RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2022/01/19/dear-joe-your-first-years-been-a-total-disaster/

Dear Joe,

Happy Anniversary.Can we get a divorce?

Sorry if this isn’t the most effusive of messages as you celebrate your first year in office as president of the United States.

But I fear it’s exactly what many disillusioned Americans, including some who voted for you, are now thinking.

I don’t like to sugar-coat things, so let me be blunt: You’ve been a disaster.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a more insipid, less inspiring, fiasco-ridden opening 12 months to a presidency.

Nor one that has so spectacularly failed to deliver on the promises made at an inauguration ceremony.

You were going to reunite a bitterly fractured country by ending “the anger and harsh rhetoric,” remember?

You’ve failed. Your enraged, spiteful, Republican-bashing speeches at the start of this year were just as divisive as anything Donald Trump ever spewed. 

You were going to “defeat” COVID, remember?

You’ve failed. More Americans have died from coronavirus on your watch than under President Trump, the Omicron variant is surging out of control all over the country, your testing system has been disastrously slow, and you’ve still only persuaded 63% of US citizens to be vaccinated.

You were going to fix the economy, remember?

https://christopherrufo.com/?mc_cid=92e93b20bd&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

Images from the Jim Crow era in America are seared into the minds of those who lived through it, and of anyone who attended an American history class after the victory of the civil rights movement: side-by-side drinking fountains with signs reading “white” and “colored”; parks and recreation facilities separated into racial enclaves; small-town main streets with whites-only theaters, restaurants, grocers, and amenities.

Fortunately, all that ended by the mid-1960s—or so we had thought. In recent years, segregation has been resurrected, but this time under the guise of “racial equity.” As I reported in late 2020, government agencies in Seattle, Washington, including the King County Library, King County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Veterans Administration, began segregating employees by race for diversity training programs, so that whites could “accept responsibility for their own racism” and minorities could be insulated from “any potential harming [that] might arise from a cross-racial conversation.”

This year, the new segregation has extended itself into new domains: public education and public-health policy. In Denver, Centennial Elementary School launched a racially exclusive “Families of Color Playground Night” as part of its racial equity programming. In Chicago, Downs Grove South High School held a racially exclusive “Students of Color Field Trip” as part of its own equity initiatives. In the words of Denver Public Schools officials, the administrators implemented the segregated program to “create a space of belonging,” which, they said, without a hint of irony, is “about uniting us, not dividing us.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/crossing-omicron-rubicon-covid/

We volunteered to serve in the biggest medical experiment in human history. We accepted the biggest peacetime suspension of civil liberties in American history. And we agreed not to ask difficult questions about the origins of the virus.

Now it’s time we recovered our freedom — and exercised the responsibility that sustains it.

The Omicron variant isn’t the end of the world. It looks more like the beginning of the end. The case numbers are rising even faster than the rate of inflation, but the ICUs aren’t overflowing and the death rate remains low. Covid-19 seems to be becoming endemic, like all the other bugs we might catch in a normal winter. If you’re elderly or obese, or if you have another co-morbidity, then you have a way to go yet. But if you’re not, then it’s time to boldly go into the new reality.

We are crossing the Omicron Rubicon. The president, having ridden Covid outrage into office, has now washed his hands and left Covid policy to the states. Or, rather, half the states, because the red states never got onboard with his dubious mandates anyway. And now the Supreme Court has dismissed his mandatory vaccination order too.

Even the other two branches of government, the CNN and the CDC, have finally got it right. After all the CDC’s faux-scientific injunctions to “follow the science,” its director Rochelle Walensky has reduced its recommendations to the Covid-positive to “You should probably not visit grandma.”

It’s time for the teachers’ union to send their members back to work. It’s time to stop the mask theater in bars and restaurants and schools and planes. If you feel you should wear a mask, or if you don’t feel comfortable eating indoors — and I’ll admit, I’m not yet comfortable with it — then take responsibility for your own risk. Wear a mask if you feel you need to. Avoid the situations you don’t feel safe in. Pull the kids from school if you think it best. But take responsibility for yourself.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/how-eric-adams-can-make-nyc-great-again

The honeymoon period for Eric Adams, New York City’s newly elected mayor, is an opportunity to propose a transformational economic growth plan in his February budget. During the campaign, Adams made remarks such as “New York will no longer be anti-business” — an about-face from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s eight-year record.

Mayor Adams’s remarks are welcome, and he has already proposed cutting red tape, cutting waste, and increasing worker training. These are good first steps, but New York is at one of its lowest economic points ever — as shown by the 9% unemployment rate.  The mayor needs more specifics if he is to restore the city’s national economic leadership and create jobs. 

Some of this can be achieved by being vocally pro-business. Tone matters. The upbeat mayor is a natural cheerleader who wants to be known as the “GSD mayor,” one who will “get stuff done.”  Ambitious targets help amplify the message.  A worthy goal would be to bring back 400,000 jobs to regain the pre-pandemic level and begin a cycle of bond rating upgrades, not downgrades.

The city lost nearly 615,000 jobs over the course of the pandemic and has brought back only 213,000 of these jobs, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. Why the sluggish recovery? For decades, New York has been at the bottom of rankings for having the worst tax, regulatory, and business environment in the country.  Businesses are leaving in record numbers for low-tax states such as Florida and Texas and taking their tax revenue and workers with them. Making all these problems more complex is that economic growth is closely linked with quality-of-life concerns such as crime and sanitation, which also need turning around.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/18/the-nazi-next-door/

 Your Democratic neighbors won’t be ordered to vote for laws that ostracize you from society, steal your property, or send you away to a concentration camp. They will do it burning with pride.

Almost half of Democratic voters—48 percent—think the government should be able to fine or imprison individuals “who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.” 

This is not the most astonishing finding of a poll just released by Rasmussen. Let’s go through the relevant points: Nearly the same percentage of Democratic voters—47 percent—think the government should be able to put a tracking system, like an ankle monitor or a locked collar, on people who refuse the vaccine. And 45 percent favor putting the unvaccinated in camps. Camps.  

More than half of Democratic voters—55 percent—think people who refuse the vaccine should be fined. Fifty-nine percent favor confining all unvaccinated people to their homes. More than a quarter of Democratic voters—29 percent—think that the government should be able to confiscate the children of unvaccinated parents . . . 

Is any of this Nazi enough for you yet? You are living next door to the people who would have turned you over to the Comité de salut public for opposing the “Law of Suspects”—the law that authorized the arrest of all suspected enemies of the Revolution and ushered in the Reign of Terror. You are living next door to the people who would have turned you over to the NKVD for “moral sabotage of the Soviet Union.” You are living next door to the people who would have called up the Gestapo and said, “My neighbor is hiding a Jew.” 

Examine these historical personages from Revolutionary France or Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany (or Nazi France): It’s not just that they were following orders. On the contrary, they thought they were doing a positive good for society. They were eager to help rid their community of dangerous elements. They were proud of what they did. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/18/the-civil-war-psy-op/

Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.” 

This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right. 

Really? With what? In one of his more lucid moments, Joe Biden himself noted that the disaffected on the Right have no chance of taking on the United States government without F-15s and nukes. Like the blind squirrel finding a nut, the old man was onto something. The government’s overwhelming advantages in technology, firepower, manpower, money, transportation, supply networks, surveillance tools and much else would be so lopsided as to make the military buzzword “asymmetric” a grim joke. Think, instead, Bambi versus Godzilla. 

To fight a civil war, you have to organize. But organizing is all but impossible for those who genuinely dream of taking on the state. The U.S. government is incompetent at many (most?) of its assigned responsibilities. But it’s quite good at keeping tabs on any hint of “right-wing” “insurrectionary” impulses. That task is made much easier by the fact that there is so little such activity to monitor—so little, in fact, that the feds increasingly feel compelled to incite it. 

It would be hard to hide a mass movement of people gearing up to fight a civil war. Do you see one anywhere? I don’t. If there were one, don’t you think the feds would be all over it? Of course they would. And don’t you think regime media would be blaring about it 24/7? Again—of course. This is a classic case of a dog not barking. Silence is confirmation that nothing is happening. 

Organization, like civil war, requires elites. Indeed civil wars, like all wars, are fought between two opposing factions of elites. Even backwoods insurgencies have leaders. Where are the elites poised to lead red America in a civil war? Who are they? There is Trump to be sure, and regime propaganda insists that he’s a modern-day Jeff Davis-Robert E. Lee hybrid. But this is the same Trump who spent January 6 tweeting. The real elites made sure that was his last day on that platform—and then impeached him for the second time. The real elites—Republican and Democrat alike—wish he would crawl into a hole and die. Trump may have tens of millions of committed followers. But a real civil war requires generals and colonels and captains and lieutenants and sergeants. Go ahead—name some. I’ll wait.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/why-was-texas-synagogue-jihadist-akram-allowed-to-enter-u-s/

When it comes to Western governments and jihadism, willful blindness is never fully cured.

EXCERPTS

Americans, particularly Jewish Americans, were justifiably nettled by agent Matthew DeSarno, who heads the FBI’s Dallas field office and who ridiculously claimed that Akram’s plot was “not specifically related to the Jewish community.” In his tin-eared way, however, DeSarno appeared to be conveying that Akram’s main objective was to extort our government into releasing convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui from custody, and reassuring Jewish communities across the country that the bureau does not believe that there’s a broader ongoing conspiracy to attack synagogues.

We should be understanding of officials who make good-faith errors in communicating facts about what otherwise seems to be a competent performance by government agencies. Nevertheless, we should also demand a complete, accurate accounting. The FBI and other agencies should not get to take a victory lap in which we are spun with information that casts them in a favorable light, while less-flattering facts are omitted and possibly concealed.

Which is to say, we need a lot more information about what happened here — in particular, about (a) the circumstances of Akram’s demise in the synagogue, and more important (b) how this jihadist managed to obtain a tourist visa allowing him to enter the United States.

Then there is the matter of how Akram managed to get a tourist visa. It raises questions that need to be addressed by both American and British authorities, whose close partnership in the lavishly funded counterterrorism field is said to set the first-world standard for international cooperation.