RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/14/thoughts-on-our-faucian-bargain/

“It’s a pity Donald Trump and his team did not consult Henderson’s work when COVID first reared its ugly head. They could have saved the country, and indeed the world, from much misery, not to mention Trump’s electoral prospects. They could also have saved the country from that other misery of listening to Anthony Fauci emit his poisonous advice. That would have been a blessing. But it would not not have done a thing to make the investigation into corruption at the NIH less pertinent. Kudos to Open the Books. ”

How much money does the federal government have? 

None. 

All those trillions of dollars the government spends is our money. Government has just appropriated it. 

The founders knew all about this process, and they abominated it. 

But as Christopher Marlowe put it in another context, “that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” 

Over the years, I have several times written about the invaluable work Open the Books has done in exposing the corrupt, self-serving, nepotistic, unaccountable leviathan that is government bureaucracy. Ever since its founding in 2011, the organization has been like Jacob wrestling with the angel, struggling to bring transparency to the fetid, self-engorging swamp that our government, colonized by bureaucracy, has become. “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.” Their motto is as neatly expressed as it is difficult to achieve. 

Open the Books has publicized outrageous taxpayer-funded pensions, lavish government subsidies to super-rich Ivy league colleges, and eye-popping public employee salaries. Every revelation is wrenched from the clenched fists of government bureaucracies whose byword, like that of the mafia, is “omertà,” silence. 

Perhaps their most damaging report was released just last week. Open the Books teamed up with Judicial Watch, another invaluable public-spirited watchdog, to mount a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health in order to prise loose information about the millions and millions of dollars the organization has received from third-parties (that would be Big Pharma) and distributed to its scientists and administrators.

The last time the NIH was forced to disgorge such information was back in 2005 in response to a Freedom of Information demand filed by the Associated Press. 

The NIH, of course, is the preferred playground of Anthony Fauci, publicity hound and COVID scold par excellence. Fauci, as has been noted many times at American Greatness, is the highest paid federal employee. In 2021, his taxpayer-funded salary alone was $456,028. That’s $56,028 more than the salary of the president of the United States. (“But the president is Joe Biden,” you object. I point out that we’re talking about the office, not the man.)

Anthony Fauci has been a fixture in the public health establishment for decades. There he was during the AIDS crisis, warning that you might catch the disease from sitting next to someone who had it, and grimly raising the specter of “heterosexual AIDS.”

And there he was day-in and day-out at press briefings at the White House in 2020 and 2021, fanning the flames of COVID hysteria, dispensing oracular and contradictory advice to a confused and terrified public. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/fbi-resists-garland-pressure-to-politicize-domestic-terrorism-probes-of-americas-parents/

Good news: Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

There was heavy breathing this week from House Republicans regarding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s abominable October 2021 directive that the FBI harass and intimidate parents who object to the woke indoctrination of their children by progressive school administrators. Garland’s memo echoed the suggestion of left-wing activists that the parents could be investigated as if they were domestic terrorists.

Garland’s actions are as condemnable as ever. GOP efforts notwithstanding, though, the only significant development in this story in the past six months is that the FBI has performed well. Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Biden Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

Back in November, I explained that Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, had prematurely leapt from the correct premise that the FBI had opened a category of investigations, known in bureau parlance as a “threat tag,” to the unfounded conclusions that (a) the bureau had employed against parents such national-security authorities as the PATRIOT Act, whose investigative measures are meant for (mainly foreign) terrorists, and (b) Garland had committed perjury during congressional testimony when he denied that the FBI had either resorted to such measures or labeled parents as “domestic terrorists.”

Our Zachary Evans has the latest news about the investigations and, despite the renewed efforts of Jordan and Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.), what we’re learning is somewhat comforting.

To repeat what I said six months ago, the abomination here, about which Republicans are right to keep reminding people, is that the Justice Department brandished its awesome investigative powers in an effort to stifle parental dissent. It was a nakedly political gambit. There is no federal jurisdiction to monitor relations between parents and schools. There is no surge in violence against school administrators. Given the vastness of our country and the importance of education, it is inevitable that there will be occasional incidents of potentially criminal threats or assaults. But such incidents — in which school officials are often more at fault than parents — are not federal crimes; they are the concern of state and local law enforcement.

Yet, in its desperation to mollify the radical Left, the Biden administration quietly collaborated with progressive activists at the National School Boards Association on a letter to Garland, which depicted parents as domestic terrorists and implored the Justice Department to act on supposed threats. This served as the pretext for Garland’s October 4 memo directing district U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country to work with the FBI in addressing this purported crisis.

https://www.nysun.com/article/spot-the-extremist-is-it-democrats-or-the-gop-who-will-shock-the-voters-on-abortion

Just recently, Republicans and Senator Manchin blocked passage of legislation that, as the New York Times described it, would “enshrine the landmark Roe v. Wade precedent in federal law.” Reporting on that defeat, few news organizations, including the Times, provided a link to the Democrats’ proposed  bill. There’s a reason for that.

While the Times dutifully linked to the leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has caused borderline hysteria on the left, the paper eschewed guiding readers to the pro-abortion legislation recently approved by 49 Senate Democrats. The Times failed even to mention the name of the bill until the 17th paragraph of its report on the vote, possibly worried that curious readers might research the 29-page legislation on their own.

Why keep the pro-abortion bill under wraps? First, because its expansive abortion rules come wrapped in racism, extolling “reproductive justice” and claiming that “restrictions on reproductive health, including abortion, perpetuate systems of oppression, lack of bodily autonomy, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism.”

Since black women, 14 percent of the population, account for roughly 40 percent of abortions performed in our country, some might think that legalizing the procedure is more persuasive of white supremacy, but never mind.

More importantly, the press might want to downplay the bill because it is a horror that goes way beyond Roe v. Wade. Most offensive, it allows abortion up through nine months of pregnancy, when, “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of puberty-blocking drugs—lifelong synthetic hormones for young people who identify as transgender or non-binary and seek medicalised gender change. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care.” We also have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health.”

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-miss-for-politicized-science-the-lancet-roe-v-wade-abortion-supreme-court-samuel-alito-11652480176?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The public’s confidence in scientific institutions has suffered greatly during Covid-19 as lockdowns and mask mandates outlived the underlying evidence. Don’t expect that to improve as an ostensibly prestigious medical journal tries to politicize medicine with an editorial denouncing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

The Lancet exhorts this week that, “The fact is that if the US Supreme Court confirms its draft decision” overturning Roe v. Wade, “women will die. The Justices who vote to strike down Roe will not succeed in ending abortion, they will only succeed in ending safe abortion. Alito and his supporters will have women’s blood on their hands.”

Allow us to offer some peer editorial review. The Court’s draft decision doesn’t end abortion in America. It returns the question to the states, where the public and elected representatives would debate and vote.

Many states would continue to allow the procedure throughout pregnancy. Some may ban it in most instances. Others would likely end up closer to where public opinion is: Allowing abortion early in pregnancy and in certain instances later, such as cases of rape or when the life of the mother is compromised.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-disagreement-became-disinformation-misinformation-nina-jankowicz-governance-board-czar-11652450632?mod=trending_now_opn_2

The preoccupation with “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the part of America’s enlightened influencers last month reached the level of comedy. The Department of Homeland Security chose a partisan scold, Nina Jankowicz, to head its new Disinformation Governance Board despite her history of promoting false stories and repudiating valid ones—the sort of scenario only a team of bumblers or a gifted satirist could produce.

Less funny but similarly paradoxical was Barack Obama’s April 21 address lamenting online disinformation, in which he propounded at least one easily disprovable assertion. Tech companies, the former president said, “should be working with, not always contrary to, those groups that are trying to prevent voter suppression [that] specifically has targeted black and brown communities.” There is no evidence of voter suppression in “black and brown communities” and plenty of evidence of the contrary, inasmuch as black and Latino voter participation reached record levels in the 2020 election.

One of the great ironies of American political life in the 2020s is that the people most exercised about the spread of false information are frequently peddlers of it. Their lack of self-understanding arises from the belief that the primary factor separating their side from the other side isn’t ideology, principle or moral vision but information—raw data requiring no interpretation and no argument over its importance. It is a hopelessly simpleminded worldview—no one apprehends reality without the aid of interpretive lenses. And it is a dangerous one.

The roots of this self-deceiving outlook are complicated but worth a brief look.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/05/13/teleworking_members_of_congress_cost_taxpayers_70_million_since_start_of_pandemic_830922.html

While President Joe Biden urged “Americans to get back to work” and said “people working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office” Democratic members of Congress think that doesn’t apply to them, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The news outlet reveals how a large number of Congressional offices continue to sit empty in Washington D.C., ostensibly because of Covid-19. We estimate that these closed offices cost American taxpayers $139,548 each day.

The Free Beacon reports that “dozens” of House offices sat vacant on the day of their visit in March, with signs informing visitors that staff was teleworking. They also reported 12 vacant Senate offices.

Each House office is given about $944,671 per year to cover administrative expenses and pay its’ staff’s salaries. The Senate’s allocation is based on the size of the Senator’s state, but the average allocation is roughly $3.3 million.

That comes out to $2,588 per day per House office, and $9,041 per day per Senate office. That totals $31,056 per day, with a very conservative estimate of 12 House offices working from home, and $108,492 for the 12 Senate offices working virtually.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/midge-the-magnificent/

I first met Midge Decter during the mid-1980s through neoconservative publishing circles in New York, a world as distant from today’s as it was, in turn, from the time of the Second World War. Though no one back then knew it, those years would turn out to be the sunset of the so-called small magazines, and with it, the end of the New York intellectuals—whose ranks, ironically, we had all moved there to join. “We” were a tight band of interns and journeymen, orbiting around small but influential journals like The Public Interest and Commentary, the American Spectator and The New Criterion, wider venues like the Wall Street Journal, Time, and book publishing houses, and other places where thinking and scribbling helped to pay the rent.

Back then, before the internet ushered in the Götterdämmerung of many things literary, those felt like glory days. This was true above all for the young men and women who had landed in these places by dint of political contrarianism—especially those recently graduated from elite campuses, where political conformity had pushed them out of stifling academia, and into the freer intellectual life of Manhattan. “In New York you can be a new man,” goes a rap in Hamilton, and that’s exactly what young, lower-case new-right types felt in the city during the mid-1980s. At that moment, Reaganism had surpassed punk for cool, and neoconservatism in its classic sense—meliorative, questioning, bookish—was ascendant, and spreading.

Beyond politics, our band also enjoyed a personal network tighter and more welcoming than most young writers today can imagine. We had access to influential thinkers and doers. We enjoyed entrée to magazines and journals in which we could stretch out our thoughts at muscle-building length—not in “750 words or under,” as is depressingly usual now. We had freedom to voice opinions that had been scolded or forbidden on the quad. We had mentors like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and Gertrude Himmelfarb. And we were graced by something else just as rare: indomitable, luminous, rascally Midge Decter.