RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/the-legends-of-our-fall/

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. ”
— Carleton Young in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Many politicians at one point or another live by lies—if they can get away with them. 

Our supposed sentinels, the media—self-defined as independent, cynical, and skeptical journalists—are supposed to separate political fictions from truth.  

Legends As Facts 

Of course, sometimes they used to do that—if only selectively. There were Communist sympathizers in the Roosevelt Administration and holdovers in the 1950s deep state. But the Red Peril was not always what the demagogic Joe McCarthy claimed when shaking his lengthy, indiscriminate “lists” of “commie” names and crimes.  

Once U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, and assorted journalists began to demand proof of all of McCarthy’s charges, his public following dissipated.  

The George W. Bush Administration in its case to remove Saddam Hussein unwisely ignored all the 23 bipartisan writs authorizing the use of the force by the Congress. Instead, it rhetorically bundled all congressional authorizations into one case against Saddam Hussein: the existential threat of huge Iraqi stockpiles of deliverable “weapons of mass destruction.”  

After Saddam’s removal, U.S. forces did not find depots of poisonous and nerve gases. Whether they were nonexistent, or moved stealthily to border dictatorships like Syria or even Iran, or were destroyed no one knew. The public only remembered the government assurance that WMDs, the popular justification for the preemptive invasion, would be there upon U.S. arrival—a narrative that the media originally did not question and then later swore that it always had been skeptical as it led the cheer: “Bush lied, people died.”

 Noble Lies

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/14/democrats-will-blame-trump-for-every-problem-they-create-for-the-next-20-years-n1432420

Poor Herbert Hoover. The Republican president had the misfortune of being in office when the Great Depression hit. While some of his policies contributed to the severity of the downturn, the depression was the inevitable outcome of ruinous tariffs and overproduction.

But from 1930 to the 1960s, Democrats made the word “Hoover” synonymous with “disaster.” Hoover became a whipping boy for every Democratic president up to and including John Kennedy.

Now, with a disaster at the border entirely of their own making, Democrats are casting about for someone to blame for the crisis. Naturally, they didn’t have to look very far.

Washington Examiner:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the number of migrant children and teenagers currently held in custody at the southern border a “humanitarian challenge,” blaming the Trump administration’s handling of immigration for the uptick.

“This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us,” Pelosi told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the childrens’ interest.”

The media has prepared the battleground for Democrats superbly. Trump has become a villain in every morality play the Democrats are staging. And that probably won’t change for decades.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/joe_bidens_parttime_presidency.html

Barack Obama never seemed very enamored of the work that went along with being president. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it, it was that he didn’t want to do it. By contrast, the much older Donald Trump was a whirlwind workaholic. Joe Biden is a different creature entirely: he is not a dynamo like Trump, nor a slacker like Obama. One gets the impression, instead, that he is incapable of putting in a full day of work. The best evidence yet comes from his schedule for this week.

Steve Herman, a White House reporter, posted on Twitter what Joe Biden’s schedule is over the next five days. On Monday, he will deliver remarks; on Tuesday, he will travel to Pennsylvania; on Wednesday, he will have a telephone meeting with the President of Ireland; and on Friday, he will travel to Georgia. In case you are thinking I skipped over Thursday, I did not. He has nothing on his calendar for Thursday (hat tip: The Gateway Pundit):

If reporters were to ask about this relaxing schedule (not that they ever would), one can be assured that the White House would insist that Biden is very busy taking care of business for America. You see, the president is traveling to highlight to people across America how the $1.9 trillion spending binge that the Democrat-run Congress passed, and that Biden signed, will benefit ordinary Americans.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_tyranny_of_woke_capital.html

Traditional American values have long been under attack by social justice warriors, cultural Marxists advancing the insidious tenets of critical theory. Their “long march through the institutions” has infiltrated schools, universities, entertainment, the mass media, the courts, politics, and beyond. One might assume that business, adhering to the Milton Friedman doctrine of maximizing returns for shareholders, would be insulated from their malign agenda. But that assumption is no longer valid, according to Stephen Soukup’s recent book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. He illuminates how ‘progressive’ forces have insinuated themselves into regulatory agencies, the finance industry, and corporate America, jeopardizing capital markets and the free-market system itself.

The book traces the genesis of American progressivism to Richard Ely (1854-1943) of Johns Hopkins University. Believing in a confused amalgam of religion, socialism, white superiority, and a paternalistic state, Ely advocated that the state should be harnessed to fix social problems like poverty, alcoholism, racial tension, and child labor in G-d’s name. He never presented himself as a socialist, but believed G-d works through the state, which should heal the ills of capitalism through labor reform and compulsory education. With little faith in the canaille to vote in society’s and their own best interests, he favored a “third way”: employing professional administrators to manage society rationally, guard against laissez-faire economics, and make socialism unnecessary. This new progressivism looked at the American state as the natural, necessary “administrator” of civic life.

Political scientist Dwight Waldo, the defining figure of modern public administration, refined Ely’s ideas and propounded that public servants should be “value advocates,” “agent of change,” and stewards of “social equity, democratic administration, and proactive, non-neutral public administration.” Voters and their elected representatives were to be superseded by unelected, unaccountable experts — with ostensibly better values than the people. Though it was seen as being in violation of the Constitution, Waldo wanted a central bank with an administrative elite controlling monetary policy to maintain stability.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/coronavirus-bruce-hendry/

In 1841, Charles Mackay wrote a 702-page book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The book details investment hysteria and panic, but it’s really about human nature, something that doesn’t change throughout recorded history. I will show the reader, in this essay, how we are experiencing popular delusions and the madness of crowds, right now, with the current corona virus, COVID-19 hysteria and panic.

Today’s social psychologists use the term “groupthink” to describe the modern versions of crowd madness. “Groupthink” represents the prevailing beliefs and rationalizations that influence the decisions of the general public as well as the experts. Their groupthink beliefs are shaped by the opinions of others (think CNN, New York Times and Twitter) and not by the rigor of their own personal and independent analysis. The current hysteria and panic over the COVID crisis is a modern example of groupthink. This essay will examine that claim.

My career history, in distressed investments, was predicated upon an independent analysis and sometimes a rejection of the accepted investment community beliefs. My rule is that when everybody accepts a belief or story, it’s time to critically examine the assumptions. Community-held investment views are often correct, but many times they are wrong too. Challenging accepted community views is not a way to win a popularity contest, but it’s important for someone to state the truth and I intend to do that here. I will use my skill in questioning popularly-held assumptions and share my thoughts with you on the COVID crisis.

Diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of a democracy. My opinion on the COVID crisis will differ from the accepted community view — and probably from your own view too. This essay was removed from Facebook — just like the Nazis’ burning of books that differed from proscribed ways of thinking. I hope that you will read this essay carefully and with an open mind.

https://spectator.us/book-and-art/amazon-book-bullying-just-latest-act-woke-intolerance/

The house of the Lord, we are told, has many mansions. So does the house of wokeness. If you are Coca-Cola, you address flagging sales by embarking on an ad campaign (and internal training regimen for employees) urging those drinking its sugar water to ‘try to be less white’, i.e.,  ‘less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant and more humble’.

If you are Disney, you scour your cartoons for images, situations, or language that worried white bureaucrats imagine might cause offense to anyone on this week’s list of designated victim groups.

If you are Dr Seuss Enterprises, you cashier six of your books because they ‘portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong’.

And if you are Amazon, ‘the world’s largest bookstore‘, you slip quietly into the censorship business by suddenly delisting When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a three-year-old scholarly book by Ryan T. Anderson about the psychological costs of blithely embracing the vogue of transgenderism.

I was proud to publish When Harry Became Sally at Encounter Books back in 2018 and was pleased when, over the course of the next couple of years, it sold some 26,000 copies in various formats.

Now, thanks to Amazon’s decision to cashier the book, it is well on its way to selling another 26,000. (Although the book has vanished without trace from Amazon and its subsidiaries, you can still get it at Barnes & Noble, various independent bookshops, and direct from Encounter.)

So should I be pleased that Amazon, in its latest act of woke intolerance, is doing so much to spread the news about this important book?

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/12/charles-hurt-welcome-to-the-white-privilege-presidency/

Washington really is the last nakedly racist place in America. And the very face of this city’s institutional racism is President Biden himself.

Welcome to the White Privilege Presidency.

Mr. Biden is living proof that no matter how dumb you are or how wrong you have always been or how many things you have screwed up, if you are just White enough and willing to wait around long enough accomplishing nothing, the kingship will eventually be yours.

This is a guy who had been rejected by voters — often in his own party — in his endless quest for the presidency many times during his five decades running his mouth in Washington. It was only when a gifted political outsider needed an old White guy for a running mate that Mr. Biden’s ticket to the White House finally got punched.

Literally, Mr. Biden’s only contribution was to be White. And old. And a barnacled deadweight from Washington.

This is why it is so astonishing — though not entirely surprising — to watch Mr. Biden so monumentally screw up everything he touches now that he is supposedly in charge. Nowhere is his reckless incompetence more obvious than on the border with Mexico.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/13/big-white-lies/

A revitalized and restorationist Republican Party will never take shape until white America finally gets off its knees.

“This government has failed us . . . We need a self-help program, a do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, an it’s-already-too-late philosophy.”
— Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”

A new poll of more than 1,000 registered voters released by Echelon Insights offers a startling glimpse into the psyche of Joe Biden supporters. Among Democrats, the top three issues over which they say they are “extremely” or “very concerned” are “Donald Trump supporters,” “white nationalism,” and “systemic racism.” 

Among the actions Biden took during his first week in the White House was to rescind President Trump’s ban on critical race theory training in the federal government. We can now expect the cultural revolution to resume in the federal bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that will now explicitly demonize huge segments of what is (supposed to be) our country. 

My purpose, however, is not to criticize our ruling regime. No, I’m here to criticize psychologically conquered white people and to denounce white liberal supremacy. The former constitute so much of the governing class within the Republican Party and the latter are at the top of every major U.S. institution, public and private. It is time to be critical of the innumerable half-truths and white lies that pass for discourse in our decadent age.

Our Dumb, Racialist Civic Vocabulary

Who is a “white supremacist” according to our ruling regime? According to students at the University of Washington, it is George Washington. Who is a “white nationalist?” Apparently, it is anyone who objects to open borders, reads Patrick Buchanan, or worked for Donald Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/13/maternity-flight-suits-and-other-admonitions/

Just about the first thing Lloyd Austin did after being confirmed as Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense was to issue a service-wide order commanding officers issue a one-day “stand down” within sixty days to “address extremism within the nation’s armed forces.” “What extremism?” you might be asking, and you would be right to ask. 

No matter what Lloyd Austin or the media tells you, the trouble with the U.S. Armed Forces is not political extremism but the enervating rust of political correctness. As Victor Davis Hanson has shown, the upper echelons of the U.S. military were purged by Barack Obama. If they are politicized today, it is firmly in the direction of the woke ideology of identity politics.

Thus we have the commander-in-chief, Joe Biden, speak about the “intensity of purpose” that will be devoted to “designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits, updating requirements for their hairstyles.” This was not a joke—or, rather, it was not said in jest. 

Perhaps the Biden means to prepare the distaff side for a different sort of Battle of the Bulge. True, he would be modestly more reassuring about the U.S. military if he could remember the name of his defense secretary or the name of the building where he works. “I want to thank the—former general . . . the guy who runs that outfit over there.” Oh, dear. 

Meanwhile, the Army is about to revise its standards for physical performance downwards so that women will be able to compete more effectively with men. Once upon a time, the Army’s slogan was “Be All That You Can Be.” Today, it might as well read “Be Whatever You Want.” Among the avalanche of executive diktats signed by Joe Biden in his first weeks in office is a directive approving sex reassignment surgery for active duty personnel. 

https://www.city-journal.org/a-formula-for-tyranny-and-more-racism

Editor’s note: the following is adapted from Glenn C. Loury’s testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on March 4, 2021.

Thank you for this opportunity. In speaking about black American disadvantage and its implications for American democracy, I draw on many years of study as economic theorist and public intellectual.

My testimony rests on two observations—about the dynamics of human development and the foundations of racial identity. I will conclude by expressing reservations about government pursuing a program to equalize group outcomes—rather than a program to provide equality of opportunity for all.

First, two statements of principle:

(a) Persistent black disadvantage is an American tragedy—a national, not merely communal, disgrace.

(b) Wherever inequality is a problem, we should address it forthrightly. But we should do so on behalf of a program of human decency, not of racial equity.

For many, these principles will seem to be in conflict. In actual fact, they complement one another.

Now, my two observations: