RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_national_fight_for_survival_is_not_over.html

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an essay for American Thinker: They escaped totalitarianism twice, only to see it again in America. I described how badly our Leftist neighbors responded to my father-in-law’s support for President Trump in the 2020 election. I described how vandals stole his political signs several times but the gist of the article was about two main points.

First, I told how my father-in-law had survived both the Nazis and the Soviets in Poland during WW2, emigrated to Argentina as a kid, and then survived the dictatorship in that country. In Argentina, he had been forced to hide his college textbooks in the backyard for fear of government agents. My wife recalls the young next-door neighbors being dragged out of the house and shot in the street, ostensibly for being socialist, but it was just as likely that they simply did not want to live in a dictatorship.

The second point was that Carmel, Indiana, a wealthy bedroom community of Indianapolis, and a thriving community in its own right, was beginning to show the same initial signs of social intolerance fomented by the Nazis, the Soviets, and Argentina’s dictators. Gina Carano warned about letting this happen in the US on her social media and was fired from Disney for her trouble.

Currently, my 82-year-old father-in-law displays in his front yard a pro-life sign and a “Facts Are Facts” sign (that I created). He also flies his US Flag upside down as a sign that he believes that the “greatest country on Earth” is in serious distress. Because we have cleverly hidden cameras (and some not so hidden), the signs have not yet been molested.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/watson-video-brooklyn-subway-attack-paul-joseph-watson/

Video commentator Paul Joseph Watson is back exploring the media discomfort over the inconvenient fact that the suspect in the recent NYC subway shooting is a — wait for it — black supremacist.

Check out the must-see video below:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/lefts-estrangement-reality-and-common-sense-bruce-thornton/

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has triggered a hysterical outburst among the “woke” progressive Twitterati after he tendered an offer to buy Twitter and turn it into a private company. For years Twitter has been the “woke” Dems most important enforcer of ideological orthodoxy and “cancel culture.” No wonder, then, that Musk’s offer, coming after his frequent criticisms of Twitter’s one-sided censorship of conservatives and defense of free speech, has induced such panic.

The content of this reaction, moreover, shows just how detached from everyday reality Leftists are, and how little common sense they possess.  Their blatant contradictions of fact, and shameless display of ridiculous begged questions and double standards bespeak a hermetically sealed mental world impenetrable to reason, common sense, and reality itself.

Take the old Clinton functionary Robert Reich. He was Secretary of Labor in an administration that campaigned and governed on “Third Way” principles: Rejecting the hard-left drift of the Democrat Party that had alienated old-school working-class Democrats and helped create Ronald Reagan’s success. Clinton announced that the “era of big government is over,” and followed up with tough reforms of lax criminal penalties for violent crime, and requirements that welfare recipients work. He also rejected the racial grievance-industry’s hold on the party when he publicly chastised the race-monger Sista Soulja.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/17/trickle-down-racist-antiracism/

Elected governments were rare in the past. They did not appear until over four millennia after civilization first emerged in the Near East. Constitutional systems were fragile at birth. And they are on the wane today. Nation after nation seems to be devolving into autocracy. Multiethnic, multiracial consensual governments have been even more brittle and sporadic in history.

The Roman, Ottoman, and Soviet empires were multiracial. But they were not consensual. Instead, they required a degree of force to ensure calm among rival tribes and warring peoples—violence that we would find incompatible with our notions of modern democracy.

Today, India and Brazil are large multicultural and multiethnic democracies. But neither, so far, has guaranteed their citizens either prosperity or security.

So present-day multiracial America is a great experiment in the unknown. Can its various tribes, and races unite around the Constitution? Or will they inevitably revert to form and give their first loyalties to those of shared superficial racial or ethnic affinities?

Regressing to the Color of Our Skin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/08/why-the-experts-keep-getting-it-wrong/

One of the most intimidating things about being a ‘heterodox’ thinker is having to constantly say that ‘the experts’ are wrong.

If, online or at a cocktail party, you point out something as obvious as the fact that very few black Americans are fatally shot by police, you can expect to be deluged with citations to articles bearing titles like ‘Know their names: black people killed by police in the US’ and ‘How unjust police killings damage the mental health of black Americans’. Best-selling and critically acclaimed books on race in America have titles like Open Season: The Legalised Genocide of Coloured People.

More broadly, if you express doubt about the idea of ‘systemic racism’ – perhaps because six or seven of the 10 most financially successful ethnic groups in present-day America are not white – you will no doubt be reminded to read famous books arguing that severe racial oppression is everywhere, like Ibram X Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist or Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

Similarly, should you criticise modern gender theory or the bizarre idea that human biological sex is complex and hard to define, you will inevitably be referred to an authoritative-sounding article, packed with data and infographics, like this one in Scientific American.

While I write from the centre-right, the same fate awaits those who ask difficult questions from the left.

This phenomenon has no doubt existed for millennia: the entire priestly class of Christendom cruelly mocked doubters of the existence of God during the Medieval and Renaissance eras – and gleefully enforced penalties against them that were far more intense than any ‘cancellation’ today. Worries about self-preservation aside, novel thinkers face a tough question whenever confronted with what the experts say: how can all of these very intelligent people be wrong? Surely it must be me who is wrong instead?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/18/the-working-classes-are-a-volcano-waiting-to-erupt/

“What is clear is that neoliberalism, which once promised gains for all classes, now means for most people an inevitable diminishment of living standards in ways not widely seen since the 1940s. We do not know when or if the volcano will erupt, but the prospect of it erupting will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from genderfluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.

The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class. The small-business class generally tends to favour the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government out of their business and to be left alone. Meanwhile, workers tend towards the populist left, which promises to relieve their economic pain.

The common feature is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French elections, a majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other rightist candidates, or for the old Trotskyist warhorse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other candidates of the hard left. The establishment parties, like the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Gaullist Républicains, were left way behind. The ultra-green Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a pathetic performance from the onetime ruling party. Intriguingly, voters under 35 went first for Mélenchon and then Le Pen, leaving the technocrat Macron in dismal third place among the young. Macron only won decisively among voters over 60.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_democrats_big_lie_about_puberty_blockers_being_harmless_and_helpful.html

From the moment we’re born, our bodies are constantly changing. The initial changes, from baby to toddler to child, occur when we lack the self-awareness to be taken aback by the process. Indeed, there are only two times in life when we are intensely aware of the changes—and, often, find them disturbing. The first is when we go through puberty and the second is when age finally catches up with us.

In both cases, people may fight back against those changes. We know all about Hollywood stars and the fight against aging. It’s the adolescent changes that matter. The changes can be disturbing and even dismaying. Boys’ voices can squeak embarrassingly and they like to hold a notebook in front of their crotch. Girls get boobs (which boys stare at), hips, and painful, messy, inconvenient periods.

We used to sympathize with adolescents and assure them that this was normal and they’d outgrow it. Nowadays, though, as often as not, they’re told that they’re probably transgender. And no, that’s not me saying that. It’s being said in a video from a company called AMAZE Org, which claims to provide age-appropriate sex education for children:

https://www.city-journal.org/ny-subway-shooter-delusions-likely-fed-by-relentless-cultivation-of-racial-resentment

Had a white male entered a New York subway car in a construction vest and gas mask, carrying a hatchet, a nine-millimeter handgun, extended ammo magazines, gasoline, fireworks, and two smoke grenades; had he then shot off at least 33 rounds, hitting ten people, the Biden administration and the media would have immediately raised an alarm about white nationalist violence. The shooter’s race would have led every story about such an attempted massacre; pundits would have immediately speculated about hate crime and domestic terrorism.

After all, U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland has elevated white supremacist violence to the top of Justice Department priorities. Federal law enforcement agencies regularly warn about coming white nationalist attacks. Since entering the White House, Biden has kept up a constant refrain about lethal white racism. On March 29, 2022, he declaimed that “hate never goes away,” “hate” referring, of course, to white Americans. He added: “If [hate] gets a little bit of oxygen, it comes roaring back out, screaming.” Kamala Harris chimed in: “Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account.”

If that hypothetical white subway shooter had then been discovered to have posted tirades about black people, had he called for whites to get a gun and start shooting blacks, the global media would be in nuclear meltdown about white supremacy. Protests would be breaking out across the country and corporations would be emitting an avalanche of press releases about America’s racial injustice.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/spin-misrepresentation-and-the-presidents-economic-policy/

A recounting of President Biden’s economic falsehoods.
“The Biden administration has rapidly built a remarkable record of ridiculous economic claims, misrepresentations, and worse.”

The recent White House budget proposal was an exercise in misdirection and spin. The budget document reaffirmed the president’s $2.4 trillion Build Back Better proposal, but simply left its massive cost out of the tax-and-spending tables. To make matters more confusing, the other tax-hike proposals that did appear in the budget were scored under a baseline that assumes Build Back Better has already been enacted.

Such economic sophistry has become a trend under President Biden.

White House economic spin is as old as the modern presidency. George W. Bush and Donald Trump portrayed their tax cuts as the most revolutionary economic growth engines in modern history. Bill Clinton took credit for balanced budgets and a late-1990s economic boom that were almost totally unrelated to presidential policies. Barack Obama spun a far-weaker-than-expected recovery from his inherited recession as a magical triumph of economic management.

And now, in just 14 months, the Biden administration has rapidly built a remarkable record of ridiculous economic claims, misrepresentations, and worse. This is especially notable following a campaign in which Joe Biden presented himself as the more professional, level-headed, serious alternative to Donald Trump.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/15/hold-on-to-your-wallets-wrong-way-krugman-says-inflation-will-soon-ease/
How often does he have to be wrong before the Nobel Committee asks for its prize back?

New York Times columnist and – we’re constantly reminded – Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman says that inflation, which hit another new high this month, will soon abate. Why? Because, he wrote on Tuesday, “Lumber prices have plunged in recent weeks. Prices of industrial metals such as copper are coming down. Prices of used cars are still very high, but their surge has stalled and they may have peaked.”

Oh, wait. That was from a column that Krugman wrote in June 2021.

What he wrote this week was that the gigantic bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last fall will get inflation under control because it will “alleviate the supply bottlenecks that have played a big role in recent inflation, while making workers more productive.”

Our apologies. That was Krugman in August 2021.

What he wrote was that “if we finally get this pandemic under control, the inflation of 2021 will soon fade from memory.”

Oops. That was Krugman in September 2021.

Here’s what he said. “The Fed can easily contain any pickup in inflation.”

Sorry, again, that was Krugman way back in January 2021, when he promised that President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion “rescue” plan wouldn’t cause an inflationary spiral and that the Fed could deal with any uptick in prices with a modest boost in interest rates.

It’s hard to keep up with all the times Krugman reassured us over the past year that inflation wasn’t and wouldn’t ever be a problem under Biden.

What Krugman actually wrote this Tuesday was that “inflation will probably fall significantly over the next few months.”