RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.persuasion.community/p/mcwhorter

John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss whether “wokeness” is a religion and how it affects black Americans.

John McWhorter is an author, a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors, a Columbia University linguist, and a columnist for The New York Times. His latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, argues that we must understand wokeness, quite literally, as a religion.

In this week’s conversation, John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss the nature of today’s social progressivism, whether it constitutes a religion, and how we can actually help to reduce racial disparities in the United States.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: What is the unifying principle of the body of thought that is, for lack of a better word, called “woke”?

John McWhorter: There’s a certain kind of person who feels that we should focus our intellectual, moral and artistic endeavors on battling power differentials, especially where white people are the ones in power. To the extent that you are not on board with that being the very center of things, you deserve to be hounded out of polite society, you should lose your job, you should be excoriated in public, you should be treated in an uncivil way in the same way as someone who was an advocate for say, pedophilia would be. These are people who are putting forth a very interesting but fragile proposition that battling power differentials should be the center of everything, rather than, say, one of ten things that should concern you.

The idea is that there is something called “whiteness”, for one, and that we’re talking about white power over people who aren’t. There’s also an idea that being a cis straight person is a kind of power that’s constantly misused. And you could argue that that’s definitely true. I think that in terms of our reckoning, though, since roughly May of 2020, an awful lot of it has been the whiteness issue. And the idea is that whites have always been in power and have abused it, and that our focus must be on decentering that power by any means necessary.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Ambrose Bierce, in his 1906 The Devil’s Dictionary, provided two definition of the transitive verb “Defame:” 1) “To lie about another.” 2) “To tell the truth about another.” People of myriad cultural backgrounds have long had difficulty communicating, as Rudyard Kipling expressed in the first two lines of his 1889 poem “The Ballad of the East and West:”“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgement Seat;”

Most politicians do not communicate honestly. They promise one thing while campaigning and promote another when governing. Speaking before the 2004 Democratic National Committee, Barack Obama embraced unity: “There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” But four years later when he became President, he chose discord over unity. In the words of Jason Riley, writing in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal: “…he started talking about racist policing and black voter suppression, and he embraced divisive racial provocateurs… All the colorblind talk went out the window.” Mr. Obama is not alone. Politicians on both sides have long campaigned on the promise of unity and then ruled with a “divide to conquer” strategy.

We are sorted by identity into “hot issue” buckets, like race, gender, immigration, climate and abortion. For example, if one does not agree with the preferred woke policy prescriptions of President Biden, one is a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a denier or a sexist. Case closed, no room or time for debate. Social media companies, instead of being impartial arbiters permitting the free exchange of ideas have closed Twitter accounts of conservative “deplorables” and declared opinions contrary to what is currently “woke” to be “harmful” or “hurtful.” Given their political leanings, this has meant that conservative speech is shut down. The same thing is true on college campuses where speeches by conservatives are cancelled.

https://mailchi.mp/dd688b95db60/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-58677?e=0c8ccf8e98

We can’t make America great again until we make America accountable again.

This week, in San Diego, at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) convention, our CEO, Adam Andrzejewski, challenged elected officials from across the country to embrace the Transparency Revolution.

The three-day conference was packed with hundreds of America’s state legislators, including new members and recently elected officials.

During a 20-minute presentation Andrzejewski laid out the blueprint to establish a new era in governance.

As outlined in the speech, here are three easy steps any public official can take to embrace the Transparency Revolution:  
Open The Books – Show citizens the money! Proactively post all financial line-by-line transactions online. Don’t be like California (we are suing the state as they refuse to open up their checkbook!).
Declare War On Waste – Identify. Cap. Cut. Dig deep! It’s a target rich environment.
Read The Bill – Do we have a representative republic if our representatives don’t even read the bills they are voting on?

WATCH ON YOUTUBE:
THE TRANSPARENCY REVOLUTION & OUR WAR ON WASTE

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/president-donald-j-biden/91791/

For someone who ran for office as the anti-Trump, President Biden has lately taken on something of an orangish hue. When the Covid variant known as Omicron popped up, Mr. Biden rushed through a travel ban for South Africa and seven other sub-equatorial states. Yet candidate Biden had called it a “disgrace” when, in February 2020, Mr. Trump imposed a similar “African ban.” Mr. Biden reckoned it was “designed to make it harder for black and brown people” to come here.

It seems to make sense to Mr. Biden now. Then again, too, when Mr. Biden took office he ended the Trump administration’s successful “Remain in Mexico” immigration program. He stoked the controversy by calling it inhumane. Since then, the border situation has become so dire that it is again emerging as a political issue. Now the administration, under court pressure, has agreed to revive Mr. Trump’s policy, with — in typical Biden fashion — “humanitarian improvements.”

Mr. Biden campaigned on returning America to the articles of appeasement with Iran. He harshly criticized the Trump administration for pulling out. In the White House, though, Mr. Biden somehow discovered that Iran is resistant to American diplomacy, and is determined to pursue its nuclear program regardless. Nor will the ayatollahs permit negotiations on ballistic missiles, drones, human rights and support for terrorism — all issues Mr. Trump pushed. Now the Vienna talks are collapsing.

On the hustings, Mr. Biden pledged to “repair” American relations with Communist China. He vowed especially to end the “trade war” over tariffs levied by President Trump. Yet the tariffs have remained in place. Mr. Biden is also continuing the effort begun under the Trump administration to crack down on Communist Chinese espionage in the United States, to oppose Beijing’s intrusive and destabilizing Belt and Road Initiative, and to remain firm in relations with Taiwan.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/bidens-travel-restrictions-dont-follow-the-science/

The rules should apply to everyone, regardless of citizenship or residency status, and use all the scientific tools available.

 J oe Biden never tires of saying his COVID-19 policies follow “the science.” He recently pontificated that he would battle the emerging Omicron coronavirus variant “with science and speed, not chaos and confusion.” So why is he relying on policies that he earlier criticized as xenophobic and ineffective and that are being condemned around the world as racist?

Back in January 2020, little was known about the emerging disease COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2. Tests, vaccines, and treatments were unavailable. All that anyone knew for sure was that the disease seemed to have started in Wuhan, China, and that is where nearly all the known cases were. The Trump administration announced on January 31, 2020, that the United States would temporarily suspend the entry of foreign nationals who had been in China during the prior 14-day period.

Later that day, Biden accused Trump of “xenophobia” and “fear mongering.” So-called “fact checkers” labored mightily to claim that Biden wasn’t specifically referring to the China travel ban when he made his remarks because he might not have been aware of the travel restrictions. But he certainly was aware of the ban when he tweeted the next day, “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.” On March 12, 2020, after Trump expanded the travel ban to include Europe, Biden tweeted, “Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.”

Biden campaign adviser and now White House chief of staff Ron Klain was certainly aware of the travel restrictions when he testified to Congress on February 5, five days after they were announced. Klain labeled the restrictions an ineffective “Band-Aid” because they did not cover American citizens traveling from China and were based on “the color of the passport someone carries.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/flash_mobs_.html

“We need to be shocked by a generation’s bold descent into anomy. When absence of conscience becomes commonplace, when sociopaths loiter around every corner and patrol every sidewalk, and when the fruits of a liberal society fall largely to those who least appreciate the origins and purposes of our freedoms, then promises of life, liberty, and happiness for all are in jeopardy, and democracy itself is at stake.”

The facile assembly of large mobs of miscreants to raid retailers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles is even more alarming than it seems.

The events are novel and even a bit entertaining, posing only a minor challenge to law enforcement if police are permitted to intercede.

More important than the incidents per se, however, is what they may reveal about the participants.

Lootings have been widely reported, mainly on the West Coast.  At Union Square in the heart of San Francisco:

“At least 40 thieves allegedly broke into a Louis Vuitton store on Friday [November 26], grabbing whatever they could before loading it into a series of cars parked curbside out front. The shoplifting caravan cut a swath through San Francisco’s high-end boutiques, creating a scene of chaos while stealing more than $1 million in merchandise.”

The New York Post described the another event, in Oakland, California:

“Hey, look — here are 80 people engaged in a large-scale smash-and-grab robbery of a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek outside San Francisco last weekend, one of a series of jaw-dropping thefts over the last several days, including an operation that cleared out a Louis Vuitton on San Francisco’s Union Square.”

Another Oakland location had  two similar lootings:

 “Prime 365 says more than 30 burglars ran through their store.

“In [a] video, you can see a long line of people rushing in, and in one instance, even pushing each other out of the way to grab hats off a shelf.”

Although the signature of these attacks is the large number of offenders, several robberies have involved, in each instance, only a handful of perpetrators (perps). Press accounts do not distinguish assaults with dozens of offenders from those with only a few, using the same terms – “flash mobs” and “smash and grab,”” for both.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/buttigiegs-ambitions-have-always-been-detached-his-daniel-greenfield/

Everyone knows someone who was touted as bright, an achiever, and most likely to succeed… not because they actually ever did anything, but because that was their image.

That’s Buttigieg in a nutshell.

Some politicians build cults of personality around them. Buttigieg is one of those honor students who makes his ambition seem like aspiration, entirely apart from anything they’ve actually accomplished. You weren’t supposed to ask what Obama had actually done to deserve the Senate and the White House. Likewise, you’re not supposed to look at Buttigieg’s actual record.

Buttigieg is currently being touted as the Dem candidate in 2024 even while the supply chain crisis that he’s supposed to be addressing is wrecking the economy.

It’s a strange mismatch between the headlines that could have been written by his PAC and the reporting on the actual consequences of the DOT’s inaction and incompetence on his watch.

But that was always the case. 

When I visited South Bend, it was a disaster, but the media’s one story about the place was how Buttigieg had brought “hope” to it. His presidential run was accompanied by virtually no scrutiny about his time there, aside from a police shooting of a black man.

Buttigieg’s disastrous mismanagement of South Bend and now the DOT has never impeded his political ambitions. Like Obama, he insists that he should be judged by his aspirations, not by his accomplishments.

Americans, like the residents of South Bend, are already paying the price for Buttigieg’s ambition and incompetence. 

https://blacklivesmatter.com/black-xmas/

Black Xmas

As we prepare ourselves for the holiday season, we are bombarded with ads that seek to whip us up into a consumerist frenzy. Black Friday sales are being rolled out weeks in advance of Thanksgiving and, at every turn, white-supremacist-capitalism is telling us to spend our money on things that we don’t need, to reap profits for corporations.

As BLMLA organizer, Jan Williams, reminds us, “Capitalism doesn’t love Black people.” In fact, white-supremacist-capitalism invented policing, initially as chattel-slavery-era “paddy rollers,” in order to protect its interests and put targets on the backs of Black people. Under modern-day policing, those targets have been affixed to the backs of Black people like, #JohnCrawford and #StevenTaylor, who were murdered by police inside Walmart stores; like #YuvetteHenderson and #RedelJones, Black mothers who were accused of petty thefts before their lives were stolen by police; and like #AlbertRamonDorsey and #DennisToddRogers, who were gunned down when 24-Hour-Fitness locations called in police on Black male patrons…twice.

Beginning in 2014, in response to John Crawford’s murder by police in Beavercreek, Ohio, Black Lives Matter has been challenging people to “dream of a #BlackXmas,” to intentionally use our economic resources to disrupt white-supremacist-capitalism and build Black community:

#BuildBlack: Invest in Black-led, Black-serving organizations by making donations in the names of your loved ones as holiday gifts.
#BuyBlack: When buying items, spend exclusively with Black-owned businesses from Black Friday through New Year.
#BankBlack: Move your money from white corporate banks (that finance gentrification, prisons, and environmental degradation) to Black-owned ones.

Wondering where to start? Resources are available at blackxmas.org.

We’re also taking your suggestions! Have a Black organization, business, or bank we should profile? Let us know! You can also demonstrate your support by changing your social media profile picture to the #BlackXmas graphic:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-spreads-faster-than-covid-19-vaccination-distribution-breakthrough-infection-omicron-11638570230?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

It deserves a wow. Some 57% of the human population has received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and 45% are fully vaccinated, in less than a year.

This means the vaccine has spread approximately twice as fast as the virus, never mind that the virus itself is an exceptionally fast spreader that organizes its own distribution without help from trained administrators and sub-zero storage.

Add that infection also offers a kind of vaccination, so now two kinds of resistance to Covid-19 have been spreading with unprecedented rapidity through the human population.

Numerous were the complaints about how Delta spoiled the summer even for vaccinated people, but it’s not clear why this was so. Vaccination takes away Covid’s deadliest property, its novelty to the human immune system, turning it into the equivalent of a cold or flu. Nobody lets the prospect of a cold or flu spoil their holiday (though perhaps they should for the sake of their elderly in-laws).

The point is not frivolous. It suggests why, rather than a dark new chapter, the Omicron variant may be our last big wallow in hysteria, from which we will awake slightly red-faced in the morning.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/john-eastman-right-resist-january-6-committee/

The name of the game Congress is playing with its partisan inquisition is intimidation. John Eastman is right to resist. Every American who cares about our Constitutional rights should support him.

John Eastman, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal team, has just declined, through his attorney, to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol.

I think he was right to do so, for several reasons.

In the first place, the congressional inquiry would be better named a congressional vendetta. Its composition is heavily weighted towards Democrats. The committee includes no “ranking members” of the opposition as the rules stipulate, hence the frequent invocation of the “Star Chamber” in descriptions of the inquiry. It is less an investigation than an inquisition.

Given the frankly biased structure of the congressional panel, Eastman, like Steve Bannon before him, was right to decline to testify or provide documents to aid in his own prosecution.

For readers who are a little fuzzy about just who John Eastman is, the relevant fact is that (apart from being a brilliant constitutional lawyer at the storied Claremont Institute), Eastman wrote the now infamous memo, originally a two-pager, later expanded to six pages, in December 2020 outlining various strategies that team Trump might consider in response to the 2020 election.

It is not, as widely reported, a scheme to “overturn” the election. It is an effort to layout various ways in which an election that was widely seen to be corrupt could be lawfully challenged.