RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-tim-scott-11620078729?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

Kamala Harris went first. In the Republican response to Joe Biden’s address to Congress, Sen. Tim Scott avowed that America “is not a racist country.” The next day on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the vice president was asked if she agreed with him.

“I don’t think America is a racist country,” she said, “but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.”

The following day, it was President Biden’s turn. In an interview with NBC’s “Today,” he, too, was asked about Mr. Scott’s characterization—and he, too, agreed. “I don’t think America’s racist,” he said, “but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow [laws], and before that slavery, have had a cost, and we have to deal with it.”

Though no one was impolite enough to bring it up, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris would never have said what they did if the black Republican senator from South Carolina hadn’t used his moment to force their hands. Essentially, he dared them to speak aloud the logical conclusion from all their repeated references to systemic racism and the threat of white supremacy. Wisely recognizing that this would be political poison, they flinched.

How different from only two weeks ago, when a Columbus, Ohio, police officer saved the life of a black teenager by shooting another black teen about to stab her. Asked about it, White House press secretary Jen Psaki went right for the progressive go-to: “Black women and girls, like black men and boys, experience higher rates of police violence.”

That’s the trouble with narratives. They are one size fits all, with no room for considering the individual case on its merits and particular circumstances. This is what Mr. Scott was referring to when he suggested race is used as “a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants”—by slamming anyone who raises an inconvenient fact as racist or dismissing speech as invalid based solely on the speaker’s racial identity.

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/america-courts-disaster-by-rewarding?token=eyJ

Is a country that rewards failure, corruption, and deceit destined to fail?

This disquieting question comes to mind when one considers how members of the commanding heights of society have increasingly failed—at least on merit—upward.

Some recent news items illustrate this point.

The Biden administration has seen a number of its nominees confirmed, with varying Republican support, in spite of their checkered records.

Samantha Power, the U.N. ambassador during the Obama administration, was found to have made several hundred seemingly unjustifiable unmasking requests—exposing the name of someone incidentally recorded by government surveillance—and apparently lied about one such series of requests, regarding retired Gen. Mike Flynn, in testimony to Congress. Her inglorious record spans from our shores to Israel, Syria, and well beyond the Levant.

Power was rewarded by being confirmed to head the U.S. Agency for International Development and is likely to be seated on the National Security Council.

Lisa Monaco, the former Obama administration homeland security adviser, played a critical role in word and deed in propagating Russiagate/Spygate. She was rewarded by being confirmed as deputy attorney general, where she is expected to take a major role in combating domestic violent extremism. There are indications that this effort could lead to the targeting of like-minded political dissenters to the ones wrongfully ensnared in Russiagate/Spygate.

Setting aside Biden administration nominees, word broke last week that Mary McCord, a former senior Obama Department of Justice official responsible for rubberstamping the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications to spy on Carter Page, helping oversee the Crossfire Hurricane operation, and like Power, targeting Flynn, was named to the eight-member amici curiae of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Amicus curiae are responsible for advising the FISC on critical matters, including, ironically, legal arguments advancing the protection of civil liberties.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/05/bidens-massive-hidden-tax-hike-that-well-all-have-to-pay/

You’re about to get hit with a huge tax. No it’s not to pay for the new infrastructure bill or the Green New Deal, which will cost trillions of dollars in new taxes, though they do play a role. Nor does it come from paying for the trillions of COVID-19 “stimulus” packages that Congress has passed, even as the economy roared out of its recession late last year. No, this tax is far more insidious than all that.

It’s inflation. A tax that costs everyone dearly, rich and poor alike.

Americans have gotten used to having little or no inflation. They’ve forgotten how awful it is. Economically speaking, it’s the most devastating of all taxes, because it comes entirely from government. And citizens don’t realize they’re paying it until too late.

If you’re under 45, you might not understand. After all, more than 90% of your life has been spent with declining or even non-existent inflation. When you got a raise, your pay really went up. And when you went to the store to buy things, prices often were below where they were a year earlier.

But guess what? With a tidal wave of tax hikes and new spending from the Biden Democrats, a raft of new “green” federal regulations on the way, key global shortages of foodstuffs, a rising minimum wage, and tight markets for industrial goods such as lumber, steel and even microchips, not to mention a Fed that loves to print money, we may be on the verge of an inflation surge that could take down our financial markets and cut deeply into average Americans’ standard of living.

Wait until the ads finish….

https://www.aol.com/news/video-shows-stranger-attacking-asian-115308599.html

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/04/the_curious_case_of_the_asian_american_victim_774865.html

The mass shooting in Atlanta on March 16, which took the lives of six Asian women among the eight victims, appears to be a one-off event – the violent act of a deeply troubled 21-year-old man who, according to what he told the police, was trying to wipe away sexual temptation, in the form of massage parlors that he felt guilty patronizing.

But that’s not how the incident was treated by the Asian American commentariat. Instead, a consensus quickly formed among journalists, scholars, and cultural figures writing op-eds and giving broadcast interviews that the shooting represented a pervasive, historical victimization by Asian people at the hands of the white majority. It was almost as if shootings of Asian women by white gunmen were an everyday occurrence, rather than a singular, exceedingly rare event.

Bee Nguyen, the first Asian woman to be elected to the George state assembly, declared at a rally four days after the shooting that the incident requires us “to demand justice not only for these victims but for all victims of white supremacy.” The Asian-American Association of Massachusetts, a supposedly nonpartisan group established by the state legislature, issued a statement blaming the attack on “misogyny, white supremacy, and the historical portrayal of Asians as the ‘Yellow Peril.’”

The Korean American novelist R.O. Kwon wrote a “letter to my fellow Asian women whose hearts are breaking,” published in Vanity Fair, saying that the Atlanta murders represented “the passing of women shot for what they looked like, killed by a racist gunman and by this country’s white supremacy.”

Two days after the attack, the page one headline in The New York Times read, “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women,” with the article quoting several women excoriating the Atlanta police for even thinking that the massage parlor shootings may not have been racially motivated. There were no views on the other side of the issue in the Times coverage. Similarly in a New York Times podcast, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong said, “We have also been victims to systemic racism throughout history,” except, she continued, “we have been conditioned to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

“I think that came from the white supremacist system that we live in,” she added.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/04/the_politics_of_attacking_t

After a week of vicious personal attacks on Sen. Tim Scott, it’s time to step back and ask what’s really going on here. Why such ferocious pushback after Scott’s calm rebuttal to President Biden’s speech to Congress? Why are the assaults so nasty, so personal? What are the political implications?

One implication should be clear, but another is well hidden. The obvious one is the attacks are meant to keep Black voters firmly within the Democratic coalition. Condemning dissidents like Scott as “race traitors” implies that the only way to keep faith with Black America is to support Democrats and their progressive agenda.

This unified, enthusiastic support from African Americans is crucial for the party to win elections in purple states. Scott is challenging that unanimity. Donald Trump did, too, and made some inroads, but Scott is a far more congenial messenger. He’s a happy warrior with an impressive background and a record of accomplishment, personal and professional.

Related movements, such as “Blexit” (Black Exit from the Democratic Party), don’t have to be large to be politically important. Small inroads matter because our electorate is so evenly divided, so many contests are tight, and Democrats can win only if (1) Blacks turn out in very large numbers and (2) almost all of them vote Democratic.

That’s also why Democrats are furious about Georgia’s new voting law. Of course, they genuinely believe it is an obstacle to Black voting. But there’s another, equally important reason. They think attacking the law shows African Americans across the country (and many progressives) that the Democratic Party really cares about them and that Republicans are racist. This PR campaign has led to some ludicrous hyperbole, such as President Biden calling the law “Jim Crow 2.0.” That’s an insult to people who actually suffered through Jim Crow, who were denied the vote, education, good jobs, and dignity under that legal regime (which lasted from the 1890s until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act).

How does Sen. Scott threaten this Democratic coalition? Both by conveying his own views so effectively and by encouraging other prominent Blacks to join him. The more such voices, the harder it is to marginalize them as “tokens.” The more who speak out, the more socially acceptable it is for African Americans to vote Republican. The more traction this movement gains, the more dangerous for Democrats. Again, a small shift in this key constituency could matter.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/two-months-later-hows-the-lifting-of-the-mask-mandate-going-in-texas/

When Texas governor Greg Abbott lifted the state’s mask mandate on March 2, he was simply leaving it up to individual businesses to decide whether they wanted to require masks depending on circumstances. As expressed by Beto O’Rourke, who called the GOP a “cult of death,” here was the typically temperate response of many in the Democratic Party and its media wing, otherwise known as “the media”:

They literally want to sacrifice the lives of our fellow Texans, for I don’t know, for political gain? To satisfy certain powerful interests within the state? This isn’t hyperbole. You heard our lieutenant governor, arguably one of the most powerful positions in the state of Texas, say on Fox News at the beginning of the pandemic, we are willing to die. Old people are willing to sacrifice their lives in order for the economy to reopen. . . . Unconscionable, unacceptable, we’re not accepting it. We’re moving forward on an individual and collective basis to help our fellow Texans.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-3-some-sensible-black-voices-are-on-to-the-antiracism-scam

As Critical Race Theory and “antiracism” have swept through academia and the media and corporations over the past few years, seemingly almost no one in those institutions is able to see the thinly concealed and vile racism embedded in these ideologies. Here is Ibram Kendi’s famous articulation of what he calls “antiracism”:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

So in other words, simply treating black people as adults and expecting them to make it on their own in a non-discriminatory world is not an acceptable remedy. Instead, blacks are to be permanently dependent on assistance from the government and/or whites. As I put it in a post back in April 2019, the “antiracism” agenda evidences:

the utter contempt in which the self-anointed elites of our country hold members of minority groups, most particularly African Americans. Somehow, these elites — or at least some very substantial number of them — have decided that African Americans are not capable of accepting personal responsibility in life or of being treated like adults.

Meanwhile, Kendi gets rich off peddling his neo-racism, and plenty of others make various sorts of comfortable livings off the trendy ideology, whether as teachers or as diversity deans at colleges or as corporate diversity officers. But are there any black thinkers who are seeing through the smokescreen of Orwellian “antiracist” verbiage and calling out the ideology for just how destructive it is for the supposedly intended beneficiaries?

The answer is that there is a small but growing number, and they are deserving of greater exposure. So let me give a small shout out to some of the more prominent examples.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/people-getting-fired-for-referring

It has become clear over the past year that our racial reckoning has shaped attitudes about the N-word. Or, among a certain few who scare the rest of us into pretending to agree.

As someone who is both a linguist and commentator, I am in an awkward position on the N-word. The linguist describes; the commentator opines. In my new book Nine Nasty Words, which publishes tomorrow, in the chapter on the N-word I try to stick with just describing. However, many will wonder how I “feel.” I have opined here on this topic before; in anticipation of the publication of Nine Nasty Words I will share some further thoughts.

* * *

A widely discussed documentary on James Baldwin in 2019 was carefully titled I Am Not Your Negro, as opposed to what Baldwin actually said in an interview, “I am not your nigger.” In 2019 when literature professor Laurie Scheck ventured a discussion in a class at the New School in New York on why Baldwin’s actual phrasing had been elided, she uttered the word itself – only to be reported to the administration by students in her class and narrowly avoid being fired. And then, more recently, she was indeed fired, with no compelling reason given. It is hard to imagine that continued evaluation of the N-word incident in light of the “racial reckoning” starting last summer had nothing to do with this.

It has become almost hard to keep up with the episodes of this kind of late. As I have discussed here, law professor Jason Kilborn was barred from the University of Illinois in Chicago’s campus as a threat to black students’ safety after in frustration referring to himself in satire as a “monster” in a conversation with black students intended as a healing one. The conversation’s spark? His writing “n*****” in an exam question about employment discrimination, that had bothered no one until – golly, wonder why? – this year.

About ten minutes before this, Greg Patton had been dismissed from a class he was teaching at the University of Southern California for mentioning that in Mandarin, the equivalent of the hedging “like” in English is “nèi ge, nèi ge” which translates as “that, that …” but sounds like, well, you know. Not only had Patton given the lecture countless times before with no problems, but – you couldn’t write this better – the class was on communication in global markets!! Yet the usual suspects went about for weeks claiming that Patton had committed a kind of “violence” added to the grinding burden that being black in modern America is.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/soviet_tyranny_warmed_over_is_still_tyranny.html

A colleague recommended I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a long and deep look into the abyss of Soviet communist oppression in the first half of the 20th century.  In her opinion, “everyone should read this book.”  I must agree — the world would probably be a better place if the book was required reading in universities, especially in the West.  It should also be taught in high schools, at least in excerpts.  Sadly, in the age of the tweet, Solzhenitsyn’s 700-odd agonized pages are probably doomed to general neglect.  More’s the pity.

Mark Twain said long ago: “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  The Gulag Archipelago, though intended by its author as a forlorn memoir to the hundreds he saw ground up by the Soviet state, is also the most powerful of warnings.  Communism is still with us.  Its central themes have never been extinguished.  Its salespeople are still out on the street.  The seductive lies of dead ideologues have never lost their power to persuade.  They have changed a little, adapted to new cultures, new eras, and new technologies — but in the end, the Devil’s siren song still rhymes.

One hardly knows where to begin.  Let’s start with the political usefulness of the common criminals — people Solzhenitsyn summarizes as “thieves.”  In Soviet prisons and labor camps, the truly antisocial elements were made the jailers of the rest.  They could torture, rape, and sometimes kill their fellow prisoners with near impunity.  “Thieves” were officially designated as a victim group, a people wronged by capitalist oppression.  They were not to blame for their own actions.  They were, in the terminology of communism, “socially friendly elements.”  The people whom the state didn’t like, on the other hand, the people who had lingering ideas of individual rights and freedoms, or who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were the peoples’ enemies — the socially undesirable.

This exaltation of the criminal classes was not merely a feature of the penal system, but permeated the judicial system as well.  Sentences for property crimes and violent crimes tended to be light.  When ideology dictates that bad is good and good is bad, the results are predictable.  Crime, fear, and suffering flourish.

When we see the knee-jerk movement to “end mass incarceration,” to “abolish the police,” and then watch as the mob terrorizes and loots city after city — we can only assume that the current revolution is progressing nicely.  The left has begun to release the pent up power it has long been nurturing in our prisons, leavening it with a hefty dose of race-hatred to increase its ferocity and garnishing it with a dollop of class envy for the sake of old-time Marxist nostalgia.  You cannot say the Marxist narrative hasn’t kept up with the times, but the core doctrine remains unaltered: thou shalt terrify and cow the populace with such sociopathic operatives as come to hand.  Nor is such doctrine in any way unique to Soviet communism.  Other socialists have played variations of this tune.  The Fascists had their black shirts and the Nazis had their brown shirts in the early stages of their development.  We now have BLM.  A thug is a thug is a thug.  His color is irrelevant.  By any other name, a fist is a fist, and a burning bottle of gasoline smells as sweet.