RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/woke-got-what-it-wanted-and-then-what/

The woke movement was giddy after January 20, 2021. The Left controlled both houses of Congress.

Joe Biden was drafted as the necessary veneer of 1980s Democratic normality to ram through an otherwise hard Left agenda. 

All the major cultural, financial, economic, entertainment, and media institutions had played various roles in seeing Donald Trump not just defeated, but also impeached twice. He was written off as persona non grata after the January 6 riot at the Capitol.  

So, academia, the corporate boardroom, Hollywood, the media, the Pentagon, professional sports, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street in near hysterical fashion all boarded the woke train. 

All now boasted of ferreting out “white rage,” and hiring legions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” czars. 

Critical race theory would be mainstreamed to excise racism and discrimination by embracing racism and discrimination. 

“Crime” was to be seen now mostly as a construct created by the elite to protect their own privilege, prerogatives, and property. Shoplifting, looting, and street thuggery were just part of living in a normal city. 

Social justice warriors could replace defunded police. Gone would be most bail, incarceration, mandatory jail time, stop-and-frisk, and broken-windows deterrent policies. 

Green agendas would fundamentally transform America to put an immediate stop to man-made “climate change.” So, lots of oil and gas leases were either canceled or their fees vastly increased. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/vaccine-mandates-public-health-theater-and-endgame-daniel-greenfield/

State Democrats are discovering that a big chunk of their base hates vaccine mandates. And that mandates familiarly pit the minority and working-class elements of their base against the white leftist hipster upper-class chunk of their base. Much like Latinx.

And they’re having to choose.

Three months ago, as California Gov. GAVIN NEWSOM was turning around his fate in the state’s recall election, many Democrats came to the conclusion that they’d struck political gold. Mandates to get the Covid-19 vaccine weren’t just extremely valuable public health policy but they were electorally powerful too.

Now, moderate and frontline members of the party are singing a different tune.

I like the implicit acknowledgment that Newsom is an extremist. Or rather California Dems are.

 The most recent Democratic lawmaker to voice her concern was Michigan Gov. GRETCHEN WHITMER. Once considered to be Biden’s vice president, Whitmer said she opposes mandates, citing the impact on the state’s workforce — as Michigan grapples with upticks in cases and residents are split on whether or not to get the vaccine.

Gov. PHIL MURPHY (D-.N.J.), shortly before an unexpectedly close re-election win, shied away from embracing a strict vaccine mandate for teachers and other public workers. Gov. KATHY HOCHUL (D-N.Y.), who is running for election after taking over for disgraced former Gov. ANDREW CUOMO (D-N.Y.), has stated her opposition to a “broad-based mandate for all private-sector workers in New York.”

The Biden administration is still doubling down.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bette-midler-trump-devil-should-be-arrested-robert-spencer/

Bette Midler is enraged, and the object of her rage is all too predictable. The America-First President has been out of the White House for nearly a year now, but the Left still focuses on him with passionate intensity, using him as an all-purpose scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong (and there is so much) since they took over. Now the washed-up chanteuse, whose claim to fame is that time she brought us a stiff, lukewarm remake of the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” wants the threat neutralized once and for all: she is demanding that Trump be locked up and charged with attempted murder for trying to infect Old Joe Biden (everyone’s idea of a competent, capable president) with COVID-19.

When did Trump try to kill Old Joe, you ask? Why, it all goes back to the sensationalistic recent fake news claim that Trump had tested positive for the dreaded killer disease with a 99% survival rate before his first debate with Biden. As my PJ Media colleague Matt Margolis noted here Thursday, Trump’s test was actually a false positive, followed by two negative tests before the debate, so Old Joe was never actually in any danger.

Midler, however, was unmoved by these facts. She tweeted Friday to her two million Twitter followers, “#DonaldTrump should be arrested for attempted murder. He tried to infect & kill #JoeBiden at the debate; by turning up too late to be tested, knowing full well he was positive; then screeched, sputtered, spit, and foamed at the mouth, hoping to infect Joe. He IS the devil.” And then: “How many people did #TyphoidTrump knowingly infect with #Covid after he tested positive last year? Between that & producing Don Jr., Eric & Ivanka, it seems like #trumps fluids are hell bent on destroying the world.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome has long been a pandemic on the Left, but Midler is suffering from a particularly virulent strain. She has consistently been one of the most hysterical among the ranks of Leftist hysterics. Back in 2018, when one of Senator Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) neighbors savagely beat him and put him in the hospital, Midler applauded the attacker. In August 2020, she mocked “this awful person,” Melania Trump: “Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.” In February 2021, it was the late Rush Limbaugh’s turn: “#RushLimbaugh has gone to his reward. Bet it’s hot.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yes-the-crime-wave-is-as-bad-as-you-think-murder-rate-violent-killings-shootings-defund-police-11638988699?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The U.S. experienced its largest-ever single year homicide spike in 2020, and crime now polls as one of the top voter concerns. This has many criminal-justice-reform advocates and their media allies scrambling to convince Americans that things aren’t really so bad, no matter what the data say.

At CNN, data journalist Priya Krishnakumar explains “how crime stats lie” by pointing out that 2020’s murder rate was “40% below what it was in the 1980s and 1990s.” The Brennan Center for Justice acknowledges that the homicide trend is “frightening” but insists that murders “have stayed far below their peaks” in earlier decades. In a “fact check” of “the ‘crime wave’ narrative police are pushing,” the Guardian reminds readers that “even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides” in 2020, “Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago.”

True enough: The national murder rate was significantly higher in the 1980s and early ’90s. But the national murder rate reflects an aggregation of all the country’s homicides measured against the national population. When it comes to the recent upticks in killings, this talking point ignores two important realities.

First, we don’t live in the aggregate. The majority of Americans spend their lives in the communities where they live and, if they commute, where they work. Given how hyperconcentrated serious violent crime is—and, therefore, how widely the homicide rate can vary from one neighborhood to the next—the national homicide rate doesn’t provide most Americans with a sense of the dangers they face. A handful of extremely safe Illinois suburbs may counterbalance Chicago’s contribution to the national murder rate, but that’s little consolation to those who live in the South Side war zones.