RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/norman-podhoretz-spiritual-war-for-america-conservatism-republican-trump-youngkin-carlson-11639

There was a time—roughly from the mid-1960s to the rise of Donald Trump in 2015—when the American right was more or less definable. No more. Major political parties are always riven by internal disputes, but even during George W. Bush’s second term, at the nadir of the Iraq war, the Republican coalition seemed to hang together better than it has these past six years. Mr. Trump’s candidacy was a sign of that fracturing rather than its cause, but his presidency wasn’t marked by unity in the GOP.

Quite the opposite. A significant faction of the party now advocates aggressive industrial policy as a means of alleviating social ills wrought by “unregulated” capitalism. Another demeans the party’s traditional predilection for hawkish foreign policy as an obsession with “forever wars.” The right’s leading media personalities, meanwhile, would rather talk about the latest cultural outrage—an androgynous Mr. Potato Head!—than explain the perils of turning social welfare into a middle-class entitlement.

Are the challenges facing conservatives really so different from what they were 50, 60 or 70 years ago? Most of the architects of postwar conservatism aren’t around to ask anymore, but Norman Podhoretz—editor of the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary from 1960 to 1995 and one of the founders of neoconservatism—is 91 and as talkative as ever. I visited his book-laden Upper East Side apartment last month with the vague premonition that he might have something to say about the fractured state of American conservatism.

My timing was good. The day before, voters had elected a Republican governor in a state most observers considered blue, and indisputably blue New Jersey had come within a few percentage points of doing the same. “I wasn’t sure they were still out there,” Mr. Podhoretz says. Who? “The ‘deplorables,’ ” he says, gesturing quotation marks as he employs Hillary Clinton’s famous term from 2016. “I really didn’t know. If the results had gone the other way, I wouldn’t have been that surprised. Our troops were not as visible, at least to me, because the media and the culture are all on the other side . . . The other side has won the culture—that’s one battlefield—but they haven’t yet won the polity. That’s very encouraging.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/joe-biden-kamala-harris-tweets-backing-jussie-smollett-remain-up-after-guilty-verdict/ar-AARFrmC

Democratic President Joe Biden and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris have left up tweets expressing support for actor Jussie Smollett after he was allegedly a victim in a racist and anti-gay hate attack that occurred on January 29, 2019. However, on Thursday, a jury found that Smollett lied about the attack.

Biden’s tweet reads, “What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.”

What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie. https://t.co/o8ilPu68CM

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 30, 2019

Harris’ tweet reads, “.@JussieSmollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery. This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.”

This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 29, 2019

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2021/12/10/jussie-smollett-verdict-guilty-disorderly-conduct-fake-hate-crime-attack/

Former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was convicted on five counts Thursday evening on charges he orchestrated a fake hate crime against himself nearly three years ago, while jurors acquitted him of one other count.

A jury of six men and six women deliberated more than nine hours over two days before finding Smollett guilty of five of six counts of disorderly conduct, accusing the actor of staging a fake racist and homophobic attack against himself in January 2019, and then lying to police about it, in a bid for publicity. Jurors found him not guilty of the sixth count of disorderly conduct.The charges for which Smollett was convicted dealt with his falsely telling several different police officers he was the victim of a hate crime and a battery.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-consumer-prices-increase-further-133924174.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

U.S. consumer prices rose solidly in November as Americans paid more for food and a range goods, leading to the largest annual gain since 1982, posing a political nightmare for President Joe Biden’s administration and cementing expectations for the Federal Reserve to start raising interest rates next year.

The report from the Labor Department on Friday, which followed on the heels of a slew of data this month showing a rapidly tightening labor market, makes it likely the U.S. central bank will announce that it is speeding up the wind-down of its massive bond purchases at its policy meeting next week.

With supply bottlenecks showing little sign of easing and companies raising wages as they compete for scarce workers, high inflation could persist well into 2022. The increased cost of living, the result of shortages caused by the relentless COVID-19 pandemic, is hurting Biden’s approval rating. The White House and the Fed have characterized high inflation this year as transitory.

“There’s not much room to explain away this inflation from pandemic or reopening anomalies,” said Will Compernolle, a senior economist at FHN Financial in New York. “Inflation is a tax, gas and food are among the most regressive aspects of it. Lower-income Americans spend disproportionately on both.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/why_does_pfizer_want_its_vaccine_research_protected.html

Go look at the VAERS COVID Vaccine Mortality Report to know why Pfizer wants FDA protection for its vaccine research along with 75 years of document secrecy. While there are all sorts of ways to interpret the VAERS data, and it’s entirely possible that the vaccine is safer than COVID, not only have many people probably died from the vaccine but there’s also still no way of knowing what the vaccine’s long-term effects are.

Some experts have calculated that only about 1% of adverse reactions are ever reported for various reasons in the US. This could be due to very minor symptoms, unfelt symptoms, or the amount of time and bureaucracy a doctor must go through to make a report. Some reasonable conservative estimates are that deaths due to the COVID vaccine in the US are around 140,000. Keep in mind that this analysis does not distinguish the factor that deaths are much more highly likely to be reported in VAERS than more minor symptoms.

If you assume that 80% of deaths are reported (80/20 rule) and that VAERS reports 19,552 deaths, then the number of COVID deaths due to vaccines is much more likely around 24,440 between 2020/21. The number of adverse deaths per prior years was about 400, or something over 5,200 deaths during the previous 30 years. At first look, these numbers are startling.

Consider, however, that ~100,000,000 million Americans were vaccinated in 2020-21, and if there were 24,440 deaths, then the probability of near-term death from the vaccine is very low. The Adverse Reaction Fatality Rate (ARFR) is about .0002% (2 in 10,000).

This is much lower than the general COVID Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of .013% (130 in 10,000). Using the VAERS reported 19,552 numbers, the probability is virtually the same as my number at .0002% of near-term death (2 in 10,000).

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/chaos_and_the_threat_to_democracy_.html

Among politics’ strangest alliances are those between the elite and the mob. They don’t happen often. The few times they have occurred produced devastating effects. The most notable of them was the rise of the Nazi party, which recruited its original and most loyal adherents from the outcasts of society.

When the Nazis became mainstream, Hitler himself remarked how he missed the passionate street fighters of old who had been replaced by political opportunists and office seekers.

There is a method to this odd partnership. It is built on mobilizing the periphery, creating chaos, and enhancing chaos where it already exists.

The Nazi example finds its parallel much earlier in the coup of Louis Bonaparte, the nephew and pretender, who overthrew the French Republic in 1852 and became the last emperor of France. Bonaparte created, from the dregs of the socio-economic system, the foundation of a mass movement. He called it the Society of December the 10th. He just as well could have called it the Brownshirts. Hitler would have easily recognized it.

Revolutionary mobilization of the periphery does not occur in a day. And, in a legitimate democratic society, it will most likely bring chaos, dislocation, and division, but it will not bring about major political change. Nonetheless, for those committed to an ideological view of the world where chaos is the paving stone to revolution, means are significant.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/09/the-republican-partys-multiethnic-working-class-coalition-is-taking-shape/

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration, and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.