RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/17/wish-you-werent-here/

It is curious how deeply the comic and the sinister are woven together in the woke dramas of our time. 

Consider, to take the latest example, the embarrassing little panic to which the well-pressed and affluent denizens of Martha’s Vineyard treated the public. 

Our agents are still out there counting the number of nauseating “Hate has no place here” and “No human being is illegal” signs on the front yards of posh Vineyard estates. To a man, woman, and everything in between, the neighbors of Barack and Michelle Obama in their 12 million seaside compound are echt correct. All of them, within the limits of statistical probability, hate Donald Trump. They all voted for Joe Biden. They support windmills (so long as they are not visible from the Vineyard), carbon-neutral energy policies, and a “woman’s right to choose” (though not of course if the female is yet-to-be-born: she gets no choice), etc., etc. 

It would be easy to draw up a menu of things the pampered people of Martha’s Vineyard support and deplore. 

One of the things they support is greater “diversity” and its primary motor, vastly increased immigration. They think Joe Biden was right when he said that the United States could very easily accommodate two million immigrants from Central America. 

They pooh-pooh reports of chaos on our Southern border. Neither Kamala Harris, in whose portfolio the border was originally placed, nor Joe Biden has even bothered to visit the border. Why should they care? They like it when thousands of poor migrants huddle into places like Brownsville, Texas. When journalists such as the New York Post’s Miranda Devine began revealing that the Biden Administration was secretly shipping planeloads of illegal immigrants around the country, including into tony venues like the Westchester, New York, airport in the dead of night, their bored reaction was to pour themselves another chardonnay. 

But then Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to attract their attention. He rounded up 50 illegal immigrants, mostly from Venezuela, who had made their way to Florida and put them on a plane to Edgartown, Massachusetts, the beating heart of Martha’s Vineyard. (And that’s just the beginning.)

The reaction of the loving, open, soft-palmed, Democrat-voting residents? “The horror, the horror”: Mr. Kurtz’s expostulation at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness about sums it up. 

Floundering Florida pol Charlie Crist said that DeSantis’ action “shocks the conscience of any fair-minded human being.” Hillary Clinton said that it was an example of “human trafficking,” while other talking heads decried it as pure “evil.” Documentary filmmaker and anti-American propagandist Ken Burns has just made a film about the Holocaust that explains how the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis was, at bottom, if you look at it the right (i.e., the Left) way, the fault of America. Interviewed just as the story about the migrants-come-to-Martha’s-Vineyard was breaking, Burns said that DeSantis, by sending illegal immigrant to Martha’s Vineyard, had taken a page from that “authoritarian playbook” and was “weaponizing human beings for a political purpose” just as you-know-who had done in World War II. 

Surreal, isn’t it?

https://unherd.com/2022/09/the-american-medias-racism-fantasy/

It was the kind of correction you love to see. The story that originally broke in the final days of August, about a young black athlete being racially heckled in front of a crowd of thousands at Utah’s Brigham Young University, was not just exaggerated but completely false. The n-word was not shouted, let alone repeatedly, at Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson when she went up to serve. A crowd of more than 5,000 people did not stand idly by during an act of malignant racism. The United States is not, apparently, a socially backwards hellscape where people openly scream slurs at packed sporting events without compunction or shame.

Unfortunately, it’s a correction that many people are probably never going to see — or if they do, they won’t believe it.

Like many stories of its oeuvre, this one began on Twitter, when Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin claimed in a series of since-deleted posts that the young volleyball player had been subject to racist abuse throughout the game: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team,” she wrote. “While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

Pamplin hadn’t been at the game herself, but the claim was incendiary. The story was soon picked up by mainstream outlets, which treated the alleged harassment — and discovery of its perpetrator — as verified fact. From USA Today: “Brigham Young fan banned after directing racial slurs toward Duke volleyball player.” The Washington Post: “BYU bans fan, relocates volleyball match after racist slurs, threats.” The New York Times: “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/marknuckols/2022/09/15/liberal-double-standards-and-fascism-n2613141

Mehdi Hasan is one of MSNBC’s most popular hosts. For American liberals, he’s a dream come true. Muslim, check. Raised in the United Kingdom, he went to an exclusive prep school in London, founded in 1561, check. He speaks like an English aristocrat, check. He despises America, check. And he has publicly referred to Christians and other non-Muslims as “animals” and “people of no intelligence.” Double check. And he’s always angry.

He did a show this week about how “Fascism is on the Rise in Europe, Not Just in the U.S.” You see, for MSNBC viewers, Europe is the Land of Enlightenment and Progress, except for those vicious right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary. But Hasan had a Yale professor and an Italian Muslim to warn us, you can’t escape fascism in America by moving to Europe, fascism is on the march everywhere these days.

“Fascists” have done well in this week’s elections in Sweden and will be part of a new coalition government. And “Fascists” are poised to do well in upcoming Italian elections. And you only see “fascism” in white-majority countries, like the U.S. or in Europe.

And what is fascism? According to Hasan and his guests, you can see several key elements in the “fascist” Swedish Democrats party and its members. They are against unlimited immigration. Check, fascism. They support traditional family values. They support gay rights, but some members find Gay Pride parades a bit boring, annoying even. Fascism, double check. They respect religious rights, but believe that Muslim immigrants should obey the laws of Sweden and should learn Swedish language, in return for generous social benefits. Fascism, triple check.

And yet, somehow Hasan seems incapable of recognizing simple facts. Now, his audience doesn’t know anything about Islam, the Middle East, Africa, or Europe. But Hasan does, so his ignorance is really just willful blindness.

There are no countries in Africa or the Middle East that welcome immigrants. In South Africa, the only country in Africa wealthy enough to attract immigrants, immigrants from neighboring countries like Zimbabwe are beaten and sometimes murdered. They are certainly not offered social benefit packages and citizenship. In Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, there are millions of immigrants, mostly from India and the Philippines. They have only “guest worker” status, they can never be accorded citizenship, and they have basically no rights in the courts.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/15/the-unidentified-and-uncharged-instigator-in-oath-keepers-case/

The long-awaited trial of the most high-profile January 6 case will begin later this month. Five members of the Oath Keepers, an alleged “militia” group involved in the Capitol protest, face charges of seditious conspiracy and other serious felonies. It is the first trial in a multi-defendant prosecution that has dominated the attention of the Department of Justice, the January 6 select committee, and the national news media.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the group, along with Thomas Caldwell, Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, and Jessica Watkins will face a highly biased D.C. jury pool—the government so far has an undefeated record in January 6 trials composed of Washington, D.C. residents—as they attempt to avoid life in prison for the seditious conspiracy count. (Meggs, Harrelson, and Watkins have been detained in the D.C. gulag denied bail since spring 2021.)

At least a dozen other members of the Oath Keepers currently await trial for their nonviolent participation in the events of January 6. But one person won’t face trial. In fact, it appears this chief instigator isn’t even charged despite a trove of evidence showing how he incited at least one member of the group to engage in criminal behavior that day.

Someone identified only as “1%Watchdog” started a group chat on an encrypted application called Zello, which mimics a walkie-talkie. The channel, named “Stop the Steal J6,” was created on January 1, 2021; by noon on January 6, 2021, the channel had about 170 subscribers including Watkins, prosecutors allege.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/16/the-bidenomics-sham-is-collapsing/

With red lights flashing nearly everywhere, the economy’s prospects look grim. Soaring inflation, crashing home sales, plunging GDP, falling real incomes. No question, the economy is a mess. So why is the Biden administration saying things are going better?

It’s not just this week’s “unexpected” 8.3% inflation jump. Or the scary plunge in stock prices, destroying trillions of dollars in household wealth in just days. It’s that the ruling party, the Democratic Party, seems utterly oblivious to the damage it’s done.

This week, President Joe Biden touted the “progress” made by his administration against inflation, just a day after the report that prices had risen 8.3% overall, and food prices by 11.4%, the fastest since 1979.

“Today’s data show more progress in bringing global inflation down in the U.S. economy,” Biden bragged. “Overall, prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months: that is welcome news for American families, with more work still to do.”

Prices have not been “essentially flat.” They’re rising sharply, as the data clearly and unequivocally show.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/15/exclusive-doc-indicates-special-counsel-failing-to-bring-collusion-hoaxers-to-justice/

John Durham’s team has known of these discrepancies for years but has failed to hold responsible those who used the CIA to target a political opponent with false smears.

A whitepaper obtained first by The Federalist suggests Special Counsel John Durham botched the investigation of a second Russia collusion hoax, the one concerning Yota cellphones.

In a scandal linked to the Spygate operation, Hillary Clinton cronies peddled to the CIA fake evidence they claimed established Donald Trump and his associates were using the Russian-made Yota cellphones in the vicinity of the White House and other key locations. The news of this operation broke during the special counsel’s prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. However, the just-obtained Yota whitepaper that was supposed to undergird Sussmann’s claims differs substantially from the memoranda documenting what Sussmann supposedly said to the CIA.

Durham’s team has known of these discrepancies for years but has failed to hold responsible those who used the CIA to target a political opponent and the then-president of the United States with false smears of corruption with a foreign power. Now with the news that the special counsel’s office has let the grand jury expire, suggesting a winding down of the investigation, Durham’s failure to seek charges related to the Yota phone hoax is appalling. Durham offered the only apparent opportunity for justice in this entire collection of major scandals.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doj-refuses-to-release-its-plan-to-implement-bidens-voting-initiative/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Despite a court-imposed September 8 deadline, the Justice Department has failed to produce its strategic plan to implement President Biden’s directive regarding voter registration and participation.

On March 7, 2021, Biden issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to submit within 200 days their plans to promote voter participation. This directive, EO 14019, was premised on the fiction that “many Americans, including people of color, confront significant obstacles to exercising that fundamental right” (to vote). The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), the public-interest group that filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking disclosure from the DOJ, says there has been no explanation from Main Justice for its resistance to release relevant documents.

In a lawsuit it filed shortly after the directive, FGA noted the observation of many congressional Republicans that EO 14019 bore a striking resemblance to “a federal election takeover plan crafted by the radical left-leaning group known as Demos.” This plan, the lawmakers said, “called for the weaponization of the DOJ” for the purpose of imposing federal standards on the states. To attempt this in light of the fact that the Constitution essentially commits elections to the states is worrisome enough. But here, Biden is attempting to proceed by federal executive fiat, under circumstances in which the Constitution reserves only to Congress the prerogative of altering states’ election procedures.

This summer, a federal court ordered the Justice Department to respond well in advance of the midterm elections, and imposed a September 8 deadline for the production of documents. FGA reports that DOJ has turned over some heavily redacted documents but has refused to disclose its 15-page strategic plan.

FGO’s Tarren Bragdon asks why DOJ is “treating these documents like they are classified information dealing with nuclear weapons?”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nature-attacks-scotus-as-anti-science/

“If anything is a “war on science,” it is publishing ideological articles like this in what is supposed to be a science journal — a trend that seems particularly infectious among establishment medical and scientific outlets. By pushing rank political advocacy that would have been perfectly appropriate in the Nation or Politico — as if the issues discussed were scientific matters — Nature undermined trust in its objectivity as an important institution furthering the dispassionate search for truth.”

Last month I criticized the prestigious journal Science for pushing ideological progressivism and attacking the Supreme Court’s conservative rulings — as if its authors’ and editors’ subjective beliefs and policy preferences are the same thing as supporting objective science.

Not to be outdone in conflating leftism with “science,” the British journal Nature — perhaps the world’s most respected “scientific” publication — has similarly attacked SCOTUS based on the wrongheaded idea that progressive policy preferences are somehow synonymous with good science. From “Inside the Supreme Court’s War on Science,” by Nature’s U. S. correspondent Jeff Tollefson:

In late June, the US Supreme Court issued a trio of landmark decisions that repealed the right to abortion, loosened gun restrictions and curtailed climate regulations. Although the decisions differed in rationale, they share a distinct trait: all three dismissed substantial evidence about how the court’s rulings would affect public health and safety. It is a troubling trend that many scientists fear could undermine the role of scientific evidence in shaping public policy. Now, as the court prepares to consider a landmark case on electoral policies, many worry about the future of American democracy itself.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-s-cities-worse-murder-rates-than-ukraines-civilian-death-rate/

You might have thought that when you hear a newscaster or reporter call a major U.S. city a “war zone” because of the high crime and murders occurring there that it was just an exaggeration. It turns out that it isn’t.

“Per capita murder rates in major U.S. cities such as Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis are outpacing Ukraine’s recorded civilian death rate from Russia’s invasion,” according to Just The News.

Think about that. Cities that get touted as examples of successful progressive places to live have more people dying, relatively, than a nation at war. Cities that held “most peaceful protests” are less safe than a nation at war.

Now ask yourself this: If we are so upset with what is happening in Ukraine, why aren’t we even more upset with what is happening in our own country?

The website compiled information from the United Nations Human Rights Office, U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources to calculate the murder rates between the Ukraine and U.S. cities.

In Ukraine, 5,401 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s attack began in February (this is actually believed to be an underestimate). With a population of about 41,167,300, this makes Ukraine’s civilian death rate 13.12 per 100,000 people using official statistics from the United Nations, according to Just The News.

Sadly, there are American cities where this would be an improvement. Baltimore’s homicide rate is 37.3 so far this year or 215 deaths. If the city had the Ukraine’s war-time death rate, the city would have had only 76 murders.

St. Louis’s murder rate is 38.2 per 100,000 so far in 2022. Chicago’s is 14.8 per 100,000.

“Using pre-pandemic data, 52 U.S. cities had worse homicide rates than Ukraine’s civilian death rate. However, crime in the United States has skyrocketed since then, meaning that there may be more cities that qualify as deadlier than Ukraine under assault by Russian forces,” Just The News reported.

How scary is that?