RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/08/a-culture-in-collapse/

In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.

The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.

Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming.

What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.

In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War. The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.

Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative. But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden’s presidency has shocked Americans.

Financial Implosion

As long as interest rates were de facto zero, both parties ran up gargantuan debt. Now the national debt has hit $34 trillion. But two odd things have also happened under the Biden administration that are beginning to undermine the very existence of the U.S. financial system:

1) Interest rates have soared from de facto zero and are on a trajectory to 5.5%—meaning that the interest on the debt, in theory, in the not too distant future will require 20 percent of the annual budget, squeezing out both entitlements and defense.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/08/biden-takes-lying-with-statistics-to-a-whole-new-level/

The headlines on Friday were that the economy created 216,000 jobs, more than expected and a sign of continued strength in the economy.

“This morning’s report confirms that 2023 was a great year for American workers,” President Joe Biden said.

Hurray!

But wait a minute. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) previously reported that there were 157,087,000 “non-farm payroll” jobs in November. The number of these jobs in December, it now says, was 157,232,000.

That’s a gain of only 145,000.

So how did Biden manage to claim that the economy created 216,000 jobs in December?

Easy. All you have to do is cut the number of jobs in November by 71,000 and then measure December’s gain against that new, lower number.

Et voilà!

Instead of 157,087,000 jobs in November, the BLS now says there were 157,016,000. Subtract that from 157,232,000 and you get … 216,000!

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/07/from-insurrection-to-satire-bidens-valley-forge-speech-fails-to-cement-the-trump-dictator-narrative/

I would not be surprised if future historians singled out Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech as the moment his campaign began its final retreat into senile collapse.

How deeply has Donald Trump burrowed into the psyche of the Democratic establishment?  I’d say the takeover is nearly total.  For proof, you need only contemplate the alarming pantomime that Joe Biden just acted out at Valley Forge.  It lacked the totalitarian, Riefenstahlich trappings of his speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in Sept. 2022. At that time, the President’s puppeteers believed that they could scare voters by turning the acronym “MAGA” into a negative epithet and affixing the extreme-sounding intensifier “ultra” to its front end.

They managed to scare themselves, but hardly anyone else. By the fall of 2022, the wrecking ball that is Joe Biden’s administration had already smashed its way through the American economy, our southern border, and our foreign policy.  Suddenly, “Make America Great Again” sounded like a pretty good formula.  And if Trump and his supporters were advocating “MAGA with knobs on,” then why not?

That’s what more and more of that most irritating cohort, voters, seemed to think.

Biden’s handlers attempted a variation on the Independence Hall theme at Valley Forge.  Noting the date, they decided to take a risk and memorialize the jamboree at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That prefabricated entertainment, brought to you by deep state actors like Nancy Pelosi with an assist from extras supplied by Trump Industries, Inc., was at the time baptized as a frontal assault on “Our Democracy™,” the worst thing since 9/11, nay, since Pearl Harbor or the Civil War.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/the-anti-israel-hooligans-have-lost-the-plot/

Sooner or later, the anti-Israel agitators will start throwing soup and mashed potatoes at things.

Their antics lately have made as much sense as those of the Just Stop Oil and copycat climate activists, around that point when they decided it was better to piss people off with befuddling stunts (soup, potatoes) while posing obviously false choices to society (e.g., What’s more important to you, the planet or a Van Gogh?) than earnestly advocate their position.

The position of those cheering on Hamas has been heinous from the start. But when they marched on America’s campuses and downtowns with placards declaring “By any means necessary” and “Resistance is justified,” their cause and purpose were painfully clear. Not so today. They began to veer into absurdity last month, when demonstrators marched on a Philadelphia falafel shop co-owned by an Israeli-born chef and accused its kitchen of genocide (incidentally, I visited said falafel shop last week and could find no evidence of the Zionist conspiracy, only perfectly composed hummus). Then during the holiday stretch, demonstrators scrambled to block traffic outside major airports, including New York’s JFK and Chicago’s O’Hare. This, while protesters tried (and failed) to disrupt Christmas itself. Caroline Downey reported on statements made at one New York rally, which we can largely recognize as being composed of English words but read like the output of an exhausted AI bot trained on Daily Stormer content:

“Zionism is antisemitic,” one attendee at the march said. “Hamas, and long live the resistance.”

Whatever you say.

Then there was, as Jay Nordlinger flagged, the effort to target retailer Zara and accuse it of complicity in, again, genocide over an ad campaign that supposedly evoked scenes of Gaza destruction — but didn’t actually, considering the campaign was conceived and put together before the war began. The episode was ridiculous, both at the time and in hindsight. Any logical cohesion behind anti-Israel protesters’ actions could be seen fraying then and there, any core purpose spitting out strands of severed sense like rubber from a fresh-cut balata golf ball. Fast-forward to the end of December, and Jimmy Quinn finds protesters in New York City flat-out endorsing an Iran-backed terrorism campaign:

“Yemen, Yemen, make us proud. Turn another ship around!” is the newest protest chant heard during anti-Israel marches in New York City, clearly referring to the attacks that the country’s Houthi rebels have launched against shipping vessels in the Red Sea.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/01/03/washington_post_reporter_to_vivek_ramaswamy_you_didnt_say_you_condemn_white_supremacy.html

Vivek Ramaswamy responded to a Washington Post reporter asking him to “condemn white supremacy” at a campaign stop Tuesday in Iowa. See more context from this exchange here.

WASHINGTON POST REPORTER: You didn’t say that you condemn white supremacy though.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I’m not going to recite some catechism for you. I’m against vicious racial discrimination in this country. I’m not pledging allegiance to your new religion of modern wokeism, which actually fits the test. I’m not going to bend the knee to your religion. I’m sorry. I’m not going to ask you to bend to mine and I’m not going to bend the knee to yours.

But do I condemn vicious racial discrimination? Yes, I do.

Am I going to play your silly game of gotcha? No, I am not.

And frankly, this is why people have lost trust, and I know you’re going to go print this headline tomorrow, I know how your game works, “Vivek Ramaswamy Won’t Condemn White Supremacy.”, Because you asked a stupid question.

The reality is, I condemn vicious racial discrimination in this country, but the kind of vicious racial discrimination we see today is discrimination on the basis of race in a very different direction.

Do you want to know what the best way is to end discrimination on the basis of race? Stop discriminating on the basis of race. Do that, and we’re going to move this country forward, and I don’t care whether you’re black or white or brown or anything in between, that’s how we’re going to unite this country.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2024-year-dei-climate-craziness-open-border-policies-lose-mojo

Welcome to 2024 – the year that Americans will reject the woke and dysfunctional policies of the progressive left. The year in which the pendulum, thank heavens, will continue to swing towards common sense and sanity.

How do we know? Because Joe Biden’s approval ratings are in the gutter and EVs are piling up on dealer lots. Because Taylor Swift breaks every conceivable record performing family-friendly shows while Disney’s woke confections fail to find an audience. Because Claudine Gay is forced to resign from Harvard and the country views the Democratic Party more negatively than at any time during the past three decades. 

It’s a start. The silent majority has not gone away; it has simply been asleep. 

Reflecting an overdue awakening, some of the most offensive assaults on our nation’s values and protections are being tossed overboard. DEI hiring is down and companies are abandoning race-based programs. 

Last year, DEI-related job posts dropped 44% as companies backed off their over-the-top response to the murder of George Floyd and demands from Black Lives Matter protesters. Tech companies like Google and Meta, vanguards of social activism, drastically cut DEI programs and laid off employees engaged in Black employee resource groups, according to CNBC.  Charges that DEI programs promoted illegal racial discrimination and shareholder blowback took a toll. 

President Biden, a big promoter of DEI, is defending the indefensible and possibly illegal. He recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post recalling the teachings of Martin Luther King, but equality-embracing King would be appalled – as are millions of Americans — by the racist policies of the Biden White House. The policies that Biden brags about are probably unconstitutional, like awarding “a record $69.9 billion in federal contracts to small, disadvantaged businesses in fiscal 2022,” meaning mostly Black-owned. Dr. King advocated equal opportunity and racial blindness, not stacking the deck in a cynical play for votes.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/its-time-to-make-some-examples/

As anti-Israel protests grow menacingly violent, Biden and his party can separate themselves from the extremists or face the consequences of their inaction.

It’s easier to itemize the conditions that aren’t contributing to a general sense of apprehension among American voters than to list the many sources of our national malaise.

Americans are beset by a “crisis of confidence” in their governing institutions. Economic anxiety abounds. Crises overseas and on the country’s southern border have made geopolitics into a kitchen-table issue in American households. And millions of Americans are increasingly convinced that the country is on the precipice of an outbreak of political violence. Recent events suggest those fears are amply justified. A multiweek campaign of unabated criminal unrest prosecuted by opponents of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas could be nearing a deadly crescendo.

Anti-Israel demonstrators mounted a coordinated effort to block access to two of America’s busiest transportation hubs over the Christmas holiday: New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport. The attempt to tie up airport traffic is already responsible for violent interactions between protesters and the targets of their harassment. Over the weekend, demonstrators temporarily shuttered JFK’s Terminal 4 as videos taken from the scene showed them releasing balloons near the airport runways — an exercise designed to ground commercial aircraft by imperiling travelers’ lives.

When the protests against the exercise of Israel’s right to its own defense aren’t menacingly violent, they’re a nuisance designed to irritate as many Americans as possible. The protesters are as likely to be found gumming up the works of holiday celebrations — ruining parades, terrorizing tourists, and generally ensuring that “joy is canceled” for most Americans — as besieging the Democratic Party’s political headquarters or even killing their opponents.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/2024_do_we_hit_the_iceberg_or_finally_change_course.html

It is difficult for any American who loves this country to watch its political, economic, and military “leaders” destroy it.  Part of the political theater propping up the illusion of electoral choice in this Kabuki dance that the State-controlled press calls “democracy” is the lie that officeholders from different parties are at each other’s throats.  More Americans than ever finally see through this convenient fiction and understand that a single Uniparty acts as a guild of political thespians who are the face of a permanently entrenched national security Deep State that runs the show.  

Furthermore, more Americans than ever finally recognize that the United States is not a country that supports free markets but rather a central bank-directed financial cartel that regulates labor, commodities, and transactions so stringently that there is nothing outside of the government’s (or Wall Street’s) economic control.  Taxing Americans’ labor, forcing them to use an inflation-driven paper currency, and encumbering their ownership of real property are not policies for encouraging middle class prosperity; they are chains meant to create debt-anchored, government-dependent slaves.

For many decades, it seemed as if a vanguard of American communists were pushing these destructive policies and operating as a kind of fifth column from within an otherwise pro-America governing class.  Whether that fifth column was always much larger than it appeared or whether it simply succeeded, through strategic patience, in conquering America’s political and economic institutions and converting them to its advantage, there is no question that America’s internal demolition is now an all-of-government operation.

You do not hand a private central bank the power to print dollar bills, unless you expect those dollars to become untethered from any gold standard.  You do not print and spend money without budgetary constraints, unless you never intend to pay down those debts.  You do not engage in such a monetary Ponzi scheme that artificially raises the prices of stocks and real properties while depreciating the common person’s meager savings, unless you plan on precipitating the mother of all economic crashes in the future.  You do not start seeding the idea of a new central bank digital currency, unless you intend to take advantage of that economic crash and transition the whole population onto a mandatory system of government welfare.  

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-vs-the-woke-let-the-people-decide-if-he-is-on-the-ballot-maine-colorado-dcaf41ce?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS:

In America in 2024, who, or what, is the real threat? Mr. Trump? Or the left? It’s a harder question than either side will admit.

It’s Mr. Trump who lies, the left will say. It’s undeniable he does. But, the Trumpian right replies, progressive America has become an entire culture of lies: Nothing is true except “my truth”—and the party line. Men aren’t necessarily men and women aren’t necessarily women. Doctors or midwives merely “assign a sex” to a newborn. Mediocrity gets an upgrade; a student worthy of a C-plus under the old regime may now graduate summa cum laude. One must never hurt the feelings of mediocrities. An appeal to excellence is racist oppression. Western Civ has got to go.

The Trumpian threat emanates from one egregious man and his massive following, citizens who, however, don’t consider themselves or their leader to be a threat at all but, rather, the better bet under these dreary circumstances. The faithful of the progressive left, every bit as cultish as Trumpians are alleged to be, consider themselves and their doctrines as the path to righteousness.

There’s the problem: The case for disqualifying both the flawed and tainted Mr. Trump and his flawed and tainted opponents on the left (including Mr. Biden) is strong.

https://johnhabelesmd.substack.com/p/an-essay-on-scientist?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=413102&post_id=140309584&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8t06w&utm_medium=email

One of the greatest challenges each society faces is deciding what constitutes “truth.” Whoever holds that power wields enormous influence and steers the direction of the society for better or for worse.

For centuries, “truth” was delegated to the ruling institutions of the time, and hence truth was simply the narrative which conformed to their interests. Then, during the enlightenment period a new idea emerged—that truth could be determined empirically through experimentation and data.

This in turn gave birth to the scientific revolution, and while not perfect (as vested interests would still try to make their “narrative” be truth irrespective of what the scientific data showed), scientific inquiry began shaping the direction of Western Culture, and in a rocky fashion gradually moved society forward, giving us many of the benefits we take for granted today.

Sadly however, the tendency of ruling interests to want to monopolize the truth never went away and we’ve watched a curious phenomenon emerge where science, riding on the social credit earned by the success of its revolutionary discoveries, has gradually transformed into something not that different from a state religion. Given that science was originally meant to be a way to move beyond truth being monopolized by the dogmatic institutions which ran society, it is quite tragic that science has become one as well.

As a result, science has more and more become the practice of “trusting scientific experts” and not being allowed to question their interpretations of the data—or even see it. This is very different from what science was originally intended to be—the collective endeavor of scientists around the world to put forth ideas and have the ones that stand up to scrutiny become the generally accepted standard.