RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/while-the-culture-war-rages-americas?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When I was in my teens and 20s, I used to chuckle at the older guys who complained about the state of the country and America’s young people. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that each generation worries about societal changes and those coming behind them. Despite a few bumps in the road, America keeps rolling and the kids turn out just fine. The old worries eventually become fodder for good conversations between generations. I’m mindful of this pattern as I get older. But now, like the old guys I laughed at when I was young, I find myself looking around at the state of our young people and seeing some disturbing trends.

I wanted to be sure these trends are real and that I wasn’t being a worrywort, so I checked the data. Unfortunately, my intuitions were correct. America’s young people are floundering. The cumulative effect of the data I present below is a bigger threat to America’s future than any of the culture war issues pundits and politicians argue about. People who care about America should care about the state of its children and young people. It’s the right thing to do. It’s also in everyone’s best interest, because too few of our children are becoming the productive adults we need to sustain our economy and institutions. Fewer still are capable of becoming leaders of those institutions.

I’m worried. Others should be worried, too, when 14% of America’s high school girls say they’ve been forced to have sex. They should be worried when 14% of America’s teachers say they’ve been victims of physical violence from students. They should be worried when high percentages of America’s young people say they’re having mental health issues, 18% of high school students have created a suicide plan, 10% of them have attempted suicide, and 3% of them required medical treatment as a result. And let’s not forget about those whose suicide attempts were successful. Suicide was the third leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 in 2020 according to the CDC’s WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) database.

A review of multiple data sources suggests that alarming percentages of America’s children and young people are struggling. Too many of them are

Born to economically disadvantaged single mothers
Living in single-parent households
Overweight or obese
Suffering from mental health issues
Victims and perpetrators of violence
Struggling academically
Unable to transition into stable, self-supporting adulthood.

Here’s a high-level summary of each of the topics mentioned above.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/10_paradigm_shifts_that_shatter_establishment_illusions.html

Sometimes it feels as if we are drowning in a torrent of bad news.  I would suggest, however, that the worse people feel, the more they are waking up to the serious contests of our time.  If you are unhappy with the political, economic, and social powers manipulating the world today, the critical first step in fighting those forces is changing the way people think about them.  By that measure, people today are changing their minds about the culture and institutions around them faster than ever.  Consider some of these fundamental shifts in thinking:

(1) Good vs. evil

Not long ago, it was common for conservatives to see the Marxist left as foolishly mistaken — a collection of young and inexperienced troublemakers who would eventually “snap out” of their common delusions once forced to confront reality.

Now people understand that the left’s real mission is to reject reality.  Castrating boys so that they can pretend to be girls is not “healthy.”  Perpetuating racism as social policy is not “justice.”  Imposing a “woke” State religion over personal conscience is not “moral.”  Aiding and abetting child sex–trafficking and drug-smuggling at our borders is not “compassionate.”  Stealing property is not “equitable.”  Just as with Leninism and Maoism before, today’s leftism is evil.

(2) Parties vs. uniparty

There has been a seismic shift in the way Republican voters see political parties.  After Obama forced government-controlled health care on America, the Tea Party movement began a desperate fight against socialism’s advances.  From the energy of that movement, Republicans eventually took back the House and Senate.  Despite those triumphs, Paul Ryan rubber-stamped Obama’s budgets, while refusing to build Trump’s border wall.  McConnell’s Senate Republicans, who had run on repealing Obamacare, cemented socialized medicine with McCain’s decisive betrayal.

Grassroots voters finally rejected Establishment Republicans and catapulted outsider Donald Trump into office.  In response, Republicans quietly assisted Democrats in their attempt to remove Trump through the Russia hoax.  In the space of a decade, most Republican officeholders were outed as RINOs, before voters properly concluded that they were actually part of a single D.C. Uniparty all along.  

(3) Science vs. political manipulation

The only good thing to come out of the government’s COVID lockdowns, forced medical experimentation, and masking theater was its inadvertent creation of a Eureka! moment for tens of millions of Americans who realized that “science” has become irredeemably politicized.  When health authorities opted for experimental injections over known medical treatments, they sacrificed lives to push an agenda.  When hospitals separated families and forced vulnerable patients onto ventilators, they acted inhumanely.  When politicians and corporations censored public dissent, destroyed livelihoods, hobbled childhood development, and terrified the public with known lies, they not only proved that objective science is dead, but also committed crimes against humanity.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/marktapscott/2023/07/15/the-amazing-accomplishments-of-adam-andrzeweski-and-open-the-books-n1710885

When Congress approved and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, it became the law of the land that the public business of the United States is the business of the American public.

Just because the FOIA had become the law, however, little immediately changed in the dominant culture of secrecy, self-serving, and cover-up that always and everywhere pervades bureaucracies, but especially the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal executive branch.

That suffocating and constantly expansive culture would only change when millions of individual citizens and activists (plus journalists devoted to “the public’s right to know”) made continuing use of the FOIA and insisted that the law be respected and followed, even if doing so required persistence and insistence to the point of hiring lawyers and heading into court.

When the authoritative history of the succeeding 56 years is written, one individual and the non-profit group he founded will stand out — Adam Andrzejewski and Open the Books. The reason why is captured in the OTB purpose, “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time,” and its standing invitation to “Join the Transparency Revolution.”

There are legions of advocacy and activism groups in America that raise hundreds of billions of dollars each year based on claims of working to make government better. But not one of them can match the monumental accomplishment of Andrzejewski and OTB.

Here’s why: transparency is the absolute prerequisite to accountability in government. That’s the ideal underlying the FOIA and the essential condition for the survival of a republican democracy. And knowing how the government is spending the tax dollars of its citizens is the necessary first step to achieving genuine and enduring accountability. That is where Andrzejewski and OTB excel as no other individual or group in America.

Here is how they explain it:

“At OpenTheBooks.com, we work hard to capture and post all disclosed spending at every level of government – federal, state, and local. In 2022, we filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and captured 25 million public employee pension and salary records.

“We also broke open the California state checkbook for the first time in American history. We are rapidly growing our data in all 50 states down to the municipal level. We won’t stop until we capture every dime taxed and spent by our government.”

Think about that: every dime, online, in real time. You want to know how much your federal government spends each year on legal fees? Go to OTB. You want to know how much your state government spends each year on computers and office furniture? Go to OTB. You want to know how much your municipal government is paying each its employees and retirees? Go to OTB.

https://www.thefp.com/p/whos-afraid-of-moms-for-liberty

In a breakout session in a windowless conference room at last weekend’s Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warrior Summit” in Philadelphia, Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party and father of three school-aged daughters, is stiffening spines. Dozens of attendees, mostly women, are nodding and taking notes as Ziegler explains how to work with local news media. 

“Your product is parental rights. Your product is protecting children and eliminating indoctrination and the sexualization of children. You’re the grassroots. You’re on the ground. You’re the moms, the grandparents, the families that are impacted. The stories you tell help set a narrative,” Ziegler coaches them.

One story above us, the ballroom floor of the downtown Marriott is groaning under the weight of crowded press risers, where camera crews have set up for the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls coming here to curry favor with the more than 600 Moms for Liberty members attending—and a few thousand more watching the livestream. 

Ron DeSantis held forth this morning. Nikki Haley is scheduled to speak at lunch. Donald Trump will close things out later this afternoon. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are on tap for tomorrow. 

It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated. 

If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system. 

They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/12/joe-bidens-ministry-of-truth/

Under President Joe Biden, the US government has undertaken ‘the most massive attack against free speech in United States history’. That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge last week. The case of Missouri v Biden has exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and other federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike.

On America’s Independence Day, the Fourth of July, US district judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction, stipulating that the federal government must cease from communicating with social-media companies for the purpose of ‘urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing’ them to remove or suppress ‘content containing protected free speech’. Essentially, government agencies are now prevented from getting the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants to censor content on their behalf.

Judge Doughty didn’t mince his words. He said the evidence presented in Missouri v Biden depicted an ‘almost dystopian scenario’. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the US government ‘seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”’, he wrote. As the ruling notes, the US government worked with the Silicon Valley titans to suppress reports of the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and to gag those who questioned the efficacy of masks, lockdowns and Covid vaccines.

What’s more, this assault on free expression extended far beyond Covid. Doughty’s 155-page ruling describes how the government squashed social-media coverage of many other inconvenient issues. In fact, the groundwork for what the plaintiffs called a ‘systemic and systematic campaign’ of censorship was actually laid by government officials in 2017, four years before Biden took office. Even when Donald Trump was president, officials suppressed stories that might have hurt his Democratic opponents, including the Hunter Biden laptop story and claims about election integrity in 2020, particularly around the security of postal voting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-student-debt-forgiveness-supreme-court-income-based-repayment-plan-11f1c5fa?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden is determined to make student loans for college a new entitlement even after the Supreme Court struck down his $430 billion cancellation. The Education Department on Friday wrote off another $39 billion in debt. And this is only a down-payment on the President’s bigger plan to sweeten Obama-era repayment plans. Call it debt cancellation on the installment plan.

Obama-era repayment plans cap borrower monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income and let borrowers discharge unpaid debt after 10 to 25 years. Yet the Education Department said Friday that borrowers will receive credit for payments even during months when they weren’t making them. This adds up to $39 billion in new loan forgiveness.

The Administration also boasted that it has approved $116.6 billion in loan forgiveness to date, including $45 billion through “improvements” to public-service loan plans. That’s $68,828 of writeoffs on average for each qualifying government and nonprofit worker. Now the Administration plans to “improve” repayment plans for all borrowers.

The Education Department plans to slash payments to 5% of discretionary income, which would be redefined to exclude more earnings. Borrowers earning less than $32,800 wouldn’t pay a cent. Even years in which they don’t make payments, as during the pandemic, would be counted toward their required payments.

The Administration estimates that a typical graduate of a four-year public university would save nearly $2,000 a year, or about $40,000 over 20 years. That’s several thousand dollars more than the already generous Obama writeoffs, and loan balances wouldn’t grow from unpaid interest as they do now.

A grad earning $50,000 with $50,000 in debt would have to pay only $860 a year compared to some $6,200 under a standard payment plan. Borrowers would have an incentive to take out more debt, and colleges would raise tuition. The Biden plan includes no reforms that would mitigate this debt ratchet.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/donald-trump-and-the-standard-of-evidence/

The headline on the New York Times story of ex-President Trump’s indictment is a wonderfully unintentional guide to the topsy-turveydom of American life in the Biden era: “US Justice System Put on Trial as Trump Denounces the Rule of Law”. To start with, the front-page piece is not a simple factual report—“Trump Indicted on Thirty-Seven Counts”, say—but “news analysis” which signalled Schumpeter’s definition of Marxism (“preaching in the garb of analysis”) even before Wokedom tightened its grip on US journalism.

It’s worse now, of course, and relentless too. An accompanying report inside warns in another headline that “Trump Backers Unleash Wave of Violent Threats, Worrying Some Analysts”. The worries of analysts don’t usually make it into headlines, and we don’t learn about the reactions of “other” analysts. Presumably, if quoted in the NYT, those complacent fellows would argue that the threats—one of which is the simple word “Retribution”—were religious and military metaphors used by all parties at times but, when employed by Republicans, more worrying than the actual if “largely peaceful” riots of the Left.

To revert to the front-page headline, though, Trump did not in fact “denounce the rule of law” unless every indicted man who proclaims his innocence is held to be denouncing it. He said that law enforcement had been “hijacked” by the Democrats, including elected Democratic prosecutors, to take out the most formidable opponent they face in next year’s presidential election, namely himself.

In a few paragraphs I’ll deal with the thirty-seven charges levelled against the former President by the Special Prosecutor looking into, inter alia, his retention of classified national security documents in insecure conditions in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. These are serious charges and pose a real threat, namely a long prison sentence. But his claim that the Democrats had hijacked law enforcement to take him out of the 2024 election is largely true.

Largely? Well, Trump is probably not the most formidable challenger Biden could face next year. He may be the strongest candidate in the GOP primaries, but his negatives are so high with the full electorate that he would probably lose to the President where a challenger like Florida’s governor, Ron de Santis, would enter the race as the favourite.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/07/13/and-just-like-that-its-no-longer-an-insurrection-n1710334

And just like that, the January 6 insurrection is no more. And the deconstruction story is really something. At the center of this narrative switcheroo is non-other than Ray Epps.

Before we get to that, let’s remember how we got here. It took only moments for the Democrat media complex to anoint the January 6 breach and riot at the U.S. Capitol Building an “insurrection.” As if beckoned by an unseen force, narrative builders dutifully lined up to receive the official wafer on their tongues, and voilà! “Trump supporters” who had never committed an act of violence at years of peaceful and crowded rallies were eligible for a 20-year prison stretch.

Shortly thereafter, the insurrection became a deadly insurrection when the same media reported, wrongly, that police officers were killed by rioters on January 6.

The only ones who died on January 6 were killed by police.

Awful it was, but insurrection? No.

Now, however, insurrection is just passé.

And you can thank Ray Epps

https://www.frontpagemag.com/affirmative-action-battle-moves-on-to-the-military/

One of the Biden administration’s big arguments for racially discriminating against white and Asian students in college admissions was the need for military diversity. More than half of the ‘national interest’ section in its amicus brief argued that the military “depends on a well-qualified and diverse officer corps” which requires that colleges select for diversity over merit.

“It is not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions, including at the nation’s service academies,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Supreme Court.

The Roberts decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard shot down affirmative action as a legal practice, but punted on the question of racial discrimination within the military and its service branch academies. A footnote briefly stated that, “no military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The idea that racial discrimination should be illegal at colleges, but still legal at service branch academies like the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy, is a loophole. Justice Sotomayor argued that the exception proves that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not categorically prohibit the use of race in college admissions.” And it’s hard to deny her reasoning. Either racially discriminating against students is legal or it’s illegal. National security can only go so far to justify an illegal practice especially when it’s a social element with an indirect effect.

Democrats quickly attacked Justice Roberts for seemingly leaving the carveout on military diversity that the Biden administration had demanded as a matter of national security.

“Adding insult to injury is that the Court exempted military service academies, like West Point and the Naval Academy, from its own ruling,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin complained. “So the majority on the Court does in fact recognize the inherent importance of a diverse military and that diversity makes our country not only more fair, but more stable and secure — but they refuse to allow our colleges and universities to hold the same values.”