RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/woke-switcheroo-bruce-bawer/

Last Wednesday, on BBC’s TV debate program Newsnight, host Emily Maitlis interviewed two American guests about the allegedly racist new Georgia voting law that led Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game, scheduled for July 13, from that state to Colorado.

Now, anyone who’s taken the trouble to learn the truth about the law, which was passed in the wake of widespread ballot fraud in the 2020 election, knows that it’s thoroughly unremarkable. Voters – all voters – are required to show ID before they can cast their ballots, just as baseball fans are required to show ID when picking up their tickets to an MLB game. But the Biden Administration and its allies have obscured this fact, painting the law as an effort to suppress the black vote. The premise of their argument is that an ID requirement is particularly hard on blacks – apparently because, unlike whites and Asians, they can’t be expected to get their act together well enough to secure proper ID.

They claim the law is racist. No: their argument is racist. But the CEOs of Coca-Cola, Delta, Dow, Hewlett Packard, ViacomCBS, and dozens of other major corporations have publicly gone along with it.

On Wednesday’s Newsnight, Eric Bolling, formerly of Fox News, defended the law. He argued that moving the All-Star game out, supposedly for anti-racist reasons, robbed many black-owned businesses of desperately needed income. He noted that Colorado’s black population is relatively low, and that Georgia’s two senators – both Democrats, one of them African-American – have opposed the MLB’s pullout.

Taking the other side was a black woman named Aisha Moodie-Mills. Instead of even trying to make a rational argument, she followed the current woke playbook from the git-go – which is to say that she accused Bolling of racism. “I think it’s really rich for any Republican, especially a white man, to run around and claim that they care about the economic condition of black communities and black businesses when that’s all a lie,” she said. Bolling called her comments “disgusting”; she doubled down.

As it happens, the clash on Newsnight came one month to the day after the airing of another dramatic three-hander – namely, Oprah Winfrey’s March 7 sit-down with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, at their $15.5 million mansion in exclusive Montecito, California (which also happens to be the site of one of Oprah’s seven residences). Meghan charged that while in Britain among her royal in-laws and palace servants, she’d been subjected to racism. Oprah was empathic. After all, Oprah (#1174 on the Forbes billionaires list, with $2.6 billion in assets) knows what it is to be a victim. And Meghan (who, with Harry, recently inked a nine-figure deal with Netflix) is nothing if not a victim.

Like Talleyrand’s Bourbons, the Democrats have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Still remembering the heady Obama years, the Biden administration is working full bore on a program of not just replicating Obama’s policies, but multiplying their ambitions and costs despite forgetting their manifold failures. At the same time, Biden and the Dems obviously have learned nothing from Obama’s missteps in handling the Great Recession and disastrous Iran deal, and Donald Trump’s success in correcting those mistakes.

At a moment when the economic recovery from the pandemic downturn is starting to gather steam, such old feckless economic policies, if enacted, will also duplicate the malign consequences of Obama’s: one of the most sluggish recoveries from a recession on record, leading to unnecessary damage to the economy and workforce. And working to return to the Iran Deal will hasten a thug regime’s possession of nuclear weapons, and increase its regional disruptive adventurism.

Obama came into office in 2009 when the Great Recession was five months from ending.

Rather than using control of the whole government to pass policies, such as tax cuts, that would have strengthen the recovery, Obama instead hijacked one-sixth of GDP by passing Obamacare, a Rube Goldberg bill so complex and ill-written that it took over 40 signing orders from Obama to fix it. Then he added a near-trillion-dollar “stimulus” binge with “clean energy” subsidies and “investment” capital for political favorites, the famous “shovel ready jobs” that Obama chuckled weren’t so shovel-ready.

Finally, in a still-fragile economy, Obama also instituted during his tenure a total of 21 tax increases, in addition to thousands of new regulations and rules that added trillions of dollars of cost to the economy. As a result, the recovery of the recession was the slowest since WWII, impacting workforce participation, unemployment, and wage growth.

That history hasn’t deterred Biden’s advisors, who are doubling- and tripling-down on Obama’s program. Having already passed a $1.9 trillions covid “relief” bill stuffed with pork, he’s now working on another $2.3 trillion “crony anti-infrastructure” bill, as economist Veronique de Rugy calls it, less than 5% of which is for roads and bridges. Another trillion is scheduled to be passed by August.

Moreover, James Freeman reports, according to a Wharton study, Biden’s claim of 19 million new jobs the bill will create––not to mention that the same Moody’s study Biden relies on says over the ten-year life of the bill 16 million jobs would be created if the bill wasn’t passed––is patently false. Hourly wages would go down just under one percent, as would GDP. And don’t forget the planned increases on personal and corporate tax rates, policies sure to further burden the economy as it’s still emerging from the covid doldrums.

As well as failing to forget past mistakes, the Dems learned nothing from the Trump administration’s success in correcting Obama’s blunders and using tax reform, including lowering the corporate tax-rate, to make the economy more competitive, and to restore its “animal spirits.” We all know what happened: restored economic growth, lower unemployment, more jobs, higher wages, and exploding stock prices. The economic expansion that covid ended in March of last year was the longest in U.S. history. The lesson Dems refuse to learn is that you have to feed an expansion, not choke it with anti-growth policies.

So too with Biden’s foreign policy, particularly the Iran nuclear deal. His team remembers the rhetoric and stale “diplomatic engagement” magical thinking that drove Obama to join an agreement that rivals Munich in its feckless appeasement. Despite the mullahs’ arrogant demands that sanctions be lifted even before starting another round of duplicitous talks, the Biden team has sent a representative to Vienna to join the UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany to get the talks restarted. The administration is anxiously soliciting Iran and promising more bribes to an apocalyptic, anti-Semitic cult that has been at war with this country for 42 years, sponsored terrorists, violently interfered in Syria and Lebanon, and serially threatened Israel, our most import ally in the region.

And Iran’s intransigence is working. A State Department flak recently announced, “We are prepared to take the steps necessary to return to compliance with the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], including by lifting sanctions that are inconsistent with the JVCOP.” That last phrase refers to Trump’s additional harsher sanctions as part of his “maximum pressure” tactic against the mullahs. This phrase clearly is a signal that Biden’s conditions for reengaging in talks such as stopping enrichment of uranium to weapons’ grade levels, are flexible.

More worrisome, this outreach comes at a time when Iran has signed an agreement to sell China petroleum products, with China pledging $400 billion that will ease the bite of Trump’s effective sanctions. The deal also contains provisions for deepening military, security, and defense ties, including weapons sales. In other words, just as Iran’s capacity for geopolitical, anti-American mischief has been enhanced by China, Biden is working to give the mullahs even more funds and scope for working against our national security and interests.

Here, too, Biden and the Dems have learned nothing from Trump. Trump walked away from the JCPOA because it was transparently an act of appeasement that created a fast-track for the mullahs to acquire nuclear weapons. He imposed sanctions that denied oil income to Iran and punished its ruling cabal. Aggression was met with punitive operations, the most spectacular being the killing of Republican Guard generalissimo Qasem Soleimani, an action Dems called an “assassination” that would spark a regional war, which of course it didn’t any more than moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem did. Trump’s policy had weakened Iran and its ability to fund foreign adventurism and its nuclear program. And it sent a deterrent message that challenging the U.S. and its military would bring a costly response.

All that now has been squandered even before Biden formally rejoins the pact. Imagine how much bolder and more dangerous Iran will be after the sanctions are gone and its revenues restored.

Projecting strength rather than weakness is the most important lesson that the Dems for decades have failed to learn. We saw the evidence a few weeks ago when our Secretary of State could respond to a Chinese minister’s slandering our country to his face only by squeaking that at least we learn from them. We might think such a confession to be a sign of strength, but the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, and probably many of our allies know it’s a sign of weakness and an eagerness to buy peace with appeasement. But though the cost of such concessions may seem a bargain at the time, eventually it becomes exorbitant.

The Bourbons who briefly restored the French monarchy had forgotten nothing of their lost aristocratic glory and privileges, and learned nothing from the world-changing French Revolution and dictatorship of Napoleon. Similarly, today’s Dems have forgotten nothing from their glory days of Obama’s two terms, and learned nothing from Trump’s populist repudiation of those times and its anointed heir, Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, if Biden succeeds in this return to failure, it will be the American people, today and in the future, who will pay the price.

https://spectator.org/chauvin-trial-blm/

Jack Cashill’s latest book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, is now on pre-sale.
The BLM website tells us that in 2013 “three radical Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called #BlackLivesMatter.”

On the website, to this day, the organizers proudly share the inspiration for the group’s creation: “It was in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.” The critical word here is “murderer.” An all-female jury believed rightly that Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense and acquitted him of all charges, including murder. Their judgment simply did not matter to the three women who founded BLM.

In the ongoing Minneapolis trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, BLM and its allies have shown no more interest in justice than did Alice’s Queen of Hearts. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” said the Queen, and when Alice protested the Queen shouted, “Off with her head.” Fearing the loss of their heads, perhaps literally, too many powerful people stand by mutely as the mob begins to circle the Minneapolis Court House.

Although the Chauvin trial gives all the appearance of fairness, it is likely to turn out to be anything but. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said of the Atlanta jury that convicted the Jewish Leo Frank of murder in 1913, “Due process does not become due process by securing the assent of a terrified jury.”

In Minneapolis, the jury has at least as much to fear as Frank’s jury did in Atlanta. From recent experience, the jurors can readily anticipate the consequences for the city and the nation should they vote to acquit. If one or more among them holds out to prevent fellow jurors from handing down an unjust sentence, they have good reason to fear for themselves and their families as well. The Left is keen on “doxxing.”

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-5c6

(Folks, this excerpt is on the long side. There isn’t really a place to stop until the next time. I promise no other post will be quite this long.)

From a certain distance it looks like we are dealing with people who “went crazy.” But that won’t do. How many people can we realistically tar as insane? In which human society have a critical mass of people become mentally deficient? Yet we want to know just why this new religion arose.

A religion soothes. It helps people make sense of things. The question is why this particular religion, promulgated so often with such sneering contempt, soothes so many.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY SAYS WHAT?

Its current grip on America as a whole starts with developments among a certain group of legal scholars a few decades ago. No one was chanting their names in protests about George Floyd, or while deep-sixing someone for tenure in an academic department, or while suspending someone from a newspaper, or while excommunicating someone for “problematic” – i.e. blasphemous – views. But the difference between good old-fashioned left and modern Elect starts with, for example, legal scholar Richard Delgado teaching nonwhites to base their complaints about injustice not on something so “rigid” as objective truth, but upon the “broad story of dashed hopes and centuries-long mistreatment that afflicts an entire people and forms the historical and cultural background of your complaint.”

This kind of argument was the source for the one now so familiar, that if a brown person says they have encountered racism, then it is automatically indisputable that they did, and if you don’t agree it makes you “problematic.” Or, the left of 1980 transmogrified into the left of 2020 on the basis of ideas such as this one by legal scholar Regina Austin, urging:

“a new politics of identification, fueled by critically confronting the question of the positive significance of black lawbreaking, might restore some vitality to what has become a mere figure of speech … drawing on lawbreaker culture would add a bit of toughness, resilience, bluntness, and defiance to contemporary mainstream black political discourse, which evidences a marked preoccupation with civility, respectability, sentimentality, and decorum.”

In other words, politics needs a jolt of some gott-damned street!! Yes, this was from a scholar of jurisprudence, and its like was the fount of the idea that for brown people, the old rules don’t matter. Forget (fuck?) civility or even logic (see Delgado above) – it’s all about how you feel, and specifically about how you hate the reigning order. Critical Race Theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses, and how to not be Caucasian in America is to be akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.

Almost anyone sees what a reductive view this is of modern society, even having read their Rousseau or Rawls. We must not be taken in by the fact that this is called “critical,” that it’s about race and that it’s titled a “theory.” It is a fragile, performative ideology, which goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/13/americans-keep-surrendering-to-the-mobocrats-on-the-left/

The story of more than 100 CEOs meeting to attack the voting laws the left is screeching over is discouraging. The healthy separation between civil society and politics has grown dangerously thin, and these “leaders” are threatening to punch right through the tattered fabric.

Sunday afternoon the Wall Street Journal reported that senior executives had “gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot what several said big businesses should do next about new voting laws under way in Texas and other states.” A pair of Kenneths, Chenault, former American Express CEO, and Frazier, CEO of Merck, “urged the leaders to collectively call for greater voting access, according to several people who attended.” These men “cautioned businesses against dropping the issue and asked CEOs to sign a statement opposing what they view as discriminatory legislation on voting.”

This being America, they have every right to gather, to express their opinions, to sign whatever statement they wish to support. And we have every right to point out how they’re falling, perhaps even willfully, for a gross mischaracterization of the new Georgia voting law and other similar legislation that is likely to follow.

Contrary to popular opinion, Georgia’s law does not suppress voting – in reality it expands voting opportunities. Even the Washington Post, a veritable Democratic Party newsletter, gave President Joe Biden four Pinocchios for his lies about the law, which were central to the widespread fabrications about it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-green-new-deal-in-disguise-11618267156?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Candidate Joe Biden emphatically denied that he supported the Green New Deal. As with so much else, President Biden is now a convert. His $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan contains enough spending and industrial planning that it amounts to the Green New Deal in disguise.

Listen to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who two weeks ago claimed maternity for the President’s plan. “As much as I think some parts of the party try to avoid saying ‘Green New Deal’ and really dance around and try to not use that term, ultimately, the framework I think has been adopted,” the progressive heroine from Queens boasted. The details prove her point.

***

Mr. Biden is pitching his plan as having a big economic return on federal investment—and better roads, bridges and ports could increase productivity. But more than half of his plan is dedicated to reducing CO2, with a goal of eliminating fossil fuels with a mix of federal spending, subsidies and regulation. This is a political project with suspect returns.

• Start with $213 billion to build and retrofit two million energy-efficient homes and buildings. These putative “upgrades” would be financed by federal grants, tax credits and the economically inefficient Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP).