RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/06/two-americas-collide-at-the-supreme-court/

When President Biden fumed that the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling is “not normal,” he spoke more truth than he may have intended. It is certainly not normal nowadays to acknowledge, even implicitly, that discrimination against whites is possible, or even wrong. The Supreme Court blasted the vaporous pretexts that elites have used to justify this invidious scheme, which has carried on indefinitely, feasting on countless dreams without satisfying a bottomless hunger of unquantifiable grievance. The sentimental and, arguably, self-serving wailing of the dissenters, particularly Justice Jackson, draws from that same source.

Although affirmative action has long been unpopular with the public, the outcome in this case is paradoxically more provocative than the Dobbs decision, which cut against popular opinion on abortion. The reason is that racially conscious discrimination has been the rule of American life for the better part of a century. When, in the majority opinion, the famously milquetoast John Roberts asserted that all racial discrimination is bad, he was appealing to a supposed truism that has been repudiated in theory and practice by this country’s ruling class.

To the left, the court’s colorblind worldview is casuistry. Judging by the fruits of civil rights, the left would seem to have the better argument. From its inception, civil rights has meant almost exclusively treating certain groups favorably and others disfavorably. Affirmative action at elite universities was merely the most high-stakes example of this system. From corporate hiring to television advertising and the way newspapers report, or do not report, crime, life in America is now encoded in the subtlest of ways by racial preferences. Even in the most informal of situations, everyone understands the power of the proverbial “race card.” Some employees are virtually unfireable because of their skin color. Freedom of speech has been throttled by a pervasive dread of retaliation for causing even unintentional offense on the basis of race.

Justices Sotomayor and Jackson envision a totalitarian nightmare where wealth, honors, and opportunities are perpetually redistributed until some intangible state of “equality” is reached. Yet this terror, indistinguishable from communism, is the reality in which Americans have lived for a long time. The disruption of that reality makes the court’s ruling anomalous. Can civil rights law now be repurposed to protect everyone, as originally advertised? Perhaps, but the role of blind luck and accident in this ruling should not be underestimated. Had Donald Trump lost in 2016, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a bit more humility, these opinions would have been flipped.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/three-landmark-supreme-court-decisions-protecting-a-free-america/

President Biden and his left-wing base are furious at the Supreme Court for the three historic decisions that the Court issued on the last two days of its 2022-2023 term. President Biden disparaged the Supreme Court, claiming it was “not a normal court” and accused its conservative majority of misinterpreting the Constitution.

President Biden’s attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court was not only a reckless assault on a co-equal branch of the federal government. It evidenced President Biden’s complete misunderstanding of the core constitutional principles of equal protection under the law, freedom of speech, and separation of powers, all of which the Supreme Court majority underscored in its landmark decisions.

With these three decisions, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority firmed up the underpinnings of America’s constitutional republic that the Left seeks to destroy.

On June 29th, the Supreme Court struck down race-based admission practices used by colleges and universities such as the defendants Harvard College and the University of North Carolina. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 6-3 conservative majority, rejected the notion that one’s racial group identity should supersede the totality of one’s own individual life experiences, skills, and aspirations as a prime criterion for admission. A diverse class of entrants can be assembled without having to discriminate against one racial or ethnic group in favor of another.

The cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina involved admission practices that pitted one minority group, Asian American students, against another minority group, African American students, for admission purposes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/07/bidens-boast-about-jobs-is-coming-undone/

We’ve pointed out how President Joe Biden is being purposely deceptive when he brags about creating 13 million jobs. An honest accounting shows the job gains to be more like 3.7 million. But what if even that altogether unimpressive number is itself a wild exaggeration?

Job growth is one of the only things Biden has to justify his reelection. He can’t talk about inflation – it’s still punishingly high. He can’t talk about real wages – they’re falling. He can’t talk about economic optimism – it’s in the dumps. He can’t point to any poll about his handling of the economy – they all give him failing grades. He can’t claim to have unified the country – as our poll this week showed. So, he plays up job creation.

Last week, Biden gave a speech claiming that “Bidenomics is working,” and tweeted out a chart showing average monthly job growth in each of the past seven presidents, with a caption that reads: “My administration has created more jobs in two years than any previous administration has created in the first four years. It’s no accident. It means our economic plan is working and this is only the beginning.”

This is the dictionary definition of lying with statistics.

Data from Biden’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 72% of the jobs the president brags about weren’t “created,” they were simply reclaiming jobs lost during the pointless COVID lockdowns.

https://www.newsweek.com/china-tariffs-solution-thats-simple-direct-plausible-wrong-opinion-1810578

Donald Trump’s chief trade official, Robert Lighthizer, devised the 2018 tariffs on many Chinese imports, and now wants to double down on a failed policy. His new book No Trade is Free proposes “strategic de-coupling” from China through even higher tariffs and related measures. This brings to mind H. L. Mencken’s crack that “for every complex problem, there is a solution, that is simple, direct, plausible—and wrong.”

U.S. imports from China have risen despite Trump’s tariffs on a range of Chinese products, as the $6 trillion in COVID stimulus spending created demand that American manufacturers couldn’t fill—but China could. U.S. and Chinese data diverge, because (as the Federal Reserve showed in a 2021 study) China counts exports that reach the U.S. via a third country while the U.S. doesn’t.

If a policy failed the first time around, why double down on it? It would be better for the U.S. to revise the tax code to favor capital-intensive manufacturing, restore Reagan-level funding for high-tech R&D, build infrastructure, ease up on environmental restrictions, provide apprenticeships for skilled workers, and subsidize industries critical to national security.