or an independent point of view.

But “woke” is worse than PC. PC was navigable essentially by being polite about things. There were topics it demanded avoidance of, but one could survive PC mostly by being nice. And PC wasn’t all that aggressive.

Woke is aggressive. It’s intolerably aggressively terrible. How bad is it?

Who lost Afghanistan? Woke lost Afghanistan.

As this space noted late last week, some utter halfwit thought it was a good idea to fly a rainbow Pride Month flag at the U.S. embassy in Kabul for the whole month of June and then send out a tweet bragging about it.

By the end of that month the Taliban were on the move. They spent July taking over most of the country, particularly the rural and wilderness areas populated by the more traditional Afghans, and then two weeks into August the rest of Afghanistan collapsed.

https://www.city-journal.org/will-policymakers-let-the-covid-crisis-end

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.

The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”

I am an admirer of John McWhorter who is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. His articles on race and education are excellent and run against cancel culture and prevalent bias.

Now, he has stopped publishing independently and has been snared by the New York times.

Here his letter to subscribers:

Many of you may know that I have been hired by The New York Times to write essays for them twice a week, as a subscriber newsletter. Yes, I’m surprised too — but I’m going to do it, and in fact have started.

However, understandably they will not allow me to continue doing this newsletter for Substack at the same time. Thus, with sincere regret — this has been a blast — I have to suspend my newsletter here.

I wish him well….sort of…..rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/23/feds-lower-expectations-for-january-6-probe/

The FBI continues to hunt down Americans even for minor involvement in the breach of the Capitol on January 6. Four Ohio residents were arrested last week and charged with common misdemeanors. It appears the group was inside the building for about 15 minutes and committed no violent crimes.

It’s the latest example of the absurdity of the Capitol breach probe; rather than pursue the handful of violent offenders, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is rounding up alleged trespassers. And it would be laughable if this eight-month manhunt to punish Trump supporters wasn’t destroying lives and tearing families apart in the process.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the insurrection gulag; the overwhelming number of cases consist only of low-level offenses. That is not what Michael Sherwin, the head prosecutor handling the first few months of the Capitol breach probe, promised one week after the protest. “The initial charges we’re filing, these misdemeanors, these are only the beginning,” Sherwin said at a January 12 press conference. “We’re looking at serious felony cases tied to sedition and conspiracy.”

Yet, in spite of Twitter’s best efforts, no one so far has been charged with insurrection or sedition; the best the government can do is file hard-to-prove charges of obstruction of an official proceeding or conspiracy, both felonies.

The Justice Department set expectations extremely high early on. Revenge against Americans who dared to protest the election of Joe Biden would come fast and fierce, the public was assured. Attorney General Merrick Garland promised the investigation into January 6, which he compares to the Oklahoma City bombing, would be his top priority. And when FBI Director Chris Wray designated January 6 an act of “domestic terrorism,” Trump haters smelled blood in the water.

No Evidence of Serious Plans

The Justice Department now seems to be prepping the ground for a major letdown. “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result,” Reuters reported August 20. Nearly all of the cases, four former and current law enforcement officials said, are “one-offs” while roughly five percent are associated with so-called militia groups.

“FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside,” the unnamed sources told Reuters.