RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/25/warning-biden-is-already-plotting-to-restart-his-disinformation-board/

No bad idea ever dies in Washington. Once it takes root, it will reemerge in another form. So, all the huzzahs about the demise of the Biden administration’s Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” are premature.

As we note in our I&I/TIPP Poll, the board attracted widespread hatred among the public, with 55% saying that they wouldn’t trust it to decide what is disinformation fairly. Among independents, 75% didn’t trust it, which is close to the 81% of Republicans who said they couldn’t trust such a government board. Among “free speech” Democrats, in stark contrast to Republicans and independents, 73% said they trusted the board to be fair.

“No doubt, both White House and congressional Democrat internal polling showed similar results,” Terry Jones notes.

But don’t declare victory just yet.

For starters, team Biden said it would only put a “pause” on the board in the wake of a furious backlash from the public and revelations that the woman chosen to head it had herself peddled disinformation on numerous occasions.

During this 75-day “pause,” the Homeland Security Advisory Council will review the board and make “recommendations on how the department can garner public trust surrounding its disinformation efforts.” (Note statement says “how” not “if.”)

https://www.city-journal.org/terror-in-new-york-subway-tunnels

On Sunday, Daniel Enriquez became the New York City subway’s latest “random” crime victim, shot in the chest at close range and killed as he traveled from Brooklyn to Manhattan for midmorning brunch. Enriquez was the fourth person to die by violence on the subway this year, and the third to be killed by a stranger. Each of the four subway killings has something in common with the others: justified intervention by police, prosecution, or incarceration could have prevented it. A few years ago, it likely would have. New York is suffering soaring crime because it has abruptly switched its justice system from enlightened prevention to gruesome mop-up.

The city’s justice system is still good at solving the most serious crimes. Just hours after Enriquez’s murder, police identified a suspect: 25-year-old Andrew Abdullah. But Abdullah’s background points up the fact that there shouldn’t have been a serious crime to solve in the first place. He has a criminal history that stretches back to his teen years. He has 19 arrests and served a state sentence for a previous gun crime. Just six months after winning parole on that conviction, the Daily News reports, Abdullah was “quickly busted again in January 2020” for carrying a loaded gun. His two most recent outstanding cases are for domestic violence and possession of a stolen vehicle. In the car-theft case, just last month, a Brooklyn judge, following guidelines set by New York State’s bail “reform” law, released him without bail.

Like many offenders who ratchet up their lower-level violence to homicide, Abdullah, who has now been apprehended, isn’t the kind of criminal who just made a mistake in the heat of passion and deserves a second chance. When he was 16, he allegedly accosted and sexually assaulted three women in Central Park, all strangers to him, within moments. But New York State’s criminal justice system allowed this antisocial behavior to escalate until, allegedly, he killed Daniel Enriquez on the train.

https://americanmind.org/features/what-trump-and-covid-revealed/what-covid-hath-wrought/

The hard facts—and hopeful opportunities—of a post-pandemic world.

Glenn Ellmers’s analysis of COVID and Trump represents a classic, and effective, account of the situation from the perspective of declining liberty and adherence to traditional values. But though it is important and necessary to hold onto our highest ideals, I would like to emphasize what is actually taking place on the ground and its likely long-term implication.

Statistics show that COVID accelerated economic, demographic, and geographic trends which were already existent, but rarely acknowledged. These trends include large-scale migration to the south, the west, and the suburbs. COVID also, as Ellmers suggests, sharpened the conflict between many Americans and the ruling “expert” class, who, unlike most Americans, actually flourished under COVID.

I am less sure that Trump was a force for good in all this, given his profound personal failings and mixed messaging during the pandemic. Yet he did stir up dissent against the overweening policies of some governors. In this sense the health crisis intensified an already existing political one. Looking forward, post-COVID reality has seen the emergence of powerful populist politics in both parties, and a marked drop in public esteem for the nation’s once-revered institutions.

Funding the New Elites

In the short run the pandemic strengthened the position of the ruling metropolitan elites centered in Puget Sound, the Bay Area, and New York City. Financial and technology moguls’ net worth has surged during the pandemic, while many businesses in the analog economy suffered devastatingly. Overall, poor and minority communities endured fatalities at twice the average rate of other areas. Minorities and the poor also often lost their jobs, which usually could not be done remotely. Their housing, health needs, and reliance on transit made them all the more vulnerable.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/25/dont-surrender-to-do-somethingism-on-guns/

Law-abiding Americans have no obligation to take ownership of a madman’s actions.

Before we even knew how the killer of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had obtained his guns, Chris Murphy was engaging in his customary performative emotionalism on the Senate floor, literally begging Republicans to “compromise.”

Compromise on what exactly? Murphy has never once offered a single proposal that would have deterred any of these mass shooters. Literally minutes after his routine, Murphy was asked about the obvious mental illness prevalent among most of these shooters. “Spare me the bullsh-t about mental illness,” the Connecticut senator responded, “ripping” the GOP. “We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world.” That’s how serious he is about compromise.

Whether America is more prone to mental illness or not, these incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious anti-social behavior.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/does_leftist_ideology_create_tangible_psychiatric_issues.html
Even outspoken Democrat Bill Maher is asking questions of the delusional narrative propagated through transgender activism. In a comedic segment posted to Twitter, Maher touched on compelling evidence, suggesting the possibility that “California is creating” trans children. Well, California is notorious for their radical trans agenda like ‘drag queen story hour’ and schools promoting transgenderism unbeknownst to parents – so in light of additional scientific evidence, it seems like Maher could be right.

A study published on PubMed compared two sets of mothers. The first set was mothers of boys with gender identity disorder, and the second set – the control group – was mothers of normal boys. Researchers found:

….mothers of boys with GID had more symptoms of depression and more often met the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder than the controls. Fifty-three percent of the mothers of boys with GID compared with only 6% of controls met the diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder….

The data showed that boys struggling with their biological sex are almost nine times more likely to have a mother who suffers from a severe personality disorder. So are they really born into the wrong body, as the transgender lobby and their activists would tell us? Or are they casualties of external factors, like a parent’s mental illness, perhaps caused by leftist ideology? The study mentioned above makes no connections between mental illness and “progessive” ideology, but other studies do.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/trump_shouldnt_run.html

“By contrast, Ron DeSantis has everything Trump has without the nastiness, the coarseness, the Everest-sized ego.  DeSantis understands restraint; he never shoots from the lip. He is pleasant, substantive, and at least as politically astute as Trump. DeSantis is far more of a traditional family man with the added benefit of having served his country in the Navy. He is also as tough as Trump, perhaps more. He is proactive not reactive, possessing admirable foresight.”

Donald J. Trump was the best POTUS in my very long lifetime. His policies were effective, making America prosperous, energy independent, and lowering minority unemployment to record low levels. Everything he did, with the possible exception of the COVID lockdown, was quintessentially Trump; competent, encouraging, and salutary for America and her people. We were blessed to have him in the White House.

Although many Americans cringed, we nonetheless put up with Trump’s coarseness and his inflated ego because he gave America back to the people. He relit the candle that lit the city on a hill. He was awesome. He took his business acumen and applied it to government very effectively, making America great again. We loved him. We still do. But sometimes the greatest love is to let go.

When 2020 happened, Trump was unceremoniously removed from office because of some highly questionable voting anomalies and practices. It was understandable that he was infuriated. We were equally so. But the prospect of more upheaval is too much for many Americans. We love a maverick but Trump became a burr under our saddle. Trump, instead of America, became the focus as he was attacked from all sides. We became beaten down, frustrated that we had no weapons to fight back with except the ballot box and even that has now become unpredictable. The election has been over for well over a year. It is time to stop talking about it; it keeps the electorate roiled. We need some tranquility, at least to regroup before the next battle.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/baneful-politics-therapeutic-sensibility-bruce-thornton/

The heart of “woke” politics is the therapeutic sensibility: the primacy we put on the role of individual feelings in self-identity and self-worth. Thus our psychic comfort, self-esteem, and the acknowledgement of both by others should be the most important concern of society, its institutions, and government policy. And they should confirm and validate our subjective emotions and identities, even if doing so infringes on both the unalienable rights of others, and on the foundational principles of our political order, particularly free speech and truth, the most important bulwark of our political freedom.

These therapeutic attitudes have contributed to the moral and intellectual incoherence of the “woke” Left, and its threat to our political freedom, one enabled by the long transformation of our federal government into a nanny Leviathan-state that empowers itself by pandering to this juvenile narcissism.

“Cancel culture,” for example, and the eagerness to create mechanisms of censorship like the proposed Disinformation Governance Board, on pause for now, are manifestations of this obsession with the impact of politically proscribed ideas and speech on manufactured victim-group identities. Public monuments or names of schools must be “cancelled” because members of certain groups will be traumatized by fleeting reminders of injuries and injustices, like slavery, they have never personally experienced.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/the-economic-doom-loop-has-begun/

High inflation, overregulation, and a general sense that things are going in the wrong direction remind us of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But today the underlying problems that were responsible for our woes in that time are vastly worse. The coming reckoning for Washington’s insanely irresponsible monetary policy may dwarf the troubles from all recent recessions and periods of inflation. 

The Federal Reserve has created a doom loop between the housing market and inflation. For years it has printed tens of billions of dollars each month to buy sketchy securities meant to subsidize the housing market and favor bond traders. This continues even now, in spite of inflation and a red-hot housing market. But the housing market has become dependent on unearned, newly printed money, and stopping the flow might cause a catastrophic correction. If it doesn’t stop, however, inflation will explode. 

Let me walk you through some of the math.

Inflation closes the gap between money earned and money spent. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve expanded M2 money supply from just under $8 trillion to around $22 trillion today. During that time GDP has increased from around $14.6 trillion to around $24.5 trillion today. We’ve gone from a ratio of one dollar chasing $2.20 in goods in services to an almost 1 to 1 ratio today. Inflation during the same period, according to the government, has eroded the dollar by a mere 33 percent. 

You think 8 percent inflation is high? Prices need to double to restore any semblance of balance between currency and the things you can buy with currency. We have a long way to go.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/25/the-real-reason-why-the-disinformation-governance-board-got-cancelled-ii-tipp-poll/

Why did the Joe Biden administration abruptly shut down its Disinformation Governance Board a mere three weeks after creating it? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll has the answer.

As the administration’s plan for creating the Orwellian-sounding speech regulator was being rolled out, the I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,320 Americans from May 4 to May 6 a simple question: “How much do you trust the Disinformation Governance Board to decide what is disinformation fairly and accurately?”

Among the 550 who said they were following the Disinformation Board “closely,” the reaction was strong: 55% said they had “little trust” (22%) or “no trust at all” (32%). That compares with 42% who said they had “a lot of trust” (19%) and “quite a bit of trust” (22%).

In short, it was a highly unpopular idea. Indeed, it was more unpopular than even the overall numbers suggest.

The only major political grouping that trusted the Disinformation board was the Democratic Party. They gave it a big thumbs up in the poll, with 73% giving it “a lot” or “quite a bit” of trust, versus just 23% granting the new agency “little” or “no” trust.