RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.

Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/the-hundred-year-road-to-crt/

While critical race theory has rightfully garnered much attention of late, it is simply the latest step in advancing what is known as cultural Marxism. Many people lay the origins of America’s left turn to the 1960s, but in fact, it actually dates back to the Progressive Era, a time of social and political reform that started over a hundred years ago. While eliminating some government corruption and granting suffrage for women were positive steps, the early 20th century movement ushered in an era of radical thought that has never left us. What follows are a few stand-out points of the far-left’s invasion into education.

“The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.” These radical words were uttered in 1909 by Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton, four years before he became the 28th president of the U.S. (When Wilson won his election in 2012, socialist Eugene Debs received 6 percent of the vote.)

In 1916, education reformer John Dewey began professing what we now call “social justice.” At the same time, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist came upon the scene. He believed that it was most effective to spread revolutionary ideology slowly and incrementally. By doing it gradually, he thought that enough people would eventually be won over to Marxist thought. His approach eventually became known as the “long march through the institutions.”

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School, came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—hated capitalism and traditional morals. (Marcuse’s dreary One-Dimensional Man was omnipresent when I went to college in the late 1960s.) The professors did not stay in their homeland long, however. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and unfortunately, they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

The 1940s saw the country involved with World War II, and we then focused on regaining domestic tranquility in the 1950s. But things became unhinged in the 1960s. Radicals ruled many college campuses and Saul Alinsky, the uber-leftist community organizer, was hired by the National Education Association as a trainer. John Lloyd, an NEA insider at the time, warned that to understand the union one must learn about Alinsky. Reading Rules for Radicals, will help one “understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else,” he said, because the organization was modeled on Alinsky’s precepts, which the union used to train its staff.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/american-armageddon/

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago. 

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life. 

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity. 

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not of illegal aliens? 

Joe Biden has also conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care. 

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has also never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism. 

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages, Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing. 

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed. 

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive. 

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.