RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/13/why-have-elites-abandoned-merit/

If you’re just a grubby striver, firm in your conviction that you deserve to succeed or fail based upon your own abilities and efforts, know well that elite institutions are now arrayed against you.

Surveying several recent news items, one could not be faulted for believing that the notion of merit has been significantly downgraded in American life.

United Airlines tweeted last week that it “plan(s) for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” While perhaps a worthy goal, left unmentioned are the relevance of gender or race to piloting a jet safely, and any support for the assertion that such groups previously had been excluded from consideration).

In higher education, two Ivy League academic institutions, Harvard and Yale, have been in the crosshairs of legal actions for disfavoring Asian Americans in college admissions, these applicants’ credentials notwithstanding (and this during a time when hate crimes against Americans of Asian heritage are on the rise). More broadly within higher education, this past year’s “test-optional” approach to admissions due to COVID-19 may be here to stay.

While few will give direct voice to the sentiment that “merit no longer matters,” our elites and institutions appear to have moved honest achievement well down the list of what is celebrated and are increasingly hostile to its promotion—a significant reversal of past practice.

The ideals of advancing one’s station through ability and hard work, and society rewarding legitimate achievement, have been on an upward trajectory since the advent of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which provided the brains and brawn for self-actualization and economic advancement, respectively. What caused our elites, who embraced merit after having signally failed to prevent its advance at the expense of entrenched privilege, to later turn against it with such force?

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/david-horowitzandjohn-perazzo/2021/04/13/bidens-team-of-racists-and-anti-semites-an-anti-american-coalition-in-the-heart-of-the-white-house-n1439724

Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti-American.

Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris, whose antipathy for America oozes from her every pore. At a February 2019 presidential campaign stop, for example she said Columbus Day should be replaced with “Indigenous People’s Day” because “we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country.”  This is an accurate summary of the way the Biden White House views its native land, and it is a view encapsulating three big lies.

What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies.  Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin.

All forms of institutional and systemic racism including Jim Crow were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In one of his first statements as president Biden claimed that “systemic racism” has been built into every aspect of our system.” This is a bald-faced lie. The opposite is the truth. Under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, systemic racism is outlawed in America. With the exception of affirmative action policies sanctioned by the Supreme Court, there is no systemic racism in America,. If there were systemic racism, there would be a tsunami of legal suits to punish those who practiced it. There is no such tsunami because the claim is a baseless lie.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/big-corporations-now-deploying-woke?toke

The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this same branding tactic. The CIA — in between military coups, domestic disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due process — joyously celebrates Women’s Day, promotes what it calls The Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE), hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black History Month. The FBI does the same.