RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/09/joe-biden-and-the-poison-of-identity-politics/

When we hear the word ‘identitarian’, we tend to think of a certain kind of person. Young, overeducated, not a fan of freedom of speech, probably white but positively obsessed with the pain and suffering of black people. They’ll be a TikToker too, no doubt, and a professional protester, forever turning up to public gatherings to shout ‘Black Lives Matter!’, or, for extra woke cred, ‘Black Trans Lives Matter!’. Well, it’s time we shook up our vision of identitarians. Next time you hear that i-word, think not of earnest Ivy League youths who spend too much time on social media, but rather of a 79-year-old man, stiff, not quite all there, and in possession of real political power rather than just influencer fame. Think of Joe Biden.

President Biden is the most powerful identitarian in the world. His presidency has been defined by identity politics. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, anti-woke liberals insisted that the insanity of identity politics would be kept in check if the American people ditched Trump and replaced him with Biden. Biden’s an old-fashioned political operator, they said, not a player in the pseudo-left’s crazy culture war against equality, reason and science. How wrong they were. Biden has guzzled down the identity Kool-Aid. He seems to view everything through the prism of race. He openly says he will pick people for high office on the basis of their skin colour rather than their skill set. Biden’s identitarian presidency risks overturning the great gains of the post-civil rights era, and replacing the humanising ideal of equality with the divisive new ideology of ‘equity’.

Biden’s hyper-identitarianism has been thrown into sharp relief by the Ilya Shapiro controversy. Shapiro was a senior lecturer at Georgetown University Law School. He resigned on Monday after months of controversy over a tweet he posted in February. Following Biden’s race-conscious promotion of the attorney Ketanji Brown Jackson as his pick for the Supreme Court, Mr Shapiro tweeted: ‘Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog and v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.’ It was those last three words – ‘lesser black woman’ – that caused a social-media storm.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/11/the-get-trump-show/

Perhaps the best comment I saw in the hours leading up to the opening performance of Washington’s latest entertainment, the January 6 committee’s “Get Trump” show, was in the Babylon Bee. The Bee promised that Miley Cyrus would be performing at halftime. Alas, our new paper of record was pulling our leg. Miley was nowhere to be seen. It was only Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the show’s emcee, and his substitute for Vanna White, soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). 

That was a disappointment. But at least the Bee was accurate in its description of the show’s basic plot line. “The January 6 Committee said,” the Bee reported, that “the opening ceremony of the hearing will include previously unseen video footage of the Capitol riots, followed by a ritual burning of Trump in effigy.” The burning happened off stage, it is true, but I am told that the snazzy television producer the committee engaged to produce the show provided some aromatherapy for the audience inside the Capitol.  

Discussions are underway with Gwyneth Paltrow to provide a scratch-and-sniff option for home viewers in season two so no one need miss the ritual aspects of this sacrificial reenactment.  

The Democrats went all-out with this entertainment. I cannot, however, pronounce it an unqualified success. Nor did the public, which mostly reacted with a yawn. (The ratings, many outlets reported, were “dismal.”) No surprise there. For one thing, as certain carping critics have noted, this entertainment is really only an updated rebranding of that earlier Democrat-sponsored farce “The Robert Mueller Show,” starring Robert Mueller and co-starring James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, with cameo appearances by Michael Sussmann, Glenn Simpson, and George Papadopoulos, among others. 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In the first half of the 20th Century (and earlier), through the early 1950s, wealth and social class were more important determinants than merit, in terms of college acceptance, employment gained, and wealth accumulated. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men were favored. Appropriately, attitudes changed in the post-War years, with merit playing a bigger role. Colleges and employers looked more at innate ability, personal drive, and willingness to work hard rather than family connections or schools attended. Race, gender and religious prejudices still applied, but that also began to change in the 1960s and ‘70s, with civil and women’s rights legislation, color-blind applications, and with many single-sex colleges going co-ed. Now we appear to have reverted to earlier times when, once again, identity – race, gender, ethnicity, and even sexual orientation – is valued above merit.

For colleges and universities, the use of merit – with SATs and ACTs as the standard measurements for educational potential – was an attempt to seek out the most qualified students, regardless of sex, race, or from whence they came. It is not a perfect system (no system is), but it has, at least, less bias than subjective measures. However, those exams now disproportionately favor Asians, so are deemed unfair, as they fail woke standards of diversity, inclusion and equity, standards which, by the way, exclude those with conservative political opinions and unsanctified cultural preferences.

Should merit alone be the standard for admitting a new student or hiring a new employee? Of course not. There are other valued traits: character, moral and common sense, integrity, diligence, loyalty. But, while many of those traits can be perceived through a subjective lens, the determination of merit is largely objective. It was almost sixty years ago that Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he spoke of a time when his four little children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Six decades later, woke progressives insist that the color of one’s skin does matter. The implication being that blacks cannot compete without assistance from the state. It is false and demeaning.

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/the-jan-6-committee-may-be-a-sham?utm_source=email&s=r

The Committee should be thought of as the most nakedly partisan force in the Whole-of-Ruling Class War on Wrongthink. 

The January 6 Committee may be Kabuki theater, literally stage-managed by an ex-corporate media executive.

It may prove wholly futile, as House Democrats themselves have seemed to acknowledge. Americans do not seem interested in litigating the Capitol breach 18 months later.

But, as I write in a new piece at Epoch Times, we ought not to let the cynical spectacle of the hearings distract from the tyrannical nature of the Committee, and how it fits in the Whole-of-Ruling Class War on Wrongthink being waged against Americans.

As I write in part:

The Committee treats its political opposition as if it is terroristic: It hoovers up the personal information and communications of countless Americans, and compels private companies to do the same. It probes conservative organizations and follows their money flows. It issues subpoenas against sitting members of Congress for their Wrongthink. It destroys the concept of executive privilege, seemingly because in its view Donald Trump was a “domestic violent extremist” leader. It submits criminal referrals to the Justice Department to carry out its jihad. How would it act differently if it was pursuing a terrorist conspiracy?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-6-10-do-additional-gun-control-laws-have-much-potential-to-rediuce-gun-crime

“Adding more and more restrictions on gun ownership is the way people who think the world can be perfected by more restrictions on freedom pursue their fantasy. The Second Amendment represents an alternative vision of how to live in an imperfect and unperfectible world.”

May 2022 brought two more in what seems like an endless series of mass shootings: On May 14, a gunman in Buffalo killed 10 people at a supermarket; and only a few days later on May 24 another gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

As is usual with these things, gun control advocates promptly seized the opportunity to demand that politicians “do something” about the gun violence. The “something” to be done as always consists of enacting more gun control statutes, on top of those that already exist.

But do additional gun control statutes really have the potential to make any significant dent in the existing level of gun violence? Almost certainly, the answer is no.

The two cited events seem, at first glance, to provide at least some support for the proposition that additional statutes could have some effect. The reason is that in both the Buffalo and Uvalde cases the gunmen had acquired their weapons legally. Buffalo (from CNN, May 18):