RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/13/why-have-elites-abandoned-merit/

If you’re just a grubby striver, firm in your conviction that you deserve to succeed or fail based upon your own abilities and efforts, know well that elite institutions are now arrayed against you.

Surveying several recent news items, one could not be faulted for believing that the notion of merit has been significantly downgraded in American life.

United Airlines tweeted last week that it “plan(s) for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” While perhaps a worthy goal, left unmentioned are the relevance of gender or race to piloting a jet safely, and any support for the assertion that such groups previously had been excluded from consideration).

In higher education, two Ivy League academic institutions, Harvard and Yale, have been in the crosshairs of legal actions for disfavoring Asian Americans in college admissions, these applicants’ credentials notwithstanding (and this during a time when hate crimes against Americans of Asian heritage are on the rise). More broadly within higher education, this past year’s “test-optional” approach to admissions due to COVID-19 may be here to stay.

While few will give direct voice to the sentiment that “merit no longer matters,” our elites and institutions appear to have moved honest achievement well down the list of what is celebrated and are increasingly hostile to its promotion—a significant reversal of past practice.

The ideals of advancing one’s station through ability and hard work, and society rewarding legitimate achievement, have been on an upward trajectory since the advent of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which provided the brains and brawn for self-actualization and economic advancement, respectively. What caused our elites, who embraced merit after having signally failed to prevent its advance at the expense of entrenched privilege, to later turn against it with such force?

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/david-horowitzandjohn-perazzo/2021/04/13/bidens-team-of-racists-and-anti-semites-an-anti-american-coalition-in-the-heart-of-the-white-house-n1439724

Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti-American.

Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris, whose antipathy for America oozes from her every pore. At a February 2019 presidential campaign stop, for example she said Columbus Day should be replaced with “Indigenous People’s Day” because “we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country.”  This is an accurate summary of the way the Biden White House views its native land, and it is a view encapsulating three big lies.

What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies.  Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin.

All forms of institutional and systemic racism including Jim Crow were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In one of his first statements as president Biden claimed that “systemic racism” has been built into every aspect of our system.” This is a bald-faced lie. The opposite is the truth. Under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, systemic racism is outlawed in America. With the exception of affirmative action policies sanctioned by the Supreme Court, there is no systemic racism in America,. If there were systemic racism, there would be a tsunami of legal suits to punish those who practiced it. There is no such tsunami because the claim is a baseless lie.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/big-corporations-now-deploying-woke?toke

The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this same branding tactic. The CIA — in between military coups, domestic disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due process — joyously celebrates Women’s Day, promotes what it calls The Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE), hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black History Month. The FBI does the same.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/13/the_great_awokening_americas

One of the most striking features of American history is its periodic waves of religious fervor. We are in the midst of another today, stripped of its references to God but filled with the same passionate desire to be reborn, absolved from past sins.

What sins need absolution now? America’s history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Those “original sins” continue, say the movement’s leaders, in a new (and vaguely defined) form: “structural racism.”

Revivals like this have been called “Great Awakenings” since the first one, in the 1740s. Today’s acolytes use similar language, so this one might be called the “The Great Awokening.” Just as slavery and abolition were central to the Second Great Awakening of the 1850s, so race is central now. In both cases, the message is that white Americans must act decisively to correct historical wrongs and pay penance for them.

Today’s progressive politicians also offer a measure of absolution. It is a costly one, a whole series of race-based policies, massive government spending, centralized controls (including new rules for voting), and economic redistribution, plus “reimagining” local law enforcement.

Who are the sinful “whites” in this account? In practice, they are everyone except descendants of enslaved African Americans. In this reframing, Americans of Chinese, South Asian, Korean, or Cuban ancestry are all considered privileged and, in a political sense, “white.”

https://www.saveservices.org/2021/02/police-investigative-misconduct-railroaded-an-innocent-catholic-priest/

In September, 1988, Keene, New Hampshire sex crimes detective James F. McLaughlin received a letter from Ms. Sylvia Gale, a New Hampshire child protection social worker. Ms. Gale’s letter reported third-hand information that Catholic priest, Gordon J. MacRae, had once been a priest in Florida “where he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated. The case is supposed to be still unsolved.”

According to Sylvia Gale’s letter, the information was passed to her by an unnamed employee of New Hampshire Catholic Social Services who claimed that she had been told this information by her employer, Monsignor John Quinn, on condition that she would be fired if she ever divulged it.

Detective McLaughlin skipped the logical first steps that such a letter might have set in motion. He did not consult the priest’s personnel file – which revealed nothing about his ever being in Florida. And he did not consult Monsignor John Quinn, the named originator of the story.

Instead, armed with the explosive Florida murder-molestation letter, McLaughlin set out to interview dozens of parents and their adolescent sons who had prior contacts with MacRae. Within a week, the entire community was in a state of alarm about the murderous lecher-priest in its midst.

Among those McLaughlin interviewed about Ms. Gale’s letter in 1988 were four young adult brothers, Jonathan, David, Thomas, and Jay Grover, the adopted sons of another state social worker, Ms. Patricia Grover, a colleague of Sylvia Gale. According to McLaughlin’s 72-page report, she vowed to question each of her sons about their interactions with MacRae. None of them reported knowing or suspecting anything of a criminal nature.

McLaughlin’s report on this investigation was filled with innuendo, but no substance. He repeatedly attributed untrue information about MacRae to unnamed “informants” and other “subjects.” Toward the end of the report he finally quoted a “Sgt. Smith” from an unnamed Florida police agency.

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

The words “epic” or “magnificent” are becoming cliched because they’re constantly used as clickbait headlines for things that are anything but “epic” or “magnificent.” That’s a shame because both words apply with their original force to Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue on Monday night. He brought both logic and passion to explaining that the Democrat party’s open borders policy is deliberately intended to import people who will vote for Democrats. In hindsight, what he said is completely obvious but too few people think about illegal immigration in the terms Tucker did. [Full transcript below.]

More must do so if we are to preserve our liberty-oriented, merit-based, constitutional republic.

The genesis for Tucker’s monologue was a discussion he had with Mark Steyn on Thursday, during which he noted, accurately, that the Democrats are encouraging illegal aliens to enter because they see them as a replacement for Americans who refuse to vote for Democrats. He explained, rightly, that this statement is not racist because the old voters who are being rendered obsolete through this illegal activity aren’t just whites. In many ways, the people most affected are Blacks. Every American who is a legal citizen, regardless of race, is affected.

The usual crowd of leftists instantly assaulted Tucker as a rabid white supremacist who should instantly be taken off the air. I wrote yesterday about how Jonathan Greenblatt, an Obama-era hack who is now head of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, tried to claim that Tucker was speaking in code to anti-Semitic white supremacists. Greenblatt’s statement was completely dishonest.

One of the things I like about Tucker, who is fortunate to have the weight of the Fox News company behind him, is that he cannot be bullied into backing down from his principles. Unsurprisingly, then, he came back swinging against this latest charge of white supremacy.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/12/indefinite-incarceration-for-protesters-with-wrong-politics/

Joe Biden’s Justice Department wants to keep Richard Barnett in jail—indefinitely.

The Arkansas man, photographed showboating inside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6, has been behind bars for more than three months. Barnett occupied Pelosi’s office for six whole minutes; he absconded with a piece of mail and left her a note that read “Nancy, Bigo was here, you Bitch.”

The desk belonged to a Pelosi aide, not the speaker herself. Several reporters and photographers who also happened to be in Pelosi’s office at the very same time prompted Barnett to sit at the desk and “act natural” as they took a series of photos.

Death threats against Barnett’s family immediately started when a press photograph of Barnett went viral that afternoon; Pelosi’s daughter tweeted the picture right after it was taken. Upon his return home, Barnett met with FBI investigators without an attorney present, allowed for a search of his home, and turned himself in.

He was taken into custody on January 8 and charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct, and possession of a “deadly or dangerous weapon,” to wit, a walking stick that also can be used as a stun gun. He never used it.

A local judge authorized Barnett’s conditional release a week later but federal prosecutors, as they’ve done in many cases, immediately appealed to the chief judge of the D.C. district court, which is handling every Capitol breach case, to deny Barnett’s release.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/woke-switcheroo-bruce-bawer/

Last Wednesday, on BBC’s TV debate program Newsnight, host Emily Maitlis interviewed two American guests about the allegedly racist new Georgia voting law that led Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game, scheduled for July 13, from that state to Colorado.

Now, anyone who’s taken the trouble to learn the truth about the law, which was passed in the wake of widespread ballot fraud in the 2020 election, knows that it’s thoroughly unremarkable. Voters – all voters – are required to show ID before they can cast their ballots, just as baseball fans are required to show ID when picking up their tickets to an MLB game. But the Biden Administration and its allies have obscured this fact, painting the law as an effort to suppress the black vote. The premise of their argument is that an ID requirement is particularly hard on blacks – apparently because, unlike whites and Asians, they can’t be expected to get their act together well enough to secure proper ID.

They claim the law is racist. No: their argument is racist. But the CEOs of Coca-Cola, Delta, Dow, Hewlett Packard, ViacomCBS, and dozens of other major corporations have publicly gone along with it.

On Wednesday’s Newsnight, Eric Bolling, formerly of Fox News, defended the law. He argued that moving the All-Star game out, supposedly for anti-racist reasons, robbed many black-owned businesses of desperately needed income. He noted that Colorado’s black population is relatively low, and that Georgia’s two senators – both Democrats, one of them African-American – have opposed the MLB’s pullout.

Taking the other side was a black woman named Aisha Moodie-Mills. Instead of even trying to make a rational argument, she followed the current woke playbook from the git-go – which is to say that she accused Bolling of racism. “I think it’s really rich for any Republican, especially a white man, to run around and claim that they care about the economic condition of black communities and black businesses when that’s all a lie,” she said. Bolling called her comments “disgusting”; she doubled down.

As it happens, the clash on Newsnight came one month to the day after the airing of another dramatic three-hander – namely, Oprah Winfrey’s March 7 sit-down with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, at their $15.5 million mansion in exclusive Montecito, California (which also happens to be the site of one of Oprah’s seven residences). Meghan charged that while in Britain among her royal in-laws and palace servants, she’d been subjected to racism. Oprah was empathic. After all, Oprah (#1174 on the Forbes billionaires list, with $2.6 billion in assets) knows what it is to be a victim. And Meghan (who, with Harry, recently inked a nine-figure deal with Netflix) is nothing if not a victim.