RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_war_on_america_by_twisted_logic.html

We are living under a regime that’s increasingly totalitarian.  And it is using an insidious strategy — call it disinformation, propaganda, gaslighting, indoctrination, or outright lying — to achieve the leftists’ political and social goal of a “Great Reset” of America.  The regime’s enforcers, or boosters, are the media, academia, and Big Tech, who together control the narrative with faked statistics, slanted semantics, and endless repetition.  They also deploy the psychological tactics of intimidation, shaming, and canceling.  At the center sits the government, but the chain of command — who dictates to whom — is often unclear.

“Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth” is a principle often attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.  In America today, “woke” social justice warriors are using a continuous barrage of lies to achieve their Machiavellian agenda.

Four recent, egregious lies come to mind.  In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a UCLA business school professor who has taught at the institution for forty years, was suspended for refusing a student’s request to provide an easier exam for black students.  Black students, it was propounded, were emotionally distressed after the death of serial felon George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The email exchange between Klein and the student, which went viral, was deemed “hurtful,” and the professor was unreasonably branded an “insensitive bigot.”  Antonio  Bernardo, the school’s dean, organized a smear campaign against Klein and sought permission to fire him.

Klein stood his ground, saying he was shocked by the student’s request, which he found “deeply patronizing and offensive” to black students.  He also assessed, rightly, that granting the request would violate the California constitution’s prohibition of “race-based preferences in public education.”  But such has been the effect of woke indoctrination that, incomprehensibly, students called for his removal and gathered 20,000 signatures on a petition demanding that he be relieved of his teaching duties.  In its eagerness to be seen as woke in the current racially charged atmosphere, UCLA chose to ignore the abject harassment of its professor, sided with the crybullies, and suspended Klein.  Fortunately, an academic senate committee ruled that instructors are entitled to refuse requests to change grading schemes, and Klein was reinstated three weeks later.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/07/biden-to-taxpayers-go-invest-in-yourself/

Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t get more arrogant or dishonest, President Joe Biden on Tuesday, visiting the congressional district of one of the House’s less-extreme Democrats, warned that “autocrats” in the world are scrutinizing America for signs of decline on the geopolitical stage, and we therefore must “invest in ourselves” to prove “that American democracy works.”

Translation: spend trillions with a T establishing a new series of cradle-to-grave entitlements that, like our already-existing entitlements, will in short order become politically impossible ever to repeal.

Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, moreover, look straight into the TV camera and tell the American people that these unprecedented, astronomical expenditures will cost zero.

This, not Donald Trump placing the spotlight on all-too-real election fraud, is the true “Big Lie.”

No one using a gift card at the store in the weeks after Christmas is a big enough liar or financial illiterate to claim that the spending spree he’s enjoying costs zero. It costs plenty; the point is he’s not paying for it! But shame and economic ignorance are never obstacles for today’s Democrats in pursuit of power over our lives.

We know that middle-class American taxpayers will be suffering the pain of paying for the “$3.5 trillion” that is actually more like $5 trillion, which Democrats themselves know isn’t infrastructure at all, as they claim it to be.

Why else would the bill include $80 billion for the IRS to expand its powers to Orwellian realms and spy on checking and savings accounts where the balances or transactions exceed $600? Are we to believe that in order to steal from the rich and give to Uncle Sam, Robin Hood and his merry band of revenue collectors now need the bank statements of the millions of Americans who can barely pay their monthly bills – so many of whom pathetically voted for Democrats, naively thinking it was in their interest?

The left’s overreach is so glaring that this all may backfire. After all, the two lone Democrats in the Senate with a modicum of fiscal sanity, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom know that supporting the bill as presently constituted spells their own political suicide, have been terrorized by leftist activists – in kayaks on the Potomac River in Manchin’s case, and in a public ladies room stall and a commercial airplane in the case of Sinema.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/biden-ethics-son.html

There should be little doubt that President Biden was not being truthful when, days after the Taliban’s victory, he told ABC News that his senior military advisers had not urged him to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president’s claim was flatly contradicted last week in sworn testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command.

During the generals’ testimony, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, sought to defend her boss by pointing to a line in Biden’s interview in which he appeared to suggest that the military’s advice “was split.”

Another whopper. What split? As The Times’s Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David Sanger reported in April, right after Lloyd Austin was sworn in as secretary of defense in January, he and his top generals “were in lock step in recommending that about 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan.” Asked whether there were top military advisers who argued otherwise, Psaki evaded the question.

Biden’s dissembling, regarding the worst-executed major foreign policy decision in years, would be a scandal in any presidency. It’s worse coming from the man who campaigned for office by insisting that he stood “for honor and telling the truth.”

A week earlier, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger published a scrupulously reported book on the Biden family. It makes a compelling case that some of the most explosive emails from Hunter Biden’s purported laptop were entirely genuine — a claim that Schreckinger confirmed with multiple sources, including a Swedish government agency, and that was never explicitly denied by Hunter himself.

That includes a 2017 email in which one of Hunter’s potential business partners proposed a “provisional agreement” with the now-defunct company CEFC China Energy to share equity percentages in a new venture, with “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” Jim Biden is the president’s brother. “The big guy,” according to Tony Bobulinski, a recipient of the email, is Hunter’s father.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a05e044bdd

I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around. Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.

As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.

The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others. The alternative definition of “science” mentioned in my September 2020 post is that “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” Under this alternative definition, “following the science” means taking instruction from whoever appear to be, or declare themselves to be, the most expert scientists of the moment. In the field of Covid-19, those people would be the CDC and the NIAID (Fauci’s organization), and everyone who takes funding from them and their allies and therefore can’t disagree with anything they say without risking job and career.

Back on August 5, the CDC “updated” their “guidance” on the subject of masking for students, teachers and other staff in schools. The updated guidance reads as follows:

CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

How far ago it was when a Democrat President could speak of open markets and of trusting the American people. Fear has become a tool of American politicians, especially those on the left, to help control the people they are supposed to serve. In a recent issue of The Spectator, regarding the United States’ handling of the COVID-19 virus, Karol Markowicz wrote: “We are in a moment of profound fear in the U.S…We cannot continue to succumb to a fear of life. We must not continue to be scared of each other.” Yet, politicians used fear to place the sick in nursing homes, and to close places of worship, schools and businesses, and to issue mask and vaccine mandates.

As well, fear of climate change infects our youth. Writing in February 2020 in The Washington Post, Jason Plautz wrote: “Kids are terrified, anxious and depressed about climate change,” while academics, politicians and certain businesses thrive on this fear. Michael Moore and Al Gore made millions out of scaring people about climate change. Thomas P. Gloria, managing director of Industrial Ecology Solutions and Program Director, Sustainability, Harvard Extension School, wrote in the April 22, 2020, edition of the Harvard Gazette: “My fear is, despite the science and the early warning signals that we bear witness to – record temperatures, 1000-year storms, glacial retreat, coral reefs dying on a continental scale – global society may finally wake up, but it may be too late.”

Fear of expressing non-conventional ideas has become pervasive. Many will not speak out for fear of financial retaliation. Ted Rall, author of The Stringer, wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “What meaningful difference is there between an authoritarian state, where saying the wrong thing can get you arrested, and a regime of economic censorship, in which the consequence of unpopular expression results in unemployment, potentially followed by eviction and destitution?” A culture that cancels history and opinions is one that denies free speech. How many students fear expressing opinions that depart from a progressive narrative that has become ubiquitous? How many junior executives question their senior managers? Do members of Congress let demands of Party out-weigh their own consciences? Fear of failing grades, loss of job and political retribution are used to suppress speech and control people.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/the-left-can-finally-admit-what-it-wants/

I remember a staggering conversation with my high school lunch table in the early 2000s. Everyone agreed with one kid’s statement that there was nothing special about living in America: Life in Canada, or anywhere else, would be identical except for maybe the weather. 

At the time, I wondered what was going to happen to America when all these kids grew up. What happens when America’s young adults, far from having any intellectual commitment to freedom, don’t even understand what life would be like without it? 

Twenty or 30 years ago, before my generation metastasized, it was tacitly understood on both sides of the political aisle that leftists—mostly Democrats—had to lie about what they wanted to do. They had to pretend, for instance, that they didn’t want to raise taxes. SNL made fun of this in their famous 1988 sketch “Dukakis After Dark”: “Mike, now that it’s all over, you can tell me. You were going to raise taxes, weren’t you?” “You bet I was!”

Leftists likewise had to pretend they liked the military. This led to Dukakis’ disastrous Abrams tank photo op.  

It wasn’t Dukakis’ fault exactly—as “he” says in the SNL sketch, “We represent unpopular, discredited views.” But if only he’d been more fortunate in his timing, and could have waited 20 or 30 years: Precisely those discredited views were being indoctrinated into school children across the country. The children grew up, and the ideas have found new life. 

Walter Mondale’s 1984 pledge to raise taxes helped destroy his presidential campaign. In 2020, Biden’s pledge to do the same went essentially unnoticed—in part because the press, now run by the kids who were in school when Mondale ran, didn’t want to report it. But also because those kids like the idea of higher taxes. In a sense we’ve come full circle. The Left can finally admit in public all the things it used to hide.  

The Left is finally out of the closet. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/06/covid-19-is-not-a-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated/

On Friday, Sept. 17, the CDC published a study that refutes the common claim that COVID-19 is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Coauthored by more than 50 MDs and Ph.D.’s, the study contains data on the vaccine status of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 at 21 U.S. hospitals across 18 states from March to August of 2021.

Contrary to assertions from the Associated Press and Anthony Fauci that fully vaccinated people comprise only 1% of those being hospitalized or killed by C-19, the study found that 13% of patients hospitalized with C-19 had been fully vaccinated. Moreover, that 13% figure is just the tip of the iceberg because the authors excluded from their study a large group of hospitalized C-19 patients, the bulk of whom were likely vaccinated.

About half of the omitted group and 27% of the C-19 patients in these hospitals were people with “immunocompromising conditions,” such as cancer, HIV, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, scleroderma, and Crohn’s disease. In the words of an FDA official and 18 other coauthors published in a medical journal, “immunocompromised individuals” were “prioritized for early immunization” and are “plausibly more likely to be offered and seek vaccination” because they are highly vulnerable to C-19.

On Sept. 21, Just Facts asked Dr. Wesley Self, the lead author of the study, to release the data on the vaccination status of the C-19 patients with immunocompromising conditions. He has not replied.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/a-family-affair

Last year, I was asked by Hillsdale College to participate in their online symposium “Race in America: History and Controversies.” I prepared a talk about the black family that gave me the opportunity to outline the complex relationship between what goes on in black families and the larger social fabric in which those families are embedded. My ideas about these matters go all the way back to the economic theories I outlined in my doctoral dissertation at MIT, particularly the notion of “social capital.”

I describe that theory below, but to me the problem comes down to this: Until we recognize that many (though not all) of the economic problems in black communities originate in the social relationships fostered within the family unit, we’re not going to be able to make much headway in solving those problems. And make no mistake, the black family is in crisis. But simply saying that “those people” need to get their acts together and change their behavior is not a sufficient response to the problem. We need to stop thinking of black families who need help as “them” and start thinking of them as what they are: Us. The crisis of the black family is an American crisis. When we abandon black families by offering stern rebukes in place of real solutions, we’re not abandoning “them,” we’re abandoning ourselves.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/beginning-democrats-biden-defeat-merrick-garland-critical-race-theory/

When future historians congregate to conduct their postmortem of the short-lived Biden administration, what date will they pick to mark the crisis that signaled the beginning of the end? I’d like to offer October 4, 2021 for consideration.

In the weeks before, it is true, Biden’s approval rating had been in free fall. (Fun pastime if you’re bored: enter ‘Biden’ and ‘free fall’ into your favorite search engine). There was the world historical disaster of our evacuation of Afghanistan, the nearest parallel to which was not America’s ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 but William Elphinstone’s disastrous evacuation from Kabul in 1842. There was the unfolding crisis at our southern border. The President insisted that the border was ‘closed’ (in the same way that he said that the cost of his doomed, $3.5 trillion spending plan was ‘zero’), but his own officials are prepping for a surge of 400,000 illegals in the month of October. Inflation is at a 30-year high, with no end in sight. Gas, food, housing, clothes: the prices of all are skyrocketing. The President came to office promising to ‘shut down’ COVID, not the country, but since he took office some 250,000 people have died and ineffectual mask mandates, vaccine mandates, St-Anthony-Fauci-certified mandate mandates have proliferated like pussy hats at an anti-Trump rally.

Several weeks ago, writing about the incineration of 10 innocent Afghans (including seven children) in an errant drone strike that the lying US military first said had killed an Isis-K operative, I pondered the proverbial expression ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. Some trace that expression back to Thomas Hobbes, but I suspect the germ of the idea is much older. The basic idea, of course, is that an accumulation of evils is bearable up to a certain point, beyond which even a tiny addition, apparently insignificant, brings sudden disaster.

I wonder if Attorney General Merrick Garland has just supplied the proverbial straw that will send the camel that is the Biden administration crashing to the ground.

Garland was supposed to be a moderate. The Washington Compost assured its readers that there was a ‘98 percent probability that Merrick Garland is “in between” Ginsburg and Scalia. In other words, that he is comparatively moderate’. One of my friends even wrote that he was a ‘superb’ choice to be attorney general.