RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/whats-normal-in-america

A few days ago, 216 employees of Simon and Schuster, along with several thousand people from outside the trade publishing house, sent a petition to top executives of the company demanding that they stop publishing anyone who had anything to do with the Trump administration. Their rationale for making such a demand was that Trump’s presidency was a dangerous historical aberration. According to the Wall Street Journal, the letter insists that Simon and Schuster not treat “the Trump administration as a ‘normal’ chapter in American history.” 

Before I sat down to write this essay, I had to ask myself several questions. Will the opinions I express jeopardize my position at the liberal university where I teach? Will they endanger my relationship with my liberal publisher? Will they roil my relations with my neighbors in the ultra-progressive New Jersey suburb where I live? 

That I had to ask is not “normal.” 

For a long time, dictators, from the European tyrants of the 1930s to the military leaders of the Latin American juntas, skillfully used the violent excesses of dissenters to seize and preserve power. Now so-called liberal “resistance” to “fascism” justifies its attacks on freedom of speech by citing the threat posed by a former American president. Susan Sontag famously enraged the New Left by calling Communism “fascism with a human face.” The current woke movement has all the trappings of fascism with an anti-fascist face. 

https://freebeacon.com/politics/tim-scott-biden-response/

Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) delivered a powerful and inspiringly diverse response to President Joe Biden’s congressional address on Wednesday, causing professional journalists and other liberal ideologues to lose their minds.

Scott argued that Biden—a “good man” whose speech was “full of good words”—had failed to deliver on his promise to unite the country and “lower the temperature” after his victory in the 2020 election. “The Biden administration has pushed us apart,” he said, praising the bipartisan COVID-19 relief legislation passed under former president Donald Trump and the success of Operation Warp Speed. The radical policies Democrats have proposed, he argued, were not intended to find “common ground.”

Invoking his personal story of being raised in poverty by a single “prayin’ momma,” Scott challenged the lockdown policies backed by Democratic politicians that have closed down the institutions that aided his improbable rise, including schools and churches. He spoke of his experience as a black man in America and his struggle to be taken seriously by Democrats and their supporters.

“I get called ‘Uncle Tom’ and the N-word by progressives, by liberals,” said Scott, who also called out the Washington Post for publishing a widely condemned fact check suggesting “my family’s poverty was actually privilege.” He challenged the prevailing corporate and cultural norms regarding issues of race, denouncing those who are “making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all.”

In contrast to Biden’s rambling tirade, Scott envisioned a “joyful springtime for our nation,” where his illiterate grandfather “saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.” This was precisely the claim that Post chief fact checker Glenn Kessler, whose grandfather was a Dutch steel magnate, dinged for lacking “nuance.”

Nuance was certainly lacking from the liberal response to Scott’s speech. MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said the speech was “delivered from a planet where facts don’t matter.” Democratic analyst Jason Nichols, in a since-deleted tweet, called Scott a “clown” whose “ancestors are ashamed of him.” At least one left-wing media personality had to apologize for “an ironic joke” using racially charged language. The term “Uncle Tim” was trending on Twitter.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/28/cdc-punishes-superstar-scientist-for-covid-vaccine-recommendation-the-cdc-followed-4-days-later/

Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff invented key parts of the U.S. vaccine safety system. But the CDC doesn’t want his expertise on COVID vaccines. Why? Looks like politics.

The Centers for Disease Control pulled a world-renowned expert off a vaccine safety advisory committee after he publicly disagreed with the agency’s pause of the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine.

In an email, the CDC’s Dr. Amanda Cohn said Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School was being removed for communicating to the public his expert opinion, which differed from what the CDC was saying publicly at the time. Four days later, however, the CDC reinstated the use of the vaccine, effectively adopting Kulldorff’s recommendation after punishing him for publicly communicating it.

“It has been brought to CDC and ACIPs attention recent public statements you’ve made regarding policy opinions that appear to be pre-determined prior to complete review of data,” Cohn wrote Kulldorff in an April 19 email. “We understand and appreciate that VaST members have personal opinions and we do not object to the expression of those opinions. However, we expect members to be objective and devoid of any appearance of bias… Therefore, CDC is respectfully ending your membership on VaST effective today.”