RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/the-new-blue-confederacy/

Why are progressive regions of the country—especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)—institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through “proportional representation” based on “disparate impact”? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus “safe spaces” by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?

Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear? What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?

Isn’t it strange that there are entire states and regions wholly reliant on the money and power of “one-crop” Big Tech monopolies? And why, in the 21st century no less, are Democratic-controlled counties, cities, and entire states nullifying federal law?

In archetypical “states’ rights” fashion, blue-state “sanctuary cities” are as defiant of the federal government as the Old South was when it claimed immunity from federal jurisdiction—all the way from the nullification crisis of 1830-1833 to George Wallace in 1963 blocking the door at the University of Alabama.

Ask yourself: in the decades following the conclusion of the Civil War in April 1865, how might the reunited American public have answered the following hypothetical questions:

One-hundred-fifty-six years from now, in the year 2021, where in the United States will Americans most likely discriminate on the basis of race?

Where will citizens squabble over the racial percentages of ancestral bloodlines, and schools admit or reject students in part on the DNA of an applicant?

Where will free speech and expression become most endangered?

Where will states’ rights boosters deny federal officers the right to enforce federal law?

Where will the major cities be the most unsafe and the middle classes the most embattled? And from which regions of the country will people flee, and to which will they migrate?

Of course, in the century-and-a-half since the end of the Civil War, we have become in a certain sense a homogenizing country. Gender studies programs at, say, the University of Texas are not that much different from those at Yale. The same types of homeless are found in downtown Atlanta as well as in San Francisco.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/are-democrats-digging-their-own-grave-bruce-thornton/

President Biden’s approval numbers continue to drop. Republicans are up ten points in the generic ballot for the 2022 midterms. Blue Virginia elected a Republican governor, defeating a pillar of the party since the Clinton administration. Inflation is reaching record highs, as are gasoline prices. Meanwhile  Xi, Putin, and Khamenei are geopolitically partying like it’s 1979.

Yet the progressive Dems and their media PR flaks keep promoting policies and indulging in political antics guaranteed to alienate more and more voters. A year out from the midterm elections, a party with razor-thin margins of control in the House and Senate seem headed for a massive repudiation.

Their most recent example of political myopia is the grotesque lies and hysteria over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and acquittal. As the New York Post’s Miranda Devine writes, “Of all the willful lies and omissions in the media’s coverage of the Steele dossier, Brian Sicknick, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, the Wuhan lab, Hunter Biden’s laptop and so on, nothing beats the evil propaganda peddled about Kyle Rittenhouse.”

So it happened that a working-class teenager offering medical aid and protecting a business in his community during a riot, and who was attacked by three white men, including two convicted felons, was transformed into a “white supremacist” and a lawless, Trumpkin “vigilante” who “crossed state lines” with an illegal “assault rifle” in order to stalk and murder Black Live Matter activists “peacefully protesting” against extrajudicial police murders of black man (who’s still alive). A couple of “woke” journalists even turned the slain white thugs into innocent blacks.

As Mary McCarthy said of lefty Lillian Hellman’s memoirs, every word of the narrative is a lie, including “the” and “and.” It’s a textbook example of Hitler’s “big lie,” one so “colossal,” Hitler wrote, that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Over the last five years the Dems have had some success with this propaganda tactic. But the Biden administration’s serial failures, and the arrogant excesses of the “woke” racial tribunes, have soured voters who, as the Virginia gubernatorial race shows, are sick of the “systemic racism” and Critical Race Theory smears, which are genuine racist nonsense. And parents––approaching two years of unscientific, politicized, disruptive covid policies like remote teaching and masks imposed on their children––aren’t happy about a racist, divisive curriculum piled on to all that pedagogical malfeasance.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/11/21/dr_scott_atlas_the_birx-fauci_lockdowns_failed_to_stop_the_pandemic.html

Author of “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,” Dr. Scott Atlas, joined “Sunday Morning Futures” with FNC’s Maria Bartiromo to talk about how the government has politicized science about Covid-19.

DR. SCOTT ATLAS, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: The data is the data. And the data is being denied by the lockdowners. The data shows the following. Bjornskov’s study of 24 European countries, the lockdowns did not reduce the deaths during the pandemic. That was a spring 2021 study.

A January 2021 study from Stanford’s Bendavid and colleagues, lockdowns failed to stop the spread of the infection. In fact, Ioannidis, one of the authors, said it was — quote — “pro-contagion,” increasing infections.

And the most important study was National Bureau of Economic Research by RAND in June this year. Everyone should look at it, because they showed analysis of 43 countries and all the states that lockdowns increased the excess deaths during the pandemic. Earlier lockdowns increased the deaths during the pandemic.

And when lockdowns were instilled, deaths were coming down. And the deaths started increasing when the lockdowns were implemented. So the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, which was the advice of the task force the entire year, failed to stop the spread of the infection. They failed to stop the dying. And they destroyed millions and millions of people, particularly low-income families.

BARTIROMO: Yes, I want to ask you about the Birx-Fauci lockdown, because, today, we have the FDA authorizing now booster shots for everybody, all adults.

Pfizer and Moderna are going to make a combined $93 billion in sales on this in the coming years on vaccines. What is going on here? Is this about money? Your thoughts on the FDA asking a federal judge to give it 55 years to wait for all data, release final data on the Pfizer vaccine?

ATLAS: Yes, I mean, there are so many problems with this.

BARTIROMO: Fifty-five years.

ATLAS: And the science — yes. And on the science side alone, boosters to be indicated for people who are, for example, low-income groups like children, healthy children have extremely low risk from COVID, period. That’s been known for more than a year-and-a-half.

https://www.city-journal.org/how-progressives-enforce-ideological-conformity

Politics today seems to have crawled out of some Hobbesian muck. It is a nasty, brutish little runt wherever it appears, which is almost everywhere. Its act—for these days everything is performance art—is a tragic farce. On the streets, its watchword is riot; on the Internet, abuse; in the academy, the boardroom, and the media, a coordinated equalization of attitudes that borders on the totalitarian. At the highest levels of government, it is too lazy or stupid to persuade, preferring rather to manipulate, bully, spy, and punish.

Hobbesian man is moved by powerful passions of pride and fear. His vainglory and the joy he takes in standing above others give rise to war. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death make him seek peace. The ugly and ubiquitous politics of the Left is now channeling these passions into a massive project of social engineering: the construction of a new Tower of Babel.

Fear and pride raised the old Tower of Babel, built by anonymous wanderers who sought to “make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” Their anonymity is fitting, for there was then only “one language, one set of words. . . . one people” in the world. The Babylonians formed bricks out of the soil—adamah in Hebrew, the same stuff God breathed life into to make the first human being (ha’adam)—and began to “build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” These hard-baked bricks, all cut to the same measure, are images of human beings from whom the breath of individual life and particularity has somehow departed.

Modern attempts to construct the Tower have unfolded before, most notably in the Soviet Union and China. Today an inhumanly univocal tongue, asserting itself as the measure of all things, once again threatens to swallow the rich particularities and multiple languages of individual thought, speech, and creative expression.

The foundations of the new Tower have already been laid. In a recent interview, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was an authoritarian. He did not:

If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/22/fake_white_house_is_a_fitting_home_for_fake_president_146769.html

News last month that President Biden makes electronic appearances from a pretend White House brought to mind another president whose image was carefully crafted to assuage the American people that all was well even when things were at their most dire.

No, I’m not referring to Franklin Roosevelt, although his facade of the strong, virile man was as much of an invention as Biden’s carefully crafted persona as a reasonable moderate who would unite our country.

Instead, to fully comprehend the essence  of the invented Joe Biden, we must visit the paranoid fantasies of one of our greatest writers — Philip K. Dick, whose 1964 novel “The Penultimate Truth” imagined a future where the leader of the Western world was in fact nothing but a simulacrum programmed to reassure the masses that their sacrifice of toiling underground for decades was noble when in fact it was the equivalent of the turkey’s sacrifice on Thanksgiving. Given a choice, the turkey would have politely declined. 

I’m hardly the first columnist to suggest that Biden is parroting lines written for him in an effort to convince the American public of their need to sacrifice for the general good, but his banal bromides have an unmistakable Orwellian feel: “Lockdowns are freedom,” “inflation is wealth,” “moms and dads are domestic terrorists.” But when it was revealed that Biden got his COVID vaccine booster shot in a fake White House, it became easy to picture his presidency as some political variant of “The Truman Show,” or as I propose, a Philip K. Dick novel.

Dick was the mid-20th century’s answer to Kafka — an author in search of the ultimate truth who taught us that the truth mostly consisted of disappointment and deception. So too might we conclude about the puppet presidency of Joseph R. Biden. Even the majority of those who accept the legitimacy of his presidency can have a hard time believing in the legitimacy of his leadership.

According to Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, “The reason Biden uses this bizarre virtual set for televised meetings — and not an actual room like East Room, Cabinet, Oval, Roosevelt, Sit Room, etc. — is because it allows him to read from a script directly from a face-on monitor (& w/out teleprompter glass that can be seen on camera).”

That doesn’t in itself make Biden an ersatz president. Lots of politicians are nothing but empty reflections of what their handlers put in front of them, but in his case there is ample evidence aside from the fake White House that he is a product of the imagination of those around him, a figurehead whose policies and even his press conferences (“I’m not supposed to take any questions”) are scripted by others.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/20/the-right-outcome-for-rittenhouse-but/

I do not have much to add to the cataract of commentary about Friday’s Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. Like all sane people, I applaud the young man’s acquittal on all charges. 

There seem to be essentially three sorts of responses to the decision. One is “Hallelujah, justice was done, let us chalk up the victory, and move on. The System™ works.” 

A second response, about which I’ll say a bit more below, is the standard-issue, angry woke identity politics response. According to this narrative, Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist” who acted as a vigilante when Kenosha, Wisconsin exploded in violence in August 2020, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man. According to this script, Rittenhouse wantonly murdered two people in cold blood—Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26—and grievously injured a third, Gaige Grosskreutz, 27. This charge was the specialité de la maison of the so-called mainstream media and the Democratic establishment up to and including Joe Biden. 

In the aftermath of the verdict, the meme was supercharged by all the usual suspects. Rep. Jerry “the Waddler” Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was among the first to suggest the U.S. Justice Department bring federal charges against Rittenhouse since the state charges didn’t stick. I’m sure the ghoulish Merrick “the Moderate” Garland is considering it if only he can peel off enough agents from harassing parents attending school board meetings for the task. 

For his part, Biden, though acknowledging his disappointment that the 18-year old wasn’t going to be thrown in prison for the rest of his life, did at first say that the trial vindicated the judicial process and that “the jury system works.” Aides soon began walking that back, however, perhaps in preparation for the Nadler gambit of trying the boy twice. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/20/no-more-summits-for-joe-biden/

Joe Biden on Monday finally got the summit he had long sought with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Biden officials and many in the mainstream media credited the three-and-a-half-hour virtual summit with reducing tensions between the two nations by promoting dialogue and diplomacy. 

But in fact, Biden should not have skipped his bedtime. The optics of him again appearing as an extremely weak and indecisive president, contrasted with the strong leader of a U.S. adversary, were so bad that White House officials should avoid any more bilateral meetings like this in the future.

It was clear that Xi came to the summit prepared to intimidate Biden and dominate the discussion. He bullied Biden with accusations against U.S. and Taiwanese officials for stirring up tensions with China over Taiwanese independence. Biden said very little in reply.

For his part, Biden took a much softer approach. He emphasized easing tensions and constructing “guardrails” in U.S.-China “competition,” urging China to act responsibly and sought more cooperation and diplomacy. 

Biden read a laundry list of U.S. grievances prepared by the State Department concerning human rights, arms control, Taiwan, regional security, and other issues. But he showed no urgency about any of them or expressed any serious U.S. policy to address them. 

Biden again failed to demand Chinese cooperation in investigating the origins of the coronavirus in a Chinese biolab, which thus far has killed more than 767,000 Americans. 

Although Biden said the United States “strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo or undermine peace and stability,” he endorsed the U.S. “One China” policy. He also didn’t complain about China’s recent provocations against Taiwan, flying large numbers of fighter planes and bombers into its Air Defense Identification Zone, practicing invasion tactics, and erecting mock-ups of U.S. aircraft carriers for Chinese air force pilots to practice attacking American warships.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/its_funny_watching_a_kennedy_struggle_with_the_rittenhouse_case.html

I’ve never been a fan of the Kennedy mystique. When I think of John F. Kennedy, aside from the fact that I enjoy reminding Democrats that he would be a Republican now, I think of compulsive womanizing, massive drug cocktails, and the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco. My thoughts about Teddy Kennedy are even worse. With him, it’s a fake neck brace and Mary Jo Kopechne slowly suffocating in a car lodged in shallow water. I also think of his waitress sandwiches.

With those images in mind, I had to laugh (along with a lot of other people) when Maria Shriver, Teddy’s niece, announced on Twitter that she had no idea how to explain to her son how someone could commit a crime and not get “charged” for anything.

There’s a lot to unpack in the following tweet:

First, the tweet manages to imply that Shriver is trying to explain this mystery of life to a little boy, someone who is slowly learning his way around the world and struggling to form his own opinions. Maybe he’s ten or thirteen.

Nope. Her older son is 28 and her younger one is 24. Talk about infantilizing one of those boys…er, young men.

Second, Shriver has spent decades as a journalist and was First Lady of California during ex-husband Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term as a RINO governor in California’s statehouse. With that in mind, her statement that she’s shocked that Kyle Rittenhouse (who is much younger than both her sons) “didn’t get charged for anything” makes her sound like a moron.

What really happened back in September 2020 is that the Kenosha District Attorney charged Kyle with lightning speed. That’s why he was in court for three weeks, watching the allegations against him crumble.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/19/build-back-better-is-climate-change-socialism-not-the-smaller-right-sized-government-we-need/

Just 10 months into his administration, Joe Biden is seemingly a man on a destructive mission:  everything he touches augers spectacularly into the political dirt and his approval rating reflects the country’s dismay.

Last week, consumer prices jumped the highest in 31 years owing to non-stop stimulus checks, big government spending and energy sector “climate change” subsidies to electrical vehicle (EV) promoters and manufacturers. 

Everything from food prices to used cars increased faster than paychecks. If a working person didn’t receive a 6.2% pay raise this year, he/she is losing money, plain and simple.  There hasn’t been a measurement this dramatic in decades.

Inflation is not an act of God.  It’s completely manmade largely through government policy.  Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman famously pointed out that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary problem.  Between March 2020 and September 2021 the amount of money in circulation has increased a staggering 336%.  That year-over-year average price increases for consumables is 6% is not a reflection of the full measure of the problem, which is much worse. 

In poll after poll, Americans are recording their complete dissatisfaction with Biden’s job performance, the latest coming last weekend in an NBC Survey that had Chuck Todd almost in tears:  fully 71% feel our nation is on the wrong path, with only 22% saying things are going well.  And that tracks with many other polls pushing this administration underwater except a slight bump for “climate change”.