RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/pete-du-pont-conservative-ahead-of-his-time/

Du Pont, who died Saturday, was a great two-term GOP governor and conservative innovator.

Pete du Pont, the man who inadvertently may have jump-started Joe Biden’s political career in Delaware, passed away on Saturday at age 86.

Du Pont, an heir to one of the most successful corporate legacies in America, had a bigger impact on American government than his failed 1988 presidential bid for the GOP nomination would indicate. He served as a congressman and then rescued his bankrupt state during two terms as governor by applying classic Reagan conservatism: cutting taxes, deregulating, restraining spending, and expanding economic opportunity.

His record as Delaware’s governor won bipartisan plaudits and prompted him to run for president in 1988, when Ronald Reagan retired. His campaign attracted plenty of attention from pundits, but GOP primary voters plumped for a more well-known member of another aristocratic family: George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president.

Though he never ran for office again, du Pont devoted another quarter century to building and supporting the conservative movement, including a stint as president of the National Review Institute from 1994 to 1997.

He studied engineering at Princeton and law at Harvard, and then he worked for six years in product development at the family company. Frustrated that he would have to wait his turn to run the company until he was past 60, he entered politics at age 33 and won a seat in Delaware’s part-time legislature. In 1970, he easily won Delaware’s sole congressional seat.

In 1972, Republican U.S. senator J. Caleb Boggs was preparing to retire. Du Pont prepared to run, but he would have faced then–Wilmington mayor Harry G. Haskell Jr. in a bitter Senate primary. To avoid a divisive primary, President Richard Nixon helped convince Boggs to run again with united party support.

But Boggs was 63 — he looked tired and ran a lackluster campaign. He was upset by a hard-charging young Democrat named Joe Biden, who beat Boggs, even though he didn’t reach the required age of 30 until after the election. We can speculate how different history might have been if du Pont had beaten Biden and sent “Uncle Joe” in a different direction.

Instead, in 1976, du Pont decided to tackle a real challenge. Delaware had 9 percent unemployment, some of the highest taxes in the nation, a staggering debt, and one of the lowest bond ratings in the country. Previous governors had failed to halt the slide: None had been reelected in 25 years.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/love-song-bill-and-melinda-daniel-greenfield/

After Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleoptra, and Pepé Le Pew and Penelope, there were Bill and Melinda. The Microsoft technocrat and his spouse were a love story for the ages.

In 1993, Bill proposed to Melinda: an executive at his company. In 1994, they were married. In 1995, Melinda debuted Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob treated computer users like idiots who were too stupid to be allowed to use their computers without a lot of handholding.

Condescending handholding was also what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offered the world as one of the industry’s most notoriously miserable human beings decided to become a philanthropist and save the world from all the people who weren’t running it properly.

In 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, left his day-to-day role in 2008, and departed as chairman of the board in 2014. He also jettisoned 8 million shares of the company.

Forget CEO of Microsoft, Bill would use his vast wealth to become the CEO of the world.

Each of Bill’s resignations followed another ‘Microsoft Bob’, another failed Microsoft project, from Windows 2000, to Windows Vista in 2006, and most infamously, Windows 8 in 2014.

Every time Microsoft screwed up badly, Bill Gates seemed to decide that he should spend less time trying to make the company that had temporarily made him the richest man in the world succeed, and more time trying to run the world. Running the world hasn’t gone well for Gates.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/texas-muslim-who-helped-his-father-evade-capture-robert-spencer/

In Fort Worth, Texas on Tuesday, a 32-year-old Muslim named Islam Said was sentenced to ten years in prison for spending the last thirteen years helping his father, Yaser Said, one of the FBI’s Most Wanted criminals, evade capture. Yaser Said was wanted for murdering his two daughters, Islam Said’s sisters, Amina and Sarah Said. What kind of man would know that his father had murdered his two sisters and then help his father avoid justice, rather than turning him in? The answer to that question is far too uncomfortable and inconvenient for law enforcement officials to face honestly.

Islam Said was arrested along with Yaser last August. Apparently he was in hiding with his father, although he doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the killings. And according to the Dallas Morning News, Islam Said denies that the killings were honor murders or had anything to do with Islam. “It’s something else. Religion has nothing to do with it.”

Yet that raises the question of why Islam Said was with his father at all. If these weren’t honor killings, why would Islam Said go on the run with Yaser and help him hide for all these years? Why wouldn’t he have the normal human reaction of thinking that what his father had done in murdering his sisters was abhorrent, and turn his father in to authorities? Did Islam Said’s commitment to the religion of Islam override that natural human reaction and make him think that what his father had done was good and praiseworthy?

For despite media denial and obfuscation of the fact, honor killing is something that many Muslims believe to be good and in accord with their faith. According to Islamic law, “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance of the Traveller o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law. In this case the victim was the murderer’s daughter, a victim to the culture of violence and intimidation that such laws help create.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-scientific-method-identity-politics-11620581262?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

The Biden administration is considering a laudable major expansion in funding for scientific agencies to shore up America’s research base. The money will help, but it doesn’t obviate the need to scrutinize who will be leading the government’s scientific efforts, as many of us did during President Trump’s term in office. The current emphasis in academic hiring on affirmative action shouldn’t be of concern here. We should expect that merit and accomplishment will guide promotion to the highest levels of scientific leadership. Even if the Biden administration may appear more in touch with the concerns of the scientific community, it isn’t excused from the duty to appoint qualified people to leadership positions.

Many don’t realize that the largest funder of physical science in the country isn’t the National Science Foundation, whose 2022 budget the Biden administration has proposed to increase by 20%, but the Energy Department. Here, too, the Biden administration is proposing a major funding increase.

The DOE Office of Science’s $7 billion budget, set to rise by $400 million, supports research in high-energy and nuclear physics with large accelerators, materials physics with X-ray synchrotrons, fusion and advanced scientific computers, and runs 10 national laboratories employing thousands of researchers.

President Biden has nominated Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil biogeochemist from the University of California, Merced, to lead the Office of Science. Ms. Berhe will be the first black woman to lead the science office, happily lending a more diverse face to science in this country.

Ms. Berhe’s research program on soil chemistry, exploring the capture of carbon dioxide, is relevant to climate-change policy. But her research expertise isn’t in any of the Office of Science’s major programs, and she has no experience as a scientific administrator and minimal experience with the Energy Department itself.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/10/dude-wheres-my-workforce/

It must be a nasty surprise for companies that have slavishly repeated Woke mantras and imposed overtly racist policies on workers and even customers in the name of “racial equality” to now find themselves short of the one thing they need to thrive and grow: workers. They can thank Joe Biden and the Woke Democrats for that.

No question, right now companies are sucking for air, finding it impossible to ramp up fast enough as workers stay home in droves rather than return to work.

People are said to be “scratching their heads” over why, after a year of pandemic-forced business closings, workers aren’t desperate to work and earn. After all, just a few months ago the concern was whether they’d have jobs to go back to.

President Biden’s comment that the economy is “moving in the right direction” after the number of new payroll jobs undershot expectations by nearly 800,000 shows a president out of touch with reality.

There are nearly 15 million jobs going begging, according to online job site ZipRecruiter, far more than the 7.4 million “old economy” estimate of the Labor Department. Yet, data from April’s distressing jobs report shows that nearly 9.2 million Americans remain unemployed, 29% of those for more than a year.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/antony-blinken-continues-to-lecture?token=eyJ1c

How can you feign anger over others’ attacks on a free press when you imprison Assange as punishment for his vital revelations about U.S. officials?

Continuing his world tour doling out righteous lectures to the world, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday proclaimed — in a sermon you have to hear to believe — that few things are more sacred in a democracy than “independent journalism.” Speaking to Radio Free Europe, Blinken paid homage to “World Press Freedom Day”; claimed that “the United States stands strongly with independent journalism”; explained that “the foundation of any democratic system” entails “holding leaders accountable” and “informing citizens”; and warned that “countries that deny freedom of the press are countries that don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves or in their systems.”

The rhetorical cherry on top of that cake came when he posed this question: “What is to be afraid of in informing the people and holding leaders accountable?” The Secretary of State then issued this vow: “Everywhere journalism and freedom of the press is challenged, we will stand with journalists and with that freedom.” Since I know that I would be extremely skeptical if someone told me that those words had just come out Blinken’s mouth, I present you here with the unedited one-minute-fifty-two-second video clip of him saying exactly this:

That the Biden administration is such a stalwart believer in the sanctity of independent journalism and is devoted to defending it wherever it is threatened would come as a great surprise to many, many people. Among them would be Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and the person responsible for breaking more major stories about the actions of top U.S. officials than virtually all U.S. journalists employed in the corporate press combined.

https://sapirjournal.org/social-justice/2021/05/critical-race-theory-and-the-hyper-white-jew/

Imagine you’ve just been accepted to college. You open your welcome packet. It contains the bestseller all first-year students are expected to read: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. You flip to a random page and read, “Only whites can be racist.” You flip to another page where you read that to deny being racist is itself evidence of “white fragility.” You wonder what you’re supposed to do in order to not have “white fragility.” 

You dutifully read the book.

Your first day arrives. You decorate your room with pictures. Your favorite is the one of you and your extended family in Israel when you were little. Your cousins live in Tel Aviv and you love visiting them. You hang a hamsa above your desk. Your roommate seems nice. 

The theme of orientation is “Campus Inclusion.” The first thing you learn about is “microaggressions.” The associate dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion explains that perpetrators of microaggressions are often unaware of the harm they’re causing. They can even have good intentions. But as the handout says, “almost all interracial encounters are prone to microaggressions.”

You were looking forward to meeting people from different backgrounds. You didn’t realize it would be so fraught — you don’t want to perpetrate anything. It never would have occurred to you that asking someone where he’s from could be a microaggression. Or that saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” is. Even saying “America is a melting pot” is on the list.

You cringe when you read that it’s a microaggression to say “there is only one race, the human race.” That’s something your grandmother always says. Her father, who survived several concentration camps, used to say that, too. They aren’t racist. But according to the list, it’s also a microaggression to deny being racist. 

You wonder whether it’s a microaggression to deny being antisemitic. You look on the list for examples of microaggressions against Jews. There aren’t any.

In your second year, you attend a campus protest against systemic racism. You hear from the Asian American and Pacific Islander Student Union, the Latinx Student Union, the LGBTQIA+ Alliance, the Black Student Union, and the leaders of student government. All of them reiterate in various ways that any system with unequal outcomes is a “white supremacist” system. “We’re either racist or antiracist,” says Sandra, the president of the student government. She adds, quoting this year’s summer reading for all students, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist: “The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/the-partisan-exaggeration-of-right-wing-terrorism/

Terrorist incidents in the West peaked in 2017, and have fallen dramatically since, mainly due to the defeat of the Islamic State. Yet the politics of fear demands a substitute: right-wing terrorism. “Right-wing” is stretched so broadly today that it conflates ethnic and religious identities, i.e., whites and Christians. Identity politics is fashionable but makes for terrible analysis.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with a rarefied left-wing news site (Quartz, then under the same ownership as The Atlantic magazine) to claim that two-thirds of American terrorism in 2017 was right-wing. Their “right-wing” categories were slippery, including “alt-light,” as a gateway to “alt-right.” Worse, they categorized both anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism as right-wing. Extremist Muslims and Jews hate each other. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center put them together as right-wing allies. Such an equation prevents admission of the fact that anti-Semitism is the bigger problem, and largely jihadi. 

United States official data for 2019 shows that more than 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed against Jews, while 13 percent are directed against Muslims (about the same as all Christians).

The Anti-Defamation League jumped on the bandwagon of fearmongering over “right-wing” terrorism, by launching its own study of American “extremist violence.” In January 2019, the ADL reported right-wing extremists as the “biggest threat” by the “numbers.” The report uses the term “white supremacist” interchangeably with “right-wing.” Here, critical race theory meets left-wing partisanship. 

But the ADL does not fully reveal its data or methods. By contrast, official statistics show that whites (72 percent of Americans) are underrepresented in hate crimes (52.5 percent of perpetrators of hate crimes in 2019 were white). And there is no upward trend in white perps.

Trends tend to get pushed behind unrepresentative events. In the deadliest attack of 2018, a white male shot 11 people to death at synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was officially categorized as white supremacist (although all the victims were white). The ADL effectively treated that single event as evidence for a multi-year trend.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/what-are-the-paleoconservatives-conserving/

There is less dividing Paul Gottfried and me than I would have expected, which is good. For when the orc hordes—at Sauron’s urging—come for both of us, they aren’t going to discern, much less care about, any academic differences over this or that statement from the American founding era. They are going to see us identically as enemies to be exterminated. 

I also welcome this chance to reiterate some points that bear repeating. To those bored with the repetition, I can only say that what I learned in politics apparently applies to intellectual debates as well: if you want your message to break through, you can’t repeat it often enough. This exchange also gives me the opportunity to take a few more whacks at Cracker Jack Claremontism, which can’t be beaten often enough. 

The Claremont-Hillsdale School does indeed hold that all human beings “have inalienable rights to life and liberty.” Gottfried continues from here that this “did not mean that for the founders ‘all men’ were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right.” And he’s absolutely right. Only Cracker Jack Claremontism holds to that silly view. Anyone who’s actually studied the founders (and if we’ve done nothing else, we’ve certainly done that) knows that it’s false. 

A Separate and Equal Station
Among the Powers of the Earth

Let’s take these two issues separately. The first is membership in the political community. We may say that, for the American founders, their government’s exclusivity as a political community internationally mirrors the principle of freedom of association at the domestic level. Just government originates in the social compact—that is, a compact in which men freely choose to form a government for their mutual protection and benefit. At the founding of such a government, agreement on membership must be unanimous, and in both directions. That is, no one who doesn’t want to be in the compact can be forced to join, but also no one whom others don’t want to take in can be allowed to join either. The social compact is invitation only. 

It remains so in perpetuity for newcomers. Children born to members of the existing compact are automatically made members but may, if they later choose, renounce that membership via emigration. No one from outside the compact, however, may join it without the consent of its existing members. As Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the U.S. Constitution, put it: “every society, from a great nation down to a club, has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members shall be admitted.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-dojs-abusive-indictment-of-the-police-who-killed-george-floyd/

Federal prosecution of these defendants makes no sense — except as a political matter.

A t best, the Justice Department’s indictment of Derek Chauvin and the three other former Minneapolis cops involved in George Floyd’s killing nearly a year ago is overkill. At worst, it is an exercise in political zeal that could undermine the accountability being achieved by state prosecutions. In the meantime, it is abusive — ironically so given that the charges are brought under the guise of upholding civil rights, though it obviously has not dawned on the Civil Rights Division’s social-justice warriors that police have civil rights, too.

Chauvin, of course, has just been convicted by a Minnesota jury on two murder counts, as well as a manslaughter charge. He faces up to 40 years’ imprisonment — the maximum sentence on the most serious charge, second-degree felony murder — when he is sentenced, which is scheduled to happen on June 16. State prosecutors have asked Judge Peter Cahill to apply penal-law enhancements that would push Chauvin’s term close to the maximum. Even if the court does not apply all of them, Chauvin’s sentence is bound to be severe — probably 20 years or more, maybe a lot more.

And make no mistake: That will be a very tough stretch, assuming the 45-year-old survives it. Chauvin is a notorious ex-cop convicted in a case that is racially charged, notwithstanding the absence of racial-bias evidence. He will be a target for gangs and other violent inmates. Holding him in the general prison population would not be responsible in the short term, if ever. There is no harder time than time in isolation. That is not a defense of the excessive force that resulted in the jury’s verdict; it is simply a realistic observation of what lies ahead.

The other three former cops charged by the Justice Department are Chauvin’s partner, Tou Thao, a 35-year-old veteran of the force, and a pair of rookies, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, 38 and 27 respectively, who were brand new to the job when they encountered Floyd last Memorial Day. The three are scheduled to be tried jointly in state court, starting August 23, on charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter. Furthermore, prosecutors are pushing to add a third-degree “depraved indifference” murder charge, just as they controversially did in Chauvin’s case. In less than two weeks (May 20), a state appellate court will hear arguments on whether that should be permitted.