RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/04/a-victory-for-reality

Karl Marx looked at the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and declared that all that was solid seemed to be melting into air, but witnesses of the Cultural Revolution of the twenty-first century might be tempted to respond that the Communist Manifesto had only the vaguest idea of what such dissolution looks like. It is one thing to replace the hand loom with the factory production line, quite another to replace the material realities of the world with linguistic fictions.

In this context, I have noticed recently that numerous correspondents have begun to identify their “preferred pronouns” in the bylines at the bottom of their emails. Yet it is already clear that the notion of “preference” functions somewhat like “volunteer” did at my old school. It is really code for “required,” and any deviation or refusal might not simply cause personal offense but lead to more significant and sinister consequences.

Such was true in the matter of Meriwether v. Hartop, a case decided last week by the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio, had found himself in trouble for initially refusing to use the preferred pronouns of a transgender student (referred to as “Doe” in the court filing) because this would require him to act against conscience.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_totalitarians_covid_con_unintentionally_explained_by_cnn_public_health_expert.html

Too much freedom is a bad thing because it limits the ability of the state to coerce its subjects (“citizens” seems almost archaic as the Great Reset looms) into behavior they otherwise would resist. That’s the basic message explained to Chris Cuomo by a professor of public health policy that CNN favors with its airtime.

We lost an incredible amount of the freedom we formerly took for granted when Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, and was greeted by world leaders as a pandemic justifying the radical curtailment of liberty and enhancement of their own power. Now, they and their lackeys in the academic and medical establishment see the restoration of those liberties as a threat. George Washington University Public Health Policy Professor Laura Wen said it out loud – a classic Kinsley gaffe of accidentally telling the truth about something that politicians would rather the public not understand. A lot of people noticed, including Ace of Spades, Legal Insurrection, and Instapundit. This tweet with 38 seconds of video has gotten almost 4 million views: WATCH HERE.  :

It’s clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket to pre-pandemic life….and the window to do that is really narrowing. You were mentioning, Chris, about how all these states were reopening. They are reopening at 100 percent….and we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status.

Because, otherwise, if everything is reopen, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things…here’s all these freedoms that you have.” Because, otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy those freedoms anyway.” [emphasis added]

You can’t have people enjoying freedoms before the government forces them all to take a experimental drugs, some of which act on their genetic makeup. One that has caused severe reactions in some, including a number of deaths.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/01/against-the-covid-clingers/

With all signs indicating that things are improving, there is no justification for carrying on this way. After all the country has suffered, it is a slap in the face. Americans have lived in stultifying confinement for a year now. Persistence in this social experiment is not merely irrational, but anti-social and hostile to life.

If we do not reclaim the world we had, we will have a new form of life dictated to us by social engineers.

The COVID Clingers Won’t Let Go

Let’s not kid ourselves. For some, the coronavirus has been a joyride. Topping the list of COVID clingers is Biden. Where would he be without the pandemic? Not in the White House, that’s for certain. Without COVID, Biden would still be tottering around one of his mansions in Delaware.

COVID-19 has also been a blessing to the “expert” class and their media mouthpieces who have been elevated to god-like status, the newly contrived “essential” worker classes, and our ghastly health bureaucracy, praised ad nauseam for its “heroism” while preventing families from seeing loved ones and limiting transparency.

For countless unremarkable people, being a COVID hall monitor has provided a sense of superiority and importance. They will miss scolding their maskless neighbors. They have come to love the fear. Ironically, or perhaps not, those who ostensibly fear coronavirus the most seem most loath to lose it.

The COVID clingers are trying to squeeze everything they can out of this “crisis” before the momentum fades. We are, by a sleight of hand, being nudged to accept a “new normal” that we never asked for under the guise of returning to the normal that we once had. 

https://americanmind.org/salvo/terms-of-servitude/

A fresh lesson in the un-American cost of chilling online political speech.

After January’s explosive drama, the battle for digital control of American life is now proceeding quietly, by soft degrees. The shock of 1/6 has morphed into a pretext for something still more consequential: a new phase of national crisis wherein corporations with strategic control over Americans’ communications enforce a creeping line of censorship against critics of the sitting regime. While online platforms claim only to be applying their terms of service in neutral fashion, those terms themselves stink of delegitimization. Once this shadow falls upon you and your account, you are as good as deactivated. You know this; you know they know this; they know you know they know it. Forced de facto to impose a precautionary principle on yourself, you “voluntarily” recoil well from the fuzzy line of unofficial censorship that advances far beyond the bright official line.

Already in March of 2020, Google had erased heterodox research on COVID-19. But things escalated rapidly when election season came in earnest. The New York Post was locked out of Twitter for breaking a story about Hunter Biden’s Chinese business ventures. The sitting president had his social media accounts shut down entirely. Twitter competitor Parler was removed from Amazon’s servers for hosting discussions among Trumpists about the unfolding events. And YouTube banned even the allegation of widespread election fraud. Americans realized—or should have—that they had suddenly been herded into a communications control system unlike any ever imposed—or even conceived—in America.

Not merely a handful of fringe cranks, but a full half of the country, is being pre-screened out of the kinds of political discourse fundamental to American citizenship. Yet this radical change is setting in with unnerving ease and rapidity. Day by day, Americans are losing faith that there is anything they can do about it. Day by day, they are getting used to it.