RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/are-democrats-digging-their-own-grave-bruce-thornton/

President Biden’s approval numbers continue to drop. Republicans are up ten points in the generic ballot for the 2022 midterms. Blue Virginia elected a Republican governor, defeating a pillar of the party since the Clinton administration. Inflation is reaching record highs, as are gasoline prices. Meanwhile  Xi, Putin, and Khamenei are geopolitically partying like it’s 1979.

Yet the progressive Dems and their media PR flaks keep promoting policies and indulging in political antics guaranteed to alienate more and more voters. A year out from the midterm elections, a party with razor-thin margins of control in the House and Senate seem headed for a massive repudiation.

Their most recent example of political myopia is the grotesque lies and hysteria over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and acquittal. As the New York Post’s Miranda Devine writes, “Of all the willful lies and omissions in the media’s coverage of the Steele dossier, Brian Sicknick, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, the Wuhan lab, Hunter Biden’s laptop and so on, nothing beats the evil propaganda peddled about Kyle Rittenhouse.”

So it happened that a working-class teenager offering medical aid and protecting a business in his community during a riot, and who was attacked by three white men, including two convicted felons, was transformed into a “white supremacist” and a lawless, Trumpkin “vigilante” who “crossed state lines” with an illegal “assault rifle” in order to stalk and murder Black Live Matter activists “peacefully protesting” against extrajudicial police murders of black man (who’s still alive). A couple of “woke” journalists even turned the slain white thugs into innocent blacks.

As Mary McCarthy said of lefty Lillian Hellman’s memoirs, every word of the narrative is a lie, including “the” and “and.” It’s a textbook example of Hitler’s “big lie,” one so “colossal,” Hitler wrote, that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Over the last five years the Dems have had some success with this propaganda tactic. But the Biden administration’s serial failures, and the arrogant excesses of the “woke” racial tribunes, have soured voters who, as the Virginia gubernatorial race shows, are sick of the “systemic racism” and Critical Race Theory smears, which are genuine racist nonsense. And parents––approaching two years of unscientific, politicized, disruptive covid policies like remote teaching and masks imposed on their children––aren’t happy about a racist, divisive curriculum piled on to all that pedagogical malfeasance.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/11/21/dr_scott_atlas_the_birx-fauci_lockdowns_failed_to_stop_the_pandemic.html

Author of “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,” Dr. Scott Atlas, joined “Sunday Morning Futures” with FNC’s Maria Bartiromo to talk about how the government has politicized science about Covid-19.

DR. SCOTT ATLAS, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: The data is the data. And the data is being denied by the lockdowners. The data shows the following. Bjornskov’s study of 24 European countries, the lockdowns did not reduce the deaths during the pandemic. That was a spring 2021 study.

A January 2021 study from Stanford’s Bendavid and colleagues, lockdowns failed to stop the spread of the infection. In fact, Ioannidis, one of the authors, said it was — quote — “pro-contagion,” increasing infections.

And the most important study was National Bureau of Economic Research by RAND in June this year. Everyone should look at it, because they showed analysis of 43 countries and all the states that lockdowns increased the excess deaths during the pandemic. Earlier lockdowns increased the deaths during the pandemic.

And when lockdowns were instilled, deaths were coming down. And the deaths started increasing when the lockdowns were implemented. So the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, which was the advice of the task force the entire year, failed to stop the spread of the infection. They failed to stop the dying. And they destroyed millions and millions of people, particularly low-income families.

BARTIROMO: Yes, I want to ask you about the Birx-Fauci lockdown, because, today, we have the FDA authorizing now booster shots for everybody, all adults.

Pfizer and Moderna are going to make a combined $93 billion in sales on this in the coming years on vaccines. What is going on here? Is this about money? Your thoughts on the FDA asking a federal judge to give it 55 years to wait for all data, release final data on the Pfizer vaccine?

ATLAS: Yes, I mean, there are so many problems with this.

BARTIROMO: Fifty-five years.

ATLAS: And the science — yes. And on the science side alone, boosters to be indicated for people who are, for example, low-income groups like children, healthy children have extremely low risk from COVID, period. That’s been known for more than a year-and-a-half.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kamikaze-democrats-nancy-pelosi-joe-biden-build-back-better-house-welfare-2022-11637362201?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal dominated the weekend news, but the more significant story for the long run was House passage Friday of the multi-trillion-dollar tax, climate and entitlement spending bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi marched her majority off a cliff in 2010 with votes on ObamaCare, and now she has done it again.

The Speaker muscled the bill through on a 220-213 vote. No Republicans voted aye, and Rep. Jared Golden of Maine was the sole Democratic dissenter. Other swing-district Democrats had made a show of demanding concessions and a bill that “paid for itself,” but in the end the bill didn’t pay for itself even by the rigged rules of the Congressional Budget Office. But they still rolled over, as they always do when Mrs. Pelosi gives the order.

***

The 81-year-old Mrs. Pelosi is almost certainly retiring after this Congress, and this vote is a legacy project for her. But her younger Members will have much to explain in 2022 as they defend this gargantuan, destructive and unnecessary bill.

There’s the immigration provision that would give 6.5 million or so illegal migrants who have been in the country since 2011 a 10-year right to work in the U.S. This will probably be stripped from the bill in the Senate, but House Members will be on record for legalizing millions of migrants even as the border has become a lawless mess. The political effect will be to empower GOP restrictionists.

Then there’s the $8 billion methane “fee” that is in effect a tax on natural gas production and thus on consumer energy prices. The American Gas Association estimates this could raise the average family’s natural gas bill by 17%, so this is also a violation of President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year.

https://www.city-journal.org/how-progressives-enforce-ideological-conformity

Politics today seems to have crawled out of some Hobbesian muck. It is a nasty, brutish little runt wherever it appears, which is almost everywhere. Its act—for these days everything is performance art—is a tragic farce. On the streets, its watchword is riot; on the Internet, abuse; in the academy, the boardroom, and the media, a coordinated equalization of attitudes that borders on the totalitarian. At the highest levels of government, it is too lazy or stupid to persuade, preferring rather to manipulate, bully, spy, and punish.

Hobbesian man is moved by powerful passions of pride and fear. His vainglory and the joy he takes in standing above others give rise to war. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death make him seek peace. The ugly and ubiquitous politics of the Left is now channeling these passions into a massive project of social engineering: the construction of a new Tower of Babel.

Fear and pride raised the old Tower of Babel, built by anonymous wanderers who sought to “make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” Their anonymity is fitting, for there was then only “one language, one set of words. . . . one people” in the world. The Babylonians formed bricks out of the soil—adamah in Hebrew, the same stuff God breathed life into to make the first human being (ha’adam)—and began to “build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” These hard-baked bricks, all cut to the same measure, are images of human beings from whom the breath of individual life and particularity has somehow departed.

Modern attempts to construct the Tower have unfolded before, most notably in the Soviet Union and China. Today an inhumanly univocal tongue, asserting itself as the measure of all things, once again threatens to swallow the rich particularities and multiple languages of individual thought, speech, and creative expression.

The foundations of the new Tower have already been laid. In a recent interview, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was an authoritarian. He did not:

If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/22/fake_white_house_is_a_fitting_home_for_fake_president_146769.html

News last month that President Biden makes electronic appearances from a pretend White House brought to mind another president whose image was carefully crafted to assuage the American people that all was well even when things were at their most dire.

No, I’m not referring to Franklin Roosevelt, although his facade of the strong, virile man was as much of an invention as Biden’s carefully crafted persona as a reasonable moderate who would unite our country.

Instead, to fully comprehend the essence  of the invented Joe Biden, we must visit the paranoid fantasies of one of our greatest writers — Philip K. Dick, whose 1964 novel “The Penultimate Truth” imagined a future where the leader of the Western world was in fact nothing but a simulacrum programmed to reassure the masses that their sacrifice of toiling underground for decades was noble when in fact it was the equivalent of the turkey’s sacrifice on Thanksgiving. Given a choice, the turkey would have politely declined. 

I’m hardly the first columnist to suggest that Biden is parroting lines written for him in an effort to convince the American public of their need to sacrifice for the general good, but his banal bromides have an unmistakable Orwellian feel: “Lockdowns are freedom,” “inflation is wealth,” “moms and dads are domestic terrorists.” But when it was revealed that Biden got his COVID vaccine booster shot in a fake White House, it became easy to picture his presidency as some political variant of “The Truman Show,” or as I propose, a Philip K. Dick novel.

Dick was the mid-20th century’s answer to Kafka — an author in search of the ultimate truth who taught us that the truth mostly consisted of disappointment and deception. So too might we conclude about the puppet presidency of Joseph R. Biden. Even the majority of those who accept the legitimacy of his presidency can have a hard time believing in the legitimacy of his leadership.

According to Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, “The reason Biden uses this bizarre virtual set for televised meetings — and not an actual room like East Room, Cabinet, Oval, Roosevelt, Sit Room, etc. — is because it allows him to read from a script directly from a face-on monitor (& w/out teleprompter glass that can be seen on camera).”

That doesn’t in itself make Biden an ersatz president. Lots of politicians are nothing but empty reflections of what their handlers put in front of them, but in his case there is ample evidence aside from the fake White House that he is a product of the imagination of those around him, a figurehead whose policies and even his press conferences (“I’m not supposed to take any questions”) are scripted by others.