RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/race-america-still-incoherent-bruce-thornton/

We recently witnessed yet more examples of how incoherently the “woke” establishment talks about “race.” This confusion and duplicity can be explained by the Left’s commitment to “any means necessary” as their most important tactic for increasing their power. But it also reflects the strange persistence of the old racialist categories that flourished during the age of Jim Crow and “scientific racism.”

First came the murder of eight people, six of them ethnic Asians, by a clearly insane, guilt-obsessed sex-addict. Despite confessing his motives and their corroboration by friends and family, the “woke” commissars instantly began blaming white “racism” against Asians fomented by Donald Trump and his “white supremacist” minions. This attack, the narrative continues, explains the “outbreak” of anti-Asian “hate crimes” first stirred up by Trump when he insisted on calling the current pandemic “Chinese.”

Of course, this is all blatantly preposterous. Identifying diseases by geographical origin goes back half a millennium to syphilis being called the “Italian disease.” In 1957-58 we had the “Asian Flu,” and in 1968 the “Hong Kong” pandemic. No record of a “breakout” of anti-Asian pogroms back then. As for “white supremacists,” a plurality of “hate crimes” against Asians are committed by blacks. Meanwhile, blatant institutional discrimination against Asian applicants to our most prestigious universities––a lawsuit was making its way to the Supreme Court until Biden’s DOJ tossed the case–– continues to punish Asians for being hard-working and disciplined.

Then quickly followed another mass shooting that killed ten. Once more the itchy twitter-fingers of the “woke” decried psychopathic “white males” as a dire threat to our health and safety. Turned out the perpetrator is from Syria, most likely Arabic. While critics of the hasty “woke” gloated over the blunder, most people seemingly didn’t notice that Arabs are Semites, and Semites are Caucasians just like Swedes. Or at least they used to be: identity politics has turned “Caucasian” into a synonym for people of European descent. As Muslims, alleged victims of “white” Western imperialism, Arabs are now “people of color.”

This is where the incoherence becomes obvious. Those old racial categories were always useless other than for legitimizing the reduction of people to vast, simplistic categories based on physical traits like the color of skin, the texture of hair, and the shape of the nose or eyes. In other words, they are truly racist concepts that in their heyday invidiously defined the world’s peoples and put them into hierarchical ranks.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/30/trump-rails-at-anthony-fauci-deborah-birx-as-self-promoters-trying-to-reinvent-history/

“Trump’s statement comes after Anthony Fauci falsely claimed total credit for the coronavirus vaccine, saying it ‘may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made.’

Former President Donald Trump railed against his past White House coronavirus task force advisers, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, as “self-promotors trying to reinvent history” after the pair criticized Trump’s pandemic decision-making in a CNN documentary clip released Sunday.

“Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” Trump said in a Monday statement. “They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine – putting millions of lives at risk.”

Trump also touted the triumphant success of Operation Warp Speed, which produced not one, but two vaccines by the end of 2020 with a third vaccine by Johnson & Johnson approved by the Food and Drug Administration early this year.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2021/03/29/american-elites-do-not-hate-america-they-just-profit-by-destroying-it-n1435955

“It’s the fate of the nation and related matters that worries me.” Ivan C. Karp, Doobie Doo

American elites are not destroying America because they hate it, but because they profit from it. It is not that they hate America, the Constitution, or the American people, it is just that they do not care about them. What they care about above all is power and money. Their entire focus is on what brings them more power and money.

Who are these elites? They are the coastal and urban political elites, the security services, the big tech dictators, the industrial elite, Wall Street, the “heritage” mainstream media, and the academic elite, all almost entirely Democrat and increasingly far left in political commitment. Together these elites, through cooperation and collusion, form the American oligarchy that determines the state of the nation. As Lind puts it, “oligarchy’s essence is precisely the blurring and blending of public and private power in a partisan manner.”

One way that the elite gains power is through the breakdown of civil society. The Democrats have encouraged that breakdown through advocating racial, gender, other identity divisions among the population. Drawing on university-propounded academic theories of “critical racism” they have proclaimed the awful lie that America is blighted by “systemic racism.” On the basis of that lie, they demand that every child in school must learn that “whiteness” is evil and people of color are all helpless victims of evil whites and police. In other words, university professors and administrators, and Democrat politicians, applauded by the mainstream media, engage in race bating against American whites, who form the supermajority of the population. There could not be a clearer case of reverse racism. Advancing racial and gender hatred and fear among the population is the Democrat formula for drawing people to the Democrat government for protection. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oh-the-horrors/

I wrote today about the dishonest attacks on the Georgia election law, and a Biden claim that has, appropriately, gotten four Pinocchio’s from the Washington Post.

If you delve even a little into this law, it is beyond belief how distorted it’s getting. Here’s a good rundown, from which I’ll pull some notable items.

Hours for early voting will be extended in many places:

One of the biggest changes in the bill would expand early voting access for most counties, adding an additional mandatory Saturday and formally codifying Sunday voting hours as optional. Counties can have early voting open as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at minimum. If you live in a larger metropolitan county, you might not notice a change. For most other counties, you will have an extra weekend day, and your weekday early voting hours will likely be longer.

The deadline for requesting an absentee ballot is moved up to avoid completed ballots not getting delivered on time:

Instead of returning an application by the Friday before election day, SB 202 now backs it up to two Fridays before. Republican sponsors of the bill and local elections officials say this will cut down on the number of ballots rejected for coming in late because of the tight turnaround.

Absentee ballots will be more secure:

The actual absentee ballot and envelopes will look different, as well. SB 202 requires absentee ballots to be printed on special security paper, and your precinct name will now be included along with precinct ID printed at the top. Once you fill out your choices by filling in the circles for your choices, you will place it in an envelope that will have your name, signature, driver’s license or state ID number (or last four digits of your Social Security number) and date of birth. The envelope will be designed so that sensitive personal information will be hidden once it is sealed.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/30/bidens-weakness-on-the-world-stage-is-dangerous/

A series of embarrassing incidents in recent days shows that while the left may control the media narrative, it’s not fooling Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin into thinking President Joe Biden is strong.

Biden had a beyond-friendly interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, on March 16 in which he allowed Stephanopoulos to lure him into calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “killer” with “no soul.” It would be one thing if there were some purpose behind Biden’s hostile utterance about his Russian counterpart, but it didn’t appear tied to any strategic foreign policy goal.

Other than some largely symbolic sanctions on Moscow for the poisoning and wrongful imprisonment of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, Biden’s response to the January resumption of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany, which the United States had succeeded in halting under the Trump administration, has been “half-hearted.” The Biden team says it just wants to move cautiously, but observers say if they wait any longer to act against Berlin and Moscow, it will be too late.

Putin took full advantage of the blunder. After vintage philosophical musings about how Biden may be projecting his own inadequacies, he said the United States has a dark history. He quickly challenged Biden to a public debate. He condescendingly said the sooner it could be done, the better, even if Biden needed a bit of rest and time to prepare. The White House declined the offer for such a public conversation, as Putin surely knew they would.

Russia also recalled its ambassador, the first time such a move had been necessary in decades.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-majority-of-americans-see-cancel-culture-as-threat-to-freedom/

A majority of Americans see cancel culture as a threat to their freedom and are “concerned” that if they expressed their opinions online they would be banned or fired, according to a new poll.

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll shows 64 percent of respondents believe that there is a “growing cancel culture” threatening their freedom, according to The Hill. Thirty-six percent said they did not view it as a threat to their freedom.

Thirty-six percent of Americans said cancel culture is a “big problem,” the poll shows, while 32 percent said it was a “moderate problem,” 20 percent deemed it a “small problem,” and 13 percent said it is “not a problem.”

Additionally, 54 percent of respondents said they were “concerned” that sharing their opinions online could get them banned or fired, while 46 percent said they were not concerned. 

“It is a chilling finding that most people in the country now are afraid they would be fired if they expressed their real views on social media,” said Mark Penn, the director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey.

“The public generally gives negative ratings to social media companies and sees the movement as more about censorship rather than trying to correct wrongs. It is growing as a national issue,” he said. 

The survey was conducted from March 24 to 25 among 1,945 registered voters.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/29/media-fawns-as-fauci-promotes-child-abuse/

Exactly one year ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci joined President Trump in the Rose Garden to announce plans to extend the COVID-related lockdowns for another 30 days. Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx then presented doomsday models predicting more than 2 million Americans would die of COVID-19 in a matter of months, and urged the president to keep the country shut down until the end of April. Trump, persuaded by the data, agreed.

“We feel that the mitigation we’re doing right now is having an effect,” Fauci said on March 29, 2020, referring to the initial “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative the White House announced on March 16. “But the decision to prolong . . . this mitigation process until the end of April, I think, was a wise and prudent decision.” Fauci bragged that he and Birx pored over the data with the president and explained why they believed it was the best course of action. “The president accepted it.”

At that moment, Donald Trump officially handed over the reins of his once-booming economy and his political future to two heartless, clueless incompetents who unfortunately remain in the spotlight to this day. The economic, educational, physical, and mental damage Fauci and Birx inflicted on the country will never be fully calculated, yet neither shows a hint of remorse for what they’ve done. And yet the virus is still here—in fact, in some areas, such as New York and New Jersey, cases are again starting to rise despite more than a year of shutdowns, masking, and social distancing.

So it’s fitting that Fauci’s year-long reign of terror culminated in his suggesting a form of child abuse disguised as more “mitigation strategies” to fight the virus.

“When we talk about what you can do when you’re vaccinated, you can certainly have members of a family if the adults are vaccinated and you’re in the home with your child, you don’t need to wear a mask and you can have physical contact,” Fauci told “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan on Sunday. “When the children go out into the community, you want them to continue to wear masks when they’re interacting with groups from multiple households.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/30/joe-bidens-rule-by-decree-how-far-can-he-go/

President Joe Biden’s candidacy was built on the idea that he was an old, experienced, centrist in Washington, someone who could bring two sides together. So far, with his penchant for issuing “executive orders” to fundamentally change America, he’s governing precisely as a socialist dictator would. Is that what Americans voted for?

Never mind talk of Biden’s clear symptoms of age-related dementia as he stumbles, fumbles and mumbles his way through his presidential duties. Even at 78, Biden is still our nation’s chief executive and commander in chief. He has power, and he plans to use it.

He’s already issued more than 50 executive orders, including 22 reversals of previous Trump policies. Even his aides have gotten in on the imperious act: Last weekend one of Biden’s public relations people physically interfered with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s efforts to film the conditions of migrants at the U.S. border. Is this the Soviet Union?

Biden’s ready to do more — a lot more. PJ Media noticed this gem from White House spokesperson Jen Psaki’s press conference last week, in reference to gun control.

“We are considering a range of levers, including working through legislation, including executive action … he as vice president was leading the effort on determining executive actions that could be taken on gun safety measures, it’s something that he has worked on, he’s passionate about, he feels personally connected to. But there’s an ongoing process and I think we feel we have to work on multiple channels at the same time.”

But it won’t just be gun control. No, he has plans for lots of “executive actions” to bring about a major reshaping of American civic, political and cultural life, whether Americans like it or not.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-near-call-whether-the-left-will-implode-or-triumph_3754081.html?utm_source=partner

Here’s a question that I do not know the answer to: “Is the Left on the Cusp of Permanent Triumph, Or Is It Committing Suicide?”

That’s the title of an essay by Francis Menton at his blog Manhattan Contrarian.

Menton points out that the sudden acceleration of “cancel culture” and social media “de-platforming” are only two arrows in the Left’s quiver of intimidation.

Another weapon—more bludgeon than arrow, perhaps—ratchets up the Left’s “coercive suppression of dissent” to new, Soviet or Chinese Communist levels of ferociousness.

One main tactic is the universalization of diversity imperatives. The whole “diversity” gambit was always noxious because it never had anything to do with fostering genuine diversity—which requires a sedulous fostering of dissenting opinion and open debate about contentious issues.

On the contrary, the diversity racket was always about enforcing conformity and ideological purity.

The difference now is that what had been confined to a few administrative proclamations and particular “consciousness raising” classes has metastasized and is poised to dictate the emotional and ideological weather of entire institutions.

This development was possible only because of the Left’s “long march through the institutions.” It began in the 1960s with a handful of outside agitators.

It gained steam in succeeding decades as activists slipped into more and more positions of power—administrators as well as faculty. The puzzle was completed and fully weaponized when the government stepped in and backstopped the radicals.

Bureaucratic Instruction

They didn’t necessarily look like radicals. Many of the examples that Menton adduces are just ordinary academic administrators who, in embracing the poison of woke ideology, have trampled all over the ideals of individual rights, due process, and fostering an atmosphere where substantive, fact-based argument, not racial grievance mongering, could thrive.