RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/the-foolish-gop-proposal-to-open-china-to-american-lawsuits-over-covid-19/

The bill introduced by Senators Marsha Blackburn and Martha McSally, however well-intentioned, would have disastrous consequences.

Some terrible ideas never go away, especially ideas that help politicians to disguise weakness as strength. One such scheme in the Beltway bag of tricks is the proposal to “punish” a hostile foreign power by allowing it to be sued in court.

Senators Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Martha McSally (R., Ariz.) are the latest to try this tactic, proposing a bill that would allow Americans harmed by the coronavirus — or their estates if they have died from it — to sue China for damages. To pave the way, Senators Blackburn and McSally would strip of sovereign immunity any foreign state (i.e., China) that even accidentally discharges a biological agent upon the world.

Sounds ferocious, right? Except no American victim would actually get compensation, because Beijing would, of course, ignore the lawsuits . . . except to exploit them as a (further) excuse not to cooperate with American and foreign investigations; as a further basis not to honor its treaty obligations; as a reason to step up its aggression in the Far East; and as a rationale for retaliating by encouraging other countries to strip sovereign immunity from the United States, so that our nation and officials may be sued and indicted for harms real and imagined abroad.

This is foolish on so many levels it is tough to know where to begin.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-bill-of-rights-protects-freedoms/

Thank God for the Bill of Rights.

I n this current crisis, the longest if not the first complete shutdown in U.S. history, the freedoms of American democracy are being tested in ways we scarcely ever imagined. Out of nowhere little Napoleonic governors arise to enact decrees prohibiting gardening or strolling on an empty beach — decrees that seem to have little purpose other than to reflect that they can do so. Snitches volunteer to out felonious social deviants who are seen cooking in the backyard with a neighbor. A little horned-devil virus seems to be trying to do what those Russkies never could.

Experts with all sorts of Ph.D.s, M.D.s, and J.D.s after their names lecture from authority about what we must right now do — or else! — on the principle that they have a scientific or technocratic prerogative to impress critics of their modeling or their demand that we shut down a $22-trillion economy for “18 months,” if need be.

A supposedly disinterested media — found by media watchdogs to be 93 percent negative in its presidential reportage before the virus crisis — envision their coverage of the Trump demon as an endless zero-sum game in which any morsel of good news for him is instantly bad for them.

In short, if American democracy were to fail to sustain itself under myriad pressures, then this would be the moment. For some, the Sixties can at last be made manifest — especially given that its aging children just impeached an American president on articles nowhere found in the Constitution, after weaponizing the FBI, CIA, and DOJ in an attempt to abort a presidential campaign and then presidency.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/20/america-is-paying-the-price-for-the-nyc-superspreader/

To bring some much-needed context to the nation’s coronavirus crisis, let’s remove the states of New York and New Jersey from the current totals for a moment. Here, for the sake of argument, are what the numbers would show:

Since early March, roughly 18,700 people have died from COVID-19. That’s about 2,700 deaths per week in the United States since testing began. Some of the most populous states—Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California—suffered between 1,000 to 2,500 fatalities over the seven-week period. Florida, which is home to a highly vulnerable population and was a destination for thousands of domestic and international travelers before the pandemic began, reports fewer than 1,000 deaths.

Nineteen states and Washington, D.C. each report fewer than 100 deaths.

Tests show about 434,000 Americans have contracted the disease so far. Only a few states indicate COVID-19 symptomatic activity; most of the country now is quiet.

Would those facts frighten you into government-ordered submission? If the United States had a population of 300 million and 48 states, would the fact that 18,000 people—sadly, mostly elderly and already sick patients—succumbed to the virus over a period of nearly two months warrant an ongoing lockdown that is destroying the economy, overwhelming unemployment rolls and food bank lines, shutting down schools and colleges for five months, and bankrupting small businesses?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/21/the-disintegration-of-america-its-economy-and-its-constitution/

“Is it Donald Trump that the media, the Socialist Democrats and the Woke progressives hate? Or do they hate America itself and the millions of “deplorables” who voted for Trump and who are the last stalwart vestiges of American Exceptionalism?”

We – the people in geographic America – are now so diverse in character, culture and competence, so riven by racial, regional, religious, ethnic, gender, economic and social jealousies and dislikes and so afraid of one another that we may no longer be “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  

A 2011 book by journalist Colin Woodard asserts that geographic America never has been one nation, but rather has always been several separate ones. Compare, for example, the characteristics of a native of Woodard’s “Greater Appalachia” nation with those of a typical inhabitant of his “Yankeedom” nation or his “Left Coast” nation.  

F. H. Buckley, Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, powerfully asserts in his 2020 book, “American Secession,” that both geographic America and constitutional America are “divisible” and ripe for a breakup.

The old ties that held together the disparate parts and peoples of America are now frayed or broken.  Some have been viciously cut.  

Patriotism and rallying around the flag no longer unify.  The population of geographic America is now so diverse in its origins and cultural DNA that the person standing next to you may hate the American flag you are saluting.   

Christianity has been banned from schools and the public square, undermined in the popular culture by Hollywood and the media – and is no longer the unifying force that it once was.  Far from it.

Even the secular form of the Judeo-Christian tradition that Samuel Huntington called the American Creed is being “canceled” and replaced by Woke prescriptions that substitute hate for Christianity’s agape love and divide Americans into many warring identity-group tribes.  

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/21/the-economy-doesnt-need-government-help-to-reopen/

After weeks of lockdown, several states have begun to outline plans for returning to business as usual. The economies in these states don’t need political schemes. They simply need to be released from government chains.

Governments don’t create economies. It’s not only beyond their legitimate functions, it’s beyond their abilities. They need to stay out of the way and let the wisdom of markets steer us back to normal. But some officials see an opening through which they can drive their big government dreams.

For instance elected officials in California, which is likely to be the last state to fully open though it hasn’t seen the most suffering from the COVID-19 outbreak, view the crisis as a means to push the state harder and faster down the Blue State path. When asked by a reporter earlier this month if he saw “the potential, as many others in the party do, for a new progressive era and opportunity for additional progressive steps,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said yes, of course “there is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism.” 

“Absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern,” Newsom added.

A little more than two weeks later, Newsom announced the formation of his Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. Behind the official sounding name, and a few non-Democrat token members, hides a plan to use the pandemic as a means for advancing Blue State economic interventions that include: greater redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, bankrupting the oil and gas industry, an “unhinged” green energy program, minimum wage that breaks the backs of small businesses, and more of California’s hostility toward business in general.

Expect Newsom’s task force to draw the blueprint for other progressive states to follow.

The task forces, committees, and other councils across the country that will be charged with reopening economies “didn’t build that,” if we might borrow a particularly repugnant phrase. In fact, there is a certainty the most active of these will take what others built and wring the life out of it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/its-time-build-frontpagemagcom/

Editors’ note: We are proud to publish the following article by Marc Andreessen  on the long-term crisis facing our nation, and what can be done to create a better future. Marc is co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and a member of Facebook’s board of directors. In 1994, he was one of six inductees to the World Wide Web Hall of Fame.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation. Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. Our scientists will hopefully invent therapies and a vaccine, but then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production. And even then, we’ll see if we can deploy therapies or a vaccine fast enough to matter — it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives. In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/19/suppression-of-expression-obscures-the-truth-about-the-virus/

What explained the paradox of near paranoia to some inquiries but magnanimous tolerance of other absurdities? Usually, one of three explanations suffice—and often all three together.

Americans are acquainted with predictable but ultimately failed progressive efforts to suppress free expression by preemptive invective and politically correct finger-pointing.

To believe that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers revealed too many contradictions, too many lacunae, too many episodes of timely amnesia, and too many unsubstantiated accusations in their testimonies was chauvinistically to attack/smear/silence all women’s voices—at least until the same sort of memory-repressed accusations focused on handsy Joe Biden.

To express skepticism that current global temperatures are uniformly rising almost entirely due to human carbon emissions, that this state of affairs poses catastrophic dangers that may end civilization as we know it, and that this emergency can only be addressed by the radical restructuring of global economies is to be rendered a denialist, a crank, a fool.

But these parameters of censorship have a logic and predictability, given their race/class/gender/environmental orthodoxy.

Shifting Pandemic Orthodoxy

What explains the current taboo on topics regarding the coronavirus?

It is now a truism that almost every influential model that has been advanced about the spread of the coronavirus was flawed. They almost all erred on the side of exaggerated morbidity. But to suggest that in public is deemed heresy.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/lockdown-theater-brings-hoopla-and-amateur-epidemiologists_3318336.html#

I know that a lot of people are eagerly awaiting the roll-out of the new Netflix compilation of all the White House pressers from the Coronavirus Task Force. I’m told that, thanks to the sponsorship of Hermes scarves, all 876 hours will go on-line at once, so those of us under virtual house arrest can binge watch it for the next month or so. Those with a premium account can opt for an edition that omits any questions from Jim Acosta.

Speaking for myself, I hope it comes soon, for it looks as though we may soon be allowed out of our houses again. I’ll like that, though I expect that there will be a period of adjustment. When you are in a dark room for a while and then go out into brilliant sunlight, the light is dazzling.

That’s one reason coming out of a movie theater on a sunny summer afternoon is so disorienting. You get acclimated to the tenebrous environment. I suspect something similar and even more disorienting when the Lockdown ends.

I wonder when the critical reassessments will start. That will probably depend on the state of the economy, though I would like to find a more emollient word for the pulsing “élan vital” that sustains us. “Economy” sounds abstract and somehow in opposition to human things, whereas in fact it is part of what makes human things possible.

An acquaintance of mine made what I think is an astute observation when he wrote that “Politicians and bureaucracies tend to respond to crises with theater. After 9/11 it was airport security theater. Following Corona it was lockdown theater. There’s some utility to it, but only some, there is much more hoopla.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/suicide-of-the-west-postponed/

“Latter-day progressives recommend accommodation with all things non-Western and, more ominously, all things anti-Western. To take the contrary view, as Donald Trump has done, makes him the enemy of very powerful interests. Russiagate, the Ukraine impeachment farce and every other faux scandal laid at the White House door are the consequence of that.”

Donald Trump may have been too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to be indoctrinated by what James Burnham called, as early as 1964, “the ideology of Western suicide”. Trump-haters will loathe me saying so, but there is at least one connection between Trump and Churchill. The latter, despite the lengthening shadow of Nazi Germany, was himself too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to accept what others regarded as “inevitable”. His opposition to appeasement throughout the 1930s and his determination, as prime minister in 1940, to spurn Hitler’s overtures in the aftermath of the Battle of France might seem straightforward enough now, but that is with the benefit of hindsight. Equally, with Trump. Recall his decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, impose tariffs on goods imported from China, insist on a hard border with Mexico, call North Korea’s bluff, quit the Paris Agreement, ad infinitum. Like it or not, Trump’s aversion to mollification, which is just another word for appeasement, makes him in a sense Churchillian.

The ideology of civilisational suicide, argued Burnham in Suicide of the West (1964), had its origins in the Great War. The war was a calamity with consequences still playing out half-a-century later, and we could now say more than a century later. There was an observable decline in confidence about the merits of Western civilisation, from both internal and external points of view, during the inter-war period. This process only accelerated after the Second World War. James Burnham based his claim, partly at least, on the withdrawal of Western-sponsored governance in Africa, the greater Middle East and South Asia. As the West literally shrank during the decolonisation era, foreign policy experts had to come up with a new worldview, a new kind of liberalism, to account for this changing reality. Some of the military adventurism involved in the Cold War—for instance, the Korean War and America’s Vietnam War—disguised (and acerbated) a surge of unabashed anti-West creeds throughout the world. The Muslim Brotherhood, Maoism, Guevaraism, Khomeinism, Juche, Fanonism and so on are but a few examples. Edward Said’s Orientalism, as a radical form of liberal “broadmindedness”, has encouraged one generation after another to cast off their Westocentric and patriotic “biases” in order to accommodate themselves to a post-America global community.

https://dianebederman.com/what-is-the-meaning-of-america-first/

“From this day forward,” Trump said at one point, “it’s going to be only America first. America first.”

We hear a lot today about the term America First; always attached by politicians, pundits and professors to Donald Trump, and in a derogatory manner.  America First is a racist term they say. It was. There is a show on TV now called; The Plot Against America,  based on a novel by Philip Roth,  that takes place around the time of the Second World War.  At that time there was a group of people calling themselves America First which had its roots in the America First Committee (AFC), founded in 1940. These people opposed any U.S. involvement in World War II, and were harshly critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it accused of pressing the U.S. toward war. At its peak, it had 800,000 members across the country, included socialists, conservatives, and some of the most prominent Americans from some of the most prominent families. There was future President Ford; Sargent Shriver, who’d go on to lead the Peace Corps; and Potter Stewart, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. It was funded by the families who owned Sears-Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune and of course had its share of antisemites.

These people walking around calling for America First tended to be white Christians who wanted America to remain white and Christian. Echoes of their German compatriots who called for Germany to be an Aryan nation, nice, white, blond people. No one else. I don’t know if it is hypocritical or ironic that the man behind the plan was dark haired and looked nothing like his idealized Aryan German.

America First.  That was white nationalism, white racism and antisemitism.

That was then.