RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.newsweek.com/china-tariffs-solution-thats-simple-direct-plausible-wrong-opinion-1810578

Donald Trump’s chief trade official, Robert Lighthizer, devised the 2018 tariffs on many Chinese imports, and now wants to double down on a failed policy. His new book No Trade is Free proposes “strategic de-coupling” from China through even higher tariffs and related measures. This brings to mind H. L. Mencken’s crack that “for every complex problem, there is a solution, that is simple, direct, plausible—and wrong.”

U.S. imports from China have risen despite Trump’s tariffs on a range of Chinese products, as the $6 trillion in COVID stimulus spending created demand that American manufacturers couldn’t fill—but China could. U.S. and Chinese data diverge, because (as the Federal Reserve showed in a 2021 study) China counts exports that reach the U.S. via a third country while the U.S. doesn’t.

If a policy failed the first time around, why double down on it? It would be better for the U.S. to revise the tax code to favor capital-intensive manufacturing, restore Reagan-level funding for high-tech R&D, build infrastructure, ease up on environmental restrictions, provide apprenticeships for skilled workers, and subsidize industries critical to national security.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-stages-of-grief-over-affirmative-action-sffa-court-higher-ed-87dd642a?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Almost immediately after the Supreme Court announced its ruling for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I received several emails about the decision. From Harvard’s president-elect, Claudine Gay, a message of shared grief: “Today is a hard day, and if you are feeling the gravity of that, I want you to know you’re not alone.” A personal message from a former student: “Today is a great day in the life of the country.”

The difference was that the student was writing to someone he knew shared his opinion, while the president assumed that everyone shared hers. In that difference lies the corruption at the heart of higher education. Like many universities, Harvard has been striving for a uniformity of prestamped opinions that its incoming president assumes. But Students for Fair Admissions invites us to hope for a pause if not a turning point in that demand for uniformity.

As a professor at Harvard starting in 1993, I saw how a great university fell into this robotic state. From the mid-1990s to my retirement in 2014, I spoke out against what I insisted on calling “group preferences” whenever the subject was raised at faculty meetings. First among my many concerns was how the pursuit of diversity, engineered on the basis of race, subverted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That legislation, itself regrettably belated, had guaranteed freedom from “discrimination or segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin,” even if such treatment was locally required by law. Brave Americans had fought hard to secure those individual rights, and social experiments in other countries had proved that an imposed equality of results impeded the advancement of their supposed beneficiaries.

I also objected on academic grounds that the goal of correcting for socioeconomic inequality was replacing the goal of intellectual inquiry, the search for truth and the pursuit of excellence. Had the school truly wanted to correct racial inequities it would have used its resources to improve the education of millions of underserved children. Instead, I argued, the university’s embrace of racial categories could only deepen and promote politics on behalf of existing grievances.

But the most immediate and consequential effect of engineered group diversity was to quash debate. When I questioned then-president Neil Rudenstine’s self-satisfied report on “diversity at Harvard” to the faculty of arts and sciences in 1996, he was roused to respond with “an uncharacteristic display of emotion,” as the next day’s issue of the student newspaper, the Crimson, described it. In her turn, his successor Drew Faust laughed off my proposal at another such faculty meeting that Harvard investigate the correlation between the introduction of imposed group diversity and the decline of diversity of opinion.

These incidents did me no personal harm, and they would have been amusing had I not worried about the pusillanimity they encouraged. In what was meant as a warning to others, one of my professorial colleagues informed the Crimson that no one listens to Prof. Wisse.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2023/07/the-biden-family-scandals-a-basic-primer/

“When you talk to people who have spent time around Joe Biden, including Republicans, there is one word that keeps coming up…”extraordinarily decent person”… “the most decent, honourable politician I’ve ever known”…”a person with decency”   — ABC icon Leigh Sales shilling for Joe Biden days before the 2020 election

President Joe’s son, Hunter, made it into the ABC’s news selection the other day, when he was let off from paying his debt to society for a trio of crimes normally viewed as prison-worthy felonies. According to the ABC team, nothing much to see here. Hunter pleaded guilty to a couple of tax  misdemeanours – he’d under-paid $US580,000 tax for 2017 and $US620,000 tax for 2018, according to IRS whistle-blower Gary Shapley. The official court documents spoke merely of him evading about $US100,000 tax per year. Hunter’s total earnings for 2014-19 were $US8.3 million, derived mainly from shaking down corrupt Ukrainians, Romanians, Kazakhs and Chinese-based tycoons affiliated with the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.

He got probation on tax, not even a fine, thanks to his dad’s Justice pals. He also admitted to lying when buying a handgun, signing that he wasn’t a drug addict. For that, he is to do a year’s upmarket rehab, called “a pre-trial diversion program”. When he completes rehab, the gun charge lapses.

I’d thought Joe Biden and his Democrats were fiercely for gun control but apparently not when it’s Joe’s son buying a Colt Cobra .38 Special. President Joe just one year ago signed into law the Safer Communities Act, with gun violation penalties upped from a maximum 10 years to 15 years goal. “It keeps guns out of the hands of people who are a danger to themselves and to others,” he explained. Around when Hunter bought the gun he was living in a stupor of crack cocaine and making home-made porn films of himself with prostitutes, all of it filed on his laptop. He also wrote off $US106,000 of payments to hookers and sex clubs as business expenses, a further tax crime Biden’s Justice Department has been happy to overlook.

In Joe’s relatively coherent presidential gun-law speech (compared those of the past month, when he has twice said Putin was getting beaten “in Iraq”), Joe called gun safety “a critical issue”.[1]

Lives will be saved … I’ve been at this work for a long, long time, and I know how hard it is, and I know what it takes to get it done. It was there — I was there 30 years ago, the last time this nation passed meaningful gun safety laws. And I’m here today for the most significant law to be passed since then, since — for the last 30 years … How many times we heard that? ‘Just do something. For God’s sake, just do something’.

Well, today, we did. Today, we say more than ‘enough’. I know there’s much more work to do, and I’m never going to give up. But this is a monumental day. God bless us with the strength to continue to work to get the work that’s left undone done … I’m now going to sign this bill into law. [The bill is signed.] God willing, it’s going to save a lot of lives.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/the_realities_of_hate_speech.html

Language is the battleground for ideas.  Which words become common and which go out of style record the advances and retreats of competing beliefs.  People who use words as weapons understand that hijacking a country’s vocabulary is the shortest path toward claiming total control over a country’s thoughts.  In a war of words, what is forbidden from being said out loud is more important than what is allowed. 

Sometimes language bans are explicit, such as Ireland’s continuing crusade against so-called “hate” speech or Facebook’s policy directives to censor as “misinformation” any commentary questioning the effectiveness of COVID “vaccines.”  In other instances, certain words are stigmatized until populations learn to see them as “politically incorrect,” if not downright vulgar or taboo.  Whether enforced through official corporate policy, criminal statute, or polite society’s behavioral codes, the effect of limiting speech is identical: free expression is reduced to a verbal minefield.

Can I say that?  Should I say that?  Will I be punished for saying that?  Just asking those questions encourages a degree of self-censorship unpalatable in any truly “free” society.  If human innovation is a product of argument and debate, then any kind of debate that limits which words may be spoken also limits mankind’s capacity for discovery.  Stifled thoughts lead to closed minds.

A June poll from the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania found that nearly 60% of Americans feel their right to free speech has significantly eroded in the last decade.  Over 40% said that they or someone they know has self-censored during the last year to avoid punishment or harassment.  “We have heard from numerous individuals who are bullied into silence and fear retaliation if they speak,” Jeremy Samek, senior counsel at Pennsylvania Family Institute, told the Epoch Times.  “They fear retribution from their private employers, government employers, and even by those in the media.”  In the United States — where free speech was once considered as quintessentially American as baseball and apple pie — ordinary people are afraid to speak.  That fact should shock the sensibilities of any American who once believed totalitarianism died in the twentieth century.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19780/sex-trafficking-child-abuse-biden-administration

Currently, at least 85,000 children are believed to be missing.

“Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the US Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children…. Realizing that we were not offering children the American dream, but instead putting them into modern-day slavery with wicked overlords was a terrible revelation…. They threatened me with an investigation. They… took my badge. It is a terrible thing when you blow the whistle to try to save children and you’re retaliated against for trying to help. The HHS [The United States Department of Health and Human Services] did everything they could to keep all of this silent.” — Tara Lee Rodas, testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, April 26, 2023.

“Over the last two years, this country has become an international hub for child trafficking. And the US government is behind it. Under Biden, hundreds of thousands of children have come into this country illegally. Once they get here, most are sold for sex, used for cheap labor, or forced to join gangs.” — Rachel Campos-Duffy, Fox News, April 26, 2023.

“In April 2021, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott learned of allegations of abuse of unaccompanied minors in a federal facility in San Antonio, he said, ‘The Biden administration is presiding over the abuse of children.’ He also called on the administration to shut these facilities down. Instead, the administration has only expanded them without communicating with state or local authorities. Local communities are not told how long the minors will be there, or where they will go when released and with no concern of the impact to local citizens. I am requesting that Congress launch a full investigation into the federal agencies responsible for approving the contracts for these facilities.” — Sheena Rodriguez, president of the Alliance for a Safe Texas, testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, April 26, 2023.

“The mass migration crisis instigated by the Biden administration’s misguided immigration policies has caused incalculable harm…. These migrants were enticed by these policies to… cross the border illegally, led by criminal smuggling and trafficking organizations, and enabled by government agencies and contractors…. The Biden administration has implemented policies that incentivize the illegal entry of unaccompanied alien children on a massive scale, to the profit of criminal smugglers and traffickers, even with full knowledge of the risks that such policies will endanger the safety and well-being of the migrant children. Some supporters of these policies have defended them on the belief that they are aiding the reunification of families, providing a safe haven from difficult living environments in their home countries, and even benefiting US employers. On the contrary, I submit that there is no possible rationalization for policies that have facilitated the abuse and exploitation of child migrants on such a large scale for so many years. There is no possible humanitarian or economic motive that could justify or make up for the damage that has been done to the victims by the smugglers, traffickers, abusive sponsors, and even family members who participated in these dreadful arrangements.” — Jessica M. Vaughan, director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, April 26, 2023.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described what is happening as “effectively the largest human smuggling operation in American history.”

“This is criminal… The FBI needs to be involved. They need to go find every single one of these kids — 85,000 or more — who are lost. The FBI needs to find them. We need to have an investigation by the FBI into the Homeland Security Department, into HHS to figure out who is facilitating these smuggling rings, are they deliberately not doing their job, are they deliberately or negligently turning these kids over to smugglers? We need to find out. The FBI needs to get on it and launch a full-scale investigation right now.” — Senator Josh Hawley (R- MO), Fox News, April 26, 2023.

“To solve the problem, Congress must change the immigration laws and rein in the executive policies that are incentivizing the mass illegal migration of both adults and minors.” What is needed is “more opportunity for state and local governments to investigate and penalize human trafficking and the illegal migration, human smuggling, identity fraud, and illegal employment.” — Jessica M. Vaughan, testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, April 26, 2023.