RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/08/who_should_compete_in_womens_sports_150762.html

“What is a woman?” “Can a man get pregnant?” Questions like those are frequently raised at Senate hearings for progressive nominees to the federal bench or Cabinet positions. Republicans pose them for a reason. They know the witnesses will fumble the answers.

Some try to wriggle out with circumlocutions, offering only convoluted mumbling. That works brilliantly for French academic articles but not so well for U.S. Senate hearings. Other witnesses, mostly judicial nominees, claim they cannot answer because the questions might come before them in future cases. They breathe a sigh of relief since their real motto is “Loose lips sink ships.”

Often, Republicans discover the witnesses have already proclaimed their views in opinion pieces, social media posts, or academic articles when they were appealing to like-minded audiences on the left. When the audience is more skeptical, however, they are less eager to repeat those answers or to defend them.

Progressive witnesses may not have answers, but ordinary voters certainly do. They tell pollsters that men cannot get pregnant. Shocking, I know. They think it is ludicrous to place tampons in men’s bathrooms, which some universities and elite high schools do now.

The question of “who is a woman?” is more vexed. The reason is that common sense and cultural tradition point in one direction (“he was born a male and that’s what he is”) but those are opposed by another tradition: our respect for human autonomy. The Western values of human autonomy and deference for individual choices mean we normally acknowledge an adult’s self-identification. (Here is a hard question, though. If my autonomy is to be respected on issues of self-identification, why can’t I simply identify myself as an African American or Native American, even if there is no DNA evidence of that identity? Why shouldn’t that be my choice, just like gender? Yet self-identification as a racial minority without that bloodline is fiercely condemned as a malicious fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, or Ward Churchill.)

These issues are far from settled politically. If an adult male identifies as a woman, many people say, “So be it. Live and let live.” Others are more dubious. Still others reject it outright.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/08/is-the-great-illusion-in-ruins/

In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.

Americans were then set to witness a great experiment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?

The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.

But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.

Who was running things?

The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/marxist_globalists_will_resort_to_terror_and_violence.html

It is important to understand that censorship does not occur in a vacuum.  It is a symptom of a worsening disease.  It is an early indicator of the political repression to come.  Like a canary in a coal mine, the criminalization of speech forewarns that State-sponsored terror and murder are not far away.  First, certain words and thoughts are banned.  Next, certain people are rounded up and imprisoned.  Finally, certain “enemies of the State” are executed quite publicly.  The imposition of fear supersedes the rule of law.  Terrorism undergirds social order.  Oppression replaces popular support.

What is happening in the West today is a concentrated push for global communism.  We could bicker about precise definitions — whether we are under attack from Marxists, socialists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, or other “revolutionaries” — but the end goal is clear.  A small group of global “elites” seek to use ideological and economic leverage to centralize political power and direct all human activity.  They seek the abolition of private property.  They seek absolute control over individual lives and local communities.  They are rebuilding twentieth-century totalitarianism with the privacy-destroying surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century.  

Most Western nations are working together to promote a public vision that achieves their private totalitarian goals.  Governments do not care about “hate speech”; they are dedicated to seizing control of the press, punishing dissent, censoring political opposition, and regulating public debate.  Governments do not care about “climate change”; they are dedicated to seizing control over all economic activity by first establishing a monopoly on available energy.  Governments do not care about “systemic racism,” “social justice,” or “income inequality”; they are dedicated to maximizing social divisions and distorting the meaning of fundamental rights, so that they may undermine long-cherished personal liberties.  Governments do not care about “gun violence”; they are dedicated to disarming their populations and making it impossible for them to fight back against tyranny.  Governments do not care about minimizing vicious and costly wars; they are dedicated to distracting their citizens with false threats to their personal security.  Governments do not care about maintaining the integrity and value of their monetary currencies; they are dedicated to printing and spending money that inflates household costs, taxes middle class savings, maximizes Wall Street profits, and increases welfare dependency.  Governments do not need to create central bank digital currencies to stave off economic disaster; they are dedicated to creating economic disasters, so that they can justify a future communist system that runs on privacy-destroying CBDCs.  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/07/navigating-the-vibe-shift-of-a-cultural-reckoning/

We have been hearing a lot about a “vibe shift” in American culture recently. The phrase has been around for a while. It gained new currency after the commentator Santiago Pliego wrote an essay about the phenomenon, and Tucker Carlson had him on his show to talk about it.

I recommend both.  For one thing, they offer notes of cheerfulness (I almost said “optimism,” but optimism is Dr. Pangloss’s failing) in the midst of our sea of gloominess and despondency. According to Pliego, Americans are awakening from their “dogmatic slumbers,” where the dogmas in question are the rancid pieties of the so-called “progressive” establishment. Have you checked your privilege today, Comrade? How are your pronouns holding up? What have you done to combat “whiteness,” “toxic masculinity,” and “climate change?”

The air of unreality is as unmistakable as it is noxious, and I think Pliego is right that the modification in the ambient vibrations—to the extent that one is underway—“is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.”

I like all those things—the items on the list of affirmations just as much as the tally of rejections.  Pliego admits that the shift he discerns may be ephemeral, though he is emphatic about his hope that the inklings of change he discerns are strong enough to last and effectively challenge what has become the dominant narrative in our culture.

I, too, have sensed a sea change abroad.  This forthright manifesto by Newsmax’s Carl Higbie is a representative declaration of the New Resistance.

But I also sense a robust resistance to the resistance, an increasingly agitated effort to tamp down and discredit anything or anyone that dares to wake up from wokeness.

That exercise in vibe stiffening takes place around the electric nodes of our culture war.  The carefully manicured narrative surrounding the January 6 entertainment, for example, has become increasingly tattered in recent months as revelation after revelation has undercut, contradicted, or exploded the official “insurrection” narrative. True, there were skeptics from the very beginning (I was one).  But the succeeding months and years—thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of investigative reporters like Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie—have knocked one pillar after the next out from under the official account of what happened during those few hours in and around the Capitol. Remember the “pipe bombs” that were supposedly planted by “insurrectionists” that day? It turns out they were almost certainly dummy explosives planted by government agents.

https://nypost.com/2024/04/04/opinion/up-close-and-too-personal-with-americas-fentanyl-epidemic-where-new-york-is-ground-zero/

It is very easy to find fentanyl in New York.The drug that in 2022 alone killed nearly 110,000 Americans is readily available right here on the streets of this city.Over the past the year, I’ve been investigating the spread of this lethal drug across this country .Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has a potency many hundreds of times that of morphine.

Largely made in China, its strength means it is easy to transport huge quantities of the drug. It floods into this country, mainly through Mexico.

One recent evening in New York, I headed over to OnPoint, a supervised drug injection site in Washington Heights.

The controversial facility allows addicts to shoot up under “safe” conditions, with staff on hand to revive users if they overdose.

These “safe use” facilities are still in the experimental phase, with many critics as well as supporters.

But, inevitably, it is a meeting place for drug addicts.

And although people are not meant to deal drugs inside the facility, inevitably OnPoint is a focal point for people who are using the most lethal drugs.

Hanging around outside after dark, it didn’t take me long to find someone who was using fentanyl.

He led me over to the park opposite to show me where people were coming to meet dealers.

While I was there, I watched a steady stream of people (including a couple pushing a stroller) going into the darkened park. For one reason alone.

Then, right there in the middle of the street, this man started tourniquetting his arm, getting out a needle and burning something up in a container with a lighter.

What was it?

“Fentanyl,” he explained.