RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/08/who_should_compete_in_womens_sports_150762.html

“What is a woman?” “Can a man get pregnant?” Questions like those are frequently raised at Senate hearings for progressive nominees to the federal bench or Cabinet positions. Republicans pose them for a reason. They know the witnesses will fumble the answers.

Some try to wriggle out with circumlocutions, offering only convoluted mumbling. That works brilliantly for French academic articles but not so well for U.S. Senate hearings. Other witnesses, mostly judicial nominees, claim they cannot answer because the questions might come before them in future cases. They breathe a sigh of relief since their real motto is “Loose lips sink ships.”

Often, Republicans discover the witnesses have already proclaimed their views in opinion pieces, social media posts, or academic articles when they were appealing to like-minded audiences on the left. When the audience is more skeptical, however, they are less eager to repeat those answers or to defend them.

Progressive witnesses may not have answers, but ordinary voters certainly do. They tell pollsters that men cannot get pregnant. Shocking, I know. They think it is ludicrous to place tampons in men’s bathrooms, which some universities and elite high schools do now.

The question of “who is a woman?” is more vexed. The reason is that common sense and cultural tradition point in one direction (“he was born a male and that’s what he is”) but those are opposed by another tradition: our respect for human autonomy. The Western values of human autonomy and deference for individual choices mean we normally acknowledge an adult’s self-identification. (Here is a hard question, though. If my autonomy is to be respected on issues of self-identification, why can’t I simply identify myself as an African American or Native American, even if there is no DNA evidence of that identity? Why shouldn’t that be my choice, just like gender? Yet self-identification as a racial minority without that bloodline is fiercely condemned as a malicious fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, or Ward Churchill.)

These issues are far from settled politically. If an adult male identifies as a woman, many people say, “So be it. Live and let live.” Others are more dubious. Still others reject it outright.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/08/is-the-great-illusion-in-ruins/

In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.

Americans were then set to witness a great experiment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?

The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.

But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.

Who was running things?

The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/marxist_globalists_will_resort_to_terror_and_violence.html

It is important to understand that censorship does not occur in a vacuum.  It is a symptom of a worsening disease.  It is an early indicator of the political repression to come.  Like a canary in a coal mine, the criminalization of speech forewarns that State-sponsored terror and murder are not far away.  First, certain words and thoughts are banned.  Next, certain people are rounded up and imprisoned.  Finally, certain “enemies of the State” are executed quite publicly.  The imposition of fear supersedes the rule of law.  Terrorism undergirds social order.  Oppression replaces popular support.

What is happening in the West today is a concentrated push for global communism.  We could bicker about precise definitions — whether we are under attack from Marxists, socialists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, or other “revolutionaries” — but the end goal is clear.  A small group of global “elites” seek to use ideological and economic leverage to centralize political power and direct all human activity.  They seek the abolition of private property.  They seek absolute control over individual lives and local communities.  They are rebuilding twentieth-century totalitarianism with the privacy-destroying surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century.  

Most Western nations are working together to promote a public vision that achieves their private totalitarian goals.  Governments do not care about “hate speech”; they are dedicated to seizing control of the press, punishing dissent, censoring political opposition, and regulating public debate.  Governments do not care about “climate change”; they are dedicated to seizing control over all economic activity by first establishing a monopoly on available energy.  Governments do not care about “systemic racism,” “social justice,” or “income inequality”; they are dedicated to maximizing social divisions and distorting the meaning of fundamental rights, so that they may undermine long-cherished personal liberties.  Governments do not care about “gun violence”; they are dedicated to disarming their populations and making it impossible for them to fight back against tyranny.  Governments do not care about minimizing vicious and costly wars; they are dedicated to distracting their citizens with false threats to their personal security.  Governments do not care about maintaining the integrity and value of their monetary currencies; they are dedicated to printing and spending money that inflates household costs, taxes middle class savings, maximizes Wall Street profits, and increases welfare dependency.  Governments do not need to create central bank digital currencies to stave off economic disaster; they are dedicated to creating economic disasters, so that they can justify a future communist system that runs on privacy-destroying CBDCs.  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/07/navigating-the-vibe-shift-of-a-cultural-reckoning/

We have been hearing a lot about a “vibe shift” in American culture recently. The phrase has been around for a while. It gained new currency after the commentator Santiago Pliego wrote an essay about the phenomenon, and Tucker Carlson had him on his show to talk about it.

I recommend both.  For one thing, they offer notes of cheerfulness (I almost said “optimism,” but optimism is Dr. Pangloss’s failing) in the midst of our sea of gloominess and despondency. According to Pliego, Americans are awakening from their “dogmatic slumbers,” where the dogmas in question are the rancid pieties of the so-called “progressive” establishment. Have you checked your privilege today, Comrade? How are your pronouns holding up? What have you done to combat “whiteness,” “toxic masculinity,” and “climate change?”

The air of unreality is as unmistakable as it is noxious, and I think Pliego is right that the modification in the ambient vibrations—to the extent that one is underway—“is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.”

I like all those things—the items on the list of affirmations just as much as the tally of rejections.  Pliego admits that the shift he discerns may be ephemeral, though he is emphatic about his hope that the inklings of change he discerns are strong enough to last and effectively challenge what has become the dominant narrative in our culture.

I, too, have sensed a sea change abroad.  This forthright manifesto by Newsmax’s Carl Higbie is a representative declaration of the New Resistance.

But I also sense a robust resistance to the resistance, an increasingly agitated effort to tamp down and discredit anything or anyone that dares to wake up from wokeness.

That exercise in vibe stiffening takes place around the electric nodes of our culture war.  The carefully manicured narrative surrounding the January 6 entertainment, for example, has become increasingly tattered in recent months as revelation after revelation has undercut, contradicted, or exploded the official “insurrection” narrative. True, there were skeptics from the very beginning (I was one).  But the succeeding months and years—thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of investigative reporters like Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie—have knocked one pillar after the next out from under the official account of what happened during those few hours in and around the Capitol. Remember the “pipe bombs” that were supposedly planted by “insurrectionists” that day? It turns out they were almost certainly dummy explosives planted by government agents.

https://nypost.com/2024/04/04/opinion/up-close-and-too-personal-with-americas-fentanyl-epidemic-where-new-york-is-ground-zero/

It is very easy to find fentanyl in New York.The drug that in 2022 alone killed nearly 110,000 Americans is readily available right here on the streets of this city.Over the past the year, I’ve been investigating the spread of this lethal drug across this country .Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has a potency many hundreds of times that of morphine.

Largely made in China, its strength means it is easy to transport huge quantities of the drug. It floods into this country, mainly through Mexico.

One recent evening in New York, I headed over to OnPoint, a supervised drug injection site in Washington Heights.

The controversial facility allows addicts to shoot up under “safe” conditions, with staff on hand to revive users if they overdose.

These “safe use” facilities are still in the experimental phase, with many critics as well as supporters.

But, inevitably, it is a meeting place for drug addicts.

And although people are not meant to deal drugs inside the facility, inevitably OnPoint is a focal point for people who are using the most lethal drugs.

Hanging around outside after dark, it didn’t take me long to find someone who was using fentanyl.

He led me over to the park opposite to show me where people were coming to meet dealers.

While I was there, I watched a steady stream of people (including a couple pushing a stroller) going into the darkened park. For one reason alone.

Then, right there in the middle of the street, this man started tourniquetting his arm, getting out a needle and burning something up in a container with a lighter.

What was it?

“Fentanyl,” he explained.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fetterman-is-the-democrats-stand-up-guy/

I was wrong about John Fetterman. I misjudged the man’s ability, his character, and his strength. Writing an encomium to a reliably Democratic senator is an odd position for a conservative opinion writer to find himself in, and yet I have done so before. Given current events, however, it feels like a particularly appropriate time to reiterate the point, and explain why I missed so badly on him initially.

It was overdetermined, really; I was deeply skeptical of Fetterman’s ability to serve as senator after his stroke while on the campaign trail in 2022. I never much cared for his working-man shtick — his personal dress habits may be slovenly, but he comes from family money. And I had my partisan desires regardless. (That this put me in the awkward position of preferring a quack TV doctor from New Jersey was merely another one of the many indignities Republicans have had heaped upon them since 2015.) And when Fetterman got to Washington, his first move of note was having the Senate dress code temporarily revised to allow his own peculiar brand of sweatpants chic, which didn’t help either.

But even at the time, one thing was pleasantly clear: Fetterman was making a surprisingly strong recovery from his stroke and, equally as surprising, from the crippling depression that accompanied it. (In all honesty, that was the most important thing of all.) And then, he started going a little bit off the reservation as well: When Senator Robert Menendez was indicted in one of the most amusingly sleazy corruption scandals of recent New Jersey history, which is saying something, Fetterman literally jumped the line ahead of anyone in the Republican Party not only to denounce Menendez but also to clown on him brutally in public. (“Today sure would be a great day to resign, Bob!” remains my favorite political line of 2023, and it was spoken by Fetterman to Menendez as they were sharing an escalator in the Capitol building.)

October 7 was his public turning point, however: Since that awful day, he has been a genuine beacon of moral clarity in the midst of a maelstrom of confusion enveloping the Left as the Gaza war unfolds.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/05/d-c-jury-convicts-great-grandma-for-walking-around-the-capitol-for-10-minutes-on-jan-6/

After being strung up on charges by President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), a 71-year-old great-grandmother may be thrown in jail because she walked around the Capitol for a few minutes on Jan. 6, 2021.

Rebecca Lavrenz was convicted on four counts Thursday after just three days of jury deliberation for entering the Capitol on J6. Lavrenz entered the building through an open door around 2:43 p.m., according to the official statement of facts.

Lavrenz told The American Spectator‘s Jack Cashill that she “felt that if those doors [on the east side of the building] opened I was supposed to go through.”

Lavrenz exited the Capitol around 2:53 p.m., just 10 minutes after entering, having briefly spoken to at least one Capitol Police Officer before leaving, according to the statement of facts.

Two FBI agents showed up on April 19, 2021, to Lavrenz’s home in Colorado. Lavrenz told the agents she was in the middle of baking a cake for her son and asked if they could return at a different time, according to The American Spectator. The agents returned one week later for a “consensual interview,” according to the statement of facts.

After months of investigation, agents reportedly told Lavrenz she should be grateful the weaponized agency would only charge the self-described “praying great-grandmother” with four misdemeanor charges for entering a building her tax dollars pay for.

“Glad?” Lavrenz reportedly said. “I shouldn’t be charged with anything.”

Lavrenz was charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a capitol; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol, according to the criminal complaint.

https://quillette.com/2024/04/04/innovation-utilitarianism-conor-mckinley-tesla/

Utilitarianism is currently en vogue. Two of its important contentions are that all lives have equal value and that decisions should be evaluated on how much they raise average well-being (so-called utility). This philosophy underpins many left-wing economic policies because the same amount of money has more value to a poor person than to a rich one. For example, if you take $100 from Jeff Bezos and give it to a starving artist, Bezos won’t even notice but the artist will have ramen for weeks, and average utility will therefore increase. This is probably the rationale behind Bernie Sanders’ claim that the “obscene level of income and wealth inequality in America is a profoundly moral issue that we cannot continue to ignore.” Implicit in this is the assumption that the redistribution of wealth would provide much more benefit to the poor than it would harm the rich.

The problem is that this is only true if we restrict our view to the domestic arena. When inequality is measured on a global scale, most people in the developed world can be considered affluent. If we include foreigners into our utility calculus, we should recommend very different policies: in particular, we should loosen regulations on biotech; we should oppose excessive unionisation; and we should increase the number of highly skilled immigrants we accept.

All these policies promote the most effective foreign aid programme ever discovered: innovation. Figuring out how to do things is expensive, but once we develop that knowledge, it is relatively cheap to distribute. For example, US research institutions and venture capitalists have poured billions into AI research and, as a result, ChatGPT has given every kid with access to the Internet a personal tutor that is an expert in every subject. There is well documented research to show that this effect, known as “catch-up growth,” partially explains why emerging markets grow faster than developed ones. They can just copy what has already worked for us.

Biotech

Developing countries are generally unable to invest large amounts into the research and development of new drugs. But, thanks to innovation in the US, Japan, and Europe, this has not stopped them from accessing vaccines against polio, malaria, smallpox, and COVID-19.

Pharmaceutical companies get lots of bad press for their high profit margins on successful drugs (think of Martin Shkreli). But these criticisms fail to consider the underlying pharmaceutical business model: successful drugs have to pay for all the drugs that never made it to market.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

As Americans we have choices, except when we don’t. When liberty is at risk, we have a duty to ensure that freedom reigns. In his Farewell Address (published in September 1796), George Washington wrote: “The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts – of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” There are times when liberty needs defending.

While Washington, in the same Address, warned against foreign entanglements, he could not have foreseen how the world would shrink. By the dawn of the 20th Century, steamships and later air travel shortened distances across the Atlantic and Pacific, encouraging commerce, trade and tourism. Obligations, embedded in treaties and alliances, extended beyond our borders. By the late 1930s Europe was mired in a second world war, brought about by Hitler’s hatred for Jews and his desire for lebensraum – living space. Over the course of almost six years he and his NAZIs murdered seven million Jews. At its peak, in November 1942, Germany dominated Europe. Apart from the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal, Germany’s occupation extended 2,500 miles, from Brittany east to Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and 2,100 miles from Helsinki south to Athens. As well, they controlled a good part of North Africa.

On December 7, 1941 Japan attacked our naval base at Pearl Harbor. The next day, the U.S. declared war on Japan. In his address to Congress on December 8, President Roosevelt committed the United States: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.”  Three days later, Germany declared war on the United States. Two years later, by early 1944, the momentum of the War, which in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East was in its fifth year, favored the Allies. Even so, some of its costliest battles – the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima – were still in the future. Millions of soldiers and civilians were yet to die.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/drama-over-trumps-presidential-records-act-defense-in-florida-case/

I will have a lot more to say in the weekend column about Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s dyspeptic response to Judge Aileen Cannon’s order – which I posted about on Tuesday – requiring prosecutors to respond with proposed jury instructions to two factual scenarios she posited. Both involved the 32 felony charges of unlawfully retaining national-defense intelligence in Smith’s Mar-a-Lago indictment against Donald Trump.

As I observed in the post, Smith had to be dumbfounded by Judge Cannon’s order because the two scenarios she laid out seemed to accept some or all of the former president’s Presidential Records Act (PRA) defense. Indeed, the second scenario appears to buy it wholesale — advising the parties to propose jury instructions on the assumptions that (a) a president is deemed to have designated documents as personal records simply by having caused them to be removed from government safekeeping, and (b) that a president’s decision to designate materials as personal records (which he can keep), rather than presidential records (government property that must be archived) is unreviewable by a court or jury. If that’s the law, Trump gets acquitted on the document-retention counts.

The first scenario is better for Smith in that it anticipates that the jury may review a presidential designation of personal (rather than presidential) records by applying the PRA (i.e., reading Congress’s definitions of personal and presidential records). Nevertheless, although Trump could (and probably would) be convicted in this scenario, Smith objects to it because he believes the PRA is irrelevant to the case — the question of whether Trump was in unauthorized possession of the documents is controlled by the Espionage Act’s plain terms and the executive order that governs handling of classified documents (EO 13256, promulgated at the direction of Congress in §3161 of classified-information law). For what it’s worth, I think Smith is substantially correct about that (see, e.g., here and here).

Given Smith’s notorious aggressiveness (which the Supreme Court took note of in unanimously reversing a conviction he’d gotten in United States v. McDonnell), the special counsel’s response to Cannon was sharp and monitory.