RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Yogi Berra is alleged to have said: “Forecasting is very difficult, especially when it involves the future.” Republicans were quick to conclude that Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia last week promises wins for Republicans in next year’s midterms. I hope they are right, but there is a lot of time between now and then. Such predictions can lull candidates into complacency.

However, the election may have put a stop – perhaps temporarily – to the leftward shift of the Democratic Party. Sanity was the winner in Virginia and a handful of other states, with derangement the loser. Even deep-blue New Jersey appeared to have second thoughts about their fall into leftist lunacy, though the heavily taxed state chose to stay with its spendthrift governor. In its aftermath, Congress passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, with the help of thirteen Republicans (from swing districts) and with six Congressional Democrats (including all four members of “The Squad”) voting no. Nevertheless, following Virginia’s election, progressives showed their colors: Michael Eric Dyson, a guest on MSNBC’s “Reidout,” called Virginia’s newly elected Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, a “black voice for white supremacy.” Jemele Hill, a former host on ESPN, tweeted that Ms. Sears is a white supremacist.  New York’s Chuck Schumer and California’s Nancy Pelosi, ignoring Tuesday’s elections, assured Progressives they will pass the far-more-expensive “human infrastructure” legislation (Build Back Better) by Thanksgiving – a single bill whose all-in costs equals what total annual federal spending had been in 2014.

One lesson for Republicans is that the personal presence of Donald Trump may prove a hindrance, at least in blue and purple states. Mr. Trump alleged that without his endorsement Mr. Youngkin would have lost by fifteen points. My guess is that the reverse is true – if he had personally campaigned for him, Mr. Youngkin, would have lost by ten points. As President, Mr. Trump was victim of what probably was the largest political scandal in our nation’s history – the Clinton campaign-inspired Russian collusion story. As well, he was confronted with one of the worst pandemics to hit this nation. Yet he reduced regulatory red tape, increased economic activity at home, raised wages for black and minority workers, brought energy independence to the country, slowed illegal immigration, and, with the Abraham Accords, brought glimmers of peace to Israel and her Arab neighbors. But his narcissistic personality and polarizing ways accentuated the divide of an already ruptured nation. His policies were correct, His character was not.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-are-profoundly-committed?token=e

The 2020 protest movement that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha became one of the most sustained and consequential in modern U.S. history. Though there seems to be a somewhat bizarre effort underway by its advocates to insist that this movement accomplished nothing — why are some claiming that radical cultural and political changes are happening? — it is demonstrably true that, as intended, the movement transformed discourse and policy around multiple issues from race, to policing, to gender identity, to the teaching of history, and fostered an ongoing effort for still-greater changes.

The issues raised by that movement were varied and often shifting: though it was catalyzed by the claim that the U.S. is swamped with racist police brutality as illustrated by the Floyd and Blake cases, it quickly metastasized into other areas far removed from those two cases. White Antifa members clashed with Black protesters over the attempt to steer or broaden the movement away from a narrow focus on racist police brutality into one devoted to generalized insurrectionary anarchy. One of the largest and most densely packed gatherings was a spontaneous march, at the height of the COVID pandemic, in Brooklyn, where ten thousand people paid homage to the importance of “black trans lives,” a cause whose relationship to the Floyd and Blake cases was tenuous at best. Institutional changes regarding gender identity were quickly adopted by the corporations and security state institutions that lent their support, however cynically, to this growing movement.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/11/11/america-is-being-held-hostage-a-progressive-left-that-represent-6-of-the-electorate-n1531975

The radical left has taken over the culture. From racialized and sexualized curriculum in K-12 to the American Medical Association policing the language of its members to ensure that it is “inclusive,” the ideologies from the university sociology department are being shoved down America’s throat. You are not supposed to believe your own lying eyes, and a person’s lived experience supersedes all objective data. Now, the word “woke” is problematic, even though the progressives coined it.

If you violate the ever-changing rules of the woke coalition, you can lose your social media account, your reputation, and even your job. They govern what you can watch, how movies get cast, and who wins the awards. Even comedians, who are supposed to touch the third rail, are subjected to the wrath of their offense. Words are violence, and violence is speech. Men can be women and shut up bigots.

These narratives are so overwhelming that one may assume that a large portion of the population shares them. However, a new Pew Research study debunks that idea. So the next time you are sitting in a corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion training session, remember that only 6% of the population thinks this way. Pew Research refers to them as the Progressive Left. According to the study results:

Progressive Left are more liberal than the three other Democratic-oriented groups on many issues. For example, while majorities in all four of these groups favor a bigger government providing more services, Progressive Left are most likely to express this view. When asked a follow-up question about how much bigger the government should be, 63% of Progressive Left say government services should “greatly expand” from current levels – a far higher share than any other group.

Their liberal outlook is not limited to issues related to the size and scope of government. Their views on race and racial equality also distinguish them from other typology groups: Sizable majorities say White people benefit from societal advantages that Black people do not have and that most U.S. institutions need to be completely rebuilt to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/11/unprecedented-capitol-protest-sets-new-precedents/

Unprecedented: It is the word most often applied to the events at the Capitol on January 6.

In his remarks that afternoon, as the chaos was still ongoing, Joe Biden warned that “our democracy is under unprecedented attack.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Attorney General Merrick Garland, and leaders of both political parties also describe the four-hour mostly nonviolent disturbance at the Capitol complex as something without precedent. 

“On January 6, 2021, the world witnessed a violent and unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Vice President, Members of Congress, and the democratic process,” wrote Republican and Democratic senators in a joint committee report released earlier this year.

“We mourn the deaths of the two Capitol policemen and others connected to these unprecedented events,” the nation’s top military leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, said in a January 13 statement. (We now know that those two officers did not die as a result of the protest.)

The national news media also flaunts the word with ease and frequency, historical context and common sense be damned. One federal prosecutor who handled the Oklahoma City bombing case, which resulted in the murder of 168 innocent people including 15 children under the age of five, told the New York Times in April that “the Capitol attack was, thankfully, an unprecedented event.”

Joe Biden’s Justice Department argues for unusually harsh sentences on the basis that “the crimes . . . committed on January 6 are unprecedented.” Therefore, the government routinely claims in sentencing motions, judges should ignore precedent for similar offenses. “These crimes defy statutorily appropriate comparisons to conduct in other cases that occurred before January 6, 2021,” one prosecutor wrote in August.

Long delays in the discovery process are blamed on the “unprecedented” volume of evidence, which includes tens of thousands of hours of video footage and hundreds of thousands of FBI documents. Ditto for delayed trial dates; foot-dragging on discovery renders many defense lawyers unable to prepare for trial. Judges repeatedly cite the “unprecedented” nature of the Capitol protest and massive trove of evidence as an excuse to stall trial dates until the middle of 2022.

New Norms

Portraying January 6 as “unprecedented” is not an accident; it justifies extra-constitutional, judicial, and legislative action under the guise that nothing like this has ever happened before and that language will rationalize future measures to make sure it never happens again. Nothing is off the table as the Biden regime, Beltway judges, and the media seek to avenge an “unprecedented” protest in a government building where the only people killed were Trump supporters, including at least one by a federal police officer.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/squad-joins-china-appeasement-caucus-daniel-greenfield/

The ‘Squad’ of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and Rep. Cori Bush, already full-time members of the Hamas caucus, expanded their horizons by joining the Communist China appeasement caucus. 

Earlier this year, Kerry visited China and returned bearing a warning from his old masters that unless the United States dropped President Trump’s sanctions on the Communist regime over its slave labor, and on China’s military hackers stealing our technology, there would be no deals on global warming. The Xi regime also demanded that America allow its Confucius Institute front groups to conduct infiltration on American campuses, ban pro-democracy protests outside its consulates, and allow it to repress Hong Kong, and conquer Taiwan without any interference.

After his latest treasonous expedition, Kerry became the loudest voice of appeasement even in an administration that was already appeasing the Taliban, Iran, Russia, and China. The Communist regime aided Kerry by undermining other administration envoys, keeping up the pressure from the outside even as Hanoi John and his allies applied pressure from the inside.

Last month it was reported that Congressional allies were circulating a letter urging “U.S. collaboration with China” and insisting that, “There is no conceivable way to address the climate crisis without substantially strengthening communication and collaboration between our nations.” In a treasonous Freudian slip, they couldn’t stop calling it what it was, “collaboration”.

Who would possibly sign a letter like that? Even most Democrats wouldn’t “collaborate”.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/12/please-go-brandon-americans-want-this-president-out/

A poll taken earlier this month shows that voters believe job No. 1 for President Joe Biden is to vacate his office. His replacement, of course, would be the vice president whose approval rating is so low it hardly registers. Take a bow, voters. This is the mess that America has become.

When 1,000 voters were asked what is “the single most important goal for Biden over the next year,” the top answer at 20% was “resign/retire/quit.” That answer was almost twice as popular as the No. 2 response, “economy/jobs,” which logged in at 11%. These are the unsurprising-to-many findings of a Suffolk University-USA Today poll taken over three days last week. 

“Nearly half of those surveyed, 46%, say Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he’s done worse, not better, than they expected,” says USA Today, which didn’t bother to include in its report that voters want Biden to leave, but did admit there’s a “gloomy landscape” ahead for Democrats in next year’s midterms. 

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/11/medical_journals_pour_forth_hundreds_of_articles_on_race_and_racism_803026.html

Part 2 of 2 Articles (Part 1 Here)

The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and its JAMA network of other periodicals have published about 950 articles on race, racism, and racial and ethnic disparities and inequities in the past five years – about a third appearing in just the past year.

A search for “health disparities” on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed.gov search page shows an exponential “hockey stick” trend in recent years, with articles through October already surpassing last year’s total of 10,719. By comparison, “ovarian cancer” yields 7,134 search results last year, while “aortic aneurysm” yields fewer than 4,000.

These numbers attest to the fact that the academic study of racial justice, power and privilege is no longer the sole domain of non-scientific university departments, such as sociology, literature and education. The trendy topic has migrated to peer-reviewed medical journals, where editors now view systemic racism as a leading cause of disproportionate illness and premature mortality among black people.

A PubMed.gov search for articles on “health disparities” shows a “hockey stick” trend lately.
PubMed.gov

“The rules of the game have definitely changed, and these changes can be easily seen at the highest level,” said Shervin Assari, a professor of family medicine and urban public health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically black medical school in Los Angeles.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd killing by a Minneapolis cop, medical researchers have seized on systemic racism as a unifying theory that explains the shorter life expectancies and more prevalent chronic conditions among black Americans. The mass conversion to systemic racism as the canonical explanation for health disparities has swept through the medical profession with stunning velocity, emboldening scholarship with the certitude of a single explanatory narrative.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/what_is_an_america_that_holds_prisoners_indefinitely_without_charging_them.html

The U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis over the handling of the cases of defendants in the Jan. 6 so-called “insurrection” in Washington, D.C. to protest the presidential election modus operandi and the results.  Those being held for many months without a trial are being denied their habeas corpus rights under the U.S. Constitution and even dating back to English law hundreds of years before our Constitution was implemented.  Not only are they being incarcerated without having had a trial, but there is some evidence that they are being mistreated or are being held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, which is a punishment accorded only the most dangerous criminals, such as serial killers and terrorists.

What are habeas corpus rights?  According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “[h]abeas corpus is a fundamental right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment.  Translated from Latin it means ‘show me the body.’  Habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument to safeguard individual freedom against arbitrary executive power.”  A citizen must be charged and cannot be held indefinitely.  A charge requires a trial, and, if found guilty in a trial, there is a sentence for a specific amount of time.

Even PolitiFact — hardly an unbiased fact-checker — relates, “The vast majority of defendants have been released from custody while awaiting trial, but some [my italics] held in jail have been kept in solitary confinement.”  The fact that exact numbers for how many are held in solitary confinement or for how long suggests to this writer evasion by the Washington, D.C. jail authorities.

Despite the attempt by outlets like PolitiFact to minimize the problem of solitary confinement, a number of GOP senators have voiced their concern about this problem, and even the ACLU — certainly not an outreach arm of the Republican Party — has become involved.  However, the Republican senators who are concerned do not have a specific number.  The lack of definitiveness in this area is alarming.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_sissy_generation.html

Just 70-80 years ago we had what was dubbed “The Greatest Generation” – the people who had fought and won World War II.  Now, just a couple of generations down the road, we have unconditionally surrendered to a disease with minuscule mortality (for the vast majority of the population), and which is to a large degree treatable. How did that happen?

Roll back to the first months of 2020, when we just learned about the sinister new virus which was killing people and for which we had neither vaccine nor cure. We were scared – in the 21st century, we don’t expect to encounter something to which our medicine has no answer. A lot of things about COVID-19 were unknown at the time, but one of the first confirmed pieces of information was that this virus spares children.

What great news! Whatever calamity befalls us, children are always our main concern. Now, when we know that they are safe, shouldn’t we, adults, breathe a big sigh of relief, return to normal life and let the doctors do what they always do: treat the sick, research for a cure, work on the vaccine? I can imagine that this would have happened a few decades ago, despite the (incorrect) perception that the mortality rate was maybe small, but still meaningful, a few percentage points. Yet the only developed country that behaved more or less like that was Sweden. The rest of mankind locked themselves up and essentially stopped living normal lives.

The word that we heard the most during this time was ‘safety.’ Coming to work is declared unsafe — sure, we can stop working, no big deal. Going to school is unsafe — cheer up, kids, you are staying home today — and next week, and then month after month after month. Wear your mask everywhere and stay at least 6 feet away (better 20) from everybody. Safety is king!

How did we end up here? As very often happens the course happened first gradually, then suddenly. The worship of safety began long ago and now it’s everywhere. Everything we buy and use, from lawnmowers to toasters to toothbrushes, undergoes elaborate safety checks and is accompanied by instructions for safe operation. And not only is it a legal requirement but, for many people, safety became the most important feature of any device. There is a commercial on TV promoting gutter guards.  A woman asks her husband: ‘Do you climb a ladder to clean the gutter?” “Yes.” “But it’s unsafe!” — enough said, everybody needs to get the damn thing.

Of course, nothing is wrong with being safe, and many things that we do toward that end are good and reasonable — like seat belts, and later airbags in cars. But more and more the idea of ‘being safe’ has morphed into ‘feeling safe’, so the natural desire for safety is now abused beyond recognition. In other times, the idea of banning a group of people from entering some location would be called ‘segregation’; today the leftist students who don’t want to be around anybody with different views demand ‘safe spaces.’ When a controversial speaker is invited to speak at a university, protesters wouldn’t say ‘we hate this guy’ (which would be the truth, but ‘hate’ is a loaded word nowadays, better not to use it); instead, they declare that such an event would make them ‘feel unsafe’.