RUTHFULLY YOURS

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In a September 2021 Public Agenda/USA Today/Ipsos poll, 72% of Americans thought it would be “good for the country” if there were less political hostility and a greater focus on common ground. Yet only 9% of respondents thought hostilities would decrease in the next decade, while 42% expected them to increase. Why have political differences made us so bitter? Why do we hate those with different opinions so intensely? What does this anger mean for the future of our nation?

Political hatred has had a long gestation.  It is easy to blame the crude and narcissistic Donald Trump. But this bitterness preceded him. He made things worse, but he was not its genesis. He reflected the animosity felt by rural and mid-Americans toward coastal elites. He widened and deepened the divide, but he was not its cause. Barack Obama, as the first African American elected President, was one who could have bridged racial dissensions. Instead, he made things worse. It is true that Mr. Obama was despised by a few right-wing racists, but most criticisms of his policies were assumed by his supporters to be race-based. President Joe Biden ran on a platform of unity, yet he has fanned the flames of partisanship; an example – when in Georgia he referred to Republicans as similar to Jefferson Davis, George Wallace and Bull Connor, ironically all Democrats. Political hatefulness has deepened because of social media and cable TV.

I do not presume to know all reasons why we have become so angry. But I suspect three culprits play a role: wokeism, identity politics, and a breakdown of traditional ethical norms. Wokeism is a creed that uses Jacobin tactics to foster economic chaos and property destruction, as it obsesses about climate, race, class and gender. Climate evangelists call opponents deniers – those who suggest adaption and see natural forces as an important cause of climate change. Then we have transgender women allowed to compete in women’s college sports. Wokeism in the classroom and the boardroom has replaced meritocracy with equity, in the belief it will produce equality of outcomes. In their unbridled zeal, these acolytes of wokeism, with their self-righteousness and absence of common sense, remind one of Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/how-housing-first-fueled-the-homelessness-crisis

In New York City last week, a woman died when a homeless man pushed her onto the Times Square subway tracks. Over the weekend, Los Angeles suffered a tragedy when a homeless man with a long rap sheet stabbed a woman to death in an upscale furniture store.

For the last 40 years, America has been in a crisis of homelessness. The damage extends to the homeless, their victims, and the cities that suffer from failed policies. Far-left liberals have dominated policymaking, but the problem is getting worse, not better. It’s time for a reset on homeless policies.

It’s not about spending more money. Federal funding for homelessness has grown every year in the last decade, resulting in a jaw-dropping 200% increase . Despite this, from 2014 to 2019 (before COVID-19), the number of unsheltered people, who mostly live outdoors, increased 21%, according to a report from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. In California, the unsheltered homeless during this same period increased 47%, and overall homelessness increased 31%.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/01/27/throwback_thursday_us_spent_112000_to_study_if_different_personalities_prefer_different_foods_813172.html

“The study apparently broke in Psychology Today magazine, in an article titled “Profiles in Eating – Sexy Vegetarians and other Diet Based Social Stereotypes.”

We’ve all seen those clickbait quizzes offering to decipher what type of personality we have based on our favorite foods. A few of us may have even taken them, but nobody actually believes preferring pizza over pasta has any meaningful interpretation for our personality.

Nobody, except some scientists in 1982, to whom the government paid $40,000 to conduct scientific research on the matter. Today, adjusted for inflation, the government spent the equivalent of $112,500 on the study.

Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) highlighted this as his “Golden Fleece Award” for the month of January 1982. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $40,000 on a yearlong study called “Food Preferences and Social Identity” to test the claim that people with a certain personality prefer certain types of food.

Sen. Proxmire had the right response when said in a press release, “SO WHAT? Who cares what it means whether you eat carrots or caviar? Here’s a $40,000 study calculated to make the American taxpayer eat his heart out.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/28/will-we-ever-eradicate-the-cancer-of-identity-politics/

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally granted a writ of certiorari in two now-consolidated affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The cases will be argued jointly during the next Supreme Court term, and they place directly in their crosshairs the court’s noxious precedents in the thorny area of race-conscious university admission policies. As presented to the court, the leading question the justices will consider is “whether the Supreme Court should . . . hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions.”

The court should of course do so posthaste. The propagandist assertion that America in the year 2022 is bedeviled by a sprawling “systemic racism” is a destructive lie, but the ubiquity of affirmative action means that university admissions offices do, in fact, propagate systemic racism. Fortunately, there is reason for optimism that the justices will do their job. It was the mercurial Chief Justice John Roberts himself who, in the 2007 case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, penned perhaps his most iconic line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, Monday’s propitious step forward toward an America no longer obsessed with race and identity politics was abruptly undermined by a severe step backward toward a race-centric polity.

Justice Stephen Breyer, an octogenarian Jewish male and the senior statesman of the court’s liberal bloc, announced his retirement, effective at the end of this court term and contingent upon the successful confirmation of his successor. The announcement was hardly surprising; given Breyer’s long-standing Democratic ties, his liberal jurisprudence, and the fact that Republicans are poised to retake control of the U.S. Senate this fall, it would have been more surprising if Breyer had not retired this year.