RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

A problem endemic to successful countries is the need to create issues that get people excited when things are going relatively well. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, except for a few years following 9/11, the United States has not faced a major crisis that galvanized and unified the nation. In 2008, we faced a credit crisis. It could have undone the global financial system but, truth be told, the crisis was over by the end of calendar year 2008 when the TED spread – a calculation used to measure risk in financial markets – narrowed sharply from its October-November highs, and high-yield bonds began to rally. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 last year was seized by politicians and called a crisis. A (deliberate?) confusion of correlation with causation regarding reported deaths was used as an excuse to expand governmental power and curtail individual rights. Despite conventional opinion, however, we do not know if shutting down the economy did more harm than good.

The United States has achieved high living standards and diminished poverty because of capitalism and individual freedom. Is everything perfect? No. Should we rest on our laurels? Of course not. There is always more to be done. But the world, and especially the West, is richer and more at peace than at any time in history, which is a problem for politicians whose campaigns are all about needed change.

It is true that external problems lurk. China threatens peace in the western Pacific. Russia is flexing its muscles along borders of its old empire in Ukraine. Iran, an impoverished state with little to risk and much to gain, is disrupting the Middle East with a revival of its nuclear program. North Korea, another state so impoverished it has little to lose, is led by a man who in a normal country would be committed.

However, in this time of relative prosperity and peace, Progressives convert addressable issues into partisan crises. While there are several, two, in my opinion, are forefront: race and climate. Others include policing, guns and immigration, with the latter having become a serious problem on our southern border. Methods used to create and promote crises are insidious: claim the moral high ground, censor speech, disallow gender-specific pronouns and cancel history. A consequence is the intimidation (and worse) of those in academia, corporate offices, entertainment, and professional sports who do not hew to an approved narrative.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17317/hunter-biden-laptop

The book’s [Secret Empires] conclusions were based on reconstructions of timelines, records obtained through hard work done on location in foreign countries. Yet, some in the media still accused us of engaging in a “witch hunt” designed simply to embarrass the family of now-President Joe Biden.

Law enforcement sources have since confirmed a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes, but that actually means they are looking not just at his taxes, but at the money he made that he may or may not have declared on his taxes. That investigation continues.

What emerges from all of this clearly shows what I call the “Biden business model,” in which the Biden family seems to trade off the Biden name, Biden connections, and the Biden access.

Recently, Hunter Biden has sat for several interviews to discuss his new memoir about his struggles with drug addiction. The investigative reporter in me cannot resist pointing out these interviews were done by CBS News, owned by ViacomCBS, which also owns Simon & Schuster, the publisher of his new book. He mostly dodged questions about the laptop.

[T]he deeper question that should concern us more… is whether he is covering for his father. Emails reviewed by Sen. Ron Johnson’s committee during its investigation referenced a consultant writing to Hunter Biden about a proposed partnership with Chinese businessmen. The email says Hunter will receive a 20% equity in the partnership, plus a 10% stake “held by H for the big guy?”

The identity of “the big guy” has not been established. But… [t]he modern model of corruption in politics is rarely done in a straight line, but along the branches of a family tree. As foreign governments and other interested parties have learned, the way to a politician’s heart is through his family. There is circumstantial evidence in the collection of materials now possessed by the FBI and journalists that Hunter Biden was acting as a cover for business dealings that would benefit his father or at a minimum the Biden family estate, which includes his father.

Investigative journalism mostly reconstructs events and exchanges from hidden scraps, obscure records, and third-party documents. Often the best we can do is to show that something bad must have happened based on the coincidences we find in these records. Because reporters are not prosecutors, they cannot issue subpoenas or compel testimony. It is exceedingly rare for a reporter to obtain that “smoking gun.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_dangerous_attack_on_meritocracy.html

The core meritocratic idea — that tasks should be assigned to those most qualified to accomplish them — is, and has been for some time, under attack.  That attack, predictably in the current identity politics-obsessed climate, has been based on race and sex.

Just recently, for example, the CEO of United Airlines proudly announced that United’s new goal for its stable of pilots and co-pilots is that it reflect the demography of United’s passengers.  So if a certain percentage passengers are women, and a certain percentage are black, then the occupants of United’s cockpits should reflect those percentages.  The CEO failed to explain whether United’s current failure to meet those percentages was due to its own race and sex discrimination, or whether instead it was due to such factors as the skills and occupational preferences of women and blacks.  Nor did he explain why anyone, including United’s passengers, should care anything about United’s pilots other than whether they were highly qualified to execute a pilot’s only job, which is to fly and land the plane safely.

The same point applies to the FAA’s policy to “diversify” air traffic controllers.  Air traffic controllers, too, have one task, which is to manage congested skies so that airplanes do not collide and land safely.  The occupants of airplanes care only that they do that task the best that it can be done, and care not a whit about to what race or sex they belong.

This point also applies to the military.  It, too, has a singular task, to win wars and do so at the lowest cost in blood and treasure.  Accomplishing that mission, regardless of the racial, sexual, or sexual orientation of its members, is all citizens should demand of it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/hunter-biden-teach-college-class-public-policy-daniel-greenfield/

Ex-politicians signing up to ‘teach a class’ (actually deliver a few guest lectures while some adjunct does the actual work) is nothing new. Even if it’s easily mockable. But Hunter Biden isn’t an ex-politician or even a politician. He’s a politician’s kid. That’s also not wholly unprecedented. Ask Chelsea Clinton, but at least she put in enough time to build some sort of resume.

Hunter Biden has gone from drug fiend to the classroom in a ridiculously short amount of time while still under FBI investigation.

Hunter Biden is helping teach a class on fake news at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana this fall.

The course titled ‘Media Polarization and Public Policy Impacts’ will include several guest speakers throughout its 10 weeks, including the president’s son.

The course description, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by DailyMail.com, says: ‘America’s rapidly advancing partisan divide is fueled substantially by the growing political polarization increasingly evident in our news media.’

‘This course will explore the current state of the media landscape in the United States and how media polarization, fake news, and the economics of the news business impact public policymaking in Washington, D.C,’ it continues.

Call this a contribution to Hunter’s redemption tour. A completely unjustified and unqualified one. But Hunter is the son of the guy in the White House. And Tulane would be happy to wet its beak. As Tulane notes, it’s got 4 alumni in the new administration, including Rick Levine. And it scored a $1.6 million cancer grant. I’m not saying it’s quid pro quo. But it’s not just the Chinese who get to politicians through their kids.

Hunter spends some time at Tulane. Gets treated like a VIP. And good stuff happens. At the very least Tulane is much more on Biden’s radar.

That’s public policy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/biden-beginning-lloyd-billingsley/

White House resident Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, at the age of 29. Two years later, in 1974, the Delaware Democrat was the subject of a 4,000-plus-word Washingtonian profile, but not for anything he had accomplished in office.

“I have no illusions about why I am such a hot commodity,” Biden told Kitty Kelley.  “I am the youngest man in the Senate and I am also the victim of a tragic fate which makes me very newsworthy.” Biden’s wife Neilia and the couple’s infant daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after Biden’s election in 1972. Biden wanted to resign, but Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield promised him prestigious committee assignments. The grieving newcomer had higher goals in mind.

“I know I can be a good Senator, and I know I can be a good President,” Biden told Kelley. “I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia. And my family still expects me to be there one of these days. With them behind me anything can happen.” As Biden’s sister Valerie explained, “Joey is going to be president someday. He was made to be in the White House. Just you wait and see.”

Biden proclaimed “there is no other walk of life which can do more good for mankind than politics,” but money was also part of it. “I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 a year in this body,” Biden explained in the Senate. “It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt.” That brought a response from William Loeb, editor of the “right wing”  Manchester Union Leader.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/black-supremacy-david-horowitz-and-john-perazzo/

When a white police officer in Ohio shot and killed Ma’Khia Bryant, stopping her from plunging a butcher knife into the chest of an unarmed black teenager, the racial melodrama that is destroying the very fabric of American society reached what the “woke” refer to as an “inflection point.” At that moment, the narrative of the national lynch mob – verdict first, due process be damned – collided with an impossible reality: a white cop saving the life of a black child. Unable to resolve this dilemma, the woke mob simply refused to see it.

It was left to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors to formulate their denial bluntly:

The verdict of George Floyd’s murder was a victory in accountability but not a victory towards abolition [of the police]. While we watched Derek Chauvin be convicted for murder, a Black child named Ma’Khia Bryant was murdered by police, proving there is no justice.

Patrisse Cullors is a racist whose sociopathic premise is: all cops are guilty and all black criminals are innocent. This is also the premise and rationale of all the riots and protests of the year just passed: White cops are racists, and blacks their innocent targets, even if they happen to be armed criminals resisting arrest. Through these ideological blinders, the Ohio event – a white cop rescuing an unarmed black teen about to be murdered by a knife-wielding black teen – was simply impossible. The fact that the knife-wielding black teen was shouting “I’m going to stab the fuck out of you, bitch” as she thrust a butcher knife towards her intended victim’s chest was just inconceivable. If white cops protected black victims from black criminals, the goal of abolishing the police could not be justified.

It is a truism that equality and justice require a single standard by which everyone is judged. There can be no justice if black people are innocent regardless of the facts, and whites are guilty despite them. This is a simple truth that everyone recognizes – except when it comes to race. Universally absent from such discussions, therefore, is a taboo subject: black racism. Yet, it is an incontrovertible fact that the overwhelming majority of homicides against blacks are committed by blacks. Moreover, the largest overtly racist organization in America today is black. The Nation of Islam is a racist religion, headed by America’s most virulent, anti-Semitic, anti-white, anti-gay bigot, who is also black: Louis Farrakhan. According to Wikipedia, the Nation of Islam has an estimated 50,000 members; currently, according to the same source, the Ku Klux Klan has 3,000. 

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/04/27/critical_race_theory_is_about_to_face_its_days_in_court_774290.html

As recently as last summer, few people outside academia had heard of critical race theory, whose central claim is that racism, not liberty, is the founding value and guiding vision of American society. Then, President Trump issued an executive order last September banning the teaching of this “malign ideology” to federal employees and federal contractors.

Trump’s ban was blocked by a federal judge in December and immediately revoked by Joe Biden upon occupying the White House in January. Since then, federal agencies and federal contractors have resumed staff training on unconscious bias, microaggressions, systemic racism and white privilege – some of the most common but also most disputed concepts associated with the four-decade-old academic theory.

Now critical race theory is about to face a major real-world test: a spate of lawsuits alleging that it encourages discrimination and other illegal policies targeting whites, males and Christians. But unlike Trump’s executive order, which ran into First Amendment problems by prohibiting controversial speech, the lawsuits name specific policies and practices that allegedly discriminate, harass, blame and humiliate people based on their race.

The common thread of these legal challenges is the inescapable logic that making accommodations for critical race theory will erode the nation’s anti-discrimination law as it has developed since the 1960s. This would mean replacing the colorblind ideal of treating all people equally, which has been widely viewed as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, with a contrary strategy: implementing race-based policies, which can range from affirmative action to reparations for compensating African Americans for the injustices of the past and for producing equitable outcomes in the future.

“Critical race theory is a Trojan horse of sorts,” said David Pivtorak, a Los Angeles lawyer representing two white men who are suing two California state environment agencies. “It disguises itself as the gold standard of fairness and justice but, in fact, relies on vilification and the idea of permanent oppressor and oppressed races. Its goal is not ensuring that all people play by the same rules, regardless of race, but equity, which is a euphemism for race-based outcomes.”

About a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018, with another wave planned this summer by conservative public interest law firms and private attorneys. Their goal is to draw attention to some of the more pronounced practices and win court judgments to slow down the spread of CRT in K-12 schools, government agencies other organizations.

https://www.city-journal.org/bigots-within-antiracist-ranks

Most Americans agree that racism in any form is abhorrent. But in recent weeks, far too many who call themselves “antiracists” have inflamed racial tensions with antiwhite bigotry that’s every bit as disgusting as what they claim to oppose. When will the antiracists start rooting out the bigots in their own ranks?

When Robert Long, a 21-year-old Georgia man, killed eight people, six of them Asian, at three spas on March 16, prominent figures on the left reflexively branded it an anti-Asian hate crime. In a piece for The Root titled, “Whiteness is a Pandemic,” Damon Young wrote after the Georgia killings, “Whiteness is a public health crisis. . . . It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air . . . it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars . . . and it kills people.”

There was a palpable sense of disappointment in the media when Georgia police threw cold water on the theory that Long was motivated by animus toward Asians. Many on the left stuck to this story against all evidence, pretending that statements by police and others who knew Long well must have been wrong. Days later, when early news leaked out of Boulder, Colorado that ten people were killed in a mass shooting, a CNN anchor rushed to assert that “another white male” appeared to be responsible. Meena Harris, a prominent lawyer and Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”

The Nation published a piece by a woman who wrote, “One of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life.” And how about the bizarre poem penned by the (Democratic) mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, who lambasted her city as a place “anchored in white supremacy” that “rapes you” and “suffocates your hopes and dreams.”

When the Boulder assailant turned out to be a Syrian immigrant, progressives pivoted to their second favorite obsession after race: gun control, because every tragedy must be exploited to advance preferred narratives. Police shootings aren’t noteworthy unless the cop is white and the victim is black. The Oregonian all but acknowledged this recently after Portland police killed a white man, tweeting that it was identifying his race “in light of social unrest prompted by police shootings of Black people.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/28/america-is-in-the-hands-of-its-most-foolish-rather-than-its-finest/

Mark Jan. 20, 2021, as the day the U.S. fell under the control of the lousiest presidential administration of our lifetimes, if not our history. Heaven help us to get past this bunch in Washington that is either so inept, or so blinded by its radical ideology, that it’s ushering the country into an era of decline.

Where to begin? How about with John Kerry? President Joe Biden’s climate envoy believes that “even if we get to net zero, we still have to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” So no CO2, get rid of it all? Was this a slip of the tongue? A misstatement that can happen to anyone? Or simply yet another politician on the left gone mad?

More likely the latter. As our friend Steve Milloy at junkscience.com pointed out, Kerry actually made the same nonsensical statement twice at last week’s virtual climate summit to emphasize his point.

Another friend, Anthony Watts of the world’s most widely read global warming website, reminds us Kerry “said essentially the same thing back in 2015” when arguing – correctly – that no matter what the West does, carbon emissions will still be pouring out of the developing world.

Whether or not Kerry was making this exact same point last week, or was absurdly suggesting a zero-CO2 Earth, matters little. The inanity, however, does. How did we allow ourselves to be saddled with such a character?

Likewise, Kerry’s behavior as secretary of state under Barack Obama indicates he’s a man who cannot be trusted. He reportedly warned Iran about hundreds of Israeli covert attacks on the terrorist regime’s interests in Syria while working for that administration. If reports are accurate – and given the history of Democrats in general and Kerry in particular, there’s good reason to believe they are – then he provided aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States. None from the America-after-all-others administration dare call it treason, though.