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May 2022

Trump shouldn’t run By M.B. Mathews

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/trump_shouldnt_run.html

“By contrast, Ron DeSantis has everything Trump has without the nastiness, the coarseness, the Everest-sized ego.  DeSantis understands restraint; he never shoots from the lip. He is pleasant, substantive, and at least as politically astute as Trump. DeSantis is far more of a traditional family man with the added benefit of having served his country in the Navy. He is also as tough as Trump, perhaps more. He is proactive not reactive, possessing admirable foresight.”

Donald J. Trump was the best POTUS in my very long lifetime. His policies were effective, making America prosperous, energy independent, and lowering minority unemployment to record low levels. Everything he did, with the possible exception of the COVID lockdown, was quintessentially Trump; competent, encouraging, and salutary for America and her people. We were blessed to have him in the White House.

Although many Americans cringed, we nonetheless put up with Trump’s coarseness and his inflated ego because he gave America back to the people. He relit the candle that lit the city on a hill. He was awesome. He took his business acumen and applied it to government very effectively, making America great again. We loved him. We still do. But sometimes the greatest love is to let go.

When 2020 happened, Trump was unceremoniously removed from office because of some highly questionable voting anomalies and practices. It was understandable that he was infuriated. We were equally so. But the prospect of more upheaval is too much for many Americans. We love a maverick but Trump became a burr under our saddle. Trump, instead of America, became the focus as he was attacked from all sides. We became beaten down, frustrated that we had no weapons to fight back with except the ballot box and even that has now become unpredictable. The election has been over for well over a year. It is time to stop talking about it; it keeps the electorate roiled. We need some tranquility, at least to regroup before the next battle.

Ohio School District’s ‘Transgender Guidelines’ Instruct Teachers to Socially Transition Students without Parental Consent- By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ohio-school-districts-transgender-guidelines-instruct-teachers-to-socially-transition-students-without-parental-consent/

In recently developed K-12 “transgender guidelines” circulated among principals and school counselors, the Olentangy Local School District in Ohio instructs teachers to begin the social transitioning of non-gender conforming students without parental consent.

The guidelines, obtained by non-profit Parents Defending Education, would advise teachers and staff on how to treat students who identify as a member of the opposite sex, though it’s not clear whether they’ve yet been issued to teachers. The guidelines have implications for record-keeping, addressing students, and communicating with parents, and touch on bathrooms/locker room access and overnight school trips.

“A student’s transgender status or gender assigned at birth is not considered directory information and therefore cannot be released without prior consent,” the document reads. It demands that school staff “not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status to others, including parents and other staff, unless legally required to do so,” according to a copy of the document released

Superintendent Mark Raiff writes in an email, obtained by PDE, that “the guidelines were shared following the issuance of new guidance from the US Department of Education and US Department of Justice so that our principals and school counselors were apprised of the most recent developments.”

“As far as board policy, the guidelines support and do not supersede the board policies referenced within the document that prohibit harassment or discrimination based on gender identity,”  he adds.

Staff and faculty are to refer to students by the “name and pronoun requested by the student or parent that matches their gender identity,” according to the guidelines. While district administration, staff and faculty are “required to maintain legal name and gender assigned at birth on all legal documents and permanent records” until “provided with a legal name change,”  anything “not considered an official school document should feature the student’s preferred name,” it says.

Georgia Governor Kemp Defeats Perdue in GOP Primary, Setting Up Rematch against Stacey Abrams-By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/georgia-governor-kemp-defeats-perdue-in-gop-primary-setting-up-rematch-against-stacey-abrams/

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has successfully fended off a challenge from former Senator David Perdue in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, the Associated Press has projected. The victory sets up a rematch between the governor and Democrat Stacey Abrams, whom he defeated in the 2018 general election.

Kemp bested Abrams by 55,000 votes in November 2018, though Abrams contested the race and has made repeated claims that the election was stolen from her.

She has, to this day, never conceded to Kemp and said as recently as October, “Just because you win, doesn’t mean you won.”

Abrams peddled disinformation about Georgia’s new election law, becoming one of many Democrats to claim the law would suppress voter turnout. Even when Tuesday’s primary races saw record early voter turnout —more than 850,000 ballots were cast in person or returned via absentee ballot in three weeks of early voting— Abrams claimed that the voter turnout is not proof that the law has not caused voter suppression.

An Open Letter to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Her Fellow Travelers Instead of memorializing the Nakba, perhaps you should have learned from it. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/open-letter-congresswoman-rashida-tlaib-and-her-richard-l-cravatts/

“But do not ask the American people to enshrine in law the self-delusion and Jew-hatred that has long impeded your own self-determination and made you victims of your own corrosive and hateful ideology.”

On May 16th, you and some other members of The Squad, including Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, McCollum, and others, introduced a loathsome resolution, H. RES. 1123, which had as its purpose “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights” and to “commemorate the Nakba,” the catastrophe you assign to Israel’s creation, “through official recognition and remembrance.” According to your baleful resolution, the Nakba not only took place at Israel’s founding “but [refers] to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day.”

This resolution is yet another manifestation of your narcissistic victimology, a corrosive point of view in which the very creation and continued existence of Israel, according to you, is an ongoing tragedy because, in your contorted view, Israel’s “violence and war crimes are an ongoing and ever-present assault on the existence and humanity of the Palestinian people. The Israeli apartheid government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing seeks to degrade Palestinian humanity and break the will of the people to be free.”

The Baneful Politics of the Therapeutic Sensibility The most important casualty of our obsession with feelings. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/baneful-politics-therapeutic-sensibility-bruce-thornton/

The heart of “woke” politics is the therapeutic sensibility: the primacy we put on the role of individual feelings in self-identity and self-worth. Thus our psychic comfort, self-esteem, and the acknowledgement of both by others should be the most important concern of society, its institutions, and government policy. And they should confirm and validate our subjective emotions and identities, even if doing so infringes on both the unalienable rights of others, and on the foundational principles of our political order, particularly free speech and truth, the most important bulwark of our political freedom.

These therapeutic attitudes have contributed to the moral and intellectual incoherence of the “woke” Left, and its threat to our political freedom, one enabled by the long transformation of our federal government into a nanny Leviathan-state that empowers itself by pandering to this juvenile narcissism.

“Cancel culture,” for example, and the eagerness to create mechanisms of censorship like the proposed Disinformation Governance Board, on pause for now, are manifestations of this obsession with the impact of politically proscribed ideas and speech on manufactured victim-group identities. Public monuments or names of schools must be “cancelled” because members of certain groups will be traumatized by fleeting reminders of injuries and injustices, like slavery, they have never personally experienced.

The Economic Doom Loop Has Begun No communist was ever as dedicated to economic suicide as the current class of idiots who rule us. By Adam Mill

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/the-economic-doom-loop-has-begun/

High inflation, overregulation, and a general sense that things are going in the wrong direction remind us of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But today the underlying problems that were responsible for our woes in that time are vastly worse. The coming reckoning for Washington’s insanely irresponsible monetary policy may dwarf the troubles from all recent recessions and periods of inflation. 

The Federal Reserve has created a doom loop between the housing market and inflation. For years it has printed tens of billions of dollars each month to buy sketchy securities meant to subsidize the housing market and favor bond traders. This continues even now, in spite of inflation and a red-hot housing market. But the housing market has become dependent on unearned, newly printed money, and stopping the flow might cause a catastrophic correction. If it doesn’t stop, however, inflation will explode. 

Let me walk you through some of the math.

Inflation closes the gap between money earned and money spent. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve expanded M2 money supply from just under $8 trillion to around $22 trillion today. During that time GDP has increased from around $14.6 trillion to around $24.5 trillion today. We’ve gone from a ratio of one dollar chasing $2.20 in goods in services to an almost 1 to 1 ratio today. Inflation during the same period, according to the government, has eroded the dollar by a mere 33 percent. 

You think 8 percent inflation is high? Prices need to double to restore any semblance of balance between currency and the things you can buy with currency. We have a long way to go.

The Real Reason Why The Disinformation Governance Board Got Cancelled: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/25/the-real-reason-why-the-disinformation-governance-board-got-cancelled-ii-tipp-poll/

Why did the Joe Biden administration abruptly shut down its Disinformation Governance Board a mere three weeks after creating it? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll has the answer.

As the administration’s plan for creating the Orwellian-sounding speech regulator was being rolled out, the I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,320 Americans from May 4 to May 6 a simple question: “How much do you trust the Disinformation Governance Board to decide what is disinformation fairly and accurately?”

Among the 550 who said they were following the Disinformation Board “closely,” the reaction was strong: 55% said they had “little trust” (22%) or “no trust at all” (32%). That compares with 42% who said they had “a lot of trust” (19%) and “quite a bit of trust” (22%).

In short, it was a highly unpopular idea. Indeed, it was more unpopular than even the overall numbers suggest.

The only major political grouping that trusted the Disinformation board was the Democratic Party. They gave it a big thumbs up in the poll, with 73% giving it “a lot” or “quite a bit” of trust, versus just 23% granting the new agency “little” or “no” trust.

National Security Crisis: Russia’s and China’s Nuclear Threats by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18535/russia-china-nuclear-threats

Russia has not only been modernizing its nuclear triad; it has also been developing new types of nuclear systems….

Russia, of course, is not the only nuclear threat to the United States. China has accelerated its nuclear buildup to the extent that Admiral Charles Richard, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, “For the first time in our history, the nation is on a trajectory to face two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time, who must be deterred differently. We can no longer assume the risk of strategic deterrence failure in conflict will always remain low.”

The Minuteman III ICBMs are badly in need of modernization — they were built in the 1970s and were originally intended to last for just 10 years. The development of a next-generation ICBM, known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) has been decided, but the process has proven slow and the Air Force only expects the GBSD to begin replacing Minuteman III in 2029. According to General John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the GBSD system will not achieve initial operational capability until 2030, or full operational capability until 2035.

“It’s going to take us 10 to 15 years to modernize 400 [ICBM] silos that already exist. China is basically building almost that many overnight.” — General John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Defense Magazine, regarding the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, September 13, 2021.

The Minuteman III has grave structural problems stemming from the fact that “the missile itself is 51 years old,” but the launch capsules and other support facilities are “58 years old.” — Col. Erik Quigley, director of the Minuteman III systems directorate, Air Force Magazine, June 14 2021.

In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump administration decided that a new Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (known as the SLCM-N)…. needed to be added to the US nuclear arsenal to provide the US with “a needed non-strategic regional presence” that would address “the increasing need for flexible and low-yield options.” The Biden administration, however, removed it from the FY2023 budget, while several generals have disagreed with that decision, arguing that it is needed against Russia and China.

“The Trump Administration proposed the SLCM-N in 2018. Message to Mr. Putin: If you drop a nuke on NATO soil, the alliance has the will and ability to respond in kind. This reduces the risk Mr. Putin will use a nuke,” the WSJ wrote in April. “The Trump Administration said the U.S. might reconsider the SLCM-N if ‘Russia returns to compliance with its arms control obligations, reduces its non-strategic nuclear arsenal, and corrects its other destabilizing behaviors.’ How’s that working out? Now Mr. Biden is surrendering this leverage—probably to placate progressives who are opposed to nuclear weapons as an article of faith.” — Wall Street Journal editorial, April 20, 2022.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought renewed attention to Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the risk of nuclear war, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin placed his country’s nuclear forces on high alert shortly after invading Ukraine on February 24. Close to half of Americans are very concerned that Russia would directly target the U.S. with nuclear weapons, and an additional 3 in 10 are somewhat concerned about that, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

We Aren’t Raising Adults. We Are Breeding Very Excellent Sheep. Our elite college graduates know how to imitate, but they don’t know how to be independent. William Deresiewicz

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-arent-raising-adults-we-are-breeding?token=

I have given up on being able to properly pronounce the last name of today’s guest writer. But anytime I see the byline William Deresiewicz I make sure to read very carefully. He first came on my radar through friends who raved about him as a professor at Yale. But Deresiewicz separated himself from that herd when he wrote the book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” which presaged so much of what we see today—and what he writes about, in part, in the essay below.

Keep an eye peeled for Deresiewicz’s new book, “The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society,” which will be out this August. — BW

….

I taught English at Yale University for ten years. I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students—people who went on to write novels, devote themselves to their church, or just wander the world for a few years. But mostly I taught what one of them herself called “excellent sheep.”

These students were excellent, technically speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.

But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.

SELF DOUBT: SYDNEY WILLIAMS

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“What the Durham trial has exposed is not getting the press it and the people deserve. The decision by the Clinton campaign to deliberately instigate a false story of Russian collusion by Donald Trump – no matter what one thought of him – was the dirtiest trick ever played in Presidential politics. It tells us what sort of a President Mrs. Clinton would have been. Why is this not getting more coverage? Can you imagine the headlines if roles were reversed?”

Self-doubt is usually considered a negative. And when it dominates one’s activities it is. In Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare has Lucio speak to Isabella: “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt.” A recent article in National Review, signed by 59 conservatives, was titled “America’s Crisis of Self-Doubt:” “Our traditional values of fair play, free speech and religious liberty are trampled by inflamed ideologies determined to impose their will by force and fear.” That is all true, but the real problem is the over-confidence of the woke who, with religious zeal, see society “as archaic, unfair, and racially biased.” As a governor of impetuous behavior, self-doubt is a positive.