RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/21/the_stain_of_afghanistan_will_stick_to_biden_146437.html

President Biden’s supporters are hewing to one message since the disastrous Afghan exit: “Voters won’t remember it.” That analysis—or hope, really—could well be wrong because the evacuation left Biden with so many problems. None are going away soon.

The most consequential is that many independent voters are deciding that Joe Biden is simply incompetent. This “buyer’s remorse” is new, and it’s growing. Although Democratic voters are still backing the president, he is now deeply underwater with independents, both on overall “favorability” and on his handling of several high-profile issues. A Quinnipiac Poll, conducted Sept. 10-13, showed only 34% of independents approved his job performance, while 52% disapproved.

Those negative views will harden unless the White House and its media allies can upend them quickly. To do that, they must turn attention away from the cumulating failures (Afghanistan, illegal immigration, the COVID pandemic, and inflation) and achieve some big legislative wins that help voters in tangible ways. Biden is counting on two mammoth stimulus bills to accomplish that, but success is far from certain. The larger one might not pass, partly because it will fuel inflation and partly because it requires Democrats to support large tax increases. Moreover, the projected benefits, if they materialize, won’t happen for a year or two. The costs will come sooner: higher taxes and perhaps higher inflation and economic sluggishness.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-the-jews

Everybody hates the Jews. That’s the refrain from the brilliant satirist Tom Lehrer in “National Brotherhood Week,” a song that I had memorized by the time I was ten.

The very fact of the song’s existence, of course, is evidence of abundant American tolerance and pluralism.

But these days, the idea that “everybody hates the Jews” feels like less of a punchline and more like an accurate report of public sentiment. It seems every other day a new study or survey confirms what so many American Jews are feeling, as the old joke had it, that they are hating us more than is necessary. 

Today, came the latest study from the Brandeis Center, which released a poll of “openly Jewish” college students. Seventy percent of the students surveyed reported that they experienced antisemitism. Half of the students said they have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity at school, explaining that they felt doing so would protect them from harassment, bullying or social exclusion. This is the kind of thing we would expect to hear about the Jews of Europe. But not here.

“What is so ​​alarming about these results is that the survey focused on more than a thousand AEPi brothers and AEPhi sisters. These are kids who generally enter college with strong Jewish identities and an eagerness to be active in Jewish organizations. Instead, they are learning to hide their Judaism. And the longer they are in college, we found, the more they closet themselves,” Kenneth L. Marcus, the head of the Brandeis Center, told me. “Anyone who has been paying attention can see that what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. This should be an alarm for the entire American Jewish community.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/17/contradictions-gone-viral-n1479646

The controversy over the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines and boosters, and the validity of vaccine passports, seems only to have grown more pronounced and, indeed, more vehement with every passing week. The apologists for the vaccines—political leaders, medical “experts” (usually government-affiliated), the media and the punditocracy—have deposed that everyone must be vaccinated, unleashing an army of “fact-checkers” to torpedo any dissident argument and call the credentials and bona fides of highly accredited objectors into question, that is, when they are not being summarily censored.

The legacy press, as to be expected, is busy advancing the staple narrative of the official echelons. There are very few exceptions. I have just come across a particularly egregious and representative sample of such sanctimonious special pleading by Jonathan Kay in Canada’s National Post, worth attending to as an example of hack opportunism to be met with almost everywhere in the mainstream media. The moving finger writes, but in the case of the majority of journalists, only after it has gauged the direction of the wind.

As for our politicians and public health bureaucracies, they have put all their eggs in the mRNA vaccine basket and are now incapable of responding honestly to the bankruptcy of their policies. Their only strategy is to double down on their failure and persist in terrifying a gullible citizenry. Maintaining authority, the perks of office and reputation are powerful incentives. Notwithstanding, contradictions continue to poke holes in the consensus of what passes for official—and much public—unanimity. 

We are told that booster shots, which are coming thick and fast, are fail-safe supplements to counter the proliferation of variants. That these variants seem to have no trouble escaping the orbit of the recommended antidotes does not trouble the equanimity of our so-called “experts.” A recent report states that “An international group of vaccine experts, including officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and World Health Organization (WHO), said that there is no evidence to suggest that the general population needs COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.” Yet they keep coming and the variants keep humming along.

The Mayo Clinic and the CDC expediently changed their definition of vaccination from “produce immunity” to “produce protection,” essentially, from controlling the disease to reducing its symptoms. Apparently, the vaccine train and its caboose of booster shots looked as if it were beginning to run off the rails, requiring the gambit of shunting to another track. In any event, the destination is likely unattainable.