RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/crony-capitalism-and-professional-sports

On public funding for professional athletic arenas.

Professional athletic leagues have traditionally steered clear of politics in order to emphasize the purity of their entertainment and to avoid dividing fans over partisan controversies. That has changed in the last year. Players in the National Football League have “taken the knee” during playing of the national anthem as a protest against police practices; the National Basketball Association has embraced Black Lives Matter, also as a protest against the police; and now Major League Baseball has taken this year’s All-Star game out of Atlanta as a protest against Georgia’s new voting law, though baseball executives do not appear to have studied that law. Through these gestures, formerly non-political organizations have allied themselves with explicitly political causes.

These steps are unusual and unprecedented. Business corporations generally prefer to serve inclusive markets while avoiding controversies that might divide customers for or against them. The new corporate alliance with liberals and the Democratic Party is not only new – it is also dangerous. It will politicize the country along new lines, introduce political controversies into the internal operations of corporations, encourage boycotts and assaults on all sides, and much more. Some of this is already happening. As a strategy for dividing America, this one would be hard to beat.

Professional sports leagues, while mostly operating as for-profit enterprises, nevertheless receive generous subsidies from federal, state, and local sources to build and maintain modern stadiums and arenas. Importantly, these subsidies assume that the enterprises are non-political and non-partisan in nature, otherwise they would not be granted. Are professional sports franchises violating the bargains they made with taxpayers and public authorities?

Up until the 1950s, professional stadiums were constructed with private funds provided by owners. Fenway Park in Boston was built in 1913 by the franchise itself, as was Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (1913), Yankee Stadium in New York (1923), Wrigley Field in Chicago (1913), and nearly every other professional ballpark and stadium built in that era. Many professional football franchises leased these stadiums to stage their games. It did not occur to the owners that the public might pay for their facilities. That mindset disappeared in the 1950s when owners began to ask cities and states to pay for their stadiums.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/04/donald-j-trump-joe-bidens-best-friend/

The myth of Biden the healer, and Trump the cruel divider, got Biden elected. But the fantasy that Biden had the answers to problems that Trump created is a far greater—and more dangerous—delusion.

The Pavlovian “Trump did it!” sums up Joe Biden’s fallback excuse when faced with any embarrassment.  

His own completely optional, self-created, illegal immigration disaster? Trump somehow caused it, despite leaving office with a stable and secure border.  

Vaccination rates soaring? There would be even more if not for Trump’s mere 1-million-a-day vaccination rate, mere weeks after the rollout of the “experimental” vaccinations that supposedly would take “years” to develop. 

Chinese aggressiveness? Trump’s provocations again due to all his paranoid talk of travel bans, and a lab-escaped virus. 

European unwillingness to confront the Chinese? Yep, Trump’s the cause again, with jawboning our friends into paying $100 million more for their own defense.  

In truth, Trump’s atmospherics were chaotic, but not just due to his incessant tweeting and candid ad hoc outbursts—or even media hatred that led to 90 percent negative coverage by the networks, newspapers, and online social media. (Notice how few, Left or Right, use any more the adjective “left-wing” or “liberal,” since to do so is a redundancy: “the media” is now accepted as a synonym for “left-wing media.”)  

 I apologize for this depressing e-mail . This morning, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, lives are never going to be the same.

 I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

 You can’t justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind.
 We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.

 Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.

 People who say there is no such thing as a gender are demanding a female President.

 Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.

 Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

 Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it’s a violation of THEIR rights.

 People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.

 After legislating gender, if a dude pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

 It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquiries about it.

 People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees of real or questionable value.

 Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

 Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcomed.

 $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

 If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
 And, pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us “racists”!

 Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility, and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it is racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China.

 We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

 Wake up America. The great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg is taking on water and sinking fast.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/glazov-gang-mike-lindell-tells-his-story-frontpagemagcom/

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/biden-democrats-american-lives-dont-matter-wayne-allyn-root/

We know Democrats support “Black Lives Matter.” It’s all they talk about. While I’m no fan of the Marxist BLM organization, I think all of us can agree that black lives matter. No one wants a single law-abiding, innocent black American to die needlessly.

But someone needs to ask puppet President Joe Biden and every Democratic politician in Washington, D.C., a simple question: Do American lives matter?

Because, from their actions, it’s pretty darn clear that they don’t. It seems like they’re purposely trying to destroy the lives of American citizens.

Who in their right mind would open the borders, stop construction of the wall, invite the entire world to come to America, announce they won’t deport anyone, and incentivize migrants with free lawyers, welfare, bus or air fare and, of course, free health care?

Even worse, who in their right mind would open the borders in the middle of this COVID-19 pandemic?

Who’d be insane enough to demand every American citizen returning to the U.S. to take a COVID test but refuse to give COVID tests to thousands of immigrants illegally breaking into our country each day?

Who would spend $86 million on nice hotel rooms for illegal immigrants, yet ask our brave, selfless troops to sleep in freezing cold parking garages, on concrete floors, with only one bathroom for 5,000 troops?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/biden-aims-to-outshine-obama-as-a-progressive-reformer/

“Instead, the country may well suffer in many ways if Biden succeeds in grasping for the fool’s gold of what he perceives as “greatness.”

As a likely one-term POTUS, he is aiming for ‘greatness’ — fast. And the country may pay the price.

I n looking at the nearly $5 trillion in proposed spending in the Biden budget, people are wondering, “What happened to the Joe Biden who ran for president by citing his 36-year record as a moderate dealmaker in the Senate?”

The answer is that, at age 78, he has bought into the belief that he has only a little time to become a transformational president and leave a legacy of “greatness.” In Washington speak, that means adding to the size of government and ridding oneself of any notion you can spend too much money.

As National Review editor Rich Lowry points out, bills in the Senate still require 60 votes to break a filibuster. Much of what Biden wants will crash against that barrier. But there’s an exception. He can pass his stimulus and infrastructure bills under budget-reconciliation rules in the Senate that require only 50 votes — thus his “stimulus” and “infrastructure” bills.

Biden has also been bewitched by a parade of liberal court historians who have met with him. Their implied message: Because of his age, he’s likely to be a one-term president, but he can still go down in history if he creates his own New Deal or Great Society, and uses executive orders to reform our entire immigration system and to redress income inequality.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/2/biden-effect-emerges-through-massive-spending-and-/

“Lunch Pail Joe” has gone woke.

A scant couple of months into the Biden presidency and the governing philosophy of the nation’s 46th president has become painfully clear. Increase federal power through massive spending and weaponize race at every turn. The result is the “Biden Effect.”The Biden Effect turns the American economic paradigm on its head by inserting significant government influence into virtually every aspect of the private sector. It undermines racial solidarity and recklessly promotes division that could tear the nation apart. 

This is the administration’s one-two punch to advance its far-left goals. Issues of race are presented as an urgent crisis but instead are tools to justify federal overreach. Radical shifts in policy reminiscent of the failed Great Society and New Deal are the real objectives, not equity, equality or empowerment. 

With the Biden Effect, the Georgia election-law reform is characterized as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” The filibuster Sen. Joe Biden used against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination in 2006 is now a “relic of the Jim Crow era.” Mr. Biden’s administration baselessly equates an assertive foreign policy toward Communist China with domestic anti-Asian bias. 

Kamala Harris, who compared ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan, is now in charge of the southern border crisis.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/01/the-texas-neanderthals-were-right/

In early March, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he was ending the state’s mandate for people to wear masks, and reopening businesses at full capacity. Media outlets went into overdrive to denounce him and predict catastrophe. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called Abbott’s decision ‘head-scratching, anti-science’. ‘Model projections for Texas show worst-case scenario without mask mandate’, warned an ABC TV station in Houston. Abbott’s move was part of a ‘bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans’, screamed Vanity Fair.

Politicians also rushed to criticise Abbott. Former representative and failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called his decision a ‘death warrant for Texans’. California governor Gavin Newsom said Texas was ‘absolutely reckless’ for lifting its Covid rules.

No less than President Joe Biden felt obliged to speak out and condemn Abbott. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine – take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.’

Well, it appears the Neanderthals in Texas got it right, and Biden is the one whose thinking is caveman-like. Now, three weeks after Abbott’s order to lift the mask mandate went into effect, the Covid situation has improved in Texas. New cases are down, to their lowest level since June. Hospitalisations have fallen to their lowest level since autumn. Death rates have plummeted. Furthermore, the outlook for vaccinations in the state appears bright, with a record daily number of people receiving shots. Adults of all ages are now eligible for a vaccine jab, a faster pace than many other states.

Have Biden and the media apologised for slandering Texas? And have they learned that lifting mandates on mask-wearing and removing other restrictions does not lead to Covid-spreading? Of course not.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-derek-chauvin-a-racist-murderer

I am neither a criminologist nor pathologist nor coroner nor police officer. However, from what it would seem to me, Derek Chauvin should spend a good deal of the rest of his life in prison for the murder of George Floyd. However much fentanyl or meth Floyd had in him that night, no one will seriously argue that Floyd was about to keel over that night on his own.

Furthermore I hope Chauvin serves as a harbinger of change. It is gruesome that a person can end up at the mercy of a police officer and be killed in a flash, by someone who almost always walks away innocent, let off according to legal niceties that allow that cops may do hideous things under pressure but that’s just the way it goes.

However, the good-thinking consensus here is that I am leaving something out.

I am supposed to be deeply aggrieved that George Floyd died because he was black. Chauvin, I am supposed to think, murdered Floyd at least partly out a disregard for black lives – or, to use the term of art these days, bodies. This is supposed to be about race.

It is perhaps the most heretical belief I hold these days that I don’t think so. However, I use the term heretical with some irony.

* * *

The cops kill hundreds and hundreds of people every year. Of them, white people are the majority by a good margin. For every incident we hear of where cops kill a black person, there are multiple others where cops killed a white person and we did not hear about it.

Black people, however, are killed more than what our proportion of the population would predict in itself. Specifically, black people are killed at a rate two and a half times our representation in the population.

The good word is that this “proves” that racism is behind the killings of black people. Presumably racist bias, even subconscious, makes cops pull the trigger in tense situations.

This is an understandable approach, but not truth incarnate, and it leaves something out.