RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-fall-of-saint-anthony-fauci/#slide-1

On the unforced errors of America’s most political doctor

In mid March of 2020, most Americans, including those in the White House, were still trying to understand the COVID-19 crisis unfolding around them. In a span of 24 hours, the NBA came to a sudden halt when players tested positive for the virus; seemingly minutes later, the American actor Tom Hanks announced from Australia that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had this mysterious new illness; stock markets crashed around the world; President Donald Trump declared a pause on travel from Europe; and the World Health Organization, belatedly, labeled the spread of the coronavirus a pandemic. On March 16, the Trump White House called for 15 days to slow the spread of the virus — a lockdown.

The White House coronavirus task force was meeting regularly and issuing daily briefings at that time. In the Situation Room, economic advisers began presenting their models and predictions for the economic effects of lockdown to the task force, including its leader, Vice President Mike Pence, and the president. What the advisers reported was shocking. Just four weeks of lockdown would lead to millions of Americans unemployed, extreme burdens on the public purse, and the greatest one-month contraction of the American economy since the Great Depression. A health adviser present said that, as the lights came up following the presentation, the faces of most of the advisers in the room were ashen. The gravity of what had just been said — all of which shortly came to pass — seemed to have stunned everyone into silence.

Except one man. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), immediately turned to Vice President Pence and asked a question that appeared to dismiss not only the imminent miseries of lockdown but the relevance of the entire subject from the proceedings: “I’m still in charge, right?”

More or less, yes, Fauci was still in charge. And he still is. Though he had spent the weeks before that day giving interviews in which he told Americans to be more concerned about the seasonal flu than the coronavirus, and that the wearing of masks by the public would be useless at protecting them from it, Fauci was cast as the face of America’s best pandemic response, the one figure who took it seriously. Fauci was the anti-Trump, possessed of a “quaint fondness for facts and evidence-based science,” according to the New York Times. Trump’s biggest supporters, sensing that Fauci was delighting in this role and despairing as they were of lockdowns, turned on the doctor, demanding he be fired. The White House began treating the administration’s most prominent medical expert as a threat, circulating anti-Fauci talking points. Which made progressives embrace him all the more. On social media your liberal friends call their COVID-19 vaccine shots their “Fauci ouchies.” Fauci became the latest warrior-saint of “the Resistance,” holding aloft the banner of science and reason.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pandemic-of-anti-semitism-11622131302?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“I am proud to stand with Jews against anti-Semitism, just as many Jews have stood and continue to stand with black Americans against racism. We haven’t stamped out the virus of hatred yet, but all people of goodwill must continue trying to achieve this vital task.”

As if the coronavirus pandemic isn’t bad enough, another sickness is breaking out across the world—a pandemic of anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jewish people is only one expression of the virus of prejudice. Even our most brilliant scientists can’t develop a vaccine for this disease. All of us—citizens and government officials—need to do our best to stamp it out.

“The recent attacks on the Jewish community are despicable, and they must stop,” President Biden tweeted Monday. “I condemn this hateful behavior at home and abroad—it’s up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor.” All Republicans and Democrats should applaud Mr. Biden’s firm stance.

Hours later, the president signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, in response to racist attacks against Asian-Americans carried out by bigots who blame them for the coronavirus pandemic.

The latest eruption of anti-Semitism has been sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But the perpetrators of these vile anti-Semitic attacks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, use the actions of Israel as an excuse to mount assaults against Jews.

There is nothing anti-Semitic about policy disagreements with the government of Israel. Jews themselves, including Israelis, are sharply divided in their opinions of the government, just as Americans are sharply divided in our views of the U.S. government. But attacking people because they’re Jewish isn’t about a policy dispute—it is about simple hatred.

Those on the left who profess to champion Palestinian rights are sorely misguided if they believe praising Adolf Hitler, beating up Jews in New York and elsewhere, and defacing synagogues in the U.S. and Europe with swastikas will aid Palestinians.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/28/bidens-wild-spending-binge-its-socialism-not-stimulus/

Of all President Joe Biden’s awful economic policies, none will have as nasty and lasting an impact on average Americans as the sheer growth he’s proposing for the federal government. His newly unveiled budget lays bare once again the Democratic Party’s sharp socialist turn.

Biden’s budget is, in a word, mammoth. It proposes a total of $6 trillion in spending next year, with a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion. That’s a 36% rise above the pre-pandemic spending of $4.4 trillion in 2019. By 2031, the Biden plan sees spending of $8.1 trillion, while annual deficits will remain above $1.3 trillion every year for all 10 years.

Numbers crunched by the Congressional Budget Office show that Biden’s spending plans would add $22 trillion to our deficits over and above current levels in the decade.

That translates into a massive, unsustainable increase in publicly held federal debt, from an estimated $22.6 trillion this year to just under $43 trillion in 2031. For comparison, it took the U.S. more than 210 years to reach $5 trillion in total federal debt. In the 22 years since then, we’ve added 3.6 times that amount.

Put still another way, our debt will go from 108% of our total GDP to over 130%, a level most economists see as fiscally dangerous, even for a country as well-off as the U.S.

“In just a little over 100 days in the White House Biden has won the mantle as the most fiscally reckless president in American history,” as our friends at The Committee to Unleash Properity put it. “He’s making Barack Obama look like a piker. If his red ink schemes pass Congress, he will have added more to the national debt than the previous five presidents combined.”

Democrats like to say, “who cares? We owe it to ourselves.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17412/social-media-antisemitism

People often forget that the very concept of political correctness was invented by Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Now… that social media companies have decided to become “Glavlit” — to publish only material that is supposedly truthful and passes its “community standards” — they have become more like the former Soviet Union than like the United states under the First Amendment.

This is not a call to censor anti-Semitic tweets. It is a call for the social media companies to stop censoring other speech based on criteria of supposed truthfulness, “community standards” and other such questionable criteria that are subject to political, Ideological and other biases. I want no censorship other than for material that is already prohibited by law. But if the social media companies persist in censoring, they must apply a single standard to everything. I want no censorship other than for material that is already prohibited by law.

The current social media have the worst of both worlds: they censor material that is neither dangerous nor necessarily false; and then permit material which is both highly dangerous and demonstrably false.

Social media platforms are engaged in massive censorship of matters related to alleged election fraud, doubts about medicine, vaccination, anything from former President Donald J. Trump, criticism of Black Lives Matter, doubts about transgender activities, climate change, hate speech and other supposedly politically incorrect tweets and posts. At the same time, it is open season for anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and the double standard toward things Jewish.

This combination — censoring many other things but not censoring anti-Semitism — sends a chilling message: If some things are censored because they are untrue, then items that are not censored must have passed some test for truth. Thus, the hashtag #HitlerWasRight, which has been posted thousands of times across the social media, must be true. So, too, must the thousands of tweets and posts that claim Israel is a genocidal, Nazi state that deliberately murders children. These anti-Semitic posts must also meet the “community standards” of the various social media.

https://www.city-journal.org/on-covid-19-origins-elites-followed-politics-not-science?wallit_nosession=1

It is a disturbing prospect, like something out of a science fiction novel, but it’s appearing increasingly plausible nonetheless: the cause of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed millions and cost tens of trillions of dollars, may have been a viral escape from a Wuhan, China virology laboratory.

The latest indicator pointing toward a man-made catastrophe—that, until now, has been obscured with the aid of credulous media and scientists—comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reported that U.S. intelligence found that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with Covid-19. That is well before the Chinese government’s claim that the first confirmed case occurred on December 8, 2019. This new report echoes a January 15, 2021 State Department fact sheet that reported several Wuhan Institute researchers became ill in autumn 2019. The steady accumulation of circumstantial evidence has prompted President Biden to order a review.

Early in the pandemic, conservative newspapers, like the Daily Mail and the Washington Times, and Senator Tom Cotton raised the possibility of a Chinese lab leak. The Washington Post dismissed such speculation as a debunked conspiracy theory. The New York Times labeled it a “fringe theory.”

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/nigel-farage-has-a-message-for-the-democratic/91524/

The heads-up this week to American Democrats from Nigel Farage strikes us as more newsworthy than its coverage so far would suggest. He’s warning that left-wing hostility to Israel could deliver to Democrats the kind of political catastrophe that befell Labor in Britain in December 2019. That’s when voters, reacting in part to Labor’s hostility to the Jewish state, gave Conservatives such a victory that Jeremy Corbyn was forced to resign.

On a visit here, Mr. Farage, a founding father of the Brexit movement, issued his warning in an interview Monday with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. He reckoned that Mr. Corbyn’s taking the Labor Party “in the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel but clearly also anti-Semitic direction” had prompted voters in “Middle England” to say “‘we don’t like this kind of extremism,’ and it did hurt the Labor Party.”

“I think,” Mr Farage also said, “there are many instances here in the USA of members of Congress who are supporting these Palestinian protests.” He scored the Democrats for failing to condemn attacks on Jews “in strong enough terms.” He suggested that “across the western world” the left has “openly supported a Palestinian cause that behaves more like a terrorist organization,” and “decent people don’t like this sort of thing.”