RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/one-super-bowl-two-national-anthems-bruce-bawer/

His mother was a white girl who’d been abandoned by her black baby daddy before the infant’s birth. She gave the child up for adoption, and he found a home with a white couple who’d lost two sons because of heart defects. By all accounts they were loving parents. Yet six years ago, during a pre-game performance of the national anthem, their adopted son, who’d become a NFL quarterback, introduced the toxic business of “taking a knee” as a protest against the purported oppression of black people by white Americans. With that one action, Colin Kaepernick unleashed a whirlwind of mischief that inflicted very real and substantial damage upon his country’s precious, hard-won social cohesion, thereby ensuring that he would go down in history not as an athlete but as an activist with a thoroughly destructive legacy.

If the impact of Kaepernick’s actions extended to every corner of American society, their first impact was on his own sport. As “taking the knee” became popular in the world of football – professional, college, and high-school alike – boys and men who’d learned to regard one another as teammates, as brothers, now saw themselves as irremediably divided by skin color. This sense of racial division was exacerbated just this past February 1, when Brian Flores, a former coach who is both black and Hispanic and who was fired last month by the Miami Dolphins after two successful seasons on the job, filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL alleging racism in the “hiring and retention of Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-really-was-spied-on-2016-clinton-campaign-john-durham-court-filing-11644878973?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Special Counsel John Durham continues to unravel the Trump-Russia “collusion” story, and his latest court disclosure contains startling information. According to a Friday court filing, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign effort to compile dirt on Donald Trump reached into protected White House communications.

The filing relates to Mr. Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represented the Clinton campaign while he worked for the Perkins Coie law firm. Mr. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI at a September 2016 meeting when he presented documents claiming to show secret internet communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The indictment says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was presenting this information solely as a good citizen—failing to disclose his ties to the Clinton campaign. (He has pleaded not guilty.)

The indictment revealed that Mr. Sussmann worked with “Tech Executive-1,” who has been identified as Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar Inc. The indictment says Mr. Joffe used his companies, as well as researchers at a U.S. university, to access internet data, which he used to gather information about Mr. Trump’s communications.

Mr. Durham says Mr. Joffe’s “goal” was to create an “inference” and “narrative” about Mr. Trump that would “please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at [Perkins Coie] and the Clinton Campaign.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/plague-phony-experts-elites-anthony-fauci-canada/

Quick: what do you think when someone tries to convince you of something by prefacing their remarks with the phase “Experts say”?

I think of that rude, two-word imperative of Germanic origin that ends in “You.”

As Laplace said in another context, it is par expériences nombreuses et funestes that I have this almost Pavlovian reaction.

The “experts,” alas, are not expert, i.e, “possessing a high degree of skill in or knowledge of” a certain subject.

For proof of my contention I offer the name of Anthony Fauci or the organization that glories in the acronym CDC, that is, the Centers for Disease Control. They are both a bit like Michael Avenatti, once championed everywhere as a genius and presidential material, but now universally exposed and discredited. Remember last year when the public health “experts” said that it was dangerous for people to gather in crowds, but entirely OK if the gathering was for the purpose of promoting Black Lives Matter? Fun times.

In the coming months, as the Democrats loosen the preposterous, virtue-signaling, counterproductive mask mandates, requirements to display your “vaccination status,” etc., just remember that it is not because “the science” has changed. The data never supported those draconian expedients. What’s changed are the polls, and the Dems are nervously eying the 2022 midterm elections. They are right to be nervous.

But I digress. The plague of experts we face is akin to the plague of locusts, vividly recounted in Book 10 of Exodus. “And the locusts went up over all the land… very grievous were they; For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened,” and so on. The key thing to appreciate, however, is the link between experts and another short word beginning with the letter “e,” “elites.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/15/are-you-better-off-than-you-were-a-year-ago/

Turn the clock back a year. President Joe Biden, just weeks after taking office, was pitching his American Rescue Plan, saying that “It’s big, and it’s bold. And it’s a real answer to the crisis we’re in.”

Biden promised that the $2 trillion spending spree would “generate more growth, higher incomes, a stronger economy, and our nation’s finances will be in a stronger position.” We’d be at “full employment by the beginning of next year.”

Well, here it is. Next year. And nothing Biden promised has come to pass. By most measures, in fact, we’re worse off than we were before Biden “rescued” us.

The economy is growing more slowly than expected. Incomes are being eaten up by rising inflation. Optimism is below where it was during the height of the pandemic in 2020. The nation’s finances are in far worse shape, with the national debt up $1.8 trillion since Biden took office. We’re still nearly 3 million jobs shy of the previous peak. Oh, and COVID deaths under Biden now top 430,000 – more deaths than happened while Donald Trump was president.

Let’s go through some of the specifics of how we’re worse off than a year ago.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-ugly-vilification-of-freedom/

Pundits are attempting to cast the fundamental value as a ‘far-right’ code word, reinventing the notion of liberty itself.

T he Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently set out to explain why the word “freedom” has become a “useful rallying cry” for protesters in the trucking convoy. Freedom, it added, “has become common among far-right groups, experts say.”

It’s worth noting here that the addendum “experts say” is perhaps the laziest scam run by contemporary political journalism. It is little more than columnizing by proxy, or what Kyle Smith calls, “opinion laundering.” Journalists scan the websites of think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities to find some credentialed ideologue who will repeat every tedious bit of liberal conventional wisdom the reporter already believes. While we may need experts to explain quantum computing or synthesize complex mathematical data for us, we hardly need them to smear political adversaries. Reporters are already aficionados in that field.

Take Gary Mason, a national affairs columnist at the Globe and Mail, who contends that truck-protest supporters such as Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre “have weaponized” the word “freedom” — a “word that gets bandied about a lot these days, but has mostly been co-opted by the alt-right, both here and in the U.S.”

The problem isn’t merely that Mason insinuates that anyone using the rhetoric of liberty is on the “far right,” or that he doesn’t seem to comprehend the difference between negative and positive liberties. Mason takes the authoritarian position — shared by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who says that protesting truckers hold “unacceptable views” — that speech is no longer a genuine liberty if it is used for allegedly “selfish, malicious purposes.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/14/bidens-department-of-homeland-security-announces-it-will-investigate-thought-crimes/

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that outlined their thought crime agenda.

The Biden administration has been steadily ratcheting up its abuse of power to attack political enemies and criminalize dissent. The egregious overcharging and heinous treatment of January 6 detainees in the DC gulag is one painful example. But it’s making even more dangerous moves toward creating thought police. And they are bold enough to announce it publicly.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin on Feb. 7, 2022 that outlined their thought crime agenda. It states, “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM).”

“False or misleading narratives” could very well be used to describe the entire programming schedule of CNN and MSNBC. They even have a TLA (three-letter acronym) for the problem, so you know we’re deep into a bad government solution.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18230/storm-clouds-approaching

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free
Let us all be grateful that we are far from there
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer

God bless America, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above

The words of Irving Berlin who wrote “God Bless America” in 1918 and then revised it in 1938 as Europe stood once more on the abyss of war still speak to us today as Russia positions tens of thousands of troops on the Ukraine border.

The Russian trigger could be pulled “at any time” according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The crisis begs the question: Is Biden in the same mold as Lincoln. Or Wilson. Or Roosevelt?

In our nation’s history, three out of these four Presidents experienced the lengthening shadows of war. Through the strength of their leadership and force of personality provided our democracy with the power required to navigate an existential threat to our nation and the future of freedom. They were able to call upon the patriots of American democracy to preserve and defend our country. They had the means to galvanize the enormous power of an exceptional America and confront our enemies.

As the shadows of possible conflict dramatically darken, one has to ask whether President Biden is prepared and capable of confronting what may be the defining test of Western Democracy, his administration, and by extension, the man himself.

One is compelled to ask because his tenure to date reveals a muddled and amateurish response to crisis. Media reports regarding our retreat from Afghanistan reveals an embarrassing level of incompetence by the White House that left our “boots on the ground” not just frustrated but in danger.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/truckers-biden-trudeau-not-enemy-liz-peek

What if … Justin Trudeau had met with the truckers the day they first arrived in Ottawa?

Instead of bolting and hiding out in an “undisclosed location,” what if Canada’s prime minister had emerged from the Privy Council building and talked to the Freedom Convoy drivers about their demands?

Might Trudeau have defused the entire protest? Would the truckers have been satisfied that their cause was heard and gone home?

After all, these are truck drivers, not thugs. Even under the microscope of a censorious press, during those first heady few days, when massive crowds appeared from nowhere to cheer on the drivers, they committed no crimes, no injuries, no looting. There was not a single arrest, much to the disappointment of the liberal media.

More recently, as police moved in to dismantle the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge at Windsor, almost all the demonstrators peacefully decamped. CNN sounded downright disappointed to report that none went to jail.

The truckers are speaking for millions of working people in Canada and around the world who are sick of COVID restrictions and increasingly skeptical of the “science” behind them. Canada’s drivers were set off by a new rule, imposed even as the pandemic crested, that required all truckers entering the country from the U.S. be vaccinated or self-quarantine. The rule seemed unnecessary considering that 85% of the truckers had taken the shot, and that most spend the majority of their time alone.

The new mandate also seemed whimsical in that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other medical authorities have now proclaimed immunities from surviving COVID just as effective against infection as the vaccines. Truckers were praised as selfless essential workers as they continued to work through the pandemic, putting themselves in harm’s way. Presumably, many got sick and now have antibodies; they may not need the vaccine.

What was Trudeau scared of? That the crowd of burly drivers might scoff at his perfectly coiffed hair? Not be properly reverent of his literature degree from McGill University? That the truckers might not respect a lifelong politician whose career rested on the fame of his father?

Instead of engaging with the truckers, Trudeau ran like a rabbit, only to emerge from hiding to demean the protesters as a “fringe minority.” The irony is, of course, that Trudeau himself represents a minority, with his Liberal Party setting a record last fall for the lowest vote share of any party to ever form a government, winning a mere 33% of the popular vote. As in 2019, the Conservatives won the popular vote.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/13/joe-biden-alchemist/

Medieval alchemists sought to turn base metals into precious metals like gold. The more the alchemists bumped into the reality that gold was an element, the more desperately they sought to find fantastic ways to fabricate the rare element out of nothing. 

Joe Biden operates on the same alchemist principles. He tries to turn his record of dross into golden success. And the more he fails, the more zealously he embraces his next new fantasy. Meanwhile,  the midterm reckoning approaches. 

Printing money, talking up low interest rates, disincentivizing work, subsidizing inactivity, and being unprepared that a pent-up, locked down, constipated economy of the past two years would eventually break out—all that resulted in January’s 7.5 percent annualized inflation rate. Unlike Joe Biden, even a child knows that too much demand and liquidity and too few available goods and services cause prices to rise. The rate of inflation is increasing at an annualized rate not seen in 40 years. And the jump already follows a prior 2021 annual rate of 6.8 percent. The prices of gas, food, and houses—the stuff of life—are collectively rising far higher than just 7.5 percent. 

At first, the Biden Administration attempted to turn this inflationary dross into gold. Price hikes, we were assured, were all just the worries of an elite. 

https://www.city-journal.org/metropolitan-museum-of-art-has-redefined-itself-as-an-antiracist-agent-of-change

Like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has redefined itself as an antiracist “agent of change.” In July 2020, its director Max Hollein and CEO Daniel Weiss announced that the museum will henceforth aim to overcome the racism still perpetrated by our “government, policies, systems, and institutions.”

What such a political mandate means for an art museum may seem puzzling, but two exhibits currently running at the Met provide an answer. They suggest that the museum will now value racial consciousness-raising over scholarship and historical accuracy. Double standards will govern how the museum analyzes Western and Third World art: only the former will be subject to the demystification treatment, while the latter will be accorded infinite curatorial respect. The Met will lay bare European art’s alleged complicity in the West’s legacy of oppression, while Third World violence and inequality will be chastely kept off stage.

The first show, “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met,” arranges the Met’s own seventeenth-century Dutch canvases in thematic categories, such as still life and landscape. (The content of those categories is sometimes hard to discern underneath such mannered academic rhetoric as “Contested Bodies.”) Highlights of the show include Franz Hals’s portrait of Paulus Verschuur, a bravura performance of spontaneous brushwork and psychological acuity that captures the Rotterdam merchant’s modern irony, and Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, which anticipates Paul Cézanne in its treatment of decorative pattern and geometry.

The Dutch Baroque formed the cornerstone of the Met’s first holdings; subsequent bequests created one of the world’s great assemblages of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and their peers. The antiracist museum, however, understands that it is not just Western art that needs deconstructing; the collecting and donating of art does, too. Thus, the commentary accompanying “In Praise of Painting” wearily notes that “of course” there are “blind spots in the story these particular acquisitions tell. Colonialism, slavery, and war—major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history—are scarcely visible here.”