RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/22/there-is-no-such-thing-as-black-america/

In much of the West, there is a tendency to lump together culturally and economically different groups on the grounds of race. This is particularly pronounced in the case of ‘Black America’.

This category, to which many progressives still cleave, hides significant differences among the US’s black population – such as those between US-born black Americans and recently arrived black immigrants and refugees. The lives of the black immigrants, originating from countries such as Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Dominican Republic, simply do not fit the pessimistic narratives of ‘Black America’ that we always hear from the identitarian left. These tend to focus on the plight of US-born black Americans.

Instead, among immigrant black Americans there are myriad success stories. Stories of people achieving academically, getting well-paid jobs and generally doing well. The lives of these black Americans, obscured by the term ‘Black America’, fly in the face of those who insist that America is systemically racist, or in the grip of white supremacy.

Recent data produced by the Migration Policy Institute bears this out. Take, for instance, the very different educational and employment outcomes for black immigrants compared to those for US-born black Americans: 31 per cent of black immigrant men and 28 per cent of black immigrant women are college graduates. This compares to 17 per cent of US-born black men and 24 per cent of US-born black women.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/21/from-1945-to-2022/

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is packed with parallels to 2022 such as the Thought Police, Hate Week, alteration of the past, and so forth. For more fearful symmetry on the current scene, dial back to 1945, when Orwell’s Animal Farm hit the bookstores. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell was writing about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

The prize boar Old Major is Karl Marx, Snowball is Leon Trotsky, and Napoleon is Josef Stalin. Inspired by the Old Major’s dream, the revolutionary animals evict the exploiter Jones and take over his farm. Though supposedly run on an egalitarian basis, it quickly emerges that some animals are more equal than others. Consider, for example, the distribution of food on the animal farm. 

“Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare.”

In reality, the “brainworker” pigs watched while horses Boxer and Clover did the heavy lifting. Another parallel is the pretension of Marxism-Leninism to represent “science.” 

During the Communist crackdown on the Solidarity movement in Poland, for example, Soviet bosses lamented the “lack of training in Marxist-Leninist sciences in secondary school.” What actual science Lenin might have advanced remains unclear. The same goes for Marx, only more so. 

Marx was a true believer in the quackery of phrenology, which extrapolated character from the shape of the skull. Consider Marx’s 1862 letter to Engels about socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a man Marx called a “Jewish nigger.” 

“As the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger).” In addition, “the fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.” Plenty more where that came from, but Marx’s inherent bias seldom if ever shows up in books on racism and white supremacy. 

The Marxist-Leninists vanguard somehow escaped the repressive condition that afflicts everybody else, and in power, they always know best. As the Marxist-Leninists have it, the state will wither away, but in the meantime, they must build the most repressive state in history. For all but the willfully blind, it’s old-fashioned dictatorship taken to new depths of depravity.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/21/trudeau-style-tyranny-is-already-here/

In a recent court motion, Joe Biden’s Justice Department changed the official name of its investigation into the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Originally designated the “Capitol breach” probe, the department just replaced “breach” with a more sinister word: siege.

“The ‘Capitol Siege’ refers to the events of January 6, 2021, when thousands of individuals entered the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Capitol grounds without authority, halting the Joint Session and the entire official proceeding of Congress for hours,” Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, wrote in a footnote to a February 10 filing. Graves commended Capitol and D.C. Metro police for “clear[ing] the Capitol of rioters” that afternoon.

But courtroom rhetoric isn’t the only thing Graves is heating up. The Justice Department has opened a “Capitol Siege Section” in the agency’s criminal division and wants to hire at least 20 more lawyers to help prosecute Americans for any involvement in what happened on January 6. Qualified attorneys will be employed on a temporary basis and could earn as much as $176,000 per year.

“Capitol siege” prosecutors will complement an army of thousands of Justice Department employees, including FBI agents from 56 field offices across the country, handling what Attorney General Merrick Garland warned is the biggest investigation in the department’s history. More than 730 people have been arrested so far—amounting to more than three times the number of federal arrests related to the 2020 “mostly peaceful” riots that lasted for months and resulted in far more death and destruction—and the first major trial of a January 6 defendant starts next week.

As freedom-lovers justifiably recoil at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on vaccine mandate protesters, Americans worry the same sort of political retribution could happen here. I’m sorry to report, it already has.

The scenes from Ottawa are matched or surpassed by the images here, including thuggish cops attacking January 6 protesters with mace and explosive devices. The difference? Instead of mounted police trampling a woman, ours merely shot and killed one woman and beat up a few more.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/condoleezza-rice-coleman-hughes-and?token=

Why does Condoleezza Rice celebrate Black History Month? Because, as the former Secretary of State told me last week during a wide-ranging interview: “When I was a little kid growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in fourth grade, we had a book called ‘Know Alabama.’ And you would never have known that there were any black people as part of that history. So I think it’s important to call out.”

What is the meaning and purpose of Black History Month?

Does it risk emphasizing the false idea that black history is separate from American history? Or is it an acknowledgement of the essential black contribution toward creating a more perfect union? Does it allow us to step back and see, as Coleman Hughes writes below, not just what the country has done to black people but what black people have done for the country? Or does its existence reify the idea of race—and, in so doing, perpetuate the myth that we are somehow not all equally American?

In honor of Black History Month, we reached out not only to Coleman, but also to Daryl Davis, Eli Steele, Ronald Sullivan, Sheena Mason, Noah Harris and Brittany Talissa King.

Read their thoughtful contributions below. And you can listen to my whole conversation with Secretary Rice here: 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/an_unstoppable_peaceful_protest_on_18_wheels.html

Americans are ticked off at the shenanigans going on in Canada.  Martial law for a few thousand truckers protesting mandates?  Seizing bank accounts?  Trampling peaceful protesters with horses?  All this to force people to get an injection that doesn’t work for an illness that causes less death than the seasonal flu?  This has gone too far.

U.S. truckers are even angrier.  They are the critical part of our transportation system that gets goods from the farms and factories to the stores, and they worked tirelessly during the darkest days of the pandemic.

Now they, too, are being forced to get the shots, despite the fact that they spend 95% of their time isolated in their trucks.  If unvaxxed truckers can’t cross into Canada, that will be another blow to our already failing supply chain and will weaken our economy.

I saw an idea online about a safe way for truckers to support their brethren in Canada, and protest similar overreaches in the U.S.  It’s called #12NoonTruckStop and makes a lot of sense.

The idea is for all truckers to safely pull to the side of the road every day at 12 noon and stop for 12 minutes.  Hundreds of trucks would line the highways, and people could honk their support.  At 12:12 P.M. they’re back on the road.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/real-terrorist-attack-trudeau-ignored-robert-spencer/

In justifying his invocation of the Emergencies Act and turning Canada into a police state, Justin Trudeau falsely claimed that the Freedom Convoy was “not a peaceful protest” and asserted that “the blockades are harming our economy and endangering public safety.” Unsurprisingly, however, Trudeau’s outrage was selective: on Thursday, Canada suffered a genuine terror attack that was not a peaceful protest and that undeniably hurt the Canadian economy and endangered public safety, yet Trudeau didn’t say a word. The terrorists in question were Leftists, so they got a pass.

The UK’s Daily Mail reported Thursday that “ax-wielding eco-terrorists attacked a British Columbia gas pipeline Thursday, shooting flare guns at frightened workers and causing millions in damage…About 20 attackers, wearing camouflage and masks, surrounded Costal [sic] Gaslink [sic] workers in the early morning hours of February 17 in what the company called a ‘highly planned and dangerous unprovoked assault.’”

Reportedly, only one person was hurt, but that was sheer serendipity. Coastal GasLink added: “In one of the most concerning acts, an attempt was made to set a vehicle on fire while workers were inside. The attackers also wielded axes, swinging them at vehicles and through a truck’s window. Flare guns were also fired at workers. Workers fled the site for their own safety and remain shaken by this violent incident.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/air-force-went-woke-its-planes-wont-fly-daniel-greenfield/

Chief of Staff Charles Brown and Chief Master Sergeant Kaleth Wright have made diversity and wokeness into the core of the Air Force’s mission. Meanwhile the planes won’t fly.

Brown has spent the past few years unleashing worthless diversity reviews to try and blame the Air Force for a supposed lack of diversity, even though it now has a black chief of staff and a black top enlisted leader. The military justification for their divisive shenanigans was that diversity equated somehow to military readiness. How is the Air Force’s readiness?

The latest numbers show that the Air Force has made no progress in improving the readiness of its planes with a rate of 71.5% or 7 out of 10 planes in 2021.

The United States Air  Force is supposed to have mission capable rates of 75% to 80%, but about the only aircraft that meet that criteria are the unmanned drones. The high ratings of the drones disguise the fact that the actual numbers, when broken down by aircraft, are worse.

The F-35As, the fifth generation fighters that would be crucial in countering any sizable aerial engagement with Communist China, dropped catastrophically from 76% to 68.8%.

Last year, the Biden administration boasted about the largest deployment of F-22 stealth fighters in the Pacific. Unfortunately their readiness hovers at around 50%.

Deploying fighters with the readiness rate of a coin flip won’t impress Communist China.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/21/the-tyranny-of-high-status-opinion/

At first glance, it looked like one of the strangest, most incongruous moments of the great trucker uprising of 2022. There were the truckers and their working-class allies, in Ottawa, loudly agitating against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates, when a bunch of hyper-woke, definitely not working-class counter-protesters rocked up to rail against this horn-honking throng. And what did they chant, these painfully PC counter-protesters? ‘Trans rights are human rights’, that’s what. As clear as anything, these supposed leftists, seemingly horrified by the sight of working-class men and women fighting for their rights, engaged in arguably the most striking non-sequitur of the 2020s so far – they brought transgenderism into an issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with transgenderism.

The truckers have said nothing about trans people. We have no idea what these pissed-off working-class drivers think about genderfluidity and all the rest. My hunch is that they think it’s nonsense. But we don’t know. This vast gathering of truckers and their supporters, which has so rattled the Trudeau administration and inspired copycat revolts around the world, is completely unrelated to sex changes and pronouns and the right of born men to beat women in sports and all the other things that fall under the banner of ‘trans rights’ these days. So, understandably, many people were perplexed by the counter-protesters’ chant. ‘I don’t think they are at the right protest’, said one observer. Memes emerged, saying: ‘Truckers: Freedom for all! Counter-protest: Trans rights are human rights. Truckers: What??’ What indeed.

And yet, at another level, at a deeper level, this weird, disjointed counter-revolt against the ‘revolting’ truckers actually makes sense. For what we had here was the shrill, noisy reassertion of high-status opinion against the supposedly low-status demands of the truckers for more freedom and better working conditions. This was the correct-thinking set staking its moral authority over the irritated truckers; the upper-middle-class guardians of approved ‘progressive’ thought pushing back against a pesky, old-fashioned, grassroots demand for liberty and respect. There was at least a semi-conscious element to this spectacular non-sequitur on the streets of Ottawa – the elite counter-revolters were essentially saying that identity is now more important than class, that issues like trans rights now thoroughly trump workers’ rights, and that being ‘left-wing’ no longer means supporting the masses against the state, but rather is about reprimanding the masses for their supposed wrongthink and siding with the state against the people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/dude_looks_like_a_lady__ivy_league_swimming_style.html

Rock group Aerosmith released a song in 1987 entitled, “Dude looks like a lady” about a man with an effeminate appearance who could be mistaken for a woman. Today the inverse is playing out in the athletic world, where a lady who looks like a dude — a male who has transitioned to a female as much as basic biology permits — is making a mockery of women’s sports.

I speak of Lia Thomas, a transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer who last week, “Dominates 200 yard freestyle at Ivy League swimming championships and sets a new tournament record.” But Lia wasn’t always a woman swimmer. In fact, not too long ago she was a dude, but she looks more like a lady these days, yet she still swims like a dude, and that is where the problem lies.

Lia Thomas wins the 200 yard freestyle Ivy League 2022 championship by a wide margin

This saga began last fall and in brief involves a University of Pennsylvania swimmer named Will Thomas, an unremarkable member of the men’s team whose life and swimming career went on hiatus due to COVID. During his year off, Will the dude became Lia the lady, and is now a member of the Penn women’s swim team. While a mediocre men’s swimmer, Lea is anything but as a women’s swimmer. “UPenn trans swimmer, 22, sparks outrage by smashing women’s competition records after competing as a man for three seasons.”

As a female swimmer, Lia is the phenomenon she would not likely have been as a male swimmer.