RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/01/as-inflation-fears-rise-biden-starts-looking-for-scapegoats/

You know inflation is a problem when it gets harder to find something for $1 at Dollar Tree stores. And that’s exactly what’s happening as the discount chain announced that many of its goods would carry a price of up to $1.50.

There’s been more bad news on the inflation front this week, so, naturally, Biden is looking for someone or something else to blame – other than his own economic policies.

As soon as Biden conjured up his reckless $1.9 trillion “rescue” plan, economists left and right said that pumping that much deficit-financed spending into a fast-growing economy risked sparking an inflationary spiral, to which team Biden said “nonsense.”

When prices did spike in the spring, Biden insisted that “the overwhelming consensus is it’s going to pop up a little bit and then go back down.” 

That didn’t happen. This week, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, who’d previously dismissed inflation fears, said price increases have “been larger and longer-lasting than anticipated,” and that this will “likely remain so in coming months before moderating.” The Fed now predicts that inflation this year will be 4.2%, up from its June forecast of 3.4%.

Also this week, the London-based research firm Capital Economics said that the U.S. may be heading into an “era of higher inflation.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/republicans-infrastructure-bill-biden-democrats/

President Joe Biden, facing a crisis on the southern border, a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, and a breakdown of relations with foreign allies, desperately needs a win on his domestic agenda. It looks increasingly unlikely, however, that the ambitious spending bills he wants passed will ever make it to his desk. The usually unified Democratic party is so fractured over the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that it appears Speaker Nancy Pelosi no longer has the votes to pass either.

Biden is primarily to blame for negotiations going this way. He said back in June that he would not sign the infrastructure bill without the reconciliation bill, describing the bills as being in ‘tandem’. This set up the perfect showdown between the two factions within the Democratic party. Progressives warned that they wouldn’t vote for the infrastructure bill unless the reconciliation bill also had enough votes to pass. Moderates responded that they wouldn’t be bullied into supporting the reconciliation bill and demanded a standalone vote on infrastructure.

Pelosi tried to call the progressives’ bluff, scheduling a vote for the infrastructure bill — known as the ‘BIF’ — on Thursday. The progressives refused to be rolled, with at least two dozen of them promising to block the legislation; without their votes, it would likely not pass. Unless, that is, dozens of Republicans made up the gap.

Senate Republicans, some of whom helped negotiate the BIF, urged their colleagues in the House to go ahead and vote for it.

‘It’s a good bill; it’s right there for the country, so I’m encouraging Republicans to support it,’ Sen. Rob Portman said. ‘There’ll be some that have told me they will, but they’re under a lot of pressure.’

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/wrongthink-on-race-with-glenn-c-loury

Four decades ago, Glenn C. Loury became the first tenured black professor of economics in Harvard’s history. Ever since then, he has made waves for his willingness to buck the elite intellectual establishment; for his iconoclastic ideas about race and inequality; and for his incisive cultural criticism. 

He is a man of many apparent contradictions: he rails against the divisiveness of woke politics from his post as the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics Brown University, one of America’s most left wing campuses. He worries about what the death of God means for the country — though he calls his own past religious beliefs a “benevolent self-delusion,” even as he admits they saved his life. In the ‘80s, Glenn challenged his fellow black Americans to combat the “enemy from within,” while he himself battled personal demons like addiction. 

For my part, I think Glenn embodies what the philosophers call a man in full. Glenn is a man who, in a time of lies told for the sake of political convenience, strives to tell the truth even when the truth is hard. Or complicated. Or an affront to our feelings. Or contradicts what we wish were true.  

On today’s episode of Honestly we discuss: race, racism, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Tony Timpa, school choice, standardized tests, crack, sexual infidelity, Christianity, the Nation of Islam, neoconservatism, and pretty much every other hot-button subject you can imagine.

Plus, Glenn’s own remarkable life story and what it says about America.

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/another_leftist_gets_redpilled_by_the_truth.html

Several honest leftists have been red-pilled—that is, their eyes have been opened politically—because of the Democrats’ tyrannical moves in 2020/2021, That list includes Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolf, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Maher. They’re not Republicans, by any means, but their disgust with their party is growing. The most recent addition to this cavalcade of honest leftists may be British comedian Russell Brand, who just discovered the truth about Russiagate.

Brand started as a stand-up comedian and then moved into TV and movie stints in both Britain and America. Many Americans came to know about him because of his two-year-long marriage to Katy Perry, which ended when his self-admitted drug, pornography, and sex addictions came to the fore. (If you read about his early life, you can see how he ended up with those problems.) He’s a relatively bright guy and can be very funny.

Politically, Brand is a man of the left. In 2009, along with every other leftist, he attacked Israel for the Gaza incursion. By 2013, Brand had pretty much given up comedy in favor of political activism and commentary…always from the left. He’s all about climate change, sought a socialist revolution in England, advocates for decriminalizing drugs, opposed Brexit, and supports just about any other leftist cause de jour.

For seven years now, Brand has done a one-man video podcast that looks at news and social issues from his self-admitted leftist viewpoint. He’s got almost 4 million subscribers, so he has a bully pulpit for his ideas. The problem for Brand of late is that, while he may be a leftist, in his own way he’s intellectually honest. In the crazy world of 2021, that’s making it difficult for him to maintain a pure leftist attitude. He’s discovering that the people he admired and supported don’t just have feet of clay but are also truly terrible people.

Six days ago, Brand had his mind-blown (call it swallowing a red pill) when he discovered that the entire Russiagate scandal that ran for most of Trump’s presidency and seriously damaged his ability to govern, was a Clinton hoax. The video is only 15 minutes long but Brand leads with his conclusion: He’s a leftist and no fan of Trump but he just had his mind blown. He is “in awe, gobsmacked, flabbergasted, and startled” by which he learned. Continue to listen to him and you’ll see a man in the beginning stages of disillusionment, long may it continue:

(Incidentally, have you noticed that the leftists’ problem isn’t that Russia is totalitarian because it’s always been totalitarian? Their real problem is that Putin is a garden-variety oligarch, rather than a communist. They liked the Soviet Union.”)

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/29/our-porcine-two-legged-wokists/

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

—George Orwell, Animal Farm

What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?
Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000 a ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well attended to by masked Morlock servants.

Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?

For answers about these hypocritical wokeists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, Animal Farm, an array of animal characters—led by the thinking pigs of the farm—staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers. 

The antihuman animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).

Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged piggish revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life. 

The Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise—the rewards for revolutionary service.