RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/a-ghost-story?token=

EXCERPT

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd was killed by a white police officer, and Black Lives Matter protests erupted in cities all over the United States. I feel comfortable saying this now: I felt conflicted. I remember surrendering to the peer pressure to donate every single day, and to post receipts of those donations (like I was in trouble for something—oh yeah, being “white”). I remember my Instagram stories were just re-post after re-post of this, that and the other activist, of whom I had no background knowledge, but who I was told were the people to re-post. I’ve since unfollowed them all because all of them showed themselves to be antisemitic.

I was performing. I was absolutely performing. And I am not ashamed to admit it. I was so scared. I was still a hired freelance journalist, and I knew the impact of staying silent. Freelance writing isn’t a joke. You cannot pay rent if you offend people. So I kept a foot in the world of music writing, and with my paychecks, I splurged on bailing out protestors via GoFundMe pages, or whatnot. At least, I think I did. Who knows?

I remember that Lady Gaga’s album “Chromatica” came out within 48 hours of Floyd’s death, and there was an unspoken directive on Twitter that only BIPOC people were allowed to be joyous about this album release. It was for them and nobody else.

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-common-sense-problem?s=r

The Democrats are bleeding voters, particularly working class voters of all races. There are lots of reasons for this and I’ve written about some of them. One important throughline here is what we might call the common sense problem. As in, Democrats seem to have abandoned it in many areas. This helps explain why there hasn’t been a ”Trump disenchantment dividend” for the Democrats as the former President’s popularity has fallen and for that matter a “nutty GOP politicians” dividend as various Republican pols do and say fairly crazy things. Voters just aren’t sure the Democrats are that well-grounded either.

Awhile ago, I tried to codify some of voters’ common sense views and values into ten short statements to illustrate how Democrats are losing the plot relative to the median voter. I’ll go through some of them here with the aid of some new data demonstrating how widely this common sense is embraced by ordinary Americans in contrast to their rejection by woke liberal activists and some politicians associated with the Democratic party.

1. Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not. Americans love equal opportunity! But lately more and more Democrats have embraced, implicitly or explicitly, the idea that we must equalize outcomes as well by emphasizing policies that promote “equity” as opposed to simple equality.

But Americans’ common sense is that opportunities should be made equal if they are not and then let people achieve as they will. There is no guarantee, nor should there be, that everyone will wind up in the same place.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/26/of-boiling-and-jumping-frogs/

“When average families can no longer pay their rent or mortgage, gas up their car, or even put food on the table, all bets are off. Our rulers think they have anesthetized those portions of the population they have not simply bought off. They might find that there is quite a lot of jump left in the frog yet. If so, they may be the ones in hot water.”

It’s said that if you toss a frog into a pot of hot water it will instantly jump out. If, however, you toss it into a pot of cold water and then very gradually increase the heat to the boiling point, the frog will linger languidly in the increasingly hot bath as it is slowly cooked alive. 

Despotic politicians who also abhor the fuss of public unrest have long noted the application of this apologue to human affairs. In early March 2020, if Anthony Fauci had said that we were about to shut down the economy for two years, force people to wear paper masks, “socially distance,” and forcibly prevent people from going to church, or visiting their dying friends and relatives, there might well have been a revolt. 

But that isn’t how it happened. Fauci and the health police got everything they wanted, they destroyed thousands of middle-class businesses, enriched the entitled class, and, more generally, made fools and peons of us all. But they did it slowly. “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” Remember that? Remember when, early on, Fauci said that it would be fine for young, healthy people to go on a cruise? Remember when he pooh-poohed the effectiveness of masks? 

Whatever else they demonstrated, the regime’s COVID policies, and the public’s response to those policies, showed that entire populations could be herded and shorn like sheep. All you needed was a public health pretext—not a genuine emergency, mind you, just a pretext—and battalions of aspiring Gauleiters willing to enforce the rules and, bang, instant and prolonged hysteria. 

Like a well masticated stick of chewing gum, COVID has lost its savor. New gambits must be devised to cow the public. “Climate change” and green energy are hardy perennials, but the economic devastation wrought by their advocates has stripped the sheen off those baubels of elite, virtue-signaling. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/26/the-lefts-cynical-effort-to-use-the-ukraine-crisis-to-discredit-president-trump-and-america-first/

Desperate to change the subject from how Joe Biden’s weak leadership and incoherent foreign policy set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine, many on the Left and in the mainstream media have resorted to a familiar tactic: Find a way to blame this crisis on President Trump—even though he has been out of office for 14 months. 

The first attempt by liberals, like Washington Post editorial writer Eugene Robinson and former National Security Council staff member and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Fiona Hill, was to claim that Trump’s national security policies, especially concerning Russia and NATO, emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine. 

This criticism didn’t make sense since Putin ordered invasions of neighboring states during three of the last four presidencies, but none while President Trump was in office. All of these invasions—Georgia during the George W. Bush Administration in 2008, Ukraine during the Obama Administration in 2014, and Ukraine now during the Biden Administration—occurred when there was a global perception of American weakness and lack of resolve. 

There’s no question the world sees weakness and lack of resolve in the Biden presidency after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and a year of confusing and unserious national security policies focused on climate change and wokeness in the U.S. military. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/whats_happening_to_the_marines.html

Lately, when we think about what’s happening to America’s military under Biden, we’ve been focusing on the Pentagon’s obsessions with race, LGBTQ+++ issues (especially transgenderism), women’s rights, and political “wrong think” (i.e., conservativism). That obsession has consistently put progressive social policy ahead of military cohesion and readiness. However, Jim Webb, who was a Marine infantry officer while in Vietnam, then the Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan and, lastly, a Virginia senator during the Obama years, has written an op-ed about a different concern: The potentially damaging, purely operational changes Marine commandment Gen. David Berger intends to impose on the Corps.

Webb raises the issues in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Berger’s proposed changes including (1) eliminating infantry battalions, (2) reducing the number of Marines in the remaining battalions, and (3) eliminating two reserve-component battalions, 16 cannon artillery battalions (to be replaced by 14 rocket artillery battalions), all of the Marine Corps tanks, and multiple tilt-rotor, helicopter, and attack helicopter squadrons.

From the outside looking in, that seems like a very significant force reduction. It turns out that this isn’t just an uninformed lay person’s perception. Marines are also worried about Berger’s plans:

Among Marines there are serious questions about the wisdom and long-term risk of dramatic reductions in force structure, weapon systems and manpower levels in units that would take steady casualties in most combat scenarios. And it is unclear to just about everyone with experience in military planning what formal review and coordination was required before Gen. Berger unilaterally announced a policy that would alter so many time-honored contributions of the Marine Corps.

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2022/03/26/secret-seizure-of-james-okeefe-cloud-email-abusive-doj-lawyers-and-a-vindictive-father-president-n1584457

In the Washington D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Va., carjackings have made the news lately. Thieves steal cars at Virginia gas stations and race across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac and into Maryland to relative safety.

The Department of Justice doesn’t seem to be doing anything about enforcing the federal laws prohibiting transport of stolen goods across the Virginia-Maryland state line.

If the carjacker was named James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, things would be very different.

The saga of James O’Keefe’s quite possibly completely legal acquisition of Ashley Biden’s diary, and the resulting DOJ secret seizure of his emails from the Microsoft Office 365 cloud, is disgraceful. The lawyers involved should be ashamed, and perhaps even sanctioned by the bars to which they belong. It is an example of a Justice Department even more politicized than it was under Eric Holder, something few thought possible.

It also is a warning about storing documents and communications on someone else’s computer, aka the Cloud.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/03/26/bombshell-did-russia-invade-ukraine-because-of-the-bidens-biolabs-hunters-laptop-says-yes-n1584441

If you thought Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” was just a collection of drug porn, buckle up. It appears as though Hunter’s emails show that he invested in and helped find millions of dollars for biolabs in Ukraine, which is one of Putin’s declared reasons for invading the nation.

FACT-O-RAMA! U.S. officials have dismissed Putin’s accusations of Biden’s funding of Ukrainian biolabs as “Russian propaganda.“

Vyacheslav Volodin, Russia’s State Duma speaker, claims the emails are solid proof that Hunter and Gropey Joe Biden are involved in Ukraine’s bioweapons research.

According to the New York Post, “US intelligence officials had earlier dismissed Russia’s messaging as war propaganda, explaining that Ukraine’s network of biological labs dedicated to pathogen research were not secret, and had publicly received funding from Washington.”

Although the statement was posted on Tass, Russia’s state-run propaganda outlet, the New York Post, said Volodin’s claim is “accurate” based on emails from Hunter’s laptop reviewed by both The Post and the UK Daily Mail.

Volodin further declared, “US President Joe Biden himself is involved in the creation of bio laboratories in Ukraine. An investment fund run by his sun [sic] Hunter Biden funded research and the implementation of the United States’ military biological program. It is obvious that Joe Biden, as his father and the head of state, was aware of that activity.”

Volodin also openly accused George Soros of helping to fund the biolabs.

He stresses that involved in the same program was the fund of the ‘notorious mastermind of color revolutions, George Soros, who openly calls for changing government in our country.

Here are the details, and remember also that then-Vice President Joe Biden was in charge of relations with Ukraine at the time all of this was happening:

Hunter Biden was a partner in a company called Rosemont Seneca.
Rosemont Seneca invested $500,000 in a pathogen research company called Metabiota. Hunter also helped raise millions more for the company through investors.
Emails from his laptop show Hunter introduced Metabiota to his friends at Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which was paying Hunter $50 thousand per month as a “board member.”
The money was used for a “science project” involving biolabs in Ukraine.

Now we know why Burisma was paying all that cheddar to Hunter: he was bringing them money for their biolabs. Hunter’s own emails appear to prove it.

https://spectator.org/reject-ketanji-brown-jackson/

The issue with Ketanji Brown Jackson, the 51-year-old federal appellate judge who is our senile president’s Supreme Court nominee, is not necessarily her on-paper qualifications. By most traditional metrics, she is “qualified”: She has served as both a district court and appellate court judge, served as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, formerly clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer (the man she has been nominated to replace) and is a double-Harvard alum. In terms of “objective” criteria, this is an impressive resume.

Instead, the issue with Judge Jackson is that she is a left-wing ideologue who, if successfully confirmed by the Senate, will devote the next few decades endeavoring to move the Supreme Court far to the left. All relevant indications are that she will approach her job not like her (slightly) more pragmatic former boss, but like a leftist activist — in the mode of her possible future colleague, the midwit partisan flack Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Worse, Jackson, due to the outrageous race- and sex-conscious nominating process in which President Joe Biden selected her, is uniquely unfit to render equal justice under the law for legal issues affecting race and sex. Even worse, she is a proponent of critical race theory and, despite getting nominated solely due to her XX chromosomal structure, appears ignorant as to how to differentiate men from women. Worst of all, she has shown a peculiar juridical soft spot for some of society’s very worst offenders — pedophiles and child pornographers.

In a just world, Jackson’s nomination to replace Breyer would be soundly defeated. And at a bare minimum, every Republican senator should vote against her.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/ketanji-brown-jacksons-favorite-critical-race-daniel-greenfield/

The existence of a speech by Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, praising Derrick Bell, the godfather of critical race theory, and citing his book, “Faces At the Bottom of a Well”, as an influence has been widely reported. Conservatives have covered Bell’s racist views, his praise for Farrakhan, his antisemitism, and attacks on America. Much of this was already hashed out during the exposure of the relationship between Barack Obama and Derrick Bell.

But it’s important to specifically focus on Jackson’s interest in “Faces At the Bottom of the Well.”

In her speech, Jackson mentions that Bell, whom along with his wife she praises throughout her speech, “wrote a book in the early 1990s about the persistence of racism in American life”.

The subtitle of the book, which few people have mentioned, is, “The Permanence Of Racism”.

Persistence and permanence are not the same thing. But this is another example of Jackson subtly distorting Bell and his book in order to make their extremism seem more moderate.

Jackson goes on to say that, “My parents had this book on their coffee table for many years, and I remember staring at the image on the cover when I was growing up; I found it difficult to reconcile the image of the person,who seemed to be smiling, with the depressing message that the title and subtitle conveyed. I thought about this book cover again for the first time in forty years when I started preparing for this speech.” That would have made her ten years old.

As others have pointed out, “Faces At the Bottom of the Well” was published when Jackson was in her early twenties during Bell’s tantrum against Harvard University. It’s unlikely that Biden’s Supreme Court nominee grew up with the hateful text, but it’s entirely plausible that she was influenced by the book which came out when she was at Harvard and then Harvard Law.

Since Bell began his racial strike against Harvard Law before she had completed her undergraduate degree, it’s unlikely that she had taken any of his classes, but the former member of the faculty was clearly an influence on her. Perhaps Jackson’s memory is faulty or she’s deliberately backdating the book’s influence to her childhood to make it seem more innocent. Surely no one could blame a ten year old for being attracted to a racialist text.