RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/28/build-back-betters-dead-dont-bet-on-it/

“If Republicans aren’t paying attention, Democrats will find the way. And we will be stuck with Biden’s Build Back Better monster. Forever.”

When Sen. Joe Manchin said he couldn’t vote for “Build Back Better,” it might have seemed like President Joe Biden’s multi-trillion spending spree had finally met its demise. If you think so, remember Obamacare.

Bad ideas never die in Washington, particularly when it comes to expanding the size, scope, or intrusiveness of the federal government.

And sure enough, once the dust cleared on Manchin’s announcement, rather than admit the massive Build Back Better plan was a terrible idea that would create huge new entitlements, add trillions to the national debt, and that most people believe it will do them more harm than good, Democrats immediately started plotting on how to rescue this monstrosity.

Over the weekend, for example, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin took to the airwaves to say that his party hasn’t given up.

“There is unanimity in our caucus that we want to get a bill to the president, and we are working to see what that bill will contain,” Cardin said on Fox News Sunday. “President Biden is directly involved in these negotiations.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/27/its-time-for-the-black-community-to-embrace-a-post-racial-america/

This is the least racist period in the history of our country. If black Americans want to address disparity, we must start with the black nuclear family.

In some respects, I feel as if we are living through a time like Charles Dickens, “The Tale of Two Cities,” of which he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

We are bombarded with messages claiming America is overflowing with systemic racism and white supremacists. Even the National Council on Family Relations now labels the traditional two-parent family an extension of white privilege. 

If you listen exclusively to the news media, the entertainment industry, and the academic-industrial complex, you will be surprised to learn this truth: This is the least racist period in the history of our country.

Having lived in the Jim Crow south, my parents and grandparents would have loved to have grown up in the America I grew up in. A large percentage of the country has been operating in a post-racial America for many years. Across our nation, people have been interacting with each other with respect, dignity, and compassion regardless of race. They have been judging people by the content of their character.

We can pass laws that allow me to enter the front door and reserve a room in any hotel in this country, but we can’t pass laws to force people to open their hearts and their homes to people who don’t look like them. But that is precisely what Americans have done for decades. So how do we explain the differences in the realities on the ground and what we hear in the media?

My family is a classic example of the “best of times – worst of times” and of the disparity between reality and rhetoric. My children, who are now adults, grew up in a two-parent family.  They had their challenges, but they also had stability, unconditional love, and clear boundaries.

Unfortunately, there is a stark contrast with their cousins on my side of the family.  Of my four siblings, my children are the only ones who grew up with both a mother and father in the home. As a result, the lives of my siblings’ children have been interwoven with trauma and tragedy. 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/never-say-die-trump-russia-collusion-theorists-strike-again

Call it the scandal that will not die. Or, more accurately, the scandalmongering that will not die. In the last few weeks, there has been a spate of new assertions that presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Trump campaign did, in fact, collude with Russia to fix the 2016 election. No matter that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors, an aggressive bunch with a big budget and all the powers of U.S. law enforcement, investigated the collusion allegation for years and failed to establish that it ever happened.

Now, there are more and more references to something called the “Russia hoax hoax.” Anti-Trump types are unhappy that Trump, and some Trump defenders, and even some who aren’t Trump defenders, now talk about the Russia investigation as a “hoax.” Calling the Trump-Russia investigation a hoax, they argue, is a hoax in itself — thus the “Russia hoax hoax.”

“The Real Hoax” is the title of a web piece by the Brookings Institution’s Jonathan Rauch. “It Wasn’t a Hoax” is the title of an article by the Atlantic’s David Frum. “The End of the Great Russia Hoax Hoax” is the title of a Deep State Radio podcast featuring prominent Trump-Russia promoters Natasha Bertrand of Politico, Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast, Josh Campbell of CNN, and Susan Hennessey of the Brookings Institution’s Lawfare website. Lawfare also produced a podcast featuring Rauch and Frum, as well as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, moderated by Brookings’s Benjamin Wittes.

Why all the new activity? The Trump-Russia true believers are deeply concerned about the fallout from special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the investigation. In particular, Durham’s indictments have demolished any possibility of believing in the Steele dossier, which played a big role in the Trump-Russia investigation.

https://reason.com/2021/12/27/rip-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated/?utm_medium=email

If you spend too much time observing the way politicians speak, you’ll pick up an almost perceptibly mechanical gear-shift in their heads when the brain-groove reminds them to reproduce an anecdote or talking point they have formulated so many times before. Occasionally the subconscious rebels against the alienating monotony with apologetic prefix clauses like, “That’s why I like to say,” or “I always tell the story that,” but the pre-sets mostly override such human twitches to deliver the desired political result.

So it was for President Joe Biden’s counterproductive “pandemic of the unvaccinated” slogan, which the White House COVID-19 Response Team introduced in mid-July, and which the president was still regurgitating inaccurately as late as December 14.

In a local TV interview with News Center 7 in Dayton, Ohio, the president was asked about whether his administration would continue fighting his contested employer vaccine mandates in court. The politician-brain quickly whirred into gear.

“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated,” Biden emphasized, on the same day that the omicron variant produced a one-day positive-case increase of 16 percent in highly vaccinated New York City. “That’s the problem. And so everybody talks about ‘freedom,’ and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?”

What about that indeed. New York City’s one-shot vaccination rate (of 92 percent for adults, 83 percent for kids between 13 and 17) “rivals any number in the free world,” Politico’s Jack Shafer observed last week, and yet somehow my vaccinated teen and boosted self spent Christmas under quarantine. The fact-checkers over at The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact generously rated Biden’s “vaccinated…do not spread the disease” claim as only “mostly” false, despite epidemiologist quotes like “[the] statement is not accurate,” and “vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/26/surveillance-video-show-d-c-police-beating-women-on-january-6/

Recently-released surveillance video from inside the lower west terrace tunnel at the Capitol building from last January 6 confirms what American Greatness has reported for months: law enforcement officers from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police led a brutal assault against Trump supporters trapped inside that tunnel during the Capitol protest.

The three-hour clip offers one angle of what happened between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. in the tunnel, the site of the most violent clashes between police and protesters. It also is the location where Rosanne Boyland, a Trump supporter from Georgia, died.

One clip shows the attack on Victoria White, a Minnesota mother of four who was viciously beaten by at least two D.C. Metro officers including a supervisor:

The video supports what White told me in a series of interviews earlier this month; she was repeatedly beaten on the head with a baton and punched directly in the face numerous times by police. One officer grabbed her by the hair and shook her head side to side. Government charging documents, however, claim White—who is 5’6”, weighs 155 pounds, and had no weapon—was the aggressor:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/26/sowing-winds-and-reaping-whirlwinds/

“For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. ”
— Hosea 8:7

Joe Biden, first as a candidate and then in the White House, from the outset saw the COVID-19 pandemic mainly as a means of leveraging political support, from the manner in which the lockdowns allowed him to run a virtual campaign from his basement to equating Donald Trump with the COVID-19 virus.

Like many on the Left, Biden was overt in such cynicism. So were Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, and Jane Fonda—who claimed that COVID was a “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” moment. Panic and lockdowns could help achieve single-payer health care, or a recalibrated capitalism, or the end of Donald Trump himself. 

At the height of the last presidential campaign, Biden in September 2020 declared that Trump was responsible for the then-current 200,000 COVID deaths: “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive.”

Biden felt no need to list details where Trump had lethally erred or had not “done his job.” 

He did not explain how any president should be able to prevent all deaths from a plague. And in 2020, Biden certainly had no expectation that before his own first year as president was over the cumulative deaths from the pandemic would exceed 800,000. He would have found it surreal to even imagine that soon there would be far more deaths under his own tenure than during Trump’s presidency—despite being the beneficiary of ubiquitous vaccinations, new therapies, and antiviral drugs unavailable throughout most of 2020.

During the 2020 campaign, both Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris also had cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines. They repeatedly implied that any forthcoming jabs would be tainted by Trump’s sponsorship. 

Yet, later in office, both would publicly deplore any doubt similar to their own about vaccination safety or efficacy. Indeed, they equated remaining unvaxed to being unpatriotic. In addition, when Biden was inaugurated, he claimed that no Americans had been vaccinated. In fact, on some days under Trump more than a million people were receiving vaccinations. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/26/2022-new-years-resolution/

 We are living in a unique historical moment where we will need to change some of our attitudes toward politics, confrontation, and activism if we and our children are to survive as free people, and as Americans bequeathed with God-given rights. Further, if we do not begin to take off our kid gloves, our children will be indoctrinated in anti-American concepts of “civil rights” and “social justice” and immersed in smut. Now is the time to battle for country, family, and God and for what is good, wholesome, and righteous.

It is clear that the political Left, whose political home and power base is in today’s Democratic Party, fervently wants to make us second-class citizens. Even questioning the decisions of local school boards or election results will taint you with the label “white extremist” so as to nullify your legitimacy. Americans are being silenced, threatened with job loss, and forced into social submission to the progressive Left’s fictitious and repressive paradigm. It is profoundly un-American. But, that is not surprising given that the Left no longer subscribes to the historic American ethos and way of life.

They are sending or allowing Antifa, BLM, and anarchist goons to burn cities, destroy shops, and beat up locals to get their way. They intimidate, bully, and maim—all in the name of social justice. If done by others, what BLM and Antifa do would be labeled criminal and immediately prosecuted. Now is the time for Americans, especially religious Americans, to fight back! Self-righteous anger is justified, indeed called for, against people on an unending rampage to physically harm you, rob you of your lawful heritage, and purposefully foul the souls of your children. 

We religious people must get involved in the nitty-gritty political arena, and as citizens we need to muster the emotional self-confidence and fortitude—the stomach—to confront those hell-bent on bullying us into submission.  

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

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the South African bishop known for his fight to end apartheid is being universally lauded. I do not share that sentiment. While I will certainly acknowledge that he was a warrior against one of the great evils of his time, I believe that, on the scales of goodness, he squandered that moral virtue by being an ardent advocate of anti-Semitism and an enemy to Israel.

Over the years, I’ve found philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism to be very good yardsticks of both nations and people. Regarding the former, it’s no coincidence that, throughout history, those nations that thrive are, for their time and place, philo-Semitic, while those that fail are anti-Semitic. One can say that this is God’s will or one can note that free societies benefit all citizens and part of a free society is that it leaves its Jews alone. You don’t have to love Jews, you just have to leave them be. Totalitarian societies, on the other hand, the ones that oppress their people, invariably hate their Jews and use them as a scapegoat to distract the masses from the horrors of the regime.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the same turns out to be true: Totalitarian individuals hate Jews; freedom-oriented people don’t. I happen to believe that this is because the Torah stands for absolute moral truths, justice, and a reckoning in the afterlife. Totalitarians oppose all those things.

This doesn’t mean that individual Jews are all moral, just, or will be rewarded in the afterlife. There have been and still are a lot of Jews who are bad people. Still, symbolically, those core virtues are Jewish ideas and leftists back away from them like slugs from salt or vampires from the cross.

And this gets me to Desmond Tutu. I won’t repeat here, because you can read it everywhere else, that he fought to end apartheid which was, as I said, one of the great evils of the modern era. However, Desmond Tutu also practiced the African version of liberation theology—and liberation theology, quite simply, is a fusion of communism and Christianity.

As is true for all leftist ideologies, those who support liberation theology are hostile to Israel. Karl Marx, a self-hating Jewish convert, baked anti-Semitism into the communist cake, both because he personally bought into all the worst stereotypes about Jews and because he melded Jews in with capitalism, which encouraged the true-believers to think that overthrowing Jews was a shortcut to achieving “true” socialism.

Back in 2015, the Gatestone Institute wrote how Desmond Tutu strongly supported both liberation theology and the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, which attempts to use economic means to destroy Israel:

A virulent global campaign by a powerful Christian lobby is trying to influence the Church and use it to delegitimize Israel. The lobbying group is the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, with Nobel Prize Laureate and retired Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu as its patron.

Tutu not only agreed to serve as Sabeel’s patron but also to “assist the Palestinian Christian organization in its outreach and development work with Christian Churches around the world.”