RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/living-by-the-race-card?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In recent conversations, John McWhorter and I have noted that some of the less reputable initiatives put forward by progressive educators, administrators, and elected officials in the name of social justice seem to be losing traction. There is a concerted pushback among parents to reinstate blind admissions testing in elite public schools and banish CRT-type programs from K-12 education, among voters living in cities run by district attorneys who favor overly lax sentencing for felons, and among ordinary people who feel like their ordinary political views can no longer be uttered in polite society.

“Resistance” is one word that describes this trend. “Backlash” is another. In the following excerpt from my conversation with my friend the economist Rajiv Sethi, he worries that this backlash is harming people who did nothing to deserve the ire of those who are fed up with the progressive line on race. I have no doubt there are such innocent victims, and that is regrettable. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the backlash has its excesses; the progressive insistence on injecting race into seemingly every facet of public life is itself excessive. As I say below, you live by the race card, you die by the race card.

When our policy decisions and political movements are premised on the notion that we as human beings are reducible to our race, that our responsibilities and experiences begin and end in race, we are in deep, deep trouble. I hope that those who are resisting the progressive race hustle in the schools and on the ballot are successful, and that those defeats can ratchet down the atmosphere of division and grievance we’re living in now. If not, I fear the backlash will continue, and that a few wrongfully terminated teachers will be the least of our problems.

https://dianebederman.com/hallelujah-i-am-woman-hear-me-roar/

Excerpts

Women, through time, have had this enormous power to decide who will live and who will die.  A great responsibility. The blessing and the curse. For it is woman who decides whose genes will carry on from the past to the future, for she is the carrier of creation and men have always known that, consciously or subconsciously.  Men need permission from women to pass on their genes. Sadly, there are men who will not grant the woman her right to choose.

And then came FEMINISM.

Today, being a woman has nothing to do with procreation, with creating life. Oh no! It has to do with the right to abort! What could be more important  than that?

The Supreme Court ruled on Roe Versus Wade and the feminists went crazy! I haven’t seen protests like this since the Summer of Love 2021 when riots, I mean peaceful protests, took place around America – because of the murder of George Floyd. The murder of one man by police. How dare they? Yet these same people are screaming for the right of women to kill the unborn; not just abort in the first 6 weeks, or even the first trimester – 12 weeks, but right up to BIRTH! And how dare anyone get in the way!  Those Supreme Court Justices! Well, these feminists will teach them a lesson. ShutDownDC offered $50 to people who harass any of the Justices who voted in the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade.

https://nypost.com/2022/07/11/the-posts-revelation-of-hamptons-migrant-camps-sparks-outrage/

Hamptons residents said Monday they were shocked to learn from The Post that illegal immigrants were living in the woods amid the area’s sprawling mansions — as outraged online commenters blamed nouveau-riche property owners and liberal voters.

“I haven’t seen homelessness in the Hamptons at all. The first I heard of it was when I read it in The Post,” a woman in Southampton said.

“I see those guys at the 7-Eleven in the morning waiting for work. I would imagine it’s impossible for them to find housing because it’s very expensive but you don’t see homelessness around town.”

Bill Gallo, 74, of Remsenburg, said, “I had no idea. I can’t imagine people here even know.”

“I bought a home in the Hamptons in 2015. I spend half my time in Florida and half my time here,” the retired grain trader said.

“You walk the streets of Southampton and you don’t see any homeless.”

Gallo added: “I imagined migrant workers lived in lower-income areas adjacent to the Hamptons, like certain areas in Riverhead or Speonk — very modest areas.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/11/as-whitmer-plays-the-victim-the-justice-department-moves-to-conceal-more-evidence/

No one in national politics plays the role of victim better than Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

In a fawning 3,700-word puff piece published by the Washington Post over the weekend, reporter Ruby Cramer told the embattled governor’s self-described tale of woe: Whitmer isn’t really an ambitious political climber—the daughter of well-connected and wealthy parents, she started running for office in her 20s and was elected to the Michigan legislature at age 29—but rather a misunderstood and underappreciated champion of the people targeted because of her sex, looks, anti-Trump stance, lockdown orders, and pro-abortion views, among other unjustified reasons for “right-wing” derision. 

That’s Whitmer’s story, anyway.

Interviewed at the official governor’s summer residence in Mackinac Island, Whitmer and her daughters detailed the horrors of growing up in Clarence Thomas’ America while enjoying a taxpayer-funded getaway. “I live on a college campus,” Whitmer’s oldest daughter, Sherry, told Cramer. (Both daughters attend the prestigious University of Michigan.) “There are people out there who would force me into conceiving. It’s a scary thought.” She then admitted she really doesn’t have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy since she is a lesbian.

But the FBI-concocted plot to abduct and assassinate Whitmer remains a source of great angst for the governor even though she knew about it weeks, if not months, before the “kidnappers” were arrested. At some point during the summer of 2020, Whitmer told her family “there was going to be a story coming out soon about ‘some people plotting to kidnap and kill me.’” That disclosure, according to Whitmer, happened a few months after an anti-lockdown protest at the Lansing Capitol building in late April 2020.

From there, Whitmer’s recollection of the timeline gets fuzzy, if not revelatory. “When the kidnapping plot was announced, it was summer. And people were blowing up your phone, right?” Whitmer asked her daughters during the interview. “Yeah,” replied her daughter, Sydney.

Except that’s not what happened. Law enforcement made the arrests on October 7, 2020—fall, not summer. Whitmer for her part was ready to go the next day with a distraught video message blaming Donald Trump for inciting right-wing “militias” to attack her. The shocking news produced wall-to-wall negative headlines for Trump as millions of Americans were voting for president; Joe Biden took full advantage of the FBI’s latest gift to the Democratic Party, ranting from the campaign trail about Trump’s “dog whistles” to extremist groups.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-biden-age-uncomfortable-issue-white-house-democrats-stunning-report?intcmp=tw_fnc

The New York Times published a stunning report about President Biden’s age and how it’s becoming an “uncomfortable issue” for the White House and the Democratic Party. 

The headline of the report on Saturday declared that 79-year-old Biden is “testing the boundaries of age and the presidency,” first highlighting how his upcoming trip to the Middle East was initially tacked onto his recent trip to Europe with one anonymous official calling it “crazy” if the president had done a 10-day trip overseas, those aides tell the Times there were “political and diplomatic” reasons behind separating the trip into two. 

“But the reality is that managing the schedule of the oldest president in American history presents distinct challenges,” Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote. “And as Mr. Biden insists he plans to run for a second term, his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party.”

Baker recapped from Biden’s European trip how he needed guidance from another world leader to look at the cameras for a photo-op and how now-outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson answered a question on behalf of the president, who didn’t hear a reporter shouting a question about Ukraine. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/10/our-new-antoinettes/

Marie Antoinette, the beheaded wife of the beheaded French Bourbon King Charles Louis XVI, did not really say “Let them cake.”

But in the short time that the French Revolution became utterly unhinged, toxic, and nihilistic, she became nonetheless iconic as an out-of-touch elite who had lived in a make-believe world at Versailles, without a clue (or care?) about the ordeal of the masses.

Rather than worry about the drudgery of the French peasant, Marie dressed up as one. And she roamed about in her idyllic faux peasant “farm” at the Hameau de la Reine, near the palace at Versailles.

Apparently, during these brief rustic interludes, Marie felt that the more she might act out a sort of aristocratic peasant life, the more she could find simplicity and escape the drama of court life, but without the real-life, crushing poverty of the poor.

The modern left-wing elite are becoming our version of Antoinettes. Thirty-eight-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is worth over $60 billion. But he enjoys T-shirts, jeans, and apparent simplicity in his many landed estates. He is so worried about the wrong voting tendencies of the clueless middle classes that he poured nearly $420 million of dark money from his vast fortune into the 2020 election—de facto absorbing the work of key precinct registrars—to ensure the “right” result for the unthinking multitudes.

Americans, almost uniquely among modern nations, mostly do not envy, much less despise the rich. But there is a certain sort of privilege that they do not like: the sanctimonious and hypercritical rich whose rhetoric is at odds with their own lifestyles and the methods by which they inherited or made vast sums. And they especially are turned off by those who exude open disdain for the clinger/deplorable/dregs class—to paraphrase the Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden nomenclature.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/11/look-deeper-and-the-jobs-news-under-biden-sucks/

After months and months of bad news and metastasizing crises, who can blame President Joe Biden for seizing one glimmer of good economic news? Too bad the good news isn’t really that good at all.

On the surface, the economic news from Friday looked celebratory. The Labor Department reported that the economy had created 372,000 mobs in June, beating the consensus forecast (a rare thing under Biden). The unemployment rate held at 3.6%. And, to top it off, jobs in the private sector regained all the losses from the COVID lockdowns.

In response, Biden rushed out a statement bragging about how “this has been the fastest and strongest jobs recovery in American history,” and that it “would not have been possible without the decisive action my administration took last year to fix a broken COVID response, and pass the American Rescue Plan to get our economy back on track.”

He went on: “We have more Americans working in the private sector today than any day during Donald Trump’s Presidency – more people than any time in our history.”

Only the last claim has any truth to it.

The idea that Biden presided over the fastest job growth in history is meaningless since he took office after the biggest decline in jobs in history. From February 2020 to April 2020, the economy shed a stunning 22 million jobs – thanks to COVID lockdowns we now know were completely pointless.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bidens-approval-hits-33-percent-democrats-want-2024-options-poll-shows/ar-AAZrdFj?li=BBnb7Kz

President Biden is facing an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party, with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, as voters nationwide have soured on his leadership, giving him a meager 33 percent job-approval rating.

Widespread concerns about the economy and inflation have helped turn the national mood decidedly dark, both on Mr. Biden and the trajectory of the nation. More than three-quarters of registered voters see the United States moving in the wrong direction, a pervasive sense of pessimism that spans every corner of the country, every age range and racial group, cities, suburbs and rural areas, as well as both political parties.

Only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point in Times polling since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago.For Mr. Biden, that bleak national outlook has pushed his job approval rating to a perilously low point. Republican opposition is predictably overwhelming, but more than two-thirds of independents also now disapprove of the president’s performance, and nearly half disapprove strongly. Among fellow Democrats his approval rating stands at 70 percent, a relatively low figure for a president, especially heading into the 2022 midterms when Mr. Biden needs to rally Democrats to the polls to maintain control of Congress.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/09/trumped-up-j6-hearings-pump-trump-up/

It’s been an eventful week. Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, was forced to resign. Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan, was shot dead while delivering a campaign speech. And Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Sri Lankin prime minister, offered to resign after thousands of protestors stormed his residence and burned it to the ground. 

On the home front, various groups unhappy with some recent rulings by the Supreme Court have offered bounties for people who report on the whereabouts of the justices. A 73-year-old man in North Philadelphia was set upon and beaten to death by a pod of rampaging black teens. And it was widely reported that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, would be traveling to Utah to meet with conservative donors. 

It was that last item that really set the collective heart of the punditocracy all pit-a-pat. You could tell this by the number of reporters who breathlessly described the event as a meeting with “mega-donors,” “mega” being the favored intensifier du jour. It means, “This is serious. Pay attention.”

For those with an active imagination, what that event signaled was the prospect—glorious or terrifying, depending on the political coloration of the reporter—of a DeSantis candidacy for president in 2024. 

That would suit me just fine. I think DeSantis is one of the very best governors in the United States. He is also the one most often spoken of together with the word “president.” The prospect terrifies anyone on the Left who preserves even a slender tether to reality, for it is clear that set against a drooling, senile puppet such as Joe Biden or a clownish relative of Nancy Pelosi like Gavin Newsom, DeSantis would wipe the floor, dry the dishes, and tidy up the laundry with them. 

For many on the Right, DeSantis is the handkerchief with which they can mop their furrowed brow. For he is conservative. He is quick on his feet. And, above all, he is not Donald Trump.