RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-crisis-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia

EXCERPT:

We are also an American society. That is, we share characteristics with other countries in the Americas like Mexico and Brazil that set the countries of our hemisphere apart from countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Like many other American countries, the United States has more ethnic, cultural, social, and religious diversity than most European countries. The turbulent history of the hemisphere has left its mark on many American societies, where levels of crime, inequality, and violence are extraordinarily high by world standards. At the same time, our cultural roots are more Anglo and Protestant than most of our fellow American states, giving us much in common with countries like Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and of course Canada. As is the case throughout the Western Hemisphere, our intellectual classes and social elites have historically looked to Europe for aesthetic and intellectual values, while much of our population has had little knowledge of or interest in European history and culture. Serial waves of immigration, the latest and largest of which is taking place now, have reshaped American politics and culture, while leaving many of the essential elements of the national character largely unchanged.

Most of the time, however, our national conversation fails to do justice to the rich complexity of our national life. There are some outstanding exceptions both on the left and the right of American political discourse, but the quality of too much of our national conversation, mediated as it often is by cable news and social media, is too superficial, too one-sided, and too polarized to address the real issues in American life. That would be dangerous enough in ordinary times, but we live in demanding times. The disruptive economic and social consequences of the information revolution combine with the decadence and decay of the midcentury American model of regulated industrial democracy to plunge American society into a maelstrom of interconnected economic, social, racial, political, cultural, and ideological crises.

Between the domestic upheavals in American society, the international turmoil at a time of renewed great power competition, and global threats ranging from nuclear war to climate change, many Americans feel angry, frustrated, and afraid. To make matters worse, America’s leadership class has lost its way, and too many of the politicians, intellectuals, artists, educators, and religious leaders who ought to be pointing the way forward are locked into stale ideologies and failed institutional models, lacking the vision required to move up to the next stage of American life.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/vivek-ramaswamy-files-lawsuit-against-world-economic-forum_5209770.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is suing the World Economic Forum (WEF) for affiliating him as one of its “Young Global Leaders,” despite rejecting the request and repeatedly asking to be removed from its list of members.

“I fundamentally disagree with the WEF agenda,” Ramaswamy said in a post on Twitter Tuesday. “I’ve been one of the biggest crusaders in our country against it. They named me a ‘young global leader’ when I explicitly said no. Now it’s time to hold them accountable for it.”

Ramaswamy argued that the organization of global elites also listed other young and successful business leaders on the forum without their consent.

In a poll initiated by the 37-year-old businessman-turned-politician, he asked his 456,000 followers to vote on whether they think he should sue the WEF, with over 29,000 Twitter users responding to it. The result showed a whopping 90 percent in favor of filing a lawsuit against the organization, which is headquartered in Geneva.

In a statement on Wednesday, Ramaswamy formally announced that he’s filing a lawsuit against the WEF, saying it’s time to hold the organization accountable “for creating the false illusion of affiliation” in order to undermine its adversaries.

“Our Founding Fathers fought the American Revolution to declare independence from the Old World monarchy,” Ramaswamy said. “That old monster now rears its head again in the form of WEF’s agendas including ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and the ‘Great Reset.’ That’s why I’ve been one of the most vocal crusaders in America against WEF.”

According to the New York Post, citing the lawsuit, Ramaswamy filed it in a court in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Wednesday and is seeking only nominal damages of $2,500.

The lawsuit, per the Post, reads: “The WEF seemingly exploited this false and manufactured affiliation with Mr. Ramaswamy to undermine his credibility as a critic of the World Economic Forum and its objectives.”

“This is an organization that does a lot of wrongs and I’ve opposed it publicly and believe it should be held accountable,” Ramaswamy told the paper. “The WEF has a radical worldview that rejects the principles America was founded on. I’m not interested in being a ‘global citizen.’ I’m an American.”

Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who founded and leads biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, appeared on the WEF’s 2021 list of Young Global Leaders (YGL) before his name was pulled from the website, an archived version shows.

https://www.newsweek.com/toxicity-dei-tale-newton-massachusetts-opinion-1795907

A white grievance backlash has arrived in Massachusetts, to hear the liberal media tell it. Well-funded and well-connected GOP power players masquerading as aggrieved parents have been “harassing educators for policies they deem unfair to white students and antithetical to their values,” per a Boston Globe columnist. It’s “white backlash politics” that’s “clearly coordinated, with right-wing money” and engaged in a campaign of “whipping suburban parents into a frenzy” to win elections for the Republicans.

Sounds sinister! But if you talk to the parents at the center of the ongoing fight over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in public schools in Newton, Massachusetts, you’ll find something very different. You won’t find MAGA Republicans opposing DEI in the schools, but rather liberal Democrats who have noticed a shift in their children’s school system priorities. And their complaints have nothing to do with being white.

One parent had a child excluded from an affinity group (a race-based social group), while other parents were dismayed to find an accelerated math program that was in place for years had been scrapped due to equity concerns. Still others were troubled to learn that their children’s English and History instruction was filled with language dividing everyone into categories of oppressor or oppressed.

When these parents questioned the school about these issues, they were told that their complaints targeted aspects of their children’s education that were consistent the values of Newton Public Schools (NPS). That was true: In 2022, NPS shared these values in their Statement of Values and Commitment to Racial Equity. With imperatives like “Take immediate and sustained action to dismantle racism in our schools and communities” and “It is essential to give voice to those who have traditionally been underrepresented and historically marginalized,” the Statement of Values consists of typical progressive antiracism language, which leaves you with no doubt that blacks and other minorities are marginalized and have no agency, and adheres to the highly subjective findings of unconscious bias.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/the_biden_administrations_attack_on_free_speech.html

If it weren’t for Tucker Carlson, I wouldn’t have known about a disturbing story that Glenn Greenwald broke: The Biden administration is finding ways to stifle speech supporting the Russian position in the ongoing strife in Ukraine. 

I guess I should say up front that I am neither pro-Russian nor pro-Ukrainian. I dislike both sides equally and reserve all my compassion for the innocents caught in the crossfire (including the hapless Russian conscripts). My greatest concern is the one Donald Trump articulated during his interview with Tucker Carlson, which is the fact that we’re witnessing two nuclear powers squaring off against each other—and (which Trump didn’t say) one is ruled by a megalomaniac and the other ruled (for nuclear purposes) by someone who seems to have incipient dementia. I also have no dealings with or respect for black socialists, who are usually antisemitic, too. My sole focus here is on free speech in America.

On Wednesday, Greenwald, a leftist who is also a First Amendment absolutist, tweeted that members of a Black nationalist group were just indicted for spreading pro-Russian propaganda.

Yeshitela sounds exactly like the Reverent Jeremiah Wright, doesn’t he? 

According to the DOJ press release about the indictment, charges were filed against four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals. The charge is that Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a Russian, founded something called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), which was headquartered in Russia and which the Russian government funded. He was aided by the two other Russian defendants. One of their illegal activities was to spend money to affect a candidate running for a local office in Florida.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/transportation_secretary_pete_buttigieg_proposes_spending_20_million_taxpayer_dollars_on_female_crash_test_dummies.html

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has proposed that the Department of Transportation include  $20 million for female crash-test dummies in its 2024 fiscal budget. That Buttigieg — famous for his love of females though he may be — wants to spend vast sums of taxpayer dollars on feminine crash dummies seems odd in the current cultural climate in which we salute all things non-binary.

Nonetheless, Mayor Pete’s proposal has already garnered support from several House Democrats. For example, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut praised Buttigieg’s plan during a recent House Appropriations Subcommittee meeting. DeLauro stated that the use of female crash dummies would be a major step forward in the fight against “gender inequity”.

Say what? Unlike humans, who are either one sex or another, crash dummies can’t be gendered…as they are not living beings. But, in today’s world, nothing can stand in the way of insanity.

How will manufacturers make crash dummies “female?” Will they be shorter and lighter? Have big breasts and wear lipstick? Carry a purse? Will they tell the “male” crash dummies to slow down and ask for directions? This would seem kind of stereotypical and/or misogynistic in this day and age, wouldn’t it?

How can we even have female crash test dummies if we don’t even know what an actual woman is?

And who’s to say “female” crash dummies don’t identify as male? Particularly since they are arbitrarily “assigned” their gender at birth when they are made.

https://victorhanson.com/wokism-and-history-part-three-the-commissariat/

Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided up Poland. Germany invaded first from the north, west, and south, the Soviet Union subsequently from the east. By early October the war was over. A victorious Germany concluded that while its forces had learned much about Blitzkrieg and needed improvement, Soviet Russia in comparison seemed inept.

That impression was solidified by the so-called “Winter War” of November 30, 1939–March 13, 1940, when the Soviets invaded neutral Finland. Although technically a victory, Russia lost nearly 500,000 dead, wounded, missing, and captured, compared to 75,000 causalities of the so-called losing Finns. Hitler concluded that his new ally Stalin’s Russia was a paper tiger, a view enhanced by the vast and continual improvement in German war-making for much of 1940–41 with the victories in Norway, the Low Countries, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa.

Germans assumed that the Russian officer corps was largely to blame for these embarrassments, especially given that during the 1937–38 Stalin purges, some 30,000 officers were executed on the pretext of anti-Stalin, anti-communist sympathies.

Among them was over 75 percent of Soviet generals and admirals—at precisely the time Stalin was vastly expanding and modernizing his armed forces and in dire need of competent officers.

Given these exempla, Hitler turned on his ally on June 22, 1941, and foolishly invaded the vast Soviet Union. The initial three-pronged attack was stunning, and nearly knocked out the Soviet Union in the first three months of the invasion, inflicting somewhere between 4-5 million casualties, with perhaps over 2 million immediate dead. Hitler was at first convinced that Stalin had wrecked his military and Moscow would be in German hands by early September.

What followed December 1941—Hitlerian strategic blunders, German overextended logistics and manpower shortages, vast resupplies of Anglo-American Lend-Lease war material to Russia, intact Russian industrial production beyond the Urals, and improving Soviet generalship—had doomed Germans to defeat by late 1943.

By 1943 Stalin had reversed course, reviving the Russian Orthodox Church to lend religious zeal to the war, and increasingly turning over the day-to-day decision making, both tactical and strategic, to an array of talented Soviet generals, most famously Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev, Vasily Chuikov, and Konstantin Rokossovsky. Both Konev and Rokossovsky had been purged between 1936–38 but were by 1941–42 “rehabilitated.” In short, once the Soviet Union de facto ended the commissariat/ideological control of the military and allowed it to function more on the basis of military efficacy, the Soviets began to take advantage of inherent German weaknesses.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/20/feds-still-fighting-release-of-j6-tapes-despite-mounting-legal-pressure/

Matthew Graves just received a court summons.

As the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Graves is rarely on the receiving end of a legal inquiry. In fact, Graves’ hand must be tired from signing thousands of criminal indictments, sentencing memos, and plea offers related to his ongoing investigation into the events of January 6, 2021. Just this week, the FBI arrested two more individuals on minor offenses, giving Graves’ overstaffed office more fresh meat for the Justice Department’s vengeful retaliation against Americans who protested the certification of Joe Biden’s election that day.

No investigative technique is too invasive for Graves’ henchmen to use in court proceedings. Big Tech, banking institutions, airlines, hotels, and other private interests work hand-in-glove with the Justice Department to hunt down Trump supporters and track their every movement before and on January 6. Much of the evidence consists of video footage captured by Capitol police’s closed-circuit television system during the breach of the building. Investigators routinely include still shots of the surveillance video in criminal complaints.

But now Graves is under pressure from all sides to make the video footage public. A consortium of major media companies is suing Graves and the FBI for ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the still-secret recordings. As I’ve reported since May 2021, the entire trove was designated “highly sensitive” government material shortly after the investigation began. Clips entered as evidence in January 6 cases are under strict protective orders.

Over the past two years, a group called the Press Coalition filed motions seeking to unseal video clips in numerous cases, however, it never requested access to the full archive of footage. That changed after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy allowed Fox News host Tucker Carlson to view the videos and air selected clips in February.

Lawyers representing the group—which includes CNN, the New York Times, and Politico among other outlets—wrote congressional leaders to demand “all closed-circuit camera footage recorded on January 6, 2021, inside the United States Capitol and on its surrounding outside grounds.” 

In what might be a first, news organizations commended McCarthy. “The Speaker also explicitly recognized the overriding public interest in disclosure: ‘I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment,’” the letter quoted McCarthy.

https://thehill.com/homenews/3951579-recession-already-here-for-many-americans-as-buying-power-credit-social-net-shrinks/

The stock market may be closely watching the chance of an official economic recession, but many Americans across the country are already feeling the squeeze as they contend with higher prices and borrowing costs than they saw a year ago.

While Evelyn Canela, 31, a senior program director at a nonprofit based in Harlem, said she thinks she has a “well-paying job,” which paid in the $100,000-range when she first started, she also said she’s been feeling the pressure to save, particularly as various industries have seen more layoffs in recent months. 

In a poll released by Morning Consult last month, almost half of respondents believed the nation was already in a recession.

The poll also found that about 41 percent of Americans surveyed had begun taking precautions and steps to beef up savings, but a closer look at the data revealed disparities by income. 

Adults in households with annual earnings above $100,000 were more likely than others to say they were beginning to prepare for an economic downturn or recession, with 52 percent saying they’d taken to stockpiling goods or food, cut back on spending or other steps.

By contrast, the poll found that those in households that earned under $50,000 annually were more likely to say they had not yet begun to make preparations “but wish they could.”

The poll comes as recent months have seen more Americans are feeling poorer and pessimistic about the nation’s economic forecast at a time that rising price stickers are putting a squeeze on pockets across the spectrum.

At the same time, data shows credit card debt is also on the rise; a March study from Wallethub found “credit card debt increased by $85.8 billion during Q4 2022 – the highest quarterly increase ever recorded.”

Job losses are cutting into spending power, even for six-figure earners

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/in_charleston_ron_desantis_gave_a_pitchperfect_conservative_speech.html

I’ve just returned from hearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speak. I went in open-minded and came out impressed. DeSantis is a very good speaker, but it was the content of his speech, which is about core conservativism, that had the audience clapping and cheering. DeSantis made the case that his very successful, focused, disciplined conservative leadership is what all voters want.

In 2018, when he was first elected, out of 8 million votes cast, DeSantis won by only 32,000 votes. Still, he took his win as a mandate to implement the policies and principles he’d promised. When he ran for reelection four years later, he got reelected by over 1.5 million votes. Voters, he believes, responded to leadership and competence.

Leading from the front means abandoning polls. “Why would I want to be led by polls? A leader is not captive to poll results. A leader sets out a vision, executes the vision, and delivers results for people.”

Leadership also requires team cohesion, which DeSantis instituted on his first day. His job was to make the decisions, and his team had to be on board. The result is no drama and, he explained, “just daily execution of the mission. And that’s the reason why we’ve been able to get so much stuff done.”

DeSantis governed proactively, rather than fearing he’d offend someone. You can’t make things happen if “your whole kind of ambition is to not upset anybody,” which can cause paralysis.

Ultimately, said DeSantis, “Leadership…is about doing what’s right when you have intense opposition and a lot of unfair criticism, but you’re still willing to chart the proper course. You’ve got to have the fortitude to stand alone, if necessary, if that’s what the circumstances called upon.” DeSantis practices what he preaches, as seen with his stand against COVID madness and tyranny. He maintained individual liberty in Florida against pressure for lockdowns, masks, and forced vaccinations. For him, keeping the economy going and people working was a top priority.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19588/rising-us-national-debt

Sad but true, history is now all but a forgotten subject in our schools. But economic history? With luck, you may find the topic in some esoteric book written by a professor and hidden on some dusty library shelf. Yet it is there, within those pages, that you will find the history of nations who harnessed the power of a balanced budget and assumed global dominance. Of equal importance will be the parallel lesson of those that failed to appreciate that the most sophisticated military in the world can win a war only to come home to a nation that will eventually fall because of a mismanaged economy.

Without an appreciation of that history a nation’s leaders can easily pursue a disastrous course of pork spending that can destroy the promise of the future. Which is why Americans should be deeply concerned about this Administration and its reign of spending and resultant increased debt, that will be burdening us, and future citizens, far into the future. That kind of debt is a silent nation-killer.