RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/27/cultural-appropriation-as-civilizational-education/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

The West draws on the best from everywhere

The scientific director of Cana­da’s Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health resigned in early No­vember after she was revealed to have falsely claimed to be a Native American. Carrie Bourassa, who represented herself as a member of the Métis nation, turned out to be of Russian, Polish, and Czech extraction. Bourassa, of course, is one of many ethno-preneurs who in recent years have played this kind of costume drama.

Rachel Dolezal is among the most famous: the white woman who, pretending to be black, rose to become president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash. But such cases are now too common to be thought of as aberrations. Ward Churchill built his career as a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder by pretending to be Cherokee. Fake Cherokee ancestry also served Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) as she advanced her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Jessica Krug, a professor of African-American history at George Washington University, passed herself off as black and was well known for her black “rage,” until she confessed that she was white and that her whole career was rooted in a “toxic soil of lies.”

These are instances in which individuals achieved some degree of prominence by carrying a false claim of ancestry all the way to a wholly fictitious biography, including a fake cultural identity. Eliza­beth Warren earned widespread mockery for the supposed family recipes she contributed to a cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow.” There are plenty of others who could be added to the list, just as there were once plenty of blacks who passed as white.

These days the cultural dynamics as well as the spoils of affirmative action favor whites passing as Native American or black — so much so that, according to a recent report, more than a third of white college applicants lie about their race by claiming to belong to a racial minority.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/20/ii-tipp-poll-41-dont-trust-faucis-opinions-on-covid-19/

Fewer than half of all Americans say they trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, the controversial director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when it comes to the fight against COVID-19, a new I&I/TIPP Poll shows. But as with many other issues these days, the level of trust in Fauci is highly partisan.

The December I&I/TIPP Poll asked: “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s opinions related to coronavirus?”

Of those responding, 47% said they had “a lot of trust” or “quite a bit of trust” in Fauci, while 41% said they had “little trust” or “no trust at all.” Another 13% responded they were “not sure.”

The December data were collected from I&I/TIPP Poll’s survey of 1,301 adults, which was conducted online from Dec. 1-4 by TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, I&I’s polling partner. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/20/in-email-to-fauci-nih-dir-collins-asked-for-media-hit-piece-to-smear-fringe-harvard-stanford-oxford-epidemiologists/

Last fall, outgoing National Institutes of Health Director (NIH) Francis Collins asked Dr. Anthony Fauci in an email to pursue a “quick and devastating” media hit piece to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration, recently released emails show.

More than 60,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists signed the declaration to express their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

The document was authored by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. All three of the doctors are epidemiologists with expertise in monitoring infectious diseases.

“This proposal from three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford,” Collins wrote in the Oct. 8, 2020, email, released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis last week.

“There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,” the NIH chief continued. “I don’t see anything like that on line yet – is it underway?”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/why-hasnt-jussie-smollett-been-charged-perjury-larry-elder/

This did not wear well. On February 22, 2019, a story posted on Gentleman’s Quarterly website was headlined: “The Racist, Homophobic Attack on Jussie Smollett Is America’s Endgame. When one of the most famous black and gay men in America is not safe, the message is clearer than it has ever been.” One of the most famous black and gay men? Count me among the multitudes who said, “Who is Jussie Smollett?”

GQ.com, of course, referred to the alleged hate crime committed one winter night in Chicago against actor Smollett, coming back from Subway toting a tuna fish foot-long sandwich. He claimed his attackers were President Donald Trump-supporting thugs who yelled racial and homophobic slurs. The tale quickly fell apart, but not before the “America is systemically racist” media and political ambulance chasers weighed in.

The soon-to-be presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeted in January 2019: “What happened today to Jussie Smollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.”

Biden’s future running mate, Kamala Harris, tweeted: “Jussie Smollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery. This was an attempted modern day-lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.”

https://www.city-journal.org/joe-bidens-anti-constitutional-vaccine-mandate

“In republican governments, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” said James Madison. But what sort of government is it when the president thinks he can decree a nationwide vaccine mandate without the legislature’s involvement? Such a decree would seem to be more characteristic of an elective monarchy than a republic.

President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate has been criticized for intrusively injecting the federal government into personal health decisions, for denying the existence of natural immunity (already obtained by perhaps half of the U.S. population), and for causing people who choose not to be vaccinated to lose their livelihoods (and at a time when the nation is already experiencing a shortage of workers). In short, it is being criticized as bad policy. But another problem with the mandate is that Biden thinks he can decide such policy questions unilaterally for a nation of more than 300 million ostensibly free citizens—and that so much of the country is willing to go along with his claim.

Biden’s mandate is clearly an exercise of legislative power on the part of the chief executive. As such, it marks the substitution of the arbitrary rule of one man for the republican rule of law. At the same time, it represents the substitution of federal rule for state or local rule. In other words, it undermines both the separation of powers and federalism—which together form what Madison in Federalist 51 called the “double security . . . to the rights of the people.” Biden’s assertion of power is therefore about much more than Covid vaccines. It is about whether Americans will accept having the president function as a one-man quasi-legislature or will instead demand that we revert to what Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist 1, called “the true principles of republican government.”

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/president-trump-raises-a-serious-question-about/91836/

President Trump’s lawsuit against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, deserves, in our view, a serious hearing. Mr. Trump complains that she’s investigating him for political purposes. That truth is so plain that even the New York Times has been warning against it. This is a moment for the robed sages to declare that they will not permit their hallowed courtrooms to be used for politics.

It’s hard to think of a more important principle. We carry no brief for Mr. Trump or any of his businesses. And we fully appreciate what a formidable opponent Ms. James is as a political operator. Without ever filing a charge, she took down, in Andrew Cuomo, the man standing athwart her own ambitions for the governorship. It’s no small thing, though, that Mr. Trump was in her sights when she was but a candidate.

During the race for attorney general in 2018, Ms. James told Democratic primary voters she was “closing in on him.” After winning the nomination, she credited her victory to her aggressive criticism of the President. Her win, she said, “was about the people but most importantly it was about that man in the White House who can’t go a day without threatening our fundamental rights.” She vowed to “stand up and fight back.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/20/math-for-demmies/

The Biden administration “Believes in Science.” But math – not so much. It seems to have a fuzzy concept of large sums of money as all being just “bazillions.” So here is a little arithmetic using nice round numbers that even the administration and congressional progressives can follow.

There are about 330 million people in the United States. So, if we say that the average family is 3.3 people (mom, dad, one or two kids), then we have about 100 million families. So, on average, each trillion dollars costs each family $10,000. And ultimately, it’s they who pay the lion’s share of taxes.

President Joe Biden recently signed into law an “infrastructure” bill that will cost about $1.2 trillion. That means that each family will pay, on average, $12,000. A person working full time for a year (about 1,800 hours) at the federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) makes about $13,050. So good news! You get to keep $1,050 of that for food, rent, energy, and other “luxuries.”

But now the Democrats want a “human infrastructure” bill, which, as they first proposed, would have cost $3.5 trillion, which boosts per-family costs to $45,000. Sorry, Josephine the Plumber and Lewis the Librarian, no Caribbean cruise for you this year.

But there’s more! We still have to pay for Social Security, Medicare, national defense, welfare, unemployment, interest on the existing debt, and a few sundries such as electric vehicle subsidies and endowments for the arts and humanities. Those add up to about another $3.5 trillion. So, add another $35,000 to the above. Don’t go out and buy that Tesla just yet.

The confiscation of resources from ordinary Americans to satisfy the aspirations and whims – good, bad, or indifferent – of the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exerts an “income effect” that reflects the correlation between wealth and health.