RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://unherd.com/2021/05/tribalism-has-come-to-the-west/

About a decade ago, when I worked for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), I had to force myself to go to lunch with a friend. I dreaded the meeting because I knew that she was going to try to convince me to leave my job. AEI is a pro-business, conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, DC. My friend was an enthusiastic liberal.

After I had run out of excuses, the day arrived and, predictably, after a few minutes of the usual small talk, my friend launched into a tirade about the Iraq War, which several of my colleagues strongly supported.

“You don’t belong there, Ayaan,” she said.

I remember trying to steer the conversation on to actual policies. I had voted for supporting the American coalition in Iraq when I was a Member of Parliament in The Netherlands — and I started to explain why.

But she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton, the former Ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently National Security Advisor to President Trump). Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a moustache. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath.

“But what about the policies?” I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. The more she spoke, the more I recognised her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. Her attitude was almost entirely tribal. Two things, in particular, stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans); and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred.

Today, ten years later, this attitude seems to be the prevailing norm. Numerous studies support the hypothesis that American life — not just politics, but life in general — has become deeply polarised. The deeply divided society we now live in increasingly reminds me of clan or tribal behaviour in Africa.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/opinion/race-police-violence-liberalism.html

“Joe Biden’s resounding victory and his progressive policies are supposed to mark the real end of the Reaganite era of American politics. Don’t be surprised if they’re a prelude to its return, just as the last era of progressive excess ushered in its beginning.”

 Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief last week after Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. The crime was heinous, the verdict just, the moral neat. If you think that systemic racism is the defining fact of race relations in 21st-century America, then Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck is its defining image.

But what about a case like that of Ma’Khia Bryant, a Black teenager who was shot and killed last week by Nicholas Reardon, a white police officer in Columbus, Ohio, at the instant that she was swinging a knife at a woman who had her back against a car?

Ben Crump, the Floyd family’s lawyer, accused the Columbus police in a tweet of killing “an unarmed 15yo Black girl.” Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama adviser, tweeted that Bryant “was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight.” Jarrett wants to “Demand accountability” and “Fight for justice.”

An alternative view: Maybe there wasn’t time for Officer Reardon, in an 11-second interaction, to “de-escalate” the situation, as he is now being faulted for failing to do. And maybe the balance of our sympathies should lie not with the would-be perpetrator of a violent assault but with the cop who saved a Black life — namely that of Tionna Bonner, who nearly had Bryant’s knife thrust into her.

That’s a thought that many, perhaps most, Americans share, even if they are increasingly reluctant to say it out loud. Why reluctant? Because in this era of with-us-or-against-us politics, to have misgivings about the left’s new “anti-racist” narrative is to run the risk of being denounced as a racist. Much better to nod along at your office’s diversity, equity and inclusion sessions than suggest that enforced political indoctrination should not become a staple of American workplace culture.

https://freebeacon.com/policy/woke-medicine-comes-to-new-york-city/?utm_source=actengage&utm_campaign=FreedomMail&utm_medium=email

Medical workers tend to a patient at a Brooklyn hospital that has seen a rise in coronavirus-related cases on December 15, 2020 in New York City. / Getty Images

A pair of doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital last month outlined a pilot program that, they said, would offer “preferential care” to patients of color. The proposal, published in Boston Review, accuses hospitals across the country of practicing “medical apartheid”—something they said must be addressed through “race-explicit interventions.”

Those interventions may violate civil rights laws, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital assured the Washington Free Beacon that they are “not currently underway at the hospital.” That hasn’t stopped one of its authors, Dr. Michelle Morse, from moving on up: She is now the chief medical officer of New York City.

In her new post, Morse will wield enormous influence over New York’s hospital system, and she has promised to use it to “advance health equity.” Part of her job will be serving as a liaison between the health department and local medical centers, including three she singled out as examples of “apartheid”: Montefiore, New York-Presbyterian, and Mount Sinai. She was also named the deputy commissioner for the Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness, a division within the New York City health department.

Asked how her office would address apartheid at local hospitals, Morse did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/04/07/just-decades-after-the-holocaust-the-woke-mob-targets-jews-and-america/

Commemorating Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — in New York always felt vaguely foreign, even un-American, to me. Heavily-accented, emotionally-scarred Europeans would describe the dark days in that dark continent, forgetting that we were different. We American Jews lived in the land of light, the center of the New World — the Free World.

The Nazi evil happened over there, in that swamp of hyper-nationalist poisons that produced two world wars — then unfairly blamed the chaos on the Jews. As a second-generation American Jewish kid, I instinctively identified with the victors not the victims, the super-powered GI Joes magnanimously distributing cigarettes and chocolate, not the broken, emaciated concentration camp Jews desperately grabbing the goodies.

How lucky we were to feel that — and how fleeting that feeling was. This Yom HaShoah, I am thinking about how many of my fellow Americans have spent the last few years Europeanizing America, making the land of the free and the home of the brave look like the land of the fanatic and the home of the bully, where the left and right can agree on little — except that the Jews are somehow at fault and inherently flawed.

One of this moment’s greatest Jewish tragedies is that while our enemies put their differences aside to target us, most Jews can’t put our differences aside to defend ourselves.

In a sick way, hating Nazis on Yom HaShoah is easy. The Holocaust was Jew-hatred at its crudest: it was blatant and bloody. Condemning this genocidal expression of fascism — and all its Neo-Nazi heirs today — keeps most American Jews in their comfort zone. Liberals’ generalized hatred of the right reinforces their self-defensive hatred of right-wing antisemitism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/after-the-boulder-mass-shooting-comes-the-debate-about-motive

“When it was supposedly a white man, he was a white supremacist and a “terrorist.” Now that he’s a Syrian Arab Muslim, he is suddenly someone with anger issues and mental problems. Any other possibilities come to mind? Like maybe he’s just an Arab Muslim out to kill Jews? Of course, I’m not saying that. That’d be jumping to conclusions.”  D.P.S.

For anyone who doubts that we are living through Obama 2.0, the mass-murder attack at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo., should be an eye-opener.

A young Muslim male immigrant from Syria carries out an ostensibly senseless shooting spree, killing ten innocent people in cold blood. A full day goes by without his being publicly identified, even though the authorities had him in custody, had identified him, and were searching his home and interviewing family members. Based on past experience with such delays, sensible people begin to wonder if there’s an effort to spin the story in a certain way so that the benighted American public won’t leap to conclusions based on negative stereotypes of Muslims.

Finally, he is identified as a 21-year-old Muslim man named Ahmad Alissa — the media sticking to a less obviously Islamic rendering of his name than “Al Issa,” which is how the suspect refers to himself. (Isa is Arabic for Jesus, whom Islam regards as a prophet.)

And now, inevitably, the Will we ever know the motive? narrative has commenced, with the New York Times, as ever, leading the way.

https://www.dickmorris.com/biden-speech-the-rooster-took-credit-for-the-dawn/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

In the maiden speech of his presidency last night, Biden was like the rooster taking credit for the dawn.

Crowing loudly about the COVID vaccines he inherited from Donald Trump — his predecessor of whom he could not bring himself to speak — he announced triumphantly that 100 million shots of the vaccine will have been given by his 60th day in office.

But this is the Trump vaccine he is talking about. Operation Warp Speed mobilized the world’s scientists and pharma companies to develop the drug in an unbelievably short time. Trump paid for shots that did not then exist (and might never come to fruition) on spec so as to fund vaccine development.

Now Biden has the chutzpah to say, “When I took office 50 days ago, only 8 percent of Americans after months, only 8 percent of those over the age of 65 had gotten their first vaccination. Today, that number is 65 percent.”

After months? The FDA approved the first vaccine (from Pfizer) on Dec. 11, 40 days before the end of Trump’s term. Not months. In those six short weeks, his team delivered 31 million doses of the vaccine.

From Tablet Magazine….scroll@tabletmag.com

March 10, 2021

Anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City were up 833% last year, from 3 reported in 2019 to 28 in 2020, according to New York Police Department data analyzed by the California State University’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The preliminary report finds that while hate crimes in the U.S. were down overall in 2020 by 7%, attacks targeting Asians were up 149%, with New York City leading the trend. The muted response from city officials and media, despite a number of graphic videos showing attacks on innocent pedestrians and elderly Asian people, is a replay of the response to earlier waves of attacks on religious Jewish communities in New York. It is not, however, especially surprising in a city where the mayor’s wife does not recommend calling the police if you witness an Asian person being attacked.