RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/axis-of-evil/

“In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

That was Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother, in  Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. British author Paul Johnson didn’t grow up in Nazi Germany, but his landmark Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, takes up the “virtually indistinguishable” theme in considerable detail.

By the dawn of the 1930s, “Stalin had already begun to perfect the dramaturgy of terror.” The decision to collectivize by force, “was taken suddenly, without any kind of public debate” and Stalin set out to “smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.” This was “the green light for a policy of extermination, more than three years before Hitler came to power, twelve years before the ordering of the ‘Final Solution.’”

The Thirties was “the age of the heroic lie,” Johnson writes, and “the competition to deceive became more fierce when Stalinism acquired a moral rival in Hitler’s Germany.” Stalin’s agents “were always quick to learn anything the Gestapo and SS had to teach. But the instruction was mutual.”

The Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 was the “culmination of a series of contacts between Soviet and German governments.” For two decades “this evil stream of exchanges had flowed underground. Now at last it broke to the surface.” During the Pact, Stalin handed Jewish communists directly to Hitler’s Gestapo. At the height of the SS extermination program in 1942-45, “there were many more Soviet camps, most of them larger than the Nazi ones.” Early in 1941, Johnson notes, “Stalin began quietly to accumulate military reserves of his own, the Stavka, which he commanded personally.”

As in all totalitarian systems, Johnson explains, “a false vernacular had to be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism.” The SS terms for murder included “special treatment,” “resettlement,” and above all “sending East.” Before Hitler died, “he had largely committed the greatest single crime in history, the extermination of the European Jews.”

As Johnson shows, Stalin’s Soviet Union “was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been.” After WWII, “the tale was resumed where it had left off when Stalin and Hitler signed the pact of August 1939, and Soviet Russia represented the acquisitive totalitarian principle on the world stage.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/14/taibbi_same_people_that_cooked_intel_report_russia_interfered_with_election_also_surveilled_trump_aides_in_2016.html

Racket News editor Matt Taibbi on Wednesday told FOX News host Jesse Watters about a “broad political espionage campaign” involving the same people in the intelligence community that cooked the intel assessment that Russia interfered with the election.

JESSE WATTERS, FOX NEWS HOST: The point remains that the Obama-Biden White House, their CIA and FBI director launched an illegal preemptive war against democracy, got caught, and have been covering it up for eight years. Shellenberger and Taibbi also said redacted FOIA documents suggested that Biden has been conspiring against Donald Trump with the intelligence committee to prosecute the former president in federal court. Which would be an impeachable offense. Matt Taibbi is the Racket News editor-in-chief and “Griftopia” author. So this is great reporting. It’s hard to verify because we were told that this special counsel, Durham, was going to get to the bottom of it. Are you saying he missed this?

MATT TAIBBI, RACKET NEWS: We were told that the scope of the Durham investigation was limited to a few areas and that he wasn’t looking at this particular direction. The information that we have, the investigation that was conducted by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, what they found was a broad political espionage campaign and there were two main conclusions that are at the center of our reports.

One is that at least 26 Trump aides and associates were improperly and without predication placed under surveillance in election year of 2016. And the other one is that these same folks cooked the intelligence for the January 6, 2017 intelligence community assessment saying that Russia interfered, I’m sorry, conducted an influence campaign to help Donald Trump. It is a WMD-style story. They suppressed dissenting opinions and created a false narrative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/us/politics/biden-palestinians-deportation.html

The president, who is facing mounting criticism over U.S. support for Israel, used an authority that exempts people from deportation if their homeland is in crisis.

President Biden on Wednesday shielded thousands of Palestinians in the United States from deportation for the next 18 months, using an obscure immigration authority as he faces mounting criticism over U.S. support for Israel in the Gaza war.

About 6,000 Palestinians are eligible for the reprieve under a program called Deferred Enforced Departure, which allows immigrants whose homelands are in crisis to remain in the United States and work legally.

In a memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Biden said that “many civilians remain in danger” in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.

“Therefore, I am directing the deferral of removal of certain Palestinians who are present in the United States,” he said.

The decision comes as Mr. Biden faces pressure over the war, particularly among Arab Americans who were once a reliable constituency for him. In recent weeks, pro-Palestinian groups have been demonstrating outside his campaign stops, chanting “Genocide Joe.”

While Mr. Biden’s criticism of the war has grown more forceful since the Oct. 7 attack, the United States has not signaled that it plans major policy changes such as putting conditions on billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.

Israel’s war against Hamas has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Much of Gaza has been left in ruins as Israel bombards the territory in retaliation for the attacks on Oct. 7, when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in Israel.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/16/the-don-of-the-biden-crime-family/

The evidence of President Joe Biden’s criminal activity continues to grow. As has often been said, the wheels of justice grind slowly, but we’d like to see them get in gear in time for voters to know that their president is a crook.

During testimony earlier this week before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski said “it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family.”

“The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period.”

Simply put, Bobulinski said Joe has been the recognizable name that the Bidens sold to amass wealth that few Americans can conceive of.

“From China to Ukraine, the Biden crime family sold access to Joe Biden,” Bobulinksi said during an impeachment inquiry deposition.

He further revealed that “the Chinese Communist Party through its surrogate, China Energy Company Limited,” a business syndicate, infiltrated and compromised Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/14/dei-overpromised-under-delivered-ran-amok/

The concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been in the ascendancy for nearly a decade. The movement is an outgrowth and expansion of affirmative action, whose intention was to proactively promote opportunity for racial and ethnic minorities that were perceived to be historically disadvantaged. But as awareness that Affirmative Action had evolved into applying “good” discrimination to cure past “bad” discrimination, support for it waned, culminating in its virtual elimination by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

For many reasons, despite its noble aspirations, DEI should follow affirmative action into the dustbin of discarded feel-good but perverse social causes. In practice, DEI is irretrievably flawed. It has devolved into toxic authoritarianism on the part of those who control and promote it, while undermining basic tenets of American values, societal cohesiveness, and free expression.

The recent turmoil at Harvard concerning the discriminatory treatment of certain groups according to their identities or ideologies has helped to bring some of these failings to light. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 4, Douglas Belkin quotes professor Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist in the Department of Astronomy on how the DEI bureaucracy functions on campus:

Under Gay’s leadership [as Dean of the Faculty] … the mandate of the administrative state of the university continued to expand and shift from serving faculty to monitoring them. The message was, ‘Don’t deviate from what they find to be appropriate’ … [DEI] became more of a police organization.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/15/put-a-kill-switch-on-govt-bureaucrats-not-our-cars/

Remember that “kill switch” mandate for new cars that media fact-checkers years ago assured the public was just a crazy right-wing conspiracy? Well, the federal government recently took the first step toward a rule that would …. require all new cars sold to come with a kill switch.

A provision in the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed in 2021 directed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to come up with a rule by this year requiring new cars to have “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”

The law describes this tech as being able to “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected.”

Critics immediately raised privacy, cost, and reliability concerns any such “monitoring” system would raise, only to be reassured by the mainstream press that this was much ado about nothing. The provision was meant only to keep drunk drivers off the road.

The fact checkers also said that law enforcement and government agencies wouldn’t be notified of an impaired driver or ever be able to remotely disable your car.

Phew.

But the law doesn’t specifically forbid such systems from communicating with third parties or allowing them to shut down cars remotely. And you can bet that cops, government agencies, insurance companies, and who knows who else will all want access to it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/will_white_males_become_an_endangered_species_in_the_workplace.html

DEI is producing some pernicious situations in the workplaces of America, particularly with one egregious case in Seattle.

America was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal.” 

So how did whites end up at the bottom of a new hierarchy of races?  Why are lawsuits by whites alleging “reverse discrimination” -– racism of another kind -– on the rise?

Conservative writer Christopher Caldwell says it all began in the 1960s.  The decade marked a radical change in how America –- especially official America -– viewed itself.  In The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, his objective, incisive analysis of the process, Caldwell writes:

Today slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s self-understanding.  Never before the 1960s was this the case.

Until then, racial conflict in America was always seen against the larger story -– of building a constitutional republic. 

But after the 1960s, he writes, “the constitutional republic was sometimes discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human lives.”

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) -– which Caldwell describes as “less a judicial argument than a judicial order” -– and the Civil Rights Act (1964) ended up casting a “rival Constitution” incompatible with the original and bypassing the democratic process. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-not-learning-from-history/

From its beginning 2400 years ago in ancient Greece, the purpose of history has been to counsel the present by documenting the mistakes of the past. Thucydides explicitly made this goal the purpose of his History of the Peloponnesian War: to memorialize “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”  At the violent end of the Roman Republic, the historian Livy similarly explains his intent: to shows us “what to imitate,” and “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”

Yet here we are, two millennia later, despite our wealth, technological advances, and much vaster knowledge, still repeating the mistakes and follies not just of the distant past, but of the last half-century. The four years of the Biden administration’s failing foreign policy are the consequence of bad ideas and practices that we have already witnessed over and over.

Until we pay attention to the blunders of the past, and acknowledge the tragic nature of human affairs, we will continue to let misplaced idealism, electoral politics, ideological mantras, and sheer laziness endanger our national security and interests.

The conflict ignited by Hamas’ war crimes on October 7 features another lesson our foreign policy and national security mavens have failed to learn.  U.S. forces in the region have been attacked 170 times by Iranian proxies, with scores of U.S. troops wounded, some critically, and three killed. Yet during that time, the Biden administration has responded with telegraphed and limited missile attacks on proxy assets in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Red Sea. Yet the aggression against our forces and international shipping has persisted.

https://tomklingenstein.com/woke-equality-is-a-myth/

Editor’s Note: The woke regime, or the group quota regime, is defined by its pursuit of group outcome equality: a leveling of social and economic results across racial categories, irrespective of actual differences and the realities of the individual. Yet credible social science, especially the work of Thomas Sowell, suggests that such outcome equality is not just undesirable — a threat to the republic of liberty and merit established by the Constitution — but impossible. Variation in outcomes stems from human nature and from reality, social and otherwise. A society that ensures group outcome equality cannot possibly be one that respects human liberty.

This central insight of Sowell’s work explains, in part, the stunning radicalism the group quota regime has exhibited in recent years: Driven toward a virtually unattainable goal, the woke set themselves up in direct opposition to the natural law — and seek ever more power in hopes of overcoming its influence on American society and the American regime. That quest for power has ignited a cold civil war between the partisans of this revolution and those who still believe in the free society  — even a free society marked by disparate outcomes.

This essay was originally published in the Summer 2018 issue of the Claremont Review of Books under the title “Thomas Sowell’s Inconvenient Truths.”

New York City’s vast public school system enrolls 1.1 million students, some 18,000 of whom attend nine “specialized” high schools, where the curriculum is particularly rigorous and admission is both widely sought and highly competitive. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech are the oldest, largest, and most famous such institutions. Eight of these schools base admission decisions solely on applicants’ scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), developed by an education assessment company under contract to the New York school system, which began using it in 1971. (The ninth concentrates on art, music, and the performing arts. It admits students on the basis of portfolios or auditions, since no standardized test can reliably identify those 13-year-olds who will, over the ensuing four years, turn out to be the most annoying.)

In June, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called for his city’s schools to replace SHSAT with an admissions process relying on two measures: middle-school class rank, and scores on a test taken by every student in New York state. Using SHSAT is a “monumental injustice,” he contended, because blacks and Hispanics account for two thirds of all New York City public school students but only one tenth of those enrolled in the specialized high schools. For de Blasio, this gap shows that using SHSAT denies students “an equal chance to get into one of their city’s best high schools.” Under the admissions procedure the mayor has proposed, which cannot be implemented without the New York state legislature’s approval, the specialized high schools will “start looking like New York City.” Black and Hispanic students, that is, would account for about 45% of enrollment, much higher than the current figure, though still only two thirds of their numbers in New York’s entire school system.

Tellingly, de Blasio treats SHSAT’s unrepresentative outcome as proof that its use constitutes an unfair process. His reasoning applies to a specific situation the general principle recently expressed by Ibram X. Kendi: “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Kendi, a historian who directs the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University, is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won a National Book Award in 2016. He recently wrote in the New York Times that “many racist Americans” resort to what he considers the only alternative explanation for racial disparities: “black inferiority.” In the same spirit, de Blasio writes that objections that his admissions proposals will “lower the standard” at the specialized schools are based on a “narrative” that not only “traps students in a grossly unfair environment,” but “actually blames them for it.”