RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/01/the-cult-of-victimhood-will-destroy-western-civilization/

Human beings are complex social animals who evolved the extraordinary ability to empathize with others—especially in their suffering—which further led to the ability to signal suffering to other humans as a strategy to receive help, resources, and social status. This tactic can be morally desirable. For example, people are more willing to donate to causes, such as GoFundMe, when difficult social circumstances are a factor in the request. A just and moral society is concerned with the welfare of those in low positions through no fault of their own. 

Wherever benefits can be obtained from exhibiting hard-to-verify personal information, however, there will always be cynical and morally obtuse people looking to cash in on the generosity of a well-intended populace. This unfortunate reality is exacerbated by our modern proclivity to use victimhood as an identity.

Victim identities, deserved or undeserved, are said to warrant special care and deference, whereas “privileged” identities are devalued. Victimhood confers a special status that today generates tremendous power; it can be used as justification for retributive acts against “oppressors,” provide an exclusive moral legitimacy or position to speak to certain issues, and function as an excuse for one’s personal wrongdoing or failures. The allure of victim status—because of the leverage it seems to impart to people who want to obtain power and sympathy all at once—should not be underestimated. Seeking this anointed status, would-be victims often exaggerate the severity of offenses or create these offenses themselves.

Recent research into victimhood signaling found individuals who exhibit high degrees of narcissism, psychopathy, personal entitlement, and amoral manipulation. The frequency with which these individuals signal victimhood predicts their willingness to engage in ethically questionable behaviors, such as exaggerating claims about being harmed in an organizational context.

The Victim Hoax Game

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/bidens_militarized_executive_agencies.html
Does the IRS really need all that ammunition?

The Obama-Biden administration stockpiled an arsenal of high-powered weapons in the Executive Branch based on the vision of a civilian national security force.  The stockpile can outfit an army.  The Biden regime controls the trigger to the arsenal.  

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set.  We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,”  Obama said on July 2, 2008.

Non-profit OpentheBooks released a comprehensive oversight report earlier this year titled “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies” (here).  The report estimated “that there are now more federal officers with firearm authority (200,000+) than U.S. Marines (186,000).”  It’s the fulfillment of Obama’s well funded prophecy.

There is clearly no legal authority, requirement, or reason for general administrative agencies, like the Internal Revenue Service, whose power is limited to implementing laws, to have weapons.  Biden plans on expanding the IRS by 87,000 workers.  Will their audit training include marksmanship?

Accountability isn’t a strength of the federal government.  The Pentagon never passed its 2017 audit, nor could the Department of Defense document $22 trillion in expenditures.  Not a vote of confidence when it comes to the executive agencies protecting the decentralized stockpiles of firearms and ammunition.  Weapons could easily fall into the hands of vigilantes like Antifa.  Given the Biden administration’s top-down revolution, it is not unthinkable for agencies to intimidate citizens in gun-toting confrontations, conduct government purges, or supply military-grade weapons to a civilian national security force (paramilitary).

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

In 2015, during the Obama administration, the Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  This decision — which made the final pronouncement on the first major battle about gender confusion — rendered meaningless the distinction between men and women.  It was no longer necessary for a married couple to comprise a male and a female.  In a marriage, there could now be two husbands or two wives.

The weekend prior to this ruling, Bruce Jenner, a former decathlete who won gold in the 1976 Olympics, came out as transgender and won an award for “courage” for doing so.  Thus began the linking of sexual orientation and gender identity that cemented the transformation of LGB to LGBT.  In the following years, Hollywood and the media sought to mainstream transgenderism by highlighting it in TV shows, movies, and articles.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration began pushing legal mandates that characterized gender identification — whether in education, health care, housing, or the military — as a civil rights issue.  An individual’s “gender identification,” not biological sex, would be the criterion for determining admittance to public schools, sports teams, washrooms, locker rooms, showers, dorms, and the like.

The dogmatism and irrational haste surrounding so-called “anti-discriminatory” gender policies and the notion of “gender fluidity” have made it nearly impossible to voice alternative views.  This not only is unhealthy for society, but deprives the gender dysphoric — that is, people who are uncomfortable with their sex — of balanced counseling and a reasonable amount of time to arrive at how they want to be identified and whether they want so-called “sex change” surgery.  As a matter of course, counselors driven by the false narrative of “trapped in the wrong body” impose gender reassignment on confused youths, often causing untold trauma.

https://victorhanson.com/eeyores-cabinet-revolution-without-the-middle-class/

The beleaguered middle class, especially those of the suburbs, for the most part did not join rioting radicalized youths and inner-city minorities in the violence, looting, and destruction, even as their businesses were often targeted, and jobs lost.

Some small stores that had somehow endured the two months of shutdowns, did not survive the flames and break-ins that devoured entire city blocks from Santa Monica to Minneapolis. It was also no accident that many of the nation’s wealthiest, from enclaves in Malibu, Silicon Valley, and Manhattan, played the Jacobin role among the French aristocracy, and so cheered on the violent protests, assured that they were exempt from the violent ramifications of their own ideology.

Certainly, while there was expressed outrage about reports of the use of riot gas in dispersing violent protestors in the nation’s capital, few even noticed that the Beverly Hills police department stopped all would-be Black Lives Matter protestors aimed at Beverly Hills, through the generous use of tear gas.

In reductionist terms, the violence was medieval. The underclass attacked the sustenance of the middle class, while the progressive upper class virtue signaled the protests from their secure keeps. Disenchanted and mostly white youth found a new relevance for their education as megaphones for violence, in a loud and visible fashion that working at Starbucks or Target had never offered. Their foot soldiers who looted on television were all too often the urban and minority underclass.

So, in bitter irony, an entrenched feudalism was apparent even in the new resistance society—as the more educated middle class condescendingly directed the noncredentialled poorer to new looting grounds.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/terry-mcauliffe-faith-experts/

Parents shouldn’t control schools, he says, but what about when expertise is wrong?

Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former governor and Democratic power broker, is seeking to return to his old job in 2021. Polls show him narrowly ahead of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, by a one- to four-point margin.

That is by no means a safe distance for McAuliffe in a state that is widely understood to reflect national sentiment. Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, one year ahead of the congressional midterms, will be the first major contest held in the blazing light of Biden’s constitutional bonfire.

Many Americans believe that the government is absconding with their rights and liberties, and high on the list of stolen articles is their right to have some say in the education of their children. School boards in almost every state have been visited by throngs of citizens outraged over the imposition of curricula infused with the 1619 Project, critical race theory, the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda and other approaches that characterize the country as systemically racist. Many of those parents are also unhappy over their schools’ embrace of transgenderism and aggressive mask mandates.

Virginia has been no exception. Fairfax and Loudoun county school districts are frontline battlegrounds in the fight over curricula. Videos of parent rebellions and the heavy-handed responses of school boards have racked up millions of hits. Fairfax and Loudoun are adjacent in the metropolitan DC area. They are part of must-win Northern Virginia if McAuliffe is to prevail over Youngkin.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17811/hunter-biden-corruption

It is the latest in a string of scams Hunter Biden has undertaken. First, it was his being named, with no expertise whatsoever in either Ukraine or the oil and gas business, to the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company under investigation for fraud. Then it was the deluxe payday in 2012 for his Rosemont-Seneca real estate investment partnership, which was bankrolled to the tune of more than $1.5 billion by Chinese investors with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

It is genius-level corruption, an ethical nightmare for the White House, and a masterpiece of congressional and media dereliction of duty.

Bergès himself has said he is eager to expand his business into the Chinese market. Who will know if China’s art-loving billionaires, all connected deeply to the Communist Party and in some cases to the Chinese military, are Hunter’s benefactors?

Are we really supposed to believe that the anonymity of the buyers will remain a tight secret, and that Chinese government-connected buyers will not somehow let the Bidens know they are Hunter’s newest and biggest fans?

Money-laundering in the art market is nothing new. A Senate Homeland Security and Government Oversight committee report last year identified the art market as the “largest legal, unregulated market in the United States” and a significant weakness in the nation’s sanctions and anti-money laundering regimes. Simply put, art transactions are not covered under what’s known as the Bank Secrecy Act, which require financial institutions to maintain anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing controls.

Is there any reason to doubt that the proceeds from Hunter’s artistic payday will somehow once again find their way into the Biden family estate?

Why are they failing to scrutinize what is so obviously a back-door scheme to funnel money to the president’s son from foreign sources? Every American who cares about transparency in government should be outraged.

They say the beauty of art is in the eye of the beholder, but does that apply to corruption as well?

President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has now plunged into the world of international art, with a New York gallery owner brokering art sales for the rare, emerging talent. Apparently, Hunter’s paintings might sell for as much as $500,000 to various anonymous aficionados, according to Hunter’s new art dealer, Georges Bergès.