RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://lawliberty.org/is-civic-decline-an-existential-threat/

Several factors combine to make our discordant times more perilous than most of those in America’s past.

The United States is going through one of the most politically divisive times in its history. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, reminded us last month that sharp and seemingly intractable disagreements are the familiar grist of our national experience. Americans faced them around the election of 1800, in the leadup to the Civil War, in the Gilded Age, around the New Deal, and in the tumultuous 1960s. Yet we resolved all but one of those periods peacefully and emerged from these conflicts on a continued trajectory of ever-greater prosperity and global dominance.

Rove tells a hopeful tale, but past results are no guarantee of future performance. Four new factors combine to make our times more perilous than most past flareups of disunion. First, never have we had an educational establishment so hostile to the story of American exceptionalism, and as a result, never have the young been so willing to think America was bad from the beginning. Second, our cross-political associations have radically declined and with them the bonds that draw Americans together across partisan divides. Instead, we sort ourselves by geography and employment into blue and red bubbles. Third, traditional religious belief has dissipated. People still worship but ever more at the altar of politics. These comprehensive ideological views may give meaning to citizens’ lives but they make compromise hard. And fourth, the stakes (with the exception of those around the Civil War) are generally higher. Government is bigger and thus its control brings greater rewards. Even more importantly, many people claim—sometimes with not implausible reasons—that humanity faces existential crises, like those from climate change and AI. It is hard to feel goodwill to opponents who you think are bent on destroying the human race.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/14/post-postmodern-america/

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.

Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So cash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming but to stay far away from their advocates—by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the US. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Precivilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/15/bidenomics-bidenflation/

We can imagine the White House summer meeting as President Joe Biden’s handlers, whoever they might be, desperately tried to figure out how boost his flagging favorability ratings among voters. Some genius, no doubt, shouted out “Bidenomics!” as just the ticket to repair his tattered reputation. They rolled it out and, well, Americans still aren’t buying it.

On Thursday, Biden’s people pushed him out once again to flog the nearly dead Bidenomics horse. At an appearance in Maryland touted by the administration as a “major” economic address, Biden told voters that his agenda is about “investing in America and investing in Americans,” and referred to Republican plans to reduce federal spending and lower taxes as “MAGAnomics.”

So far, such rah-rah, pro-Bidenomics rhetoric hasn’t convinced voters.

A recent CNN-SSRS poll, for instance, found that 58% of Americans say that Bidenomics has made the economy worse, up from 50% last year. This, despite a relentless tide of positive press in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, a just-released Rasmussen Reports poll finds 52% saying the economy has become “worse” under Biden, versus 31% who say it’s improved. And our own recent I&I/TIPP Poll found a similar 51% who disagreed with Biden’s statement that his policies were “turning things around.”

Americans have good reason to be pessimistic. Recent headlines, mostly all about the ravages of inflation, and almost all within the last week, tell you why they’re not buying what Biden has to sell:

Bidenomics In Action: 16.7% Bidenflation — The Chickens Come Home To Roost, Hurting Americans (TIPP Insights)
Biden’s Food Inflation Record: Grocery Prices Up 19.6% (Breitbart)
Bidenomics strikes again: Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession (Washington Examiner)
Credit card and car loan defaults hit 10-year high as inflation squeezes families (New York Post)
5 states’ residents got richer, but 17 states’ got poorer, new Census data shows (The Hill)
Inflation rises for second straight month in August on higher gas costs (USA Today)
Wholesale inflation surges more than expected in August (Fox News)
Inflation is weighing down Americans. Many trust Trump, more than Biden, to fix it (USA Today)
In a bad omen for inflation, US oil prices top $90 a barrel for the first time this year (CNN)

It seems there are lots of inflationary “bad omens” these days. At the heart of it all is what we might just as well call “Bidenflation.”